It
is the “Kataphatic” (symbols and words: mediations of likeness between
the mind and reality) that keeps imposing the experience that reality is “thing-in-itself,”
as opposed to the experience of receptivity and love (tendency) which is the
experience of the deeper reality of the self. To explain freedom in terms of “thing-in-itself”
constrains one to think in terms of potency or indetermination toward choice.
Ratzinger's anthropological rendering of the "Son" as relation in the previous blog is the articulation of relational and non-substantialistic meaning of freedom.
And so, I would offer that freedom
is the exercise of determining the self in accord with “the inner ontological tendency
within man, who is created in the likeness of God, toward the divine.”[1]
Where does this tendency come from? It comes from the mimicking of the
Self-transcendence which is prototypical freedom. The Three Divine Persons are
not only free; They are Freedom itself. Then-Cardinal Ratzinger commented: “The
real God is bound to himself in threefold love and is thus pure freedom.”[2] Freedom means
to become fully who one is. God the Father is fully Himself as Father by being
the act of engendering the Son. He is not Father, and then engenders the Son.
He is the very act of relating. He is not substance who “then” engenders the
Son, thus becoming Father. His totality of Being as Father and Person is the
“relating.” And this, of course, is what true freedom means in us as images. To
be free will mean to be fully who one is and is supposed to be.
To be as act of
relation constitutively, of course, sounds unthinkable – precisely because
it is our way of thinking that we
impose on the revelation. And it is because we think by the mediation of
abstract concepts – “kataphatically,” i.e.
by the mediation of symbols and words - that we insist that there must be a
substance in which relation is grounded as an accident. But the God of
revelation is not the God of the philosophers. Ratzinger remarked that “The
Fathers [of the Church], who started from the assumption of this harmony
between philosophy and biblical revelation, realized that the one God of the
Bible could be affirmed, in his identity, through two predicates: creation and
revelation, creation and redemption. But these are both relational terms. Thus
the God of the Bible is a God-in-relationship; and to that extent, in the
essence of his identity, he is opposed to the self-enclosed God of philosophy.”[3]
After the likes of the “Da Vinci Code”
we are aware of the tension that preceded the Council of Nicea, and continues
today. To say that the man Jesus of Nazareth is the divine Person, Logos,
Absolute God, Creator and Lord of all reality, and that He is such in that He
is equal to the Father in Godhead but dissimilar as Person-Son engendered from
all eternity – explodes the meaning of “Being” substance-in-itself that was
received from Greek metaphysics. That is, how can a being be one with another
yet be irreducibly different. “Being” for Aristotle and Plato – perhaps they
themselves are a decline from the higher metaphysics of the 5th
and 6th centuries of Anaximander, Parmenides, Heraclitus, etc. as
suggested by Heidegger[4]
– meant precisely to be an individual “substance” or the “One,” but not a
relation.
For Heidegger, there is a
“concealment of Being” (discovered in the experience of the self) by sensible
perception (of “things”) and concepts (judgements of “fact”). That done, there
is λήθη
which is forgetfulness (the river
of Homer
(To see that the prototypical meaning of “being”
is “person” as in revelation does not created a philosophy that we call
“personalism.” It is simply to see that what we mean by “being” in its first
instance is person).
Contrarily, “Being” for the Fathers of the Church meant “relation.”
Ratzinger says, “as a result of this struggle, 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.” Notice that the analogy between God and man is
not “being” but person. He
goes on: “The meaning of 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. In
this context, covenant would be the response to man’s imaging of God; it would
show us who we are and who God is.”[6]
Ratzinger goes further when he directly
says that the revealed concept of person “was quite foreign in its inner disposition
to the Greek and Latin mind. It is not conceived in substantialist, but… in
existential terms. 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 individua 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 Greeks mind which thinks
in substantialist terms.”[7]
To sum up: since the prototypical
meaning of Being in Christian faith-experience is person-in-relation, and
freedom takes its meaning from Being, then one “becomes” free to the extent
that he/she enters the relationality of self-gift. The more one gives self, the
freer one is. Hence, “If you abide in my work, you will be my
disciple indeed; you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free”
(Jn. 8, 32); and “The Crucified Christ reveals the authentic meaning of freedom; he
lives it fully in the total gift of himself and calls his disciples to share in his freedom;” (VS #85).
[1] J.
Ratzinger, “Conscience and Truth,” Proceedings of the Tenth Bishops’ Workshop, Dallas , Texas
[2] J.
Ratzinger, “Freedom and Liberation, The Anthropological Vision of the 1986
Instruction Libertatis Conscientia,” Church, Ecumenism and Politics
Crossroad (1988) 274.
[3] J.
Ratzinger, “Many Religions – One Covenant,” Ignatius (1999) 75-76.
[4] Martin
Heidegger, “Early Greek Thinking, The Dawn of Western Philosophy,” Harper
Collins (1975- 1984)
[5] Mel
Gibson wrote: “There is a classical Greek word which best defines what `truth’
guided my work, and that of everyone else involved in the project: Aletheia. It simply means `unforgetting’
(derived from lethe – water from
Homer’s River Lethe cased forgetfulness). It has unfortunately become part of
the ritual of our modern secular existence to forget. The film, in this sense,
is not meant as a historical documentary or does it claim to have assembled all
the facts. But it does enumerate those described in relevant Holy Scripture. It
is not merely representative or merely expressive. I think of as contemplative
in the sense that one is compelled to remember (unforget) in a spiritual way
which cannot be articulated, only experienced;” The Passion, Tyndale
(2004) Foreword.
[6] Ibid
76-77.
[7] J.
Ratzinger, “Concerning the Notion Parson in Theology,” Communio 17
(Fall, 1990) 448.
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