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Reading Selections (2) from Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter AUGUSTINUM HIPPONSENSEM

October 16, 2009

It is difficult to venture forth upon the sea of Augustine’s thought, and even more difficult to summarize it — this indeed is almost impossible. I may however be permitted to recall some illuminating insights of this mighty thinker, for the edification of all.
Pope John Paul II

Augustine On Reason And Faith
First of all, there is the problem that occupied him most in his youth and to which he returned with all the force of genius and the passion of his spirit: the problem of the relationship between reason and faith. This is a perennial problem, no less acute today than yesterday, and the direction taken by human thought depends on its solution. It is a difficult problem, however, because one must pass safely between two extremes, between the fideism that despises reason and the rationalism that excludes faith. Augustine’s intellectual and pastoral endeavor aimed to show, beyond any shadow of doubt, that “since we are impelled by a twin pull of gravity to learn,” both forces, reason and faith, must work together.

He always listened to what faith had to say, but he exalted reason no less, giving each its own primacy in time of importance. He told all, “Believe that you may understand,” but he repeated also, “Understand that you may believe.” He wrote a work, perennially relevant, on the usefulness of faith, and explained that faith is the medicine designed to heal the eye of the spirit, the unconquerable fortress for the defense of all, especially of the weak, against error, the nest in which we receive the wings for the lofty flights of the spirit, the short path that permits one to know, quickly, surely and without errors, the truths which lead the human person to wisdom. He also emphasizes that faith is never without reason, because it is reason that shows “in what one should believe.” “For faith has its own eyes, by means of which it sees in a certain manner that what it does not yet see is true.” Therefore “no one believes anything, unless he has first thought that it is to be believed,” because “to believe is itself nothing other than to think with assent…if faith is not’ thought through, it is no faith.”

The outcome of the discourse on the eyes of faith is the discourse on credibility, of which Augustine often speaks, adducing the reasons for credibility as if to confirm the consciousness with which he himself had returned to the Catholic faith. It is good to listen to one of these texts: “There are many things that most properly keep me in the bosom of the Catholic Church; to say nothing of the most genuine wisdom…let me therefore omit mention of this wisdom” (for this argument, which for Augustine was extremely strong, was not accepted by his opponents). “The consensus of peoples and races keeps me in the Church, as does the authority based on miracles, nourished by hope, increased by charity, strengthened by its ancient character; likewise the succession of the priests, from the very see of the apostle Peter, to whom the Lord entrusted the care of His sheep after the resurrection, down to the episcopate of today; finally, the very name of the Catholic Church keeps me in her, because it is not without reason that this Church alone has obtained such a name amid so many heresies.”

In the great work on the City of God, which is at once apologetic and dogmatic, the problem of reason and faith becomes that of faith and culture. Augustine, who did so much to establish and promote Christian culture, solves this problem by developing three main arguments: the faithful exposition of Christian doctrine; the careful salvaging of pagan culture, to the extent that it had elements capable of being salvaged (in the area of philosophy, this was no small amount); and the insistent demonstration of the presence in Christian teaching of whatever was true and perennially valid in pagan culture, with the advantage of finding it perfected and exalted there. It was not for nothing that the City of God was widely read in the middle ages; and it greatly deserves to be read today as well, as an example and stimulus to deepen the encounter of Christianity with the cultures of the peoples. An important text of Augustine may be usefully quoted here: “The heavenly city…draws citizens from all peoples…taking no account of what is different in customs laws and institutions;…she neither suppresses nor destroys anything of these, but rather preserves and fosters it. The diversities that may exist in the diverse nations work together for the single goal of earthly peace, unless they obstruct the practice of the religion that teaches the worship of the one, true and most high God.”

Augustine On God And Man
The other great word-pair which Augustine continuously studied is God and man. As I have said above, when he freed himself from the materialism which prevented him from having an exact concept of God- and hence the true concept of man- he made this word-pair the center of the great themes of his study, and always studied the two together: man thinking of God, God thinking of man, who is His image.

In the Confessions, he asks himself these two questions: “What are You for me…. What am I myself for You?” He brings all the resources of His thought and all the unwearying labor of his apostolate to bear on the search for an answer to these questions. He is fully convinced of the ineffability of God, so that he cries out: “Why wonder that you do not understand? For if you understand, it is not God.” It follows that “it is no…small beginning of the knowledge of God, if before we are able to know what He is, we already begin to know what He is not.” It is necessary therefore to strive “that we should thus know God, if we are able and as far as we are able, the one who is good without quality, great without quantity, the creator not bound by necessity,” and thus going through all the categories of reality that Aristotle has described.

Although God is transcendent and ineffable, Augustine is nevertheless able, starting from the self-awareness of the human person who knows that he exists and knows and loves, and encouraged by Sacred Scripture, which reveals God as the supreme Being (Exodus 3:14), highest Wisdom (Wisdom, passim) and first Love (1 John 4:8), is able to illustrate this threefold notion of God: the Being from whom every being proceeds through creation from nothing, the Truth which enlightens the human mind so that it can know the truth with certainty, the Love that is the source and the goal of all true love. For God, as he so often repeats, is “the cause of what exists, the reason of thought and the ordering of living, or, to use an equally famous formula, “the cause of the universe that has been created, and the light of the truth that is to be perceived, and the fountain from which happiness is to be drunk.”

But it was above all in studying the presence of God in the human person that Augustine used his genius. This presence is both profound and mysterious. He finds God as “the eternal internal,” most secret and most present—man seeks Him because he is absent, but knows Him and finds Him because He is present. God is present as “the creative substance of the world,” as the truth that gives light, as the love that attracts, more intimate than what is most intimate in man, and higher than what is highest in him. Referring to the period before his conversion, Augustine says to God: “Where were You then for me, and how far away? And I was a wanderer far away from You…. But You were more internal than what was intimate in me, and higher than what was highest in me”; “You were with me, and I was not with You.” Indeed. he insists:

“You were in front of me; but I had gone away from myself and did not find myself, much less find You.” Whoever does not find himself does not find God, because God is in the depths of each one of us.

The human person, accordingly, cannot understand himself except in relationship to God. Augustine found ever new expressions of this great truth, as he studied the relationship of man to God and stated this in the most varied and effective way. He sees the human person as a tension directed toward God; his words, “You have made us for yourself and our heart has no rest until it rests in You,” are very well known. He sees the human person as a capacity of existence elevated to the immediate vision of God, the finite who reaches the Infinite. He writes in the De Trinitate that man “is the image of the one whom he is capable of enjoying, and whose partner he can become.” This faculty “is in the soul of man, which is rational or intellectual…immortally located in his immortality,” and therefore the sign of his greatness: “he is a great nature, because he is capable of enjoying the highest nature and of becoming its partner.” He sees the human person also as a being in need of God, because he is in need of the happiness that he can find only in God. Human nature “has been created in such an excellent state that even although it is itself mutable, it reaches happiness by cleaving to the unchangeable good, that is, to God. Nor can it satisfy its need unless it is totally happy; and only God suffices to satisfy it.”

It is because of this basic relationship between man and God that Augustine continually exhorts men to the life of the spirit. “Go back into yourself; the truth dwells in the inner man; and if you discover that your nature is mutable, transcend yourself also,” in order to find God, the source of the light that illuminates the mind. Together with the truth there is in the inner man the mysterious capacity to love, which is like a weight (in Augustine’s celebrated metaphor) that draws him out of himself, toward the others and especially toward the Other, i.e. God. The force of attraction exercised by love makes him social by his very nature, so that. as Augustine writes “there is nothing so social by nature…as the human race.”

Man’s interiority, where the inexhaustible riches of truth and love are stored, is “a great abyss,” which St. Augustine never ceases to investigate with unfailing wonder. Here we must add that, for one who reflects on himself and on history, the human person appears as a great problem- as Augustine says, a “great question.” Too many enigmas surround him: the enigma of death, of the profound division that he suffers in himself, of the incurable imbalance between what he is and what he desires. These enigmas can be synthesized in the fundamental enigma of the greatness of the human person and his incomparable wretchedness. The Second Vatican Council spoke at length of these enigmas when it wished to cast light on the “mystery of the human person.” Augustine tackled these problems with passion and employed all the genius of his interest, not only to discover the reality, which is often very sad — if it is true that no one is more social by nature than the human person, it is no less true, adds the author of the City of God, taught by history, that “no one is more prone to discord by vice than the human race”-but also and above all to seek and propose their solution. He finds only one solution, which had already appeared on the eve of his conversion: Christ, the Redeemer of man. I too have felt it necessary in my first Encyclical, called precisely Redemptor Hominis, to draw the attention of the Church’s children and all of men and women of good will to this solution; I was happy to take up with my own voice the voice of all the Christian tradition.

Augustine On Christ And The Church
As Augustine’s thought penetrates these problems John Paul II has summarized above, it becomes more theological, while remaining fundamentally philosophical; and the word-pair Christ and Church, which he had at first denied and later recognized in his younger years, began to illuminate the more general word-pair of God and man.

One may rightly say that the summit of the theological thinking of the Bishop of Hippo is Christ and the Church; indeed, one could add that this is the summit of his philosophy too, in that he rebukes the philosophers for having done philosophy “without the man Christ.” The Church is inseparable from Christ. From the time of his conversion onwards, he recognized and accepted with joy and gratitude the law of providence which has established in Christ and in the Church “the entire summit of authority and the light of reason in that one saving name and in His one Church, recreating and reforming the human race.”

Without doubt, he spoke profusely and sublimely of the Trinitarian mystery in his work on the Trinity and in his discourses, tracing the path that was to be taken by later theology. He insisted both on the equality and on the distinction of the divine Persons, illustrating these through his teaching on their relations: God “is what He has, with the exceptions that are predicated of each Person in respect of the other.” He developed the theology of the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and from the Son, but “principally” from the Father, because “the Father is the principle of all the divinity, or, to put it better, of the Godhead,” and He has granted to the Son the spiration of the Holy Spirit, who proceeds as Love and therefore is not begotten. To reply better to the “garrulous rationalists,” he proposed the “psychological” explanation of the Trinity, seeking its image in the memory, in the intellect and in the love of the human person, and studying thus the most august mystery of faith together with the highest nature of creation, the human spirit.

Yet when he speaks of the Trinity, he never removes his gaze from Christ, who reveals the Father, nor from the work of salvation. Having come to understand the reason for the mystery of the incarnate Word, shortly before his conversion, he did not cease to investigate this more deeply, summarizing his thought in formulae that are so full and effective that they are like an anticipation of the teaching of Chalcedon. In an importance passage of one of his last works, he writes: “the believer…believes that .in him there is the true human nature, that is our nature, although it is taken up in a unique way into the one Son of God when God the Word receives it, such that the One who received it and what He received formed one Person in the Trinity. The assumption of man did not make a quarternity, but the Trinity remained: this assumption wrought in an ineffable manner the truth of one person in God and man. Therefore we do not say that Christ is only God…nor only man…nor man in such a way that He would lack something that certainly belongs to human nature…but we say that Christ is true God, born of God the Father…and the same is true man, born of a human mother…nor does His humanity, in which He is less than the Father, take away anything from His divinity, in which He is equal to the Father…The one Christ is both of these.” He puts it somewhat more briefly: “The same one who is man, is God; and the same one who is God, is man-not by the confusion of the nature but in the unity of the person,” “one…person in both natures.”

With this solid vision of unity of the person in Christ, who is called “wholly God and wholly man,” Augustine covers an immense ground in theology and history. If his eagle’s eye gazes on Christ the Word of the Father, he insists no less on Christ the man; indeed, he asserts vigorously that without Christ the man there is neither mediation, nor justification, nor resurrection, nor membership of the Church whose head is Christ. He returns often to this theme and develops it broadly, both to explain the faith which he had obtained again at the age of twenty-two and because of the needs of the Pelagian controversy.

Christ, the man-God, is the sole mediator between the righteous and immortal God and mortal and sinful human beings, because He is at once mortal and righteous. It follows that He is the universal way, “which has never been lacking for the human race, no one has been set free no one is set free, no one will be set free.”

The mediation of Christ is accomplished in the work of redemption, which consists not only in the example of righteousness, but above all in the sacrifice of reconciliation, which was supremely true, supremely free, and completely perfect. The essential characteristic of the redemption by Christ is its universality, which shows the universality of sin. This is how Augustine repeats and interprets the words of St. Paul, “If one has died for all, then all have died” (2 Corinthians 5:14), i.e., dead because of sin: “The Christian faith, accordingly, exists precisely because of these two men”; “One and one: one for death, one for life.” Therefore “every man is Adam; likewise, for those who have believed, every man is Christ.”

In Augustine’s view, to deny this doctrine is the same as “emptying the cross of Christ” (1 Corinthians 1:17). To prevent this, he wrote and spoke much about the universality of sin, including the doctrine of original sin, “which the Catholic faith has believed from ancient times.” He teaches that “Jesus Christ came in the flesh for no other reason…than to give life and salvation to all, to free, redeem, and enlighten those who beforehand were in the death of sins, in sickness, slavery, captivity, and darkness…. It follows that those who are not in need of life, salvation, liberation and redemption cannot have anything to do with this dispensation of salvation by Christ.”

Because Christ, the only mediator and redeemer of men, is head of the Church, Christ and the Church are one single mystical person, the total Christ. He writes with force: “We have become Christ. Just as He is the head, we are the members; the whole man is He and ourselves.” This doctrine of the total Christ is one of the teachings that mattered most to the Bishop of Hippo, and one of the most fruitful themes of his ecclesiology.

Another fundamental theme is that of the Holy Spirit as the soul of the mystical body: “what the soul is to the body of a man, the Holy Spirit is for the body of Christ, which is the Church.” The Holy Spirit is also the principle of community, by which the faithful are united to one another and to the Trinity itself. “By means of what is common to the Father and the Son, They willed that we should have communion both among ourselves and with Them. They willed to gather us together, through that gift, into that one thing which both have in common; that is, by means of God the Holy Spirit and the gift of God.” He therefore says in the same text: “the fellowship of unity of the Church of God, outside of which there is no remission of sins, is properly the work of the Holy Spirit, of course with the cooperation of the Father and the Son, because the Holy Spirit himself is in a certain manner the fellowship of the Father and the Son.”

The Church As Body Of Christ
Contemplating the Church as body of Christ, given life by the Holy Spirit who is the Spirit of Christ, Augustine gave varied development to a concept which was also emphasized in a special way by the recent Council: that of the Church as communion. He speaks in three different but converging ways: first, the communion of the sacraments, or the institutional reality founded by Christ on the foundation of the apostles. He discusses this at length in the Donatist controversy, defending the unity, universality, apostolicity and sanctity of the Church, and showing that she has as her center the See of Peter, “in which the primacy of the apostolic see has always been in force.” Second, he speaks of the communion of the saints, or the spiritual reality that unites all the righteous from Abel until the end of the ages. Third, he speaks of the communion of the blessed, or the eschatological reality that gathers in all those who have attained salvation, that is, the Church “without spot and wrinkle” (Ephesians 5:27).

Another theme dear to Augustine’s ecclesiology was that of the Church as mother and teacher, a theme on which he wrote profound and moving pages, because it had a close connection to his experience as convert and to his teaching as theologian. While he was on the path back to faith, he met the Church, no longer opposed to Christ as he had been made to believe, but rather as the manifestation of Christ, “most true mother of Christians” and authority for the revealed truth.

The Church is the mother who gives birth to the Christians: “Two parents have given us the birth that leads to death, two parents have given us the birth that leads to life. The parents who gave us birth for death are Adam and Eve: the parents who gave us birth for life are Christ and the Church.” The Church is a mother who suffers on account of those who have departed from righteousness, especially those who destroy her unity; she is the dove who moans and calls all to return or draw near to her wings; she is the manifestation of God’s universal fatherhood, by means of the charity which “is mild for some, severe for others; an enemy to none, but mother for all.”

She is a mother, but also, like Mary, a virgin: mother by the ardor of charity, virgin by the integrity of the faith that she guards, defends and teaches. This virginal motherhood is linked to her task of teacher, a task which the Church carries out in obedience to Christ. For this reason, Augustine looks to the Church as guarantor of the Scriptures, and attests that he will remain secure in her whatever difficulties arise for him, urgently exhorting others to do the same: “Thus, as I have often said and impress upon you with vehemence, whatever we are, you are secure if you have God as your Father and His Church as your mother.” From this firm conviction then is born his passionate exhortation that one should love God and the Church -God as Father and the Church as Mother. Perhaps no one else has spoken of the Church with such great affection and passion as Augustine. I have pointed out a few of his statements, in the hope that these are sufficient to show the depth and the beauty of a teaching that will never be studied sufficiently, especially from the point of view of the love that animates the Church as the effect of the Holy Spirit’s presence within her. He writes, “We have the Holy Spirit if we love the Church: we love the Church if we remain in her unity and charity.”

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The Wedding At Cana: A Picture Of The Divine Gatherer At Work

October 15, 2009

Jacopo Robusti Tintoretto - The Wedding at Cana

This is a selection from Fr. Barron’s The Priority of Christ:

The Gathering
The English word sin is derived from the German term Sunde, which carries the connotation of sundering or dividing. The Greek word diabalos, from which various terms for the evil one derive — diablo, diable, devil, Teufel — means basically “scatterer.” In the book of Genesis, the original sin — incited by the serpent — amounts to a sundering of the human relationship to God (expulsion from the Garden) and a radical division and scapegoating among creatures. When Adam is challenged by God, he responds, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate,” and when the woman is confronted, she passes the buck to nature: “The serpent tricked me, and I ate” (Genesis 3:11-13). Over-and-againstness, separation, suspicion, mutual hatred, blaming — all are signs that the scattering power of sin is let loose.

In the course of the Old Testament, the twelve tribes of Israel — gathered together as one people through the power of God’s covenant — are periodically separated, divided, carried into exile because of their infidelity to that covenant. The hope for a united Israel, for a return of the exiled tribes, is expressed in the Prophets and in Psalms: “Jerusalem — built as a city that is bound firmly together. To it the tribes go up” (Psalms 122: 3-4), “the joy of all the earth, Mount Zion, in the far north, the city of the great King” (Psalms 48:2). A large part of the mystique of King David was that he had united the disparate people of Israel and had governed them from the central capital city, Jerusalem. And despite his numerous failings, David’s son Solomon enjoyed great renown, first because he had built the temple in Jerusalem, which had become a physical and spiritual focal point for the nation, and second because his reputation had drawn to the capital potentates from around the world, most famously the Queen of the South. In this he had embodied Israel’s mission to be a light to the nations, the true pole of the earth, the gathering point of the world.

When a Jewish prophet of the first century announced that the reign of God is at hand, N. T. Wright has argued, he would be taken to mean something very specific: that the scattering of the tribes of Israel (in both a literal and a spiritual sense) was over and that Yahweh was coming to reign in Jerusalem, this reconfiguration inaugurating the illumination and salvation of the entire world. In other words, he would be interpreted as saying that the dream of Israel — realized only fitfully and inadequately throughout its history — was now coming definitively true. So when Jesus of Nazareth said, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” (Mark 1:15), he was not calling attention to general, timeless spiritual truths, nor was he urging people to make a decision for God; he was telling his hearers that Yahweh was actively gathering the people of Israel and, indirectly, all people into a new salvific order, and he was insisting that his hearers conform themselves to this new state of affairs. In this gathering, he was implying, the forgiveness of sins — the overcoming of sundering and division — would be realized. In a word, the proclamation of the kingdom was tantamount to an announcement that the Gatherer of Israel had arrived and had commenced his work. What is most remarkable about Jesus, according to Wright, is that he not only indicated this fact but embodied it and acted it out, taking, in his words and gestures, the very role of the Gatherer. Origen said substantially the same thing when he described Jesus as autobasileia, the kingdom in person.

The Wedding at Cana
The first narrative that I will consider under the rubric of the Gathering is the Johannine account of the wedding feast at Cana. Throughout the Old Testament, the motif of the wedding is used to symbolize the marriage of God and his people as well as the good cheer that obtains when human beings come together in love. It is accordingly a particularly apt expression of the overcoming of the sundering of sin. Thus it is no accident that in the context of John’s Gospel, Jesus’s first public “sign” takes place at a wedding feast, for he himself is the marriage of divinity and humanity. The narrative begins with an elegant Johannine code: “On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee . . .“ (John 2:11). Throughout the Gospel, te hemera te trite (on the third day) is the expression for the day of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead. More to the point, this marriage feast takes place in Cana of Galilee, and Galilee, in the symbolic system of John, is the country of resurrection, that place where Jesus would meet his friends after Easter. Therefore, this story must be read through the lens of the resurrection, which is to say, the act by which God in an unprecedented and unsurpassable way gathered humanity to himself and inaugurated the process of the universal gathering (“Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died,” 1 Corinthians 15:20). The wedding feast of Cana and the wedding feast of the resurrection will stand in one another’s hermeneutical light.

We hear that the disciples of Jesus — presumably at this point Andrew, Simon Peter, Philip, Nathanael, and the disciple whom Jesus loved — were invited to the wedding along with the Lord himself and his mother. The presence of both the mathetai and the mother are key. In calling disciples to himself, Jesus had already inaugurated the gathering of his people (eventually the Twelve will be seen as evocative of the twelve tribes of Israel), and so their presence signals the novelty and future purpose of Jesus’s ministry. Mary is a rich and multivalent symbolic figure in all of the Gospels. In Luke’s infancy narrative, she emerges as the spokesperson for ancient Israel, speaking, in her Magnificat, in the words and cadences of Hannah; and as the recipient of an angelic announcement of a miraculous birth, she calls to mind not only Hannah but also Sarah and the mother of Samson as well.

In Matthew’s Christmas account, she is compelled to go into exile in Egypt and is then called back to her home, recapitulating thereby the journey of Israel from slavery to freedom. She is thus the symbolic embodiment of faithful and patient Israel, longing for deliverance. In John’s Gospel, she is, above all, mother — the physical mother of Jesus and, through him, the mother of all who would come to new life in him. As mother of the Lord, she is, once again, Israel, that entire series of events and system of ideas from which Jesus emerged and in terms of which he alone becomes intelligible.

Hans Urs von Balthasar comments in the same vein that Mary effectively awakened the messianic consciousness of Jesus through her recounting of the story of Israel to her son. So in the Cana narrative, Mary will speak the pain and the hope of the chosen people, scattered and longing for union.

We hear that in the course of the wedding celebration “the wine gave out” (John 2:3). In an era when such parties lasted upward of several days, this was not a minor difficulty. With the wine depleted, the spirit of conviviality would dissipate, the celebration would wind down quickly, and the hosts, as well as the bride and groom, would be profoundly em barrassed. Noticing the difficulty, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine” (John 2:3).

Let us press ahead with a symbolic reading of this iconic episode. Wine — that which changes, uplifts, and enlivens the consciousness, that which produces good feeling and good fellowship — evokes the Spirit of God, the divine life. When we are linked to that infinite source, when we partake freely of it, we are brought to personal joy and a deep sense of community connection. It is the elixir that makes of human life a communal celebration; it is the condition for the possibility of the gathering. To be in sin is nothing other than to be sundered from that source and hence to fall into a depression of the spirit, a listlessness and loneliness.

When Mary quietly suggests to Jesus that the wedding party has run out of wine, she is ancient Israel speaking to its God, reminding him that the people have run out of joy, purpose, and connection to one another, that they have become dry bones with no life. She is taking up the lament of so many of the Hebrew prophets and sages: “How long, O Lord?”

What follows is the most puzzling part of the story, Jesus’s seemingly cold distancing of himself from this reasonable request of his mother:

“Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come” (John 2:4). First, his addressing her as “woman” should not be construed as a mark of disrespect; rather, it should be interpreted as a densely textured symbolic act. Eve, in the Old Testament context, is the woman par excellence; Mary is presented here as the new Eve, the new representative of the human race, with whom God is seeking union.

As is fitting in this Cana setting, the theme of human bride and divine bridegroom is being hinted at. But if she is the Woman with whom God seeks union, why the aloof and off-putting words? The best explanation, in my judgment, is that this is a narrative device that serves to highlight the importance of Jesus’s “hour” and shows the relation between what he does at Cana and what will transpire in that hour. Like “the third day,” “hour” is code for the Paschal Mystery, Jesus’s passage through death to life. In that event, God will effect the perfect marriage between himself and the human race, for he will enter into the most intimate union with us, embracing even death itself and leading us into the bridal chamber of the divine life. Thus, the exchange with Mary brings to our attention the ultimate purpose and correct symbolic setting for the action that Jesus will perform for the humble bride and groom of Cana.

Unfazed by her son’s response, Mary says to the diakonoi (the table servers), “Do whatever he tells you” (John 2:5). Once again, this is Israel who is speaking. The rupture between God and humanity is irreparable from the human side and through human effort. The dysfunction into which men and women have fallen is like an addiction or an obsession: any attempt on their part to overcome the difficulty will onlv sink them deeper into it. Therefore the proper attitude in the presence of the saving God is obedience and acquiescence, imitating his moves, responding to his commands, doing whatever he tells us.

We come to the heart of the matter as Jesus commences his work of transformation. “Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons” (John 2:6). These huge containers, used in connection with the religious life of the people, are empty, and this calls to mind the tiredness and uselessness of a religiosity unconnected to the divine Spirit. In this regard, these jars play the same symbolic role as the priest and Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan. But they are, we might say, eloquently empty, for they represent the potential for life: in relation to God, human religiosity; indeed human being, is a passive receptacle, something waiting to be filled.

Jesus now does two things — one visible and one invisible — and we must attend carefully to both. He first tells the servants to fill the jars with water, and John pointedly tells us that “they filled them up to the brim” (John 2:7).

The divine giver is now responding to the request of long-suffering Israel. The first thing he gives is the opportunity for them to contribute to the process of their vivification. Mind you, this is not in conflict with what I just specified concerning the attitude of total acquiescence, since he himself is giving, through his command, their very capacity to cooperate. So the filling of the jars to the limit is symbolic of all that human agency — through the divine prompting and power — can bring to the task of cultivating human flourishing: art, music, science, technology, politics, spirituality. All of this is obviously good, but it remains provisional and inadequate, for remember that the problem is that they are out of wine, not water. What they (Israel, the human race) require is not just the ordinary nourishment that water provides but rather intoxication, elevation, something greater.

Jesus tells them, “Draw some out, and take it to the chief steward” (John 2:8). When the steward tastes the water (now transformed into wine), he remarks on its extraordinary quality and undoubtedly passes on to the bride and groom the good news that they have wine in superabundance – 80 gallons! Jesus has changed the water into wine, taking something relatively insipid and making it tasty and intoxicating. He has received what they gave him and has not negated it, but rather raised it to a new pitch of intensity.

Augustine’s comment that Jesus simply accelerates and concentrates a natural process that occurs all the time — rainwater gives rise to grapes, which give rise to wine — is pertinent here. The water isn’t cleared out in order for the divine contribution to be made; instead, the divine contribution is precisely the “perfecting” of the water. This quality of God’s giving is congruent, of course, with the Christology of Chalcedon, the noncompetitive coming together of the divine and human natures: when God and a creature meet, the creature is confirmed and made more authentically itself.

What is being hinted at in the Cana miracle is the elevation and expansion of human culture under the influence of the divine life. Filled with God’s Spirit, architecture, art, science, politics, etc., become more completely themselves and realize their own deepest purposes. God gives our very capacity to give, and then he gives further by transfiguring our gift to our greater benefit. This miracle is hence a particularly apt iconic representation of divine-human coinherence.

Now we mustn’t forget that the purpose of this water made wine is to increase and prolong the celebration of a wedding. Because of Jesus’ miracle, a large group of celebrants will continue to be gathered around a couple who have chosen to form, themselves, an intimate community for the rest of their lives. Read symbolically, this wine is the divine Spirit which alone grounds authentic human coinherence. When human solidarity is based upon something other than God’s love — mutual self-interest, political considerations, shared convictions, etc. — it will inevitably shake apart and dissolve.

Aristotle knew that a friendship endures only in the measure that both friends have commonly given themselves to a good that transcends them individually, and Augustine knew that people love each other most appropriately when they do so for the sake of God. What both appreciated was that without a transcendent ground or point of reference, the other orientation of the partners would quickly devolve into self-preoccupation. When God and humanity are married, the connections between human beings intensify and deepen, vertical coinherence giving rise to horizontal coinherence. This fully developed one-in-the-otherness is on iconic display in the story of the wedding at Cana. It is a picture of the divine gatherer at work.

Posted in Fr. Robert Barron | Tagged gathering the people of Israel, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Mary at Cana, the Christology of Chalcedon, The divine giver at Cana, The Wedding at Cana | 1 Comment »

Reading Selections and Notes From “Evangelizing Theology” by Avery Cardinal Dulles

October 14, 2009

Christ Among the Doctors, Dürer (1506), oil on panel

The Catholic Church As “Evangelical”
It might seem paradoxical, to say the least, to describe the Catholic Church as “evangelical” — a term that is commonly taken to be practically synonymous with “Protestant” or with a particular kind of Protestant. In Germany the word evangelisch rather than protestantisch is the preferred designation for Protestant churches. In the English-speaking world, evangelicalism stems from the great revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It indicates an intense personal faith in Jesus Christ as savior and an assured sense of being saved by that faith. The term suggests an individualistic and biblically centered piety, such as that found in churches stemming from, or deeply affected by, the great revivals — notably Methodist, Baptist, and Pentecostal. (Most mainline Protestant churches have evangelical wings.) A common characteristic of evangelical churches is their strong missionary spirit.

The Catholic Church As Corporate And Traditional
Catholicism, by contrast, has put the accent elsewhere, on the corporate and traditional features of Christianity. The Catholic Church has been the church of organization, dogma, and sacraments. While always sponsoring missionary activity, the Catholic Church has relied chiefly on religious orders to perform this task. They were expected not so much to spread the gospel as to plant the Church in countries where it had as yet no roots.

The Vatican II Shift
With Vatican II a major shift took place. The Catholic Church became in a true sense evangelical. The Council spoke frequently of the gospel (in Latin, evangelium, 157 times) and of evangelization (31 times). It taught that every Christian has a responsibility to evangelize. Paul VI followed this up in many ways. He took the name of Paul in honor of the apostle of the Gentiles and engaged in long apostolic journeys to distant continents. At the climax of his pontificate he called a meeting of the synod of bishops to deal with the question of evangelization, and from materials supplied by that synod he composed his great apostolic exhortation, Evangelii nuntiandi (“Evangelization in the Modern World,” 1975). In this exhortation he described evangelization as the deepest identity of the Church, which exists, as he put it, in order to evangelize.

An Environment Unfriendly The Gospel
Evangelization is not and never has been easy. Today we tend to blame the prevalent culture for our lack of success. We denounce its individualism, secularism, relativism, hedonism, and other vices — which do indeed render the environment unfriendly to the proclamation of the gospel. But we too easily overlook the deep religious hunger that continues to stir in the hearts of contemporary men and women. Discontented with a civilization of gadgets and entertainment, many are looking for some overarching meaning in life. For all its worldliness, the United States remains a remarkably religious nation — a nation, as G. K. Chesterton famously said, with the soul of a church. Many evangelically oriented sects and churches — Mormons, Adventists, Pentecostals, and Southern Baptists, for example — are winning enormous numbers of converts. One wonders why, with all the official encouragement given to evangelization by Vatican II and the recent popes, Catholics are for the most part ready to leave the task to Protestants, some of whom are overtly hostile to Catholicism. The reluctance of Catholics to evangelize has many roots, historical, sociological, cultural, and political.

The Right Principles For An Evangelically Oriented Theology
In Jesus person and mission are identified. His mission on earth stands in unbroken continuity with his eternal existence within the godhead. As Son he is perfectly obedient to the Father, from whom he receives all that he is and does. Sent into the world by Christ, the Church is the gathering of those who engage themselves to travel on the road marked out by him. They seek to show that he is for all humanity, as he is for the baptized, the way, the truth, and the life. Taken up into the body of Christ and directed by the Holy Spirit, Christians become bearers of the good news by their speech, their actions, and their whole mode of being. Like Jesus himself, they have an essentially missionary existence.

Building on these biblical themes, theology seeks to show the connection between the word of God and the truth that leads to salvation. As “salutary truth,” the gospel rescues believers from death and gives them a share in eternal life. Taken up into the “pro-existence” of Christ the Redeemer, the Christian feels driven to declare by word and work the wonderful deeds of God. Because faith flowers into testimony, the theology of faith is inseparable from a theology of witness. All the truths of revelation draw their meaning and power from their relationship to Christ’s redemptive action, which comes to expression in the gospel, the evangelium.

A Theology Too Rationalistic And Ecclesiocentric
A theology that is both Catholic and evangelical differs from medieval Scholasticism and Counter-Reformation apologetics. These theologies contained much that is true and permanently valid; they lent themselves well to the situation of earlier centuries, when Europe was a self-contained Christian society. But they are no longer adequate for the complex global culture of our day. Medieval Scholasticism was a theology for professors and graduate students, highly speculative in its orientation. Presuming the truth of revelation and the authority of the canonical sources, it pursued subtle theoretical questions with great acumen. But, as Luther and Erasmus recognized, it did not greatly help in the business of proclaiming the gospel. The apologetically oriented theology of recent centuries, although it was more practical in orientation, was too rationalistic and ecclesiocentric to be called evangelical. The primary goal of that theology was to argue unbelievers into Catholic faith and induce a docile acceptance of “whatever the Church teaches.” An evangelical theology, by contrast, seeks to reflect on the ways in which the Holy Spirit transforms the gospel into the power of salvation for all who believe.

Christian Faith In Evangelical Terms
Christian faith, understood in evangelical terms, is much more than an intellectual assent. It is a complex act involving the whole person — mind, will, and emotions. In believing I entrust myself to God as He makes Himself known by His word. Faith includes a cognitive element, for it could not arise unless one were intellectually convinced that God is, has spoken, and has said what we take to be His word. But in believing I entrust myself to this God and, if I am sincere, commit myself to live according to that word. An evangelically oriented theology will explore these various dimensions of faith.

Evangelization is not complete with the first proclamation of the gospel. It is a lifelong process of letting the gospel permeate and transform all our ideas and attitudes. Theology itself is an exercise in the process of evangelization, for it seeks to draw out the implications of the gospel for our understanding of reality as a whole.

A Truly Catholic Form Of Evangelical Theology Differs
A truly Catholic form of evangelical theology will differ not only from earlier Catholic theologies but also from its Protestant counterparts. Unlike some Protestant evangelicalism, it will not be predicated on the doctrine of salvation by faith alone. It will seek to renew the entire life of believers, of the Church, and of society itself through the leaven of the gospel. Hence it will not separate word from sacraments, or faith from works, or personal morality from social action. It will strive to regenerate the entire community of believers in the light of the gospel and to transform the larger secular society in the image of the kingdom of God.

Seven Enemies Of Evangelization
(1) The first of these trends, in my enumeration, is the radical separation sometimes made between faith and belief. Some assert that faith is not a special gift of grace but a universal human quality found in different forms in all religions and ideologies. In transcendental theology, saving faith is frequently depicted as an interior orientation toward an encompassing mystery — a mystery that is inseparable from human nature itself. We are told, for example, that faith can be found in persons of any religion, and even in those who believe that they must be atheists, provided that such persons are obedient to the demands of conscience. The impression is given that all who accept themselves unconditionally, without self-rejection, and thus fulfill their primordial capacity for the transcendent, have faith in a satisfactory measure.

Faith, in this view, can exist without any definite set of beliefs, and hence without the gospel. The implication seems to be that there is no need to proclaim the gospel in order to bring people to faith. Anyone who accepts the inbuilt orientation of the human spirit to the nameless transcendent mystery is already an “anonymous Christian,” on the path of salvation. Salvation is seen as the fruit of self-acceptance rather than of obedience to an externally spoken or written word.

Indeed, one can easily find contemporary authors who deny that any specific beliefs can be matters of faith. Faith, they declare, has no object that can be expressed in propositions. All the articles of the creed and dogmas of the Church, and the gospel message itself, in their estimation, are human constructs rather than divinely revealed truths.

This thesis, I believe, is incompatible with a vigorous program of evangelization. We need to see again what seemed evident to the early Christians — that the gospel preached by the apostles and their fellow workers is the word of God, and must be received as such. Paul, for example, was able to write to the Thessalonians: “We thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of man but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers” (1 Thessalonians 2:13).

This Pauline teaching, which is consonant with that of the other New Testament authors and the classical theological tradition, does not require one to hold that all unevangelized peoples are consigned to eternal damnation. Indeed, the Catholic Church has repeatedly proclaimed that God puts salvation within reach of everyone. But the way in which people can be saved without hearing the gospel remains God’s secret. We may conjecture that they are saved by accepting seeds of the Word (semina Verbi), which the divine Sower has liberally disseminated throughout the world, far and wide. But these seeds of the word do not suffice for a mature and developed faith. They are mere hints of an answer yet to be given, and cry out for completion. The gospel message concerning the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ remains the normal path to salvation. Apart from it no one can be secure from serious error or have access to the saving truth in its fullness.

Faith, therefore, is not simply the acceptance of an inner orientation of the human spirit to some kind of absolute transcendence. As Paul put it, “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing comes from the preaching of Christ” (Romans 10:17). Unless we are convinced of the primacy of hearing, we shall not be of service in the present call for the Church to launch a new program of evangelization.

(2) The present reluctance to proclaim the gospel is intensified by a second theological deviation. Metaphysical agnosticism, typified in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, maintains that nothing speculatively true can be said about God, because the human mind can have assured knowledge only about phenomena — things that appear to the senses. Accepting this philosophical stance, some theologians conclude that revelation gives no genuine knowledge about God and the supernatural. Anything we say about God is taken to be a metaphor that symbolically reaches out to the encompassing mystery, which is incomprehensible and ineffable. Since metaphors are arbitrary and expendable, say these theologians, no one can be required to profess the articles of the Christian creed.

To overcome metaphysical agnosticism, which undermines the realism of faith, we need to retrieve the tried and true doctrine of analogy. When we speak of God as wise, loving, and just, or as existing in three persons, or as creating and redeeming the world, we are making statements that are literally though analogously true. These statements are not metaphorical, like the statements that God is a rock or a shield. The biblical metaphors, moreover, are themselves charged with cognitive value, and may not be arbitrarily discarded. Bound up as they are with the word of God, they are part of the sacred heritage that is to be proclaimed to all peoples.

Faith, of course, lacks the perfect clarity of direct vision. There is a sense, of course, in which God remains hidden from us so long as we are in this life. Because God dwells in inaccessible light (1 Timothy 6:16), we know Him only obscurely, as reflected in the mirror of faith (1 Corinthians 13:12). But, thanks to Christ and the Holy Spirit, we do know Him. Faith in the biblical and Christian sense of the word has never been a mere experience of the ineffable. Paul did speak of a mystical encounter in which he was “caught up into the third heaven” and heard things that cannot be told (2 Corinthians 12:1–4). But this was not the gospel he proposed for the faith of his communities. Convinced of the intelligibility of the Christian message, he could write: “Even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled only to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel” (2 Corinthians 4:3–4).

(3) A third obstacle to evangelization is a kind of religious pragmatism that is rarely formulated in explicit statements but is implicit in much contemporary religious literature. Faith is esteemed not because it is true but because it leads to desirable effects, whether personal or social. We are told, for example, that faith leads to peace of mind, psychological balance, success in business, social progress, or liberation of the oppressed. On this view it makes little difference whether the God in whom one believes is a reality or a fiction. The saving effects are regarded as coming not from God but from belief itself.

The biblical authors and classical theologians would heartily agree that faith normally brings with it many psychological and social benefits. But these are not the heart of the matter. For them it is essential that faith be true, for it gets its saving power from its reliance on the only power that can effectively vanquish the destructive forces of sin and death. Faith, in other words, saves by reason of its object. If we were not convinced that salvation comes from the God who speaks His saving word in Christ, we could perhaps be good therapists or social engineers but not evangelists.

(4) A fourth enemy of evangelization is the reigning cultural relativism. In many circles today it is almost a dogma that no dogma can be valid cross — culturally. Since cultures are tied to their time and place, the Christian message — it is claimed — has to be radically reconstructed for every region and every generation. To proclaim the doctrines of the New Testament and the creeds is often denigrated as a form of cultural imperialism. In particular the dogmas of the ancient councils and of the Catholic Church are dismissed as sedimentations of a Greco-Roman culture that must be consigned to the ash heap of history. If the old dogmas have any value, it is to stimulate us to concoct new dogmas appropriate to our own age.

In my judgment, this cultural and historical relativism is itself behind the times. It ignores the fact that the world is becoming a global village in which ideas and attitudes travel with the speed of light. Since every idea is received according to the condition of the recipient, adaptations will inevitably occur. But truth, whether in science or religion, transcends all cultural barriers. Any true statement, properly understood, is true everywhere and always. In any great religion, such as Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam, there will be constants, and indeed the very value of the religion depends upon its capacity to transcend the fads and fashions of the day. A totally ephemeral religion might capture momentary interest but would not long hold the allegiance of its members.

Biblical and traditional Christianity has never been bound to a particular culture. In Christ there is no East or West. He is to be worshiped by Jews and Gentiles, by barbarians and Greeks. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and his gospel is eternal.

Modern ethnology places increasing emphasis on anthropological constants, which make it possible for people to appreciate the cultural achievements of civilizations remote from their own. The writings of ancient authors such as Plato, Virgil, and Cicero are not unintelligible to modern Americans. Indeed, they are often more intelligible to us than the works of twentieth-century philosophers such as Whitehead, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. For the same reason it is easier to proclaim the gospel in the relatively simple language of the New Testament and the early creeds than in the involved rhetoric of some contemporary theologians who offer new and original confessions of faith.

What is correct in the recent approach is the recognition that the human mind formulates revealed truth in concepts and language that are historically conditioned. The manner of expression must be adapted to different audiences, as Paul recognized when he said that he became a Jew to Jews and a Greek to Greeks in order to win them to Christ (1 Corinthians 9:19–23). But the truth of the gospel does not change. Paul invoked an anathema on anyone who would try to preach a different gospel than that which he had received and handed on (Galatians 1:8–9).

(5) Connected with the cultural relativism of the day is a fifth deviation: religious pluralism. If truth is “polymorphic,” in the sense that it varies from race to race and from age to age, it would seem that Christianity cannot be proclaimed in new times and places. In an extreme form this relativism leads to the conclusion that every people should have its own religion. Under the rubric of “soteriological pluralism” some modern theologians deny that Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world. Each religion is said to have its own way of salvation, its own myths, and very often its own savior figures. Christians may believe in Jesus as their savior provided that they are ready to allow other races to worship other savior figures, such as the Lord Krishna and the Lord Buddha. The saving power of any such figure is thought to consist in its mythic impact on the psyche of the believer rather than the actual mediation of the person believed in.

This soteriological pluralism, which is patently antithetical to any program of evangelization, can seem very appealing in an age when we are reacting against the so-called Eurocentrism of past centuries and discovering the great and ancient religions of nonbiblical peoples. But religious pluralism is not a new proposal. The attitude was rampant in the world into which Christianity was born. If the early Christians had been willing to include Christ in the pantheon of deities worshiped by the pagans, the martyrs would never have gone to their deaths, but the pagan world would never have been converted. The Roman senator Symmachus argued that religious truth had to be approached through a variety of faiths, but his views were vigorously repudiated by theologians such as Ambrose. As Paul had already declared in his diatribe against idolatry, the pagans have many gods and many lords, but Christians acknowledge only one God, the Father of all, and one Lord, Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 8:4–6). Christianity stands or falls with the affirmation that, as there is but one God, so too there is but one name under heaven by whom one can be saved (Acts 4:12); for there is only one Mediator of salvation, the man Christ Jesus (1 Timothy 2:5). To proclaim the gospel is necessarily to proclaim that Jesus Christ alone is Lord.

(6) A sixth obstacle to evangelization is the false concept of freedom that pervades contemporary culture and frequently infects theologians. In the individualistic climate of our day, freedom is understood as the ability to choose whatever one pleases. Freedom of religion consequently means the capacity to choose whatever religion or lack of religion one wishes. This view has gained momentum as a reaction to situations in which the religion of the individual was made to depend almost totally upon the society into which one was born. In some countries the control of religion was handed over to the rulers of the state, according to the axiom that the religion of the ruler is that of the people: cuius regio eius religio.

With the Enlightenment, the state ceased to favor any particular religion. For the past three hundred years the political and social supports for religion have been crumbling. Ideological liberals seek to carry this secularization into the whole of public life, making faith a purely private matter to be settled in the intimacy of one’s own conscience. On the theory that religion should always be a matter of personal choice, parents sometimes refrain from raising their children in a definite faith. For teachers or others to manifest their faith, or to pray in public, is today deplored as a form of proselytism. Evangelization is thus made socially unacceptable and in some circumstances illegal.

Theology should resist this privatization of religion. In the absence of favorable influences from parents, teachers, and the social environment, few persons will find their way to a strong personal faith. Evangelization, to be sure, should not be done in an aggressive way that interferes with the religious freedom of the hearer, but, when properly carried out, it can actually enhance that freedom. By presenting Christian faith as an inspiring, coherent, and credible option, it gives people the freedom to consider and adopt a faith that might otherwise elude them.

If faith were nothing more than a human opinion, and if it had no real consequences for salvation, there might be good reasons for telling people to follow their own inclination about whether they wanted to believe or not. But Christians are convinced that their faith is true, that it is revealed by God, and that God wants all men and women to come to knowledge of the truth (1 Timothy 2:4). For this reason every believer has a duty to try to share the faith. We cannot compel people to believe, and should not try to do so, but there is every reason for helping people to come to a willing and responsible decision of faith. In the absence of truth, freedom is greatly diminished. As the Gospels tell us, the truth will make us free (John 8:32). Christ frees us from the slavery of sin and error and leads us into “the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Romans 8:21). A correct theological notion of freedom can overcome the privatist individualism that today inhibits the task of evangelization.

(7) Closely connected with this false concept of freedom is a seventh and final aberration, an antiauthoritarianism that militates against evangelization, especially in its Catholic form. In the current climate institutions are usually objects of suspicion. Regarding the Catholic Church as a vast and highly organized institution, many of our contemporaries feel reluctant to place their trust in it. In practice, however, those who reject religious authority usually adopt some other authority, often unconsciously and uncritically. In rejecting the authority of revealed religion, they are generally submitting to the authority of the secularist opposition, which has its own institutions and promotional organs. Because truth in religious matters is hard to come by, the choice of a faith is almost inevitably a choice among rival authorities.

The rejection of authority is more often a sign of adolescent rebellion than of maturity. As we mature, we learn to distinguish between reliable and unreliable authorities, and to make a discriminating use of authority, but not to dispense with all authority. St. Thomas says very wisely that whereas arguments from merely human authority are weaker than rational demonstrations, arguments from the authority of divine revelation give the strongest possible grounds for assent.

Theologians themselves are sometimes overly suspicious of ecclesiastical authority. This seems to be a hazard of their profession. Whenever a new pronouncement comes from the Holy See, theologians feel called upon to judge whether it is right or wrong. I confess that I do not think it is my function to judge the authorities whom God has set over the Church. They have the commission and the charisms to safeguard the transmission of the faith. It is for them to judge theology, not to be judged by it. As a theologian I am grateful that there is someone to correct me.

And yet evangelizers should not appeal, purely and simply, to the teaching authority of the Church. In an age suspicious of institutions, we shall do well to emphasize, as Paul and John did, the joy and freedom that come from a personal relationship to Christ. In comparison with Christ the ecclesiastical institutions are mere means. The spoken and written word of God can mediate faith, but faith goes out beyond the words to submit to the person of the revealer. An evangelically renewed Catholicism will seek to show that the entire apparatus of Catholicism, including the hierarchical ministry, the proclaimed word, and the sacraments, has value because and insofar as it gives more adequate and authentic access to the God who comes to us in Jesus Christ. Christ and his gospel must be proclaimed, in season and out of season. Evangelization is the primary and essential task of the Church. Those who have been successfully evangelized find their home in the Church as the place in which their relationship to Christ can be fully lived out. Through its ministries and sacraments they have continually new access to the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the living Christ.

Christ Proclaims The Gospel Through The Church
In the last analysis it is not individual Christians or even the Church that proclaims Christ. According to a sounder theology of evangelization, Christ proclaims the gospel through the Church and its members. The Holy Spirit is the transcendent agent of evangelization. We strive to be obedient instruments. Since we cannot cause anyone to believe, we must accompany our efforts with prayer that God will bestow the grace of faith upon those to whom the gospel message is proclaimed.

Seeing itself as addressed by the call of recent popes for a new evangelization, contemporary theology can profit from the present moment as a season of grace. Directing its critical scrutiny upon itself, theology should be alert to root out any tendencies it may have had that stand in the way of evangelization. In becoming authentically evangelical, theology can better achieve its own objective, which is to understand and serve the faith that comes through Christ and the apostles. By opening itself more fully to the word of God, it can assist the Church to adhere to that word more faithfully and proclaim it more effectively, so that the whole world, in the words of Vatican II, “by hearing the message of salvation, may believe, and by believing may hope, and by hoping may love.”

Posted in The State of the Catholic Church | Tagged Evangelical Faith, Evangelization, Evangelization in the Modern World, Faith, Paul VI, Seven Enemies Of Evangelization, The Catholic Church As “Evangelical” | Leave a Comment »

Reading Selections (1) from Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter AUGUSTINUM HIPPONSENSEM

October 13, 2009

Indeed, this holy man…was always in the habit of telling us, when we talked as intimates, that even praise worthy Christians and bishops, though baptized, should still not leave this life without having performed due and exacting penance. This is what he did in his own last illness: for he had ordered the four psalms of David that deal with penance to be copied out. From his sick-bed he could see these sheets of paper everyday, hanging on his walls, and would read them, crying constantly and deeply. And, lest his attention be distracted from this in any way, almost ten days before his death, he asked us that none should come in to see him, except at those hours when the doctors would come to examine him or his meals were brought. This was duly observed: and so he had all that stretch of time to pray…” (Possidus’ Vita XXXI:1-3)

Augustine’s Influence in the Church
Augustine of Hippo, who, scarcely one year after his death, was called “one of the best teachers” of the Church by my distant predecessor, St. Celestine I, has been present ever since in the life of the Church and in the mind and culture of the whole western world. In a similar fashion, other Roman Pontiffs have proposed the example of his way of life and the writings that embody his teachings as an object of contemplation and imitation, and very many Councils have often drawn copiously from his writings. Pope Leo XIII praised his philosophical teachings in the Encyclical Aeterni Patris; later, Pius XI made a brief synthesis of his virtues and teachings in the Encyclical Ad salutem humani generis, declaring that, of those who have flourished from the beginnings of the human race down to our own days, none—or, at most, very few—could rank with Augustine, for the very great acuteness of his genius, for the richness and sublimity of his teachings, and finally for his holiness of life and defense of Catholic truth. Paul VI later affirmed: “Indeed, over and above the shining example he gives of the qualities common to all the Fathers, it may be said that all the thought-currents of the past meet in his works and form the source which provides the whole doctrinal tradition of succeeding ages.”…He was likewise the genius who constructed a philosophy that can truly be called Christian because of its harmony with the faith, and a tireless promoter of spiritual and religious perfection.

The Confessions
We know the progress of his conversion from his own works written in the solitude of Cassiciacum before his baptism, and above all from the famous Confessions, a work that is simultaneously autobiography, philosophy, theology, mysticism and poetry, a work in which those who thirst for truth and know their own limitations have always discovered their own selves. Toward the end of his life, he wrote: “Which of my works succeeded more often in being known and loved than the books of my Confessions?” History has never contradicted this judgment, but has amply confirmed it. Even today, the Confessions of St. Augustine are widely read, since the richness of their interior insight and religious emotion have a profound effect on the minds of men and women, stimulating them and disturbing them. This is true not only of believers; even one without faith, but in search at least of a certainty that will allow him to understand himself, his deep aspirations and his torments, reads this work with advantage. The conversion of St. Augustine, an event totally dominated by the need to find the truth, has much to teach the men and women of today, who are so often mistaken about the greatest question of all life.

Not Arriving At But Rediscovering
It is well known that this conversion took a wholly individual path, because it was not a case of arriving for the first time at the Catholic faith, but of rediscovering it. He had lost it, convinced that in so doing, he was abandoning only the Church, not Christ.

He had been brought up in a Christian manner by his mother, the pious and holy Monica. In virtue of this education, Augustine always remained not only a believer in God, in providence and in the future life, but also a believer in Christ, whose name he “had drunk in,” as he says, “with my mother’s milk.” After he had returned to the faith of the Catholic Church, he said that he had returned “to the faith which was instilled in me as a child and which had entered into my very marrow.” If one wishes to understand his interior evolution, and what is perhaps the most profound aspect of his personality and his thought, one must take this fact as one’s starting-point.

He awoke at the age of nineteen to the love of wisdom, when he read the Hortensius of Cicero—”That book altered my way of thinking…and I desired wisdom’s immortality with an incredible ardor in my heart.” He loved the truth deeply, and sought it always with all the strength of his soul: “O Truth, Truth, how deep even then was the yearning for you in the inmost depths of my mind!

The Errors Of Augustine
Despite this love for truth, Augustine fell into serious errors. Scholars who look for the reasons for this indicate three directions:
1. first, a mistaken account of the relationship between reason and faith, so that he would have to choose between them;
2. second, in the supposed contrast between Christ and the Church, with the consequent conviction that it was necessary to abandon the Church in order to belong more fully to Christ; and
3. third, the desire to free himself from the consciousness of sin, not by means of the remission of sin through the working of grace, but by means of the denial of the involvement of human responsibility in the sin itself. [ dj: I was amazed when I read these, realizing I had made the exact same errors over the course of my life as well.]

The first error consisted, therefore, in a certain spirit of rationalism which led Augustine to believe that “one should believe those who teach, rather than those who issue commands.” With this spirit, he read the Sacred Scriptures and felt himself repelled by the mysteries that they contain, mysteries that need to be accepted with humble faith. When he spoke later to his people about this period of his life, he said: “I who speak to you was once deceived, when I first came to the divine Scriptures as a youth, preferring to discuss intellectual points rather than to seek piety…. In my wretchedness, I thought that I could fly, and left the nest; and before I could fly, I fell.”

Augustine And The Manichaeans
It was at this time that Augustine met the Manichaeans, heard them and followed them. The chief reason for this was that “they said that, having set aside the terrible authority, they would lead to God by pure and simple reason those willing to listen to them, freed from all errors” Augustine then presented himself as “one wishing to grasp and imbibe the open and authentic truth” with the force of reason alone.

After long years of study, especially of philosophical study, he realized that he had been deceived, but the effect of the Manichaean propaganda was to keep him convinced that the truth was not to be found in the Catholic Church. He fell into a profound depression and indeed despaired of ever coming to know the truth: “the Academicians kept my rudder for long in the middle of the streams, resisting all winds.”

It was the same love for truth which he always had within him, that rescued him from this interior crisis. He realized that it was impossible that the path to truth should be closed to the human mind; if it is not found, it is because men neglect and despise the means that will lead to the discovery of truth. Strengthened by this conviction, he replies to himself: “Rather, let us seek more diligently, and not despair.” He therefore continued to search, and reached the harbor under the guidance of the divine grace which his mother implored for him in her supplications and abundant tears.

He understood that reason and faith are two forces that are to cooperate to bring the human person to know the truth, and that each of these has its own primacy: faith comes first in the sequence of time, reason has the absolute primacy: “the authority is first in the order of time, but in reality the primacy belongs to the reason.” He understood that if faith is to be sure, it needs a divine authority, and that this is none other than the authority of Christ, the supreme teacher—Augustine had never doubted this-and that the authority of Christ is found in the Sacred Scriptures that are guaranteed by the authority of the Catholic Church.

With the help of the Platonist philosophers, he freed himself from the materialistic concept of being that he had taken in from Manichaeism: “Admonished by them to return to myself, I entered within myself, under Your guidance…. I entered, and I saw as with the eye of my soul…the inalterable light above my mind.” It was this inalterable light that opened to him the immense horizons of the spirit of God.

He understood that the first question to be asked about the serious question of evil, which was his great torment, was not its origin, but what it was; and he saw that evil is not a substance, but the lack of good: “All that exists is good. The evil about the origin of which I asked questions is not a substance.” He concluded that God is the creator of everything, and that no substance exists that was not created by Him.

Taught by his own experience of life, he made the decisive discovery that sin has its origin in the will of the human person, a will that is free and weak: “It was I who willed and refused; it was I, I.”

Although he could assert at this time that he had reached the point of arrival, this was not yet the case, because he was caught in the tentacles of a new error, the presumption that he could attain the beatifying possession of the truth by natural powers alone. An unhappy personal experience changed his opinion on this point. He understood then that it is one thing to know the goal, another to reach it. In order to find the necessary powers and the path itself, he took up “most eagerly,” as he says, “the venerable Scripture of Your Spirit, and above all the apostle Paul.” He found Christ the teacher in the letters of Paul, as he had always venerated Him, but also Christ the Redeemer, the incarnate Word, the only mediator between God and men. He saw then in all its splendor “the face of philosophy”- the philosophy of Paul that has as its center Christ, “the power and wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24), and has other centers in faith, humility and grace; the “philosophy” that is at once wisdom and grace, so that it becomes possible not only to know one’s homeland, but also to reach it.

Having rediscovered Christ the Redeemer and embraced Him, Augustine had returned to the harbor of the Catholic faith, to the faith in which he had been brought up by his mother: “For I had heard while still a boy about the eternal life promised to us by the God who in His humility came down to our pride.” The love for the truth, nourished by divine grace, overcame all errors.

Consecrate Himself Totally To Wisdom
But the path was not yet at its end. A former plan was reborn in Augustine’s mind: to consecrate himself totally to wisdom once he had found it, abandoning every earthly hope in order to possess wisdom. Now he could no longer make excuses: the truth so long desired was now certain. Nevertheless, he hesitated, seeking reasons to put off the decision to do this. The bonds that tied him to the earthly hopes were strong: honors, money, marriage, especially the last, in view of the way of life that that had become customary for him.

Augustine knew well that he was not forbidden to marry; but he did not want to be a Catholic Christian in any other way except by renouncing the excellent ideal of the family in order to dedicate himself with “all” his soul to the love and possession of wisdom. In taking this decision which corresponded to his deepest aspirations but was in contrast to his most deeply-rooted habits, Augustine was prompted by the example of Anthony and of the monks who were beginning to spread in the West also and whom he came to know by chance. He accused himself with great shame, “You could not do what these men and women do.” A deep and painful struggle ensued, which was brought to its close by divine grace once again.

Augustine related to his mother his serene and strong decision: “Then we went to my mother and related the matter to her: she rejoiced. We related how it had come about: she exulted in triumph and she blessed You, who are able to do more than we ask or think (Ephesians 3:20), because she saw that You had given her so much more, as regarded me, than she had been accustomed to ask with her unhappy and tearful groanings. For You converted me to yourself, so that I might seek neither wife nor any hope of this world.”

Tagaste and Hippo
From this moment, Augustine began a new life. He finished the academic year-the harvest holidays were near-and withdrew to the solitude of Cassiciacum; at the end of the vacation, he gave up teaching, and returned to Milan at the beginning of 387. He enrolled among the catechumens and was baptized on the night of Holy Saturday-April 23-24—by Ambrose, the bishop from whose preaching he had learned so much. “We were baptized, and the care of the past life fled from us. I could not have enough in those days of the wonderful sweetness of contemplating the sublimity of Your plan of salvation for the human race.” He adds, bearing witness to the profound emotion of his mind, “How much I wept at the hymns and canticles, keenly moved by the sweet voices of Your Church!”

After baptism, Augustine’s one desire was to find a suitable place to live with his friends according to his “holy resolution” to serve the Lord. He found it in Africa, at Tagaste, his native town, where he went after the death of his mother at Ostia Tiberina and after spending a few months at Rome to study the monastic movement. When he arrived at Tagaste, “having now cast off from himself the cares of the world; he lived for God with those who accompanied him, in fasting, prayers, and good works, meditating on the law of the Lord by day and by night.” The passionate lover of the truth wanted to dedicate his life to asceticism, to contemplation, and to the intellectual apostolate. His first biographer indeed goes on to say: “In his discourse and his books, he taught about what God had revealed to his intellect as he pondered and prayed.” He wrote very many books at Tagaste, as he had done at Rome and Milan and at Cassiciacum.

After three years he went to Hippo, intending to look for a site to found a monastery, and to meet a friend whom he hoped to win for the monastic life. He found instead, in spite of himself, the priesthood. But he did not give up his ideal: he asked and obtained permission to found a monastery, the monastery of the laymen, in which he lived, and from which many priests and many bishops came for all of Africa. When he became bishop, five years later, he transformed the bishop’s house into a monastery, the monastery of the clerics. Not even as priest and bishop did he abandoned the ideal conceived at the moment of his conversion. He wrote also a rule for the servants of God, which has had so much influence in the history of western religious life, and continues to play its part today.

His Conversion Helps Us Understand His Life
I have dealt at some length with the essential points of the conversion of Augustine, because they offer so much useful teachings, not only for believers, but for all men and women of good will: they teach how easy it is to go astray on the path of life, and how difficult it is to rediscover the way of truth. But this wonderful conversion also helps us to understand better his life afterwards as monk, priest and bishop who always remained the great man who had been struck by the lightning-flash of grace: “You had shot at our heart with the arrow of Your love, and we bore Your words transfixed in our breast.” Above all, the conversion helps us to penetrate more easily into his thought, which was so universal and profound that it rendered incomparable and imperishable service to Christian thought, so that we have good reason to call him the common father of Christian Europe.

The hidden force of his tireless search was assuredly the same force that had guided him on the path of his conversion: love for the truth. He himself indeed says: What does the soul desire more strongly than the truth?” In a work of lofty theological and mystical speculation, written more out of personal need than for external requirements, he recalls this love and writes: “We are caught up by the love of seeking out the truth.” This time, the object of the search is the august mystery of the Trinity and the mystery of Christ, the Father’s revelation, “knowledge and wisdom” of the human person: thus was born the great work On the Trinity.

Two coordinates guided the research, which was unceasingly nourished by love: the deepening of the Catholic faith and its defense against those who denied it, such as the Manichaeans and the pagans, or who interpreted it erroneously, such as the Donatists, the Pelagians and the Arians.

St. Augustine has been a topic of many posts. Some of the others are:

1. A review of Peter Brown’s wonderful book, Augustine of Hippo, here.

2. A collection of references by other writers that illuminate the many gifts that Augustine has for the student, here.

3. A short biography of Augustine, here.

Posted in St. Augustine | Tagged Augustine -- Consecrated To Wisdom, Augustine And The Manichaeans, Augustine's Conversion, Augustine’s Influence in the Church, AUGUSTINUM HIPPONSENSEM, Pope John Paul II, the Confessions of St. Augustine, The Errors Of Augustine | Leave a Comment »

Book Recommendation: The Autobiography — G.K. Chesterton

October 12, 2009

autobiography GKC This is a book that it is said Chesterton preferred not to write, but did so near the end of his life after much insistence by friends and admirers. Gilbert Keith Chesterton was one of the most prolific authors of modern times an intellectual giant who bestrode the Victorian and modern age, and who wrote some one hundred books on philosophy, theology, poetry, literature, fiction and history. His best-selling works include Orthodoxy, The Everlasting Man, St. Thomas & St. Francis, The Man Who Was Thursday and Father Brown Stories.

At the end of the World War and the Great Depression prefigured by the rise of fascism, the major issue was the clash between modernism’s Idea of Progress and despair. In some ways this echoes one of the major issues of our time, the clash of civilizations between the secular and the religious, Islam and Modernity, the Church and the secular state, Western atheists and Christian/Jewish believers. To the readers of his age, Chesterton advised that “The two sins against Hope are presumption and despair.” He went on to say that what we should really be doing is not presuming that things will go right, or despairing that they will go ill, but rather we should be appreciating what we have. As a reader on Amazon stated, “some things are perhaps hard to appreciate, but this book is not one of them.”

As is my habit, my reading notes and favorite passages follow:

The Advent of Flashy Finance
Anyhow there has been a change from a middle-class that trusted a businessman to look after money because he was dull and careful, to one that trusts a businessman to get more money because he is dashing and worldly. It has not always asked itself for whom he would get more money, or whose money he would get.
[What goes around, comes around, eh?]

Family
I regret that I have no gloomy and savage father to offer to the public gaze as the true cause of all my tragic heritage; no pale-faced and partially poisoned mother whose suicidal instincts have cursed me with the temptations of the artistic temperament. I regret that there was nothing in the range of our family much more racy than a remote and mildly impecunious uncle and that I cannot do my duty as a true modern by cursing everybody who made me whatever I am.

In Childhood, The Fragmentary Suggestions of A Philosophy
All my life I have loved edges and the boundary line that brings one thing sharply against another. All my life I have loved frames and limits; and I will maintain that the largest wilderness looks larger seen through a window. To the grief of all grave dramatic critics, I will still assert that the perfect drama must strive to rise to the higher ecstasy of the peep-show. I also have a pretty taste in abysses and bottomless chasms and everything else that emphasizes a fine shade of distinction between one thing and another; and the warm affection I have always felt for bridges is connected with the fact that the dark and dizzy arch accentuates the chasm even more than the chasm itself. I can no longer behold the beauty of the princess; but I can see it in the bridge the prince crossed to reach her.
And I believe that in feeling these things from the first, I was feeling the fragmentary suggestions of a philosophy I have since found to be the truth. For it is upon that point of truth that there might perhaps be a quarrel between the more material psychologists and myself. If any man tells me that I only take pleasure in the mysteries of the window and the bridge because I saw these models of them when I was a baby, I shall take the liberty of telling him that he has not thought the thing out.
To begin with, I must have seen a thousand of other things before as well as after; and there must have been an element of selection and some reason for selection. And, what is still more obvious, to date the occasion does not even begin to deal with the fact….of why I was so happy. Why should looking through a square hole, at yellow pasteboard [a toy theatre] lift anybody into the seventh heaven of happiness at any time of life? Why should it specially do so at that time of life? That is the psychological fact that you have to explain; and I have never seen any sort of rational explanation.

Mind Is Manufactured By Accidental Conditions?
I do not wish my remarks confused with the horrible and degrading heresy that our minds are merely manufactured by accidental conditions, and therefore have no ultimate relation to truth at all. With all possible apologies to the free-thinkers, I still propose to hold myself free to think. And anybody who will think for two minutes will see that this thought is the end of all thinking. It is useless to argue at all, if all our conclusions are warped by our conditions. Nobody can correct anybody’s bias, if all mind is all bias.

Memory
The things we remember are the things we forget. I mean that when a memory comes back sharply and suddenly, piercing the protection of oblivion, it appears for an instant exactly as it really was. If we think of it often, while its essentials doubtless remain true, it becomes more and more our own memory of the thing rather than the thing remembered.

A Miraculous World
What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world. What gives me this shock is almost anything I really recall; not the thing I should think most worth recalling. This is where it differs from the other great thrill of the past, all that is connected with first love and the romantic passion; for that, though equally poignant, comes always to a point; and it is narrow like a rapier piercing the heart, whereas the other was more like a hundred windows opened on all sides of the head.

The Changeless World Of Childhood
We have read countless pages about love brightening the sun and making the flowers more flamboyant; and it is true in a sense; but not in the sense I mean. It changes the world; but the baby lived in changeless world; or rather the man feels that it is he who has changed. He has changed long before he comes near to the great and glorious trouble of the love of woman; and that has in it something new and concentrated and crucial; crucial in the true sense of being as near Cana to Calvary. In the latter case, what is loved becomes instantly what may be lost.
[Expression: near Cana to Calvary John's Gospel, the last of the four, speaks twice of Mary. At Cana in Galilee she intercedes with her son for a newly married couple and he changes the water in wine. (John 2:1-12) On Calvary she stands beneath the cross at Jesus' death. (John 19:25-27) At Cana and on Calvary Jesus calls his mother "Woman," which early Christian tradition saw as an allusion likening her to the first woman, Eve. In God's plan, Mary, by her faith, reversed the failure of Eve and so became the new "mother of all the living." Through the centuries the stories of Cana and Calvary have led Christians to seek Mary's intercession with her Son and to rely on her as a mother with compassion for those in need.]

About His Father
[My father] He never dreamed of turning any of these plastic [artistic] talents to any mercenary account, or of using them for anything but his own private pleasure and ours. To us he appeared to be indeed the Man With the Golden Key, a magician opening the gates of goblin castles or the sepulchers of dead heroes; and there was no incongruity in calling his lantern a magic-lantern. But all this time he was known to the world, and even the next-door-neighbors, as a very reliable and capable though rather unambitious business man. It was the first good lesson in what is also the last lesson of life; that in everything that matters, the inside is much larger than the outside. On the whole I am glad that he was never an artist. It might have stood in his way of becoming an amateur.

Hobbies
A good game is a good thing, but it is not the same thing as a hobby; and many go golfing or shooting grouse because this is a concentrated form of recreation; just as what our contemporaries find in whiskey is a concentrated form of what our fathers found diffused in beer. If half a day is to take a man out of himself, or make a new man of him, it is better done by some sharp competitive excitement like sport. But a hobby is not half a day but half a lifetime. It would be truer to accuse the hobbyist of living a double life. And hobbies, especially such hobbies as a toy theatre, have a character that run parallel to a practical professional effort, and is not merely a reaction from it. It is not merely taking exercise; it is doing work. It is not merely exercising the body instead of the mind, an excellent but now largely a recognized thing. It is exercising the rest of the mind; now an almost neglected thing.

Adults and Children
Now children and adults are both fanciful at times; but that is not what, in my mind and memory, distinguishes adults from children. Mine is a memory of a sort of white light on everything, cutting things out very clearly, and rather emphasizing their solidity. The point is that the white light had a sort of wonder in it, as if the world were as new as myself; but not that the a world was anything but a real world. I am much more disposed now to fancy that an apple-tree in the moonlight is some sort of ghost or gray nymph; or to see the furniture fantastically changing and crawling a twilight, as in some story of Poe or Hawthorne. But when I was a child I had a sort of confident astonishment in contemplating the apple-tree as an apple-tree. I was sure of it, and also sure of the surprise of it; as sure, to quote the perfect popular proverb, as sure as God made little apples. The apples might be as little as I was; but they were solid and so was I. There was something of an eternal morning about the mood; and I liked to see a fire lit more than to imagine faces in the firelight. Brother Fire, whom St. Francis loved, did seem more like a brother than those dream-faces which come to men who have known other emotions than brotherhood. I do not know whether I ever, as the phrase goes, cried for the moon; but I am sure that I should have expected it to be solid like some colossal snowball; and should always have had more appetite for moons than for mere moonshine. Only figures of speech can faintly express the fact; but it was a fact and not a figure of speech.

Four Statements of Childhood
I will here sum up in four statements…First: my life unfolded itself…I have…come to believe in development; which means the unfolding of what is there… I was not conscious of them but I contained them. In short, they existed…in the condition called implicit…Second pretending is not deceiving…a child understands the nature of art long before it understands he nature of argument.. dolls are not idols but in the true sense images…things necessary to the imagination… imagination is the opposite of illusion…I enjoyed Punch and Judy as a drama and not a dream…the whole extraordinary state of mind I strive to recapture was really the very reverse of a dream,. It was rather as if I was more wide-awake then than I am now, and moving into the broader daylight, which was to our broad daylight what daylight is to dusk. Only, of course to those seeing the last gleam of it through the dusk, the light looks more uncanny than any darkness. Anyhow it looks quite different; of that I am absolutely and solidly certain; though in such a subjective matter of sensation there can be no demonstration…Fourth, ….I was often unhappy in childhood like other children; but happiness and unhappiness seemed of a different texture or held on a different tenure…I never doubted for a moment the moral of all the moral tales; that, as a general principle, people ought to be unhappy when they have been naughty. That is I held the whole idea of repentance and absolution implicit but not unfolded in my mind…I was by no means unacquainted with pain….the pain did not leave on my memory the sort of stain of the intolerable or mysterious that it leaves on the mature mind.

My Real Life
…I have been a journalist and have seen such things; there will be no difficulty in filling chapters with such things; but they will be unmeaning, if nobody understands that testily mean less to me than Punch and Judy on Campden Hill…In a word I have never lost the sense that this was my real life; the real beginning of what should have been a more real life; a lost experience in the land of the living….I was subconsciously certain then, as I am consciously certain now, that there was the white and solid road and the worthy beginning of the life of man; and that it is man who afterwards darkens it with dreams or goes astray from self-deception. It is only the grown man who lives a life of make-believe and pretending; and it is he who has his head in a cloud.

Christian Apologist
As an apologist I am the reverse of apologetic…I am very proud of my religion; I am especially proud of those parts that are most commonly called superstition. I am proud of being fettered by antiquated dogmas and enslaved by dead creeds, for I know very well that it is the heretical creeds that are dead, and that it is only the reasonable dogma that lives long enough to be called antiquated. I am very proud of what people call priestcraft since even that accidental term of abuse preserves the medieval truths that, like every other man, ought to be a craftsman. I am very proud of what people call Mariolatry; because it introduced into religion in the darkest ages that element of chivalry which is now being belatedly and badly understood in the form of feminism. I am very proud of being orthodox about the mysteries of the Trinity or the Mass. I am proud of believing in the Confessional; I am proud of believing in the Papacy.

Skeptics
On this matter a man may be intellectually right only through being morally wrong I am not impressed by the ethical airs and graces of skeptics on most of the other subjects, I am not over-awed by a young gentlemen saying that he cannot submit his intellect to dogma; because I doubt whether he has even used his intellect enough to define dogma.
I am not impressed very seriously by those who call Confession cowardly; for I gravely doubt whether they themselves would have he courage to go through with it.

The Ouija Board: Divination
The only thing I will say with complete confidence about that mystic and invisible power, is that it tells lies. The lie may be larks or they maybe lures to the imperiled soul or they may be a thousand other things; but whatever they are, they are not truths about the other world; or for that matter about this world.

Impressionism And The Age of Skepticism
I think there was a spiritual significance to Impressionism, in connection with this age of skepticism. I mean that it illustrated skepticism in the sense of subjectivism. Its principal was that if all that could be seen of a cow was a white line and a purple shadow, we should only render the line and the shadow; in a sense we should only believe in the line and the shadow, rather than in the cow.
In one sense the Impressionist skeptic contradicted the poet who said he had never seen a purple cow, He tended rather to say that he had only seen a purple cow; or rather that he had not seen the cow but only the purple. What ever may be the merits of this method of art, there is obviously something highly subjective and skeptical about it as a method of thought. It naturally lends itself to the metaphysical suggestion that things only exist as we perceive them, or that things do not exist at all. The philosophy of Impressionism is necessarily close to the philosophy of illusion. And this atmosphere also tends to contribute, however indirectly, to a certain mood of unreality and sterile isolation that settled at this time upon me; and I think upon many others.

The Splendor Of Being Alive In Mean Cities
It was the problem of how men could be made to realize the wonder and splendor of being alive in environments which their own daily criticism treated as dead-alive, and which their imagination had left for dead. It is normal for a man to boast if he can, or even when he can’t, that he is a citizen of no mean city. But these men had resigned themselves to being citizens of mean cities; and on every side of us the mean cities stretched far away beyond the horizon; mean in architecture, mean in costume, mean even in manners; but, what was the only thing that really mattered, mean in the imaginative conception of their own inhabitants.

Spontaneous Style of Talking: Lucidity
W.B [Yeats] is the best talker I ever met, except his old father, who alas will talk no more in this earthly tavern, though I hope he is still talking in Paradise. Among twenty other qualities, he had that rare but very real thing, entirely spontaneous style. The words will not come pouring out, any more than the bricks that make a great building come pouring out; they are simply arranged like lightning; as if a man could build a cathedral as quickly as a conjurer builds a house of cards….That style, or swift construction of a complicated sentence, was the sign of a lucidity now largely lost…Since then some muddled notion has arisen that talking in that complete style is artificial; merely because a man knows what he means and means to say it. I know not from what nonsense world the notion first came that there is some connection between being sincere and being semi-articulate. But it seems to be a notion that a man must mean what he says, because he beaks down even in trying to say it, or that he must be a marvel of power and decision, because he discovers in the middle of a sentence that he does not know what he was going to say. Hence the conversation of current comedy; and the pathetic belief that talk may be endless, so long as no statement is allowed to come to an end.

Patriotism
The truth is that for most men about this time Imperialism, or at least patriotism, was a substitute for religion. Men believe in the British Empire precisely because they had nothing else to believe in.

Theosophy
There had already appeared in that world the beginnings of a reaction against materialism; something analogous to what has since appeared in the form of Spiritualism. It has ever taken the yet more defiant form of Christian Science, which denied the existence of the body merely because its enemies had denied the existence of the soul. But the form it took first, or most generally, in the world of which I speak was the thing commonly called Theosophy: also sometimes called esoteric Buddhism…When I disliked Theosophy I had no Theology. Perhaps I did not dislike Theosophy but only Theosophists…I disliked them because they had shiny pebbly eyes and patient smiles. Their patience mostly consisted of waiting for others to rise to the spiritual plane where they themselves already stood.

Yeats And Theosophy
It is certain that Yeats was not deceived. He was not taken in by the Theosophical smile; or all that shining, or rather shiny, surface of optimism. He having a more penetrating mind, had already penetrated to the essential pessimism that lies behind that Asiatic placidity; and it is arguable that the pessimism was not so depressing as the optimism.

Yeats And Mysticism
In the scheme of mysticism to which he [Yeats] more and more tended after his first more fortunate adventures among farmers and fairies, the ancient religions stood more and more for he idea that the secret of the sphinx is that she has no secret. The veil of Isis was more and more merely the veil of Maya; illusion, ended with the last illusion that the veil of Isis is rent the last and worst illusion that we are really disillusioned. He said to me once, apropos of somebody’s disappointment about something achieved, “You would not get out of your chair and walk across the room, if Nature had not her bag of illusions.” Then he added, as if against a silent protest, “It isn’t a very cheerful philosophy that everything is illusion.”

Yeats Play: The Land of Heart’s Desire
In that magic burst of music, there was only one thing said by the fairy with which I fully and entirely sympathized; and that was the line: “I am tired of winds and waters and pale lights.” I do not think I have anything to alter in the sentence of literary criticism that I wrote long after: “There is only one thing against the Land of Heart’s Desire; the heart does not desire it.”

Practicing Religion: The Secretary of the Debating Club
On the other hand she had a sort of hungry appetite for all the fruitful things like fields and gardens and anything connected with production; about which she was quite practical. She practiced gardening…and on the same perverse principle, she actually practiced a religion…practicing a religion was much more puzzling than professing it [to all that agnostic or mystic world].

The Intelligentsia
The intelligentsia of the artistic and vaguely anarchic clubs was indeed a very strange world. And the strangest thing about it, I fancy, was that, while it thought a great deal bout thinking, it did not think. Everything seemed to come at second or third hand; from Nietzsche or Tolstoy or Ibsen or Shaw; and there was a pleasant atmosphere of discussing all these things, without any particular sense of responsibility for coming to any conclusion on them…A large section of the Intelligentsia seemed wholly devoid of any Intelligence. As was perhaps natural, those who pontificated most pompously were often the most windy and hollow. I remember a man with a long beard and deep booming voice who proclaimed at intervals, “What we need is Love,” or “All we require is Love,” like the detonations of a heavy gun. I remember another radiant little man who spread out his fingers and said, “Heaven is here. It is now!” which seemed a disturbing thought under he circumstances…A sort of Theosophist would say to me “Good and evil, truth and falsehood, folly and wisdom are only aspects of he same upward movement of the universe.” Even at this stage it occurred to me to ask, “Supposing there is no difference between good and bad, or between false and true, what is the difference between up and down?”

Idealistic Theists and Realistic Atheists
One half of the sensible men were more and more arguing that, because God was in His heaven, all must be right with the world; with this world or the next. The other half of hem were specially bent on showing that it was very doubtful if there was any God in any heaven and that it was so certain to the scientific eye that all is not right with the world, that it would be nearer the truth to say that all is wrong with the world.
One of these movements of progress led into the glorious fairyland of George MacDonald, the other led into the stark and hollow hills of Thomas Hardy. The one school was specially insisting that god must be supremely perfect if He exists; the other that if He exists, he must be grossly imperfect. ….
I think the first thing that struck me as startling was exactly this: that these two schools, which were logically in contradiction, were practically in combination. The idealistic theists and the realistic atheists were allies, against what? It has taken me about two-thirds of my life to answer that question. But when I first noticed it the question seemed unanswerable; and what was queerer still, to the people themselves it did not seem even questionable…the glamorous mysticism of George MacDonald…a full and substantial faith in the Fatherhood of God, and little could be said against it, even in theological theory, except that it rather ignored the free will of man. It’s universalism was sort of optimistic Calvinism…that was my first faith, before anything could be called my first doubt.
To my simple mind there could be no connection between the man whose whole faith was in the Fatherhood of God and the man who said there was no God or the man who said that God was not father…Meredith maintains on the whole that Nature is to be trusted and Hardy that nature is not to be trusted…I had not yet discovered the higher synthesis which connects them.. For the higher synthesis…consists in wearing liberty ties and curiously shaped beards and hats and meeting in cultured clubs where they drink coffee.
These skeptical doctrinaires do not recognize each other by the doctrines. They recognize each other by the beard or the clothes, as the lower animals know each other by the fur or the smell…I believe the congregation of these semi-secular chapels consist largely of one vast and vague sea of wandering doubters, with their wandering doubts who may be found one Sunday seeking a solution from the Theists and another Sunday form the Theosophists… They are only connected by the convention of unconventionality.

Fragments Of The Old Religious Scheme
Amid all this scattered thinking, sometimes not unfairly to be called scatter-brained thinking, I began to piece together the fragment of the old religious scheme; mainly by the gaps that denoted its disappearance. And the more I saw of real human nature the more I came to suspect that it was really rather bad for these people that it had disappeared. Many of them held, and still hold, very noble and necessary truths in the social and secular area. But even those it seemed to me they held less firmly than they might have done, if there had been anything like a fundamental principle of moral and metaphysics to support them. Men who believed ardently in altruism were yet troubled by the necessity of believing with even more religious reverence in Darwinism about a ruthless struggle in the rule of life. Men who naturally accepted the moral equality of mankind yet did so, in a manner, shrinkingly, under the gigantic shadow of the Superman of Nietzsche and Shaw. There hearts were in the right place; but their heads were emphatically in the wrong place, being generally poked or plunged into vast volumes of materialism and skepticism, crabbed barren, servile and without any light of liberty or hope…the old theological theories seemed more or less to fit into experience, while he new and negative theories did not fit into anything, least of all into each other.

Orthodoxy: A Spiritual Asylum
In all the welter of inconsistent and incompatible heresies, the one and really unpardonable heresy was orthodoxy…It was not that I began by believing in supernormal things. It was the unbelievers who began by disbelieving even in normal things. It was the secularists who drove me to theological ethics, by themselves destroying any sane of rational possibility of secular ethics. I might myself have been a secularist, so long as it meant that I could be merely responsible to secular society. It was the Determinist, who told me at the top of his voice, that I could not be responsible at all. And as I like being treated as a responsible being, and not as a lunatic let out for the day, I began to look about for some spiritual asylum that was not merely a lunatic asylum.

Questions Of The Skeptic
There is still a notion that the agnostic can remain secure in this world, so long as he does not wish to be what is called “other-worldly”. He can be content with commonsense about headwomen, so long as he is not curious of mysteries about angels and archangels. It is not true. The questions of the skeptic strike at the heart of this our human life; they disturb this world, quite apart from the other world; and it is exactly commonsense that they disturb the most. There could not be a better example that this queer appearance, in my youth, of the determinist as a demagogue; shouting to a mob of millions that no man ought to be blamed for anything he did, because it was all heredity and environment. Logically, it would stop a man in the act of saying “Thank you” to somebody for passing the mustard…In the grossly unjust social system we suffer, it is probably enough that many of these really are punished unjustly; that some ought not be to punished at all, that some, perhaps, are really not responsible at all…a pity for the weak and the unfortunate, a slightly lopsided exaggeration of Christian charity…He was so anxious to forgive that he denied the need of forgiveness.

Philosophical Differences
For in fact all these [philosophical] differences come back to a religious difference; indeed I think all differences do. I did not know myself, at the beginning, what the religious difference was; still less what the religion was. But the difference is this; that the Shavians [Of, relating to, or characteristic of George Bernard Shaw or his works] believe in evolution exactly as the old Imperialists believed in expansion. They believe in a great growing and groping thing like a tree; but I believe in the flower and the fruit; and the flower is often small. The fruit is final and in that sense finite; it has a form and therefore a limit. There has been stamped upon it an image, which is the crown and consummation of an aim; and the mediaeval mystics used the same metaphor and called it Fruition. And as applied to man, it means this; that man has been made more sacred than any superman or super-monkey; that his very limitations have already become holy and like a home; because of that sunken chamber in the rocks, where God became very small.

The Chief Idea Of My Life
I am not here defending such doctrines as that of the Sacrament of Penance; any more than the equally staggering doctrine of the Divine love for man. I am not writing a book of religious controversy; of which I have written several and shall probably, unless violently restrained by my friends and relatives, write several more. I am here engaged in the morbid and degrading task of telling the story of my life; and have only to state what actually were the effects of such doctrines on my own feelings and actions. And I am, by the nature of the task, especially concerned with the fact that these doctrines seem to me to link up my whole life from the beginning, as no other doctrines could do; and especially to settle simultaneously the two problems of my childish happiness and my boyish brooding.
And they specially affected one idea; which I hope it is not pompous to call the chief idea of my life; I will not say the doctrine I have always taught, but the doctrine I should always have liked to teach. That is the idea of taking things with gratitude, and not taking things for granted. Thus the Sacrament of Penance gives a new life, and reconciles a man to all living, but it does not do it as the optimists and the hedonists and the heathen preachers of happiness do it. The gift is given at a price, and is conditioned by a confession. In other words, the name of the price is Truth, which may also be called Reality; but it is facing the reality about oneself. When the process is only applied to other people it is called Realism.

Comparison Breeds Contempt: Presumption And Despair
The pessimists of my boyhood, when confronted with the dandelion, said with Swinburne: “I am weary of all hours Blown buds and barren flowers Desires and dreams and powers And everything but sleep.” … But there is a way of despising the dandelion which is not that of the dreary pessimist, but of the more offensive optimist. It can be done in various ways; one of which is saying, “You can get much better dandelions at Selfridge’s,” or “You can get much cheaper dandelions at Woolworth’s.” Another way is to observe with a casual drawl, “Of course nobody but Gamboli in Vienna really understands dandelions,” or saying that nobody would put up with the old-fashioned dandelion since the super-dandelion has been grown in the Frankfurt Palm Garden; or merely sneering at the stinginess of providing dandelions, when all the best hostesses give you an orchid for your buttonhole and a bouquet of rare exotics to take away with you.
These are all methods of undervaluing the thing by comparison; for it is not familiarity but comparison that breeds contempt. And all such captious comparisons are ultimately based on the strange and staggering heresy that a human being has a right to dandelions; that in some extraordinary fashion we can demand the very pick of all the dandelions in the garden of Paradise; that we owe no thanks for them at all and need feel no wonder at them at all; and above all no wonder at being thought worthy to receive them.
Instead of saying, like the old religious poet, “What is man that Thou carest for him, or the son of man that Thou regardest him?” we are to say like the discontented cabman, “What’s this?” or like the bad-tempered Major in the club, “Is this a chop fit for a gentleman?” Now I not only dislike this attitude quite as much as the Swinburnian pessimistic attitude, but I think it comes to very much the same thing; to the actual loss of appetite for the chop or the dish of dandelion-tea. And the name of it is Presumption and the name of its twin brother is Despair.

A Great Deal Of Gratitude Even For A Very Little Good
In short, as it seems to me, it matters very little whether a man is discontented in the name of pessimism or progress, if his discontent does in fact paralyze his power of appreciating what he has got. The real difficulty of man is not to enjoy lamp-posts or landscapes, not to enjoy dandelions or chops; but to enjoy enjoyment. To keep the capacity of really liking what he likes; that is the practical problem which the philosopher has to solve.
And it seemed to me at the beginning, as it seems to me now in the end, that the pessimists and optimists of the modern world have alike missed and muddled this matter; through leaving out the ancient conception of humility and the thanks of the unworthy. This is a matter much more important and interesting than my opinions; but, in point of fact, it was by following this thin thread of a fancy about thankfulness, as slight as any of those dandelion clocks that are blown upon the breeze like thistledown, that I did arrive eventually at an opinion which is more than an opinion. Perhaps the one and only opinion that is really more than an opinion. For this secret of antiseptic simplicity was really a secret; it was not obvious, and certainly not obvious at that time. It was a secret that had already been almost entirely left to, and locked up with, certain neglected and unpopular things. It was almost as if the dandelion-tea really were a medicine, and the only recipe or prescription belonged to one old woman, a ragged and nondescript old woman, rather reputed in our village to be a witch.
Anyhow, it is true that both the happy hedonists and the unhappy pessimists were stiffened by the opposite principle of pride. The pessimist was proud of pessimism, because he thought nothing good enough for him; the optimist was proud of optimism, because he thought nothing was bad enough to prevent him from getting good out of it. There were valuable men of both these types; there were men with many virtues; but they not only did not possess the virtue I was thinking of, but they never thought of it. They would decide that life was no good, or that it had a great deal of good; but they were not in touch with this particular notion, of having a great deal of gratitude even for a very little good. And as I began to believe more and more that the clue was to be found in such a principle, even if it was a paradox, I was more and more disposed to seek out those who specialized in humility, though for them it was the door of heaven and for me the door of earth.

Why This [Roman Catholic] Theology
And if it be next asked why this [Roman Catholic] theology, I answer here–because it is the only theology that has not only thought, but thought of everything. That almost any other theology or philosophy contains a truth, I do not at all deny; on the contrary, that is what I assert; and that is what I complain of. Of all the other systems or sects I know, every single one is content to follow a truth, theological or theosophical or ethical or metaphysical; and the more they claim to be universal, the more it means that they merely take something and apply it to everything.
A very brilliant Hindu scholar and man of science said to me, “There is but one thing, which is unity and universality. The points in which things differ do not matter; it is only their agreement that matters.” And I answered, “The agreement we really want is the agreement between agreement and disagreement. It is the sense that things do really differ, although they are at one.” Long afterwards I found what I meant stated much better by a Catholic writer, Coventry Patmore: “God is not infinite; He is the synthesis of infinity and boundary.” In short, the other teachers were always men of one idea, even when their one idea was universality. They were always especially narrow when their one idea was breadth. I have only found one creed that could not be satisfied with a truth, but only with the Truth, which is made of a million such truths and yet is one.

Existence Is Still A Strange Thing To Me
I have said that I had in childhood, and have partly preserved out of childhood, a certain romance of receptiveness, which has not been killed by sin or even by sorrow; for though I have not had great troubles, I have had many. A man does not grow old without being bothered; but I have grown old without being bored. Existence is still a strange thing to me; and as a stranger I give it welcome. Well, to begin with, I put that beginning of all my intellectual impulses before the authority to which I have come at the end; and I find it was there before I put it there. I find myself ratified in my realization of the miracle of being alive; not in some hazy literary sense such as the skeptics use, but in a definite dogmatic sense; of being made alive by that which can alone work miracles.

The Practice Of Confession
I have said that this rude and primitive religion of gratitude did not save me from ingratitude; from sin which is perhaps most horrible to me because it is ingratitude. But here again I have found that the answer awaited me. Precisely because the evil was mainly of the imagination, it could only be pierced by that conception of confession which is the end of mere solitude and secrecy. I had found only one religion which dared to go down with me into the depths of myself. I know, of course, that the practice of Confession, having been reviled through three or four centuries and through the greater part of my own life, has now been revived in a belated fashion.
The scientific materialists, permanently behind the times, have revived all that was reviled in it as indecent and introspective. I have heard that a new sect has started once more the practice of the most primitive monasteries, and treated the confessional as communal. Unlike the primitive monks of the desert, it seems to find a satisfaction in performing the ritual in evening-dress. In short, I would not be supposed to be ignorant of the fact that the modern world, in various groups, is now prepared to provide us with the advantages of Confession. None of the groups, so far as I know, professes to provide the minor advantage of Absolution. I have said that my morbidities were mental as well as moral; and sounded the most appalling depths of fundamental skepticism and solipsism. And there again I found that the Church had gone before me and established her adamantine foundations; that she had affirmed the actuality of external things; so that even madmen might hear her voice; and by a revelation in their very brain begin to believe their eyes.

Learning That Liberty Is Human Dignity
Anybody who cares to turn up the files of the great newspapers, even those supposed to be Radical newspapers, and see what they said about the Great Strikes, and compare it with what my friends and I said at the same date, can easily test whether this is a boast or a brute fact. But anybody reading this book (if anybody does) will see that from the very beginning my instinct about justice, about liberty and equality, was somewhat different from that current in our age; and from all the tendencies towards concentration and generalization. It was my instinct to defend liberty in small nations and poor families; that is to defend the rights of man as including the rights of property; especially the property of the poor. I did not really understand what I meant by Liberty, until I heard it called by the new name of Human Dignity. It was a new name to me; though it was part of a creed nearly two thousand years old.
In short, I had blindly desired that a man should be in possession of something, if it were only his own body. In so far as materialistic concentration proceeds, a man will be in possession of nothing; not even his own body. Already there hover on the horizon sweeping scourges of sterilization or social hygiene, applied to everybody and imposed by nobody [A distant echo of Obama Care?]. At least I will not argue here with what are quaintly called the scientific authorities on the other side. I have found one authority on my side.

My End Is My Beginning
But for me my end is my beginning, as Maurice Baring quoted of Mary Stuart, and this overwhelming conviction that there is one key which can unlock all doors brings back to me the first glimpse of the glorious gift of the senses; and the sensational experience of sensation. And there starts up again before me, standing sharp and clear in shape as of old, the figure of a man who crosses a bridge and carries a key; as I saw him when I first looked into fairyland through the window of my father’s peep-show. But I know that he who is called Pontifex, the Builder of the Bridge, is called also Claviger, the Bearer of the Key; and that such keys were given him to bind and loose when he was a poor fisher in a far province, beside a small and almost secret sea.

ballad of white horse

G. K. Chesterton’s “Ballad of the White Horse” is available as a series of eight 15-minute MP3s, read by Joshua Christensen.

Posted in Book Recommendations, G. K. Chesterton | Tagged A Miraculous World, A Spiritual Asylum, Adults and Children, Christian Apologist, confession, Four Statements of Childhood, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, GKC About His Father, GKC Childhood, GKC Family, Gratitude, Hobbies, Impressionism, Liberty Is Human Dignity, mean cities, Patriotism, Presumption and Despair, Skeptics, Theosophy, W.B. Yeats | Leave a Comment »

Learning To Dwell In This Desert

October 9, 2009

Early in his life, van Gogh was a devout Christian and wanted to become involved in religion for his profession. He became a lay preacher and afterwards strived to become a painter of the working people. Capturing peasants’ everyday laboring in his paintings, he most famously did so in The Potato Eaters (1885). In a dark room lit only by a single candle hung above the table, the painting shows five peasants eating potatoes at the table. The overall darkness and dull green shades coloring the walls give off an impression of dirt and grime everywhere, and the shadows threaten that there are worse unseen areas in the room. The size of the people relative to the room and the low-hanging candle-lamp crowd the room to a stifling point, and the presence of only one community plate certainly is a statement of the family’s sanitary standards.

Some further reading selections from Kathleen Norris’ Acedia and Me.

Depression
Let’s call it sickness, a desert malady. Anyone could lose perspective in that heat, weakened by hunger, thirst, and uncertainty. Yet a curious fact about illness, including depression, is that it can bring us to clarity. We value the quality of attention that comes to us when we are not well. In “I’m Not OK, You’re Not OK [ her review of The Noonday Demon, Joyce Carol Oates observes that “those afflicted with depression are often ambivalent about it, as no one is ambivalent about physical illness.” Her latter assumption belies the fact that people of many faiths have experienced ailments and incapacities as a gateway to spiritual insight. But her observation about depression reflects the fact that many people are conflicted about a state in which the ploys they’ve used to color things in their favor are stripped away, and they sense that they are witnessing the world as it is. The light maybe harsher than we would like, but at least it forces us to see.

[This reminds me of Dostoyevsky’s creed: “One sees the truth more clearly when one is unhappy,” he wrote from Siberia. “And yet God gives me moments of perfect peace; in such moments I love and believe that I am loved; in such moments I have formulated my creed, wherein all is clear and holy to me. This creed is extremely simply: here it is. I believe that there is nothing lovelier, deeper, more sympathetic, more rational, more manly and more perfect than the Saviour: I say to myself with jealous love that not only is there no one else like Him, but that there could be no one.”]

From his extensive research, Andrew Solomon reports evidence that depressed people have a more realistic view of the world than others. He writes of one study that showed “depressed and non-depressed people are equally good at answering abstract questions. When asked, however, about their control over an event, non-depressed people invariably believe themselves to have more control than they really have, and depressed people give an accurate assessment.”

In a test involving a video game, “depressed people. . . knew just how many little monsters they had killed’ while the non-depressed people consistently overestimated their kills by four to six times the actual amount. For all of that, Solomon reminds us that “major depression is far too stern a teacher: you needn’t go to the Sahara to avoid frostbite.” Still, we find ways to love that old devil we know. And “love” is not too strong a word. “Curiously enough:’ Solomon admits, “I love my depression. I do not love experiencing my depression, but I love the depression itself. I love who I am in the wake of it?’ He cannot help respecting that which gave him knowledge of “my own acreage, the full extent of my soul.”

Solomon’s perception is an ancient one; in the first century the Stoic Seneca observed that people “love their vices with a sort of despair, and hate them at the same time?’ Solomon is also in agreement with the desert fathers and mothers who made their stand in the desert in order to combat their demons and assess themselves more honestly. When he asserts that “the opposite of depression is not happiness but vitality:’ he is echoing the existential monastic view that the opposite of acedia is an energetic devotion. When I am at my worst, mired in torpor and despair, simply recalling this can give me hope.

“Hope” is the title of Solomon’s last chapter, and in it he writes, poignantly, of valuing his depression because it unearthed “what I would have to call a soul, a part of myself I could never have imagined until one day . when hell came to pay me a surprise visit. It’s a precious discovery:’ It is also a costly one, and the price is exacted again and again. All too often we are like the man in the Gospel story who is cleansed of evil spirits only to find that the demons who have been displaced keep wandering, looking for a place to land. When they see that the house of his soul has once more been made neat and clean, they descend on him and make his condition even worse than before.

How is it possible to maintain our sanity, let alone to foster hope? Acedia is a particularly savage enemy, because it is not content with just a part of us. Evagrius writes that “the other demons are like the rising or setting sun in that they are found in only a part of the soul. The noonday demon, however, is accustomed to embrace the entire soul and oppress the spirit.” Evagrius, Cassian, and Andrew Solomon might agree that hope is nurtured when we can recall the peace of mind we once attained, and regard it as real, at least as real as our most troubled and anxious state. But we must start small. Often my first act of recovery is doing something as menial as dusting a bookshelf or balancing my checkbook.

If I am tempted to devalue such humble activities, I remember that acedia descended on Anthony as soon as he went to the desert, but when he prayed to be delivered from it, he was shown that any physical task, done in the right spirit, could free him. Likewise, Evagrius gives sound advice to anyone who has begun to recover from an assault of the demon: “What heals acedia is staunch persistence…Decide upon a set amount for yourself in every work and do not turn aside from it before you complete it?’

If my pride recoils from endeavors that seem futile in the face of my world-weary despair, I have to remember that disdaining ordinary, mundane chores that come to nothing can lead to my discounting personal relationships as well. Why honor my mother and my father, when they will grow old and infirm and then abandon me by dying? My own “antirrheticus” for that thought comes from Psalm 27:“Though father and mother forsake me, / the Lord will receive me.” Under acedia’s siege I might ask: Why vow myself to a spouse, if it is “until death do us part”? We all die anyway, and even our sun will one day burn itself out, destroying life as we know it on earth. Does this mean that I don’t need to bother about loving, or living, here and now? I am better off asking: Why is it that acedia brings such thoughts to the table just as I would feast on life’s bounty? Only then can I fight back, embracing love and commitment as a source of strength and peace instead of despondency. Only then will I have defeated acedia, At least for now.

Both ancient and modern writers speak of the profound serenity that can come after a period of torment and trial. As Solomon puts it, “Depression at its worst is the most horrifying loneliness, and from it I learned the value of intimacy.” The pain is real, but remedy may yet be found. For Evagrius, the struggle with acedia is worthy because it leads not only to peace but also to joy. If, as the scholar Christoph Joest has written, acedia for Evagrius was the culmination of all the temptations, then its absence is the fulfillment of all virtues, which find their ultimate expression in love. That is why the struggle is worth our while.

Isaiah 43
I thought, “Oh, hell, it’s getting close to Christmas — I might as well see what’s up.” After consulting the liturgical calendar, I opened the Gideon Bible to Isaiah 43 and found this:

But now thus says the LORD, who created you; O Jacob,
And He who formed you, O Israel:
Fear not, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by your name;
You are Mine.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
And through the rivers, they shall not overflow you.
When you walk through the fire you shall not be burned,
Nor shall the flame scorch you.
For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.
Isaiah 43: 1-3 (NICJV)

Taking in these words as I listened to the steady sound of my husband’s breathing, I was profoundly glad for everything. This is a blessed time, I thought to myself. We wait and want for nothing. We are free to love, which is the ultimate freedom. Our situation might appear hopeless to others. But we are Adam and Eve, before the Fall, and all we know is heaven.

A Little Riff on Heaven and Hell
I suspect that any married person, or any monk for that matter, has at one time or another felt the loss and diminishment expressed by the fourth-century Abba Megethius when he said to his fellow monks, “Originally, when we met together we spoke of edifying things, encouraging one another. We were ‘like the angels’; we ascended up to the heavens. But now when we come together, we only drag one another down by gossiping, and so we go down to hell.”

For the early Christian abbas and ammas, both heaven and hell were to be found in present reality. While both were envisioned as an inheritance — one to be hoped for, the other avoided — neither existed apart from everyday experience. No doubt these monastics would have greeted Sartre’s famous existentialist credo “Hell is other people” by saying, “Yes, of course, and heaven as well.”

Eugene Ionesco wrote that “there is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think we live in alienation: in one way or another. . . humanity has always had a nostalgia for the freedom that is only beauty, that is only real life, plenitude, light?’ Heaven or hell? Either place is within our reach, for we carry it within us. Today is the first day, and the last. Heaven or hell: this is the moment, here, now. Make of it what you will.

To Say ‘God Is Love’ Is Like Saying, ‘Eat Wheaties’
In a series of talks in the 1960s, Thomas Merton foresaw our contemporary world as one-dimensional, a world in which “all words have become alike. . . To say ‘God is love:” he commented, “is like saying, ‘Eat Wheaties? – . . There’s no difference, except… that people know they are supposed to look pious when God is mentioned, but not when cereal is? Now that expensive handbags and jackets are displayed in store windows as reverentially as icons, and swimsuits alleged to have a slimming effect are advertised with the tagline “Why pray for a miracle when you can wear one?” even that distinction has been compromised.

And it matters. When magazines such as Time and Newsweek pretend that the news consists of page after page of unpaid advertisements for the latest gadgets, we may, as Merton predicted, fall into the trap of “[thinking we are informed:’ when in fact we are “living in an imaginary world?’

In this hyped-up world, broadcast and Internet news media have emerged as acedia’s perfect vehicles, demanding that we care, all at once, about a suicide bombing, a celebrity divorce, and the latest advance in nanotechnology. Advertisements direct our attention to automobiles; medications to combat high blood pressure, hemorrhoids, and insomnia; the Red Cross; a new household cleanser. When the “news” returns, there are appalling segues, such as one I witnessed recently, the screen going from “Child Sex Offender Search” to “Gas Prices Rise.” It all comes at us on the same level, and an innocent from another world might assume that we consider these matters to be of equal value and importance.

We may want to believe that we are still concerned, as our eyes drift from a news anchor announcing the latest atrocity to the NBA scores and stock market quotes streaming across the bottom of the screen. But the ceaseless bombardment of image and verbiage makes us impervious to caring.

As Thomas Merton predicted, our world has been flattened, and we’ve been had. Our concern with being up-to-date on the latest product -- be it a lotion promising to make our skin more youthful or a trend in politics, medicine, or spirituality -- is both “hypnotic [and] narcissistic, which is what a closed circle always is?’ Presented with a seductive product or idea, “you allow yourself to be seduced by it, and then…you’re happy?’ The problem, as Merton notes, is that “this is the way the abuse of language functions?’ Inundated with “self-validating, hypnotic formulas [that] are immune to contradictions” — he uses as an example a maxim employed by military officers during the Vietnam War: We are destroying a village in order to save it — we lose the ability to reflect on either world events or our own lives.

It is hard work to look beneath the surfaces presented to us and examine the cultural and historical forces underlying current conditions. Why should we care enough to make the effort? In positing this question, we are well advised to name and confront our acedia. For it is an unseen enemy; like a windstorm, it is witnessed only in its damaging effects.

Acedia is not a relic of the fourth century or a hang-up of some weird Christian monks, but a force we ignore at our peril. Whenever we focus on the foibles of celebrities to the detriment of learning more about the real world — the emergence of fundamentalist religious and nationalist movements, the economic factors endangering our reefs and rain forests, the social and ecological damage caused by factory farming — acedia is at work. Wherever we run to escape it, acedia is there, propelling us to “the next best thing;’ another paradise to revel in and wantonly destroy. It also sends us backward, prettying the past with the gloss of nostalgia. Acedia has come so far with us that it easily attaches to our hectic and overburdened schedules. We appear to be anything but slothflul, yet that is exactly what we are, as we do more and care less, and feel pressured to do still more.

We may well ask: If we are always in motion, constantly engaged in self-improvement, and even trying to do good for others, how can we be considered uncaring or slothful? In Sloth, the late playwright Wendy Wasserstein concluded a brilliant parody of a self-help book, titled Sloth and How to Get It, with a cogent observation of the “ubermotivated” people of our time.

“When you achieve true slothdom’ she writes, “you have no desire for the world to change. True sloths are not revolutionaries, but the lazy guardians at the gate of the status quo:’ The culture may glorify people who do Pilates at dawn, work their BlackBerrys obsessively on the morning commute, multitask all day at the office, and put a gourmet meal on the table at night afier the kids come home from French and fencing lessons, but, Wasserstein asks, “are these hyper-scheduled, overactive individuals really creating anything new? Are they guilty of passion in any way? Do they have a new vision for their government? For their community? Or for themselves?” She suspects that “their purpose is to keep themselves so busy, so entrenched in their active lives, that their spirit reaches a permanent state of lethargiosis (the process of eliminating energy and drive, the vital first step in becoming a sloth.)”

Just look at us, with more money and less sleep than we know how to handle, except to go into debt, and take pills that get us up in the morning and others that let us rest at night. If we are to believe Bertrand Russell, who remarked that “one of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important:’ then a good many of us are on the edge. Despite the abundance of available therapies, we are still bewildered in the face of our neuroses and spiritual poverty and may be less well equipped than a fourth-century monk to deal with them.

In our desperate seeking after more precise terms to define our condition, we have become like the hapless citizens of Jean-Luc Godard’s savagely comic film Alphaville, who, in a dystopian future, receive new government-issued “Bibles” every day, dictionaries from which words are continually vanishing, because, as one character says, “they are no longer allowed.” She adds, mournfully, that “some words have disappeared that I liked very much” among them weep, tenderness, and conscience. Recalling a man she knew who wrote intriguing but “incomprehensible things” she says, “they used to call it poetry.”

I wonder whether that future is now, and why, if we have effectively banished the word demon, we are still so demon-haunted. It may be acceptable to speak again of demons. The New Yorker recently published a cartoon depicting an unshaven, bleary-looking businessman leaving for work, holding a liquor bottle along with his briefcase, and saying to his wife, “It’s Take Your Inner Demons to Work Day.”

To me this haggard man, even in his slothful appearance, epitomizes our latest, purely acedic mantra, “I don’t have time to think,” which presumes that we also don’t have time to care. Our busyness can’t disguise the suspicion that we are being steadily diminished, not so much living as passing time in a desert of our own devising. We might look for guidance to those earlier desert-dwellers, who had no word for depression, but whose vocabulary did include words for accidie, discernment, faith, grace, hope, and mercy.

They gave one another good counsel: Perform the humblest of tasks with full attention and no fussing over the whys and wherefores; remember that you are susceptible, at the beginning of any new venture, to being distracted from your purpose by such things as a headache, an intense ill will toward another, a neurotic and potent self-doubt. To dwell in this desert and make it bloom requires that we indulge in neither guilt nor vainglorious fantasizing, but struggle to know ourselves as we are.

In this process we will not escape sadness and pain; it can help to employ Amma Syncletica’s distinction between two forms of grief, one that liberates, another that destroys. “The first sort;’ she writes, “consists in weeping over one’s own faults” and over “the weakness of one’s neighbors, in order not to destroy one’s purpose, and attach oneself to the perfect good.” Yet “there is also a grief that comes from the enemy, full of mockery, which some call accidie. This spirit must be cast out, mainly by prayer and psalmody.” If we recognize the bad thought of acedia for what it is, we can indeed cast it out using the very means it has employed to torment us. Amma Syncletica called on prayer and psalmody for a reason. As the slogan has it, life’s a bitch, and then you die: so you might as well find a psalm and sing anyway.

Posted in Reflections, Understanding Acedia/Sloth | Tagged acedia, Acedia and Me, Alphaville, Andrew Solomon, Depression, Dostoyevsky’s Creed, Eugene Ionesco, Heaven and Hell, Hope, Isaiah 43, Jean-Luc Godard, Kathleen Norris, Sloth and How to Get It, the noonday demon, Thomas Merton, Wendy Wasserstein | 1 Comment »

Exploring The Good Samaritan

October 8, 2009

Van Gogh was staying in an institution for the mentally ill when he painted this work, in May 1890.

But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”
Luke 10:29-37

A Portrait of Christ by Fr. Robert Barron:

THE STORY OF the Good Samaritan is probably the best known of Jesus’ parables. And the moral lesson contained in this narrative — that one should reach out to the suffering person, no matter what social, racial, or religious animosities might exist between helper and helped — is perennially pertinent. But something that both the fathers of the church and the Protestant theologian Karl Barth have taught me is that all things in the New Testament — stories, moral exhortations, letters, and parables are finally descriptions of Jesus, portraits, however indirect, of the Lord. In one of the great painted windows of Chartres Cathedral, there is depicted the intertwining of two biblical stories: the account of the fall of the human race and the parable of the Good Samaritan. This artistic juxtaposition reflects a connection that was made from earliest centuries of the church between the figure of the Good Samaritan and Jesus the savior. It is this provocative symbolic suggestion that I should like to explore.

Jesus’ story begins as follows: “There was a man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho.” Jerusalem is a symbol of heaven, Mt. Zion — the place where, as Isaiah predicted, all of the tribes of the Lord will go up. Read mystically, therefore, Jerusalem signals the state of friendship with God. And as any attentive reader of the Hebrew Scriptures would know, Jericho evokes the city of sin, for it was the place that the invading Israelites had to conquer as they moved into the Promised Land. The journey from Jerusalem to Jericho is thus a symbol of the fall, the downward progression of the human race from unity with God to alienation from him. As the parable unfolds, we hear that “the man fell in with robbers.” This is a realistic detail, since that road was notorious in Jesus’ time as a haunt of bandits, but there is also a symbolic resonance. Sin effectively robs us of friendship with God and thereby corrupts all that is good in us. When we know the world apart from God, we know it less truly and less well; when our wills function in alienation from God, they do so errantly and awkwardly; when our passions are divorced from God, they become disordered and fall into a kind of civil war. Now all of this debilitation robs us of our dignity and corrodes the image of God according to which we were created. Those who have been the victims of a robbery often say that the worst part of the experience is the humiliation of it — and this same dynamic holds when the robbery is a spiritual one. Next we hear that “they stripped him, and then went off, leaving him half-dead.” What a perfect description of sin. In its wake, we are alive, hut barely, for the divine life in us has been compromised; we are like the Gerasene demoniac, alive hut wandering among the tombs, half-dead.

The parable is a tightly scripted drama, and now we turn to act two. “A priest happened to he going down the same road; he saw him, but continued on. Likewise there was a Levite who came the same way; he saw him and went on.” To be sure, this is a sharp criticism of our unwillingness to take care of people in need; there is certainly a moral lesson to he learned here. If we pursue our Christological reading, however, unexpected dimensions open up. The priest and the Levite symbolize official religion, pious practice, the works of the law — all of the efforts of Israelite religion to affect salvation. These disciplines are not, of course, bad in themselves, but in accord with Paul’s constant observation, they are, in their fallen state, unable to save us. Walking from Jerusalem to Jericho, the two pious figures stand for religion that has itself been compromised by sin, devolving into an exercise in self-justification. Those who have been beaten up and left half-dead by sin should, therefore, not expect aid from that particular quarter.

Now comes the hinge upon which the parable turns:

“But a Samaritan who was journeying along came on him and was moved to pity at the sight.” Samaritans were half-breeds, the descendants of those Jews who remained behind at the time of the exile and allowed themselves to mix sexually and culturally with non-Jewish tribes. Their very presence, therefore, was repulsive to Jews of pure blood. Jesus was a Jew, hut he mingled so prodigally with sinners, outsiders, the morally suspect that he became, in the course of his public ministry, an object of suspicion. Finally, at the close of his life, all of polite society turned away from him. He is, therefore, the Samaritan. What does this despised traveler do? “He approached him and dressed his wounds, pouring in oil and wine as a means to heal.” In his letter to the Philippians, Paul says of Jesus, “Though he was in the form of God, Jesus did not deem equality with God a thing to he grasped at, hut rather emptied himself, taking the form of a slave.” The Son of God was not pleased to remain in his heaven, but rather took to himself a human nature by which he could enter as radically as possible into the condition of the fallen human race. He approached us, even in our repugnant state, stooping down in order to raise us up. What is more, he healed us. One of the earliest titles given to Jesus is Soter (healer, in the Greek), rendered in Latin as salvator (bearer of the salus, the salve, the healing balm). Christ is the great healer, And how does he heal? Once more the symbolism of the parable is striking: he pours in oil and wine. The alert Christian reader immediately interprets these as evocative of the sacraments of baptism, confirmation, and orders (all of which involve anointing) and Eucharist (wine consecrated to be the blood of Jesus). The author of the Gospel of John makes much the same sacramental point when he tells us that from the pierced side of Jesus there flowed water (baptism) and blood (the Eucharist),

We then hear that “he hoisted him on his own beast and brought him to an inn, where he cared for him.” In his dying, Jesus took upon himself the sins of the world; in Paul’s even more dramatic language, he became sin on the cross, bearing in his own body the suffering of the human race — hoisting us, as it were, upon himself. And then he brought us to the church, a place of rest and recuperation, where he continues, through the word, sacraments, and the community itself, to care for us. The narrative closes with a sharp symbolic detail: “The next day, he took out two silver pieces and gave them to the innkeeper and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever you spend.’” A word frequently used to describe what Jesus accomplished in his dying and rising is “redemption,” from the Latin redemere, which means simply “to buy back.” Christ Jesus paid the price for sin; he redressed the imbalance that it caused; he reestablished justice in God’s cosmos. And thus we live as debtors no longer; we’ve been paid for.

We recall that the telling of this parable was prompted by the question of a man who “wished to justify himself” and asked, “who is my neighbor?” Jesus turns the table on him by asking, at the close of his narrative, “Which of these three was neighbor to the man who fell in with the robbers?” When the answer comes, “the one who treated him with compassion,” Jesus says, with devastating simplicity: “Go and do the same.” Having been saved by Christ, who became a neighbor to us, we must spend our lives becoming neighbor to those in need, scouting the road for those who have been brutalized by sin, and then endeavoring to pour in the wine and the oil. Having read this story as an icon of Jesus, we must become what we have seen.

From Jesus of Nazareth by Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI):

What Are The Parables?
There is one vexed saying of Jesus concerning the parables that stands in the way: “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables; in order that ‘they may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand; so that they may not turn again and be forgiven.’” [Mark 4:12] …In saying these words, Jesus places himself in the line of Prophets – his destiny is a Prophet’s destiny…In the book of Isaiah it says “Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed.” [Isaiah:6:10] Prophets fail. Their message goes too much against general opinion and the comfortable habits of life. It is only through failure that their work becomes efficacious. …Prophets are the way that to reach the point where “they turn and God will forgive them” It is precisely the method for opening the eyes and ears of all. It is on the Cross that the parables are unlocked. …The parable has a two fold movement. One the one hand the parable brings distant realities close to the listeners as they reflect upon it. On the other hand, the listeners themselves are led onto a journey. The inner dynamic of the parable, the intrinsic self-transcendence of the chosen image, invites them to entrust themselves to this dynamic and to go beyond their existing horizons, to come to know and understand things previously unknown. This means , however, that the parable demands the collaboration of the learner, for not only is something brought close to him, but he himself must enter into the movement of the parable and journey along with it. At this point we begin to see why parables can cause problems: people are sometimes unable to discover the dynamic and let themselves be guided by it. Especially in the case of parables that affect and transform their personal lives, people can be unwilling to be drawn into the required movement. …He (Jesus) has to lead us to the mystery of God – to the light that our eyes cannot bear and that we therefore try to escape. In order to make it accessible to us, he shows how the divine light shines through in the things of this world and in the realities of our everyday life. Through everyday events, he wants to show us the real ground of all things and thus the true direction we have to take in our day–to-day lives if we want to go the right way. He shows us God: not an abstract God but the God who acts, who intervenes in our lives, and wants to take us by the hand. He shows us through everyday things who we are and what we must therefore do. He conveys knowledge that makes demands upon us; it not only or even primarily adds to what we know, but it changes our lives. It is knowledge that enriches us with a gift: “God is on the way to you.” But equally it is an exacting knowledge: “Have faith, and let faith be your guide” The possibility of refusal is very real, for the parable lacks the necessary proof.

Parables Are An Expression Of God’s Hiddeness
We have developed a concept of reality today that excludes reality’s translucence to God. The only thing that counts as real is what can be experimentally proven. God cannot be constrained into experimentation. That is exactly the reproach he made to the Israelites in the desert:

Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness,
when your ancestors tested me, and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.
[Psalms 95:8-9]

God cannot be seen through the world – that it is what the modern concept of reality says. And so there is even less reason to accept the demand he places on us: To believe in him as God and to live accordingly seems like a totally unreasonable requirement. In this situation, the parables really do lead to non-seeing and non-understanding, to “hardening of heart.”

This means, though, that the parables are ultimately an expression of God’s hiddeness in this world and of the fact that knowledge of God always lays claim to the whole person – that such knowledge is one with life itself, and that I cannot exist without “repentance.” For in the world marked by sin, the gravitational pull of our lives is weighted by the chains of the “I” and the “self.”

The Samaritan
And now the Samaritan enters the stage. What will he do? He does not ask how far his obligations of solidarity extend. Nor does he ask about the merits required for eternal life. Something else happens: His heart is wrenched open. The Gospel uses the word that in Hebrew had originally referred to the mother’s womb and maternal care. Seeing this man in such a state is a blow that strikes him “viscerally,” touching his soul. “He had compassion “ – that is how we translate the text today, diminishing its original vitality. Stuck in his soul by the lightening flash of mercy, he himself now becomes a neighbor, heedless of any question or danger. The burden of the question thus shifts here. The issue is no longer which other person is a neighbor to me or not. The question is about me. I have to become the neighbor, and when I do, the other person counts for me “as myself”

If the question had been “Is the Samaritan my neighbor, too?” the answer would have been a pretty clear-cut “No “given the situation at the time. But Jesus turns the whole matter on its head: The Samaritan, the foreigner, makes himself the neighbor and shows me that I have to learn to be a neighbor deep within and that I already have the answer in myself. I have to become like someone in love, someone whose heart is open to being shaken up by another’s need. Then I find my neighbor, or – better – then I am found by him.

The Samaritan: The Risk Of Goodness
We always give too little when we just give material things. And aren’t we surrounded by people who have been robbed and battered? The victims of drugs, of human trafficking, of sex tourism, inwardly devastated people who sit empty in the midst of material abundance. All this is of concern to us, it calls us to have the eye and heart of a neighbor, and to have the courage to love our neighbor, too. For –as we have said – the priest and the Levite may have passed by more out of fear than out of indifference. The risk of goodness is something we must relearn from within, but we can do that only if we ourselves become good from within, if we ourselves are neighbors” from within, and if we then have an eye for the sort of service that is asked of us, that is possible for us, and is therefore also expected of us, in our environment and within the wider ambit (scope) of our lives.

The Samaritan In Terms Of World History
The (Church) Fathers see the parable (The Good Samaritan) in terms of world history: Is not the man who lies half dead and stripped on the roadside an image of “Adam,” of man in general, who truly “fell among robbers”? Is it not true that man, this creature man, has been alienated, battered and misused throughout his entire history? The great mass of humanity has almost always lived under oppression; conversely, are the oppressors the true image of man, or is it they who are really distorted caricatures, a disgrace to man?

The road from Jerusalem to Jericho thus turns out to be an image of human history; the half-dead man lying by the side of it is an image of humanity. Priest and Levite pass by; from earthly history alone, from its cultures and religions alone, no healing comes. If the assault victim is the image of Everyman, the Samaritan can only be the image of Jesus Christ. God himself, who for us is foreign and distant, has set out to take care of his wounded creature. God, though so remote from us, has made himself our neighbor in Jesus Christ. He pours oil and wine into our wounds, a gesture seen as an image of the healing gift of the sacraments, and he brings us to the inn, the Church in which he arranges our care and also pays a deposit for the cost of that care. …The great theme of love which is the real thrust of the text, is only now given its full breadth. For now we realize that we are all “alienated,” in need of redemption. Now we realize that we are all in need of the gift of God’s redeeming love ourselves, so that we too can become “lovers’ in our turn. Now we realize that we always need God, who makes himself our neighbor so that we can become neighbors.

Posted in Scriptural Exegesis, Variety | Tagged An Expression Of God’s Hiddeness, Fr. Robert Barron, Pope Benedict XVI, the Good Samaritan, What Are The Parables? | Leave a Comment »

Book Recommendation: Jesus: A Gospel Portrait by Fr. Donald Senior

October 7, 2009

jesus a gospel portrait Donald Senior, C.P., is president of the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, where he has taught the New Testament since 1972. A Roman Catholic priest of the Passionist order, Fr. Senior has served on the Pontifical Biblical Commission since Pope John Paul II named him to it in 2001. In addition to having written books and articles too numerous to list, Fr. Senior is general editor of The Bible Today and The Catholic Study Bible, as well as coeditor of the 22-volume commentary New Testament Message. At the seminary where I take courses you get a chance to purchase the over orders from the other courses and this was a gem of a little book I picked up. It was filled with Fr. Senior’s observations of a life time of reading the gospels. My reading selections follow:

The Reality Of The Presence Of Jesus
Genuine Christianity is based on knowing Jesus….Knowledge of this kind is synonymous with friendship and trust. It means a mutual commitment to steadfastness and support. The language of a relationship like this is not curiosity or exploitation but love. …The reality of the living presence of Jesus is, is some ways, ineffable, But the experience of faith undergirds a conviction that it is real – a surge of peace in a moment of prayer, the transforming power of a genuine forgiveness, the infectious strength of another believer. These are the moments, however rare, when we touch the reality of the presence of Jesus

Only The Gospels Present The Life History Of Jesus
No one can build much of a portrait of Jesus from the incidental references in Roman and Jewish documents. So we must return to the New Testament and ultimately to the Gospels…Among all this literature (of the New Testament), only the gospels present the life history of Jesus in any detailed way. If we screen the letters of Paul, for example, we can find some basic facts about the life of Jesus: that he lived and died in Palestine, that he gathered disciples, that he was crucified by the Romans with the Jewish leaders as instigators. But Paul never gives us any narration about incidents in the life of Jesus – with the possible exception of the account of the Eucharist…Paul’s concern is the significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection for Christian life. He spells out this concern not by reviewing the details of Jesus history but by reflecting on the dynamics of redemption.

The Three Stages of Gospel Material
Stage One – Gospel material finds its root in the life history of Jesus. But not Jesus alone. Jesus chose disciples. He interacted with his opponents. Much of the gospel record includes reaction to Jesus as well as his own message and actions. And if the life and message of Jesus were to survive his death, then it would be up to his disciples, those entrusted with his memory and message to proclaim Jesus to the others. It was the disciples who transmitted the gospel material to the second stage.

Stage Two — (For the early Church) if the future (which the early Church felt had little chance of being realized) was in some way neglected, the past was not. The past was the record o f God’s saving acts and promises in the Old Testament. The past was the fulfillment of those promises in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. This basic conviction – that the life of Jesus fulfilled the promise of God – became the fundamental message of early Christian preaching as we can see from the basic outline of the missionary sermons the Book of Acts e.g. [2:14-36] [3:12-26]…Very often the Christian practice of reflecting on Jesus’ life against the backdrop of Old Testament prophecy has bound New Testament incident and Old Testament allusion so closely together that now they can hardly be pried apart. Such is the case of the passion story with its countless Old Testament images and allusions.

Stage Three – It is unlikely that any of the gospels represent the penned memories of an eyewitness…the gospels do not represent the attempt to preserve as accurately as possible eyewitness memories of Jesus. They are something much more….the evangelist depended on the fund of material preserved by and circulating in the life of his church. The contribution of the evangelist was to draw together this material (from preachings, liturgy, catechetics)…fitting it into an overall narrative framework of the life of Jesus (and to )counter a splinter effect (of stage two materials)… helped to preserve the gospel content from excessive fragmentation….The gospel writers gathered together the traditions about Jesus available to them in their particular locale and put them together in a coherent story, a literary whole, in such a way that it would speak eloquently to the problems and hopes of the community of Christians they served. …They (like the prophets of old) drew on the tradition of the Church and shaped it in such a way that it spoke boldly and eloquently to the present….Thus each gospel is unique…because the situations to which it was addressed were different. …(For the gospels) First came the Church, the community of believers charged with faith in Jesus and his words of life…the gospels were, in a real sense, the product of the churches’ life….The evangelist was depending not on his memory (in his writing of the gospel) but on the faith experiences of generations of Christians (in his Church)…(We need) a renewed understanding of what we mean by “inspiration”…In the past we may have concentrated too much on the individual writer and his piece of parchment, placing divine inspiration somewhere in between. But crucial steps had already been taken place before this moment, steps that had shaped and sealed much of the message the evangelist would transmit. Inspiration – by which we maean the guidance by the spirit – must be as extensive and diffuse as the process we have traced. The focus to the inspiration must be not only the individual but the Church itself….The most crucial consideration we can make about the gospels and the early Church is that the portrait of Jesus handed on to us is truly credible – credible in the sense that it faithfully conveys to us who Jesus was and what he was about…

What To Seek In The Gospels
An understanding of what a gospel is and how it came to be written tells us that we should not seek in the gospels something we cannot find. We can find in the gospels…the common features are that cut across all four New Testament portraits of Jesus. What is there about the person and ministry of Jesus that each of the evangelists, no matter what the particular situation of his church, felt compelled to include in his gospel message…the common brush strokes….The gospels have the power to enrich our faith because that precisely is their purpose…the gospels are written from faith to faith

The Kingdom of God
The Kingdom of God was not an invention of Jesus or the gospels. The theme had deep roots in Israel’s religious history. Old Testament religion basically was a religion of hope, of an unshakable confidence that God eventually would vindicate Israel and bestow on the people the blessings of peace, prosperity, and fullness of life. Isaiah 11: 6-9

The wolf will live with the lamb,
       the leopard will lie down with the goat,
       the calf and the lion and the yearling together;
       and a little child will lead them.

The cow will feed with the bear,
their young will lie down together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox.

The infant will play near the hole of the cobra,
and the young child put his hand into the viper’s nest.

They will neither harm nor destroy
       on all my holy mountain,
       for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD
       as the waters cover the sea.

Jesus was a Jew who shared the longings and hopes of his people. He drew on the rich theme of the kingdom of God as a way of understanding his own vocation and ministry. The uniqueness of Jesus’ preaching of the kingdom was not so much the way he defined it but the emphasis he gave to it. In the Judaism of Jesus’ day, the theme was not dominant. The Pharisees, for example, spoke of “taking upon oneself the yoke of God’s kingdom,” but this referred to total obedience to the law and to the one God whose will the law expressed. They did not emphasize the kingdom as an imminent reality in the way that Jesus did. The same is true of the Essenes; the concept of the kingdom of God doesn’t figure prominently in the writings of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Only the Zealots utilized this concept, but for them the kingdom was to be precipitated by overt political and military action….For Jesus the kingdom was the work of God. And everything that Jesus said or did was evidence that the kingdom was beginning to break into the world. His acts of healing and compassion, his words of wisdom, were all directed toward creating the kind of life that would characterize the kingdom over which God alone would be master.

Jesus and His Disciples
The ideal of the disciple was to choose a master teacher from whom one could learn genuine wisdom. In a Jewish context, this meant choosing a rabbi in order to learn the delicate art of interpreting the law. The disciple subordinated himself to the master, learning from him, serving him. By constant repetition and association, the master handed onto his disciples the heritage of the past and the skill to interpret it. Discipleship, however was not a permanent status

But discipleship on Jesus’ terms was quite different. First one did not become a disciple by choice but through a “call”, not unlike that of God’s mysterious call that inaugurated the missions of the great prophets such as Samuel, Isaiah or Jeremiah. The process that drew the disciples to Jesus was probably more extensive and built on a developing relationship to him. But the “call” stories in their clipped form emphasize that it was upon Jesus’ initiative that the disciples were drawn into his mission…the call to discipleship cuts through the ordinary ways of life, whether “clean” or unclean”, whether fisherman or hated tax collector. The response is expected to be instant, complete, unquestioned. It is obvious that the gospels have one eye on Christian life and commitment…The disciples are called to share Jesus’ style of life, even to share his suffering and hardship…It is a call that brooks allegiance to no other priority.

[Matthew 8:18-23]: “When Jesus saw the crowd around him, he gave orders to cross to the other side of the lake. Then a teacher of the law came to him and said, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.”

Jesus replied, ‘Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.’

Another disciple said to him, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’

But Jesus told him, ‘Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.’”

The Disciples Are Less Than Heroes
First the very origin of the disciples causes notice…The “call” stories list people of prosaic backgrounds: Fishermen and a tax collector….Two of them were nicknamed …hotheads, one apparently is a former Zealot…There is no indication from the gospel story or from its citation of the disciples background that they were well-educated men or even so inclined. And nothing in the gospel story suggests a quick conversion in that direction…One of he consistent features of the disciples was a chronic dullness. They exhibit an embarrassing inability to understand who Jesus is or what he is about…Mark puts the disciples in a privileged position. They witness Jesus’ miracles; they are exposed to his teaching. Yet they seem unable to comprehend any of these awesome events….

The strongest gospel indictment of the disciples is not for their lack of comprehension but for their ultimate failure of Jesus. Again, the presence of such a disappointing account of the disciples in the tradition testifies to its foundation in history. The gospels state that Jesus’ disciples desert him at the crisis of arrest and impending death. Again, the reaction of each evangelist is different , but their basic agreement is testimony to the strength of the tradition.

One Theme Binds The Traditions Together: Resurrection
It is not possible to harmonize the resurrection accounts of the four gospels. Hence, more than in any other place in the gospel story, each evangelist goes his own way to muster the traditions to suit the purpose of his gospel account. But one theme binds the traditions together: the experience of the resurrection was one of reconciliation. Their share in Jesus’ ministry of the kingdom, forfeited by their desertion of him, is restored to the disciples through the risen Lord’s own initiative….if the resurrection faith has helped shape this story, there is little doubt that it is rooted in the community’s memory of the touching bond between Jesus o f Nazareth and his disciples. The early Christians too were called by Jesus and were given a share in the his mission. Their response too was flawed by fear and hesitation. But with the church, as with the disciples. Jesus’ reaction is one of unending love. The community’s experience of resurrection as reconciliation could not have been unrelated with that they knew of Jesus before his death. Their joy was ecstatic; they discovered in the liberating love of the risen Lord the same fellowship that had bound Jesus to his improbable followers. He had chosen them, human beings practically identical with the “sick” he came to save. He endured their dullness. He dealt with them honestly exactingly, but neither his critique nor his commands were ever destructive The disciples’ record was not good. They complained, they misunderstood, they quarreled, they deserted, they denied. Only one was lost. But he part of the story that becomes “gospel” – “good news” – is that in the face of the master they failed, the disciples detected the infinite compassion of God, and they committed this memory to the church.

Crucial Role Played By Women
All four accounts refer to the presence of women near the cross as Jesus dies. Their presence is not attributable to curiosity or defeat. In the synoptic presentation, they are associated with the Roman centurion who witnesses Jesus’ death and confesses his identity as the Son of God. In each case, the women are identified as those who “had followed Jesus” from Galilee to Jerusalem and “ministered to his needs.” In the gospel tradition, being present to Jesus and following him in his ministry from Galilee to Jerusalem defines discipleship.

This testimony to the women’s faithful discipleship is carried over into the resurrection story. Again a major consensus unites the various gospel presentations. All four gospels state that women were the first to discover the empty tomb. In Matthew and John women are the first to whom the risen Lord appears. And in all of the accounts the women are given the responsibility of bringing the Easter news to the other disciples…. But the crucial role played by women in all layers of the narrative tradition cannot be ignored. At the very least, the tradition suggests that women were major participants in the life of the earliest Christian community.

Divorce
Divorce was permitted under Mosaic Law,

If a man marries a woman who becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her and sends her from his house, and if after she leaves his house she becomes the wife of another man, and her second husband dislikes her and writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her and sends her from his house, or if he dies, then her first husband, who divorced her, is not allowed to marry her again after she has been defiled. That would be detestable in the eyes of the LORD. Do not bring sin upon the land the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance. (Deuteronomy 24:1-4):

but interpretation of sufficient grounds for initiating a divorce was controverted (note that in Jewish law, in contrast Roman law, only the man could initiate a divorce). The strict school o f Shimmai believed that only adultery justified divorce; the Hillel school allowed divorce for numerous reasons, some as trifling as the wife’s inability to cook or her lack of physical beauty. Jesus’ reply does not choose sides, Instead, he appeals to a more fundamental view of marriage reflected in the traditions of Genesis: “Have you not read that at the beginning the creator made them male and female and declared, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and cling to his wife, and the two shall become as one?’” (Matthew 19:5). Jesus citation is not only an injunction against divorce; even more basically, it reveals an attitude toward the human person and the mystery of sexuality that is one of the supreme expressions of the Old Testament. The will of God expressed in creation is a call to unity, a unity in which male and female have an integral part. It is here that the image of God is found.

Jesus Speaks: The Coming Of The Kingdom
When we sift through Jesus’ statements about the coming of the kingdom, there seems to be certain ambivalence. Many parables insist that the kingdom of God comes slowly, almost imperceptibly. The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds. But an insignificant beginning eventually blooms into a large tree (Matthew: 13:31-32). Or the kingdom is like a bit of leaven folded into dough. It gradually transforms the loaf (Matthew13:33). Or the kingdom is like a handful of seeds that a man scatters on the ground. While he sleeps the seed begins the struggle towards the harvest. Jesus prays, “your kingdom come” (Matthew 6:10), a prayer for the future.

Thus some of the parables and sayings of Jesus refer to the kingdom as a future event whose full impact must be preceded by slow and patient growth. But these sayings must be balanced with an equally urgent insistence that he kingdom is somehow present now, in the very words and works of the kingdom’s herald. In the gospel of Luke, some Pharisees put a direct question to Jesus about the kingdom’s timetable. He replied: “You cannot tell by careful watching when the reign of God will come. Neither is it a matter of reporting that it is ‘here’ or ‘there.’ The reign of God is already in your midst.” (Luke 17:20-21)…

This confused timetable for the kingdom, seemingly both present and future, has baffled biblical scholars. No neat solution is likely to be found Jesus seems to say both. The fullness of the kingdom, the complete expression of God’s rule over Israel and the nations, awaits the future. But that does not mean that we are stranded in the kingdom’s waiting room, victims of an uncertain future. Now is the time of decision. Now is the time when we either open our lives to a new age of grace or wall ourselves up in a life of egoism. This urgency pulsates throughout most of the preaching of Jesus. The kingdom may be future, but the choice is now.

The Response To The Coming Of The Kingdom
Jesus’ preaching was not limited to an excited announcement of a time of opportunity (the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven). The approach of the kingdom demands a precise response, and the sayings of Jesus define it. Those who perceive the kingdom’s nearness are to “repent.” The Greek word that expresses this repentance in several sayings of Jesus is metanoia – meaning, literally a “change of mind” or a “change of perspective.” The impact of the word implies a complete reform, a radical change in priorities that comes from seeing the world as God sees it. “I assure you, unless you turn around and become like little children, you will not enter the kingdom”[Matthew 18:3] The call is for a complete reassessment of priorities that rule our lives. Many of the “renouncement” sayings of Jesus are simply alternate ways of stressing the need for radical confession and full commitment of to the kingdom.

Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. [Mark 8:34]

For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it. [Mark 8:35]

“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple. [Luke 14:26]

And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life. [Matthew 19:29]

Those who hear the kingdom should be aware of its cost:

“Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? “Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Will he not first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand? [Luke 14:28,31]

Any unconsidered attempt will be brought up short:

Still another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say good-by to my family.”

Jesus replied, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.” [Luke 9:61-62]

To respond less than fully to the kingdom is to forfeit the choice of life itself:

“I tell you, not one of those men who were invited will get a taste of my banquet.” [Luke 14:24]

Trying To Appreciate Jesus’ Experience Of God
To probe anyone’s experience of God, let alone Jesus’, is a daring ambitious task. Much of that experience remains ineffable, untouchable. W e can only hope to grasp at the edge of the mystery. Our image of God is as intimate as our image of ourselves. Trying to appreciate Jesus’ experience of God is complicated by our own faith in him. Mature Christian belief proclaims that Jesus is human and divine, truly human yet “more than:” human. This “more than” – which Christian faith has always confessed tenaciously but can never comprehend fully – can have a side effect of robbing Jesus of this humanity. If Jesus is divine, as the believer affirms, then we confer on Jesus all the attributes of divinity. He must be all knowing, eternal, somehow exempt from the ignorance and anxiety that make up the ordinary human experience. If Jesus is divine, how can we conceive of him as “learning from God” or having an “experience of God?”

But genuine Christian theology has always reacted against a perception of Christ that attempts to protect his divinity as the expense of his humanity. Both ends of the mystery must be maintained to do justice to belief.

Jesus And Scripture
Jesus’ appeal to the scriptures should not be thought of as a rummaging though Israel’s sacred book for particular texts that could be applied literally to the circumstances at hand. Such a literalism would have been foreign to him, as it was to the early Christian writers who used biblical texts with great freedom. What Jesus sought in the scriptures was the voice of his God, the God whose will was Jesus’ “meat”

”My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work. [John 4:34]

Jesus’ obedience to the scriptures was the expression of an intimate relationship to God, a relationship that bursts into expression in the prayer of Jesus. The gospels, particularly that of Luke, refer to Jesus at prayer. Jesus’ urgent ministry of preaching and healing is punctuated by moments of prayer in solitude. Luke implies too that the olive grove of Gethsemane was a customary refuge of prayer for Jesus

“Jesus went out as usual to the Mount of Olives, and his disciples followed him.” [Luke 33:39]

Jesus’ prayer at the crisis of his suffering and death is instinctive. It must have been in these moments of prayer that the religious experience of Jesus was forged. And here too we find the source of his ministry of the kingdom.

The Baptism Scene
Even if the scene (of the baptism at the Jordan) has been formalized in the gospel tradition, there is no reason to deny that the root of the tradition was a profound religious experience of Jesus himself. Perhaps the preaching of John or Jesus’ own experience in prayer and reflection on the scriptures, had led him to the realization of his call to announce the kingdom. One of the most revealing aspects of the baptism scene, for our purposes, is the insistence on God’s special love and favor toward Jesus. The “voice from heaven” a Jewish reverential way of referring to God, declared, “This is my beloved Son. My favor rests on him.”[Matthew 3:17] The words seem a blend of two Old Testament texts,

“Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
       my chosen one in whom I delight;
       I will put my Spirit on him
       and he will bring justice to the nations. [Isaiah 42:1]

and

I will proclaim the decree of the LORD :
He said to me, “You are my Son;
today I have become your Father.” [Psalm 2:7],

evidence that the early Christian community’s own reflection on the meaning of Jesus and his mission is at work here. But the insistence on the intimate bond between God and Jesus, begins a theme that is a hallmark of Jesus’ religious experience and a major motif of the gospel portrait of Jesus.

Abba
It seems certain that the use of Abba as an address for God entered the gospel tradition because Jesus himself used it. The ordinary word for “father” in Aramaic and Hebrew is ab. Abba is an intimate diminutive, similar perhaps to “Dad” or Daddy” in English. A rabbinic text says that “when a child experiences the taste of wheat, it learns to say abba and imma (mommy).” But it should be noted that the word was not used only by small children, Texts have been found where adults use the term abba as an expression of respect and affection for their father.

No direct parallels to this familiar way of addressing God in prayer have been found in the period contemporary with Jesus….

This intimacy of Jesus with God becomes part of the Christian heritage. The Lord’s Prayer, the prayer that Matthew and Luke trace to Jesus’ own instruction, makes this clear: “This is how you are to pray: our Father in heaven…”

Thus to conceive of God as abba or “father” did not mean for Jesus that God was simply the originator of the universe. Jesus understood God in affectionate terms. God was “father” because this term best described the compelling, nourishing love that Jesus himself experienced. We do not have to speculate about this; some of the most memorable of Jesus’ parables and sayings reveal the touching dimensions of God’s parental love. Most of Jesus’ conception of God centers on the tireless healing love of God. God’s love is gratuitous, indiscriminate, lavish.

“Amen, Amen, I Say Unto You…”
Scholars point to a fascinating hallmark of many of Jesus’ more solemn statements in the gospels. They often begin, “Amen, Amen, I say unto you…”The Hebrew word amen normally means “certainly.” It is used in the Old Testament and other Jewish literature as a response to a benediction or to an oath, much like the use of “amen” in English. But Jesus uses the word as a confirmation of his own statements, a usage without parallel in Jewish literature. Many scholars believe that the expression is a substitute for the phrase used by many of the Old Testament prophets to introduce their messages: “Thus says the Lord.” Jesus’ “Amen, Amen, I say unto you…” rings with awesome authority. The same tone is present in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount when Jesus contrasts his own teaching with traditional interpretations: “You have heard it said….but I say to you.” The brisk and convincing authority of Jesus is reflected too in the amazed reaction of the crowds that punctuates many of his gospel discourses” “Jesus finished this discourse and left the crowds spellbound at his teaching. The reason was that he taught with authority and not like their scribes.” [Matthew 7:29]

The Discussion Of The Two Fold Commandments Of Love
Luke’s practical emphasis (on the discussion of the love command) savors more of Jesus’ own style Coming up with the right answer to the question of the greatest commandment, of the law is no long the prime issue; living it out is. The shift in emphasis, an emphasis echoed in most of Jesus’ other sayings about love, is apparent in the way Luke presents the exchange in Chapter 10 of his gospel. A lawyer asks, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit everlasting life?” Jesus turns the question on the lawyer: “What is written in the law? How do you read it?” The lawyer’s response is correct; he cites the twofold command of love of God and neighbor (now neatly joined into one). The subsequent response of Jesus seems almost impatient with the discussion: “You have answered correctly. Do this and you shall live.” The answer seems almost too simple, too straightforward. The lawyer has asked how he is to gain life, and the teacher of Nazareth has unmasked the question’s lack of seriousness by proving that the lawyer already knew the answer. Unwilling to appear outmaneuvered, the lawyer attempts to throw some complexity into the discussion: “And who is my neighbor?” At this point, the genius of Luke’s presentation becomes apparent. Now fused onto the discussion of the two fold commandments of love is Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan. A Samaritan, detested in the eyes of any law-abiding Jew in Jesus’ day, demonstrates the law of love by a practical response to someone in need. The Priest and the Levite, paragons of virtue, fail the same test.

The conclusion of the parable touches the heart of the matter. Jesus actually refuses to answer the lawyer’s question, “Who is my neighbor?” The question now becomes: “Which of these three, in your opinion, was neighbor to the man who fell in with the robbers?” The perspective has been reversed. The lawyer, in effect, has asked about the limits of the love command: Who is my neighbor? That is, to whom am I bound to show compassion and love? Jesus centers on the response itself. The “limits” of love can never be defined by any theoretical projection. The command of love is never circumscribed by the nationality, status, or inherent lovableness of the potential “neighbor.” The neighbor, the one who has a claim on my love, is anyone in need to whom I am able to respond.

Jesus Statement On Love Of Enemies
If any saying of the gospel can claim to be an unaltered saying of Jesus, it is his statement on love of enemies. Virtually every New Testament scholar, Christian and Jewish, traces this unique command to Jesus himself. While both Jewish and Greco-Roman teachers had urged the virtue and sometimes the prudence of Roman teacher had urged the virtue and sometimes the prudence of not retaliating against an enemy, there is no clear parallel in any ancient text to Jesus radical command to love the enemy. …the foundation for these compelling demands of Jesus brings us back to his own experience of God. To love your enemy, Jesus states “But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” [Matthew 5:44-48] It is here – in the motivation for loving one’s enemy—that the true heart of Jesus’ teaching is revealed. One is to forego retaliation, even more, to wish the good for the enemy, to love the very one who is intent on harming you because God does just that. God whose love is as gracious, indiscriminate and lavish as the sunshine and the rainfall, is the one who sets the fundamental course of reality for the disciple. Only someone who has experienced God’s compassionate love in an intense way can fully understand the compelling logic of Jesus’ teaching.

Perfect As Your Heavenly Father Is Perfect
To be a disciple…means being as the heavenly Father is: “perfect” Luke uses the word “merciful” [Luke 6:36] whereas Matthew uses the Greek word teleios. Both terms can be reduced to the same reality. For “perfect” in Matthew’s context means “whole,” “complete.” To be whole or complete as God is complete, means loving with God’s limitless compassion. The word teleios or perfect is used only one other time in Matthew’s gospel. In Matthew 19:21, the rich young man is told that if he wishes to become “perfect,” he must give his possessions to the poor and follow Jesus. Following Jesus in his ministry of compassion defines the meaning of being “perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” It is not some sort of static perfection but being complete and whole, acting fully in accord with one’s God given nature.

Jesus’ Critique Of His Opponents And The Law
Something more complicated and subtle undoubtedly stood at the basis of the tension between Jesus and some of his contemporaries. Rabbinic Judaism, for example, ascribed to love as the meaning of religious fidelity. But for many of the stricter factions of Judaism the dimensions of love were to be expressed by rigorous adherence to the prescription of the law as understood and interpreted within their tradition….Jesus’ own teaching and his style of living approached religious fidelity from a different perspective. It was not a case of his rejecting the law as useless or harmful; the evidence in the gospels suggests that he was faithful observer of the law…the angle at which Jesus’ teaching touches life is different. True fidelity to God, genuine religion, can be nothing less than a full, loving response to God and to neighbor. Here is the center that judges all else, prescriptions of the law and issues of identity included. True fidelity can never be measured by how many laws we have kept. Its only test is the quality of our love.

…The demand for wholeness and integrity approaches the heart of Jesus’ critique of his opponents. The law itself does not prevent fidelity, but the almost inevitable spin-offs that accompany a legalistic morality do. The attempt to define fidelity as a specific set of rules seems doomed to end up substituting the rules for the fidelity they are meant to foster. Externalism, formalism, and an infectious pride in one’s own accomplishment subvert the very purpose of the law. They stifle the believer’s ability to respond to the situation with compassion and love.

Speech, Action, Prayer Proceed From An Inner Response
Speech and action, like prayer must proceed from an inner response. There is no need for the disciple to swear oaths to reinforce the truth of what he says: “Say ‘Yes’ when you mean ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ when you mean ‘No.’ Anything beyond that is from the evil one.” [Matthew 5:37]. ..For Jesus every response, every decision, every action had to proceed from love. This defined the meaning of integrity. Jesus’ insistence on love and compassion and his revulsion at legalism and hypocrisy ultimately find their authority in his intimate relationship with God. It was God’s love for Israel, a love that Jesus himself had personally experienced in an extraordinary way, that opened to Jesus the meaning of human love. It was God’s love that was showered on the good and the bad, that wrote off the debt, that searched out the lost, that rejoiced in repentance, that demanded attention to the weightier laws of justice, mercy and compassion. Jesus’ experience of the love of this God, his Abba, is the source of his teaching

John’s Gospel Brings Christian Interpretation To Bear On Jesus’ Words And Deeds
John’s Gospel more than any other, has brought Christian interpretation to bear on the tradition of Jesus’ words and deeds. John presents Jesus as the revelation of God. He is the eternal word who speaks God’s name. To see Jesus is to see the Father. Jesus, by word and work, reveals the infinite love of God for the world. He is “light” for those in darkness, “bread” for the hungry, “living water” for those who thirst, the “way” for those who are lost, “truth” for the perplexed. “Life” and “resurrection” for those who taste death. These basic images are used by John to identify Jesus as the revealer of the God of love to those who believe. In the magnificent last discourse of Jesus, John lays ou the very core of the teaching of Jesus: “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. [John 15: 9-12]. ..No church, no evangelist, no accident of time and culture could create a man or a message like this. Too listen carefully to these words is to draw near to the Jesus of the gospels.

Jesus’ Miracles
A major part of the gospel material concentrates not on what Jesus says but on what he does – his miracles of healing, of exorcism, of power over the forces of nature….Matthew lays out a string of ten miracles, absorbing the same incidents mentioned by Mark. And, as did his predecessor, the evangelist injects several summaries into his narrative to indicate that the miracles recorded are only samples of Jesus’ wide-spread healing activity. The story is much the same in Luke and in John. Luke prefaces Jesus’ public ministry with a quote from Isaiah 61:

       “The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me,
       because the LORD has anointed me
       to preach good news to the poor.
       He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
       to proclaim freedom for the captives
       and release from darkness for the prisoners,

To announce a year of favor from the Lord.”

John is more sparing of miracles in his gospel, but they have a special place of prominence in Jesus’ ministry. Seven great “signs” mark the first half of the gospel. several of the signs become the occasion for Jesus’ long discourses, so characteristic of the fourth gospel.

Our Miracle-Less Experience Vs Believers Of The First Century
Some effort is needed to fit Jesus’ activity (miracles) into our own miracle-less experience. …The Gospels’ insistence that Jesus performed miraculous deeds, even to the point of “breaking the laws of nature” ultimately can be answered by choosing to dismiss the testimony of the gospel tradition or by believing that Jesus was no ordinary human being. But some refinements can and should be made before that choice is too blatantly forced on the modern mind. A responsible understanding of Jesus’ world and of what “miracle” meant to it helps bring the gospel tradition closer to our own experience. ….For us (a miracle) is an exception, a rupture of the observable order of the world that we experience and that science works to explain. But a believer of the first century did not think of it in these terms. “A miracle” understood as a manifestation of God’s control over the world, really was not an exception; rather it was a vivid insight into the way things actually were. God directly controlled creation. God shaped human destiny and ruled the awesome forces of nature. If God chose to manifest this control over life in a clearly visible way, that was no violation of law but a wonderful sign of the power that normally affected humans in more subtle and ordinary ways. Thus the exceptional thing about miracles was not their possibility but the vividness of their manifestation. A miracle provoked awe and reverence, even fear, but not fundamental surprise….The Biblical mind might not be tempted to pursue the search into the mysteries of created reality with our convictions. A cogent explanation was at hand. A baffling illness, a sudden cure, the fearsome power of a storm, the inevitable pattern of the seasons – all of those experiences were signposts that supernatural powers touched the everyday human life. Thus miracles and miracle workers were much more commonplace in the first century than they are in the twentieth.

The Uniqueness Of The Gospel Portrait Why Miracles Have Such An Important Place Within It
Here is an accurate portrait of the background of the gospel narrative: the blind and disabled scattered along the roadside begging for coins from passers-by; lepers, banned from town and temple moved in condemned bands across the countryside; epileptics and psychotics roaming wild among the tombs or cruelly manacled, rolling on the ground and shrieking in uncontrolled frenzy. Jesus and his contemporaries faced the stark reality of sickness and death in a way that we seldom do. …to the Biblical mind, sin, sickness, chaos, death were practically the same thing….If mature biblical reflection rejected the notion that all suffering could be explained by guilt for sin, it still clung to he notion that all the various forms of death humans had to contend with were ultimately bound up with the mystery of evil. Seen from this perspective, it made little difference ultimately whether someone was possessed by an evil spirit or was blind or was smitten by leprosy or had seen the life of a son or daughter snuffed out. All were manifestations of “evil” that could bring pain and suffering to God’s children. All of them were limitations imposed on God’s creation. And God’s victory over the power of evil in the world would not be complete until all pain and suffering and death itself were overcome and every human longing and potency fulfilled…. An honest appraisal of the gospel material does not allow us to “solve” Jesus’ miracles so easily. There still remains a solid residue of the tradition that insists that Jesus performed extraordinary signs of power over evil in its various forms. At this point the question of faith moves forward to take a central place. But also at this point a solid understanding of how miracles fit into Jesus’’ overall ministry and message becomes crucial. To become transfixed only by the question of if and how Jesus worked miracles would be to miss the uniqueness of the gospel portrait and the reason why miracles have such an important place within it.

The Motivation Behind Jesus’ Healing Ministry
Jesus’ searching of the scriptures and his own experience in prayer had convinced him that the critical hour of the kingdom was about to break onto the world. The God of the Kingdom, the God of mercy and compassion was drawing near to human kind in a way unprecedented in history. This fundamental conviction, based on Jesus own intimate relationship with God, and his Abba, animated his teaching on love and forgiveness, and it provided the motivation for its sharp critique of his opponents. It also drove Jesus to search out the marginalized, to bring to the alienated members of his own society the message of grace and reconciliation uniquely characteristic of this Galilean rabbi….The gospels leave little doubt that such compassion and such a deep sense of justice were the motivation behind Jesus’ healing ministry.

The Full Purpose Of The Gospel Miracle Tradition
The most characteristic designation applied to the miracles of Jesus in the gospels in not “acts of kindness” nor even the technical Greek term for “miracle,” but the word “power” – in Greek dynamis. Jesus’ miracles are acts of power; they reveal the power of God himself working through Jesus. The gospels give special attention to Jesus’ exorcisms, those acts of healing whereby Jesus liberates the victim from an evil spirit….the biblical mind linked sin and sickness and death as differing manifestations of the fundamental evil that afflicted the human world and set it in opposition to God. Personal responsibility for sin was not excused by allocating all evil the arbitrary power of Satan, as much contemporary literature of the occult implies. The human contribution to sin and evil was accepted as a fact of life. At the same time, though, experience had convinced the Jew that the mystery of evil transcended individual choice; it could stifle the innocent as well as the guilty in its deathlike grip. The evil they feared was pervasive, chronic, hereditary and systematic; it seeped into every aspect of life and stifled human dignity and freedom, leaving people seemingly defenseless before its aggressive power. To get some sense of what the Bible means by such evil, one has only to think of the impact drugs or violence or the inequities that have left millions of people starving throughout the world, or homeless and despairing people on the streets of the worlds’ richest cities.

Jesus confrontations with the symptoms of such a pervasive evil as expressed in his struggle to liberate someone from a tormenting spirit or to cure an illness or to challenge those denying access and dignity to God’s children were merely skirmishes in an epic war. God’s victory would be complete only when all evil – personal, communal, cosmic – was eradicated from creation. This is the immense significance of Jesus’ exorcisms. Jesus power over Satan is a sign of God’s saving power – as sign of the immanence of the kingdom. The gospel temptation scenes….symbolize the deeper meaning of Jesus’ approaching ministry. His healings, his teaching, his conflicts, even his own death are ultimately a confrontation between the power of God and the power of evil….What the temptation scenes symbolize the exorcism stories dramatize in the prosaic setting of Jesus’ ministry. During his public life, Jesus never directly confronts a disembodied Satan. The power of evil is manifested in human suffering: illness, exclusion, prejudice, lives consumed by despair. This is the tragic arena where Jesus confronts Satan. And in each case, the power of God present in Jesus heals and restores…. Thus exorcisms in the gospel are not marketable superstition (like the current occult phenomena in modern life) they are a way of acknowledging the helplessness of humanity in the face of evil, evil in which our own responsibility may be not absent over which we are often powerless.

What The Miracles Say About Jesus
The exorcism miracles become a strong statement about Jesus…His opponents recognize the issue at stake: “He is possessed by Beelzebub! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons.” [Mark 3:22] Jesus retorts that if this were so, then Satan’s household must be divided. He then adds a short parable that reveals Jesus’ own insight into his ministry: “In fact, no one can enter a strong man’s house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man. Then he can rob his house” [Mark 3:27] Jesus is a plunderer in Satan’s own household, a man armed with the might of God who binds up the power of evil and rescues Satan’s captives. …He states: “But if I drive out demons by the finger of God, then the kingdom of God has come to you. [Luke 11:20] …The gospel tradition leaves little doubt that Jesus’ own contemporaries considered him a man of extraordinary force and power, a power that could liberate and heal, a power that could only come from God.

The Link Between Miracles And Faith
If anything characterizes the gospel miracle tradition and sets it off from other analogies in Greek or Jewish literature, it is the consistent link between miracles and faith. What Jesus demands of those who come to him, either to learn or to be cured, is that they should totally trust him and his message and act on it. They were expected to believe in him, in the sense that they would acknowledge that what Jesus said or did was the work of God. …Jesus amazement at the faith of the Gentile centurion and the Canaanite woman triggers his response to their needs. These exemplars of authentic faith not only believe in Jesus but take the initiative to respond to him: they reach out to him over boundaries of culture and taboo; they take roofs of houses to gain access for a friend; they dare to touch the hem of his cloak; they refuse to be silenced. Theirs is an active, not a passive faith. Conversely, lack of faith or mere curiosity about Jesus’ healing power stands in the way of Jesus’ miracles. A surprisingly blunt text of Mark’s notes that Jesus “could not” work miracles in his home of town of Nazareth “so much did their lack of faith distress him.”

Posted in Book Recommendations | Tagged Abba, Amen, C.P., Divorce, Fr. Donald Senior, I Say Unto You, Jesus and His Disciples, Jesus And Scripture, Jesus' Baptism, Jesus’ Miracles, Love Of Enemies, Perfect As Your Heavenly Father Is Perfect, The Kingdom of God, The Presence Of Jesus, The Two Fold Commandments Of Love, Three Stages of Gospel Material | Leave a Comment »

Dostoevsky’s Question

October 6, 2009

DostoevskyBier On the occasion of Rowan Williams publishing Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus wrote a few brief comments in First Things. He praised Williams for his impressive command of Dostoevsky scholarship, and his ability to correct translations when he thought it was called for. Greatly influenced, as all Dostoevsky scholars were, by Michael Bakhtin’s work, published in English in 1984 as Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Williams urged his readers to move beyond the countless books claiming that Dostoevsky’s novels are about wrestling with the problem of belief or unbelief in the existence of God. Both Neuhaus and Williams felt Dostoevsky settled that question a long time ago. Writing toward the very end of his life in 1881, Dostoevsky had declared, “It is not as a child that I believe in Christ and confess him. My hosanna has passed through a great crucible of doubt.”

Neuhaus continues: “The great question addressed in multiple ways by Dostoevsky was this: What does it mean to believe in Christ as the Son of God in a world that so brutally denies his claims? Or, as Williams puts it, proposing this as the theme of his book, “What is it that human beings owe to one another?” His subtitle— Language, Faith, and Fiction—is key to Williams’ understanding of Dostoevsky’s answer to the question.

As someone who has wrestled with the problem of Christian fellowship, my interest was pricked by the question. I instantly reformed it again from “What is it that human beings owe to one another?” to “What is it that Catholics owe to one another?” What does it mean to coexist with each other in the belief in Christ as the Son of God in a society that turns its back on those claims? For me I see less a brutal denial as much as an even more brutal failure to engage that belief in any form at all. There is something more brutal than denying, it is simply ignoring the other or not speaking to them. This has always been the weapon of choice in my family – my two sisters and my brother no longer speak to me.

The representative passage that Neuhaus chooses to answer this from Williams’ book on Dostoevsky is this: “The enterprise of growth and so the life of narrative thus always involves a venturing into that uncontrolled territory where dialogue and interaction bring to light, not to say bring into being, hidden dimensions in a speaker. To engage in this venture is to accept at the outset that no speaker has the last word, and that the position taken up in an initial exchange is going to be tested and sifted and renegotiated in the process. It is to accept that at the outset no one possesses the simple truth about their identity or interest, and to treat with the deepest skepticism any appeal to the sacredness of an inner life that is transparent to the speaker.”

Neuhaus comments: “This passage shows an endlessly patient insistence on and respect for the “the other” and “otherness,” a dialogical enmity toward every form of closure, an obligation to keep the narrative open. It is in many ways an attractive disposition, although at times its expression, frequently littered with literary jargon, can be cloying. For instance: “In sum: Responsibility is the free acceptance of the call to give voice to the other, while leaving them time and space to be other; it is the love of the other in his or her wholeness, that is, including the fact of their relatedness to more than myself; it is the acceptance of the labor of decentering the self and dissolving its fantasies of purely individual autonomy, and it is to be open to a potentially unlimited range of relation, to human and nonhuman others.” That is certainly Rowan Williams. Whether it is Dostoevsky is quite another matter. My own impression is that Dostoevsky would gag at that way of putting the matter.”

Fr. Neuhaus always made me laugh out loud.

But he always returns to praise: “Williams also offers flashes of insight such as this: “The cultural situation evoked in Devils illuminates that teasingly familiar formula in Karamazov about everything being permitted if God does not exist. What happens ‘if God does not exist’ is not that a particular item is withdrawn from the sum total of actual things, so that no punishment for evil can be guaranteed. It is that we are no longer able to see violence against others as somehow blasphemous, an offense against an eternal order; no longer able to see our dealings with each other as opening on to a depth of interiority that we cannot fathom or exhaust. In a world deprived of such possibilities, it is reasonable enough to respond to a suicide by saying ‘it was the best solution’; there is nothing definably insane about taking one’s own life.” The great question posed by Dostoevsky in asking about what human beings owe to one another is how we can be counted on to respect that to which we are not obliged by a truth beyond our own contriving. That is the context in which the proposition is entertained that, if there is no God, all things are permitted.

Fr. Neuhaus concludes: “Rowan Williams persuasively makes the case that Dostoevsky’s novels are a “polyphonic” exercise in which the many voices of his characters, including the voices of his conflicted self, address with inspired passion, cool rationality, demonic possession, and radical faith the question of what we human beings owe one another. In making that case, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction is — despite the author’s excursions into strumming the jargon of fashionable literary theory — a magnificent contribution to understanding the questions that haunted and drove the world’s greatest novelist…Dostoevsky illuminates what we human beings owe one another. …it does provide needed wisdom in tempering the rancor of the bellicosity to which we human beings, including we Christians, are prone.”

It strikes me that the response of the secular society to the Catholics in their midst is to marginalize, to turn their backs on us. Many times arguing from the point of view of faith is seen to eliminate one from the discussion – the diabolists in our midst see an argument from faith as being “absolutist” and not worthy of reply. Oddly enough the so-called absolutist is discarding the many in favor of one whereas the relativist is only recognizing one to begin with and doesn’t engage in any beyond that. As Peter Kreeft put it in A Refutation Of Moral Relativism: “Relativism says there are no absolutes… Absolutism says there are some absolutes. At least one absolute. Absolutism is relatively absolutistic, and relativism is absolutely relativistic.”

Much in the same way as my family, to deny the other actually involves dealing with him, so the solution is to ignore the other. The diabolist’s solution is to ignore the Catholic – this is far safer, far easier to deal with. But it can never last. Most situations I have found simply require patience in dealing with the other – what was Flannery’s collection of short stories called? “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” an expression she found in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin that stuck in her mind. This is what I took from Neuhaus’ meditation on Dostoyevsky’s Question: No speaker has the last word, and that the position taken up in an initial exchange is going to be tested and sifted and renegotiated in the process. It is to accept that at the outset no one possesses the simple truth about their identity or interest, and to treat with the deepest skepticism any appeal to the sacredness of an inner life that is transparent to the speaker. You cannot marginalize Jesus, it is only an illusion that one can, in the same way that the diabolist (relativist) claims that he advocates no absolutes. Everything moves towards a resolution. In the meantime, let us pray for one another as we approach that resolution.

Posted in Reflections, Understanding Dostoevsky | Tagged and Fiction, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Rowan Williams, what human beings owe to one another | 1 Comment »

The Parable of the Prodigal Son

October 5, 2009

rembrandtProdigalSon I haven’t quite figured out how to read the Bible yet. Obviously I do but I never get as much out of my own reading as I do out of reading others. Case in point this marvelous writing on the Parable of the Prodigal Son. I’ve read several commentaries on the parable but never one as knowledgeable or illuminating as the following. How does one get to be able to read as well as Frs. Barron, Cantalamessa or Guardini or do? They are my favorites. I know there must be more, so if you know them, leave me a comment here. This Fr. Barron piece comes from The Priority of Christ, a book where he seeks bridge the divide between Christianity and secular liberalism.

“One of the greatest showings of the Gathering (Jesus’ work of gathering the scattered tribes of Israel) is Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son, or better, of the father and his two sons. In considering this narrative, we are, hermeneutically (hermeneutics is the science of interpretation, esp. of the Scriptures), on interesting ground, for we are dealing with an icon of the Father told by the one who is himself the Icon of the Father. Thus we have Jesus indirectly crafting a subtle self-portrait. The gathering technique of the father in the story mirrors that of the heavenly Father, which in turn is iconically represented in that of Jesus. In the course of this narrative, we will see who the Father/God/Jesus is and how he brings to himself an Israel that had, in a double sense, wandered into exile.

A man, Jesus tells us, had two sons, and “the younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me” (Luke 15:11-24). As many have commented, this demand is presumptuous and highly insulting, for normally a son would not receive his inheritance until after his father has died. Thus, in claiming his money now, the younger son is none too subtly suggesting that he wishes his father would hurry up and die. Especially in Jesus’ time and culture, a more stinging remark could scarce be imagined. The parable opens, then, with the declaration of a clear break in the communion and coinherence that one would expect to hold between a father and his son. And if we attend closely to the language of the parable, we will sense further dimensions of this rupture. The boy doesn’t ask his father, he tells him: “Give me the share of the property that will come to me.” By definition, a gift cannot be demanded; it can only be received graciously and as a sort of surprise. In making his demand, therefore, the younger son is precluding the possibility of a gifted relationship between himself and his father; he is cutting off the flow of grace.

Second, in asking for property that is coming to him, he emphatically confirms the gracelessness of the exchange. Property is what is “proper” to a person, what is uniquely his, what he can claim in at least a quasi-legal sense. In common usage, the word indicates what is to be held on to and defended against counter-claimants: we might hear someone say, “Get off my property,” or set up a sign that defiantly declares “Private property.” Jean-Luc Marion has helpfully drawn attention to the Greek term that undergirds “property” in this story, ousia. This is the only time in the New Testament that this famously controversial and theologically charged term is employed. In this context it obviously doesn’t have the fully developed metaphysical sense that it has, for instance, in Aristotle, but it does have at least an overtone of the philosophical usage.

The more ordinary meaning of ousia (displayed here) is money, property, or what is “presently disposable,” ready to hand for use. Thus there is a link to the metaphysical “substance,” which could be construed as that which a thing possesses as its own, that which it has ready to hand –as opposed to its more fleetingly possessed accidents. In demanding this ousia, then, the younger son is asking emphatically for something to have and hold as his own, free of any merely accidental link to either the source or the possible destination of his possession. He expects the gift (in a substantive sense) apart from giving, and this is precisely what he receives when his father “divided his property between them” (Luke 15:12).

Here is a portrait in miniature of God in relation to sin. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve sought to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, taking God’s place and seizing his prerogatives. At the prompting of the tempter, they wanted to take for themselves a life that could only be received as a gift. Prior to the fall, God and Adam had walked together in the cool of the evening as friends, giving and receiving in a circle of grace, and the original sin is nothing but the rupture of this friendship through the desire to possess ousia. The true God can be “had” only when one disposes oneself to receive the divine life as a grace and to give that life away in turn as a gift. Grace is “possessed” only in the measure that it is received and offered and never held on to.

A key implication of this analysis is that God is himself not an ousia, not a substance, not a supreme being in solemn possession of an infinite range of perfections. Rather, God is a supreme letting-be, a being-for-another, his perfections fluid and generously given. Consequently, in the measure that a human person endeavors to be a supreme being, he falls out of right relation with this God.

As the story unfolds, we hear what happens to “substance,” so possessed. We are told that after a few days, the young man “gathered all he had and traveled to a distant country” (Luke 15:13). We notice the frenzy of possessiveness implied in that “gathering” to himself all that was uniquely his, and we remark the thoroughness of the relational rupture with his father in his journey to a far country. The Greek here is instructive: the young man sets out to a choran makra, literally a great open space, a place without borders or points of reference. In Plato, the chora is the space in between the forms and physical objects, the realm of nonbeing and nonvisibility. The implication of the parable seems to be that this ontological emptiness is the consequence of the younger son’s severing of relation to his father. This is made explicit in the next phrase, “and there he squandered his property on dissolute living” (15:13).

He had made bold to seize ousia from his father and claim it as his own, and now he sees what inevitably occurs when a gift becomes a possession. It is a basic biblical intuition that as long as one is receiving being as a grace and resolving to pass it on as a grace, one paradoxically keeps it. But if one endeavors to interrupt the flow and seize what is received, then that possession quickly withers away, dissipates. When the young man had spent everything, “a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need” (Luke 15:14). Read symbolically, this famine is not merely an unhappy accident that happens to intensify the young man’s suffering; rather, it is the natural condition of the chora makra. Cut off from relationship and the giving and receiving of gifts, one necessarily experiences famine, a starvation of the soul.

So great became the young man’s need that “he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs” (Luke 15:15). In these few laconic phrases, Jesus describes the spiritual dynamics of the “far country.” The only relationship that a citizen of the chora makra could envision is a professional one involving hiring and the paying of salaries. There it cannot be a question of giving and gratefully receiving, but only of the paying out and possessing of ousia. Second, the feeding of pigs (animals particularly repugnant to pious Jews) indicates the dehumanization that characterizes the far country: grubbing for what is one’s own reduces one to the level of competitive and self-absorbed beasts. So pathetic is the younger son’s situation that he “would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating,” but — and here we come to the heart of it — no one gave him anything” (Luke 15:16). This is the mark of the far country: it is the place where there is no giving. It is the country whose citizens only hire, pay, and receive what is strictly agreed to, and thus it is the polar opposite of the land where the young man’s father is lord.

The younger son wandering in a distant land is evocative of the human race — all the descendants of Adam and Eve who have lost contact with the flow of the divine life. Living in the land of hiring, taking, paying, and possessing, they starve spiritually. They are like the sad guests at the wedding feast of Cana who have run out of wine; they are like Israel in the land of exile, pining for Zion; or they are like the psalmist’s deer yearning for flowing streams. How appropriate, by the way, is that last image. The divine life flows because it is a process of giving and receiving; sin is substantive and fixed, “hard” currency.

The only solution is a return to a graced mode of being. And this is precisely what the prodigal realizes in a moment of clarity: “But when he came to himself he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger!” (Luke 15:17). Even those whom his father has hired — even those only professionally related to him — have enough and more than enough, with superabundance indicating that they are in the circle of grace. Were they merely possessing what their employer paid them, they would be psychologically and spiritually in the far country and would soon enough run out. And this is why the younger son resolves, in the carefully rehearsed speech that we overhear, to ask his father to treat him as one of his hired hands: even the least in the country of grace have more than enough. Then, full of contrition, he sets out to return to his father.

While he is still a long way off (still to some degree in the land of exile), his father catches sight of him (he had obviously been looking for him) and is “filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him” (Luke 15:20). The word used in the Greek here for the feeling of compassion is esplagnisthe, meaning literally that the father’s guts are moved, the visceral connection to his child stirred up. This same term is applied in the New Testament to the feelings of Jesus himself: “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36). This powerful feeling leads to an extraordinary gesture.

As many have pointed out, in ancient Jewish society, it was considered terribly unseemly for an elderly man to run to meet someone; rather, he was the one to whom others would come in a spirit of respect and obeisance. So the Father’s running, throwing caution and respectability to the wind, is an act of almost shocking condescension and other orientation.

When they meet, the father embraces his son and kisses him; then the boy speaks: “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son” (Luke 15:21). The embrace of the father is one of the most powerful biblical symbols of the Gathering: exiled Israel has returned, and the Father-God takes him to himself; drawing him back into the circle of light. How evocatively Rembrandt van Rijn depicted this inclusion-enlightenment in his late-career painting of the return of the prodigal: the penitent son is embraced by his father and participates thereby in a light that does not so much come from without as radiate from within the father himself.

The saint, remarked G. K. Chesterton, is someone who knows he is a sinner. Whenever characters in the Bible come close to the divine grace, they experience a heightened sense of their own unworthiness: Isaiah in temple, Jeremiah at the moment of his call, Peter at the miraculous draught of fishes. This is the dynamic at work in the case of the prodigal son. Precisely in the measure that he is reconnected to the graciousness of God and the flow of his mercy, he knows unambiguously his sorry spiritual state. His cruel leave-taking and subsequent sojourn in the choran makra had perverted his relationship to his father, and it is in the embrace of his father that he truly senses this.

However, his worthiness to be called son has nothing to do with his own moral achievement or lack thereof. His father ignores his carefully rehearsed speech, and with an eagerness bordering on impatience, he instructs his servants: “Quickly, bring out a robe — the best one — and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. And get the fatted calf and kill it., and let us eat and celebrate” (Luke 15:22-23). Our participation in the flow of the divine life is, necessarily, a gift, not so much because God arbitrarily chooses those who should receive it but because it is itself nothing but the giving and receiving of gifts. It cannot, in principle, be earned or merited, but only accepted. We can only be embraced by it.

The father’s comment on the reason for the celebration-.-.-”For this son of mine was dead and is alive again” (Luke 15:24) — is theologically accurate. When the divine life hardens into a possession, it is, as we’ve seen, effectively lost; when one wanders away from the living stream of God, one necessarily dries up, and one’s “life” is merely biological. Like the Gerasene demoniac — living among the tombs –the prodigal son had been one of the living dead. Authentic spiritual life is had only when one enters into the flow of grace, when one can accept robe, ring, and fatted calf.

With that the narrative of the parable turns to the elder brother, a man superficially quite unlike the prodigal son, but practically identical to him at the spiritual level. The strategy that the father employs to gather him in should be the focus of our attention. While the father was attentively waiting for the return of the younger son, the older brother was “in the field,” a somewhat more subtle version of the choran makra, obviously indifferent to his brother’s fate. Hearing the sounds of celebration, he approaches the house, and when he discovers the reason for the festivities, he is filled with indignation: “Then he became angry and refused to go in” (Luke 15:28). In accord with his relentlessly inclusive character, the father comes out to this second exile and pleads with him to join the circle of celebration.

Then we hear the words that reveal the spiritual state of the older son: “Listen! For all these years, I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends” (Luke 15:29). Though he has remained physically close to his father, his exile is just as dramatic as his younger brother’s, for he too has allowed his relationship to his father to harden into possessiveness. The harshly economic vocabulary gives away the game: working like a slave, obeying commands, getting something of his own, his friends. Just like his brother, this man wants to claim the father’s love as his own possession and use it as he sees fit. Whereas the younger brother demanded it in a presumptuous way (“Give me the share of the property that will belong to me”), the elder brother “slaves” for it, working in a calculating way in order to earn it.

The problem is that, as we have already seen, the divine love — which is a flow of grace — cannot be received in this manner. The economic exchange model just cannot work, so slaving is every bit as ineffectual as hoarding. Rebellion against God and resentful obedience to his “commands” are equally hopeless strategies, since both attempt to transform the flow of grace into ousia that can be made one’s own.

The gatherer-father then speaks to his older son: “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours” (Luke 15:31). From the father’s perspective, his son is connected to him, with him in such an intimate way that the life of the father flows to the son. The economic language of the son is therefore metaphysically and spiritually inappropriate, the result of a basic misperception. The Creator God relates to creation in just this ontologically (ontology studies the nature of existence or being) intimate fashion, giving being every moment to whatever exists in the realm of finitude. Though a creature could imagine itself as existing in an extrinsic relation to God, this would be an incorrect, a distortion. The Redeemer God wants nothing more than to give his own inner life away to the human race – “All that is mine is yours.” The problem is that the sinner persists in misperceiving along competitive lines – “I have slaved for you” — and thus fails to receive the gift.

The prophetic motif of the return of the exile applies, according to N. T. Wright, not only to those who are physically distant from Judea and Jerusalem but also to those who are in a kind of internal exile, spiritually alienated from what Zion symbolizes. The prodigal son and his brother are perfect evocations of both types: while the younger son goes literally into a far country the older son retreats into an interior choran makra. They are co-equally far from the flow of grace. In Rembrandt’s picture, the older brother resembles the father physically, and like him, he wears a sumptuous red cape, but he stands outside the circle of light that envelops his father and brother. The resemblance hints at the superficial similarity to the father that comes from physical proximity and mimicking the father’s behavior (obeying his commands), but the darkness points to the spiritual exile that the older son endures.

The father, with equal vehemence and devotion, reaches out to both wanderers and seeks to bring them into the celebration. Here we can see how this parable is an icon of the Icon of God. In his work of gathering the scattered tribes of Israel — in both external and internal exile — Jesus is the living icon of the Father, whose whole purpose is to gather his alienated creation back to himself. The embrace of the father and his words ‘All that is mine is yours” are representations of Jesus’ ministry of gathering Israel into his circle of influence, which in turn is the Icon of the Father’s noncompetitive and life-enhancing proximity to his creation.

The fundamental problem for both sons is their deep conviction that their relationship to their father is competitive and Promethean (Prometheus in a Greek myth stole fire from Olympus and gave it to humankind in defiance of Zeus). In order for them to be fully alive, they must wrest what is “their own” from him. So it goes when one stands in relation to a god who is only other, and not otherly other.

Human beings will always resent a supreme being, because they will be locked, necessarily, in a terrible zero-sum game with him. And their rapport with such a god will devolve, accordingly, into the mercenary and the calculating, as we see clearly in Jesus’ story. The spiritual strategy of the father is to convince his sons that they are not in competition with him, that in fact their own being and life will increase inasmuch as they accept the gift of his life.This is the “spirituality” of the two-natures doctrine: a divine and a human nature remain utterly themselves, in the moment of deepest connection and mutual participation. What obtains between the creaturely and the Creator is the polar opposite of a zero-sum game, precisely because it is a matter of grace and not ousia.”

Posted in Fr. Robert Barron | Tagged Authentic spiritual life, choran makra, esplagnisthe, Fr. Robert Barron, G. K. Chesterton, Luke 15:11-24, N. T. Wright, ousia, Priority of Christ, Rembrandt van Rijn, The Parable of the Prodigal Son | 2 Comments »

Paying Attention To The Sky

Archive for October, 2009

Reading Selections (2) from Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter AUGUSTINUM HIPPONSENSEM

The Wedding At Cana: A Picture Of The Divine Gatherer At Work

Reading Selections and Notes From “Evangelizing Theology” by Avery Cardinal Dulles

Reading Selections (1) from Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter AUGUSTINUM HIPPONSENSEM

Book Recommendation: The Autobiography — G.K. Chesterton

Learning To Dwell In This Desert

Exploring The Good Samaritan

Book Recommendation: Jesus: A Gospel Portrait by Fr. Donald Senior

Dostoevsky’s Question

The Parable of the Prodigal Son

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