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Mother Teresa of Calcutta: Temperance

January 15, 2010

Fr. Robert Barron looks at the Cardinal virtues and illustrates how a Saint elevates these virtues through grace. Following my post on Dawn Eden and living a chaste life, I wanted to explore more about Temperance which is the virtue that chastity belongs to. The best way to show these virtues is to do what Fr. Barron does here – illustrate them through the life of a Saint. He uses Mother Teresa to show us an example of elevated Temperance.

About The Cardinal Virtues
Prudence is the virtue that oversees and governs the moral life, and justice is the heart and soul of ethical activity. Fortitude is the excellence that allows one to do the prudent thing in the face of external threats, most especially the prospect of death. The fourth and final cardinal virtue — temperance — is that which enables one to overcome obstacles to goodness coming from within the structure of one’s own subjectivity. As such, it orders and renders peaceful the soul, producing what Aquinas calls quies animi, serenity of spirit. Josef Pieper comments that temperance is an attention to the self, but for the sake of selflessness, whereas intemperance is an inattentiveness to the self, conducing to self-destruction.

Unlike the inner order of a plant or animal, human ordo is not simply a natural given but rather an achievement of intellect, will, and discipline: “the discipline of temperance defends one against all selfish perversion of the inner order through which alone the moral person exists and lives effectively.” The perversion in question has to do with excessive exercise of the drives for self-preservation: hunger, thirst, and sexual desire. Precisely because these are so strong and primal, they tend rather naturally toward excess and distortion.

Thomas Aquinas, borrowing from Aristotle, says that temperance concerns the ordering of the sense of touch, since all three of these elemental desires are related ultimately to that most basic and perfect of the senses. Because we want so passionately to touch, to satisfy our longings for food, drink, and sexual pleasure, we will become quite easily twisted away from right moral action. Temperance is the virtue that monitors and limits this tendency.

The first dimension of temperance that Aquinas analyzes is chastity, the ordering of the sexual desire. Because the very words chastity and temperance have puritanical overtones, at least to our ears, it is most important to note that there is not a hint of Manichaeism in Thomas’s approach to sex. He never tires of reminding us — over and against some fairly weighty intellectual authorities — that sex in itself is nothing but good. One of his more remarkable comments is that the sexual pleasure of Adam and Eve in paradise, prior to the fall, was greater than that which we heirs of original sin experience.

Pieper reflects Thomas’s view quite closely when he observes that “heresy and hyperasceticism are and always have been close neighbors.”Thus chastity is not a flight from sex but an ordering of sexual desire so as to place it in the higher context of self-forgetting love. An intriguing implication of chastity is a deepened appreciation for the beautiful, for it removes desire from preoccupation with the sexual. Pieper comments, “Unchaste lust has the tendency to relate the whole complex of the sensual world, and particularly of sensual beauty, to sexual pleasure exclusively.”The rightly ordered and disciplined self is thus far more capable of taking in the dense objectivity of the aesthetic.

Next, Aquinas examines the second major aspect of temperance, the ordering of the desire for food and drink. The basic purpose of abstinence and fasting is to free the soul for a readier contemplation of higher things and a more prompt exercise of moral virtue. Thomas Merton once observed that our desires for food and drink are something like little children in their persistence and tendency to dominate. Unless and until they are disciplined, they will skew the functions of the soul — including reason itself — according to their purposes.

Now what happens when this moral virtue is invaded and elevated by grace? Chastity becomes radicalized into what Aquinas calls “virginity,” the willingness not only to order sexual desire but to eschew sexual relations altogether so as to realize a supernatural end. In Thomas’s own language, “It [virginity] is made praiseworthy only by its end and purpose, to the extent that it aims to make him who practices it free for things divine.” The love of God has so seized a person that she is willing to give up permanently and definitively an activity that the naturally chaste person would only discipline, in order that she might be utterly available to God.

And when ordinary abstinence is invaded by the divine life, it becomes the radical asceticism of the desert fathers, of St. Benedict, St. Francis, and Charles de Foucault. Obviously, no one can sensibly abstain absolutely from food and drink as one might from sex, but one can press and push the natural disciplining of sensual desire into a radical form — once again, for the sake of loving and serving God more fully. In the strict sense, temperance is not in itself a realization of the good but rather the necessary prerequisite to that realization. This remains true in regard to elevated temperance. Neither celibacy nor radical asceticism is sought for its own sake. Were that the case, each would be at best a rather peculiar form of ascetical athleticism, a test of endurance. They are, in point of fact, conditiones sine qua non for the achievement of a love that seeks to imitate, however inadequately, the unlimited love of God.

The saint I have chosen to illumine this virtue of elevated temperance is Mother Teresa of Calcutta. I realize that this might strike my reader as a strange choice. In her utterly generous gift of self on behalf of the poor and the dying, Mother Teresa seems to be, even more than Katharine Drexel (whom Fr. Barron had used to illustrate the cardinal virtue of Justice), the paragon of elevated justice.

Let me observe first that the virtues are mutually implicative and interdependent. In fact Thomas feels that it is next to impossible to have any one virtue in its integrity and not to have the others concomitantly. Thus it is not surprising that we should notice elevated justice, as well as courage and prudence, in someone marked by elevated temperance. Second, in her own accounts of her life and work, Mother Teresa put a constant emphasis on the utter necessity of asceticism and celibacy as conditions for the work that she and her sisters undertook. This protective and ordering virtue was, in a word, indispensable to the effecting of the justice that was the far more visible dimension of the life of Mother Teresa.

Mother Teresa’s Birth and Early Years
Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu was born on August 26, 1910, in Skopje, Serbia, the youngest child of Nikola and Dranafile Bojaxhiu. Agnes’s father was a merchant and entrepreneur, trading in a variety of different goods and providing various services in Skopje, eventually becoming a prominent player in the town’s civic life. Her mother was a dedicated housewife and mother whose very traditional views of a woman’s role in the family would have a marked influence on her daughter. Nikola became involved in the political movement that eventually led to the independence of Albania from Serbia, and in the years just after World War I, he was active in bringing the province of Kosovo under the control of Albania.

In pursuit of this latter goal, one day he left with some friends to attend a political meeting in Belgrade. Though he departed in seemingly perfect health he returned desperately ill from an internal hemorrhage, possibly the result of poisoning. Emergency surgery proved fruitless, and he died at the age of forty-five, leaving his wife and family in rather severe economic straits. In this regard, Mother Teresa’s story comes quite close to Edith Stein’s.

After an initial period of intense grief and psychological disorientation, Drana, Agnes’s mother, gathered herself and stabilized her family both emotionally and financially. But she was well aware of the law of the gift. Drana insisted that their family table be open to the poor, both in her extended family and in the town. She also cared for an old woman who had been abandoned by her family and the six children of a destitute widow. Agnes øften accompanied her on these missions of mercy, taking in the lesson that her goods, however meager, were meant to be shared.

Her Call to the Religious Life
‘When she was twelve, Agnes felt called to the religious life, though she had never, to that point in her life, so much as laid eyes on a nun. A key player in the shaping of her vocation was a young Croatian Jesuit priest, Fr. Jambrekovic, who had become her parish priest in 1925. He introduced the young people of the town to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius and their challenge to orient one’s life radically toward the service of Jesus. When Agnes asked him to help her discern her call, he responded in the Ignatian spirit that joy is the compass by which one should steer one’s life. Both of these themes, the totality of dedication and the primacy of joy in the spiritual life, would remain central to Agnes to her last day. But perhaps Fr. Jambrekovic’s greatest impact on the future Mother Teresa came from his contagious enthusiasm for the missionary work undertaken by the Jesuit order throughout the world — especially in Bengal.

Inspired by his stories, Agnes applied at the age of eighteen to join the Loreto Sisters, the Irish branch of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which had a strong missionary presence in India. After an initial interview, Agnes was recommended to the mother general of the order, who accepted her and sent her to begin a postulancy at Loreto Abbey in Rathfarnham, Ireland. There she commenced her study of English, the language in which she would operate, spiritually and practically, for the rest of her life, and there she endured her first of many culture shocks. But she had little time to adjust to her new environment, for she spent only six weeks in Ireland before setting sail for India. During her postulancy in Rathfarnham, Agnes took the name Sister Mary Teresa of the Child Jesus, devoting herself thereby to the recently canonized Therese of Lisieux. The spirituality of Therese — accepting one’s littleness before God, taking every moment as an opportunity for great love, being happily subject to the divine providence — would come to radically mark Mother Teresa.

Early Years in India
When she arrived in India, she was dazzled by its luxuriant natural beauty and shocked beyond words by its grinding poverty. Though she had associated with the poor in Skopje, nothing had prepared her for what she saw in India. We have this passage from the journal she kept at this time: “Many families live in the streets, along the city walls…Day and night they live out in the open on mats they have made from large palm leaves…They are virtually naked, wearing at best a ragged loincloth…. As we went along the street we chanced upon one family gathered around a dead relation, wrapped in worn red rags…It was a horrifying scene.” The conviction that service to such poor would necessarily involve a radical simplifying of her own life, a willingness to join them in their destitution, began to form in Sister Teresa’s mind.

After completing her novitiate in Darjeeling, Teresa made temporary vows and began teaching in the convent school there and working part time as an aide to the nursing staff at a small hospital. Here again she confronted the suffering face of India: “Many have come from a distance, walking for as much as three hours. What a state they are in! Their ears and feet are covered in sores. They have lumps and lesions on their backs. Many stay at home because they are too debilitated by tropical fever to come.”

Once a man arrived at the hospital with a bundle out of which protruded what appeared to be twigs. When Teresa looked more closely, she saw that they were the impossibly emaciated legs of a child, blind and on the point of death. The man told the young sister that if she didn’t take the boy, he would throw him to the jackals. Teresa’s journal takes up the story: “With much pity and love, I take the little one into my arms, and fold him in my apron. The child has found a second mother.” And then the passage from the Scripture dawned upon her: “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me” (Matt. 18:5). This is the key to the mature practical spirituality of Mother Teresa: in serving the suffering and the poorest of the poor, one moves into the mystical ontology assumed by Matthew 25, the coinherence of Christ and the least of his brothers and sisters.

In Calcutta
From Darjeeling, Teresa was sent to Loreto Entaly, a school run by the Loreto Sisters in Calcutta. It was thus that she came to the city that would be her home and base for the rest of her life, a city that would, in many ways, define her and her ministry. At first, she was relatively isolated from the worst of Calcutta’s poverty, teaching courses in geography and English behind the high walls of the boarding school, which served orphans and girls from broken homes. But in time she began to make her way to St. Teresa’s primary school, some distance from Loreto Entaly, and there she came face to face with truly dire poverty. She taught outside, drawing figures and letters in the dirt, or inside a kind of stable, and the filthiness and destitution of the children filled her with anguish. But she discovered that her identification with these poorest of the poor, her willingness to live where they lived and do what they were compelled to do, brought great consolation to them: “Oh God,” she wrote, “how easy it is to spread happiness in that place.”

On May 24, 1937, Sister Teresa took the formal religious vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience for life and thereby became, as was the Loreto custom, “Mother Teresa.” Throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s, Mother Teresa worked at a furious pace, teaching, administering schools, visiting the sick, and making frequent forays into the poorest sections of Calcutta. Her frenetic activity led to a breakdown in her health, and her superiors decreed that she should spend three hours each afternoon resting in bed. When this did not prove sufficient, she was told to go on a kind of extended retreat, convalescing and praying at the hill station of Darjeeling where she had done her novitiate.

On September 10, 1946, while she was making her way on the dusty train to Darjeeling, Mother Teresa had an experience that would change her life. Though it is fair to say that Jesus had gotten into her boat many years before, when she accepted the call to religious life, on that train to Darjeeling he began to direct her life even more radically and completely. Though she would speak of it only sparingly, she specified that what she received during that train ride was “the call of God to be a Missionary of Charity” This was, she said, “the hidden treasure for me, for which I have sold all to purchase it. You remember in the Gospel, what the man did when he found the hidden treasure — he hid it. This is what I want to do for God.”

A New Order
When she got to Darjeeling, she commenced her formal retreat, and during that extended time of reflection and prayer, she received even more inspirations in regard to this new vocation. She scribbled down her thoughts on tiny slips of white paper, and when she returned to Calcutta, she gave these to Fr. Celeste Van Exem, a Belgian Jesuit priest who had become, somewhat against his will, her spiritual director. What he read on those bits of paper was an outline of the order that Mother Teresa would found: a new congregation dedicated to working in poverty and a spirit of joy with the poorest of the poor, free of any connection to hospitals, schools, or other institutions.

In a series of talks that Mother Teresa herself would give upon her return from Darjeeling, another defining dimension of the spirituality of her new order would become clear: thirst. In the narrative of the woman at the well, as we have seen, Jesus expresses his thirst in the presence of the Samaritan woman: “Give me a drink.” Mother Teresa interpreted this, along Augustinian lines, as God’s thirst for our faith and friendship. Accordingly, a principal work of her community would be to slake the thirst of Jesus for intimacy with human souls. Later in John’s Gospel, Jesus says, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink” (John 7:37). All human beings are thirsty, ultimately, for friendship with God, and thus Mother Teresa determined that a major work of her new order would be facilitating that relationship. The two motifs perfectly dovetail in the passage in chapter 25 of Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus explicitly identifies himself with those who suffer: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink” (v. 35). The human thirst for God becomes God’s thirst for our love. This multivalent theological meditation on thirst would be expressed later in every house established by Mother Teresa’s congregation, with an image of the crucified Jesus and, next to him, the words “I thirst.”

Despite all of this spiritual inspiration, insight, and energy, Fr. Van Exem urged Mother Teresa to wait and to test her call. They would pray over the matter until January of the following year, and only if at that time both were convinced that this new congregation was congruent with God’s will would they present the idea to Ferdinand Perier, the archbishop of Calcutta. When January came, both the young nun and the young priest were persuaded that God desired this undertaking, and they accordingly contacted Perier. The gruff archbishop, however, was not at all in agreement. There were, he argued, already a number of women’s orders taking care of the poor; furthermore, it was highly irregular and more than a little spiritually dangerous for a nun to leave her congregation; and finally, it seemed impolitic during a time of intense Indian nationalism to found another order headed by a European. These were, to be sure, serious objections, but the archbishop’s opposition was also a classic example of the kind of testing that is de rigueur in such situations: if she persevered despite all obstacles and pressures, her vocation might be from God.

For over a year, Mother Teresa and Fr. Van Exem exorted, cajoled, and demanded, and the archbishop remained adamant. When he fell seriously ill, Mother Teresa informed him that if he got better, she would take his recovery as a sign from God that she should move forward with her plan. He did recover but did not give in. Time and again, he impatiently rebuffed Van Exem when the Jesuit came to beg on Teresa’s behalf. Secretly, however, the archbishop was intrigued by the idea and impressed by this prayerful, stubborn young nun. He thus consulted with experts in canon law to determine the feasibility of her proposal. In early 1948, convinced that her call was genuine, Perier gave permission for Mother Teresa to petition for permission to leave her Loreto community — but he insisted that she apply not for exclaustration, which would allow her to remain under vows, but for secularization, which would effectively and finally cut her off from Loreto. Once again he was testing her, seeing whether she would be able to trust totally in God’s providence.

Rome Says Yes
In her simple, unaffected style, Mother Teresa wrote the cardinal in charge of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in Rome, explaining her mission and asking permission to leave her community to commence this work among the poor. In April 1.948, a decree came from Rome, granting her a year to experiment with this new form of religious life, under the direction of Archbishop Perier. When Van Exem brought her the decree and explained it to her, Mother Teresa’s immediate response was “Father, can I go to the slums now?”

In preparation for leaving Loreto, Teresa bought three saris at a local bazaar: white garments, edged with blue stripes. They were the cheapest she could find, and the blue stripes appealed to hei, for blue is the color of the Virgin Mary. In time, of course, these would provide the model for the distinctive habit of the Missionaries of Charity. Under cover of night, so as to avoid a tearful leave-taking, she slipped away from the Loreto convent by taxi, holding only five rupees in her pocket and trusting utterly in God’s providence. She went first to the Holy Family Hospital in Patna, run by the Medical Mission Sisters, in order to acquire some basic medical know-how. After only a few weeks of instruction, she felt that she had sufficient training and was ready for her work. Returning to Calcutta, she began looking for suitable accommodations for herself and for those that would, she was convinced, eventually join her. Her first lodging was with the Little Sisters of the Poor, and from this small room she set out, on December 2, 1948, to work in the slum district of Motjhil.

A Home In the Slums For the Dying
Within a few weeks, she had established a school attended by dozens of children. Once more, she used the ground as a blackboard and sought to inculcate the rudiments of Bengali and English in her very young charges. When she had finished instructing the children for the day, she would take them with her on her rounds, visiting the sick and the destitute. Once she saw a woman lying on the street just outside a hospital that had refused her admittance. Mother Teresa petitioned on her behalf, but she was turned away, and the woman died on the open road. This experience convinced her to make a home for the dying, “a resting place,” as she put it, “for people going to heaven.”

These first several months of ministry in the slums were far from idyllic. Mother Teresa endured terrible bouts of loneliness, depression, and discouragement — and an accompanying desire to return to the relative stability and ease of Loreto. In her journal from this period, we find a powerful passage in which she recounts the struggle and the resolution: “Our Lord wants me to be a free nun covered with the poverty of the Cross… The poverty of the poor must be so hard for them. While looking for a home, I walked and walked till my arms and legs ached. I thought how much they must ache in body and soul, looking for a home, food and health. Then the comfort of Loreto came to tempt me.” The temptation was toward self-indulgence (curvatus in se), and the solution was a radicalized temperance conducing toward freedom.

As we have seen, courage holds off the threats to moral rectitude that come from without, and temperance battles those that come from within. Accordingly, both virtues are oriented toward freedom. The radical moral form that Mother Teresa chose required, she saw, an equally radical modality of temperance, the very destitution of the poor she served. Clothed in that “poverty of the Cross,” she could be a “free nun.”

In early 1949, with the help of Fr. Van Exem, Mother Teresa moved into a room on the second floor of a home in east Calcutta. The furnishings consisted of a bench, which served as a bookshelf, a cardboard box for a table, a single chair, and a green almirah which served as a small altar. When one of her former colleagues among the Little Sisters of the Poor came to inspect the place, she commented, “Well, you are sure to have Jesus with you. They cannot say that you left Loreto to become rich!”

The third floor of the. home was a single long room, and Mother Teresa immediately envisioned it as a dormitory for the girls who would, she was sure, in time come to join her. And they came soon enough. In March of 1949, Subhasini Das, a Bengali girl who had been one of Mother Teresa’s pupils at the convent school of Entaly, moved into the sparsely furnished room, and she was joined in April by Magdalen Gomes, another former student whose fierce patriotic feelings Mother Teresa had managed to channel into a fierce love for the poor. In May of that same year a sixteen-year-old girl, the future Sister Margaret Mary, was taken on as a “boarder.”

At this early stage, these four women did not constitute a religious order but simply — to use the formal canonical terminology — a group of “pious women living together.” But Mother Teresa moved rapidly to form them in the rudiments of the religious life, for her goal was from the beginning to found a congregation. Thus, she brought them to a local parish for training in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius, which had had such an impact on her when she was very young, and she began to shape them, practically and theoretically, for work among the poorest of the poor.

A Franciscan Love Of Poverty
All this time, Archbishop Perier was watching over the development of this group with a fatherly care, for he was technically Mother Teresa’s religious superior. He urged her to formulate, with the help of Fr. Van Exem, a rule of life for her new community, and this she did, scribbling down her wishes in a little yellow notebook. Though they drew heavily from the rule of Loreto, which in turn was indebted to the constitutions of the Jesuits, Mother Teresa added special features dealing with poverty. For example, she carefully stipulated that “Missionaries of Charity” would own none of the buildings from which and in which they served the poor. Though this particular regulation was eventually deemed impractical, given the exigencies of both ecclesial and civil law, there remained in the rule much of the spirit of St. Francis, li poverello.

As the community increased in size, the sisters embodied this Franciscan love of poverty with a vengeance. Mother Teresa insisted that in order to understand those whom they served, they must live like them, and therefore all that the first Missionaries of Charity possessed was “their cotton saris, some coarse underwear, a pair of sandals, the crucifix they wore pinned to their left shoulder, a rosary, an umbrella to protect them against the monsoon rains, a metal bucket for washing, and a very thin palliasse to serve as a bed.”Since they were utterly dependent upon the generosity of others — much like the earliest Dominicans and Franciscans — the Missionaries of Charity often had trouble procuring even these simple staples. Once, they were short of shoes, and one of the sisters had to wear an old pair with red stiletto heels; another time, a sister was compelled to wear a habit made out of material that had been used to store wheat, so that through the thin fabric of her sari, across her behind, the words “not for resale” were clearly visible! One winter, they were short of shawls, and some of the sisters had to wear their bedclothes to attend Midnight Mass.

And there was a kind of poverty built into the very rhythm of their day. During the week the sisters rose at 4:40 a.m., and on Sundays at 4:15 a.m. They washed their faces with water drawn with empty milk tins out of a common tank; they brushed their teeth in ashes taken from the kitchen stove; and they scrubbed their bodies and their clothes with a small bar of soap, which had been divided into six. Between 5:15 and 6:45, they meditated, prayed, and attended Mass.

Then they ate a very basic breakfast (though Mother Teresa stipulated that they drink plenty of water in order not to tire in the intense heat) and were on the streets doing their work by 7:45. Just after noon, they returned to the mother house for prayers and ate a meal consisting of five ladles of bulgur wheat and a few bits of meat, if meat was available. After housework, they rested, at Mother Teresa’s insistence, for a half an hour, and then they did spiritual reading for an hour before returning to their pastoral work in the slums. At six, they gathered again at the mother house for dinner — usually a collation of rice and vegetables — and next engaged in whatever tasks of cleaning and sewing were necessary before recreation, evening prayer, and bed by ten o’clock. Mother Teresa called for a poverty that went beyond mere physical hardship and deprivation.

One rather aristocratic newcomer to the order “found the toilet dirty one day and hid herself away in disgust. Mother Teresa happened to pass by without seeing the Sister. She immediately rolled up her sleeves and took out a broom and cleaned the toilet herself,” manifesting to the reluctant novice the kind of spiritual simplicity called for by the community. Another time, a young member of the group won a gold medal for her medical studies, “and Mother Teresa directed her to surrender it to the student who had come in second.”The hoarding of honors would be just as detrimental to their work as the hoarding of food and drink. An essential aspect of the temperance and poverty of the Missionaries of Charity was an utter confidence in the efficacy of divine providence — and an accompanying abandonment of self-reliance and self-disposition. Once, when the sisters were completely without food for the evening meal, they resolved to pray. Suddenly, a knock came to the door and there stood a woman carrying some bags of rice — just enough, it turned out, to feed the community that night. She told the sisters that some inexplicable impulse had brought her to them.

Ignatius’ Spirit of Detachment
A spirituality of detachment — which Mother Teresa had learned from the exercises of Ignatius — was inculcated at all times. The sisters were instructed to pray special prayers while they put on each article of clothing at the beginning of the day. While they donned their habit, they prayed that this distinctive garb would remind them of their separation from the world and its vanities: “Let the world be nothing to me and I nothing to the world.”‘While they girded their waist, they prayed for the purity of the Virgin Mary: “surrounded and protected by that absolute poverty which crowned all you did for Jesus.” As they put on their sandals, they prayed that they might have the detachment to follow Jesus wherever he prompted them to go.

Further, they were compelled to be detached from their own will through a strict obedience. Despite her affability and kindness, Mother Teresa exhibited toward her sisters a toughness that outsiders sometimes found off-putting, or at the very least surprising. She consistently acted out of the conviction that obedience was “to be prompt, simple, blind, and cheerful,” precisely because Jesus was obedient unto death.

Now all of this might strike us as a bit exaggerated, an asceticism bordering on puritanism. But we must recall the radicality of the love to which Mother Teresa was calling herself and her followers. To will the good of the poorest of the poor, the most destitute and alone, the most physically repulsive and spiritually hopeless, required, she discerned, a radicalized temperance. Charity to an extreme degree necessitated a self-control and detachment that went far beyond the natural forms of those virtues. Because it is ordered most directly to God, love is in itself unlimited, and hence when love invades the soul, it causes the natural virtues to participate in its infinity And so what we have already seen in regard to courage, prudence, and justice, we now see in regard to temperance: a natural virtue supernaturalized, a moderate ethical habit rendered immoderate.

Missionaries of Charity Growth
For the first ten years of its existence from 1949 to 1959 — the Missionaries of Charity continued to grow, but its work was restricted, by canon law to the confines of the diocese of Calcutta. When the period of probation was over, Mother Teresa was eager to extend her work throughout India, and almost immediately she received invitations to establish houses in Ranchi, Delhi, Jhansi, and Bombay In 1965, almost twenty years after she had her first inspiration to establish an order to work among the poorest of the poor, Mother Teresa received word from Rome that the Missionaries of Charity had been formally named a society of pontifical right.

For the public announcement of the decree in Calcutta, chairs and benches had to be borrowed so as to accommodate the visiting dignitaries; Mother Teresa squatted on the ground as she listened to the declaration. Following the formal establishment of the order, the Missionaries of Charity spread with amazing rapidity around the world. In late 1965, responding to an invitation from a local bishop, the community opened a house in Venezuela, where they worked among the millions of baptized Catholics who had fallen away from the practice of the faith and into extreme material Poverty In 1968, at the Prompting of the pope himself, Mother Teresa set up a house in Rome, taking, she was proud to say, the poorest quarters ever occupied by the Missionaries of Charity. Later that same year, they opened houses in Tabora, Tanzania, and in Melbourne, Australia. By the end of the 1970s, there were Missionaries of Charity establishments on all six continents, and by the close of the 1990s, there were more than five hundred houses around the world. When she was asked how far her work would spread, Mother Teresa said, “If there are poor on the moon, we shall go there too.”

Although she could hardly supervise each convent personally, she determined, as far as was able, to monitor her followers’ exercise of the virtue of poverty. Again and again, she insisted that fundraising on behalf of her work was against her wishes. “I don’t want the work to become a business but to remain a work of love,” she wrote her sisters. “I want you to have that complete confidence that God won’t let us down.” When Terence Cardinal Cooke of New York offered to pay each of the Missionaries of Charity in his archdiocese five hundred dollars a month, she retorted, “Do you think, Your Eminence, that God is going to become bankrupt in New York?”And when, especially in Western countries, her sisters were offered gifts of labor-saving devices such as washing machines, she insisted that they accept nothing but a glass of water by way of hospitality, since that was all that the poor could offer.

Her Later Years
For the remaining years of her life, Mother Teresa, though based in Calcutta, would travel widely, visiting her numerous establishments, in this regard calling to mind the lifestyle of Katharine Drexel, whose active career was coming to an end just as Mother Teresa’s was beginning. Like Mother Drexel, she would try to travel in the simplest, least expensive way, sometimes sleeping in a luggage rack of a third-class train car. When she traveled by plane, her baggage would consist of a small paper package wrapped in string and marked “Mother Teresa.” She accepted a number of prestigious prizes and honors during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985, using these occasions to raise the consciousness of the world concerning the plight of the poor and the responsibility of the wealthy nations. When she was invited by President Bill Clinton to speak at the National Prayer Breakfast in 1994, she dismayed her host by speaking vigorously against abortion, a mode of state-sanctioned abuse that, she argued, disproportionately affects the poor.

Throughout the 1 990s Mother Teresa’s health gradually deteriorated, and her travels became less frequent. In 1990, she tried to hand over direction of her order, but she was compelled by her community to take back the reins of authority. Finally, in early 1997, she insisted that her bad health precluded her continuing as superior, and a general chapter of the Missionaries of Charity elected as superior Sister Nirmala, a Hindu convert who had joined Mother Teresa in the early days and who had been head of the contemplative branch of the Missionaries of Charity. This transition seemed to please Mother Teresa, assuring her of a measure of institutional continuity in the community to which she had given her life. Throughout 1997, her condition steadily worsened, and she died on September 5 at the age of eighty-seven.

When it was displayed for public viewing, Mother Teresa’s body was, of course, clothed in the habit of the Missionaries of Charity, but it was left shoeless, revealing her remarkably misshapen feet. For many people, those gnarled feet bore the most eloquent witness to the hard years that she spent on behalf of the poorest of the poor.

Posted in The Cardinal Virtues | Tagged Josef Pieper, Missionaries of Charity, Mother Teresa In Calcutta, Mother Teresa's Call to the Religious Life, Mother Teresa's Early Years in India, Mother Teresa’s Birth and Early Years, St. Thomas Aquinas, Temperance, The Cardinal Virtues | 3 Comments »

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January 14, 2010

Francis Cardinal George Arrives At The Funeral of Henry Hyde, 2007

Francis Cardinal George has a gift of being able to view his country as an outsider. As one who grew to manhood in Japan and lived there for 23 years, I think I experienced more of a wrenching adjustment to American life than I ever did to living in Japan. I’ve also wondered how much this played into my conversion to Catholicism, as it has allowed me to maintain a sense of being a cultural outsider.

Here Cardinal George is able to trace the effects of Protestantism on the United States and to view his own country as an object for the evangelization of the gospel by the Catholic Church. I think that is especially helpful to Americans who are not able to see their country in such a critical light. Sometimes as I debate atheists and others on the Internet I find myself thinking: where do these aliens come from? Of course the answer is right here in my home country. They are my neighbors and yet I feel separated from them by a huge gulf.

If you have ever felt that way (remember Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid looking at the posse in their pursuit repeating over and over again “Who are those guys?”), this exposition on the United States will answer some of that question. For the Catholic Church is being pursued, make no mistake about it. The Church stands in many ways as the only defender of the weakest and most needful members (the elderly, the unborn, the economically unproductive, the mentally and physically disabled) of American society. And the secular left is in full throated opposition to any who express their faith on public issues, claiming it is culturally inappropriate to express “privately held” religious views in the public square.

The Distinctive Contribution of Theology
WHAT ARE YOU DOING to affect the culture in the United States?” Pope John Paul II asked me this question directly when I was in Rome in the late 1990s for an ad limina visit. John Paul often spoke of the Church’s mission as including culture-engagement or culture-transformation. “The faith creates culture” was a frequent refrain of his.

There are, of course, many ways that the Church shapes culture, but one of the most significant means to this end is the intelligent and faithful practice of theology Even in its most technical academic expression, Catholic theology is essentially evangelical in nature and purpose, since its task is to explore the full meaning of the story of God’s love for the world in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen from the dead.

When theologians are no longer taught by the Church and fired by her evangelical enthusiasm, they may become cultural critics or philosophers of religion, but they cannot carry out the full culture-forming task envisioned by the Church. When theologians speak from within the household of the faith, however, their words can create a culture open to Catholicism. How can authentically Catholic theology help announce the Good News to and within a culture shaped by a complex and uniquely American set of assumptions, values, symbols, practices, and convictions?

The Evangelically Ambiguous Quality of Every Culture
Since we have recognized that every culture is a human artifact and since human beings are both made in the image of God and also fallen, we can assume, on strictly theological grounds, that every culture is evangelically ambiguous — that is to say, both fertile soil and rocky ground for sowing the seed of the Gospel. Accordingly, we may search, with Paul Tillich, for the religious ground of the artistic, political, and institutional life of any society; and we may notice, with Karl Barth and John Milbank, the various spiritual distortions evident in those same cultural expressions.

With Ongen and the bishops of Vatican II, we may discern the semina verbi [the seeds of the word] that are present in non-Christian philosophies and religions; and with Augustine, we may craft an appropriate critique of even a great culture grown decadent. Thus it is in a spirit neither optimistic nor pessimistic, neither overly enthusiastic nor excessively censorious, that we look, with Gospel eyes, at our American culture. Since this is our culture, all of us can look at trends and values and past history to understand who we are collectively; but each of us can also look within and seek for identity and self-understanding as individuals. Our culture is a locus theologicus, a privileged source for theological reflection.

American Culture as Rocky Ground
What are some of the qualities of our culture that make it hostile, or at least unreceptive, to the proclamation of the Good News? The United States is a nation that has been shaped decisively by Protestantism, with its stress on the power of inner experience. For Martin Luther and other great reformers, justification is mediated less through an external system of sacraments and ecclesial institutions than through the deeply subjective intuition of faith. When this Lutheran insight passed into the thought-world of Calvinism, it became the inner conviction that one had been predestined to salvation.

A particularly powerful insight into the psychological dynamics of this Calvinist feeling of being saved is given by John Henry Newman in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua. He recounts there the story of his embrace of evangelical Christianity at the age of fifteen. By an “inward conversion” of great intensity; Newman became aware of two “luminously self-evident beings,” himself and his Creator, and of the fact of his final perseverance in grace. At the beginning of the modern age, such subjective certitude had come to replace the objective givenness of participation in Church and sacramental rites as assurance of salvation.

The Emphasis on Experience in American Theology
When, in the seventeenth century the Reform became more rationalized through the efforts of the Protestant scholastics, the focus on interiority and experience was preserved on the continent in such groups as the Hutterites, the Anabaptists, and the Moravians and in England by the Puritans and the Quakers. Many of the earliest settlers of colonial America were members of these more radical and marginalized Protestant groups. An already subjective Protestantism was expressed in a more markedly inward and experiential form.

Think, for instance, of the Quaker emphasis on the inner light and the Puritan — and later Wesleyan concern for tracking the movement of the divine spirit within one’s soul. And in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, during the various “Awakenings” that swept the country, preachers confirmed these tendencies by encouraging their listeners to feel their conversion to Christ in an intensely emotional way and to express it vividly and physically. This is the ground of our contemporary search for what might be called spiritualities without faith.

Experiential Protestantism assumed a new and more intellectual form at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the thought of the founder of theological liberalism, Friedrich Schleiermacher. Trained in a Moravian community; Schleiermacher never lost his fascination with the subjective ground of faith. He simply transposed it, in line with the romanticism of his time, into the “feeling of absolute dependency,” claiming that intuition as the self-verifying foundation for Christian dogma. This Schleiermacherian liberalism profoundly shaped the religious thought of both Europe and America, helping to give theological legitimacy here to Unitarianism (Schleiermacher placed the Trinity beyond the range of what could be verified through religious experience) and Emersonian transcendentalism (in his early writings, Schleiermacher spoke of a mystical union with the Universe). Though these more liberal forms of religion strayed far from the classical Christianity of the sixteenth-century reformers, they retained the powerful subjectivism and experientialism of the Reformation.

Paul Tillich, the twentieth-century Protestant theologian standing most clearly in the tradition of Schleiermacher, found a receptive audience among American intellectuals for his correlational version of Christian theology; Tillich understood religion, subjectively enough, as “ultimate concern”; as he saw it, the task of the theologian was to relate the anguished questions of finitude to the answers of the biblical tradition. Through a kind of trickle-down effect, the thought of Tillich has found its way into much of popular narrative theology and into many forms of theological reflection done in pastoral contexts.

And even as our Protestant-formed culture shades today into a post-Christian secularism, the emphasis on subjectivity and experience remains. It can be seen, for instance, in the numberless talk shows, those public confessionals where people discuss their deepest feelings and anxieties and are urged to act them out, sometimes histrionically. And it can be discerned in the myriad forms of New Age spirituality most of which are grounded in a mysticism of the divinized self.

The Challenge to Revelation and Authority in American Culture
All of this, quite obviously, renders extremely difficult the proclamation of a revealed and doctrinally developed faith. For classical Catholic Christianity, the truths of faith do not arise from common human experience; they come to us through God’s gracious self-revelation. More to the point, they cannot be verified, measured, or contained by our subjectivity. In the very first question of the first part of the Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas argues that a revealed sacra doctrina is required beyond the philosophical discipline of metaphysics because human beings are oriented to an end beyond what they could in principle grasp through their own powers. Revealed doctrine, and its theological elaboration, are necessary, in other words, because God has not intended that we rest in ourselves, trapped, as it were, in our own experience.

In his critique of Tillich’s correlational method, Barth said that the “answers” of Scripture are so surprising and strange that they confound any and all questions that we ask. And in his critique of Karl Rahner’s more experiential approach, Hans Urs von Balthasar compares Jesus to a mountain torrent. The torrent cannot be exhausted by the various human channels made to receive its water. What Aquinas, Barth, and von Balthasar suggest is this: experience and subjectivity are most themselves when they are graciously overthrown by the revelation that surpasses them. The exaggerated subjectivism of American culture renders this overthrow problematic.

A related difficulty is that of authority especially religious authority. When subjective experience is the source, measure, and criterion of truth, any and all authority is seen as arbitrary and invasive. But a doctrinal tradition that is grounded in objective revelation must be preserved and monitored by an authority that transcends subjectivity and is thus capable of real judgment. Newman argued, throughout his career, that the existence of a developing and historically situated dogmatic faith requires an infallible authority in order to discriminate between legitimate evolutions and corruptions. As even a casual survey of American religious culture reveals, acknowledgment of such an authority is problematic.

Another theologically negative dimension of our American culture is what could be called its fundamentally antagonistic social ontology. In addition to John Calvin’s influence in America, we have to recognize the presence of Hobbes. As noted earlier, at the heart of the medieval Catholic theological worldview was a metaphysics of participatio. God was seen, not so much as a supreme being, but the sheer act of to-be itself (Thomas’s ipsum esse subsistens), in which and through which all created things exist. This analogical conception of being allowed the medievals to see God in creation and thus to appreciate the essential connectedness of all things to God and, through God, to one another. Because human beings participate in God, they are, willy-nilly, linked to each other in the deepest ground of their existence. This powerful underlying metaphysical account led medieval Christians to appreciate the connectedness of social/political life as natural to human beings and, consequently, to see violence as not only ethically improper but ontologically inconsistent.

This vision began to break down under the influence of Duns Scotus’s univocal conception of being (which turned God into a supreme instance of being, set over and against finite realities) and Nominalism (which radically individualized and hence separated God and creatures). Pope Benedict XVI laid great emphasis on this problem in his 2006 address at the University of Regensburg, where he spoke of the relation between social violence and a God totally transcendent to His creation. As we saw in an earlier chapter, the total dissolution of the medieval ontology was realized only in the early modern metaphysical and political thought of Hobbes. Having bracketed the creator God, Hobbes saw, consequently, that the basic form of human existence must be antagonistic and individualistic. If there is no universal ground in the divine being, the war of all against all is the natural state of affairs, and sociality; an artificial contrivance for the preservation of life, is no reflection of ontology. On this Hobbesian reading, the purpose of government is no longer — as it was in classical and Christian thought — civic virtue and social justice, but rather the protection of each individual from the potential threat posed by every other individual. A social ontology of peace gives way to one of violence. “Ought” can find no foundation in “is”; and metaphysics no longer functions as meta-ethics.

This basic Hobbesian view goes through various shadings and permutations in Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and the other American founders, but they share in a common understanding of the essential nature of government. Thus, in the Declaration of Independence, it is the right to life, liberty; and happiness that is affirmed; the form of that life, the purpose of that liberty; and the proper ground of that happiness are left completely unarticulated. And the role of government is still exclusively protective rather than directive, since ontological antagonism is taken for granted.

When John Paul II spoke against a Western conception of freedom that is detached from justice and truth, it was this peculiarly modern, Hobbesian sense of freedom that he had in mind. When the free choice of the individual is incontestably paramount, the consequences are the materialism, self-absorption, litigiousness, and, above all, violence that so obviously mark our culture. Abortion and domestic abuse, human trafficking, capital punishment, the increasing gap between rich and poor, the appalling violence on our city streets often fueled by drugs, our sometimes arrogant and aggressive nationalism all flow from an apotheosized freedom rooted, in turn, in an antagonistic, disenchanted metaphysics.

One of the most remarkable and disturbing expressions of this Hobbesian freedom is the Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1992, dealing with abortion rights. The majority of the justices determined that “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” What we see here, with breathtaking clarity is the complete eclipse of truth by freedom and hence the subjectivizing of any and all moral, metaphysical, or religious claims.

In the City of God, Augustine mocked the order of the Roman Empire as a pseudo-justice, based more on fear and oppression than on a dedication to real community And he clearly showed the relationship between the phony social order of the empire and its inadequate theology: the worship of vain and violent false gods led to a dysfunctional political system. What he proposed to replace it was the communio of Christianity, grounded in the love, forgiveness, and compassion of Christian believers, and ultimately in the communio of the Trinitarian persons: a good society rooted in right worship. In Pope John Paul II’s warnings to the West, we hear an overtone of this Augustinian critique. A freedom that is disengaged from the worship of the Creator God, one that is thus correlated to a false metaphysics, becomes poisonous.

Proclaiming a Christian metaphysics of participation, connection, and compassion is, obviously, difficult in a culture predicated on Hobbesian social and ontological assumptions. In a nation formed by an antagonistic and individualistic sense of freedom, it is awkward to say that our lives do not belong to us, that our liberty is for the sake of the Gospel, and that happiness lies in surrender to the divine will. Ignatius of Loyola is speaking a profoundly Christian language when he says, “Take, Lord, receive all my liberty my memory my understanding, my entire will. You gave them to me, now I give them back to you.”

What Ignatius assumes is a metaphysics of participation and creation: our being is, first and above all, given and then received, and therefore the task is to give it away in love rather than cling to it. “What you have received as a gift, give as a gift.” Americans often find this language of self-sacrifice hard to grasp. But not only our values and patterns of thought are evangelically ambiguous — our institutions and social patterns are as well. Political democracy and religious pluralism, both characteristic of America, require extensive theological analysis as carriers of culture, as do the worlds of entertainment and the professions.

American Culture as Receptive Soil
The theological assumption I made at the outset, that every culture is evangelically ambiguous, now compels us to explore the other side of this question: To what degree is American culture receptive to the sowing of the Gospel seed? As we saw, John Paul II was a trenchant and honest critic of the modern West, but he was also an admirer of the American experiment, and his theological analyses and meditations on the value of our society can guide us effectively in this section.

Pope John Paul II visited the United States in 1979, 1987, and 1995. On each occasion, he found much to praise in America. During his 1979 pilgrimage, he preached at the Chicago lakefront on the theme of the national motto e pluribus unum. Looking out over the throng of about a million people, he reminded them that they had come from a variety of cultural, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. He exulted in the fact that from this diversity they had created something new: “You brought with you a different culture and you contributed your own richness to the whole; you had different skills and you put them to work, complementing each other, to create industry agriculture, and business; each group carried with it different human values and shared them with others for the enrichment of your nation. E pluribus unum: you became a new entity a new people.”

This new people was forged for the purpose of pursuing material wealth, fellowship, and social progress, but, the pope reminded them, “history does not exhaust itself in technological conquest or in cultural achievement only.” There is a deeper reality, signaled by the very act of gathering around the table of the Eucharist: “your unity as members of the People of God.” What John Paul underscored was the analogy between the secular national communio of the United States and the sacred, transnational communio of the Church. Like America, the Church gathers people from every corner of the world, benefits from their distinctive contributions, and then draws them into oneness around a common principle: “The Body of Christ is a unity that transcends the diversity of our origin, culture, education, and personality”

John Paul meant to highlight this analogy not only theoretically but practically: the praxis of America, as it has painfully but effectively forged unity out of diversity, echoes the praxis of the Church as she has brought, throughout the centuries, peoples to Christ. Thus, when America has successfully produced the one from the many, it has participated, however imperfectly, in the divine unifying principle on full display in the Church, namely, Christ’s love for the world.

This insight was never more dramatically expressed than in the homily the pope delivered at Dodger Stadium during his 1987 pilgrimage. Once more looking out on an audience of striking ethnic diversity; John Paul said, “Christ is Anglo and Hispanic, Christ is Chinese and Black, Christ is Vietnamese and Irish, Christ is Korean and Italian, Christ is Japanese and Filipino. . . and many other ethnic groups.” And this is why the idea and practice of e pluribus unum make American culture receptive to the proclamation of Christ’s Gospel in universal communion.

When the Puritan settlers arrived in the New World, they expressed the significance of their pilgrimage in explicitly biblical terms. Having passed through the Red Sea waters of the Atlantic Ocean and having left behind the divisiveness and superstition (as they saw it) of Europe, they sought to establish on these shores “a city on a hill,” a New Jerusalem where a purified Christian community would gather. This sense of America as a divinely sanctioned place of fresh beginnings worked its way quickly and deeply into the national consciousness.

It can be sensed in the rhetoric of the writers and activists of the Revolutionary period, in the western movement of the pioneer generations, in Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, in the poetry of Walt Whitman, and in the hope against hope of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigrants. American culture is shaped significantly by the intuition that we are not the victims of history, inescapably caught in a maelstrom of war, recrimination, and social oppression. Rather, we sense that, here, the rejected are welcomed and even the lowliest, by dint of imagination and courage, can move confidently into an open future.

On October 3, 1979, John Paul II gathered in the rain with three hundred thousand people in Battery Park on the southern tip of Manhattan. There he spoke of this quality of the American soul. “It will always remain one of the glorious achievements of this nation that, when people looked toward America, they received together with freedom also a chance for their own advancement.” In the cadences of our own literary tradition, the pope urged us to realize the fullness of this vision: “Break open the hopeless cycles of poverty and ignorance … the hopeless cycles of prejudices that linger on despite enormous progress. . . the inhuman cycles of war that spring from the violation of man’s fundamental rights.”

What the pope counseled was that the biblical understanding of history as hopeful, open, and providentially guided would find an echo in the American mythology of opportunity and advancement, and hence that prophetic calls to radical social transformation, which might sound strained and naïve elsewhere, would here find a receptive ear. At the very heart of John Paul’s assessment of our culture is a deep and often-expressed appreciation for our ideal of human rights.

The Hobbesian conception of rights and freedom, as we saw, has, to some degree, haunted us from the founding of the nation to the present. But it would be an oversight if we ignored the pope’s equally passionate endorsement of a properly directed and grounded freedom. In a homily delivered on October 3, 1979, in Philadelphia, John Paul drew attention to the Declaration of Independence, which had been composed and ratified in that city two hundred years earlier. He cited the prologue of the document, which contains “a solemn attestation of the equality of all human beings, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”

The key word in this sentence is “Creator.” In pre-Christian political and social thought, the radical inequality of human beings was taken for granted. In Aristotle’s Politics, our fundamental differences in intelligence, courage, and physical ability provide the justification for clear social distinctions and hierarchies, including that of master and slave. But with the Judeo-Christian revelation, something radically new was introduced: the idea of a creator God in whose presence all of us, despite our differences, are respected and loved. In light of this biblical idea, it became clear that human social status could never be simply a function of natural abilities or accomplishments. It must rather be rooted in our identity as beloved children of God.

Inasmuch as Locke and Jefferson spoke of creation in their articulation of human rights, they showed the influence of this Christian heritage and their departure from a purely Hobbesian construal of the question. In that same Philadelphia sermon, John Paul drew attention to the Genesis account of the creation of human beings in the image and likeness of God. It is this biblical intuition, he implies, that informed the best of the language of “rights” from the founders of the American political culture.

Therefore when the Church speaks — as she must — of the dignity of each individual, created by God and redeemed by Christ, she ought to find a receptive audience in Americans formed by the civil tradition of human rights. ‘When, on Gospel grounds, she defends the weakest and most vulnerable members of a society– the elderly, the unborn, the economically unproductive, the mentally and physically disabled — her words ought to resonate with the deepest convictions of the American soul. In the measure that these “least” among us are legally unprotected, our culture has rejected a creation-centered understanding of rights and chosen a Hobbesian conception. A theological analysis of our rights language would be a powerful contribution to culture and society.

Posted in Apologetics, Francis Cardinal George | Tagged American Culture, effects of Protestantism on the United States, Emphasis on Experience in American Theology, evangelization of the gospel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hobbesian freedom, Ignatius of Loyola, Paul Tillich, The Challenge to Revelation and Authority | Leave a Comment »

Francis Cardinal George on The Emergence of the Modern

January 13, 2010

Continuing from our post from yesterday, Francis Cardinal George takes us from the complex development (and corruption) of the Augustinian notion of the City of God affecting the City of Man through late antiquity and the Middle Ages until the Emergence of the Modern. I always find this transition in history so interesting because I was brought up to celebrate the “birth of science” and the “Age of Rationalism” or “The Enlightenment.” Nowadays I tend to think of it as “The Darkenment,” which is another extreme but at least captures the sense that something was lost as well as gained.

A Compromise with Augustine’s the City of Man
The dark underside of the ideal unity of the social order informed by religious faith was the use of state power, often uninfluenced by moral considerations of its limits, to enforce religious conformity — a conformity more often used for political than for genuinely religious ends. The reaction to this misuse of power justified modernity’s understanding of religious freedom. What created modern consciousness is a breakdown of classical Christian participation metaphysics and the consequent emergence of a secular arena at best only incidentally related to God.

It is this modern, non-participatory, ideological context that impoverishes most of our discussions of religion and politics. It is most evident, perhaps, not in the loss of visual symbols to integrate space but in the creation of rival calendars to shape the rhythm of public life. In the modern era, national feasts and ceremonies replaced the liturgical calendar of the Church, whose feasts become private observances. The end of the modern era, however, is signaled by the inability of the secular calendar to call people out of their private concerns into the rhythm of a shared public life. National holidays have become primarily occasions for private recreation. Time itself becomes a field to be personally scheduled, a function of private purposes. A rigorously secularized society is less and less able to call people to any kind of participation.

The loss of the communio ontology in Western thought begins, perhaps surprisingly, just after Aquinas, in the writings of Duns Scotus. Scotus consciously repudiates the Thomistic analogy of being — predicated upon participation — and adopts a univocal conception of being. Though it was perhaps Scotus’s intention to draw the world and God into closer connection, this epistemological and ontological shift had the opposite effect. In maintaining that God and the world can be described with a univocal (vocab: having only one meaning; unambiguous) concept of being.

Scotus implied that the divine and the non-divine are both instances of some greater and commonly shared power of existence. But in so doing, he radically separated God from the world, rendering the former a supreme being (however infinite) and the latter a collectivity of beings. In opting for the univocity of the idea of existence, Scotus set God and world alongside each other, thereby separating “nature” and “grace” far more definitively than Aquinas or Augustine ever had and effectively undermining a metaphysics of creation and participation. God is no longer that generous power in which all things exist but rather that supreme being next to whom or apart from whom all other beings exist.

The distancing of God from creation and the defining of the world as profane, made possible by this univocal concept of being, can be seen in the voluntarism and nominalism of William of Ockham, which in turn had a decisive influence on Martin Luther. Scotus’s compromised sense of analogy shaped the later and more decadent scholasticism, finally giving rise to Francisco Suarez’s awkward rendering of Thomas’s doctrine of analogy; Some have argued that this Jesuit Renaissance version of Aquinas — with its sharp delineation of nature and grace — came to form modern consciousness, especially through the work of the Jesuit-trained René Descartes.In both its Lutheran and Cartesian manifestations, modernity assumes a fundamental split between the divine and the non-divine and hence implicitly denies the participation/communio metaphysics that had shaped the Christian world through the ancient and medieval periods.

What does this modern worldview produce in the arena of the social and political? Thomas Hobbes made the political implications of modernity most evident. In his famous description of the natural (prepolitical) state of human beings as “solitary; poor, nasty; brutish, and short,” Hobbes assumes the primacy of antagonism. Void of a religious, and therefore communitarian, sensibility natural man is engaged in a desperate attempt to keep himself alive, fighting a “war of all against all.” Responding only to his most elemental passions, man in the state of nature lives a thoroughly individualist and “secular” existence, and any link to an englobing and transcendent context is lost.

Given this framework, the role of government — Hobbes’s Leviathan — becomes what it was in ancient Rome: the maintenance of a temporary and ersatz peace on the basis of coercion and violent control. The only way to curb the relentless violence of the state of nature, Hobbes assumes, is to accept the mitigated violence of the commonwealth. Because debates over ultimate ends and especially over theology tend to be disruptive of the peace, Hobbes places the Church under the tight control of the Leviathan, the sovereign who determines and enforces what is to be believed. To be sure, this adoption of a particular religious policy has nothing to do with a correlation to an objective truth; it is simply adopted as political expediency. It is this stipulation that constitutes the core of the modern “theological” vision. The natural state of human beings is irreligious, unrelated to a transcendent God and his purposes, thoroughly secular. Whatever role religion plays in the structuring of life is artificial and totally subordinate to political ends.

This Hobbesianism is softened a bit but preserved in its essential structures in the political thought of John Locke. Though he allows a rudimentary moral sense to remain even in the state of nature, Locke follows Hobbes in deriving individual rights from irresistible and antagonizing passions and in defining government’s role as basically protective of those individualist prerogatives. Government’s only task is to ensure one man’s legitimate claim to life, liberty, and property over and against the encroachments of others. The loss of a sense of man’s nature as deeply social leaves unchallenged the assumption that antagonism, disassociation, and suspicion are the natural condition of human beings. Here, the metaphysics of participation and communio has become a distant cultural memory.

This Hobbes/Locke tradition profoundly shaped the minds of the founding fathers of the United States. In the prologue to the Declaration of Independence, we hear of “self-evident truths” concerning “inalienable rights” to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As in Hobbes and Locke, these rights are individualistic — my liberty and life over and against yours. These rights are somewhat correlated to moral ends outside of themselves by the greater or lesser religious sense of common destiny and purpose in the minds and beliefs of many of the founders; but it is, tellingly, the pursuit of happiness — unguided, unanchored, unfocused by truth — that is guaranteed as a right. And government is “instituted among men” in order to protect these prerogatives and hence assure some level of peace and order in a still primarily antagonistic community.

In what appears to be a departure from Hobbes, the framers of our Constitution insisted that no single religion be officially established but that the state should remain separated from religion, neither sanctioning nor prohibiting its exercise. This approach to religion, however, is still essentially Hobbesian, since it proceeds from the distinctively modern creation of a thoroughly secular space, untouched by religious questions, concerns, and finalities.

Much more could be said about the subtle differences in emphasis and accent between the pure Hobbesian, Lockean, and American construals of political reality For example, Alexis de Tocqueville’s still provocative analysis of the play between the American “secular” state and the vibrant, though officially privatized, religiousness of the American people continues to yield insights into the actual experience of generations of Americans. But despite certain nuanced differences, all three perspectives remain recognizably secular and modern in form and content. All three are possible only after the breakdown of the communio metaphysics characteristic of authentic Christianity And therefore, all three amount to an embrace —whether relatively enthusiastic or relatively cautious— of what Augustine would describe as the City of Man.

Protestantism and Modernity in the American Context
What was the Christian response to the challenge of modernity in its American form? The full answer is obviously complex, and it varies according to whether one begins from a Protestant or from a Catholic perspective. After Walter Rauschenbusch’s theology of the Social Gospel in the beginning decades of the twentieth century, the two most influential American Protestant social thinkers of the last century were the prolific Niebuhr brothers, Reinhold and H. Richard. What makes these figures particularly interesting from our perspective is their Augustinianism, expressed in and for the peculiarly American context.

Reinhold Niebuhr began his career as a liberal in the tradition of Rauschenbusch and the Social Gospel but soon he became disillusioned with what he took to be the ineffectuality and uncritical idealism of this position. Through his pastoral practice and his reading of the Hebrew prophets, he was in time converted to a stance that his commentators are nearly unanimous in referring to as “Christian realism.” By this they mean that, despite (or perhaps because of) his religiosity; there was nothing dreamily idealist about Niebuhr’s political analysis. He was willing to take human beings as they are —with all of their duplicity; violence, selfishness, rancor, and sin — and not as he would like them to be. “In political and moral theory; ‘realism’ denotes the disposition to take all factors in a social and political situation, which offer resistance to established norms, into account, particularly the factors of self-interest and power.

Niebuhrean realism manifested itself in the distinction between a personal ethic of love and a social ethic of justice. ‘Whereas the demands of radical love contained in the Sermon on the Mount could be justifiably applied to the personal realm, they would have to be set aside in favor of the more mitigated form of love that is justice when applied to the properly social or political arena. Given the fact of original sin, it is simply asking too much, thinks Niebuhr, to expect a body politic to behave according to the absolute moral demands of the Gospel. The more appropriate and “realistic” criterion for evaluation of the moral quality of a society is that of justice, that “rendering to each his due” which is a qualified mode of love.This clarification, with its deepest roots in Max Weber’s distinction between an “ethic of ends” and an “ethic of means,” enabled Niebuhr to accept and affirm, for example, both a personal embrace of pacifism on the part of the saint and a social acceptance of warfare as a tragic necessity on the part of the body politic.

For our purposes, it is interesting to note that Niebuhr saw Augustine as a major influence in the development of his social ethic. Presumably it was Augustine’s honest assessment of the City of Man and his qualified acceptance of certain social practices (such as warfare) that shaped Niebuhr’s position. It seems, however, that Niebuhr’s solution bears only a passing resemblance to Augustine’s treatment of the two cities. For St. Augustine, the Niebuhrean distinction between love and justice would be highly problematic, precisely because what determines the justice of the City of God is finally the quality of its love. The City of God is just only in the measure that it remains a collectivity that loves God (and hence human beings) according to the pattern of Jesus. Furthermore, the privatization of love would have struck Augustine as untenable. As Henri de Lubac pointed out in his Catholicism, one of the defining marks of the Church Fathers as a whole is the passionate conviction that no dogma is to be construed individualistically, that every Christian claim has a social range and implication. That there is a private and interior dimension that can be cleanly distinguished from the public seems to be a conviction far more Lutheran than Augustinian, and it would certainly fly in the face of the communio metaphysic we have been describing.

A form of Protestant Augustinianism perhaps more congenial to this analysis is that of Reinhold Niebuhr’s brother, Helmuti Richard Niebuhr. In his classic text Christ and Culture, H. Richard Niebuhr distinguished several paradigms for the relationship of Christian faith to the culture in which it finds itself.Christ has been envisioned over the centuries as, variously, against, over, of and in paradoxical relation to the culture. Each of these positions has advantages and disadvantages, but Niebuhr seems to favor the paradigm that he articulates last, namely, Christ as the transformer of culture.

According to this model, the culture is fallen and hence in need of transformation, but it is also capable of conversion through the influence of Christ’s way of being. The transformation paradigm is sufficiently “realistic” in its honest assessment of sin, but it is also spiritually alert to the possibility of a real and thorough conversion of a culture through Christ. Intriguingly, H. Richard Niebuhr, claims St. Augustine — especially in the City of God — as the best advocate of this position, and here we can agree. There is no artificial distinction between public and private and no pessimistic resignation to the intractability of the public realm. But rather, in the spirit of Augustine, the whole of the public ordo is seen as fallen through false love but redeemable through the authentic love of the communio opened up by Christ. This position, unlike Reinhold Niebuhr’s, allows for a more robust Christian critique of the assumptions and practices of a political culture flowing from Hobbesian individualism.

Catholicism and Modernity in the American Context
What is the Catholic attitude to the distinctively modern polity that is the United States? Catholics have had, it seems fair to say, a complex relationship to American society. When they arrived in great numbers starting in the early nineteenth century, they were met with fierce opposition from a Protestant establishment fearing a “foreign” and despotic takeover. The Egyptians seemed to have managed to cross the Red Sea of the Atlantic Ocean and now threatened to corrupt the almost chosen people, to use Abraham Lincoln’s phrase, of this American promised land. In the face of anti-Catholic propaganda, the burning of convents and monasteries, and the rise of the Know-Nothing party American Catholics tended to lie low, muting the “political” dimension of their faith and preferring to build a Catholic culture under the protection of the religious freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment. And they did so with a passion, establishing by the beginning of the twentieth century a vibrant and institutionally powerful subculture in the still predominantly Protestant United States.

So favorable did this American environment seem that influential Catholic bishops such as James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore and Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul actively promoted American-style separation of church and state. At the same time, some American Catholics — and Vatican observers — worried that the non-establishment clause of the First Amendment would conduce to a secularized, or at least Protestantized, understanding of the relation between faith and society. At the end of the nineteenth century this concern led to Pope Leo XIH’s official ecclesial condemnation of the heresy called “Americanism.”

John Courtney Murray — Reconciling the Catholic and the Modern
It is against this complex background that the thought of John Courtney Murray, S.J., emerged. Murray is undoubtedly the most persuasive voice advocating the reconciliation of the Catholic faith with a characteristically modern political experiment. Murray’s proposal needs to be analyzed with some care in order to gauge the degree of success he achieved.

A fundamental and guiding assumption of the Murray project is that a civil society is characterized by constructive and disciplined argument, the working-our of consensus in a rational manner. The conditions for the possibility of this civil conversation are two: an agreement that there is “a heritage of an essential truth… [that] furnishes the substance of civil life,” and a respect for the rights, freedom, and dignity of the individual.If the former is missing, the conversation becomes unfocused; and if the latter is absent, the conversation devolves into power plays. When the founding fathers of. this country embraced certain self-evident truths and placed their political efforts under the authority of a transcendent God, they fulfilled the first condition; and when they insisted that basic rights and freedoms especially with regard to religion — are to be guaranteed, they fulfilled the second. Murray believed that, in their acceptance of both a form of natural law and the authority of the divine, the American founders differ radically from the Jacobin and laicist revolutionaries of Europe, whose convictions were marked by a fierce anticlericalism and a sort of uncritical rationalism.

Though they were not antireligious, the American founders saw the necessity of eliminating a consideration of ultimate ends from the political conversation. Precisely because there was, in colonial America, such an irreconcilable pluralism of Protestant theological views, they saw that the consensus requird for civil conversation would dissolve if any religious viewpoint were officially sanctioned or allowed to determine secular policy. Therefore, according to Murray, the framers declared the state incompetent in matters of religion and restricted its interests to the political sphere. The “truths” that are held in common and that undergird the civil conversation are thus not final or theological truths but are rather basic convictions and intuitions in principle available to all people of intelligence and good will. It is here that Murray senses •a link to the Catholic tradition of the natural law, a universal moral sensibility distinguishable from the specific precepts of the revealed law.

In this context, one can begin to understand Murray’s insistence that the two articles of the First Amendment should be interpreted, not as “articles of faith” but as “articles of peace.”Behind the separation of church and state in the American constitution is neither a secularist ideology that would simply drive religion from the public square nor a Calvinist theology placing exclusive stress on the divine transcendence. Rather, Murray claims, there is no ideological commitment no faith — of any kind behind these purely legal decisions to restrict the range and sanction of the civil conversation. Their purpose is not to make claims regarding ultimate ends, but only to provide the conditions necessary for a peaceful and therefore civil dialogue.

Murray exults in the fact that the First Amendment is the product not of theologians but of lawyers. If it were otherwise, Catholics would be obliged, he thinks, to dissent from the American proposition. It is the very ideological agnosticism of the First Amendment that renders it palatable to people of various religious and philosophical persuasions. Under the protection, and within the confines, of these ideologically “neutral” articles, Catholics can feel free to develop their particular spiritual and faith-based culture while insisting that the original Protestant flavor of early American culture not be normative. Against a perceived Protestant hegemony, Catholics, along with Jews, have often acted as “secularizers” in American society.

The Price of A Catholic Reconciliation
It appears as though we have found, in Murray’s balanced argumentation, a philosophical justification for the pro-American sentiments of Archbishop Ireland and Cardinal Gibbons. It seems that a reconciliation of the Catholic and the modern is not only possible but welcome. With the benefit of a longer historical experience, however, this reconciliation seems less certain. If we look more closely, we uncover some of the distinctively modern ideological content of Murray’s ostensibly agnostic solution.

It is no secret that John Courtney Murray’s thought was shaped by a neo-Scholastic two-tiered conception of nature and grace, a view that he inherited from his Suarezian Jesuit tradition. This sharp delineation between the natural and the supernatural is, as discussed above, a departure from the communio and participation metaphysics of the patristic and medieval periods. It is congruent with the typically modern carving out of a distinctively profane realm untouched by ultimate finalities or direct religious influence. Given this distinction, Murray could easily enough establish two realms, a “political” one where questions of ultimate ends are bracketed and a “religious” one where those ends can be proclaimed and sought.

Such a demarcation is impossible, however, within the context of a participation metaphysics, which sees all of finitude as grounded in and touched by the divine. It was, of course, John Courtney Murray’s contemporary and fellow Jesuit Henri de Lubac who, in a series of groundbreaking texts, vigorously attacked the two-tiered conception of nature and grace and attempted a recovery of a communio metaphysics. According to de Lubac, nature is not a self-contained realm with its own finalities, but rather one that is permeated by and oriented toward the supernatural from the beginning. But if this is the case, then the separation that Murray tolerates — the bracketing of ultimate ends in the political context—is exposed as simply a pragmatic and religiously inadequate ploy.

Father Murray’s separation assumes as well the implicit acceptance of a relentlessly modern view of the person. If the political or social dimension is essentially untouched by the sacred, then the human being who is naturally social is also by nature agnostic, perhaps even atheist. Whatever is religious in him is added as an extrinsic superstructure to a religiously neutral substructure. Any “truth” suggested by religion regarding humanity and its ends remains adventitious if not alien to this secularized natural man To be sure, American liberalism is not, like continental Jacobinism, overtly atheist; but it is, one could argue, implicitly or covertly so. The “peace” gained by the articles of the First Amendment is bought at the price of a secularized understanding of the world and the loss of communio.

Communio
None of this relativizes the important contribution made by John Courtney Murray, for in Murray state neutrality in religion is not so much the condition for social peace as the necessary means for protecting personal religious liberty in a pluralistic society. In fact, his insistence on the centrality of religious liberty was affirmed at Vatican II, although the Council’s defense of religious liberty owes at least as much to Fréflch Christian personalism as to Murray’s historical and social analyses. Nevertheless, the anthropology of the Council’s document Dignitatis humanae now shapes Catholic social teaching and has been consistently emphasized in the writings of John Paul II.

The pope’s construal of this liberty however, flows from the thought world of communio metaphysics rather than from a modern political framework. “What is central to John Paul’s interpretation is that freedom and truth belong together from the beginning, that the latter is in fact an essential component of the former. Without correlation to truths rooted in nature and in God, human freedom becomes license or, alternatively, acquiesces in state tyranny. In Augustinian terms, it becomes an improperly directed love, a mere “pursuit of happiness” rather than a structured spiritual activity. John Paul II consistently criticized in the Western democracies born of the Enlightenment this divorce of freedom from truth, this tendency to think that liberty can be unquestioningly affirmed while consideration of ultimate truth is bracketed or privatized. Such a bifurcation — allowed for by Murray in the interest of peace — was, for John Paul II, an undermining of the very structure of freedom itself

And what indeed are the fruits of this great divorce? “When we look at the moral landscape of America at the dawn of the millennium, what do we see? We see, again to invoke the Augustinian hermeneutic, ample evidence of the flourishing of the City of Man. In the millions of abortions annually, the divorce of human reproduction from the embrace of human love, the increased application of the death penalty, the practice of euthanasia, the conviction that hopelessly handicapped people are better off dead, the seemingly indiscriminate arid sometimes disproportionate use of the military, the gun violence in the streets of our cities and the corridors of our schools in all of this we see the fruits of what Pope John Paul II called “the culture of death,” a society that allows for the destruction of its weakest members according to the simple will of the strong. The culture of death is none other than that “world” generated by the separation between freedom and truth; it is a result of the poorly conceived compromise between the City of God and the City of Man which stands at the heart of the modern experiment.

Conclusion
What follows from this faith-based critique of modernity? One might assume that, given the line of argument presented here, the only alternative is some sort of theocracy or confessional state. Nothing could be further from the truth. Having lived through late antiquity; the medieval period, and the modern era, the Church is opposed to “theocracy” on two basic grounds. First, as Murray argued and Vatican II clearly stated, faith is never to be pressed on anyone through coercive means of any kind. A coerced faith is not personal faith, and the development of doctrine in Vatican II has moved the Church from simply standing the modern problematic on its head and accepting a purely public faith as an article of peace in a contemporary version of medieval society.

Second, the Church should not seek to establish itself officially or juridically outside its own structures. A communion on its own terms, the Church cannot set up a “political” arm or expression without betraying its integrity. If churchmen over the centuries have sometimes embraced the theocratic model, they have done so without sufficient attention to the demands of the Gospel and the nature of the Church herself

The community of Jesus Christ does not seek to take over the reins of political power; rather it seeks to create a culture. The debate on the institutional relationship between church and state has become now a conversation on the relationship between faith and culture. Provided the political order respects human dignity, communio can be visible in a culture open to transcendence. The faith creates such a culture by being simply, boldly, and unapologetically itself. At the heart of the Church is the sacred liturgy what Vatican II called “the source and summit” of the Christian life.

The liturgy on earth is an iconic display of the heavenly liturgy of the angels and saints, that community gathered together around the throne of God and united in praise. In the way we gather, the way we pray, the way we behave liturgically, we act out the paradigm of the heavenly communio, seeking to remake ourselves in its image. Then, as a liturgical people, we endeavor to shape the world according to this icon, bringing love where there is hatred, forgiveness where there is resentment, compassion where there is animosity; and peace where there is warfare. By the power of the Eucharist and through a kind of osmosis, we transform the culture, gently but subversively, from within.

In his text on the role of the laity; ChristiFideles laici, Pope John Paul II articulated several dimensions of this culture-creating work. First, the family must be remade as an expression of communio. Then, starting from that foundation, Eucharistic people must refashion the social, economic, and political realms; next, they should influence the arenas of education, entertainment, literature, and the arts. Finally, they ought to concern themselves with the environment and ecology; caring, in a spirit of communio, for the planet itself.

There is nothing coercive or violent about this process; but, at the same time, there is nothing private or self-effacing about it either. Its ambition is the total transformation of the world in all its dimensions. In the Lord’s Prayer we ask that God’s kingdom come, that his will be done on earth as in heaven. We are petitioning, in a word, that God’s ordo, God’s way of thinking and being, become, in the richest sense, our ordo, that the City of Man might be transformed by the City of God.

This transformation will not be easy. Personal conversion challenges individuals; cultures and entire societies also resist being evangelized. The history of tensions between the community of faith and the political order shifts according to what element of the faith seems the greatest challenge to the civil powers at any particular time. Emperors and feudal lords, during the many years of the controversy over the investiture of bishops, tried to take to themselves the government of the Church.

Josephismand the Napoleonic conventions tried to take to the state the control of the worship and ministry of the Church. Modern states founded in revolutions with universalist pretensions, such as the French, the American, and the Russian, have tried to arrogate to themselves the mission of the Church. Co-opting the faith’s sense of purpose in order to create a secularist universal culture sets up tensions difficult to dispel. The Church resists being reduced to a department of state, a particular denomination, or a private club.

The deepest truth that Catholics proclaim is that of communio:all things and all people are ordered to God and hence ordered in love to one another. This truth informs everything we say about the political, social, economic, and cultural realms. If we surrender this truth — either through ideological compromise or even out of concern for civility — we succumb to the culture of death.

At the beginning of the third millennium, the mission of the community that looks to Jesus as Lord is to create a culture of life and to do this within social structures that are more and more global in outreach. For the second time in two thousand years, the Church finds herself in social, economic, and some political structures that are increasingly universal. In such a situation, the Catholic Church is an agent of transformation that is, paradoxically, completely at home.

Posted in Francis Cardinal George, Readings | Tagged Alexis de Tocqueville, Aquinas, Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul, Catholicism and Modernity, Duns Scotus, Francis Cardinal George, Francisco Suarez, H Richard Niebuhr, Henri de Lubac, James Cardinal Gibbons, John Courtney Murray, John Locke, Nominalism, Pope John Paul II, Protestantism, Reinhold Niebuhr, the City of God, the City of Man, the communio ontology, the Leviathan, the pursuit of happiness, Thomas Hobbes, voluntarism, William of Ockham | Leave a Comment »

The Philosophy Of Incarnation And Communio

January 12, 2010

Francis Cardinal George

Cardinal George covers the same ground that we encountered in yesterday’s post on the Chalcedonian Doctrine. Yesterday I commented on how I had used the Doctrine to dismiss a Jesus Denier’s claim that Christianity had simply drawn the Jesus fable from other pagan mythologies. Today Cardinal George will relate it to the fundamental Christian social concepts manifested in the ontology of communio and participation.

It also struck me that it is precisely the philosophy of the incarnation that we see expressed in multifarious ways in the lives of the Saints, which we are all beckoned to become. This is all taken from Cardinal George’s splendid new book “The Difference God Makes”

Philosophy of Incarnation
At the heart of Christianity is a provocative claim: In Jesus Christ, God has become a creature, without ceasing to be God and without compromising the integrity of the creature he becomes. Many pre-Christian myths and legends spoke of God or the gods “becoming” creaturely, but such incarnations always resulted in uneasy mixtures of the divine and the non-divine. Thus Achilles and Hercules are quasi-godly and quasi-mortal, their divinity compromised by their humanity and vice versa. But as the Greek and Latin theologians of the patristic period struggled to express their incarnational faith, they consciously abandoned this mythological construal.

The Council of Chalcedon in 451 expressed the radicality of Christian belief when it said that in the divine person of Jesus Christ, two natures — divine and human — come together in a hypostatic union, without mixing, mingling, or confusion. This means that in Jesus the divine and the human unite without competition or compromise. Christ is not quasi-divine and quasi-human; in fact, just such a mythological reading was rejected in 325 at the Council of Nicea during the struggle against Arianism. Rather, Jesus is fully divine and fully human, the proximity of the divine enhancing and not weakening the integrity of the human.

But the condition for the possibility of such a claim is a new understanding of the nature of God. Finite things exist necessarily in a sort of mutual exclusivity: the being of one is predicated, at least in part, on its not being the other. Hence, when one finite thing “becomes” another, it does so through ontological aggression and surrender: the desk becomes a pile of ashes through being destroyed by fire, and the lion assimilates the antelope by devouring it. Competition characterizes the play between conditional realities.

Therefore, when the Church proclaims that in Jesus Christ the divine and the human have come together without competition and compromise, she is saying something of extraordinary novelty. She is claiming that God is not a worldly nature, not a being, not one thing alongside others. God is not in competition with nature because God does not belong to created nature; God does not overwhelm finite being, because God is not a finite being.

When Christian theologians, inspired by their faith in the Incarnation, attempted to name God, they accordingly reached for language that evoked this distinctiveness. Thus St. Anselm said that God is not so much the supreme being as “that than which no greater can be thought,” implying, paradoxically, that God plus the world is not greater than God alone.And when St. Thomas Aquinas named God, he avoided the term ens summum (highest being) and opted for ipsum essesubsistens (the subsistent act of to-be itself).

Both of these theologians thought of God as noncompetitively transcendent to the realm of finite things and therefore totally immanent to all things as the cause of their being. God is transcendent cause, and therefore Christianity is not a form of pantheism or Emersonian panentheism; but God is therefore closer to his creatures than they are to themselves. God is not related to the world, for that would create too great a division between God and the world, but neither is God identified with the world. The transcendent God is within his creation as the cause of its very being.

It is from this understanding of God, rooted in but developed from Jewish faith, that the peculiarly Christian sense of creation flows. Because God is not one being among others but rather the sheer energy of to-be itself. God does not make the world through manipulation, change, or violence, as the gods of philosophy and mythology do. Since there is literally nothing outside of God, he makes the entirety of the finite realm ex nihilo, through an act of purest and gentlest generosity.

God’s is a non-possessive love. And since God is the act of to-be, all creaturely things exist in and through God, “participating” in the power of his being and the graciousness of his love. And we can draw a final implication: because all of nature and the cosmos are, likewise, creatures participating in the divine generosity, they are all related to one another by bonds of ontological intimacy.

When St. Francis of Assisi spoke of “brother sun and sister moon,” he was making both a poetically evocative and metaphysically precise remark. All things in the cosmos exist in a communio with one another precisely because they are rooted in a more primordial communio with the creator God. This view of reality as a communion based on love is the worldview that proceeds from the Incarnation.

Augustine’s Two Cities
Whatever Christians say about the social, political, and economic realm must flow from this grounding metaphysical vision. Or better put, there is an unavoidably social dimension to the Christian ontology of communio and participation. This can be discerned clearly in one of the most remarkable and influential presentations of the Christian worldvjew ever written: the De Civitate Dei – On the City of God – of St. Augustine.

What strikes the modern reader perhaps most immediately is St. Augustine’s adamant refusal to dialogue with the representatives of the polity of Rome who had challenged the legitimacy of Christianity. He is interested in neither accommodating nor compromising with the Roman system, which he sees as fallen. Rather, he boldly proposes the Christian way as being, in all regards, preferable. He does not turn to Rome to find a social theory or political arrangement compatible with a privatized and interiorized Christian spirituality; on the contrary, he excoriates Rome as an unjust society and holds up Christianity itself as the only valid basis for a just form of social arrangement.

Augustine’s hermeneutical key is well known. He distinguishes sharply between the City of Man (a collectivity based upon self-love) and the City of God (a collectivity whose foundation is the shared love of God). The former is not so much an inadequate society; it is rather like a group of thieves or marauders masquerading as a body politic. Much of the first part of De Civitate Dei is a spirited demonstration that what looks like a paragon of justice — the Roman Empire — is in fact a manifestation of the City of Man.

Augustine’s argument has a “theological” and a “political” phase. First, he shows, over hundreds of pages, that the multiple gods of Rome are in fact demons because they engage in and encourage various forms of immorality including and especially rivalry, jealousy, and warfare.Then he paints a vivid picture of the political life that has followed from the worship of such gods. What has characterized Rome, from its founding in the fratricidal struggle between Romulus and Remus to the chaos of Augustine’s day, is unremitting violence.

The door of Janus, supposed to be closed during times of peace, has remained stubbornly open for almost the entirety of Roman history. The regnant spirit of Rome is what Augustine refers to as the libido dominandi, the lust for mastery, and it is this spirit that has sent conquering armies around the world. At the heart of Augustine’s analysis of Rome is the correlation between a faulty metaphysics (the worship of finite and self-assertive gods) and a faulty polity of violence and domination. A denial of a metaphysic of participation and communio leads to the false imitation of justice in the City of Man.

But Christians believe in the God who is Father of Jesus Christ, a God of nonviolent and creative love who brings the whole of the world into being from nothing. Such a God, unlike the false gods of Rome, enters into competitive relation with no one or no thing. The worship of such a God leads to a society based not on the libido dominandi but on the love, compassion, nonviolence, and forgiveness preached and embodied by Jesus. What Augustine proposes, therefore, is an altera civitas that has “no logical or causal connection to the city of violence,” requiring the repudiation of worldly dominium and worldly peace.It is a city based upon the consensus that mirrors the community of the saints and angels in heaven, an icon of the heavenly ordo. This communio conception of society corresponds to God’s original and deepest intention toward the world.

If one seeks to know the origins of the City of Man — the corruption of this original intention of God – one has to look to the rebellion of Adam and Eve. In the original sin, Augustine sees the first human decision to sever the relationship with God, to deny the implications of creation and corn munio and to establish a kind of “secular” realm apart from God. The violence and injustice of Rome is, for Augustine, simply the latest and most virulent consequence of this original rebellion.

Again, what is surprising for moderns is Augustine’s refusal to place this analysis in anything even vaguely resembling a “church/state” context. It is not the case that the secular state ought to order public life while the Church cares for the spiritual good of the people. There is no such easy distinction in Augustine. There is, rather, the dramatic difference between the false worship (and hence flawed social arrangement) of the City of Man and the proper worship (and hence life-giving social arrangement) of the City of God.

The problem is not how to reconcile the competing concerns of the spiritual and the secular; the problem is orthodoxy, that is to say, getting our metaphysics and our praise of God in order, so that we can live in a just, rightly ordered society.

It is impossible to trace in a brief chapter the complex development (and corruption) of this Augustinian notion through late antiquity and the Middle Ages. But one can see its perdurance in the remarkable relationship between medieval worship and social life. At the center of the medieval town — both physically and psychologically — was the church or cathedral, where the drama of the paschal mystery and its communal implications were played out in a sacramental rhythm. This visual display of the Christian faith shaped the consciousness of worshipers and in turn influenced economic, agricultural, and political life, as had the Temple in Jerusalem.

The activity of medieval guilds, the labors of farmers, the ordering of the economy — all were predicated upon and shaped by the sacramental life, especially baptism and the Eucharist.There was a keen sense that the heavenly liturgy (God’s ordo), iconically displayed in the earthly liturgy, worked its way into all of those social and political realities that today we would misleadingly refer to as entirely “secular.” In the medieval consciousness, a sacred/secular chasm would have seemed anomalous, since politics, economics, and social order existed as a sort of extension of the sacramental life of the Church.

As the civil society became more explicitly shaped by faith, it came to be treated as good in itself because it had the same ultimate goals as the Church: the incorporation of each citizen into communion with God. Thomas Aquinas, using Aristotle’s reflections on man as essentially political and social, admitted real distinctions between church and state according to their respective functions, but he saw them united in a single goal – the common good of all on earth and a common life in God for all eternity.

Posted in Francis Cardinal George, Readings | Tagged Augustine’s Two Cities, “The Difference God Makes”, communio, Council of Chalcedon, Francis Cardinal George, libido dominandi, non-possessive love, On the City of God, Philosophy of Incarnation, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, the City of God, the City of Man, the two natures of Jesus Christ | Leave a Comment »

The Chalcedonian Doctrine

January 11, 2010

The Fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon 451AD

The following is adapted from Fr. Robert Barron’s And Now I See which one reviewer has called “the most readable, sensible and well-supported view of Christianity” he had ever read. It constantly surprises me that as I return to this book to help me advocate the Church’s positions, I always find something clear-cut and easily understandable. Most recently I was in an Internet food fight on the historicity of Jesus. The Jesus Denier was going on and on about how Jesus was in fact a fable constructed from earlier pagan myths. I used the Chalcedonian Doctrine against him, pointing out that what had gone before in various mythologies was as similar to the Jesus of the gospels as a fine burgundy wine is to grape Kool-Aid.

Anyways, here is the amalgam of arguments I used in a longer more thoughtful piece. It couples Fr. Barron’s writings on Chalcedon and Robert Sokolowski’s The God of Faith and Reason (another fine book previously featured on PayingAttentionToTheSky)

The Chalcedonian Doctrine came at the end of a long period of debate and discussion in the early church concerning the nature and salvific significance of Jesus Christ. To simplify somewhat, two camps battled for supremacy over the course of two centuries: one placing greater emphasis on the humanity of the Lord and the other on his divinity. Arius, the fourth-century heresiarch, proposed a sort of compromise according to which Jesus is somewhat divine and somewhat human. Arius’s position, to give it its due, had a certain coherency in the context of the ancient world, since it was borrowed from a mythological framework. In the legends of the Greeks, many gods and goddesses “mixed themselves” with humans, producing all sorts of divine/human hybrids, quasi-gods and demigods. Arius proposed to his Hellenistic Christian world a similar theory of the mingling of nature and supernature.

Robert Sokolowski has commented on this Christian distinction between older pagan myths and legends and the Christian religion:

Christian theology is differentiated from pagan religious and philosophical reflection primarily by the introduction of a new distinction, the distinction between the world understood as possibly not having existed and God understood as possibly being all that there is, with no diminution of goodness or greatness. It is not the case that God and the world are each separately understood in this new way, and only subsequently related to each other; they are determined in the distinction not each apart from the other.

The Christian distinction between the world and God may receive its precise verbal formulation in a theoretical context, since it is described especially by theologians and philosophers, but the distinction does not emerge for the first time in this theoretical setting. It receives its formulation in reflective thought because it has already been achieved in the life that goes on before reflective thinking occurs.

The distinction is lived in Christian life, and most originally it was lived and expressed in the life of Jesus, after having been anticipated, and hence to some extent possessed, in the Old Testament history which Jesus completed. The Christian distinction is there for us now, as something for us to live and as an issue for reflection, because it was brought forward in the life and teaching of Christ, and because that life and teaching continue to be available in the life and teaching of the Church. It is a massive theological and philosophical fact that this understanding arose and is maintained by Christian belief.

Further, as Sokolowski explains this “Christian distinction” carries with it a certain strangeness:

When we turn away from the world or from the whole and turn toward God, towards the other term of the distinction that comes to light in Christian belief, we begin to appreciate the strangeness of the distinction itself. In the distinctions that occur normally within the setting of the world, each term distinguished is what it is precisely by not being that which it is distinguishable from. Its being is established partially by its otherness, and therefore its being depends on its distinction from others. But in the Christian distinction God is understood as “being” God entirely apart from any relation of otherness to the world or to the whole. God could and would be God even if there were no world. Thus the Christian distinction is appreciated as a distinction that did not have to be, even though it in fact is. The most fundamental thing we come to in Christianity, the distinction between the world and God, is appreciated as not being the most fundamental thing after all, because one of the terms of the distinction, God, is more fundamental than the distinction itself.

In Christian faith God is understood not only to have created the world, but to have permitted the distinction between himself and the world to occur. …No distinction made within the horizon of the world is like this, and therefore the act of creation cannot be understood in terms of any action or any relationship that exists in the world. The special sense of sameness in God “before” and “after” the creation, and the special sense of otherness between God and the world, impose qualifications on whatever we are to say about God and the world, about creation out of nothing, about God’s way of being present and interior to things and yet beyond them….Furthermore, if “being” is the term that philosophers use to name that which is articulated in the sameness and otherness that reason can register, if “being” is used of the world as last horizon, it is appropriate that another term, like “esse,” be introduced for use in the “whole” made up of God and the world, as a name for what is articulated in the identities and differences occurring in this new context.

Of course it was the Council of Nicea that famously refuted Arius’s view with the counterclaim that Jesus is homoousios with God, “one in being” with the Father, not a demigod but fully divine. In the wake of Nicea, the debate continued to rage, Arius and semi-Arians fighting defenders of homoousian orthodoxy, such as Athanasius the bishop of Alexandria. At the center of the controversy was the nagging problem of relating the true and complete divinity of Jesus with his undoubted humanity. How could these two come together without contradiction, compromise, or mutual exclusion?

At the Council of Chalcedon in 451, Christian bishops and theologians of both the East and the West met to resolve the difficulty, and their statement of belief has emerged as a sort of classic expression of Christian faith on the question of the ontology of Jesus, It is interesting to note that the Chalcedonian fathers provided, not so much a philosophical explanation of how the divine and human come together in Christ, as an ecstatic proclamation born of faith.Standing in the rich tradition stretching back to the Scriptures and the first witnesses to Christ, they gave voice to the fundamental Christian conviction that, in Jesus, divinity and humanity coexist in a noncompetitive way and that, as we have often emphasized, the fullness of each is revealed precisely in their coexistence.

The “definition” of Christ offered at Chalcedon can be stated rather briefly:

One and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only begotten, made known in two natures which exist without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the difference of the natures having been in no wise taken away by reason of the union, but rather the properties of each being preserved, and both concurring into one Person and one hypostasis — not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten, the divine Logos, the Lord Jesus Christ.

The first, and in some sense elemental, affirmation of this statement is the oneness of Christ. In Jesus we are dealing, not with two things or two persons, but with one basic reality or power of existence And it is this unified ground that the Council fathers identify as the divine person of the Logos. In the language of Greek metaphysics, “person” refers to an instantiation of a rational nature, the specification and concrete expression of an abstract form.

Thus the “person” of Socrates is a particular focusing of the general species of humanity, the receptacle, if you will, into which the form of human being is poured in his case, it is that which makes Socrates this one individual and identifiable human being. The center and source of unity in Jesus is the divine “person” of the Logos, but there is a key difference with regard to Christ, for his person bears or instantiates, not one nature, but two — and here we see the real novelty of the Chalcedonian formula. No Greek philosopher would speak of a single person bearing multiple natures, though it was a commonplace to hold that a single nature could be instantiated in multiple persons, as Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates are all instances of the one nature of humanity. As is so often the case, Christian dogmatic language twists and breaks the language of philosophy even as it uses it.

In Jesus, one person “lights up” two distinct natures, divine and human, allowing both to come to expression in all of their distinctiveness and uniqueness. Accordingly, Jesus is fully human, that is to say, in possession of a human body, mind, will, and passion, as well as subject to all of the characteristic limitations of being a creature. As Karl Rahner points out, despite the union of natures spoken of at Chalcedon, Jesus remains a creature who confronts the divine across an infinite abyss. The ontologically limited and culturally determined humanity of Jesus is not overwhelmed or swallowed by his divinity.

But Jesus is also in possession of a divine nature, that is to say, of all that characterizes and renders distinctive the being of God. In him, the sacred reality that transcends the universe and yet pours itself out in creative love, is alive, operative, personally present. And the ontological proximity of the human nature of Jesus does not compromise or overwhelm this divinity. He is not a demigod or a lesser divinity, but rather “fully divine.” As the surprising formula states it, the two natures — human and divine — exist in personal union, but without “confusion, change, separation or division.”

Sokolowski looks at the Incarnational Jesus from the standpoint of God and what it says about Him:

The Council of Chalcedon, and he councils and controversies that led up to it, were concerned with the mystery of Christ, but they also tell us about the God who became incarnate in Christ. They tell us first that God does not destroy the natural necessities of things he becomes involved with, even in the intimate union of the incarnation. What is according to nature, and what reason can disclose in nature, retains its integrity before the Christian God. And second, they tell us that we must think of God as the one who can let natural necessity be maintained and let reason be left intact; that is God is not himself a competing part of nature of a part of the world.

If the incarnation could not take place without a truncation of human nature, it would mean that God was one of the natures of the world that somehow was defined by not being the other natures; it would mean that his presence in one of these other natures, human nature, would involve a conflict and a need to exclude some part of what he is united with. Either God would only seem to have become man, or he would have become united to something less than man and would have become a new kind of being in the world. These are all ways in which the pagans thought the gods could take on human form or bring about beings that were higher than the race of men but lower than the gods. The reason the pagans could not conceive of anything like the incarnation is that their gods are part o f the world, and the union of any two natures in the world is bound to be, in some way, unnatural, because of the otherness that lets one thing be itself only by not being the other.

But the Christian God is not part of the world and is not a “kind” of being at all. Therefore the incarnation is not meaningless or impossible or destructive. …To consider the early Christological controversies and their attendant councils as merely historical episodes, or to suppose that they are just an importation of Hellenistic thought-patterns into Christianity, is to fail to take seriously the need to distinguish Christian faith and its theology from simply natural religion and philosophy.

On the surface of it, what is being proposed here is nonsense. How can two mutually exclusive realities — one finite, the other infinite — come together as one? It seems as though this formula violates the most elemental principle of logic, the law of noncontradiction. What is being proposed here, to borrow the language of Hans Urs von Balthasar, is a “theo-logic,” a new way of thinking about the real based upon an ecstatic sense of who God truly is.

We saw that one of the chief effects of the originating sin is the tendency to objectify the divine. Once we have established our egos as sovereign and central, God necessarily appears as a supreme being, either threatening or irrelevant. From the standpoint of the self-elevating pusilla anima, God is a being with whom we have, at best, an extrinsic relationship; he is “out there” and “over and against us.” To be sure, this attitude born of sin affects decisively the way we think theologically: we cannot imagine that God is the immanent/transcendent ground in whom we find our own center. We cannot conceive of the intimacy with the sacred that can be ours. And consequently, we find it terribly difficult to accept the ecstatic metaphysical poetry of Chalcedon, the language of divine/human unity.

But, from the standpoint of metanoia, from the perspective of the new mind, we see that God is not a competing supreme being, but the power whose very closeness to us enhances our humanity, whose very proximity makes us most fully ourselves. And we see, at the same time, that God is a reality that can work its way into every corner of creation without ceasing to be itself In a word the “natures” of God and creation can come together without compromise and contradiction, precisely because God is not a being but the mysterious power of Being itself.

The Chalcedonian fathers proclaim, in their sober philosophical language, the undoing of Eden, they see as reality what the sinful mind can appreciate only as illusion or nonsense. And this new vision, these new eyes, come from Jesus Christ, from the God/human intimacy that is his very being. In the startling and unique way of being that was Christ’s, the first believers glimpsed the theonomy that was offered but lost at Eden, that was held out alluringly throughout the Old Testament, that indirectly animated and gave purpose to all the finest expressions of the religious imagination of humanity.

Let us make this a bit more explicit with regard to the reality of God We see, in the Chalcedonian formulation, the unheard of closeness of God to the world. What we have termed the creativity, passion, and humility of the sacred are clearly on display in the language of hypostatic union. In Christ we see just how low the divine can stoop — even to the point of “becoming” what is not divine.

What is perhaps less obvious is the equal, though implicit, emphasis on the transcendence of God that is contained in Chalcedon. The realm of finitude is characterized by mutual exclusion. One finite thing is defined, appropriately, over and against all those other things that it is not to be a particular chair is not to be any other chair or any other thing. More to the point, one finite reality cannot become another without some radical change taking place a chair becomes a table or is reduced to ashes only by ceasing to be a chair, a wild beast “becomes” a leopard only by being devoured .Because of the mutual exclusivity that marks all limited things, relationship between them is always difficult if not dangerous.

But the Council of Chalcedon boldly proclaims that, in Christ, two natures, divine and human, come together in personal unity in such a way that one can speak of God becoming a creature. Yet this becoming in no way compromises the integrity of the natures, nothing is ceded either on the part of God or on the part of the human nature of Jesus But this entails that God is not in any sense a worldly nature, decidedly not a finite form. If God were a thing alongside of others, a supreme being among beings, then the union of God with a creature would be possible only through some radical compromise of either God’s or the creature’s ontology.

As in mythological conceptions, the divine would have to supplant or push out some dimension of the non-divine as it makes its way into the world. But it is just this notion, just this style of thinking, that is consciously rejected at Chalcedon in favor of a properly “theological” solution. The God who can establish the intimacy with the race experienced in Jesus Christ must be, not any sort of being, but a power of existence that, in the most dramatic sense possible, transcends finitude God must be, not a being, but Being itself. And therefore, like the Infancy narratives, this formula implies the serenity, self-sufficiency, and sovereignty of God just as surely as it implies the tensive qualities of God’s humility, creativity, and passion. The bipolarity hinted at on Sinai in the revelation of the burning bush now comes to full expression: the God capable of hypostatic union is very strange indeed, strange enough to save us from our sins.

The God of the Incarnation is thus the power that “throws everything off,” that calls into question everything we assumed about the structure of reality. We live, not in a world of division, presided over by the supreme being, but rather in a universe of interrelationship and “charged with the grandeur of God.” God can become one of us, and therefore our minds have to change, the Word has been made flesh, and metanoia is the only valid response.

Posted in Apologetics | Tagged a Christian distinction, Arius, Council of Nicea, homoousios, pagan myths and legends, The “definition” of Christ, The Chalcedonian Doctrine, The Incarnation, the novelty of the Chalcedonian formula, the world and God | 2 Comments »

A Novelistic Life of Jesus III

January 6, 2010

A continuation from Part Two.

The Death-And Beyond
Jesus must have had many friends and admirers in the city, so the choice of venue was an embarras de richesse. His instructions to the disciples on how to find the house he selected were cryptic: he sent two disciples ahead with the words,

“Go into the city, and a man carrying a jar of water will meet you: follow him, and wherever he enters, say to the householder, ‘The teacher says, “Where is my guest room [refectory, katalyma] where I am to eat the passover with my disciples?”‘

And he will show you a large upper room furnished and ready” (Mark 14:13-15). Probably Jesus did not wish Judas to know the site till the last moment, so as to avoid any early warning to the Sanhedrin, whereupon he might be arrested. The water-carrier was in all likelihood a servant sent to fetch fresh water from the Pool of Siloam, by way of substitute for the cistern water in normal domestic use. Eventually, the upper room of Zion, where the disciples gathered on returning from the Mount of Olives after the ascension, came to be regarded as the scene of this Last Supper.

A New Covenant
Then, on the last evening of his life, Jesus announced the solemn beginning of a new covenant between God and the world, a covenant made in his death, with his life offered up as a sacrifice of expiation — along the lines of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53:12, his soul “poured out unto death” for “the sins of many.”

A crisis stage was coming: an ordeal that would mean Jesus’ own death but also the persecution of his followers; intensified suffering for Israel which had, in the main, rejected the public offer of salvation; and the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. The crisis was to be resolved, however, in the triumph of the Son — referred to by Jesus as “the day of the Son of Man,” a phrase that is probably the counterpart in the private teaching of the term “the reign of God” in the public proclamation.

To anticipate such an exaltation, Jesus must have supposed for himself, after his ordeal, a stupendously transcendent condition, which would be constituted by, on the one hand, his resurrection and ascension, and on the other, his final parousia, the second coming. The two were evidently telescoped in his awareness. The moment of the parousia was, to his consciousness, extraordinarily close. By his work, he was the bearer of God’s lordship over time. The whole time of the redemption was as it were concentrated in his person, since where he acts the terms on which the salvational future will proceed are already laid down.

During his disciples’ missionary journeys, he had seen “Satan fall like lightning from heaven” (Luke 10:18), even though that final victory remained to be accomplished. The disciples shared something of Jesus’ consciousness in this regard. Their confidence in the imminence of his return coexisted perfectly happily with their knowledge that Jesus had established an “apostolic succession” for his Church, and had promised to intercede with the Father, so that the Spirit, in whose power he had worked and taught, might come to counsel the apostolic fellowship, both defending them against the last, peculiarly vicious death-throes of the evil powers in their antagonism towards the Church, and leading them into all truth, bringing to mind all he had said to them (what we now call the “development of doctrine”). To ordinary consciousness it would be contradictory both to expect the final outcome of history and to provide for an indefinite future — but the disciples did not by now have an ordinary consciousness. They had, instead, begun to share in Jesus’ consciousness.

At the Last Supper, Jesus ordered his disciples to celebrate the new covenant, to be made between God and humankind in his blood, by a sacramental re-presentation of his sacrificial death. Equipped with this rite, for as long as the ordeal lasted they would themselves be the eschatological temple in its earthly aspect, the house built on rock, which the power of Hades would try in vain to overcome. The Church, which the disciples constituted in relation to Jesus, would be the mystery of the kingdom, the reign of God, the day of the Son of Man, insofar as that kingdom, reign, day, are already manifested in time. Until the definitive ingathering of the saved at the end of time (the plenary coming of the new heaven and the new earth) the redemptive purposes of Jesus would be incorporated and continued in this community.

Having instituted the sacrificial meal of his own memorial, and sung a hymn, the Messiah went out with his friends onto the Mount of Olives (more precisely, into a garden just across the Cedron, on its lower slopes, an olive orchard where the Gethsemani church stands today). After his agony, endured while the disciples largely slept, noises and lights announced the arrival of the betrayer.

The Betrayal
Tradition locates the betrayal in the grotto on the edge of the garden, possibly where the eight waited, and the three together with Jesus returned when’ Judas and the guards approached. Whereas Mark and Matthew give the impression that the high priest and the elders had merely collected a motley crew with “swords and staves” to apprehend him, Luke and John make it more official: they were Jewish temple police, though John uses a Roman military term. Jesus was taken for a preliminary private hearing of the case against him before the high priest Annas, father-in-law of the reigning high priest of the year, Caiaphas. Only in the morning could a proper judicial sentence be passed by the Sanhedrin, and that in the Temple precincts. In the courtyard of the high priest’s house, however, there took place an event recorded by all the evangelists: Peter’s denial that he knew Jesus, and his subsequent tears of repentance.

The Sanhedrin condemned Jesus for blasphemy, but in order to win over Pilate stressed the political menace implicit in a Jewish Messiah. As the superscription on the cross — “The King of the Jews” — shows; Jesus was condemned as a rebel against Roman rule. The hearing took place, and judgment was given in the praetorium — either the procurator’s palace (originally built by Herod the Great) or the Antonia fortress (also Herodian) where the Via Dolorosa begins today, close by the Franciscan monastery of the scourging of the Lord. According to one tradition at least, it was on the forecourt of the Antonia that Jesus was shown to the people: “Behold the Man!”

There he was judged, mocked, crowned with thorns, and scourged while Pilate ceremoniously washed his hands. Though Pilate was seemingly far from convinced that Jesus deserved the death penalty, he swallowed his scruples under the combined pressure of the religious authorities, the ever-hostile tetrarch, Herod, whom he consulted, and the Jerusalem crowd, anxious, in all probability, for their economic position (largely dependent as that was on the employment and prosperity generated by the Temple, whose supersession Jesus had predicted). In the account given by John, the timing of Pilate’s judgment is significant.

“In condemning Jesus at noon, the very hour when the Passover lambs began to be killed in the Temple precincts, Pilate fulfills at the end of the Gospel the word spoken about Jesus at the beginning by John the Baptist, identifying him as the lamb of God who would take away the world’s sin.”[ R. Brown, The Death of the Messiah (London, 1994) 1.34.]

The Crucifixion
He was led out to Golgotha, the “place of the skull.” During the time of the two Jewish wars, the memory of this place — essentially an abandoned quarry — would be preserved. The emperor Constantine cleared away the pagan temple erected over this “cave of the Redeemer” and built there the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which later excavation shows to have been surrounded by rock tombs. Today within the walls of the Old City, in its own time Golgotha was outside the city wall — but close enough for people to see, and reflect upon, the crucifixion victims. The date was, in all probability, Friday, 7 April (14 Nisan) of the year 30 of what would eventually be called the Christian era.

Crucifixion was a widespread penalty in antiquity; among the Romans it was used chiefly on slaves, violent criminals, and the unruly elements in rebellious provinces. Valued for its deterrent effect, it was also an expression of sadism and the lust for) revenge. The public display of a naked victim in a prominent place was linked in the Jewish mind with human sacrifice; hence the horror expressed in Deuteronomy 21:23 at the very thought of such a victim. In this context, the crucified Messiah was a lived demonstration of the solidarity of the love of God with those tortured and put to death by human cruelty.

As we have seen, the significance of that death in Jesus’ own mind was strictly salvational. It had absolutely nothing of the character of political adventure. Jesus uses the political significance of his situation, and the possible political consequences of his actions (e.g., the entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, mounted on an ass), so as to secure his rejection on his own terms. Only such rejection could set him free to be the Messiah according to the very truth of God’s self-revelation. He had foreseen this outcome, and, though dreading it in itself, also welcomed it as the crucial turning-point in the ushering in of the reign of God.

The Resurrection
Jesus’ body was laid in a “new tomb” by Joseph of Arimathea, a figure otherwise unmentioned in the Gospels. Though privately buried, the corpse of Jesus, which, according to Israel’s sacred law was accursed, could not be allowed to contaminate other corpses in a family grave. Given the need for speedy burial before the Sabbath, the choice of a hitherto unused tomb, close to the site of the execution, was understandable. It appears to have been a shaft tomb of a distinctive first century type.

The body was laid in an antechamber, wrapped in linen sweetened with spices. Jesus’ corpse was anointed royally, according to John, for he has Joseph and Nicodemus use a simply enormous quantity of myrrh and aloes. Apparently, though, Joseph ran out of time for the full process of embalming; this was noted by various women disciples who looked on, the Twelve having scattered. The tomb was sealed by a circular stone. The spot would eventually be cleared, and the rock cut away to allow access and, not least, scope for building; by the late third century the actual tomb would be wholly encased in a round church of its own. But this would dignify no sacred remains. For, in all the Synoptic accounts, on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene and some other women went with fresh embalming materials to the tomb of Jesus and found the stone rolled away. A young man (or two, sometimes presented “angelogically” as a divine messenger or messengers) explained, “He is raised; he is not here.”

The resultant resurrection faith is linked to the events of the ministry for two reasons. First, it confirms the claim of authority made by the pre-Easter Jesus, and second, it reveals the latter’s unity with God, and so God’s unique presence in him. After his death, and counter to all natural possibility, Jesus’ disciples experienced him as returning to them. At the first Easter they encountered him with all the characteristics of a real human being, only now he was beyond the common frontiers of human experience as though in a new life. They felt obliged to regard his personality as somehow continuous with that of God himself, and, though strict monotheists (believers in one God alone), worshipped him with the titles “Lord” and “God.” For his part, he finalized their instruction on continuing his mission until the Easter encounters ceased with the overwhelming spiritual experience of Pentecost: the pouring out of the Spirit of God, now experienced as the Spirit of both Father and Son.

The Christian Religion Begins
The Christian religion thus began when, all human hopes, enthusiasm, and comradeship annihilated, the disciples of Jesus were involved in certain events on the morning after the Sabbath of his entombment in a garden outside Jerusalem, and either concurrently or at some subsequent point by the Sea of Galilee, in an upper room in Jerusalem, and on the road to an unimportant Judaean village called Emmaus.

The Catholic Church, as a reality that may be studied by the historian, began with an empty tomb. Whatever construction the historian may put on the fact, it started with an extraordinary transformation of the broken and distraught friends and disciples of the crucified. They were changed into men and women blazing with confidence that God, in a manner beyond the gropings and imaginings of the human spirit, had “visited” (i.e., acted upon) history. It began with some such words, reported by the eyewitnesses, as “I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has risen as he said” (Matthew 28:5-6); “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here but has risen” (Luke 24:5).

The truth-claims of Catholic Christianity are those of an interpretation of history. We are invited to say of this history — which the Church lives by repeating it in preaching, in the sacraments, and in the prayer whereby she communes with her risen master — whether it is based on a mistake or is just an insoluble enigma, or whether the career of Jesus was in fact extended, by the grace of a power thus disclosed as the Spirit of his Father, into a new and limitless future with God, a future in which our human nature has at last found its hidden meaning, thus making superfluous all humankind’s other faiths and ideologies.

Gospel Discrepancies
To the critical reader the discrepancies in the scriptural accounts of the appearances of the risen Jesus have sometimes seemed as notable as their points of contact. Yet without straining the evidence, some kinds of order may be introduced into the apparent chaos. For instance, all the gospel accounts narrate the same basic sequence of events, though they differ on their location. The same elements are always there: a situation where Jesus’ followers are bereft, an appearance of Jesus, his greeting, their recognition, his word of command or mission. Moreover, the geographical complexity of the appearances — Galilee or Jerusalem — is not so off-putting as it might seem.

The Jerusalem appearances, so Père M. J. Lagrange suggested, were chiefly intended to convince and reassure the disciples. The Galilee appearances were principally meant to link their minds to memories of the past. For the risen Christ is the glorified earthly Jesus, just as the earthly Jesus was the one destined to be the glorified risen Christ. There is no contradiction between the historian’s Jesus and the Church’s Jesus (whom we shall be contemplating in a moment).

If the majority of the resurrection appearances took place in Galilee, why then did the apostles return to Jerusalem? Because as observant Jews, they would naturally have gone up to the holy city for the next pilgrimage feast, “Weeks” or Pentecost. It was in Jerusalem, on that feast, that there took place an overwhelming manifestation of the Spirit they had received from the risen Christ. Now the Twelve through Peter began to proclaim the good news they perceived in faith. God had fulfilled his promises to Israel in Jesus whose crucifixion was not a defeat, for God had raised him and thus stamped his message and life with the seal of divine approval.

Agnosticism About The Resurrection
An ultimate agnosticism about the resurrection requires one to consign to the realm of the inexplicable the origins of the major transformation of the Greco-Roman world whose heirs we are. If we are not prepared to countenance the Church’s own account of her beginning, with the reversal that turned Jesus’ disciples, that smashed and headless group, into missionary apostles, we shall be hard pressed to make sense of the new Christian element running like quicksilver through the Mediterranean basin and beyond. Some would have it, with Goethe, that “They are celebrating the resurrection of the Lord for they themselves are resurrected.” But what “they” (the disciples) in fact experienced was fear and doubt, and what awakened joy and jubilation was something other than themselves. They were the ones marked out by death, but the crucified and buried one was alive. We can put it like this: Those who survived him were the dead; the dead one was the Living.

The triumphant return to life of the Lord Jesus has been deemed “not proven” by many who have approached it with an historian’s eye. Yet the faith-account handed down in the living witness of the’ Church of all generations remains a plausible construction of the evidence. Moreover, the kind of event that faith-witness depicts is, importantly, one open to public scrutiny, one that would submit to falsification. The discovery of the skeletal remains of Jesus — along the lines of a celebrated novel by Piers Paul Read-would surely falsify (i.e., disprove) the Christian faith. It is, on an orthodox view of that faith, an intrinsic feature of the divine sacrifice by which the Father sent his Son on his mission of liberation that God freely made himself vulnerable to human beings, even in the very truth-claims of his own self-revelation.

Conclusion
There was once a man, within historical times, who, as a child of the Jewish people, knew only of one God of heaven and earth, of a unique Father in heaven, and stood in reverential awe before this heavenly Father; a man whose meat was to do the will of this Father, who from his earliest youth in good and bad had sought and loved this will alone, whose whole life was one prayer; a man, further, whose whole being was so firmly united with this Divine will, that by its omnipotence he healed the sick and restored the dead to life; a man, finally, who was so intimately and exclusively dedicated to this will, that he never swerved from it, so that not even the slightest consciousness of sin ever oppressed him, so that never a cry for penance and forgiveness passed his lips, so that even in dying he begged pardon not for himself but for others.

And this man from the intimacy of his union with God could say to afflicted mortals, “Thy sins are forgiven thee.” And it was this holy man, utterly subject as he was to God throughout his whole life, absorbed as he was in God, awestruck as he stood before him, who asserted, as if it were the most natural and obvious thing in the world, that he was to be the judge of the world at the last day, that he was the suffering servant of God, nay more, that he was the only-begotten Son of God and consubstantial with him, and could say of himself, “I and the Father are one.”[K. Adam, The Son of God (New York, 1934) 203]

The mystery of Jesus is so deep that it has taken a number of New Testament interpretations of it to constitute the New Testament canon, to satisfy the Church that she has in the Scriptures an adequate written basis for her future. Theologians, mystics, poets, and artists down the ages have all made their attempts to plumb Jesus’ mystery. Of course, part of Jesus’ elusiveness comes from the fact that we today do not share the dominant ideas and symbols of the particular culture in which he was born. But if a redemptive incarnation were to take place at all, it had to happen in some particular culture, and so there had to be a risk — and more than a risk, a moral certainty — that with distance in space and time the form of the redemptive incarnation would become harder to identify with and, so to understand. The role of the Paraclete or Counselor, promised by Jesus, is to overcome this problem by leading the disciples into all truth, which means first and foremost all the essential truth about Jesus Christ.

To the Catholic Christian, the Jesus Christ of the Church’s dogma is this infallible portrait of the incarnate Redeemer, an interpretation of the New Testament materials made under the leading of the Holy Spirit, so that the community of the kingdom, constructed on the basis of the Holy Eucharist, will appreciate the essentials of that person who is the kingdom’s center and really present in its Eucharistic feast. The Christ of dogma, the Christ of the Church, is an unerring interpretation of what was given in and with the Jesus of history We seek the history, therefore (using the tools of scholarship), in the context of the Church’s tradition, just as we also seek the personal origin of the Church’s tradition within scholarly history. If we differentiate the two it is only for the purpose of revealing more clearly their interconnection.

Once … we accept the faith perspective of the authors of the New Testament and the judgment of the Church which has canonized this apostolic faith response as a witness guaranteed by God, a new avenue of knowing the reality of Jesus is opened up for us. This faith is then pursued not merely as a safeguard against reducing the figure of Jesus to pre-fabricated clichés, but as a positive hermeneutical tool which can answer the question raised by the quest for the historical Jesus: who is this man?

We also begin to understand that it is not a great tragedy for us — in fact it might be providential — that we do not have personal writings by Jesus himself (or transcripts of his discourses for that matter). God’s intention was to bring a community of faith around Jesus so that the understanding of Jesus would become inseparable from accepting the witness of this archetypal community. In fact, the reality of Jesus, “who he was and what he intended,” or more precisely, who he was in God’s plan of salvation and what God revealed to us through his person, deeds, and words, becomes accessible to us only through the divinely guaranteed documents of the apostolic Church, that is, the New Testament.

If Jesus wanted to reach all humankind through a community whose faith, life, and ritual are to continue the faith, life, and ritual of this archetypal apostolic community, then the fact that Jesus himself authored no book or letter makes complete sense. If Jesus’ reality could be reached without the faith response embodied in the documents of the apostolic Church, an individualistic relationship between isolated individual believers and Jesus would become a distinct possibility. Then our faith would not necessarily be an ecclesial faith.[R. Kereszty, "Historical Research, Theological Inquiry, and the Reality of Jesus: Reflections on the Method of J. P. Meier," Communio 19 (1992) 595.]

Posted in Fr. Aidan Nichols | Tagged Jesus' New Covenant, The Betrayal of Jesus, The Crucifixion | Leave a Comment »

A Novelistic Life of Jesus II

January 6, 2010

A continuation from Part One. Fr. Aidan Nichols leads us on an historical overview of the life of Jesus.

The Execution Of John The Baptist
It was probably at Passover of the second year of the public ministry that news reached Capharnaum of the execution of John the Baptist, and Herod Antipas’s fear that Jesus might be another John. The antagonism of the Herodians, the supporters of the puppet king, grew apace. Henceforth Jesus would avoid crowds and never remain too long in any one place.

When the disciples, sent out in pairs by Jesus in the missionary extension of his preaching of the imminence of the kingdom, returned to base at Capharnaum, flocks of people wanted to see the Master with their own eyes, thus bringing new danger. Jesus accordingly took the disciples away in search of solitude, but when the boat turned in toward the fishing ground and the crowd caught up with them Jesus had compassion on them as “sheep without a shepherd” and began to teach them (Mark 6:34).

It was here, in the lakeside spot now called Tabhga, that the first feeding of the multitude took place; it is recalled by a venerable Jewish-Christian inscription on a large slab of rock, visible today beneath the altar of the Benedictine chapel of the multiplication. The twelve baskets of bread and fish mentioned by the evangelists, and the way the people are made to sit in groups of hundreds and fifties, as their ancestors had been accustomed to do in the Sinai desert according to the Book of Exodus, point to this as a feeding of Jews rather than local pagans. This renewal of the miraculous feeding of the Exodus generated a religious and nationalist enthusiasm which found expression in an attempt to have Jesus proclaimed Messiah.

He bundled off the disciples to safety in the less paranoid atmosphere of the lands of Herod’s brother Philip, at Bethsaida, while he himself retired to the cave below the cliff where he was accustomed to pray in solitude to the Father. But that night one of the sudden fierce winds characteristic of the Sea of Galilee arose, blowing from the direction of Bethsaida, and Jesus, concerned for the Twelve, hurried down to the lake. This is the mise en scène for the walking on the water. Taking the shortest course to the land, the disciples and their Master made for Gennesaret, where, however, he was once again the target of the crowds, this time carrying their sick with them (Mark 6:54-55). So the group set off for the borders of a largely pagan country, Phoenicia, which lay outside the lands of the petty Jewish subkings altogether.

A New Opening To The Gentiles
Here at the midpoint of his ministry, Jesus made a new opening to the Gentiles while at the same time becoming more distanced from the Pharisees. It was probably at the only city on his route, Gischala in northern Galilee, though the name is absent from the Gospels, that Jesus had a serious set-to with the stricter Pharisees. The topic was food laws; Jesus opposed a rigorist interpretation, for only what comes from within can make a person unclean (Mark 7:15). Mark interpreted this exchange to mean that Jesus declared all foods clean — an unheard of challenge to the authority of the Law.

This was the point at which Jesus would come to spend a lengthy period among Gentiles. Phoenicia represented an opening to the pagans. The meeting with the Syro-Phoenician woman, who besought him to cure her sick daughter, though he had been “sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 15:24), appears to have greatly affected him. Did he think of the words spoken about the Suffering Servant of the Lord in the Book of Isaiah?

“It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back the preserved of Israel. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring my salvation to the ends of the earth” (Isaiah 49:6).

For Paul, as the “apostle of the Gentiles,” such passages of Isaiah — notably chapter 53, with its teaching that universal salvation would come through the redemptive death of the Servant of the Lord — would be all-important (see 1 Corinthians 15:1-3; 2 Corinthians 5:14-21). It seems no accident that Mark describes Jesus as returning at this juncture to the Gentile Decapolis (7:31). The news of the cured demoniac had spread widely and an enthusiastic crowd of pagans awaited him on a hillside by the lake’s eastern shore. In a second feeding of the multitude, this sign of the dawning of the messianic era, already worked for Jews, is now renewed for Gentiles who “praised the God of Israel” (Matthew 15:29-31). The baskets were seven in number — perhaps for the seven heathen peoples mentioned in the Book of Deuteronomy as having once inhabited the Land. The message is that the gates are now thrown open for all nations to enter God’s presence.

The Sign of Jonah
The increasingly innovative nature of Jesus’ behavior was a growing worry to other Jewish parties, and when he arrived back on the western shore of the lake, he was met by Pharisee and Sadducee representatives who asked him for a “sign,” a legitimizing confirmation of his mission. He replied that none would be given except the sign of Jonah.

In Church tradition this is taken to refer to the resurrection, for just as Jonah was three days in the living tomb of the whale so was Jesus three days in the living tomb of the earth. Originally, however, the “sign of Jonah” may have referred to the conversion, on the occasion of Jonah’s preaching, of the pagan city of Nineveh. Jesus is saying that the conversion of the Gentiles will be the sign that the messianic kingdom has come.

In the latter part of the second year of his ministry Jesus visited Jerusalem for the feast of Tabernacles. In the courtyard of the Temple, stimulated by the stirring symbolism of the feast — the water carried from the Pool of Siloam for ceremonial lustration of the altar of burnt offerings Jesus spoke of himself, of his own heart, to bystanders in exalted terms as a source of water for all who believe in him (John 7). Naturally, such statements only increased the anxiety of the Sadducee and Pharisee leaders.

Reeducating The Disciples
Back in Galilee, amid encouraging reactions from pagans, but deepening suspicion from the Jewish movements, Jesus took the disciples on a tour intended for their reeducation. It led them into the subalpine north of Galilee, where the mount of the transfiguration would be the climax of the program. The expedition, which began with a sea-crossing from Caphamaum to Bethsaida, seems to have originated in Jesus’ awareness both of a mounting confusion among his disciples and of a resultant thinning out of their ranks.

In the discourse on the bread of life, which following the miraculous feeding in John 6, many of the disciples sorrowfully go away. Mark may be alluding to this when he remarks of the beginning of the expedition north that the disciples had forgotten to bring bread save for the one loaf in the boat — namely, Jesus himself. At the heart of the reeducation lay concepts of messiahship. The route took them past both Tiberias, a city founded by the Herodians in the honor of the Roman emperor, and, at the opposite pole of the political spectrum, Gamla, seat of the Zealot movement, itself founded by the extreme Pharisee Jehuda of Gamla in A.D. 6.

The idea of the Messiah in this northern section of the lake was indeed colored by revolutionary militancy, which explains Jesus’ extreme reluctance to allow the disciples to acclaim him as Messiah. He now proposed to enlighten them in a suitably gradual fashion — as made clear by the symbolic action of healing a blind man, at Bethsaida, in stages (Mark 8:22-25).

For alongside his public, exoteric teaching lay a private, esoteric message delivered to the disciples alone. The turning-point, beyond which Jesus begins a deeper and more mysterious-sounding instruction of the disciples, is Peter’s confession of Jesus’ messiahship at Caesarea Philippi. In his response to Peter, Jesus defines his aim as the messianic task of building a living “temple,” as on rock, secure against decay, the temple of the last days.

He was referring here to the eschatological temple which, in the Hebrew Bible, symbolized the final meeting-place of God and humankind, the site of their definitive communion. In the symbolic thinking of the period, this temple was conceived as miraculous, everlasting, the center of a new heaven and a new earth, the goal of pilgrimage for all nations.

Rebuilding the Temple
How did Jesus understand his role in creating this permanent divine-human communication? As the final revealer of God’s will and the agent through whom that will was to be realized, the construction of this temple fell to him personally, but he could not achieve it until first he had become victorious over the anti-God powers at work in the world — sin and death — and thus been enthroned at God’s right hand. At his trial, Jesus was accused of having said, “Destroy this temple and I will rebuild it in three days” (Matthew 26:61). Why should that particular statement have been taken as blasphemy? In an oracle from the Second Book of Samuel, God is made to say of the future messianic king:

“He shall build a house for my Name, and I will establish the throne of his reign forever. I will be his father, and he shall be my son” (2 Samuel 7:13-14a).

“Forever”: originally this was deliberate hyperbole, court rhetoric, but Jesus treated it literally. Unless he had referred to himself as an ever-living or eschatological Messiah, we cannot understand why his disciples, after the first Easter, took the resurrection appearances as proof that their crucified teacher had turned out to be the Christ of Israel, the “once and future king.”

A Suffering Messiah
At his trial before the Sanhedrin, we shall see Jesus refusing to conceal his messianic character for fear of implicitly abandoning this eschatological claim. In any case, now helpless in his enemies’ hands, the title “Messiah,” “Christ,” had lost its liability to political misinterpretation: Jesus would become a suffering Messiah, a Messiah of the Cross. Yet to claim to be Messiah, albeit forever, would not itself be regarded by other Jews as blasphemous. Something more was involved. The last line of the oracle suggests what it was: “I will be his father, and he shall be my son.”

Jesus understood his eschatological messianic sonship in a sense entirely his own. He spoke of himself as “the Son,” absolutely or unconditionally, and so uniquely. When speaking with the disciples he was always careful to say “my Father and your Father.” “Our Father” was what he told the disciples to say, not what he said with them. Part of his unique sonship, as Jesus understood it, was a sharing in the divine prerogatives vis-à-vis creation.

From the moment of Peter’s confession onwards, we find the two themes of Jesus’ messiahship and his cosmic enthronement joined together. In these contexts he often spoke of himself in terms of the figure called the “Son of Man,” that angelic representative of suffering Israel, described in the Book of Daniel as receiving glory and power from God to triumph over the forces hostile to his people. This constellation of ideas reoccurs at the climactic moment of Jesus’ trial:

Blasphemy
“Again the high priest asked him, ‘Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?’ And Jesus said, ‘I am; and you will see the Son of man sitting at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.’ And the high priest tore his mantle and said, ‘Why do we still need witnesses? You have heard his blasphemy’” (Mark 14:61-62).

It was as a messianic pretender who also claimed to share in the divine attributes that Jesus was condemned for blasphemy.

After Peter’s confession, Jesus’ esoteric teaching became an initiation of the disciples into the meaning of his suffering and death. As the Messiah, whose enthronement, itself stunningly supernatural, transcendent, would not come about without his own violent death, he had the power to (as he put it) “ransom” the mortal and the dead. The Son of Man had come “to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45), which is a Semitic way of saying for all — not just for a remnant of Israel, but for all Israel; and not just for all Israel, but for all the world. His death and subsequent enthronement would purify the world from sin, and by thus overcoming its alienation from God the Creator give it entry into a new life.

It was under the lee of Mount Hermon, the northernmost point of their journey, that Jesus had thus begun to teach the disciples his understanding of messiahship, entailing as this did identification with a Son of Man who could only be glorious if he was first humiliated and killed (Mark 8:31-32a). Their amazed and negative reaction, vocalized by Peter, was followed by the experience of Christ’s transfiguration on the mountain’s summit. The disciples were able not only to see their master as belonging to the company of the greatest figures of Israel’s history, Moses and Elijah, but also to glimpse something of his deeper mystery.

But even after further discussion of his coming passion (Mark 9:31), the whole trip ended up with a debate among the Twelve as to which of them was the greatest, a depressing upshot which prompted Jesus’ saying on the necessity of service and of spiritual childhood (Mark 9:35-36). Only serving their fellow human beings and particularly those disregarded by others, the “little ones,” would give the Twelve a share in his work and lead to their being honored by the Father who had sent him.

In the discouraging aftermath of the transfiguration, Jesus soon decided to abandon Galilee. He was deeply disappointed with reactions in Korazin, Bethsaida, and Capharnaum, in which he had invested so much hope and energy (Matthew 11:20-24); despite admiration, there was little true obedience. His efforts at dialogue with the moderate Pharisees (his friends Simon and Nicodemus were doubtless in this camp) had come to little: these pious men with their insistence on the traditions of the fathers could not accept his interpretation of the Torah.

Gradually, the Pharisees at large began to see his popularity as a danger. Likewise those in the northern townships under Zealot influence soon realized that he was no candidate for the kind of messiahship in which they believed. It was easy for them, therefore, to form an unholy alliance with the Herodians to move him on (Mark 3:6). Jesus did move on — to Batanea, Bethany-beyond-the-Jordan (cf. John 10:40-42), from where he paid one more visit to Jerusalem, for the feast of the Dedication of the Temple, the last visit before his death.

The Winter of His Life
We are now in the last winter of Jesus’ life. As during the autumn trip for the feast of Tabernacles, Jesus was moved by the exploitation of the great symbols of the Scriptures in the Temple liturgy; notably, at Hanukkah, the symbolic lights with which the Temple and its precincts were set ablaze led him to declare himself personally identical with the light of the divine glory to which they referred (John 12:1). Once again, the consequences (namely, mounting hostility from the Jewish leaders and their theologians) were entirely predictable. There was a threat of stoning for blasphemy; however, Jesus extricated himself and returned to Bethany beyond the Jordan which was to be his last home.

The Gospels locate three events in the life of Jesus at this Bethany: a controversy, an urgent personal summons of what proved to be a lethal kind, and what we may call a lyrical intermezzo. In this politically peaceful region, ruled by the unambitious tetrarch Philip, Pharisees and Essenes differed on a major socioreligious theme: marriage (the former permitted divorce, the latter did not). Mark, who records Jesus’ adjudication in favor of the Essene position, also speaks of the “house” where the disciples pursued this topic further (10:10).

Lazarus
We know from the tenth chapter of Luke’s Gospel that Jesus had earlier visited the sisters of Lazarus not at the Bethany in the Jerusalem district, where we otherwise find them, but at Bethany-beyond-theJordan. It is conjectured that this house, then, was the summer residence of Jesus’ friends. This would explain how, from their city home near Jerusalem, they knew of Jesus’ hiding place and so could send him the message, “Lord, the one whom you love is sick” (John 11:35). Here we come to an event — the raising of Lazarus — which, more than any other, set into motion the wheels of enmity against Jesus, bringing him to his death. The hostility of the supreme spiritual authority of Judaism, the high priesthood, which Jesus was soon to incur stands out all the more sharply by contrast with the idyllic scene at Bethany-beyond-the-Jordan word-painted by Matthew and Mark: Jesus blessing children.

The raising of Lazarus — this spectacular and well-attended miracle — focused the antagonism of the Sanhedrin who resolved to be rid of Jesus. He returned with the disciples to a village, Ephrem, in the desert area some twelve miles north of Jerusalem. From there, according to John, he would make his final entry into Jerusalem. The Synoptic Gospels have Jesus set out from Jericho, further down the valley, as he begins this final journey. The fourth evangelist’s account converges with the Synoptics only when they come to describe Jesus’ entry into the city, thus leaving those of his readers who knew one or more of the Synoptics to conclude that Jesus and his disciples went down from Ephrem to Jericho.

Final Entry to Jerusalem
There was indeed a Roman road between the two, making possible a relatively easy ascent from the Jordan valley into the hills where Jerusalem stands. As Jesus passed through Jericho he healed the blind beggar Bartimaeus (and one other, unnamed): beggars would have lined up at this point where the pilgrim routes from north and east converged. Luke tells us how crowds of pilgrims and curious citizens thronged around Jesus so that a chief tax collector, Zacchaeus, had to climb a “sycamore” (actually a mulberryfig) to get a glimpse of him, its dense foliage (the species still flourishes there) concealing him from those beneath. Jesus called him down and invited him to his dwelling with the gripping words, “Salvation has come today to this house” (Luke 19:9a).

Why did Jesus make this detour via Jericho? It may have been to end where he had begun. There at the Jordan his ministry had started. Where the Baptist had been his forerunner, coming to an untimely death as a witness to God’s commandments, Jesus would imitate him in his own violent death. In the desolate solitude of the mountain wilderness he had renounced Satan who had offered him “all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them” (Matthew 4:8). He could look to the right and left of that road and again see the mountain where he had chosen the way now leading to his death, a death that would also inaugurate God’s kingdom, whose glory would outshine those worldly realms.

The pilgrims who joined him would be his witnesses as to how he had entered Jerusalem poor and with his majesty unrecognized yet implicitly declaring himself the Messiah of the coming divine reign. Following the Roman road, Jesus climbed over the crest of the Mount of Olives and down into Bethany. We must suppose that the pilgrim crowds learned he would be following their number the next day: many would come out to meet him waving their palm branches in acclamation. Mounting an ass at Bethany, when the worst of the ascent (from a mounted animal’s viewpoint!) was over, Jesus descended into the awaiting city. Somewhere on the route, with its wonderful vista, Jesus, “seeing the city, wept over it” (Luke 19:41). The anointing by an unnamed sinner (later identified with Mary Magdalene) is placed by Mark and Matthew after the entry into Jerusalem.

As the Passover approached, Jesus made arrangements for celebrating it with the disciples; it was the last such celebration of his life.

Posted in Fr. Aidan Nichols | Tagged A Suffering Messiah, Jesus' Blasphemy, Jesus' Final Entry to Jerusalem, Jesus' Opening To The Gentiles, Lazarus, The Sign of Jonah | Leave a Comment »

A Novelistic Life of Jesus Part I

January 4, 2010

So if you solved all the problems associated with trying to write an account of the historical Jesus, what in fact would it look like? Fr. Aidan Nichols presents all the problems associated with just getting to this point (here) before he sits down with the data he has parsed from which he can write a novelistic account of the Historical Jesus. This is his attempt from which I have edited here and there to present a more readable online account. It was a little long so I broke it into two parts. This comes from his book, Epiphany: A Theological Introduction To Catholicism which can be found online here.

Background
Jesus was born in Mediterranean Asia, in a territory known anciently as Canaan, and in his own lifetime as Palestine. It consisted of three regions: Galilee in the north, Samaria in the center, Judaea in the south. Jesus lived there during a period of Roman rule, though this rule was directly exercised, in the period of his public ministry, only in Judaea. Otherwise it functioned indirectly through petty sub-kings or tetrarchs (rulers of a quarter of a kingdom, whether literally or metaphorically). The Jewish community, though humiliated by this foreign presence, was still permeated by the religious ideas of the Hebrew Bible, which provided the foundation for its culture. These ideas were, however, differently expressed in the various movements characteristic of the rather pluralistic and fluid Judaism of the day. Of these three were notable:

the Sadducees, the priestly aristocracy and their followers: conservative and minimalizing in their attitude to the Old Testament but culturally innovative and pro-Greek, and on good terms with the Romans who left certain powers of governance with their council, the Sanhedrin;
the Essenes, who were deeply opposed to the acceptance of pagan elements by the Sadducees and withdrew, exteriorly or interiorly, from official society, seeing themselves as the only true Israel who had renewed their Sinai covenant with God and now were awaiting the Day of the Lord, a definitive separation of the righteous from the unrighteous;
the Pharisees, an enthusiastic reform party, which maximized the divine revelation by treating the oral law as equally authoritative with the written Bible. They had a revolutionary nationalist wing, the Zealots, which boasted a sufficient following among have-nots to precipitate open warfare with the Romans after Jesus’ death.

His Family
The father of Jesus’ own family was a craftsman, and his circle of relations appears to have lived in the style of the sortis media, neither rich nor poor. More significant is the fact that they knew themselves to be descended from the ancient kings of Judah, the Davidides, to whose line the messianic hope of Israel was intimately linked. The name of the town where the family lived, Nazareth, and the word for an inhabitant thereof, Nazarene, come from the Hebrew root netzer, which refers to the springing of the Messiah as a fruitful “shoot” from the stump of Jesse, David’s father (Isaiah 11:1).

Nazareth had been founded in the period just before the Roman occupation; its first inhabitants would have been Jewish exiles intent on resettling the largely paganized Galilee on their return to the Land. Near the end of the second century of the Christian era, the Palestinian writer Julius Africanus records that the blood relations of Jesus in two villages had preserved the Davidide family trees: Kochba, the village of the star, and Nazara, village of the shoot — both names deriving from terms closely associated with the dynasty of David. This explains an incident in the Gospels of Luke and Mark: in Jericho, when the blind beggar Bartimaeus is told that “Jesus the man from Nazara” is passing by, his spontaneous reaction is to call out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me” (Luke 19:37; Mark 10:47).

His Birth
The circumstances of Jesus’ birth and certain episodes in his childhood were remembered as extraordinary. The narratives of his conception, birth, and infancy have been, alongside those of the resurrection, the main target of skeptical critics in their approach to the Gospels. Not only does the supernatural play a major role in these stories (in the form of angels, visions, dreams, and strange astronomical phenomena), but even the realistic elements in the narratives make, in context, a palpably theological demand upon their readers.

Thus some would maintain that the matrix of the infancy narratives (the term normally used to cover all the stories from the annunciation up to, but excluding, the baptism) lies in popular legends which the evangelists found already in circulation. Without necessarily claiming that these stories were historically well founded, the gospel writers saw that they could serve as vehicles for their own theological message.

Infancy Narratives As Midrash
Alternatively, it may be held that the infancy narratives are a form of the imaginative interpretation of the Old Testament known to Jewish tradition as midrash. This is a recognized genre of book or text in the Palestinian Judaism of the period: examples lie to hand in the Dead Sea Scrolls. But while practitioners of midrash certainly tried to apply Old Testament prophecy to events or developments of their day, there is no reason to think that they considered themselves justified in creating events ex nihilo.

In point of fact, when we listen to Luke’s account of his own historical method in the prologue to his Gospel as a whole, he makes it clear that his approach consisted in the provision of an orderly framework for materials derived from what today would be called oral history.

Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us, just as they were delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed (Luke 1:1-4).

Again, though Matthew makes no comparable statement, the body of his Gospel, while taking perhaps certain liberties with the chronology of events in Jesus’ lifetime, is generally regarded as giving access nonetheless to authentic Jesus material — thus raising the question whether someone would knowingly synthesize in the same work historically valueless with historically invaluable information.

In any case, what is more probable than that, as writers who believed Jesus to be the Jewish Messiah and the Savior of all peoples, Luke and Matthew would have been curious about his origins, ancestors, birthplace, family circle, and any memories that pointed to his later fate? (It is the absence of such material in Mark and John that requires an explanation.)

However, none of this is meant to deny that the infancy Gospels were also meant to convey a theological message about Jesus’ identity and future mission. Scenes have been presented as carefully constructed tableaux, often using props drawn from the Old Testament, so as to convey to reasonably well-informed Jews, or Gentile converts to Judaism, the significance of the child who would be the Messiah of Israel and the answer to the hopes of the nations.

It is admittedly difficult for scholars to establish what should count here as historical reportage and what as deliberate dramatization by the evangelist (or his source). Only some wider epistemological framework, skeptical or not, can provide an orientation. The Catholic historian will find this in the mind of the Church which has determined, in her use of the Bible in the liturgy and the construction of doctrine, that the events described in the infancy Gospels are historically based, even though literary techniques may also have been used to draw attention to certain key aspects of their theological meaning.

If the Church is to limit her decisions to what pleases critics she must surrender all claim to divinity. And if she did so she would only please the critics of today. What about those of tomorrow? No one who watches the ebb-and-flow of Biblical criticism can fail to see how the “accepted” positions of a few years ago, the rejection of which stamped a man as a hopeless obscurantist, are now being called in question. How long before “Q” will hear his Requiem sung?[H. Pope, "Assent to the Decrees of the Biblical Commission," Blackfriars 6, no. 61 (1925) 225]

Jesus Before His Public Ministry
With these preliminary points made, what may the historian assert about the man Jesus before his public ministry began? First, that there was some mystery about his conception and birth: Mark refers to Jesus as “son of Mary” (6:3) — a strange designation in so patrilinear a culture. John calls Jesus “son of Joseph” (1:45; 6:42), but he also records a dialogue which seems to imply, in an ironic play on the concepts of earthly and heavenly fatherhood (8:19-41), that he is not. Matthew and Luke, for whom Jesus’ Davidic descent through Joseph is crucial, have to settle, by implication, for a purely legal sonship by adoption in putting forward the notion of parthenogenesis from Mary.

Second, he was born in the Judaean town of Bethlehem, once celebrated as David’s birthplace, where in all probability Joseph’s extended family maintained some form of property. (The “inn” where no room was to be had is more correctly a “house,” presumably that of the Bethlehemite members of the clan.) The birth took place during a census. Luke’s Greek may plausibly be construed as identifying this bureaucratic intervention of Roman authority as the last before Quirinius became governor of Syria (in A.D. 6). There may well have been a census in 7 B.C., connected with the requirement of an oath of allegiance to the emperor and his procurator: Augustus not only wanted a general stock-taking in the empire, but saw a particular need to tighten control over Palestine and Rome’s Eastern frontier.

As to the manger-cave, many Palestinian houses had feeding troughs for animals in the vicinity of their main entrance: doubtless this was where Mary laid her new-born child amid the confused as well as straitened circumstances of a clan-gathering in the ancient Near East.

On Matthew’s account, Joseph and Mary remained in Bethlehem for up to two years: their stay included an astronomically inspired encounter with wandering astrologers from the pagan cultures to Palestine’s east. Though reconstruction is more than usually hypothetical, reference may be made here to the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in the constellation Pisces in 7 B.C., and the conjunction of both those planets with Mars early in the following year. There is evidence that Pisces was associated with both the Hebrews and the end of the world, Jupiter with global rulers, and Saturn with the Amorites, the earliest inhabitants of Syro-Palestine; the combination could well have suggested the emergence of an eschatological ruler in that part of the world. A conjunction of planets would of course resemble “stars,” rather than “a star”: and the Protogospel of James, a noncanonical text that may include some material from early Jewish-Christian tradition, has exactly that.

The negative reaction of the Judaean king Herod the Great to such inquiries is in keeping with attitudes of the period. Where affairs of state were concerned, an astrology still undifferentiated from astronomy was taken very seriously in the ancient world. Astrologers could be forbidden from making predictions about the emperor’s health; Domitian executed men born with imperial horoscopes. The massacre of the innocents (the destruction, on Herod’s orders, of Bethlehemite children of approximately Jesus’ age), was the typical reaction of a cruel and insecure ruler faced with a potentially subversive astrological prediction in a village whose name was charged with symbolism and situated on the doorstep of his key fortress of Herodion.

The “flight into Egypt” of Jesus’ nuclear family may have been no more than a short journey across a frontier. Alternatively, it might have entailed a stay in some major center of Egyptian Jewry, accessible, numerous, vibrant, and in frequent contact with Jerusalem as this was.

Visits to Jerusalem by Palestinian Jews were not in the nature of the later pilgrimage by Muslims from the Maghreb to Mecca, a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. Rather were they frequent features of a well regulated liturgical life for the devout. Jesus’ presentation in the Temple, and his conversation with its resident clergy on the eve of his Jewish coming-of-age, as recorded by Luke, are out of the ordinary only inasmuch as the convictions of the evangelists about the ultimate identity of this child (or youth), based on the events of his adult life, give them a significance they could not otherwise possess. It is to that adult life we must now turn, leaving till the next chapter an account of the inner meaning of these and others of the chief episodes of Jesus’ life, a commentary on the fuller, indeed divine, meaning invested in them, as the Church sees them.

The youth grew up to inherit his foster-father’s profession (Mark 6:3), but he was soon caught up in the mission of the first post-biblical Jewish prophet, Johanan ben Zechariah. In the context of this attempted religious renewal of the Jewish nation, he began to express in a “public ministry” his identity and role.

Jesus and John the Baptist
At a certain point in early manhood, then, Jesus left his native place so as to associate himself with the spiritual revival initiated by his cousin John the Baptist. John saw his work as a call to repentance in the spirit of the prophet Elijah, and chose to concentrate his activity in places hallowed by Elijah’s memory. He preached by the river Jordan near Jericho where Elijah had ascended to heaven in a whirlwind of fire (2 Kings 2:11-12), and baptized at Aenon near Salim where Elijah had thrown his cloak around Elisha, his successor, as a sign of his transmitting to him the prophetic spirit (1 Kings 19:19).

John first spoke of Jesus to representatives of the Pharisee party at Batanea, “Bethany beyond the Jordan,” near the ravine where Elijah had hid from King Ahab in preparation for his great campaign to purify Israel from its sins and errors. Just as in Jewish tradition Elijah was linked to the fulfillment of God’s promises for Israel at the end of time (when, it was thought, he would reappear), so John’s preaching and the baptism of repentance he offered had as their theme the imminence of an all encompassing divine judgment. In permitting himself to be baptized by John, Jesus identified himself with these expectations.

To begin with, then, Jesus shared the Baptist’s aim which was the reconstitution of God’s sacred people, Israel, in view of the coming consummation of world history known in Greek shorthand as the eschaton — the last age, the final epoch, the ultimate moment in historical time as hitherto known. Jesus met some of his first disciples — Andrew, Peter, Philip, John — in the context of the Baptist’s activities, as the latter tells us in his gospel (1:38b-39), and the Baptist singled Jesus out as having a special role to play in the great events that were coming (John 1:30).

The background lay in the biblical conviction that history, understood as including all our individual life-stories as well as great public events, is the unfolding of a divine purpose for the world. As such it must be construed as a plan, with a beginning, middle sections, and an end. The Baptist taught that the end was close at hand, and would take the form of a painful judgment and thus purgation and remaking of Israel. Therefore he preached repentance — the renouncing of any and every claim on God’s justice based on one’s own righteousness. When the end came, only such repentance would make it (for the individual Israelite) a positive experience rather than a negative one, what the prophets had called “weal” rather than “woe.”

Jesus, in seconding this affirmation, also approved the method John used to communicate it: a call to repentance which, if answered, led to a symbolic purification in the Jordan. When the Baptist was arrested by the civil authorities, however, Jesus evidently took this as a signal that one significant stage in the events of the endtime had finished. He ceased baptizing and withdrew further north to his native region of Galilee. There he embarked on a new proclamation and ministry of his own.

Jesus’ Ministry
The Gospels differ as to where to place the public beginning of Jesus’ ministry. Luke takes it to be Jesus’ preaching in the synagogue at Nazareth, his home town, where he aroused the scornful opposition that befalls prophets in their own country; John locates it at Cana some few miles to the south, the first miracle of Jesus rather than the first sermon. John also reports that Jesus’ Nazarene origin did not commend itself to all Jews outside of Nazareth (John 1:46 — no doubt Davidides were as slightly ridiculous then as, say, members of the house of Habsburg fallen on hard times would be today).

However, Nathanael of Cana, when he actually met Jesus and witnessed this first miracle at a wedding feast in his native town, rapidly changed his mind. Luke and John agree in saying that after the initiation of his ministry, wherever we place it, Jesus transferred his base to Capharnaum, a town on the Sea of Galilee, the native country of his future apostles.

Although the three Synoptic Gospels speak explicitly about only one visit of Jesus to Jerusalem, they hint at others, and John is quite definite that Jesus did go up to Jerusalem for the feast of Passover during the first and last spring times of the two to three years of his public ministry, and that he attended the Temple for the feasts of Tabernacles and Dedication in the intervening year when Passover found him still in Galilee. Such relatively frequent pilgrimages to Jerusalem are only what one would expect of a devout Jew of this period.

After, then, some initial activity in Galilee which need not demand more than few weeks for its performance, Jesus journeyed to the Jewish capital and immediately confronted the guardians of its holiest shrine in the episode of the cleansing of the Temple. John records that the spiritual vigor of this act brought many Jews to his side; perhaps prominent among them were Essenes, who had theological difficulties with the Temple cultus as practiced by the dominant, Sadducee party. Jerusalem would remain of the highest importance to Jesus, not only for the obvious reason that it was the holy city of Judaism, but also because one of his major rivals for the definitive interpretation of the Hebrew Bible — the priestly party of the Sadducees — were there in strength.

On the other hand, Galilee was the great stronghold of the other principal contender for the right to interpret the divine revelation to Israel. There the Pharisees, both moderates and rigorists, had a devout following as had their revolutionary wing, the Zealots. In Galilee too Jesus would touch the fringes of the pagan world, the Gentiles, whom his proclamation of imminent salvation also concerned. Hearing, then, of the many converts being made by those of his disciples who were continuing to practice John’s baptism of repentance, Jesus left Judaea for Galilee by way of Samaria where his conversation with a Samaritan woman reinforced the point that the messianic kingdom would not be restricted to the Jewish people (John 4:42).

At the fishing ground of Capharnaum, Jesus relocated certain disciples he had already met in the Baptist’s company. The news that John the Baptist had been imprisoned by the Roman satrap Herod Antipas — in the Machaerus fortress, far away by the Dead Sea — was the cue for his urgent message to these men: “The Kingdom of God is near” (Mark 1:5). Calling two sets of brothers (Andrew and Peter, James and John), Jesus walked the two miles to Capharnaum, his adopted home. There he began to build up a spiritual family in the form of a circle of friends in which he was the rabbi surrounded by his special disciples.

Jesus borrowed this concept from the Pharisees, but the closed number of twelve disciples of predilection was his own contribution. It harked back symbolically to the twelve tribes of Israel, a new version of which was in the making. Jesus had no home of his own (Matthew 8:20), but seems to have lived in the house of Peter. Recently excavated, it was venerated by Jewish Christians who scribbled the names of both Jesus and Peter on its walls.

The Nature of His Teachings
Jesus now began to develop a highly personal style of teaching through parables and pithy sayings, and such was his originality that he made an immediate impact. The main motifs of his preaching were: the reign or kingly rule of God; his own role in bringing in that reign; the unique importance of the epoch on which humanity had just entered, thanks to his presence and words; and the task consequently entrusted to his followers.

He also taught ethics, reworking in the light of these themes a number of the moral dictates come down from Jewish tradition. Though many of his ideas and values were taken over from the Hebrew Bible, he tended to express them in an absolutely new way. As a result, his teachings caused ill-feeling between himself and the various religious leaders of the Jewish people.

Jesus was first registered as something quite exceptional when he illustrated his message with actions that exceeded normal human capability: notably, exorcisms, healings, and intensifications of the bounty of nature. Contrary to Jesus’ intentions, these miracles were popularly interpreted as feats of power indicative of a political renaissance for Israel, and so by implication divine vengeance on the Romans for their rule.

It was fortunate, then, that he had gathered around him the group of pupils called the “disciples” for whom he could correct such misconceptions. From their number he chose twelve apostles (the word can be paraphrased as “mandated representatives”) to whom he gave a more intimate teaching. This centered on his relation with God, whom he characteristically called “Abba” (“dear Father”) and the Spirit of God, whom he referred to as the Paraclete, or Counselor, and so dealt more fully with his own identity, his special role in the mission of the Spirit from the Father. This more intimate or esoteric teaching also concerned the founding of a new Israel: a new community termed in Greek (a language Jesus probably knew) ekklēsia “the Church.” Several remarkable women lent this apostolic group their support.

The novelty of Jesus’ approach and the impact he made naturally gave rise to questions about his identity and intentions. The narratives of his baptism and its sequel, the temptations, were partly autobiographical answers to these questions which (we may suppose) the inner core of the disciples were invited to memorize, as they (evidently enough) were trained to commit to memory his formal teaching.

Jesus’ immersion in the waters had been accompanied by a profound experience of the Spirit of God, and of his own unique sonship of the Father (two vital themes of the esoteric teaching). His free act of solidarity with sinners, as he went down under the waters, may have given him the notion of redemptive solidarity in a suffering and death freely offered for them. Certainly, the gospel tradition knows nothing of the view that only late in his ministry was Jesus aware that he must suffer and die. These experiences led him to forsake his former trade and way of life and go out into the desert. There he felt Satan — the angelic figure appointed in the Hebrew Bible to test God’s righteousness — entice him to try out the various possibilities implicit in the power of the divine sonship he now experienced.

Seeking the Father’s will through prayer and fasting, he dismissed these promptings as presumptuous and evil. But this did not mean that Jesus had thereby rejected the idea that he himself was central to the working out of the phase of salvation history inaugurated by the Baptist. He referred to John as his Elijah, the “greatest among those born of women,” that is, the announcer of the start of the final fulfillment of history (Matthew 11:11). Yet the least person in the kingdom of heaven (i.e., the period of God’s actual reign as now ushered in by Jesus) must be greater than John. Whereas John had only announced that beginning of the new age, Jesus was actually realizing it by his teaching and activity.

That activity would be concentrated in the area sometimes called the “evangelical triangle,” the piece of land between the three towns of Capharnaum, Korazin, and Bethsaida, on the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee. Here, as Matthew records (11:20), most of his miracles were to be performed. Of special importance was the local mountain of Capharnaum, a ridge of hills called by the Gospels “the lonely place” or “the mount.” With its superb view over the lake and the surrounding villages, this craggy hill with its own cave, well suited to contemplative withdrawal, enabled Jesus to gather large crowds without inconvenience to local farmers. Its spring covering of anemones and iris led him to reflect on the lilies of the field (Matthew 6:28), whose beauty surpasses Solomon’s in all his splendor. Matthew prefaces his account of Jesus’ sermon on this mount by detailing the regions from which people were streaming to hear him: from Galilee, the Decapolis (ten nearby towns with Greek-speaking settlers), Jerusalem, Judaea, and the region across the Jordan (4:25), while news of him had reached even Syria, far to the north (4:24).

Jesus also delivered his new interpretation of the Torah, the divine revelation to Israel, from a boat — almost certainly in the inlet now called the “bay of the Parables,” halfway between Capharnaum and its fishing ground, where the land slopes down like a Roman theater to the water’s edge. Using the extraordinary natural acoustic, his voice could reach thousands in, for instance, the parable of the seed falling on different kinds of earth (a scenario easily imagined by the hearers, for the countryside around them illustrated it).

Here we can see the Land as, in Bargil Pixner’s words, a “fifth Gospel”-something recognized since at least the fourth century when the historian Eusebius produced his Onomastikon, an explanation of biblical place-names in their scriptural contexts, using records of roads, distances, and so forth available in the provincial headquarters at Caesarea. The Onomastikon extends Eusebius’s other treatise, the Demonstration of the Gospel: the testimony of the holy places tends both to substantiate and supplement the testimony of the Bible. As another Greek Christian of the early centuries, Cyril of Jerusalem, would write: “Reverence the place, and learn from what you see.”

Clashes With Demons
Already in the early part of the ministry sources of tension can be detected, despite the popular acclaim Jesus undoubtedly received. Clashes with pagans and with his own kinsfolk occur in what is probably the first year of Jesus’ public life. Mark describes his crossing over to the pagan, eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee as a challenge to a world under the control of the Evil One. Jesus’ quieting of the threatening wind with, it is insinuated, the evil spirit of chaos behind it is followed by his encounter with a possessed man, who embodies both the depravity and the strength of paganism.

Challenged by Jesus, the demons maintain their right to remain if not in a human being then at least in the swine, animals associated with paganism because the early Canaanites had sacrificed them to their gods. The confrontation ends with an act of self-destruction at the rock precipice which falls away suddenly into the lake. But the local inhabitants, discovering that the exorcist was an intruder from Israel, implore him to leave the area. Jesus’ first attempt to bring the message of salvation into heathen territory-’had failed, though the exorcised man was commissioned to spread the good news of his visitation among his compatriots.

A less conflictive encounter with an individual pagan, back on Jewish soil, is the healing of the woman with a hemorrhage. Almost certainly a pagan-a statue of her meeting with Jesus was erected some while after at Caesarea Philippi, an action only conceivable then in a Gentile context-she knew herself doubly unclean in the ritual outlook of Jews: she was both a hemorrhaging woman and a Gentile. This explains her secret stealing up to Jesus to touch his garment, though he at once makes personal contact with her lest she should feel she had somehow stolen her cure. More encouraging relations with pagans would be established in the middle period of the ministry, but these rather tense and uncomprehending moments point ahead to the final rejection of the earthly Jesus by the pagan world in the shape of the Roman governor of Judaea two years later.

Jesus’ Relation With His Kinsfolk
The other early source of conflict was Jesus’ relation with his kinsfolk. Though his spiritual family, the disciples, sometimes coexisted harmoniously with his natural family (e.g., at Cana, and again before Pentecost in the upper room), there was also tension between them. To the relatives in Nazareth it seemed that they had lost their son and cousin to the new family of the Twelve. The Nazarenes would have regarded Jesus’ kinship with their clan as giving them legitimate demands on his person. If, as seems natural to think, the account in Luke of Jesus’ initial preaching at Nazareth. implies a space of time between a first enthusiastic welcome (“All spoke well of him,” 4:22) and a subsequent rejection, the reason may be that the son of Joseph preferred now to work down at Capharnaum with the fishermen, whereas for centuries it was they, the clan of the Nazarenes, the Davidides, who had been divinely elected.

The result was an open breach with his kinsfolk, and even an attempt at assassination (Luke 4:24). However, as we can see when his brethren tried to persuade him to go to Jerusalem for the feast of Tabernacles on the ground that he had disciples there also (John 7:3), some links were still maintained. John reports, though, that these brethren did not really believe in Jesus: they offered him their admiration and counsel but not their discipleship. Looking ahead, we can say that not till Calvary was the tension between the two groups — the spiritual family and the natural family — fully overcome. That was when Jesus gave his mother into the keeping of the “beloved disciple.” By Pentecost, the families were united, Peter heading the Twelve and James, “the brother of the Lord,” heading the clan. Paul records in 1 Corinthians 15:1-7 that the risen Jesus appeared precisely to these two leaders, one of whom became head of the universal Church, the other that of the Church of the Jewish Christians in Israel itself.

Jesus’ Message And John The Baptist’s
By the end of the first year of the ministry it was clear that Jesus’ message differed from that of the Baptist in two respects. First, he placed less emphasis on the negative moment of God’s judgment of Israel and more on the positive moment, soon to be realized, of her restoration. Second, he stressed the concomitant salvation of all the other nations for whom Israel was meant to be a light. In his public preaching, Jesus proclaimed God as not only judge but Savior. He spoke of salvation as not simply the result of human decision and effort but also as the gift of God. Indeed, he spoke of the human decision for salvation and the effort to gain it as part and parcel of that very gift. The only thing he asked was that this gift of salvation be accepted as a total gift — in other words, in the most radical poverty of spirit, something which went against the grain of the Jewish religious parties in his day, who preferred to rely on their own works, and notably the observance of the Old Testament Law. This aspect of his teaching, exemplified in the parable of the two men who went up to the Temple to pray, would be especially well understood by Paul.

Salvation
But what was this “salvation” that Jesus held out to his hearers, and saw his own preaching as inaugurating? He saw it as the coming of a new paradise, as is made clear by his sayings on marriage. Divorce is now prohibited, for the norm of paradise is restored, and this is possible because a cure for human hardness of heart (the problem that had led the Old Testament to allow divorce) is now to hand. Thanks to Jesus’ presence and influence, the disciples are becoming changed people. The rigor of Jesus’ ethical demands upon them (no hatred, no lustful thoughts) only makes sense on the understanding that human nature is being transformed, thanks to communion with Jesus.

That this was not self-delusion was shown in the miraculous signs of salvation Jesus worked. The exorcisms he carried out were meant to point to God’s imminent triumph over evil, the dawning of his reign. The miracles of healing and such nature miracles as the calming of the storm and the multiplication of the loaves and fishes point to the restoration of physical nature, its harmonization with what is good for human beings, and a superabundant fulfillment for the life of the old creation.

The coming about of the reign of God, at which Jesus aimed in his public teaching and action, had, then, its cosmic aspect, but its center lay in the relations of persons to God. In his table fellowship with sinners, regarded by the Jews of the day as ritually unclean, Jesus reversed the hitherto normal biblical order by putting communion before conversion. Without acquiescing in the sins of these reprobate characters, Jesus first of all extended fellowship to them in the Father’s name, and that turned out to trigger repentance and so conversion.

His extraordinary freedom displayed itself not in an abstract criticism of accepted standards but in making himself accessible to those who needed him, regardless of conventional limitations. The meals he took with the disreputable he regarded as anticipation of the banquet between God and humanity at the end of time. That Jesus understood this offer of communion with God through him as including (eventually) the Gentiles is shown by the parable of the mustard seed which grows into a great shrub in which birds can rest. “Birds” was, at the time, a common metaphor for the Gentiles; “nesting” was a technical term for their eschatological assimilation to Israel.

What can we conclude then on the basis of the public or exoteric teaching and actions of Jesus? That his proclamation of the reign of God was aimed at bringing about the actual communication of that reign as a new paradise in which, most importantly, human nature, thanks to his presence and influence, is transformed. Miraculous signs attest that this is actually happening as evil is depotentiated, human bodies and psyches healed, the maladjustment of natural forces to human happiness rectified, and the created order itself transcended in enacted symbols of ultra-fruitfulness.

The transformation of the human being by the grace of God is also symbolized by the offer of table fellowship, and Jesus predicts that his preaching, even though it sparked few conversions, will be the means for the entry of the Gentiles into the salvation promised in the first instance to Israel. We can add that, because this program necessarily involved the restoration and integration of the depressed elements in society — the poor, the sick, the simple — a later age whose own outlook was sociological and humanistic rather than metaphysical and religious could misconstrue Jesus as a social reformer.

Posted in Fr. Aidan Nichols | Tagged Biblical Infancy Narratives As Midrash, Fr. Aidan Nichols, Jesus and Demons, Jesus and John the Baptist, Jesus Before His Public Ministry, Jesus' Background, Jesus' Birth, Jesus' Family, Jesus' Message And John The Baptist’s, Jesus' Relation With His Kinsfolk, Jesus’ Ministry, Salvation, the Historical Jesus, The Nature of Jesus' Teachings | Leave a Comment »

Paying Attention To The Sky

Archive for January, 2010

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