Class April 16, 2014
GRACE
CCC:
Man
355 "God created man in his own image, in the image of God
he created him, male and female he created them." 218 Man occupies a unique place in creation:
(I) he is "in the image of God"; (II) in his own nature he unites the
spiritual and material worlds; (III) he is created "male and female";
(IV) God established him in his friendship.
I. "IN THE
IMAGE OF GOD"
356 Of all visible
creatures only man is "able to know and love his creator". 219 He is "the only creature on earth that
God has willed for its own sake", 220 (Gaudium et spes #24, 3) and he alone is called to share, by knowledge and love, in
God's own life (Me: that is personal Life: Trinitarian relation).
It was for this end that he was created, and this is the fundamental reason for
his dignity:
“What made you
establish man in so great a dignity? Certainly the incalculable love by which
you have looked on your creature in yourself! You are taken with love for her;
for by love indeed you created her, by love you have given her a being capable
of tasting your eternal Good.” 221 (St.
Catherine of Siena: Dialogue 4).
357 Being
in the image of God the human individual possesses the dignity of a person, who
is not just something, but someone. He is capable of self-knowledge, of
self-possession and of freely giving himself and entering into communion with
other persons. And he is called by grace to a covenant with his Creator, to
offer him a response of faith and love that no other creature can give in his
stead. (Me: This is Christian anthropology taken from a the divine
transcendent and uncreated reality of God Himself as Trinity: therefore,
personal and relational. This anthropology is Gaudium
et spes #24: “God, the only earthly being God has willed for itself, finds
itself by the sincere gift of itself”).
358 God created
everything for man, 222 (Gaudium et spes #12. 1; 24, 3; 39,
1) but man in turn
was created to serve and love God and to offer all creation back to him:
What is it that is
about to be created, that enjoys such honour? It is man that great and
wonderful living creature, more precious in the eyes of God than all other
creatures! For him the heavens and the earth, the sea and all the rest of
creation exist. God attached so much importance to his salvation that he did
not spare his own Son for the sake of man. Nor does he ever cease to work,
trying every possible means, until he has raised man up to himself and made him
sit at his right hand. 223 (
St. John Chrysostom, In Gen. Sermo II, 1).
359 "In
reality it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of
man truly becomes clear." 224 (GS #22). [Me: Hence, man is not “nature” or even a
“rational nature,” nor an “individual substance of a rational nature.” Man is a
person for whom the entire universe exists. Man is the goal of the universe. And
the meaning and goal of man is Christ. And Christ is God].
“St. Paul tells us
that the human race takes its origin from two men: Adam and Christ. . . The
first man, Adam, he says, became a living soul, the last Adam a life-giving
spirit. The first Adam was made by the last Adam, from whom he also received his
soul, to give him life... The second Adam stamped his image on the first Adam
when he created him. That is why he took on himself the role and the name of
the first Adam, in order that he might not lose what he had made in his own
image. The first Adam, the last Adam: the first had a beginning, the last knows
no end. The last Adam is indeed the first; as he himself says: ‘I am the first
and the last.’” 225 (St.
Peter Chrysologus Sermo 117). [Me:
Consider how the Fathers of the Church saw Christ as pre-existing the creation
of the world.”]
360 Because of its common origin the human race forms a
unity, for "from one ancestor [God] made all nations to inhabit the
whole earth": 226
O wondrous vision,
which makes us contemplate the human race in the unity of its origin in God. .
. in the unity of its nature, composed equally in all men of a material body
and a spiritual soul; in the unity of its immediate end and its mission in the
world; in the unity of its dwelling, the earth, whose benefits all men, by right
of nature, may use to sustain and develop life; in the unity of its
supernatural end: God himself, to whom all ought to tend; in the unity of the
means for attaining this end;. . . in the unity of the redemption wrought by
Christ for all. 227(Pius XII, Summi Pontificatus, 3.).
361 "This law of
human solidarity and charity", 228 without
excluding the rich variety of persons, cultures and peoples, assures us that
all men are truly brethren.
II. "BODY AND SOUL BUT TRULY ONE"
362 The human person, created in the image of
God, is a being at once corporeal and
spiritual. The biblical account expresses this reality in symbolic language
when it affirms that "then the LORD God formed man of dust from the
ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a
living being." 229 Man,
whole and entire, is therefore willed by God. [See now in #363, that the entirety of man,
spirit and matter, is person imaging the divine
Persons, and therefore having the dynamic of the divine Persons as relations to
each other. Hence, we see that man is not “soul” but person who is not
reducible to spirit or animal. This vision was not achieved in Greek
philosophy].
363 In Sacred Scripture the term
"soul" often refers to human life or the entire human person. 230 But
"soul" also refers to the innermost aspect of man, that which is of
greatest value in him, 231 that
by which he is most especially in God's image: "soul" signifies
the spiritual principle in man.
364 The human body shares in the dignity of
"the image of God": it is a human body precisely because it is
animated by a spiritual soul, and it is the whole human person that is intended
to become, in the body of Christ, a temple of the Spirit: 232
Man, though made of body and soul, is a unity. Through his very
bodily condition he sums up in himself the elements of the material world.
Through him they are thus brought to their highest perfection and can raise
their voice in praise freely given to the Creator. For this reason man may not
despise his bodily life. Rather he is obliged to regard his body as good and to
hold it in honour since God has created it and will raise it up on the last
day. 233
365 The unity of soul and body is so profound
that one has to consider the soul to be the "form" of the body: 234 i.e., it is because of its spiritual
soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and
matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a
single nature.
366 The Church teaches that every spiritual soul
is created immediately by God - it is not "produced" by the parents -
and also that it is immortal: it does not perish when it separates from the
body at death, and it will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection. 235
367 Sometimes the soul is distinguished from
the spirit: St. Paul for instance prays that God may sanctify his people
"wholly", with "spirit and soul and body" kept sound and
blameless at the Lord's coming. 236 The Church teaches that this distinction
does not introduce a duality into the soul. 237 "Spirit"
signifies that from creation man is ordered to a supernatural end and that his
soul can gratuitously be raised beyond all it deserves to communion with God. 238
368 The spiritual tradition of the Church also
emphasizes the heart, in the biblical sense of the depths of one's
being, where the person decides for or against God.239
III. "MALE AND FEMALE HE CREATED
THEM"
Equality and difference willed by God
369 Man and woman have been created, which is to say, willed by God: on the one hand,
in perfect equality as human persons; on the other, in their respective beings
as man and woman. "Being man" or "being woman" is a reality
which is good and willed by God: man and woman possess an inalienable dignity
which comes to them immediately from God their Creator. 240 Man and woman are both with one and the
same dignity "in the image of God". In their "being-man"
and "being-woman", they reflect the Creator's wisdom and goodness.
370 In no way is God in man's image.[1] He is neither man nor
woman. God is pure spirit in which there is no place for the difference
between the sexes. But the respective "perfections" of man and woman
reflect something of the infinite perfection of God: those of a mother and
those of a father and husband. 241
[Me: But, while is it true that “God is pure
spirit.” Do no forget that Christ, Who is a divine Person, is eternally Man and
therefore will “always” be Man (with His Body). Matter and body do not lessen
the divinity since its characteristic is relation and giftedness as
spirit/matter. The same applies to us: divinization does not involve
immaterialization, but giftedness to other.
How can we know this? Revelation: “Feel me and see that a spirit does not have flesh and bones
as you see I have” (Lk. 24, 24)].
"Each for the other" - "A unity
in two"
371 God created man and woman together and willed each for the other. The
Word of God gives us to understand this through various features of the sacred
text. "It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a
helper fit for him." 242 None of the animals can be man's
partner. 243 [Me: Because none of them was person (“I”).
None
could make or receive the gift of self to image God Three-in-Oneness].The
woman God "fashions" from the man's rib and brings to him elicits on
the man's part a cry of wonder, an exclamation of love and communion: "This
at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh." 244 Man discovers woman as another
"I", sharing the same humanity.
372 Man and woman were made "for each
other" - not that God left them half-made and incomplete: he created them
to be a communion of persons [Me:
That is, Each cannot be Who He is without the Other. We will see that each one
is “grace” for the other], in which each can be "helpmate" to the
other, for they are equal as persons ("bone of my bones. . .") and
complementary as masculine and feminine [Me: That is, they are constitutively
relational: “for”]. [2]
In marriage God unites them in such a way that, by forming "one
flesh", 245 they can transmit human life: "Be
fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth." 246 By transmitting human life to their
descendants, man and woman as spouses and parents co-operate in a unique way in
the Creator's work. 247
373 In God's plan man and woman have the
vocation of "subduing" the earth 248as stewards of God. This sovereignty is not to
be an arbitrary and destructive domination. God calls man and woman, made in
the image of the Creator "who loves everything that exists", 249 to share in his providence toward other
creatures; hence their responsibility for the world God has entrusted to them.
IV. MAN IN PARADISE
374 The first man was not only created good, but
was also established in friendship with his Creator and in harmony with himself
and with the creation around him, in a state that would be surpassed only by
the glory of the new creation in Christ.[3]
375 The
Church, interpreting the symbolism of biblical language in an authentic way, in
the light of the New Testament and Tradition, teaches that our first parents,
Adam and Eve, were constituted in an original "state of holiness and
justice". 250 This
grace of original holiness was "to share in. . .divine life". 251
Lumen Gentium #2: “The eternal Father…chose to raise up men to
share in his own divine life; and when they had fallen in Adam, he did
not abandon them, but at all times held out to them the means of salvation,
bestowed in consideration of Christ, the Redeemer, ‘who is the iamge of the
invisible God, the firstborn of every creature’ and predestined before time
began ‘to become conformed to the image of his Son, that they should be the
firstborn among many brethren (Rom 8, 29).”
Council of Trent (1546): “If anyone does not
confess that the first man Adam, when he had transgressed the commandment of
God in Paradise, immediately lost his holiness and the justice in which he
had been established, and that he incurred through the offense of that
prevarication the wrath and indignation of God and hence the death with which
God had previously threatened him, and with death captivity under his power,
who thenceforth ‘had the empire of death’ (Heb. 2, 14) that is of the devil,
and that through that offense of prevarication the entire Adam was transformed
in body and soul for the worse, let him be anathema.”
376 By the radiance of this grace all
dimensions of man's life were confirmed. As long as he remained in the divine
intimacy, man would not have to suffer or die.252 The inner harmony of the human person,
the harmony between man and woman, 253 and finally the harmony between the
first couple and all creation, comprised the state called "original
justice".
377 The "mastery" over the world
that God offered man from the beginning was realized above all within man
himself: mastery of self. The first man was unimpaired and
ordered in his whole being because he was free from the triple concupiscence 254 that subjugates him to the pleasures of
the senses, covetousness for earthly goods, and self-assertion, contrary to the
dictates of reason.
378 The sign of man's familiarity with God is that
God places him in the garden.255 There he lives "to till it and keep
it". Work is not yet a burden, 256 but rather the collaboration of man and
woman with God in perfecting the visible creation.
379 This
entire harmony of original justice, foreseen for man in God's plan, will be
lost by the sin of our first parents.
380 "Father,. . . you formed man in your
own likeness and set him over the whole world to serve you, his creator, and to
rule over all creatures" (Roman Missal, EP IV, 118).
381 Man
is predestined to reproduce the image of God's Son made man, the "image of
the invisible God" (Col 1:15), so that Christ shall be the
first-born of a multitude of brothers and sisters (cf. Eph 1:3-6; Rom 8:29).
382 "Man, though made of body and soul,
is a unity" (GS 14 # 1). The doctrine of the faith affirms
that the spiritual and immortal soul is created immediately by God.
383 "God did not create man a solitary
being. From the beginning, "male and female he created them" (Gen 1:27).
This partnership of man and woman constitutes the first form of communion
between persons" (GS 12 # 4).
384 Revelation makes known to us the state of
original holiness and justice of man and woman before sin: from their
friendship with God flowed the happiness of their existence in paradise.
CCC:
1996
Our justification comes from the grace of God. Grace is favor, the free
and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become
children of God, adoptive sons, partakers of the divine nature and of eternal
life. 46
1997 Grace is a participation in the life of God. It introduces us into the
intimacy of Trinitarian life: by Baptism the Christian participates in the
grace of Christ, the Head of his Body. As an "adopted son" he can
henceforth call God "Father," in union with the only Son. He receives
the life of the Spirit who breathes charity into him and who forms the Church.
Where
can we find revelation of the meaning of grace?
Joseph Ratzinger:[4]
Our Lady. That is, since it is revealed that Our Lady is “full of grace,” she
becomes the this-worldly revelation of what it does, and therefore what it is.
The
Archangel Gabriel announces: “Rejoice, full of grace. The Lord is with you”
(Lk. 1, 28). “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 ti concrete in two ways. What in the prophecy is said to
daughter Zion is not 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 identifies with Yahweh,
the living God. When Jesus comes, it is God himself who comes to dwell in her.
He is the Savior – this is the meaning of the name Jesus, which thus becomes
clear from the heart of the promise…. 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 and incredibly realistic force: God in the flesh of a human being, which flesh now
becomes his dwelling place in the midst
of creation….
“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 ure 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 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….
“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 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 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….”
(Continuing Ratzinger): “The Greek word for
grace (charis) derives from the same
root as the words joy and rejoice (chara,
charein). Thus, we see once more in a different form the same context to
which we were led by our earlier comparison with the Old Testament. Joy comes
from grace. One who is in the state of grace can rejoice with deep-going,
constant joy. By the same token, grace is joy.” But again, what is grace? It is not “a thing.” Thus Ratzinger:
“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, 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.’ Peter Lombard, the
author of what was the universal theological manual for approximately three
centuries during the Middle Ages, propounded the thesis that grace and love are
identical but that love ‘is the Holy Spirit.’ 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.
“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 tha the infinite distance between Creator and creature is
not blurred in the relation of the human I to the divine Thou. It means that
the 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 but 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?”[5]
[1]
The background of this assertion is the mind of Feuerbach that God is a
creation of man made in our image and likeness: Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), “Essence
of Christianity: God the Image of Man. Man's Dependence
upon Nature the Last and Only Source of Religion" (1841).
“The
root of man’s joy is the harmony he enjoys with himself. He lives in this
affirmation. And only one who can accept himself can also accept the thou, can
accept the world. The reason why an individual cannot accept the thou, cannot
come to terms with him, is that he does not like his own I and, for that
reason, cannot accept a thou.
“Something strange happens here.
We have seen that the inability to accept one’s I leads to the inability to
accept a thou. But how does one go about affirming, assenting to, one’s I? The
answer may perhaps be unexpected: We cannot do so by our own efforts alone. Of
ourselves, we cannot come to terms with ourselves. Our I becomes acceptable to
us only if it has first become acceptable to another I. We can love ourselves
only if we have first been loved by someone else. The life a mother gives to
her child is not just physical life; she gives total life when she takes the
child’s tears and turns them into smiles. It is only when life has been
accepted and is perceived as accepted that it becomes also acceptable. Man is
that strange creature that needs not just physical birth but also appreciation
if he is to subsist. This is the root of the phenomenon known as hospitalism.
When the initial harmony of our existence has been rejected, when that
psycho-physical oneness has been ruptured by which the ‘Yes, it is good that
you are alive’ sinks, with life itself, deep into the core of the unconscious – then birth itself
is interrupted; existence itself is not completely established…. If an
individual is to accept himself, someone must say to him: ‘It is good that you
exist’ – must say it, not with words, but with that act of the entire being
that we call love. For it is the way of love to will the other’s existence and,
at the same time, to bring that existence forth again. The key to the I lies
with the thou; the way to the thou leads through the I.”
[3] In
“Faith Seeking Understanding” page 343, the topic is presented of “Humanity’s
Elevation to the Supernatural Order.” The language suggests that there are two
vertical orders (elevation), the natural as the ground floor and grace as an
upper floor. This is ambiguous in the light of the very first question of CCC,
#27 that states: “The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man
is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself.” We
have seen that by the revelation that the human person has been created in the
image and likeness of the divine Persons, that, as They are relational, so also
will man’s being as image tend to be relational. But the human person will not
be able to master himself, take position of himself and raise himself to the
act of making the gift of himself without being engendered by the further Love
of God that will give him an identity and make him capable of exercising his
freedom. And this because the Person of Christ Who is the prototype of man, is
revealed to be engendered by the Father as constitutive of His Person. The
Son’s actuality as Person is the Father’s identity as the act engendering the
Son. The Son is always being love by the Father. The Father is that very act. And
so, in the case of a created person, it is not enough to be created by God as
person. There must be a further creation that loves the created and therefore
finite person into his free act. This further creation is grace.
It is also human love. Consider
Joseph Pieper here: “Obviously, then, it does not suffice us simply to exist;
we can do that ‘anyhow.’ What matters to us, beyond mere existence, is the
explicit confirmation: It is good that
you exist; how wonderful that you are! In other words, what we need over and
above sheer existence is: to be loved by another person. That is an astonishing
fact when we consider it closely. Being created by God actually does not
suffice, it would seem; the fact of creation needs continuation and perfection
ty the creative power of human love;” (“An Anthology” Ignatius [198]) 30).
In sum,
when speaking about man as “person,” there are not two tiered orders, but
rather one. And if the meaning of divine Person – the “supernatural” - is
self-transcending giftedness to the Other and others, then the human person
achieves the reality of the “supernatural,” not by being taken up into a
different order, but by actually transcending himself as gift in actual imaging
of the divine Person of the Son.
Put simply, Ratzinger presents the season of Advent as the “already” –
“not yet.” That is, one is already Christ by creation as image and likeness,
but only by Baptism (the sacrament of “sanctifying grace) which empowers one to
live the faith to the act of dying, does one become “Ipse Christus.”
[4] J.
Ratzinger, “Credo for Today – What Christians Believe” Ignatius (2009) 59-61.
[5] J.
Ratzinger, “Credo for Today – What Christians Believe” Ignatius (2009) 61.
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