1. What is Opus Dei: Vocation and praxis to be “alter Christus,” “Ipse Christus.”
- August 7, 1931: Locution: “Et si exaltatus fuero a terra, omnia traham ad meipsum” (Ioann. 12, 32). “A voice, as always, perfect, clear:… And the precise concept: it is not in the sense in which Scripture says it; I say it to you in the sense that you put me at the summit of all human activities, so that in all the places of the world, there may be Christians with a personal and most free dedication, that they be other Christs.”
- October 16, 1931: Locution: “You are my son, you are Christ.” And I only knew how to repeat: Abba, Pater!, Abba, Pater! Abba!, Abba!, Abba!
To say “Abba” from within oneself, one must be “another Christ.” Joachim Jeremias says: “No Jew would have dared to address God in this manner. Jesus did it always, in all his prayers which are handed down to us, with one single exception, the cry from the cross: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ (Mark 15, 34; Matt. 27, 46); here the term of address for God was prescribed by the fact that Jesus was quoting Ps. 22, 1. Jesus thus spoke with God as a child speaks with his father, simply, intimately, securely. But his invocation of God as abba is not to be understood merely psychologically, as a step toward growing apprehension of God. Rather we learn from Matt. 11, 27 that Jesus himself viewed this form of address for God as the heart of that revelation which had been granted him by the Father. In this term Abba the ultimate mystery of his mission and his authority is expressed. He, to whom the Father had granted full knowledge of God, has the messianic prerogative of addressing him with the familiar address of a son. This term abba is an ipsissima vox of Jesus and contains in nuce his message and his claim to have been sent from the Father.
“The final point, and the most astonishing of all, however, has yet to be mentioned: in the Lord’s Prayer Jesus authorizes his disciples to repeat the word abba after him. He gives them a share in his sonship and empowers them, as his disciples, to speak with their heavenly Father in just such a familiar, trusting way as a child would with his father. Yes, he goes so far as to say that it is this new relationship which first opens the doors to God’s reign: ‘Truly, I say t you, unless you become like children again, you will not find entrance into the kingdom of God’ (Matt. 18, 3). Children can say ‘abba’! Only he who, through Jesus, lets himself be given the childlike trust which resides in the word abba finds his way into the kingdom of God.”[1]
2. The call to become “another Christ” is radical:
- “Now great crowds were going along with him. And he turned and said to them, ‘If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, and wife and children, and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. And he who does not carry his cross and follow me, cannot be my disciple
‘For which of you, wishing to build a tower, does not sit down first and calculate the outlays that are necessary, whether he has the means to complete it? Lest, after he has laid the foundation and is not able to finish, all who behold begin to mock him, saying ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish!’
‘Or what king setting out to engage in battle with another king, does not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to meet him who with twenty thousand is coming against him? Or else, whilst the other is yet at a distance, he sends a delegation and asks the terms of peace. So, therefore, everyone of you who does not renounce all that he possesses, cannot be my disciple
‘Salt is good; but if even the salt loses its strength, what shall it be seasoned with? It is fit neither for the land nor for the manure heap, but must be thrown out. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.’”[2]
- St. Josemaria Escriva: “In our path in life, we too have stumbled upon an amazing treasure: our vocation as children of God. To gain this treasure, to acquire the happiness of following Christ, we need to renounce everything. The goods that I must sell are my ambitions, my concupiscence, my dreams of earthly happiness, my affections that stem from flesh and blood, which are noble but tie me down, my professional dreams, even though these will often fit in with my apostolic plans.
“Is this all I need to sell? Even more, I have to sell my will. Is there still something left to renounce? Yes, my entire ‘I,’ my self-complacency. In a word, my self-love. How hard it is to renounce this self-love! How often it robs us of peace and leads us astray. Our dignity, we think, is at stake. We think that something is a matter of justice; we need to do things in a certain way and in no other. But wouldn’t the man in the parable have been foolish to have scorned the treasure he found? Aren’t we foolish if, by not rejecting our wretched self-love, we abandon the treasure of our dedication to Christ?” [3]
3. To be Christ radically is to be secular: The humanity of Christ is complete and total. Therefore, to be in the world making money, having things, being married, living a full social life, etc. is no obstacle to a total and complete identity with Christ such as to be “alter Christus.”
There is no full man who is not Christ: “All things are yours, and you are Christ’s and Christ is God’s” (1 Cor. 3, 23). You are to subdue the world, make it your own and then make it gift as you yourself must be gift to Christ and to the others. Nothing is yours for simple possession’s sake (cf. Laborem Exercens #14).
4. The call is to personal intimacy with Christ = faith. The danger is: a) the culture of fictitious Christs; b) superficiality (in us)
a) Fictitious Christs: “Yet concurrent with this manifold presence of the figure of Jesus, it is disturbing to note that, within Christianity itself, Christology has been losing its meaning. It started with the effort to rediscover the man Jesus behind the gilded background of dogma, to return to the simplicity of the Gospels. Of course, it quickly became evident that the figure of Jesus in the Gospels cannot be reduced to that of a bland philanthropist – that precisely the Jesus of the Gospels, too, bursts open the framework of what is merely human, posing questions and demanding decisions that challenge man to the very depths of his soul. And so it became necessary then to pick and choose even in the Gospels themselves, in order to find a little consolation and not be exposed to any disturbance of one’s own world view. Today in broad circles, even among believers, an image has prevailed of a Jesus who demands nothing, never scolds, who accepts everyone and everything, who no longer dos anything but affirm us: the perfect opposite of the Church, to the extent that she still dares to make demands and regulations….
“The presence of the figure of Jesus itself is becoming diminished – also with regard to the non-Christian contemporaries who surround us; the figure is transformed from the Lord’ (a word that is avoided) into a man who is nothing more than the advocate of all men. The Jesus of the Gospels is quite different, demanding, bold. The Jesus who makes everything okay for everyone is a phantom, a dream, not a real figure. The Jesus of the Gospels is certainly not convenient for us. But it is precisely in this way that he answers the deepest question of our existence, which- whether we want to or not – keeps us on the lookout for God, for a gratification that is limitless, for the infinite. We must again set out on the woe to his real Jesus.”[4]
5) The Goal: The Kingdom of God
a) The Kingdom is a Person: Jesus Christ: RMi #18
b) The Kingdom is “Now,” as well as at the end of time. When you become “ipse Christus,” since He personally is the Kingdom, when you become “another Christ,” the Kingdom is here and now in you – as St. Josemaria heard it.
The Priority: The plan of life that is the lived deed of the Sabbath Structure of Creation: 15 minutes of mental prayer daily; Holy Mass, daily; 5 minutes of New Testament, daily; Holy Rosary, daily; brief examination of conscience. Weekly Confession and spiritual direction.
[1] Joachim Jeremias, “The Prayers of Jesus,” Fortress Press (1978) 97.
[2] Lk. 14, 25-35.
[3] St. Josemaria Escriva, “Growing on the Inside,” 261-262.
[4] J. Ratzinger, “On the Way to Jesus Christ,” Ignatius (2005) 7-8.
Thursday, November 08, 2007
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
From a Blog on Charles Taylor's "A Secular Age" in the Light of Gaudium et Spes #24
In a blog from Patrick Deneen: "Giving a Damn," Sunday November 4, on Charles Taylor’s new “A Secular Age,” he commented:
“I am reading Charles Taylor's newest book A Secular Age. In a chapter entitled "The Age of Authenticity" he describes the rise of authenticity - a kind of thoroughgoing form of individual self-realization - as being based upon a transformation of our traditional social and political arrangements…. A thick and unequal society built on interpersonal relationships was replaced by a more egalitarian theoretical form of mutual respect. We came to respect each other's freedom - the choices of "lifestyle" - in part because we became more separate. We are freer, but more alone; we are more equal, but necessarily more self-reliant [my underline]. Taylor points out that the costs tend to be overlooked as merely "systemic" or small prices to pay for our greater liberty and our greater equality. Yet he acknowledges our widespread feeling that "community has been undermined and that people are less trustworthy today." How does one do a cost-benefit analysis on which benefit is preferable and which price is steeper - the benefit of our liberty and equality or the cost of communal norms and a thick network of relationships? No such valid analysis can occur, he suggests, because of a "a real value shift" that doesn't allow us equally to weigh the costs involved: "things that were borne for centuries are now declared to be unbearable" (480).
Deneen continues: “I would contend one of the costs that tends to be overlooked is too dangerous and unsustainable for any society to ignore. I grow increasingly convinced that our more just society is based not upon a deeper commitment to justice per se, but our increasing liberation from having to care about the fate and condition of other people. Our more just society is manifested particularly in juridical forms, but its underlying motivations are increasingly absent in our lived reality, in our social sphere. It is easy for me to claim to respect you and your way of life if I don't fundamentally care, and I know I won't be bothered, by any aspect of your life. We are a more tolerant and easy-going society not because our consciousnesses have been expanded, but because we are relieved of any burdens to see our fates as intertwined. Such tolerance is not hard-won, but an easy default. It is the toleration of the self-indulgent and the unbothered. Underlying the Seinfeldian refrain "Not that there's anything wrong with that" are the subtexts "I don't care," "it doesn't matter to me," or the reigning sentiment of the age, "Whatever." The show wasn't about nothing; it was really about tolerant ironists who didn't give a damn about anyone. Can it be any coincidence that within a decade of the supposed renewal of political philosophy in America - the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice in 1971, perhaps the most intricate theoretical justification of the welfare state ever penned - that the welfare state in America, and increasingly throughout the world, was being dismantled? The American welfare state increases in scale especially during those decades when our thicker communities are being dismantled or abandoned ("The Great Society" - in the singular). As Tocqueville predicted, it would be the ascent of individualism itself that would give rise to the felt need for a "tutelary State" to compensate for what had once been provided - albeit unevenly, informally, unequally - within the thicker webs of familial and local life. The dismantling of the welfare state is seen as a victory by the Right, but they are often uncognizant of the corresponding dismantling of communal forms that their valorization of individualism - especially the individualism of the marketplace - effectively undermines. The Left believes that the battle can be won by developing the correct philosophical articulation of Rawls's thesis (and then applying it through the Courts), all the while fundamentally oblivious to the wholesale dismantling of any real commitment to civic concern that has been a consequence of their universalizing efforts at achieving individual liberation and autonomy.
The deep connection between our theoretical liberal mutual respect and our actual condition of not giving a damn is nearly invisible, but its self-evidence is all around us. Our affluence and ease of life makes this condition seem plausible; a disruption of our ease will, I fear, reveal the superficiality of our purported respect and the absence of any real habituation in civic care" [underline mine].
I comment: The social doctrine of the Church is hugely significant as commentary at this juncture. The great Christological anthropology of Gaudium et Spes #24: "man, the only earthly being that God has willed for itself, finds himself by the sincere gift of himself" bifurcates into the principle of solidarity and subsidiarity. Unless there is the "thick" gift of self on the occasion and in the exercise of secular work and ordinary familial life, there is, and will be more and more, a loss of identity as autonomy and freedom. The ontological density and weight of the human person cannot be substituted for programs and schemes. Taylor's phrase of "toleration of the self-indulgent and the unbothered" is tellingly true, each one being the default of the other. It is a debt that will not go unpaid. As John Paul II said in 1999: "The history of our time has shown in a tragic way the danger which results from forgetting the truth about the human person. Before our eyes, we have seen the results of ideologies such as Marxism, Nazism, and Fascism... No less pernicious, thought not always obvious, are the effects of materialistic consumerism [where an] exaltation of the individual and the selfish satisfaction of personal aspirations become the ultimate goal of life."
“I am reading Charles Taylor's newest book A Secular Age. In a chapter entitled "The Age of Authenticity" he describes the rise of authenticity - a kind of thoroughgoing form of individual self-realization - as being based upon a transformation of our traditional social and political arrangements…. A thick and unequal society built on interpersonal relationships was replaced by a more egalitarian theoretical form of mutual respect. We came to respect each other's freedom - the choices of "lifestyle" - in part because we became more separate. We are freer, but more alone; we are more equal, but necessarily more self-reliant [my underline]. Taylor points out that the costs tend to be overlooked as merely "systemic" or small prices to pay for our greater liberty and our greater equality. Yet he acknowledges our widespread feeling that "community has been undermined and that people are less trustworthy today." How does one do a cost-benefit analysis on which benefit is preferable and which price is steeper - the benefit of our liberty and equality or the cost of communal norms and a thick network of relationships? No such valid analysis can occur, he suggests, because of a "a real value shift" that doesn't allow us equally to weigh the costs involved: "things that were borne for centuries are now declared to be unbearable" (480).
Deneen continues: “I would contend one of the costs that tends to be overlooked is too dangerous and unsustainable for any society to ignore. I grow increasingly convinced that our more just society is based not upon a deeper commitment to justice per se, but our increasing liberation from having to care about the fate and condition of other people. Our more just society is manifested particularly in juridical forms, but its underlying motivations are increasingly absent in our lived reality, in our social sphere. It is easy for me to claim to respect you and your way of life if I don't fundamentally care, and I know I won't be bothered, by any aspect of your life. We are a more tolerant and easy-going society not because our consciousnesses have been expanded, but because we are relieved of any burdens to see our fates as intertwined. Such tolerance is not hard-won, but an easy default. It is the toleration of the self-indulgent and the unbothered. Underlying the Seinfeldian refrain "Not that there's anything wrong with that" are the subtexts "I don't care," "it doesn't matter to me," or the reigning sentiment of the age, "Whatever." The show wasn't about nothing; it was really about tolerant ironists who didn't give a damn about anyone. Can it be any coincidence that within a decade of the supposed renewal of political philosophy in America - the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice in 1971, perhaps the most intricate theoretical justification of the welfare state ever penned - that the welfare state in America, and increasingly throughout the world, was being dismantled? The American welfare state increases in scale especially during those decades when our thicker communities are being dismantled or abandoned ("The Great Society" - in the singular). As Tocqueville predicted, it would be the ascent of individualism itself that would give rise to the felt need for a "tutelary State" to compensate for what had once been provided - albeit unevenly, informally, unequally - within the thicker webs of familial and local life. The dismantling of the welfare state is seen as a victory by the Right, but they are often uncognizant of the corresponding dismantling of communal forms that their valorization of individualism - especially the individualism of the marketplace - effectively undermines. The Left believes that the battle can be won by developing the correct philosophical articulation of Rawls's thesis (and then applying it through the Courts), all the while fundamentally oblivious to the wholesale dismantling of any real commitment to civic concern that has been a consequence of their universalizing efforts at achieving individual liberation and autonomy.
The deep connection between our theoretical liberal mutual respect and our actual condition of not giving a damn is nearly invisible, but its self-evidence is all around us. Our affluence and ease of life makes this condition seem plausible; a disruption of our ease will, I fear, reveal the superficiality of our purported respect and the absence of any real habituation in civic care" [underline mine].
I comment: The social doctrine of the Church is hugely significant as commentary at this juncture. The great Christological anthropology of Gaudium et Spes #24: "man, the only earthly being that God has willed for itself, finds himself by the sincere gift of himself" bifurcates into the principle of solidarity and subsidiarity. Unless there is the "thick" gift of self on the occasion and in the exercise of secular work and ordinary familial life, there is, and will be more and more, a loss of identity as autonomy and freedom. The ontological density and weight of the human person cannot be substituted for programs and schemes. Taylor's phrase of "toleration of the self-indulgent and the unbothered" is tellingly true, each one being the default of the other. It is a debt that will not go unpaid. As John Paul II said in 1999: "The history of our time has shown in a tragic way the danger which results from forgetting the truth about the human person. Before our eyes, we have seen the results of ideologies such as Marxism, Nazism, and Fascism... No less pernicious, thought not always obvious, are the effects of materialistic consumerism [where an] exaltation of the individual and the selfish satisfaction of personal aspirations become the ultimate goal of life."
November: Suffrages for "Souls"
"Souls?"
The Christian revelation of the relational subject in the Trinitarian God and in man as image and likeness should revamp our perception of the human person as a surviving “soul” without the body, and therefore clarify what we should mean by “soul.” In brief, it is not the Greek “form” but the enfleshed spirit as subject, the whole “I.”
Joseph Ratzinger:
“We are confronted with two different total views, which cannot simply be added together: the image of man, of God and of the future, is in each case quite different, and thus at bottom each of the two views can only be understood as an attempt at a total answer to the question of human fate.
"The Greek conception is based on the idea that man is composed of two intrinsically alien substances, one of which (the body) perishes, while the other (the soul) is in itself imperishable and therefore goes on existing in its own right independent of any other beings. Indeed, it was only in the separations from its essentially alien body, so it was thought, that the soul came fully into its own. The biblical train of thought, on the other hand, presupposes the undivided unity of man; for example, Scripture contains no word denoting only the body (separated and distinguished from the soul), while conversely in the vast majority of cases the word soul too means the whole corporeally existing man; the few places where a different view can be discerned hover to a certain extent between Greek and Hebrew thinking and in any case by no means abandon the old view. The awakening of the dead (not of bodies!) of which Scripture speaks is thus concerned with the salvation of the one, undivided man, not just with the fate of one (so far as possible secondary) half of man. It now also becomes clear that the real heart of the faith in resurrection does not consist at all in the idea of the restoration of the body, to which we have reduced it in our thinking; such is the case even though this is the pictorial image used throughout the Bible. What, then, is the real content of the hope symbolically proclaimed in the Bible in the shape of the resurrection of the dead? I think that this can best be worked out by means of a comparison with the dualistic conception of ancient philosophy.
1. The idea of immortality denoted in the Bible by the word ‘resurrection’ is an immortality of the ‘person,’ of the one creation ‘man.’ In Greek thought the typical man is a perishable creature which as such does not live on but goes two different ways in accordance with its heterogeneous formation out of body and soul; but according to the biblical belief it is precisely this being, man, that as such goes on existing, even if transformed.
2. It is a question of ‘dialogic’ immortality (= awakening!); that is, immortality results not simply from the self-evident inability-to-die of the indivisible but from the saving deed of the lover who has the necessary power; man can no longer totally perish because he is known and loved by God... All love wants eternity, and God’s love not only wants it but effects it and is it. In fact the biblical idea of awakening grew directly out of this dialogal theme: he who prays knows in faith that God will restore the right (Job 19, 25 ff; Ps. 73, 23 ff); faith is convinced that those who have suffered in the interests of God will also receive a share in the redemption of the promise (2 Macc. 7, 9 ff). Immortality as conceived by the Bible proceeds not from the personal force of what is in itself indestructible but from being drawn into the dialogue with the Creator; that is why is must be called awakening. Because the Creator means not just the soul but the man physically existing in the midst of history and gives him immortality, it must be called ‘awakening of the dead’ = ‘of men.’ It should be noted here that even in the formula of the Creed, which speaks of the ‘resurrection of the body,’ the word ‘body’ means in effect ‘the world of man’ (in the sense of biblical expressions like ‘all flesh will see God’s salvation,,’ etc.); even here the word is not meant in the sense of a corporality isolated from the soul….(underline mine).
"To the soul as conceived by the Greeks the body, and so history too, is completely exterior; the soul goes on existing apart from them and needs no other being in order to do so. For man understood as a unity, on the other hand, fellowship with fellow men is constitutive; if he is to live on, then this dimension cannot be excluded. Thus on the biblical premise the much-discussed question whether after death there can be any fellowship between men seems to be solved; at bottom it could only arise at all through a preponderance of the Greek element in the intellectual premises: where the ‘communion of saints’ is an article of faith, the idea of the anima separata (the ‘separated soul’ of scholastic theology) has in the last analysis become obsolete.
"These ideas could only attain their full scope after the New Testament had given concrete shape to the biblical hope – in the last analysis the Old Testament by itself leaves the question of the future of man in the air. Only with Christ, the man who is ‘one with the Father,’ the man through whom the being ‘man’ has entered into God’s eternity, does the future of man finally appear open. Only yin him, the ‘second Adam,’ is the question of man’s identity finally answered. Christ is man, completely; to that extent the question who we men are is present in him. But he is at the same time God speaking to us, the ‘Word of God.’ In him the conversation between God and man which has been going on since the beginning of history has entered a new phase: in him the Word of God became ‘flesh’ and was really injected into our existence. But if the dialogue of God with man means life, if it is true that God’s partner in the dialogue himself has life precisely through being addressed by him who lives for ever, then this means that Christ, as God’s word to us, is himself ‘the resurrections and the life’ (Jn. 11, 25). It also means that the entry into Christ known as faith becomes in a qualified sense an entry into that being known and loved by God which is immortality: ‘Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life’ (Jn. 3, 15; 3, 36; 5, 24). Only from this angle is it possible to understand the train of thought of the fourth evangelist, who in his account of the Lazarus episode wants to make the reader understand that resurrection is not just a distant happening at the end of the world but happens now through faith.”[1]
* * * * * * * * *
Aside: See here Ratzinger’s whole presentation of the Kingdom of God as the very Person of the Incarnate Christ, and that we are that Kingdom now insofar as we live out the sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation, now. See Benedict XVI’s “Jesus of Nazareth” which develops the theme that Jesus of Nazareth is Jesus the Christ, Son of the living God. That is, this historically contingent individual man is the Absolute Person of God. The Absolute is in the contingent, the Eternal is in time. The Parousia is not merely for the end of time. It is then, but also, now.
This sounds good… [but] (o)n close inspection, this whole project proves to be utopian dreaming without any real content, except insofar as its exponents tacitly presuppose some partisan doctrine as the content that all are required to accept.
But the main thing that leaps out is that God has disappeared; man is the only actor left on the stage. The respect for religious’ traditions claimed by this way of thinking is only apparent. The truth is that they are regarded as so many sets of customs, which people should be allowed to keep, even though they ultimately count fort nothing. Faith and religions are not directed toward political goals. Only the organization of the world counts. Religions matters only insofar as it can serve that objective. This post-Christian vision of faith and religion is disturbingly close to Jesus’ third temptation.
“Let us return, then, to the Gospel, to the real Jesus. Our main criticism of the secular-utopian idea of the Kingdom has been that it pushes God off the stage. He is no longer needed, or else he is a downright nuisance. But Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom of God, not just any kind of kingdom. It is true that Matthew speaks of the ‘Kingdom of the heavens,’ but the word heavens is an alternative expression for the word God, which the Jews, with an eye to the second commandment, largely avoided out of reverence for the mystery of God. Accordingly, the phrase ‘Kingdom of heaven’ its not a one-sided declaration of something ‘beyond;’ it speaks of God, who is as much in this world as he is beyond it – who infinitely transcends our world, but is also totally interior to it.”[2]
Let me add that to bring God back on the stage by the conversion of self into being “another Christ” is not to introduce the Kingdom that is the religio-political “Christendom” which is a clericalized caricature of living, faith-grounded secular order built on the truth of the human person as another Christ, perfect God, perfect man.
* * * * * * * * *
“Whoever believes is in the conversation with God which is life and which outlasts death. At this point, too, the ‘dialogic’ strand’ in the biblical concept of immortality, the one related directly to God, and the ‘human fellowship’ strand meet and join. For in Christ, the man, we meet God; but in him we also meet the community of those others whose path to God runs through him and so towards one another. The orientation towards God is in him at the same time towards the community of mankind, and only the acceptance of this community is movement towards God, who does not exist apart from Christ and thus not apart either from the context of the whole history of humanity and its common task.
"This also clarifies the question, much discussed in the time of the Fathers of the Church and again since Luther, of the ‘intermediate state’ between death and resurrection; the existence-with-Christ inaugurated by faith is the start of resurrected life and therefore outlasts death (Phil. 1, 23; 2 Cor. 5, 8; 1 Thess. 5, 10). The dialogue of faith is itself already life, which can no longer be shattered by death. The idea of the sleep of death continually discussed by Lutheran theologians and recently also brought into play by the Dutch Catechism is therefore untenable on the evidence of the New Testament and not even justifiable by the frequent occurrence in the New Testament of the word ‘sleep:’ the whole train of thought of every book in the New Testament is completely at variance with such an interpretation, which could hardly be inferred even from late Jewish thinking about the life after death.”[3]
Does This Mean that Only Those Living Out Supernatural Faith Live Forever? Or, At Root, Is There Such a Thing as a "Natural Man?"
Ratzinger asks the question: "Does this view not make immortality into a pure grace, although in reality it must fall to man's lot by virtue of his nature as man? In other words, does one not finish up here with an immortality only for the pious, and thus in a division of human fate which is unacceptable?...
"To put it in theological terms, are we not here confusing the natural immortality of the being 'man' with the supernatural gift of eternal love which makes man happy? Must we not hold fast, precisely for the sake of the humanity of the Christian faith, to natural immortality, for the reason that a continued existence conceived in purely christological terms would necessarily slide into the miraculous and mythological?...
"The last question can indubitably be answered only in the affirmative. But this is by no means at variance with our original premise. It too entitled us to say decisively: The immortality which we have called, precisely because of its dialogic character, 'awakening' falls to the lot of man, every man, as man, andis not some secondary 'supernatural' addition. But we must then go on to ask: What really makes man into man? What is the final distinguishing mark of man? To that we shall have to answer: The distinguishing mark of man, seen from above, is his being addressed by God, the fact that he is God's partner in a dialogue, the being called by God. Seen from below, this means that man is the being that can thinkof God, the being opened on to otranscendence. The point here is not whether he really does think of God, really does open himself to him, but that he is fundamentally the being who is in himself capable of doing so, even if in fact, or whatever reasons, he is perhaps never able to utilize this capacity (underline and color emphasis mine).
"Now one could say: Is it not much simpler to see the distinguishing mark of man in the fact that he has a spiritual, immortal soul? This definition is perfectly sound; but we are in fact at this moment engaged in the process of trying to elucidate its concrete meaning The two definitions are not in the least contradictory; they simply express the same thing in different modes of thought.
What does “having a spiritual soul” mean?
Ratzinger: “'having a spiritual soul’ means precisely being willed, known and loved by God in a special way; it means being a creature called by God to an eternal dialogue and therefore capable for its own part of knowing God and of replying to him. What we call in substantialist language ‘having a soul’ will be described in a more historical, actual language as ‘being God’s partner in a dialogue.’ This does not mean that talk of the soul is false… in one respect it is indeed even necessary in order to describe the whole of what is involved here. But on the other hand it also needs to be complemented if we are not to fall back into a dualistic conception which cannot do justice to the dialogic and personalistic view of the Bible.”[4]
Living on the Surface of the Self?
"This morning the governess came to confession. I happen to know that her regular confessor is my colleague, the Cure de Heuchin, but I could not refuse her as a penitent. Those people who think the Sacrament gives us instant power to read the hidden places of a soul are indeed credulous! If only we could ask them to try for themselves! Used as I am to the confessions of simple seminary students, I still cannot manage to understand what horrible metamorphosis has enabled so many people to show me their inner life as a mere convention, a formal scheme without one clue to its reality. I should imagine that once they have ceased to be adolescents, few Catholics go in mortal sin to communion. It’s so easy not to go to confession at all. But there are worse things. Petty lies can slowly form a crust around the consciousness of evasion and subterfuge. The outer shell retains the vague shape of what it covers, but that is all. In time by sheer force of habit, the least ‘gifted’ end by evolving their own particular idiom, which still remains incredibly abstract. They don’t hide much, but their sly candour reminds one of a dirty window-pane, so blurred that light has to struggle through it, and nothing can be clearly seen.
What then remains of confession? It barely skims the surface of conscience. I don’t say dry rot has set in underneath; it seems more like petrification." (pp. 107-109).
I believe, in fact I am certain, that many men never give out the whole of themselves, their deepest truth. They live on the surface, and yet, so rich is the soil of humanity that even this thin outer layer is able to yield a kind of meager harvest which gives the illusion of real living. I’ve heard that during the last war timid little clerks would turn out to be real leaders; without knowing it, they had in them the passion to command. There is, to be sure, no resemblance there with what we mean when we use the beautiful work ‘conversion’- convertere – but still it had sufficed that these poor creatures should experience the most primitive sort of heroism, heroism devoid of all purity. How many men will never have the least idea of what is meant by supernatural heroism, without which there is no inner life! Yet by that very same inner life shall they be judged: after a little thought the thing becomes certain, quite obvious. Therefore? …Therefore when death has bereft them of all the artificial props with which society provides such people, they will find themselves as they really are, as they were without even knowing it – horrible undeveloped monsters, the stumps of men.
Fashioned thus, what can they say of sin? What do they know about it? The cancer that is eating into them is painless – like so many tumours. Probably at some period in their lives most of them felt only a vague discomfort, and it soon passed off. It is rare for a child not to have known an inner life, as Christianity understands it, however, embryonic the form. One day or another all young lives are stirred by an urge which seems to compel; every pure young breast has depths which are raised to heroism. Not very urgent perhaps, but just strongly enough to show the little creature a glimpse, which sometimes half-consciously he accepts, of the huge risk that salvation entails, and gives to human life all its divinity. He has sensed something of good and evil, has seen them both in their pristine essence unalloyed by notions of social discipline and habit. But of course his reactions are those of a child, and of such a decisive solemn moment the grown-up man will keep no more than the memory of something rather childishly dramatic something mischievously quaint, whose true meaning he never will realize, yet of which he may talk to the end of his days with a soft, rather too soft a smile, the almost lewd smile of old men …. (107-109)
(Courtesty of Virginia Hughes)
What then remains of confession? It barely skims the surface of conscience. I don’t say dry rot has set in underneath; it seems more like petrification." (pp. 107-109).
* * * * * * * * *
"For several days I have been thinking a great deal about sin. In defining sin as a failure to obey God’s law, I feel there is a risk of conveying too abstract an idea of it. People say such foolish things about sin, and as usual they never take the trouble to think. For centuries now doctors have been discussing disease. If they had been content to define it as a failure to obey the rules of health, they would long since have been in agreement. But they study it in the individual patient in the hope of curing him. And that is just what we priests are also attempting. So that really we aren’t very impressed by sneers and smiles and jokes about sin.
I believe, in fact I am certain, that many men never give out the whole of themselves, their deepest truth. They live on the surface, and yet, so rich is the soil of humanity that even this thin outer layer is able to yield a kind of meager harvest which gives the illusion of real living. I’ve heard that during the last war timid little clerks would turn out to be real leaders; without knowing it, they had in them the passion to command. There is, to be sure, no resemblance there with what we mean when we use the beautiful work ‘conversion’- convertere – but still it had sufficed that these poor creatures should experience the most primitive sort of heroism, heroism devoid of all purity. How many men will never have the least idea of what is meant by supernatural heroism, without which there is no inner life! Yet by that very same inner life shall they be judged: after a little thought the thing becomes certain, quite obvious. Therefore? …Therefore when death has bereft them of all the artificial props with which society provides such people, they will find themselves as they really are, as they were without even knowing it – horrible undeveloped monsters, the stumps of men.
Fashioned thus, what can they say of sin? What do they know about it? The cancer that is eating into them is painless – like so many tumours. Probably at some period in their lives most of them felt only a vague discomfort, and it soon passed off. It is rare for a child not to have known an inner life, as Christianity understands it, however, embryonic the form. One day or another all young lives are stirred by an urge which seems to compel; every pure young breast has depths which are raised to heroism. Not very urgent perhaps, but just strongly enough to show the little creature a glimpse, which sometimes half-consciously he accepts, of the huge risk that salvation entails, and gives to human life all its divinity. He has sensed something of good and evil, has seen them both in their pristine essence unalloyed by notions of social discipline and habit. But of course his reactions are those of a child, and of such a decisive solemn moment the grown-up man will keep no more than the memory of something rather childishly dramatic something mischievously quaint, whose true meaning he never will realize, yet of which he may talk to the end of his days with a soft, rather too soft a smile, the almost lewd smile of old men …. (107-109)
(The Diary of a Country Priest by George Bernanos, 1937 translated by Pamela Morris, Carroll & Graf Publishers 2002 pg. 86)
(Courtesty of Virginia Hughes)
"If There's a Doubt of Fact, Don't Act"
Chilean and US Catholic Bishops go Opposite Ways on Morning After Pill
FatherChristopher Kubat, M.D, who heads Catholic Charities in diocese of Lincoln states, "If there's doubt of fact, you don't act."
By John-Henry Westen
SANTIAGO, November 5, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - There is a marked difference between the approach to the morning after pill by Catholic Bishops in the United States and their Chilean counterparts. Following Pope Benedict XVI's advice to pharmacists last week which called on them to refuse to dispense drugs "that have the goal of preventing the implantation of the embryo," the Bishops of Chile have called on their government to allow pharmacists the right to conscientious objection regarding the morning after pill. In their bid to the Chilean government however, the Secretary General of the Chilean Bishops Conference noted that on principal drugs may not be given which have even a slight chance of procuring an abortion. Arguing for a pharmacists right to refuse to dispense the morning after pill, Bishop Cristián Contreras said, "This is a matter of human life. Whenever there is a minimum doubt of the existence of human life the safest options must be taken". In this discussion "we must keep in mind that freedom is an ample concept and in this sense pharmacists have every right to refuse the sell the pill for reasons of conscious objection," the Bishop underlined. For many US Bishops however, there has been a general acceptance of the use of the morning after pill (in cases of rape), precisely because of a supposed minimal chance of causing an abortion as opposed. The Bishops of Connecticut, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Colorado, New York, California and Washington also offer so-called 'emergency contraception' to some rape victims with the approval of local Catholic bishops. Some of the Bishops require only a pregnancy test to administer the drugs, which would only rule out a pregnancy which occurred prior to a rape since the morning after pill is to be taken within 72 hours after intercourse, and pregnancy tests only register positively after implantation - a process that can take up to a week. Other US Bishops require an ovulation test prior to administration of the drug, thus hoping to avoid the pill's abortifacient effect which prevents the implantation of an embryo. However, ovulation tests are not exact and the morning after pill is also not known to be foolproof in halting ovulation. Thus there remains a chance, however slight, of causing an abortion with the use of the morning after pill even after an ovulation test is done.But while the Chilean Bishops see that very slight chance as necessitating not administering the drug, many of their US counterparts under the advice of the Catholic Health Association have deemed it a green light since, suggest the ethicists, while there is not absolute certainty that an abortion will not occur, there is "moral certainty".That line of argument is problematic for many Catholic physicians. As LifeSite News.com has previously reported, the Catholic Medical Association opposes outright the administration of the morning after pill. The Pontifical Academy for Life ruled similarly in 2000.
A medical doctor, turned Catholic priest and bioethics expert, spoke in Wisconsin on the subject last month. Father Christopher Kubat, M.D, who heads Catholic Charities in the diocese of Lincoln, spoke against the use of Plan B in Catholic hospitals recalling the moral principle: "If there's doubt of fact, you don't act."Regarding 'moral certainty', Fr. Kubat had this to say: "If we are morally certain about anything, it is that the risk of an abortion using these drugs is significant based on the scientific data presented. That's what we can be morally certain of if we want to talk about moral certainty." Catholic Times reporter Franz Klein also quotes Fr. Kubat saying: "If you take an honest look at the scientific data, reliable testing" to establish absolute certitude "does not exist."
Father Kubat added. "But now, unfortunately, most hospitals regularly dispense emergency contraception, including Catholic hospitals."The president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Chile, Bishop Alejandro Goic of the diocese of Rancagua held a press conference at which he appealed to the government not to sanction pharmacies which refuse to dispense the morning after pill. "I believe there exists a legitimate right to conscious objection which must be respected. There can be no intolerance in the face of a conscious objection to promoting the use of a pill which could cause abortion," he said.
Sunday, November 04, 2007
Improbable Quintet: Kant, Herder, Hegel, Wojtyla and Ratzinger
(A work in progress)
The reason for the foray into such improbable intellectual sources is to search for the adequate philosophic account for Gaudium et spes #24: "Man, the only earthly being God has willed for itself, finds himself by the sincere gift of himself." This Trinitarian based Christological anthropology needs more than the received anthropology of man as an "individual substance of a rational nature." What is a needed is a metaphysic of the individual "I" as "self." Substance as "self" is "object" and, as such, inadequate to give an account of "self" as "subject" and gift. Substances - as we have conceived them - are neither self-determining nor capable of self-giving.
Louis Bouyer explained that the valid insights of the Protestant Reformation were vitiated by the use of an inadequate philosophy - the essentialist "nominalism" of Willian of Occam - that eventually extrinsicized the whole of Protestantism such that grace and nature, person to person lost the mysterious character of being integrated. Reality was construed to fit our way of conceptualizing rather than the other way round.
Concretely, Bouyer asks: "What, then, is the source of the element in Protestant theology of a God forbidden to communicate himself to his creature, of man unable, even by the divine omnipotence, to be torn from his own solitude, from the autonomy of his so arrogant humility, of a world and a God inexorably condemned to the most utter 'extrinsicism?' To the historian, the reply is obvious. The Reformers no more invented this strange and despairing universe than they found it in Scripture. It is simply the universe of the philosophy they had been brought up in, scholasticism in its decadence. If the Reformers unintentionally became heretics, the fault does not consist in the radical nature of their reform but in its hesitation, its timidity, its imperfect vision. The structure they raised on their own principles is unacceptable only because they used uncritically material drawn from that decaying Catholicism they desired to elude but whose prisoners they remained to a degree they never suspected. No phrase reveals so clearly the hidden evil that was to spoil the fruit of the Reformation than Luther's saying that Occam was the only scholastic who was any good. The truth is that Luther, brought up on his own system was never able to think outside the framework it imposed..." Louis Bouyer, "The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism," Scepter (1956) 184.
I fear the same will be the fate of the insights of Vatican II and the Magisterium of John Paul II and Benedict XVI if the theological content is not undergirded and accounted for by an adequate exercise of reason that attends to, and discovers, the experience of the "I" as being and participating absolute. Hence, the search for the "I" experiencing itself in the use of language as obediential self-gift, and hence, the survey of Herder's origin of languate, Kant's absolute "I," Hegel's integration of the two, Wojtyla's phenomenology of the experience of self-determination and assignation of being, and ultimately Ratzinger's Jesus of Nazareth being Jesus the Christ, the Absolute Son of the living God - in the contingency of history.
The Absolute in History
Joseph Ratzinger’s initial intellectual interest was centered on the problem faced by German philosophy of the 18th and 19th centuries: the absolute in the concrete. As appearing below in “The Drama of Third Millennial Theology,” Ratzinger remarked:
“As we are well aware, the central theme of salvation-historical theology has always been the question of the relationship between ontology and history: How can history play a role in the molding of being, and when is it alien to being?”[1]
“Has not the ‘Hellenization’ of Christianity, which attempted to overcome the scandal of the particular by a blending of faith and metaphysics, led to a development in a false direction? Has it not created a static style of thought which cannot do justice to the dynamism of the biblical style?”[2]
To the question: How do we find the absolute truth (or good) in the contingencies of history, the answer from the Magisterium of the Church in Veritatis Splendor #17 is: “Perfection demands the unique maturity in self-giving to which human freedom is called.” That is, the Being that is the supreme absolute immersed in the contingencies of time and space is the individual man Jesus of Nazareth Who is the redeeming God Jesus Christ.
The human person is made in the image and likeness of this prototype. Therefore, the human person experiences and becomes conscious of absoluteness in the experience and consciousness of the individual self in the “maturity of self-giving.” Commenting on this, John Paul II remarked to Andre Frossard: “God gives himself to man created in his own image, and this ‘image’ and ‘likeness’ alone can make this communication possible. This communication creates the innermost, transcendent, final thread in the history of each man and of humanity as a whole. It is also a ‘trans-historical’ thread, since, while taking account of the transitory character of man, inscribed in time together with the whole visible world, it also reveals in him the element that does not pass away, that resists time, destruction and death. As we have just said, this is the historicity of man – this arrest, this hold on what passes away to extract from it what does not pass away, what serves to immortalize the most essentially human element, the element through which man is the image and likeness of God and surpasses all the creatures subject to an ephemeral existence. Historicity is also the existence of some one who, while ‘passing away,’ retains his identity.
“Understood in this way, the historicity of man is the focal point of Revelation in which faith and its history, and consequently the history of salvation, are fashioned.
“That said, the historicity of man so regarded is one of the sources of theist thought, of the intelligence going to meet God. It is precisely in his historicity and because of it that man is prompted to seek a Being who embodies everything in him that resists transitoriness, or in other words the ultimate Transcendent of his own transcendence, the eternal model of whom he is, as man, the image and likeness.
“Thus it is not only the world (or the Universe) that is at the root of the rational knowledge of God [the five ways of St. Thomas], but also and perhaps above all man himself-in-the-world, man in his historicity, that is, at the same time in what transcends him.”[3]
The above becomes concretized in the early development of “Veritatis Splendor” where the argument of the moral absolute appears in the question put by the rich young man to Christ: “What shall I do to gain eternal life” (Mk. 10, 18)? The boy wants absolute, unending life. Jesus answers: “There is only one who is good” (Mt. 19, 17); “No one is good but God alone (Mk. 10, 18; cf. Lk. 18,19). If that is the case, and man has been made in the image and likeness of God Who alone is good, then, “If you wish to be perfect, come follow me” (Mt. 19, 21). That is to say, since “I and the Father are one” (Jn. 10, 30), do what I do, and you will be like me. You will become good like me, and good like the Father. You will experience that the God-like goodness in yourself, which as perfection, is absolute. It is the ontological grounding of the entire moral life since it is in that ontological experience of the self as “acting person,” as going out of self to serve as Christ-Gift, that the “anamnesis” (not-forgetting = remembering) that we first become conscious of the value: “good.”
This doesn’t mean that only self-transcending persons experience the good. Everybody has this anamnesis (“not forgetting”) in that the very being of the human person - made in the image and likeness of the divine Persons Who are Self-transcending Gifts to each other - experiences itself in this “tendency” toward the Absolute Good that is divine Personhood. In this regard, Joseph Ratzinger commented (and recorded many times on this blog): “There is an inherent existential tendency of man, who is created in the image of God, to tend toward that which is in keeping with God. Thanks to its origin, man’s being is in harmony with some things but not with others. This anamnesis of our origin, resulting from the fact that our being is constitutively in keeping with God, is not a knowledge articulated in concepts, a treasure store of retrievable contents. It is an inner sense, a capacity for recognition, in such a way that the one addressed recognizes in himself an echo of what is said to him. If he does not turn back on himself, he comes to the insight: this is the goal toward which my whole being tends, this is where I want to go.”[4]
Kant
Accounting for the Absolute in the Subject
The insight of Immanuel Kant consisted in his experience of the absolutes in morality. The absolute must be rigorously separated from anything exterior or extrinsic to the self as autonomous subject. All that is not the Cartesian “cogito” and that is not on the side of pure thought thinking itself is foreign, or “heteronymous,” to what Kant will call “autonomy” and cannot enter into the purity of the absolute that is evident in moral decision. The absolute is the unsullied a priori of the practical intellect that is pure duty. There is, and cannot be, any admixture of nature, its laws and tendencies.
David Hume, attentive to the matter side of the mind-matter dualism, held, in Charles Taylor's account, that “the subject could only be studied as another object…. It was because Hume was dealing with the self as a set of phenomena that he could say such an outrageous thing as that the self was a mere ‘bundle of perceptions’ with no visible principle of unity.”[5]
But Kant held to the experience of absoluteness in moral life and constructed the “transcendental argument” that infers the subject from the phenomenon of absoluteness. Taylor says that Kant “tries to infer from experience back to the subject of that experience: what must we be like in order to have the kind of experience we do? In this way it can claim to say things about the nature of the subject which could never be founded in the objects of experience [where sensible perception finds no absolutes, only contingency]. The Kantian answer to Hume’s bundle theory of the self is to point out that the subject is not exhausted by the phenomena given in introspection, that underlying the observation of self as much as that of the external world is the subject of this observation, who pro tanto as observer is not the observed. But this dimension of the subject can only be reached by inference, by arguing back from what experience is like to what the structure of the subject must be if this experience is to be possible.
“This is transcendental argument…”
In a word, all we find in sensible nature are laws of necessity. There is no freedom in the sense of self-determination in the realm of nature. It is pure S and P (stimulus and response), and there is no moral absolute because there is no freedom for what we experience moral action to be: self-determination in conformity with the truth of the self (as absolute). So, the starting point for Kant is the experience of moral freedom that is autonomy that decides against “natural inclination,” as exterior or extrinsic to the self: thus heteronomy. What is evident, however, is that Kant does not recognize the “experience” of the absolute to be the contact with the ontological reality of the self, and, as son of the Enlightenment, he assigns absolute value as an “a priori” of reason. It is noteworthy that Kant recognized the absolute as a phenomenon of the subject, but not the subject as consciousness being, i.e., not as a being that is conscious of self as self-determining act. Taylor recognizes Kant’s unique value here in the discovery of the freedom of autonomy of the self. He says: “This is the central, exhilarating notion of Kant’s ethics. Moral life is equivalent to freedom, in this radical sense of self-determination by the moral will.”[6] He rejects Hume’s reduction of the subject to an object that is a bundle of sensations. The subject is not an object, but a subject that determines itself according to the a priori (which he confuses with the will and which Wojtyla shows to be the ontological “I” itself[7] ). Taylor remarks: “It was taken for granted by Enlightenment thinkers like Hume that the subject could only be studied as another object. True, it was special in that one gained access to it by ‘reflection’ rather than the ordinary perception which yielded us knowledge of external things; but in either case one was dealing with the given, a set of phenomena that he could say such an outrageous thing as that the self was a mere ‘bundle of perceptions’ with no visible principle of unity.”[8]
The genius of Kant, the “central, exhilarating notion of Kant’s ethics,” is his recognition of another kind of experience than the experience of objects. His transcendental argument consists in trying “to infer from experience back to the subject of that experience: what must we be like in order to have the kind of experience we do? In this way it can claim to say things about the nature of the subject which could never be founded in the objects of experience.” And then, importantly, Taylor says: “The Kantian answer to Hume’s bundle theory of the self is to point out that the subject is not exhausted by the phenomena given in introspection, that underlying the observation of self as much as that of the external world is the subject of this observation, who pro tanto as observer is not the observed. But this dimension of the subject can only be reached by inference, by arguing back from what experience is like to what the structure of the subject must be if this experience is to be possible.”
That said, it must be stated that, although Kant’s method is correct, his conclusion does not square with the experience. Wojtyla takes the same method and concludes to the “I” as ontological reality. Wojtyla sees a division in man – that of act and potency - on the basis of the experience of free action. The human person is both the agent and the patient of every action he performs. Every free action is self-determination. Wojtyla says: “It is impossible to deny that he who acts is simultaneously the one in whom something or other happens. Similarly, it is impossible to question the unity and the identity of man at the roots of acting and happening. Neither is it possible to question of his unity and identity at the roots of the efficacy and the subjectiveness structurally contained in the acting and the happening that occur in man. For the human being is… a dynamic unity… Man’s acting and that human efficacy which constitutes it experientially, as well as all that happens in him, combine together as if they issued from a common root. For it is the human being, as the dynamic subject, who is their origin.”[9] In summary, he says, “The two structures, that in which man acts and that in which something happens in man, cut across the phenomenological field of experience, but they join and unite together in the metaphysical field. Their synthesis is the man-person, and we discover the ultimate subject of the synthesis in its ontological groundwork. Not only does this groundwork underlie the whole dynamism of the man-person, but it itself is also the dynamic source of the dynamism.”[10]
What is unique to Kant – “exhilarating” – is the attention to experience, the distinction of experience of objects and the experience of subjects, and the attempt to give an account of the latter without reducing it to the empirical mechanistic and objectified. Wojtyla followed the same road but found the experience of the subject to be empirical, objective and yet irreducible to being an object. As he said in Crossing the Threshold of Hope: “It is not possible to affirm that when something is transempirical it ceases to be empirical.
“It is therefore possible to speak from a solid foundation about human experience, moral experience, or religious experience. And if it is possible to speak of such experiences, it is difficult to deny that, in the realm of human experience, one also finds good and evil, truth and beauty, and God…. If God is a knowable object… He is such on the basis of man’s experience both of the visible world and of his interior world. This is the point of departure of Immanuel Kant’s study of ethical experience in which he abandons the old approach found in the writings of the Bible and Saint Thomas Aquinas. Man recognizes himself as an ethical being, capable of acting according to criteria of good and evil, and not only those of profit and pleasure. He also recognizes himself as a religious being, capable of putting himself in contact with God. Prayer … is in a certain sense the first verification of such a reality.”[11]
Herder
Expressivism: Disclosing Subjectivity through Language (Art)
In the Enlightenment dualism of mind and matter in which we still find ourselves, it is important to see the emergence of the self in the context of the experience of being, and not identified with pure consciousness. The key to that emergence is “integral expressivism” that is the spoken word as found in Johann Gottfried von Herder. Let us go by steps:
1) The Aristotelian Form:
It is important to start with the received metaphysical anthropology of Aristotle that sees man as an organic substance integrated by matter and form with rationality as an accidental specific difference. Such an account of the human person antedates the epistemological split into subject and object that took place after Descartes in the 17th century. After that time, the human person was accounted for on either one side or the other, i.e. either pure consciousness, or pure material mechanism. We are still caught between the horns of that dilemma. Herder represents a recovery of integration but now as subject.
This is revolutionary. And the decisive criterion for subsuming both body and soul under the epistemological rubric of subject is language. Only man speaks; or rather, only man “names.” Herder adds to ancient rational hylomorphism the dimension of tendency and feeling that he had sifted from Spinoza (life-force, tendency, feeling) and which he locates, not in the world-spirit, but in the individual monad of Leibniz.
Charles Taylor says: “On the anthropology developed by Herder and those who followed him, there is certainly a rehabilitation of some basic Aristotelian concepts; to see life as an expression is to see it as the realization of a purpose, and in so far as this purpose is not meant to be ultimately blind, one can speak of the realization of an idea. But this is also understood as the realization of a self; and in this respect the notion is modern, it goes beyond Aristotle and shows a filiation to Leibniz.” He continues: “Leibniz too is obviously of central importance, whose notion of the monad was seminal for that of a self-unfolding subject. But Herder and those of his generation and the succeeding one were also greatly influenced by Spinoza. This may be surprising in that Spinoza was the great philosopher of the anti-subject… But the age in receiving him imposed a certain reading on Spinoza. His philosophy was not seen as denying an understanding of human life as self-unfolding; rather the Spinozan notion of a conatus in all things to preserve themselves was read in this light. What Spinoza seemed to offer… was a vision of the way in which the finite subject fitted into a universal current of life… In other words he was re-interpreted to incorporate the category of self-unfolding, now seen as the act of a universal life which was bigger than any subject, but qua self-unfolding life very subject-like.”[12]
2) Self-Mastering Form:
This self-unfolding as dynamic is not simply conformity to a non-rational tendency of mechanical nature for a fulfillment of life as object. It is a conscious form that is a self whose first move is to determine consciously what the form or self is. Taylor says: “If we think of our life as realizing an essence or form, this means not just the embodying of this form in reality; it also means defining in a determinate way what this form is. And this shows in another way the important difference between the expressivist model and the Aristotelian tradition: for the former, the idea which a man realizes is not wholly determinate before hand; it is only made fully determinate in being fulfilled. Hence the Herderian idea that my humanity is something unique, not equivalent to yours, and this unique quality can only be revealed in my life itself… The idea is not just that men are different; this was hardly new; it was rather that the differences define the unique form that each of us is called on to realize. The differences take on moral import; so that the question could arise for the first time whether a given form of life was an authentic expression of certain individuals or people. This is the new dimension added by the theory of self-realization.”[13]
Taylor considers Herder “a hinge figure: he swings our thought about language into a quite different angle.” In his “The Importance of Herder,”[14] Taylor sees in Herder what, in my estimation, Walker Percy sees in Helen Keller. Only Percy is clearer. What Herder, Taylor and Percy see is the subjective agency of the person who uses signs (like words), and in the exercise of self-mastery, experiences the “I” as ontological reality, precisely because it is experience. As Percy says - describing Helens naming the water from the pump as it washed over one hand, Ann Sullivan tapping in the Braille in the other - : “Here in the well-house in Tuscumbia in a small space and a short time, something extremely important and mysterious had happened. Eight-year-old Helen made her breakthrough from the good responding animal which behaviorists study so successfully to the strange name-giving and sentence-uttering creature who begins by naming shoes and ships and sealing wax, and later tells jokes, curses, reads the paper, writes La sua volontade e nostra pace, or becomes a Hegel and composes an entire system of philosophy.”[15] Helen had remarked: “As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand.” Percy draws attention to the word “meant” and I would suggest that it is precisely the experience of the exercise of “agency” of the subject in naming. This is huge discover since it opens up an entirely new metaphysical horizon of agency-being and completes the traditional metaphysic of the object.
It might be added that Wojtyla is clearer still since he does the phenomenology and metaphysics of the act of self-determination that must precede the act of language, say, in Adam’s naming the animals. There, in that act and in its wake, Adam had altered and determined his being such that he experienced the consciousness of being alone, the so-called “original solitude.”[16] By the act of obedience whereby Adam gave his entire self in submission to God to subdue the earth, the first part of the earth to subdue was his very self composed of matter (slime of the earth) and spirit (breathed into his nostrils). Before he could subdue that earth and the animals by naming them, he had to subdue himself in order to get possession of himself as a self. In that act, Adam achieved in act the potential subjectivity that he was originally endowed with as image of the Subjectivity of Yahweh’s “I Am” (Exodus 3, 15). Wojtyla says: “The Yahwist text allows us… to discover also further elements of this admirable passage, in which man finds himself alone before God, above all to expr3ess, through a first self-definition, his own self-knowledge as the first and fundamental manifestation of humanity. Self-knowledge goes hand in hand with knowledge of the world, of all visible creatures, of all living beings to which man has given their names to affirm his own dissimilarity before them… He is not only essentially and subjectively alone. In fact, solitude also signifies man’s subjectivity, which constitutes itself through self-knowledge. Man is alone because he is ‘different’ from the visible world, from the world of living beings. When we analyze the text of Genesis, we are in some way witnesses of how man, with the first act of self-consciousness, ‘distinguishes himself’ before God-Yahweh from the whole world of living beings (animalia), how he consequently reveals himself to himself and at the same time affirms himself in the visible world as a ‘person.’ That process of seeking a definition of himself… also leads to the first delineation of the human being as a human person, with the proper subjectivity that characterizes the person.”[17] In the next General Audience, John Paul drives home the meaning of solitude as being a subject in a universe of objects: “The concept of original solitude includes both self-consciousness and self-determination. That fact that man is ‘alone’ contains within itself this ontological structure” of subjectivity that sets Adam apart from all else that is object. “This man, about whom the account of the first chapter says that he has been created ‘in the image of God,’ is manifested in the second account as a subject of the covenant, that is, a subject constituted as a person, constituted according to the measure of ‘partner of the Absolute’… Man is ‘alone:’ this is to say that through his own humanity, through what he is, he is at the same time set into a unique, exclusive, and unrepeatable relationship with God himself.” [18]
Taylor considers Herder “a hinge figure: he swings our thought about language into a quite different angle.” In his “The Importance of Herder,”[14] Taylor sees in Herder what, in my estimation, Walker Percy sees in Helen Keller. Only Percy is clearer. What Herder, Taylor and Percy see is the subjective agency of the person who uses signs (like words), and in the exercise of self-mastery, experiences the “I” as ontological reality, precisely because it is experience. As Percy says - describing Helens naming the water from the pump as it washed over one hand, Ann Sullivan tapping in the Braille in the other - : “Here in the well-house in Tuscumbia in a small space and a short time, something extremely important and mysterious had happened. Eight-year-old Helen made her breakthrough from the good responding animal which behaviorists study so successfully to the strange name-giving and sentence-uttering creature who begins by naming shoes and ships and sealing wax, and later tells jokes, curses, reads the paper, writes La sua volontade e nostra pace, or becomes a Hegel and composes an entire system of philosophy.”[15] Helen had remarked: “As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand.” Percy draws attention to the word “meant” and I would suggest that it is precisely the experience of the exercise of “agency” of the subject in naming. This is huge discover since it opens up an entirely new metaphysical horizon of agency-being and completes the traditional metaphysic of the object.
It might be added that Wojtyla is clearer still since he does the phenomenology and metaphysics of the act of self-determination that must precede the act of language, say, in Adam’s naming the animals. There, in that act and in its wake, Adam had altered and determined his being such that he experienced the consciousness of being alone, the so-called “original solitude.”[16] By the act of obedience whereby Adam gave his entire self in submission to God to subdue the earth, the first part of the earth to subdue was his very self composed of matter (slime of the earth) and spirit (breathed into his nostrils). Before he could subdue that earth and the animals by naming them, he had to subdue himself in order to get possession of himself as a self. In that act, Adam achieved in act the potential subjectivity that he was originally endowed with as image of the Subjectivity of Yahweh’s “I Am” (Exodus 3, 15). Wojtyla says: “The Yahwist text allows us… to discover also further elements of this admirable passage, in which man finds himself alone before God, above all to expr3ess, through a first self-definition, his own self-knowledge as the first and fundamental manifestation of humanity. Self-knowledge goes hand in hand with knowledge of the world, of all visible creatures, of all living beings to which man has given their names to affirm his own dissimilarity before them… He is not only essentially and subjectively alone. In fact, solitude also signifies man’s subjectivity, which constitutes itself through self-knowledge. Man is alone because he is ‘different’ from the visible world, from the world of living beings. When we analyze the text of Genesis, we are in some way witnesses of how man, with the first act of self-consciousness, ‘distinguishes himself’ before God-Yahweh from the whole world of living beings (animalia), how he consequently reveals himself to himself and at the same time affirms himself in the visible world as a ‘person.’ That process of seeking a definition of himself… also leads to the first delineation of the human being as a human person, with the proper subjectivity that characterizes the person.”[17] In the next General Audience, John Paul drives home the meaning of solitude as being a subject in a universe of objects: “The concept of original solitude includes both self-consciousness and self-determination. That fact that man is ‘alone’ contains within itself this ontological structure” of subjectivity that sets Adam apart from all else that is object. “This man, about whom the account of the first chapter says that he has been created ‘in the image of God,’ is manifested in the second account as a subject of the covenant, that is, a subject constituted as a person, constituted according to the measure of ‘partner of the Absolute’… Man is ‘alone:’ this is to say that through his own humanity, through what he is, he is at the same time set into a unique, exclusive, and unrepeatable relationship with God himself.” [18]
Taylor considers Herder a hinge or swing figure because he recognizes the ontological reality of the “I” as agent of language, art and meaning, or better, that language, art and meaning is the “I” itself proffered as gift. A self-determining subject means a self that is ontological reality and that is both act and potency with regard to itself while being an integral whole and not an accidentally connected dualism. The disappointment was that Herder did not give a clear and rigorous account of that. (How could he? since he did not have the conceptual philosophic tools at his disposal to give such an account). Taylor goes further and suggests that both Kant and Herder failed to go as deep as they could and failed to discover that they were both talking about the same thing. That “same thing” is the subject that is in another epistemological horizon and knows and is known with another type of knowing that accompanies another kind of experience: the experience of the “I” in the act of self-transcendence, self-unfolding, self-expression (be it language, art, etc.). Herder calls it “Besonnenheit,” which Taylor translates as “self-clarity.”[19] It corresponds to Kant’s distinction between Verstand and Vernunft.
"Besonnenheit" (Awareness)
Herder’s “Besonnenheit” is translated by Michael N. Forster as “awareness.”[20] Herder says: "The human being demonstrates reflection when the force of his soul operates so freely that in the whole ocean of sensations which floods the soul through all the senses it can, so to speak, separate off, stop, and pay attention to a single wave, and be conscious of its own attentiveness. The human being demonstrates reflection when, out of the whole hovering dream aof images which proceed before his senses, he can collect himself into a moment of alertness, freely dwell on a single i8mage, pay it clear, more leisurely heed, and separate off characteristic marks for the fact that this is that object and no other…. The first act of this acknowledgment provides a distinct concept… What brought about this acknowledgment? A characteristic mark which he had to separate off and which as a characteristic mark of taking-aware-ness fell distinctly within him. Good! Let us shout to him the eureka! This first characteristic mark of taking-awareness was a word of the soul! With it human language is invented…. White, soft, woolly – his soul, operating with awareness, seeks a characteristic mark – the sheep bleats... the sheep comes again. White, soft, woolly… it bleats…'Aha! You are the bleating one!’… The sound of bleating, perceived by a human soul as the distinguishing sign of the sheep, became, thanks to this determination to which it was destined, the name of the sheep, even if the human being’s tongue had never tried to stammer it.’”[21]
This was to be the task of Hegel. Taylor remarked: “The hope was that men would unite the two ideas, radical freedom [Kant] and integral expression [Herder]. Because of the affinities between then… it was almost inevitable that if either were deeply and powerfully felt, the other would be as well. Members of the older generation could remain aloof from one or the other; thus Herder never warmed to the critical turn of Kant’s thought, and the two from having been close during Herder’s time of study at Konigsberg became somewhat estranged in the 1780s.Herder saw in the transcendental exploration of Kant only another theory which divided the subject. Kant for his part was snooty about Herder’s philosophy of history, and seems to have felt little attraction to this powerful statement of the expression theory.”[22]
The key to the union of the two strands can be found in the metaphysical anthropology that is subjacent to the theological formulation in Gaudium et spes #24 of the Second Vatican Council. The prime epistemological point is the notion of experience that has been hidden forever within, behind or under the consciousness of the self that is background to all conceptual (intentional and scientific) knowing. As soon as one discovers that the consciousness of the “I” is the consciousness of the absolute value of good and evil, and that that consciousness is the result of the experience of self-determination (which is, as experience, of the ontological passage from potency to act: the self as potency to the self as act), and that this self-determination is the condition of the possession (ownership) of the self by the self and which leads to self-gift if it be a good act, then both strands of Kant’s absolute, free and autonomous self coincides with Herder’s self-giving expression of language. We will see that Hegel did not hit explicitly on this notion of experience of the self in the act of self-determination, and failing that, he invented the Geist as a philosophoumenon to jury-rig a solution. Wojtyla has actually done it philosophically, and Ratzinger has given the theological explanation by the Person of Christ (Jesus of Nazareth in history is Jesus the Christ as Absolute) in history. My point here is that Hegel is immensely useful in Taylor’s account of him because he was working toward the above solution of Gaudium et spes #24 that is right before us if we have eyes to see and ears to hear.
This was to be the task of Hegel. Taylor remarked: “The hope was that men would unite the two ideas, radical freedom [Kant] and integral expression [Herder]. Because of the affinities between then… it was almost inevitable that if either were deeply and powerfully felt, the other would be as well. Members of the older generation could remain aloof from one or the other; thus Herder never warmed to the critical turn of Kant’s thought, and the two from having been close during Herder’s time of study at Konigsberg became somewhat estranged in the 1780s.Herder saw in the transcendental exploration of Kant only another theory which divided the subject. Kant for his part was snooty about Herder’s philosophy of history, and seems to have felt little attraction to this powerful statement of the expression theory.”[22]
The key to the union of the two strands can be found in the metaphysical anthropology that is subjacent to the theological formulation in Gaudium et spes #24 of the Second Vatican Council. The prime epistemological point is the notion of experience that has been hidden forever within, behind or under the consciousness of the self that is background to all conceptual (intentional and scientific) knowing. As soon as one discovers that the consciousness of the “I” is the consciousness of the absolute value of good and evil, and that that consciousness is the result of the experience of self-determination (which is, as experience, of the ontological passage from potency to act: the self as potency to the self as act), and that this self-determination is the condition of the possession (ownership) of the self by the self and which leads to self-gift if it be a good act, then both strands of Kant’s absolute, free and autonomous self coincides with Herder’s self-giving expression of language. We will see that Hegel did not hit explicitly on this notion of experience of the self in the act of self-determination, and failing that, he invented the Geist as a philosophoumenon to jury-rig a solution. Wojtyla has actually done it philosophically, and Ratzinger has given the theological explanation by the Person of Christ (Jesus of Nazareth in history is Jesus the Christ as Absolute) in history. My point here is that Hegel is immensely useful in Taylor’s account of him because he was working toward the above solution of Gaudium et spes #24 that is right before us if we have eyes to see and ears to hear.
Hegel
On Charles Taylor’s interpretation of Hegel, we find that he is not the mad and impenetrable idealist of the ethereal Geist and the unthinkable confusion of reason’s dialectic with matter-making-history, but a synthetic mind trying to resolve the two horns of the Enlightenment dualism of mind and matter. What Taylor suggests he saw were the two parallel lines of thought in Kant’s free autonomous self and Herder’s integral expressivism.
[1] J. Ratzinger, “Section 2, Faith and History, A. Salvation and History,” in Principles of Catholic Theology Ignatius (1987) 159.
[2] J. Ratzinger, “The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure” Franciscan Herald Press (1989) xi.
[3] John Paul II, Andre Frossard, “Be Not Afraid,” St. Martin’s Press (1984) 59-60.
[4] J. Ratzinger, “Conscience and Truth,” Values in a Time of Upheaval Ignatius (2006) 92.
[5] Charles Taylor, “Hegel” Cambridge University Press (1975) 30.
[6] Ibid. 32.
[7] “The most evident feature in an act of will is the efficacy of the personal self. This efficacy is immediately given: it is reflected in the awareness of the acting person as an act of will….Kant abandoned this dynamic essence of the will in his interpretation of ethical life, confining himself to an analysis of the contents of practical reason as the determining factors in the direction of the will And yet the first and most fundamental aspect of ethical experience is the very efficacy of the personal self, which Ach, Lindworsky, and other representatives of the same school of psychology describe as essential for the will;” K. Wojtyla, “The Will in the Analysis of the Ethical Act,” Person and Community, Lang (1993) 7-8.
[8] Charles Taylor, “Hegel,” op. cit. 30.
[9] K. Wojtyla, “The Acting Person,” Analecta Husserliana Reidel (1979) 72.
[10] Ibid
[11] John Paul II, “Crossing the Threshold of Hope,” Knopf (1994) 34.
[12] Charles Taylor, “Hegel,” op. cit 16.
[13] Charles Taylor, “Hegel” op. cit. 17.
[14] Charles Taylor, “Philosophical Arguments” Harvard University Press (1997)
[15] Walker Percy, “The Delta Factor,” Message in the Bottle, Noonday (1995) 35.
[16] John Paul II, “Man and Woman He Created Them, A Theology of the Body,” Pauline Books and Media (2006) 146-156.
[17] Ibid. 150
[18] Ibid 151.
[19] Charles Taylor, “Hegel,” op. cit 22.
[20] “Herder – Philosophical Writings,” Cambridge University Press (2002) 87-89.
[21] Ibid
[22] Charles Taylor, “Hegel,” op. cit. 34.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
The Mother's "Quid Divinum" in the Ordinary
(Forwarded to me by Regan Wick)
"I'm invisible.......
It all began to make sense, the blank stares, the lack of response, the way one of the kids will walk into the room while I'm on the phone and ask to be taken to the store.
Inside I'm thinking, "Can't you see I'm on the phone?"
Obviously not. No one can see if I'm on the phone, or cooking, or sweeping the floor, or even standing on my head in the corner, because no one can see me at all. I'm invisible. Some days I am only a pair of hands, nothing more: Can you fix this? Can you tie this? Can you open this? Some days I'm not a pair of hands; I'm not even a human being. I'm a clock to ask, "What time is it?" I'm a satellite guide to answer, "What number is the Disney Channel?" I'm a car to order, "Pick me up right around 5:30, please."
I was certain that these were the hands that once held books and the eyes that studied history and the mind that graduated summa cum laude --but now they had disappeared into the peanut butter, never to be seen again.She's going ... she's going ... she's gone!
One night, a group of us were having dinner, celebrating the return of a friend from England. Janice had just gotten back from a fabulous trip, and she was going on and on about the hotel she stayed in. I was sitting there, looking around at the others all put together so well. It was hard not to compare and feel sorry for myself as I looked down at my out-of-style dress; it was the only thing I could find that was clean. My unwashed hair was pulled up in a banana clip and I was afraid I could actually smell peanut butter in it. I was feeling pretty pathetic, when Janice turned to me with a beautifully wrapped package, and said, "I brought you this."It was a book on the great cathedrals of Europe. I wasn't exactly sure why she'd given it to me until I read her inscription:
"To Charlotte,with admiration for the greatness of what you are building when no one sees."
In the days ahead I would read -- no, devoured -- the book. And I would discover what would become for me, four life-changing truths, afterwhich I could pattern my work: No one can say who built the great cathedrals-- we have no record of their names. These builders gave their whole lives for a work they would never see finished. They made great sacrifices and expected no credit. The passion of their building was fueled by their faith that the eyes of God saw everything.A legendary story in the book told of a rich man who came to visit the cathedral while it was being built, and he saw a workman carving a tinybird on the inside of a beam. He was puzzled and asked the man,
"Why are you spending so much time carving that bird into a beam that will becovered by the roof? No one will ever see it."
And the workman replied, "Because God sees."
I closed the book, feeling the missing piece fall into place. It was almost as if I heard God whispering to me,
"I see you, Charlotte. I see the sacrifices you make every day, even when no one around you does. No act of kindness you've done, no sequin you've sewn on, no cup cake you've baked, is too small for me to notice and smile over. You are building a great cathedral, but you can't see right now what it will become."
At times, my invisibility feels like an affliction. But it is not a disease that is erasing my life. It is the cure for the disease of my own self-centeredness. It is the antidote to my strong, stubborn pride.
I keep the right perspective when I see myself as a great builder. As one of the people who show up at a job that they will never see finished, to work on something that their name will never be on. The writer of the book went so far as to say that no cathedrals could ever be built in our life time because there are so few people willing to sacrifice to that degree. When I really think about it, I don't want my son to tell the friend he's bringing home from college for Thanksgiving, "My mom gets up at 4 in the morning and bakes homemade pies, and then she hand-bastes a turkey for three hours and presses all the linens for the table." That would mean I'd built a shrine or a monument to myself. I just want him to want to come home. And then, if there is anything more to say to his friend, to add, "You're gonna love it there."As mothers, we are building great cathedrals. We cannot be seen if we're doing it right. And one day, it is very possible that the world will marvel, not only at what we have built, but at the beauty that has been added to the world by the sacrifices of invisible women
The Eternal Resiliance of Choices
(I post this at the suggestion of Peter O'Malley)
In that place between wakefulness and dreams, I found myself in a file room. There were no distinguishing features save for the one wall covered with small indexcard files. They were like the ones in libraries that list titles by author or subject in alphabetical order. But these files, which stretched from floor to ceiling and seemingly endless in either direction, had very different headings. As I drew near the wall of files, the first to catch my attention was one that read "People I have Liked." I opened it and began flipping through the cards. I quickly shut it, shocked to realize that I recognized the names on each one. And then without being told, I knew exactly where I was. This lifeless room with its small files was a crude catalog system for my life. Here were written the actions of my every moment, big and small, in a detail my memory couldn't match. A sense of wonder and curiosity, coupled with horror, stirred within me as I began randomly opening files and exploring their content. Some brought joy and sweet memories; others a sense of shame and regret so intense that I would look over my shoulder to see if anyone was watching. A file named "Friends" was next to one marked "Friends I Have Betrayed". The tiles ranged from the mundane to the outright weird. "Books I Have Read", "Lies I Have Told", "Comfort I Have Given", "Jokes I Have Laughed At". Some were almost hilarious in their exactness: "Things I've Yelled At My Brothers". Others I couldn't laugh at: "Things I Have Done In My Anger", "Things I Have Muttered Under My Breath At My Parents". I never ceased to be surprised by the contents. Often there were many more cards than I had expected. Sometimes fewer than I had hoped. I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the life I had lived. Could it be possible that I had in my 20-years to write each of these thousands or even millions of cards? But each card confirmed this truth. Each was written in my own handwriting. Each signed with my signature. When I pulled out the file marked "Songs I Have Listened To", I realized the files grew to contain their contents. The cards were packed tightly, and yet after two or three yards, I hadn't found the end of the file. I shut it, shamed, not so much by the quality of the music, but more by the vast amount of time I knew that file represented. When I came to a file marked "Lustful Thoughts", I felt a chill run through my body. I pulled the file out an inch, not willing to test its size, and drew out a card. I shuddered at its detailed account. I felt sick to think that such a moment had been recorded. An almost animal rage broke on me. One thought dominated my mind: "No one must ever see these cards! No one must ever see this room! I have to destroy them!" In an insane frenzy I yanked the file out. Its size didn't matter now. I had to empty it and burn the cards. But as I took it at one end and began pounding it on the floor, I could not dislodge a single card. I became desperate and pulled out a card, only to find it as strong as steel when I tried to tear it. Defeated and utterly helpless, I returned the file to its slot. Leaning my forehead against the wall, I let out a long, self-pitying sigh. And then I saw it. The tile bore "People I Have Shared the Gospel With". The handle was brighter than those around it, newer almost unused. I pulled on its handle and a small box not more than three inches long fell into my hands. I could count the cards it contained on one hand. And then the tears came, I began to weep. Sobs so deep that the hurt started in my stomach and shook through me. I fell on my knees and cried. I cried out in shame, from the overwhelming shame of it all. The rows of file shelves swirled in my tear-filled eyes. No one must ever, ever know of this room. I must lock it up and hide the key.
But then as I pushed away the tears, I saw Him. No, please not Him. Not here. Oh, anyone but Jesus. I watched helplessly as He began to open the files and read the cards. I couldn't bear to watch His response. And in the moments I could bring myself to look at His face, I saw a sorrow deeper than my own. He seemed to intuitively to go to the worst boxes. Why did He have to read every one? Finally He turned and looked at me from across the room. He looked at me with pity in His eyes. But this was a pity that didn't anger me. I dropped my head, covered my face with my hands and began to cry again. He walked over and put His arm around me. He could have said so many things. But He didn't say a word. He just cried with me. The He got up and walked back to the wall of files. Starting at one end of the room, He took out a file and, one by one, began to sign His name over mine on each card. "No !" I shouted rushing to Him. All I could find to say was "No, no," as I pulled the card from Him. His name shouldn't be on these cards. But there it was, written in red so rich, so dark, so alive. The name of Jesus covered mine. It was written with His blood. He gently took the card back. He smiled a sad smile and began to sign the cards. I don't think I'll ever understand how He did it so quickly, but the next instant it seemed I heard Him close the last file and walk back to my side. He placed His hand on my shoulder and said, "It is finished." I stood up, and He led me out of the room. There was no lock on its door. There were still cards to be written.
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