An
Unfinished Work in Progress
The
Universal Call To be Ipse Christus:
St.
Josemaria Escriva had two back to back audible experiences
(locutions)
in 1931: One was during Mass on August 7 when he heard the
words: "And
I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to
myself" and
"You
are my son (Psalm 2, 7), you are Christ."
With
regard to the first, Escriva commented years later that he
understood Christ saying those words "not
in the sense in which in which Scripture says them. I say
[them] to you in the sense that you are to raise me up in all
human activities, in the sense that all over the world there should
be Christians with a personal and most free dedication, that they be
other Christs."
With
regard to the second, he recounted later: “the
Lord was giving me those blows around the year 31, and I did not
understand. And suddently (de pronto), in the midst of that great
bitterness, these words: 'You are my Son (Psalm 2, 7), you are
Christ.' And I could only stammer: 'Abba,
Pater! Abba, Pater! Abba! Abba! Abba!' Now I see it with new light,
like a new discovery, just as one sees, after years have passed,
that hand of God, of divine Wisdom, of the All-Powerful One. You've
led me, Lord, to understand that to find the Cross is to find
happiness, joy. And I see the reason with greater clarity than ever:
to find the Cross is to identify oneself with Christ, to be Christ,
and therefore to be a son of God.”
These
two locutions with
reference to Christians as "other Christs" and to himself
"You are my Son, you are Christ," gave him the
consciousness to persistently repeat throughout his life that the
vocation of every man as image of God, and not just the Christian by
the sacrament of Baptism, is to be "no
ya alter
Christus,
sino ipse
Christus,
!el mismo Cristo!" (not
just another
Christ, but Christ
Himself)
Burkart
and Lopez add here that the novelty is not so much that Escriva
affirms that being created in the image of God, or being bapized
into Christ will bring about an identification with Christ Himself
(which is already deep in Christian Tradition), but that this
identification with Christ has an ontological character to it, and
it is accessible to all in ordinary secular life. It is new to say
that one can actually become Christ Himself by living out ordinary
life.
Let
it be clear that Escriva did not experience that he had
become like Christ,
that he wasimitating Christ,
that he was following Christ,
that he had identified
himself with
Christ, that he was sharing
with Christ, that
he belonged
to Christ,
that he was tending toward
the fullness of the humanity of Christ, or
even that he was another
Christ. Rather,
these two authors commented that: “he
saw and felt that to be a son of God was “to be Christ' and
therefore God the Father treated him as he treated Christ when
giving him these physical and moral pains: the cross. It was the
evident proof of his filiation, because as the Father had wanted the
passion and death of His incarnate Son for the redemption of men, so
those contradictions of his were the way to fulfill the mission
which He has given him to share in the redemptive work of Christ.
God the Father had not only treated him 'as Christ' but when
inviting him to embrace the cross, he said to him: 'you are Christ'
'you are my son.'”(?)
The
texts of our Father are unambiguous: “To
have the Cross is to be identified with Christ, it is to be Christ,
and therefore, to be a son of God.” In
the same meditation, our Father said: “There
is only one way to live on earth: to die with Christ in order to
rise with Him, until we may be able to say with the Apostle: 'It is
not I who live, but Christ who lives in me' (Gal 2, 20)” Burkhart
and Lopez comment: “St.
Josemaria understands that Gal. 2, 20 speaks of a presence of the
life of Christ in the Christian not only in an intentional sense (as
the known is in the one who knows, and the beloved in the one who
loves) butontologically” (my
underline). Removing any lingering ambiguity, our Father
writes” “Each
Christian is not simply alter
Christus;
another Christ,
but ipse
Christus:
Christ himself!”
What
Is Meant By Saying That One Becomes“Ipse Christus?”
It
is impossible to become Ipse Christus
as uncreated Person ontologically.
The Person of Jesus Christ is divine and therefore uncreated.
We are created.
Therefore, we are not to become uncreated.
But since the divine Person has assumed a complete human nature and
lived a divine life through a human nature, it is not contradictory
to consider the possibility of living a human life in a divine way
ontologically,
since it has been already done by Christ.
What
does that mean? The Council of Chalcedon (451) was considered by
Joseph Ratzinger to be the simplest and best statement of
Christology. He called it “the
boldest and most sublime simplification of the complex and
many-layered data of tradition to a single central fact that is the
basis of everything else: Son of God, possessed of the same nature
as God and of
the same nature as us...."
["one
and the same Christ only begotten Son our Lord, acknowledged in
two natures, without mingling, without change, indivisibly,
undividedly, the distinction of the natures nowhere removed on
account of the union but rather the peculiarity of each nature being
kept, and uniting in one person and substance, not divided or
separated into two persons, but one and the same son only begotten
God Word, Lord Jesus Christ..."]
Ratzinger went
on to say that " ... In
contrast to the many other approaches that have been attempted in
the course of history, Chalcedon interpreted Jesus theologically. I
regard this as the only interpretation that can do justice to the
whole range of tradition and sustain the full impact of the
phenomenon itself. All other interpretations become too narrow at
some point. Every other conception embraces only one part of the
reality and excludes another. Here and here alone does the whole of
the reality disclose itself.”
He
explains this by going on to say that “he
(Jesus) requires much more than the Church dares to require and that
his radical words call for radical decisions of the kind Anthony,
the Desert Father [the
progenitor of the “religious life”],
or Francis of Assisi made when they took the Gospel in a
fully literal way. If we do not accept the Gospel in this
manner, then we have already taken refuge in
casuistry, and we remain afflicted by a gnawing feeling of
uneasiness, by the knowledge that like the rich young man we have
turned away then we should have taken the Gospel at face
value”
There
is the constant referral by Escriva to his love for the canonical
religious who have been called to the consecrated life involving
leaving the world and taking vows of poverty, chastity and
obedience. Theirs is the radical call to be Christ Himself in this
way. But, that said, he testified: “We
are not religious. We bear no resemblance to religious nor is there
any authority on earth which could require us to be religious. Yet
in Opus Dei we venerated and love their religious state. I pray
every day that all venerable religious will continue to offer the
church the fruits of their virtues, their apostolic works, and their
holiness.”
But I add, that there is no greater holiness nor perfection of life
in principle in the consecrated life of separation from the world
and taking vows. The sacrament of Baptism suffices for
This
is what is new in
Escriva's proposal: the radical call to be "Christ
Himself"
in ordinary secular life by engaging in the ordinariness
of work and family life. And since the context is ordinary,
there is something extraordinary going on in the internal workings.
Ordinary also is the sacramental entre into
this radical life: Baptism as the "death event" of the
"exchange of the old subject for another. The 'I' ceases to be
an autonomous subject standing in itself. It is
snatched away from itself and fitted into a new subject.
The 'I' is not simply submerged but it must really
release its grip on itself in order then to receive itself anew
in and together with a greater 'I.'”
Contrary to the normal understanding, Baptism as the sacrament
of death to self (three drownings) is enough for radical
holiness.The "consecrated life with the characteristics of
stepping out of the secular world and the taking of the vows of
poverty, chastity and obedience, does not increase the radicality of
the call to holiness which is already there in the sacrament of
Baptism. What is radical in
Escriva's experience of the vocation to live Baptism is the
gift of self.
And what is new is
that it is foreveryone. The
novelty of the “Ipse Christus” is that it is the universal call
for everyone and that it is achievable in the secular world
through ordinary work.
This
is not explainable by any kind of anthropology "from
below." This can only be explained by a Christology, and in
particular, the Christology of Chalcedon and perfected by the
Council of Constantinople III.
Chalcedon (451):
As we saw above, Benedict XVI considers Chalcedon to be the most
ontologically complete in expressing the architecture of the
God-man: One divine Person, two
ontologically distinct natures ("nature" meaning principle
of operation):
created human nature and uncreated divine nature. But Chalcedon
offered the metaphysical Christology in abstraction. The dynamic of
the relation of the natures with and through the divine Person of
the Son of the Father was not confronted in Chalcedon. Chalcedon
worked within an abstract objectivity that left unexplained how the
divine and the human worked as one in Christ: concretely, how could
the human will of Christ be free without diminishing the
absoluteness of His divinity?
Constantinople
III:
introduced the dynamic of relation of the two natures in Christ thus
overcoming the impression of a static parallelism and
explaining how God brings salvation to man, not by
a juxtaposition of
the two natures but by a mutual indwelling of the divine Person
which he calls "compenetration." The nub of the
teaching of Constantinople III is that natures do not operate.
Persons do. The human will of Christ is not a nature that acts with
its own autonomy as human will. It is the human will of Jesus of
Nazareth of the soul of His body taken from the Virgin, all of which
has been assimilated by the Divine Person of the Son. The human will
of Christ does not will. The
Son wills with His human will.
And that will, laden with all the sin of all men of all time ("he
made Him to be sin who knew nothing of sin" [2 Cor. 5, 21]) is
the human will of the divine "I" of the Son Who willed
obedience to death in conformity to the Will of the Father. The
divine Will could not assimilate the evil; but the human created
will could. The divinization of the man, Jesus of Nazareth, is the
result of the "compenetration" of the divine Person
willing with His own human will - laden with all sin
- His relationality to the Father as Son . The operative and
decisive text of Constantinople III was Jn. 6, 38: "I
have come down from heaven not to do my [human] will, but the will
of Him Who sent Me."This
decisive exegesis of Jn. 6, 38 has given the Church the
Christological anthropology that is the very meaning of man. That
is, Scripturally, man has been understood to be made in the image
and likeness of God as Three Divine Persons, and concretely "sons
in the Son."Besides, "the
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ...chose us in him before the
foundation of the world [and] predestined... to be adopted through
Jesus Christ as his sons..." (eph.
1,4-5)
The
Explanation Takes Place on the Level of the Person as Subject:
The
vocation that Escriva received in 1928 found voice, as we saw above,
in the locution of 8/7/1931 took place in the first person
singular "And I, when I am lifted up from the earth...".
It was interpreted and interpreted as staying in the world,
working, becoming "other Christs" and confirmed two months
later that, indeed, by so doing, one becomes Ipse Christus: "You
are my son, you are Christ." But this takes place in the first
and second person.
Escriva had experienced
becoming Christ (and told so) in living out his vocation to found
Opus Dei in the arduous years of 1928 to 1931. They were years of
suffering (“the
Lord was giving me those blows around the year 31, and I did not
understand. And suddenly (de pronto), in the midst of that great
bitterness, these words: 'You are my Son (Psalm 2, 7), you are
Christ.'"). They
were years of his experience of mastering his will (his entire self
as a subject) in order to obey the vocation received on October 2,
1928. We can see the parallel here between the passion of Christ and
the founding of Opus Dei, and we can see how the subjective Council
of Constantinople III can be the theological account of Escriva
mastering his will to obey that divine command. The grace received
was a call to give his entire self to fulfill the divine Will.
Constantinople III, grounded on Jn. 6, 38: "I have come not to
do my own will, but the will of Him who sent me" (Jn. 6, 38)
gives us the theological prototype to understand the radicality of
total self-giving even to death. The subjectivity of "I"
and the call to self-mastery, self-gift asks for a phenomenological
anthropology to account for this.
The
Philosophical Account:
Wojtyla's
"The Personal Structure of Self -Determination" (Person
and Community [Lang)
[1993] 190-193). reads: "Self-determination takes place
through acts of will, through this central power of the human soul.
And yet self-determination is not identical with these act in any of
their forms, since it is a property of the person as such...
(S)elf-determination is a property of the person, who, as the
familiar definition says, is a naturae
rationalis individual substantia.
This property is realized through the will, which is an accident.
Self-determination -or, in other words, freedom - is not
limited to the accidental dimension, but belongs to the substantial
dimension of the person: it is the person's freedom, and not just
the will's freedom, although it is undeniably the person's freedom
through the will."
The
large development here, and germane to the topic of the "Ipse
Christus," is that self determination is not simply the subject
orienting itself to a value, or a good, but that "I
simultaneously determine myself as well." Wojtyla
goes on: "I
am not only the efficient cause of my acts, but through
them I am also in some sense the 'creator of myself (191).'"
Here
we have the ontological/phenomenological grounding of the meaning of
the "good," not simply as an abstract conclusion of
metaphysical/psychological reasoning, but as theexperience of
the self as imaging the divine Person of the Son, determining itself
along the lines of the dynamic of the Son toward the Father. And if
this very act of determining the self (affirmed by grace [Love]) is
radical in its generosity in response to the call, we have the
experience of being made in the image of the Prototype: Ipse
Christus.
The
root of the radicality - to
be Christ - is
to be found in the fact the gestalt of
the interplay of the divine and the human in Christ is a divine
Person who is nothing
but Relation to the Father.
That
totally transcendent Trinitarian modality can only be imaged by the
mystical (but world-immanent) experience of self-gift (mastering
self to get control and possession of self to make the gift).
Escriva experienced this to be the vocation to found Opus Dei, the
meaning of the vocation to Opus Dei, and the meaning of all baptized
and yet-to-be-baptized human existence. Man is called by the very
imaging of the divine Persons and the reality of the Incarnation of
God Himself in Jesus Christ, to be Christ Himself,and to be so by
living out the giving of himself.
Escriva
wrote prodigiously on this experience: "We really have to give
ourselves, my children. And that's something we're always in time to
do. We have to get off the omnibus and
travel the world without attachments, ready to be nothing and
to have nothing, for the love of Jesus Christ.
"Our
self-giving gives us a great feeling of peace and confidence. That
is why I usually say that Opus Dei, without the omnibus,
is a wonderful place to live and a wonderful place to die. We are
not afraid either of life or of death."
Does
one lose one's unique personality by submerging the "I" in
the larger "I"of Christ?
Since
the anthropology is self-determination, there are two things
happening in each internal act. The human "I" becomes more
and more determined as itself by the ongoing free choices made
according to conscience. One creates the human "I" more
and more in its individuality.
But,
as each of these choices is to transcend self "for"
another as gift in accordance with the ontological tendency that
images the very being of the Person of the Son as total self-gift to
the Father, the more I determine myself to be gift, the more I am
uniquely who I am humanly, and the more Christ I am. The respective
asymptotes of this development is the identity between Jesus as
Christ, as well as Escriva as Founder of Opus Dei.
The
Name: “Jesus Christ”
Various
perspectives converge confirm the identity of the founder of Opus
Dei with Christ Himself. The name Jesus Christ emerged in the
consciousness of the first Christian community because His very Self
was His activity. "Christ" is the name for the redemptive
act which was, as we have seen, the uncreated "I" of the
Son willing each human act in the secular minutiae of each day.
Escriva had written that "there is a divine
something in
the ordinary things of every day, and it is up to each one of us to
find it" (Passionately Loving the World). That "divine
something" is the self given totally to the Lord in the service
of the others. The "self-given" in any human, secular act
is a "divine something," it is being "Christ."
What
we are dealing here in this anthropology grounded in Christ's
priesthood, the action of the person is his very self as gift. That
is, your action is the very gift of your "I." Consider the
name "Jesus Christ." Jesus of Nazareth is Christ the
Redeemer, and the first Christians experienced this. He has come
down to us as "Jesus Christ." Ratzinger wrote: "It
can be shown that the Christian community at Rome, which formulated
our Creed, was still completely aware of the significance of the
word's content. The transformation into a mere proper name, which it
is for us today, was certainly completed at a very early period, but
here 'Christ' is still used as the definition of what this Jesus is.
The fusion with the name Jesus is well advanced.
Consider: It
is impossible to be the Son of God-become-man and not be redeemer of
man, and this for the same reason that we saw above in
Constantinople III. It is impossible for a divine Person to have a
human will without living out who He is as total self-gift to the
Father with that will. As Escriva
said it: "You
cannot separate the fact that Christ is God from his role as
redeemer."
In
the case of Jesus as Christ, Benedict XVI wrote that "with
Jesus it is not possible to distinguish office and person... The
person is the office, the office is the person.
The two are no longer divisible. Here there is no private area
reserved for an 'I' which remains in the background behind the deeds
and actions and thus at some time or other can be 'off duty;' here
there is no 'I' separate from the work; the 'I' is the
work and the work is the 'I'"
Alvaro
del Portillo made the same observation concerning Escriva: "all
those who knew Josemaria Escriva perceived that his person was
inseparable from the mission for which God had chosen him. Having
been able to form a particularly close and profound relationship
with him for 40 years reinforces in my memory this characteristic
dimension of his human and spiritual physiognomy. I have seen him,
so to speak,in his 'first act' as founder, that is to say,in the
daily and continuous building of Opus Dei, and as a consequence, of
the Church, as he affirmed not in vain that the Work exists solely
to serve the Church.
"(T)the identification of his very self with his
foundational activity implied that Mons. Escriva perfected himself
as a subject - up to the point of living the virtues to a heroic
degree...
