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The Gospel Of Suffering – John Paul II

February 3, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sharers In The Suffering Of Christ — John Paul II

February 2, 2012

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

A reading selection from his Apostolic Letter Salvifici Doloris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

February 1, 2012

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 31, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 30, 2012

John Paul II

The Power Of Salvific Suffering
Declaring the power of salvific suffering, the Apostle Paul says: “In my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church”(Colossians 1:24).

These words seem to be found at the end of the long road that winds through the suffering which forms part of the history of man and which is illuminated by the Word of God. These words have as it were the value of a final discovery, which is accompanied by joy. For this reason Saint Paul writes: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake”(Colossians 1:24). The joy comes from the discovery of the meaning of suffering, and this discovery, even if it is most personally shared in by Paul of Tarsus who wrote these words, is at the same time valid for others. The Apostle shares his own discovery and rejoices in it because of all those whom it can help — just as it helped him — to understand the salvific meaning of suffering.

The Theme Of Suffering
Even though Paul, in the Letter to the Romans, wrote that “the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now”( Romans 8:22), even though man knows and is close to the sufferings of the animal world, nevertheless what we express by the word “suffering” seems to be particularly essential to the nature of man. It is as deep as man himself, precisely because it manifests in its own way that depth which is proper to man, and in its own way surpasses it. Suffering seems to belong to man’s transcendence: it is one of those points in which man is in a certain sense “destined” to go beyond himself, and he is called to this in a mysterious way.

When Suffering Enters Your Life
It can be said that man in a special fashion becomes the way for the Church when suffering enters his life. This happens, as we know, at different moments in life, it takes place in different ways, it assumes different dimensions; nevertheless, in whatever form, suffering seems to be, and is, almost inseparable from man’s earthly existence.

Assuming then that throughout his earthly life man walks in one manner or another on the long path of suffering, it is precisely on this path that the Church at all times – and perhaps especially during the Holy Year of the Redemption – should meet man. Born of the mystery of Redemption in the Cross of Christ, the Church has to try to meet man in a special way on the path of his suffering. In this meeting man “becomes the way for the Church”, and this way is one of the most important ones.

A Meditation On Suffering
Human suffering evokes compassion; it also evokes respect, and in its own way it intimidates. For in suffering is contained the greatness of a specific mystery. This special respect for every form of human suffering must be set at the beginning of what will be expressed here later by the deepest need of the heart, and also by the deep imperative of faith. About the theme of suffering these two reasons seem to draw particularly close to each other and to become one: the need of the heart commands us to overcome fear, and the imperative of faith — formulated, for example, in the words of Saint Paul quoted at the beginning — provides the content, in the name of which and by virtue of which we dare to touch what appears in every man so intangible: for man, in his suffering, remains an intangible mystery.

The World Of Human Suffering
Even though in its subjective dimension, as a personal fact contained within man’s concrete and unrepeatable interior, suffering seems almost inexpressible and not transferable, perhaps at the same time nothing else requires as much as does suffering, in its “objective reality”, to be dealt with, meditated upon, and conceived as an explicit problem; and that therefore basic questions be asked about it and the answers sought. It is evident that it is not a question here merely of giving a description of suffering. There are other criteria which go beyond the sphere of description, and which we must introduce when we wish to penetrate the world of human suffering.

Medicine, as the science and also the art of healing, discovers in the vast field of human sufferings the best known area, the one identified with greater precision and relatively more counterbalanced by the methods of “reaction” (that is, the methods of therapy). Nonetheless, this is only one area. The field of human suffering is much wider, more varied, and multi-dimensional. Man suffers in different ways, ways not always considered by medicine, not even in its most advanced specializations. Suffering is something which is still wider than sickness, more complex and at the same time still more deeply rooted in humanity itself.

A certain idea of this problem comes to us from the distinction between physical suffering and moral suffering. This distinction is based upon the double dimension of the human being and indicates the bodily and spiritual element as the immediate or direct subject of suffering. Insofar as the words “suffering” and “pain”, can, up to a certain degree, be used as synonyms, physical suffering is present when “the body is hurting” in some way, whereas moral suffering is “pain of the soul”. In fact, it is a question of pain of a spiritual nature, and not only of the “psychological” dimension of pain which accompanies both moral and physical suffering The vastness and the many forms of moral suffering are certainly no less in number than the forms of physical suffering. But at the same time, moral suffering seems as it were less identified and less reachable by therapy.

Sacred Scripture is a great book about suffering. Let us quote from the books of the Old Testament a few examples of situations which bear the signs of suffering, and above all moral suffering: the danger of death, the death of one’s own children and, especially, the death of the firstborn and only son; and then too: the lack of offspring, nostalgia for the homeland, persecution and hostility of the environment, mockery and scorn of the one who suffers, loneliness and abandonment; and again: the remorse of conscience, the difficulty of understanding why the wicked prosper and the just suffer, the unfaithfulness and ingratitude of friends and neighbors; and finally: the misfortunes of one’s own nation.

In treating the human person as a psychological and physical “whole”, the Old Testament often links “moral” sufferings with the pain of specific parts of the body: the bones, kidneys, liver, viscera, heart. In fact one cannot deny that moral sufferings have a “physical” or somatic element, and that they are often reflected in the state of the entire organism.

As we see from the examples quoted, we find in Sacred Scripture an extensive list of variously painful situations for man. This varied list certainly does not exhaust all that has been said and constantly repeated on the theme of suffering by the book of the history of man (this is rather an “unwritten book”), and even more by the book of the history of humanity, read through the history of every human individual.

It can be said that man suffers whenever he experiences any kind of evil. In the vocabulary of the Old Testament, suffering and evil are identified with each other. In fact, that vocabulary did not have a specific word to indicate “suffering”. Thus it defined as ” evil” everything that was suffering. Only the Greek language, and together with it the New Testament (and the Greek translations of the Old Testament), use the verb * = “I am affected by …. I experience a feeling, I suffer”; and, thanks to this verb, suffering is no longer directly identifiable with (objective) evil, but expresses a situation in which man experiences evil and in doing so becomes the subject of suffering. Suffering has indeed both a subjective and a passive character (from “patior“). Even when man brings suffering on himself, when he is its cause, this suffering remains something passive in its metaphysical essence.

This does not however mean that suffering in the psychological sense is not marked by a specific “activity”. This is in fact that multiple and subjectively differentiated “activity” of pain, sadness, disappointment, discouragement or even despair, according to the intensity of the suffering subject and his or her specific sensitivity. In the midst of what constitutes the psychological form of suffering there is always an experience of evil, which causes the individual to suffer.

Thus the reality of suffering prompts the question about the essence of evil: what is evil?

This questions seems, in a certain sense, inseparable from the theme of suffering. The Christian response to it is different, for example, from the one given by certain cultural and religious traditions which hold that existence is an evil from which one needs to be liberated. Christianity proclaims the essential good of existence and the good of that which exists, acknowledges the goodness of the Creator and proclaims the good of creatures. Man suffers on account of evil, which is a certain lack, limitation or distortion of good. We could say that man suffers because of a good in which he does not share, from which in a certain sense he is cut off, or of which he has deprived himself. He particularly suffers when he “ought” — in the normal order of things — to have a share in this good and does not have it.

Thus, in the Christian view, the reality of suffering is explained through evil, which always, in some way, refers to a good.

In itself human suffering constitutes as it were a specific “world” which exists together with man, which appears in him and passes, and sometimes does not pass, but which consolidates itself and becomes deeply rooted in him. This world of suffering, divided into many, very many subjects, exists as it were “in dispersion”. Every individual, through personal suffering, constitutes not only a small part of that a world”, but at the same time” that world” is present in him as a finite and unrepeatable entity.

Parallel with this, however, is the interhuman and social dimension. The world of suffering possesses as it were its own solidarity. People who suffer become similar to one another through the analogy of their situation, the trial of their destiny, or through their need for understanding and care, and perhaps above all through the persistent question of the meaning of suffering. Thus, although the world of suffering exists “in dispersion”, at the same time it contains within itself a. singular challenge to communion and solidarity. We shall also try to follow this appeal in the present reflection.

Considering the world of suffering in its personal and at the same time collective meaning, one cannot fail to notice the fact that this world, at some periods of time and in some eras of human existence, as it were becomes particularly concentrated. This happens, for example, in cases of natural disasters, epidemica, catastrophes, upheavals and various social scourges: one thinks, for example, of a bad harvest and connected with it – or with various other causes – the scourge of famine.

One thinks, finally, of war. I speak of this in a particular way. I speak of the last two World Wars, the second of which brought with it a much greater harvest of death and a much heavier burden of human sufferings. The second half of our century, in its turn, brings with it — as though in proportion to the mistakes and transgressions of our contemporary civilization — such a horrible threat of nuclear war that we cannot think of this period except in terms of an incomparable accumulation of sufferings, even to the possible self-destruction of humanity.

In this way, that world of suffering which in brief has its subject in each human being, seems in our age to be transformed — perhaps more than at any other moment — into a special “world”: the world which as never before has been transformed by progress through man’s work and, at the same time, is as never before in danger because of man’s mistakes and offences.

 

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On Suffering, Faith, Sanctity III – Léon Bloy

November 30, 2011

Léon Bloy

A series of quotes from the Maritain’s tribute to Léon Bloy, Pilgrim of the Absolute. See this post for an intro to Bloy.

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[THE SIN OF OMISSION.] I have often thought that the most dangerous injury to the soul is the sin of omission. The sin of action, however vast it may be, can be forgiven because Jesus has paid. But He has not paid for the sin of omission, which concerns the Holy Spirit. Here is a tormenting thought, especially at the end of your life, when you accurately remember certain circumstances in which you could so easily have accomplished certain acts God asked for, and which you neglected or formally refused to carry out.

That is my case. In this way, I am exactly on a level with the rich who could, without giving themselves the least trouble, have helped me to fulfill my mission, and who did not want to. All I can do is to weep bitterly, as did Saint Peter, who could have avoided denying his Master, and who obtained forgiveness only when the Holy Ghost fell upon him like a thunderbolt.

I AM GOING TO COMMUNION. The priest has uttered the fearful words which a fleshly piety calls consoling: DOMINE NON SUM DIGNUS . . . Jesus is about to come, and I have only a moment in which to prepare myself to receive Him … In a moment He will be under my roof.

I do not recall having swept clean this dwelling wherein He will enter as a king or as a thief, for I do not know what to think of this visit. Indeed, have I ever swept it clean, my dwelling place of unchasteness and carnage?

I give it a glance, a poor glance of terror, and I see it full of dust and full of filth. Everywhere there seems to be an odor of dirt and decay.

I dare not look into the dark corners. In the last shadowy places, I behold awful spots, old or new, which remind me that I have slaughtered innocents, and in what numbers, with what cruelty!

My walls are alive with vermin and trickling with cold droplets that recall to me the tears of so many unfortunates who implored me in vain, yesterday, the day before yesterday, ten, twenty, forty years ago …

And look! There, before that ghastly door, who is that squatting monster whom I had not noticed until now, and who resembles the creature I have sometimes glimpsed in my mirror? He seems to be asleep on that trap door of bronze, sealed by me and padlocked with such care, in order that I might not hear the clamors of the dead and their pitiful Miserere.

Ah! truly it takes God not to fear entering such a house! And here He is! How shall I greet Him, and what shall I say or do?

Absolutely nothing.

Even before He may have crossed my threshold, I shall have ceased thinking about Him, I shall no longer be there, I shall have disappeared, I know not how, I shall be infinitely far away, among the images of creatures.

He will be alone and will Himself clean the house, helped by His Mother whose slave I claim to be, and who is, in fact, my humble serving-maid.

When They will have gone, both of Them, to visit other dens, I shall return and I shall bring with me a new mass of filth.

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

My well-beloved sovereign, I do not know what it is to honor You in this or that of Your Mysteries, as has been taught by certain of Your friends. I want to know nothing except that You are the sorrowful Mother, that all Your earthly life was nothing but sorrow, infinite sorrow, and that I am one of the children of Your sorrow. I have placed myself at Your service like a slave, I have entrusted to You my temporal and spiritual life in order to obtain through You my sanctification and that of other men. Only in this way, under this title alone, can I speak with You. I lack faith, hope and love. I do not know how to pray and I am unacquainted with penance. I can do nothing and I am nothing but a son of sorrow. You know that long ago, more than thirty years past, in obedience to an impulse that surely came from You, I called down upon myself all possible suffering. Because of this I reason with myself that my suffering, which has been great and continual, can be offered to You. Draw from this treasure to pay my debts and those of all the beings I love. And then, God willing, vouchsafe me to be Your witness io death’s torments. I ask this of You by Your most tender name of Mary.

WE ARE CREATED THAT WE MAY BE SAINTS. If anything is written, this surely is. Sanctity is so required of us, it is so inherent in human nature, that God presumes its existence, so to speak, in each of us, by means of the sacraments of His Church, that is, by means of mystical signs invisibly making operative in souls the beginning of Glory. Sacramentum nihil aliud nisi rem sacram, abditam atque occultam significat. (A Sacrament is nothing other than a sacred, withdrawn and mysterious thing.) This sacred and mysterious thing thus alluded to by the Council of Trent has the effect of uniting souls to God. The most transcendent theology contains nothing stronger than this affirmation.

There are even three sacraments that imprint a character, and whose mark cannot be effaced. Thus we are virtually saints, pillars of eternal Glory. A Christian may disown his baptism, debar the Holy Spirit from his thought, and, if he is a spoiled priest, reject the succession of the Apostles conferred upon him by holy orders; in short, he may damn himself forever; nothing will be able to disunite him, to separate him from God, and what an unfathomable mystery of terror is this persistence of the sacred Sign even into the infinite pangs of perdition. Hence it must be said that hell is peopled with fearsome saints become the companions of the hideous angels!

However evil such saints or angels may be, they have God in them. Otherwise they would not be able to subsist, even in the state of nothingness, since nothingness, also inconceivable without God, is the eternal reservoir of Creation.

All that God has made is sacred after a fashion which only He could explain. Water is holy, stones are holy, plants and animals are holy, fire is the devouring likeness of His Holy Spirit. His entire work is holy. Man alone, who is more holy than other creatures, will have none of sanctity.

He considers it ridiculous and even insulting to his dignity. Such is, in the twentieth century of the Redemption, the visible and perceptible result of the unfaithfulness of so many shepherds, of the monstrous blindness brought about by those who should have been the light of the world, and who extinguished all light.

It is certain indeed that never, at no age of the world’s history, were men as far from God, as contemptuous of the Sanctity which He demands, and yet never has the necessity for being saints been so manifest. In these apocalyptic days it truly seems as though only a film of nothingness separates us from the eternal gulfs.***

“Not all men are called to saintliness,” says a Satanic cant phrase. To what then are you called, O wretch? and above all in our day and age? The Master said you must be perfect. He said it in an imperative, absolute way, giving to be understood that there is no alternative, and those whose duty it is to teach His word, by themselves presenting an example of perfection, ceaselessly assert that it is not necessary, that a reasonably trifling average of love is more than enough for salvation, and that the desire for the supernatural way of life is rash, when it is not culpable presumption.

Aliquam partem, “a certain portion,” they argue, debasing an expression in the Liturgy, a tiny little corner in Paradise, that is what we need. To this base retreat, to this formal denial of the divine Promise, they give a color of humility, cunningly omitting the heroic sequel to the two liturgical words, in which is specified that the “portion” in case is nothing less than “the company of the Apostles and the Martyrs.”

But cowardly minds and mediocre hearts can avail nothing against the Word of God, and the Estote perfecti (Be ye perfect) of the Sermon on the Mount continues to weigh upon us infinitely more than all the globes in the firmament.

Sanctity has always been required of us. In older days, it was possible to believe that sanctity was demanded from afar, like a debt due on a vague date, which might possibly lapse. Today sanctity is laid on our doorstep by a wild-eyed, blood-smeared messenger. Behind him, a few steps behind him, are panic, fire, pillage, torture, despair, the most frightful death ..

And we have not even a moment in which to choose!

[THERE IS BUT ONE SADNESS . ..] Today Clotilde is forty-eight, and looks as though she were at least a hundred. But she is more beautiful than before, and resembles a pillar of prayer, the last pillar of a temple wrecked by cataclysms.

Her hair has become entirely white. Her eyes, burned by the tears that have furrowed her face, are almost extinguished. Yet she has lost none of her strength.

Hardly ever is she to be seen sitting still. Ever journeying from one church to another, or from cemetery to cemetery, she stops moving only to get on her knees, and you might say that she knew no other posture.

Her head covered only with the hood of a great black coat which reaches to the ground, her invisible feet naked in sandals, upheld for ten years by an energy far more than human, there is no cold or foul weather capable of frightening her. Her dwelling place is that of the rain which falls.

She asks for no alms. She limits herself to taking with a very tender smile whatever is offered to her, and giving it in secret to the destitute.

Whenever she encounters a child, she kneels down before it, as did the great Berulle, and, with its pure little hand, traces upon her forehead the sign of the cross.

Comfortable and well-clad Christians, who are inconvenienced by the Supernatural and who “have said to Wisdom: Thou art my sister,” judge her to have a disordered mind, but ordinary people are respectful to her, and a few churchdoor beggarwomen believe her to be a saint.

Silent as the celestial spaces, she seems, when she speaks, to return from a beatific world situate in an unknown universe. This can be felt in her distant voice, which age has deepened without impairing its tender charm, and this can be felt even better in her words.

“Everything that happens is divine,” is her usual comment, with the ecstatic air of a creature a thousand times overwhelmed, who would find no other utterance for every movement of her heart and mind, were the occasion a universal plague, or were the moment that of her being devoured by wild beasts.

Although they know she is a vagrant, the police, themselves astounded by her power, have never sought to molest her.

After Leopold’s death — his body was never found amid the nameless and appalling ruins — Clotilde had sought to conform herself to that one of the Precepts in the Gospels the rigorous observation of which is considered more unbearable than even the torture of fire. She had sold all that she possessed, had given the proceeds to the poorest of the poor and overnight had become a beggar.

What the first years of this new life must have been like, God only knows! Wonders have been told about her which resemble those wrought by the Saints, but what seems altogether likely is that the grace was granted her of never needing rest.

“You must be very unhappy, my poor woman,” some priest once told her, after he had seen her bathed in tears before the Blessed Sacrament exposed — a man who happened to be a real priest.

“I am perfectly happy,” she answered. “You do not enter Paradise tomorrow, or the day after, or in ten years, you enter it today, when you are poor and crucified.”

“Hodie mecum eris in paradiso (Today thou shalt be with me in Paradise),” murmured the priest, who moved off overwhelmed with love.

By virtue of suffering, this pulsating and vigorous Christian found out that there is, above all for women, only one way of being in contact with God and that that way, that wholly unique way, is Poverty. Not that easy, beguiling poverty of complicity, which gives alms to the world’s hypocrisy, but that difficult, revolting, scandalous poverty, which must be succored without the least hope of glory and which has nothing to give in return.

She even understood — and this is not very far from the sublime — that Woman really exists only on condition of being without bread, without abode, without friends, without husband and without children, and that only thus can she force her Saviour to descend.

After the death of her husband, this beggarwoman of good will became even more the wife of that extraordinary man who gave his life for Justice. Perfectly tender and perfectly implacable.

Linked to every form of wretchedness, she was able fully to see the murderous horror of what calls itself public charity, and her constant prayer is a torch shaken against the mighty…

Lazare Druide was the sole relic of her past who still occasionally saw her. Here was the only tie she had not broken. The painter of Andronic was too upright to have been able to win the favors of fortune, whose age-old custom is to spin her wheel in filth. This made it possible for Clotilde to visit him without exposing to the mud of a worldly luxury her ragged vesture of a wanderer and “pilgrim of the Holy Sepulchre.”

At rare intervals, she came to inject into the soul of that profound artist a little of her peace, of her mysterious grandeur, then she went back to her vast solitude, in the midst of the streets swarming with people.

“There is but one sadness,” she told him, the last time she saw him, “and that is for us NOT TO BE SAINTS ..:’

[IN PARADISE.] The basis of Paradise or of the idea of Paradise is union with God starting in the present life, which is to say the infinite Distress of man’s heart, and union with God in the future Life, which is to say Beatitude. ***

Union with God is certainly achieved by the Saints, starting in the present life, and is perfectly consummated at once after their birth into the other Life, but that is not enough for them and it is not enough for God. The most intimate union is not enough, there must be identification, which itself will never be enough, and thus Beatitude cannot be conceived or imagined except as an ascension ever more lively, more impetuous, more thundrous, not toward God, but in God, in the very Essence of the Unbounded. A whirlwind of the knowledge of God without end or surcease, which the Church, speaking to men, is forced to name Eternal Rest!

The raging multitude of the Saints is like unto a vast army of cyclones, hurling itself upon God with a blast able to uproot the nebulae, and this for all eternity …***

It will be a firmament of differentiated, inconceivable splendors. The Saints will rise to God like lightning, supposing that lightning doubled itself in strength, second by second, forever and ever, their charity ever growing along with their brilliance — ineffable Stars who will be followed at an enormous distance by all those who will have known only the Face of Jesus Christ and who will have been unaware of His Heart. As for the others, the poor Christians called practicing, the observers of the easy Letter, yet not perverse, and capable of a certain generosity, they will follow in their turn, not being lost, at a distance of billions of lightning flashes, having previously paid for their places at an unutterable price, but joyful all the same — infinitely more so than could express the rarest lexicon of happiness  – and joyous precisely at the incomparable glory of their elders, joyful in depth and in width, joyful as the Lord when He finished creating the world!

And all, as I have said, will climb together like a tempest without lull, the beatific tempest of the endless end of ends, an assumption of cataracts of love, and such will be the Garden of Delights, the indefinable Paradise named in the Scriptures.

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On Suffering, Faith, Sanctity II – Léon Bloy

November 29, 2011

Portrait of the Young Léon Bloy

A series of quotes from the Maritain’s tribute to Léon Bloy, Pilgrim of the Absolute. See the previous post for an intro to Bloy.

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[OBEDIENCE.] There is but one action, and that is Obedience, which is the characteristic mark of superior men, of true men; that sublime and holy and salutary and virginal and miraculous and primitive Obedience which is quite simply the theological term for the lost earthly Paradise … So go out and find a poor priest, the one I mentioned to you or any other, but a Priest, O my child, that is to say a man, good or bad, but invested with the sacerdotal character, and thence having the very power of God to give peace to your soul, which is an empire the greatest of which you do not know. “Father, have mercy upon me, wash me, purify me, loosen me!” And then, the heavenly sweetness, the eyes streaming with tears, the racing heart, the burning heart, the joy of which one seemingly would die.. . Ah! If you but knew, if you but could get a glimpse of this just once! There is Activity! Do you know that the mass, the Sacrifice of the mass, is the sole act of obedience, the essential Act.

[WE ARE ON THE RACK ONLY IN ORDER TO AVOW GLORY.] Christ said in the Gospel: “I am the Truth,” and the truth, my dear Henri, is that we all must suffer, since He who calls Himself the Truth, He who thus states His Family Name, is precisely the Chief of the suffering and of the tortured. We must suffer even as He suffers, for others and in others, men or beasts, telling ourselves that God’s words are not in vain, and that it is wholly certain that the humblest among the oppressed will in the end be avenged and in the end consoled, when will come the hour of the infallible retributions. We are on the rack only in order to avow Glory.

Do you know that to be a real Christian, that is to say a Saint, one must have a tender heart within a shell of bronze? Saint Luke tells that in the midst of the most unutterable suffering, Christ had pity on the brutes who were crucifying Him and that He entreated His Father to forgive them. “They know not what they do,” He cried unto Him. Now remember that a filthy butcher or pig-sticker who, not satisfied with slaughtering his poor animals, unworthily and ridiculously mutilates them after their death, carries on — after a fashion — in the most unfathomable darknesses, the immolation of the Saviour, and that they are enfolded in His Prayer. All the more do they need it as they are more abject, more unfeeling, more snug in an appalling ignorance of what they do.

Christ is at the center of all things, He takes all things upon Himself, He bears all things, He suffers all things. It is impossible to strike a human being without striking Him, to humiliate someone without humiliating Him, curse or kill anyone without cursing Him or killing Him, Himself. The lowest of contemptible fellows is forced to borrow the Face of Christ in order to receive a blow, from no matter what hand. Otherwise the buffet could never reach him and would remain hanging in interstellar space, through the ages of ages, until it should have met with the Face which forgives…

The altogether noble sorrow and indignation which make your stomach turn at the sight of the disgusting degradations whereof you tell me would serve you as a counterpoise were you habitually mindful of deep realities to think about the vast scope of that Forgiveness.

People who kill or cause suffering, people who degrade or who dishonor in any way whatsoever the divine work and who, consequently, cannot know what they do, are themselves in such horrible wretchedness that it was needful for the dying Jesus to insert them into the testament of His Passion, in order that they might obtain mercy.

So raise up your soul by contemplating the things that are not obvious. Be a man of prayer, and you will be a man of peace, a man living in peace. Tell yourself, I beg of you, that everything is but appearance, that everything is but a symbol, even the most heart-rending sorrow.

We are sleepers who cry in their sleep. We cannot ever know whether this or that which grieves us is not the secret principle of our later joy. At present we see, said Saint Paul, per speculum in aenigmate, literally: “into a puzzle by means of a mirror,” and we cannot see otherwise before the coming of Him who is all aflame and who is to teach us all things. Until then all we have is obedience, the loving obedience which restores for us, on earth, the paradise lost through disobedience.***

I knew well what fatherhood would accomplish in you. Before becoming a father myself, I ill understood the Our Father. Our Father Who art in heaven … When my little daughter speaks to me, it seems to me that my kingdom comes … You will feel that.

All that happens is divine: this I maintain with all the authority of my utter poverty, which is perfect as God is perfect, and which is therefore itself divine. Complain all we will, you and I, we cannot escape from this law, and we shall never succeed in giving life to a plausible grievance against Providence. If we lack money, it is because money would be baneful to us, and we shall certainly be rolling in it whenever that metal will have ceased to be, for us, an occasion of peril.

To believe this, fully to see this, such is the sole means offered us not to fall below the level of brutes. If your foot hurts you, my poor Henry, it is because moving about would be harmful to you at the moment, and if I myself am stuck, with my wife and child, for some time more in this devilish blind alley, [In the Petit-Montrouge suburb of Paris] it is doubtless because pure air and the perfume of flowers would be less advantageous for us than the odor of cesspools and the nasty smell of carrion which we breathe here.***

Do we not know, at the very moment when we suffer some painful blow, that it is Jesus, covered with wounds, who is tumbling upon the muddy carpet of our souls, begging us, at the least, not to bristle too much against Him, and that thus we are filled to overflowing with the most unimaginable happiness?

You know how Job speaks of the world: Terram tenebrosam (this darksome earth), etc. What about it? Remember that this is the dwelling place of fallen man, the tabernacle of the disobedient, this is what we refer to as our spinning ball of earth, and we have been amply warned, by these sure Words, that it would be either idiotic or ill-willed to suppose that what the Church calls a “vale of tears” is, on the contrary, a luminous and comfortable place. Blessed are the poor, blessed are the meek, blessed are those who weep and those who hunger for justice, blessed also are the merciful, the pure of heart and the peacemakers. Blessed, finally, are those who suffer persecution. Ah! Yes indeed. Don’t you see that all these Elect, among whom we belong, more or less, even though we be most unworthy, are in an admirable position to decipher Job’s text and that it is always a beginning of Paradise to glimpse, even if barely at all, a lineament of the Word of God.

[THE TEARS WE HAVE SHED.] Dear friend, you have written me a beautiful and painful letter. I would that God might give me words of comfort for you. In my helplessness and sorrow which are indeed great I wish first to try to answer your question: “What have you been doing with yourself?” It would be easier for me to tell you what I have not been doing. Here it is more than thirty years that I have sought the one and only happiness, Sanctity. The result makes me ashamed and fearful. “I have this much left, that I have wept,” said de Musset. I have no other treasure. But I have wept so much that I am rich after this fashion. When you die, that is what you take with you: the tears you have shed and the tears you have caused to be shed, your capital of bliss or of terror. It is on these tears that we shall be judged, for the Spirit of God is always “borne upon the waters.” A sculptor of great talent is at present finishing my bust. “Do not forget the furrow,” I said to him, “this gutter here under each of my two eyes.”

That is what I wish for you, my dear Rouault. I should like you to be bathed in tears at the feet of Jesus. Quare tristis es, anima mea … why art thou sorrowful, my soul, and why troublest thou me? Spera in Deo. As I read this sublime beginning of the mass, how often have I not shed those tears that are worth more than canticles and that place the heart in the meadows of Paradise.

You are among those whom God seeks. Quaerens me, sedisti lassus… As you sought me, you sat down, outworn with weariness. Let yourself be found, go forth to meet that shepherd … Then He will make you weep so sorely that almost you will be no longer able to suffer.

[SORROW IS NOT OUR LAST END.] Your whole article “De Profundis” bears witness to and heralds a religious, ardent and profound soul. When you wrote me in answer to my friendly counsel, you declared yourself without appetite for happiness — which is obviously absurd. It is in the power of no man not to seek Paradise, were it even in despair. But in that case it is the earthly Paradise.

Sorrow is not our last end; it is Blessedness which is our last end. Sorrow leads us by the hand to the threshold of eternal Life. There it takes leave of us, that threshold being forbidden to it. You yourself see it this way, when you write: “The solid understructure of every great moral edifice is despair,” an utterance that would be a contradiction in terms if you had in mind philosophic despair alone, which consists in expecting Nothing from men and All from God, “the great starry despair,” to use your magnificent phrase. “From this do hope and religion take their flight toward heaven.” So here we are wholly in agreement. A new edition of my Le Desespere could bear this epigraph drawn from Carlyle: “Despair carried far enough completes the circle and becomes once more a kind of burning and fruitful hope.”

As for the other despair, the theological, the despair that expects nothing from God, we shall leave it to the bourgeois who seek the joy of their bellies.

“I am too beautiful to be loved!” says Sorrow.

[I HAVE ASKED TO SUFFER.] I find in your dear letter a phrase that worries me. You tell me that you want to sacrifice your time to prayers. I fear you may be under an illusion. What God asks of each of us is the sacrifice of our will, nothing more, and that includes everything.

If circumstances demanded that for a while you give to lesser pursuits the time you could give to prayer, you must look upon this as an order from God and believe that that sacrifice is more agreeable to Him than your prayer, that it is itself an infinitely better prayer.

As for my sufferings, my beloved Jeanne, accept them generously as having been willed by God and, I beg of you, do not pay too much attention to my complaints. If I must be unhappy, very unhappy, for a long time still — which I do not believe is the case — all the better for you. The reason would be that it is needful for the payment of your debt. When we receive a divine grace, we should be confident that someone paid for it on our behalf. Such is the law. God is infinitely good, but He is at the same time infinitely just and, as such, He shows Himself an infinitely rigorous creditor. About fifteen years ago, when you were still a little girl, I spent months asking God, in prayers that were like the tempest, that He should make me suffer all a man can suffer, so that my friends, my brethren, and souls unknown to me who lived in darkness might be helped, and I assure you, my love, that my prayers have been granted in a terrible fashion. Well, I am just about convinced that it is thus that I have won you, and that it is through the infernal sorrows of fifteen years that I have paid for the extraordinary joys which will come to you.

[SUFFERING IN OTHERS.] Do you know, my love, that what is hardest for the soul is to suffer, I do not say for others, but IN others. That was the most terrible of the Saviour’s

agonies. Underneath the appalling visible Passion of Christ, beyond that procession of tortures and ignominies, to form a vague idea of which in itself gives us so much trouble, there was His Compassion, which we shall need eternity to understand — a heart-rending compassion, absolutely beyond words, which quenched the sun and made the stars waver in their courses, which made Him sweat blood before His last agony, which made Him cry out His thirst and beg His Father for mercy during His agony.

[THE COMPASSION OF JESUS.] Reflect that Christ suffered in His heart with all the knowledge of a God, and that in His heart were all human hearts with all their sorrows, from the time of Adam until the consummation of the ages.

Ah, yes! Suffering for others, that can be a great joy when one has a generous soul, but suffering in others, that is what really deserves to be called suffering!

When he in whose church you go to pray every Sunday, when the wonderful Saint Vincent de Paul, having no other means of redeeming a poor galley convict, paid with his own person by taking on his irons in his place, this Christian hero must have felt a great joy, but at the same time a most great sorrow, a sorrow that infinitely surpassed that joy, when he said that his sacrifice could serve for only one miserable wretch and that around him a multitude of captives continued to suffer.

[REFLECT, MY GENTLE REDEEMER.] “My divine Saviour Jesus, who for two thousand years are crucified by me, for me, in me, and who Yourself are waiting to be set free while bleeding upon us, from the height of that terrible Cross which is the image and the infinitely mysterious likeness of Your devouring Spirit — I implore you to look upon my appalling wretchedness and utterly to have pity upon me. Reflect, my gentle Redeemer, that I, I too, have had pity on You, that Your sufferings have very often torn my heart, and that I have wept day and night tears without number while remembering Your agony. Have You not seen me whole years through at Your holy feet, shot through with love and compassion and turning away with horror from the joys of life in order to sob with Your Mother and the throng of Your dear martyrs who did not blush at accepting me for their companion? Nor can you have forgotten that out of respect for Your divine Wounds I have seldom neglected to suffer for the unhappy, and that I have drawn a few of them from the bottom of all abysses to bring them with brotherly love into Your presence.

“Nonetheless, You have demanded much of me, You have overwhelmed me with a very heavy burden, and You have willed that I should endure sorrows so great that You alone, my God, can know them. When I wanted, in these latter days, no longer to hope in You, to part from You forever, You sent me, in Your mercy, this sweet creature who loves You, who has been seeking You for so long a while and whom You have at last pushed into my arms. My divine Master, Yourself put to death, You cannot be the executioner of the poor souls for whom You are in agony. I implore You, by the sacred name of Joseph, by the pierced heart of Your Mother, and by the glorified bones of all Your saints, have pity upon my well-beloved Jeanne and upon me. Fill us to overflowing with Your grace and unite us into Your service forever.”

… WE must pray. Everything else is fruitless and stupid. We must pray to endure the horror of this world, we must pray to be pure, we must pray to obtain the strength to wait.

There is neither despair nor bitter sadness for the man who prays much. It is I who tell you that. If you but knew how much I have the right and with what authority I speak to you!

You know the commonplace troubles of life, but you do not know true Sorrow. You have not received the true blow that pierces the heart. Perhaps you never will receive it, for very few do, though many claim that they have.

There is an infinite number of men who have never grown up and think they suffer immeasurably while actually suffering very little. There is an infinite number who imagine that they have the Faith, yet whose faith would not raise a grain of dust. As for Hope and Love, what words have been more prostituted?

Faith, Hope and Charity, and Sorrow which is their substratum, are diamonds, and diamonds are rare, as you have learned. They are very expensive, never forget.

Diamonds of such sort cost Prayer, which is, itself, a priceless jewel only wrested by conquest.

[WHEN WE PRAY.] Christians know or ought to know that prayer is the surest of all forces, but its effects are unknown. When we pray we place in God’s hand a naked, magnificent and dread sword wherewith He doeth as He listeth, and we know nothing more. Prayer for a little child is surely the most mysterious of all with respect to its effects. We are then ourselves like children at the edge of the sea, or like beggars who look upon the Milky Way. In the heights and in the depths lie treasures or terrors beyond conception.

I feel strong, my dear Benoit, that is to say, able to act upon God (praevalens Deo), only when I feel my utter wretchedness and when this makes me weep. I refer, of course, to the wretchedness of my soul and mind, which in far more real than one might think. Believe me, all I may ever have written that was good, beautiful if you prefer, all that was profitable to a few souls, was given me because I wept over myself at the same time as I wept over many another, over the whole creation mutilated by the fall, and those blessed tears, they too, were a wonderfully free gift, so that I am, in truth, a very poor man, the poorest of the poor, God knows.

[ALONE IN THE PRESENCE OF GOD.] To Jean de la Laurencie: Dear friend, my wife, who saw you today, tells me that you ascribe to me the power of comforting you. You have already written me similar things and it always astounds me. Does no one of your own age exist, so that you think you need me! What need have I not myself to lean upon someone! How many times have I tried it! How many times have I thought I had found columns of granite which were nothing but ashes, or even worse! And I am truly fearful that I myself am nothing more.

What little I have, God gave me without my playing any part in it, and what use have I made of it? The worst evil is not committing crimes but failing to do the good one could do. It is the sin of omission, which is nothing other than non-love, and of which no man accuses himself. Anyone who might watch me every day, at the earliest mass, would often see me weeping. These tears, which might be holy, are rather tears of great bitterness. I do not, at such moments, think of my sins, some few of which are enormous. I think of what I could have done and did not do, and I tell you it is black indeed .. .

Do not tell me that it is the same with everybody. God had given me the feeling, the need, the instinct — I do not know how to put it — of the Absolute, just as He has given quills to the porcupine and a trunk to the elephant. An extremely rare gift, of which I was aware even in childhood, a faculty more dangerous and tormenting even than genius, since it implies a constant and ravenous appetite for that which does not exist on earth, and since through it is infinite isolation acquired. I could become a saint, a worker of wonders. I have become a man of letters.

If only people knew that these sentences or pages they choose to admire are merely the residue of a supernatural gift of which I have made a hateful mess and for which I shall be required to make a fearful accounting!

I have not done what God wanted of me, that’s sure. I have dreamt, on the contrary, of what I wanted from God, and here I am, at sixty-eight, with nothing in my hands but paper! Ah! I know well that you will not believe me, that you will assume this to be some quirk of humility. Alas! When one is alone, in the presence of God, at the entrance of a most darksome avenue, one sees into oneself and is in no position to overrate oneself!

True kindliness, unadulterated good will, the simplicity of little children, all that calls for a kiss from the Mouth of Jesus — you know very well that you have none of this and that you really have nothing to give to poor suffering hearts which beg for succor. Here is my position with regard to you, dear friend. Certainly I can pray for you, I can suffer with you and for you, by trying to bear a little of your burden; yes, but the drop of water drawn from a chalice of the earthly Paradise it is impossible for me to give you. I have felt today I had the duty to tell you this so you might not count too much on a weak and sorrowful creature…

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On Suffering, Faith, Sanctity I – Léon Bloy

November 28, 2011

The Fiery Léon Bloy

“Bloy is quoted in the epigraph at the beginning of Graham Greene’s novel The End of the Affair, and in the essay “The Mirror of Enigmas”, by the Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, who acknowledged his debt to him by naming him in the Foreword to his short story collection “Artifices” as one of seven authors who were in “the heterogeneous list of the writers I am continually re-reading”. In his novel The Harp and the Shadow, Alejo Carpentier excoriates Bloy as a raving, Columbus-defending lunatic during Vatican deliberations over the explorer’s canonization. Bloy is also quoted at the beginning of John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, and there are several quotations from his Letters to my Fiancée in Charles Williams’s anthology The New Christian Year.

Bloy was born in Notre-Dame-de-Sanilhac, in the arondissement of Périgueux, Dordogne. He was the second of six sons of Voltairean freethinker and stern disciplinarian Jean Baptiste Bloy and his wife Anne-Marie Carreau, pious Spanish-Catholic daughter of a Napoleonic soldier. After an agnostic and unhappy youth[2] in which he cultivated an intense hatred for the Roman Catholic Church and its teaching, his father found him a job in Paris, where he went in 1864. In December 1868, he met the aging Catholic author Barbey d’Aurevilly, who lived opposite him in rue Rousselet and became his mentor. Shortly afterwards, he underwent a dramatic religious conversion.

Bloy’s works reflect a deepening devotion to the Catholic Church and most generally a tremendous craving for the Absolute. His devotion to religion resulted in a complete dependence on charity; he acquired his nickname (“The Ungrateful Beggar”) as a result of the many letters requesting financial aid from friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers, all the while carrying on with his literary work, in which his eight-volume Diary takes an important place.

Bloy was a friend of the author Joris-Karl Huysmans, the painter Georges Rouault, and the philosopher Jacques Maritain, and was instrumental in reconciling these intellectuals with Roman Catholicism. However, he acquired a reputation for bigotry because of his frequent outbursts of temper; and his first novel, Le Désespéré, a fierce attack on rationalism and those he believed to be in league with it, made him fall out with the literary community of his time and even many of his old friends. Soon, Bloy could count such prestigious authors as Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Ernest Renan, Alphonse Daudet, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Paul Bourget and Anatole France as his enemies.”
From the Wikipedia article on Léon Bloy

The following quotes are taken from Jacques and Raissa Maritain’s tribute to Bloy Pilgrim of the Absolute.

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[SUFFERING.] Freedom, that prodigious, incomprehensible, indescribable gift by means of which we are given the power to vanquish the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, to kill the incarnate Word, to stab seven times the Immaculate Conception, to excite at a single word all created spirits in the heavens and in hell, to hold God’s Will, Justice, Mercy and Pity in abeyance on His Lips and to prevent them from flowing down upon His creation; this inexpressible freedom is nothing but this: the respect God has for us.

Let us try to picture it a little to ourselves: God’s respect! And so great is this respect that never, since the law of grace, has God spoken to men with absolute authority. On the contrary, He has ever spoken with the timidity, the gentleness, I would even say the obsequiousness, of a poor petitioner whom no affront could rebuff. By a highly mysterious and inconceivable decree of His eternal will, God seems to have condemned Himself until the end of time never to exercise over man any immediate right of master to servant, of king to subject. If He desires to have us, He must seduce us, for if His Majesty does not please us, we can throw it from our presence, buffet it, scourge it and crucify it to the applause of the vilest rabble. God will not defend Himself with His power, but only with His patience and His Beauty.***

Between man involuntarily clothed in his freedom, and God voluntarily stripped of His power, it is normal that there be an antagonism; attack and resistance reasonably balance each other, and this perpetual combat between human nature and God is the gushing fountain of inexhaustible Suffering.

Suffering! Here then is the key word! Here the solution for every human life on earth! the springboard for every superiority, the sieve for every merit, the infallible criterion for every moral beauty! People absolutely refuse to understand that suffering is needful. Those who say that suffering is useful understand nothing about the matter. Usefulness always supposes something adjectival and contingent, and Suffering is necessary. It is the backbone, the very essence of moral life. Love is recognized by this sign, and when this sign is lacking, love is but a prostitution of strength or of beauty. I say that someone loves me when that someone consents to suffer through or for me.***

Well, we are — what, Lord God? — yes, we are the MEMBERS of Jesus Christ! His very members! Our unutterable wretchedness comes from our continually taking for figures or inanimate symbols the clearest and most living assertions of the Scriptures. We believe, but not substantially. Ah! the words of the Holy Ghost should enter and flow through our souls as did molten lead in the mouth of a parricide or a blasphemer. We do not understand that we are the members of the Man of Sorrows, of the Man who is supreme Joy, Love, Truth, Beauty, Light and Life solely because

He is the Lover eternally stricken with the supreme Suffering, the Pilgrim of the last torment, who, to endure it, rushed up through infinity, from the far deep of eternity, and on whose head have been heaped in an appallingly tragic unity of time, place and person, all the elements of torture, collected from every human act performed during each second, over the whole surface of the earth, for the length of sixty centuries! ***

We can use this as a starting point to measure all things. In declaring us members of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit clothed us with the dignity of Redeemers, and, when we refuse to suffer, we are straitly guilty of simony [vocab: Simony is the act of paying for sacraments and consequently for holy offices or for positions in the hierarchy of a church, named after Simon Magus (Also, Simon the Sorcerer), who appears in the Acts of the Apostles 8:9-24. Simon Magus offers the disciples of Jesus, Peter and John, payment so that anyone on whom he would place his hands would receive the power of the Holy Spirit. This is the origin of the term simony; but, it also extends to other forms of trafficking for money in "spiritual things.”] and betrayal of trust.

We have been made for that, and for that alone. When we shed our blood it flows on Calvary, and from thence over the whole earth. Woe to us, therefore, if this blood be poisoned! When we shed our tears, which are “the blood of our souls,” they fall on the heart of the Virgin, and from there onto all living hearts. Our standing as members of Jesus Christ and sons of Mary has made us so great that we can drown the world in our tears. Woe, then, and three times woe upon us, if these tears are poisoned!

Everything in us is identical with Jesus Christ, to whose likeness we have been naturally and supernaturally shaped. So when we refuse suffering, we adulterate as much as we are able our own substance; we cause to enter into the very Flesh and even the Soul of our Head, a profanating [vocab: to profanate = to profane] element which He must afterwards cast from Himself and all His members by an inconceivable redoubling of torment.

Is all this clear? I have no idea. The gist of my thought is that in this tumbling world, all joys burst forth in the natural order, and all suffering bursts forth in the divine order.* * *

The Saints have sought the society of Jesus’s Passion. They believed the saying of the Master when He said that he possesses the greatest love who gives his life for his friends. [John 15, 13] In all ages, ardent and magnificent souls have thought that in order to do enough, it was absolutely necessary to do too much, and that thus did one ravish the Kingdom of the Heavens…

[PARADISE LOST.] Look about you on the distant mountains, on all the balconies of the horizon; look at those panic-stricken heads, those millions of faces taking on expressions of horror and grief as soon as the Fall and the lost Paradise are mentioned. Here is the universal testimony of men’s consciences: the deepest, the most invincible testimony.

There is but one sorrow and that is to have lost the Garden of Delights, and there is but one hope and one desire, to recover it. [There is but one regret…there is but one sorrow…Bloy seems to like this pattern. It’s a powerful one. dj]The poet seeks it in his own way, and the filthiest profligate seeks it in his. It is the only goal. Napoleon at Tilsit and a foul drunkard picked up in the gutter have precisely the same thirst. They must have the water from the Four Rivers of Paradise. All know instinctively that it cannot be bought too dearly. The ditch digger and the tinker spend their fortnight’s salary on it, and Napoleon, four million men.

Empti estis pretio magno (You have been bought at a great price). That is the key to everything, in the Absolute. When you know this, when you see it and realize it, you are like a God and ceaselessly do you weep. Your wish to see me less unhappy, kindly Raissa, is a thing that was in you, in your substantial being, in your soul which prolongs God, long before the birth of Nachor, who was Abraham’s grandfather. Strictly speaking, your desire is the desire for the Redemption accompanied by the presentiment or the intuition of what it cost Him who could pay. It is Christianity, and there is no other way of being a Christian. Kneel then at the edge of this fountain and pray for me thus:

“My God who has bought me at a great price, I most humbly beg You to make me at one in faith, hope and love with this poor man who is suffering in Your service, and who is perhaps suffering mysteriously for me. Set him free and set me free for the Eternal life which You have promised to all those who would hunger for You.”

Here, my most dear and blessed Raissa, is what a man truly sorrowful is able to write you today, but a man filled with the most sublime hope for himself and for all those he bears in his heart.”

[FAITH.] To Jacques Maritain:
You are seeking, you say. O professor of philosophy, O Cartesian, you believe, with Malebranche, that truth is something one seeks! You believe that the human mind is capable of something! You believe — in other words — that with a certain degree of effort a person with black eyes could manage to acquire green eyes spangled with gold! You eventually understand that one finds what he desires only on that day when he has most humbly renounced seeking what lay under his hand, unbeknown to him. For my part, I declare that I never sought or found anything, unless one wishes to describe as a discovery the fact of tripping blindly over a threshold and being thrown flat on one’s stomach into the House of Light. [Guess that takes care of Jacques’ pretentions…dj]

[THE FRIEND OF GOD] … At bottom, what should you do to avoid being an idiot or a swine? Merely this: you should do something great, you should lay aside all the foolishness of a more or less long existence, you should become resigned to the fact that you will seem ridiculous to a brace of janitors and a notary if you are to enter the service of Splendor. Then will you know what it is to be the friend of God.

The Friend of God! I am on the verge of tears when I think of it. No longer do you know on what block to lay your head, no longer do you know where you are, where you should go. You would like to tear out your heart, so hotly does it burn, and you cannot look upon a creature without trembling with love. You would like to drag yourself on your knees from church to church, with rotten fish strung from your neck, as said the sublime Angela da Foligno.

[I AM A PILGRIM WHOM THE VERY SUN DISSATISFIES.] To Henriette Charasson [Henreitte was part of a stable of writers who wrote for The Monthly Magazine, founded by Jean Daujat in 1933 and published until 1939. In addition to its own articles and those of Yvonne Estienne, there were many prestigious authors who wrote for the magazine, such as Father Garrigou-Lagrange, Mgt Ghika, Father Lallement, Jacques Maritain, Henri Gheon, Charles Du Bos, Stanislas Broth, Robert of Harcourt, Gustave Thibon, Henriette Charasson, Olivier Lacombe, Merleau-Ponty, and Jacques Madaule. dj]:

You say you are “anaesthetized,” which is the ugliest way of being dead. Why could you not be mistaken? Your love of the Beautiful shows you to have a lack of certainty which cannot help make you suffer. You have too much insight to hope that works of art will be able to satisfy your heart. You know very well that beyond the masterpieces there is a burning hearth of Love from which artists must necessarily draw their inspiration, without ever becoming satisfied, and that they cannot, even with genius, give more than a very faint echo, a most pallid reflection of that thunder and that furnace.

“You do not know,” says Ruysbroeck the Admirable, “the delights God gives, and the delicious taste of the Holy Spirit.” You know what that means. You must have lodged in your past, prior to the disaster that has befallen your faith, some remembrance of the joy of love, of the dazzlement of which he speaks; and the feelings or stirrings you have experienced over beautiful human works must have seemed little, compared with that wondrous moment.

“Talent does what it wants, genius does what it can,” is Hello’s magnificent statement. The more a man has genius, the more he gives evidence of his incapacity. Here is what deep souls feel. An artist of talent shows all there is to be seen; an artist of genius imparts the desire for what cannot be seen, and so the matter stands. I am one of those whom nothing can satisfy, I am that pilgrim in La Femme Pauvre “whom the very sun dissatisfied.” How could I not have pity on you? The greatest poet, the greatest musician in the world is a beggar, a pitiable ragamuffin, a man dying of hunger and thirst, whom your alms of admiration is prodigiously, ridiculously incompetent to assuage. I have believed I saw a soul within you, and that is why I am writing you these things.

“When the first doubts pierced me,” you have written me, “I was stricken with horror because I thought that there was the breath of the Devil.” You were right, but this devil would certainly and on the spot have lost all his power had he told you his name: “I am the devil of the Hackneyed.” Everything you tell me is worn utterly threadbare. “I spent hours before my crucifix in order to find the truth … I could not accede to intellectual dishonesty, I could not practice when I no longer believed . . . I had acted as I thought I ought to.” Poor pensive lamb, who would have no further dealings either with grazing or with shepherd! “I no longer had a God, but I had the hope that someday I should cease being.” As though this frightful hope were a conceivable thing! And to this loss and hope you add “the love of the Beautiful”! But child though you are, how can you not have been aware that all this was hideously commonplace and mediocre, that the ringing of this change is to be found in every cheap novel? …

God refuses His grace to no one. If He has withdrawn it from you for a time, which I do not know that He has, it is because there lies within you some obstacle unknown to me, but which your conscience must surely point out to you. You speak of dishonesty, as if it could ever be dishonest to obey! To practice when one no longer believes! You are very wide off the mark and the meaning of the words escapes you. Here is simply a case of seasickness. One day I was on the Baltic, making my first sea voyage. As I stepped aboard, I decided I should not be seasick — an ailment as ridiculous as it is painful. An hour later I felt it coming on. My will to resist thereby grew all the firmer, and I began to walk about like a wild man, telling myself that I would not give in. Complete victory, dizziness and nausea disappeared, and my joy at having triumphed over them was a delight.

Well, my poor little one, you are doing the exact opposite; though you know better, you cowardly retreat before phantoms. Pretty and clever, either by choice or by laziness you pledge your troth to ugliness and folly. What a future is ahead of you! A sophist against yourself and a sentimentalist against God, it is all too easy for me to challenge you to scorn that which I adore.

As much as I reread your letter, I do not find a single intellectual objection in it, a single argument, even though specious. Nothing but literary cant phrases. Make a clean breast of it; confession frightens you, pure and simple obedience revolts you, and the Hail Mary or the Our Father seem less beautiful to you than a poem by Baudelaire. How you must suffer at having come down to so low a level!

This morning at mass I was reading the liturgical words of the day’s communion: “Qui manducat meam carnem … He that eateth My flesh and drinketh My blood abideth in Me, and I in him.” I thought of you, of others who are dying of hunger and thirst, and tears welled up within me. These inexpressibly holy and mysterious words became a gulf of splendors for me. I shall try to translate this into a book which I have tremblingly in mind. Trembling from what I see, trembling from what I know, trembling from what I do not know. More and more I work in this way. I go to mass, I go to communion. I say the rosary with the joy or the hope of being with the simple and the little ones, to whom belongs the “kingdom of heaven.” The vast door, then, half opens … I come back twice as strong, often heaped with delights, having God in me.

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Why Thomas Aquinas Tells Us God Must Be Completely Actualized – Fr. Robin Ryan CP

October 28, 2011

 

The Incomprehensibility of Human Suffering

Fr. Ryan’s writings on Aquinas here come with a particular point of view in mind. His book, God and the Mystery of Human Suffering, is a theological meditation across history on the topic of human suffering. As such, he distills the writings of Aquinas from his topic, giving them a renewed focus in the process. I found myself understanding some things about Aquinas that I hadn’t realized before.

The sentence in this essay, He makes this same point in another way when he argues that God’s essence is God’s existence, was sort of a mind-opener for me. And when you see these arguments impacting the conversation on suffering, it makes a greater sense. How many “Suffering Father in Heaven” asides have I read concerning Christ’s passion? It is, quite simply, bad theology. Read on to find out why…

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IN THE THIRD OF HIS “FIVE WAYS” OF REASONING TO THE AFFIRMATION OF GOD’S EXISTENCE, Aquinas adduces the experience of contingency (Summa Theologiae 1, 2 ,3). As he puts it, “Some of the things we come across can be but need not be, for we find them springing up and dying away, thus sometimes in being and sometimes not.” Aquinas is drawing on our experience of the fragility of creatures — indeed, the fragility of our own lives. If everything need not be, there was a time when there was nothing. But, Aquinas insists, if that were true there would be nothing now, because what does exist can only be brought into existence by something that already exists. He concludes that there has to be something that must be — a necessary being. Otherwise, there would be nothing in existence:

 ”One is forced therefore to suppose something which Must be, and owes this to no other thing than itself; indeed it itself is the cause that other things must be.” This necessary being, this first cause, is the reality to which we give the name “God.”

Employing the Aristotelian categories of potency and act, Aquinas teaches that God, as necessary being and first cause, must be completely actualized. There can be no unrealized potentialities in God. In his treatment of the simplicity of God, he writes, “For what is able to exist is brought into existence only by what already exists. Now we have seen that the first existent is God. In God then there can be no potentiality” (Summa Theologiae I, 3, 1). He speaks of God as “Pure Activity” (Actus Purus). He makes this same point in another way when he argues that God’s essence is God’s existence (Summa Theologiae 1, 3, 4; Summa Contra Gentiles, 1, 22).

The essence of something is that which it is — the “whatness” of something. The existence of something is that by which a thing is — that which makes the essence real and actual.” Every creature is a composite of essence and existence. No creature has to be. Existence (esse) is something that creatures have as gift. But the Creator — the first cause and the giver of all existence — is the One whose essence is his existence.

For Aquinas, “God is not something with the potentiality of not being.”" God is God’s own existence and is the reason why other beings have existence. Creatures have existence through participation in the fullness of God’s existence. As fully actualized, as the One whose essence is to be, God is perfect:

“Thus the first origin of all activity will be the most actual, and therefore the most perfect, of all things. For things are called perfect when they have achieved actuality, the perfect thing being that in which nothing required by the thing’s particular mode of perfection fails to exist” (Summa Theologiae I, 4, 1). Pure activity means that God is not subject to another being but is fully in act all of the time.

Aquinas wants us to think of God as dynamic, as full of life. When he speaks of “existence” he does not use the noun form of the word, (existentia); instead, he employs the infinitive form of the verb “to be” (esse). William Hill observes that “existence or actuality for Aquinas is not mere facticity nor givenness but the exercise of existential act.” For Aquinas the essence of God is simply to-be. O’Meara remarks, “Thus God’s reality is not an activity but activity, and God is not just living but is life (I-II, 55, 2, 3; I, 18, 3).” The way in which Aquinas speaks about God is exactly the opposite of a static deity. This leads Elizabeth Johnson to translate Aquinas’ understanding of God as “sheer liveliness.”

Aquinas argues that the transcendent perfection of God is the ground of God’s immanence. As the giver of all existence, God exists in everything, not just at the beginning of something’s coming to be but as long as it exists. Thomas employs the images of fire and the sun in speaking of God as the perduring cause of existence:

Now since it is God’s nature to exist, he it must be who prop­erly causes existence in creatures, just as it is fire itself sets other things on fire. And God is causing this effect in things not just when they begin to exist, but all the time they are maintained in existence, just as the sun is lighting up the atmosphere all the time the atmosphere remains lit. During the whole period of a thing’s existence, therefore, God must be present to it, and present in a way in keeping with the way in which the thing possesses its existence.
(Summa Theologiae 1, 8, 1)

McCabe comments on Aquinas’ teaching about the immanence of God: “If the creator is the reason for everything that is, there can be no actual being which does not have the creator at its centre and holding it in being.” The God about whom Aquinas writes is indescribably close to creation and to each creature. “Aquinas insisted that God be sovereignly free from creation, infinitely different, and yet also be intimately directive of and present to each being.”

Divine Immutability and Impassibility
Aquinas maintains that if God is pure activity then God must be unchangeable. If God changed it would mean that there were unrealized potentialities in God. This would make God less than pure activity. He asserts that God “is sheerly actual and unalloyed with potentiality” while “any changing thing is somehow potential” (Summa Theologiae I, 9, 1).

Moreover, if we were to say that God changes it would mean that God acquired something. Aquinas argues, “God, being limitless and embracing within himself the whole fullness of perfection of all existence, cannot acquire anything, nor can he move out towards something previously not attained” (Summa Theologiae 1, 9, 1). In his reflections on the incarnation, Aquinas insists that the incarnation did not involve any sort of change in God’s eternal existence. It entailed something created (the human nature of Jesus) becoming united to God. The change (the becoming) took place on the side of the created reality (Summa Theologiae III, 1, 1, ad 1).

For Aquinas, affirming the immutability of God entails denying to God the change we experience as creatures: “Immutability remains a negative concept, denying to God all forms of creaturely alteration; though it does intend to designate a positive divine attribute, this is something we can neither know nor represent in itself.

For Aquinas, divine immutability implies divine impassibility. Because to suffer means to be acted upon and changed, suffering cannot touch the divine nature. To suggest that God suffers would mean that one had detracted from the transcendent perfection of God. It would entail reducing God to the level of the creaturely.

Contemporary Thomistic scholars argue that by denying suffering to God, Aquinas was convinced that he was affirming divine transcendence. Torrell asserts, “And if we really wish to implicate God in his creation (to make him share our sufferings, for example, as many theologians try to do today), we would only be making an unnecessary idol, nothing more. That god would not be God.” O’Meara takes note of Aquinas’ analogical thinking in the latter’s attempts to depict the transcendence of God:

Indecision and illness do not best characterize human beings, and so too God is not passive or searching for an identity, not paralyzed by sorrow over the casualties of history deformed by human coldness, nor a heavenly watcher or repair-person, always judging and always disappointed. A purely becoming god is a freak in a world out of control, a suffering god is a momentarily consoling myth for the sick but not a credible cause of the universe. God is not to be limited by human psychology and earthly history.

Thus, for Aquinas, the transcendence of God entails that the suffering of the world does not impinge upon the divine nature.

 

Posted in St. Thomas Aquinas, Understanding Affliction/Suffering | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

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The Unbearable Lightness of Co-Suffering

April 23, 2011

Lorenzo Albacete

Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete, the Puerto Rican physicist/priest has written that Jean Paul Sartre, Germaine Greer and (my own volunteer here) Dostoevsky’s passionate intellectual creation, Ivan Karamazov, qualify as creative sufferers in that their personal authenticity creates a kind of solidarity among those who suffer because it opens us up to others who are suffering:

To suffer together means to walk together toward transcendence. This solidarity is the proper human response to suffering. This doesn’t mean that we “share the pain” of those who suffer. While this phrase is used quite often, I don’t think this is possible. Nothing is more intimately personal than the pain of suffering. It is, after all, a wound in our personal identity, and personal identity cannot be shared. Each person is unique and unrepeatable. What we share is the questioning, and thus we suffer with the one who suffers. We “co-suffer” with that person.
Lorenzo Albacete, God At The Ritz

Albacete tells us that suffering reflects the transcendence of the human person. Since it points to a Mystery that is the author of the drama of human life, we cannot really use suffering to deny the existence of God as many of these atheist examples have done. Instead, it is because there is a God that suffering exists as human beings experience it. The suffering of human beings is a sign of God. What this God is like, the good monsignor notes, is another question.

Albacete reminds us of C. S. Lewis’s autobiographical A Grief Observed. Lewis wrote about his suffering as a result of his wife’s death (and her suffering in the struggle against it, especially when her hopes, raised by what appeared to be miraculous interventions, were dashed by a worsening of her illness).

This suffering did not make him doubt God’s existence, but God’s goodness. If the meaning of suffering cannot be grasped, this response in the face of unbearable suffering is understandable. It is no surprise that according to some scripture scholars, the Gospel of John presents Jesus’ suffering as a trial in which God is the accused, Satan is the accuser, and we are the jury. To co-suffer is to be willing to serve on the jury in the trial of God and to risk our own faith by identifying with those who suffer in their questioning of God. Even if the one who suffers can no longer articulate or express the experience of suffering, we must put that unutterable question into words for those who suffer. We must establish that solidarity, risk our own faith and identity, make a human connection with the sufferer, and cry out to God together. Authentic suffering, then, is a dialogue, not only with God but also among humans. To co-suffer is to share the question “why,” to be a companion, and to walk together toward transcendence.
Lorenzo Albacete, God At The Ritz

In fact, if you think of it, the only adequate response when confronted with another person’s suffering is co-suffering. It is the only way to respect the suffering of another. Co-suffering affirms the wounded personal identity of the sufferer through our willingness to expose our identity to the questioning provoked by the sufferer’s pain. This willingness to share suffering is an act of love. Co-suffering is the way we love the one who suffers.

In our relationship with the one who suffers, we as co-sufferers can impose nothing on the other person. We can only help the other to ask the question “why” by asking it together — that is, by praying together. Praying together with the one who suffers is the just response to the suffering.

The cruelest response to suffering is the attempt to explain it away or to interpret it to the one who suffers: “This is why this is happening. I’m sorry that you can’t see the answer, but it’s clear to me.” When the apostles saw a man born blind, for example, they asked Jesus whether it was due to his sins or his parents’ sins. This is the modern “functional mentality” that explains everything in terms of past causes. This does not do justice to the one who suffers. We secularize the suffering by eliminating its link with transcendence. Jesus rejected this explanation: he does not suffer because of his sins or his parents’ sins; he suffers to manifest God’s glory.

I recently went through several PTSD therapy sessions concerning things that happened to me in Vietnam. I found myself confronting a secular therapist (ostensibly Catholic) who insisted on “interpreting” my suffering for me. I had hoped to find a good Catholic listener, I found a secular monster and so there was no prayer together nor anything that would lead us to that moment.  

Job’s friends sought to explain the origins of Job’s suffering by looking to his past, but Job bitterly protested and repeatedly rejected these explanations as, at the end of the book, did God. Mystery’s answer to suffering is always grace — a free grace that comes to us without conditions, without rationalizations, without explanations. Suffering can be relieved by the co-sufferer only when the co-sufferer can bring the suffering person into contact with grace and into the experience of being loved. The answer to suffering will always be an experience of grace and love.

For Job’s so-called friends, Job’s suffering was an occasion to construct their theology rather than an opportunity to express their love. They would not walk with him, co-suffer with him, pray with him for grace. Instead, they fit Job’s suffering into a theological system that explained everything away. True friends would have acknowledged the horror he was going through, stood by him in his pain and refrained from offering an answer to or a reason for his suffering. Since suffering is experienced as a destruction that renders life meaningless, simplistic explanations trivialize the suffering. It’s like saying those who suffer lose their right to full life because of something they did and now they have to pay the price. Job understood that he could not accept an explanation for his suffering; to do so would have devalued his own life and experience.

With grace, we suddenly experience the goodness of our (and others’) existence, which has infinite value for its own sake. At the end of the book of Job, God asks Job to consider his origins, to realize that he was created without any claim to existence, that he is not his own maker. His existence is sheer grace. Job discovers himself as he is asked by God to consider the mystery of his human identity. By asking questions of Job, God joins, so to speak, Job’s questioning. In a way, God co-suffers with Job.

Suffering is an expression of human personhood, human transcendence. God’s response to our suffering, a suffering with us, respects our identity as individuals. Likewise, the most intimate encounter between human beings is through shared suffering. The communion of life born through shared suffering is the strongest interpersonal communion in the world, breaking down all barriers among human beings, and bringing us together through a bond with transcendence, with “something always greater than us.”
Lorenzo Albacete, God At The Ritz

Posted in Understanding Affliction/Suffering | Tagged , | 1 Comment »

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