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The God of Jesus Christ — by Jean Daniélou

March 14, 2012

God the Father (top), and the Holy Spirit (represented by a dove) depicted above Jesus, painting by Francesco Albani 1600s

The Mosaic revelation, as compared with the cosmic revelation, represents a great advance in the knowledge of the true God; but it represents, nevertheless, nothing more than a stage. It is only in Jesus Christ that the hidden God is truly revealed: “No man hath seen God at any time: the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.” [John 1:18]

The Epistle to the Hebrews describes the sequence of revelations: “God, who, at sundry times and in divers manners, spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets, last of all, in these days hath spoken to us by his Son.” [Hebrews 1:1-2] This revelation is that of the last days, after which there can be no further manifestations, for God has expressed his fullness in the Word.

The object of this revelation is the Trinity of Persons — that is, strictly speaking, the mystery of God, wholly inaccessible to human reason, hidden in darkness. All forms of knowledge and all comparisons that we bring to bear on this subject are deceiving, even those of the greatest theologians. They are justified in the sight of reason only insofar as they more or less clarify its apophatic nature, hidden as it is, and transcending all reason. For it will always remain true that the requirement of human reason, when it follows its inclination, is that of reducing everything to unity and seeing in all differences a secondary, subsidiary stage.

This is so true that theologians like Eckhardt have tended to see in the Trinity a manifestation of primordial, unfathomable unity. But in reality the paradox is that the Three is as primitive as the One. It participates in the structure of absolute Being. Without doubt the master key to Christian theology, which distinguishes it utterly from all rational theodicy, is contained in the statement that the Trinity of Persons constitutes the structure of Being, and that love is therefore as primary as existence.

At the same time, this inaccessible mystery is the whole of Christianity — not merely a single aspect, but its very essence. For Christianity is the appeal addressed to man by the Father, inviting him to share in the life of the Son through the gift of the Spirit. This constitutes the very essence of Christianity. The first words that a child hears the Church speak over him are: “I baptize you in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” He is thrown, as a creature of flesh and blood, into the abyss of Trinitarian life, to which all life and all eternity will have no other object than to accustom him. It is in the gift that it makes of its own life that the Trinity at the same time communicates and reveals itself, estranging man from his own ways and views in order to transfer him into itself.

Thus it remains true of this supreme revelation of God that, as we said of the preceding revelations, it is through his action in the world and in man that God makes himself known. Here again, Scripture confronts us with facts; and it is on these facts that theology is to reflect. But while the Old Testament showed us God the One making a covenant with Israel and drawing it away from idols, the New Testament confronts us with God the Three revealed in Jesus Christ.

This progressive revelation corresponds to a course of divine instruction, whose development Gregory of Nazianzen has well described: “The Old Testament has clearly, though darkly, revealed the Father and the Son. The New Testament has revealed the Son and provided a glimpse of the divinity of the Holy Spirit. Now the Holy Spirit dwells among us and is revealed more clearly.” [Theological Discourses, v, 2] It was first necessary that faith in the unity of God, in monotheism, should be profoundly rooted in a human race always inclined toward polytheism, in order that, at the heart of that unity, the Trinity of Persons could be revealed without any danger. This revelation of the oneness of God fills the Old Testament to overflowing. The New Testament reveals chiefly the divinity of the Word. According to the excellent view of Gregory, the revelation of the Holy Spirit fills the time of the Church, which is the manifestation of its mighty works.

Gregory of Nazianzen continues by saying, “It was necessary to proceed by successive perfectings, by `degrees’, in David’s phrase; it was necessary to advance from radiance to radiance, through ever more luminous movements of advance, in order that the light of the Trinity might finally be seen to shine forth.” The brightness of the Trinity is such that man’s sight could not have borne it. According to the ancient view of Irenaeus, it was necessary that God should acclimatize man gradually to the vision of his unendurable glory.

The light that blazes from the countenance of the Father is already too overwhelming a sight for men of flesh and blood. It is by gradual stages that the divinity of the Word appears darkly in the Old Testament, and clearly in the Gospel. The Holy Spirit in its turn crowns the education of mankind with the Trinitarian vision. Thus man goes on from glory to glory, and the whole history of salvation may be considered as a gradual unveiling of the ineffable Trinity.

But if the New Testament alone gives us knowledge of the Three Persons, at the same time it throws light upon the wholeness of God’s plan and displays it as being entirely the work of the Trinity. It appears, in fact, to be a history of the divine missions; all the works of God are fulfilled by the Three Persons, but each acts in a particular manner. St. Irenaeus explains this clearly when he writes, “The Father is well pleased and commands, the Son works and creates, the Spirit nourishes and gives increase, and man moves little by little towards perfection.” [Against Heresies., iv, 38, 3] The Father is He who sends; the Word and the Spirit are sent. Thus the divine missions are like a reflection of the eternal relationships between the Persons; their economy appears as theology, and it is through this epiphany of the Trinitarian life that man glimpses something of its eternal existence.

So again we follow the very order of revelation, when we begin our account of the Trinity of Persons with their action in the world. The New Testament is in fact essentially a testimony borne to this action; it shows us Christ, who is God, and who is distinct from the Father; it shows us the Spirit, who is God since he bestows the life of God, and who is sent by the Father and the Son. It is through the divine works carried out by the Three Persons that theology is to discover little by little, in an endless task of contemplation, what they are in themselves. That is why we shall speak of the Trinity as revealed in Scripture — above all as a series of missions. Later we shall develop theologically the mystery of their relationship. Before speaking in particular of the Word and the Spirit, we shall speak of these missions in general.

They begin, we said, with creation. All is the work of the Three Persons. St. John says of the Word, “All things were made by him” [John 1:3] and the Epistle to the Hebrews, in the sequel to the passage we quoted above, declares that God “in these days hath spoken to us by his Son, whom he bath appointed heir of all things.” [Hebrews 1:2] Against the Gnostics, who contrasted the God of creation with the God of redemption, St. Irenaeus insists on the unity of God’s plan. Christ is that same Word of God who created the world and man in the beginning, and who, in the fullness of time, came down to earth to reawaken his creature, to restore him and grant him incorruptibility.

We have already had occasion to encounter the theme of creation, both in relation to cosmic religion and to Mosaic revelation. But each of these revelations shows us new wonders. On the level of cosmic religion, the theme appeared as a sign of the fundamental distinction between God and the creature, and of the creature’s subsistence in his basic dependence on God. On the level of Mosaic revelation, we encountered the theme as the first phase in the history of salvation, of God’s plan which began with time (since it is time itself), but whose content remained veiled. From the beginning, the Three Persons created in their own image a human being, called to share in their life and to be led by them into Paradise.

Thus the light of the New Testament comes to illuminate, retrospectively, the Old. In Origen’s phrase, it “whitens the fields of the Scriptures for the harvest,”[Commentary Job., XIII, 46] by bringing forth what was only a seed. In the beginning, says St. Irenaeus, the gift of the Spirit was still tentative, for the hand of God, which is the Word, had not yet grasped man in that everlasting grip which was to be known one day as the Incarnation.

But meanwhile these beginnings of mankind were bathed in a supernatural light, and the artists of the Middle Ages were right to show us Adam and Eve talking with the Three Persons. Since man appeared, formed by the Three Persons, he has been called to share in their life. Paradise is the place where the divine energy is at work, and where that tree of life is to be found which communicates incorruptibility. In all this there is a foreshadowing of the Church.

This is expressed by the Fathers of the Church in the doctrine of “man created in the image and likeness of God”. Faithful to the literal meaning of the biblical text, Athanasius and Gregory of Nyssa do not see in the image and likeness two different realities, but two aspects of the same reality. [R. Bernard, L'Image de Dieu d'apres SaintAthanase, pp. 22-38; Jean Danielou, Platonisme et theologie mystique, pp. 48-61.] For them, this reality is not reason, which is simply nature, but that sharing in the life of the Trinity which is grace.

Made in the image of the only begotten Son, who is the perfect image of the Father, the first Adam is already called in the Son to be the child of the Father and the temple of the Spirit. Thus the creation of man appears, in the light of the New Testament, already to be plunged in the sphere of Trinitarian grace.

The history of God’s people, Israel, in its turn sheds fresh light on the subject, for it becomes the place of the magnalia of the Trinity [vocab: the magnalia dei, the great deeds God has done for us in creation and redemption.]. For if it is the shape of God’s total plan that it should be through the Word and the Spirit that the Father should accomplish his mysterious designs, this was also true in the time of the Old Covenant. St. Paul already states this when he shows us in the desert rock, from which a stream arises, a foretelling of Christ — that is, an act of the Word in the history of the world. St. Irenaeus is faithful to this spirit when he sees in the history of Israel the action of the Word and the Holy Spirit, by whom man was created, and who acclimatize him gradually to the life of the Trinity in order to prepare him for that inwardness of human and divine nature that is to be fulfilled in due time in the Incarnation. In this way the Fathers of the Church acknowledged the theophanies of the Old Testament as revelations of the Word.

No one has expressed this view more profoundly than St. Irenaeus. “All the visions of the Old Testament”, he writes, “represent the Son of God speaking with men and living in their midst. He did not leave the human race, but remained with them, foretelling what must happen and teaching men the things of God. Thus He foreshadowed in our terms, and showed us through imagery, what was to come.” [The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, V] So, like creation, the covenant shines, in the light of the Old Testament, with the brightness of the Trinity. We said that the covenant foreshadowed the Incarnation, insofar as it was a sign of a God who comes to meet man and establish with him a living kinship. But now, to be more accurate, it is the Word of God who, according to Irenaeus, foreshadows his Incarnation by making himself familiar with the ways of men.

This familiarizing of the Word of God with the ways of men prepares for the Incarnation, insofar as the latter is a movement of God toward man. But Irenaeus notices, too, another aspect: the Word of God at the same time familiarizes man with the things of God, in order to make him fit to enter, through the Incarnation, into full communion with him: “God created man from the beginning, because of His munificence; He chose the patriarchs for their salvation; He educated His restless people, by teaching them to serve God; He sent His prophets into the world, accustoming man to bear His Spirit and live in communion with God.” [Against Heresies, IV, 14, 2]

And later Irenaeus says, “Thus the Word of God, traversing all times, educated His people, calling them through secondary things to primary things, through imagery to reality, through things temporal to things eternal, through the carnal to the spiritual.” [Against Heresies, IV, 14, 3]

But only the light of Christianity enables us to see in the Old Testament this manifestation of the Trinity, whereas it is the very subject matter of the New Testament, whose purpose is to bear witness to the Incarnation of the Word and the outpouring of the Spirit, and which through these two missions teaches us to distinguish them from the Father. All these mysteries of Christ appear as the work of the Three Persons. St. Luke shows us the Holy Spirit descending on Mary to arouse in her the humanity of Christ, and St. John shows us the Word of God becoming “flesh”, that is, taking human nature.

It is the Spirit who leads Zechariah to the Temple and Jesus to the desert. It is he whom the Incarnate Word, present in Mary, shows forth in John the Baptist at the Visitation. Above all, the Three Persons appear in the great theophany of the Baptism, when the voice of the Father bears witness that Christ, who plunges in the waters of Jordan, is his beloved Son, while the Spirit descends upon him in the likeness of a dove. On two further occasions, the voice of the Father is to bear witness to Christ — at two solemn moments, that of the Transfiguration, and that of the Agony, according to St. John.’ [John 12:27-28]

This revelation, which remains veiled in the Synoptics, appears in all its fullness in St. John’s Gospel. The only begotten Son, distinct front the Father, shares completely in his divine nature: “I and the Father are one.” The work of salvation is the joint work of the Father and the Son: “For the Father loveth the Son, and sheweth him all things which himself doth.” [John 5:20]

The Son is sent by the Father. He fulfills the work that the Father has given him. His mission is to make known the Father and communicate his life. But, as he does nothing save with the Father, he who sees him sees the Father, and he who believes in him has eternal life. Thus, through the mission of the Word, the Trinity of Persons is revealed at the same time as their unity; eternal life, which is the life of God, draws near to man through him, to take hold of man and awaken him.

For this work of redemption is not only Threefold insofar as it leads mankind, through the mediation of Jesus, to share in the life of the Three Persons; it is the mystery of filial adoption that is the boundary of the divine work, that design hidden in God which St. Paul describes: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath … [chosen] us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and unspotted in his sight in charity … hath predestinated us unto the adoption of children through Jesus Christ unto himself, according to the purpose of his will: unto the praise of the glory of his grace.” [Ephesians 1:3-6] This adoption as children, accomplished in substance by the Incarnation of the Word, is conveyed by the gift of the Spirit, which is “the spirit of adoption of sons, whereby we cry: Abba (Father).” [Romans 8:15]

This outpouring of the Spirit is granted in baptism. The time of the Church continues to be that of the great works of the Trinity. These are the sacraments that are strictly divine works, effecting a divine life in man. Thus in the time of the Church the Trinity continues to be revealed through its works. Baptism, as St. Paul has shown, conforms man to the death and Resurrection of Christ. [Romans 6:3] Thus he conveys spiritual life to man through the gift of the Spirit; and man is led through baptism to intimate contact with the Father, in the freedom of the sons of God. Thus to be a Christian is to be born into the life of the Trinity, which is the incorruptible life of God, possessed by the Three Persons and conveyed by them in a pattern of incomprehensible love.

None has described better than St. Irenaeus this birth in the Trinity:

When we are born again through baptism in the Name of the Three Persons, we are enriched, by a second birth, with the good things that are in God the Father, by means of His Son, with the Holy Spirit. Those who are baptized receive the Spirit of God, who gives them to the Word, that is, the Son; and the Son takes them and offers them to the Father, and the Father grants them incorruptibility.

Therefore without the Holy Spirit we cannot see the Word of God, and without the Son no one can come to the Father; since the knowledge of the Father is the Son, and the knowledge of the Son of God is gained by means of the Holy Spirit; but it is the Son whose function it is to distribute the Holy Spirit, according to the good pleasure of the Father, to those whom the Father chooses and in the way that the Father chooses.
Against Heresies, IV, 20, 7

But all this is a mystery that is wholly spiritual and forbidden to carnal man. Only the Holy Spirit gives us understanding of it. Carnal man has no means of grasping it by himself. This is why it remains alien to him, since it is in truth alien to him; yet the reality of the Trinity is revealed through this very strangeness. It is the hidden life of the transcendent God; and if it became accessible to carnal man it would not be one and the same.

In conveying it to man, the Trinity remains a mystery. It is not to man that it adapts itself, it is man whom it raises above himself and adapts to itself. This is why the Christian life, which is the life of the Trinity, is itself an incomprehensible mystery and a stumbling block to those who see it from outside. The darkness that conceals the Trinity from profane sight also conceals from it the mysterious acts of the Trinity in the soul of the saints.

Just as it is through the covenant that the ways of the living God are revealed to us, and that he appears to us as justice, truth, and love, so it is through adoption that the Persons are revealed to us as Father, Son, and Spirit.

Posted in Fr. Jean Daniélou, The Trinitarian God | Tagged Against Heresies, Gregory of Nazianzen, St. Irenaeus, The God of Jesus Christ, the Trinity of Persons | Leave a Comment »

“Why I Chose Love As The Theme Of My First Encyclical” by Pope Benedict XVI

March 2, 2012

The image reproduced above is a detail of the mosaics that decorate the Pope’s private chapel “Redemptoris Mater.” The mosaics were completed in 1999. The artist who created them is Marko Ivan Rupnik, a Slovenian Jesuit. The detail depicts the Good Samaritan. In the preface to the encyclical, Benedict XVI cites him as follows: “God's eros is love that has created man and that bends before him, as the Good Samaritan bent before the wounded man, victim of thieves, who was lying on the side of the road that went from Jerusalem to Jericho.”

The cosmic excursion in which Dante wants to involve the reader in his “Divine Comedy” ends before the everlasting light that is God himself, before that light which at the same time is the love “which moves the sun and the other stars” (Paradise XXXIII, verse 145). Light and love are but one thing. They are the primordial creative power that moves the universe.

If these words of the poet reveal the thought of Aristotle, who saw in the eros the power that moves the world, Dante’s gaze, however, perceives something totally new and unimaginable for the Greek philosopher.

Eternal light not only is presented with the three circles of which he speaks with those profound verses that we know: “Eternal Light, You only dwell within Yourself, and only You know You; Self-knowing, Self-known, You love and smile upon Yourself!” (Paradise XXXIII, verses 124–126).

In reality, the perception of a human face — the face of Jesus Christ – which Dante sees in the central circle of light is even more overwhelming than this revelation of God as Trinitarian circle of knowledge and love.

God, infinite light, whose incommensurable mystery had been intuited by the Greek philosopher, this God has a human face and – we can add – a human heart.

In this vision of Dante is shown, on one hand, the continuity between the Christian faith in God and the search promoted by reason and by the realm of religions; at the same time, however, in it is also appreciated the novelty that exceeds all human search, the novelty that only God himself could reveal to us: the novelty of a love that has led God to assume a human face, more than that, to assume the flesh and blood, the whole of the human being.

God’s eros is not only a primordial cosmic force, it is love that has created man and that bends before him, as the Good Samaritan bent before the wounded man, victim of thieves, who was lying on the side of the road that went from Jerusalem to Jericho.

Today the word “love” is so tarnished, so spoiled and so abused, that one is almost afraid to pronounce it with one’s lips.

And yet it is a primordial word, expression of the primordial reality; we cannot simply abandon it, we must take it up again, purify it and give back to it its original splendor so that it might illuminate our life and lead it on the right path.

This awareness led me to choose love as the theme of my first encyclical.

I wished to express to our time and to our existence something of what Dante audaciously recapitulated in his vision. He speaks of his “sight” that “was enriched” when looking at it, changing him interiorly (cfm Paradise XXXIII, verses 112-114).

It is precisely this: that faith might become a vision–comprehension that transforms us. I wished to underline the centrality of faith in God, in that God who has assumed a human face and a human heart.

Faith is not a theory that one can take up or lay aside. It is something very concrete: It is the criterion that decides our lifestyle.

In an age in which hostility and greed have become superpowers, an age in which we witness the abuse of religion to the point of culminating in hatred, neutral rationality on its own is unable to protect us. We are in need of the living God who has loved us unto death.

Thus, in this encyclical, the subjects “God,” “Christ” and “love” are welded, as the central guide of the Christian faith. I wished to show the humanity of faith, of which eros forms part, man’s “yes” to his corporeal nature created by God, a “yes” that in the indissoluble marriage between man and woman finds its rooting in creation.

And in it, eros is transformed into agape, love for the other that no longer seeks itself but that becomes concern for the other, willingness to sacrifice oneself for him and openness to the gift of a new human life. The Christian agape, love for one’s neighbor in the following of Christ, is not something foreign, put to one side or something that even goes against the eros; on the contrary, with the sacrifice Christ made of himself for man he offered a new dimension, which has developed ever more in the history of the charitable dedication of Christians to the poor and the suffering.

A first reading of the encyclical might perhaps give the impression that it is divided in two parts, that it is not greatly related within itself: a first, theoretical part that talks about the essence of love, and a second part that addresses ecclesial charity, with charitable organizations.

However, what interested me was precisely the unity of the two topics, which can only be properly understood if they are seen as only one thing.

Above all, it was necessary to show that man is created to love and that this love, which in the first instance is manifested above all as eros between man and woman, must be transformed interiorly later into agape, in gift of self to the other to respond precisely to the authentic nature of the eros.

With this foundation, it had then to be clarified that the essence of the love of God and of one’s neighbor described in the Bible is the center of Christian life, it is the fruit of faith.

Then, it was necessary to underline in a second part that the totally personal act of the agape cannot remain as something merely individual, but, on the contrary, it must also become an essential act of the Church as community: that is, an institutional form is also needed that expresses itself in the communal action of the Church.

The ecclesial organization of charity is not a form of social assistance that is superimposed by accident on the reality of the Church, an initiative that others could also take. On the contrary, it forms part of the nature of the Church.

Just as to the divine Logos corresponds the human announcement, the word of faith, so also to the agape which is God must correspond the agape of the Church, her charitable activity.

This activity, in addition to its first very concrete meaning of help to the neighbor, also communicates to others the love of God, which we ourselves have received. In a certain sense, it must make the living God visible. In the charitable organization, God and Christ must not be strange words; in fact, they indicate the original source of ecclesial charity. The strength of “Caritas” depends on the strength of faith of all its members and collaborators.

The spectacle of suffering man touches our heart. But charitable commitment has a meaning that goes well beyond mere philanthropy. God himself pushes us in our interior to alleviate misery. In this way, in a word, we take him to the suffering world.

The more we take him consciously and clearly as gift, the more effectively will our love change the world and awaken hope, a hope that goes beyond death.

Posted in Pope Benedict XVI, Understanding Dante | Tagged agape and love, Dante, Eros, Paradise XXXIII, the agape of the Church and God | Leave a Comment »

Theologian of Life in the Spirit: St. Gregory Of Nyssa

February 23, 2012

: Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335 – c. 395) (also known as Gregory Nyssen) was bishop of Nyssa from 372 to 376, and from 378 until his death. He is venerated as a saint in Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, Lutheranism and Anglicanism. Gregory, his brother Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus are collectively known as the Cappadocian Fathers.

Each of these lives seems to contain a life experience that Benedict XVI makes jump off the page for me.

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In the last chapters, I spoke of two great fourth-century Doctors of the Church, Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus, a bishop in Cappadocia, in present-day Turkey. Today, we are adding a third, St. Gregory of Nyssa, Basil’s brother, who showed himself to be a man disposed to meditation with a great capacity for reflection and a lively intelligence open to the culture of his time. He has thus proved to be an original and profound thinker in the history of Christianity.

Gregory was born in about 335. His Christian education was supervised with special care by his brother Basil, whom he called “father and teacher” (Epistle 13, 4: SC 363, 198), and by his sister Macrina. He completed his studies, appreciating in particular philosophy and rhetoric.

Initially, he devoted himself to teaching and was married. Later, like his brother and sister, he too dedicated himself entirely to the ascetic life. He was subsequently elected bishop of Nyssa and showed himself to be a zealous pastor, thereby earning the community’s esteem. When he was accused of embezzlement by heretical adversaries, he was obliged for a brief period to abandon his episcopal see but later returned to it triumphant and continued to be involved in the fight to defend the true faith.

Especially after Basil’s death, by more or less gathering his spiritual legacy, Gregory cooperated in the triumph of orthodoxy. He took part in various synods; he attempted to settle disputes between churches; he had an active part in the reorganization of the Church and, as a “pillar of orthodoxy,” played a leading role at the Council of Constantinople in 381, which defined the divinity of the Holy Spirit. Various difficult official tasks were entrusted to him by the Emperor Theodosius, he delivered important homilies and funeral discourses, and he devoted himself to writing various theological works. In addition, in 394, he took part in another synod, held in Constantinople. The date of his death is not known.

Gregory expressed clearly the purpose of his studies, the supreme goal to which all his work as a theologian was directed: not to engage his life in things but to find the light that would enable him to discern what is my worthwhile. He found this supreme good in Christianity, thanks to which “the imitation of the divine nature” is possible (De Professione Christiana: PG 46, 244c).

With his acute intelligence and vast philosophical and theological knowledge, Gregory defended the Christian faith against heretics who denied the divinity of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (such as Eunomius and the Macedonians) or compromised the perfect humanity of Christ (such as Apollinaris).

He commented on Sacred Scripture, reflecting on the creation of man. This was one of his central topics: creation. He saw in the creature the reflection of the Creator and found here the way that leads to God. But he also wrote an important book on the life of Moses, whom he presents as a man journeying toward God: this climb to Mount Sinai became for him an image of our ascent in human life toward true life, toward the encounter with God.

He also interpreted the Lord’s Prayer, the Our Father, as well as the Beatitudes. In his Great Catechetical Discourse (Oratio Catechetica Magna), he developed theology’s fundamental directions, not for an academic theology closed in on itself but in order to offer catechists a reference system to keep before them in their instructions, almost as a framework for a pedagogical interpretation of the faith.

Furthermore, Gregory is distinguished for his spiritual doctrine. None of his theology was academic reflection; rather, it was an expression of the spiritual life, of a life of faith lived. As a great “father of mysticism,” he pointed out in various treatises — such as his De Professione Christiana and De Perfectione Christiana — the path Christians must take if they are to reach true life, perfection. He exalted consecrated virginity (De Virginitate) and proposed the life of his sister Macrina, who was always a guide and example for him (cf. Vita Macrinae), as an outstanding model of it.

Gregory gave various discourses and homilies and wrote numerous letters. In commenting on human creation, he highlighted the fact that God, “the best artist, forges our nature so as to make it suitable for the exercise of royalty. Through the superiority given by the soul and through the very makeup of the body, he arranges things in such a way that malt is truly fit for regal power” (De Hominis Opificio 4: PG 44, 136b).

Yet we see that man, caught in the net of sin, often abuses creation and does not exercise true kingship. For this reason, in fact, that is, to act with true responsibility for creatures, he must be penetrated by God and live in his light.

Indeed, man is a reflection of that original beauty which is God: “Everything God created was very good,” the holy bishop wrote. And he added: “The story of creation [cf. Genesis 1:31) witnesses to it. Man was also listed among those very good things, adorned with a beauty far superior to all of the good things. What else, in fact, could be good, on par with one who was similar to pure and incorruptible beauty? ... The reflection and image of eternal life, he was truly good; no, he was very good, with the radiant sign of life on his face" (Homilia in Canticum 12: PG 44, 1020c). Human being was honored by God and placed above every other creature:

The sky was not made in God's image, not the moon, not the sun, not the beauty of the stars, no other things which appear in creation. Only you (human soul) were made to be the image of nature that surpasses every intellect, likeness of incorruptible beauty, mark of true divinity, vessel of blessed life, image of true light, that when you look upon it you become what he is, because through the reflected ray coming from your purity you imitate he who shines within you. Nothing that exists can measure up to your greatness.
(Homilia in Canticum 2: PG 44, 805d)

Let us meditate on this praise of the human being. Let us also see how man was degraded by sin. And let us try to return to that original greatness: only if God is present does man attain his true greatness. Man therefore recognizes in himself the reflection of the divine light: by purifying his heart he is once more, as he was in the beginning, a clear image of God, exemplary Beauty (cf. Oratio Catechetica 6: SC 453, 174). Thus, by purifying himself, man can see God, as do the pure of heart (cf. Matthew 5:8): "If, with a diligent and attentive standard of living, you wash away the bad things that have deposited upon your heart, the divine beauty will shine in you.... Contemplating yourself, you will see within you he who is the desire of your heart, and you will be blessed" (De Beatitudinibus 6: PG 44, 1272ab). We should therefore wash away the ugliness stored within our hearts and rediscover God's light within us. The Human goal is therefore the contemplation of God. In God alone can one find one's fulfillment.

To somehow anticipate this goal in this life, one must work ceaselessly toward a spiritual life, a life in dialogue with God. In other words -- and this is the most important lesson that St. Gregory of Nyssa its bequeathed to us -- total human fulfillment consists in holiness, in a life lived in the encounter with God, which thus becomes luminous also others and to the world.

A Theologian of Human Dignity
I present to you certain further aspects of the teaching of St. Gregory of Nyssa.

First of all, Gregory of Nyssa had a very lofty concept of human dignity. The human goal, the holy bishop said, is to liken oneself to God, and one reaches this goal first of all through the love, knowledge, and practice of the virtues, "bright beams that shine from the divine nature" (De Beatitudinibus 6: PG 44, 1272c), in a perpetual movement of adherence to the good like a corridor outstretched before oneself.

In this regard, Gregory uses an effective image already present in Paul's Letter to the Philippians: epekteinomenos (3:13), that is, "I press on" toward what is greater, toward truth and love. This vivid expression portrays a profound reality: the perfection we desire to attain is not acquired once and for all; perfection means journeying on; it is continuous readiness to move ahead because we never attain a perfect likeness to God; we are always on our way (cf. Homilia in Canticum 12: PG 44, 1025d).

The history of every soul is that of a love that fills every time and at the same time is open to new horizons, for God continually stretches the soul's possibilities to make it capable of ever greater goods. God himself, who has sown the seeds of good in us and from whom every initiative of holiness stems, "sculpts the block ... , and polishing and cleansing our spirit, forms Christ within us" (In Psalmos 2, 11: PG 44, 544b).

Gregory was anxious to explain: "In fact, this likeness to the divine is not our work at all; it is not the achievement of any faculty of man; it is the great gift of God bestowed upon our nature at the very moment of our birth" (De Virginitate 12, 2: SC 119, 408-10). For the soul, therefore, "it is not a question of knowing something about God but of having God within" (De Beatitudinibus 6: PG 44, 1269c). Moreover, as Gregory perceptively observes, "Divinity is purity, it is liberation from the passions and the removal of every evil: if all these things are in you, God is truly in you" (De Beatitudinibus 6: PG 44, 1272c).

When we have God in us, when one loves God, through that reciprocity which belongs to the law of love one wants what God himself wants (cf. Homilia in Canticum 9: PG 44, 956ac); hence, one cooperates with God in fashioning the divine image in oneself, so that "our spiritual birth is the result of a free choice, and we are in a certain way our own parents, creating ourselves as we ourselves wish to be, and through our will forming ourselves in accordance with the model that we choose" (Vita Moysis 2, 3: SC 1ff., 108). To ascend to God, one must be purified:

The way that leads human nature to heaven is none other than detachment from the evils of this world.... Becoming like God means becoming righteous, holy and good.... If, therefore, according to Ecclesiastes (5:1), "God is in heaven'," and if, as the Prophet says, "You have made God your refuge' (Psalm 73[72]:28), it necessarily follows that you must be where God is found, since you are united with him. Since he commanded you to call God “Father” when you pray, he tells you definitely to be likened to your Heavenly Father and to lead a life worthy of God, as the Lord orders us more clearly elsewhere, saying, “Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).
(De Oratione Dominica 2: PG 44, 1145ac)

In this journey of spiritual ascesis, Christ is the model and teacher; he shows us the beautiful image of God (cf. De Perfectione Christiana: PG 46, 272a). Each of us, looking at him, finds ourselves “the painter of our own life,” who has the will to compose the work and the virtues as his colors (De Perfectione Christiana.: PG 46, 272b). So, if man is deemed worthy of Christ’s name, how should he behave? This is Gregory’s answer: “[He must] always examine his own thoughts, his own words, and his own actions in his innermost depths to see whether they are oriented to Christ or are drifting away from him” (De Perfectione Christiana.: PG 46, 284c). And this point is important because of the value it gives to the word Christian. A Christian is someone who bears Christ’s name, who must therefore also liken his life to Christ. We Christians assume a great responsibility with baptism.

But Christ, Gregory says, is also present in the poor, which is why they must never be offended: “Do not despise them, those who lie idle, as if for this reason they were worth nothing. Consider who they are and you will discover wherein lies their dignity: they represent the person of the Savior. And this is how it is: for in his goodness, the Lord gives them his own person so that through it, those who are hard of heart and enemies of the poor may be moved to compassion” (De Pauperibus Amanidis: PG 46, 460bc). Gregory, as we said, speaks of rising: rising to God in prayer through purity of heart, but also rising to God through love of neighbor. Love is the ladder that leads to God. Consequently, Gregory of Nyssa strongly recommends to all his listeners: “Be generous with these brothers and sisters, victims of misfortune. Give to the hungry from what you deprive your own stomach” (De Pauperibus Amanidis.: PG 46, 457c).

Gregory recalls with great clarity that we all depend on God and therefore exclaims: “Do not think that everything belongs to you! There must also be a share for the poor, God’s friends. In fact, the truth is that everything comes from God, the universal Father, and that we are brothers and sisters and belong to the same lineage” (De Pauperibus Amanidis.: PG, 465b). The Christian should then examine oneself, Gregory insists further: “But what use is it to fast and abstain from eating meat if with your wicked puss all you do is to gnaw at your brother? What do you gain in God’s eyes from not eating your own food if later, acting unfairly, you snatch from their hands the food of the poor?”

Let us end our catechesis on the three great Cappadocian Fathers by recalling that important aspect of Gregory of Nyssa’s spiritual doctrine, which is prayer. To progress on the journey to perfection and to welcome God within him, to bear the Spirit of God within him, the love of God, man must turn to God trustingly in prayer: “Through prayer we succeed in being with God. But anyone who is with God is far from the enemy. Prayer is a support and protection of charity, a brake on anger, an appeasement and the control of pride. Prayer is the custody of virginity, the protection of fidelity in marriage, the hope for those who are watching, an abundant harvest for farmers, certainty for sailors” (De Oratione Dominica 1: PG 44, 1124ab).

The Christian always prays by drawing inspiration from the Lord’s Prayer: “So if we want to pray for the kingdom of God to come, we must ask him for this with the power of the Word: that I may be distanced from corruption, delivered from death, freed from the chains of error; that death may never reign over me, that the tyranny of evil may never have power over us, that the adversary may never dominate me nor make me his prisoner through sin but that your kingdom may come to me so that the passions by which I am now ruled and governed may be distanced, or better still, blotted out” (De Oratione Dominica., 3: PG 44, 1156d-57a).

Having ended his earthly life, the Christian will thus be able to turn to God serenely. In speaking of this, St. Gregory remembered the death of his sister Macrina and wrote that she was praying this prayer to God while she lay dying: “You who on earth have the power to take away sins, `forgive me, so that I may find refreshment’ [cf. Psalm 38:14], and so that may be found without blemish in your sight at the time when I am emptied from my body [cf. Colossians 2:11], so that my spirit, holy and immaculate [cf. Ephesians 5:27], may be accepted into your hands `like incense before you” (Psalm 141:[140]:2) (Vita Macrinae 24: SC 178, 224). This teaching of St. Gregory is always relevant: not only speaking of God but also carrying God within oneself. Let us do this by commitment to prayer and living in a spirit of love for all our brethren.

Posted in Great Teachers of the Ancient Church, Pope Benedict XVI | Tagged Becoming like God, Gregory of Nyssa, Human Dignity, man's original greatness, the soul's possibilities, the spiritual life, The story of creation | Leave a Comment »

The Philosophical Problem Of God Is A Limit Problem by Jean Daniélou

February 17, 2012

The paradox of philosophy, then, would seem to be that it is caught between two alternatives: either it is an assertion of the sufficiency of reason itself and a negation of God, or else it is an assertion of the sufficiency of God to himself and a negation of man. But the possibility of the coexistence of God and other things appears to be untenable. This brings us back to the problem of creation, which we must now examine more deeply.

The difficulty is as old as philosophy. We may say that it is the philosophical problem. Ancient thought had given two different answers. For Parmenides, only the One exists, and all multiplicity is an illusion. Thus God is affirmed, and the world is denied. This is what is called acosmism. In the Indian tradition it is the doctrine of Sankara, which drives Indian monism in the direction of world negation. Nothing ever existed but God alone; the rest is a dream from which one wakes, and philosophy is the awakening.

In face of acosmism [Vocab: Acosmism, in contrast to pantheism, denies the reality of the universe, seeing it as ultimately illusory, (the prefix "a-" in Greek meaning negation; like "un-" in English), and only the infinite unmanifest Absolute as real.This philosophy begins with the premise that there is only one real thing, and it is infinite, and non-dual; The Absolute. But the phenomenal reality of which we are normally aware is just the opposite: finite, and dualistic. And since the Absolute is the only reality, that means that everything that is not-Absolute cannot be real. Thus, according to this viewpoint, the phenomenal dualistic world is ultimately an illusion (maya to use the technical Indian term), irrespective of the apparent reality it possesses at the mundane or empirical level.], antiquity offers us another solution, that of pantheism, which, however, is in the last analysis only a less rigorous way of expressing the same concept. Here again creation does not exist, has no proper consistency. It is the unfolding of unity — or, in other words, being, which is one and is God, existing in a collected form, which is God, and in a dispersed form, which is the world. But it is enough for man to recollect himself, to pass from the divine that is in everything to the divine that is in hint. The rhythm of the life of man is thus identical with the rhythm of the cosmos, which is for him, too, expansion and contraction. This is the pantheism that in the West found expression in Spinoza.

The nineteenth century put the question differently. The development of the idea of progress led to the assignment of value to becoming and gave it a positive meaning. Reality is the perpetual arising of creative newness. Yet this appears to be annulled, and progress deprived of all creative value, in that everything super-exists preeminently in God.

Progress, then, does nothing but rediscover what has always been known and produce what has always existed. The preexistence of God seems to empty it of all content and necessarily leads to a philosophy of the eternal, which is the negation of the value of time. So modern pantheism, reversing the perspective, makes God not he who has always existed, but he who no longer exists. God, the absolute Mind of Hegel, is the end of history. History becomes theogenetics.

We may say that this constitutes the philosophy of the nineteenth century. Hegel gave it an idealist look. Strauss applies it to the history of religion. Becoming materialist with Marx, it retains none the less a religious basis, the idea of man the demiurge ofGod-humanity.

Teilhard de Chardin struggled to provide a version acceptable to Christians, but was only partially successful. We can estimate the extent to which it overflows the banks of systematic philosophy and has infected the structure of the modern spirit by reading this passage from Rilke:

“Why not prove that God is He who shall come, He who from all eternity must come, that He is the future, the completed fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? Don’t you think everything that happens is a beginning? Wouldn’t it be God’s beginning? What meaning could there be in our quest, if He whom we are looking for belonged already to the past?”
[Teilhard de Chardin, Lettres a un jeune poete, 1937]

In contemporary philosophy, this fundamental difficulty has found fresh expression in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Sartre, metaphysically elaborating the Nietzschean theme of the death of God as the condition for the existence of man, claims in the Preface to his Descartes that, existence being identical with creative liberty, man only exists if his free act is an absolute beginning, if no essence precedes existence. Les Mouches illustrates the theme in dramatic terms. Oreste exists only when he has killed Agamemnon. Merleau-Ponty in his turn criticizes the Christianity of transcendence and opposes to it what he calls a Christianity of incarnation, in which God becomes man, not in the Christian sense of the word, by remaining God, but by identifying himself with man. The existence of a God distinct from man seems to him incompatible with man’s existence, for man then becomes an object for God, and this annihilates him. God must therefore exist and man must not exist, or man must exist and God must not exist.

The existentialism of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty removes the obstacle in the sense of affirming man and denying God. It has its exact counterpart in the theology of Karl Barth, who renews the acosmism of Parmenides and Sankara. Taking up the solus Deus of Luther, he denounces all claims to human liberty, which seem to him usurpations of the absolute sovereignty of divine liberty. All that God does not work in man is nothingness. There is no knowledge of God except that which God works in the spirit, and any claim to a philosophical knowledge of God is idolatry and illusion. There are no virtues but those that the grace of God works in man, and any idea of merit, of a partnership of God with man in his salvation, is denounced as pride.

Man seems to Barth to be unworthy of damnation. Barth’s predestinationism leads, paradoxically, to a doctrine of universal salvation. Thus man is despoiled of the last thing that he imagined he could still call his own and subtract from the divine omnipotence: the right to go to hell in his own way. For, as Jouhandeau has well said, hell is the ultimate expression of the value of human liberty. To deny it is to say either that liberty is incapable of resisting effective grace or that sin is finally so absurd as not even to deserve punishment.

This reference to Barth draws our attention to the most striking aspect of the fundamental difficulty, which is that of the coexistence of the absolute power of God and of man’s divine liberty. But this is only an aspect of the problem. Let it be a question of the being of God and of the creature, of the power of God and of human liberty, and we are always brought up against the same difficulty.

For if God is all, does all, says all, where is a place to be found for anything else? Metaphysically, we can scarcely see how to justify its existence; we reach an apparently insoluble contradiction. Psychologically, human life seems tasteless, and man feels frustrated, dispossessed, expropriated.

Yet what appears to be a fundamental difficulty turns out to be a sign that we are working in the right direction. For in fact we are brought back to the principles that we stated at the outset. What really characterizes the problem of God, we were saying then, is that it is a limit problem — that it cannot be mastered by reason; and it is just through this that the reality of God comes to bear upon the problem in that which specifically constitutes him — that is, in the fact that he transcends reason.

Moreover, it is just to this that we are led by the fundamental difficulty. We are brought to the point of making two statements, which to all appearances are contradictory. On the one hand, all being loses itself in God; on the other, some being exists outside God. Or again, God determines everything, and yet human liberty determines itself. We are confronted here by a defect in logic, by the impossibility of making our two statements coincide; and they are both of the utmost importance.

Thus the error in all the answers we have found to the problem is just this, that they all fail to accept this opposition, and that they rule out one of the data in the problem. They boil down in the end to the claim of reason to master the difficulty. This is also true of the position of Barth, which returns finally to that of Parmenides, and which involves taking up a philosophical position contrary to analogy. Catholic theology has also made efforts to surmount the problem. We know what an important place the question of grace and liberty has held in its history. But finally these attempts have come to a checkmate; neither Banez nor Molina has found a satisfactory solution. This is a sign that we are really dealing with the mystery of God, which cannot be reduced to entire intelligibility by created mind, but remains fundamentally independent in a realm of sovereign subjectivity.

Yet there is more to be said. What characterizes limit problems is not only that they cannot be elucidated by reason, but that they compel us to leave the order of discourse, that they drive us toward conversion. Moreover, this is eminently true of the case we are considering. When Sartre and MerleauPonty say that the existence of God annihilates man, they are expressing something perfectly real. In that it means that God is the whole of being and that the whole of being comes into God, it means that man possesses nothing of himself; or rather the only thing proper to him is nothingness, for it is only the action of God that arouses him at every single moment from nothingness. Jacques Riviere felt this strongly when he said about sin: “This at least is really mine.” He was expressing in this way the fundamental truth that all goodness proceeds from God, just as all happiness does. What God asks of us is to let ourselves love through him, to agree to receive from him both being and goodness.

But this is what man refuses to do. For this acceptance is a confession of his utter poverty. It dispossesses him of everything. Moreover, man’s passion is to belong to himself. It is repugnant to him to acknowledge his complete dependence, to agree to receive himself at every single moment from another, to leave the entire initiative to God, to be able to hold fast only to something that exists before him and outside him, although this may be more himself than he is. This is why, when his metaphysical perspicacity brings him to acknowledge that all goodness comes from God, he revels in his sins; that all happiness comes from God, he revels in his misery; that all being comes from God, he revels in nothingness. For this is the only way for him to deny himself to God, if all that is comes from him, and if the acceptance of being involves the acknowledgment of his dependence.

But the fact that the being that I possess does not belong to me, but is received from another, does not mean, for all that, that this being does not exist. Such is precisely the condition of created being. There is no necessity in it, it is perfectly contingent, it introduces nothing new; and in this sense it is entirely gratuitous, or rather entirely under grace. I am not my own origin. Since my existence began, we have been two. My existence is in its very essence a relationship. I only subsist insofar as I am uttered by another. To acknowledge this fundamental dependence is simply to ratify what I am. I do not exist except insofar as I am loved. For me, to exist will be to love in my turn, to answer through grace to the action of grace.

Thus created being is not dispossessed of existence, as Sartre claims, but of the appropriation of existence. What I am dispossessed of is my will to self-sufficiency. From the beginning, I am drawn into the cycle of love, of grace and the action of grace. It is impossible for me to separate myself. I enter, then, into the region of “dissemblance”, according to the phrase of St. Bernard — that is, of nonbeing. By a remarkable paradox, it is in my will to sufficiency that I find destruction, while when I acknowledge my insufficiency, I assert my true self. The very notion of creature, which is correlative to the divine aseity [Aseity: (from Latin a "from" and se "self", plus -ity) refers to the property by which a being exists in and of itself, from itself, or exists as so-and-such of and from itself.The word is often used to refer to the Christian belief that God contains within himself the cause of himself, is the first cause, though many Jewish and Muslim theologians have also believed God to be independent in this way. Notions of aseity as the highest principle go back at least to Plato and have been in wide circulation since Augustine, though the use of the word 'aseity' began only in the Middle Ages.], can, then, be recognized only in that I accept myself existentially as a creature. And that, too, is a limit notion.

Thus we are led afresh to the idea of creation. It is this that expresses the tension between the existence of a God who exhausts in himself the possibilities of real being, and the existence of a reality before God, which yet has its own existence. But this idea represents a threshold on which philosophical thinking left to itself has never succeeded in standing upright. Gilson has correctly seen in this a category of Christian philosophy, insofar as it is only when relying on revelation that reason has accurately stated it. But even so, the idea remains mysterious. It is affirmed, but not plainly intelligible. It puts forward the two terms, but it does not grasp how they can coexist. Even this intelligibility is the expression, within the scheme of thought, of its reality in the order of existence.

What we said of the fundamental difficulty indicates, then, that it is at the same time the manifestation of the value of reason and of the limits of reason; and that it is just because it is both that it is the right way of putting philosophically the question of God. This applies to philosophy as a whole. It is altogether a threshold. Its supreme act is, therefore, to cross-examine itself, and to show by this means that the cross-examination, which affirms a realm beyond reason, is stipulated by reason.

Thus it will appear reasonable to affirm a revelation. A god whom reason dominated would be neither a personal god nor a transcendent god. It is by affirming at the same time that God exists and that he surpasses reason, that reason itself knows him to be God indeed. A more perfect knowledge of him would only be his free gift. He is subjective sovereignty, the darkness to which none is able to break through, but which is revealed when and how it wishes. And this is what we call the revelation.

Posted in Fr. Jean Daniélou, Philosophy | Tagged acosmism, created being, Karl Barth, limit problems, Teilhard de Chardin, the problem of creation | Leave a Comment »

The God Of True Philosophy by Jean Daniélou

February 16, 2012

Toward the end of his career, Rodin began to use giant hands in a series of original and idiosyncratic arrangements, with titles such as The Hand of God, The Hand of the Devil (1903), The Cathedral (1908), and The Secret (ca. 1910). The Hand of God (seen above) represents divine creation expressed in terms of the sculptor's art: the rough stone is both primeval matter and the sculptor's medium; the smooth, white emerging forms held by the hand are the bodies of the first man and woman, while the great, life-giving hand itself is a symbol of the original Creator, and, perhaps quite literally, of the sculptor as well. The Hand of God was another of Rodin's works that has had wide appeal, and there are numerous versions of it, both in marble and in bronze. This marble was commissioned from Rodin in 1906 by one of the Metropolitan Museum's trustees.

It remains for us to ask how the human mind can, by the sole light of intellect, rise to the knowledge of divine personality. The latter results from the absolute independence of God within being, from his aseity [vocab: God is self-existent, God has always been. Our Maker exists in an eternal, self-sustaining, necessary way necessary, that is, in the sense that God does not have it in Him to go out of existence, just as we do not have it in us to live forever. We necessarily age and die, because it is our present nature to do that; God necessarily continues forever unchanged, because it is His eternal nature to do that. This is one of many contrasts between creature and Creator]. In fact this being that necessarily exists, since it is necessary that there should be being which exists through itself, from the mere fact that it possesses existence in itself, is also necessarily a substance, because that is the very definition of substantial being. It is even the most perfect of substances — since the independence in being that defines substance is not complete in created substances (which are always at the same time dependent), it could only be from being that they receive existence; while in being, which is a se, there is, on the contrary, absolute sufficiency within itself to exist, a total independence within being.

It could not be a se without being, by the same token, in se. Every form of pantheism is hence excluded. The proper existence of the Creator is irreducibly distinguished from that which he communicates to his creature. Being subsists by essence in itself. “Ecce distinctio personalis: Ego sum qui sum.” [Summa Theologiae, Part I, q14., a2 and 2] God can say “I”.

We may notice, on the other hand, that the transcendence of a personal God is that of a spiritual and willing substance, one that not only subsists in itself, but moreover perfectly possesses itself through the will and perfectly knows itself through the intellect; it is the transcendence of a being who can say “I”. It follows, as we have said, that the divine personality participates, to a sovereign degree, in the “dignity” that attaches to the person as such, and which seems the first thing that comes to mind in the current use of the word; a person is contrasted with a thing in that it has a right to a certain respect. Pere de Grandmaison emphasizes this aspect when he defines the person as “a living, knowing, willing and loving ego whom one cannot, without doing him an injustice, treat as a thing, who cannot without revaluation be considered as such”.

If human personality implies this dignity, it is abundantly clear that, insofar as God has not been conceded personality, there is at least one sense, that of spiritual substance, in which man is not transcended. If God is not a person and man is one, insofar as he is a person, insofar as he judges and chooses; he escapes from the domain of God.

Perhaps it would be necessary to seek here for the deep reason that causes the wise men of this world to be reluctant to acknowledge God as a person. In fact it is for this reason that God deserves, to an infinite degree, that respect which we owe to a person as such — and which, in his case, is adoration. It is for this reason that we fundamentally depend on hint, not only in the physical, but in the moral order as well.

It is this — that it offends a person and violates the sacred rights of an infinite person — that underlies the gravity of moral evil and marks it off from physical evil. “Because man is a sovereign personality the notion of sin has meaning: to wound the order of that which is committed to the free-will of self-rule, is to wound God Himself.” [Jacques Maritain, Les Degrés du Savoir ]This also makes it clear, as Gilson remarks, that the true idea of moral good and evil only appeared with the clear idea of a personal God.

Divine personality expresses, above all, the infinite abyss that separates God from his creature. God is sufficient to himself, the whole creation lies before him as pure nothingness, it adds nothing to what he already is. But to this first aspect there is added a second, which seems at first sight to contradict it: the very attribute that succeeds in making God inaccessible is at the same time the one that will permit us to enter into a relationship with him. “This sovereign personality”, says Maritain, “is at once that which removes Him farthest from us — the inflexible infinite stands face to face with me, a wretched mortal — and at the same time brings Him nearest to us, since the incomprehensible purity has a countenance, a voice, and has set me before it so that I may gaze upon Him, so that I may speak to Him and He to me.” [The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, Etienne Gilson]

A new aspect now appears in the notion of personality. After incommunicability, communicativeness; after self-possession, self-giving. We have to determine to what extent philosophy is justified in seeing this as an element in the constitution of personality. But we should take good note of the fact that in the current usage of the word this aspect is as primitive as the previous one. The very name “person”, the Greek prosopon, signifies at the same time that a being has a face of his own, and also that he faces other people. A person faces other people, the universe, God; he holds converse with another person, communes or communicates with him according to intellect and affection.”

But the contrast between openness toward others and sufficiency toward himself, which personality implies, is only too apparent. Possession and giving are opposites when it comes to material objects, whose possession by one excludes possession by another, but it is no longer the same when it comes to spiritual personalities. Not only can they give themselves, commune with one another without ceasing to possess themselves, but it is this possession that they have of themselves that permits them to commune with one another, just as the understanding of oneself is, as Max Scheler rightly said, “the first condition requisite in order that a person may be able to make another person understand who he is”.

Let it not be objected either that human personality is often self-centered, for this refers rather to shortcomings entailed by its connection with individuality and with its material condition than to the very essence of personality. “The human person”, says Pere de Regnon, “is inclined to refer everything to himself, and to refer himself to himself. I shall leave it an open question whether this is a necessary constituent of his nature or a vicious defect…. Of God, the opposite is to be believed.

When it is said that God is personal, it seems that with his transcendence what is meant above all is that it is possible to enter into communication, into communion with him. It is just in this that the God of true philosophy is to be contrasted with the impersonal God of idealism, and even with the God of Aristotle and Plotinus, who is indifferent to the world. This prepares the way for the revelation of the God of Abraham who “speaks” to his people, who “governs” them, who enfolds them in his “love”.

Yet these are characteristics of personality as such. As Pere de Regnon profoundly says, ” `Saying’ and `loving’ are directed towards a person, and consequently issue from a person, as against `thinking’ and `willing,’ which are acts of nature considered as the principle of activity.” ” If speaking and loving signify communicating oneself to persons and are characteristics of personality, it seems we can say that the power at least to communicate oneself forms part of the conception of personality.

This explains how when we said that God is personal we meant not only that he infinitely transcends us, but moreover that he knows us and loves us. Whereas divine personality seemed to us just now to be the basis of true morality, it becomes now the foundation of religion, that is, of the connections that unite man to God, since it is the divine personality that makes God infinitely far from us, and at the same time enables us to commune with him. Because God is a person, we can speak to him and love him, just as he speaks to us and loves us. As the divine personality permits us to distinguish true philosophy from false, it now permits us to distinguish true religion from its substitutes. “All spirituality is a dialogue; a spirituality that is addressed to an anonymous impersonal companion proves itself by that very fact a lying witness.” [Jacques Maritain, Les Degrés du Savoir]

But it remains none the less true that philosophy knows in a very different manner what the divine personality reveals about incommunicability, and what it reveals about communication and relationship. Under the first aspect, philosophy knows it as a necessity; so this is what it really means when it says that God is personal. Under the second aspect, on the contrary, it knows it only as a possibility. Philosophy really knows nothing about communication in God except that which he makes to his creatures by existing.

Yet creation, being a strictly contingent fact, and not being in any way required by the divine essence, would not by any means permit us to conclude that it is of God’s essence to communicate himself and thus to make the gift of himself a constituent element in the divine personality. Once again we reach a limit problem, which reason puts forward but cannot solve. Only the revelation of the Trinity will provide the answer.

Philosophical statement about God consists, then, in saying with Pseudo-Dionysus that he is all that is, that he possesses in himself in a preeminent fashion the value of all that is. We may comment here that there is often a tendency to identify God with such an aspect of reality. It is thus that Plato ranges God on the side of mind, by contrast with the world of matter. But this is ambiguous. For if it is true that God is esprit, it remains true also that the world of bodies is not alien to him. But he possesses in himself in a preeminent fashion both that which creates the value of mind and that which creates the value of matter.

Christianity is not a spiritualism in the Platonic sense of the word, which identifies the divine with the sphere of spirit. But Christianity implies also a materialist aspect. This is of great practical consequence, for it is by not making this sufficiently clear that Christians may well have given the impression to men who have more to do with matter, and who respected its potentialities, that they were strangers to them.

We may make a similar comment on other ideas. It is commonly said that God is immovable, and it is right to say so. The meaning is that God is entirely detached from the vicissitudes of becoming, from change and evolution. But this runs the risk of giving the impression that God is on the side of immobility and security, that he is opposed to novelty, to motion. Yet, if there is perfection in rest, there is also perfection in motion. If on the human level motion is a sign of insufficiency and thus unworthy of God, this only represents a shortcoming. But in God motion exists in its preeminent value, as pure act, as intensity of life, as immanent activity. This is what Bergson clearly saw, when he contrasted the becoming of time with the immanent activity of the mind in pure duration.

Here again, Pseudo-Dionysus expresses this universal analogy with admirable courage. He shows that it is false to say that God is great, unless we add that he is small, for there is a perfection in smallness, just as there is a perfection in greatness. God possesses the one quality just as much as the other. He is as near to what is small as to what is great. “The Scriptures celebrate God as Great, and under the mode of Greatness, and yet they also speak of that divine littleness which is manifested in a puff of wind.” Equally, if it is true that God possesses the perfection of that which is identical, he also possesses that which is active. “He is stable and immobile, dwelling always in the same place, and yet mobile, since He radiates through all things.”

This amounts precisely to saying that there is no reality that does not abound preeminently in God, in that all the perfection that it has is a participation of God in the limitations that belong to created being. Thus what we love in any creature is only that which is reflected from him. The whole world of the soul and the angels is a book that speaks to us of God and awakes in us a thirst that only God can slake, for it cannot give us the fullness of that which it prompts us to desire. “If the world did not speak so much of you,” says Claudel, “my weariness would not be so great.” It is this search for God among the creatures that are only his reflection, which is described in the Confessions of St. Augustine: “Beauty so old and so new, late have I loved you. You were within me and I was outside myself, and there it was that I sought you; I scattered myself among your works, and I withered at the touch of their beauty; and those things kept me far from you, which would not be themselves if they did not rest in you.”

Not only does all being exist preeminently in God, but it exists in him in a sufficient manner, that is, in an absolute fullness that exhausts every possibility. Plato had already noted this feature of divine being, when he said that God is without needs (anendees), that he is absolutely self-sufficing, since he expresses in himself the fullness of that which is; therefore he can receive nothing, he abides only in himself. This is the “aseity” that distinguishes him utterly from the creature, whose essence is to receive its being from another. Equally, God’s will is fully satisfied and fulfilled within himself, in the perfect possession of his fullness. Therefore he who possesses him possesses all in him. As Catherine of Genoa says, “He who desires some thing loses what he desires, to know God, who is all things.”

But it must be added that all this exists in God in a transcendent manner, that after having asserted that he possesses the being of all things, we must deny it, for God possesses this being in a manner utterly other than that in which he exists in created things; and this manner is entirely inconceivable to us; we can only assert it. He is not the being of all; he is the being who is beyond all, not through essence, but super-essence — according to a word dear to Pseudo-Dionysus — and “the unknowing of that super-essence, which surpasses reason, thought and essence, such should be the object of super-essential science”.

But this super-essential science is no longer philosophy. Only faith, which is participation in the knowledge of that which God himself knows, penetrates that darkness and knows God not only as he who is all, but as he who transcends all, not only the same, but the utterly other, not other than love but yet (to use a phrase of Pere Henri de Lubac) an otherness of love.

Finally, what philosophy can assert of God is that he is preeminently the being in whom the reality of all things is exhausted. But even this assertion will be the source of what we may well call the fundamental difficulty of philosophy, which no philosophy has entirely succeeded in overcoming, without the light of revelation. This difficulty is that, if God exhausts reality in himself, we cannot see how there can exist and how there does exist any other thing than he.

Posted in Fr. Jean Daniélou, Philosophy, Understanding Personalism | Tagged Being, Divine personality, God is immovable, God is Personal, Jacques Maritain, prosopon, Pseudo-Dionysus, the power to communicate oneself, the transcendence of a being who can say "I" | 1 Comment »

The Divine Person — Cardinal Jean Daniélou S.J.

February 15, 2012

Cardinal Jean Guénolé Louis Marie Daniélou Daniélou S.J., was a one of the Twentieth Century's most renowned Theologians, a keen Historian, and Member of the Académie Française.

We continue Fr. Daniélou’s essay on the God of the Philosophers. He deals with the concept of “person” and how it relates to the divine, particularly how it needs to overcome the obvious anthropomorphism that it appears to contain.

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We have tried to make clear the status of the philosophical knowledge of God within the Christian scheme, and we arrive at a twofold result: reason can know God’s existence when it operates in the region that alone is real, that of existent being, and when, leaving contingent existence behind, it links it again to God as a personal existent. This implies an existential relationship between reason and perception; by reflecting on itself as an existent subject, reason comes to acknowledge its relationship to an existent transcendent subject who is God.

But for all that, it does not grasp who this God is. He is the object of a statement, not of an intuition. His existence is stated, but his ousia remains unknowable — and that precisely is the heart of the matter. For reason, to know God is to state the existence of the unknowable, that is, the existence of that which transcends its knowledge; and it is clear that the claim to know “what” this unknowable “is” would be the denial of its essence. This would put it in the world of that which is on the level of reason, and it would then be no longer a question of God. That is the core of the paradox of the knowledge of God, that is what makes it an order apart, on the frontiers of knowledge and non-knowledge.

But we must establish that the concourse of philosophies has proved its inability to remain on this narrow frontier, and that they almost always run to one excess or another. Exaggerating the non-knowledge of God, they will arrive either at agnosticism, which refuses to say anything about him, even that he exists, and maintains a questioning position, or at atheism, which denies the existence of that which lies beyond the light of reason. Or, exaggerating knowledge, they will claim to possess God’s essence; but the God whom they think they know is only their own mind, so they run either into rationalism, which reduces God to the measure of the intelligible realities of the mind, or into pantheism, which makes him the immanent inward being of all reality, the primordial unity of all things. In each of these ways they fail to reach him as a person, therefore it is not he whom they reach.

Must we, then, resign ourselves to saying nothing about God without making an attempt to define his transcendence? At first sight, yes. To affirm God is surely in effect to affirm that he is nothing that falls within the field of our experience, that he is altogether Other; and it remains true that this is the first thing we must say about him. The great patristic theologians rightly insisted on this incomprehensibility of the divine essence, against the Christian NeoPlatonist Eunonius, who declared that the notion of unbegotten, agennetos, was an adequate concept of the divine essence. Those against him, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, Cyril of Jerusalem, were never weary of affirming that the divine ousia was a mystery inaccessible to human reason.

But in face of this, it is true also that, if we cannot directly know, by an immediate intuition, the divine nature, something of it is accessible to our intellect through the created world. We have already seen, in relation to cosmic religion, that visible realities are hierophanies of God, and that the human soul is his created image. This is true of all the realities of this world. Thus each of them tells us something about God. Having said that we can say nothing about him, we must now say that we can say an infinite number of things about him. We find here once again the paradox that is always presented by the knowledge of God. We must at the same time deny everything about him and affirm everything about him. It is this union of positive and negative theology that gives us the true knowledge of God.

No writer has shown this better than Pseudo-Dionysus. “Thus instructed,” he says,

the theologians praise it by every name — and as the Nameless One. For they call it nameless when they speak of how the supreme Deity, during a mysterious revelation of the symbolical appearance of God, rebuked the man who asked, “What is your name?” and led him away from the knowledge of the divine name by countering, “Why do you ask my name, seeing it is wonderful?” This surely is the wonderful “name which is above every name” and is therefore without a name. It is surely the name established “above every name that is named either in this age or in that which is to come.”

And yet on the other hand they give it many names, such as “I am being,” “life,” “light,” “God,” the “truth.” These same wise writers, when praising the Cause of everything that is, use names drawn from all the things caused: good, beautiful, wise, beloved, God of gods, Lord of Lords, Holy of Holies, eternal, existent, Cause of the ages. They call him source of life, wisdom, mind, word, knower, possessor beforehand of all the treasures of knowledge, power, powerful, and King of Kings, ancient of days, the unaging and unchanging, salvation, righteousness and sanctification, redemption, greatest of all and yet the one in the still breeze.

They say he is in our minds, in our souls, and in our bodies, in heaven and on earth, that while remaining ever within himself he is also in and around and above the world, that he is above heaven and above all being, that he is sun, star, and fire, water, wind, and dew, cloud, archetypal stone, and rock, that he is all, that he is no thing.
Treatise on the Divine Names, I, 6. Translation by Coins Lulbheid, PseudoDionysius: The Complete Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1987)

So we can understand the remark of that old Christian who said to Origen, “It is always dangerous to speak of God.” For every time I say something about him, I must immediately say the opposite. In fact, there is a great danger of picturing God in the image of man. This anthropomorphic representation of God arouses difficulties in many minds. They rightly reject a representation of God that seems to them to bring him down to human realities.

But if I say nothing of God, I thus betray my mission as a theologian. To speak of him I must use words borrowed from human experience and proclaim his love or his beauty, while knowing how much these expressions lend themselves to equivocation. Such is the tragic position of the theologian, who must speak of what is beyond speech. Such, too, is the difficulty of using analogies. I shall give only one example of this, but it is a crucial one — the possibility, for reason, of knowing that God is personal. I mean by this that he possesses preeminently the perfection that personality on the human level constitutes. Even the idea of impersonal mind is a contradiction. The person seems to be the supreme value on the human level, and therefore it must needs exist in God.

This, then, is an essential truth; one is all the more struck by the fact that most philosophers have overlooked or misunderstood it. The Ancients seem hardly to have reached it. This is certainly true of Indian philosophy, which has never been able to bear the idea of divine transcendence; and if Plato or Plotinus glimpsed something of divine personality, they never expressed it clearly. It is after the revelation that philosophy was able to make this ultimate progress in the natural knowledge that it could have of God. “Theoretically,” writes Borne with justice, “reason could have risen by her own efforts to the notion of a personal God; but in fact it was necessary for her attention to be attracted by faith towards charity, in order that she might concern herself with what she already knew implicitly, that God is a person.” [E. Borne, Le Problème de la philosophie Chrétienne, Esprit]

Modern philosophers in their turn have stumbled against this idea. The pantheism of Spinoza, as well as the idealism of Hegel or Brunchvicg, deny the impersonality of a God subsisting apart from the world. All their difficulties derive from that of reconciling the infinity of the divine perfection with the limitation that seems to be implied by the notion of personality. “God the person and God the principle of unity exclude one another by all their characteristics,” says Parodi, “the former implying determinacy and singularity, the latter infinity and indeterminacy.” He could not have expressed more neatly the antinomy that was already a stumbling block to Plotinus. It results in the rejection of a personal God as an anthropomorphism; God is taken to be nothing but the supreme ideal principle of explanation.

How are we to reply to this difficulty? Some thinkers, struck by the apparent impossibility for philosophy of reconciling these two notions of God and not wishing to sacrifice either, have admitted that of itself philosophy could only reach God the supreme principle of intelligibility, and that the notion of God the Person belonged to the realm of moral and religious experience. Thus Pere Laberthonniere contrasted the God of Nature, the unmoved abode of the ideas, of Greek idealism, with God the Person, the source of life, of Christian realism. Le Roy makes the same distinction:

There is a duality, almost an antinomy, in the prevailing conception of God; for he is regarded from a twofold standpoint — that of metaphysics, in which he appears as the supreme principle of explanation and the center of intelligible unity; and that of morality and religion, in which God is, above all, the basis and guarantee of human values, with whom man enters into spiritual communion. I have maintained that here, in a certain sense, is to be found the contrast between Hellenism and Judaism.

But it seems to us that such a distinction is unacceptable, founded as it is upon the idealist conception of philosophy, which eliminates from the field of metaphysics any consideration of existences, in order to concentrate on intelligibility, on the essence of things. It is abundantly clear that such a philosophy could not admit the idea of a person, which is a perfection of the existential concrete order.

But that is an undue mutilation of metaphysics, whose aim is to know beings in all that they require for existence, that is, at the same time in their nature and in their substance. The distinction between God the Person and the God of Nature leads finally to a distinction between two modes of attribution of the divine perfections, those indeed which St. Thomas distinguishes at the beginning of the Summa: “De Deo loquentes utimur nominibus concretis ut significemus ejus subsistenciam, quia apud nos non subsistunt nisi composita, et utimur nominibus abstractis, ut significemus ejus simplicitatem.”

Subsistencia, simplicitas, personality, unity — these are the very terms of the antinomy presented above by Parodi, and it is here that we see them resolved.

In opposition to M. Le Roy, who declares that “pure philosophy is not required to demonstrate any reality with regard to divine personality”, we hold with Maritain that “metaphysics knows demonstrably that the divine essence subsists in itself as infinite personality”. If in fact human reason did not already know divine personality before the revelation, it could nevertheless arrive at it by its own resources, it already knew it implicitly. In this matter, as in others, revelation led metaphysics to the discovery of truths that were new, but that none the less were strictly metaphysical.

To understand this, we must first of all make it clear in a general way what are the constituents of this perfection of personality that we claim to attribute to God. In fact it is in the very idea that they have of “person” that for many people the real difficulty lies, when it is a question of giving this name to God. “Person” is conceived by them in an anthropomorphic manner, as something essentially finite; how, on that basis, are they to avoid contradicting the divine infinity? For if, in spite of everything, God is to be regarded as a person, they would have, with Renouvier, to make him a finite being. Le Roy puts the antinomy as follows: “Either we shall define the word `personality’ and so fall into the pit of anthropomorphism, or we shall leave it undefined and fall into the no less terrible pit of agnosticism.” ”

I shall not insist on the error that lurks in identifying all “determinacy” (as Parodi did just now) or all “definition” (as Le Roy now does) with limitation. I shall turn without delay to the fundamental charge of anthropomorphism. What do I mean by this? If it is maintained that we ought not to picture God as a human person, with all the imperfections that personality implies in man, I shall be quite willing to agree. “But”, as Maritain rightly says,

all that is laborious and complicated, all that is twisted round an inadequate center and based on an inadequate design, in the current usage of the word “personality”, the whole anthropomorphic burden that weighs the word down, refers uniquely to that in us which connects personality with individuality, and thus with material conditions…. We must deliver the idea of personality from this matrix, in order to grasp its transcendent value and its anoetic power.
Jacques Maritain, Les Degrés du Savoir

If, on the other hand, by the charge of anthropomorphism we mean a refusal to the mind of the strict right to form positive notions of infinite being — starting with man, who is a finite being — when these notions do not imply any limitation, the criticism falls to the ground. In fact, between anthropomorphism, strictly understood, and agnosticism, there is a certain analogy. But, rightly considered, the main difficulty that the moderns find in comprehending divine personality is the intellectual contempt that makes them misunderstand the analogy and reject as anthropomorphic every effort aimed at knowing God through the medium of man. This is what Pere de Grandmaison replied to M. Le Roy:

Divine personality presents a difficulty if, as it seems, anthropomorphism is here inevitable, and if, in the desire to eliminate it, we risk depriving what we are saying of all precise meaning. It is true that we naturally model our distinct concept of a person on the ever-present reality that we are. But a more careful reflection reveals, beneath this anthropomorphic image which usually conceals them, certain features that do not necessarily imply the mode of human existence, and which surpass human limitations.
Père de Grandmaison, Le Dogme Chrétien

We have, therefore, the right to form our own idea of divine personality, beginning with the only personality we know, human personality, but on condition that we retain only its essential features, those that have analogical value and so justify the attribution of personality at once to God and the creature.

Thus we can set aside the preliminary objection that sees in its attribution to God a form of anthropomorphism. We must say, on the other hand, that if, in the order of knowledge, it is on the basis of knowledge of human persons that we form our notion of divine personality, in the order of being it is to God that primarily and properly belongs the personality in which our inadequate human persons are only feeble participations. In fact, there is nothing in the concept of a person that indicates anything other than the perfection of being that is in itself at all the levels of knowledge which it implies.

Posted in Fr. Jean Daniélou, Philosophy, Understanding Personalism | Tagged Cardinal Jean Daniélou S.J., hierophanies, Pseudo-Dionysus, The Divine Person | 1 Comment »

The God of the Philosophers I by Jean Daniélou

February 14, 2012

: The Christian Scientist … “When I was undertaking my doctoral research in molecular biology at Oxford University, I was frequently confronted with a number of theories offering to explain a given observation. In the end, I had to make a judgment concerning which of them possessed the greatest internal consistency, the greatest degree of predictive ability. Unless I was to abandon any possibility of advance in understanding, I was obliged to make such a judgment… I would claim the right to speak of the ‘superiority’ of Christianity in this explicative sense” Alister McGrath

Although not as well-known today as his fellow Jesuit Henri de Lubac and theological contemporary Hans Urs von Balthasar, Jean Daniélou occupies a key place in twentieth-century Catholic theology, recognized for his dialogue with other world religions, his writings on the Church Fathers and Scripture, and his insights into the nature of divine revelation and Tradition. Trained in philology — the study of classical languages — and theology, Daniélou was a professor at the Institut Catholique in Paris and a vital member of the controversial “New Theology” or ressourcement movement.

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The God of the philosophers is one of the signs of the contradictory nature of religious thought. Christian theology, from St. Thomas Aquinas to the Vatican Council, has always maintained the possibility of a rational knowledge of the existence and attributes of God; and this remains a principle of Catholic thinking. But even in the heart of Christianity another current has never ceased to pulsate — that which regards the God of reason as a stumbling block, to whom the God of faith is opposed.

Thus Pascal speaks of “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, not the God of the philosophers and scholars”; thus Kierkegaard, for whom reason leads to despair, and despair to faith; thus Chestov [Lev Isaakovich Shestov was a Ukrainian/Russian existentialist philosopher. Born in Kiev (Russian Empire) on February 13 1866, he emigrated to France in 1921, fleeing from the aftermath of the October Revolution. He lived in Paris until his death on November 19, 1938. In France he is well known as Léon Chestov], contrasting Job, the Christian philosopher, with Socrates, the wise man after the flesh; thus Barth, denouncing the God of the philosophers, in whom the spirit of man is reflected, as the supreme idol.

My plan here is not to inquire whether in the order of existence philosophy has ever led man to God, for this is a fictitious problem. Conversion to God is always a development of the whole man; and since the order in which we find ourselves historically is an order of grace and sin, the real progress of man is not a progress of pure reason. My purpose here is different. I set myself within this real order, which is in fact an order of grace, within the history of salvation. I ask myself what is the status of philosophy within a theological perspective, just as I have asked this question about religion. And as with the god of the religions, I shall attempt to prove that there is a good and bad use of philosophy, that there is a false god of the philosophers, and yet also a true philosophy of God.

Before studying the means by which philosophy may approach the knowledge of God, we must first deal with the legitimacy of such a practice, for this is what is now in question. Its legitimacy is challenged from widely differing motives. For some, reason, being fundamentally corrupted on account of original sin, is incapable of attaining to truth. For others, God being in essence beyond the capture of the human mind, all claim on the part of this mind to know him cannot be other than illusory. Some are struck by the contradictions among the philosophers and think that it is dangerous on this account to put their faith in God on rational grounds. Positivist minds, trained in scientific disciplines, are disconcerted by the trend of metaphysics, in which they fail to find their criteria of certainty and take refuge in religious experience.

All these objections contain something valuable and rightly warn us against any blind confidence in reason. The encyclical Humani Generis, while endorsing the possibility that reason may arrive at the knowledge of God, recognizes that man in fact attains it with difficulty unless he has the support of grace. Moreover, it is true that the ancient philosophers never reached any but imperfect and conflicting notions of God, and that reason has not been able to gain right knowledge of him except with the help of revelation.

This is the meaning that Gilson rightly gives to the idea of Christian philosophy. It is still more true that the living God cannot be circumscribed by the intellect, and that a god who was entirely intelligible to man would surely not be the true God. Finally it is true that metaphysical certainties belong to another order than mathematical certainties, and that the same criteria of evidence cannot be applied to both.

But all the same, do the limitations of reason justify us in depreciating it? Many men of our time contrast it with personal religious experience. Certainly it is a fact that the knowledge of the true God always implies a personal encounter and an inward conversion. But first of all, religious experience is preeminently subjective. The certainty to which it attains is incommunicable. One is tempted to conclude, then, that the knowledge of God is the expression of an instinct connected with man’s psychological structure. There will be religious and nonreligious temperaments; belief in God will be regarded as the expression of an inner need, the projection of a thirst for happiness that cannot be satisfied by any created thing.

There is no need to emphasize the danger of such an outlook. It justifies the frequent taunt of nonbelievers who hold that belief in God is prompted by the need for security, inward comfort, and consolation. To this we must reply that belief in God has nothing to do with the religious instinct. It is objectively imposed alike on the mystical and the positive temperament.

But far from admitting that the harmony between God’s existence and our affective desires is a criterion of his existence, we must state on the contrary that God’s reality is imposed on us far more in an objective manner, in that he contradicts our desires, in that his reality disconcerts our intellect and his will upsets our plans, in that we are compelled to recognize him, in some sense against our will.

On the other hand, if it is true that the encounter with God is a personal event, it is no less true that this event needs afterward to be controlled and placed within the scheme of things. It is never a development of pure reason, but it must always be subsequently submitted to criticism and sifted by reason. It is only then that I can make certain that I am not the plaything of an illusion, that I am not being carried away by an affective impulse. Only a belief in God that has thus been tested by reason and found solid, which has been brought into relation with the other data and acknowledged to be consistent with them, carries real weight and assures us that our conviction has a sound basis.

Just as reason is necessary to the establishment of the knowledge of God, so is it necessary in exercising this knowledge. Nothing is more dangerous than a religion that claims to have outdistanced reason; it can only lead to fanaticism, illuminism, obscurantism; it is lost in a jungle of superstition. Above all, it runs the risk of being an idle solution. Recourse to the supernatural easily turns into an escapist’s paradise. It claims to find mystery where there may only be ignorance, and thus to justify the positivist critic for whom religion corresponds to a prescientific stage of thought. But the true religious mystery is quite different; it is concerned with what cannot be explained in any other way. Yet there is a danger of confusing the two regions. The function of scientific criticism is precisely that of clearing up this confusion.‘

If rationalism and that pride of the mind which claims to possess God and deal with him are a serious danger, how noble, on the other hand, are the courageous efforts of the intellect, which in respect for mystery never renounces its determination to understand and which goes on to the limit of its capacity and never halts until it is conquered by the overwhelming pressure of a blinding light! This boldness of the intellect in exploring the mystery is the quality on which the imperishable greatness of St. Thomas Aquinas rests. It implies a difficult equilibrium, seldom realized, between the abyss of rationalism and that of fideism. But it is doubtless this perfectly balanced equilibrium that the instinct of the Church acknowledged when she proclaimed him as the supreme theologian.

This is particularly relevant to the very problem we are discussing. For none has shown better than he, both the limitations and the value of the rational knowledge of God. First, as to the limitations: until his time Christian philosophers, especially St. Augustine, more or less yielded to the temptation presented by Platonism, of seeing in the divine the proper object of the intellect, obscured only by its immersion in the flesh. St. Thomas had the courage to break entirely with this tendency and to refuse to admit that we could form for ourselves any sound or intelligible notion of God, since our concepts are always abstracted from the sensible world. He thus reaffirmed the view of Gregory of Nyssa, whom, however, he scarcely knew. Christian tradition gave him good reason to reject any kind of ontologism, and to deny that there could be any natural intuition of God.

Thus reason can never approach God except mediately, insofar as his existence is postulated by the contingency of what it does not attain. Reason can affirm existence and transcendence. But, as Gilson says so well in his summary of St. Thomas’ thought:

Once this is said, all that man can say is said. This divine essence, whose existence he assumes, is not penetrated by his intellect, and we know that of himself he will never reach it. Denys is right in saying that the God toward whom our reason strives is still, so to speak, an unknown God. For we know well that he is, and what he is not. But what he is remains for us entirely unknown.
The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, Etienne Gilson

In other words, reason can know God — and that is its supreme greatness; but it can know him only from outside, and that is its infinite limitation. Reason is compelled to affirm him in order to remain faithful to itself; and by this very affirmation reason recognizes its limits.

But this is at the same time a courageous affirmation of the power of reason. For if the knowledge that it has of God is never adequate, it is none the less perfectly real. There is no trace in St. Thomas of skepticism or agnosticism. In fact, reason has a secure knowledge of God’s existence. The latter, as necessary cause, is implied in the existence of contingent being; as absolute truth, it is presupposed by the very exercise of the intellect; as perfect good, it is postulated by the existence of morality. Not only does reason know his existence, but it can form for itself some idea of him, insofar as he participates in contingent being, and insofar as all the perfections of the latter are a defective, but real, image of his infinite perfection.

We must go further still. Imperfect as it is, the created spirit still has a capacity to become all things. If its proper object is created being, it remains true that no created being exhausts its possibilities. It is thus a frontier between two worlds, as St. Thomas admirably describes it. The created spirit lies on the far side of all determinate beings, and yet remains on the near side of that Being who transcends all determinacy. Thus, if it cannot directly grasp him, there is yet in it an instinct to grasp him, the “natural desire” of that real, though ineffective, vision which the grace of God could bring to perfection by communicating to it, through grace, a mysterious share in the divine Being.

Such is the admirable manner in which St. Thomas defines the status of reason in the sphere of the knowledge of God. By presenting at the same time in a rigorous fashion the value and the limitations of the rational knowledge of God, he reveals the paradox of the philosophical quest. For God is at the same time its object and its boundary, its supreme end and its question mark. The goal of philosophy is to prove his existence, but it can do this only by acknowledging its powerlessness.

In that it refuses to make this confession of its limitations, in that it yields to the Platonist temptation, the god at whom it arrives is not the true God. In fact, it is clear that, as Gregory of Nyssa says, “God being beyond all determinacy, he who thinks that God is something determinate deceives himself when he believes that what he knows is God”. [Life of Moses, Gregory of Nyssa] Thus the problem of God reveals the inward contradiction of philosophy; and it is here that at the same time he justifies it and defines its position.

But it is precisely this position, which constitutes the status of philosophy in the Christian scheme of things, that the majority of philosophers refuse to accept. Philosophy seems to them to lose its significance if it lacks a complete grasp of the intelligibility of being, if it is not supreme knowledge. They do not resign themselves to having to acknowledge a principle that is not perfectly intelligible to them. It is this perfect intelligibility that they call by the name of God; and it is this false god of the philosophers that we may justly oppose to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But this deity is not the God of reason, but the idol of rationalism.

Let us be more precise. The requirement of philosophy is a requirement of intelligibility. Confronted by the apparent disorder of things, the philosophical mind seeks to establish order, to build up sequences, to demonstrate a chain of causes. Beyond concrete realities, it seeks to disclose the very structure of being itself. In this search for being, it desires to arrive at the first principle, that which is at once the cause, the pattern, the end of all that is. This principle is called God. The philosophical quest comes necessarily to the problem of God, which is in reality the only one that concerns it.

But here it meets temptation. For the principle that it calls God, it arrives at through its demand for intelligibility. He represents for philosophy a requirement. Philosophy proceeds to apply to God the principle that has led it to him; God is expected also to be intelligible, and the intelligibility that philosophy applies to him is the law of the human mind. Thus philosophy proceeds to define him with its accustomed categories, calling him the One, intellectual Love, absolute Mind, and so forth. Many great philosophers have reduced the totality of the real to a perfectly coherent system, of which God is the immanent law. Their mind is perfectly satisfied with thus having mastered the totality of being.

But it happens that, by a strange contradiction, it is precisely at the moment when they imagine in their audacity that they have reached God that they have in reality lost him. In fact, they thought they had reached him when the demand of their mind for intelligibility was completely satisfied. But for all that, they had made their mind the measure of God. Yet the very essence of God is precisely to be that which is measured by nothing and which measures all things.

On the level of God, the problem of intelligibility is reversed. He is the unintelligible for whom everything else is intelligible. But in reducing him to intelligibles, they deny his specific reality. He is not found within intelligibility, but he is that which constitutes it. So, as Pascal says, the most reasonable course is the disavowal of reason; and that is where the knowledge of God lies.

But this runs counter to the claims of reason. It refuses to leave open this wound in its side, this crack in its edifice. Erecting into an absolute the intelligibility that is proper to itself, it pulls everything down to that level. Reason cannot allow anything to escape it. It refuses to acknowledge that it is checkmated; yet it is just this checkmate that was the knowledge of God which threw wide the gates of mystery. It would have found God by acknowledging its powerlessness; it loses him by claiming to possess him. The One of Plotinus, the Brahman of Sankara, the Being of Spinoza, the absolute Mind of Hegel, are finally idols, not so much by being the object of reason as by being the sufficiency of reason.

The error of all rationalism is that of putting God on the same basis as other objects of reason, higher, no doubt, but not really other. To paraphrase Gabriel Marcel, God cannot be treated as a problem. He represents the boundary of reason. His dazzling light prevents the eye from seeing him. Consequently, all that we say of him is inadequate. He cannot be contained by any concept. But at the same time all that we say of him is true. “He is all that is and nothing that is”, says Pseudo-Dionysus.

The moderns will say knowledge of him is dialectical, that all statements about him imply their opposite. Already St. Thomas showed that all that is said of him must also be denied, that negative theology is the necessary complement of positive theology. This is that very doctrine of analogy which enables us to speak of God in words borrowed from creation, but on condition that we make it clear that they apply to him in a different way from that in which they apply to his creatures.

Moreover, we can see that what is true of God is also true of other “limit problems” that imply an apparent contradiction, and about which it is only possible to construct propositions that seem to be irreconcilable because the place where they are reconciled is beyond the reach of sight. So with liberty, which is a limit problem, and one that is irreducible to complete intelligibility, since we must at the same time say that man is free and that God is the cause of all and since nobody has ever shown or will ever show how these two statements are to be reconciled. So, too, with evil, which is imposed upon us as a tragic reality and seems irreconcilable with the goodness of God. The real problems of metaphysics are also those that bring metaphysics up against a boundary line.

But their function is precisely to do this. They prevent reason from getting shut in on itself; they are windows opening toward the mystery of being. That mystery cannot be fathomed by reason, but at least it can lead toward it, and this is indeed its function. It leads the spirit as far as its frontiers; it discerns the region of mystery. By clarifying all that is within its domain, reason prevents us from placing the mystery where it does not lie. It demystifies the natural realities that people are trying to make into mysteries. This is its critical, purifying function. But none the less it points toward the true mysteries. It would betray its mission if it refused to acknowledge them and denied the reality of all that the brightness of its gaze does not penetrate.

But these limit problems, the thresholds of reason, are not characterized only by the fact that they are placed somewhat beyond its reach and so cannot be neatly defined. Another feature that they possess is that they cannot be broached from the standpoint of straightforward discussion, but demand a total outlook, an existential conversion.

So it is with suffering — all attempts to provide an explanation are unbearable. We cannot hold a discussion with a man who is suffering. That is what Job’s comforters did, and it cannot be tolerated. Neither can suffering be analyzed and counterattacked. This is why Christ seems the only answer to it, because he gives no rational explanation, but unravels it existentially. So, too, with hell, which is a limit problem, at the same time necessary (for without it nothing would any longer be important or serious) and nevertheless intolerable — and again it can only be met by an existential attitude.

If limit problems compel us to conversion, that is because they involve the being of a person, they engage his existence. I have no right to treat anyone as a mere object of thought; moreover it is impossible to do so, for a person represents a nucleus irreducible by discursive analysis; he presents himself as existing in himself, as a distinct spiritual center. This irreducible nucleus can be reached only by love, which compels me to go out of myself. This is why an idealist philosophy that reduces everything to thought is a truncated philosophy. An integral philosophy could only be a spiritual realism, which would compel me to hold on by love to the person of the other, and make me reach in that other what is really real, that is, what I cannot make use of, what cannot be reduced to having and remains in the region of being.

This is really true of God. He is, above all, the one whom I cannot make use of. The error of false philosophies is precisely that of making God an object, of claiming to possess him through the intellect. But that which the intellect possesses could not be God. On the contrary, it must be said that the encounter with God drives the intellect to a fundamental conversion, to a decentralization from the self; and this conversion is the knowledge of God himself. For God can be broached only as an existent and as a personal existent. On his level, my act of intellect seems itself to be an existential act, the act of an existent; and thus far it depends on God. To know God is not, then, to hold him in my intellect, but on the contrary to rediscover myself as measured by him.

So we see at the same time how the knowledge of God is a work of reason and a challenge to reason. It is in this sense that “nothing is more reasonable than the disavowal of reason”. Reason is the necessary means of knowledge in that it prevents us from placing God where he is not and keeps us from idols, including that of the mind of man himself. Surveying the world of bodies and the world of spirits, it fails to find God there. Reason implores the angels to reveal his name, but they refuse to tell it. Then “she [reason] understands that the true knowledge of Him whom she seeks and her true vision consist in seeing that He is invisible and in knowing that He transcends all knowledge, separated from all things by His incomprehensibility as by darkness.” [Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses]

Posted in Fr. Jean Daniélou, Philosophy | Tagged Alister McGrath, Etienne Gilson, Humani Generis, Kierkegaard, limit problems, Pascal, St. Thomas Aquinas, The God of the Philosophers | Leave a Comment »

Sin and Forgiveness — Ronald Knox

February 9, 2012

Can the philosophy of materialism explain the existence of intelligence? Bertrand Russell believes it can: given the vastness and complexity of the universe, it is probable that among the various combinations you will have one or two that produce intelligent organisms. This, for Knox obfuscates the question: "If the police were to discover a human body in Mr. Russell's Saratoga trunk, he would not be able to satisfy them with the explanation that, among all the innumerable articles of luggage in the world, it is only natural that there should be some few which are large enough to contain a body. They would want to know how it got there." By airily talking of hypothetical possibilities in a vast universe, Russell is avoiding the question of how in fact our material world has produced the spiritual reality of intellect. The existence of something different from the material world requires a cause that is other than material, and points to a Mind which is the source of our human ability to reason.

Sin is one of those tiresome words that have a whole lot of different meanings, nearly the same but not quite the same. Shame is a word like that, and so is progress, and so is democracy. A word is used in one sense by the general public, very often, but the expert will confuse the issues by using it in a lot of other senses as well. Somebody advertises a lecture about cats, and all the old ladies in North Oxford flock to it so as to find the proper way to treat their cats, and then they find the lecture is nearly all about lions and tigers and leopards. And when they complain to the lecturer, he smiles in a superior way and says, “Yes, but I didn’t mean domestic cats.”

So it is if you read a theological treatise about sin; it starts at once by saying, “There are two kinds of sin, original and actual”; and you have to wade through pages and pages about original sin (not a lively subject) before you get on to what you mean by sin, which is actual sin; the sort of sin one tries to avoid, and commits, and repents of, and wants to be forgiven for. It would save a deal of trouble if we all agreed to call Original Sin Original Guilt. Because sin, in the mind of the common man, is something which he commits himself, whereas guilt is something he may get involved in through no fault of his own; all the German people were involved in war guilt in a sense, and they all had to suffer for it. So let’s leave Original Guilt on one side, the handicap, the disability, which we have inherited through no fault of our own from our first parents, and get on to sin.

The next thing your theologian says is, “Oh, you wanted to know about actual sin, did you? You should have made that clear. Well, actual sins — I don’t mind telling you that they are divided into material sins and formal sins.”And there you are at cross purposes again; because of course material sin isn’t what you and I mean by sin. If you wake up in the night and your watch says five minutes to twelve and you eat a slice of cake and go to Communion next morning and then find that your watch was really an hour slow, that is a material sin, because the Church tells you to fast from midnight.

But it isn’t a formal sin; in other words, it isn’t what you and I mean by sin. You are under no kind of obligation to mention it when you go to Confession, though you may prefer to do so on the ground that even material sins ought to be submitted to the Church’s judgment. (That’s another curious point about language; the ordinary Englishman uses the word “material” when he thinks a thing is very important, “a material consideration”; he uses the word “formal” when he thinks a thing is quite unimportant, “the Society passed a formal resolution”. But when you go out to tea with the theologians, you must use the words exactly the other way round.)

Well, I want to play at being a theologian for a moment and say a very little about material sins. This first: if you read the Old Testament you must keep it clearly in mind that material sins, under the Old Law, counted as sins. Saul takes a vow that no soldier in his army shall eat food till night-fall; Jonathan, who hasn’t heard of it, eats a mouthful of wild honey, and everything starts going wrong. The edge of your cloak touched a dead body without your knowing it, and you were nevertheless unclean, you might incur Divine punishment for it. I suppose Almighty God set about training the Chosen Race by a very slow and patient process; outward obedience to a set of rules was all they could understand at first of what it meant to obey God’s will. It was only later on that the prophets taught them it wasn’t much use sacrificing bullocks and things if you were oppressing the widow and orphan on the side.

And here is another point about material sins which is of some importance. It is a maxim of English jurisprudence that “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.” The Church takes the opposite point of view; if you do the wrong thing under the honest impression that you are doing the right thing, you do not offend God, you earn his approval. When the Emperor Otho committed suicide, because he saw no hope of peace for his country unless he were got out of the way, he did the wrong thing; it is wrong to commit suicide.

But I think it is fairly obvious that he thought it was the right thing, and if the Emperor Otho went to hell, I am quite certain it was not for that. With this in mind, we can all afford to cheer up a bit about the poor pagans. But what about us Christians, us Catholics? What judgment is going to be passed on us if we do the wrong thing because we did not know our stuff? For instance, suppose you didn’t go to Mass on New Year’s day, and that afternoon somebody mentioned it was a day of obligation. “Gosh”, you said, “I never knew that!” Yes, but how genuine was the surprise? Had you, on New Year’s eve, a kind of feeling that it might be a day of obligation tomorrow, and did you think of ringing up somebody and finding out, and then. . . well, decided not to because it would be rather a bore if it was? That would be affected ignorance, and it does not excuse. It wasn’t that; you really hadn’t the least idea?

Good; but the further question arises whether you had any right not to have the least idea. If you are so little instructed in your duties as a Catholic, oughtn’t you perhaps to be taking steps to get better instructed? There is such a thing, you see, as crass ignorance; a rude name by which the moralists imply that if you didn’t know you ought to have. More probably you forgot to think about it at all; I don’t know what the moralist would call that; my own name for it would be ignorantia undergraduatorum, because it seemed almost universal when I was chaplain.

So we can stop bothering about original sin, and material sin, and go on to discuss sin, by which we mean that men or women, probably ourselves, knowing what they are about, choose the evil and refuse the good. How that is possible, remains a headache for the philosophers. Because after all the good is by definition that at which man naturally aims; and it is very difficult to see how he misses his aim, unless it were from want of proper information, and that would land us right back in material sin, just when we thought we had got rid of it.

Those of you who are reading Greats, if anybody does read Greats nowadays, have probably been introduced to Aristotle’s speculations on the subject, and made to write an essay on whether the doctrine of the practical syllogism solves the problem of the moral conflict. He never seems to be able to make up his mind whether all wrong action is not really a kind of ignorance.

But it is no good telling us that we cannot choose the evil. We are like the drunk man on the edge of the pavement, when they told him he couldn’t sit there all night, and he replied, “You don’t know my c’pash’ties.” Mass observation, conducted over a number of centuries, proves that man does deliberately choose evil; and we have only to examine our own behavior to find that it is true; we can distinguish, in the sorry record of our past failures, which of them were really due to ignorance, which of them to a momentary obfuscation of the mind, and which of them to downright cussedness.

Not that we ever choose the evil as such. Evil as such is something negative, and cannot, therefore, exercise any spell over the human mind. When we sin, we are always aiming at something which is in itself good; but it is the wrong good in that particular context. It is a good thing to drink a glass of wine; as St Thomas says, “If a man deliberately abstains from wine to such an extent that he does serious harm to his nature, he will not be free from blame.” But if the glass of wine happens to be the fifteenth you have taken that evening, it is the wrong good in that particular context.

Sometimes indeed people — undergraduates especially — will use careless language which seems to imply that they mean to choose evil for its own sake. They will say, for instance, “Let’s go and get drunk.” But they don’t mean that; they mean “Let us go and get rid of our inhibitions”, which is a good idea as far as it goes. No, man can’t choose evil for itself; but in some mysterious way man, endowed with free will and then fallen, can and does choose the lesser good instead of the greater, with a kind of moral near-sightedness which is not ignorance, and therefore is not an excuse.

Not, that is to say, a full excuse; sometimes it is a partial excuse. And that brings us on to the two kinds of sin there really are; you really do sit up and begin to take notice when I tell you that there is a distinction between mortal and venial sins. Even that is not a self-evident proposition. The theologian, Baius, that curious sixteenth-century figure who seemed to spend all his life trying to sell the pass to the Protestants, maintained that all sins of their own nature were mortal sins, and merited damnation. You will be glad to hear that he was condemned.

There are sins of inadvertence; you may act knowing what you are doing, but not thinking what you are doing. The sudden provocation is too much for you, and you hit out. And again, there are sins too trivial in their scope to be counted in any serious reckoning. The man who takes a sheet of notepaper from the J.C.R. is performing just the same kind of action as the man who takes a priceless folio from the Bodleian. But, instinctively, you feel that there is something unhealthy about his mental balance if he comes rushing round to confession. Put venial sins on the same level as mortal sins, and it will not be long before you adopt views about man’s fallen nature which will make nonsense of the whole subject we are discussing, Sin and Forgiveness.

But there are mortal sins. Four hundred years ago, when the Reformation movement had got going, it was difficult to persuade people that any sins were venial; now, it is difficult to persuade them that any sins are mortal. We have all got so accustomed to a mental atmosphere in which everything is graded; one thing differs from another in degree, rather than in kind. There is no absolute standard about our human criticisms, no black and white, only shades of grey. There is no absolute justice about our human quarrels; it is always six query plus on one side and six query minus on the other. We are like travelers over a long tract of flat country, who are not prepared to see a sudden precipice gaping at their feet.

But that, you see, is the Christian religion all over; always these sharp antitheses, heaven and hell, God’s smile or God’s frown; you are in the state of grace or out of it, not mid-way between. After all, there is one nasty bump waiting for all of us, death; there are no shades or gradations about that. And why should we assume that the world which lies on the other side of death is a replica of ours?

There’s another reason which disinclines us to believe in mortal sin; we are so ready to make psychological excuses. Is it possible, we ask, for a man to adopt an attitude of conscious, deliberate revolt against his Creator without something a little wrong somewhere, some slight kink? And with that, mortal sin becomes venial again…. Well, I don’t say that this instinct of ours is to be despised. Certainly, if we are sitting in judgment upon the actions of other people, we should be ready to make allowances.

The late Canon Barry used to say that it took a Frenchman to commit a mortal sin. He was rather fond of saying not quite the ordinary thing, was Canon Barry; but you saw what he meant. With our own sins, if we are in real doubt whether they were mortal or venial, we must make a prudent judgment about them, as honest and objective as we can make it; going to Communion or not going will depend on that. But in confession, as long as the sin is mentioned, I don’t know that anything is gained by telling the priest whether it was or wasn’t a mortal sin; let him ask questions if he wants to.

And then, having carefully divided up our sins into venial sins, those which can be pardoned, and mortal sins, which presumably cannot be pardoned, we proceed to tell Almighty God that we hope, by the merits of Jesus Christ, for the pardon of all our sins. Once more we are plunged in an atmosphere of mystery. The simplest way to put it, perhaps, is this. If you think of your sin as a personal affront offered to a personal God, the difficulty is to see why he doesn’t forgive it at once, as soon as it is committed. After all, he tells us to forgive our enemies; why shouldn’t he forgive his?

Here lie I, Martin Elginbrodd;
Have mercy on my soul, Lord God,
As I would do, gin I were God
And thou wert Martin Elginbrodd.

If, on the other hand, you think of your sin as a breach of the eternal order of things, an upsetting of the balance of eternal Justice, how can God forgive that? He is himself eternal Justice; is he not, then, false to his own nature if he agrees to treat the act irrevocably done as if it had never happened? You and I can forgo our right to get satisfaction out of an enemy, because the right is something external to ourselves. But the right God has to punish us is a part of himself, how, without ceasing to be God, can he forgo it?

There is an easy answer we are inclined to suggest at that point, but it’s one we mustn’t make. We are inclined to say, “Surely that was the whole point of the Atonement! It was because God could not forgive us unless we made adequate amends for our fault that Jesus Christ came to make amends for us. If there had been any other terms on which he could grant us forgiveness, surely he wouldn’t have had recourse to so strange an expedient as that!”

But the theologians won’t let you say that. Whenever you think you have got a really good answer to a theological difficulty, the theologians say, “No, that’s where you’re wrong” It wasn’t absolutely necessary for our Lord to die; it wasn’t even necessary for him to come to earth. Almighty God could have consented, if he had wished it, to accept the sacrifice of some less worthy victim; he could have consented, if he had wished it, to forgive us our sins without demanding that any amends should be made for them at all. But he decreed that satisfaction should be made in this way; and since it has been, it is quite certain that the forgiveness to which you and I look forward is forgiveness earned on our behalf by our Blessed Lord, when he died on the Cross…. But the inner nature of the divine pardon is still a mystery.

There remains the question, how you and I are to avail ourselves of this gift of pardon, freely offered. As we know, we have to be sorry for our sins. Not necessarily in the sense of feeling sorry, because our feelings are not sufficiently within our own control. Sorrow for our sins is a matter of the will, not of the affections, and what is required of us is that we should unite our wills, although it be by an act which seems to awake no echo in the sensitive part of us, with the will of God. Nor is it expected of us, that we should feel certain we shall not fall into the same sins again. We know the weakness of our natures, and often the best we can do is to throw ourselves on God’s mercy with the prayer that his grace will enable us to avoid sin thenceforward.

We are also bound to go to confession, if we have reason to suspect that we are in mortal sin. And here, as you know, there is a distinction to be made; the distinction between perfect and imperfect contrition. Imperfect contrition, or attrition, may be dictated to us only by the fear of God, not by the love of him; that is sufficient motive if it is accompanied by actual confession to a priest.

Perfect contrition, which is dictated to us by the love of God, wins us the forgiveness of our sins there and then, as long as it is accompanied by the resolve to go to confession at the earliest possible opportunity. But it is only in rare circumstances that we are encouraged to go to Communion without sacramental confession, if we have committed a mortal sin. We cannot be certain enough, being what we are, of our own dispositions. And, as we know, contrition must be accompanied by the desire to put things right. We must mean to make restitution, if we have defrauded people of their money or their good name; we must mean to avoid the occasions of sin, as far as the way lies clear to us. If in fact those resolves afterwards break down, we nevertheless have been in a state of grace at the time when the resolves were made. But the duty of restitution doesn’t disappear, and our next confession, if it is to be valid, must be accompanied by a new resolve. We must not be, consciously and deliberately, holding something back from God.

One of the most perfectly constructed lines in English poetry is, “To err is human, to forgive, divine.” How perfect is the balance of those words, how rich the sense of them! They enshrine two of the greatest mysteries which, as Christians, we are bound to accept. The doctrine, I mean, that man, being what he is, can rebel against God; and the doctrine that God, being what he is, can forgive man.

Posted in Fr. Ronald Knox, Understanding Sin | Tagged contrition, forgiveness, Ronald Knox, Sin | Leave a Comment »

Introducing Ronald Knox

February 8, 2012

Monsignor Ronald Knox

A reminiscence by a colleague (?), the kind of prose combining both affection and an easy accuracy of portrayal that makes us all linger a bit.

********************************

I am delighted to introduce Ronald Knox to those who do not know him. All my adult life he has been a private pleasure, a delight expected and delivered, a literary and higher satisfaction on which to reflect and be pleased.

He is a happy part of the intellectual and esthetic life of so many who love fine English prose; who rejoice in the joie de vivre that bursts suddenly from this hooded, diffident person; who discern the apostolic roots of a devotional life that steadied his easily injured person. His uncommon literary gifts, restricted social instincts, and unlimited imagination, his bouts with self-doubt and dejection were all carried nicely by his deep trust in Christ and the dignity of an honorable priest.

Ronald Arbuthnott Knox (1888-1957), son and grandson of evangelical Anglican bishops — true believers — was born into a family of uncommon brightness and scholarly gifts. His childhood was filled with profound goodness and enlivening opportunities to learn and imagine, memorize the best, and wrestle with intellectual puzzles. His niece wrote, “As for Ronnie, the little boy who had been asked at four years old what he liked doing and had replied, `I think all day, and at night I think about the past,’ was already a natural philosopher”[Penelope Fitzgerald, The Knox Brothers (London: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1977]. At six he wrote letters salted with Greek and Latin words. He attended Eton and Balliol College, by contemporary estimate the finest schools in England in the attention they gave to students.

These were his advantages, and not much was lost. But he did not live in secure circumstances. As a small boy he lost his mother; he lived in no great homes. His family had not enough money for his schools; he had to win scholarships to each. All his life he had to be careful of money, and he worked hard, young and old, not to burden anyone.

From childhood he loved Church life and normal religious practice, and long before he ever saw a ritual service, he came to love ritual because he felt every object associated with worship was sacred. As two brothers slipped into agnosticism, Ronald taught himself sharp distinctions that served him well. Early he distinguished ritual, theology, and faith as exercises of very different value. An irredeemable romantic in religious matters (he loved Bruges as Catholic and Robert Hugh Benson’s novels), he rejoiced in a skeptical mind ever demanding clear, supported truth. He was wary of theological vagueness and intellectual shortcuts. His biographer, Evelyn Waugh, wrote:

Such temptations against the Faith as he suffered — and he was near despair in the year before his reception into the Catholic Church — were total. Either the whole deposit of Faith was divinely inspired and protected and developed under divine guidance, or it was false. He never saw it, as did many of the contemporaries with whom he now took issue, as the agglomeration of history and fable, of hints and shadows of Truth, of vestigial philosophic notions and dark superstitions from which anyone could pick at will whatever he found agreeable, and discard the rest. He was for some years uncertain where he could find the authority which guarded and administered the Faith, but he always recognized it as a single, indivisible world. [Evelyn Waugh, Ronald Knox (London: Chapman Hall, 1959)]

Nor did relaxing intellectually into the Faith diminish his skeptical approach to invention in Catholic doctrine and emotion-tinged theological conclusions. This was, of course, not the skepticism unbelievers proclaim but the mind of a clear-headed believer wanting to trust only purest apostolic teaching, and the longing of a scholar for clear, sure conclusions as a base for further reflection. Many other “truths” of religion he thought dangerous mush. One of his earliest pieces as an Anglo-Catholic was the often reprinted Absolute and Abitofhell (in the style of Dryden), in which he lampooned the waffling Anglican hierarchy.

As an Anglican, early on, he saw that the first danger to the Church was not Protestantism, as most Anglo-Catholics thought, but modernism. Oddly, too, for an early ritualist, he considered the externals and consolations of religion very minor factors in spirituality. His sound thinking in this kept his sharp esthetic sense well grounded and also nicely liberated. He groaned inwardly at the wording of Catholic hymns and official prayers. But he never injured the feelings of those who profited from those prayers.

Was it perhaps his demanding mind in limning the final verities that allowed him to abandon himself to comic devices in lectures and wild charades? He was so entertaining and delightful to high school girls that they were known to race home so as not to miss his talks. At Oxford he completed a lecture, offering his conclusions muffled in a gas mask.

One piece of doggerel will do:

We love the pitch-pine pews
On which our coat-tails bend,
Designed to make us muse
Upon our latter end.
[Evelyn Waugh, Ronald Knox (London: Chapman Hall, 1959]

After a long, painful wrestling with himself and grace and disbelief altogether, he submitted, exhausted and happy, to the Catholic Church on September 22, 1917.

He was ordained a Catholic priest on October 5, 1919.

It was no easy business for him. He enjoyed the finest education England had to offer, was well known as an Anglo-Catholic of lively positions and the author of very entertaining books, and was named the “wittiest young man in England” (Daily Mail’s Choice, 1924). As he entered the Catholic Church and the priesthood, there were awkwardnesses and a few painful dislocations. He served as a master at Saint Edmund’s Preparatory School and Seminary (1919-26) and as chaplain at Oxford (1926-39).

Although his personality and learning, his hold on Christian doctrine and reality, his goodness and wit made a profound impression on many young people — mostly as they looked back — he knew he was painfully unsuited to the routine of those posts. He wrote and preached to larger congregations during his vacations, but he knew his literary work, of which so much was expected, was reduced to a thin stream of pleasant secondary works. (The exception was his brilliant Let Dons Delight, which appeared at the end of his Oxford chaplaincy.) At Saint Edmund’s and Oxford we see the deeper “hidden stream” of his life: an honorable priest and self-denying Christian who had promised obedience to the Church and her work. [The Hidden Stream was the title of a series of his lectures in which he developed an analogy between a stream now hidden under Oxford and the hidden sustaining Catholic Traditions of English Christianity.]

What is interesting is that he was ordained on his own “patrimony” (nonexistent), promising in effect to support himself and not to expect any pension. He supported himself largely by writing and preaching. Because of that circumstance, he could have removed himself from those two posts, but he accepted them for twenty years because the Church in the person of her hierarchy asked him to serve in them.

From 1939 to the last years of his life, he enjoyed chaplaincies in two accommodating English Catholic homes where he was a paying guest. In the first he was swallowed up in a girls’ high school fleeing the bombing of London. He responded with the incisive and charming Slow Motion books for the girls on the Mass, Creed, and Gospels. They increase in popularity in our day.

But his two major works were also accomplished in that period. Enthusiasm (begun in 1919 and published in 1950) is his scholarly and enchanting exposition of the Christian religion, gone off the track of sound doctrine and sacramental life, turning into privately inspired and sometimes hilarious inventions. Serious students of Christianity cannot be without Enthusiasm. It is a truly insightful, sympathetic, and cool-eyed study of amazing Christians.

And he also wrote his beautiful, graceful, and literarily inspired translation of the Bible during this period (1939-55). The Bible, on which people make such varied demands for clarity and mystery, mellifluousness and declarability, devotion and nostalgia, doctrine and more, cannot satisfy a majority through any one translation. But, I dare say, if contemporary Christians love both a clear, understandable, easily comprehended, reliable translation of the New Testament and the graces of a master’s fine rhythmic prose, they need to pray for a handsome reprinting of Ronald Knox’s translation. It is a refuge from the bathos and awkwardness of many contemporary translations and from the taunting of believers by citing the “brothers and sisters of Christ.” The Old Testament, touched by Monsignor Knox with a note of archaism, divides admirers into those who love it and those who wished he had not added even a slight archaic shade to the clarity and style that were his genius.

His collection of talks, sermons, and letters constitutes a major part of his published works. They created a special genre of his thinking and style. Most of his sermons were carefully crafted conversations that he read in the pulpit, but somehow he made them seem like easy dinner conversation. It was an uncommon style for sermons, but it will surely last. Some of his most thoughtful and evocative sermons were obituaries of the great figures he had known. Many were Newmanesque, as he gently exposed the heart and aspirations of a subject.

This charming don also left us a delicious menu of delightful communications. In Essays in Satire he punctured the pretentions of the higher critics of the Bible through a study of Sherlock Holmes and a piece that “proved” Queen Victoria wrote In Memoriam. He reveled in the absurdities of early Anglican ecumenism and in much else to delight honest men and women who enjoy the human comedy in religious and scholarly life.

Let Dons Delight was recognized immediately as the work of a master of English styles and of the nuances of English politics and theology. It is a work of subtle wit and good fun: conversations in an Oxford common room, every fifty years, from the Armada to our own time. It is, of course, full of wisdoms and pathos of a deeper sort. It is, for Catholics, a sign of hope in education wherever it is appreciated or understood.

Ronald Knox died a good Christian and loyal priest. Fame meant little to him; he suffered a dreadful fear that he might not have done enough with what the Lord had given him. We, his heirs of lesser gifts, may think he was more concerned than he need have been. But let us do what he wanted and pray for him in gratitude for the treasures of perception, belief, and easy wit that he gave us — his own happy traditio of Catholic Faith and good fun.

Monsignor Eugene V. Clark, Ph.D.
Church of Saint Agnes, New York City

Posted in Fr. Ronald Knox | Tagged Ronald Knox | Leave a Comment »

The Gospel Of Suffering – John Paul II

February 3, 2012

Before Rouault turned his attention to Christ-centered paintings, he painted series of works showing clowns, kings, and prostitutes as a way of commenting on the sad state of modern society. In Christ Mocked by Soldiers (above, from 1932) Rouault shows Jesus at the moment he is forced to play the clown king for the amusement of the soldiers, who crown him with thorns and place a reed “scepter” in his hands. In Christ Mocked by Soldiers, Rouault mocks the world itself, which he sees as prostituting itself for material things at the expense of its soul. “The richness of the world, all artificial pleasures,” Rouault lamented, “have the taste of sickness and give off a smell of death in the face of certain spiritual possessions.” By 1932, Rouault may have recognized, as did many others, the degenerating situation in the world that would eventually lead up to World War II. Rouault returns to the image of the bearded Christ here to emphasize the weariness of age rather than the innocence of youth of The Crucifixion. In his sixties himself, Rouault grew weary of the world and its self-destructive ways. Shortly before his death in 1958, Rouault destroyed three hundred of his own paintings, which would be worth a fortune today, as if to place them on his own funeral pyre and out of the reach of the materialists who valued them in currency instead of, as he did, in Christianity. From the excellent http://artblogbybob.blogspot.com/. See more of Roualt’s work there

A reading selection from John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter Salvifici Doloris

Mary’s Suffering
The witnesses of the Cross and Resurrection of Christ have handed on to the Church and to mankind a specific Gospel of suffering. The Redeemer himself wrote this Gospel, above all by his own suffering accepted in love, so that man “should not perish but have eternal life.” This suffering, together with the living word of his teaching, became a rich source for all those who shared in Jesus’ sufferings among the first generation of his disciples and confessors and among those who have come after them down the centuries.

It is especially consoling to note — and also accurate in accordance with the Gospel and history — that at the side of Christ, in the first and most exalted place, there is always his Mother through the exemplary testimony that she bears by her whole life to this particular Gospel of suffering. In her, the many and intense sufferings were amassed in such an interconnected way that they were not only a proof of her unshakeable faith but also a contribution to the redemption of all.

In reality, from the time of her secret conversation with the angel, she began to see in her mission as a mother her “destiny” to share, in a singular and unrepeatable way, in the very mission of her Son. And she very soon received a confirmation of this in the events that accompanied the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, and in the solemn words of the aged Simeon, when he spoke of a sharp sword that would pierce her heart. Yet a further confirmation was in the anxieties and privations of the hurried flight into Egypt, caused by the cruel decision of Herod.

And again, after the events of her Son’s hidden and public life, events which she must have shared with acute sensitivity, it was on Calvary that Mary’s suffering, beside the suffering of Jesus, reached an intensity which can hardly be imagined from a human point of view but which was mysterious and supernaturally fruitful for the redemption of the world. Her ascent of Calvary and her standing at the foot of the Cross together with the Beloved Disciple were a special sort of sharing in the redeeming death of her Son. And the words which she heard from his lips were a kind of solemn handing-over of this Gospel of suffering so that it could be proclaimed to the whole community of believers.

As a witness to her Son’s Passion by her presence, and as a sharer in it by her compassion, Mary offered a unique contribution to the Gospel of suffering, by embodying in anticipation the expression of Saint Paul which was quoted at the beginning. She truly has a special title to be able to claim that she “completes in her flesh” — as already in her heart — “what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions “.

In the light of the unmatchable example of Christ, reflected with singular clarity in the life of his Mother, the Gospel of suffering, through the experience and words of the Apostles, becomes an inexhaustible source for the ever new generations that succeed one another in the history of the Church. The Gospel of suffering signifies not only the presence of suffering in the Gospel, as one of the themes of the Good News, but also the revelation of the salvific power and salvific significance of suffering in Christ’s messianic mission and, subsequently, in the mission and vocation of the Church.

Christ did not conceal from his listeners the need for suffering. He said very clearly: “If any man would come after me… let him take up his cross daily, ” and before his disciples he placed demands of a moral nature that can only be fulfilled on condition that they should “deny themselves.” The way that leads to the Kingdom of heaven is “hard and narrow”, and Christ contrasts it to the “wide and easy” way that “leads to destruction.” On various occasions Christ also said that his disciples and confessors would meet with much persecution, something which — as we know — happened not only in the first centuries of the Church’s life under the Roman Empire, but also came true in various historical periods and in other parts of the world, and still does even in our own time.

Here are some of Christ’s statements on this subject: “They will lay their hands on you and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors for my name’s sake. This will be a time for you to bear testimony. Settle it therefore in your minds, not to meditate beforehand how to answer; for I will give you a mouth and wisdom, which none of your adversaries will be able to withstand or contradict. You will be delivered up even by parents and brothers and kinsmen and friends, and some of you they will put to death; you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your lives.”

A Particular Proof Of Likeness To Christ
The Gospel of suffering speaks first in various places of suffering “for Christ”, “for the sake of Christ”, and it does so with the words of Jesus himself or the words of his Apostles. The Master does not conceal the prospect of suffering from his disciples and followers. On the contrary, he reveals it with all frankness, indicating at the same time the supernatural assistance that will accompany them in the midst of persecutions and tribulations ” for his name’s sake”.

These persecutions and tribulations will also be, as it were, a particular proof of likeness to Christ and union with him. “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you…; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you… A servant is not greater than his master. If they persecuted me they will persecute you… But all this they will do to you on my account, because they do not know him who sent me.” “I have said this to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”

This first chapter of the Gospel of suffering, which speaks of persecutions, namely of tribulations experienced because of Christ contains in itself a special call to courage and fortitude, sustained by the eloquence of the Resurrection. Christ has overcome the world definitively by his Resurrection. Yet, because of the relationship between the Resurrection and his Passion and death, he has at the same time overcome the world by his suffering.

Yes, suffering has been singularly present in that victory over the world which was manifested in the Resurrection. Christ retains in his risen body the marks of the wounds of the Cross in his hands, feet and side. Through the Resurrection, he manifests the victorious power of suffering, and he wishes to imbue with the conviction of this power the hearts of those whom he chose as Apostles and those whom he continually chooses and sends forth. The Apostle Paul will say: “All who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.”

Those Who Suffer Together With Christ
While the first great chapter of the Gospel of suffering is written down, as the generations pass, by those who suffer persecutions for Christ’s sake, simultaneously another great chapter of this Gospel unfolds through the course of history. This chapter is written by all those who suffer together with Christ, uniting their human sufferings to his salvific suffering. In these people there is fulfilled what the first witnesses of the Passion and Resurrection said and wrote about sharing in the sufferings of Christ. Therefore in those people there is fulfilled the Gospel of suffering, and, at the same time, each of them continues in a certain sense to write it: they write it and proclaim it to the world, they announce it to the world in which they live and to the people of their time.

Down through the centuries and generations it has been seen that in suffering there is concealed a particular power that draws a person interiorly close to Christ, a special grace. To this grace many saints, such as Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Ignatius of Loyola and others, owe their profound conversion. A result of such a conversion is not only that the individual discovers the salvific meaning of suffering but above all that he becomes a completely new person. He discovers a new dimension, as it were, of his entire life and vocation. This discovery is a particular confirmation of the spiritual greatness which in man surpasses the body in a way that is completely beyond compare. When this body is gravely ill, totally incapacitated, and the person is almost incapable of living and acting, all the more do interior maturity and spiritual greatness become evident, constituting a touching lesson to those who are healthy and normal.

This interior maturity and spiritual greatness in suffering are certainly the result of a particular conversion and cooperation with the grace of the Crucified Redeemer. It is he himself who acts at the heart of human sufferings through his Spirit of truth, through the consoling Spirit. It is he who transforms, in a certain sense, the very substance of the spiritual life, indicating for the person who suffers a place close to himself. It is he — as the interior Master and Guide — who reveals to the suffering brother and sister this wonderful interchange, situated at the very heart of the mystery of the Redemption. Suffering is, in itself, an experience of evil.

But Christ has made suffering the firmest basis of the definitive good, namely the good of eternal salvation. By his suffering on the Cross, Christ reached the very roots of evil, of sin and death. He conquered the author of evil, Satan, and his permanent rebellion against the Creator. To the suffering brother or sister Christ discloses and gradually reveals the horizons of the Kingdom of God: the horizons of a world converted to the Creator, of a world free from sin, a world being built on the saving power of love. And slowly but effectively, Christ leads into this world, into this Kingdom of the Father, suffering man, in a certain sense through the very heart of his suffering.

For suffering cannot be transformed and changed by a grace from outside, but from within. And Christ through his own salvific suffering is very much present in every human suffering, and can act from within that suffering by the powers of his Spirit of truth, his consoling Spirit.

This is not all: the Divine Redeemer wishes to penetrate the soul of every sufferer through the heart of his holy Mother, the first and the most exalted of all the redeemed. As though by a continuation of that motherhood which by the power of the Holy Spirit had given him life, the dying Christ conferred upon the ever Virgin Mary a new kind of motherhood — spiritual and universal — towards all human beings, so that every individual, during the pilgrimage of faith, might remain, together with her, closely united to him unto the Cross, and so that every form of suffering, given fresh life by the power of this Cross, should become no longer the weakness of man but the power of God.

However, this interior process does not always follow the same pattern. It often begins and is set in motion with great difficulty. Even the very point of departure differs: people react to suffering in different ways. But in general it can be said that almost always the individual enters suffering with a typically human protest and with the question “why”. He asks the meaning of his suffering and seeks an answer to this question on the human level. Certainly he often puts this question to God, and to Christ.

Furthermore, he cannot help noticing that the one to whom he puts the question is himself suffering and wishes to answer him from the Cross, from the heart of his own suffering. Nevertheless, it often takes time, even a long time, for this answer to begin to be interiorly perceived. For Christ does not answer directly and he does not answer in the abstract this human questioning about the meaning of suffering. Man hears Christ’s saving answer as he himself gradually becomes a sharer in the sufferings of Christ.

The answer which comes through this sharing, by way of the interior encounter with the Master, is in itself something more than the mere abstract answer to the question about the meaning of suffering. For it is above all a call. It is a vocation. Christ does not explain in the abstract the reasons for suffering, but before all else he says: “Follow me!”. Come! Take part through your suffering in this work of saving the world, a salvation achieved through my suffering! Through my Cross.

Gradually, as the individual takes up his cross, spiritually uniting himself to the Cross of Christ, the salvific meaning of suffering is revealed before him. He does not discover this meaning at his own human level, but at the level of the suffering of Christ. At the same time, however, from this level of Christ the salvific meaning of suffering descends to man’s level and becomes, in a sense, the individual’s personal response. It is then that man finds in his suffering interior peace and even spiritual joy.

The Testimony of St. Paul
Saint Paul speaks of such joy in the Letter to the Colossians: “I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake”(88). A source of joy is found in the overcoming of the sense of the uselessness of suffering, a feeling that is sometimes very strongly rooted in human suffering. This feeling not only consumes the person interiorly, but seems to make him a burden to others. The person feels condemned to receive help and assistance from others, and at the same time seems useless to himself. The discovery of the salvific meaning of suffering in union with Christ transforms this depressing feeling. Faith in sharing in the suffering of Christ brings with it the interior certainty that the suffering person “completes what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions”; the certainty that in the spiritual dimension of the work of Redemption he is serving, like Christ, the salvation of his brothers and sisters.

Therefore he is carrying out an irreplaceable service. In the Body of Christ, which is ceaselessly born of the Cross of the Redeemer, it is precisely suffering permeated by the spirit of Christ’s sacrifice that is the irreplaceable mediator and author of the good things which are indispensable for the world’s salvation. It is suffering, more than anything else, which clears the way for the grace which transforms human souls. Suffering, more than anything else, makes present in the history of humanity the powers of the Redemption. In that “cosmic” struggle between the spiritual powers of good and evil, spoken of in the Letter to the Ephesians, human sufferings, united to the redemptive suffering of Christ, constitute a special support for the powers of good, and open the way to the victory of these salvific powers.

And so the Church sees in all Christ’s suffering brothers and sisters as it were a multiple subject of his supernatural power. How often is it precisely to them that the pastors of the Church appeal, and precisely from them that they seek help and support! The Gospel of suffering is being written unceasingly, and it speaks unceasingly with the words of this strange paradox: the springs of divine power gush forth precisely in the midst of human weakness.

Those who share in the sufferings of Christ preserve in their own sufferings a very special particle of the infinite treasure of the world’s Redemption, and can share this treasure with others. The more a person is threatened by sin, the heavier the structures of sin which today’s world brings with it, the greater is the eloquence which human suffering possesses in itself. And the more the Church feels the need to have recourse to the value of human sufferings for the salvation of the world.

Posted in Pope John Paul II, Understanding Affliction/Suffering | Tagged Mary's Suffering, Salvifici Doloris, Suffering Together With Christ, The Need for Suffering | Leave a Comment »

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