On Evangelii Gaudium
For those of you are
sensitive to the epistemology, and have spent some time with the person as
relation over the years, what Pope Francis is doing is living out the “New
Evangelization” in front of our eyes as person-in-relation, and, in Evangelii
Gaudium, pointing to the failure to move the entire ecclesial and global
culture from “nature” to person. In EG, he is outing American and global
economics as built on the reductive, positivist, materialist calculus of supply
and demand where the work of the human person is split from the person and
treated as a commodity. At best we will have an ethic of material justice, but
the person is trashed, and relationality and gift as demanded by the real
metaphysics of the person is trashed. And sexuality, even in the pre Vatican II
mind, is nature with ends.
Let me explain. I first came to a
shocking awareness that the meaning of reality - of “Being” – was not this sensible thing that
I could take in my hand like a dollar bill or a neon sign, abstract from it,
form a concept, create a proposition and elaborate it into a syllogism, and
call it a “substance” (as in thing-in-itself). I was deeply prejudiced about
the realism of common sense and that the whole intellectual endeavor that
started with the senses and that gave me sensible things - clearly “this” and
“that” – and that were “in themselves.” Relation
was always something that took place between the “this” and the “that.”
Until I read Joseph Ratzinger’s “Introduction to Christianity”
on “The Concept of Person” as revealed in the Trinity. He made the straight
forward insistence that the Father was not the Father and then, in some derivative
sense, engendered the Son, but rather that the Father was the act of
engendering the Son. In a word, the Father was not a reality in
Himself as “substance” but what He really is, is relation. This was
followed by the assertion that here was concealed a revolution in the way the
world is to be viewed, and then the unmitigated assertion: “the undivided sway of thinking
in terms of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid
primordial mode of reality…. a new plane of being comes into view.”[1]
This is a hard sell in a secularized world culture dominated by
the empirical evidence that the real is the sensible “this” and “that,” and
that has been traditionally elaborated into the philosophic notion of substance
that grounds all relation but in itself is not relation. And in the Greek
culture that this epistemology was derived from, the substance and the nature
which are interchangeable, are what is real, and are the grounding and
explanation of the moral goodness of human acts.
Pat Deneen recently published an insightful piece[2] on the reaction of the public – particularly
the Catholic public – to Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation, “The Joy of the
Gospel.” In it he points to the discrepancy of
reaction in general when the Church speaks of sexual matter and when she speaks
on economy/political matters. Since the pope spoke little on matters sexual and
much and forcefully on matter economic, Deneen writes: “Not far below the surface of
many of these critiques one hears the following refrain: why can’t the Pope
just go back to talking about abortion? Why can’t we return to the good old
days of Pope John Paul II or Benedict XVI and talk 24/7/365 about sex? Why
doesn’t Francis have the decency to limit himself to talking about Jesus and gays,
while avoiding the rudeness of discussing economics in mixed company, an issue
about which he has no expertise or competence?”
Deneen goes on to explain: “These commentators all but come out
and say: we embrace Catholic teaching when it concerns itself with ‘faith and
moral’ – when it denounces abortion, opposes gay marriage, and urges personal
charity. This is the Catholicism that has been acceptable in polite
conversation. This is a stripped-down Catholicism that doesn’t challenge
fundamental articles of economic faith.”
But we must ask why the public embraces morality in terms of the
biological and the sexual, but not in the economic. I would venture to suggest
according to the Magisterium of John Paul II and Benedict XVI that work is the
action of persons, and only of persons since it is an action of subjects. More
important in the meaning of work is the development of the subject than the
object made (although the giftedness of the subject in the work process is the
very quality of the object made).
Consider that since the onset of
industrialization, work has been neutered and split from gender, and therefore
from the person. Ivan Illich writes:
“From afar, the
native can tell whether women or men are at work, even if he cannot distinguish
their figures. The time of year and day, the crop, and the tools reveal to him
who they are. Whether they carry a load on their head or shoulder will tell him
their gender. If he notices geese loose in the field, he knows a girl must be
nearby to tend them. If he comes across sheep, he knows he will find a boy.
To belong means to know what befits our kind
of man. If someone does what we consider the other gender’s
work, that person must be a stranger. Or a slave, deprived of all dignity.
Gender is in every step, in every gesture…”[3]
He continues: “What Bohr and
Heisenberg have done for the epistemology of physics has not yet been done for
the social sciences. That light fits the paradigms of both particle and wave,
that neither theory alone conveys its complex reality, and that no broader
framework allows us to grasp it more clearly are today everyman’s truths. But
that a similar approach is demanded for most social-science concepts is still
news for many.”[4]
I would argue that the separation of
work from gender is the separation of work from the person which leaves it “a
thing” or commodity subject to the mathematical and materialist calculus of
supply and demand to determine its “value.” That done and you have evaporated the moral criterion. Hence,
for a global society of imperfect persons, the correct narrative for those with
economic power is to maintain the status quo with a morality of sexuality and
to tip toe quietly by the absence of same in the political and economic.
Francis has disrupted
this state of affairs. He is saying that the “Thou shalt not kill” of
biological morality must be echoed as “Thou thalt not” “to an economy of
exclusion and inequali ty. Such en economy kills” (53). He dramatizes it saying
“it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person ldies of exposoure, but
it is news when the stock market loses two points” (53).
Conclusion: The moral criterion has moved from nature to person,
object to subject and must be applied fully in all dimensions of the human act.
Francis has caused great
disruption What occurs to me after listening to Fr. William Smith
of Brooklyn, is that the media is doing our job for us. They are bypassing this
whole epistemological problem, i.e., how to move from a nature based ethic to a
person based ethic semantically. They are doing it with pictures and headlines.
The Church proposed the human person in GS#24 as moral criterion for all things
sexual and economic. Both. The point made is that pope Francis is out of
himself and into others living mercy, and that is on the side of the poor. He
is cutting both ways because he is working with the human person as imaging
Christ the prototype. This was the message of Vatican II, but it could not
escape the gravitational pull of a reductive, objectified and abstractive way
of knowing.
The
effect that Francis is producing resonates in everybody. All buy it. And
it turns out to be the central message of Christianity. Again, see Pat Deneen
on this below. This week Francis is on the cover of Time as “Person of
the Year” and “The New Yorker” as pope in full regalia making snow angels in
the snow. Perfect. He is an icon of freedom liberated from himself and at the
service of the poor with heart. That is the message. Semantically, it has been
a nightmarish quagmire of verbiage trying to get this kind of giftedness across
from a reductive, objectivized conceptualism. But it is happening thanks to the
media. They do not really know what they are dealing with, but what they
see, they like. They know the pubic likes it. It fits with what has played
under the banner of political liberalism. And to the dismay of some, it turns
out to be the truth. The “liberal” has been popularly conceptualized as non-truth,
but as love for the other and being-in-relation, when turned into a metaphysics
of person imaging the Person of Christ, it is the “new evangelization”
that the Spirit is communicating through the person of this pope.
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