Immaculate Conception, December 8, 2005: 40th Anniversary of the Second Vatican Council

The key to the Second Vatican Council was the recovery of the Church as a Subject, a Woman:

“The Church is not an apparatus, nor a social institution, nor one social institution among many others. It is a person. It is a woman. It is a Mother. It is alive. A Marian understanding of the church is totally opposed to the concept of the Church as a bureaucracy or a simple organization. We cannot make the Church, we must be the Church. We are the Church, the Church is in us only to the extent that our faith more than action forges our being. Only by being Marian, can we become the Church. At its very beginning the Church was not made, but given birth. She existed in the soul of Mary from the moment she uttered her fiat. This is the most profound will of the Council: the Church should be awakened in our souls. Mary shows us the way.”[1]

The Dogma
1. CCC: 491: “Through the centuries the Church has become ever more aware that Mary, `full of grace’ through God, was redeemed from the moment of her conception. That is what the dogma of the Immaculate Conception confesses, as Pope Pius IX proclaimed in 1854:
“The most Blessed Virgin Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and by virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, Savior of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin.”[2]
Notice that “the Church has become ever more aware.” This means that there is growth in the faith-experience of the Person of Jesus Christ and therefore growth in the consciousness of the meaning of Revelation. Recall Cardinal Ratzinger’s biographical remarks on his once-failed habilitation thesis: “Where there is no one to perceive `revelation,’ no re-vel-ation has occurred, because no veil has been removed. By definition, revelation requires a someone who apprehends it… (I)f Bonaventure is right, then revelation precedes Scripture and becomes deposited in Scripture but is not simply identical with it. This in turn means that revelation is always something greater than what is merely written down. And this again means that there can be no such thing as pure sola scriptura… because an essential element of Scripture is the Church as understanding subject, and with this the fundamental sense of tradition is already given.”[3] Hence, “meaning” is the result of personal experience of the self-giving that is faith.

The “Meaning” of Original Sin
It is a failure to respond. It is a silent No! It is disobedience. It is non-relation. It is the turning back on self of a self that was called to go out of self in the act of obedience. Ratzinger is at pains to make clear that original sin is not a fact that is an empirical existence like “Goethe was born on August 28, 1749. Original sin is a `fact,’ a reality of a different type, known only through typology; the basic text, Romans 5, is a typological interpretation of the Old Testament. Original sin became recognizable in the type Adam, and in his recurrence at the turning points of history. Its affirmation rests upon the typological identification of every single man with man as such, with average man, with man from the beginning on. Original sin was not handed on in the tradition (and previously communicated) from the beginning as a fact…. To have missed this truth was perhaps the principal error of the neoscholastic doctrine on original sin [the loss of the gift of integrity whereby right reason controls the passions].”[4]
To clarify this, here is the CCC #386: “To try to understand what sin is, one must first recognize the profound relation of man to God, for only in this relationship is the evil of sin unmasked in its true identity as humanity’s rejection of God and opposition to him, even as it continues to weigh heavy on human life and history.”
John Paul II clarified that this is the meaning of the Holy Spirit “convincing the world of sin.” One cannot convert is he does not know that he has sinned. And sin is a mystery that is revealed in the Cross of Jesus Christ. He says: “It is precisely the Holy Spirit who `searches’ the `depths of God ’and from them draws God’s response to man’s sin.”[5] That response is Christ’s Cross.
Because of sin, man has forgotten who he is. He has lost the experience of the original solitude and therefore the consciousness of being made in the image of God. The original solitude was the result of the act of obedience to the Creator in the naming of the animals. His identity as “like” God is that relation of obedience. Having broken that relation, there is a loss of self-identity: amnesia. Hence, he must be “convinced” of sin by the Holy Spirit. “Man does not know this dimension – he is absolutely ignorant of it apart from the Cross of Christ. So he cannot be `convinced’ of it except by the Holy Spirit.”[6]
Therefore, the CCC 387 says: “Without the knowledge Revelation gives of God we cannot recognize sin clearly and are tempted to explain it as merely a developmental flaw, a psychological weakness, a mistake, or the necessary consequence of an inadequate social structure, etc. Only in the knowledge of God’s plan for man can we grasp that sin is an abuse of the freedom that God gives to created persons so that they are capable of living him and loving one another.”

The Meaning of the Immaculate Conception

Cardinal Ratzinger: “We may say that original sin is not an assertion about a natural deficiency in or concerning man, but a statement about a relationship that can be meaningfully formulated only in the context of the God-man relation. The essence of sin can only be understood in an anthropology of relation, not by looking at an isolated human being. Such an anthropology is even more essential in the case of grace. We could therefore describe original sin as a statement about God’s evaluation of man’ evaluation not as something external, but as a revealing of the very depths of his interior being. It is the collapse of what man is, both in his origin from God and in himself, the contradiction between the will of the Creator and man’s empirical being.
This contradiction between God’s `is’ and man’s `is not’ is lacking the case of Mary, and consequently God’s judgment about her is pure `Yes,’ just as she herself stands before him as a pure `Yes.’ This correspondence of God’s `Yes’ with Mary’s being as `Yews’ is the freedom from original sin. Preservation from original sin, therefore, signifies no exceptional proficiency, no exceptional achievement; on the contrary, it signifies that Mary reserves no area of being, life, and will for herself as a private possession: instead, precisely in the total dispossession of self, in giving herself to God, she comes to the true possession of self. Grace as dispossession becomes response as appropriation. Thus from another viewpoint the mystery of barren fruitfulness, the paradox of the barren mother, the mystery of virginity, become s intelligible once more; dispossession as belonging, as the locus of new life.
Thus the doctrine of the Immaculata reflects ultimately faith’s certitude that there really is a holy Church – as a person and in a person. In this sense it expresses the Church’s certitude of salvation. Included therein is the knowledge that God’s covenant in Israel did not fail but produced a shoot out of which emerged the blossom, the Savior. The doctrine of the Immaculata testifies accordingly that God’s grace was powerful enough to awaken a response, that grace and freedom, grace and being oneself, renunciation and fulfillment are only apparent contradictories; in reality one conditions the other and grants it its very existence.”[7]

Is the Immaculate Conception in Scripture?

1. John Henry Newman: “The New Eve” According to the earliest Fathers of the Church:
Our Lady as the Second Eve

“What is the great rudimental teaching of Antiquity from its earliest date concerning her” By `rudimental teaching,’ I mean the prima facie view of her person and office, the broad outline laid down of her, the aspect under which she comes to us, in the writings of the Fathers. She is the Second Eve. Now let us consider what this implies. Eve had a definite, essential position in the First Covenant. The fate of the human race lay with Adam; he it was who represented us. It was in Adam that we fell; though Eve had fallen, still, if Adam had stood, we should not have lost those supernatural privileges which were bestowed upon him as our first father. Yet though Eve was not the head of the race, still, even as regards the race, she had a place of her own; for Adam, to whom it was divinely committed the naming of all things, named her `the mother of all the living,’ a name surely expressive, not of a fact only, but of a dignity; but further, as she thus had her own general relation to the human race, so again she had her own special place, as regards its trial and its fall in Adam…. …She listened to the Evil Angel; she offered the fruit to her husband… She cooperated, not as an irresponsible instrument, but intimately and personally in the sin: she brought it about. As the history stands, she was a sine qua non, a positive, active cause of it. And she had her share in its punishment; in the sentence pronounced on her, she was recognized as a real agent in the temptation and its issue, and she suffered accordingly…
“But it was to be a second Adam and a second Eve, and the new Eve was to be the mother of the new Adam: `I will put enmity between thee and the woman and between thy seed and her seed.’ The Seed of the woman is the Word Incarnate, and the Woman, whose seed or son He is, is His Mother Mary. This interpretation, and the parallelism it involves, seems to me undeniable; but at all events (and this is my point) the parallelism is the doctrine of the Fathers, from the earliest times; and, this being established, we are able, by the position and office of Eve in our fall, to determine the position and office of Mary in our restoration….”

First, then, St. Justin, Martyr (A.D. 120-165), St. Irenaeus (120-200), and Tertullian (160-240)….

“Now, what is especially noticeable in these three writers is that they do not speak of the Blessed Virgin merely as the physical instrument of Our Lord’s taking flesh, but as the an intelligent, responsible cause of it; her faith and obedience being the accessories to the Incarnation, and gaining it as her reward. As Eve failed in these virtues, and thereby brought on the fall of the race in Adam, so Mary by means of the same had a part in its restoration…. Not to go beyond the doctrine of the three Fathers, they unanimously declare that she was not a mere instrument in the Incarnation, such as David, or Judah, may be considered; they declare she co-operated in our salvation not merely by the descent of the Holy Ghost upon her body, but by specific holy acts, the effect of the Holy Ghost within her soul; that, as Eve forfeited privileges by sin, so Mary earned privileges by the fruits of grace; that, as Eve was disobedient and unbelieving, so Mary was obedient and believing; that, as Eve was a cause of ruin to all, Mary was a cause of salvation to all; that, as Eve made room for Adam’s fall, so Mary made room for Our Lord’s reparation of it; and thus, whereas the free gift was not as the offence, but much greater, it follows that, as Eve co-operated in effecting a great evil Mary co-operated in effecting a much greater good.”


2. Josef Ratzinger in 1975: Yes! As Israel, and therefore as Church!

The large picture to keep in mind: the spousal union of Adam and Eve prior to sin is the “type” of the spousal union of the Creator with man. Notice the spouse of God is not a goddess, but believing man in the subjective reality of Israel.[8] The Incarnation – already predestined before the creation of the world (Eph 1, 4) – is the one-flesh union between God and man in Jesus Christ.

“For your Maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts is his name, and the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer; the God of the whole earth he is called. For the Lord has called you like a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit, like a wife of youth when she is cast off, says your God. For a brief moment I forsook you, but with great compassion I will gather you. In overflowing wrath for a moment I hid my face from you, but with everlasting love, I will have compassion oon you, says the Lord, your Redeemer” (Isaiah 54, 5-8).

When the Logos becomes flesh as Redeemer, He is revealed as the “Bridegroom” who “loved the Church, and delivered himself up for her, that he might sanctify her” (Eph. 5, 25). The analogy is spousal: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the Church” (Eph. 5, 25). The Church is Israel believing in Mary at the Annunciation: “Fiat.” And so our Lady sums up the whole of Israel as “Daughter Zion” responding “Yes!” to the invitation of the Creator-Bridegroom who calls, “Come!” The one-flesh union is the Incarnation itself taking all the flesh from Mary as His own Body, and the gift of that flesh of His Body back in the Eucharist whereby Bridegroom and Bride become one flesh in the Eucharist forming the whole Christ.

This is the prototypical reality of all the various types beginning with the communio of Adam and Eve in the garden, the development of Israel as spouse of the Creator, her Husband (Isaiah 54, 5) shown forth in the various women of the Old Testament[9] and culminating in our Lady as the Daughter Zion. In this regard, CCC 489 reads: “Throughout the Old Covenant the mission of many holy women prepared for that of Mary. At the very beginning there was Eve; despite her disobedience, she receives the promise of a posterity that will be victorious over the evil one, as well as the promise that she will be the mother of all the living. By virtue of this promise, Sarah conceives a son in spite of her old age. Against all human expectation God chooses those who were considered powerless and weak to show forth his faithfulness to his promises: Hannah, the mother of Samuel; Deborah; Ruth; Judith and Esther; and many other women. Mary `stands out among the poor and humble of the Lord, who confidently hope for and receive salvation from him. After a long period of waiting the times are fulfilled in her, the exalted Daughter of Sion, and the new plan of salvation is established.”

Ratzinger: “The Epistle to the Ephesians describes the new Israel, the bride, as `holy,’ `immaculate,’ `luminously beautiful,’ `without spot, wrinkle, or the like’ (5, 27). Patristic theology further developed this image of the Ecclesia immaculata in passages of lyrical beauty. Consequently, from the very beginning there is a doctrine about the Immaculata in Scripture and especially in the Fathers, even if it concerns the Ecclesia immaculata. Here the doctrine of the Immaculata, like the whole of later Mariology, is first anticipated as ecclesiology. The image of the Church, virgin and mother, is secondarily transferred to Mary, not vice versa. So if the dogma of the Immaculate Conception transferred to the concrete figure of Mary those assertions which primarily belong to the antithesis new-old Israel, and are in this sense a typologically developed ecclesiology, this means that Mary is presented as the beginning and the personal concreteness of the Church. It entails the conviction that the rebirth of the old Israel into the new Israel, of which the Epistle to the Ephesians spoke, achieves in Mary its concrete accomplishment. It proclaims that this new Israel (which is simultaneously the true old Israel, the holy remnant preserved by the grace of God) is not only an idea but a person. The type, of which the ecclesiology of the New Testament and the Fathers speak, exists as a person.”[10]

Cardinal Ratzinger in 2002: “The Church is not an apparatus, nor a social institution, nor one social institution among many others. It is a person. It is a woman. It is a Mother. It is alive. A Marian understanding of the church is totally opposed to the concept of the Church as a bureaucracy or a simple organization. We cannot make the Church, we must be the Church. We are the Church, the Church is in us only to the extent that our faith more than action forges our being. Only by being Marian, can we become the Church. At its very beginning the Church was not made, but given birth. She existed in the soul of Mary from the moment she uttered her fiat. This is the most profound will of the Council: the Church should be awakened in our souls. Mary shows us the way.”[11][i]


Rev. Robert A. Connor


[1] J. Ratzinger, The Ecclesiology of Vatican II, L’Osservatore Romano N. 4 – 23 January 2002, 7.

[2] Pius IX Ineffabilis Deus, 1854,: DS 2803,
[3] J. Ratzinger, Milestones… (1997) 108.
[4] J. Ratzinger, Daughter of Zion. op. cit. 66-67.
[5] John Paul II, Dominum et vivificantem #32.
[6] Ibid.
[7] J. Ratzinger, Daughter of Zion, op. cit.
[8] “In all this the Jews sharply distinguished themselves and their God from other people and their gods; indeed, the myriad distinctions enjoined by the Torah – between different kinds of animals and different kinds of food, different periods of time, different forms of clothing and utensils – may have been not just ceremonial rubrics or practices useful for preserving health and public order; they may have served as a training for the Jews in the very habit of seeing that this and not that, so that hey would be all the more able to realize that `they,’ the other nations, are not `us,’ because their `gods’ are not Yahweh;” Robert Sokolowski, Eucharistic Presence CUA (1944) 145.
[9] Our Lady is preceded by the great women of the Old Testament who, instead of being fertile in the order of nature, are infertile – thus disclosing the supernatural character of God’s intervention. Ratzinger calls this “the remarkable reversal:” “In the history of the patriarchs, Sarah-Hagar, Rachel-Leah, and Hannah-Penina are those pairs of women in whom the extraordinary element in the path of the promises stands out. In each case the fertile and the infertile stand opposite each other, and in the process a remarkable reversal in values is reached. In archaic modes of thought, fertility is a blessing, infertility is a curse. Yet here all is reversed: the infertile on e ultimately turns out to be the truly blessed, while the fertile on e recedes into the ordinary or even has to struggle against the curse of repudiation, of being unloved…. “(A) theology of grace was developed from this reversal of values in the song of Hannah, which is echoed in Mary’s Magnificat: the Lord raises the humble from the dust, he lifts the poor forum the ashes (1 Sam. 2, 8). God bends down to the humble, the powerless, the rejected, and in this condescension the love of God, which truly saves, shines forth both for Hannah and for Mary, in the remarkable phenomenon of unblessed-blessed women. The mystery of the last place (Lk. 14, 10), the exchange between the first and the last place (Mk 10, 31), the reversal of values in the Sermon on the Mount, the reversal of earthly values founded upon hybris, all of this is intimated. Here also the theology of virginity fins its first, still hidden formulation: infertility becomes true fertility…” Daughter Zion

[10] Josef Ratzinger, Daughter Zion Ignatius (1983) 67-68.
[11] J. Ratzinger, The Ecclesiology of Vatican II, L’Osservatore Romano N. 4 – 23 January 2002, 7.

Feast of St. Nicholas, December 6, 2005

The Figure of St. Nicholas:

"Tradition has always equated Santa Claus with the Bishop Nicholas who participated in the Council of Nicaea and, together with that first great assembly of bishops, helped to formulate the affirmation of the true divinity of Jesus Christ. What was at stake here was the core of Christianity, whether Christianity was to become just another sect or something really new, faith in the Incarnation of God himself. Was Jesus of Nazareth only a great religious man, or had God himself actually become, in him, one of us? So, ultimately, the question was this: Is God so mighty that he can make himself small; is he so mighty that he can love us and really enter our lives? For if God is too far away from us to love us effectively, then human love too is only an empty promise. If God cannot love, how can man be expected to do so? In professing faith in God's Incarnation, therefore, it was ultimately a case of affirming also man's capacity to live and die in a human manner. The figure of St. Nicholas, Santa Claus, illustrates and symbolizes this connection....

"Nicholas is one of the first people to be venerated as a saint withouit having been a martyr. During the persecution of Christians, those who opposed the pagan state power and gave their lives for their faith had quite automatically become great examples of faith. When peace was concluded between Church and state, people needed new models. Nicholas impressed them as one ready to help others. His miracle was not that of great heroism in the face of torture, imprisonment and death. It is the miracle of constant kindness in everyday life.

"Another of the legends expresses it very beautrifully in this way: Whereas all the other miracles could be performed by magicians and demons, and thus were ambivalent, one miracle was absolutely transparent and could not involve any deception, namely, that of living out the faith in everyday life for an entire lifetime and maintaining charity. People in the fourth century experienced this miracle in the life of Nicholas, and all the miracle stories which accrued subsequently to the leged are only variations on this one, fundamental miracle, which Nicholas' contemporaries compared, with wonder and gratitude, to the morning star reflecting the radiance of the light of Christ. In this man they understood what faith in God's Incarnation means; in him the dogma of Nicaea had been translated into tangible terms" (Josef Ratzinger, Seek That Which is Above Ignatius [1986] 20-22).

The anecdotal consists in Nicholas' provident amassing of doweries for unmarriageable women. But it all comes down to the meaning of the Incarnation as self gift, and therefore, the human person. As we shall see, John Paul II makes it clear that, pace the absolute right to private property by the work of subduing creation, whatever becomes private property must be poured back into the work process to serve others, and this because the working person must be gift to the others by the very title of being person in the image of the Incarnate God. "Property is acquired first of all through work in order that it may serve work. This concerns in a special way ownership of the means of production. Isolating these means as a separate property in order to set it up in the form of `capital' in opposition to `labor' - and even to practice exploitation of labor - is contrary to the very nature of these means and their possession. The cannot possessed against labor, they cannot even be possessed for possession's sake, because the only legitimate title to their possession -whether in the form of private ownership or in the form of public or collective ownership - is that they should serve labor,, and thus by serving labor, that they should make possible the achievement of the first principle of this order, namely, the universal destination of goods and the right to common use of them" (Laborem Exercens #14). Hence, the principle:

Having and Being: Man is worth more for what he is than for what he has! – or - how can one live the virtue of the poverty of Jesus Christ in the middle of secular society earning a living wage?


a) Poverty does not consist in the extrinsic state of not having things. Rather, it consists in the interior attitude of self-gift. This is the priesthood of Jesus Christ.[1] God took no pleasure heartless external sacrifices: “What care I for the number of your sacrifices?” says the Lord. “I have had enough of wholeburnt rams and fat of fatlings; in the blood of calves, lambs and goats I find no pleasure.”[2] St. Paul says, “But when Christ appeared as high priest… he entered once for all through the greater and ore perfect tabernacle, not made by hands [the temple]… nor again by virtue of blood of goats and calves, but by virtue of his own blood, into the Holies, having obtained eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls and the sprinkled ashes of a heifer sanctify the unclean unto the cleansing of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the Holy Spirit offered himself unblemished unto God…” (Heb. 9, 11-14). And again, “But as it is, once for all at the end of the ages, he has appeared for the destruction of sin by the sacrifice of himself” (Heb. 9, 26).

b) The metaphysical anthropology of poverty is the following: “property is acquired first of all through work in order that it may serve work. This concerns in a special way ownership of the means of production. Isolating these means as a separate property in order to set it up in the form of `capital’ in opposition to `labor’ – and even to practice exploitation of labor – is contrary to the very nature of these means and their possession. They cannot be possessed against labor, they cannot even be possessed for possession’s sake, because the only legitimate title to their possession –whether in the form of private ownership or in the form of public or collective ownership – is that they should serve labor, and thus, by serving labor, that they should make possible the achievement of the first principle of this order, namely, the universal destination of goods and the right to common use of them.”[3]

This is an instantiation of Christian anthropology, i.e., “man, the only earthly being God has willed for itself, finds himself, by the sincere gift of himself” (Gaudium et Spes #24). One gains private property by subduing the earth. And since the human person was taken from the slime of the earth, he must subdue himself and so as to own himself by becoming master of self. Work, then, has this subjective dimension, namely, that subduing the earth presupposes this subjective subduing and giving of self in obedience to the divine command to, say, till the garden and name the animals. The self-transcendence of obedience takes place in this anthropology of work, and in this crossing of the threshold from the experience of being object (rational animal) to subject (“I”), the likeness to the divine Persons takes place. And with it, the experience of not being “like” the rest of creation that is “thing.” The “original solitude,” the divine assessment that it is "not good” for man to be alone with the consequent creation of sexuality as male and female ensues, etc., etc. But the key point is that the person and all that accrues to the person as personal property because of work must become gift for the person to flourish as person. Hence, the conclusion imposes itself on everyone. No one can own anything-for-self. John Paul II said, “Private property… is under a `social mortgage’…”[4] because the human person (imaging the divine Persons) is under a “social mortgage.” Nothing for self! We are all administrators! He goes on:

“The Church’s social doctrine is not a `third way’ between liberal capitalism and Marxist collectivism, nor even a possible alternative to other solutions less radically opposed to one another: rather, it constitutes a category of its own. Nor is it an ideology, but rather the accurate formulation of the results of a careful reflection on the complex realities of human existence, in society and in the international order, in the light of faith and of the church’s tradition. Its main aim is to interpret these realities, determining their conformity with or divergence from the lines of the Gospel teaching on man and his vocation, a vocation which is at once earthly and transcendent; its aim is thus to guide Christian behavior. It therefore belongs to the field, not of ideology, but of theology and particularly of moral theology.”[5]

St. Nicholas in the Spirit and History of Opus Dei:

Getting down to the quotidian details, one of the spiritual children of St. Josemaria Escriva, founder of Opus Dei, once remarked:

“The Father expected a lot of us in living poverty: making good use of time; lights always turned off when they were not needed; carefully planned purchases, made where they offered the best prices; not wasting food or leftover pieces of cloth or thumbtacks, nails or anything useful in making repairs. We saw how he got the most out of his own clothing – his cassocks, his overcoat (more patches than original cloth) – and of the sheets of paper he wrote on; and how he tried to keep our few pieces of furniture from getting too much sunlight. We were moved to want to learn how to live this virtue in detail.”[6]

Historically, St. Josemaria named St. Nicholas of Bari as patron of Opus Dei financial affairs: “Despite these efforts, by December the financial situation was becoming desperate. As Escriva prepared to celebrate Mass on December 6, [1934] the feast of St. Nicolas of Bari, who is known for solving economic problems, he challenged the saint to resolve DYA’ financial crisis, `If you get me out of this one, I’ll name you patron of the economic affairs of the Work.’ As he left the sacristy, he repented and added, `and even if you don’t.’”[7]

Coverdale continues: “On March 13, 1935, Escriva sent a petition to the archbishop of Madrid, explaining the spiritual activities that were being held in the residence and asking for permission to establish a semi-public oratory where Mass could be said and the Blessed Sacrament reserved. He hoped to celebrate Mass for the first time in the oratory on Sunday, March 31, 1935m but they still lacked many essential items. Toward the end of March, a distinguished-looking bearded gentleman, wearing an old-fashioned Spanish cape, anonymously left a package containing everything they needed. Escriva said the benefactor might have been a friend of his, Alejandro Guzman, but the residents said, half-jokingly and half-seriously, that it must have been St. Nicholas or St. Joseph. They mentioned St. Joseph because Escriva had been asking them to pray incessantly to him for the gift of Eucharistic bread, prefigured in the Old Testament by the bread that Joseph distributed to the Egyptians at the Pharaoh’s order.”[8]

On two other significant projects, the first (Villa Tevere) and second (Cavabianca) sites of the Roman College of the Holy Cross for the “roman” formation of future directors and priests, Escriva had recourse to the saint:

Re: Villa Tevere: “With an eye to the financial difficulties, the Father made a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Saint Nicholas of Bari, in southern Italy, on July 6, 1954. Saint Nicholas, as we recall, was Opus Dei’s intercessor for financial matters, and the founder had had recourse to him in the midst of the material difficulties involved in setting up the first centers of the Work in Madrid.
In the following year, 1955, the founder met Leonardo Castelli, a hardworking and very generous man who had become good friends with Don Alvaro, and who had a family construction company. He proved to be the person that the Father was looking for – not to him things as gifts, but to provide the minimal support needed to keep the construction work going. This good businessman, besides offering him credit and deferments of payments, gave him the benefit of his professional services.”[9]

Re: Cavabianca: “`In Rome, very close to Villa Tevere (which also needs some touching up, since we did it in a big hurry), we decided to acquire a few acres, and there is being built there a house for over three hundred `birds.’ Bishops from all over the world come to see me, and they say to me, `But you are crazy…’ And I answer them, `I am sane as can be. When you have birds and you don’t have a birdcage, what you need is a birdcage. I need to form there – keeping them there for one, two, three years at the most – my intellectual children from all over the world.’
“Some churchmen, on hearing him speak of the project and all it involved, tried to dissuade him. Such an ambitious enterprise seemed very crazy indeed, especially given the severe crises there were among Catholics in all countries. How did he expect to maintain and fill those buildings? It was surely a folly. He had to be making a big mistake.
“The Father was the first to admit it. The project was a real folly – but an exemplary and necessary folly. So he never considered going back on it.
“On December 6, 1971, when the work had been going on for a year, the Father asked the architects to pray to Saint Nicholas for a solution to the financial problem. Also, he told them that the work had to be finished by three years from that day.
“But obstacles arose, some foreseen, but others unexpected. These included impediments of a technical and bureaucratic nature: labor strikes; sudden increases in the costs of materials… All of this in years of social instability, trade-union tensions, kidnappings, and large-scale terrorism. More than one friend suggested to him that it might be better to give up the project at Cavabianca and build somewhere other than Rome, perhaps even in some other country. But he felt it necessary to go ahead with Cavabianca, for a spiritual reason: its `Romanness’ was a guarantee of unity and apostolic effectiveness…
“Torreciudad and Cavabianca were two follies of love, carried out at the same time. Both gave expression to the Father’s love for souls and devotion to our Lady. Both were founded on magnanimity and poverty, and begun with hope. Both were carried out with great care, down to the last detail, and were completed with constancy and sacrifice.
“One day the Father was speaking with his sons about Cavabianca, and, as he often did, he referred to it as his `next-to-last folly.’ And when someone asked him, `What will the last one be?’ he replied, `To Die on time.’…”[10]

* * * * * * * *

P.s. “Tribal peoples usually distinguish between gifts and capital. Commonly they have a law that repeats the sensibility implicit in the idea of an Indian gift. `One man’s gift,’ they say, `must not be another man’s capital.’ Wendy James, a British social anthropologist, tells us that among the Uduk in northeast Africa, `any wealth transferred from one subclan to another, whether animals, grain or money, is in the nature of a gift, and should be consumed, and not invested for growth. If such transferred wealth is added to the subclan’s capital [cattle in this case] and kept for growth and investment, the subclan is regarded as being in an immoral relation of debt to the donors of the original gift.’ If a pair of goats received as a gift from another subclan is kept to breed or to buy cattle, `there will be general complaint that the so-and-so’s are getting rich at someone else’s expense, behaving immorally by hoarding and investing gifts, and therefore being in a state of severe debt. It will be expected that they will soon suffer storm damage…. If the object is a gift, it keeps moving, which in this case means that the man who received the goats throws a big party and everyone gets fed. The goats needn’t be given back, but they surely can’t be set aside to produce milk or more goats. And a new note has been added: the feeling that if a gift is not treated as such, it one form of property is converted into another, something horrible will happen. In folk tales the person who tries to hold on to a gift dies; in this anecdote the risk is `storm damage.’”[11]

[1] Prior to Christ, priesthood – which is mediation – had been removed from the people of God as an intrinsic quality of their anthropology as a people because of the sin of worshiping the golden calf and located in the Levitical priesthood as a cast apart from the people. See Scott Hahn, “Worship in the Word,” Letter and Spirit, Vol 1, 2005 (112).
[2] Isaiah 1, 11.
[3] Laborem Exercens #14.
[4] John Paul II, On Social Concern, #42.
[5] Ibid. #41.
[6] Andres Vazquez de Prada, The Founder of Opus Dei, Vol. III (2002) 51.
[7] John F. Coverdale, Uncommon Faith, Scepter (2002) 150.
[8] Ibid. 151.
[9] Andres Vazquez de Prada, The Founder of Opus Dei, Vol. III (2002) 178-179.
[10] Ibid. 483-484.
[11] Lewis Hyde, The Gift, Vintage (1983) (4-5).

Scalia on "Meaning"

Review of Steven D. Smith’s “Law’s Quandary” by Antonin Scalia (First Things, November 2005 pp. 37-46)

At the philosophic nub of his review, Justice Scalia tries his hand at semiotics. He digs in his heels and takes the firm stand that words are signs or symbols that have meaning independent of any sign-giver. Standing alone, they have meaning unto themselves. He accuses Steven Smith’s “Law’s Quandary” of confusing the question whether words merely “convey a concept from one intelligent mind to another (communication) with the question whether words produce a concept in the person who reads or hears them (meaning).” Obviously, he understands the primary function of words as symbols to “produce” concepts.

Launching into concreteness, he asserts that “The bridegroom who says `I do,’ intending by that expression to mean `I do not,’ has not succeeded in communicating his intent; but what he has said unquestionably means that he consents to marriage.”

Or “If the ringing of an alarm bell has been established, in a particular building, as the conventional signal that the building must be evacuated, it will convey that meaning even if it is activated by a monkey.”

Or, “to a society in which the conventional means of communication is sixteenth-century English, The Merchant of Venice will be The Merchant of Venice even if it has been typed accidentally by a thousand monkeys randomly striking keys.”

Perhaps a rejoinder to this could be the amusement that a parrot or mynah bird would produced if trained to squawk “I do” in a matrimonial setting. We laugh because the symbolic sounds, “I do,” mean: “I intend to give myself to you forever. ” Those sounds are our conventional symbols signifying the interior intention of a self – an “I” – to give self to another. What’s funny is there is no “I” to give. Incongruity is funny. However, when the bridegroom – a self - says “I do” but means “I don’t,” the “I do” does mean something because there is an “I” who can intend meaning and therefore the words “I do” should “mean” “I do”(when in reality they “mean” “I do not”). Where there is an "I" speaking a word, the word is a symbol that should make sense (have meaning) because the "I" intends it. If he doesn't intend it, Scalia is right: the words still carry meaning; but not because they have self-evident meaning or some autonomous and objective intelligibilityi in themselves. Rather, every "I" before this has intended the words to mean "I give myself to you." This is convention. You cannot separate meaning from the intentionality of a subject. “I do” is assumed to have meaning in the mouth of the bridegroom because it is assumed that words as symbols have the meaning that an “I” intends them to have precisely as symbols. Otherwise, they would not be "symbols." However, the symbols may be false because “I do” should really be “I do not.” And so, we may say that symbols may be false, but not that they have meaning independent of an intending subject.

In the case of the fire bell, as the Justice says, the bell has meaning from convention that has been given to it by an intending subject or subjects. And that intention of persons has been so understood even if set off by a monkey.And indeed, The Merchant of Venice is The Merchant of Venice precisely because one thousand monkeys randomly striking keys could never have written it in an infinity of time.What is astounding is that Scalia takes Smith’s claim that “legal meaning depends on the (semantic) intentions of an author” as “extravagant and nonsensical.” Equally astounding is that he contrasts meaning with convention, as if convention has nothing to do with meaning.

Scalia and Dualism:

Scalia shows himself to be a child of his time as he and Alice in Wonderland “believe that words, like conventional symbols, do convey meaning, an objective meaning, regardless of what their author `intends’ them to mean.” He next says that “What is needed for a symbol to convey meaning is not an intelligent author, but a conventional understanding on the part of the readers or hearers that certain signs or certain sounds represent certain concepts.” But, one must ask, what is convention at all but the participated meaning that subjects impart to objective signs and symbols? Such a radical separation of subject and object is nothing but the defunct dualism that has impaired the very use of reason and has led us into the “dictatorship of relativism” and the nihilism of absolutes that then-Cardinal Ratzinger announced on the cusp of his becoming Benedict XVI.

Ratzinger: Toward a Solution:

Since Scalia’s point turns on the hermeneutic of words, the analogy of Josef Ratzinger’s (now Benedict XVI’s) discoveries in the interpretation of the words of Scripture could be helpful. Ratzinger had difficulty with his director Michael Schmaus in the approval of his habilitation thesis as professor of theology in Germany. In his research, he had found in St. Bonaventure that the words of Scripture were not in themselves “revelation” as in “meaning.” Rather, that Revelation was an action of the Person-subject of the revealing Christ that was “deposited” in the words of Scripture. That Scripture itself was not revelation, and that its real meaning could not be found objectively in itself independently of the revealing Subject and the believing self. The words themselves did not have the full meaning. He wrote: "`revelation’ is always a concept denoting an act. The word refers to the act in which God shows himself, not to the objectified result of this act. And because this is so, the receiving subject is always also a part of the concept of `revelation.’ Where there is no one to perceive `revelation,’ no re-vel-ation has occurred, because no veil has been removed. By definition, revelation requires a someone who apprehends it. These insights, gained through my reading of Bonaventure, were later on very important for me at the time of the conciliar discussions on revelation, Scripture, and tradition. Because, if Bonaventure is right, then revelation precedes Scripture and becomes deposited in Scripture but is not simply identical with it. This in turn means that revelation is always something greater than what is merely written down. And this again means that there can be no such thing as pure sola scriptura (`by Scripture alone’), because an essential element of Scripture is the Church as understanding subject, and with this the fundamental sense of tradition is already given.”[1]

It is revolutionary in an epistemological climate dominated by positivism to affirm “that revelation is always something greater than what is merely written down.” I submit that if the involvement of the self as believer is constitutive of the revealed meaning of the words of Scripture, it is analogically supportive of Smith’s contention that “legal meaning depends on the (semantic) intentions of an author” and far from “extravagant and nonsensical” as Scalia maintains. The question is large and involves the escape from or imprisonment within the hard dualism of mind and matter that has come to us for the past 400 years. Scalia works within that dualism, and being a lover of truth and impatient with subjective whimsicalness, he takes the hard road of the plaster cast that protects the broken leg until it heals. As he once wrote, “You can’t beat somebody with nobody.” Within dualism, he has nothing real except the word. As a judge, his task is the interpretation of the law. His workbench is words that express and hold that law. His mission is not judicial activism that would make law. That is the task of the elected legislature in a representative democracy. The received philosophic heritage has given him no tools to ground truth ontologically on the side of subjectivity. So he chooses the objective realism of words and - not being able to refute philosophy without doing philosophy – he inevitably backs himself into the corner of legal positivism.

One of the great minds in semiotics, Owen Barfield (an “Inkling” with J.R.R.Tolkien, Charles Williams and C.S. Lewis, the latter calling him “the wisest and best of my unofficial teachers”) remarked, “Lovers do not intend to talk about the emotion of love; they intend to talk qualitatively about each other, and a speaker’s intention is his meaning; indeed it is another word for it.”[2]

Breaking the Dilemma of Dualism.

How great it would be if Scalia could open himself to the discovery that the “I” can be experienced as being, in fact, as the “privileged locus for the encounter with being, and hence with metaphysical enquiry” (Fides et Ratio #83) and so ground the “self evident truths” and “inalienable rights” that are symbolized in the wording of America’s constitutive law. When asked why he has no recourse to natural law as the intention that is the meaning of our law, he retorted (to me), “which natural law, Brennan’s or mine?”

The One "Natural Law:"

Irving D. Yalom, long time professor at Stanford University, in his existential therapy suggests that the anxieties experienced in society, such as fear, guilt, yearning for ecstacy, sadness and depression, correspond to the real absolutes of Christian Revelation such as death, judgment, Heaven and Hell. We fear death; we are guilty in the anticipation of judgment; we yearn for joy, and not finding it in the asceticism of self-gift, procure it for ourselves in orgasmic sexuality and the technology of drugs; we experience sadness in isolation that ends in depression. There is no escaping the effects of the inner ontology of the human person that grounds the one "natural law" (or, better, law of the person). Man is constantly experiencing the truth or falsity of the real self. If the self were not real, there would be no experiences. The cartesian self of consciousness is an abstract fiction.

Remarking on the deep experiences of man's revealed origin, John Paul II suggested that "The important thing is not that these experiences belong to man's prehistory (to his `theological prehistory'), but that they are always at the root of every human experience. That is true even if in the evolution of ordinary human existence, little attention is paid to these essential experiences. They are so intermingled with the ordinary things of life that we do not generally notice their extraordinary character" ("Theology of the Body," 51) .Corresponding to these experiences, which are ultimately "conscience" is the above mentioned ontological structure of the person. Ratzinger commented: "This means that the first so-called ontological level of the phenomenon conscience consists in the fact that something like an original memory of the good and true (both are identical) has been implanted in us, that there is an inner ontological tendency within man, who is created in the likeness of God, toward the divine. From its origin, man's being resonates with some things and clashes with others. This anamnesis of the origin, which results from the godlike constitution of our being is not a conceptually articulated knowing, a store of retrievable contents. It is so to speak an inner sense, a capacity to recall, so that the one whom it addresses, if he is not turned in on himself, hears its echo from whtin. He sees: That's it! That is what my nature points to and seeks" (Conscience and Truth, 1990). To grasp this would liberate Scalia from the tyrrany of being trapped in symbols the meanings for which he cannot explain except by bluster. The truths of the American founding cannot be mined only in the wording of the Constitution and Bill of Rights but in the original intent behind them, which historically was a Christian experience.

Conclusion:

It is worth repeating: without the lived experience of Christian faith as an act of self-transcendence, there is no breaking the dilemma of Enlightenment dualism with the bogus choice of subjective relativism or reductive objectivism. The fact that faith is an act and involves a lived experience means that the believing subject is being. This experience of self-transcendence is accompanied by the consciousness of the “self-evident” truths and inalienable rights grounding the American experiment in liberty. By the experience of self-transcendence, we regain the self-evident consciousness (truth) of the dignity of the human person with inalienable human rights that ground and protect the separation of Church and State, and the consciousness that is the truth and intention of the words of our law that must be sought out in judicial interpretation.

[1] J. Ratzinger, Milestones, Memoirs 1927-1977 (1997) 108-109.[2] Own Barfield, “Language and Discovery,” The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays, Wesleyan (1987).

Self Knowledge and Knowledge of God: November 11, 2005

Self Knowledge and Knowledge of God

"Knowledge by Experience of the Self."

1) We are confronting the Absolute existentially in death, judgement, Heaven and Hell. It will happen to you necessarily, and it is final.

2) All experience involves the self. There is no such thing as experience where there is no one experiencing. Experience is an action of the self that is cognitive. Karol Wojtyla introduced “The Acting Person” with: “Man’s experience of anything outside of himself is always associated with the experience of himself, and he never experiences anything external without having at the same time the experience of himself” (3).

3) Experience works on two (2) levels: 1) sense + abstract thought; 2) the acting self involving cognition such as love, responsibility, freedom, obligation, guilt, joy, etc.

Meaning of Experience: “sense of reality” and “sense of knowing.” Wojtyla wants to disclose “experience” as larger than just sensation. He struggles with this on 115 -117 of “The Problem of Experience in Ethics.”[1]

Wojtyla’s rendering of Christian faith as the response of the whole person as being that becomes gift is a new metaphysics that embraces the two traditions of classical metaphysics (reaching it apogee in St. Thomas) and modern subjectivity from Descartes to the present day.
There is a constellation of thinkers[2] who have been circling around this same flame with this same insight but have never passed through the flame of recognizing the ontological source of their deep awareness. However, it has been Wojtyla who has passed through this flame and struck at the heart of both dimensions – the experience of the I, and the experience of the I experiencing things as sensed.. Wojtyla has had the sensitivity not to confuse the I with consciousness as thought. The disclosure of this hitherto obfuscated experience binds together the two seemingly incompatible threads of idealism and empiricism that have come down to us as static intelligibility (the universal concept) and ceaselessly changing irrationality of a constantly changing world. Wojtyla, instead of trying to solve the conundrum from within conceptual rationality, has begun from lived experience, concretely the mysticism of lived Christian faith as a privileged access to an as yet undisclosed dimension of being - the “I.” For him, the truth of Being[3] is the dynamism of self-transcendence as found in action, or as we find in Gaudium et Spes #24, one comes to the truth of oneself by the dynamics of the act of self-gift. In this regard, Josef Seifert has pointed out,

“The philosophical originality of the work [The Acting Person] manifests itself especially in the deliberate attempt to overcome a one-sidedness in the philosophical approach to the person which has dominated philosophy since Descartes, but which actually goes back to Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. The one-sidedness in question lies in approaching the person primarily through knowledge and cognition. The book The Acting Person tries to correct this one-sidedness by viewing the person primarily as he manifests himself in action, and action as it reveals the person. This approach itself is highly original…”[4] (italics mine).


1) The experience of the self when sensing and conceptualizing is objectifying, reductive and leaves the existential reality of the self out, as well as the existential reality of the object. As Walker Percy says: “The fateful flaw of human semiotics is this: that of all the objects in the entire Cosmos which the sign-user can apprehend through the conjoining of signifier and signified (word uttered and thing beheld), there is one which forever escapes his comprehension – and that is the sign-user himself.
“Semiotically, the self is literally unspeakable to itself. One cannot speak or hear a word which signifies oneself, as one can speak or hear a word signifying anything else, e.g., apple, Canada, 7-Up.
“The self of the sign-user can never be grasped, because, once the self locates itself at the dead center of its world, there is no signified to which a signifier can be joined to make a sign. The self has no sign of itself. No signifier applies. All signifiers apply equally…. (see “Lost in the Cosmos” 107 *)

2) The experience of the self mastering the self, possessing the self, governing the self and finally either giving or taking back the self for itself gives one a consciousness of self as “I.” That consciousness appears as a value of self-approval or self-disapproval, either “good” or “bad.” And if the self is real being (and just thought), then the experience of good and bad is empirically based in concrete, existing being. Ultimately, the experience of the self conforms or disconforms with the ontological tendency as created persons in the image of relational Persons. If we have been affirmed and have made the gift of ourselves, we experience ourselves as O.K., or “good.” If not, if we have not been affirmed and loved for ourselves simply because we are what and who we are, then we cannot accept ourselves, nor others, nor the world. All of the neuroses of self-hatred, unworthiness, lack of self-confidence which boils over into criticism, negativity, contempt for the other and ultimately into revolutionary disconformity with the world of social injustice such as Communist revolution and terrorism, stem from the experience of evil in the self and therefore the recognition of evil outside the self.

This experience of real value – good and evil - is achieved not by reflective thinking but by the “mirroring” of these moments of self-determination in which the self is conscious of passing from potency to act in itself by its own agency. The grasping of the passage of the “I” – by Wojtyla’s unique attempt at phenomenological description – from potency to act testifies to the ontological reality of the “I” as totally transcending consciousness, although consciousness is the vehicle of this self perception. This is the same account John Henry Newman gives of the experience of causality that is not found in the senses(see footnote 2). Notice that this is not done by reflective thinking but by direct pre-conceptual mirroring. There are no concepts. Therefore there is no medium that would distort the perception. It is for this reason that John Paul II says in Fides et Ratio #83 that “in a special way, the person constitutes a privileged locus for the encounter with being [actu essendi], and hence with metaphysical enquiry.”

This is a huge step in the history of thought since 300 hundred years of Enlightenment thought had not known how to solve the riddle of the dualism established by the Cartesian “cogito” as irreducibly other than the empirically senses “body.” The best philosophic minds of the period perceived that good and evil resided in the self (Kant, concretely, found value to be category of the practical intellect), but they were not able to see through “consciousness” to self as “being.” Wojtyla was able to do so from the experience of himself as believer and real being. Did he not suggest that the entire proposal of the fathers of the Second Vatican Council was the question, “What does it mean to be a believer…” rather then “What should men believe?”[5] He steeped himself in the methodology of phenomenology that is the description of inner experience and discovered that there was indeed an experience of the self as being in the moral act. And that experience was not about thought but about being, the being of the “I.” In the light of it, John Paul II was able to give an account of the faith experience as an experience of the absolute: “what good must I do to gain eternal life” (Mt. 19, 16)? The answer to that “good” is the radical response: “go, sell your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me” (Mt. 19, 16-21). Make the gift of yourself!
In sum, as Josef Seifert says, all the philosophic inquiry prior to Wojtyla sought the initial access to being through the senses. This includes the latter Greeks like Plato and Aristotle through St. Thomas and down through a scholasticism that became increasingly rationalized. The only experience that was acknowledged was the sensible: Nihil in intellectu nisi in sensu (“There is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses”). But we have learned from modern science that Nihil in sensu nisi per intellectum (“There is nothing in the sense without the prior action of the intellect”). For example, we sense the sun rising and setting, but the intelligence corrects the senses that it is the earth that is rotating, and not the sun that is moving. What is actually taking place is not the way it is perceived through sensation. “The senses experience nothing if no question has been raised, if there is no preceding command from the intellect without which sensory experience cannot take place. Experimentation is possible only if natural science has elaborated an intellectual presupposition in terms of which it controls nature and on the basis of which it can bring about new experiences. In other words, it is only when the intellect sheds light on sensory experience that this sensory experience has any value as knowledge and that experiences thus become possible.”[6]
Ratzinger points out that this lesson learned from modern science is exactly what he had discovered in his study of the meaning of revelation and faith in St. Bonaventure: “I had ascertained that in Bonaventure (as well as in theologians of the thirteenth century) there was nothing corresponding to our conception of `revelation,’ by which we are normally in the habit of referring to all the revealed contents of the faith: it has even become a part of linguistic usage to refer to Sacred Scripture simply as `revelation.’ Such an identification would have been unthinkable in the language of the High Middle Ages. Here, `revelation’ is always a concept denoting an act. The word refers to the act in which God shows himself, not to the objectified result of this act. And because this is so, the receiving subject is always also a part of the concept of `revelation.’ Where there is no one to perceive `revelation,’ no re-vel-ation has occurred, because no veil has been removed. By definition, revelation requires a someone who apprehends it. These insights, gained through my reading of Bonaventure, were later on very important for me at the time of the conciliar discussion on revelation, Scripture, and tradition. Because, if Bonaventure is right, then revelation precedes Scripture and becomes deposited in Scripture but is not simply identical with it. This in turn means that revelation is always something greater than what is merely written down. And this again means that there can be no such thing as pure sola scriptura (`by Scripture alone’), because an essential element of Scripture is the Church as understanding subject, and with this the fundamental sense of tradition is already given.”[7]

The revelation that takes place because of the giving of the self is the goodness that is God and is experienced in the self on the occasion of responding to that Good. In a word, like is known by like; Good is known by good.

Value


3) The Experience of the “I” as the value “Good:”

a) The “good” is the “I” experienced (not an a priori nor deduced) as affirmed by another:

“The root of man’s joy is the harmony he enjoys with himself. He lives in this affirmation. And only one who can accept himself can also accept the thou, can accept the world. The reason why an individual cannot accept the thou, cannot come to terms with him, is that he does not like his own I and, for that reason, cannot accept a thou.
“Something strange happens here. We have seen that the inability to accept one’s I leads to the inability to accept a thou. But how does one go about affirming, assenting to, one’s I? The answer may perhaps be unexpected: We cannot do so by our own efforts alone. Of ourselves, we cannot come to terms with ourselves. Our I becomes acceptable to us only if it has first become acceptable to another I. We can love ourselves only if we have first been loved by someone else. The life a mother gives to her child is not just physical life; she gives total life when she takes the child’s tears and turns them into smiles. It is only when life has been accepted and is perceived as accepted that it becomes also acceptable. Man is that strange creature that needs not just physical birth but also appreciation if he is to subsist…When the initial harmony of our existence has been rejected, when that psycho-physical oneness has been ruptured by which the `Yes, it is good that you are alive’ sinks, with life itself, deep into the core of the unconscious – then birth itself is interrupted; existence itself is not completely established.”[8]



b) The “good” is the “I” experienced as affirming the other: This is the great work of Veritatis Splendor, Chapter 1, #6-21.

Veritatis Splendor opens chapter 1 with “Teacher, “what good must I do to gain eternal life?” (Mt. 19, 16) and receiving the answer, “go, sell your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me” (Mt. 19, 16-21). That is, the good as absolute value (“You therefore are to be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” [Mt. 5, 48]) is the action of self-transcendence that is relation. This action belongs to empirical experience that has forbidden us to look for absolutes in the sensible, contingent finitude of experience. But Wojtyla has opened up another level of experience that has no mediation either in sensation or in conceptual symbolization. (And that is why it was not discovered by entire previous tradition of philosophic thought. Only phenomenology has yielded it). By describing an experience that is consciousness but is not symbolized by concepts, Wojtyla has given us the unmediated experience of the being that is “I” for which we have no symbol or category. This is the key to answering the whole Enlightenment dualism that had split thought from things. They sought an empirical experience of absolute value. Failing to find it, they denied the absolute, and have delivered to us the “dictatorship of relativism.” Wojtyla has retrieved this experience and the absolute in the experience of the self in the act of faith. Hence, the goal of all direction (as well as all catechetics) is the recovery of this experience: to listen and freely let oneself be controlled, rather than control.



Faith As Existential Experience:

[It is reported that the theme of Benedict’s first encyclical is a 46-page spiritual meditation focusing in large part on “Eros” (love) and “Logos” (the word) and their relationship to the person of Christ. The below is Ratzinger’s development of that]

“In `existential experience,’ on the contrary, the decisive factor is not control but letting oneself be controlled and the new way of `going where one would rather not go’ that is thus made possible… Let us quote Hans Urs von Balthasar on this subject: `It can be said with certainty that there is no Christian experience that is not the fruit of the overcoming of one’s own self-will or, at least, the determination to overcome it. And with this self-will we must include also all our willful efforts to evoke religious experiences on the basis of our own initiative and by our own methods and techniques.’ `It is only when we renounce all partial experiences that the wholeness of being will be bestowed upon us. God requires unselfish vessels into which to pour his own essential unselfishness.’[9]

Ratzinger continues: “I regard the last point as essential. To say that God is Trinitarian means, in fact, to confess that he is self-transcendence, `unselfishness,’ and, consequently, that he can be known only in what reflects his own nature. From this there follows an important catechetical conclusion: the being-led to a religious experience, which must start in the place where man finds himself, can yield no fruit if it is not , from the beginning, directed to the acquisition of a readiness for renunciation. The moral training that, in a certain sense, belongs to the natural sciences, as does the asceticism of transcendence, becomes more radical here because of the meeting of the two freedoms…. The possibility of `seeing’ God, that is, of knowing him at all, depends on one’s purity of heart, which means a comprehensive process in which man becomes transparent, in which he does not remain locked in upon himself, in which he learns to give himself and, in doing so, becomes able to see. From this perspective of Christian faith, we might say that religious experience in its most exalted Christian form bears the mark of the Cross. It embraces the basic model of human existence, the transcendence of self. The Cross redeems, it enables us to see. And now we discover that the structure of which we are speaking is not just structure; it reveals content as well.”[10] The Biblical Example: Jesus and the Samaritan Woman. They talk “thing” (water). He suggests water of eternal life. She, unknowingly, asks for it. He challenges her to transcend herself by telling the truth about herself: “Bring me your husband.” She answers: “I have no husband.” She reveals self. He then reveals Himself: “I, who speak with you, am he.” That is, to know Him who is self-gift, one must become self-gift. One experiences Christ and knows Him when one experiences self as self-transcending. Ratzinger will say importantly below: “One must know oneself as one really is if one is to know God” And one knows self only when there is the existential experience of self-gift, of telling the truth about self which is already the faith of entrusting self to the Other. Keep in mind that the only “I” you can experience is your own “I.” You experience that when you freely determine self, i.e., master self, get possession of self and therefore are able to make the gift if you so choose. Then, in doing that, you experience yourself as imaging God and therefore being like Him [one being with Him] who is the image of God as pure Relation: Logos. You know yourself as image, and you know Him who is the prototypical image. You are then able to say, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God [“I and the Father are one” Jn. 10, 30] because I, too, am Christ the Son of the living God [by sacramental and participation].
Therefore, we do not know God the way we are in ourselves, but the way He is in Himself. Christ is total relation to the Father. And we achieve this likeness to His relationality by this internal experience of self-determination in the act of faith that is the gift of the whole person, and not merely the accidental activity of the faculties of intellect and will. The whole self must be given to be likened to this Relationality, which is symbolized in the changing of the name of Simon, son of John into “Peter” (rock). The name of Jesus Christ is “cornerstone” (Acts 4, 11). The name of one who “knows” Him, who reads Him from within the self (intellegere = legere ab intus [to read from within]), knows Him as a Self, an “I.” One must experience oneself as relation to know Him who is relation. This unmediated experience (no sensation or concepts/symbols) of self as gift (and therefore as relation) is transferred to the Person of Christ. Thus one knows the divine Person of Christ as one knows self experientially.
This is the reason for a deeper examination of conscience as to whether one is really making the gift of self – or simply running on fumes.
______________________________________________

Josef Ratzinger on John 4: The Samaritan Woman and the Experience of God

“This periscope seems to me to be a beautiful and concrete illustration of what we have just been saying. It opens with the meeting of Jesus and the Samaritan woman in the context of a normal, human, everyday experience – the experience of thirst, which is surely one of man’s most primordial experiences. In the course of the conversation, the subject shifts to that thirst that is a thirst for life, and the point is made that one must drink again, must come again and again to the source. In this way, the woman is made aware of what in actuality she, like every human being, has always known but to which she has not always adverted: that she thirsts for life itself [Zoë] and that all the assuaging that she seeks and finds cannot slake this living, elemental thirst. The superficial `empirical’ experience has been transcended.
“But what has been revealed is still of this world. It is succeeded, therefore, by one of those conversations on two levels that are so characteristic of John’s technique of recording dialogue, the Johannine `misunderstanding,’ as it is called by the exegetes. From the fact that Jesus and the Samaritan woman, though they use the same words, have in mind two very different levels of meaning and, separated thus by the ambiguity of human speech, are speaking at cross-purposes, there is manifested the lasting incommensurability of faith and human experience however extensive that experience may be. For the woman understands by “water’ that of which the fairy tales speak: the elixir of life by virtue of which man will not die and his thirst for life that is familiar to her, whereas Jesus wants to reveal to her the true life, the Zoë.
“In the next stage, the woman’s full attention has been attracted to the subject of a thirst for life. She no longer asks for something, for water or for any other single thing, but for life, for herself. This explains the apparently totally unmotivated interpolation by Jesus: `Go and call your husband!’ (Jn. 4, 16), It is both intentional and necessary, for her life as a whole, with all its thirst, is the true subject here. As a result, there comes to light the real dilemma, the deep-seated waywardness, of her existence: she is brought face to face with herself. In general, we can reduce what is happening to the formula: one must know oneself as one really is if one is to know God. The real medium, the primordial experience of all experiences, is that man himself is the place in which and through which he experiences God. Admittedly, the circle could also be closed in the opposite direction: it could be said that it is only by first knowing God that one can properly know oneself.
“But we anticipate. As we have said, the woman must come first to the knowledge of herself, to the acknowledgement of herself. For what she makes now is a kind of confession: a confession in which, at last, she reveals herself unsparingly. Thus a new transition has occurred –to preserve our earlier terminology, a transition from empirical and experimental to `experiential’ experience, to `existential experience.’ The woman stands face to face with herself. It is no longer a question now of something but of the depths of the I itself and, consequently, of the radical poverty that is man’s I-myself, the place where this I is ultimately revealed behind the superficiality of the something. From this perspective, we might regard the conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman as the prototype of catechesis. It must lead from the something to the I. Beyond every something it must ensure the involvement of man himself, of this particular man. It must produce self-knowledge and self-acknowledgment so that the indigence and need of man’s being will be evident.
“But let us return to the biblical text! The Samaritan woman has achieved this radical confrontation with her own self. In the moment in which this occurs, the question of all questions arises always and of necessity; the question about oneself becomes a question about God. It is only apparently without motivation but in reality inevitable that the woman should ask now: How do things stand with regard to adoration, that is, with regard to God and my relationship to him? (cf. Jn 4, 20). The question about foundation and goal makes itself heard. Only at this point does the offering of Jesus’ true gift become possible. For the `gift of God’ is God himself, God precisely as gift – that is, the Holy Spirit (cf. v10-24). At the beginning of the conversation, there seemed no likelihood that his woman, with her obviously superficial way of life, would have any interest in the Holy Spirit. But one she was led to the depths of her own being the question arose that must always arise if one is to ask the question that burns in one’s soul. Now the woman is aware of the real thirst by which she is driven. Hence, she can at last learn that it is for which this thirst thirsts.
“It is the purpose and meaning of all catechesis to lead to this thirst. For one who knows neither that there is a Holy Spirit nor that one can thirst for him, it cannot begin otherwise than with sensory perception. Catechesis must lead to self-knowledge, to the exposing of the I, so that it lets the masks fall and moves out of the realm of something into that of being. Its goal is conversion, that conversion of man that results in his standing face to face with himself. Conversio (`conversion,’ metanoia) is identical with self-knowledge, and self-knowledge is the nucleus of all knowledge. Conversio is the way in which man finds himself and thus now the question of all questions: How can I worship God? It is the question that means his salvation; it is the raison d’etre of catechesis.”[11]


Amnesia

Sin is the act of turning back on self. It is the loss of the act of self-gift that had been the obedience to till the garden and name the animals. As Adam had experienced the “original solitude” that is crossing the threshold from being “Adam” – man - as “rational animal” to being a subject – “I” – as God is a “We,” now by sin, that experience of subjectivity is lost. And with it the consciousness of being image of God in act. Hence, sin and bourgeois life where the self is unengaged in self-transcending as gift leaves the human person with an ignorance of self.

The experience of responding to the call of Revelation in the Person of Christ activates the “I” precisely as “I” and awakens reason to the ever fuller exposure to the act of being that is its light. This is the profound reason for the statements of Ratzinger that “reason shut in on itself does not remain reasonable or rational…”[12] The goal of spiritual direction is always to activate the person to give self in prayer (that is the first act of faith [fourth part of the Catechism of the Catholic Church]) so as to climb the road of anamnesis (non-forgetting). Ratzinger reinterprets natural law in terms of the law of the person (or as “Law of the Gift” as in John Paul II). It is the recovery of conscience as the memory of what it was like to experience God as Person in Paradise. This means that “the first so-called ontological level of the phenomenon conscience consists in the fact that something like an original memory of the good and true (bot are identical) has been implanted in us, that there is an inner ontological tendency within man, who is created in the likeness of God, toward the divine. From its origin, man’s being resonates with some things and clashes with others. This anamnesis of the origin, which results from the godlike constitution of our being is not a conceptually articulated knowing, a store of retrievable contents. It is so to speak an inner sense, a capacity to recall, so that the one whom it addresses, if he is not turned in on himself, hears its echo from within. He sees: That’s it! That is what my nature points to and seeks.”[13]

It is because of this that Ratzinger quotes John Henry Newman’s remark that “Certainly, if I am obliged to bring religion into after dinner toasts, (which indeed does not seem quite the thing), I shall drink – to the Pope, if you please, - still, to conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.”[14] This means that the voice of the truth of the being of the person must be liberated by the action of self transcendence, and it is to this voice that seeks the absolute that the voice of Revelation interpreted by Tradition and Magisterium answers. The answering voice is not imposed on the person but reveals to the person what he is seeking from within his own being as imaging person. But first that ontological tendency must be activated. That is the deep work of spiritual direction.

Sincerity


As in the periscope of the Samaritan woman, sincerity as gift of self must be elicited from the person. One must tell the truth about self.

“We never really face ourselves, until we face someone else as well, some other human being. This is, for example, at the heart of the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. You must not only face your faults and the harm they have caused, but you must face someone else and admit this to him. The very existence of the Sacrament of Penance is psychologically sound. This is why we need confession of our sins before another human being.
“It is all too easy to try to console ourselves by thinking that we need only go to God. In fact, this really means that we simply stay inside ourselves. I can speak of this with a good deal of certainty, because it is part of my own experience. For a long time I preached on penance and spoke of the necessity of it, but I was not really using it. There were parts of me that I did not want anyone to see, and I was convinced that I could handle them myself somehow, and then come before God or another human being with the satisfaction of being repentant, but having done a good job at self-rehabilitation. It did not work…”

“Why must we face God and another? Because we cannot change ourselves, and we must be able to see that clearly. We must never make the mistake of thinking that we can change ourselves by will power…
“By using will power I had tried to change myself. I prayed for will power, and God gave me will power. Jesus said that if we pray for a fish or bread, God will not give us a snake or a stone. But what does He do if we pray for snakes and stones? And that was really what I was dong! I was not asking for the grace to be changed internally, I was merely asking for self-control over my own actions. And that I received. It was usually enough to stop sinful actions. But it was never enough to change my own sinfulness, because that is never changed by mere will power. If the sin was in my heart, it was still destructive whether it took the form of actions or not.

I can look back now and understand the cause for what I was doing. I was trying to cure myself so that I could somehow stand before God and be commended. I could stand before Him and deserve to be loved. But that was ridiculous. There is no way in which any of us can earn love. God simply loves. He knows my sinfulness better than I do. But he can change me from within, and yet there Iwas praying for the ppower to do it all by myself. I was simply standing in His way. Will power could never accomplish what I needed, because greater will power made me rely more and more onmyself, and that was the problem, not the solution….

“True victory over self is the victory of God in the man, not of the man alone.” Go back to the absolute need for affirmation to have an identity and the desire to master self. This affirmation is the love of God for me that gives me precisely my “I.” Without this there can be neither self-identity nor the desire that becomes the freedom of self mastery.

Continuing need of the Sacrament of Penance:

“We all have the tendency to take our lives back into our own hands, especially when things seem to be going well. This is what makes regular use of the sacrament so important, because it causes us to continue to face ourselves. Regular confession lacks the drama of great conversion, but it is regular confession which sustains the conversion.

“Signs of the need: Hurried and harried. Rushed and restless. Impatient. Being constantly annoyed by the faults of others. Have a confessor who knows you. Realize that the form of your confession will change somewhat.”[15]

The Great Divorce (C.S. Lewis): A third example of the role of mentors in The Great Divorce occurs in the episode of the Ghost and the red lizard. Embarrassed by the creature's constant talking and its conspicuous position, the Ghost is leaving Heaven when he encounters a flaming Spirit. The Spirit acts as a mentor with his offer to kill the lizard. This mentor differs, however, from the others. He does not speak of love or theology, he only offers the Ghost a choice and exhibits the power of God to heal. Still, this approach qualifies him as a mentor. When the Ghost tries to rationalize his decision to keep the lizard, the Spirit does not try to persuade him; instead, he rejects the Ghost's self-serving arguments and offers again, "Shall I kill it?" (Divorce 97-99). What the Spirit lacks in eloquence, he makes up for in power; he is the only mentor able to take care of the problem on his own. Unlike the Dwarf, this Ghost listens to his mentor and is freed from his bondage.

“I saw coming towards us a Ghost who carried something on his shoulder….What sat on his shoulder was a little red lizard…. As we caught sight of him he turned his head to the reptile with a snarl of impatience. "Shut up, I tell you!" he said….
"Would you like me to make him quiet?" said the flaming Spirit…."Of course I would," said the Ghost."Then I will kill him," said the Angel, taking a step forward…."….I think the gradual process would be far better than killing it.""The gradual process is of no use at all.""….How can I tell you to kill it? You’d kill me if you did…..""It won’t. But supposing it did?""You’re right. It would be better to be dead than live with this creature." 39

A True Feminist Epistemology


It is true that Western thought has been dominated by a male epistemology, which Ratzinger would characterize as “experimental.” It is the attempt to dominate reality by controlling it, rather than listening and receiving it. The result, or course, is distortion and necrology of the real. If the approach to reality is analysis, which demands breaking it down into parts, the result inevitably will be to kill it. Ultimately, to render reality intelligible to us, we have to – Procrustean like – make it fit into our conceptual categories. Self-gift as reception is distinctively female and must be the other epistemological dimension that we must assume. Hence, Sandra Harding as editor introducing others on this topic:

“The attempts to add understandings of women to our knowledge of nature and social life have led to the realization that there is precious little reliable knowledge to which to add them. A more fundamental project now confronts us. We must root out sexist distortions and perversions in epistemology, metaphysics, methodology and the philosophy of science – in the `hard core’ of abstract reasoning thought most immune to infiltration by social values…. Human experience differs according to the kinds of activities and social relations in which humans engage. Women’s experience systematically differs from the male experience upon which knowledge claims have been grounded. Thus the experience on which the prevailing claims to social and natural knowledge are founded is, first of all, only partial human experience only partially understood: namely, masculine experience as understood by men. However, when this experience is presumed to be gender-free – when the male experience is taken to be the human experience – the resulting theories, concepts, methodologies, inquiry goals and knowledge-claims distort human social life and human thought…. (Contributors to this volume) show how men’s understanding of masculine experience shape Aristotle’s biology and metaphysics, the very definition of `the problems of philosophy’ in Plato, Descartes, Hobbes and Rousseau, the `adversary method’ which is the paradigm of philosophic reasoning, contemporary philosophical psychology, individuation principles in philosophical ontology, functionalism in sociological and biological theory, evolutionary theory, the methodology of political science, Marxist political economy, and concept ions of `objective inquiry’ in the social and natural sciences. On the other hand, many of the contributors also begin the feminist `reconstructive project.’ They identify distinctive aspects of women’s experience which can provide resources for the construction of more representatively human understanding. Some of the essayists focus extensively on this reconstructive project, showing us what is required in social practice and in scientific inquiry to make women’s experience into a foundation for a more adequate and truly human epistemology, metaphysics, methodology and philosophy of science.;” Sandra Haring and Merrill B. Hintikka, Discovering Reality D. Reidel (1983) Introduction IX-X.

[1] Person in Community, Lang (1993) 117- 119.
[2] John Henry Newman, "The assent which we give to the proposition, as a first principle, that nothing happens without a cause, is derived, in the first instance, from what we know of ourselves; and we argue analogically from what is within us [experienced] to what is external to us. One of the first experiences of an infant is that of his willing and doing; and, as time goes on, one of the first temptations of the boy is to bring home to himself the fact of his sovereign arbitrary power, though it be at the price of waywardness, mischievousness, and disobedience. And when his parents, as antagonists of this willfulness, begin to restrain him, and to bring his mind and conduct into shape, then he has a second series of experiences of cause and effect, and that upon a principle or rule. Thus the notion of causation is one of the first lessons, which he learns from experience, that experience limiting it to agents possessed of intelligence and will. It is the notion of power combined with a purpose and an end" Grammar of Assent, p. 70-71; Michael Polanyi, Walker Percy; Charles Peirce, Bernard Lonergan, etc.


[3] The justification for alternating between uppercase B and lowercase b will be the immediate and/or mediate access to reality by two types of experience.
[4] “Karol Cardinal Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) As Philosopher And The Cracow/Lublin School Of Philosophy,” Aletheia, Vol. II, 1981, p. 132.
[5] Karol Wojtyla, Sources of Renewal, Harper and Row (1979) 17.
[6] J. Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology Ignatius (1987) 348.
[7] J. Ratzinger, Milestones Ignatius (1997) 108.
[8] See Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love Ignatius (1997) 163-210.
[9] Josef Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology Ignatius (1987) 353-355.
[10] Ibid. 349-350.
[11] Ibid. 353-355.
[12] J. Ratzinger, Church, Ecumenism and Politics, Crossroad (1988) 218.
[13] J. Ratzinger, “Conscience and Truth,” The Pope John Center, Proceedings of the Tenth Bishops’ Workshop, Dallas, Texas (1991) 18-22.
[14] Ibid. 14-15.
[15] Talk given in Washington, D.C. in 1991 by Msgr. James Mulligan.