Paying Attention To The Sky

 

In 2005 Pope John Paul II surveyed his life and experiences and sat down to write a chapter in a slender volume he would title “Memory and Identity.” The book was an elaboration of the  main themes of some conversations that had taken place in 1993 in Castel Gandolfo. Two Polish philosophers, Jozef Tischner and Krzysztof Michaiski, founders of the Vienna-based Institute for Human Sciences (Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen), had invited him to undertake a critical analysis, from a historical and philosophical point of view, of the two dictatorships that marked twentieth-century Polish history: Nazism and communism.

Those conversations had been  recorded and subsequently transcribed. In the year before his death the Holy Father sought to enlarge the perspective of the discussion. Beginning from these conversations, he set the reflections in a broader context. The result was“Memory and Identity.” One chapter especially concerned the mystery of evil or mysterium iniquitatis — the great eruption of evil that had held Europe by the throat for most of the twentieth century — first through the rise and fall of the fascist states and later with the occupation of Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union. The Pope didn’t end there however – no great triumph of the West in the Cold War or neocon hymns to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan for John Paul II.

Ironically enough what had happened in John Paul’s beloved homeland of Poland after the Marxists came to power had much the same effect as the philosophical developments that had occurred in Western Europe in the wake of the Enlightenment and had come to a slow fruition in the Western democracies in the latter half of the twentieth century. The old Pope had lived in one and observed the other. He could tell the difference and knew there wasn’t any.

While the fall of the regimes built on ideologies of evil put an end to the forms of extermination of fellow citizens in the concentration camps and gulags, new regimes of evil in the form of parliamentary democracies perverted the Jewish, classical, and Christian ideas of freedom to mean the pursuit of an irreducible nihilism – for “there must literally be nothing transcendent of the will that might command it towards ends it would not choose for itself, no value higher than those the will imposes upon its world, no nature but what the will elects for itself.”(David Bentley Hart)

The history of Western culture’s long, inglorious departure from these Jewish, classical, and Christian models of freedom came with an astonishing tsunami-like speed at the end of the century and the wave of diabolist “freedom” as measured by the flotsam and raw sewage of pornography and exploitation of women and children in the world-wide human sex trade; the legal extermination of human beings conceived but unborn, the so-called “unwanted” child, and  what has now emerged as the standard medical treatment for children prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome and a host of other diseases under a system of eugenics the Nazis could have only dreamed of; the establishment of homosexual unions as an alternative type of family, with the “right,” no less, to adopt children, subverting the very idea of human sexuality and Christian marriage; the emergence of False Gods Of Expedient Mercy, the outrage, the scandal the sin of euthanasia – or what the diabolists among us call “assisted suicide” or do you prefer, ahem, “end of life choices?” So many horrors, so many choices — what’s a free man to do these days?

But I digress… 

All these things the aged Pope surveyed in a world where the true, the good, the beautiful and societies ordered towards a transcendental structure of being now seemed to be quaint ideals of a past either dead or dying. He searched for the words to teach his children one last time the lessons of the Gospel and found these profound and challenging observations. I was struck by the bluntness of some of his observations, particularly his readiness to identify the motivation for gay marriage and gay families as another “ideology of evil.”

As is my custom, reading selections I found compelling below.

Mysterium Iniquitatis: The Coexistence Of Good And Evil
The twentieth century was, so to speak, the “theater” in which particular historical and ideological processes were played out, leading toward that great “eruption” of evil, but it also provided the setting for their defeat. Is it fair, then, to consider Europe solely from the point of view of the evil which marked its recent history? Is this not a rather one-sided approach? The modern history of Europe, shaped — especially in the West — by the influence of the Enlightenment, has yielded many positive fruits. This is actually characteristic of evil, as understood by Saint Thomas, following in the tradition of Saint Augustine. Evil is always the absence of some good which ought to be present in a given being; it is a privation. It is never a total absence of good. The way in which evil grows from the pure soil of good is a mystery. Another mystery is the element of good which is never destroyed by evil and which keeps on growing despite it, sometimes even from the same soil. The Gospel parable of the good grain and the weeds comes to mind immediately (cf. Matthew 13:24-30). When the servants ask the householder: “Do you want us to go and gather them [the weeds]?” his reply is highly significant: “No, for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, ‘Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn’ (Matthew 13: 29-30). In this case, the reference to the harvest points to the final phase of history, the eschaton.

This parable can serve as a key to the entire history of mankind. In different eras and in different ways, “wheat” grows alongside “weeds” and “weeds” alongside “wheat.” The history of mankind is the “theater” of the coexistence of good and evil. So even if evil exists alongside good, good perseveres beside evil and grows, so to speak, from the same soil, namely human nature. This has not been destroyed, and has not become totally corrupt, despite original sin. Nature has retained its capacity for good, as history confirms.

Evil And Original Sin
The encyclical on the Holy Spirit, Dominum et Vivificantem…developed during meditation on Saint John’s Gospel, on the words spoken by Jesus during the Last Supper. It was in those final hours of Christ’s earthly life that we were given perhaps the most complete revelation on the Holy Spirit. One passage from that farewell discourse is highly significant for the question we are considering. Jesus says that the Holy Spirit “will convince the world concerning sin” (John 16:8).

As I tried to penetrate these words, I was led back to the opening pages of the Book of Genesis, to the event known as “original sin.” Saint Augustine, with extraordinary perceptiveness, described the nature of this sin as follows: amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei – self-love to the point of contempt for God.’ It was amor sui which drove our first parents toward that initial rebellion and then gave rise to the spread of sin throughout human history. The Book of Genesis speaks of this: “you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5), in other words, you yourselves will decide what is good and what is evil.

Overcoming Original Sin
The only way to overcome this dimension of original sin is through a corresponding amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui–  love for God to the point of contempt of self. This brings us face to face with the mystery of man’s redemption, and here the Holy Spirit is our guide. It is he who allows us to penetrate deeply into the mysterium Crucis and at the same time to plumb the depths of the evil perpetrated by man and suffered by man from the very beginning of his history.

That is what the expression “convince the world about sin” means, and the purpose of this “convincing” is not to condemn the world. If the Church, through the power of the Holy Spirit, can call evil by its name, it does so only in order to demonstrate that evil can be overcome if we open ourselves to amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui. This is the fruit of Divine Mercy. In Jesus Christ, God bends down over man to hold out a hand to him, to raise him up, and to help him continue his journey with renewed strength.

The Sin Which “Will Not Be Forgiven”
Man cannot get back onto his feet unaided: he needs the help of the Holy Spirit. If he refuses this help, he commits what Christ called “the blasphemy against the Spirit,” the sin which “will not be forgiven” (Matthew 12:31). Why will it not be forgiven? Because it means there is no desire for pardon. Man refuses the love and the mercy of God, since he believes himself to be God. He believes himself to be capable of self-sufficiency.

Ideologies Of Evil: Aspects Of European History
In order to illustrate this phenomenon (Ideologies Of Evil )better, we have to go back to the period before the Enlightenment, especially to the revolution brought about by the philosophical thought of Descartes. The cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) radically changed the way of doing philosophy. In the pre-Cartesian period, philosophy, that is to say the cogito, or rather the cognosco, was subordinate to esse, which was considered prior. To Descartes, however, the esse seemed secondary, and he judged the cogito to be prior. This not only changed the direction of philosophizing, but it marked the decisive abandonment of what philosophy had been hitherto, particularly the philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, and namely the philosophy of esse. Previously, everything was interpreted from the perspective of esse and an explanation for everything was sought from the same standpoint. God as fully Self-sufficient Being (Ens subsistens) was believed to be the necessary ground of every ens non subsistens, ens participatum, that is, of all created beings, including man. The cogito, ergo sum marked a departure from that line of thinking. Now the ens cogitans enjoyed priority. After Descartes, philosophy became a science of pure thought: all esse — both the created world and the Creator — remained within the ambit of the cogito as the content of human consciousness. Philosophy now concerned itself with beings qua content of consciousness and not qua existing independently of it.

The Abandonment Of Christianity As A Source For Philosophizing Under Communism and In The West
At this point it is worth pausing to examine the traditions of Polish philosophy, especially what happened after the Communist party came to power. In the universities, every form of philosophical thought that did not correspond to the Marxist model was subjected to severe restrictions, and this was done in the simplest and most radical way: by taking action against the people who represented other approaches to philosophy. Foremost among those who were removed from teaching posts were the representatives of realist philosophy, including exponents of realist phenomenology like Roman Ingarden and also Izydora Dąmbska of the Lviv-Warsaw school. It was more difficult to deal with the exponents of Thomism, since they were based at the Catholic University of Lublin and the Theology Faculties of Warsaw and Krakơw, as well as the major seminaries, but they too eventually fell victim to the merciless hand of the regime. Certain eminent thinkers who maintained a critical attitude toward dialectical materialism were also regarded with suspicion. Of these I particularly remember Tadeusz Kotarbiński, Maria Ossowska, and Tadeusz Czeżowski. Clearly it was not possible to remove from the university’s teaching program such courses as logic and the methodology of science; yet in different ways the “dissident” professors could be subjected to restrictions, thus limiting by every possible means their influence on students.

What happened in Poland after the Marxists came to power had much the same effect as the philosophical developments that occurred in Western Europe in the wake of the Enlightenment. People spoke, among other things, of the “decline of Thomistic realism” and this was understood to include the abandonment of Christianity as a source for philosophizing. Specifically, the very possibility of attaining to God was placed in question. According to the logic of cogito, ergo sum, God was reduced to an element within human consciousness; no longer could he be considered the ultimate explanation of the human sum. Nor could he remain as Ens subsistens, or “Self-sufficient Being:’ as the Creator, the one who gives existence, and least of all as the one who gives himself in the mystery of the Incarnation, the Redemption, and grace. The God of Revelation had ceased to exist as “God of the philosophers.” All that remained was the idea of God, a topic for free exploration by human thought.

In this way, the foundations of the “philosophy of evil” also collapsed. Evil, in a realist sense, can only exist in relation to good and, in particular, in relation to God, the supreme Good. This is the evil of which the Book of Genesis speaks. It is from this perspective that original sin can be understood, and likewise all personal sin. This evil was redeemed by Christ on the Cross. To be more precise, man was redeemed and came to share in the life of God through Christ’s saving work. All this, the entire drama of salvation history, had disappeared as far as the Enlightenment was concerned. Man remained alone: alone as creator of his own history and his own civilization; alone as one who decides what is good and what is bad, as one who would exist and operate etsi Deus non daretur, even if there were no God.

If man can decide by himself, without God, what is good and what is bad, he can also determine that a group of people is to be annihilated. Decisions of this kind were taken, for example, by those who came to power in the Third Reich by democratic means, only to misuse their power in order to implement the wicked programs of National Socialist ideology based on racist principles. Similar decisions were also taken by the Communist party in the Soviet Union and in other countries subject to Marxist ideology. This was the context for the extermination of the Jews, and also of other groups; like the Romany peoples, Ukrainian peasants, and Orthodox and Catholic clergy in Russia, in Belarus, and beyond the Urals. Likewise all those who were “inconvenient” for the regime were persecuted; for example, the ex-combatants of September 1939, the soldiers of the National Army in Poland after the Second World War, and those among the intelligentsia who did not share Marxist or Nazi ideology. Normally this meant physical elimination, but sometimes moral elimination: the person would be more or less drastically impeded in the exercise of his rights.

Other Ideologies Of Evil Emerge
At this point, we cannot remain silent regarding a tragic question that is more pressing today than ever. The fall of the regimes built on ideologies of evil put an end to the forms of extermination just mentioned in the countries concerned. However, there remains the legal extermination of human beings conceived but unborn. And in this case, that extermination is decreed by democratically elected parliaments, which invoke the notion of civil progress for society and for all humanity. Nor are other grave violations of God’s law lacking. I am thinking, for example, of the strong pressure from the European Parliament to recognize homosexual unions as an alternative type of family, with the right to adopt children, It is legitimate and even necessary to ask whether this is not the work of another ideology of evil, more subtle and hidden, perhaps, intent upon exploiting human rights themselves against man and against the family.

The Root Of Post-Enlightenment Ideologies That Generate Ideologies Of Evil
Why does all this happen? What is the root of these post-Enlightenment ideologies? The answer is simple: it happens because of the rejection of God qua Creator, and consequently qua source determining what is good and what is evil. It happens because of the rejection of what ultimately constitutes us as human beings, that is, the notion of human nature as a “given reality”; its place has been taken by a “product of thought” freely formed and freely changeable according to circumstances. I believe that a more careful study of this question could lead us beyond the Cartesian watershed. If we wish to speak rationally about good and evil, we have to return to Saint Thomas Aquinas, that is, to the philosophy of being. With the phenomenological method, for example, we can study experiences of morality, religion, or simply what it is to be human, and draw from them a significant enrichment of our knowledge. Yet we must not forget that all these analyses implicitly presuppose the reality of the Absolute Being and also the reality of being human, that is, being a creature. If we do not set out from such “realist” presuppositions, we end up in a vacuum.

The Limit Imposed Upon Evil
In 1945, at the end of the war, communism seemed very solid and extremely dangerous — much more so than before. In 1920 we had had the distinct impression that the Communists would conquer Poland and advance farther into Western Europe, poised for world domination. In fact, of course, it never came to that. “The miracle on the Vistula,” that is, the triumph of Pilsudski in the battle against the Red Army, muted those Soviet ambitions. After the victory over Nazism in 1945, though, the Communists felt reinvigorated and they shamelessly set out to conquer the world, or at least Europe. At first, this led to the repartition of the Continent into different spheres of influence, according to the agreement reached at Yalta in February 1945. The Communists merely paid lip service to this agreement; in reality, they violated it in various ways, above all through their ideological invasion and political propaganda both in Europe and elsewhere in the world. Even then I knew at once that Communist domination would last much longer than the Nazi occupation had done. For how long? It was hard to predict. There was a sense that this evil was in some way necessary for the world and for mankind. It can happen, in fact, that in certain concrete situations, evil is revealed as somehow useful, inasmuch as it creates opportunities for good. Did not Johann Wolfgang von Goethe describe the devil as “ein Teil von jener Kraft / die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft”? Saint Paul, for his part, has this to say: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:21). That, after all, is the way to bring about a greater good in response to evil.

If I have wanted to underline the limit imposed upon evil in European history, I must conclude that the limit is constituted by good — the divine good and the human good that have been revealed in that history, over the course of the last century and of entire millennia. Yet it is hard to forget the evil that has been personally experienced: one can only forgive. And what does it mean to forgive, if not to appeal to a good that is greater than any evil? This good, after all, has its foundation in God alone. Only God is this good. The limit imposed upon evil by divine good has entered human history, especially the history of Europe, through the work of Christ. So it is impossible to separate Christ from human history. This is exactly what I said during my first visit to Poland, in Victory Square, Warsaw. I stated then that it was impossible to separate Christ from my country’s history. Is it possible to separate him from any other country’s history? Is it possible to separate him from the history of Europe? Only in him, in fact, can all nations and all humanity “cross the threshold of hope”!

Redemption As The Divine Limit Imposed Upon Evil
When I speak of the limit imposed upon evil, I am thinking, above all, of the historical limit Providence imposed upon the evil totalitarian systems established in the twentieth century, namely national socialism and Marxist communism. Yet I find myself wanting at this point to explore some further reflections of a theological nature. I do not simply mean what is sometimes described as a “theology of history.” Rather, I mean a deeper theological reflection, analyzing the roots of evil in order to discover how it can be overcome through Christ’s saving work.

It is God himself who can place a definitive limit upon evil. He is the essence of justice, because it is he who rewards good and punishes evil in a manner perfectly befitting the objective situation. I am speaking here of moral evil, of sin. In the Garden of Eden, human history already encounters the God who judges and punishes. The Book of Genesis describes in detail the penalty imposed on our first parents after their sin (cf. Genesis 3:14-19). And their penalty has been prolonged throughout human history. Original sin is an inherited condition. As such, it signifies the innate sinfulness of man, his radical inclination toward evil instead of good. There is in man a congenital moral weakness which goes hand in hand with the fragility of his being, with his psycho-physical fragility. And this fragility is accompanied by the multiple sufferings indicated in the Bible, from the very first pages, as punishment for sin.

And Deliver Us From Evil: Sin And Human Sinfulness
It could be said that human history is marked from the very beginning by the limit God the Creator places upon evil. The Second Vatican Council has much to say on this subject in the pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes. It would be worth quoting the introductory account given in that document concerning man’s place in the modern world. I shall limit myself to some extracts regarding sin and human sinfulness:

When man looks into his own heart, he finds that he is drawn toward what is wrong and sunk in many evils which cannot come from his good Creator. Often refusing to acknowledge God as his source, man has also upset the relationship which should link him to his last end; and at the same time he has broken the right order that should reign within himself as well as between himself and other men and all creatures. Man therefore is divided in himself. As a result, the whole life of men, both individual and social, shows itself to be a struggle, and a dramatic one, between good and evil, between light and darkness. Man finds that he is unable of himself to overcome the assaults of evil successfully, so that everyone feels as though bound by chains. But the Lord himself came to free and strengthen man, renewing him inwardly and casting out the ‘prince of this world’ (John 12:31), who held him in the bondage of sin. For sin brought man to a lower state, forcing him away from the completeness that is his to attain. Both the high calling and the deep misery men experience find their final explanation in the light of this Revelation.

It is impossible, then, to speak of the “limit imposed upon evil” without considering the ideas contained in the passage just quoted. God himself came to save us and to deliver us from evil, and this coming of God, this “Advent;’ which we celebrate in such a joyful way in the weeks preceding the Nativity of the Lord, is truly redemptive. It is impossible to think of the limit placed by God himself upon the various forms of evil without reference to the mystery of Redemption.

The Mystery Of Redemption And The Response To Historical Evil
Could the mystery of Redemption be the response to that historical evil which, in different forms, continually recurs in human affairs? Is it also the response to the evil of our own day? It can seem that the evil of concentration camps, of gas chambers, of police cruelty, of total war, and of oppressive regimes — evil which, among other things, systematically contradicts the message of the Cross — it can seem, I say, that such evil is more powerful than any good. Yet if we look more closely at the history of those peoples and nations who have endured the trial of totalitarian systems and persecutions on account of faith, we discover that this is precisely where the victorious presence of Christ’s Cross is most clearly revealed. Against such a dramatic background, that presence may be even more striking. To those who are subjected to systematic evil, there remains only Christ and his Cross as a source ~of spiritual self-defense, as a promise of victory. Did not the sacrifice of Maximilian Kolbe in the extermination camp at Auschwitz become a sign of victory over evil? And could not the same be said of Edith Stein — that great thinker from the school of Husserl — who perished in the gas chamber of Birkcnau, thus sharing the destiny of many other sons and daughters of Israel? And besides these two figures, so often named together, how many others in that tragic history stand out among their fellow prisoners for the strength of the witness they bore to Christ crucified and risen!

Purified And Perfected By The Cross And Resurrection Of Christ
The mystery of Christ’s Redemption puts down deep roots in our lives. Modern life is a predominantly technological civilization, but here too the mystery leaves its efficacious mark, as the Second Vatican Council reminds us:

To the question of how this unhappy situation can be overcome, Christians reply that all these human activities, which are daily endangered by pride and inordinate self-love, must be purified and perfected by the Cross and Resurrection of Christ. Redeemed by Christ and made a new creature by the Holy Spirit, man can, indeed he must, love the things of God’s creation: it is from God that he has received them, and it is as flowing from God’s hand that he looks upon them and reveres them. Man thanks his divine benefactor for all these things, he uses them and enjoys them in a spirit of poverty and freedom: thus he is brought to a true possession of the world, as having nothing yet possessing everything

It could be said that the whole of the constitution Gaudium et Spes is an exploration of the definition of the world with which the document begins:

Therefore the world the Council has in mind is the whole human family seen in the context of everything which envelops it: it is the world as the theater of human history, bearing the marks of its travail, its triumphs and failures, the world, which in the Christian vision has been created and is sustained by the love of its maker, which has been freed from the slavery of sin by Christ, who was crucified and rose again in order to break the stranglehold of the evil one, so that it might be fashioned anew according to God’s design and brought to its fulfillment.

Redemption
The vital words — Cross, Resurrection, and Paschal Mystery — appear again and again throughout Gaudium et Spes. All three point to the same thing: Redemption. The world is redeemed by God. The scholastics used to speak of status naturae redemptae –  the state of redeemed nature. Although the Council hardly uses the word “Redemption:’ it frequently invokes the idea. In the language of the Council, Redemption is understood as the culmination of the Paschal Mystery in the Resurrection. Was there a reason for this choice? When I became more familiar with Eastern theology I understood better the important ecumenical character that lay behind this conciliar vision. The insistence on the Resurrection was an expression of the spirituality typical of the great Fathers of the Christian East. If Redemption marks the divine limit placed upon evil, it is for this reason only: because thereby evil is radically overcome by good, hate by love, death by resurrection.

The Mystery Of Redemption 
In the light of these reflections, one is impelled to seek a fuller explanation of the nature of Redemption. What exactly is Redemption in the context of the battle between good and evil in which man is caught up?

Sometimes the battle is expressed using the image of a pair of scales. In terms of this symbol, we could say that God, through the sacrifice of his Son on the Cross, placed that expiation of infinite value on the side of good, so that it would always ultimately prevail. In Polish, the word for “Redeemer” is Odkupiciel, derived from the verb odkupić meaning “regain:’ Similarly, the Latin term Redemptar is related to the verb redimere (regain). This etymological analysis may bring us closer to understanding the reality of the Redemption.

Closely connected to it are the concepts of forgiveness and justification. Both these terms belong to the language of the Gospel. Christ forgave sins, strongly emphasizing that the Son of Man had the power to do so. When they brought the paralytic before him, the first thing he said was: “My son, your sins are forgiven” (Mark 2:5); only later did he add: “Rise, take up your bed and go home” (Mark 2:11). In so doing he implicitly made the point that sin is a greater evil than physical paralysis. And after the Resurrection, when he appeared for the first time in the Upper Room where the Apostles were assembled, he showed them the wounds in his hands and his side, breathed on them, and said: “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” John 20: 22-23). In this way he revealed that the power to forgive sins, which only God possesses, has been given to the Church. At the same time he reaffirmed that sin is the greatest evil from which man has to be delivered, and he showed that the faculty to bring about this deliverance has been entrusted to the Church through the Passion and redemptive death of Christ.

Redemption And The Concept Of Justification
Saint Paul expresses the same truth in greater depth through the concept of justification. In the Apostle’s Letters — especially those to the Romans and the Galatians — the doctrine of justification even acquires a polemical connotation. Paul was formed in the schools of the Pharisees, who were well versed in the study of the Old Covenant, and he challenges their conviction that the Law was the source of justification. In reality, he affirms, man does not attain justification through the actions prescribed by the Law — particularly not through observing the multiple prescriptions of ritual character, to which great importance was then attached. Justification has its source in faith in Christ (cf. Galatians 2:15-21). It is Christ crucified who justifies sinful man every time the latter, through his faith in the Redemption accomplished by Christ, repents of his sins, is converted, and returns to God as his Father. Hence, from one point of view, the concept of justification is an even deeper expression of the content of the mystery of Redemption. To be justified before God, human effort is not enough; the grace which pours forth from Christ’s sacrifice is also needed. Only the immolation of Christ on the Cross has the power to restore man’s righteousness before God.

The Definitive Measure Of Man’s Existence In The World
The Resurrection of Christ clearly illustrates that only the measure of good introduced by God into history through the mystery of Redemption is sufficient to correspond fully to the truth of the human being. The Paschal Mystery thus becomes the definitive measure of man’s existence in the world created by God. In this mystery, not only is eschatological truth revealed to us, that is to say the fullness of the Gospel, or Good News. There also shines forth a light to enlighten the whole of human existence in its temporal dimension and this light is then reflected onto the created world. Christ, through his Resurrection, has so to speak “justified” the work of creation, and especially the creation of man. He has “justified” it in the sense that he has revealed the “just measure” of good intended by God at the beginning of human history. This measure is not merely what was provided by him in creation and then compromised by man through sin; it is a superabundant measure, in which the original plan finds a higher realization (cf. Genesis 3:14-15). In Christ, man is called to a new life, as son in the Son, the perfect expression of God’s glory. In the words of Saint Irenaeus, gloria Dei vivens homo—the glory of God is man fully alive.

Redemption: Victory Given As A Task To Man
In the mystery of Redemption, Christ’s victory over evil is given to us not simply for our personal advantage, but also as a task. We accept that task as we set out upon the way of the interior life, working consciously on ourselves-with Christ as our Teacher. The Gospel calls us to follow this very path. Christ’s call “Follow me!” is echoed on many pages of the Gospel and is addressed to different people-not only to the Galilean fishermen whom Jesus calls to become his Apostles (cf. Matthew 4:19, Mark 1:17, John 1:43), but also, for example, to the rich young man in the Synoptic Gospels (cf. Matthew 19:16-22, Mark 10:17-22, Luke 18:18-23). Jesus’ conversation with him is one of the key texts to which we must constantly return, from various points of view, as I did, for example, in the encyclical Veritatis Splendor.

The call “Follow me!” is an invitation to set out along the path to which the inner dynamic of the mystery of Redemption leads us. This is the path indicated by the teaching, so often found in writings on the interior life and on mystical experience, about the three stages involved in “following Christ.” These three stages are sometimes called “ways.” We speak of the purgative way, the illuminative way, and the unitive way. In reality, these are not three distinct ways, but three aspects of the same way, along which Christ calls everyone, as he once called that young man in the Gospel.

When the young man asks: “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?” Christ answers him: “If you wish to enter life, keep the commandments” (Matthew 19:16-17 et passim). And when the young man continues to ask: “Which?” Christ simply reminds him of the principal commandments of the Decalogue, and especially those from the so-called “second tablet” concerning relations with one’s neighbor. In Christ’s teaching, of course, all the commandments are summarized in the commandment to love God above all things and one’s neighbor as oneself. He says so explicitly to a doctor of the Law in response to a question (cf. Matthew 22:34-40; Mark 12:28-31). Observance of the commandments, properly understood, is synonymous with the purgative way: it means conquering sin, moral evil in its various guises. And this leads to a gradual inner purification.

Discovering Christian Values: The Purgative, Illuminative and Unitive Ways
It also enables us to discover values. And hence we conclude that the purgative way leads organically into the illuminative way. Values are lights which illumine existence and, as we work on our lives, they shine evermore brightly on the horizon. So side by side with observance of the commandments — which has an essentially purgative meaning — we develop virtues. For example, in observing the commandment: “You shall not kill!” we discover the value of life under various aspects and we learn an ever deeper respect for it. In observing the commandment: “You shall not commit adultery!” we acquire the virtue of purity, and this means that we come to an ever greater awareness of the gratuitous beauty of the human body, of masculinity and femininity. This gratuitous beauty becomes a light for our actions. In observing the commandment: “You shall not bear false witness!” we learn the virtue of truthfulness. This not only excludes all lying and hypocrisy from our lives, but it develops within us a kind of “instinct for truth” which guides all our actions. And living thus in the truth, we acquire in our own humanity a connatural truthfulness.

So the illuminative stage in the interior life emerges gradually from the purgative stage. With the passage of time, if we persevere in following Christ our Teacher, we feel less and less burdened by the struggle against sin, and we enjoy more and more the divine light which pervades all creation. This is most important, because it allows us to escape from a situation of constant inner exposure to the risk of sin — even though, on this earth, the risk always remains present to some degree — so as to move with ever greater freedom within the whole of the created world. This same freedom and simplicity characterizes our relations with other human beings, including those of the opposite sex. Interior light illumines our actions and shows us all the good in the created world as coming from the hand of God. Thus the purgative way and then the illuminative way form the organic introduction to what is known as the unitive way. This is the final stage of the interior journey, when the soul experiences a special union with God. This union is realized in contemplation of the divine Being and in the experience of love which flows from it with growing intensity. In this way we somehow anticipate what is destined to be ours in eternity, beyond death and the grave. Christ, supreme Teacher of the spiritual life, together with all those who have been formed in his school, teaches that even in this life we can enter onto the path of union with God.

The dogmatic constitution Lumen Gentium states: “Christ, made obedient unto death and because of this exalted by the Father (cf. Philemon 2:8-9), has entered into the glory of his kingdom. All things are subjected to him until he subjects himself and all created things to the Father, so that God may be all in all (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:27-28) .“Evidently the Council is thinking on a very large scale, illustrating what it means to participate in Christ’s kingly mission. At the same time, however, these words help us to understand how union with God can be achieved during earthly life. If the kingly way, indicated by Christ, leads definitively to the state in which “God will be all in all,” the union with God that can be experienced on earth is attained in just the same way. We can find God in everything, we can commune with him in and through all things. Created things cease to be a danger for us as once they were, particularly while we were still at the purgative stage of our journey. Creation, and other people in particular, not only regain their true light, given to them by God the Creator, but, so to speak, they lead us to God himself, in the way that he willed to reveal himself to us: as Father, Redeemer, and Spouse.