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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.

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Sharers In The Suffering Of Christ — John Paul II

February 2, 2012

In 1920, Rouault painted The Crucifixion (above) in the same stained-glass style with the same contorted limbs. The Fauves claim Rouault as one of their own for his bold use of color. The Expressionists count him among their ranks for Rouault’s tortured rendition of the human body, usually Christ’s. Rouault paints Jesus in The Crucifixion without a beard, whereas other works show the familiar bearded face. Michelangelo chose to paint the Savior of The Last Judgment as a beardless youth to allude to the Greek ideal, casting Christ as a new Apollo bringing light into the world. Rouault may paint Jesus here as the beardless youth to stand for the whole generation of beardless European youth that met their end in the trenches and fields of wartime folly in WWI.

A reading selection from his Apostolic Letter Salvifici Doloris

I Know That My Redeemer Lives…
The same Song of the Suffering Servant in the Book of Isaiah leads us, through the following verses, precisely in the direction of this question and answer:

“When he makes himself an offering for sin,
he shall see his offspring,
he shall prolong his days;
the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand;
he shall see the fruit of the travail of his soul
and be satisfied;
by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant.
make many to be accounted righteous;
and he shall bear their iniquities.
Therefore I will divide him a portion with the great,
and he shall divide the spoil with the strong;
because he poured out his soul to death,
and was numbered with the transgressors;
yet he bore the sin of many,
and made intercession for the transgressors”.

One can say that with the Passion of Christ all human suffering has found itself in a new situation. And it is as though Job has foreseen this when he said: “I know that my Redeemer lives …”, and as though he had directed towards it his own suffering, which without the Redemption could not have revealed to him the fullness of its meaning.

A Sharer In The Redemptive Suffering Of Christ
In the Cross of Christ not only is the Redemption accomplished through suffering, but also human suffering itself has been redeemed,. Christ, – without any fault of his own – took on himself “the total evil of sin”. The experience of this evil determined the incomparable extent of Christ’s suffering, which became the price of the Redemption. The Song of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah speaks of this. In later times, the witnesses of the New Covenant, sealed in the Blood of Christ, will speak of this.

These are the words of the Apostle Peter in his First Letter: “You know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your fathers, not with the perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot”.

And the Apostle Paul in the Letter to the Galatians will say: “He gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age,” and in the First Letter to the Corinthians: “You were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”

With these and similar words the witnesses of the New Covenant speak of the greatness of the Redemption, accomplished through the suffering of Christ. The Redeemer suffered in place of man and for man. Every man has his own share in the Redemption. Each one is also called to share in that suffering through which the Redemption was accomplished. He is called to share in that suffering through which all human suffering has also been redeemed. In bringing about the Redemption through suffering, Christ has also raised human suffering to the level of the Redemption. Thus each man, in his suffering, can also become a sharer in the redemptive suffering of Christ.

The Eloquence Of The Resurrection
The texts of the New Testament express this concept in many places. In the Second Letter to the Corinthians the Apostle writes: “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For while we live we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh …. knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus.”

Saint Paul speaks of various sufferings and, in particular, of those in which the first Christians became sharers “for the sake of Christ “. These sufferings enable the recipients of that Letter to share in the work of the Redemption, accomplished through the suffering and death of the Redeemer. The eloquence of the Cross and death is, however, completed by the eloquence of the Resurrection. Man finds in the Resurrection a completely new light, which helps him to go forward through the thick darkness of humiliations, doubts, hopelessness and persecution.

Therefore the Apostle will also write in the Second Letter to the Corinthians: “For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.” Elsewhere he addresses to his recipients words of encouragement: “May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ.” And in the Letter to the Romans he writes: “I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”

The very participation in Christ’s suffering finds, in these apostolic expressions, as it were a twofold dimension. If one becomes a sharer in the sufferings of Christ, this happens because Christ has opened his suffering to man, because he himself in his redemptive suffering has become, in a certain sense, a sharer in all human sufferings. Man, discovering through faith the redemptive suffering of Christ, also discovers in it his own sufferings; he rediscovers them, through faith, enriched with a new content and new meaning.

This discovery caused Saint Paul to write particularly strong words in the Letter to the Galatians: “I have been crucified with Christ, it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me: and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Faith enables the author of these words to know that love which led Christ to the Cross. And if he loved us in this way, suffering and dying, then with this suffering and death of his he lives in the one whom he loved in this way; he lives in the man: in Paul. And living in him-to the degree that Paul, conscious of this through faith, responds to his love with love-Christ also becomes in a particular way united to the man, to Paul, through the Cross. This union caused Paul to write, in the same Letter to the Galatians, other words as well, no less strong: “But far be it from me to glory except in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.”

Through Faith The Cross Reaches Man
The Cross of Christ throws salvific light, in a most penetrating way, on man’s life and in particular on his suffering. For through faith the Cross reaches man together with the Resurrection: the mystery of the Passion is contained in the Paschal Mystery. The witnesses of Christ’s Passion are at the same time witnesses of his Resurrection. Paul writes: “That I may know him (Christ) and the power of his Resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.”

Truly, the Apostle first experienced the “power of the Resurrection” of Christ, on the road to Damascus, and only later, in this paschal light, reached that ” sharing in his sufferings” of which he speaks, for example, in the Letter to the Galatians. The path of Paul is clearly paschal: sharing in the Cross of Christ comes about through the experience of the Risen One, therefore through a special sharing in the Resurrection. Thus, even in the Apostle’s expressions on the subject of suffering there so often appears the motif of glory, which finds its beginning in Christ’s Cross.

The witnesses of the Cross and Resurrection were convinced that “through many tribulations we must enter the Kingdom of God”(65). And Paul, writing to the Thessalonians, says this: “We ourselves boast of you… for your steadfastness and faith in all your persecutions and in the afflictions which you are enduring. This is evidence of the righteous judgment of God, that you may be made worthy of the Kingdom of God, for which you are suffering”(66).

Thus to share in the sufferings of Christ is, at the same time, to suffer for the Kingdom of God. In the eyes of the just God, before his judgment, those who share in the suffering of Christ become worthy of this Kingdom. Through their sufferings, in a certain sense they repay the infinite price of the Passion and death of Christ, which became the price of our Redemption: at this price the Kingdom of God has been consolidated anew in human history, becoming the definitive prospect of man’s earthly existence. Christ has led us into this Kingdom through his suffering. And also through suffering those surrounded by the mystery of Christ’s Redemption become mature enough to enter this Kingdom.

Suffering And Glory
To the prospect of the Kingdom of God is linked hope in that glory which has its beginning in the Cross of Christ. The Resurrection revealed this glory — eschatological glory — which, in the Cross of Christ, was completely obscured by the immensity of suffering. Those who share in the sufferings of Christ are also called, through their own sufferings, to share in glory.

Paul expresses this in various places. To the Romans he writes: ” We are … fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed in us.”. In the Second Letter to the Corinthians we read: “For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, because we look not to the things that are seen but to things that are unseen.” The Apostle Peter will express this truth in the following words of his First Letter: “But rejoice in so far as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed .”

The motif of suffering and glory has a strictly evangelical characteristic, which becomes clear by reference to the Cross and the Resurrection. The Resurrection became, first of all, the manifestation of glory, which corresponds to Christ’s being lifted up through the Cross. If, in fact, the Cross was to human eyes Christ’s emptying of himself, at the same time it was in the eyes of God his being lifted up.

On the Cross, Christ attained and fully accomplished his mission: by fulfilling the will of the Father, he at the same time fully realized himself. In weakness he manifested his power, and in humiliation he manifested all his messianic greatness. Are not all the words he uttered during his agony on Golgotha a proof of this greatness, and especially his words concerning the perpetrators of his crucifixion: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do”(70)? To those who share in Christ’s sufferings these words present themselves with the power of a supreme example. Suffering is also an invitation to manifest the moral greatness of man, his spiritual maturity. Proof of this has been given, down through the generations, by the martyrs and confessors of Christ, faithful to the words: “And do not fear those who kill the body, but cannot kill the soul .

Christ’s Resurrection has revealed “the glory of the future age” and, at the same time, has confirmed “the boast of the Cross”: the glory that is hidden in the very suffering of Christ and which has been and is often mirrored in human suffering, as an expression of man’s spiritual greatness. This glory must be acknowledged not only in the martyrs for the faith but in many others also who, at times, even without belief in Christ, suffer and give their lives for the truth and for a just cause. In the sufferings of all of these people the great dignity of man is strikingly confirmed.

I Can Do All Things In Him Who Strengthens Me
Suffering, in fact, is always a trial — at times a very hard one — to which humanity is subjected. The gospel paradox of weakness and strength often speaks to us from the pages of the Letters of Saint Paul, a paradox particularly experienced by the Apostle himself and together with him experienced by all who share Christ’s sufferings. Paul writes in the Second Letter to the Corinthians: “I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me”(72). In the Second Letter to Timothy we read: “And therefore I suffer as I do. But I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed”(73). And in the Letter to the Philippians he will even say: “I can do all things in him who strengthens me”(74).

Those who share in Christ’s sufferings have before their eyes the Paschal Mystery of the Cross and Resurrection, in which Christ descends, in a first phase, to the ultimate limits of human weakness and impotence: indeed, he dies nailed to the Cross. But if at the same time in this weakness there is accomplished his lifting up, confirmed by the power of the Resurrection, then this means that the weaknesses of all human sufferings are capable of being infused with the same power of God manifested in Christ’s Cross.

In such a concept, to suffer means to become particularly susceptible, particularly open to the working of the salvific powers of God, offered to humanity in Christ. In him God has confirmed his desire to act especially through suffering, which is man’s weakness and emptying of self, and he wishes to make his power known precisely in this weakness and emptying of self. This also explains the exhortation in the First Letter of Peter: “Yet if one suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but under that name let him glorify God”(75).

A Special Call To The Virtue
In the Letter to the Romans, the Apostle Paul deals still more fully with the theme of this “birth of power in weakness”, this spiritual tempering of man in the midst of trials and tribulations, which is the particular vocation of those who share in Christ’s sufferings. “More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.” Suffering as it were contains a special call to the virtue which man must exercise on his own part. And this is the virtue of perseverance in bearing whatever disturbs and causes harm. In doing this, the individual unleashes hope, which maintains in him the conviction that suffering will not get the better of him, that it will not deprive him of his dignity as a human being, a dignity linked to awareness of the meaning of life.

And indeed this meaning makes itself known together with the working of God’s love, which is the supreme gift of the Holy Spirit. The more he shares in this love, man rediscovers himself more and more fully in suffering: he rediscovers the “soul” which he thought he had “lost” because of suffering.

Concerning The Creative Character Of Suffering
Nevertheless, the Apostle’s experiences as a sharer in the sufferings of Christ go even further. In the Letter to the Colossians we read the words which constitute as it were the final stage of the spiritual journey in relation to suffering: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church.” And in another Letter he asks his readers: “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?”

In the Paschal Mystery Christ began the union with man in the community of the Church. The mystery of the Church is expressed in this: that already in the act of Baptism, which brings about a configuration with Christ, and then through his Sacrifice — sacramentally through the Eucharist — the Church is continually being built up spiritually as the Body of Christ. In this Body, Christ wishes to be united with every individual, and in a special way he is united with those who suffer. The words quoted above from the Letter to the Colossians bear witness to the exceptional nature of this union. For, whoever suffers in union with Christ — just as the Apostle Paul bears his “tribulations” in union with Christ — not only receives from Christ that strength already referred to but also “completes” by his suffering “what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions”.

This evangelical outlook especially highlights the truth concerning the creative character of suffering. The sufferings of Christ created the good of the world’s redemption. This good in itself is inexhaustible and infinite. No man can add anything to it. But at the same time, in the mystery of the Church as his Body, Christ has in a sense opened his own redemptive suffering to all human suffering. In so far as man becomes a sharer in Christ’s sufferings — in any part of the world and at any time in history — to that extent he in his own way completes the suffering through which Christ accomplished the Redemption of the world.

Does this mean that the Redemption achieved by Christ is not complete? No. It only means that the Redemption, accomplished through satisfactory love, remains always open to all love expressed in human suffering. In this dimension — the dimension of love — the Redemption which has already been completely accomplished is, in a certain sense, constantly being accomplished.

Christ achieved the Redemption completely and to the very limits but at the same time he did not bring it to a close. In this redemptive suffering, through which the Redemption of the world was accomplished, Christ opened himself from the beginning to every human suffering and constantly does so. Yes, it seems to be part of the very essence of Christ’s redemptive suffering that this suffering requires to be unceasingly completed.

Thus, with this openness to every human suffering, Christ has accomplished the world’s Redemption through his own suffering. For, at the same time, this Redemption, even though it was completely achieved by Christ’s suffering, lives on and in its own special way develops in the history of man. It lives and develops as the body of Christ, the Church, and in this dimension every human suffering, by reason of the loving union with Christ, completes the suffering of Christ. It completes that suffering just as the Church completes the redemptive work of Christ. The mystery of the Church — that body which completes in itself also Christ’s crucified and risen body — indicates at the same time the space or context in which human sufferings complete the sufferings of Christ. Only within this radius and dimension of the Church as the Body of Christ, which continually develops in space and time, can one think and speak of “what is lacking” in the sufferings of Christ. The Apostle, in fact, makes this clear when he writes of “completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church”.

It is precisely the Church, which ceaselessly draws on the infinite resources of the Redemption, introducing it into the life of humanity, which is the dimension in which the redemptive suffering of Christ can be constantly completed by the suffering of man. This also highlights the divine and human nature of the Church. Suffering seems in some way to share in the characteristics of this nature. And for this reason suffering also has a special value in the eyes of the Church. It is something good, before which the Church bows down in reverence with all the depth of her faith in the Redemption. She likewise bows down with all the depth of that faith with which she embraces within herself the inexpressible mystery of the Body of Christ.

Posted in Pope John Paul II, Understanding Affliction/Suffering | Tagged human suffering redeemed, I know that my Redeemer lives, Job, Perseverance, Rediscovering Suffering Through Faith, Share in Christ's Suffering, Suffering And Glory, Suffering for the Kingdom of God | 1 Comment »

Jesus Christ’s Suffering Conquered By Love by John Paul II

February 1, 2012

Rouault’s The Flagellation (above, from 1915) shows the lingering influence of stained glass window design in the cloisonnist dark lines separating the fields of color. Christ stands at the pillory in the center of the work to take the blows of the soldiers. World War I raged as Rouault painted this scene of suffering, which may allude to Europe’s self-flagellation in the name of nationalism. Rouault’s works concentrate almost exclusively on the passion and death of Christ, with no images that I know of depicting the triumph of the Resurrection. Rouault identified with agony more than ecstacy, saying once, “The conscience of an artist worthy of the name is like an incurable disease which causes him endless torment but occasionally fills him with silent joy.” Perhaps Rouault allowed himself a moment of “silent joy” upon completing The Flagellation, but the emphasis was definitely on the silence.

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

God’s Salvific Work
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” These words, spoken by Christ in his conversation with Nicodemus, introduce us into the very heart of God’s salvific work. They also express the very essence of Christian soteriology, that is, of the theology of salvation. Salvation means liberation from evil, and for this reason it is closely bound up with the problem of suffering. According to the words spoken to Nicodemus, God gives his Son to “the world” to free man from evil, which bears within itself the definitive and absolute perspective on suffering. At the same time, the very word “gives” (“gave”) indicates that this liberation must be achieved by the only-begotten Son through his own suffering. And in this, love is manifested, the infinite love both of that only-begotten Son and of the Father who for this reason “gives” his Son. This is love for man, love for the “world”: it is salvific love.

We here find ourselves — and we must clearly realize this in our shared reflection on this problem — faced with a completely new dimension of our theme. It is a different dimension from the one which was determined and, in a certain sense, concluded the search for the meaning of suffering within the limit of justice. This is the dimension of Redemption, to which in the Old Testament, at least in the Vulgate text, the words of the just man Job already seem to refer: “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at last… I shall see God….” Whereas our consideration has so far concentrated primarily and in a certain sense exclusively on suffering in its multiple temporal dimension (as also the sufferings of the just man Job), the words quoted above from Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus refer to suffering in its fundamental and definitive meaning. God gives his only-begotten Son so that man “should not perish” and the meaning of these words ” should not perish” is precisely specified by the words that follow: “but have eternal life”.

Man ” perishes” when he loses “eternal life”. The opposite of salvation is not, therefore, only temporal suffering, any kind of suffering, but the definitive suffering: the loss of eternal life, being rejected by God, damnation. The only-begotten Son was given to humanity primarily to protect man against this definitive evil and against definitive suffering. In his salvific mission, the Son must therefore strike evil right at its transcendental roots from which it develops in human history. These transcendental roots of evil are grounded in sin and death: for they are at the basis of the loss of eternal life. The mission of the only-begotten Son consists in conquering sin and death. He conquers sin by his obedience unto death, and he overcomes death by his Resurrection.

When one says that Christ by his mission strikes at evil at its very roots, we have in mind not only evil and definitive, eschatological suffering (so that man “should not perish, but have eternal life”), but also — at least indirectly toil and suffering in their temporal and historical dimension. For evil remains bound to sin and death. And even if we must use great caution in judging man’s suffering as a consequence of concrete sins (this is shown precisely by the example of the just man Job), nevertheless suffering cannot be divorced from the sin of the beginnings, from what Saint John calls “the sin of the world,” from the sinful background of the personal actions and social processes in human history. Though it is not licit to apply here the narrow criterion of direct dependence (as Job’s three friends did), it is equally true that one cannot reject the criterion that, at the basis of human suffering, there is a complex involvement with sin.

It is the same when we deal with death. It is often awaited even as a liberation from the suffering of this life. At the same time, it is not possible to ignore the fact that it constitutes as it were a definitive summing-up of the destructive work both in the bodily organism and in the psyche. But death primarily involves the dissolution of the entire psychophysical personality of man. The soul survives and subsists separated from the body, while the body is subjected to gradual decomposition according to the words of the Lord God, pronounced after the sin committed by man at the beginning of his earthly history: “You are dust and to dust you shall return”(30).

Therefore, even if death is not a form of suffering in the temporal sense of the word, even if in a certain way it is beyond all forms of suffering, at the same time the evil which the human being experiences in death has a definitive and total character. By his salvific work, the only-begotten Son liberates man from sin and death. First of all he blots out from human history the dominion of sin, which took root under the influence of the evil Spirit, beginning with Original Sin, and then he gives man the possibility of living in Sanctifying Grace. In the wake of his victory over sin, he also takes away the dominion of death, by his Resurrection beginning the process of the future resurrection of the body. Both are essential conditions of “eternal life”, that is of man’s definitive happiness in union with God; this means, for the saved, that in the eschatological perspective suffering is totally blotted out.

As a result of Christ’s salvific work, man exists on earth with the hope of eternal life and holiness. And even though the victory over sin and death achieved by Christ in his Cross and Resurrection does not abolish temporal suffering from human life, nor free from suffering the whole historical dimension of human existence, it nevertheless throws a new light upon this dimension and upon every suffering: the light of salvation. This is the light of the Gospel, that is, of the Good News.

At the heart of this light is the truth expounded in the conversation with Nicodemus: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” This truth radically changes the picture of man’s history and his earthly situation: in spite of the sin that took root in this history both as an original inheritance and as the “sin of the world” and as the sum of personal sins, God the Father has loved the only-begotten Son, that is, he loves him in a lasting way; and then in time, precisely through this all-surpassing love, he “gives” this Son, that he may strike at the very roots of human evil and thus draw close in a salvific way to the whole world of suffering in which man shares.

In his messianic activity in the midst of Israel, Christ drew increasingly closer to the world of human suffering. “He went about doing good,” and his actions concerned primarily those who were suffering and seeking help. He healed the sick, consoled the afflicted, fed the hungry, freed people from deafness, from blindness, from leprosy, from the devil and from various physical disabilities, three times he restored the dead to life. He was sensitive to every human suffering, whether of the body or of the soul. And at the same time he taught, and at the heart of his teaching there are the eight beatitudes, which are addressed to people tried by various sufferings in their temporal life. These are “the poor in spirit” and “the afflicted” and “those who hunger and thirst for justice” and those who are “persecuted for justice sake”, when they insult them, persecute them and speak falsely every kind of evil against them for the sake of Christ…. Thus according to Matthew; Luke mentions explicitly those “who hunger now”.

At any rate, Christ drew close above all to the world of human suffering through the fact of having taken this suffering upon his very self. During his public activity, he experienced not only fatigue, homelessness, misunderstanding even on the part of those closest to him, but, more than anything, he became progressively more and more isolated and encircled by hostility and the preparations for putting him to death.

Christ is aware of this, and often speaks to his disciples of the sufferings and death that await him: “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem; and the Son of man will be delivered to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death and deliver him to the Gentiles; and they will mock him, and spit upon him, and scourge him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise.” Christ goes towards his Passion and death with full awareness of the mission that he has to fulfill precisely in this way.

Precisely by means of this suffering he must bring it about “that man should not perish, but have eternal life”. Precisely by means of his Cross he must strike at the roots of evil, planted in the history of man and in human souls. Precisely by means of his Cross he must accomplish the work of salvation. This work, in the plan of eternal Love, has a redemptive character.

And therefore Christ severely reproves Peter when the latter wants to make him abandon the thoughts of suffering and of death on the Cross. And when, during his arrest in Gethsemane, the same Peter tries to defend him with the sword, Christ says, ” Put your sword back into its place… But how then should the scriptures be fulfilled, that it must be so?” And he also says, “Shall I not drink the cup which the Father has given me?”. This response, like others that reappear in different points of the Gospel, shows how profoundly Christ was imbued by the thought that he had already expressed in the conversation with Nicodemus: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” Christ goes toward his own suffering, aware of its saving power; he goes forward in obedience to the Father, but primarily he is united to the Father in this love with which he has loved the world and man in the world. And for this reason Saint Paul will write of Christ: “He loved me and gave himself for me.”

The Fourth Song Of The Suffering Servant
The Scriptures had to be fulfilled. There were many messianic texts in the Old Testament which foreshadowed the sufferings of the future Anointed One of God. Among all these, particularly touching is the one which is commonly called the Fourth Song of the Suffering Servant, in the Book of Isaiah. The Prophet, who has rightly been called “the Fifth Evangelist”, presents in this Song an image of the sufferings of the Servant with a realism as acute as if he were seeing them with his own eyes: the eyes of the body and of the spirit. In the light of the verses of Isaiah, the Passion of Christ becomes almost more expressive and touching than in the descriptions of the Evangelists themselves. Behold, the true Man of Sorrows presents himself before us:

“He had no form or comeliness that we should look
at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by men;
a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions,
he was bruised for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that made us whole,
and with his stripes we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray
we have turned every one to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”

The Song of the Suffering Servant contains a description in which it is possible, in a certain sense, to identify the stages of Christ’s Passion in their various details: the arrest, the humiliation, the blows, the spitting, the contempt for the prisoner, the unjust sentence, and then the scourging, the crowning with thorns and the mocking, the carrying of the Cross, the crucifixion and the agony.

Even more than this description of the Passion, what strikes us in the words of the Prophet is the depth of Christ’s sacrifice. Behold, He, though innocent, takes upon himself the sufferings of all people, because he takes upon himself the sins of all. “The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all”: all human sin in its breadth and depth becomes the true cause of the Redeemer’s suffering. If the suffering “is measured” by the evil suffered, then the words of the Prophet enable us to understand the extent of this evil and suffering with which Christ burdened himself. It can be said that this is “substitutive” suffering; but above all it is “redemptive”.

The Man of Sorrows of that prophecy is truly that “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” In his suffering, sins are cancelled out precisely because he alone as the only-begotten Son could take them upon himself, accept them with that love for the Father which overcomes the evil of every sin; in a certain sense he annihilates this evil in the spiritual space of the relationship between God and humanity, and fills this space with good.

Here we touch upon the duality of nature of a single personal subject of redemptive suffering.

He who by his Passion and death on the Cross brings about the Redemption is the only-begotten Son whom God “gave”. And at the same time this Son who is consubstantial with the Father suffers as a man. His suffering has human dimensions; it also has unique in the history of humanity — a depth and intensity which, while being human, can also be an incomparable depth and intensity of suffering, insofar as the man who suffers is in person the only-begotten Son himself: ” God from God”. Therefore, only he — the only-begotten Son — is capable of embracing the measure of evil contained in the sin of man: in every sin and in “total” sin, according to the dimensions of the historical existence of humanity on earth.

It can be said that the above considerations now brings us directly to Gethsemane and Golgotha, where the Song of the Suffering Servant, contained in the Book of Isaiah, was fulfilled. But before going there, let us read the next verses of the Song, which give a prophetic anticipation of the Passion at Gethsemane and Golgotha. The Suffering Servant — and this in its turn is essential for an analysis of Christ’s Passion — takes on himself those sufferings which were spoken of, in a totally voluntary way:

“He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
yet he opened not his mouth;
like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,
and like a sheep that before its shearers is dumb,
so he opened not his mouth.
By oppression and judgment he was taken away;
and as for his generation, who considered that
he was cut off out of the land of the living,
stricken for the transgression of my people?
And they made his grave with the wicked
and with a rich man in his death,
although he had done no violence,
and there was no deceit in his mouth.”

Christ suffers voluntarily and suffers innocently. With his suffering he accepts that question which — posed by people many times — has been expressed, in a certain sense, in a radical way by the Book of Job. Christ, however, not only carries with himself the same question (and this in an even more radical way, for he is not only a man like Job but the only-begotten Son of God), but he also carries the greatest possible answer to this question.

The Word Of The Cross
One can say that this answer emerges from the very master of which the question is made up. Christ gives the answer to the question about suffering and the meaning of suffering not only by his teaching, that is by the Good News, but most of all by his own suffering, which is integrated with this teaching of the Good News in an organic and indissoluble way. And this is the final, definitive word of this teaching: “the word of the Cross”, as Saint Paul one day will say.

This “word of the Cross” completes with a definitive reality the image of the ancient prophecy. Many episodes, many discourses during Christ’s public teaching bear witness to the way in which from the beginning he accepts this suffering which is the will of the Father for the salvation of the world. However, the prayer in Gethsemane becomes a definitive point here.

The words: “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt”(45), and later: “My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, thy will be done,” have a manifold eloquence. They prove the truth of that love which the only-begotten Son gives to the Father in his obedience. At the same time, they attest to the truth of his suffering. The words of that prayer of Christ in Gethsemane prove the truth of love through the truth of suffering. Christ’s words confirm with all simplicity this human truth of suffering, to its very depths: suffering is the undergoing of evil before which man shudders. He says: let it pass from me”, just as Christ says in Gethsemane.

His words also attest to this unique and incomparable depth and intensity of suffering which only the man who is the only-begotten Son could experience; they attest to that depth and intensity which the prophetic words quoted above in their own way help us to understand. Not of course completely (for this we would have to penetrate the divine-human mystery of the subject), but at least they help us to understand that difference (and at the same time the similarity) which exists between every possible form of human suffering and the suffering of the God-man. Gethsemane is the place where precisely this suffering, in all the truth expressed by the Prophet concerning the evil experienced in it, is revealed as it were definitively before the eyes of Christ’s soul.

After the words in Gethsemane come the words uttered on Golgotha, words which bear witness to this depth — unique in the history of the world — of the evil of the suffering experienced. When Christ says: “My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?”, his words are not only an expression of that abandonment which many times found expression in the Old Testament, especially in the Psalms and in particular in that Psalm 22 [21] from which come the words quoted(47).

One can say that these words on abandonment are born at the level of that inseparable union of the Son with the Father, and are born because the Father “laid on him the iniquity of us all.” They also foreshadow the words of Saint Paul: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin.” Together with this horrible weight, encompassing the “entire” evil of the turning away from God which is contained in sin, Christ, through the divine depth of his filial union with the Father, perceives in a humanly inexpressible way this suffering which is the separation, the rejection by the Father, the estrangement from God. But precisely through this suffering he accomplishes the Redemption, and can say as he breathes his last: “It is finished.”

The Cross of Christ
One can also say that the Scripture has been fulfilled, that these words of the Song of the Suffering Servant have been definitively accomplished: “it was the will of the Lord to bruise him.” Human suffering has reached its culmination in the Passion of Christ. And at the same time it has entered into a completely new dimension and a new order: it has been linked to love, to that love of which Christ spoke to Nicodemus, to that love which creates good, drawing it out by means of suffering, just as the supreme good of the Redemption of the world was drawn from the Cross of Christ, and from that Cross constantly takes its beginning. The Cross of Christ has become a source from which flow rivers of living water. In it we must also pose anew the question about the meaning of suffering, and read in it, to its very depths, the answer to this question.

Posted in Pope John Paul II, Understanding Affliction/Suffering | Tagged A Result of Christ's Salvific Work, Christ's Passion, Gethsemane, Rouault’s The Flagellation, Salvation and Suffering, The Dominion of Sin, The Fourth Song Of The Suffering Servant, The Opposite of Salvation, The Word Of The Cross | Leave a Comment »

Reading Selections 2 From The Apostolic Letter Salvifici Doloris By John Paul II

January 31, 2012

The God of Job's comforters, who claim that Job's trials are punishment for his sins, is to Blake a false god, equivalent to the demiurge of the Gnostics. This was more of a distinction between Elohim (the creator) and Yahweh (the law-giver) than it was any direct influence of Gnosticism. For Blake, Yahweh was an imposer of laws upon a humanity that could never keep to them -- he appears in the 11th illustration as a cloven-hoofed apparition who menaces Job while pointing to the tablets of the covenant. In Blake's mythology he is analogous to "the Accuser of Sin", the specter, and Urizen. This particular print was based upon Blake's earlier monotype, Elohim Creating Adam.

The Quest For An Answer To The Question Of The Meaning Of Suffering
Within each form of suffering endured by man, and at the same time at the basis of the whole world of suffering, there inevitably arises the question: why? It is a question about the cause, the reason, and equally, about the purpose of suffering, and, in brief, a question about its meaning. Not only does it accompany human suffering, but it seems even to determine its human content, what makes suffering precisely human suffering.

It is obvious that pain, especially physical pain, is widespread in the animal world. But only the suffering human being knows that he is suffering and wonders why; and he suffers in a humanly speaking still deeper way if he does not find a satisfactory answer. This is a difficult question, just as is a question closely akin to it, the question of evil. Why does evil exist? Why is there evil in the world? When we put the question in this way, we are always, at least to a certain extent, asking a question about suffering too.

Both questions are difficult, when an individual puts them to another individual, when people put them to other people, as also when man puts them to God. For man does not put this question to the world, even though it is from the world that suffering often comes to him, but he puts it to God as the Creator and Lord of the world. And it is well known that concerning this question there not only arise many frustrations and conflicts in the relations of man with God, but it also happens that people reach the point of actually denying God.

For, whereas the existence of the world opens as it were the eyes of the human soul to the existence of God, to his wisdom, power and greatness, evil and suffering seem to obscure this image, sometimes in a radical way, especially in the daily drama of so many cases of undeserved suffering and of so many faults without proper punishment. So this circumstance shows — perhaps more than any other — the importance of the question of the meaning of suffering; it also shows how much care must be taken both in dealing with the question itself and with all possible answers to it.

Man can put this question to God with all the emotion of his heart and with his mind full of dismay and anxiety; and God expects the question and listens to it, as we see in the Revelation of the Old Testament. In the Book of Job the question has found its most vivid expression.

The story of this just man, who without any fault of his own is tried by innumerable sufferings, is well known. He loses his possessions, his sons and daughters, and finally he himself is afflicted by a grave sickness. In this horrible situation three old acquaintances come to his house, and each one in his own way tries to convince him that since he has been struck down by such varied and terrible sufferings, he must have done something seriously wrong.

For suffering — they say — always strikes a man as punishment for a crime; it is sent by the absolutely just God and finds its reason in the order of justice. It can be said that Job’s old friends wish not only to convince him of the moral justice of the evil, but in a certain sense they attempt to justify to themselves the moral meaning of suffering. In their eyes suffering can have a meaning only as a punishment for sin, therefore only on the level of God’s justice, who repays good with good and evil with evil.

The point of reference in this case is the doctrine expressed in other Old Testament writings which show us suffering as punishment inflicted by God for human sins. The God of Revelation is the Lawgiver and Judge to a degree that no temporal authority can see. For the God of Revelation is first of all the Creator, from whom comes, together with existence, the essential good of creation. Therefore, the conscious and free violation of this good by man is not only a transgression of the law but at the same time an offence against the Creator, who is the first Lawgiver. Such a transgression has the character of sin, according to the exact meaning of this word, namely the biblical and theological one.

Corresponding to the moral evil of sin is punishment, which guarantees the moral order in the same transcendent sense in which this order is laid down by the will of the Creator and Supreme Lawgiver. From this there also derives one of the fundamental truths of religious faith, equally based upon Revelation, namely that God is a just judge, who rewards good and punishes evil: “For thou art just in all that thou hast done to us, and all thy works are true and thy ways right, and all thy judgments are truth. Thou hast executed true judgments in all that thou hast brought upon us… for in truth and justice thou hast brought all this upon us because of our sins.”

The opinion expressed by Job’s friends manifests a conviction also found in the moral conscience of humanity: the objective moral order demands punishment for transgression, sin and crime. From this point of view, suffering appears as a “justified evil”. The conviction of those who explain suffering as a punishment for sin finds support in the order of justice, and this corresponds to the conviction expressed by one of Job’s friends: “As I have seen, those who plough iniquity and sow trouble reap the same”(24).

Job however challenges the truth of the principle that identifies suffering with punishment for sin. And he does this on the basis of his own opinion. For he is aware that he has not deserved such punishment, and in fact he speaks of the good that he has done during his life. In the end, God himself reproves Job’s friends for their accusations and recognizes that Job is not guilty. His suffering is the suffering of someone who is innocent and it must be accepted as a mystery, which the individual is unable to penetrate completely by his own intelligence.

The Book of Job does not violate the foundations of the transcendent moral order, based upon justice, as they are set forth by the whole of Revelation, in both the Old and the New Covenants. At the same time, however, this Book shows with all firmness that the principles of this order cannot be applied in an exclusive and superficial way. While it is true that suffering has a meaning as punishment, when it is connected with a fault, it is not true that all suffering is a consequence of a fault and has the nature of a punishment.

The figure of the just man Job is a special proof of this in the Old Testament. Revelation, which is the word of God himself, with complete frankness presents the problem of the suffering of an innocent man: suffering without guilt. Job has not been punished, there was no reason for inflicting a punishment on him, even if he has been subjected to a grievous trial. From the introduction of the Book it is apparent that God permitted this testing as a result of Satan’s provocation. For Satan had challenged before the Lord the righteousness of Job: “Does Job fear God for nought? … Thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But put forth thy hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will curse thee to thy face”. And if the Lord consents to test Job with suffering, he does it to demonstrate the latter’s righteousness. The suffering has the nature of a test.

The Book of Job is not the last word on this subject in Revelation. In a certain way it is a foretelling of the Passion of Christ. But already in itself it is sufficient argument why the answer to the question about the meaning of suffering is not to be unreservedly linked to the moral order, based on justice alone. While such an answer has a fundamental and transcendent reason and validity, at the same time it is seen to be not only unsatisfactory in cases similar to the suffering of the just man Job, but it even seems to trivialize and impoverish the concept of justice which we encounter in Revelation.

The Book of Job poses in an extremely acute way the question of the “why” of suffering; it also shows that suffering strikes the innocent, but it does not yet give the solution to the problem.

Already in the Old Testament we note an orientation that begins to go beyond the concept according to which suffering has a meaning only as a punishment for sin, insofar as it emphasizes at the same time the educational value of suffering as a punishment. Thus in the sufferings inflicted by God upon the Chosen People there is included an invitation of his mercy, which corrects in order to lead to conversion: “… these punishments were designed not to destroy but to discipline our people.”

Thus the personal dimension of punishment is affirmed. According to this dimension, punishment has a meaning not only because it serves to repay the objective evil of the transgression with another evil, but first and foremost because it creates the possibility of rebuilding goodness in the subject who suffers.

This is an extremely important aspect of suffering. It is profoundly rooted in the entire Revelation of the Old and above all the New Covenant. Suffering must serve for conversion, that is, for the rebuilding of goodness in the subject, who can recognize the divine mercy in this call to repentance. The purpose of penance is to overcome evil, which under different forms lies dormant in man. Its purpose is also to strengthen goodness both in man himself and in his relationships with others and especially with God.

But in order to perceive the true answer to the “why” of suffering, we must look to the revelation of divine love, the ultimate source of the meaning of everything that exists. Love is also the richest source of the meaning of suffering, which always remains a mystery: we are conscious of the insufficiency and inadequacy of our explanations. Christ causes us to enter into the mystery and to discover the “why” of suffering, as far as we are capable of grasping the sublimity of divine love.

In order to discover the profound meaning of suffering, following the revealed word of God, we must open ourselves wide to the human subject in his manifold potentiality. We must above all accept the light of Revelation not only insofar as it expresses the transcendent order of justice but also insofar as it illuminates this order with Love, as the definitive source of everything that exists. Love is: also the fullest source of the answer to the question of the meaning of suffering. This answer has been given by God to man in the Cross of Jesus Christ.

Posted in Pope John Paul II, Understanding Affliction/Suffering, William Blake | Tagged Christ and Suffering, Evil and Suffering, Job, Suffering as Punishment, The Meaning Of Suffering | Leave a Comment »

The Risen Body Will Be Incorruptible, Glorious, Full Of Dynamism, And Spiritual

June 10, 2011

Fra Angelico, Christ Resurrected and the Maries at the Tomb in Cell 8

The Pauline Anthropology Of The Resurrection by Pope John Paul II From his general audience of Wednesday, 3 February 1982

Pope John Paul II explains the Pauline theology of the body with regard to the resurrection of the dead.

———————————————————-

FROM THE WORDS OF CHRIST ON THE FUTURE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY, reported by all three synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), we have passed to the Pauline anthropology of the resurrection. We are analyzing the First Letter to the Corinthians 15:42-49. In the resurrection the human body, according to the words of the Apostle, is seen “incorruptible, glorious, full of dynamism, spiritual.” The resurrection is not only a manifestation of the life that conquers death — almost a final return to the tree of life, from which man had been separated at the moment of original sin — but is also a revelation of the ultimate destiny of man in all the fullness of his psychosomatic nature and his personal subjectivity.

Paul of Tarsus — who following in the footsteps of the other apostles, had experienced in his meeting with the risen Christ the state of his glorified body — basing himself on this experience, Paul announces in his Letter to the Romans “the redemption of the body” (Romans 8:23) and in his Letter to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 15:42-49) the completion of this redemption in the future resurrection.

In The Perspective Of An Eternal Destiny
The literary method Paul applies here perfectly corresponds to his style, which uses antitheses that simultaneously bring together those things which they contrast. In this way they are useful in having us understand Pauline thought about the resurrection. It concerns both its “cosmic” dimension and also the characteristic of the internal structure of the “earthly” and the “heavenly” man.

The Apostle, in fact, in contrasting Adam and Christ (risen) — that is, the first Adam with the second Adam — in a certain way shows two poles between which, in the mystery of creation and redemption, man has been placed in the cosmos. One could say that man has been put in tension between these two poles in the perspective of his eternal destiny regarding, from beginning to end, his human nature itself.

When Paul writes: “The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven” (1 Corinthians 15:47), he has in mind both Adam-man and also Christ as man. Between these two poles — between the first and the second Adam — the process takes place that he expresses in the following words: “As we have borne the image of the man of earth, so we will bear the image of the man of heaven” (1 Corinthians 15:49).

Man Completed
This “man of heaven” — the man of the resurrection whose prototype is the risen Christ — is not so much an antithesis and negation of the “man of earth” (whose prototype is the first Adam), but is above all his completion and confirmation. It is the completion and confirmation of what corresponds to the psychosomatic makeup of humanity, in the sphere of his eternal destiny, that is, in the thought and the plan of him who from the beginning created man in his own image and likeness. The humanity of the first Adam, the “man of earth,” bears in itself a particular potential (which is a capacity and readiness) to receive all that became the second Adam, the man of heaven, namely, Christ, what he became in his resurrection. That humanity which all men, children of the first Adam, share, and which, along with the heritage of sin — being carnal — at the same time is corruptible, and bears in itself the potentiality of incorruptibility.

That humanity which, in all its psychosomatic makeup appears ignoble, and yet bears within itself the interior desire for glory, that is, the tendency and the capacity to become “glorious” in the image of the risen Christ. Finally, the same humanity about which the Apostle — in conformity with the experience of all men — says that it is “weak” and has an “animal body,” bears in itself the aspiration to become full of dynamism and spiritual.

Potential to rise again
We are speaking here of human nature in its integrity, that is, of human nature in its psychosomatic makeup. However, Paul speaks of the body. Nevertheless we can admit, on the basis of the immediate context and the remote one, that for him it is not a question only of the body, but of the entire man in his corporeity, therefore also of his ontological complexity. There is no doubt here that precisely in the whole visible world (cosmos) that one body which is the human body bears in itself the potentiality for resurrection, that is, the aspiration and capacity to become definitively incorruptible, glorious, full of dynamism, spiritual. This happens because, persisting from the beginning in the psychosomatic unity of the personal being, he can receive and reproduce in this earthly image and likeness of God also the heavenly image of the second Adam, Christ.

The Pauline anthropology of the resurrection is cosmic and universal at the same time. Every man bears in himself the image of Adam and every man is also called to bear in himself the image of Christ, the image of the risen one. This image is the reality of the “other world,” the eschatological reality (St. Paul writes, “We will bear”). But in the meantime it is already in a certain way a reality of this world, since it was revealed in this world through the resurrection of Christ. It is a reality ingrafted in the man of this world, a reality that is developing in him toward final completion.

The Vision Of God
All the antitheses that are suggested in Paul’s text help to construct a valid sketch of the anthropology of the resurrection. This sketch is at the same time more detailed than the one which comes from the text of the synoptic Gospels (cf. Matthew 22:30; Mark 12:25; Luke 20:34-35). But on the other hand it is in a certain sense more unilateral.

The words of Christ which the synoptics report open before us the perspective of the eschatological perfection of the body, fully subject to the divinizing profundity of the vision of God face to face. In that vision it will find its inexhaustible source of perpetual virginity (united to the nuptial meaning of the body), and of the perpetual intersubjectivity of all men, who will become (as males and females) sharers in the resurrection.

The Pauline sketch of the eschatological perfection of the glorified body seems to remain rather in the sphere of the interior structure of the man-person. His interpretation of the future resurrection would seem to link up again with body-spirit dualism which constitutes the source of the interior system of forces in man.

This system of forces will undergo a radical change in the resurrection. Paul’s words, which explicitly suggest this, cannot however be understood or interpreted in the spirit of dualistic anthropology, (“Paul takes absolutely no account of the Greek dichotomy between ‘soul and body’…. The Apostle resorts to a kind of trichotomy in which the totality of man is body, soul and spirit.…

All these terms are alive and the division itself has no fixed limit. He insists on the fact that body and soul are capable of being ‘pneumatic,’ spiritual” (B. Rigaux, Dieu l’a ressuscité. Exégèse et Théologie biblique [Gembloux: Duculot, 1973], pp. 406-408).

Posted in Pope John Paul II, The Resurrection, Understanding Paul | Tagged First Letter to the Corinthians 15:42-49, Man Completed, Pauline anthropology of the resurrection | Leave a Comment »

Doctrine Of The Resurrection According To St. Paul — Pope John Paul II

June 9, 2011

As part of his catechesis on The Theology of the Body John Paul II also touched upon Christ’s revelation of the future resurrection titled Doctrine Of The Resurrection According To St. Paul during the general audience in the Paul VI Hall on Wednesday, 27 January.

Paul’s Meeting With The Risen Christ
During the preceding audiences we reflected on Christ’s words about the other world, which will emerge together with the resurrection of bodies. Those words had an extraordinarily intense resonance in the teaching of St. Paul. Between the answer given to the Sadducees, transmitted by the synoptic Gospels (cf. Matthew 22:30; Mark 12:25; Luke 20:35-36), and Paul’s apostolate there took place first of all the fact of the resurrection of Christ himself and a series of meetings with the risen Christ. Among these must be included, as the last link, the event that occurred in the neighborhood of Damascus. Saul or Paul of Tarsus who, on his conversion, became the Apostle of the Gentiles, also had his own post-paschal experience, similar to that of the other apostles. At the basis of his faith in the resurrection, which he expresses above all in the First Letter to the Corinthians (ch. 15), there is certainly that meeting with the risen Christ, which became the beginning and foundation of his apostolate.

God Is Not Dead
It is difficult to sum up here and comment adequately on the stupendous and ample argumentation of the fifteenth chapter of the First Letter to the Corinthians in all its details. It is significant that, while Christ replied to the Sadducees, who “say that there is no resurrection” (Luke 20:27), with the words reported by the synoptic Gospels, Paul, on his part, replied or rather engaged in polemics (in conformity with his temperament) with those who contested it. Among the Corinthians there were probably movements of thought marked by Platonic dualism and neo-Pythagoreanism of a religious shade, Stoicism and Epicureanism. All Greek philosophies, moreover, denied the resurrection of the body. Paul had already experienced in Athens the reaction of the Greeks to the doctrine of the resurrection, during his address at the Areopagus (cf. Acts 17:32).

In his (pre-paschal) answer, Christ did not refer to his own resurrection, but appealed to the fundamental reality of the Old Testament covenant, to the reality of the living God. The conviction of the possibility of the resurrection is based on this: the living God “is not God of the dead, but of the living” (Mark 12:27). Paul’s post-paschal argumentation on the future resurrection referred above all to the reality and the truth of the resurrection of Christ. In fact, he defends this truth even as the foundation of the faith in its integrity: “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain…. But, in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead” (1 Corinthians 15:14, 20).

God Of The Living
Here we are on the same line as revelation. The resurrection of Christ is the last and the fullest word of the self-revelation of the living God as “not God of the dead, but of the living” (Mark 12:27). It is the last and fullest confirmation of the truth about God which is expressed right from the beginning through this revelation.

Furthermore, the resurrection is the reply of the God of life to the historical inevitability of death, to which man was subjected from the moment of breaking the first covenant and which, together with sin, entered his history. This answer about the victory won over death is illustrated by the First Letter to the Corinthians (Chapter 15) with extraordinary perspicacity. It presents the resurrection of Christ as the beginning of that eschatological fulfillment, in which, through him and in him, everything will return to the Father, everything will be subjected to him, that is, handed back definitively, “that God may be everything to everyone” (1 Corinthians 15:28). And then — in this definitive victory over sin, over what opposed the creature to the Creator — death also will be vanquished: “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26).

Imperishable Soul
The words that can be considered the synthesis of Pauline anthropology concerning the resurrection take their place in this context. It will be opportune to dwell longer here on these words. We read in the First Letter to the Corinthians 15:42-46 about the resurrection of the dead: “What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, ‘The first man Adam became a living being’; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual which is first but the physical, and then the spiritual.”

Historical Experience
Between this Pauline anthropology of the resurrection and the one that emerges from the text of the synoptic Gospels (Matthew 22:30; Mark 12:25; Luke 20:35-36), there exists an essential consistency; only the text of First Letter to the Corinthians is more developed. Paul studies in depth what Christ had proclaimed.

At the same time, he penetrates the various aspects of that truth which had been expressed concisely and substantially in the words written in the synoptic Gospels. It is also significant for the Pauline text that man’s eschatological perspective, based on faith in the resurrection of the dead, is united with reference to the beginning as well as with deep awareness of man’s historical situation. The man whom Paul addressed in the First Letter to the Corinthians and who (like the Sadducees) is contrary to the possibility of the resurrection, has also his (historical) experience of the body. From this experience it emerges quite clearly that the body is perishable, weak, physical, in dishonor.

Mystery Of Creation
Paul confronts such a man, to whom his words are addressed — either in the community of Corinth or also, I would say, in all times — with the risen Christ, the last Adam. Doing so, Paul invites him, in a way, to follow in the footsteps of his own post-paschal experience. At the same time he recalls to him the first Adam. That is, he induces him to turn to the beginning, to that first truth about man and the world which is at the basis of the revelation of the mystery of the living God. In this way, Paul reproduces in his synthesis all that Christ had announced when he had referred, at three different moments, to the beginning in the conversation with the Pharisees (cf. Matthew 19:3-8; Mark 10:2-9); to the human heart, as the place of struggle with lusts within man, during the Sermon on the Mount (Cf. Matthew 5:27); and to the resurrection as the reality of the “other world,” in the conversation with the Sadducees (cf. Matthew 22:30; Mark 12:25; Luke 20:35-36).

Enlivening Of Matter
It belongs to the style of Paul’s synthesis that it plunges its roots into the revealed mystery of creation and redemption as a whole, from which it is developed and in the light of which alone it can be explained. According to the biblical narrative, the creation of man is an enlivening of matter by means of the spirit, thanks to which “the first man Adam became a living being” (1 Corinthians 15:45). The Pauline text repeats here the words of Genesis (2:7), that is, of the second narrative of the creation of man (the so-called Yahwist narrative). From the same source it is known that this original “animation of the body” underwent corruption because of sin.

At this point of the First Letter to the Corinthians the author does not speak directly of original sin. Yet the series of definitions which he attributes to the body of historical man, writing that it is “perishable…weak… physical… in dishonor…” indicates sufficiently what the consequence of sin is, according to revelation.

Paul himself will call it elsewhere “bondage to decay” (Romans 8:21). The whole of creation is subjected indirectly to this “bondage to decay” owing to the sin of man, who was placed by the Creator in the midst of the visible world in order to subdue it (cf. Genesis 1:28). So man’s sin has a dimension that is not only interior, but also cosmic. According to this dimension, the body — which Paul (in conformity with his experience) characterizes as “perishable…weak…physical…in dishonor” — expresses in itself the state of creation after sin. This creation “has been groaning in travail together until now” (Romans 8:22).

However, just as labor pains are united with the desire for birth, with the hope of a new child, so, too, the whole of creation “waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God…” and cherishes the hope to “be set free from its bondage to decay, and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Romans 8:19-21).

Try To Understand
Through this cosmic context of the affirmation contained in the Letter to the Romans — in a way, through the “body of all creatures” — let us try to understand completely the Pauline interpretation of the resurrection. According to Paul, this image of the body of historical man, so deeply realistic and adapted to the universal experience of men, conceals within itself not only the “bondage of decay,” but also hope, like the hope that accompanies labor pains.

That happens because the Apostle grasps in this image also the presence of the mystery of redemption. Awareness of that mystery comes precisely from all man’s experiences which can be defined as the “bondage of decay.” It comes because redemption operates in man’s soul by means of the gifts of the Spirit: “We ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:23). Redemption is the way to the resurrection. The resurrection constitutes the definitive accomplishment of the redemption of the body.

We will come back to the analysis of the Pauline text in the First Letter to the Corinthians in our further reflections.

Posted in Pope John Paul II, The Resurrection, Theology of the Body | Tagged Enlivening Of Matter, Imperishable Soul, Pauline anthropology | Leave a Comment »

The New Threshold — Pope John Paul II

June 8, 2011

As part of his catechesis on marriage titled New Threshold of Complete Truth About Man John Paul II also touched upon Christ’s revelation of the future resurrection during the general audience in the Paul VI Hall on 13 January.

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IN THE PREVIOUS WEEK I had posted Robert Spaemann’s meditation on Modern Death which linked the experience of beauty to death and meaninglessness. Reiner Kunze’s poem:

“You’re nothing special
It’s just that you cling to beauty
Knowing you’ve got to leave it all.”

It echoes something I had heard in one of my Anthem Poems:

“Say rather, two great gods, in a vault of starlight,
Play ponderingly at chess, and at the game’s end
One of the pieces, shaken, falls to the floor
And runs to the darkest corner; and that piece
Forgotten there, left motionless, is I…
Say that I have no name, no gifts, no power,
Am only one of millions, mostly silent;
One who came with eyes and hands and a heart,
Looked on beauty, and loved it, and then left it.”
Conrad Aiken, Tetélestai

The knowledge that there is an end is what first opens up for us the dimension of meaning, which is the condition for having anything like the feeling of meaninglessness in the first place. Spaemann reminded us that beauty is something that has its point in itself.

Next came the three part post of Jörg Splett’s The Gift Of Life — Why There Is No Right To Die” which led us through a reflection on life which showed us the wrongfulness of euthanasia. It got me to thinking more of the Catholic anthropology that forms our beliefs in our bodily resurrection and life after death. These three reflections by John Paul II

New Threshold of Complete Truth About Man
The Pauline Anthropology Of The Resurrection
The Risen Body Will Be Incorruptible, Glorious, Full Of Dynamism, And Spiritual

will lead us further along the path, I feel.

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The Future Resurrection
When they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven (Mark 12:25; cf. Matthew 22:30). They are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection (Luke 20:36).

The words in which Christ refers to the future resurrection — words confirmed in an extraordinary way by his own resurrection — complete what we are accustomed to call in these reflections the revelation of the body. This revelation penetrates the heart of the reality that we experience, and this reality is above all man, his body, the body of historical man.

At the same time, this revelation permits us to go beyond the sphere of this experience in two directions — first, in the direction of that beginning which Christ referred to in his conversation with the Pharisees concerning the indissolubility of marriage (cf. Matthew 19:3-8); then, in the direction of the future world, to which the Master addressed the hearts of his listeners in the presence of the Sadducees, who “say that there is no resurrection” (Matthew 22:23).

Theological Reconstruction Of Christ’s Revelation
Neither the truth about that beginning of which Christ speaks, nor the eschatological truth can be reached by man with empirical and rationalistic methods alone. However, is it not possible to affirm that man bears, in a way, these two dimensions in the depth of the experience of his own being, or rather that he is somehow on his way to them as to dimensions that fully justify the meaning of his being a body, that is, of his being a carnal man?

As regards the eschatological dimension, is it not true that death itself and the destruction of the body can confer on man an eloquent significance about the experience in which the personal meaning of existence is realized? When Christ speaks of the future resurrection, his words do not fall in a void. The experience of mankind, and especially the experience of the body, enable the listener to unite with those words the image of his new existence in the “future world,” for which earthly experience supplies the substratum and the base. An adequate theological reconstruction is possible.

I Believe In The Resurrection Of The Dead
To the construction of this image — which, as regards content, corresponds to the article of our profession of faith: “I believe in the resurrection of the dead” — there greatly contributes the awareness that there exists a connection between earthly experience and the whole dimension of the biblical beginning of man in the world. If at the beginning God “created them male and female” (cf. Genesis 1:27); if in this duality concerning the body he envisaged also such a unity that “they become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24); if he linked this unity with the blessing of fertility, that is, of procreation (cf. Genesis 1:29); if speaking before the Sadducees about the future resurrection, Christ explained that “In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage” — then it is clear that it is a question here of a development of the truth about man himself.

Christ indicated his identity, although this identity is realized in eschatological experience in a different way from the experience of the beginning itself and of all history. Yet man will always be the same, such as he came from the hands of his Creator and Father. Christ said: “They neither marry nor are given in marriage,” but he did not state that this man of the future world will no longer be male and female as he was from the beginning.

It is clear therefore that, as regards the body, the meaning of being male or female in the future world must be sought outside marriage and procreation, but there is no reason to seek it outside that which (independently of the blessing of procreation) derives from the mystery of creation and which subsequently forms also the deepest structure of man’s history on earth, since this history has been deeply penetrated by the mystery of redemption.

Unity Of The Two
In his original situation man, therefore, is alone and at the same time he becomes male and female: unity of the two. In his solitude he is revealed to himself as a person, in order to reveal, at the same time, the communion of persons in the unity of the two. In both states the human being is constituted as an image and likeness of God.

From the beginning man is also a body among bodies. In the unity of the couple he becomes male and female, discovering the nuptial meaning of his body as a personal subject. Subsequently, the meaning of being a body and, in particular, being male and female in the body, is connected with marriage and procreation (that is, with fatherhood and motherhood).

However, the original and fundamental significance of being a body, as well as being, by reason of the body, male and female — that is precisely that nuptial significance — is united with the fact that man is created as a person and called to a life in communione personarum. Marriage and procreation in itself do not determine definitively the original and fundamental meaning of being a body or of being, as a body, male and female. Marriage and procreation merely give a concrete reality to that meaning in the dimensions of history.

The resurrection indicates the end of the historical dimension. The words, “When they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage” (Mark 12:25), express univocally not only the meaning which the human body will not have in the future world. But they enable us also to deduce that the nuptial meaning of the body in the resurrection to the future life will correspond perfectly both to the fact that man, as a male-female, is a person created in the “image and likeness of God,” and to the fact that this image is realized in the communion of persons. That nuptial meaning of being a body will be realized, therefore, as a meaning that is perfectly personal and communitarian at the same time.

The Man Of The Future World
Speaking of the body glorified through the resurrection to the future life, we have in mind man, male-female, in all the truth of his humanity: man who, together with the eschatological experience of the living God (the face to face vision), will experience precisely this meaning of his own body. This will be a completely new experience. At the same time it will not be alienated in any way from what man took part in from the beginning nor from what, in the historical dimension of his existence, constituted in him the source of the tension between spirit and body, concerning mainly the procreative meaning of the body and sex. The man of the future world will find again in this new experience of his own body precisely the completion of what he bore within himself perennially and historically, in a certain sense, as a heritage and even more as a duty and objective, as the content of the ethical norm.

Mutual Communication
The glorification of the body, as the eschatological fruit of its divinizing spiritualization, will reveal the definitive value of what was to be from the beginning a distinctive sign of the created person in the visible world, as well as a means of mutual communication between persons and a genuine expression of truth and love, for which the communio personarum is constituted.

That perennial meaning of the human body, to which the existence of every man, weighed down by the heritage of concupiscence, has necessarily brought a series of limitations, struggles and sufferings, will then be revealed again, and will be revealed in such simplicity and splendor when every participant in the other world will find again in his glorified body the source of the freedom of the gift. The perfect freedom of the children of God (cf. Romans 8:14) will nourish also with that gift each of the communions which will make up the great community of the communion of saints.

Difficult To Envisage
It is all too clear — on the basis of man’s experiences and knowledge in his temporal life, that is, in this world — that it is difficult to construct a fully adequate image of the future world. However, at the same time there is no doubt that, with the help of Christ’s words, at least a certain approximation to this image is possible and attainable. We use this theological approximation, professing our faith in the resurrection of the dead and in eternal life, as well as faith in the communion of saints, which belongs to the reality of the future world.

A New Threshold
Concluding this part of our reflections, it is opportune to state once more that Christ’s words reported by the synoptic Gospels (cf. Matthew 22:30; Mark 12:25; Luke 20:34-35) have a decisive meaning not only as regards the words of Genesis (which Christ referred to on another occasion), but also in what concerns the entire Bible. These words enable us, in a certain sense, to read again — that is, in depth — the whole revealed meaning of the body, the meaning of being a man, that is, a person incarnated, of being male or female as regards the body. These words permit us to understand the meaning, in the eschatological dimension of the other world, of that unity in humanity, which was constituted in the beginning, and which the words of Genesis 2:24, (“A man cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh”) — uttered in the act of man’s creation as male and female — seemed to direct, if not completely, at least especially toward this world.

Since the words of the Book of Genesis are almost the threshold of the whole theology of the body — the threshold which Christ took as his foundation in his teaching on marriage and its indissolubility — then it must be admitted that the words reported by the Synoptics are, as it were, a new threshold of this complete truth about man, which we find in God’s revealed Word. It is indispensable to dwell upon this threshold, if we wish our theology of the body — and also our Christian spirituality of the body — to be able to use it as a complete image.

Posted in Pope John Paul II, The Resurrection, Theology of the Body | Tagged The Future Resurrection, The Resurrection Of The Dead, Theological Reconstruction Of Christ’s Revelation | Leave a Comment »

A Myopic Bookworm Digests No Good

February 1, 2011

The original was not as cute nor eager to learn...

I’ve been debating with Homosexualists recently, presenting Church Teachings and bearing their withering responses (“Medieval bigot,” one of the gentler replies). The problem, as the debate wore on, was that one side is presenting individual/rights arguments (fairness) while my comments are in a more obscure vein. Understanding the Church’s position on homosexuality requires the ability to process nuanced argument based on Aristotelian -Thomist thought and Church Teachings. Point that out to anyone and you provoke them to identify you as an insufferable arrogant twit, no matter how much truth is in your proposition.

Backed into a corner with a group of these fellows one of them finally wrote: If my comments here are always OFF TOPIC (always with civil rights and fairness – he even posted this sick video of a GLEE-like coming out of a high school lesbian.), what IS the topic, he wrote exasperatingly? What do you consider the role of gays in the Catholic Church?

With that I presented to them a quintessential problem that demonstrated how a Gay Catholic considered his faith. I explained to them some Catholic Teachings on the resurrection of the body and meaning of sin as it injures our eternal souls, and how Catholics regard themselves as “embodied souls.” I gave them a wonderful David L. Schindler piece on John Paul II’s Theology of the Body where he elaborates on the six principles contained in the late Pontiff’s teachings. Here is a shortened version of the six principles he presents from the TOB:

1. The soul is “the principle of unity of the human being, whereby it exists as a whole — corpore et anima minus — as a person” ( Veritatis splendor, 48). “It is in the unity of body and soul that the person is the subject of his…acts” (VS, 48). “The human person cannot be reduced to a freedom which is self-designing (this is what MyopicBookworm has done with his gender based constructions and comments here), but entails a particular spiritual and bodily structure” (VS. 48).

These statements, first of all, affirm the unity of the human being as a dual, or differentiated, unity of body and soul. The soul as it were lends its spiritual meaning to the body as body, even as the body simultaneously contributes to what now becomes, in man, a distinct kind of spirit: a spirit whose nature it is to be embodied

2. This second point is complex. It begins with this dogma: “The likeness with God shows that the essence and existence of man are constitutively related to God in the most profound manner. This…relationship…is therefore not something that comes afterwards and is not added from the outside” {109, emphasis original; see CCC, 356, 358}. And further: “The relationship between God and man is reflected in the relational and social dimension of human nature. Man . . is not a solitary being but ‘a social being . . . “ {cf. Gs, 12j} and then explores six “elaborations” (which I will take up here A through F):

a. It establishes “constitutive relatedness among human beings” which implies that we are, in our original and deepest meanings, persons who are ordered toward God and others.

b. We bear a constitutive order toward generosity that always-anteriorly participates in the generosity we have received and are always-already receiving — from God and other creatures in God. Although sin weighs down and profoundly skews this constitutively generous order of being, sin can never destroy the integrity of this order as naturally given. What a marvelous statement: no matter to what depths of despair we sink in battling sin, God knows that we cannot be destroyed. Jesus will help us. It recalls Matthew 19.

c. Man “is a being whose innermost dynamic is… directed toward the receiving and giving of love.” The relation to God, and to others in God (the constitutive relatedness among human beings), that establishes our individual substance in being is generous. The relation itself makes and lets us in our substantial being be.

d. The relationality of the human person introduced by love is first the relationality characteristic of the child as the one who is absolutely from the Other — God — and from other beings in God, even as he is thereby simultaneously also for the Other, and for other beings in God. It is for this reason that Pope Benedict XVI has stated that the child in the womb provides the basic figure for what it means to be a human being and why the Catholic Church wars against abortion.

e. “The account of Genesis 1 does not mention the problem of man’s original solitude: in fact, man is ‘male and female’ from the beginning. The Yahwist text of Genesis 2, by contrast, authorizes us in some way to think first only about man inasmuch as, through the body, he belongs to the visible world while going beyond it; it then lets us think about the same man, but through the duality of sex.

Bodyliness and sexuality are not simply identical. Although in its normal constitution, the human body carries within itself the signs of sex and is by nature male or female, the fact that man is a ‘body’ belongs more deeply to the structure of the personal subject than the fact that in his
somatic constitution — he is also male or female.

For this reason, the meaning of original solitude, which can be referred simply to ‘man,’ is substantially prior to the meaning of original unity; the latter is based on masculinity and femininity, which are, as it were, two different ‘incarnations,’ that is, two ways in which the same human being, created ‘in the image of God’ (Genesis 1:27), ‘is a body” (John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them, 157).

Original solitude, as understood by John Paul II, is the absolute priority of the whole man’s being ordered to God in a relation of prayer and adoration. It is in just this priority of the whole man as originally made for God alone that forms the priority of virginity (purity) already in the order of creation.

f. As Genesis makes clear, the relationality is double in a sense: reference to other beings is begins with a relationality with another being who is fully human while at once embodying a different way of being human, that is either male or female. The sexual differentiation of mankind into man and woman is much more than a purely biological fact for the purpose of procreation. It is unconnected with what is truly human in mankind. In it there is accomplished that intrinsic relation of the human being to a Thou, which inherently constitutes him or her as human, the very basis of our personhood . . The likeness to God in sexuality is prior to sexuality, not identical with it.

It is accomplished by the person. The doctrine of the imago Dei is, in the first place, that man is capax Dei [vocab: a yearning for that which human nature cannot by itself attain]: it is the relation to God that originally constitutes each person, and this relation immediately expresses itself in and as relation also to others, which is realized in a privileged way through relation to another who is the same kind of being as myself, differently: through the relation of two beings who share a common humanity in the different ways termed male/masculine and female/feminine.

Thus there is in the structure of the human person a second dual unity latent within the person as he stands in his original “solitary” unity before God, and that is the one expressed in the ordering of each person toward a unity between persons, between a one and an other.

3. The body, always-already informed by soul or spirit and actualized by esse, thus exhibits an order of love. But what is crucial to see here is that this sign of the creature’s constitutive relation to God and others takes a new form qua body. The body, in other words, indicates a distinctive way of imaging God and love, in its very order as a body, as personal — creaturely flesh.

4. The human body, marked with the sign of masculinity or femininity, “contains ‘from the beginning’ the ‘spousal’ attribute, that is, the power to express love: precisely that love in which the human person becomes a gift and — through this gift — fulfills the very meaning of his being and his existence. In this, its own distinctive character, the body is the expression of the spirit…“Sexuality characterizes man and woman not only on the physical level, but also on the psychological and spiritual, making its mark on each of their expressions.”

John Paul II’s theology of the body, in a word, is about God and being as love, and about the body and the sexual difference insofar as these are a sign and expression of this theologically ontologically-anthropologically prior love, even as the body precisely in its sexual difference provides a new and just so far enriched and deepened understanding of this prior love.

5. Man and woman each contain the whole meaning of the person, but in a different order. It is from within the substantial wholeness of each as human that the man and woman bear differently a dual reference from and toward others that is ordered differently in each.

6. In the human being, physics and biology become personalized, even as the person takes the shape of a body. Thus the human person — after Christ and in Christ — becomes the mediator (analogatum princeps) for the whole of creation. In and through the human being, the cosmos itself properly realizes its destined participation in worship of God and fruitful service to God and others.

What I was hoping in my posting this topic was an engagement by Homosexualists on these six principles. I wasn’t asking them to embrace them but to empathize with the Catholic Homosexual who believes in them and identifies to his core with John Paul II’s teachings in the TOB. On the other thread the very attempt was ridiculed or parodied and the Homosexualist assault on the Church as being homophobic continued hell-bent (pardon the pun). There were very few attempts to thoughtfully engage, I believe.

I doubt the Catholic Homosexual would find any solace in an answer that essentially rejects the teachings. While the answer is clever and ballsy to the extent he distorts the words of St. Paul, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, gender arguments are not to be confused with the theological. Anyone who reads the six principles that Dr. Schindler enumerates and I have summarized here should recognize in them the very essence of personalism that undergirds so much of our western thought and culture.

Jesus would never have said “Repent the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” had he not been speaking to the idea of resurrection for us all (and which he demonstrated). Take away the resurrection and you have taken away the whole point of Christianity. As Flannery O’Connor once said: “If all the resurrection is, is just a symbol, then I say the hell with it.” It doesn’t get off the ground without the very well thought out and crafted theological response called the “embodied soul.”

Well, despite the attempt, more opprobrium rained down but one fellow, named myopicbookworm, took me up on the challenge and posted an answer. It was an amazing piece of casuistry, even quoted Benedict XVI and John Paul II in an attempt to legitimize homosexual acts. I congratulated him on his chutzpah.

Here I would like to deal with his opening salvo:

“Natural-born intersex individuals are a standing refutation of any anthropology which requires of necessity that all human beings are physically either male or female. The existence of these intersex persons, and those which psychology recognizes as suffering from gender dysphoria (including transsexuals) would also indicate that the connection between biological sex and psychological sex may not be a necessary one. To put it bluntly, the human race does not consist simply of persons who are straightforwardly either male or female, whether biologically, psychologically, or (by extension) spiritually.

This is despite the neatness of the arrangement, and its convenience for human mythologizing or philosophizing. Much persecution of homosexuals probably does not arise simply from emotional distaste for or moral disapproval of same-sex physical relations: even chaste homosexual people, in their non-”normal” desires and tendencies, disturb the patterns and symmetries by which human beings collectively rationalize their world. They transgress the religio-social categories with which people protect their accustomed ways of life and thought.

The male-female duality can therefore not be fundamentally and essentially bound up with the existence of the human person as an embodied soul…”

My reply begins with a recalling of Edward Feser’s argument on this site concerning essence and properties:

“It is the essence of a thing that determines what will be true of it in every possible world, not what is true of it in every world that determines its essence. Moreover, as Aristotelian-Thomists use the term, a “property” is not part of the essence of a thing, but a feature that flows from its essence. Simply noting that a thing has some feature in every possible world ignores this distinction, and is for that reason too an inadequate way to characterize a thing’s essence. For example, rationality and the capacity to learn languages are both features human beings have in every possible world (if you want to put it that way), but the latter capacity presupposes rationality and is therefore less fundamental than it. While rationality is part of our essence, then, the capacity to learn languages is not, but is rather a “property” — something proper to us in that derives necessarily from our essence.

“Property” as used by contemporary philosophers ignores this distinction, and is applied indiscriminately to what is part of a thing’s essence, to what is not part of its essence but is nevertheless “proper” to a thing, and to what is neither part of a thing’s essence nor proper to it but merely some contingent feature it has (e.g. the fact that such-and-such a human being was born in Los Angeles or has a blog).

But might some human being not lose his rationality or capacity to learn languages due to brain damage or the like? Doesn’t that mean the former is not really part of his essence and the latter not really a property? No, that doesn’t follow at all, because to be impeded in the exercise of a power does not entail that one doesn’t have it. From an Aristotelian-Thomist point of view, every single human being — including one in a so-called “persistent vegetative state” — necessarily has rationality, the capacity to learn languages, etc.

Terri Schiavo was a severely damaged rational animal, not a non-rational animal; a human fetus is a rational animal that has not yet been fully formed, not a non-rational animal; and so forth. Restore Terri Schiavo to perfect health and you get someone who can once again exercise her rationality. Restore a rose bush or a dog to perfect health and you still have something that can never exercise reason. Let a human fetus develop fully and you get something that can exercise rationality. Let a rose bush or a dog develop fully and you never get something that can exercise rationality. Thus it is erroneous — not to mention absurd and morally obscene — to compare the likes of Terri Schiavo or a human fetus to a plant or a non-human animal. And thus does bad metaphysics lead to the rationalization of grave immorality, even murder.”

In myopicbookworm’s writings here we have less an example of bad metaphysics as bad thinking. His introductory sentences above provoke the question, “Do birth defects create new beings and new essences?” In other words, is an “intersex individuals” a new sex? In this case we encounter the political agenda of the Homosexualist lobby to label “intersex individuals” a new sex rather than a simple disorder of sexual development, an impedance to an inheritance of a sexual property, male or female. For you see, if androgyny is a new sex, then the Homosexualists have found the “gay gene” without going to all the scientific work to actually prove something.

Note the dripping condescension in this accusation: “They [Homosexuals] disturb the patterns and symmetries by which human beings collectively rationalize their world. They transgress the religio-social categories with which people protect their accustomed ways of life and thought.” You would be hard come as a Catholic to be hit with a gentler velvet fist labeled “Medieval Homophobic Bastard” than that.

The hypocrisy is breath-taking of course. It is Homosexualists after all who urge the grim doctrine that homosexuality is simply a matter of fate (“Yep, born homosexual, another one of those intersex kids, poor bastards”), and the dehumanizing idea that one’s core identity is determined by one’s sexual desires or orientation. As Catholics we know that we are more, immeasurably more, than our sexual desires. We embrace our essence as embodied souls secure in the knowledge that what we find impossible to overcome in our sinfulness, God will help us to overcome:

“Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astounded and said, “Then who can be saved?” But Jesus looked at them and said, “For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.”
[Matthew 19:23-26]

This is the Sunday we listened to the beatitudes (Blessed are the poor…Blessed are the grieving, those who mourn..etc.). I love Fr. Barron’s preaching on them and whenever my parish priest gives a homily on these difficult to understand passages and blows by what everyone is probably thinking (What’s so great about poverty and crying your eyes out over your dead husband or sister? What’s HE SAYING????!!!!! C’mon Father!!!!) I feel as though another Obama Teachable Moment has gone down the drain.

Catholics know that morally disordered desires are hardly limited to homosexuality or to sexual desires of any kind. We know that those who succumb to homosexual desires are, like all sinners, are to be loved and assured of the transforming power of God’s forgiveness and His power to help us by trusting in Him. In law and social practice our Church teaches we should fight alongside homosexuals to combat unjust discrimination. But we also know that the practices that define “the gay community” or the evil of homosexualism should never be put on a social or moral par with the union of man and woman in marriage.

Blessed are the homosexuals. Following Fr. Barron’s teaching: you are makarios (blessed, lucky perhaps, or envied, from the Greek) to be a homosexual, it will teach you humility and the power of chastity. Or will you choose the Homosexualist path and pretend you are without sin and act like your mindless heterosexual brothers and sisters who never question their party urges (Time to “hook up”)?

And would you be rich also and not have to work? How lucky to be poor and never tempted by material things … how your rich brother struggles, what a cross he bears: it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. Have you ever heard someone say how money can be a curse?

How wonderful to be happy, addicted to good feelings and never have to grieve because you’ve never lost anyone who was decent, kind and loving? Let’s face it, feeling happy is just as much a false god as wealth or power. “It is, in itself, only an emotional state, a fleeting and insubstantial psychological condition that cannot possibly satisfy the deepest yearning of the soul; yet it is sought with as much compulsive frenzy as any other drug. We feel the “rush” of pleasure and then, when the thrill fades, we try at all costs to reproduce it at a higher pitch. It is in this context that the addictive use of drugs, alcohol, and artificial stimulants, as well as the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure in sex and gluttony at the table are to be understood.” How blessed to be hungry…The person who lives in the center, the place of detachment, escapes these traps. Oh yes, he may pay for it with bouts of anxiety or depression but he is blessed, make no mistake about it.

Homosexualist liberal Catholics (myopicbookworm says he’s not Roman, but Catholic) like myopicbookworm project a profoundly disturbing anthropology of their fellow man and their understanding of the human person leads to the worst kind of perversion of Catholic teaching.

Posted in Aristotlian-Thomism, Pope John Paul II, Theology of the Body | Tagged Homosexualism, myopicbookworm, Theology of the Body | 2 Comments »

Respect For Life

October 11, 2010

I came across this the other day, some comments by John Paul II at the National Mall on the occasion of his papal visit to Washington D.C. Pretty simple and straightforward, who we are as Catholics. I noticed that it was all about what and who a Person is.

All human beings ought to value every person for his or her uniqueness as a creature of God, called to be a brother or sister of Christ by reason of the incarnation and the universal redemption. For us, the sacredness of human life is based on these premises. And is on these same premises that there is based our celebration of life — all human life This explains our efforts to defend human life against every influence or action that threatens or weakens it, as well as our endeavors to make every life more human in all its aspects.

And so, we will stand up every time that human life is threatened:

When the sacredness of life before birth is attacked, we will stand up and proclaim that no one ever has the authority to destroy unborn life.
When a child is described as a burden or looked upon as a means to satisfy an emotional need, we will stand up and insist that every child is a unique and unrepeatable gift of God, with the right to a loving and united family.
When the institution of marriage is abandoned to human selfishness or reduced to a temporary conditional arrangement that can easily be terminated, we will stand up and affirm the indissolubility of the marriage bond.
When the value of the family is threatened because social and economic pressures, we will stand up and reaffirm that the family is “Necessary not only for the private good of every person, but also for the common good of every society, nation, and state” (General Audience, Jan. 3, 1979).
When freedom is used to dominate the weak, to squander natural resources and energy, and to deny basic necessities to people, we will stand up and reaffirm the demands of justice and social love.
When the sick, the aged or the dying are abandoned in loneliness, we will stand up and proclaim that they are worthy of love, care, and respect.

John Paul II
October 7, 1979
Washington, D.C.

Posted in Pope John Paul II | Tagged John Paul II, Person, the sacredness of human life | Leave a Comment »

Reading Selections: Man Becomes The Image Of God By Communion Of Persons — Pope John Paul II

June 21, 2010

As I seek to understand more of what constitutes a person and the importance of the male-female relationship, I found this wonderful reflection by John Paul II which has become part of the Theology of the Body, which is the topic of a series of 129 lectures given by Pope John Paul II during his Wednesday audiences in the Pope Paul VI Hall between September 1979 and November 1984. It was the first major teaching of his pontificate and the complete addresses were later compiled and published as a single work by the same name. This particular topic was taken from his General Audience of Wednesday, 14 November 1979.

I always thought God created man and then created woman. However following John Paul II’s analysis here I begin to see that God created man which was the creation of a unity of two beings: man and woman. It is that communio personarum that is key. Marriage is the celebration of that communio personarum which can only be achieved by a man and a woman.

The Creation Of Man In Genesis
Following the narrative of Genesis, we have seen that the “definitive” creation of man consists in the creation of the unity of two beings. Their unity denotes above all the identity of human nature; their duality, on the other hand, manifests what, on the basis of this identity, constitutes the masculinity and femininity of created man. This ontological dimension of unity and duality has, at the same time, an axiological (vocab: The study of the nature of values and value judgments) meaning. From the text of Genesis 2:23 and from the whole context, it is clearly seen that man was created as a particular value before God. “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). But man was also created as a particular value for himself — first, because he is man; second, because the woman is for the man, and vice versa, the man is for the woman.

While the first chapter of Genesis expresses this value in a purely theological form (and indirectly a metaphysical one), the second chapter, on the other hand, reveals, so to speak, the first circle of the experience lived by man as value. This experience is already inscribed in the meaning of original solitude and then in the whole narrative of the creation of man as male and female. The concise text of Genesis 2:23, which contains the words of the first man at the sight of the woman created, “taken out of him”, can be considered the biblical prototype of the Canticle of Canticles. And if it is possible to read impressions and emotions through words so remote, one might almost venture to say that the depth and force of this first and “original” emotion of the male-man in the presence of the humanity of the woman, and at the same time in the presence of the femininity of the other human being, seems something unique and unrepeatable.

Unity In “Communion Of Persons”
In this way the meaning of man’s original unity, through masculinity and femininity, is expressed as an overcoming of the frontier of solitude. At the same time it is an affirmation — with regard to both human beings — of everything that constitutes man in solitude. In the Bible narrative, solitude is the way that leads to that unity which, following Vatican II, we can define as communio personarum.( 1) “But God did not create man as a solitary being, for from the beginning “male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). Their companionship produces the primary form of interpersonal communion” (Gaudium et Spes 12).

As we have already seen, in his original solitude man acquires a personal consciousness in the process of distinction from all living beings (animalia). At the same time, in this solitude, he opens up to a being akin to himself, defined in Genesis (2:18, 20) as “a helper fit for him.” This opening is no less decisive for the person of man; in fact, it is perhaps even more decisive than the distinction itself. In the Yahwist narrative, man’s solitude is presented to us not only as the first discovery of the characteristic transcendence peculiar to the person. It is also presented as the discovery of an adequate relationship “to” the person, and therefore as an opening and expectation of a “communion of persons.”

The term “community” could also be used here, if it were not generic and did not have so many meanings. Communio expresses more, with greater precision, since it indicates precisely that “help” which is derived, in a sense, from the very fact of existing as a person “beside” a person. In the Bible narrative this fact becomes eo ipso — in itself — the existence of the person “for” the person, since man in his original solitude was, in a way, already in this relationship. That is confirmed, in a negative sense, precisely by this solitude.

Furthermore, the communion of persons could be formed only on the basis of a “double solitude” of man and of woman, that is, as their meeting in their distinction from the world of living beings (animalia), which gave them both the possibility of being and existing in a special reciprocity. The concept of “help” also expresses this reciprocity in existence, which no other living being could have ensured. All that constituted the foundation of the solitude of each of them was indispensable for this reciprocity. Self-knowledge and self-determination, that is, subjectivity and consciousness of the meaning of one’s own body, was also indispensable.

Image Of Inscrutable Divine Communion
In the first chapter, the narrative of the creation of man affirms directly, right from the beginning, that man was created in the image of God as male and female. The narrative of the second chapter, on the other hand, does not speak of the “image of God.” But in its own way it reveals that the complete and definitive creation of “man” (subjected first to the experience of original solitude) is expressed in giving life to that communio personarum that man and woman form. In this way, the Yahwist narrative agrees with the content of the first narrative.

If, vice versa, we wish to draw also from the narrative of the Yahwist text the concept of “image of God,” we can then deduce that man became the “image and likeness” of God not only through his own humanity, but also through the communion of persons which man and woman form right from the beginning. The function of the image is to reflect the one who is the model, to reproduce its own prototype. Man becomes the image of God not so much in the moment of solitude as in the moment of communion. Right “from the beginning,” he is not only an image in which the solitude of a person who rules the world is reflected, but also, and essentially, an image of an inscrutable divine communion of persons.

In this way, the second narrative could also be a preparation for understanding the Trinitarian concept of the “image of God,” even if the latter appears only in the first narrative. Obviously, that is not without significance for the theology of the body. Perhaps it even constitutes the deepest theological aspect of all that can be said about man. In the mystery of creation — on the basis of the original and constituent “solitude” of his being — man was endowed with a deep unity between what is, humanly and through the body, male in him and what is, equally humanly and through the body, female in him. On all this, right from the beginning, the blessing of fertility descended, linked with human procreation (cf. Genesis 1:28).

The Body Reveals Man
4. In this way, we find ourselves almost at the heart of the anthropological reality that has the name “body.” The words of Genesis 2:23 speak of it directly and for the first time in the following terms: “flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones.” The male-man uttered these words, as if it were only at the sight of the woman that he was able to identify and call by name what makes them visibly similar to each other, and at the same time what manifests humanity.

In the light of the preceding analysis of all the “bodies” which man has come into contact with and which he has defined, conceptually giving them their name (animalia), the expression “flesh of my flesh” takes on precisely this meaning: the body reveals man. This concise formula already contains everything that human science could ever say about the structure of the body as organism, about its vitality, and its particular sexual physiology, etc. This first expression of the man, “flesh of my flesh,” also contains a reference to what makes that body truly human. Therefore it referred to what determines man as a person, that is, as a being who, even in all his corporality, is similar to God.(2 The dualistic contraposition “soul-body” does not appear in the conception of the most ancient books of the Bible. As has already been stressed (cf. L’Osservatore Romano, English edition, November 5, 1979, page 15, note 1), we can speak rather of a complementary combination “body-life.” The body is the expression of man’s personality, and if it does not fully exhaust this concept, it must be understood in biblical language as pars pro toto; cf. for example: “Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father…” (Matthew 16:17), that is, it was not a man who revealed it to you.)

Meaning Of Unity
We find ourselves, therefore, almost at the very core of the anthropological reality, the name of which is “body,” the human body. However, as can easily be seen, this core is not only anthropological, but also essentially theological. Right from the beginning, the theology of the body is bound up with the creation of man in the image of God. It becomes, in a way, also the theology of sex, or rather the theology of masculinity and femininity, which has its starting point here in Genesis.

The original meaning of unity, to which words of Genesis 2:24 bear witness, will have in the revelation of God an ample and distant perspective. This unity through the body — “and the two will be one flesh” — possesses a multiform dimension. It possesses an ethical dimension, as is confirmed by Christ’s answer to the Pharisees in Matthew 19 (cf. Mark 10). It also has a sacramental dimension, a strictly theological one, as is proved by St. Paul’s words to the Ephesians (“For no man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes it and cherishes it, as Christ does the Church, because we are members of his body. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the Church” (Ephesians 5:29-32). This refers also to the tradition of the prophets (Hosea, Isaiah, Ezekiel). And this is so because that unity which is realized through the body indicates, right from the beginning, not only the “body,” but also the “incarnate” communion of persons — communio personarum — and calls for this communion right from the beginning.

Masculinity and femininity express the dual aspect of man’s somatic constitution. (“This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh”), and indicate, furthermore, through the same words of Genesis 2:23, they indicate the new consciousness of the sense of one’s own body: a sense which, it can be said, consists in a mutual enrichment. Precisely this consciousness, through which humanity is formed again as the communion of persons, seems to be the layer which in the narrative of the creation of man (and in the revelation of the body contained in it) is deeper than his somatic structure as male and female. In any case, this structure is presented right from the beginning with a deep consciousness of human corporality and sexuality, and that establishes an inalienable norm for the understanding of man on the theological plane.

Posted in Pope John Paul II, Theology of the Body | Tagged Christian Anthropology, creation of man in the image of God, masculinity and femininity, Theology of the Body | Leave a Comment »

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Archive for the ‘Pope John Paul II’ Category

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A Myopic Bookworm Digests No Good

Respect For Life

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