The theological
epistemology of today’s gospel Mk.
8, 27-35) – clarified by Lk 9, 18 that shows Simon praying with Jesus to the
Father - + the understanding that Christ is the cosmic center of
creation and holding it all together, gives a strong clue that the only way to know the sensible, material world as it really is undistorted, comes from prayer which
enables one to say: “You are the Christ,
the Son of the living God” (Mt. 16, 16). That is, how could I truly and adequately
know and understand a physical sensible world of which Christ is the center
holding it all together without knowing
Christ. I can know Christ only by prayer, and therefore I can know and
understand the world only. The clue is to go out of self praying in order to
know the material world as an extension of the humanity of Christ, i.e.
subject, and not merely as object. I believe this to be the burden of “Laudto
Si.”
Robert
Barron offers the epistemology of Newman and his Illative sense as the way in which people really come to know
reality, i.e. “not by knowledge of premises
and inferences upon them – this is not to live. It is very well a matter of liberal curiosity and of
philosophy to analyze our modes of thought: but let this come second, and when there
is leisure for it, and then our examinations will in many ways even be subservient
to action. But if we commence with scientific
knowledge and argumentative proof, or
lay any great stress upon it as the basis of personal Christianity, or attempt
to make man moral and religious by libraries and museums, let us in consistency
take chemists for our cooks, and mineralogists for masons.”[1]
I believe the burden of Laudato Si is to bring
the Church and humanity back to a mystical perspective of the world as created
and sustained by a Person
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