Monday, July 13, 2015

On Mon, Jul 13, 2015 at 11:50 AM, Joseph Wood <josrwood@earthlink.net> wrote:

You have a lot of great material on your blog at the moment, hard as it is to follow the quotes and sort out one source from another.  But this:  "The human person is emerging not as an evolving animal but as 'another Christ' who is an autonomous and self-determining ‘I' in search of the Absolute.”  That makes me shudder.  I can make sense of it, but it really risks reducing Ratzinger and Sokolowski, to Kant and Anthony Kennedy — bad ju-ju.

I have sometimes thought of your parting guidance from the workshop in MA years back, which there is no reason for you to recall.  Do we make progress — intellectually, spiritually — in shorts bursts of maximum energy and speed, or slow steady effort with slow steady grace?  Or is this a false dualism?


Dear Joe,
   If the incarnate Son of God reaches the absolute perfection of Himself as enfleshed divine Person, He does so in His total gift of Self to death on the Cross. There is a development of His human will that has been assumed with the body/soul from the Virgin and laden with all the sin of all men of all time. He took on that sin as His own, and He - as divine Person - willed with that created human will (now assumed as His, and it is the divine Person that is doing the willing by means of a human will that is His) obedience to death: "I have come down from heaven not to do my [human] will, but the Will of Him Who sent Me" (Jn. 6, 38). The God-Man has now become fully himself. And we become Him by "learning to turn all the circumstances and events of my life into occasions of loving you" (Prayer card to St. Josemaria Escriva) by the obedience of moment by moment that is faith - until death. Amen. Fr. Bob

Joe,
  I just noticed when posting our replay that I have the typo, "The God-man is not fully HImself when I, obviously want to write "now" fully Himself - and hence there is growth and development in Christ Who is the very meaning of absolute, but yet developing. Yes, of course, this sounds like Hegel, but the Hegel that has not been understood and tucked away in the stagnant category of German idealism. It all goes back - for me - to Ratzinger waking me from my categorical and abstractive slumber with: "the Father is not the Father and then engenders the Son, but is the very act of engendering the Son." That says it all!!! Fr. Bob


Go to Charles Taylor on Hegel ("Hegel For Our Day" (?) and Walsh on Modern Philosophy and the misnomer of German thought as "idealism" when it is existentialism. And then consider again Gaudium et Spes #24: “man, the only earthly being God has willed for itself, finds himself by the sincere gift of himself.” And then go and read carefully Robert Barron’s “The Priority of Christ” to see the Person of Christ as the very meaning of “To Be” and then the resurrection and correct interpretation of authentic Thomism in this light.  Fr. Bob

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