“(R)ather than experts in dire predictions,
dour judges bent on rooting out every threat and deviation, we should appear as
joyful messengers of challenging proposals, guardians of the goodness and
beauty which shine forth in a life of fidelity to the Gospel.”[2]
The
Epistemic Priority of Christ: The mind-boggling reality that God, the
Creator of all things, has become man. This is the truth that St. Anselm was
after, and Robert Sokolowski clarifies. Anselm had said that God was “that
than which nothing greater can be thought.” Sokolowski
writes: “Anselm’s argument works explicitly with the contrast between being in
the mind and being in reality. This contrast, the two ways of being that it
distinguishes, are themselves deserving of further thought. But besides this
explicit premise for his argument, there is another, an implicit premise, which
the argument requires but which is not expressed openly by Anselm in chapter
two [of the Proslogian]. This implicit premise also contains a contrast. It
might be formulated as the statement that:
(God
plus the world) is not greater than God alone;”[3]
The
point Sokolowski makes is that the being of God is so different from the world,
that His Being (reality) would not be more because the world exists, nor would It
be less if it did not. That is to say, the Being of God as Creator of all
things is so different from the being of all things that they are
incommensurable. That is not to say that they are not analogous insofar as they
are; but rather to say that the way that they are is epistemically different.
What
does that mean? That the Being of God is not part of the world
that we know by the experience of sensation, abstraction and rational thought. His humanity is, indeed, “part” of our world,
but His divine Person is not “part” but Creator of all of it. Nevertheless, His humanity was assumed by His
divine Person, and therefore, is it.
Being Creator of the world, and yet “in” it, He must be known – as incarnate
God in Jesus Christ - through the experience of ourselves as created images of
Himself and baptized into Him. We do this by transcending ourselves in the act
of faith as He is totally out of Himself as Son of the Father.
Romano Guardini says it thus: “The
person of Jesus is unprecedented and therefore measureable by no already
existing norm. Christian recognition consists of realizing that all things
really began with Jesus Christ; that he is his own norm – and therefore ours –
for he is Truth.
“Christ’s
effect upon the world can be compared with nothing in its history save its own
creation: ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth.’ What takes place in
Christ is of the same order as the original act of creation, though on a still
higher level. For the beginning of the new creation is as far superior to the
love which created the stars, plants, animals and men. That is what the words
mean: ‘I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and what will I but that it be
kindled’? (Lk. 12, 49). It is the fire of new becoming; not only ‘truth’ or
‘love,’ but the incandescence of new creation…. Down, down through terrible
destruction he descends, to the nadir of divine creation whence saved existence
can climb back into being…
Guardini
then points out that this will demand a new way of knowing: “Now
we understand what St. Paul meant with his ‘excelling knowledge of Jesus
Christ:’ the realization that this is who Christ is, the Descender. To make
this realization our own is the alpha and omega of our lives, for it is not
enough to know Jesus only as the Savior. With this supreme knowledge serious
religious life can begin, and we should strive for it with our whole strength
and earnestness, as a man strives to
reach his place in his profession; as a scientist wrestles with the answer to
his problem; as one labors at this life work or for the hand of someone loved
above all else.”[4]
And
then, in implicit reference to the spirit of Opus Dei: “Are these directives for
saints? No, for Christians. For you. How
long must I wait? God knows. He can give himself to you overnight, you can also
wait twenty years, but what are they in view of his advent? One day he will
come. Once in the stillness of profound composure you will know: that is
Christ! Not from a book or the word of someone else, but through him. He who is
creative love brings your intrinsic potentialities to life. Your ego at its
profoundest is he.”
This
is totally the charism St. Josemaria Escriva received experientially on October
2, 1928. And you will know Christ in the most profound intimacy with the most
radical realism because you will become Him, such that you will hear from the
Father: “You are my Son; you are Christ.” Escriva wrote: “When
God sent me those blows back in 1931, I didn’t understand them… The all at
once, in the midst of such great bitterness, came the words: ‘You are my son
(Ps. 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, the hand of God, of divine Wisdom, of the
All-Powerful. 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.”[5]
With
this in view, Pope Francis encourages “the fundamental role of the first
announcement or kerygma, which is the first proclamation that must ring out
over and over: “Jesus Christ loves you; he gave his life to save you; and now
he is living at your side every day to to enlighten, strengthen and free you.”
Since it is addressing the unique ontological reality of the God-Man, it is
“the principal proclamation, the one which we must hear again and again in
different ways, the one which we must announce one way or another throughout
the process of catechesis, at every level and moment.”[6] And as a result, “rather than experts in dire
predictions, dour judges bent on rooting out every threat and deviation, “we
should appear as joyful messengers of challenging proposals, guardians of the
goodness and beauty which shine forth in a life of fidelity to the Gospel.”[7]
Msgr
Robert Barron has written “The Priority of Christ – Toward a Postliberal
Catholicism.”[8]
The third part of the book is entitled “The Epistemic Priority of Jesus
Christ,” and his first chapter under that rubric is “The Scriptural Warrant.”
There he writes that “It is my conviction that we don’t read
Jesus through the lens of a predetermined epistemology, but rather that we
understand the nature of knowledge in general through the (narrative icons concerning
Jesus Christ).”[9]
“But
is this coherent? Do Christians know in a distinctive way? Are both the object
of their intellectual investigation and their manner of rational procedure
unique?”
I
skip to the point: Two texts: a) Accepting
St. Paul’s face to face experience of Christ led to his Colossians 1, 15: “(Jesus
is) the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For in him
were created all things in the heavens and on the earth, things visible and
things invisible… All things have been created through and unto him, and he is
before all creatures, and in him all things hold together.” Barron writes:
“Jesus is not only the one in whom things were created but also the one in whom
they presently exist and through whom they inhere in one another. And if we are
inclined to view the future as a dimension of creation untouched by Christ, we
are set straight: ‘Through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all
things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his
cross’(v. 20). Individuals, societies, cultures, animals, plants, planets and
the stars – all will be drawn into an eschatological harmony through him. Mind
you, Jesus is not merely the symbol of an intelligibility, coherence, and
reconciliation that can exist apart from
him; rather, he is the active and indispensable means by which these realities
come to be. This Jesus, in short, is the all-embracing, all-including, all
reconciling Lord of whatever is to be found in the dimensions of time and
space.
b)
The Prologue to the Gospel of St. John:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God; and the Word was
God… He was in the world, and the world was made through him… And the Word was
made flesh and dwelt among us… No one has at any time seen God. The
only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has revealed him.”
(1-18).
Barron writes [the same as Guardini]: “Now
what follows from these breathtaking descriptions is a centrally important
epistemic claim: that Jesus cannot be measured by a criterion outside of
himself or viewed from a perspective higher than himself.”[10]
That is, you cannot apply a metaphysic of “being” taken “from below” –
i.e. from the experience of the created world [except the created human person
going out of himself]. And this because there cannot be any created things
without the Creator. The Being of God and the being of things have two totally
different meanings save that they are (or can be). Barron writes: “He
cannot be understood as one object among many or surveyed blandly by a
disinterested observer. If such perspectives were possible, then he would not
be the all-grounding Word or the criterion than which no more final can be
thought. If we sought to know him in this way, we would not only come to
incorrect conclusions but also involve ourselves in a sort of operational
contradiction. To be consistent with these accounts, we must say that Jesus
determines not only what there is to be known (since he is the organizing
principle of finite being) but also how we are to know what is to known (since
the mind itself is a creature, made and determined through him).
“A
Christ-illumined mind in search of Christ-determined forms seems to be the epistemology
implicit in Colossians and the Johannine prologue. Further, as Bruce Marshall
has argued, this primacy implies that the narratives concerning Jesus must, for
Christians, be an epistemic trump, that is to say, an articulation of reality
that must hold sway over and against all rival articulations, be they
scientific, psychological, sociological, philosophical, or religious. To hold
to Colossians and the prologue to John is to have a clear negative criterion
concerning all claims to ultimate truth: whatever runs contrary to the basic
claims entailed in the narratives concerning Jesus must certainly be false.”[11]
Keep
the Chalcedon-Constantinople III Christology in mind. There is only one
ontological Person in Christ, and He is God the Son, endowed with two natures.
All free actions performed by Christ, be they divine or human, are performed by
His Person. Both natures are ontologically distinct as uncreated and created,
but there is only one active principle: the Person. Therefore, every human act
of Christ is divine in time and space. This is what Barron means by “Jesus
cannot be measured by a criterion outside of himself or viewed from a
perspective higher than himself.”
Therefore, He is the meaning of
“Being.” And if his every human action derives from his divine Person, it will
have the characteristic of relation since He is nothing but Relation to the
Father. Therefore, we have to view all
the human from sex to doughnuts through the prism of Christ, divine and
human. This is a revolution.
The
unfathomable forgiveness revealed: How can we begin to understand the
magnitude of divine mercy unless we commit an unfathomable sin and be forgiven?
The unfathomable sin:
Deicide. Did Christ suffer as man, or as God-man? Ratzinger: “The suffering
Christ… was an unshakeable fact; but there is no such thing as a Passion
without the passions: suffering presupposes the ability to suffer, the
sensibility and its feeling faculty. In the patristic period it was Origen who
most profoundly grasped the theme of the suffering God, and who also most
straightforwardly declared that this theme cannot be reduced to the suffering
humanity of Jesus, but that it colors the Christian conception of God himself.
The fact that the Father allows the Son to suffer constitutes the Father’s own
Passion, and this is also the suffering of the Spirit, of whom Paul says that
he sighs in us and that, in us and for us, he bears the passion of our longing
for the fullness of redemption (Rom. 8, 26f). And it was also Origen, moreover,
who formulated the normative hermeneutic on the theme of the suffering God:
whenever you hear of God’s passions and sufferings, says Origen, you must
always relate these to his love. God is a sufferer only because he is first a
lover; the theme of the suffering God follows from the theme of the loving God
and continually points to it. The decisive step that the Christian concept of
God takes beyond that of the ancients is the realization that God is love.”
And so, God can be rejected and
suffer and not cease to be God as Greek “instrumental” reason saw it. They
under stood that one suffers only by a diminution in being, and therefore God,
within that metaphysic, would have to cease to be God to suffer. But if God is
Love as Self-gift, He suffers because He is not received.[12]
The Son of God dies, not because
they kill Him (Person), but because He wills to die. Death is an act of the
whole person. It is done to us; but it could not be done to Him (the
Author of life). He would have to execute the action of dying by His divine
Self.
John Henry Newman wrote: “He offered Himself wholly, a holocaust, a
whole burnt-offering; - as the whole of His body, stretched out upon the Cross,
so the whole of His soul, His whole advertence, His whole consciousness, a mind
awake, a sense acute, a living co-operation, a present, absolute intention, not
a virtual permission, not a heartless submission, this did He present to His
tormentors. His passion was an action; He lived most energetically, while He
lay languishing, fainting, and dying. Nor did He die, except by an act of the
will; for He bowed His head, in command as well in resignation, and said,
‘Father, into Thy hands I comend My Spirit;’ He gave the word, He surrendered
His soul, He did not love it.
“Thus
you see, my brethren, had our Lord only suffered in the body, and in ti not so
much as other men, still as regards the pain, He would have really suffered
indefinitely more, because pain is to be measured by the power of realizing it.
God was the sufferer; God suffered in His human nature; the sufferings belonged
to God, and were drunk up, were drained out to the bottom of the chalice,
because God drank them; not tasted or sipped, not flavored, disguised by human
medicaments, as man disposes of the cup of anguish.”[13]
Now,
in the light of the mental revolution that we must undergo to come to grips
with the reality of God in His own creation and living a human life in time and
space through a full humanity, we can begin to understand the unthinkable
horror of deicide and the return we received from it: Shalom: “Peace to you! It is I,
do not be afraid” (Lk. 24, 36).
Barron wrote: “According
to the standard interpretation of justice and the traditional theology, this
greatest of crimes would call for the greatest of retributions, but instead it
is met with nonviolence, compassion, shalom. This in turn shows us that
authentic justice is much different from what we had imagined and that God is
much stranger than we had thought. God’s love is such that it can swallow up, absorb,
and conquer even the most pointed resistance, and this becomes clear in the
manner in which the murdered God restores order to the broken circle of his
disciples. They (alone with many others) contributed to the killing of God, the
most egregious violation of justice imaginable, and God answers this injustice
with forgiving love. In light of this compassion that swallowed up the greatest
of sins, Paul could exclaim, ‘I am certain that neither death, nor life, nor
angels, nor rulers… neither height, nor depth, nor anything else in all
creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our
Lord’ (Rom. 8, 38-39). Human beings
committed the unsurpassable sin – not only turning from God but actively
opposing him, even to the point of putting him to death – and they were met with
forgiveness. The only conclusion is the one that Paul drew: that nothing is
powerful enough to turn back the relentlessness of the divine mercy.”[14]
Conclusion:
Revolutionaries!! Christ lives! “(R)ather than experts in dire predictions,
dour judges bent on rooting out every threat and deviation, we should appear as
joyful messengers of challenging proposals, guardians of the goodness and
beauty which shine forth in a life of fidelity to the Gospel.”[15]
The
goal is not morality, virtues, orthodoxy, a religious life, apostolate, heaven…,
all of which can be ways of looking for yourself. The goal is Christ, the
God-Man. And you find Him by exercising in the Bread and the Word.
[1]
Brazos Press (2007).
[2] Pope
Francis, Joy of the Gospel #168
[3]
Robert Sokolowski, The God of Faith and
rEason, UNDP (1982) 8.
[4]
Romano Guardini, The Lord Gateway
(2002) 357-358.
[5]
John F. Coverdale, “Uncommon Faith,” Scepter (2002) 93-94.
[6]
Pope Francis, The Joy of the Gospel, #163.
[7] Ibid
#168
[8] Brazon
Press (2007).
[9] Ibid.
133.
[10] Ibid
135.
[11] Ibid
[12]
J. Ratzinger, “Paschal Mystery as Core and Foundation of Devotion to the Sacred
Heart,” in Towards a Civilization of Love. Ignatius (1985) 154-155.
[13]
John Henry Newman, Discourse 16 to Mixed
Congregations: Mental Sufferings of Our
Lord in His Passion.
[14]
Barron, Ibid, 125.
[15]
Pope Francis, Joy of the Gospel #168
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