Tuesday, May 31, 2005

The Visitation of Our Lady, May 31, 2005

1) The “truth of Mary” is: “And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord” (Lk. 1, 45) [ John Paul II, Redemptoris Mater #12]. This truth, repeated three times by Luke, consists in Mary’s hearing the word of God in her heart and pondering it (Lk. 1, 29). Benedict XVI said,

“The word is kept in her memory; therefore she is a reliable witness for what took place. But memory requires more than a merely external registering of events. We can only receive and hold fast to the uttered word if we are involved inwardly. If something does not touch me, it will not penetrate; it will dissolve in the flux of memories and lose its particular face. Above all it is a fact that understanding and preserving what is understood go together. If I have not really understood a thing, I will not be able to communicate it properly. Only by understanding do I receive reality at all; and understanding, in turn, depends on a certain measure of inner identification with what is to be understood. It depends on love. I cannot really understand something for which I have no love whatsoever. So the transmission of the message needs more than the kind of memory that stores telephone numbers; what is required is a memory of the heart, in which I invest something of myself. Involvement and faithfulness are not opposites: they are interdependent…
Thus Mary becomes a model for the Church’s mission, i.e., that of being a dwelling place for the Word, preserving it and keeping it safe in times of confusion, protecting it, as it were, from the elements. Hence she is also the interpretation of the parable of the seed sowed in good soil and yielding fruit a hundredfold. She is not the thin surface earth which cannot accommodate roots; she is not the barren earth which the sparrows have pecked bare; nor is she overgrown by the weeds of affluence that inhibit new growth. She is a human being with depth. She lets the word sink deep into her. So the process of fruitful transformation can take place in a twofold direction: she saturates the Word with her life, as it were, putting the sap and energy of her life at the Word’s disposal; but as a result, conversely, her life is permeated, enriched and deepened by the energies of the Word, which gives everything its meaning. First of al it is she who digests the Word, so to speak, transmuting it: it but in so doing she herself, with her life, is in turn transmuted into the Word. Her life becomes word and meaning. That is how the gospel is handed on in the Church…”
(Josef Ratzinger, “Seek That Which is Above,” Ignatius [1986] 101-103).

2) The result of taking in the Word of God such that there is mutual transmutation of God into the ordinary life of Mary and the Church (and society) and Mary, the Church and ordinary life (society) into God - is the apostolate. Once the living Word of God, Who ultimately is a Person, is actively received by gift of self, one is, so to speak, driven out of oneself to serve the other. This is the very dynamic of the Trinity. This is the ontological constitution of the Person of Jesus Christ, and this is the result of the entry of Christ into the lives of those who know how “to hear.” As St. Josemaria Escriva said: “You cannot separate the fact that Christ is God from his role as redeemer.” Joseph Ratzinger did the metaphysics of this. He wrote:

“The Creed… formulates its faith in Jesus in the quite simple phrase `and (I believe) in Christ Jesus.’ The only striking thing about it for us is that, as in St. Paul’s preferred form of words, the word Christ, which was originally not a name but a title (`Messiah’), is put first [though not in the usual English version]. It can be shown that the Christian community at Rome, which formulated our Creed, was still completely aware of the significance of the word’s content… `Christ’ is still used as the definition of what this Jesus is… For what faith really states is precisely that with Jesus it is not possible to distinguish office and person; with him, this differentiation simply becomes inapplicable. The person is the office, the office is the person. The two are no longer divisible. Here there is no private area reserved for an `I’ which remains in the background behind the deeds and actions and thus at some time or other can be `off duty;’ here there is no `I’ separate from the work’ the `I’ is the work and the work is the `I.’” (Introduction to Christianity, Ignatius [1990] 149).

In a word, TO BE = TO-BE-FOR. And this is the reason it is so difficult to understand Benedict XVI and John Paul II. The object they are talking about is not an object but a Subject, a Person, who is not reducible to an object and therefore able to be symbolized by categories or symbols of created things. Hence, we stammer conceptually, and really come to grips with the reality of the Person of Christ, and therefore the Father only in the experience of them as consciousness – which we do all the time we are in the presence of love and beauty. There’s lots of light, and we experience it if we give ourselves, but it is a dark conceptual night. Yet it is communicable if we walk people through it. Then we can explain it conceptually since they will be ready to reflect on their own experience and consciousness.

3) Therefore, Benedict XVI, at the inauguration of his pontificate, said,

“Dear friends! At this moment there is no need for me to present a programme of governance…. My real programme of governance is not to do my own will, not to pursue my own ideas, but to listen, together with the whole Church, to the word and the will of the Lord, to be guided by Him, so that He himself will lead the Church at this hour of our history.”
4) And this is what is meant by the “New Evangelization.” On another occasion, Benedict said:

“Human life cannot be realized by itself. Our life is an open question, an incomplete project, still to be brought to fruition and realized. Each man’s fundamental question is: How will this be realized – becoming man? How does one learn the art of living? Which is the path toward happiness?
To evangelize means: to show this path – to teach the art of living. At the beginning of his public life Jesus says: I have come to evangelize the por (Lk. 4, 18); this means: I have the response to your fundamental question; I will show you the path of life, the path toward happiness – rather: I am that path.
The deepest poverty is the inability of joy, the tediousness of a life considered absurd and contradictory. This poverty is widespread today, in very different forms in the materially rich as well as the poor countries. The inability of joy presupposes and produces the inability to love, produces jealousy, avarice – all defects that devastate the life of individuals and of the world.
This is why we are in need of a new evangelization – if the art of living remains an unknown, nothing else works. But this art is not the object of a science – this art can only be communicated by [one] who has life – he who is the Gospel personified…
…we can see a progressive process of de-Christianization and a loss of the essential human values, which is worrisome. A large part of today’s humanity does not find the Gospel in the permanent evangelization of the Church; that is to say, the convincing response to the question: How to live?
That is why we are searching for, along with permanent and uninterrupted and never to interrupted evangelization, a new evangelization, capable of being heard by that world that does not find access to `classic’ evangelization. Everyone needs the Gospel; the Gospel is destined for all and not only for a specific circle and this is why we are obliged to look for new ways of bringing the Gospel to all.
Yet another temptation lies hidden beneath this—the temptation of impatience, the temptation of immediately finding the great success, in finding large numbers. But this is not God’s way… An old proverb says: `Success is not one of the names of God’”
(J. Ratzinger, “Immediately Finding Great Success… Is Not God’s Way,” June 23, 2001, during the Jubilee of catechists in the year 2000).

5) And this is the import of Our Lady’s Visitation to Elizabeth.

Sunday, May 29, 2005

Corpus Christ, May 29, 2005

Last Sunday –Trinity Sunday - May 22, Benedict XVI said, “Today the liturgy celebrates the solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, to emphasize that in the light of the paschal mystery the center of the cosmos and of history is fully revealed: God himself, eternal and infinite Love. This is the word that summarizes the whole of revelation: `God is love’ (1 John 4, 8, 16). And love is always a mystery, a reality that surpasses reason without contradicting it; what is more, it exalts is potentialities.”

This is a statement that reflects the depths of the mind of Benedict XVI. He began his theological career pondering the relation of salvation-history to metaphysics.

“When I began the preparatory work for this study in the fall of 1953, one of the questions which stood in the foreground of concern within German-speaking, Catholic theological circles was the question of the relation of salvation-history to metaphysics. This was a problem which arose above all from contacts with Protestant theology which, since the time of Luther, has tended to see in metaphysical thought a departure from the specific claim of the Christina faith which directs man not simply to the Eternal but to the God who acts in time and history. Here questions of quite diverse character and of different orders arose. How can that which has taken place historically become present? How can the unique and unrepeatable have a universal significance? But then, on the other hand: 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? And, of course, the short, profound and revolutionary answer of then-Josef Ratzinger was the demand for a metaphysic that burst the mold of the received Aristotelian substance-accident model. It was, and continues to be, the call for a “revolution in man’s view of the world: the undivided sway of thinking in terms of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality. It becomes possible to surmount what we call today `objectifying thought;’ a new plane of being comes into view. It is probably true to say that the task imposed on philosophy as a result of these facts is far from being completed – so much does modern thought depend on the possibilities thus disclosed, but for which it would be inconceivable” (Introduction to Christianity Ignatius (1990) 131).

John Paul II confronted the same conundrum in Fides et Ration # 12: “In the Incarnation of the Son of God, we see forged the enduring and definitive synthesis which the human mind of itself could not even have imagined: the Eternal enters time, the Whole lies hidden in the part, God takes on a human face.”
And, as he says, the identity of the historically contingent and the absolute is the human person – imaging his Prototype - who (we have learned in Gaudium et spes #24) “finds himself in the sincere gift of himself.” The absolute value of the self as “good” is disclosed in the historical and progressive gift of the self on the occasion of the historical and contingent affairs of everyday life.

John Paul II punctuated the point by insisting that “We are almost at the point of that direct experience to which contemporary man aspires….
“Let’s try to be impartial in our reasoning: Could God go further in His stooping down, in His drawing near to man, thereby expanding the possibilities of our knowing Him? In truth, it seems that He has gone as far as possible. He could not go further. In a certain sense God has gone too far! Didn’t Christ perhaps become `a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles’ (1 Cor 1, 23)? Precisely because He called God His Father, because He revealed Him so openly in Himself, He could not but elicit the impression that it was too much… Man was no longer able to tolerate such closeness, and thus the protests began.
This great protest has precise names – first it is called the Synagogue, and then Islam. Neither can accept a God who is so human. `It is not suitable to speak of God in this way,’ they protest. `He must remain absolute transcendent; He must remain pure Majesty. Majesty full of mercy, certainly, but not to the point of paying for the faults of His own creatures, for their sins.”

For the Feast of Corpus Christi today in the year of the Eucharist, May 29, 2005:

In “Mane Nobiscum Domine (#18),” John Paul II said, “This year let us also celebrate with particular devotion the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, with its traditional procession. Our faith in the God who took flesh in order to become our companion along the way needs to be everywhere proclaimed, especially in our streets and homes, as an expression of our grateful love and as an inexhaustible source of blessings.”Benedict XVI said, “In this year, therefore, the solemnity of Corpus Christi must be celebrated with particular prominence.” The Pope reminded everyone “to intensify over the next months their love and devotion to Jesus in the Eucharist and to express in a courageous and clear way their faith in the Lord’s real presence, above all through the solemnity and correctness of the celebrations.”


Last Thursday (May 26, ’05), Benedict XVI made a comparison between the Holy Thursday procession, in which the Church “accompanies Jesus in his solitude, toward the way of the cross,” and the Corpus Christi procession, which “responds symbolically to the Risen One’s mandate” to evangelize.
“We take Christ, present in the figure of bread, through the streets of our city… We entrust these streets, these homes, our daily life, to his goodness. May our streets be Jesus’ streets! May our homes be homes for him and with him! May his presence penetrate our daily life. With this gesture, we place before his eyes the sufferings of the sick, the loneliness of young people and the elderly, temptations, fears, our whole life. The procession is intended to be a great and public blessing for our city: Christ is in person, the divine blessing fort the world.”

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

The Practicality of the Trinity

"The Human Person, Image of God, is Fulfilled in Love, which is the Sincere Gift of Oneself" (Benedict XVI, Trinity Sunday, May 22, 2005).


Objection: The Trinity has been obscured as a “superfluous heavenly theorem” (Immanuel Kant, “The Conflict of the Faculties”).

Karl Rahner once remarked:

“We may venture to say that if the doctrine of the Trinity were to be suppressed as being false, a fairly good portion of religious literature would remain nearly unchanged in the aftermath… We may suspect that in the catechism of mind and heart, as contrasted with the printed catechism, the representation of the Incarnation by Christians would not undergo any change at all if there were no Trinity” (“Il Dio trino come fondamento originario e trascendente della storia della salvezza,” in Mysterium Salutis 3, Brescia, 1969, 404).

On the Contrary:
It has been revealed that man was created in the image of the divine “We.”
“Before creating man, the Creator withdraws as it were into himself, in order to seek the pattern and inspiration in the mystery of his Being, which is already here disclosed as the divine `We’” (John Paul II, “Letter to Families”, 6).

Since God has become man in Jesus Christ as perfect image of the Father (Colossians 1, 15: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature;”), and man has been made in the image of God, it is possible for man to “experience” God in Jesus Christ. And through Jesus Christ, to experience the Father.

1) Jesus Christ is the Revelation of not only Who God is, but Who Man is.
Objection: “In Antiquity philosophy was limited entirely to the level of essence. Scholastic theology developed categories of existence out of this contribution given by Christian faith to the human mind. Its defect was that it limited these categories to Christology and to the doctrine of the Trinity and did not make them fruitful in the whole extent of spiritual reality. This seems to me also the limit of St. Thomas in the matter, namely, that within theology he operates, with Richard of St. Victor, on the level of existence, but treats the whole thing as a theological exception, as it were. In philosophy, however, he remains faithful to the different approach of pre-Christian philosophy. The contribution of Christian faith to the whole of human thought is not realized; it remains at first detached from it as a theological exception, although it is precisely the meaning of this new element to call into question the whole of human thought and to set it on a new course” (Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, “Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology” Communio [Fall 1990] 449].

The meaning of this, of course, is that philosophic and theological tradition has reached us with the meaning of man taken from empirical experience of the senses, as it were, “from below.” Hence, man fits within the created category of substance, as a being-in-himself distinguished by the specific difference of rationality. Christ, on the other hand, is considered “from above” and hence relational and exceptional to man. Grace in this state of affairs must be something super-added to man as a second story of a building to a first story.

Sed Contra...


The Second Vatican Council (Gaudium et Spes #22):“In reality it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear. For Adam, the first man, was a type of him who was to come, Christ the Lord, Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling. It is no wonder, then, that all the truths mentioned so far should find in him their source and their most perfect embodiment.
He who is the `image of the invisible God’ (Col. 1, 15), is himself the perfect man who has restored in the children of Adam that likeness to God which had been disfigured ever since the first sin. Human nature, by the very fact that it was assumed, not absorbed, in him, has been raised in us also to a dignity beyond compare.”


That dignity beyond compare is the divinization in the Trinity itself. Hence, the footnote to GS #22 says that when the Creator thought man, he did not think Adam. He thought Christ. Jesus Christ, then, is the prototype of the meaning of the human person, and the meaning of our destiny and therefore fulfillment is to be one with Christ as divinized in the Trinity. Hence, the divinization of ordinary life as self-gift renders the Trinity the most practical of revelations since it is not merely a “superfluous heavenly theorem” but the constant meaning of the present moment in daily life.

Relationality in Trinity Impacts on Christology, which in turn impacts on Christology:
- the resolution of the Theology of the Incarnation (Being) and the Theology of the Cross (Action): to be = to be for the other: one finds self by the sincere gift of self [Gaudium et Spes #24]

1 - The metaphysical meaning of Person in the Trinity is pure Relation as act of self-giving: To Be = To Be For: “the First Person does not beget the Son in the sense of the act of begetting coming on top of the finished Person; it is the act of begetting, of giving oneself, of streaming forth. It is identical with the act of giving. Only as this act is it person, and therefore it is not the giver but the act of giving, `wave’ not `corpuscle’… In this idea of relativity in word and love, independent of the concept of substance and not to be classified among the `accidents,’ Christian thought discovered the kernel of the concept of person, which describes something other and infinitely more than the mere idea of the `individual;’” J. Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity Ignatius (1990) 131-132.

2 – This impacts on the metaphysical meaning of the Person of Christ such that: To Be = To Be For: “with Jesus it is not possible to distinguish office and person; with him, this differentiation simply becomes inapplicable. The person is the office, the office is the person. The two are no logner divisible. Here there is no private area reserved for an `I’ which remains in the background behind the deeds and actions and thus at some time or other can be `off duty;’ here there is no `I’ separate from the work; the `I’ is the work and the work is the `I;’”J. Ratzinger, ibid. 149.

Also:

“We have found that the being of Christ (`incarnation’ theology!) is actualitas, stepping beyond and out of oneself, the exodus of departure from self; it is not a being that rests in itself, but the act of being sent, of being son, of serving. Conversely, this `doing’ is not just `doing’ but `being;’ it reaches down into the depths of being and coincides with it. This being is exodus, transformation. So at this point a properly understood theology of being and of the incarnation must pass over into the theology of the cross and become one with it; conversely, a theology of the cross that gives its full measure must Passover into the theology of the Son and of being;” J. Ratzinger, Ibid. 171-172.

The same applies to the Word and Work spoken and performed by Christ, and by those empowered to speak in His Person by the sacrament of Orders:
“Jesus did not perform a work that could be distinguished from his `I’ and depicted separately. On the contrary, to understand him as the Christ means to be convinced that he has put himself into his word. Here there is no `I’ (as there is with all of us) which utters words; he has identified himself so closely with his word that `I’ and word are indistinguishable: he is word. In the same way, to faith, his work is nothing else than the unreserved way in which he merges himself into this very work; he performs himself and gives himself; his work is the giving of himself;” J. Ratzinger, Ibid. 150.

And since Jesus Christ is the “prototype” of the human person (Eph 1, 4 and above GS #22), then the very meaning of the human person is achieved by incorporation into Christ. The being of the self becomes being-for the other, as we see in GS #24. This is the Christology and the anthropology of the universal call to holiness as laid out in chapter V of Lumen Gentium. See my "Person as Resonating Existential" in archive.

Confrontation with Jesus Christ as the Venue to experience the self. Experience of the self as venue to the knowledge of Jesus Christ.
The only person one can “experience” as person is oneself in the free act of self-determination. One cannot experience another as “self” since there is no access to the other’s freedom of self-determination. But if I do what the other does, and therefore determine myself in the same way, the experience I have of myself can be “transposed” to the other, and I can know him/her in his/her very subjectivity as “I.” “Although I cannot experientially transfer what constitutes my own I beyond myself, this does not mean that I cannot understand that the other is constituted in a similar fashion – that the other is also an I” (Karol Wojtyla, “Participation or Alienation?” in Person in Community, Lang (1993) 199-202.
Benedict XVI (then-Cardinal Ratzinger) asserts, that the very Being of the Person of Jesus Christ is disclosed in the act of prayer to the Father. “According to Luke, we see who Jesus is if we see him at prayer” (“Behold the Pierced One,” Ignatius (1984) 19). Since “like is known by like,” if we pray, we experience who Jesus is in ourselves by the very experience we have of ourselves transcending ourselves in prayer. If Jesus is the Second Person of the Trinity, and His Person is the very act of self-giving to the Father that we call “Son,” when becoming incarnate, that very act of relation to the Father that is His very Person translates in the “kenosis” as “prayer.” And if we pray, then we experience being Christ, and therefore what it means to be relation (not just “in” relation) to the Father in our very self. “I live, no not I, Christ lives in me” (Gal 2, 20).
John Paul II said (“Crossing the Threshold of Hope” [Knopf {1994} 34]), “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.” And then-Cardinal Ratzinger commented, “This knowledge of God, in which God is no longer merely thought, but is also experienced, ripens in that dialogue with God which we call prayer. God in Karol Wojtyla is not only thought but also experienced. The pope expressly opposes the limitation of the concept of experience which occurred in Empiricism; he points out that the form of experience elaborated in the natural sciences is not the only kind, but that there are also other forms which are no less real and important…” (Communio, Spring (1995) 109-110).

In the light of this, both Revelation and Faith are Personal “Acts” that must be Experienced: Clarifications by the mind of Benedict XVI on the meaning of Revelation and Faith as Trinitarian Experience.

Revelation of the Person of the Father is the Person of the Son as Logos (Word-Truth). As Logos, the incarnate Son is the perfect image of the Father. He is the Father’s self-revelation. Sacred Scripture and Tradition are not properly speaking revelation because they are not the act of self-gift that is revelation but the “objectified result of this act.”

“The word [revelation] refers to the act in which God shows himself, not to the objectified result of this act. And because this sis 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-lation 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 concilar 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” ((J. Ratzinger, “Milestones” Ignatius (1998) 108).

As Revelation is an Act that is the Person of Jesus Christ, so also the response to that Person is the total gift of the self that we call “Faith.” Hence, faith is not merely a facultative act of intellect or will, but the moral act of the whole self. It is not merely the free assent to information, but the surrender to a Person. John Paul II taught magisterially:

“It is urgent to rediscover and to set forth once more the authentic reality of the Christian faith, which is not simply a set of propositions to be accepted with intellectual assent. Rather, faith is a lived knowledge of Christ, a living remembrance of his commandments, and a truth to be lived out. A word, in any event, is not truly received until it passes into action, until it is put into practice. Faith is a decision involving one’s whole existence. It is an encounter, a dialogue, a communion of love and of life between the believer and Jesus Christ, the Way, and the Truth, and the Life (cf. Jn 14, 6). It entails an act of trusting abandonment to Christ, which enables an act of entrustment to Christ, which enables us to live as he lived (cf. Gal 2, 20), in profound love of god and of our brothers and sisters” (Veritatis Splendor #88).

Faith, then, is an act of the whole person imaging the Relations that are the Trinitarian Persons. By believing, one enters the Trinitarian dynamic by an act of freedom, since self-gift is a free moral act. Hence, this is not pantheism.

A Biblical Example of this Trinitarian Epistemology:
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 Jon’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.

From “Natural Law” to “Law of the Person”

[“When it is a question of harmonizing married love with the responsible transmission of life, it is not enough to take only the good intention and the evaluation of motives into account; the objective criteria must be used, criteria drawn from the nature of the human person and human action, criteria which respect the total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love;” Gaudium et Spes #51]
The experience of self-transcending reveals man as person-image and therefore not merely “nature.” Man is experienced “from above” as image, not “from below” as rational animal. The latter is not false but incomplete and inadequate as objectified as an abstraction. The result of considering such an abstraction as the real existential anthropology leads to positing a natural end for man as “nature.” The recent work of the International Theological Commission “Communion and Stewardship – Human persons Created in the Image of God,” says,

“For the theological tradition, man affected by sin is always in need of salvation, yet having a natural desire to see God – a capax Dei – which, as an image of the divine, constitutes a dynamic orientation to the divine. While this orientation is not destroyed by sin, neither can it be realized apart from God’s saving grace. God the savior addresses an image of himself, disturbed in its orientation to him, but nonetheless capable of receiving the saving divine activity. These traditional formulations affirm both the indestructibility of man’s orientation to God and the necessity of salvation. The human person, created in the image of God, is ordered by nature to the enjoyment of divine love, but only divine grace makes the free embrace of this love possible and effective. In this perspective, grace [i.e., divine Love-affirmation extended to the human person] is not merely a remedy for sin, but a qualitative transformation of human liberty, made possible by Christ, as a freedom freed for the Good” (#48).
From a philosophic position, Karol Wojtyla expressed that “a belief in the primordial uniqueness of the human being, and thus in the basic irreducibility of the human being to the natural world, seems just as old as the need for reduction expressed in Aristotle’s definition [homo est animal rationale].” Therefore, “the traditional view of the human being as a person, which understood the person in terms of the Boethian definition as rationalis naturae individual substantia, expressed the individuality of the human being as a substantial being with a rational (spiritual) nature, rather than the uniqueness of the subjectivity essential to the human being as a person” (“Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the Human Being,” Person and Community, Lang [1993] 211-212).
Adrian J. Reimers (“Karol Wojtyla on the Natural Moral Order” in “The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly,” Summer 2004, 320-321) observes that the nature of a biological organism is not the “nature” that we affirm in “natural law.” He says,

“When Karol Wojtyla calls the `biological order’ an abstraction, he does not mean simply that biological theories are expressed in general terms… His point is that what we call the `biological order,’ that about which biological theories are formulated, is itself an abstraction, and he accounts for that abstraction in terms of a `generalized empiricism.’ This order, abstracted from the order of being, fails to provide an adequate basis for moral guidance, for the natural law. … The biological order is abstract because it prescinds from the totality of what is human to regard only that which pertains to certain aspects of its organism. John Paul II’s remarks concerning the charges of `biologism’ in Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae vitae further develop this point: `In this discussion, natural law was taken to mean merely the biological regularity we find in people in the area of sexual actualization. This was said to be natural law.’ But all that the biological sciences can do is to identify biological regularities. The order of being, on the other hand, is expected to provide a basis for moral norms.”
Then-Josef Ratzinger remarked in Texas that the ontological grounding of what we mean by “conscience” is not a “nature” or “essence.” He refers to the “natural law” as an “anamnesis,” non-amnesia:

“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 it echo from within. He sees: That’s it! That is what my nature points to and seeks” (“Conscience and Truth,” Proceedings of the Tenth Bishops’ Workshop, Dallas, Texas, The Pope John Center [1991] 20).

The transition from nature from below and person from above is capped off in “Veritatis Splendor” #50 that reads:“At this point the true meaning of the natural law can be understood: it refers to man’s proper and primordial nature, the `nature of the human person’ [Gaudium et Spes #51] which is the person himself in the unity of soul and body, in the unity of his spiritual and biological inclinations…To give an example, the origin and the foundation of the duty of absolute respect for human life are to be found in the dignity proper to the person and not simply in the natural inclination to preserve one’s own physical life. Human life, even though it is a fundamental good of man, thus acquires a moral significance in reference to the good of the person, who must always be affirmed for his own sake. While it is always morally illicit to kill an innocent human being, it can be licit, praiseworthy or even imperative to give up one’s own life (cf. Jn 15, 13) out of love of neighbor or as a witness to the truth. Only in reference to the human person… can the specifically human meaning of the body be grasped. Indeed, natural inclinations take on moral relevance only insofar as they refer to the human person and his authentic fulfillment…”

* * * * *


Impact of Trinity –> Christology –> Anthropology on Sexuality and the Social Doctrine of the Church:
Impact on Sexuality: “In the light of the New Testament it is possible to discern how the primordial model of the family is to be sought in God himself, in the Trinitarian mystery of his life. The divine `We’ is the eternal pattern of the human `we,’ especially of that `we’ formed by the man and the woman created in the divine image and likeness;” John Paul II, Letter to Families #6.

“If… we wish to draw also from the narrative of the Yahwist text the concept of `image of God,’ we can then deduce that man became the `image and likeness’ of God not only through his own humanity, but also through the communion of persons which man and woman form right from the beginning. The function of the image is to reflect the one who is the model, to reproduce its own prototype. Man becomes the image of God not so much in the moment of solitude as in the moment of communion. Right `from the beginning,’ he is not only an image in which the solitude of a Person who rules the world is reflected, but also, and essentially, an image of an inscrutable divine communion of persons.
In this way, the second narrative could also be a preparation for understanding the Trinitarian concept of the `image of God,’ even if the latter appears only in the first narrative. Obviously, that is not without significance for the theology of the body. Perhaps it even constitutes the deepest theological aspect of all that can be said about man;”
John Paul II, Theology of the Body, Pauline Books and Media (1997) 46-47.

Impact on Social Doctrine: “It follows that the Church cannot abandon humanit, and that `this human person is the primary route that the Church must travel in fulfilling her mission… the way traced out oby Christ himself, the way that leads invariably through the mystery of the Incarnation and the Redemption.’
“This, and this alone, is the principle which inspires the Church’s social doctrine…
“Thus, the Church’s social teaching is itself a valid instrument of evangelization. As such it proclaims God and his mystery of salvation in Christ to every human being, and for that very reason reveals man to himself. In this light, and only in this light, does it concern itself with everything else: the human rights of the individual, and in particular of the `working class,’ the family and education, the duties of the State, the ordering of national and international society, economic life, culture, war and peace, and respect for life from the moment of conception until death.
“The Church received `the meaning of the person’ from Divine Revelation. `In order to know man, authentic man, man in his fullness, one must know God,’ said Pope Paul VI, and he went on to quote Saint Catherine of Siena, who, in prayer, expressed the same idea: `In your nature, O eternal Godhead, I shall know my own nature.’
“Christian anthropology therefore is really a chapter of theology…”
John Paul II, Centesimus Annus #53-#54.

Hence, today to reduce the Trinity to a “superfluous heavenly theorem” is a rationalistic anachronism.

Wednesday, May 11, 2005

Pentecost and Benedict XVI

Class @ Our Lady of Peace, New Providence, N.J., May 13, 2005.


1)The Tower of Babel and Pentecost.

“But let us come at last to the main question. What is the real Christian message of Pentecost? What is this `Holy Spirit’ of which it speaks? The Acts of the Apostles gives us an answer in the form of an image; perhaps there is no other way of doing it, since the reality of the Spirit largely escapes our grasp. As the story is told, the disciples were touched by fiery tongues and found themselves speaking in a manner which some (the “positivists”) regarded as drunken stammering, a meaninglessness, useless babbling, while others, from all parts of the then known world, each heard the disciples speaking in his own tongue.
In the background of this text is the Old Testament story of the tower of Babel; the two stories, taken together, provide us with a penetrating insight into the theology of history. The Old Testament account tells us that human beings, their sense of independence augmented by the progress they had made, attempted to build a tower that would reach heaven. That is, they believed that by their own powers of planning and constructing they could even build a bridge to heaven, make heaven accessible to themselves by their own efforts, and turn human beings into gods. The result of their effort was the confusion of tongues. The human race, which sought only itself and looked for salvation in the satisfaction of a ruthless egoism by means of economic power, suffered instead the consequence of egoism, which is the radical hostility of each to his fellows, so that no one can understand anyone else and therefore even egoism inevitably remains unsatisfied.
The New Testament account of Pentecost picks up these same ideas. It implies the conviction that contemporary mankind is sundered to its very roots; that is characterized by a superficial coexistence and a hostility which are based on self-divinization. As a result, everything is seen in a false perspective; human beings understand neither God nor the world nor their fellows nor themselves. The `Holy Spirit’ creates such an understanding because he is the Love that flows from the cross or self-renunciation of Jesus Christ.
We need not attempt here to reflect on the various dogmatic connections that are implied in such a description. For our purpose it is enough to recall the way Augustine tried to sum up the essential point of the Pentecost narrative. World history, he says, is a struggle between two kinds of love: self-love to the point of hatred for God, and love of God to the point of self-renunciation. This second love brings the redemption of the world and the self.
In my opinion it would already be a giant step forward if during the days of Pentecost we were to turn from the thoughtless use of our leisure to a reflection non our responsibility; if these days were to become the occasion for moving beyond purely rational thinking, beyond the kind of knowledge that is used in planning and can be stored up. To a discovery of spirit, of the responsibility truth brings, and of the values of conscience and love. Even if for a moment we were not to go a step further into the properly Christian realm, we would already be touching the hem of Christ and his Spirit.”


The Tower of Babel: “Dictatorship of Relativism”
(exclusiveness of the experimental method)

2)There are three levels of experience: empirical, experimental and “existential.

Empirical and Experimental (2): Nihil in intellectu nisi in sensu: “that immediate and uncritical perception by the sense that is common to all of us. We see the sun rise; we see it set. We see a train pass. We see colors; and so forth. This manner of experience is, certainly the beginning of all knowledge, but it is always superficial and inexact. And therein lies its danger. Because of its immediate certainty, it can be an obstacle to deeper knowledge…” Galileo confronted “empirical” empiricists (Aristotelians) as a Platonists insisting that thought trumps immediate experience. “Galileo rejected what everyone can see. The same is true of the laws of gravity, which never actually occur in reality as Galileo formulated them but are a mathematical abstractions and, for that reason, also contrary to our immediate experience. Modern natural science is built on the rejection of pure empiricism, on the superiority of thinking over seeing” (my underline)….

“It is only when the intellect sheds light on sensory experience that his sensory experience has any value as knowledge and that experiences thus become possible.”

Ratzinger makes the major point here that “the structure of the experience of faith is completely analogous to that of the natural sciences; both have their source in the dynamic link between intellect and senses from which there is constructed a path to deeper knowledge.

But we must point, here, also to a crucial difference. In a scientific experiment, the object of experience is not free. The experiment depends, rather, on the fact that nature is controlled… [Heidegger calls it “set-up”; Brague says: “Because we have removed from it everything that might be a a freedom (vagueness, contingency, etc.), it can become the object of science.” “In this connection, L. Kolakowski has made the interesting observation that the way in which the natural sciences deal with nature is actually a form of necrophilia. They dissect it as though it were a dead object and, in this form, are able to control it. If we apply this thought also to the human sciences, we might conclude that their way of dealing with human beings is likewise a kind of necrophilia. The fact that a similar way of dealing with faith and with God must of necessity lead to a God-is-dead theology need hardly be elaborated.”

(Let me add: This is where right thinking feminists insist on the damage done by male dominated epistemology) .


Tongues of Fire at Pentecost


Autobiographical Anecdote of Benedict XVI: Intellectual Formation.
“Glottlieb Soehngen had immediately read my habilitation thesis; he had accepted it enthusiastically and even quoted from it frequently in his lectures. Professor Schmaus, the other reader, was a very busy man, and so he left the manuscript untouched for a couple of months. From a secretary I found out that he had finally begun reading it in February. At Easter of 1956 he put out a call to German-speaking experts in dogma for the purpose of holding a congress in Koenigstein… During the Koenigstein congress Schmaus called me aside for a brief private conversation, during which he told me very directly and without emotion that he had to reject my habilitation thesis because it did not meet the pertinent scholarly standards. I would learn details after the appropriate decision by the faculty. I was thunderstruck. A whole world was threatening to collapse around me. What was to become of my parents, who in good faith had come to me in Freising, if I now had to leave the college because of my failure? And all of my future plans would likewise collapse, since these, too, were all contingent on my being a professor of theology. I thought of applying for the position of assistant pastor in the parish of Saint Georg in Freising, which came with a house; but this solution was not particularly consoling….

(What had happened?)

“In my research I had seen the study of the Middle Ages in Munich, primarily represented by Michael Schmaus, had come to almost a complete halt at its prewar state. The great new breakthroughs that had been made in the meantime, particularly by those writing in French, had not even been acknowledged. With a forthrightness not advisable in a beginner, I criticized the superseded positions, and this was apparently too much for Schmaus, especially since it was unthinkable to him that I could have worked on a medieval theme without entrusting myself to his direction. The copy of my book that he used was in the end full of glosses of all colors in the margins, which themselves left nothing to be desired by way of forthrightness. And while he was a t it, he expressed irritation at the deficient appearance of the graphic layout and at various errors in the references that had remained despite all my efforts.
“But he also did not like the result of my analyses. 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.”

The Point: The empirical and experimental experience of the words of Sacred Scripture are not the content of Revelation. Only the Person of Jesus Christ is. Hence, we need to understand an epistemology of the subject besides an epistemology of objects. How do we know an “I” as distinct from an “it” as “thing.”

Existential experience:
“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.’
“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.”

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 Self: “I, who speak with you, am he.” I.e., to know 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, when you do that, you experience yourself as imaging God and therefore you are like 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 [by nature]” because I, too, am Christ the Son of the living God [by sacramental and participation].
Therefore, we do not know God they way we are in ourselves, but the way He is in Himself. And we do this by this internal experience of self-determination that is the act of faith as act of the whole person, and not merely an accidental act of the accidents (faculties) of intellect and will. The whole self must be given, which is symbolized in the changing of the name of Simon, son of John into Peter. 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), knows Him as a Self, an “I.” This is knowing without objectification or reduction to abstraction.





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 Jon’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.”
Pentecost contrasts with Babel in that the Apostles are speaking Christ with the giftedness that the Spirit gives them. And those hearing, are moved by the same Spirit to self-transcend, and therefore hear.

The Father is Self-gift. The Son is Self-gift. The Spirit is the Self-gift of the Father and the Son. Hence, the Spirit is the Personification of the Gift of self, the true meaning of “Love.” First, in God, who gives Self in Creation, and then in Redemption. Only one who has received the Spirit can “know” Christ, “re-cognize” Him by “cognizing” Him in the existential experience of giving themselves like the Samaritan woman. She received the water of life (Zoë) that is the Holy Spirit and engendered Christ in her such that she could re-cognize Him in “I who speak with thee am He” (Jn. 4, 26). At Pentecost, the apostles speak and the 3,000 hear the same Word. Moved by the Spirit, they “understand” each other (intellegere = legere [to read] ab intus [from within]). That is the task of the apostolate today known as the “new evangelization.”

This is the formation of his mind: to understand (to know) is to become one being with the subject to be known. This is not achieved by experience through the external perception, which reduces the perceived reality to an object. St. Thomas suggested that “whatever is received, is received according to the mode of the receiver.” That is, it is not sensed nor intellectually grasped as it is in itself, but as the knower is in himself. Hence, since we are both matter and spirit, we spiritualize what is apparently just matter, and we materialize what is just spirit. That’s why we need images and examples to understand very abstract things.

But more is involved here. Abstractions are not real since they don’t exist “outside” the mind. Only individuals exist and are real. God is real as a Communio of Three “I.” as Father, Son and Spirit. The Father is “I,” the Son is “I,” and the Holy Spirit is “I.” But each “I” is a relation in opposing directions. The Father is the act of engendering the “I” of the Son. The “I” of the Son is the obeying and glorifying of the “I” of the Father. The Holy Spirit is the personification of the “I-gift” of the Others. God is not a substance in the sense that we use the word as category for a created thing. God is an irreducible plurality of three “I’s” that are so one that one cannot be without the others. This prototypical "communio."
Since we are trying to understand God, and God is not part of the world, and “He” is three “I’s,” we cannot render him an object as another object. Hence, we cannot know the Son experientially as an object. We must know Him as Subject.

Thursday, May 05, 2005

Person as Resonating Existential

(Published in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly,1992, Vol. LXVI, No. 1, 39-56)


“The undivided sway of thinking in terms of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality.”

The question of finite substance and relation as equally valid primor¬dial modes of reality is ultimately the question of being and time, of truth as absolute yet advancing. It is ultimately the question of the reconciliation of the absolute and the relative. If substance is being and truth, then it must be absolute and unchanging. Time, change and progress must be accidental appendages to substance and of secondary importance. If time, change and progress enjoy reality in a primordial way, then there can be no truth or unchanging being in a primordial way. Since Hegel, being and time have conceptually become more and more intertwined. “Being itself is regarded as time: the logos becomes itself in history.” The philosophic question of the utmost importance that needs to be addressed today is whether there is an identity of man with himself throughout history. Is there a truth that remains true in every historical time because it is true? Ultimately, the question be¬comes, what is man?
In this light, then, the above stated thesis of Joseph Ratzinger is at the core of the most important topic ending this millennium and begin¬ning the next. That topic grapples with the nature of the person and hence the central concept on which the very meaning of society and civilization is built. “The problem of the subjectivity of the person, and especially this problem in relation to the human community, imposes itself today as one of the central questions concerning the world outlook.
This is at the basis of the human praxis and morality and at the basis of culture, civilization, and politics. The thesis as it stands is theologi¬cally derived from Ratzinger's consideration of the Trinity particularly in the light of St. Augustine. It appears in also Christology as the identity of person and office, or as he says it,

“Here there is no private area reserverd for an `I’ which remains in the background behind the deeds and actions and thus at some time or other can be `off duty;’ here there is no `I’ separate from the work; the `I’ is the work and the work is the `I’.”

And it appears most emphatically in his disagreement with the “misunderstanding” of the received philosophic tradition that contrues the human person “from below” in terms of substance and accident. In the light of the Second Vatican Council’s assertion that “only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light,” that misunderstanding consists in seeing “Christ as the simply unique ontological exception.” That exception consists in rendering Christ “an object of highly interesting ontological speculation, but it must remain separate in its box as an exception to the rule and must not be permitted to mix with the rest of human thought.”

Here, I would like to propose that the epistemological shift that took place in the Second Vatican Council from object to subject with regard to the meaning of faith, should be mimiked in understanding the human person philosophically. As Wojtyla said, “I am convinced that the line of demarcation between the subjectivistic (idealistic) and objectivistic (realistic) views in anthropology and ethics must bereak down and is in fact breaking down on the basis of the experience of the human being.” Once we enter into the realm of the experience of the “I” as ontological reality (and merely consciousness), the dynamic of substance and relation as primary and secondary modes of being breaks down. They both can be understood as equally primordial and reciprocating dimensions of the self as being: self-discovery by self-gift. That is to say, both "substance" and "relation" can now be interpreted as resonating manifesta¬tions of the deeper existential core of the “I.”
The ramifications are, of course, immense: globalization together with the autonomy of nations; the mutual resonance between solidarity and subsidiarity for the meaning of the entire social order; the reliance on the human person – working - as the defining center for the economic order; the inseparability of love making and life giving for human sexuality, the elimination of the antinomy between grace and nature: where grace is the divine relation of self-gift and nature is the person being loved and therefore capacitated for self-gift; the complementarity of faith and reason where faith activates the being (person) that reason sees (consciously) and reflects on (conceptually); the formation and development of persons by being affirmed; equality of the sexes though irreducibly different as ontological relations; the ministerial priesthood and priesthood of the laity as radically equal in the priesthood of Christ but irreducibly different in the relationality of their missions; the distinction between secularity and secularism.
The achievement of all of these depends on our ability to craft a metaphysic of the “I” as both in-itself and for-other in-resonance so as to translate Christology into anthropology and praxis so as place Christ at the summit of all human activities.

I

Two streams of thought reach us concerning the notions of substance and relation. In the first, the classical Aristotelian notion of substance is an “active nature embedded in a network of relations” where sub¬stance has an.ontological priority as act-in-itself over relation as acci¬dent. This position, we could say, is an ontologically valuable model which explains reality well, up to a point. In it, however, there is an absolute ontological priority of substance over accident, as is evi¬dent from the ordinary and common sense use of the terms. This notion of substance was vitiated from Descartes and Bacon through Locke and Hume by their rejection of the notion of "form" or nature as intrinsic act. Thus, substance becomes understood as static structure, pure non-tele¬ologic mechanism with regard to body and the rest of cosmic reality, and it becomes identified with the res cogitans on the side of "the mind." Substance, hence, is split into a mechanistic, static material structure on the one side and on the other into the Hegelian absolute spirit which rockets to earth as the Nietzschean Ubermensch, the unrelated autono¬mous individual. Relation survives but as pure accidental adjunct. Relations are not relations of life and communication but rather of domination, of "will to power." “To be” is to will and to will is to dominate. As Nietzsche says,

"A great man-a man whom nature has constructed and invented in the grand style-what is he.... If he cannot lead, he goes alone; then it can happen that he may snarl at some things he meets on the way. .. he wants no 'sympathetic' heart, but servants, tools; in his intercourse with men he is always intent on making something out of them. He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar... .When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. He rather lies than tell the truth...."
The other stream of thought, which is the collapse of being into pure relatedness, springs from the reduction of material reality into res extensa, stripping it of any "formal" causality or intrinsicness.


Real being tends to be reduced to nothing more than a pattern of relations with no subjects grounding them, or a pattern of events with no agents enacting them. The fundamental polarity within real being between the 'in-itself' and the `toward others,' the self-immanence and the self-transcen¬dence of being, collapses into the one pole of pure relatedness to others.


Maritain says it best when paraphrasing Bergson,


"Duration, concrete and real time, is pure change, that is to say, change without anything which changes; it is an activity without substratum; a creation without thing created and without thing which creates; a flux, a flowing constantly adding to itself, swelling as it advances, without however being something which flows and swells." 7

The scandal of such process thought consists in it being fundamen¬tally unthinkable. In his critique of "Bergsonism of fact," Maritain counters that


this metaphysics of pure change must be considered as not thinkable. For to say that change is the very substance of things is to say that things change inasmuch as they are and in so far as they are. And therefore in so far as they are they cease to be what they are, they leave their being, they no longer are what they are but are something else.


More to the point when affirming relations as ungrounded in substance, Wilhelmsen turgidly affirms the absurdity of it when he remarked, “accidents are in their subjects and relations belong to the genus of accidents.” It is unthinkable to affirm accidents as happening to noth ing. Therefore, it seems that relations are indeed “had” by substance as accidents. To be a relation, simply in itself, is unthinkable.
This brings us to a point of stock-taking: (1) either man is a substan¬tial
Uebermensch with no relationality except that of dominion, and such a relation, which is ultimately for self, would be necessarily accidental; or (2) man is pure relation (as becoming) or a nexus of relations with no underlying or developing substantiality; or, (3) we are looking for a new model of being where substance ,and relation would be "equally valid primordial mode(s) of reality."

II
The provocative cause for refocusing the discussion of the interplay between substance and relation is the enormous ground swell that pretends to explain person as a relational being. The quiet introduction of this notion began in the years 1918 and 1919 with Ebner, Buber, Marcel and Rosenzweig. Von Baithasar calls this “simultaneous emer¬gence of the 'dialogue principle' in thinkers who could not be farther apart...one of the strangest phenomena of 'acausal contemporaneity' in the history of the intellect .” With the introduction of the notion of person in the Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World, #24, as "achieving self by the gift of self," the notion of person as "gift," and hence as relation, has universally and constantly been offered as the core concept in all the papal pronouncements and magisterial offerings in the last 26 years since Vatican II and particularly in the last 13 years in the pontificate of John Paul II. That this notion has impacted heavily in the East as a rallying point for Solidarity and in the collapse of Marxism, as well as in the West where it collides with the individualism of what we could call the "autonomous man," gives testi¬mony to the enormous import of the notion. Hence the need to review the metaphysical state of the question and probe possible new solutions to explain it.

Fr W. Norris Clarke, S.J., confronted with the reduction of being “to nothing more than a pattern of relations with no subjects grounding them” proposes a return to the classical notion of substance and relation of Aristotle as absorbed within the existentialism of St. Thomas and enlightened by such process thought as Alfred North Whitehead's. Fr. Clarke understands substance to be “the integrating center of a being's activities, a center which is constantly pouring over into self-expression through its characteristic actions and at the same time constantly integrating or actively assimilating all that it receives from the action of other substances on it.” This dynamic center is changing; yet it is self-identical because, Clarke says, the change is accidental. Again, he calls it a "perduring principle of dynamic self-identity in an interacting system." Fr. Clarke gives heavy emphasis to St. Thomas's notion of the act of existence (esse) which "powers" that center but itself is not that center. That center is "substance." Consequently, sensitive as Fr. Clarke is. to the relational dynamics entering into and pouring forth from substance, still, being means substance. Ultimately, relation will al¬ways be accidental and therefore not an "equally valid primordial mode of reality" with substance.

Lewis S. Ford, a process philosopher, in his treatment of a topic intimately connected with the interconnection of substance and rela¬tion, viz., divine immutability (substance) and God's knowledge of contingent things (relation), offers the proposal that the dynamics of relation (knowledge of contingents) could take precedence over the immutability of substantial structure. Without getting into the polemic of the article, I would like to highlight Ford's suggestion. He says,

Given a totality that is both dynamic and static, what would the whole be? It could not be static, for if it changed in any part, then the whole would be changed to that extent. Only the dynamic could be the more inclusive. If there is also divine intentional consciousness, it would include any immu¬table inner being .... As subject it includes all intentional being as its object, as well as God's inner being. 12

Basically what Ford is objecting to is the hegemony of substance in the ontology of St. Thomas and Clarke. He is not objecting to the notion of substance, but he is objecting to the one-sided identification of substance with being and the real. Ford is implying with Whitehead, modifying him, that being is self-creative; that the process of relationality will precede substance in some way and develop it. "For Thomas, God creates the being by communicating to it its act of being. In my modification of Whitehead, God communicates to the creature its power of becoming whereby the creature acts by creating itself." This notion will meld with the following presentation of Maclntyre.

Alasdair Maclntyre richly develops the thesis in "After Virtue" that there is no subject, self or substance outside of the context of relations, history or story. Germane to the topic, Maclntyre affirms that historical, genetic, familial relations are in no way "accidental" to the identity of the subject, self or substance. He says that

[i]n many pre-modern, traditional societies it is through his or her membership in a variety of social groups that the individual identifies himself or herself and is identified by others. I am brother, cousin and grandson, member of this household, that village, this tribe. These are not charac¬teristics that belong to human beings accidentally, to be stripped away in order to discover 'the real me.' They are part of my substance, defining partially at least and sometimes wholly my obligations and my duties. Individuals inherit a particular space within an interlocking set of social relation¬ships; lacking that space, they are nobody, or at best a stranger, or an outcast. To know oneself as such a social person is however not to occupy a static and fixed position. It is to find oneself placed at a certain point on a journey with a set of goals; to move through life is to make progress-or to fail to make progress-toward a given end...'Call no man happy until he is dead.'

Maclntyre then goes on to balance this thesis concerning the consti¬tutive character of relations by affirming with equal emphasis and scholarship the thesis of structural self-identity (substance). He main¬tains that the social, historical, narrative context (relation) is "[n]ot more fundamental than that of personal identity (substance). The concepts of narrative, intelligibility and accountability presuppose the applicability of the concept of personal identitsy (substance).... The relationship is one of mutual presupposition." He dramatizes the
question, "What am I to do?" and answers it with "Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?" In other words, I am this self from the context and the self-determination in the context in which I find myself. The relation defines how I will freely define myself. Throughout the work, Maclntyre seems to be calling for the perception of the relational context as "an equally valid primordial mode of reality."

III


I would like to introduce a narrative, according to the line suggested by Maclntyre, which would dramatize a shift from substance to subject, from substance to person. The value of employing a narrative technique consists in lifting the entire question out the realm of philosophical abstraction where the person is precisely left out of the analysis because he is treated as substance. Narrative returns the subject or person to the field of analysis so that the very interaction as relation which is the plot of the narrative can be studied. The narrative account which reveals personality in its sharpest terms is the gospel account of the rich young man. The rich young man asks Jesus Christ the question, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Christ answers first with the law of nature, for Everyman let us say, on the level of substance, i.e., have you kept the commandments? Have you lived according to your nature? This is a key question for- Everyman, and the answer for all should be the same because the requirements are the same.

I would compare this part of the narrative with a distinction drawn by Karol Wojtyla as, an introduction to his own thought. He distin¬guishes between the metaphysical abstraction of the Aristotelian defi¬nition of man as "rational animal" or the Boethian "individual substance of a rational nature," both of which are on the level of substance, and the work of phenomenological description which must be made to sketch out the "irreducible subject" who is the "I." He insists that in order to be realists, we must be faithful to the lived experience of subjectivity (erlebnis) and come to grips with the person in his unique existential reality as subject. He distinguishes this clearly from subjectivism and its consequent idealism. We might call the stage of the questioning of the rich young man concerning the commandments the cosmological stage preparing for the next level, the personalist, which begins with Christ "looking" at him and "loving him."
Here the calling forth of the person begins. There is a shift to a new phase which suggests to me in the light of Wojtyla's analysis that there is a shift from the abstraction of substance which has left the individual subject out of consideration to focus on that subject. And, the focus on that subject takes place precisely by the relation of "looking," "loving" and "calling."
Receiving love: The first step in what we could call "personagenesis" seems to be passivity, receptivity of love from another. "It is only through God's calling Adam, `Where art thou?' that the latter's `Here I am' reveals to man, in the answer, his being as related to God. The ego is at the outset wrapped up in itself and dumb; it waits for its being called-directly by God and indirectly by the neighbor.” 18 Josef Pieper concurs that

[ojbviously...it does not suffice us simply to exist; we can do that 'anyhow.' What matters to us, beyond mere existence, is the explicit confirmation: it is good that you exist; how wonderful that you are! ... That is an astonishing fact when we consider it closely. Being created by God actually does not suffice, it would seem; the fact of creation needs continuation and perfection by the creative power of human love. 19

And so, Christ's looking on him and loving him is translated into the most personal vocation, "Come follow me." If the rich young man says "yes," he ceases to be Everyman, to be mere substance, and becomes the beloved "I." In contradistinction to the notion of substance, the subject, the "I," becomes "I" only by having first received love from another person. "In the love of the mother the child finds its consciousness and its self. In the mother's heart it finds the support to firm its groping, fragile existence into a form." Going a step back, we arrive at the very relation of creation itself where else is a relational gift that cannot anticipate substance but must coincide with it. In a word, there is no such thing as non-relational substantiality, even less a non-relational subject or person.
Glossing Summa Contra Gentiles IV, 11, of St. Thomas, Josef Pieper
emphasizes the phenomenon of direct proportionality between "intrinsic existence" and relationality throughout the hierarchical range of being from rock to person. 'Me implication is that there is an originating core of which intrinsicness and relatedness are manifestations. It suggests that reality is not substantial being with accidental relations to the "outside" but rather that it is precisely "an inside" that is relating.

It is essential for any genuine relationship to originate from an inside and extend toward an outside .... The higher the form of intrinsic existence, the more developed becomes the relat¬edness with reality, also the more profound and comprehen¬sive becomes the sphere of this relatedness: namely the world. And the deeper such relations penetrate the world of reality, the more intrinsic becomes the respective subject's existence.


Having established that, for the sake of true realism, subject or person is to be erected on the "metaphysical site" of substance (other¬wise we would be dealing with an abstraction) and that the subject or person is a dyad of subject and received relation of love, we return to our narrative of the rich young man. Now, awakened as affirmed and called forth from substance to subjectivity, he must choose to act in response to the call: "Come!" But having been loved and called in that love, he is raised to a new level as person and must choose from that new level. He is "more an 'I'" than before he was loved and called.
Giving love: The narrative solidifies us in the existential and rela¬tional (non- abstract) world of the subject. Wojtyla isolates this moment as precisely the moment of "becoming a person." Let us call this the heart of the dynamism of "personagenesis." For it, he reserves the name "vertical transcendence" in which the will, "as the essential of the person" and not as a power (see below), determines itself. That means that in order to give the self to another (or, sadly, back to oneself), the self, as will, must actualize itself, "structuralize" itself, in order to give itself. That is the same as saying that the person determines himself in the very act of transcending self in performing an act as service for another. Th transcend self and be relational are the same concept. It is important to note that as the awakening of the "I" as a substance was initiated by the love and call of another person affirming it (the "I"), so also, there can be no growth of the "I," no further self-determination, no increased structuralization, without the gift of self to another person. Therefore, "you only become what you do." This is tantamount to saying that doing precedes being, ease sequitur agere, process coalesces into structure.

Since the dynamic is "personagenesis," let it be noted immediately that any human action performed by a person must be "for someone." It is always for a person, self or other.2A And since the nature of being is intrinsically (i.e., constitutively) relational because it is created in the image and likeness of the Divine Persons who are relationalities in themselves, "to-be-for-¬another" becomes the very meaning of morality and the reason for the "growth" in being by a self-determination which is for another and not self-referential. Therefore, "[m]an cannot give himself to a purely human plan for reality, to an abstract ideal or to a false utopia. As a person, he can give himself to another person or to other persons, and ultimately to God, who is the author of his being and who alone can fully accept his gift.
Karol Wojtyla explains the dynamic in the following way:

The term 'self-determination' means that man as subject of his action not only determines this action as its agent ... but through this very act at the same time determines his own self. The moment of transcendence [i.e., relation] of the person by an act is based on self-determination ... Thus human action not only transcends its subject, but at the same time remains in it;. keeping its intransitivity in its subject 'man'.... While determining them [his actions] he is at the same time fully aware that owing to their personal quality, owing to their moral value, whether positive or negative, they in turn determine him; moreover, they continue to determine him even when they have passed.

We could say that his actions "continue to determine him" because he has most literally become what he did. Agere has become esse. This must affect the notion of virtue as we shall see below.
The dynamic seems to be mutual interaction of structure and rela¬tion in the simultaneous moment of self-determination. The more he receives, the more he is himself. The more he gives himself as gift, yet more is he himself. The more he is himself, the more he is able to give, the greater the outreach and depth of the relation. Again, the more I relate the more I become myself; the more I become myself, the more I relate. First agere precedes esse, then else precedes agere. This is the free moral moment of “personagenesis.” The whole process must begin with a minimum self who chooses this act in behalf of another person. But to choose this act, I am co-creating-letting the Divine Motion actualize through me--a more definite, determined, actualized "Me." I most literally achieve myself, determine, fulfill, actualize, "substantial¬ize" myself at the precise moment that I transcend myself (relate) and give myself away to another in act. I become what I do. Esse sequitur agere. Then, I do what I have become. And, besides, the moral correct¬ness of the act-if done true-to-being-translates into joy, because it is an "ek-stasis" of the self which is what it means to be in the image of the trinitarian Persons. The free process of transcending relation is so ontologically profound that, as it takes place, the "to be" (esse) coalesces into an ever increasingly substantial structure. This structure, the more developed "I," now a-growing, in turn self-determines in ever more extensive and profound choices of self-gift. The result is an ever increas¬ing relationality and intrinsic existence the asymptote of which, in the order of grace, is to be “alter Christus.”

This coincides with the notion that man as person is an “unfinished being” who is his own project. Of course, there must be some minimum of substantiality given with the creation of man, because every relation of love (and creation is an immense act of love) coalesces into some ontological structure. “The dynamic structure of self-determination tells man every time anew that he is simultaneously given to himself as a gift and imposed upon himself as a task... as someone who is an assignment to himself.” Ratzinger sums up this dynamic as exempli¬fied in John Henry Newman: “All of Newman's life was a process of conversion; he 'transformed' himself often, and in this way remained always himself while becoming ever more himself.”



IV


Let us return to our initial reference to finite being in which we are seeking the solution to reconciling being and time, the absolute and the relative, substance and relation, truth and process, the static and the dynamic. The answer is always before our eyes in life itself. In all living things, growth means becoming more identically self. The body devel¬ops from immaturity to maturity through a constant process, yet be¬comes ever more identically itself. In a seven year period, all the numerical matter is replaced in the human body. A 56 year old man (myself) has a completely new material organism down to the bones, eight times over. Yet, it is always his body. Scientists are less reluctant, today, to affirm this dynamic teleology of the living organism embracing under its rubric the phenomena of “homeostasis, immunological re¬sponse or lactation.” When there occurs a lesion of an organ, it can be frequently compensated by a spectacular transmutation of other al¬ready specified tissue into the structure and function of the `more necessary" pathological organ. A similar phenomenon is mirrored in the development of thought insofar as thought is an imaging of reality. It grows without changing. St. Vincent of Lerins, followed by John Henry Newman, said the following:


Development (of the Faith) means that each thing expands to be itself, while alteration means that a thing is changed from one thing into another. The understanding, knowledge and wisdom of one and all ... ought ... to make great and vigor¬ous progress with the passing of the ages and the centuries, but only along its own line of development, that is, with the same doctrine, the same meaning and the same import.¬


I would like to propose a Heisenberg-like solution where the ultimate reality we are discussing is neither substance nor relation in isolation but rather an existential core which is mysterious in itself but emergent as a resonating two-dimensional structure, a dyad, of progressive sub¬stantiality and relationality. John Caputo offers a rich phenomenol¬ogy along the lines of a dyadic nature of person which is identity and non-identity, face/surface and sub-face. He defines person as "the being in whom these two, identity and surpassal, intersect." He speaks of person as "the locus of transcendence ... the resonance ... (as)the rum¬bling of ...transcendence."
It is in this context that I would like to suggest my own proposal. John Caputo describes the person in such terms as "deep ground,"

"the place within us which (is] ... mystery, ambiguity, undecida¬bility, the desert and which lies at the far remove of proof and disproof, of scientific determination ... ambiguity [that] does not dissolve, even though we make a decision,...a deep decision, a deep hermeneutic resolve, a deep construal.
He does not want to resolve the ambiguity but rather "to point to an ontological structure."

I believe that the "deep. ground" is an ontological structure beyond both the increasing (or decreasing) structure of the "I" and the relational self-gift of that "I." I believe the underlying reality to be the "I" itself as existential core. The proposal is to identify the "I" with the Thomistic act of existence (esae), and the kind of existence we are dealing with is what St. Thomas calls "to understand" (intelligere). St. Thomas under¬
stands the act of existence to be the source of every dynamism since it is the source of every operation and action. He understands it to be intrinsically and constitutively expansive and self-developing, self-de¬termining and relational in our case, unless limited by a really distinct principle. 'ro understand' would be a human and personal "to be,"limited at the level of immateriality which is thought and will with its infinite openness to all reality and its corresponding intrinsicness (structure). This kind of act of existence, because of its degree of immateriality and intellectuality, is a freedom which would be self-de¬termining. What I envision to be going on is this simultaneous "relat¬ing-to-other/structuring-of-self"process which "intelligere" undergoes in its dynamic of expansion and which is constitutive of this kind of act of existence as created and "intensive" else. Since there is a double dimension to it, each one forming a higher stage for the next-the more relational, the more determination of structure, the more structure, the greater the relation-the concept of "resonating" suggests itself as the best description, even though they are simultaneous. Also, to apply the concept of "resonance" to the dynamics of the process impedes the reifying tendency of the human intellect to polarize the person with the structure alone which becomes identified with substance. I believe this to be the cause of the continual identification of person or subject with substance leaviA.g relation always in the secondary position of "acci¬dent." Ultimately, then, being will not mean substance. "Substance" will be one of the resonating modes of "to be" which, in turn, is deeper and 'beyond" substance as person. Self-identity will not take place on the level of substance, but on the level of this existence, this subject. Substance will actually be a relativized, growing intrinsicness as the relationality becomes more expansive and profound.

V


The question can be raised, "What is operative virtue?" The question is germane since virtue has been the classical site to locate the actual¬izing of finite being. But all actualizing has been seen to be accidental. Operative virtue has traditionally been defined as the habit of a power. As such, virtue is a habit of a power of a subject, i.e., it is an accident of an accident of a substance. To make it clear that the treatise on the virtues is using substance as its model, St. Thomas says, “The name `habit' is taken from having .... (I]f to have refers to a thing's being conditioned in a certain way in itself or in regard to something else, then habit is a quality....” The "having" is done by substance and the “quality” is an accident of substance; “...quality, properly speaking, implies some mode of a substance.”
Now, in the light of my analysis above and the common experience of men, the suggestion is being made that there may be a different model to explain the becoming of the person as person. As Ratzinger said of Newman, “he `transformed’ himself often, and in this way remained always himself while becoming ever more himself.” That model being suggested would be the resonating dynamic of the act of existence which (who), instead of increasing accidentally in being, would be increasing in substantial determination. By exercising myself in true-to-being actions, I have the experience of actually “being more myself” by my self-giving. Wojtyla affirms that “while determining them [his freely chosen actions], [man] is at the same time fully aware that ... they [his actions] in turn determine him; moreover, they continue to determine him even when they have passed.” It seems clear that Wojtyla is referring to the structural state of self-determination rather than to an accidental status of virtue. The failure to move away from the substan¬tialist model, used to explain the increase of actuality through true-to¬being activity, tends to obliterate the real nature of self-definition and relegate it to the secondary status of accidental accretion, virtue, added on to substance extrinsically. This has tended to mire us in extrinsicism (as will be exemplified below in the Schindler/Weigel debate) and obfus¬cate the real issue of the virtues, i.e., to be more.
By way of example, consider such simple, obvious cases as under¬standing a concept better only after having explained it. One learns to do by doing. There is not first the full, “substantial” appreciation of the concept in all of its detail and application, and then the explanation. Rather, the explanatory process precedes the substantial fullness. It seems that reality grows (structure) as it is lived (relation). And living, as we saw, always involves this resonating between increasing relation¬ality and intrinsicness of existence (structure).
There is, besides, a most telling example being given to us concerning this transmutation of the notion of virtue. The notion of faith has, until the Second Vatican Council, been construed as a virtue of supernatural origin informing the faculties of intellect and will. The act of faith itself was considered formally a conceptual act under the impulse of the will. The act of acceptance in conceptual terms responded to the revelation by God in the words and deeds of Jesus Christ. As such, the act of faith is considered as an accident of the faculties of intellect and will. The document on divine revelation, Dei Verbum, of Vatican II moves to new terrain. It puts faith on the plane of a total conversion of self to the Person (Jesus Christ) of the revealing God. “`The obedience of faith’ must be given to God as he reveals himself. By faith man freely commits his entire self to God ...(#5).” It is evident from this example that we are not dealing with virtue as an accident of a power but with the giving of the substantial self contained in the notion of conversion. The center of focus moves from virtue as accident to the enhancing of the subject as the locus of self-giving and self-determining. It takes place at the intrinsic core of being, not at its periphery. Ratzinger says,

The phrase 'I believe' could here be literally translated by 'I hand myself over to In the sense of the Creed, and by origin, faith is not a recitation of doctrines, and acceptance of theo¬ries about things of which in themselves one knows nothing and therefore asserts something all the louder, it signifies a movement of the human existence; to use Heidegger's lan¬guage, one could say that it signifies an 'about turn' by the whole person which from then on constantly structures one's existence.

Think also of such structurally-enhancing realities as being forgiven in the very measure that we forgive; or "blessed is she who believed" or "my soul magnifies the Lord because he has seen the lowliness of his handmaid" where the structural state of blessedness and greatness is the result of the relational "obedience of faith" and humble service.

VI


Karol Wojtyla makes a crucial distinction between the will as a power (and therefore an accident of substance) and the will as an "essential of the person" (i.e., "substantial" as intrinsic). He says, “Man owes his structural 'inalienability' (incommunicability) to the will to the extent to which self-governance is realized by the will, and in acting this is expressed and manifested as self-determination. If this structural trait of the whole person were to be left out of our discussion, it would be impossible to understand the will correctly and to interpret it ade¬quately.” It is the will, not as power, but as “essential of the person” that we can understand self-determination and “personagenesis.” As power, the will can desire the good and choose, but it does not choose in such a way as to make a gift-of-self by self-determination. “The essential function of acts of will, whether of simple willing or of that more complex choice resulting from counteracting motives, is not the tending itself to the object (to the value as object), but the determining of the subject.” Only by the determining of the subject will there be what he calls “vertical transcendence” which is the gift-of-self to another self. It is clear from the analysis, that whatever the will is, it is identified with the person, the self, in his deepest reality and not to be confused with the extrinsic or accidental. It seems, then, that “will” in this sense is the very “to be,” the “intellegere” which is the person.
The above distinction lends itself to immediate application in an important polemic. It is the very nub of the disagreement in the debate of David Schindler vs. George Weigel, i.e., whether American culture is bourgeois. Weigel seems naively to assume that the ontological model of man is substance-cum-accidental operations, which are patently ex¬trinsic: church attendance, voluntary services, etc.
He assumes that since the doings are relational, man must be relational. What he fails to question (and Weigel considers this "arid terrain") is whether such relationality is extrinsic or intrinsic, acciden¬tal or constitutive. Extrinsic relation seems to suffice for him. Not for Schindler. Schindler maintains that what seems to be a strong sense of relation (community) in the American founding was not really strong but essentially "voluntaryist," i.e., insufficient insofar as it is extrinsic. He finds the ontological model of American society to be individual substance, i.e., “... relation (community) is not given with human being: ...the human being, precisely in its ontologic, remains autonomous (unrelated).” 47 Schindler is convinced, with Ratzinger, that only the intrinsic relationality to God of persons seeking personal sanctity can heal a society. Hence, Schindler is in search of an ontologic of intrinsic structure and relationality which would be an “equally valid primordial mode(s) of reality.” He rejects, with Wojtyla and Ratzinger, the sub¬stance/accident model to best describe the human person.

VII


We began with the challenge of Joseph Ratzinger, originating in the theology of the Trinity, to offer an ontological model of being in which substance and relation were each primordial modes of reality. The topic coincides with the perennial struggle to reconcile being with time, the absoluteness of truth with change. The topic has historically been handled on the level of an abstraction where either absolute substance (Nietzsche) or absolute relation (Bergson) prevailed; or a combination of both, such as substance and accident (Aristotle) or essence and the “to be” of St. Thomas where both gave an adequate explanation of the antinomies up to a point. But none of them has been able to give a satisfactory ontological model to explain this ever-emerging awareness of personas-an intrinsically relational being. It would be patently false to affirm person as "nothing but" relation as it would be patently false to straitjacket the notion with a relationality which would be mere accident, and hence not intrinsic'nor constitutive.
Karol Wojtyla may have provided us with such a model in his change of methodology to a phenomenology of the acting subject who is a self-determining existential whom he calls the person. By emphasizing the double effect of the person as intrinsic will, i.e., (a) the transcending action itself and (b) the immanent and lasting determination within the agent (the literal self-determination), we have a model for growth by relating. Such a model relativizes what hitherto we may have been “reifying” as substance, be it static or dynamic. Whatever the case, the identity of the self has been perennially located in substance. With the Wojtyla model, the substance “grows,” i.e., it is relativized, thus liberat¬ing the absolute and experiential identity of the self into an existential absoluteness, a deeper freedom, which is identical as he grows in his structural intrinsicness. My effort consists in proposing a metaphysical solution for the phenomenological description of self-determination. This proposal consists in seeing substance and relation as two resonat¬ing dimensions manifesting a deeper core, a kind of Heisenberg con¬stant, which is the act of existence itself. As an act of existence, the person would be unconceptualizable, not as lacking intelligibility but as a superfluity of it, while yet manifesting facets variously, now as act, now as growing (or diminishing) structure in a resonating mutual causality. Since all ethical and social structure flows from what we understand person to be, the ramifications of such a proposal as offered above are many and deep. Such a notion represents a task to be achieved, a project for the next millenium.

South Orange, New Jersey 1992/New York, N.Y. 2005


Endnotes:


Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, Ignatius (1990), 132.
Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 16.
Karol Wojtyla, “The Task of Christian Philosophy Today,” Proceedings of the ACPA, 52 (1979) 3.
J. Ratzinger, Introduction… op. cit. 149-150: “For what faith really states is precisely that with Jesus it is not possible to distinguish office and person; with him, this differentiation simply becomes inapplicalbe. The person is the office, the office is the person. The two are no longer divisible… Jesus did not perform a work that could be distinguished from his `I’ and depicted separately. On the contrary, to understand him as the Christ means to be convinced that he has put himself into his word. Here there is no `I’ (as there is with all of us) which utters words; he has identified himself so clsely with his word that `I’ and word are indistinguishable: he is word. In the same way, to faith, his work is nothing else than the unreserved way in which he merges himself into this very work; he performs himself and gives himself; his work is the giving of himself.”
Gaudium et Spes #22.
J. Ratzinger, “Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology,” Communio Fall (1990) 449.
Ibid.
K. Wojtyla, “Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the Human Person,” Analecta Husserliana, 7 (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1978), 210.
W. Norris Clarke, S.J., To Be Is To Be Substance-In-Relation in FestSchrift for Ivor Leclerc (1992).
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue University of Notre Dame Press (1984) 257-258 (emphasis mine).
Clarke, 2.
Jacques Maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955) 128.
Maritain , Ibid., 318.
Frederick Wilhelmsen, “Creation as a Relation in St. Thomas Aquinas” in Being and Knowing, Albany, NY: Preserving Christian Publications, Inc. (1991) 143.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama I Ignatius (1988) 626.
W. N. Clarke, S.J. "What is Most and Least Relevant in the Metaphysics of St. Thomas Today?", International Philosophical Quarterly, 14 (1974), 426.
Lewis S. Ford, from The Universe As Journey: Conversation with W. Norris Clarke, S.J., eds., Gerald A. McCool, S.J., and W. Norris Clarke, S.J. (New York: Fordham, 1988), 119.
Ibid. 125
MacIntyre, 33-34.
Ibid. 218 parenthesis mine).
Mark 10, 17.
K. Wojtyla, op. cit. 210.
Karl Lowith, in Will Herberg’s From Marxism to Judaism: Collected Essays of Will Herberg, (New York: Markus Wiener Publishing: 1989), 80.
'Josef Pieper, An Anthology, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 30.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Convergences, Ignatius (1983) 128.
Josef Pieper, Living the Truth, Ignatius (1989) 81-83.
This is the phrase Wojtyla uses to describe the definition of person as substance. He says: "...the definition of Boethius determines above all the 'metaphysical site,' or in other words the dimension of being in which the personal subjectivity of man is realized, creating, so to speak, the right conditions for building upon this 'site' on the ground of experience" (cfi. “Subjectivity and the Irreducible…,” 109). The “metaphysical site,” according to Wojtyla, is the abstractive definition “rational animal,” or “individual substance of a rational nature.” This is useful and necessary, but incomplete as noetically unrealistic. This is the locus of the insertion of phenomenology into the philosophical methodology.
Karol Wojtyla, “The Acting Person,” 107,, Analecta Husserliana, (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1978), vol. 10.
K. Wojtyla, “The Degrees of Being from the Point of View of the Phenomenology of Action,” Analecta Husaerliana, 11 (1981), 127.
“Having come substantially into existence, man changes one way or another with all his actions and with all that happens in him: both these forms of the dynamism proper to him make something of him and at the same time they, so to speak, make somebody of him.” K. Wojtyla, The Acting Person, op. cit. 96-97. John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, May 1, 1991, USCC Publication, #41.
Guardini describes, with Kierkegaard, this ascending resonance of being and doing as "leaps" of decision and daring in the process of becoming a person. He describes it as coming to the brink of his hitherto existing level of existence: “he divines the new level and its demand upon him. In order to satisfy the demand, he must let go of the present level and' leap' to the next. He must leap, because he receives no guarantee from his old position that he will gain a foothold on the new one, for the latter is of a higher kind and thus 'other'. He must thus take the risk. Between the two levels lies an abyss, an obscurity. Man must, in the earnestness of the decision, gather himself together, raise himself out of himself, and throw himself across. Then he gains a footing and is able to exist on a higher level; his eyes are opened to a new and superior reality; a new power of evaluation awakens and he is able to appreciate and to love on a higher level;” in “Pascal For Our Time,” (New York: Herder and Herder, 1966), 20-21.
K. Wojtyla, “Subjectivity and the Irreducible…” op. cit. 112.
30 Days, (July-August, 1990) , 59.
Jonathan Jacobs, “Teleology and Reduction in Biology,” in Biology and Philosophy 1, (1986), 389-99. Also, the whole body forms a homeostatic or self-regulating system, with a dynamic stability in which a constant in-put of matter and energy is balanced by a constant out-put of activity and wastage by devices which adjust the flow to meet environmental variation. See Benedict M. Ashley, O.P, “Theologies of the Body: Humanist and Christian” (Braintree, MA: The Pope John XXIII Medical- oral Research and Education Center, 1985), 24.
St. Vincent of Lerins, “From the First Instruction,” 23; PL 50, 667-68.
I would like to note that Norris Clarke calls for a modification in the traditional
as well as Thomist notion of substance and relation (as accident): "Father Clarke believes, (that) unless Thomism's metaphysics of relations is radically modified, it cannot do justice to the world of our contemporary experience. For, in that world, dynamic substances do not live in self-sufficient isolation. They exist as members of a system. Far from being related to other substances in a purely accidental way, each substance, in some way or other, is intrinsically constituted by its relation to a. system that integrates the individuals within it into a higher unity. ..Thus although each substance retains its subsisting identity, its relation to the system in which it exists can enter into its essential constitution ...Thomists must admit that fact and adapt their metaphysics of relations to integrate the reality of system into their category scheme." The Universe as Journey, op. cit., 34-35.
Fr. Clarke responds to Caputo's reflections with his own analysis of the mystery of person. He agrees with Caputo on the experience of being as mystery but assigns the cause of this mystery to finitude and the defectiveness of being. He says: "...each finite being is an act of existence imitating the divine, but mixed in with a lima ' element, which means a,partial negation, almost a kind of infection by non-being, a shadow element. W. N. Clarke, The Universe as Journey, 166.
J. Caputo, “Being and the Mystery of the Person,” in The Universe As Journey, 110.
Ibid., 110-11
This really distinct principle would be the essence composed of form and matter which would receive all of its reality from ease but in a distinct order of causality (formal); it would limit ease to be this ease and this kind of ease. The matter of the essence would receive its being from the "intelligere" which is a completely immaterial kind of ease. This could be the explanation for the "language of the body" where the body is ruled by the same rhythms as the person: love-making is inseparably connected with life-giving.
St. Thomas Aquinas, "Virtue designates a certain kind of perfection of a power....powers are determined to their acts...by habits. Therefore, human habits are virtues." Summa Theologiae, I, 66, 1, c.
ST, I, 49, 2, c.
Wojtyla, “The Degrees of Being" (1981)127.
J. Ratzinger, Introduction…, op. cit., 55.
K. Wojtyla, The Acting Person, op. cit., 107.
43 "For St. Thomas, however, the will appears to be first of all a power, which makes man determine his own action." The Acting Person, n. 39, 309.
“The very intentionality of volition as it is revealed in the act of choice does not create the essential dimension of the transcendence which is so marked in the human act, since it is not its constitutive factor. That is why even the analysis of intentional acts alone fails here. The transcendence of the person in action (act) is not reducible to the intentionality of cognitive acts or even to the intentionality of volition itself... The essential function of acts of will, whether of simple willing or of that more complex choice resulting from counteracting motives, is not the tending itself to the object (to the value as object), but the determining of the subject." Wojtyla, The Degrees of Being, op. cit. 127.
What is at stake here is a partial identity between “to be” and “to act” where willing is the very dynamic of “to be” itself (somewhat like the ousia/energeia complex elaborated by Gregory of Nyssa when defending the homo-ousion of God the Father engendering God the Son. “Agennetos and gennetos… designate properties of hupostaseis within the first ousia.”). See Bernard C. Barmann, The Cappadocian Triumph Over Arianism, Stanford University Ph.D. dissertation, 1966, 261.
George Weigel, “Is America Bourgeois?”, Crisis (October 1986) 5-10.
David Schindler, "Once Again: George Weigel, Catholicism and American Culture," Communio, (1988), 97