In the gospel of John the Lord says: In this will all men know that you
are my disciples, if you have love for each other. In a letter of the same apostle we
read: Beloved, let us love one
another, for love is from God, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows
God; he who does not love does not know God, for God is love.
Notice the Christian anthropology that is
at work here. St. Leo does not presume that man is an individual substance of a
rational nature as the Greeks understood him. Rather, man is an image of the
divine Person of the Son who, as Son, is pure relation to the Father. Man, therefore,
is a finite person whose destiny is to become son as the Son, i.e. to be
totally “for” the Father, and therefore to be totally at the service of
everyone else. He achieves his maturity by transcending himself for others.
Therefore, St. Leo continues:
“The
faithful should therefore enter into themselves and make a true judgment on
their attitudes of mind and heart . If they find
some store of love's fruit in their hearts, they must not doubt God's presence
within them.”
That is, if
they experience love for others in themselves, they are experiencing the
imaging of the divine Son, and therefore the presence of the Son in them.
“If
they would increase their capacity to receive so great a guest, they should
practice greater generosity in doing good, with persevering charity.”
Therefore,
the more they give, the more they are imaging, and therefore, the more they
are.
“If God is love, charity should know no limit,
for God cannot be confined. Any time is the right time for works of charity,
but these days of Lent provide a special encouragement. Those who want to be
present at the Lord's Passover in holiness of mind and body should seek above
all to win this grace, for charity contains all other virtues and covers a
multitude of sins.
“As we prepare to celebrate that greatest of all
mysteries, by which the blood of Jesus Christ did away with our sins, let us
first of all make ready the sacrificial offerings of works of mercy. In this
way we shall give to those who have sinned against us what God in his goodness
has already given to us.
“Let us now extend to the poor and those
afflicted in different ways a more open-handed generosity, so that God may be
thanked through many voices and the relief of the needy supported by our
fasting. No act of devotion on the part of the faithful gives God more pleasure
than that which is lavished on his poor. Where he finds charity with its loving
concern, there he recognizes the reflection of his own fatherly care.
“In these acts of giving do not fear a lack of
means. A generous spirit is itself great wealth.”
This
means that the more you give away, the
more you are. And then the explicit
affirmation of the Christological anthropology that undergirds his thinking: It
is Christ Who is feeding, and Christ Who is being fed:
“There can be no shortage of material for
generosity where it is Christ who feeds and Christ who is fed. In all this
activity there is present the hand of him who multiplies the bread by breaking
it, and increases it by giving it away.
“The giver of alms should be free from anxiety
and full of joy. His gain will be greatest when he keeps back least for
himself. The holy apostle Paul tells us: He who provides seed for the sower will also
provide bread for eating; he will provide you with more seed, and will increase
the amount of your goodness, in
Christ Jesus our Lord, who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit
for ever and ever. Amen.
Note that Leo is not talking about “Charity”
as an “accident” that inheres in an already ontological established substance
as “thing-in-itself.” It is an “attitude” as an orientation of the person as
subject (”I”) by which the whole self is given to the other, as the Self of the
Son is given to the Father “for” us.
Consider
Ratzinger’s theological description of the Son, not as “substance” (being-in
self) but as “nothing” in self:
“The Son as Son, and in so far as he is Son,
does not proceed in any way from himself and so is completely one with the
Father; since he is nothing beside him, claims no special position of his own,
confronts the Father with nothing belonging only to him, retains no room for
his own individuality, therefore he is completely equal to the Father. The
logic is compelling: if there is nothing in which he is just he, no kind of
fenced-off private ground, then he coincides with the Father, is ‘one’ with
him. It is precisely this totality of interplay that the word ‘Son’ aims at
expressing. To John ‘Son’ means being-from-another; thus with this word he
defines the being of this man as being from another and for others, as a being
that is completely open on both sides, knows no reserved area of the mere ‘I.’
When it thus becomes clear that the being of Jesus as Christ is a completely
open being, a being ‘from’ and ‘towards,’ that nowhere clings to itself and
nowhere stands on its own, then it is also clear at the same time that this
being is pure relation (not substantiality) and, as pure relation, pure unity.
This fundamental statement about Christ becomes, as we have seen, at the same
time the explanation of Christian existence. To John, being a Christian means being
like the Son, becoming a son; that is, not standing on one’s own and in
oneself, but living completely open in the ‘from’ and ‘towards.’ In so far as
the Christian is a ‘Christian,’ this is true of him. And certainly such
utterances will make him aware to how small an extent he is a Christian.[1]/[2]
[1] J.
Ratzinger, “Introduction to Christianity,” Ignatius (1990) 134.
[2] Ratzinger: “I think it is not unimportant to note how
the doctrine of the Trinity here passes over into a statement about existence,
how the assertion that relation is at the same time pure unity becomes
transparently clear to us. It is the nature of the Trinitarian personality to
be pure relation and so the most absolute unity. That there is no contradiction
in this is probably now perceptible. And one can understand from now on more
clearly than before that it is not the ‘atom,’ the indivisible smallest piece
of matter, that possesses the highest unity; that on the contrary pure oneness
can only occur in the spirit and embraces the relativity of love. Thus the
profession of faith in the oneness of God is just as radical as in any other
monotheistic religion; indeed only in Christianity does it reach its full
stature. But it is the nature of Christian existence to receive and to live
life as relatedness, and thus to enter into that unity which is the ground of
all reality and sustains it. This will perhaps make it clear how the doctrine
of the Trinity, when properly understood, can become the nodal point of
theology and of Christian thought in general.”
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