EXPERIENCE

The Crisis of Our Time: The Absence of God.

Theological Epistemology:

Both Eastern and Western Christendom have shared a common epistemology that was engendered in the Christian experience of the Person of Jesus Christ, written down in the Gospels and developed by the Fathers of the Church. In a word, there was an experience of God and a pervasive consciousness of His presence. It is not so now. The opposite seems to be the case.

Robert Moynihan, editor of the monthly magazine “Inside the Vatican,” suggested that Cardinal Josef Ratzinger had been elected pope by a world-wide selection of Cardinals because they agreed with him that “the greatest `crisis’ facing the Church and the world is `the absence of God’ – a culture and way of life without any transcendent dimension, without any orientation toward eternity, toward the sacred, toward the divine. And that the `solution’ to this `crisis’ is quite simple to express in a phrase: the world needs `the presence of God.’”[1]

Ratzinger suggested that this crisis is not to be overcome by returning to “an unfruitful and overly narrow apologetic,” but rather by forging a true synthesis of modern existential experience and healing it with the existential faith experience of the Fathers of the Church. Basically, taking up the task of what the Second Vatican Council was all about. Ratzinger remarked:

“There always seems to be this dilemma: either we must reject the whole of the tradition, all the exegesis of the Fathers, relegate it to the library as historically unsustainable, or we must reject modernity…. And it seems to me that this was the true intention of the Second Vatican Council, to go beyond an unfruitful and overly narrow apologetic to a true synthesis with the positive elements of modernity, but at the same time… to transform modernity, to heal it of its illnesses, by means of the light and strength of the faith.”

Recently he suggested that “when man is entirely caught up in his own world, with material things, with what he can do, with all that is feasible and brings him success, with all that he can produce or understand by himself, then his capacity to perceive God weakens, the organ sensitive to God deteriorates, it becomes unable to perceive the sense, it no longer perceives the Divine, because the corresponding inner organ has withered, it has stopped developing. When he overuses all the other organs, the [sensible] empirical ones, it can happen that it is precisely the sense of God that suffers, that this organ dies, and man, as St. Gregory says, no longer perceives God’s gaze, to be looked at by him, the fact that his precious gaze touches me!”[2]

The Recovery of the “I” as Being

A Joint Project of Faith and Reason:

The human person is a pilgrim of the absolute. At the moment he is trapped in a quagmire of unrestricted relativism, and suffering. Drugs, for example, are the “perversion of mysticism, the perversion of the impossibility of transcending immanence, and the attempt to extend the limits of one’s own existence into the infinite. The patient and humble adventure of asceticism, which, in small steps of ascent, comes closer to the descending God, is replace by magical power, the magical hey of drugs – the ethical and religious path is replaced by technology.” They are the “pseudo-mysticism of a world that does not believe yet cannot get rid of the soul’s yearning for paradise. Thus, drugs are a warning sign that points to [something] very profound.”[3]

Created in the image and likeness of the Divine Persons who are constitutively relational, the human person is ontologically hard-wired to tend to act in a certain way. Rather than call this the “natural law” as a law of human nature, it would be more adequate to call it “the law of the person” to be self-gift as image of its prototype. The unity of faith and reason is so fundamental to the functioning of reason that then-Cardinal Ratzinger asserted that “reason shut in on itself does not remain reasonable or rational” precisely because reason without faith does not have access to the being of the reasoner as relational, or self-transcending. If the very being of the knower is constitutively relational, and if there is no act of self-transcendence - that activates that being, i.e. faith par excellence - reason is working with a non-transfigured object which is its very food, and consequently with a diminished light.[4] Most recently, Ratzinger as pope asserted most firmly at Regensburg, amidst an international brouhaha, that “The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly.” Thus “the intention is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its applications… We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons”[5] (underline mine). The full force of his magisterium since that moment to the present, especially during Lent 2007, has been directed at experiencing the wounds of the body of Christ. Through this sensible opening, reason will be able to access the divine “I.”

Modernity Gained the “I,” But "Neurotically"

Descartes’ mother died in child-birth when he was little more than a year old. Karl Stern suggests: “We can visualize the sickly schoolboy, with his chronic chest ailments, his need for prolonged sleep... and his general melancholia, which he later claimed to have overcome by an optimistic philosophy. The bereavement and grief of infancy impregnated his life with the permanence of a scent. (He remarked on several occasions, particularly in letters to Princess Elizabeth, that he had inherited his sickly disposition from his mother. We know today that such passing-on is much less through chromosomes or germs than through the experience of bereavement, at a time when the child’s main implement to grieve is still his body.”[6]

Stern sums up his psychoanalytic take on Descartes: “Consider, for a moment, his way of thinking, outside the framework of the philosophical edifice, and you enter into paradoxical world whose very genesis is intertwined with the sense of loss, whose reality is founded on uncertainty. Again and again in Descartes’ writings, particularly in the Meditations, we find him, almost in a free association of thoughts, muse on the mysterious relationship between dream and wakeful reality, between the certainty of delusional insanity and the certainty of reason. `For example, there is the fact that I am here, seated by the fire, attired in a dressing gown, having my papers in this hand, and similar matters.’ From here the thinker goes straight into the world of the insane who believe that they are kings clothed in purple, or think that their heads are made of glass! `At the same time I must remember that I am a man, and that consequently I am in the habit of sleeping, and in my dreams representing to myself the same things or even less probably things, than do those who are insane in their waking moments. How often has it happened to me that in the night I found myself in this particular place, that I was dressed and seated near the fire, whilst in realty I was lying undressed in bed!’ Take all this out of the philosophical context and you enter into a world which is only too familiar from clinical experience: the world of those to whom the certainty of being has early been shattered by maternal bereavement. For to all of us, the core and meaning of reality was at one time, before all cogitation, the certainty of carnal presence.”[7]

And now, Stern goes to his conclusion that there could be no certainty in the flesh because it was there that Descartes experienced the terror and pain. The original experience of the enfleshed self prior to all conceptual thinking was this abandonment. Stern says: “Reality, perceived primarily through the flesh, meant dread, and therefore ratiocination, the pure cogito, became an impenetrable armor.”[8] He corroborates it with Descartes’ remark: “As we have once upon a time been children and have judged the things presented to our sense in various ways, while we had not the entire use of our reason, many judgements thus precipitately formed prevent us from arriving at the knowledge of the truth, and apparently there seems to be no way in which we can deliver ourselves from these, unless we undertake once in our lives to doubt all things in which the slightest trace of uncertitude can be found.”[9]

The Cartesian dualism is an emotional experience whereby the sensible world is alien territory against which one protects self by retreating into the certainty of the cogito that is not merely rational but emotional. Charles Taylor’s use of the word to describe the Cartesian withdrawal as “disengagement” is apposite. He said: “Descartes gives Augustinian inwardness a radical twist and takes it in a quite new direction, which has also been epoch-making. The change might be described by saying that Descartes situates the moral sources, within us…. The internalization wrought by the modern age, of which Descartes’s formulation was one of the most important and influential, is very different from Augustine’s. It does, in a very real sense, place the moral sources within us. Relative to Plato, and relative to Augustine, it brings about in each case a transposition by which we no longer see ourselves as related to moral sources outside of us, or at least not at all in the same way. An important power has been internalized…. The Cartesian soul frees itself not by turning away but by objectifying embodied experience. The body is an inescapable object of attention to it, as it were. It has to support itself on it to climb free of it…. But this different ontology, and hence different theory of knowledge, and thus revised conception of dualism cannot but result in a very different notion of the self-mastery wrought by reason. This cannot mean what it meant for Plato that one’s soul is ordered by the Good which presides over the cosmic order which one attends to and loves. For there is no such order. Being rational has not to mean something other than being attuned to this order. The Cartesian option is to see rationality, or the power of thought, as a capacity we have to construct orders which meet the standards demanded by knowledge, or understanding, or certainty.”[10] [11]

Once Descartes has made his error and centered on the self as source of mental certainty and not as experience of the real, the entire intellectual world marched in the procession behind the Self disguised as consciousness, leaving reality dumbed down – “disengaged” - to sense experience and relativist subjectivism to rule the day. The experience of the “I” as being evaporated before it could be disclosed.

The Intrinsic Value of Modern Philosophy.

Positive Contributions:

1) The “I” was recovered as the primal source of meaning. It is important to state from the beginning the positive contribution that the Cartesian turn to the subject has made. Descartes’ turn to the thinking self enlarged the perspective of reality once the self was understood to be a part of reality and participating in being, and not simply an observer or a process. This enabled thinkers after Descartes to purify the content of sense experience itself of the erroneous burden of thinking reality was as we sensed it to be. John Courtney Murray commented on this epistemological sea change from “classicism” to “historical consciousness:

“The second great trend of the 19th century was the movement from classicism to historical consciousness… Suffice it to say that classicism designates a view of truth which holds objective truth, precisely because it is objective, to exist `already out there now” (to use Bernard Lonergan’s descriptive phrase). Therefore, it also exists apart from its possession by anyone. In addition, it exists apart from history, formulated in propositions that are verbally immutable. If there is to be talk of development of doctrine, it can only mean that the truth, remaining itself unchanged in its formulation, may find different applications in the contingent world of historical change. In contrast, historical consciousness, while holding fast to the nature of truth as objective, is concerned with the possession of truth, with man’s affirmations of truth… The Church in the 19th century, and even in the 20th, opposed this movement toward historical consciousness. Here, took, the reason was obvious. The term of the historical movement was modernism, that `conglomeration of all heresies,’ as Pascendi dominici gregis called it. The insight into the historicity of truth and the insight into the role of the subject in the possession of truth were systematically exploited to produce almost every kind of pernicious `ism,’ unto the destruction of the notion of truth itself – its objective character, its universality, its absoluteness. These systematizations were false, but the insights from which they issued were valid. Here again a work of discernment needed to be done, and was not done. To be quite summary about it, this work had to wait until Vatican Council II.
“The sessions of the Council have made it clear that, despite resistance in certain quarters, classicism is giving way to historical consciousness.”[12]

Karol Wojtyla also opined favorably on the import of the Cartesian turn to the subject. He remarked that prior to Descartes, “the traditional view of the human being as a person, which understood the person in terms of the Boethian definition as rationalis naturae individua substantia, expressed the individuality of the human as a substantial being with a rational (spiritual) nature, rather than the uniqueness of the subjectivity essential to the human being as a person. Thus the Boethian definition mainly marked out the `metaphysical terrain’ – the dimension of being [as substance, or thing-in-itself] – in which personal human subjectivity is realized, creating, in a sense, a condition for `building upon’ this terrain on the basis of experience.”[13]

2) The turn to the subject opened the way to disclosing the importance of “experience” as the criterion of realism:

The heightened attention of the modern empiricists, such as Locke and Hume, to the content of the experience of the senses purified modern thought of abstractions that were presumed to be real but were really masquerading conceptually and semantically, such as “substance” and “causality,” for another kind of experience that had not been isolated and objectified. It was not that there was no real “substantiality” or “causality” in the real world of sense experience. The problem was: what were we talking about when we said “substance” and “cause?”

Basically, Locke and Hume, attending only to sense experience, denied the reality of substance and cause “out there.” And, in terms of the experience of the external senses, they were right. The Cartesian turn to the subject forced them to consider whether we really experience substance, causality and qualities in the things themselves. Or rather, are “substance,” cause, qualities and values coming from us in our perception of what Kant will call the noumenal thing-in-itself – which we do not perceive sensibly.

And so the result of the turn to the subject is negative and positive. It is negative in that we seem to be trapped in our subjectivity in an epistemological solipsism where there is no possibility of returning to reality once one makes the initial start with thought. As Gilson says: “The grand metaphysical systems of the 17th century are pure masterpieces, perhaps the most perfectly self consistent systems of ideas which anyone has ever produced, precisely because, working on pure ideas, as in mathematics, the complexity of reality could in no way inconvenience them. What does inconvenience them is the difficulty of rejoining reality. Having expelled quality from the field of extension, they do not know how to account for it when it reappears in thought. Having begun triumphantly with ideas, they are ultimately unable to explain physical sensation – that low-grade, suspect, even, if one likes, despicable function, in which one nevertheless sees something make its appearance that is not pure thought, since it is not an intelligibility, but which is not extension either since it is already thought.”[14]

The turn to the subject is characterized by giving any “idea” that is not contradictory to itself, and “matters of fact” as experienced in sensation, the status of reality. What we have perceived as “substantial being,” say, a swan swimming down the river, is, in the semantics of Locke,

“white colour, long neck, red beak, black legs, and whole feet, and all these of a certain size, with a power of swimming in the water, and making a certain kind of noise, and perhaps, to a man who has long observed this kind of birds, some other properties: which all terminate in sensible simple ideas, all united in one common subject…”

Locke goes on,

“The mind being… furnished with a great number of the simple ideas, conveyed in by the senses as they are found in exterior things… takes notice also that a certain number of these simple ideas [read “sensations”] go constantly together; which being presumed to belong to one thing… are called… by one name; which, by inadvertency, we are apt afterward to talk of and consider as one simple idea [having disengaged from reality into the thinking self, sensation and idea mean the same thing as subjective experience], which indeed is a complication of many ideas together… we accustom ourselves to suppose some substratum wherein they do subsist, and from which they do result, which therefore we call substance…”

In a word, what everyone experiences as “something real,” or “substance” that we sense in various “takes,” now evaporates. Locke says,

“Hence, when we talk or think of any particular sort of corporeal substances, as horse, stone, etc., though the idea we have of either of them be but the complication of or collection of those several simple ideas [read sensations] of sensible qualities, which we used to find united in the thing called horse or stone; yet because we cannot conceive how they should subsist alone, nor one in another, we suppose them existing in and supported by some common subject; which support we denote by the name substance, though it be certain we have no clear or distinct idea of that thing we suppose a support.”[15]

In another example, this time from David Hume, causality is not perceived by reason, but only by experience (and by “experience” he means sensation of states of affairs):

“The mind can never possibly find the effect in the supposed cause, by the most accurate scrutiny and examination. For the effect is totally different from the cause, and consequently can never be discovered in it. Motion in the second Billiard-ball is quite distinct event from motion in the first: nor is there anything in the one to suggest the smallest hint of the other. A stone or piece of metal raised into the air, and left without any support, immediately falls: but to consider the matter a priori, is there anything we discover in this situation which can beget the idea of a downward, rather than an upward, or any other motion in the stone or metal?”[16]

John Henry Newman corroborates this view of both Locke and Hume on causality. He will say that indeed, causality is not perceived through the external senses but in the experience of the self exercising self as agent. There and only there. From that internal experience of the “I” as agent as master of itself – which is the proper locus of freedom – causality is extrapolated to the relations and associations that are perceived through sensation.

“The assent which we give to the proposition, as a first principle, that nothing happens without a cause, is derived, in the first instance, from what we know of ourselves; and we argue analogically from what is within us to what is external to us. One of the first experiences of an infant is that to his willing and doing; and, as time goes on, one of the first temptations of the boy is to bring home to himself the fact of his sovereign arbitrary power, though it be at the price of waywardness, mischievousness, and disobedience. And when his parents, as antagonists of this willfulness, begin to restrain him, and to bring his minds and conduct into shape, then he has a second series of experiences of cause and effect, and that upon a principle or rule. Thus the notion of causation is one of the first lessons which he learns from experience, that experience limiting it to agents possessed of intelligence and will. It is the notion of power combined with a purpose and an end. Physical phenomena, as such, are without sense; and experience teaches us nothing about physical phenomena as causes.[17]

We can say in summary that the turn to the subject has undermined our naiveté with regard to what is actually “taken in” by the external senses. Modern philosophy has been honest and correct in its evaluation of the content of sensation. We do not sense “substances” nor sensible qualities such as color, smell or sound. Pain is not in the tooth, nor red in the dress. Nor do we sense moral values that are absolutes in the objective world of sensation where the real is always individual, particulate and contingent. True there is no knowledge at all without external sensation, but it is not only the experience of sensing that gives us the full horizon of knowing, but the experience of ourselves experiencing things through sensation. The experiences itself as subject in the act of experiencing the external world as object. The received classical realism has insisted this in its nihil in intellectu nisi per sensum. The same obtains in the moral absolutes. They are not found in the contingent, empirical sensory world as absolutes. They are experienced as the being of the “I” as image of the Creator tending ontologically to union. That ontological tendency within us is the ontological hard-wiring of the created image that, when reflected as consciousness, becomes “conscience” that resonates with some forms of action and shuns others. Conscience, then, is not a store of retrieval a priori principles that we recall and from which we deduce moral probity in the concrete existential. It is an ontologically grounded innate sense.

Recall then Cardinal Ratzinger’s challenge: “Here is the problem: Ought we to accept modernity in full, or in part? Is there a real contribution? Can this modern way of thinking be a contribution, or offer a contribution, or not? And if there is a contribution from the modern, critical way of thinking, in line with the Enlightenment, how can it be reconciled with the great intuitions and the great gifts of the faith”

“Or ought we, in the name of the faith, to reject modernity? You see? There always seems to be this dilemma: either we must reject the whole of the tradition, all the exegesis of the Fathers, relegate it to the library as historically unsustainable, or we must reject modernity.”[18]
. “And I think that the gift, the light of the faith, must be dominant, but the light of the faith has also the capacity to take up into itself the true human lights, and for this reason the struggles over exegesis and the liturgy for me must be inserted into this great, let us call it epochal struggle over how Christianity, over how the Christian responds to modernity, to the challenge of modernity.”[19]

The Positive Effect of Modernity: Experience as Key to Reality

Ratzinger’s Three Stages of Experience

“Here is my Secret, a very Simple Secret: It is Only with the Heart that One Can See Rightly; What is Essential is Invisible to the Eye.”[20]

Benedict offers three stages of sensible experience: The first he calls “empirical experience”[21] which consists in the raw account of what we take in superficially and inexactly. The second is “experimental experience” whereby the sense experience is nothing if a prior question has not been raised. That is, there is no experience of the senses if the intelligence has not asked a question and devised an experiment to see how material reality reacts – which will be the new experience coming out of the questioning and the experiment. For example, we have no sensible perception of atoms or quantum particles – or waves - until an experiment is devised to experience them.

Quantum Physics:

Historically, Newtonian physics dealt with sensible reality as it was perceived. It was a thing-in-itself, a substance, a being-in-itself. He formulated laws that could explain the extrinsic relations of body to body. Max Planck attempted to give a mathematical account of black body radiation according to the Newtonian laws, and could not. He experienced, quite by chance, that there was intrinsic stability in the interior of the subatomic particles that Newtonian physics had no language to account for. Heisenberg commented: “Planck, as you know, discovered that the energy of an atomic system changes discontinuously; that when such a system emits energy, it passes through certain states with selected energy values. I myself later coined the term ‘stationary states’ for them.” Heisenberg continues: “We know from the stability of matter that Newtonian physics does not apply to the interior of the atom; at best it can occasionally offer us a guideline. It follows that there can be no descriptive account of the structure of the atom; all such accounts must necessarily be based on classical concepts which, as we saw, no longer apply. You see that anyone trying to develop such a theory is really truing the impossible. For we intend to say something about the structure of the atom but lack a language in which we can make ourselves understood.” In a conversation with Niels Bohr, Bohr remarked that “atoms were not things. For although Bohr believed that he knew a great many details about the inner structure of atoms, he did not look upon the electrons in the atomic shell as ‘things,’ in any case not as things in the sense of classical physics, which worked with such concepts as position, velocity, energy and extension. I therefore asked him: ‘If the inner structure of the atom is as closed to descriptive accounts as you say, if we really lack a language for dealing with it, how can we ever hope to understand atoms?
“Bohr hesitated for a moment, and then said: ‘I think we may yet be able to do so. But in the process we may have to learn what the word ‘understanding’ really means.”[22]


Genome Discovery:

A similar upending of the same first order abstractive and reductive positivism occurred recently with the termination of the genome project and it was found that the enormous complexity of the human body that called for well over 100,000 genes to explain its cellular makeup, in reality had in the range of 30,000 whereas the worm and the fruitfly Drosophila had 13,000 genes and the round worm that has 959 cells has as many as 19,000 genes.
Jay Gould, the Harvard high priest of biological evolution and one to one reductive determinism, remarked: “Human complexity cannot be generated by 30,000 genes under the old view of life embodied in what geneticists literally called (admittedly with a sense of whimsy) their ''central dogma'': DNA makes RNA makes protein -- in other words, one direction of causal flow from code to message to assembly of substance, with one item of code (a gene) ultimately making one item of substance (a protein), and the congeries of proteins making a body. Those 142,000 messages no doubt exist, as they must to build our bodies' complexity, with our previous error now exposed as the assumption that each message came from a distinct gene.”[23]
He continued and concluded: “But the deepest ramifications will be scientific or philosophical in the largest sense. From its late 17th century inception in modern form, science has strongly privileged the reductionist mode of thought that breaks overt complexity into constituent parts and then tries to explain the totality by the properties of these parts and simple interactions fully predictable from the parts. (''Analysis'' literally means to dissolve into basic parts). The reductionist method works triumphantly for simple systems -- predicting eclipses or the motion of planets (but not the histories of their complex surfaces), for example. But once again -- and when will we ever learn? -- we fell victim to hubris, as we imagined that, in discovering how to unlock some systems, we had found the key for the conquest of all natural phenomena. Will Parsifal ever learn that only humility (and a plurality of strategies for explanation) can locate the Holy Grail? “The collapse of the doctrine of one gene for one protein, and one direction of causal flow from basic codes to elaborate totality, marks the failure of reductionism for the complex system that we call biology.[24]

The Third type of Experience is “Existential.” Ratzinger makes a very similar observation to that of Einstein, who had said that a problem found in one horizon of consciousness cannot be solved except by moving to another horizon. Ratzinger refers precisely to this epistemological shift of horizon in the new physics that parallels his own understanding of revelation and faith.
With regard to the new physics, he said: “We know today that in a physical experiment the observer himself enters into the experiment and only by doing so can arrive at a physical experience. This means that there is no such thing as pure objectivity even in physics, that even here the result of the experiment, nature’s answer, depends o the question put to it. In the answer there is always a bit of the question and a bit of the questioner himself; it reflects not only nature-in-itself, in its pure objectivity, but also gives back something of man, of our individuality, a bit of the human subject.”

He then applies the paradigm shift in the new physics to the epistemological shift that has taken place in the Second Vatican Council. There, John Paul II observed as conciliar father that: “the Pastors of the Church were not so much concerned to answer questions like ‘What should men believe?’ ‘What is the real meaning of this or that truth of faith?’ and so on, but rather to answer the more complex question: ‘What does it mean to be a believer...”[25] In a word, the meaning of “pastoral Council” for Vatican II involved the shift from talking about objectified truths, to talking about the “I” as self-transcending believer, or more exactly, “the acting person.”
Ratzinger then situates this shift of horizon from object to subject as the key to the question about God, and how He is to be experienced and not simply conceptually thought. He remarked: This too, mutatis mutandis, is true of the question of God. There is no such thing as a mere observer. There is no such thing as pure objectivity. One can even say that the higher an object stands in human terms, the more it penetrates the center of individuality, and the more it engages the beholder’s individuality, then the smaller the possibility of the mere distancing involved in pure objectivity. Thus, wherever an answer is presented as unemotionally objective, as a statement that finally goes beyond the prejudices of the pious and provides purely factual, scientific information, then it has to be said that the speaker has here fallen a victim to self-deception. This kind of objectivity is quite simply denied to man. He cannot ask and exist as a mere observer. He who tries to be a mere observer experiences nothing. Even the reality ‘God’ can only impinge on the visit of him who enters into the experiment with God – the experiment that we call faith. Only by entering does one experience; only by co-operating in the experiment does one ask at all, and only he who asks receives an answer.”[26]

Sokolowski’s “Exorcising Concepts”[27]

Robert Sokolowski exorcises concepts as “something.” He says that we are inclined “to believe that the concept is something: that there is some sort of entity in our minds, or perhaps in our brains, that we can call the concept.”[28] He says that “We tend to substantialize both concepts and the mind. We may even go on to add a process of ideogenesis, a natural process in which impressions cause images which in turn cause concepts; thus new concepts are said to be brought into being and to take their place in the mind along with those that are there already.”[29] Sokolowski suggests that concepts are “a transcendental mirage” that we imagine because we do not understand what takes place in the use of speech. He says that “when we move from thing to meaning to word, whether in work or at play, we do not turn from that thing there (an object) to this thing here (a mental entity) to still another thing coming forth (a word); we simply shift our attitude and go from the thing, to the thing as presented, to the thing as presented and voiced. And concepts as mental entities, the transcendental mirage that occurs so persistently, are simply reified or decontextualized meanings. They are modes of presentation that have mistakenly been taken as mental things.”[30]

To intensify the point, I would make reference to Charles Peirce as interpreted by Walker Percy. Percy takes Peirce’s “thirdness” as transcending the reductive determinism of biological stimulus (S) and response (R) as the only adequate explanation of language. He says: “The point is that the picture the psychologist draws, showing stimuli and responses, big S’s and R’s outside the brain, little s’s and r’s inside the brain, with arrows showing the course of nerve impulses along nerves and across synapses, not matter how complicated it is, will not show what happens when a child understands that the sound ball is the name of a class of round objects, or when I say The center is not holding and you understand me.”[31]

Percy is not talking about an abstract concept when he says “ball.” He is talking about language as a name used by an “I” who is the “third” and critical reality towering over stimulus and response. When the “I” undergoes the act of naming the “stimulus” (round thing) with the symbol (“ball”) that has been given to him by his father or mother or nurse, the “I” activates itself by a self-determination to subdue the object and thereby come to a consciousness of self. This is not a process of ideogenesis, but of personagenesis.
Percy’s signature example is Helen Keller. He quotes Helen:

“We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that `w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.

"I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me. On entering the door I remembered the doll I had broken. [She had earlier destroyed the doll in a fit of temper.] I felt my way to the dearth and picked up the pieces. I tried vainly to put them together. Then my eyes filled with tears; for I realized what I had done, and for the first time I felt repentance and sorrow.”[32]

What had happened? Helen had exercised her subjectivity as cause by “throwing” (βαλέιν) the “likeness” (sym): w-a-t-e-r at the wet flowing object. She had experienced herself as cause, and therefore came to a consciousness of herself as “self.” Percy comments: “before, Helen had behaved like a good responding organism. Afterward, she acted like a rejoicing symbol-mongering human. Before, she was little more than an animal. Afterward, she became wholly human. Within the few minutes of the breakthrough and the several hours of exploiting it Helen had concentrated the months of the naming phase that most children go through somewhere around their second birthday.”[33]

This exercise in exorcising concepts can help us remove the ontological freight from sensation where we have tended to place it. We have bypassed the real criterion for ontological reality that is experience and have frontloaded sensation with essences, substance, causality, values, etc. that had to be transmogrified by theories of abstraction and ideogenesis that are pure mirages. The central ontological reality is the “I” that experiences itself in the act of free self-determination in the act of naming, that is work. The central act of knowing is brought about by the will in the free morality of self-transcendence. Call it love, work, faith, naming, etc, it is the acting person experiencing itself as the prime meaning of being.

As an aside, it is telling that Josef Ratzinger has exorcised the idea of substance not only as the prius ontological category, the prime meaning of being, but as an adequate way of dealing with reality. I cite three Ratzinger examples: 1) “Therein lies concealed a revolution in man’s view of the world: the sole dominion of thinking in term of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality. It becomes possible to surmount what we call today `objectifying thought;’ a new plane of being comes into view. It is probably true to say that the task imposed on philosophy as a result of these facts is far from being complete – so much does modern thought depend on the possibilities thus disclosed, but for which it would be inconceivable;”[34] 2) “In this light, Boethius’s concept of person, which prevailed in Western philosophy, must be criticized as entirely insufficient. Remaining on the level of the Greek mind, Boethius defined `person’ as Naturae rationalis individual substantia, as the individual substance of a rational nature. One sees that the concept of person stands entirely on the level of substance. This cannot clarify anything about the Trinity or about Christology; it is an affirmation that remains on the level of the Greek mind which thinks in substantialist terms;”[35] 3) “a new philosophical category – the concept of ‘person’ – was fashioned, a concept that has become for us the fundamental concept of the analogy between God and man, the very center of philosophical thought. The meaningof an already existing category, that of ‘relation,’ was fundamentally changed. In the Aristotelian table of categories, relation belongs to the group of accidents that point to substance and are dependent on it; in God, therefore, there are no accidents. Through the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, relation moves out of the substance-accident framework. Now God himself is described as a Trinitarian set of relations, as relatio subsistens. When we say that man is the image of God, it means that he is a being designed for relationship; it means that, in and through all his relationships, he seeks that relation which is the ground of his existence.”[36]

Wojtyla’s Metaphysical Phenomenology: Experience the “I” as Being

It has been the work of Karol Wojtyla that has performed the metaphysical and phenomenological amalgam of making it possible to perceive and conceptualize the grasp of the self in the moment of self-determination. The great task was to show that what was being grasped of the self was not consciousness, but being. And the even greater task was to give an account of accessing the being of the “I” without objectifying it and turning it into an object. The account of this kind of abstractive and objectified knowing of the self has been accounted for by what has been called intentional “reflection” and therefore rendering it by a concept. Wojtyla perceived that what really takes place in knowing the “I” precisely as “I” is the work of consciousness itself which is reflective rather than reflexive. That is, consciousness, that is the noetic dimension of experience itself, mirrors the “I” in its passivity before the internal act of determining as potency to so self-determine, and after the internal act, it mirrors the state of being self-determined. By so doing, consciousness embraces the “I” as both potency and act and in so doing offers the experience of the passage performed by the “I” – and this without objectifying it. This, of course, does not mean that it cannot be objectified by an intentional reflection, which, indeed, takes place. The “I,” then, is known by itself as both subject and object.

Conclusion

Repeating the challenge laid down by Benedict XVI: "Ought we to accept modernity in full, or in part? Is there a real contribution? Can this modern way of thinking be a contribution, or offer a contribution, or not? And if there is a contribution from the modern, critical way of thinking, in line with the Enlightenment, how can it be reconciled with the great intuitions and the great gifts of the faith”

“Or ought we, in the name of the faith, to reject modernity? You see? There always seems to be this dilemma: either we must reject the whole of the tradition, all the exegesis of the Fathers, relegate it to the library as historically unsustainable, or we must reject modernity.”

The answer imposes itself. Modernity – as the turn to the subject and the experience of it - is a real contribution, and a critical one. It is reconciled with the received classical metaphysics in finding the “I” of the person as the “privileged locus for the encounter with the act of existence” (Fides et ratio #83) and therefore the key to a new metaphysics that will harmonize faith and reason. The dualisms of supernatural/natural, faith/reason, grace/nature, Church/State, priest/layman will be reconciled in the experience of the self as gift.

This delicate epistemological work of the phenomenology of self-determination, the experience of the “I” in the moment of free moral activity, is precisely what opens up the new anthropology of relation that supersedes the received understanding of the human person as “individual substance of a rational nature” that has bogged down the true development of a Christian anthropology.

Only with this new metaphysical anthropology of the “I” are we able to have reasonable access to the Christological anthropology that was enunciated in Gaudium et spes #24: “Man, the only earthly being that God willed for itself, found himself by the sincere gift of himself.” And only by achieving that self-knowledge as “I am” is it possible to achieve – by transference - the knowledge of Him Who is nothing but “I AM.”

[1] “The Spiritual Vision of Pope Benedict XVI, Let God’s Light Shine Forth” ed. Robert Moynihan Doubleday (2005) 4.
[2] Benedict XVI, “Holy Mass with the Members of the Bishops’ Conference of Switzerland,” November 7, 2006.
[3] J. Ratzinger, “Turning Point for Europe?” Ignatius (1994) 20.
[4] J. Ratzinger, “Church, Ecumenism and Politics,” Crossroad (1988) 218.
[5] Benedict XVI, Papal Address at University of Regensburg: “Three Stages in the Program of De-Hellenization,” September 12, 2006.
[6] Karl Stern, The Flight From Woman,” Farrar Straus Giroux (1965) 92.
[7] Ibid. 100.
[8] Ibid. 100.
[9] Ibid. 100
[10] Charles Taylor, “Sources of the Self,” Harvard University Press, (1989) 143-147.

[12] Declaration on Religious Freedom of Vatican Council II, Paulist Press (1966), Appendix III by John Courtney Murray, S.J.
[13] Karol Wojtyla, “Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the Human Being,” Person and Community (1993) 212.
[14] E. Gilson, “Methodical Realism,” Christendom Press (1990) 88-89.
[15] John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
[16] David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
[17] John Henry Newman, Grammar of Assent, UNDP (1992) 70-72.
[18] “The Spiritual Vision of Pope Benedict XVI, `Let God’s Light Shine Forth,” ed. Robert Moynihan, Doubleday [2005] 34-35).
[19] Ibid.
[20] Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “The Little Prince” Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (1943) 70.
[21] J. Ratzinger, “Principles of Catholic Theology,” Ignatius (1987) 346-347.
[22] Werner Heisenberg, “Physics and Beyond,” 41
[23] The New York Times, February 19, 2001, op. ed.
[24] Ibid
[25] Karol Wojtyla, “Sources of Renewal,” Harper and Row (1979) 17.
[26] J. Ratzinger, “Introduction to Christianity,” Ignatius (1990)125.
[27] R. Sokolowski, “Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions,” UNDP (1992) 173-185.
[28] Ibid 173.
[29] Ibid 174.
[30] Ibid 185.
[31] Walker Percy, “The Delta Factor,” The Message in the Bottle The Noonday Press (1995) 14.
[32] Ibid 34-35.
[33] Ibid 38.
[34] J. Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, Ignatius (2004) 184; (1990) 132.
[35] J. Ratzinger, “Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology” Communio 17 (Fall, 1990) 448.
[36] J. Ratzinger, “Many Religions – One Covenant” Ignatius (1999) 76-77.

March 25th and J.R.R. Tolkien

Stratford Caldecott:

The Ring:

“The person who places himself within the golden circle of the Ring seeks not to be seen, and thereby to have power over others. Through the magic power of the Ring we escape the limitations of matter to enter the world of spiritual forces, but in the very act of doing so we become horribly visible to the forces of evil. In fact the Ring is partly a symbol of the sin of pride. It draws us towards the Dark Lord by tempting us to become like him. Its circular shape is an image of the will closed in upon itself. Its empty center suggests the void into which we thrust ourselves by using the Ring. Becoming invisible also means becoming untouchable by light; and since it is only light that allows us to be seen by others, wearing the Ring also cuts us off from human contact and relationship: it takes us, ultimately, into a world where we are alone with the Eye. In that world of evil there is no room for two wills: the wearer is either absorbed and destroyed, or he defeats Sauron and becomes another Dark Lord himself.”[1]

March 25, Annunciation and Incarnation of God:

In the “Lord of the Rings,” the Ring is destroyed on March 25. “This is mentioned in passing by Gandalf in a conversation with Sam, and its importance is reinforced by its being also the birth-date of Sam and Rosie’s first child, ‘a date that Sam noted.’ In the ‘Catholic’ word, 25th March is the Feast of the Annunciation: which is to say the moment of the Incarnation, when Eru indeed did at last take flesh in Mary’s womb. It was also accounted by many early Christian writers the date of the Crucifixion, and for many centuries it was this that was New Year’s Day in England, just as it would be in Gondor during the reign of King Elessar, after the fall of Arad-Dur.”[2]

The Destruction of the Ring:

“Why was it so appropriately destroyed or ‘unmade’ on 25th March? It is called the Ring of Power, and it is designed to rule the other rings that were made and through them the world. Yet it makes the wearer invisible to normal sight. What is the connection that Tolkien is hinting at here between the lust for power and the ability to become invisible?”[3]


March 25 represents Our Lady’s “Yes” to the invitation to obey the will of God for the Incarnation. The incarnation of God is the death of sin, and of death. The Ring “represents the essence of sin, going right back to the sin of Adam, which … led him to try to become invisible by hiding from God in the forest of Eden. The reason the Ring’s destruction is linked in Tolkien’s chronology to the Annunciation is simply that Mary’s ‘yes’ to God’s will, when it was expressed to her by the Angel, is the exact reversal of the creature’s will to usurp power for itself. This was the moment in which Christ was conceived, and so it is the moment when the true King enters the world. If we see ti also as the date of the crucifixion, then it becomes even more appropriate, for this was the day of the Devil’s overthrow, when Death was cast down from his throne by the sacrifice of Christ.

“If the Ring represents Sin, then we would expect that its destruction would be impossible without the help of divine grace, and that is indeed what we find in “The Lord of the Rings.” Tolkien’s Christian genius therefore reveals itself in a final twist of the plot. On the very brink of success, his free will having taken him as far as it can, Frodo renounces the Quest and claims the Ring for his own. His ability to cast it away has been eroded by the task of bearing it to Mount Doom. His very assertion of ownership over the Ring signifies the loss of his self-possession, and the words he uses betray this: he says, ‘I do not choose now to do what I came to do. I will not do this deed. The Ring is mine.’ Note that he does not say, ‘I choose… I do,’ but rather ‘I do not choose… I will not do.’ Frodo is, of course, saved by an apparent accident, for Gollum bites the Ring from his finger and falls into the Fire. This is in fact the consequence of Frodo’s earlier (and freer) decision to spare Gollum’s life. ‘But at this point,’ Tolkien writes in the Letters, the “salvation” of the world and Frodo’s own “salvation” is achieved by his previous pity and forgiveness of injury.’ Thus in the end it is not Frodo who saves Middle Earth at all, nor Gollum. It can only be God himself, working through the love and freedom of his creatures. The scene is a triumph of Providence over Fate, but also a triumph of Mercy, in which free will, supported by grace, is fully vindicated.”[4]

[1] Stratford Caldecott, “The Horns of Hope: J.R.R. Tolkien and the Heroism of Hobbits,” A Hidden Presence, The Catholic Imagination of J.R.R. Tolkien The Chesterton Press (Seton Hall University) 16.
[2] Ibid. 15.
[3] Ibid. 15.
[4] Ibid 16-17.

Annunciation 2007 quoad Benedict XVI

“’Rejoice’ – what reason does Mary have to rejoice in such a world? The answer is:
‘The Lord is with you.’ In order to grasp the sense of this announcement, we must return once more to the Old Testament texts upon which it is based, in particular to Zephaniah. These texts invariably contain a double promise to the personification of Israel, daughter Zion: God will come to save, and he will come to dwell in her. The angel’s dialogue with Mary reprises this promise and in so doing makes it concrete in two ways. What in the prophecy is said to daughter Zion is now directed to Mary: She is identified with daughter Zion, she is daughter Zion in person. In a parallel manner, Jesus, whom Mary is permitted to bear, is identified with Yahweh, the living God. When Jesus comes, it is God himself who comes to swell in her. He is the Savior – this is the meaning of the name Jesus, which thus becomes clear from the heart of the promise. Rene Laurentin has shown through painstaking textual analyses how Luke has used subtle word play to deepen the theme of God’s indwelling. Even early traditions portray God as dwelling ‘in the womb’ of Israel – in the Ark of the Covenant. This dwelling ‘in the womb’ of Israel now becomes quite literally real in the Virgin of Nazareth. Mary herself thus becomes the true Ark of the Covenant in Israel, so that the symbol of the Ark gathers an incredibly realistic force: God in the flesh of a human being, which flesh now becomes his dwelling place in the midst of creation.

“The angel’s greeting – the center of Mariology not invented by the human mind – has led us to the theological foundation of this Mariology. Mary is identified with daughter Zion, with the bridal people of God. Everything said about the ecclesia in the Bible is true of her, and vice versa: the Church learns concretely what she is and is meant to be by looking at Mary. Mary is her mirror, the pure measure of her being, because Mary is wholly within the measure of Christ and of God, is through and through his habitation. And what other reason could the ecclesia have for existing than to become a dwelling for God in the world? God does not deal with abstractions. He is a person, and the Church is a person. The more that each one of us becomes a person, person in the sense of a fit habitation for God, daughter Zion, the more we become one, the more we are the Church, and the more the Church is herself.

“The typological identification of Mary and Zion leads us, then, into the depths. This manner of connecting the Old and New Testaments is much more than an interesting historical construction by means of which the Evangelist links promise and fulfillment and reinterprets the Old Testament in the light of what has happened in Christ. Mary is Zion in person, which means that her life wholly embodies what is meant by ‘Zion.’ She does not construct a self-enclosed individuality whose principal concern is the originality of its own ego. She does not wish to be just this one human being who defends and protects her own ego. She does not regard life as a stock of goods of which everyone wants to get as much as possible for himself. Her life is such that she is transparent to God, ‘habitable’ for him. Her life is such that she is a place for God. Her life sinks her into the common measure of sacred history, so that what appears in her is not the narrow and constricted ego of an isolated individual, but the whole, true Israel. This ‘typological identification’ is a spiritual reality; it is life lived out of the spirit of Sacred Scripture; it is rootedness in the faith of the Fathers and at the same time expansion into the height and breadth of the coming promises.

The Meaning of Grace

“Let us return once more to the angel’s greeting. Mary is called ‘full of grace’…

What is grace? This question thrusts itself upon our text. Our religious mentality has reified this concept much too much; it regards grace as a supernatural something we carry about in our soul. And since we perceive very little of it, or nothing at all, it has gradually become irrelevant to us, an empty word belonging to Christian jargon, which seems to have lost any relationship to the lived reality of our everyday life. In reality, grace is a relational term: it does not predicate something about an I, but something about a connection between I and Thou, between God and man. ‘Full of grace’ could therefore also be translated as: ‘You are full of the Holy Spirit; your life is intimately connected with God.’ … Grace in the proper and deepest sense of the word is not some thing that comes from God; it is God himself. Redemption means that God, acting as God truly does, gives us nothing less than himself. The gift of God is God – he who as the Holy Spirit is communion with us. ‘Full of grace’ therefore means, once again, that Mary is a wholly open human being, one who has opened herself entirely, one who has placed herself in God’s hands boldly, limitlessly, and without fear for her own fate. It means that she lives wholly by and in relation to God. She is a listener and a prayer, whose mind and soul are alive to the manifold ways in which the living God quietly calls to her. She is one who prays and stretches forth wholly to meet God; she is therefore a lover, who has the breadth and magnanimity of true love, but who has also its unerring powers of discernment and its readiness to suffer.

Grace and Faith

“Luke has flooded this fact with the light of yet another round of motifs. In his subtle way he constructs a parallel between Abraham, the father of believers, and Mary, the mother of believers. To be in a state of grace means: to be a believer. Faith includes steadfastness, confidence, and devotion, but also obscurity. When man’s relation to God, the soul’s open availability for him, is characterized as ‘faith,’ this word expresses the fact that the infinite distance between Creator and creature is not blurred in the relation of the human I to the divine Thou. It means that he model of ‘partnership,’ which has become so dear to us, breaks down when it comes to God, because it cannot sufficiently express the majesty of God and the hiddenness of his working. It is precisely the man who has been opened up entirely into God who comes to accept God’s otherness and the hiddenness of his will, which can pierce our will like a sword. The parallel between Mary and Abraham begins in the joy of the promised son abut continues apace until the dark hour when she must ascend Mount Moriah, that is, until the Crucifixion of Christ. Yet it does not end there; it also extends to the miracle of Isaac’s rescue – the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Abraham, father of faith – this title describes the unique position of the patriarch in the piety of Israel and in the faith of the Church. But is it not wonderful that – without any revocation of the special status of Abraham – a ‘mother of believers’ now stands at the beginning of the new people and that our faith again and again receives from her pure and high image its measure and its path?”[1]

[1] J. Ratzinger, “Hail, Full of Grace,” Mary, The Church at the Source, Ignatius (2005) 65-69.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Put out my eyes,

and I can see you still,

Slam my ears to,

and I can hear you yet;

And without any feet can go to you;

And tongueless, I can conjure you at will.

Break off my arms, I shall take hold of you

And grasp you with my heart as with a hand;

Arrest my heart, my brain will beat as true;

And if you set this brain of mine afire,

Then on my blood-stream

I yet will carry you.

Experience THE FATHER by Becoming Father

We have lost, not the abstract thought, but the living experience of God. Benedict XVI paraphrased Gregory the Great saying: “(people today) “have never had an experience of God; they have never acquired a ‘taste’ for God; they have never experienced how delightful it is to be ‘touched’ by God! They lack this ‘contact’ – and with it, the ‘taste for God.’” [1] He went on: “when man is entirely caught up in his own world, with material things, with what he can do, with all that is feasible and brings him success, with all that he can produce or understand by himself, then his capacity to perceive God weakens, the organ sensitive to God deteriorates, it becomes unable to perceive and sense, it no longer perceives the Divine, because the corresponding inner organ has withered, it has stopped developing.”[2]

Benedict is talking about the interior “I” not being exercised. He goes on: “When he overuses all the other organs, the [sensible] empirical ones, it can happen that it is precisely the sense of God that suffers, that this organ dies, and man, as St. Gregory says, no longer perceives God’s gaze, to be looked at by him, the fact that his precious gaze touches me!”[3]

Challenge the Adolescent (of all ages) to the Absolute!

Richard Rohr points to this state of affairs as persistent adolescence, particularly in the male. His thesis is that boys at present do not become men because they undergo no initiation process mentored by true fathers. This process of initiation begins from below and from within, not from above and from without. Then-Cardinal Ratzinger had said “there is an inner ontological tendency within man, who is created in the likeness of God, toward the divine. From its origin, man’s being resonates with some things and clashes with others. This anamnesis of the origin, which results from the godlike constitution of our being is not a conceptually articulated knowing, a store of retrievable contents. It is so to speak an inner sense, a capacity to recall, so that the one whom it addresses, if he is to turned in on himself, hears it echo from within. He sees: That’s it! That is what my nature points to and seeks.”[4]

And it is to this ontologically yearning inside every young person that someone must challenge. Ratzinger goes on: “The anamnesis instilled in our being needs, one might say, assistance from without so that it can become aware of itself. But this ‘from without’ is not something set in opposition to anamnesis but ordered to it. It has maieutic function, imposes nothing foreign, but brings to fruition what is proper to anamnesis, namely, its interior openness to the truth.” This tendency within the human person needs to be spoken to and answered by the revelation of itself. Every person, especially the young, has this driving imperative for the infinite and absolute. They are “pilgrims of the absolute,” and this absolute must be answered. If not, if they are presented only with what they can see, touch, smell, hear and taste; they are disillusioned and compensate with the pseudo-absolute of “big crowds, loud music, marching armies, totally unrealistic fantasies, fame (or infamy!), money, and popularity. Anything loud, large or socially admired becomes the substitute for the cosmic and the transcendent that they are really ongoing for. Someone needs to tell them that, even if they only half-believe it.”[5] Richard Rohr expatiates: “If there is no contact with greatness, there is an almost cosmic disappointment inside of us, a deep sadness, a capacity for cynical dismissal and sullen coldness, exactly as we see in so many of our young today. The visionary gleam is lost. It is as if they are saying, ‘There are no great people or great patterns. I will not believe in anything. I will not be disappointed again.’ It is called postmodernism, and it is the general assumption of our jaded and uninitiated society.”[6] Importantly, Rohr then sounds the caveat: “But do note that it is not the presence of pain or suffering that destroys the brain; rather it is the lack of larger-than-life people around us. Primal cultures seemed to now that if young people missed being exposed to a greater meaning and greater people during key periods of their lives, especially the last clear opportunity at ages fourteen to seventeen, the result would be disastrous both for the young person and for the society.”[7]

Mentoring must come from outside, from men (for boys) who are truly fathers and who can pass on the inner experience of suffering initiation to become men. This is the foundation of all catechesis and the teaching authority of the Church and Pope. Hence, Ratzinger’s defense of John Henry Newman’s toast first to conscience, and then to the pope. Ultimately, it is God the Redeemer speaking to God the Creator of the imaging person.

Karol Wojtyla’s “Radiation of Fatherhood” and “Reflections on Fatherhood”

The challenge to the absolute is the challenge to make the full gift of self in order to find the real self. It is the passage trough the desert and the dark night of St. John of the Cross, precisely with suffering. John Paul II had presented this challenge in its true anthropological form to the young male image of God the Father in the form of becoming a father. Semantically, it became flesh as “Reflections on Fatherhood,” a kind of exegesis of his “Radiation of Fatherhood.” It reads:

“For many years now I have lived like a man exiled from my deeper personality yet condemned to probe it.

“During those years I have toiled unceasingly to reach it, always thinking with horror that it was becoming lost, blurred among the mass processes of history.

“Not for nothing am I called Adam. In this name one can meet every man; at the same time in this name everything that man contributes can be made ordinary. That is what I thought through all those years; I thought that my footsteps should be wiped out, butat I had to obliterate myself so that ti could identify with the average man, whose history is written from without by mobilized crowd. What else does the name ADAM mean?

“Do you want to substitute for it something from within? But what? Should one not recoil from it with terror?

[The answer: Loneliness]

“Although I am like the man who can be placed apart and then made a common denominator for al men, I still remain lonely.

“Nobody calls this loneliness a sin, but I know what to make of it. And I know who Adam is, he who stopped once on the frontier between the promise of fatherhood and his own loneliness. Who cut him off from men? Who made him lonely in the midst of them all? After all, he became lonely of his own free will in order to graft that loneliness onto others. Who will not call that a fault?

[The temptation to be like God as transcendent autonomy and therefore, alone]

“He is lonely. I asked myself, What will bring me nearer to Him than loneliness? What will make me more like Him, that is to say, more independent of everything?”

* * * * * * * *


Let me here insert in linear prose the insight of Louis Evely on the initiation of adolescent into man precisely as father – with pain:

“Do you know what it is to be a Father?

“To be a Father is precisely to suffer; to become a father is to become vulnerable. As long as one is young, one is hard, selfish, protected. No doubt, one has terrible blues, emotions, melancholies, but one holds one’s own pretty well, one withdraws easily, one suffers only for oneself. Our compassion for others is gratuitous, generous, superfluous.

“But when one becomes a father, or a mother, one suddenly sees oneself as vulnerable, in the most sensitive part of one’s being; one is completely powerless to defend oneself, one is no longer free, one is tied up. To become a father is to experience an infinite dependency on an infinitely small, frail, being, dependent on us and therefore omnipotent over our heart. Oh, we really depend on people who depend on us! The strong person who loves a weak person has put his happiness at his mercy. He depends on him henceforth. He is without any defense against him. To love a person is inevitably to depend on him, to give him power over us. God loved us freely; God have us power over him. God wanted to have need of us. The passion is the revelation of our terrible power over God. He surrendered himself to us, we had him at our disposal, we did with him what we wanted. On a plaque in Normandy one can read this cruel sentence: ‘It is always the one who loves the least who is the strongest.’ It is always he who is least in love who gets his way with the other, who keeps a cool head and stays in control of the situation. God, in regard to us, will always be the weakest, for he loves. God can be denied, forgotten; he cannot deny us, forget us. We can be without God. God cannot be without men.[8] We can stop being sons; he cannot stop being a Father. ‘Man in revolt against God is like the bird in the storm which dashes itself against the cliff. But God, in his mercy, became flesh so that the violence of the impact might be endured by him and not by us.’ Thus, God will always be the weakest against us for he loves us. We are of Jacob’s race, we are the true Israel, he who fought against the angel all night and who deserved his name: ‘mighty against God.’”[9]

One Father’s Relation to his Wounded Daughter

“I have always sensed that the physical somehow manifests the deeper spiritual bond we share. She is my daughter. She is a part of me. I know before anyone else, even her mother, what she wants or needs. I know when she is too cold. I know when she is hungry. I know when she will wake. Even when she has been inone of her deepest sleeps, I can sense if she will wake when I walk past. She knows I am there, and she calls me when she needs me.

“In the wee hours, when she has lain stiff in the nurse’s arms since midnight and even Liz cannot put her to sleep, I will take her in my lap, hold her hand in mine, wrap the blanket around her and she will soften slowly, then bat her eyelids heavily, and within moments drift off into a deep sleep. She was waiting for me to come to her, but had no way of telling the nurse or Liz other than by stiffening out.

“When I return after work, she is often in her chair. I drop my bag and kiss her on the cheek and say, ‘Lift your hand to greet me.’ Her body stiffens slightly, she tenses her face and groans, and then her hand comes up in what appears to be almost a voluntary motion. I know it is probably not voluntary though she does this for no one else. She hears me at least.

“Our newborn son is obviously his mother’s; they are connected. I love him. I love to hold him, carry him in my arms, change him on the table while he stares at the mobile above his head and laughs. But he is definitely his mother’s child. Elie is mine. I think God made that bond so strong, so seemingly telepathic, because He knew Elie would need it. She was given no way to communicate by normal means, so she had to have someone who could understand her through extra-ordinary means.

“I wonder sometimes if this almost telepathic bond can be developed or if it is innate. I tend to think it is the latter, but it grows as we nurture our love for the child. Most often only mother and child have it, perhaps strengthened through the power of breast feeding and nature. But Elie and I have it. We are linked, and the link is like an imperceptible spiritual nerve that connect us. It was always there, but as love grows and becomes more complex, so grows the complexity of the connection and the messages it can carry. At some point, speech becomes unnecessary, and understanding travels back and forth directly….

“There is another aspect of beauty which is more difficult to describe and yet no less important than the physical. That is the beauty born of suffering – a piquant, lovely, fragile form of beauty. Elie wears it at the corners of her eyes and the swollen skin around her joints. This beauty is not always attractive, but it is always compelling. Like the nearly hidden scar that graces her hairline from her widow’s peak to her earlobe, it becomes an outward sign of her willingness to endure adversity. There is a great beauty hidden in steadfastness.

“Elie’s suffering and endurance have given her a rare aura in this world. She is a child who can hardly communicate, who depends on others to know and meet her needs, who has little to look forward to with joy but the moments of comfort provided by her parents and nurses. I ask myself often what if she is only physically disabled but her mind still functions? What if she has dreams and hopes? What if she is trying to communicate but cannot? As a par tent, it is terrible to imagine these things because they may be true and we would never know it. Yet for her, trapped inside a strong but non-functional body, to endure takes heroism and love. The love comes from us, but the heroism is all hers. And there is beauty in that as well.

“I bathed Elie myself tonight. I held her head between two hands and let her body float in the soothing water. She slept until the water cooled, then woke and smacked her lips together softly. If I shut my eyes it was almost like waves lapping at the shore. As I lifted her from the bath, she pulled her legs up and curled into foetal position, her arms across her chest and clenched. I set her on the warmed towels and began to rub her scalp to dry it. She crunched up her face when the towel touched her lips. I drew it away… I dried around her waist… under her arms, her feet, her hands, in her ears. She suffered through everything, making hardly a sound. As I lifted her from the bathmat and cradles her naked into my chest, she sighted. A soft intake of breath then… a relaxation. Relief, love, comfort. It all comes out in that barely audible sigh. She does this often for me. It remains one of the most beautiful sounds I have ever known.”[10]

And Then – Imaging the Father. The Gift: “Go Beautiful! Go To God! Go!”

“Elizabeth Nyanga Gilges died on March 11, 2004 on my lap, cradled between Liz and me.
“She died quietly, peacefully. As she breathed her last few breaths, Liz said a Hail Mary and creid out, “Jesus come!’ I whispered in her small ear, ‘Elie, Go, beautiful. Go to God. Go.’ She took a half breath, shuddered once almost imperceptibly as if her body held very lightly now to her soul, took another half breath, and then she breathed no more.
“We bathed her, combed out her hair, dressed her in a blue Easter dress that Liz’s brother had bought for her, and placed her in the coffin which we as a family had make.
“It was built of ash, painted white with a black inlaid cross on the cover. The inside was lined with white satin. The children each placed tow hand prints in bright colors on the side of the coffin and wrote underneath in black marker, ‘I love you, Elie,’ and their name.
“In the morning, Liz’s mother and her sister bought a tiara made of yellow and blue flowers and we placed it on her forehead before the wake. Never have I seen anything more beautiful than her face in the dim twilight of her room.
“Requiem in Pace. Is Elie resting in peace? I guess I hope not. I hope that for the first time, a little girl who was never able to walk finally has the use of her legs and is running through fields filled with the yellow and blue flowers that adorned her pale brow as she lay in her coffin.
“That night Elie died, we tried to explain to our children again what death meant. They all listened solemnly. When we were done with our explanation, there were a few moments of quiet, then four year-old Hannah asked us: ‘Mom, can Elie do a cartwheel now?’”4

[1] Benedict XVI, Holy Mass with the Members of the Bishops’ Conference of Switzerland, November 7, 2006.
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid
[4] J. Ratzinger, “Conscience and Truth,” Proceedings of The Tenth Bishops’ Workshop, Dallas, Texas (1991) 20-21.
[5] Richard Rohr, “Adam’s Return,” Crossroad (2004) 20.
[6] Ibid
[7] Ibid
[8] This is not a statement of pantheistic emanationism but the “erotic” dimension of God’s Love that is both Agape and eros. See Benedict XVI’s “Deus Charitas Est:” “The one God in whom Israel believes… loves with a personal love. His love, moreover, is an elective love: … God loves, and his love may certainly be called eros, yet it is also totally agape…. Hosea above all shows us that this agape dimension of God’s love for man goes far beyond the aspect of gratuity. Israel has committed ‘adultery’ and has broken the covenant; God should judge and repudiate her. It is precisely at this point that God is revealed to be God and not man: ‘How can I give you up, O Ephraim! How can I had you over, O Israel!... My heart recoils within me, my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger, I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst’ (Hos. 11, 8-9);” (Deus Charitas Est #9-10).
[9] Louis Evely, Ibid 126-128
[10] Gilges, “Manuscript” 45-46.

Elizabeth Nyanga Gilges as "Wound of Christ"

“Elizabeth Nyanga Gilges died on March 11, 2004 on my lap, cradled between Liz and me.

“She died quietly, peacefully. As she breathed her last few breaths, Liz said a Hail Mary and cried out, “Jesus come!’ I whispered in her small ear, ‘Elie, Go, beautiful. Go to God. Go.’ She took a half breath, shuddered once almost imperceptibly as if her body held very lightly now to her soul, took another half breath, and then she breathed no more.

“We bathed her, combed out her hair, dressed her in a blue Easter dress that Liz’s brother had bought for her, and placed her in the coffin which we as a family had make.

“It was built of ash, painted white with a black inlaid cross on the cover. The inside was lined with white satin. The children each placed tow hand prints in bright colors on the side of the coffin and wrote underneath in black marker, ‘I love you, Elie,’ and their name.

“In the morning, Liz’s mother and her sister bought a tiara made of yellow and blue flowers and we placed it on her forehead before the wake. Never have I seen anything more beautiful than her face in the dim twilight of her room.

“Requiem in Pace. Is Elie resting in peace? I guess I hope not. I hope that for the first time, a little girl who was never able to walk finally has the use of her legs and is running through fields filled with the yellow and blue flowers that adorned her pale brow as she lay in her coffin.

“That night Elie died, we tried to explain to our children again what death meant. They all listened solemnly. When we were done with our explanation, there were a few moments of quiet, then four year-old Hannah asked us: ‘Mom, can Elie do a cartwheel now?’”

“God Has Taken From Me…”

“No, God is not the one who takes. He is the Father, he gives. He loves us first. He is source of life and of joy. He enjoys gratifying us with his gifts. He only reveals himself to us through his blessings, and his glory is that we find his work good.

“He likes only to give. But by dint of gifts, he teaches us how to give. If God had done nothing but give, he would have given nothing of himself. God is gift, God is love. He does not reveal himself to him who only knows how to receive. But to him whom he cherishes most, to him to whom he wants to communicate himself completely, he gives the capacity of becoming a father, he gives the capacity of being gift in his turn. He wanted so much to communicate himself, to make himself known, that he invited us to share his most intimated joy: he gave us the taste for giving in order that we might know the taste of the joy of God.

“If God calls us to sacrifice, let us not force ourselves, let us not cut by ourselves the ties which hurt us so much. Let us open ourselves to God, let us let God fill us, let us let God become God in us. Let us remain before him in silence until, by dint of gift and love, he uplifts us to give and love in our turn.”[1]

For Elie’s Father

“Do you know what it is to be a Father?

“To be a Father is precisely to suffer; to become a father is to become vulnerable. As long as one is young, one is hard, selfish, protected. No doubt, one has terrible blues, emotions, melancholies, but one holds one’s own pretty well, one withdraws easily, one suffers only for oneself. Our compassion for others is gratuitous, generous, superfluous.

“But when one becomes a father, or a mother, one suddenly sees oneself as vulnerable, in the most sensitive part of one’s being; one is completely powerless to defend oneself, one is no longer free, one is tied up. To become a father is to experience an infinite dependency on an infinitely small, frail, being, dependent on us and therefore omnipotent over our heart. Oh, we really depend on people who depend on us! The strong person who loves a weak person has put his happiness at his mercy. He depends on him henceforth. He is without any defense against him. To love a person is inevitably to depend on him, to give him power over us. God loved us freely; God have us power over him. God wanted to have need of us. The passion is the revelation of our terrible power over God. He surrendered himself to us, we had him at our disposal, we did with him what we wanted. On a plaque in Normandy one can read this cruel sentence: ‘It is always the one who loves the least who is the strongest.’ It is always he who is least in love who gets his way with the other, who keeps a cool head and stays in control of the situation. God, in regard to us, will always be the weakest, for he loves. God can be denied, forgotten; he cannot deny us, forget us. We can be without God. God cannot be without men.[2] We can stop being sons; he cannot stop being a Father. ‘Man in revolt against God is like the bird in the storm which dashes itself against the cliff. But God, in his mercy, became flesh so that the violence of the impact might be endured by him and not by us.’ Thus, God will always be the weakest against us for he loves us. We are of Jacob’s race, we are the true Israel, he who fought against the angel all night and who deserved his name: ‘mighty against God.’”[3]

Aftermath

“One of Liz’s closest friends was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of mouth cancer this year. She is tall, young, and beautiful with a lovely, optimistic view of life, and she has three girls about the same age as our own children, including twins, which is how we met.

“After surgery, which removed much of her palette, and radiation that essentially burned her mouth and throat in the hopes of killing remaining cancer cells, Mary was in a lot of pain. She could not swallow, her mouth was always dry because her saliva glands were destroyed, the prosthesis which was constructed to replace her palette caused its own pain. Mary was on tube feeding and had lost nearly 20% of her weight because she could not handle any food. She was tired and spent much of every day lying in bed with no energy to move.

“Before the surgery, Mary had such a zest for life. After, there were times when she showed little interest in living. Her energy was gone. Her waking hours were dominated by lethargy and disinterest. She found little pleasure in anything.

“Liz was one of the people that took Mary to her radiation appointments at the hospital and, though Mary has a spirit that is irrepressible, each evening Liz would come home sad because one of her very best friends was enduring so much. I often heard Liz praying for Mary when she sat with Elie on her lap in the evenings, and Elie would d lie on Liz’s lap with here eyes wide open, smacking her lips together as she often did.

“The radiation treatments ended in February, but the pain in Mary’s mouth increased to the point that May had real difficulty taking out the prosthesis even to clean it as she was supposed to do twice a day. We were concerned that Mary had become so thin and that, if she were to ge sick with something as little as a cold or the flu, it could be fatal. Liz drove to Mary’s house a couple of times to help her with the tube feedings since it was second nature to us, but could easily be scary for someone not used to it.

“And then Elie became ill, and the illness was diagnosed as a septic infection of her bowels, and we realized with a jolt that Elie would only be with us for a few days. Our time and care was taken with Elie’s final hours and making her comfortable until her death, which happened on a Thursday.

“After the Saturday funeral and most of our family had left to return home, Mary called Liz. They talked for a long time about a range of things. After they hung up, Liz found me in the living room, reading a book. She was smiling and her eyes were filled with tears.

‘You’re not going to believe this,’ she said.

I put down my book as Liz spoke. ‘Mary began eating food yesterday evening… by mouth. She ate a full meal. The pain in her mouth is completely gone. Liz beamed radiantly at me.

‘Completely gone? I asked.

‘Completely.’

‘That’s great,’ I said.

Liz stared at me. ‘It’s Ellie,’ Liz said…”[4]

Experience Christ Suffering in the Wounds of His Mystical Body

“There is at this moment, in the world, at the back of some forsaken church, or even in an ordinary house, or at the turning of a deserted path, a poor man who joins his hands and from the depth of his misery, without very well knowing what he is saying, or without saying anything, thanks the good Lord for having made him free, for having made him capable of loving. There is somewhere else, I do not know where, a mother who hides her face for the last time in the follow of a little breast which well beat no more, a mother next to her dead child who offers to God the groan of an exhausted resignation, as if the Voice which has thrown the suns into space as a hand throws grain, the Voice which makes the worlds tremble, had just murmured gently into her ear, ‘Pardon me. One day you will know, you will understand, you will give me thanks. But now, what I am looking for from you is your pardon. Pardon.’ These – this harassed woman, this pr man – are at the heart of the mystery, at the heart of the universal creation and in the very secret of God. What can I say of it? Language is at the service of the intelligence. And what these people have understood, they have understood by a faculty superior to the intelligence although not in the least in contradiction with it – or rather, by a profound and irresistible movement of the soul which engaged all the faculties at once, which engaged to the depth their entire nature… Yes, at the moment that this man, this woman, accepted their destiny, accepted themselves, humbly – the mystery of the creation was being accomplished in them. While they were thus, without knowing it, running the entire risk of their human conduct, becoming themselves, according to the words of St. Paul, other Christs. In short, they were saints (Georges Bernanos).[5]

Benedict XVI on the Meaning of the Human Body

Recall that after the Resurrection, Christ appeared in the upper room saying to the eleven: “Feel me and see; for a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have” (Luke 24, 39). Notice that it is the divine “I” that is calling to be felt and seen through the body. Benedict says: “the body is not just ‘there,’ having a merely external relationship to the sprit; rather, the body is the self-expression and ‘image’ of the spirit. In the human being, what constitutes biological life also constitutes the person. The person actualizes itself in the body and the body is, therefore, its expression. In the body we may see what is invisible as spirit. Because the body is the person become visible, and the person is an image of God, the body, taken in its full network of relationships, is also the space where the divine becomes imaged, expressed, seen. This is why, from the very beginning, the Bible portrays the mystery of God in images of the body and of the world that is ordered to that body. In so doing, the Bible is not creating external images for God; rather, if it can use corporeal things as images and if it can talk about God in parables, it is because these things truly are images. Thus, by the use of such analogous language the Bible does not alienate the corporeal world but rather names the most real thing about that world, the core of what it is. By interpreting the world as a storehouse of images for the story of God with man, the Bible points to the world’s true nature and makes God visible in that place where he really expresses himself.”

Benedict goes on: “The Incarnation is founded on the fact that God in his paradoxical love, transcends himself and assumes flesh and thus enters the very passion of being human. But in this self-transcendence of God what really comes to the forefront is, contrariwise, that interior self-transcendence of the whole creation which the Creator had woven into its very fabric: the body is a movement of self-transcendence that tends to spirit, and spirit is a movement of self-transcendence that tends to God. Seeing the invisible in the visible is a paschal event, and the encyclical.

Benedict then rounds to his point: “Here, the doubting Thomas, who needs to see and to touch in order to believe, puts his hand into the Lord’s open side, and, as he touches it, he recognizes the Untouchable while nevertheless touching it, and he sees the Invisible while nevertheless really seeing it: ‘My Lord and my God!’ (Jn. 20, 28). The encyclical (Haurietis aquas) illustrates this with the wonderful passage from St. Bonaventure’s Mystical Vine which remains one of the classical statements of devotion to the Sacred Heart: ‘The wound of the body thus points to the spiritual wound… Let us, through the visible wound, gaze at love’s invisible wound!’"[6]

[1] Louis Evely, “Suffering” Herder and Herder.
[2] This refers to God’s Erotic Love that is one with His Agape. See Benedict XVI’s “Deus Caritas Est,” #9-11. God’s Love not only gives Self but desires (spousally) to receive free love from created human persons.
[3] Louis Evely, “Suffering” op. cit.
[4] Kent Gilges, “The Gift of Life,” Unpublished Manuscript.
[5] Louis Evely, “Suffering” Herder and Herder (1971)
[6] J. Ratzinger, “Paschal Mystery as Core and Foundation of Devotion to the Sacred Heart,” Towards a Civilization of Love Ignatius (1985) 148.