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The Importance Of Ritual Part III — Fr. Aidan Nichols O.P.

September 9, 2011

“Formal traditional forms of rite cannot be dismissed as being inherently culturally incredible. These rites only become incredible when they are deemed to be so…”

That is also very much the Gospel according to the English Catholic social anthropologists who have devoted thought to our issue: Professor Mary Douglas of London University and the late Professor Victor Turner, who at the end of his professional career crossed the Atlantic to a chair at the University of Chicago.

Mary Douglas opened her study Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology with an essay entitled Away from Ritual, which had appeared in somewhat different form in the house journal of the English Dominicans as The Contempt of Ritual in the summer of 1968. [M. Douglas, The Contempt of Ritual, New Blackfriars 49, nos. 577-78 (1968)] She warns that contempt for ritual forms eventually leads people to take a purely private view of religious experience, from where it is only a short step to the frank avowal of humanism.

One feature distinguishing social anthropologists from sociologists is that the former have a much more formidable, not to say sometimes impenetrable, conceptual apparatus at their disposal. The most easily grasped aspect of Douglas’ essay is her critique of the abolition by the bishops of England and Wales of compulsory abstinence from fleshfoods on Fridays, and this contains at any rate some major clues helpful in unraveling her approach.

The Friday abstinence is the only ritual that brings Christian symbols into kitchen and larder. Taking away one symbol that means something in that domain is, she pointed out, no guarantee that the spirit of a generalized charity will reign (as the bishops piously hoped) in its stead. It would have been preferable to have built upon this weekly ritual rather than to have sought platitudinous substitutes for it. Her explanation, as an anthropologist, for the bishops’ decision to abandon Friday abstinence is not especially flattering.

Owing to the manner of their education — she refers to the embourgeoisement of those whose families were once working class — the bishops were predictably peculiarly insensitive to nonverbal signals. The decision symptomizes this age of the Church: “It is as if the liturgical signal boxes were manned by color blind signalmen.” [M. Douglas, Natural Symbols].

The issue of Friday abstinence raises for her the whole question of the contemporary Church’s approach to ritual — to symbolically intense bodily activity as used in the worship of God. Her deeper argument is that the cosmos — the fundamental order of reality, including social reality — is always seen through the medium of the body, and notably through the kinds and range of actions in which the body intersects with nature and other people. Appealing to the exploration of family structure made in the 196os by her secular colleague Basil Bernstein, [B. Bernstein, Social Class and Psychotherapy, British Journal of Sociology 15 (1964)]

Douglas proposes that children whose families are “personal” rather than “positional” — children, that is, who come from families where common life and hierarchy are minimized in favor of, at least ideally, a unique communication between parent, on the one hand, and, on the other, each individual child — are likely to grow up with ears unattuned to the unspoken messages of ritual codes. And yet, as there is in fact no human being whose life does not need to “unfold in a coherent symbolic system”, those who resist ritual are missing out on something essential to humanity as such.

Such non-verbal symbols are capable of creating a structure of meaning, in which individuals can relate to one another and realise their own ultimate purposes…. Alas for the child from the personal home who longs for non-verbal forms of relationship but has only been equipped with words and a contempt for ritual forms. By rejecting ritualized speech he rejects his own faculty for pushing back the boundaries between inside and outside so as to incorporate in himself a patterned social world. At the same time, he thwarts his faculty for receiving immediate, condensed messages given obliquely along non-verbal channels.
M. Douglas, Natural Symbols

This statement, incidentally, tells us much about the new phenomenon of Catholic individualism understood as the systematic disparagement of common structure, hierarchical authority, and traditional liturgy alike.

Among the causes of anti-ritualism, then, Mary Douglas places first and foremost social change. But if social change naturally tends to prompt a new cosmology, a new set of spectacles for looking at the world, then those concerned for the health of Catholic Christianity, which has its own cosmology based on traditional ritual, on the sacraments, and ultimately on the Incarnation, must try to break this causal chain.

The slackening of group and grid whereby change in social patterns, especially in the family, brings about contempt for rite, the lack of strong social articulation in an increasingly amorphous, excessively personalized, individualized, and de-hierarchicalized world: these processes, left to themselves, will tend to produce a “religion of effervescence”, incompatible with a sacramental faith. Writing in the immediate aftermath of the appearance of a euphoric Western European and North American radicalism in the late 1960s, she comments:

This is the sector of society which we expect to be weak in its perception of condensed symbols, preferring diffuse, emotive symbols of mass effect. The religious style is spontaneity, enthusiasm and effervescence. Bodily disassociation in trance, induced by dance or drugs, is valued along with other symbols of non-differentiation. Distinguishing social categories are devalued, but the individual is exalted. The self is presented without inhibition or shyness. There is little or no self-consciousness about sexual or other bodily orifices and functions. As to intellectual style, there is little concern with differentiated units of time, respect for past or program for the future. The dead are forgotten. Intellectual discriminations are not useful or valued.
M. Douglas, Natural Symbols

And she concludes:

The general tone of this cosmological style is to express the current social experience. In the latter there is minimum differentiation and organization: symbolic behavior reflects this lack. In the field of intellect it is disastrous.
M. Douglas, Natural Symbols

Relating all this to the Church, Douglas maintains that anti-ritualism is of a piece with the “generous warmth” of the “doctrinal latitude” of “reforming bishops and radical theologians”, their “critical dissolving of categories and attack on intellectual and administrative distinctions”. [M. Douglas, Natural Symbols] In her view, all these developments are generated by a particular social experience, that of unrestricted personalism, but the cosmology they promote is manifestly deficient from the standpoint both of the life of the mind at large and more especially that of the Christian intelligence.

In her own idiom, “The value of particular social forms can only be judged objectively by the analytic power of the elaborated code”: in other words, to decode that remark (!), the mediocrity of the spiritual and theological life typically produced by an anti-ritualist Church is the best possible proof of the inadequacy of the form of life in civil society that such a Church presupposes and represents.

The implication of Douglas’ work would seem to be, then, that we shall not get back an authentic liturgical life until we recover a rightly ordered society on the level both of the family, the micro-society, and of macro-society, society at large. A “rightly ordered society” in this context is one that gives due place to common life, hierarchy, and shared authoritative public doctrine as well as to personal freedom and creativity.

Here we can recall how for David Martin it is the error of the ideology of spontaneity not to realize that the second set of these terms positively requires the first. If this thought, that liturgical malaise will not be fully rectified until a Christian society is reinstituted, seems somewhat daunting, we can turn for counterbalance to a last British anthropologist, Victor Turner, who appears to allow a greater autonomy or shaping power to what he calls in the title of a major book “the ritual process”. [V. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, 1969)]

In Turner’s view, traditional liturgy, precisely because of its archaic quality, has a power to modify and even reverse the assumptions made in secular living.

If ritual is not to be merely a reflection of secular social life, if its function is partly to protect and partly to express truths which make men free from the exigencies of their status-incumbencies, free to contemplate and pray as well as to speculate and invent, then its repertoire of liturgical actions should not be limited to a direct reflection of the contemporary scene.
[V. Turner, Passages, Margins and Poverty: Religious Symbols of Communitas, Worship 46(1972)]

Insisting that the archaic is not the obsolete, Turner maintains that, on the contrary, archaic patterns of action are necessary to protect what he calls “future free spaces”.

In this perspective he finds the de facto liturgical reform of the 1960s and 1970s somewhat incongruous. The reformers failed to appreciate the need of believers for repetition and archaism. He would not have appreciated the emphasis of Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, in his chronicle of the reform, on the “effort to make the rites speak the language of our own time”, [A. Bugnini, The Reform of the Liturgy, 1948-1995 (Collegeville, Minn., 1990)] even though Bugnini wrote his exhaustive account from a commanding height as Secretary Of The Commission For Liturgical Reform established by Pius XII in 1948; Secretary Of The Preparatory Commission On The Liturgy At The Second Vatican Council (1960-1962); Peritus of that Council and its Commission On The Liturgy; Secretary Of The Concilium For The Implementation Of The Constitution On The Liturgy (1964-1966); and Secretary Of The Congregation for Divine Worship (1969-1975).

Like Flanagan later, Turner held that pastoral liturgists were intimidated by the reigning “structural functionalism” in sociology. For that school, just as ritual structure reflects social structure, so ritual should change as society changes. Turner’s own anthropological scheme, by contrast, privileges significant intervals where we cross what he calls limina (thresholds) in our passage between social experiences. In so doing, we periodically find ourselves separated from our statistically normal experience of identification with some limited group and enter at least for a while a state of what he terms communitas, a form of sociability where our capacity for identification with others is unrestricted by space, time, and even their biological dying, and we enter the experiential continuum he names “flow”.

Typically, ritual stands out from mundane culture in its use of a high language that abounds in lexical and grammatical forms no longer current in everyday speech. Optimally, ritual is a symphony of expressive genres, rather as opera works simultaneously through a multiplicity of art forms in prose and poetry, music and acting. Unlike opera, however, ritual escapes theatricality by the seriousness of its ultimate concerns.

In principle, what Turner says could be applied to the ritual activity of any society, Christian or not, in its religious dimension, and indeed his ideas were in part formulated through fieldwork among the Ndembu in Zambia. But in his essay “Ritual, Tribal and Catholic”, Turner applies these notions more especially to the Western Mass.

The traditional liturgy displayed an essential concern for proper form in the representation of sacred mysteries and the performance of symbolic acts. This was the fruit of popular wisdom fertilized by developing doctrine, and shaped by esthetic as well as legalistic principle. Ritual traditions of any depth or complexity represent the consolidated understanding of many generations. They embody a deep knowledge of the nature of flow, and how and where to break it in order to instill truths about the nature of time, the human condition, and evil. They reveal an understanding of the religious benefit of flow as much for individuals in their interior meditations as for eliciting the spirit of communitas, or shared flow, in congregations at worship.
V. Turner, “Ritual, Tribal and Catholic”, Worship 50 (1976)

And he continues:

A complete liturgical system represents an organized system of spiritual and rational achievements. It is a work of ages, not a hackwork of contemporaneous improvisation. In its multiplicity and variety (controlled, nevertheless, by hard-won rules), it exemplifies the many-faceted yet single spirit of mankind at prayer, of homo religiosus. Although each nacreous [vocab: 1: consisting of or resembling mother-of-pearl;2: having a play of lustrous rainbow-like colors.] increment which composes this pearl has been laid down at a particular time, the total liturgy is liberated from historical determinations. When men and women enter the “liminality”, the tract of sacred space-time, which is made available to them by such a traditional liturgy, they cease to be bound by the secular structures of their own age, and confront eternity which is equidistant from all ages.
V. Turner, “Ritual, Tribal and Catholic”, Worship 50 (1976)

Whereas, so Turner pessimistically proposes, the “flow” elicited by the reformed Liturgy too often “bubbles on the surface” as a “transient communication”.

A motif running through all these authors is the claim that the theological strategy of cultural modernism is misconceived. Modernism — I use the word in the sense of an intellectual style, not that of a heresy in the doctrine of revelation — is too indebted to those features of the Enlightenment and Romanticism that set those movements at odds with the Catholic Church or at any rate presented obstacles (as well as, to some extent, opportunities) for an authentic ecclesial reform and renewal.

In the realm of liturgiology, if the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century discussion of liturgical revision had been better known and its lessons more fully pondered, if the foundational principles suggested by Trapp and shared by such leaders of the interwar liturgical movement as Casel and Guardini had been consistently applied to contemporary sensibility in the 1960s and 1970s, much harm might have been avoided. As it was, and despite the wonderful erudition liturgical scholars brought to the remaking of the rites, liturgists, in Flanagan’s words, “managed to back modernity as a winning ticket, just at the point when it became converted into postmodernism”. [Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy]

This statement at least makes the point that there is now nothing particularly modern about cultural modernism. It may also be interpreted as hinting that the postmodernist phase into which, in literary theory, philosophy, and a wider sensibility, a significant portion of the Western intelligentsia has now passed could have formed a happier context in which both to transmit and in various discreet and prudent ways to enhance a traditional rite.

Statements of what postmodernism is are generally both elliptic and obscure, so much so that questions of how precisely it differs from modernism, what intellectual virtues it recommends, and whether it contains, at least implicitly, any broad truth-claims about the nature of reality are, at least for the present writer, unanswered. But let me mention on the basis of recent research at Cambridge some ways in which one liturgist writing in a confessedly postmodernist manner would find neglected resources in a traditional rite. Catherine Pickstock, of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in her analysis of the old Roman Eucharistic rite, stresses the mobile character of the liturgical “I”, the self that worships. In liturgical action, I am not simply and in straightforward fashion myself: hence the inappropriateness of attempting to fit the Liturgy to the needs of the extra-liturgical personality, to make liturgy “relevant” to the ordinary persona of the self. Commenting on the Fore-Mass of the 1962 Missal, from the prayers of preparation to the Gloria, Pickstock writes:

By means of its dispossessed and impersonating character, its taking on of the roles of other characters thereby unsettling the claim to a secure poetic voice, the worshipping I is designated by the act of forgetting itself, by the forgetting of ordinary identity.
[C. Pickstock, The Sacred Polis: Language, Death and Liturgy (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge, 1996)]

And again:

This complex assuming of different voices leads to an interlacing of voices or polyphony at whose centre [here she refers to the opening of the Gloria] are the seraphic voices which are heard, alluded to, and intermingled with the human voices.
[C. Pickstock, The Sacred Polis]

Impersonation, she stresses, “precedes an authentic voice”: that is, our Christian persona is formed by the way an extra-liturgical sense of the “I” is modified and extended by the Liturgy itself. “This is a de-centered `I’ which constantly moves from one identity to another, from immanent to transcendent locations, breaking the quarantining of the two worlds, but without ever compromising their difference” [C. Pickstock, The Sacred Polis] In a pithy axiom: “In giving (doxologically) we become (ontologically).” In other words, by worship our Christian selves are forged; so worship is not to be judged by what our secular or non liturgical identity may desire or demand.

In her critique of the reform of the Roman rite, Pickstock argues that criticisms of the mediaeval Liturgy by conventional historians of the rite such as Theodor Klauser are misplaced. [T. Klauser, A Short History Of The Western Liturgy, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1979). One may add to Klauser's name that of the Italian liturgiologist influential in the drafting of the new anaphoras, Dom Cyprian Vagaggini, for whom the historic Roman Canon is disunified and illogical: "hardly a model of simplicity and clarity", The Canon of the Mass and Liturgical Reform (London, 1967), 96. But note the criticism of these criticisms by the Anglican liturgiologist Geoffrey Willis, who wrote that they may arise from a "failure to understand the processes by which the Roman Canon Missae reached its present form and even a failure to apprehend the basic principles of its structure": The New Eucharistic Prayers: Some Comments, in A Voice for All Time: Essays on the Liturgy of the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council, ed. C. Francis and M. Lynch (Bristol, 1994), 91]

For Klauser the repetitious and sometimes seemingly random structure of the pre-conciliar rite (one thinks especially of the often attacked Offertory prayers) bears witness to a debasement of pure Liturgy, as does the concomitant emphasis on purification and requests for mercy. Pickstock, on the other hand, treats a certain randomness and repetitiveness as reassuring signs of the oral provenance of the Roman Liturgy, intrinsic aspects of a flow typical of speech rather than a written structure whose meanings are “spatially” compartmentalized in discrete sections. In similar fashion, she takes the repeated requests for purification as signs of an underlying apophaticism [vocab: the belief that God can be known to humans only in terms of what He is not] that stresses our distance from God, not just our sinfulness, and emphasizes what she calls “the need for a constant re-beginning of liturgy because the true eschatological liturgy is in time endlessly postponed”. [Pickstock, The Sacred Polis]

That early fourth-century text so important for the makers of the reformed Roman rite, the Paradosis apostolike, or Apostolic Tradition, ascribed to Hippolytus, being as it is more of a treatise on Liturgy than a Liturgy itself, proved misleading, she thinks, for the program of liturgical recovery, not least in these respects.

Rather like Douglas, Pickstock holds that to reform an ancient Liturgy successfully in radical guise would ultimately entail remaking the entire social order, for earlier Liturgies formed part of a culture itself ritual in character. What the Church could have done, however, was to refrain from assimilating “linguistic and structural forms” from modernity, for these are precisely the elements most inimical to liturgical goals. The “clear and linear purpose” of modern Liturgy is, in her view, sadly of this age of the world and hence in its connotations immanent when compared with traditional rites she characterizes as “a liturgical stammer in the face of the sublime excess of God”.

For a Catholic Christian, in matters of the mind illumined by grace it is theology — sound and solid theology, drawn from Scripture and tradition under the guidance of the Magisterium — that is the queen of the sciences and not the cultural sciences that the writers whose ideas I have been rehearsing represent. That is not to say, however, that these benevolent warning voices can safely be disregarded.

On the basis of her bi-millennial experience, the Church has in the past been credited by sympathetic observers with a definite store of human wisdom. Like her divine Founder, she has known what is in man. The largely independent and convergent testimony of the men and women whose work I have described in this chapter suggests that of late the Church, which must mean here her members, has shown an uncharacteristic deficiency of such wisdom, in part in the conception of the liturgical reform, but even more in its execution. This is something the clergy and laity of the next century will eventually need to address.

Posted in Fr. Aidan Nichols, Sacraments, The State of the Catholic Church | Tagged Catherine Pickstock, causes of anti-ritualism, Christian persona, communitas, David Martin, Friday abstinence, limina, Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols, Ritual, The Contempt of Ritual, The Ritual Process, The Sacred Polis, traditional forms of rite, traditional liturgy, Tribal and Catholic, Victor Turner | Leave a Comment »

The Importance Of Ritual Part II — Fr. Aidan Nichols O.P.

September 8, 2011

Hagia Sophia had been built during the reign of the Emperor Justinian between the years 532-537 AD and was the largest church in the world.

The first concept to be rendered questionable by both this definition [To repeat from the previous post: Liturgy [wrote I. H. Dalmais in Principles of the Liturgy] belongs in the order of doing (ergon) not of knowing (logos). Logical thought cannot get far with it; liturgical actions yield their intelligibility in their performance, and this performance takes place at the level of sensible realities, not as exclusively material, but as vehicles of overtones capable of awakening the mind and heart to acceptance of realities belonging to a different order.] and the sea change in sociological thinking charted by Flanagan is the notion of simplicity as a criterion for sound liturgical practice. To the sociologist, it is by no means self-evident that brief, clear rites have greater transformative potential than complex, abundant, lavish, rich, long rites, furnished with elaborate ceremonial. Noble simplicity of rite has been a theme of liturgical reforms since the Enlightenment, as the previous chapter noted. It had not commended itself, however, purely as an anthropological desideratum. It was also regarded as a hallmark of the primitive Church. Though falling outside the sociologist’s provenance, this too is now a matter of question.

The decision of the post-conciliar reformers to return to a pre-Carolingian Roman tradition as earlier and therefore simpler and so better was predictable given the influence on the tradition of liturgical scholarship of the “comparative liturgy” approach pioneered by the South German historian of liturgy Anton Baumstark. Baumstark’s book with that title was both liturgiologically pioneering and enormously successful; it was translated into various languages and enjoyed numerous reprintings. However, the work of F. S. West on Baumstark’s Comparative Liturgy [A. Baumstark, Liturgie comparee, 3d ed. (Chevetogne, 1953); the work's original is French, since it began life as lectures to Bauduin's monks at Amay.] in its intellectual setting has shown that his comparative method was itself drawn, somewhat strangely, from the biology of the German Naturphi!osophen (like Goethe) as well as from the comparative anatomy of such nineteenth-century natural scientists as Georges Cuvier and Charles Darwin. [F. S. West, Anton Baumstark's Comparative Liturgy in Its Intellectual Contex", doctoral thesis (Notre Dame, Ind. 1988), described in P. Bradshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Origins of Early Liturgy (London, 1992)]

It assumed as a law, consequently, that liturgical evolution moved from simplicity and brevity to richness and prolixity, even though Baumstark had to admit that one could also see evidence of a contrary movement, a tendency later to abbreviate what earlier had been fuller. As the Anglican liturgiologist Paul Bradshaw, now professor of Liturgy at Notre Dame, Indiana, has pointed out:

This admission that liturgical development might in fact proceed in either direction robs [Baumstark's] classification of any predictive power. We cannot judge a liturgical phenomenon …..’late’ simply because it exhibits prolixity.
[Bradshaw, Search for the Origins]

Nor, a fortiori, can we make an adverse value judgment on some liturgical rite, text, or practice because it lacks that dubiously reliable hallmark of primitive authenticity. One member of the post-conciliar Consilium who found the eagerness to apply the criterion of simplicity quite excessive, the Premonstratensian liturgist and author of a standard study of the sources of the Roman Liturgy Dom Boniface Luykx, signified his displeasure rather strongly by transferring to the Byzantine ritual church where he is now abbot of the Byzantine-Ukrainian monastery of the Transfiguration in northern California. [18R Galadza, "Abbot Boniface Luykx as Liturgist and liturgisatel", in Following the Star from the East: Essays in Honor of Archimandrite Boniface Luykx, ed. A. Chirovsky (Ottawa, Chicago, Lviv, 1992)].

A second concept that Flanagan would see as treated by Churchmen with a marked degree of sociological naivete is that of intelligibility in rite. The notion that the more intelligible the sign, the more effectively it will enter the lives of the faithful is implausible to the sociological imagination. It cannot simply be assumed that people will naturally assent more deeply once they have comprehended.

As Flanagan explains, a certain opacity is essential to symbolic action in the sociologists’ account, so that to attempt to render symbols wholly transparent is, to their mind, a thoroughly misguided proceeding. “[Symbols] proclaim that which transcends the conditions under which clarity through intervention is possible. They embody that which is unavailable to rational manipulation. [Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy] And if total vernacularization of liturgical language and the insistence on translation styles that win comprehension at the cost of banality were too frequently the result of the principle of immediate comprehensibility in the realm of the spoken word, an insistence on the complete visibility of every detail of what was happening at the altar (and hence not only the removal of rood screens but also the eventual victory of versus populum celebration) was its counterpart in the visual realm.

Here, as Flanagan remarks, it was not realized that, sociologically, “veiling”, “marking a distance”, and “tactful reticence” are necessary to reverence. But such terms as reverence, with its connotations of restraint, deference, and awe, soon became prominent by their absence in liturgical discussion.

A third key concept, community, has already been touched on apropos of Gueranger. To Flanagan, the concept of community as such — just like that, without any further qualification — is too vague to bear a specifically Christian meaning. Moreover, it can easily degenerate into the creation of a transiently benevolent atmosphere through (literal or metaphorical “glad-handing” (an eloquent Americanism). What liturgists needed but failed to find was a concept of community defined distinctively as the product of a ritual assembly itself keyed into a mystery exceeding that assembly’s limits.

As the English priest-sociologist Anthony Archer had pointed out in his study The Two Catholic Churches, the preconciliar Liturgy at least imposed a ritual authority on all classes and individuals, [A. Archer, The Two Catholic Churches: A Study in Oppression (London, 1986)] thus preventing the emergence of groups who would seize the Liturgy for their own purposes or of figures who would treat it as an opportunity for the display of their communications skills. It is not really clear whether clericalism, defined as the undue prominence, within an ecclesial community, of the sacramentally ordained, is less apparent or more apparent in a liturgical rite where the priest is constantly face to face with the congregation and encouraged to introduce some at least of the Liturgy’s salient parts, rather than being absorbed impersonally into a ritual role.

A fourth crucial idea, after simplicity, intelligibility, and community, an idea not so much this tune in the Council’s Liturgy Constitution or any official text as in the commentators who took it upon themselves to interpret the reformed rite to the clergy and others, was that of liturgical agency, in other words, the role, increasingly personalized and sometimes in a pejorative sense theatrical, to be played by the celebrant of the Liturgy and other liturgical ministers. Here Flanagan notes that, sociologically, a priest cannot as celebrant present himself at Mass in the same fashion as that in which he greets his parishioners afterward. The liturgical role must conceal or at least detract attention from the person, so as to focus it the more strongly elsewhere.

The liturgical actor wishes to cast glory onto God in acts of worship that somehow minimize or preclude these elements of worth falling onto himself. Like the self, the social has to be present to enable the act to appear, but it has to disappear if the end of reverence is to be realized.
[Flanagan. Sociology and Liturgy]

To the sociological eye, rites work best when they are repetitive and formalized, so that the liturgical actor can practice a certain forgetfulness of self, “playing into his role, as Flanagan puts it, “embodying the possibility of its existence”. In this he may need a certain distance, at least at points, from other worshippers. As Flanagan explains, too unilateral an emphasis on proximity is sociologically misplaced. Rites that do not allow a sense of distance deny to the people, paradoxically, a means of appropriating the act of worship, crippling them just at the point where they could be taking off Godward by a leap of religious imagination. For liturgical actors, though presented within a social frame, have to convey properties of what lies beyond that frame, a rumor of angels.

But where does this leave the notion of participation, which is so key not only to the Enlightenment and Catholic Revival discussions in their different ways but also to that modern movement begun in the years before the Great War as well as, and not least, in the papacy’s gradual acceptance of its proposals in the pontificates of the last three “Pian” popes, Pius X, Pius XI, and Pius XII? For Flanagan, active, outward participation is to be evaluated according to “the degree to which it generates inner appropriation, interior assent”. An English Benedictine liturgist, Dom Bernard McElligott of Ampleforth, founder of the Society of Saint Gregory, had commented on the philology as early as the year of the introduction of the Novus Ordo, 1970.

By using the word “active” for actuosa the Church’s intention has been misunderstood, and generally, if perhaps unconsciously, taken to mean bodily activity; whereas what the Church really asks for is full, sincere, mental activity, expressed externally by the body.
[B. McElligott, "Active Participation", in A Voice for All Time: Essays on the Liturgy of the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council, ed. C. Francis and M. Lynch (Bristol, 1994)]

As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has emphasized, the term actuosa participatio at the Council included silence as well as speaking and singing and hence disqualifies any activist misconstrual of “living participation” (as Trapp had called it — See his liturgical essays in The Feast of Faith (San Francisco, 1986). Flanagan’s interpretation is, evidently, not unwarranted.

The absence in the postconciliar Liturgy of the atmosphere of intense silence and devotion once so striking to observers raises the question as to whether actuosa participatio, assessed in terms of Flanagan’s criterion, is more advanced or less advanced than it was before the Council opened. Here of course tricks of memory and nostalgia, as well as wishful thinking based on ecclesiastical partisanship, may deceive us. Not every eucharistic worshipper at a celebration according to the Missale Pianum before 1962 was burning with fervor, just as not everyone at a celebration according to the Missale Paulinum after 1970 is manifestly bored. But a German sociologist’s investigation of a large suburban parish in 1960 provides an example of the relatively objective testing possible. As Flanagan comments,

Many of his subjects reported that they came to Mass to find a space in which to reestablish their spiritual equilibrium, the calmness of the rite — a re-iterated notion — giving a context in which they could adjust the proportions of an often confused existence.
[Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy]

Nor could one accuse Msgr. J. D. Crichton, the doyen of living liturgists in England, of insouciance toward the new rites, yet he has spoken recently of a loss of reverence which ultimately leads to a loss of the sense of the transcendent God who is the supreme Object of all worship. In a way we are in danger of forgetting what worship is about. It is not just a heartwarming experience for those who like that sort of thing. [J. D. Crichton, Worshipping with Awe and Reverence, Priests and People]

Or, as Father Anthony Conlon, a London parish priest, has put it in a paper read to the International Eucharistic Congress at Seville in 1994:

The overemphasis on active participation, which only conceives of worship in terms of the community realizing its group dynamic through a bias in favor of “doing things”, is a serious hindrance to any understanding of the Mass as essentially a liturgical setting of an historic action of divine mercy and sacrifice.
[A. Conlon, The Participation of the Faithful in the Post-Conciliar Liturgy: A Critical Perspective on Contemporary Practice in XLV Convenlus Eucharisticus Internationalis, Sevilla 1-13. Vi .1993, Christus Lumen Gentiuci, Euchanstia el Evangelizatio (Vatican City, 1993)]‘

Here then it is not simply a question of failing to advert properly to the divine transcendence in general. More devastatingly, when the Mass is at issue, there is inadequate advertence to that supreme act whereby the divine transcendence engaged itself in Trinitarian fashion for our definitive salvation on Calvary, when the Son offered himself to the Father in the Spirit so that his Sacrifice could be fruitful in the renewed pouring out of himself in the propitiatory intercession of the Eucharist and its foundation in his High Priestly prayer in the heavens.

Too much can be centered on the contribution made by the participants as though that alone made for the efficacy of the Eucharist and less attention — if any — may be paid to the sacramental offering of the great High Priest.
[A. Conlon, The Participation of the Faithful in the Post-Conciliar Liturgy: A Critical Perspective on Contemporary Practice]

The fact that in many parish celebrations the church building is evidently regarded as simply an assembly point before Mass starts and a place of concourse when Mass ends, in sharp contrast to the former practice when many people made prayers of preparation before Mass and prayers of thanksgiving after it and certainly were not disabled in so doing by other worshippers, points toward the same conclusion. If active participation is rightly evaluated by the quality of inner participation it arouses, then, it would seem, it has not yet succeeded in its task.

What from the sociologist’s standpoint has been overlooked is that, as Flanagan remarks, liturgical forms operate in the manner of icons — opening up a sense of the presence of the divine, not of course by the painterly means of color and line, but through social actions believed to be endowed and intended to be endowed with “holy purpose”.

Flanagan’s overall conclusion is that the Roman Liturgy has fallen into the hands of “convivial Puritans”. For these, procedures for worship are to be kept as simple as possible so as to maximize social relationships in the production of the rite. A ritual minimalism serves to sustain a relaxed atmosphere where all may contribute informally. “Bind us together” is the theme song of a liturgical life where hierarchy and ceremony are treated as deleterious to happy togetherness.

To Flanagan, as to Martin, this is simply wrongheaded.

Informal or endlessly adaptable Liturgy may be beau mais ce nest pas la guerre. The shape of the rite takes on “unfruitful unpredictability”, impairing its claim to constitute, indeed, a public order of worship. As the phenomenologist of religion Rudolf Otto saw at the beginning of this century, an undisciplined rite clamantly [vocab: loudly]asserting direct links with the production of the numinous has little chance of representing the latter successfully when compared with one that humbly petitions the holy in solemn mode.

Such tacit, mysterious qualities of rite, Flanagan continues, are, moreover, what permit its endless replaying. He likens to this the way a literary classic (The Brothers Karamazov, Moby Dick) can be endlessly reread if it be in a positive sense “ambiguous”, namely, not increasing the reader’s uncertainty about meaning but rather maintaining openness to ultimate meaning (the sacred).

Repeated use, so Flanagan concludes: “generates a passage of growth into understanding the implications of what cannot be grasped, and at the same time fuels a wish to have more revealed from what is concealed.” [Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy] The message is that the adhesive that holds rites together has become too diluted to stick, and Flanagan looks to older forms of the Latin Liturgy for assistance when he writes: “Formal traditional forms of rite cannot be dismissed as being inherently culturally incredible. These rites only become incredible when they are deemed to be so .” [Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy]

Posted in Church History, Fr. Aidan Nichols, Sacraments, The State of the Catholic Church | Tagged a concept of community, actuosa participatio, Anton Baumstark, intelligibility in rite, liturgical agency, liturgical development, participation, simplicity, Sociology and Liturgy | Leave a Comment »

The Importance Of Ritual Part I — Fr. Aidan Nichols O.P.

September 7, 2011

Fifty years earlier on the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, January 25, 1959, Pope John Paul XXIII had announced the convocation of a general council for the universal Church. And the Second Vatican Council was born.

Reporting on the world of British scholarship, it is a remarkable fact, which has not been as noticed as it deserves, that both Catholic and Anglican social anthropologists and sociologists have tended to take, from the standpoint of their own disciplines rather than simply from personal preference, a somewhat negative attitude toward the mid-twentieth-century liturgical reform that has had so marked an influence on both communions. They have a tendency to think that in the broader lines of its departures from the traditional Liturgy reform may, in certain of its characteristic emphases, rest on a mistake — not doctrinal mistake, but a failure in human prudence.

The idiom of the writers I shall be expounding is not easy, so perhaps we might begin relatively gently with a text written by an Anglican sociologist whose marks are, however, highly pertinent to the Catholic practice of Liturgy in the Western Church today. In Two Critiques of Spontaneity, Professor David Martin of the London School of Economics attacked what he called the “popular local heresy” of that “cult of choice” that wherever possible opts against an order of rules and roles in the name of spontaneity. [D. Martin, Two Critiques of Spontaneity (London, 1973)]

Though this “cult” has some respectable origins – he mentions religious notions of conscience and personal decision, and moral ideas of political liberty and existential authenticity, as well as the Romantic concept of genius and the psychoanalytical ideal of autonomy — the tree that grows from these roots has become stunted and deformed. Basically, one truth, or one collection of truths, has been stressed at the expense of the complementary truths that are their necessary counterpart. The result is a dangerous and destructive imbalance.

Libertarians stressing spontaneity — and Martin makes clear that such figures operate not only in civil society but also in ecclesial society and not least in its worship — ignore the preconditions of freedom in a determinate order of stable rules and defined roles that constitute, in Kantian language, the social a priori of personal identity, the latter’s necessary condition. In their anti-institutionalism, extreme personalists are sawing off the branch on which they are sitting.

“Institutions”, in the various senses of that word, are needful if persons with a definite sense of identity are to exist at all. When all is said and done, man, though he may not be as context-bound as an animal, is not as context-free as an angel. It is then the embedded character of freedom that is ignored by the partisans of spontaneity, and here we must include liturgical advocates of multiple choice, of endless adaptation and unscripted presidential intervention for the establishment of free rapport with others. For such libertarians, “the noumenal self [Martin means the underlying or essential `self'] is already full of experiential potency. Traditional modes are mere automatic transfers: everyman must start afresh.”[D. Martin, Two Critiques of Spontaneity (London, 1973)]

In the critique Martin is rejecting, traditional churches (that is, churches with traditional worship) are regarded as diverting the impulse to authenticity into “silted channels of alienated tradition and super-imposed forms”. Their “received rituals” and “automatic repetitions” are “frozen icons of freedom, stories from which the dynamism has been drained”. What the proponents of spontaneity would substitute for these Martin writes of scathingly as a “total and easy immersion in the All”. As he warns, “total immediacy produces total relativity.” Where each and every chosen experience is regarded as equally valuable, each by the same token may just as well be described as equally worthless.

Writing as a sociologist, Martin asserts the imperative need to defend discipline, habit, continuity, the located and familiar, the bounded and particularized, rules, roles, and relations. A rule, as he puts it, indicates the “existence of a regularity”: something that enables one to anticipate and so to act. Anticipating, acting, knowing where and who you are turn on the due existence of rules. The stability and definition of the latter are generative of psychological health, just as authority and hierarchy, rightly exercised, are necessary for the flourishing of that social health which Scripture calls “justice”. Without rules there would be only what Martin terms “unidimensional determination by peers”, the law of the jungle. [D. Martin, Two Critiques]

Martin regards the ideas of meaningful relationship and significant personal encounter as wholly impotent when considered as bases on which to found the life of groups or even individuals. Why? Because these concepts are virtually without content. “One seeks for the personally significant [but] nothing is signified.” The ideology of the experiencing self, in whose name traditional forms, including traditional liturgical rites, are rejected, is “literally self-defeating”, for beyond a certain point the emphasis on direct experience diminishes the very possibility of experience at all. How constricting, not least experientially, is a liturgy that insists on expressing the experience, the concrete self-understanding, of the immediate group that enacts it.

The experiential illumination of the Gospel depends, Martin considers, on rote and rite. As he puts it: “What is done by rote and performed in ritual provides the necessary substratum of habit on the basis of which experience becomes possible.” And invoking the literary critic George Steiner, [G. Steiner, Bluebeards Castle (London, 1971)] he asks what must it mean for a civilization to hear the Gospels repeated time and time again in the central rites of the Church. Not only, then, are repetition and ritual form not to be set over against authentic identity. More than this, they cannot be counterposed to creativity either. As Martin writes: “The shortest way to creativity is habituation to technical means of expression and steady soaking in an historical context.”[Martin, Two Critiques] And in a daring comparison with the Incarnation of the divine Word, he concludes: “Those who have accepted the conditions of confinement find they are present at a miraculous birth, limited by time and place, fully human, before which even angels cover their faces.” [Martin, Two Critiques]

A fuller account in the shape of a Catholic counterpart to Martin’s criticism is Kieran Flanagan’s Sociology and Liturgy, which marries an Anglo-American sociological tradition to the Germanophone theology of Joseph Ratzinger and Hans Urs von Balthasar. [K. Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy: Representations of the Holy (London, 1991)] Flanagan, an Irishman who is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Bristol, rejects what he regards as a consensus of practical liturgists who favor the maximizing of active participation so as to confer a democratic quality on rite and would keep liturgical symbols and actions as simple and intelligible as possible.

Stressing by contrast the ceremonious, formal, and allegorical qualities of ritual as well as what he terms ritual’s “ambiguity”, Flanagan describes the pastoral-liturgical consensus in bald terms as “sociologically misconceived”. It ignores the question of “how the cultural is domesticated and harnessed in a ritual performance that proclaims a distinctive witness.” [K. Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy] Emphasizing the functions of ceremony, the opacity of symbols, the complexity of actions, and the qualities of beauty and holiness that give the social form of rite a distinctive coloration, Flanagan echoes Martin in deploring

the rise of consumer-friendly rites and a demand for loose and lax “happy clappy” events full of meet and greet transactions. These trivialize the social, preclude deeper meanings being read into the action, and skate along the surface of some very thin ice where all attention to danger, awe and reverence is bracketed. These are rites of the immediate that demand instantaneous theological results.”
[K. Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy]

“Liberal” liturgists are in fact dismantling the entire sacred superstructure that rites exist to serve.

The apparent theological strong point of such pastoral liturgical approaches lies, Flanagan remarks, in the notion of the missionary significance of duly adapted rites. A century and more earlier, Dom Gueranger had also spoken of the evangelical power of the Liturgy, but he had seen this as expressed indirectly in its spiritual beauty. Now, however, it is to be expressed directly in a conscious opening of the Church to the world.

Unfortunately, so Flanagan explains, this “delivers Christianity to a school of sociological thought that regards rituals as social constructions shaped to express and to mirror the ideological sensitivities of the age”. [K. Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy] The result is that the rite comes to be seen as the projection of the dispositions of the actors involved in the act of worship rather than as first and foremost the work of grace, a bestowal of transcendence that (to be sure) makes use of human agents for its enactment but does not, Pelagius-like, consist of such agency. In favor of traditional ritual, by contrast, is the fact that the quality of habit (one of Martin’s favorite words) endows liturgical action with “an impunity, an absence of worry about the credibility of what is represented”.

As Flanagan would see things, the Second Vatican Council simply took place too early so far as the history of sociology is concerned. In a retrospective view of the revisionist phase of the liturgical movement in the period from the Second World War to the Council and the subsequent reform, he writes:

Theology inserted the notion of cultural praxis into its approach to liturgy, but failed to secure the sociological instruments through which this could be monitored and understood. The relationship of rite to the cultural was far more ambiguous and complex than had been understood at the time of the Council. The question of the significance of the social came from within theological efforts to renew liturgical form — not from sociology. Only recently has a form of sociology emerged that could offer a means of understanding liturgical operations in a way that is compatible with their theological basis.’
[K. Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy]

The principal schools of sociology “available” when the Council opened were positivist, empiricist, or functionalist. Only in the course of the 1960s and 1970s did the stress of the late-nineteenth-century German philosopher of method Wilhelm Dilthey on the distinctive nature of the cultural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) have its impact on sociology, as sociologists began to realize the need for a sociological imagination if they were to grasp the meaning of social forms for those human subjects who live in and with them. At last they started to ask themselves how belief systems, now taken seriously even or especially if they were religious, succeed in having cultural expression. Alas, it was then too late for such sociologists to be of use to the actual liturgical reformers. The postconciliar Consilium ad exsequendam Constitutionem de Sacra Liturgia was wound up in 1975 through absorption into the Congregation for Divine Worship, that year coinciding more or less with a real turning point in the anthropology of religion as new schools of thought began to emphasize meaning, not explanation, the non-rational as well as the rational, and ritual’s transformative power: all of which led to a new respect for the formal, ceremonious ordering of rite, the very thing that avant-garde liturgists most abhorred and the liturgical reform itself preserved only in severely truncated guise.

Yeats’ rhetorical question “How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?” was suddenly grasped in the academy as it ceased to be understood in the Church. And Flanagan suggests (albeit cautiously) that the consequent mishandling of the modernization of rite accelerated the decline of such traditional churches as his own.

He contrasts the impoverished concepts used to “deliver rite to the cultural” — simplicity, intelligibility, adaptation to “modern man” — with the subtle description of the Liturgy given by the Dominican liturgiologist Irenee-Henri Dalmais in his contribution to Canon Aime Martimort’s four-volume study The Church at Prayer.

Liturgy [wrote Dalmais] belongs in the order of doing (ergon) not of knowing (logos). Logical thought cannot get far with it; liturgical actions yield their intelligibility in their performance, and this performance takes place at the level of sensible realities, not as exclusively material, but as vehicles of overtones capable of awakening the mind and heart to acceptance of realities belonging to a different order. [I. H. Dalmais, "The Liturgy as Celebration of the Mystery of Salvation", in Principles of the Liturgy, vol. 1 of The Church at Prayer, ed. A. G. Martimort (London, 1967)]

Posted in Church History, Fr. Aidan Nichols, Sacraments, The State of the Catholic Church | Tagged anti-institutionalism, David Martin, Kieran Flanagan, Liturgy reform, rote and rite, Sociology and Liturgy, Two Critiques of Spontaneity | Leave a Comment »

The Blessed Virgin Compared To The Air We Breathe – Fr. Aidan Nichols on Gerard Manley Hopkins II

August 31, 2011

The Blessed Virgin Compared To The Air We Breathe
Gerard Manley Hopkins

Wild air, world-mothering air,
Nestling me everywhere,
That each eyelash or hair
Girdles; goes home betwixt
The fleeciest, frailest-flixed
Snowflake; that’s fairly mixed
With, riddles, and is rife
In every least thing’s life;
This needful, never spent,
And nursing element;
My more than meat and drink,
My meal at every wink;
This air, which, by life’s law,
My lung must draw and draw
Now but to breathe its praise,
Minds me in many ways
Of her who not only
Gave God’s infinity
Dwindled to infancy
Welcome in womb and breast,
Birth, milk, and all the rest
But mothers each new grace
That does now reach our race—
Mary Immaculate,
Merely a woman, yet
Whose presence, power is
Great as no goddess’s
Was deemèd, dreamèd; who
This one work has to do—
Let all God’s glory through,
God’s glory which would go
Through her and from her flow
Off, and no way but so.

I say that we are wound
With mercy round and round
As if with air: the same
Is Mary, more by name.
She, wild web, wondrous robe,
Mantles the guilty globe,
Since God has let dispense
Her prayers his providence:
Nay, more than almoner,
The sweet alms’ self is her
And men are meant to share
Her life as life does air.

If I have understood,
She holds high motherhood
Towards all our ghostly good
And plays in grace her part
About man’s beating heart,
Laying, like air’s fine flood,
The deathdance in his blood;
Yet no part but what will
Be Christ our Saviour still.
Of her flesh he took flesh:
He does take fresh and fresh,
Though much the mystery how,
Not flesh but spirit now
And makes, O marvellous!
New Nazareths in us,
Where she shall yet conceive
Him, morning, noon, and eve;
New Bethlems, and he born
There, evening, noon, and morn—
Bethlem or Nazareth,
Men here may draw like breath
More Christ and baffle death;
Who, born so, comes to be
New self and nobler me
In each one and each one
More makes, when all is done,
Both God’s and Mary’s Son.

Again, look overhead
How air is azurèd;
O how! nay do but stand
Where you can lift your hand
Skywards: rich, rich it laps
Round the four fingergaps.
Yet such a sapphire-shot,
Charged, steepèd sky will not
Stain light. Yea, mark you this:
It does no prejudice.
The glass-blue days are those
When every colour glows,
Each shape and shadow shows.
Blue be it: this blue heaven
The seven or seven times seven
Hued sunbeam will transmit
Perfect, not alter it.
Or if there does some soft,
On things aloof, aloft,
Bloom breathe, that one breath more
Earth is the fairer for.
Whereas did air not make
This bath of blue and slake
His fire, the sun would shake,
A blear and blinding ball
With blackness bound, and all
The thick stars round him roll
Flashing like flecks of coal,
Quartz-fret, or sparks of salt,
In grimy vasty vault.

So God was god of old:
A mother came to mould
Those limbs like ours which are
What must make our daystar
Much dearer to mankind;
Whose glory bare would blind
Or less would win man’s mind.
Through her we may see him
Made sweeter, not made dim,
And her hand leaves his light
Sifted to suit our sight.

Be thou then, O thou dear
Mother, my atmosphere;
My happier world, wherein
To wend and meet no sin;
Above me, round me lie
Fronting my froward eye
With sweet and scarless sky;
Stir in my ears, speak there
Of God’s love, O live air,
Of patience, penance, prayer:
World-mothering air, air wild,
Wound with thee, in thee isled,
Fold home, fast fold thy child.

Just the point at which to introduce the comparison with Mary: Hopkins characterizes this other mother by two features of her role as Catholic Christianity sees it. The first is her divine motherhood, by which she became the Theotokos or God-bearer, giving welcome in “womb and breast” to the “infinity” of the person of God the Word, now become what the medievals called Verbum abbreviatum, the “abbreviated Word”, inasmuch as his divine hypostasis, from the moment of the Annunciation onward, acts as the personalizing subject of an instance of human nature.

Thus is the Godhead of the Son “dwindled to infancy” in the Christ-child — without, for all that, suffering the loss of those divine attributes which make him the foundation of the universe and of the moral law. The role of our Lady at the Annunciation is so essential to Incarnation robustly conceived that it already justifies, in classical Christian vocabulary, the exalted language of channel of divine grace, which, in point of theological fact, Hopkins will use for her under a second distinct heading.

Drawing on a doctrinal tradition, which has never (yet) attained dogmatic status, he affirms that she “mothers each new grace / That now does reach our race”. The inclusion of the words “each new” here goes beyond what Mary’s divine motherhood by itself could lead us to say; it is a confession of Mary’s “sub-mediation” of the grace of Christ to individuals here and now. Were we in any doubt on the matter, Hopkins himself dispels it for us in a sermon:

Now holiness God promotes by giving grace; the grace he gives not direct but as if stooping and drawing it from her vessel, taking it down from her storehouse and cupboard. It is in some way laid up in her.
The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. C. Devlin, SJ (Oxford 1959)

So “Mary Immaculate” — a title which had surged in popularity through the ex cathedra definition of the all-holiness of the Mother of God in 1854, delighting those who followed the via Scoti, “Scotus’ way” — is “Merely a woman” and yet her “presence” and “power” is “great as no goddess’s / Was deemed, dreamed”.

This is a deliberately uncomfortable paradox, and Hopkins is positively willing us to ask whether he has not mired himself in contradiction. Can Mary of Nazareth, someone whose being is altogether finite (as the being of the Word incarnate is not), have so divine a role without calling into question her finitude or God’s infinitude or both? Hopkins resolves the issue by reimagining this role as that of a pane of glass which has no more — and no less — to do that letting the Light shine through it. She “This one work has to do — / Let all God’s glory through”, and even this is feasible only by the divine antecedent will and covenant: “God’s glory which would go / Through her and from her flow / Off, and no way but so”. St Bernard, a major articulator of this tradition, remarks simply in his sermons: “It is God’s will that we should receive all graces through Mary”. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermo VII de Aguaeductu.

The following lines (35 to 45) develop one of the loveliest titles for Mary in Latin devotion: Mater misericordiae, the “Mother of mercy”. Hopkins finds a functional identification between Mary and mercy: We are “wound / With mercy round and round” just as we are by air, and that is because we are also so wound by the “wild web, wondrous robe” of Mary as it “Mantles the guilty globe”.

There are two implications. First, the mercy which is first and foremost an attribute of God, both in Himself and in the saving economy whereby the Holy Trinity reaches out to us, is more palpably itself — that is, so far as human experience is concerned — when God wills that mercy to be mediated by Mary.

Human beings respond more fully to the mercy of God when they receive it from the hands of a mother. Hopkins as believer experiences the Mother of the Lord not merely as an occasional dispenser of divine mercy but as that very mercy: “more than almoner, / The sweet alms’ self is her”. (Of course that must be understood in terms of the interrelation of finite and infinite discussed above.) The second implication can be stated more shortly, as Hopkins himself states it: “men are meant to share / Her life”. It is an appeal to Christians who benefit from Mary’s attention to make some effort consciously to reciprocate.

In lines 46 to 72 Hopkins restates the problem of a confession of the Blessed Virgin’s universal mediation and develops, this time at more length, an explicitly Christological attempt to solve it. First, he reiterates the omnicompetence of Mary’s gracious sub-mediation: “She holds high motherhood / Towards all our ghostly good” (emphasis added). It is her “part” to “lay” — allay, or lay low — concupiscence, man’s potentially fatal trend, even after baptismal regeneration, toward evil, the “deathdance in his blood”. This is the heart of what the ascetic tradition calls holy warfare, and nothing could be more pertinent to our final salvation. So, once again, how can a mere creature receive this role? Hopkins proposes an answer in terms of the mystery of Jesus Christ, the one and only (non-subordinated) “Mediator between God and men” (1 Timothy 2:5).

Any “part” Mary has consists, in one or another way, in disposing us to be the “place” where Jesus Christ comes to be in us. She has no part that will not be “Christ our Savior still”. He continues to take on — mysterically — substantial life in the faithful, as once he did biologically in the womb of her who is, in the words of ancient litany, the “Faith of all the faithful”, the mother of all believers. Hopkins cries out with wonder — “O marvelous!” — at this truth of mystical theology, namely that Christ makes of his members “New Nazareths”, “New Bethlems”.

And he finds here the key to the puzzle of Mary’s universal task in our regard. Her role is precisely to “conceive / Him, morning, noon and eve” in us. And this explains how her mediation is both utterly comprehensive and yet altogether without derogation from the mediation of Christ. Hopkins emphasizes that this is no abstruse theory, since it concerns the ultimate issue in practical reason: my personal raising to nobility of stature. What is at stake is “New self and nobler me”. In his essay “On Personality, Grace and Freewill”, Hopkins called the divine action in sanctifying a person and bringing him to the condition of deification “a lifting him from one self to another self, which is a most marvelous display of divine power”.[The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. C. Devlin, SJ (Oxford 1959)] God appropriately does this through Christ by way of Mary, since the unique Mediator is “Both God’s and Mary’s Son”.

Hopkins would hardly be Hopkins if, thinking about air and its translucence, he did not look up at the sky. And so he bids the reader, “look overhead / How air is azured”. On a fine day, the air above us is shot through with blue, “sapphire-shot”, but that can hardly be said to “stain” light, to detract from its purity. Well, so it is with the grace of God when it comes to men through the hands of our blessed Lady. So far from distorting the real relations of God, man, and the redeemed creation, this Marian impregnation enables them to stand out with greater distinctness. “The glass-blue days are those / When every color glows”. And he adds that “this blue heaven / The seven or seven times seven / Hued sunbeam will transmit / Perfect, not alter it”. Hopkins had worked out this aspect of the controlling analogy of the poem in a sermon given at Leigh in 1879:

St Bernard’s saying, All grace given through Mary: this is a mystery. Like blue sky, which for all its richness of color does not stain the sunlight, though smoke and red clouds do, so God’s graces come to us unchanged but all through her. Moreover she gladdens the Catholic’s heaven and when she is brightest so is the sun her Son.
Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. C. Devlin, SJ (Oxford 1959)

As Hopkins declares in the poetic version of this claim, if some change in the light conditions on earth does have an effect in terms of “Bloom breathe” — encouraging the opening of buds into blossom, then that “one breath more / Earth is the fairer for”.

Without that translucent yet protecting atmosphere, by contrast, our earth would be unlivable, such as we can assume planets of thin atmosphere too close to their own suns to be. In an extraordinary disruption of tone, producing an infernal effect worthy of Milton (lines 94 to 102), Hopkins imagines how, if air did not “slake” the sun’s “fire”, the heavens would be transmogrified into a “grimy vasty vault”, the centre of the solar system a “blear and blinding ball / With blackness bound”.

And lest we miss the point he rubs it in. That is how men would look at deity were it not for the Incarnation: “So God was god of old”. The “limbs like ours”, which the humanized Word developed from the body of the Virgin, are what endear the dreadful God of the cosmic spaces to us. Were his glory — his majestic radiance — shown us “bare”, either it would “blind” our minds or at least “less would win” them. The interposing hand of Mary, through which the glory shown in Christ is showered down on us “leaves his light / Sifted to suit our sight”.

The poem ends with a personal appeal from the poet to the Mother of Christ to be with effect for him what he by his words has declared her to be in principle for everyone.

Posted in Fr. Aidan Nichols, G. K. Chesterton, Mary, Poetry | Tagged "Both God's and Mary's Son", "New self and nobler me", Bernard of Clairvaux, divine motherhood, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mary Immaculate, Mary's "sub-mediation" of the grace of Christ, Mater misericordiae, sub-mediation, The Blessed Virgin Compared To The Air We Breathe, Verbum abbreviatum | Leave a Comment »

The Blessed Virgin Compared To The Air We Breathe – Fr. Aidan Nichols on Gerard Manley Hopkins I

August 30, 2011

Gerard Manley Hopkins depicted by Irish sculptor Rowan Gillsepie

I had featured this poem under another post “Anthem Poems” before but I’ve been reading Fr. Aidan Nichols’ seminal work on Gerard Manley Hopkins and he featured it in his collection of Hopkin’ poetry, so here it is again. A little longish so I chopped into two posts.

I confess that I have learned most of my theology through literature and writings like Fr. Nichols and Anthony Esolen. See if you don’t see what I mean:

The Blessed Virgin Compared To The Air We Breathe
Gerard Manley Hopkins

Written in May 1883 at Stonyhurst, this is another example of the “May offerings” to the Mother of the Lord to set beside “The May Magnificat.” This poem was not a great favorite of Hopkins (Hopkins’ friend and future Poet Laureate to whom we owe the great debt of knowing anything about Hopkins at all), who probably considered its meter too unadventurous. It is written in trimeter couplets, which are quite common among the Latin hymns of the Roman Office. But Bridges, despite his Protestantism — or Protestant agnosticism — found it admirable, rather to Hopkins’s surprise. (Of course a more doctrinally committed Protestant might not have so well kept his literary cool.) In the third (1948) edition of the poems, W. H. Gardner summarized the theme. In this paean to the Blessed Virgin, Hopkins:

says that just as the atmosphere sustains the life of man and tempers the power of the sun’s radiation, so the immaculate nature of Mary is the softening, humanizing medium of God’s glory, justice and grace. Through her the ineffable Godhead becomes comprehensible — sweetly attuneable to the limited human heart.’
The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W. H. Gardner (London 1948).

Here Hopkins places himself square in the tradition of the seventeenth-century “Metaphysical” poets, who delighted to work out sustained analogies between utterly disparate aspects of experience: in this case, the air in which our biological life functions, on the one hand, and, on the other, the gracious intercession of the Virgin, crucial as that is — so Hopkins maintains — to our spiritual life. Gardner’s summary raises a major question of theological sensibility: in pursuing this analogy how well has Hopkins succeeded in avoiding the impression that the “softening, humanizing’ effect of the Mother of Jesus in her distinctive role in the economy of salvation might actually threaten to replace, in this regard, of the humanity of her Son?

The opening is very striking. The air to which Mary will be compared is no gentle breeze. Rather is it “Wild air”, and the adjective is repeated twice more, once in identical if inverted terms — “air wild”, and once when the Mother of Christ is described directly as a “wild web”. Norman MacKenzie points out how, in Hopkins’s distinctive language use, “wild” always has some reference to the way a being expresses its own nature in (more or less consummate) freedom [N. H. MacKenzie, A Reader's Guide to Gerard Manley Hopkins].

This air — which so far is simply the physical atmosphere of planet Earth — is, Hopkins continues, “world-mothering air”. No life is possible without the atmosphere that surrounds the planet. Hence all the complexly interrelated organisms which compose our world may be said to have their nurture in this element. Hopkins draws our attention to the exquisite delicacy with which the air enters our physical environment, so gently and unremarkably that I am almost always unaware of the atmosphere around me: “Nestling me everywhere”, girdling each eyelash or hair”. In the outdoors cold (in the Pennines there could still be snow in early May) the air “goes home betwixt / The fleeciest, frailest-flixed [fluff-like] / Snowflake”, nor is this anything unusual for it “is rife / In every least thing’s life”.

Hopkins has now positioned himself so as to be able to explain the “world-mothering” accolade with which he began. Manifestly, the air is “This needful, never spent, / And nursing element”. One would look odd without it: “This air, which by life’s law / My lung must draw and draw”. And now, says the poet, he is drawing it so as to sing air’s praise.

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From the Preface of Discovering Aquinas: An Introduction to his Life, Work and Influence by Aidan Nichols OP

December 10, 2010

Fr. Aidan Nichols

Aidan Nichols is a superb Catholic intellectual who writes lovely prose. One of his loves is Thomas Aquinas, as it shines through the preface of his Discovering Aquinas. Previously on Paying Attention to the Sky, I featured reading selections here . Enjoy some more:

In John Gray’s novel Park, set centuries hence, John Gray shows his visitors an item of furniture of outstanding beauty:

See the best of all, as to the embellishments; and with that he displayed the painted inside of the boards, in glowing opus lense, golden without the use of gold. Scenes from the Summa, said the giver, in reverent and delicate banter. Such indeed were the subjects; for there may be lovely and exquisite emblems of what is abstract.

‘Natural forms’, writes Thomas in the De veritate (the ‘disputed questions about truth’), ‘are as it were images of immaterial realities’. Brought into play re-wrought as symbols, they can stand for deep or complex concepts.

A theological thinker for whom that is a congenial reflection is useful to those of us who need the help of the poet’s sensibility if we are to be awoken from the prose of our metaphysical slumbers. Certainly, there is a difference of intellectual temper between those who approach the topic of theology with a robust assurance of the power of philosophical argument and those others, more affected by images than by ideas, who look to history and experience for the presentation of religious theory. (Immanuel Kant would call the contrast one of Verstand with Vernunft, but centuries earlier Thomas had spoken of intellectus and ratio.)

It is easy for the supporters of either to make a caricature of the other. And yet they are, or can be, complementary. It is in the spirit of Thomas – who approved of distinctions but disliked the ‘either/or’ – to follow up both approaches. Though at one point criticizing Plato for ‘proposing everything in figures and by the art of symbols’, a selection of images is vital to Thomas – who was both a conceptual thinker and a poet – in the setting forth of sacred truth.

I like to think of this as Thomistic interpretation ‘in the English manner’. I have suggested elsewhere that the particular contribution of the English Dominicans of a pre-Conciliar generation to the Thomist patrimony lay in the furnishing of a powerfully incarnational idiom for its articulation. In this they belonged to a wider common tradition. Religious metaphysics, whether Catholic or Anglican, in modern England – in Hopkins and Chesterton, Lewis and Sayers, Farrer and Mascall – delights to put ideas and images together in words, not to keep them apart. There is, I hope, a touch of this in what follows.

It is far from irrelevant to the historical St Thomas: the one who actually lived. His prose may not seem especially imagistic. It is far more so than some Thomistic manuals would suggest. In the course of giving a brief answer to a couple of objections to some thesis, Thomas is perfectly capable of switching from the most austere metaphysical analysis to some extravagant metaphor taken from a Greek Father or a Carolingian monk. But more to the point is the whole texture of his thought. In his commentary On The Divine Names, a treatise of fundamental theology by the sixth-century Syrian monk who used the pseudonym of ‘Denys the Areopagite’, Thomas remarks:

We do not know God by seeing his essence, but we know him from the order of the whole universe. For the very ‘university’ of creatures is proposed to us by God so that through it we may know God insofar as the ordered universe has certain imperfect images and assimilations of divine [things], which are compared to them as exemplary principles to images.

This Christian-Platonist comment yields up a presupposition of Thomas’s entire vision and warrants that kind of imaginative commentary on the severer conceptual reaches of his thought in which such English commentators on the angelic doctor as Thomas Gilby both delighted and excelled.

A later generation of English Dominican writers were more restrained. Influenced by the predominantly logical and languageanalysis concerns of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy, Gilby’s younger collaborators in the Cambridge bilingual Summa theologiae like Herbert McCabe, who died in 2001, or friars, like Brian Davies, of a later generation still, discussed (and discuss) Thomas in a way well suited to the Anglophone philosophical climate of our time. In this modest introduction to the life and work of Aquinas, the present author, though conscious of debts to his brethren of the English Province (in particular, those of the preConciliar period), owes more to the French-language reception of Thomas in the twentieth century: notably, to the metaphysically and dogmatically meaty studies of Thomas’s thought produced by the Dominicans in France. Some acquaintance with the flourishing garden of American Thomistic scholarship is also exhibited in these pages.

At certain points, where it seemed illuminating, or, from the standpoint of the good of the Catholic intellectual tradition, pastorally pressing, I have also tried to bring Thomas’s thought into critical correlation with theological predecessors and successors – some of a very different ilk, in our own day. The ‘line’ taken is that Thomas constitutes the classic theological moment of Latin Christendom. This is not only because he had a pre-eminent gift of synthesising the materials of Scripture and patristic Tradition, revelation’s witnesses. It is also because he honed a metaphysic that was up to the job of being that revelation’s philosophical instrument – in the traditional language, its serviceable ‘handmaid’. It is hardly surprising, then, that any major derogation from Thomas’s achievement (to be carefully distinguished from enrichment of it by the provision of complementary insights) will tend to create difficulties for the articulation of Catholic faith.

I began this Preface with a citation from John Gray that considers how Thomas’s work might be reflected in the visual arts. Christian iconographers have from time to time fashioned ‘lovely and exquisite emblems’ for the picturing of Thomas himself, in an effort to make manifest what his oeuvre signifies for the Catholic interpretation of the Gospel.

Shortly after the middle of the fourteenth century, Tommaso da Modena painted the chapter room of the priory of St Nicholas at Treviso with a number of frescoes of Dominican saints and scholars. Thomas is shown standing before a desk at a lecturer’s chair. In his right hand he holds the book of Scripture while his left hand rests on a tiny church onto, and into, which rays of light are streaming from a sun gleaming on his breast. Here is Aquinas diffusing light for the Church – the Church on which, however, he in turn depends. The burning sun emblemizes (John Gray’s word) Thomas’s teaching that theology, unlike other sciences, being as it is a knowledge of the divine mysteries seen from the viewpoint of divine Wisdom herself – ‘a certain impression of the divine knowledge’ - requires an ascetic and spiritual effort of purification, at once affective and intellectual. Hence the need in the theologian’s life for charity, the supreme evangelical virtue, and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, those ways in which human powers become more finely attuned to divine leading.

In his reading of the Gospel of St John, Thomas himself has this to say:

Just as a lamp is not able to illuminate unless a fire is enkindled, so also a spiritual lamp does not illuminate unless he first burn and be inflamed with the fire of charity. Hence ardour precedes illumination, for a knowledge of truth is bestowed by the ardour of charity.

In retrospect, we can read that as a self-portrait. It is because of the wonderfully integrated character of his wisdom – integrated not only as supernatural with natural but also as thinking with love – that the Church in our day should not leave him as a fresco on a wall, but find inspiration from his teaching and example. Some words of his commentary on Second Corinthians may whet the appetite:

Between ordinary science-knowledge and faith-knowledge there is this difference: The first shines only on the mind, showing that God is the cause of everything, that he is one and wise and so forth, whereas the second enlightens the mind and warms the heart, telling us that God is also savior, redeemer, lover, made flesh for us. Hence the savour of this knowledge, and the fragrance spread far and wide. ‘Behold the scent of my son is as of a field which the Lord hath blessed.’

Aidan Nichols OP
BLACKFRIARS, CAMBRIDGE
All Saints of the Order of Preachers, 2001

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The Task of Theology — Fr. Aidan Nichols

April 13, 2010

Altar piece, Resurrection 1553 by French enameller Léonard LIMOSIN

Another topic Fr. Nichols takes up extensively in his survey of the fundamentals of theology is to define the task of theology.

The Consequences Of Dealing With A Revelation
A first account of the theological task that one might meet has it that theology is the misguided attempt to turn into a science something that is strictly mysterious: the dogmas, or as we say more precisely, the mysteries of the Christian religion. Since these mysteries by definition transcend the scope of the human mind, what is the point of trying to work them out intellectually? As Lord Dacre of Glanton has put it, theology is “sophisticated ninnery.”[ Cited in H. A. Williams, Some Day I’ll Find You: An Auto-Biography (London: 1982,1984) 90.] If we have accepted a revealed religion we must take the consequences. The consequences are that we cannot theorize about a revelation. We can only reform our own attitudes and feelings on the basis of it. In other words, one can have a spirituality but not a theology. One can claim that grace has changed one’s heart, but it does not make sense to claim that grace has changed one’s mind.

Faith Moves Toward A State Of Total Clarity And Intellectual Union With Truth Himself
This tendency to dismiss the rational claims of theology is not, of course, restricted to retired regius professors of modern history. A conviction of the superfluity of theology often accompanies periods of spiritual revival as well as of agnostic debilitation: classically, in the devotio moderna of the Netherlandish Middle Ages. More recently, Raissa Maritain, despite her admiration for the Catholic poet-prophet Charles Péguy, wrote blisteringly of his deliberate espousal of a “discord between the soul’s infused faith on the one hand and on the other the actions and the very thoughts of a man who has received this gift of God . . . scorning, in the name of faith, the theological wisdom which he glories in not knowing.”[R. Maritain, Les Grandes Amities (Paris: 1948) 272]

However, if faith contains, as Thomas Aquinas insists, an inbuilt tendency toward the vision of God, being the inchoate form of that vision, this first definition [an attempt to turn the mysteries of faith into a science] will not do. Though, to begin with, while faith is less perspicuous, less clear, than are other kinds of knowledge, it is in fact moving toward a state of total clarity, intellectual union with Truth himself. [See Sumnia theologiae IIa IIae, qq. 1-7; Compendium theologiae 1, 2. For Thomas’ account of faith and its intellectuality, see St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, vol. 31: Faith, ed. T. C. O’Brien (London: 1974) passim ] If this is so, then faith must permit continuous growth in the understanding of what it believes, and the spiritual (or not so spiritual) anti-theologism of the first definition may be set aside.

En passant, we can note that in claiming for theology a continuity with the vision of God on the grounds that it is an intellectual habit rooted in the act of faith, we are accepting that it is a science — in the special, and now archaic, sense of the word indicated by Thomas.[ Ia q.1, a. 2, corpus ] For Thomas, theology is a science insofar as it draws its own first principles from an utterly certain and transparent or self-evident kind of knowing, namely God’s own knowing of himself. Theology cannot be reduced to spirituality because it is a way of knowing and understanding and not just a way of feeling. While Christian affectivity [(psychology) The state of being susceptible to emotional stimuli.] is itself a valuable theological theme, this does not mean that the only sensible theology would be a description of Christian affectivity.[ For a splendid example of such spiritual theology, fully conscious of its task and limitations, see C. A. Bernard, Theologie affective (Paris: 1984) and notably 10]

We Need “A Theological Good Sense”
The element of truth in the attempted transposition of theology into spirituality derives from the fact that the fire of spirituality should be burning in all theology. Faith, together with its necessary attendants, hope and charity, is the foundation of all spirituality, all lived relationships with God, while at the same time, by entering into union with studiousness, faith is also the foundation of the theologian’s work. One cannot approach theology as though one were a humanist. The theological student needs the basic natural desiderata of all students of anything, which we have summed up as argumentativeness, retentiveness, and imagination. But such qualities, taken by themselves, are insufficient equipment for a theological mind. The mind must be in some way in love with God or it will lose a certain fundamental sympathy, or tact, for Christian truth. There is indeed such a thing as theological sensibility, a kind of theological good sense which is not simply rational but which depends on our remaining within a spiritual culture.[The value of a spiritual culture vis-à-vis theological activity is evoked in J. Leclerq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture (2nd ed,, English trans., New York 1974). Needless to say, monastic culture provides a paradigm for a Christian culture here, rather than being its exclusive content]

Theology Is Something Wider Than Assistance To The Magisterium.
This appeal to the authority of God as providing theology, via revelation and faith, with its distinctive epistemological basis may suggest a second definition of the theological task. On this second version, the task of theology is said to be the transcribing in a more intelligible, or rationally acceptable, form whatever the divinely guided voice of Church authority may determine. Certainly, theologians have a duty to defend the defined teaching of Holy Church and to cooperate with the pope and bishops in clarifying or refining such teaching as may have an inadequately articulated form. But such duties, on this view, circumscribe the task of theology itself: they constitute the very borders of its home ground. Here the idea is that the starting point of all theology is the pronouncements of pope and bishops in both their extraordinary and ordinary magisterium, theology’s job being to prove authorized ecclesiastical pronouncements by a regressive method which seeks arguments in the sources, Scripture and Tradition, as well as in reason, for their truth. The support given by Pope Pius XII to this picture of theology in his encyclical Humani generis of 1956 was rightly criticized by Fr. (now Cardinal) Joseph Ratzinger in his essay on the Second Vatican Council’s dogmatic constitution on revelation, Dei verbum [In Commentary on the Documents of Vatican ii, ed. H. Vorgrirnler, ifi (English trans., New York: 1969) 197]. Theology is something wider than the direct assistance the theologian can afford the magisterium.

The Magisterium Does Not Prescribe In Advance The Theologian’s Work
The bishops, and especially the pope, are the guardians of the fides quae, doctrine, the objective content of the Christian creed. But the fides quae itself is the heritage of every believer who, on the basis of theological wonder, explores the riches of this shared faith by putting ever-new questions to it and about it. There is no reason to think that episcopate and papacy have ever thought of all these questions, much less of the answers to them. The role of Church authority is to say when a given theology has detached itself from the fides quae. It is not to prescribe in advance what the theologian’s work shall be. Let us also note here that the fides quae does not come to us simply from learning what the ecumenical councils or the popes when teaching ex cathedra have defined, nor by listening to what the bishops and pope are teaching today. It also comes to us, and in more ample fashion, from Scripture, and from Tradition — of which the past teachings of Church authority are only one element, one set of “monuments.” From this point of view, we might even say that theology does not so much echo the present-day teaching of bishops and pope as make it possible — by providing the Church’s pastors with an informed and circumstantial grasp of what the sources of revelation contain.

A Nugget Of Truth — The Task Of Theology Is To Support The Teachings Of The Magisterium
And yet there is a nugget of truth in the assertion that the task of theology is the transcription of the teachings of the magisterium. Because of theology’s dependence on the Church’s life of faith, it cannot ignore what the pastors of the Church are saying at any given time. By the sacrament of orders, the bishops, and preeminently the Roman bishop, are set over the Church by the Church’s Lord. Through their distinctive activities of preaching the gospel to the unconverted, catechizing the faithful, explaining the mysteries celebrated in the Church’s liturgy, and caring for the lives of Christians from the cradle to the grave, the bishops, and those other ministers – notably, priests — whom they co-opt to assist them, are in a good position to see the Christian faith as a lived totality. They can help the theologian to see the fides quae in its complete outline rather than to concentrate on some one aspect of it that may happen to be of particular interest in a given culture. Conversely, the pope and bishops may also, through their reading of what the Second Vatican Council called the “signs of the times,” specifically encourage theologians on behalf of the whole Church to devote their attention to some aspect of theological research deemed likely to be especially helpful at some given.time.[ For the mutual aid which should mark the relations of episcopate and theologians, see the International Theological Commission’s “Theses on the interrelationship between the ecclesiastical magisterium and theology,” which can be consulted with a commentary, in F. A. Sullivan Magistenum• Teaching Authority in the Catholic Church (Dublin:1983) 174-218. For the concept of the “signs of the times,” see M.-D. Chenu, “Les signes du temps,” Nouvelfe revue théologique 90 (1965) 29 – 39] Finally, in those unresolved disputed questions, which from time to time mar the unity of the Church’s life of faith, the theologian may, by and large, have confidence in the rightness of that side of a case to which pope and bishops lean — since the charism of truth bestowed on the apostolic ministry will naturally have its effect on the expression of that ministry, both in the local Church and in the Church universal. [Sullivan, Magisterium 172]

Facts Are Important But Not All-Important
The appeal to the fides quae as a common inheritance, embedded in the rich historical data of Scripture and Tradition, might suggest, however, a third definition of the task of theologian. For some, theology consists in the acquisition of a very large number of facts about the Bible and the Church. Fundamentally, on this view, theology is an exercise in the memorizing of data. Theologians are “professional rememberers.” The trouble with this picture of theology is that just heaping up facts and references does not in itself give one a coherent account of the Christian faith. Christian curiosity about the revelation received and the urge to connect its various facets, something that mirrors the ultimate unity of God and the mind of man, cannot rest satisfied with this purely factual or, in the technical word, “positive” view of theology. The emergence of historical theology in the sixteenth century as a mode of theological practice created the possibility of mistaking for the theological task the registering of what others have thought of God. It may be that Anglican theology has been peculiarly subject to this temptation, as such different voices in the Church of England as Dr. E. L. Mascall and Prof. S. W. Sykes have suggested.[ E. L. Mascall, Theology and the Gospel of Christ: An Essay in Reorientation (2nd ed., London: 1984) xvi. The difficulties such “positivism” can create for an entire ecclesial tradition are characterized in S. W. Sykes, The integrity of Anglicanism (London: 1978) 79ff.] In Catholicism, similar strictures have been leveled against Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638), who roundly declared that theology was an affair of the memory and not of the reasoning faculty, and against his French disciple Antoine Arnauld (1617-94).[ This must surely have had its effect in their reading of Augustine’s achievement as Jansenism ]

Nevertheless, we can agree that without positive theology, without a knowledge of facts about the Bible and Church tradition, the content of systematic theology would be extremely thin gruel. In the opening question of his Summa theologiae, Thomas gives the impression at one point that the only materials theology has to go on are the articles of the Creed.[ Ia q. 1, a. 2, ad i.] Were this true, theology would be mightily diminished. In point of fact, Thomas had an impressive familiarity with Scripture, the Fathers, and the early medieval divines as well as with the teachings of councils and popes, the texts of the Roman liturgy, and the principles of canon law. The quality of his factual or positive resources concerning the fides quae is one major reason for the quality of his theology as a whole.[ Well brought out in M.-D. Chenu, Toward Understanding Saint Thomas (English trans., Chicago: 1964) 150-55] The same could be said of the work of more modern writers like Matthias Josef Scheeben (1835-88) or Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-88)[An introduction to the work of M. J. Scheeben can be found in C. Fritz, “Scheeben,Matthias Joseph,” DTC14/i (1939) cols. 1270-74. A full study is E. Paul, Denkweg undDenkform der Theologie von Matthias Joseph Scheeben (Munich: 1970). A useful introduction to von Balthasar is the prefatory essay by D. MacKinnon in H. U. von Balthazar, Elucidat ions (London: 1972). A well-nigh exhaustive account is found in A. Moda, Hans Urs von Baithasar (Ban: 1976). See also A. Nichols, “Balthasar and his christology,” NewBlackfriars 66, 781-82 (1985) 317-24].14 Thus it is true that facts are important, though they are not all-important.

What Theology Is Not
Theology cannot be dissolved without remainder into spirituality, though it cannot do without spirituality either. Nor can it simply be a commentary on papal or episcopal utterance, though papal and episcopal utterances are vital to it, as it to them. Nor, again, can it just consist of positive theology, facts and figures, though these give it much of its concrete substance.

The Task Of Theology
The task of theology is the disciplined exploration of what is contained in revelation.

Theology And Revelation
The task of theology is the disciplined exploration of what is contained in revelation. Each of the main component terms of this definition, “disciplined,” “exploration,” “revelation,” must now be unpacked.

Starting first with “revelation,” it is surely plain that we would not be interested in theology without an acceptance of revelation. If we regarded Catholic Christianity as one religion among many, a belief system that happens to exist in some parts of the world just as do, say, Buddhism or Hinduism, we might be interested in studying theology from outside, as spectators, but we would not wish to study it from inside, as participators. Theology presupposes the truth of the Christian faith. It assumes from the outset. that what we are involved with in the life of the Church is a divine reality and not just a figment of the corporate imagination of a group of people. Whereas in pursuing religious studies, we are not committed to the view that a given religion is true, or even partly true, in learning to be theologians we are committed from the start to the position that at the origins of the Church, art authentic revelation of the one true God took place, and that we are put into contact with this same God revealing himself through our share in the Church’s common life. Theology is, therefore, essentially concerned with revelation.[ See R. Latourelle, “From Revelation to Theology,” in Theology: Science of Salvation (New York: 1969) 3-10. This section can be regarded as a bridge to the subject of theology from his earlier study of revelation, Theology of Revelation (New York: 1966).]

A Ministry Carried Out In The Service Of Revelation
Theology may be termed, indeed, a ministry carried out in the service of revelation. Theologians have a high calling, and they must acquit themselves with a profound sense of responsibility. They are servants of the divine Word, the Logos, just as much as are the bishops or the pope, though in a different mode. Theologians consecrate themselves to the meaning of revelation, and this suggests a more intimate relation with revelation than that possessed by the Church hierarchy, who are its guardians more than they are its interpreters. Unfortunately, the Holy Spirit has not been vouchsafed to theologians qua theologians, whereas the Spirit has been vouchsafed to the guardians of revelation, the Church hierarchy. The reason for this is simple. If the deposit of faith has not been successfully guarded, there will be nothing there to interpret. If the deposit of faith has not been successfully interpreted theologically, it will still be there for someone else to interpret in another age.

How Theology Serves Revelation
How can our theological efforts be said to serve revelation? The wonder, curiosity, and ever-deepening pursuit of truth implicit in the act of faith generates (as we saw in the last chapter) a variety of questions, which may be sorted into five portmanteau categories. These are

Fundamental
Historical
Systematic
Moral
Practical Theology.

The attempt to answer these questions has applications of great utility to all actual or potential recipients of revelation. Thus,

Fundamental Theology helps one to help other people keep the faith by removing difficulties they may have about believing. It also helps one to convert others to the faith by suggesting considerations relevant to the truth of Catholic Christianity.

Historical Theology helps one to discern the impression Jesus Christ made upon those who first met him (the New Testament), the situation he lived in (the Old Testament), and the way his image and teaching have been preserved and presented in the Church (the history of doctrine).In these ways, historical theology enables one to present the faith in a way that is concrete, circumstantial, and historically correct.

Systematic Theology helps one to show people how the faith hangs together, how it all makes a satisfying design that is an inspiration to live by.

Moral Theology is useful in showing people how they might be growing personally in relation to God and their neighbor.

Practical Theology shows them the relevance of their religion to their professional work or private passions, to their general knowledge or social situation. In putting it so, I may be giving the impression that it is nearly always someone else who wants help and never, well, hardly ever, oneself. In fact, just as preaching is directed first toward (or even against) oneself, so is theology.

The Sources Of Theology
Theology, then, is bound up with revelation, and is a form of service by some individuals on behalf of the whole Church. From this, certain other things immediately follow.

Above all, it must follow that the primary sources of theology will not be found in the world around us as with other disciplines, but in the revelation to which the Church is the witness. These primary sources, therefore, will be Scripture and Tradition. How Scripture and Tradition are related as the source of revealed understanding is a question of some moment in its own right, but the first thing to realize is that they are our primary materials. Whether they are seen as two separate but complementary sources or as two aspects of a single source is a relatively minor question compared with the basic point: Scripture and Tradition are the font of theological knowledge. This means, in turn, that in order to be theologians we must have a good knowledge of, on the one hand, the Old and New Testaments, and on the other, of the Tradition of the Church as expressed in ways other than Scripture. If one asks, What are these other ways of expressing Christian truth that bring us revelation, the only possible answer is that in effect, they are everything involved in the Church’s life. They include

The liturgy,
The Fathers of the Church,
The creeds and other doctrinal definitions,
The evidence of Christian art and archaeology,
The witness of ordinary believers.

When we talk about the Church’s Tradition we are referring to all these (and more), seen as an interconnected unity, the life of the Church.

Aids To Discernment
As we come to study these primary sources, Scripture and Tradition, we find that we have two what may be termed “aids to discernment” which will help us. In the first place, we have our own Christian experience. The gift of faith makes possible for each of us our own Christian sense of reality. Through the sensibility which faith gives, each of us can to some degree recognize what is an exaggeration in theology, what is a deviation in theology, and what, on the contrary, sounds right in theology. In the second place, we have the help, as already mentioned, of the contemporary day-to-day teaching of the pope and bishops, what is termed technically the “ordinary Magisterium.” In all these ways — Scripture, Tradition, Christian experience, and the teaching office of the bishops — theology is concerned with and dependent on revelation and the personal and corporate grace which accompanies and enables our response to the self-revealing God.

Theology And Its Sub-Disciplines
Theology is an exploration. It is not simply the reassertion of something that is obvious to all believers. The statement that, for instance, God is our Creator is a straightforward statement of a truth of faith such as might be found in a catechism or a prayer book. It is not in itself a theological statement, or perhaps a better way of putting this would be to say that the ability to make this statement does not yet prove that one is a theologian. The exploratory role of theology takes many different forms. I have outlined the five great questions that theology asks, questions that lead to its primordial forms: fundamental, historical, systematic, moral, and practical theology.

But in order to answer these questions, theology finds itself moving out into a whole host of sub disciplines. For example, in order to understand the context of the life of Jesus, central to historical theology (taking this to include the history of Christian origins) and vital also to fundamental theology, the theologian may want to learn more about the geographical sites involved in the ministry of Jesus. Thus arises biblical archaeology as an offshoot of theological exploration.

Or again, for the same basic reasons, one may wish to know more about the way the Gospels were written so as to achieve a better insight into the reactions to Jesus of the first disciples. So a new theological sub-discipline joins the club, historical-critical exegesis. In such ways a question which has started life in historical theology pure and simple, or even in fundamental theology, cannot be answered without further exploration, which generates whole new disciplines like biblical archaeology and New Testament criticism. It should be obvious that answers to questions about what exactly happened in the ministry of Jesus, in the concrete context of his time and place, are going to be quite complex and detailed. A catechism answer would hardly suffice. So theology is not just any expression of revealed truth. It is different from the expression of revelation that we find in preaching or in catechizing or in devotion. It differs from these by being an exploration of what is not at first obvious, even to someone who knows and accepts the .faith of the Church.

A Disciplined Exploration
Theology has to be disciplined exploration. Certain elements of order and structure should be present. The question as to what these elements of order and structure ought to be is the question of theological methodology, method in theology.

It seems to me that the structural or ordering element in theology is twofold. First, there is a principle of order in all theologies which derives from outside of theology. In a broad sense, this pre-theological principle of order may be said to come from philosophy, assuming that we take the word “philosophy” in a sufficiently general kind of way. Many people have what are in effect philosophical convictions or philosophical questions without realizing that these are in fact philosophical. Every culture carries with it one or more basic ways of interpreting the world, of saying what is important in life, what questions are the most urgent, what values are paramount. From this pretheological or, in a broad sense, philosophical background, we come to the exploration of revelation with a certain agenda, a certain list of priorities, a certain number of ready formed convictions about the nature of reality. Because of the intrinsic richness of revelation, no matter what questions we bring to it, it is able to throw light on them. So we interrogate the sources of revelation, Scripture and Tradition, using our aids to discernment, Christian experience and magisterium, and we come up with a theology, a disciplined or ordered exploration of what is contained in revelation.

The second structural element in theology derives not from outside revelation but from inside it. Once again, because of the intrinsic richness of revelation, no one theology can hope simply to reproduce revelation in some kind of complete and unconditional way. We can say of no one Christian theology, there, that is the Christian truth. Every theology takes as its central axis some facet of revelation and tries to relate everything to that. It selects one item within revelation and arranges all the others around it, like planets circling a sun. So, for instance, Augustine’s theology revolves around the theme of grace; Thomas’ theology revolves around the idea of the coming forth of creatures from God and their return to him; Rahner’s theology, around a version of the doctrine that people are the image of God, and so on. Here we have a second ordering or structuring or disciplining principle in theology, and this time it is itself strictly theological, that is, it derives from within revelation and not from outside it.[ See for a fuller account of this idea, A. Nichols, “Unity and Plurality in Theology: Lonergan’s Method and the Counter-claims of a Theory of Paradigms,” Angelicum 62 (1985) 30-52.]

Philosophy As A “Preamble Of Faith”
Apart from being a principle of order in theology, philosophy also has a vital part to play in laying the foundations for acceptance of revelation and so in providing the essential groundwork for theological activity. Philosophy is vital to what is called the “preamble of faith,” in other words, to the way in which we justify our acceptance of revelation in the first place. Philosophy has to help theology to get started by showing the basic compatibility of revelation with human rationality. Obviously, if revelation were basically incompatible with human rationality, then there would be no point in doing theology as classically understood, and the “spiritual anti-theologians” mentioned above would be fully justified.

In the preamble of faith, theology calls on philosophy to help deal with such issues as the existence of God, the problem of evil, the possibility of revelation, and the nature of the claim that the actual revelation we have is historically well grounded. But this role of philosophy vis-à-vis theology is obviously prior to anything else in theology, because without it theology could not get off the ground at all. Consideration of the task of philosophy in the preamble of faith then leads naturally to looking at philosophy as a principle of order in theology, since many of the ideas philosophy uses in the preamble of faith — ideas about God, for instance — are still relevant when one comes to theology proper. Another way of putting this would be to say that philosophy has two contributions to make to theology: one is to fundamental theology, to an account of the foundations of the act of faith; the other is to systematic theology, to an explication of the content of faith.

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The Habit of Theology

April 12, 2010

Fr. Aidan Nichols

A reading selection from Fr. Aidan Nichol’s magisterial “The Shape of Catholic Theology,” a book I have reread several times following my first encounter with it in a Fundamental Theology course.

The Subjective Preconditions Of Theological Study
Concern with the subjective preconditions of theological study is quite an ancient phenomenon in the Church. In the classical theology of the Latin tradition, it has been expressed by calling theology a habit, a particular kind of disposition which fits the human mind to deal successfully and happily with some aspect of reality.[ The conceptualization of the theological (and other) virtues is one of the greatest achievements of Christian thought, building on both sacred and secular sources: see O. Lottin, Psychologie et morale aux XlIe et Xllle siècles (Louvain: 1942-60), especially 111/2, 99-150. Although the phrase “theological virtues” first emerges with William of Auxerre (d. 1231), the classic account is that of Thomas in Summa theologiae Ia. IIae. 62, 3. There those virtues are described as grace-given adaptations of man to God as his supernatural end, paralleling the natural virtues rooted in his natural orientation toward human perfection. The idea that theology itself actualizes a specific virtue draws on both supernatural and natural models.] Père Yves Congar appeals to this tradition in saying that “theology is the highest of the habits of mind that a Christian man or woman can acquire.”[ Y. M.-J. Congar, “Theologia est altissimus inter habitus intellectuales acquisitos hominis Christiani.” La flu et Ia théologie (Paris: 1962) 192. ]This theological habit of mind, like all aspects of Christian existence, is at one and the same time absolutely ordinary and natural, yet entirely extraordinary and supernatural. It is natural in that it draws on the human ability to study. It is supernatnatural in that its root and Source is divinely given faith in the self-revealing God.

What Qualities Are Required Of Us In Theology?
In the first place, then, the theological habit requires studiousness, just as much as does any secular academic discipline. Broadly speaking, we may say that any academic discipline requires three things:

first, it requires the ability to follow an argument;
second, it requires the capacity to remember a certain number of facts;
third, it requires a basic flair or sense for the subject that enables us to be creative in thinking up hypothesesin its regard. For instance, to be a historian we need to understand certain arguments Pertaining to historical causality; why a given institution arose, why a particular social class disappeared, why one government collapsed and another took its place. We also need to retain a certain quantity of dates, names, and other historical references.
Finally, we need some kind of fundamental imaginative capacity that allows us to exercise a sympathy for the past and to suggest hypotheses for reconstructing it in the way historians do. Or again, to be a physicist we must be able to follow the largely mathematical type of arguments that physicists use, to retain some facts about the results of previous physical experiments, and to have some ability to propose fresh laboratory testable hypotheses and, indeed, wider perspectives or paradigms for interpreting the subject as a whole.
We can sum all this up by saying that a habit of study, including theology, asks that we be argumentative, retentive, and imaginative

But in the second place, such studiousness is rooted, in theology’s case, in the supernatural gift of faith. An atheist, or any non-Christian could study the Christian religion from a purely descriptive standpoint in what may be called an empirical way, amassing facts about Christianity: its origins, history, and present diffusion. Again, he or she might study the Christian religion in what may be termed a Phenomenological way, evoking what being a Christian appears to be like, so far as an outsider can tell. Such a person may be enormously erudite but could never become a theologian. He or she might achieve celebrity as a religious scientist or Phenomenologist and be elected to a chair in religious studies — a non-confessing discipline common in Europe and North America and descended from a nineteenth century German ancestor, religionsgechichte: the study of the history of religion. The history of religions school is the first great attempt at a “neutral” scholarly study of re1igion [See H. Schiler ~ “Religions-geschichtiche Schule,” Lexicon für Theologie und Kirche 8 (Freiburg: 1963) cols. 1184-85. Yet, if the studiousness were not rooted in Christian faith, the person would lack the indispensable spiritual milieu which an authentic theological culture needs, and any attempts to write theology would be epistemologically defective

What Is The Faith Which Is Necessary For The Theologian?
It can be thought of in two ways: either as

the body of belief which the Church, the Christian community, holds to be true, or
as my own personal act of faith, my very own act of believing adhesion to God in Christ by the Holy Spirit.[ Cf. E. Schillebeeckx, Revelation and Theology (London: 1967) 105-9]

Fides Quae And The Küng Affair
Drawing on a medieval distinction, we can speak first of the fides quae, the faith which the Church believes, the articles of faith which, as a member of the Church, I regard as true, since they form that objective content of truth that is Catholic Christianity. The importance of the fides quae to theological activity was well brought out by the quarrel between the papacy and the Swiss theologian Prof. Hans Küng.[ Fall Kung: Eine Dokumentation, ed. N. Creimather and H. Haag (Munich: 1980)] At one level, the Kung affair was about Church politics, that is, the proper form which the specifically Christian and ecclesial or churchly use of power should take. Kung believes that the power of the bishop of Rome has become excessively inflated, largely through historical accident, and that it is high time this power was cut down to size. It has been abused, he asserts, in order to narrow down what should count as the Catholic tradition and so is an obstacle to the development of that tradition, both inwards and in relation to other Churches in the ecumenical movement. The Pope and the Roman curia, on the other hand, believe that while each local Church or diocese should enjoy the freedom that the documents of the Second Vatican Council accord it, the Roman See must still maintain a strong supervisory role within the communion or totality of such Churches. In a world of constant change, the continuity and integrity of Catholic faith, worship, and action require this stabilizing center.

At another level, however, the Kung affair, like other causes célèbres of a similar nature since, concerned the limits of Catholic theology, the boundary which you cannot pass if you wish to keep the title of a Catholic theologian. By refusing to accept in an unqualified way the affirmation of the Council of Nicaea that the being of the one who be came man as Jesus is divine, and by refusing to accept in any way at all the ecumenicity of the First Vatican Council, which defined, inter alia, the primacy and infallibility (in certain circumstances) of the Roman bishop, Kung was held, not unreasonably, to have overstepped the limits which circumscribe what Catholic theology is. The Pope’s reaction, therefore, was to deprive him of his canonical mission, his formal mandate to teach theology as a Member of the believing community To be a theologian, one must share the common fides quae, the faith of the people of God. A theologian is not an ecclesiastical Ubermensch, but is equally bound, with all Christians, by the Church’s rule of faith. He (or she) is dependent on the Church, not necessarily financially or even sociologically but always epistemologically. A theologian may be so gifted a writer that he can Support himself without the Church’s monetary aid. He may interest so many people beyond the Church’s membership that his lectures and books find an adequate audience outside the household of faith. Yet there are aspects of his understanding which are only available to the individual because the Church’s tradition makes them so. Any scholar can study the texts of the New Testament considered simply as intriguing religious writings from the ancient Near East. But to grasp the meaning which the Christian religion has found in these texts, it is necessary to be in touch with the fides quae, the faith of the Church. We can borrow here a useful term from Kant’s epistemology and call this the “ecclesiological a priori” in theology ecclesial faith precedes, enters into, and organizes the concrete knowledge which theology possesses.[C. Ernst, Multiple Echo: Explorations in Theology (London: 1979) 139]

Fides Qua
Complementary to this view of faith as a body of doctrine giving true insight into God, there is also what the medievals called the fides qua, the faith by which I turn to God in Christ by the Spirit through my acceptance of what the Church believes. If the fides quae is objective faith, then the fides qua is the subjective faith, not in the sense of partial, individual opinions about faith, but the faith that pertains to me as an acting subject in my own right. As described by St. Thomas Aquinas in his theologian’s primer, the Summa theologiae, subjective faith opens the mind to God’s own truth, enabling objective faith to become the medium of direct contact with God himself.[ Summa theologiae IIa. IIae. 1-7. A valuable introduction and useful notes and appendices are found in the modern English Dominican edition, St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theo1ogiae vol. 31: Faith ed. T. C. O‘Brien (London: 1974). Again, in his Compendium theologiae 1, 2, Thomas describes faith as that which “makes our future blessedness to exist in us inchoatively”. his account of the eschatological character of faith turns on the vulgate text of Hebrews where faith is declared to be substantia speradarum rerum, “the substance of things to be hoped for.”

For an account of Thomas’ reflections on discernment propter connaturalitatem, or per modum inclination is, see T. Gilby, “The Dialectic of Love in the Summa” in St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1: Theology (London: 1963) 124-32.] The light which the fides qua brings to the mind derives from God’s radian being and enables us to share here and now in the knowledge which the saints enjoy in heaven and which, more fundamentally, God has of himself. St. Thomas refers to it as the semen gloriae, the seed of glory, or the inchoatio gloriae, the first shadowy sketch of the vision of God. Infused into our minds, it gives us a sympathy or connaturality with God’s revelation, orienting us in an obscure but real manner toward his truth. [As M. -D. Chenu has said, faith is “(tine) connaissance réaliste, c’est-a-dire qui touche Ia chose divine. Perception directe, impregnee de l’affectivite,” “L’unite de Ia foi: réalisme et formalisme,” La foi dans L’intelligence (Paris: 1964) 15-16.]

Fides Qua And Doctors Of The Church
The importance of the fides qua here can be seen if we consider the persistent unwillingness of the Christian tradition to give the title “theologian” or “teacher” (Doctor) to more than a handful of people exceptional for the quality of their personal faith.[ As M. -D. Chenu has said, faith is “(tine) connaissance réaliste, c’est-a-dire qui touche Ia chose divine. Perception directe, impregnee de l’affectivite,” “L’unite de Ia foi: réalisme et formalisme,” La foi dans L’intelligence (Paris: 1964) 15-16] In the Greek tradition, for instance, one can point to the fact that only three writers bear the title ho theologos, “the theologian”: the evangelist John, the fourth-century bishop Gregory of Nazianzus, and the eleventh-century monk Symeon of Constantinople, the so-called New Theologian.[ V. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (English trans., London: 1957) 9] Though this fact is to be explained in part by the caprices of piety and liturgical usage, nevertheless an attempt is being made to single out three individuals who shared a similar quality. By the outstanding character of their faith, they were able to enter into God’s mystery in an intimate way and so communicate that inwardness of divine revelation to others. Almost any reader of the Gospels can detect that the Gospel of John is in a class of its own when compared with the other three. And if biblical scholarship be worth anything at all, the qualitative difference between the Fourth Gospel and the others derives, at least partially, from the special qualifies of religious insight with which the Christian mind of St. John was liberally endowed.[ The special qualities of John were early acknowledged in the Church’s history: see F.-M. Braun, Jean le théologien et son Evangile danns l’EgIise ancienne (Paris: 1959); M. Wiles, The Spiritual Gospel: The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel in the Early Church (Cambridge: 1960).] Again, in the Western tradition, there is the practice of naming certain saints doctores Ecciesiae: outstanding teachers of the Church.[ V. Pugliese and others, “Dottori della Chiesa,” Encloclopedia Cattolica 4 (Rome: 1950) cols. 1902-7, The first Western list, that of Bede in his Epistola respcnsoria ad Accam episcoum., depended like Lossky’s modem Eastern triumvirate on received custom; but stimulated by Trent’s praise of Thomas, Pope Pius V began the practice of canonically nantg new Doctors in 1567. The most recent creations are the first two women Doctors, Catherine of Siena and Teresa of Avila, named by Pope Paul VI in 1970.] Particular popes, acting as the Church’s chief pastors, thus attempted to draw the attention of the community to some figures more deserving of the title “teacher” than others. Here studiousness and conformity to the fides quae are presupposed, and to the resultant qualities of erudition and orthodoxy is added the test of holiness, by which faith, the subjective response to the self-revealing God, is rooted in mind and heart. It is perhaps instructive to reflect on the implications of the difference between these liturgical and canonical titles and the professional titles of lecturers in a university theology faculty today.

Faith Lives In Theology As “Christian Wonder”
Yet, though the root of the theological habit is supernatural faith, that faith takes on a particular quality when exercised theologically because of its entering into symbiosis with the natural human quality of studiousness. The specific mode in which faith lives in the theological enterprise is Christian wonder, or curiosity.[ Schillebeeckx, Revelation and Theology, 109] The studious believer who wishes to become a theologian wants to know, Why? Why do we say that God exists? Why did this God make the world? How, if the God of Christian faith exists, does evil coexist with such a God? Why did God’s Word, or self-expression, become man and, more specifically, a Jew of the house of David? Why did he conduct his ministry as he did? In what way did he save the world? By what means is he still present and active through his Spirit in the Church? All of these questions and a hundred and one others deserve an answer. Probably everyone who takes his or her faith at all seriously has thought about one or more of them at some time. But there is a difference between the ordinary person who may discuss these things occasionally over a pint of beer at the local pub, or worry about them for a while before dropping off to sleep, and the person who makes a serious lifelong commitment to struggling with them and turns that commitment into a part of his or her very self-definition. For one cannot say, I’ve finished theology; now I’ll move on to another subject. There is a sense in which one might say something similar of Akkadian grammar or the family tree of the Hapsburg dynasty, but one cannot reasonably assert it of exploration into God’s revelation, which is, by definition infinite in its implications for human understanding. To be a theological student in the full sense of those words cannot be a temporary state or a preamble to something else, such as the ministerial priesthood or an all-round education. Rather, it is a solemn engagement to developing over a lifetime the gift of Christian wonder or curiosity, which is the specifically theological mode of faith. As theologians, then, we commit ourselves to the lifelong study and reflection which the satisfaction of such curiosity will need. Our faith is from now on, in St. Anselm’s words, fides quaerens intellectum, “a faith that quests for understanding.”[ The subtitle of Anseim’ s Proslogion; Cf. his Epistola de incarnatione Verbi 1: “The one who does not believe has no experience, and the one who has no experience, does not know.” For Thomas’ version see Scriptum super libros sententiarum III. 23, 2, 2, 1 ad ii]

Three Circles – The First Circle
Such an engagement implies another aspect of the theological habit, the willingness to be stimulated by appropriate objects: the kind of objects which have, in point of fact, stimulated the curiosity of theologians. Such objects can be thought of as arranged in three concentric circles. The first and largest of these circles can be labeled “existence” or, more colloquially, “anything you care to mention.” In principle, any existent thing could elicit theological wonder. We should not fall into the trap of thinking that only directly religious things can be cues for theological reflection. For those like myself whose work takes them to Rome, where the symbols of Catholicism lie all about them and where most of their colleagues and students and they themselves live in ecclesiastical institutions, it is tempting to narrow the theological vision to the internal life of the Church and that alone. But giving in to such a temptation would be a disaster. The work of God is as wide as the whole of creation, and the story of grace includes every human soul, whether he or she knows it or not. Two examples drawn from the history of culture may help to illustrate this.

First Circle Example 1
The first is the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Jesuit priest and writer who lived in England and Ireland from 1844 to 1899. Hopkins, looking at nature with the penetrating eye of an artist, found in it evidence of the divine creativity. Thus, Hopkins brought to life a commonplace of patristic and medieval theology, namely that nature is a book in which we read of God. In fact, a study of his visual world is entitled, significantly, All My Eyes See.[ R. K. R. Thornton, All My Eyes See: The Visual World of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Sunderland: 1975]With Hopkins’ help, we learn how to see the most ordinary things — a bird, a star in the night sky — in a new, theological light, as marked or, in Hopkins’ word, “in-stressed” by God’s creative act. We also learn how to see certain extraordinary and terrible things — such as shipwreck — as related not simply to the continuous act of creation but to the finer divine activity of re-creation through a travail of suffering and destruction. [See, e.g., C. M. Hopkins, “The Windhover,” “The Starlight Night,” “The Loss of the Eurydice,” “The Wreck of the Deutschland”. The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. Mackenzie (Oxford: 1967) 69, 66, 72-76, 51-63. A theologically informed reading of the poems is presented in J. F. Cotter, Inscape: The Christology and Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Pittsburgh: 1972).]

First Circle Example 2
A second example is the writings, more especially the thoughts, Pensees, of Blaise Pascal, the devout French scientist-philosopher who lived from 1623 to 1662. Pascal looked at the people around him in order to give us dramatic evidence of the Christian understanding of humankind. According to Christianity, people are made for God and open to God. At the same time, they are sunk in original sin, having a built-in tendency to what is evil. Humans are essentially a paradox, what Pascal calls “the glory and the refuse of the universe.” [Pascal, Pensées, ed. L. Lafunta (Paris: 1962) no. 131; cf. nos. 78, 149, 430, 470,613, 629. See A. Krailsheimer, Pascal (Oxford: 1980) 50-68.] To see this as really the truth we need the assistance of men like Pascal, of novels, plays, and films as well as our own observation of the people we meet.

In these two cases, then, nature and people rather than anything specifically religious spark off theological wonder. They invite us to set out on a theological exploration. In Hopkins’ case, we would be exploring the doctrine of creation, and of re-creation, through sharing in Christ’s death and resurrection In Pascal’s case, we would be exploring theological anthropology; the doctrine of humans, their original righteousness, fall, and need for redemption. To take a leaf out of their books, I advise my students at the Angelicum in Rome to go walking in the Alban hills, or to read some classical novels, or just to loiter in the Pincio Gardens or the Piazza di Spagna on a Sunday afternoon, places where all Romans go to play the favorite Roman sport, which is people watching. This is not necessarily time subtracted from theological study. In principle, theological wonder can be stimulated by any human experience, and any human experience is a proper starting point for theological reflection.

Three Circles – The Second Circle Of “Sacred History”
Coming now to the second, smaller concentric circle, I would label this “the sacred history.” Although anything can spark off theological wonder, the central focus of that wonder for the Christian must lie in history.[ O. Lewry, The Theology of History (Cork: 1969) 10] Christianity is a historical religion. Its central figure lived two thousand years ago. And this central figure cannot himself be understood without a grasp of the religion of his people Israel, a religion whose own history dates back at least another fifteen hundred years. Similarly, the central figure of Christianity cannot be understood without a grasp of the tradition that flowed from him, the tradition of the Church. The historical nature of the Christian religion means that we cannot reinvent the Christian faith in our own age to suit our own tastes and using our own speculation. We are always in dependence on the people of the past. Certainly, our age has its own contribution to make to an understanding of the faith. Each generation is open to God, and, in fact, this century has seen a positive torrent of theological writing, unprecedented, at least in quantity, in the history of the Church. Nevertheless, we make our contribution as part of a dialogue, arid in this dialogue the initiative belongs firmly with the past, since it is out of the past that Christ comes.

A Need For Historical Sympathy
This basic truth about Christianity, a truth often minimized or overlooked by people looking for immediate relevance, means that our original outer circle labeled “existence” or “anything” is not a sufficient guide to the field of play of theological wonder. We need a second circle, a circle for the special history that has defined the Christian faith. Much of the time, specifically Christian theological wonder takes the form of what we can call “historical sympathy,” sympathy for the people of the past. By sympathy I do not mean that we should feel sorry for them. I mean that we should deliberately try to put ourselves on their wavelength. By historical sympathy we place ourselves in the position of those in the past, insofar as that is humanly possible. We try to understand their viewpoint, their mind-set, their hopes and fears. Historical sympathy is a very special kind of charity toward our neighbor. It is a kind of love in which we reach out to the long-dead generations and make their thoughts and words live again by re-creating them in our own minds.[R. C. Collingwood, The Idea of History (London: 1946) remains valuable on this aspect of the historian’s approach]This is not an easy task, because many of these people lived in a world very different from ours, with preoccupations that are, at first, quite alien to us. It requires an enormous effort on our part to get inside the mind of the author of the Book of Lamentations, to grasp the situations and problems facing St. Paul or St. Augustine. But if we are not willing to make this effort, then there is little point in our trying to study the theology of a historical religion at all.

The Third Circle Of “The Bible”
The third arid smallest concentric circle I propose to label “the Bible.” This may sound like a strangely Protestant remark in what is intended to be an essay on getting the habit of Catholic theology. After all, in the scheme I am presenting, the smallest circle is the nearest to the center of all. But it is in point of fact a sound principle of Catholic theology that all of Christian revelation is contained in Scripture in some manner.[ Y.M.J. Congar, Tradition and Traditions (English trans., London: 1966) 376-424]The crucial phrase there is obviously the words “in some manner.” Naturally, Catholics will say that certain aspects of revelation cannot be found easily in Scripture unless one reads Scripture within Tradition, but they will also say that the idea that one could read Scripture theologically outside of the tradition of the Church that produced it is crazy anyhow. (Evidently, the Church only canonized the Old Testament, though it created the New; but quite apart from the “preexistence” of the Church in Israel it is the union of Old and New Testaments which definitively constitutes Scripture.) The ecclesiological a priori works here just as well as everywhere else in theology, for the operation of theological wonder in a Christian presupposes the faith of the Church as well as one’s own individual act of faith, It can be said that tradition is more a medium than it is an object. Though tradition has its own foci, it is more an environment or context or atmosphere in which we read Scripture than an object set side by side with Scripture. If we are looking for an actual object, a tangible monument to serve as the supreme concentration of stimuli to theological wonder, an object that expresses in a paramount way the historical religion which is Christianity, then that object can only be the Bible. Pondering on the Scriptures is the most important and fertile source of theological wonder that we have. For the average Catholic, such stimulus will come through the reading of the Scriptures in the liturgy and, if he or she is fortunate, the comments thereon of the Church’s ministers. For the contemplative monk, one thinks in addition of the longstanding custom of lectio divina, the prayerful chewing over of the Bible in one’s private room. For the young or the enthusiastic ‘groupie,” there are Bible study groups meeting in presbyteries or parishioners’ homes.[ For a general orientation in the Catholic use of the Bible, see C. Charlier, The Christian Approach to the Bible (Westminster: 1958).]

The New Jerusalem Bible
The theological student must take further the trajectory that all of these represent. Every theological student should possess a copy of the Bible in a study edition, that is, a Bible with good critical introductions and notes. In practice, in the English-speaking world, this will mean the New Jerusalem Bible which is as well adapted for such study as it is ill adapted to the needs of Christian worship.[ John 1:1-3]It is never too soon to become familiar with the layout and content of the Bible. In the recent past, few lay Catholics were capable of finding relevant passages in Scripture, but in a theological student this deficiency would be inexcusable. In the course of working with the Bible, the theologian learns to see it as a human product, like any other text from the ancient world. But if we are to study Scripture as theologians, and not simply as Semitic scholars or students of Hellenistic Greek, then we have to sustain our sense that this very human product is also a divine gift. In a saying no less true for being oft repeated, the Bible is the Word of God in the words of men.

An Example Of Theological Wonder
Theological wonder may begin anywhere in any of these three circles, but the closer it is to their common center (the self-revealing God), the closer it will be to the heart of Christian truth. However, the three circles are not, of course, mutually exclusive. Their concentricity shows their interconnection. A practical example may illustrate this. Suppose that my theological wonder is aroused during the Mass of Christmas Day by hearing the words of St. John’s prologue: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.”Stimulated by this great text (starting point), I might trace back the idea of the living and creative Word of God, here identified with Jesus Christ, through the sapiential and prophetic books of the Old Testament (Bible). From there I might try to find out how faith in God as Creator arose among the people of Israel (sacred history), thus moving from the first circle to the second. Finally, I might reflect on what philosophers of science today might think of the idea of creation, perhaps themselves stimulated by research into the origins of the cosmos (existence, or anything). Having thus crossed into the third circle, I might begin the journey back to the original starting point more richly furnished with data and reflection relevant to the prologue, and use that to study further the presentation of the figure of Jesus in the Gospel of John, and so come at last to the mystery of the incarnation of the Creator within his own cosmos, which the liturgy of Christmas presents as the full meaning of the Johannine text. Cultivating theological wonder by openness to such stimuli and developing his or her natural studiousness in order to exercise it with profit, the theologian will be led to ask a very large number of questions.

Five Basic Kinds Of Question
In order to understand the organization of contemporary theology, it is imperative to sort out these questions into various distinct types. In all, the theological habit finds itself confronted by five basic kinds of question.

First, there are questions concerned with the foundation of faith. How is faith to be justified? On what is it based? This leads the theologian into what was formerly called “apologetics” and is now more usually termed “fundamental” or “foundational” theology, a less combative but somewhat bland title.
Second, there are questions about the historical origin and development of the faith. What does the biblical text mean? How is later doctrine derived from it? This would take us into historical theology — if the exegetes will forgive us for including biblical studies under this more capacious term.
Third, there are questions about the interconnection of the contents of the faith. How does it all hang together? How is one truth related to another? Such questions entail trying to relate in a systematic way the various elements that make up the teaching or dogma of the Christian religion. So they belong to systematic or dogmatic theology.
Fourth, there are questions to do with the way faith should affect the behavior of the individual or the group. How are my ethical standards altered by becoming a Christian? How should a Christian community behave? Answering these questions would involve an exploration of the basic principles of Christianity as a life, an exploration known as “moral” or “pastoral” theology.
Finally, we can group together a number of rather heterogeneous questions that deal with the implications of the Christian faith for the rest of human knowledge. What does natural science look like in the light of faith? Or social studies? How does faith modify our approach to literature or art or psychology? There is no generally agreed portmanteau for such questions, but a suitable one might be “practical” theology. Such theology would look at the consequences that faith has for our practice of a variety of human disciplines (anything from parapsychology to poetry), the manifold ways that we have of moving intelligently about the world. And certainly we could include here such disciplines as sociology, economics, and politics, thus making a connection with an increasingly widespread use of the term “practical theology” in writers influenced by the political and liberation schools of theological thought.[A. T. Hennelly, Theologie in Conflict: The Challenge of Juan Luis Segundo (Maryknoll:1979) 9-10.]However, to reduce practical theology to the concerns of social politics or social economics would mean a grave impoverishment of its human materials.

In any case, if the theological habit is in good working order, it will not wish to deal with any one of these five types of question on its own, despite the fact that each is rich enough to occupy the energies of a lifetime.

Distinguishing Systematic And Practical Theology
If theology is to be studiousness made supernatural, enquiring faith stimulated by various kinds of objects to ask a variety of questions but in a specifically Christian way, then it must always keep in mind the meaning and truth of Christianity as a whole. And so another vital aspect of the habit of theology emerges, and this is the urge to connect. In the Christian religion there are a great number of beliefs and practices. There are special texts, special ritual actions, special institutions, special ethical qualities, all of which are said to be distinctively Christian things. Also, within any one set of these things there is a sometimes bewildering diversity. The Bible, for instance, is not just one book, but a whole library of books of different kinds from different periods. The theologian wants to know how all of these different books are connected into a single, unitary whole. He or she wants to know how the Christian religion is a unitary belief system, and how it offers a unitary way of life. The attempt to show that Christianity is a coherent system of beliefs is another definition for systematic theology, The attempt to show how the Christian religion can be lived as a coherent way of life for an individual or a community is another definition of moral and pastoral theology. And these two types of theology are surely theology’s central themes, since questions dealing with the rationale and genesis of Catholic Christianity (fundamental and historical theology) have something of the nature of a preamble, while questions dealing with the implications of theology for the practice of other human disciplines (what I have called practical theology) are by way of being a coda, though in practice — as we would say — a profoundly important one for human living.

Ideally, The Theologian Should Be A Saint
In order to preserve this sense of the unity of God’s approach to us through a medley of discrete facts and truths, the theologian must always be concerned to develop his or her own personal relationship with the Christian Absolute found in all these particulars: the God of Jesus Christ. And this brings us back in conclusion to the idea that to see the theological habit at work, we should look to its highest practitioners, the Doctors of the Church. The final aspect of that habit, which needs highlighting, is the quality of the intersubjective friendship between a theologian and the Lord. Ideally, the theologian should be a saint; at any rate, all theology should be what the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Baithasar called die betende theologie or La théologie à genoux: “theology on one’s knees.” [Hans. Urs. von Balthasar, “Theology and Sanctity,” in Word and Redemption. Essays in Theology 2 (English trans., New York: 1965) 49-86]

Although the personal relationship of the theologian with God is a reality wider than prayer, since it necessarily involves the entire Christian life, nevertheless prayer is its conscious heart. The fourth-century desert Father Evagrius of Pontus had a saying, “If you pray, you are a theologian.”[ Evagrius, On Prayer 60. See I. Hausherr, Les Leçons d’un contemplatif (Paris: 1960).] The saying has been, perhaps, a little overexposed and not a little misunderstood. The term “theologian” here carries a somewhat specialized meaning. It really means someone who contemplates God as the Trinity. But at least we can echo Evagrius and say, “If you do not pray then you are not a, theologian.” It is a necessary (though not a sufficient) condition for becoming a theologian (in the non-Evagrian sense) that one has some kind of prayerful quality to one’s life and thought. How we should understand this is a delicate business. Clearly, it is not the case that if we flop down in a church for half an hour a day we shall emerge from the pew reborn as a latter-day Duns Scotus. But continued exposure to God and a God-centered vision of reality brings a greater quality of intuitive ability when it comes to theological judgment. In other words, if two people who differ on some aspect of theology share a comparable theological culture, but one prays and the other has stopped praying, it is the one who still prays that we should be well advised to follow.[ J. Leclerq, Theology and Prayer (English trans., St. Meinrad, md.: 1963).]

Posted in Book Recommendations, Fr. Aidan Nichols | Tagged Christian Wonder, Faith and The Theologian, Fides Qua, Fides Qua And Doctors Of The Church, Preconditions Of Theological Study, Three Circles of Theological Habit | 1 Comment »

A Novelistic Life of Jesus III

January 6, 2010

A continuation from Part Two.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Novelistic Life of Jesus II

January 6, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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