December 27, 2023

December 27, 2023 By
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Sailko: Jonah As Depicted At The Vatican /  Wikimedia Commons

The book of Jonah demonstrates the difference between human conceptions of justice and how it influences the way people believe God’s justice should be like with the way God actually acts and promotes justice. We tend to expect retributive not restorative justice, while God always acts for the greater good, helping to restore, with mercy and grace, the justice or goodness which humans have denied. This difference is played out with Jonah; he thought his purpose was merely to condemn Nineveh, to tell them they were about to face God’s wrath for their sins and there was nothing they could do to prevent their destruction. The people of Nineveh heard what Jonah had to say, but hoped and thought their doom was not necessary if they changed their ways. They did penance, showing God their willingness to change their ways, asking God to give them another chance, that is, to be merciful towards them. God heard their pleas. Jonah had accomplished what God wanted him to accomplish, which was to effect such change, but Jonah did not understand, which is why he was upset with God:

But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry.  And he prayed to the LORD and said, “I pray thee, LORD, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that thou art a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and repentest of evil. Therefore now, O LORD, take my life from me, I beseech thee, for it is better for me to die than to live.”  And the LORD said, “Do you do well to be angry?”  (Jonah 4:1-4 RSV).

Jonah was angry. Before God’s demonstration of mercy, he felt God’s pathos, God’s “outrage” for Nineveh’s sins. He felt called to preached to the people of Nineveh, to speak against their evils, and yet he didn’t want to do so; he struggled against his calling, but God  intervened, making sure he would not reject his calling. It is easy to understand why Jonah was angry. He felt that he had been duped by God. When he accepted his calling, he preached to the people of Nineveh, telling them that God’s judgment was about to bring about their destruction. He felt their doom was certain, and yet, what he preached did not seem to come to pass.

Jonah misunderstood the prophetic call; he was called to preach, and he was inspired by God’s pathos, but he did not understand the full pathos of God which included God’s love for all humanity. He did not comprehend God, but he thought he did, and so turned his apprehension into an absolute which it was not. He did not understand what he was doing was providing a conditional warning, indicating what would come to pass if things did not change; he assumed, as many assume with many similar types of prophecies in Scripture, it was not conditional but a necessary forgone conclusion. Christians continue to make the same kind of mistake when they read warnings about eternal perdition in Scripture, assuming that they represent what must come to pass instead of being a potential outcome for history. Prophetic warnings must be understood as conditional, indicating what will come to pass if things do not change; if they were not conditional, it would seem as such statements are a kind of gloating, an action contrary to the nature of God.

It would have been useless for Jonah to preach if Nineveh’s doom was certain. But, since it was conditional, God was able to use Jonah to change the situation. The people of Nineveh did not have to face  “karmic retribution” for what they had done because they repented and pleaded for God’s mercy, mercy which they received. That mercy gave them the grace they needed so they could be transformed into something better.  And, responding to Jonah, God revealed that God is looking to the world with great care and concern, as God loves everyone, and seeks every possible reason to show them mercy:

But God said to Jonah, “Do you do well to be angry for the plant?” And he said, “I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.” And the LORD said, “You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night, and perished in a night.  And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?” (Jonah 4:9-11 RSV).

God loves the world and those within it; it is through such love God made the world, and it with such love that God acts for the good of all creation. God’s love and mercy lies behind all of God’s interactions with the world. And as God is one, all of God’s actions, can be and should be seen as interconnected and one in such a way that, as Walter Kasper explained, “Mercy, of which we have just spoken, stands in an indissoluble inner connection with God’s other attributes, especially holiness, justice, fidelity, and truth.” [1] Denial of mercy is a denial of true justice, even as a denial of mercy leads to a denial of the absolute truth. For we know, it is love, not sacrifice, which God desires from us: “For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God, rather than burnt offerings” (Hos. 6:6 RSV). Taking up these words, Jesus indicated what they mean:

But when he heard it, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, `I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matt. 9:12-13 RSV).

Sadly, many Christians have ignored this; they read Scripture with a legalistic hermeneutic. Like Johan, they end up thinking God’s justice has little to no room for mercy or grace. They focus on sins, and how and why sins are condemned, making them desire to see sins condemned for their sin. They hate sin for a legalistic reason. They do not understand why God hates sin, which is simple: because sin hurts those whom God loves. Condemnations of sin in Scripture must not be read outsider of the greater mercy God intends to bestow upon sinners. God intends to bless them with grace so that they can find themselves being restored to what they should have been like instead of being destroyed, for in their destruction, sin, not God, wins. Condemnations are given as a foundation for restorative justice, and so must be understood in the same was as Jonah’s mission to Nineveh is to be understood: they are to help people see the ways they have strayed from true justice, to accept, that is, the judgment of God’s justice, so that they are open to and willing to change. Then, they will be ready to receive the grace they need. That is, the purpose of such condemnation is never the condemnation itself. This is exactly the point God is making in and with the story of Jonah, as J.R.R. Tolkien realized:

Incidentally, if you ever look at the Old Testament, and look at Jonah, you’ll find that the ‘whale’  — it is not  really said to be a whale but a big fish – is quite unimportant. The real point is that God is much more merciful than ‘prophets’, is easily moved by penitence, and won’t be dictated to even by high ecclesiastics whom he has himself appointed.[2]

Those who would use their authority to undermine mercy and grace, even if the authority is legitimate, even if what they say is based upon some element of the truth (like Jonah and his apprehension of some of God’s pathos), end up undermining the absolute truth because they reject God’s mercy.  Ecclesiastical authorities, just like the prophet Jonah, might possess some sort of legitimate authority, but that authority should be used to help them be pastors, looking for the good of everyone. But, as we also see with Jonah, God can and will work for the good of everyone even through flawed ministers, which is one of the reasons why Donatism leads to the wrong conclusions about the sacraments. God will not be controlled or dictated by those who try to isolate some portion of the truth and use it to reject the greater, absolute truth. Mercy will not be denied, no matter how much some would like to limit it. And, as the sign of Jonah is the sign of Jesus’ ministry, we must understand it is the sign of mercy and hope: no matter how much it seems some might be destined to perdition, God’s mercy will always be ready to offer a way out of it, so that everyone has a chance to be saved :

For our Lord and Savior willed to illuminate all places in order to have mercy on all. He came down from heaven to earth in order to visit the world.  He went down further to the lower world in order to illumine those who were being held in the lower world, in accordance with the statement of the prophet who said, “You who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, a light has arisen for you” [Isa 9:2]. [3]

God is willing to pardon to everyone so easily, which St. Isaac the Syrian (apropos of Nineveh), beautifully stated:

But we possess a greater sense of God and we have an elevated knowledge of Him. Indeed, we know Him as one who pardons, who is good, who is humble. Even for one good thing <done>, if only in thought or compunction, He pardons the sins of many years. And the sins of others He does not remember, lest they be associated <with ours>. But even those who have died in their sins and passed over already, He rends asunder the greater part of their sins by means of His mercy. [4]

Mercy, indeed, is greater than God’s condemnation, as it will always be. This is why, if someone embraces mercy, that mercy will bring them grace and salvation:

But since “mercy will be exalted over condemnation” and the gifts of clemency will surpass any just compensation, all the lives led by mortals and all different kinds of actions will be appraised under the aspect of a single rule. No charges will be brought up where, in acknowledgment of the Creator, works of compassion have been found. [5]

Those mercilessly judge and condemn others risk having their own judgment brought back against themselves. This is not to say they will be condemned for eternity. God’s mercy is for all, and those who repent, even those who once did not give or show it to others, can receive it, but in receiving it, they will change and become merciful themselves. Restorative justice can embrace anyone and help them become the person God intended them to be. This is not to say the process of becoming what God wants anyone to be will be easy; it will not. They will have to become purified as if through a trial of fire, but in the process, their every defilement will be cleansed and they will become pure at heart and ready for the beatific vision. The story of Jonah, the sign of Jonah, therefore is the sign of mercy, and those who are upset when they see mercy is being offered to others should consider the words God gave to Jonah. They should remember that God is always at work, trying to restore the fallen world so that it, and all those in it, can be made fit for the kingdom of God.

[1] Walter Kasper, Mercy. Trans. William Madges (New York: Paulist Press, 2013), 88-9.

[2] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Revised and Expanded Edition. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (Broadway, NY: William Morrow, 2023), 370 [Letter 196a to Michael George Tolkien].

[3] St. Chromatius of Aquileia, Sermons and Tractates on Matthew. Trans. Thomas P. Scheck (New York: Newman Press, 2018), 60 [Sermon 16].

[4] St. Isaac the Syrian, “The Third Part.” Trans. Mary T. Hansbury in An Anthology of Syriac Writers From Qatar in the Seventh Century. Ed. Mario Kozah, Abdulrahim Abu-Husayn, Saif Shaeen Al-Murikhi and Haya Al Thani (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2015), 387 [XI.5].

[5] St Leo the Great, Sermons. Trans. Jane Patricia Freeland CSJB and Agnes Josephine Conway SSJ (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 1996), 47 [Sermon 11].

 

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July 14, 2023

July 14, 2023 By
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St. John of the Cross: Christ On The Cross / Wikimedia Commons

One of the most difficult elements of Christianity for us to understand, thanks to the way we have been led to think and consider ourselves as mere individuals in modern times, is the way Jesus, the incarnate God-man, is said to have made atonement for our sins. That is, we have a problem understanding his substitutionary atonement for us. It is not possible in a short space to properly respond to all the concerns people can and do bring up. However, it is possible to point to a particular framework which can and does help deal with the questions which can and do arise. That is, a brief response can be given which, if considered, should hopefully lead people to consider things on their own, to discern their own insights, and perhaps, give their own answers.

There are two types of questions Christians and non-Christians tend to ask about Christ’s atoning work. The first asks why, exactly, does God need to act in and through the incarnation, and with it the death of Jesus on the cross, in order to provide us forgiveness; can’t God just forgive us?  The second asks, if God, for some good reason, wants us to deal with the consequences of our actions, especially, therefore, our sins, why would God send Jesus to do so in our place? That is, God wants us to make amends for what we have done, why, then, do we find God circumventing that by having Jesus make those amends for us?

The second question often arises due to the way Christianity answers the first question. God has given us free will, and God wants to preserve our freedom. It would be rendered meaningless if our actions do not have consequences, that is, if God comes in and instantly undermines any particularly negative consequence for our actions. Freedom comes with responsibility, and so, by giving us freedom, God also gives us a great responsibility. That responsibility includes more than just experiencing the “karmic” result of our action. It means we should also bear the burden of dealing with and fixing whatever harm we have caused thanks to our actions. God could have easily forgiven us, taking care of the harm which we have caused, but that would render our choices, our lives, meaningless because we would be shown to have no moral responsibility of our own. God could have made it that there would be no karmic-like response to bad choices,  that we could cause harm in the world without being responsible for it, but that would have undermined all sense of justice in the world.

We bear responsibility for our actions and we should strive to make amends for whatever harm we have caused in the world. The problem is we often cannot fix what we have broken (as the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty indicates). This is not to say we should not try. We should do all that we can. But, in the end, we need help. We can’t heal all the wounds we have caused. We can’t fix the world all by ourselves. Thankfully, we are not in this world all by ourselves. We are in this together. We often can and do help each other with our particular skills and abilities.  What one of us cannot do by ourselves, we can with the help of another.  Contrary to what modern individualism suggests, our existence in the world is of an interdependent relationship with each other (and the rest of creation). What one person does will not only affect themselves, but will have an effect on everyone. This is why we can help each other, because we are interdependent; we are not monads out of reach from each other. Similarly, then, as we are interdependent with each other, we form a whole together, and through this, we actually bear the responsibility of making amends for what humanity, as a collective whole, has done wrong. Despite how much we have divided ourselves from each other, trying to set ourselves up as independent individuals, we are never going to be completely independent; we are persons in relation with each other, sharing a common heritage, a common nature, and we bear the burdens of each other thanks to our connections with each other.

Because we share in a common nature, we share with each other the burden of what humanity has done in and to the world (as exemplified by the notion of original sin). Similarly, what one person does in which serves to benefit the world, can and will provide something of positive value for the whole of humanity as well. We benefit from the good which we all do, even as we suffer from the evil which we all do. This line of thought leads us to the best way to engage and understand Christ’s “atoning sacrifice.” Jesus, the God-man, assumed human nature, and in doing so, shared with the rest of us our burdens, our responsibilities. He was able to take upon himself all that we cannot do, and thanks to the fact he is also a divine person, he is able do it for us. He wants us to share in the work, to cooperate with him, and so make amends the best we can, but then he offers the grace which we need to supplement and perfect our actions, to fulfill what we cannot fulfill ourselves. This is how he was able to take upon himself all the consequences of sin and bring them to their proper end. That accomplishment is represented to us in his resurrection from the dead; sin, and the consequences of sin, are shown to be transcended by him, and we are called to share in that transcendence in the eschatological resurrection from the dead. Thus, as Walter Kasper explains:

The idea of substitutionary atonement can be understood only in the context of this corporate understanding. On the basis of this common entanglement in sin and common subjection to death, no individual can brag about being able to pull him- or herself out of the morass with his or her own two hands. First and foremost, as mere mortals we are not able to restore life by our own power. [1]

This, then, provides the insight we need to understand the idea of substitutionary atonement. It is not that Jesus merely does something in our place, as if there were no connection between him and us. Rather, we must understand Jesus, in assuming human nature, takes on the common heritage and burden of humanity. The actions and value of human history is affirmed, and it is affirmed in the greatest way possible, as it is assumed by the divine person of God-the Son as he unites himself with us, taking the human condition upon himself and making it and its one with his person. And in doing so, he connects us with himself, allowing us to become one with him, so that his actions become, therefore, the actions of humanity, just as much as ours are; his work becomes our work, even as our work and actions, and feelings, become a part of his own person. Indeed, through our unity with him, our words and feelings can be transferred to him and spoken by him, which is one way to understand some of the words he spoke while on the cross:

Hence it is that our Head, the Lord Jesus Christ, transforming all the members of his body into himself, cried out amid the punishment of the cross (assuming the persona of those redeemed), saying what on one occasion he had uttered in the psalm: “My God, My God, look at me. Why have you abandoned me?” This expression, dearly beloved, represents a teaching, not a complaint. [2]

Thus, the key to understanding the atoning sacrifice, the key to understanding how Jesus can make satisfaction on our behalf, is interdependence. We are not entirely separated from each other. Rather, everyone, indeed, everything in creation, is interdependent with each other, and through that interdependence, form one collective whole, one participated unity.  It is a participated unity because it does not undermine the relative distinctions found in it, including, and especially, the personal distinctions of subjects found within that whole. That is, the unity of creation must not be understood as some sort of monistic unity which reduces everything and everyone down to one by annihilating all distinctions. With that as the foundation, we should understand the atonement better. The incarnation provides a way for God to help humanity, to engage the burdens of humanity, to offer grace, without subverting the value of creation itself because God does not do so in any way which renders our freedom meaningless. God wants to preserve our freedom, and with it, the freedom to act in such a way that our actions have meaning and significance. God works with humanity to make amends for what humanity has done together in the world, for the bad decisions and bad actions which we have taken upon ourselves throughout history. Our freedom, therefore, is not only preserved, but the responsibility which comes from it is not undermined, but rather, reinforced by the incarnation, even as we are provided a way by which we can truly repair the harm which we have caused instead of suffering unending trials and tribulations trying to fix which we cannot fix on our own.

To give our lives meaning by making our actions have real impact in the way they shape history and the world around us is important. But it is also important that we are given the opportunity to make amends and make reparations for whatever harm we cause to others (or even ourselves).  It is fitting, then, that with the assumption of humanity, the God-man, Jesus, is able to fulfill our responsibility for us, that is, confirm that what justice expects of us as a whole can and will be fulfilled by us. God joins in and acts in and with us, as a human, the whole of human history, indeed, due to the interdependent nature of humanity with creation, the whole of created history. He makes amends as one of us, not because God is angry and wants to punish us for our sins, but because God loves us and wants the best for us, including, the preservation of our freedom while also having a way to make reparations for that freedom itself.

[1] Walter Kasper, Mercy. Trans. William Madges (New York: Paulist Press, 2013), 74.

[2] St Leo the Great, Sermons. Trans. Jane Patricia Freeland CSJB and Agnes Josephine Conway SSJ (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 1996), 295 [Sermon 67].

 

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June 9, 2023

June 9, 2023 By
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Lawrence OP : The Divine Name / flickr

Many Christians say that anyone who has a different understanding of God than the one they have must worship or follow a different God. To make that point, they ask how could people believe in the same deity if they say different, indeed, contradictory things about God. This is a bad line of argument. If that line of reasoning was valid, it would end up leading to all kinds of similar conclusions, such as, historians who believe in two different, indeed, contradictory things about George Washington must not really be talking about the same man. We can believe something false about someone or something; in doing so, we are still talking about a particular subject or object, even when we end up being wrong about it. Similarly, if a different belief or conception about a particular subject or object means that it is ultimate a different subject or object being discussed, then, ultimately, there would be no way for anyone to be wrong when talking about various subjects.

If we must have the same conception of God to have the same God, no one will have the same God. Everyone has their own unique experience with God, and with it, all kinds of unique understandings about God which no one else will have. Our apprehension of God grows in relation to our experience of God’s work in our lives or what we see of God’s work in the world. Each of those works, in their own way, represents a way we can come to name God. Each of those names indicates a way we have come to know God (in a relative, not absolute manner).

God is transcendent. God’s essence must not to be confused with the energies or works of God, though that essence is proven to exist in and through those energies, which is why in and through them, we can know something about God and what we could call God’s character. Nonetheless, the more we apprehend God, the more we should realize how transcendent God is, and so, how much God transcends what it is we have apprehended. We must accept that the transcendental essence of God will only be comprehended by God – that is, “none know God with innermost knowledge save God.”[1] Only God will know God in the absolute sense, and so, if one must have the same, and correct, conception of God in order to believe in God, only God can believe in and know God.

Our experience, our lives, our ability to interpret that experience, can and will lead us to all kinds of interpretations of God. Some understandings will be better than others. Some, perhaps, will be quite terrible, especially if what they use to understand God is mostly the reified statements others make of God. And yet, behind all such conceptions of God, even those which are bad or even erroneous, there are apprehensions of God, apprehensions, if we can ascertain them, which will help us better understand God. Each apprehension of God, while it might need some purification to discern it, can be used together with every other apprehension of God, serving as complements to each other. Together, they can better point to the absolute truth of God (through a kind of triangulation). Thus, even those which seem to contradict each other, when misunderstood, can be seen to work together and help us approach God better. It is like taking two different people at different parts of the United States, one on the West Cost, one on the East, asking them where to find Chicago. They would point in different directions, and yet both would be correct. If we took the answer to lie in the pointer, and not where they were pointing to, we would have to claim there was a contradiction, but if we understood their response properly, we would be able to see how they work together and point to the same place. Thus, when studying and learning from others about God, we must understand the context to better appreciate what they have to tell us, but also, to see how different statements about God which seem contradictory could end up working together and end up being not so contradictory after all. Each discussion about God represents an attempt to come to know God, and though what is said can be different in each discussion, they can still end up talking about the same God, for they are all attempts to point to and represent the ultimate truth, the ultimate reality, which is found in and with God, indeed, which is God.

Thus, while the fullness of revelation is disclosed to us in and through Jesus Christ, we can still discern God’s work with others, and through them and what they tell us about God, learn about God. Even if we believe they are mistaken about many things about God because they have not engaged or believed the fullness of revelation of God which we received, that doesn’t mean what they are talking about is another God. After all, have we not, in our own spiritual life, found ourselves coming to know God differently, realizing many times we were mistaken about God? Did we believe in a different God when we did so? No.

God is one, and is always at work in the world. That is, God is at work with everyone. God is engaging humanity in its history, interacting with all the nations of the world, providing the means to each of them to interact with and learn from God’s engagement with them. We can find people within every culture, within every religious tradition, seeking after and engaging God, though each are doing so in a different way, some, obviously, better than others. If we ignore God’s work with them, if we try to make God exclusive to ourselves, that is exclusive to Christianity, not only will it be able to be proven we are wrong about God (as  Scripture consistently shows God is at work throughout all creation), our understanding of God will end up being deficient, as Roger Bacon understood:

For this reason the philosophizing Christian can unite many authorities and various reasons and very many opinions from other writings besides the books of the unbelieving philosophers, provided they belong to philosophy, or are common to it and theology, and must be received in common by unbelievers and believers. If this be not done, there will be no perfecting, but much loss. [2]

Indeed, it can be said that the philosophers from various cultural traditions helped their people come to a better understanding of God, making sure they got away from some of the errors found in their own cultural or religious traditions, especially the kind of errors which develop when cultural myths are misunderstood and overly literalized. The philosophers, and of course, the religious traditions which they inherited and refined, show us one way humanity has always been working with and seeking to understand one and the same God.  They also warn us not to reify our current understanding of God in such a way to put a limit on God, a limit which cuts God from divine transcendence. If we don’t do that, we end up falling for idolatry. The sin of idolatry lies in the way it transforms human apprehension of God to a claim of comprehension, and in doing so, ends up limiting and undermining the divine nature. That is, it turns God, who is the absolute, universal good into some particular, limited good. And the error which creates for such idolatry, as Henry of Ghent explained, comes by the way we predicate such limiting notions to God as being absolutes when we hear the name God invoked:

Hence, the fact that idol worshipers among the people claimed that God is something by his essence and in actuality, did not come from some knowledge that they had about God’s essence or existence, but from the faith they had in the philosophers, who knew that about God through arguments from creatures, as was stated above. They also had form them a notion of what is expressed by this name “God.” And, therefore, they erred in the determination of what they understood by the name. For each of them claimed that God is that which he preferred to other things –some the sky, others the sun, still others the moon – and in that way different people spoke in different ways, as Augustine says in book three of On Christian Doctrine. They would never have done this if they had truly known something about whether God is. For whatever of the divine nature is known to be, its being is not known except by knowledge that it surpasses everything that is found in a creature. [3]

It is important to recognize the transcendence of God, and to keep that transcendence at the forefront of our engagement with God. What we say about God can be said to be true when we keep it on the level of a relative truth based upon our apprehension of God through God’s works or energies, but it becomes erroneous when we try to turn that relative truth into the absolute truth itself. All such relative truths are true insofar as they participate and is one with the absolute truth which transcends it. When we recognize the relative truth as relative truth, we can speak about the truth through its relative presentation because of its connection to the absolute truth. And, this is important, because the absolute truth is something which we cannot comprehend, yet the relative truth often is something which we can, and so it explains how we can have some comprehension of the truth even if we cannot comprehend the absolute truth itself. Similarly, this connection between the two is necessary, for by recognizing how the relative truth relates to the absolute truth we stop ourselves from falling for relativism because there is an ultimate truth which lies behind and connects all relative truths, an ultimate truth which also can be used to show how some claims about the truth are false.  It is also this connection which allows us to engage different apprehensions, different experiences, about God and use them to work together to bring about a better understanding of God.  For God is at work in and throughout the world. Different people engage God differently. They have different levels or kinds of revelation or apprehension of God which they use to discus God, and if we can correlate them properly, we can better understand God and how God is at work in the world and keep us away from the idolatrous error of exclusivism which denies God’s universal work with the world.  God’s work with others them means they have something to share us, something which we can learn from, and with it, come to understand God just that much better, even as then they can learn from us and come to know God better as well. Indeed, though the fullness of revelation lies in the incarnation, the incarnation brings us together as one humanity, showing that it is by coming together we will best understand and appreciate that revelation.

 

[1] Al-Ghazālī, The Niche of Lights. Trans. David Buchman (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1998), 17.

[2] Roger Bacon, Opus Majus. Part I. trans. Robert Belle Burke (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1928), 74.

[3] Henry of Ghent, Henry of Ghent’s Summa: The Question on God’s Existence and Essence (Articles 21 – 24). Trans. Jos Decorte and Roland J Teske, SJ (Leuven: Peeters, 2005), 203 [Art 24 Q3].

 

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May 7, 2023

May 7, 2023 By
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Schuppi: St. Photina From Scripture / Wikimedia Commons

One of the ways early Christians looked at Scripture was for the way it should be read, not as mere positive history, not as some simple text to be read literally, but as a text which gives us all kinds of theological truths through various symbols inserted into the narratives themselves. That is, they did not take Scripture as a simple history book. They did not believe that everything which was written down happened exactly in the way it was described; they understood, indeed, that various contradictions in historical narratives indicated that this was not meant to be the way it was viewed. This, of course, was normal in the ancient world, not just for Christians, but for ancient historians in general. As many particular details were unavailable to them, they had to be supplied by the writers themselves. Thus, history was more about giving a general presentation of what happened funneled by the historian’s creative attempt to reconstruct the event. What they wrote about was, in general, were believed to have happened, but just not in the precise way the historians recorded those events. The historian, therefore, often interpreted the events and used their own interpretation in creating their narratives, hoping to lead their audience to understand the meaning of history the same way they did. Scripture often followed the same methodology; thus, if what is written is not entirely factual, it was not because the writers were intending to deceive their reader, but rather, they wanted to present various truths, especially theological truths, by their reading of history. This makes what they wrote more akin to myth than it is empirical history. This is why they wrote histories with symbols and with dialogues which might not have been engaged the way they were written down; what the writers were interested in doing is given a broad outline of the events and then supplying the means to find the truth which can be discerned through the event itself. We can read the story of the Samaritan woman (St Photina) as being an example of this.

St. Photina, the early Christians recognized, was a real woman, and beyond what was described in Scripture, she had an important role in the early Christian community. And while it is true that we can see, even in the apostolic times, women were slowly being sidelined, that their voice was being more and more ignored (if not outright suppressed), the way they had been lifted up and promoted by Jesus made sure they could not be quickly silenced. Thus, we find that they had a more vital role in the early community than they would have just a few centuries later. The trajectory of their subjugation and silence began during the apostolic era, but it would not be at its worst until much later. This is why we can find many important women, like St. Photina, capable of having a role in evangelization, even preaching. The fact that she held such a role should not have us ignore the way she, and other women, found themselves being sidelined, as if they were second class citizens in the church (despite the way Paul said differences in gender should not be seen in Christ). Nonetheless, while all of this is true, Scripture does not tell us her later story, only the way she first met Christ. How Scripture explains that meeting is full of symbols, so much so, that it is obvious it is meant more to express theological truths than it is to elevate the status of Photina:

There came a woman of Samaria to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food. The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, `Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep; where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank from it himself, and his sons, and his cattle?” Jesus said to her, “Every one who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (Jn. 4:7-14 RSV).

The theological truths connected to her meeting with Christ were often emphasized by early commentators as they saw her representing the way fallen humanity was often trapped by seeking after and embracing mere material sensations. The Samaritan woman’s five husbands which were really not husbands were often believed to represent the five senses and the way our souls have been seduced by them so as to ignore our spiritual heritage. We can see an example of this tradition in St. Augustine’s Tractates on John:

But since we are hemmed in by what follows, “And he whom you now have is not your husband,” it appears to me that we can more easily take the five senses of the body to be the five former husbands of the soul. For when one is born, before he can make use of the mind and reason, he is ruled only by the senses of the flesh. In a little child, the soul seeks for or shuns what is heard, and seen, and smells, and tastes, and is perceived by the touch. It seeks for whatever soothes, and shuns whatever offends, those five senses. At first, the soul lives according to these five senses, as five husbands; because it is ruled by them. But why are they called husbands? Because they are lawful and right: made indeed by God, and are the gifts of God to the soul. The soul is still weak while ruled by these five husbands, and living under these five husbands; but when she comes to years of exercising reason, if she is taken in hand by the noble discipline and teaching of wisdom, these five men are succeeded in their rule by no other than the true and lawful husband, and one better than they, who both rules better and rules for eternity, who cultivates and instructs her for eternity. For the five senses rule us, not for eternity, but for those temporal things that are to be sought or shunned. But when the understanding, imbued by wisdom, begins to rule the soul, it knows now not only how to avoid a pit, and to walk on even ground — a thing which the eyes show to the soul even in its weakness; nor merely to be charmed with musical voices, and to repel harsh sounds; nor to delight in agreeable scents, and to refuse offensive smells; nor to be captivated by sweetness, and displeased with bitterness; nor to be soothed with what is soft, and hurt with what is rough. For all these things are necessary to the soul in its weakness.[1]

While John was telling us about an event in Jesus’ life, it was understood that he wrote it to highlight theological truths, not mere facts. The readers were meant to understand not everything was to be taken literally. He was writing with symbols, symbols they were meant to interpret so as to discern the transcendent truth(s) revealed in Photina’s meeting with Jesus. He expected his audience to wrestle with the text, and not take it at its face value. When we do as John wanted, we will probably see that there are a wide variety of interpretations which we can come up from what he wrote. Perhaps that is also the point, especially here. We are told we should be seeking living water, that is the Spirit, and the Spirit is not going to be trapped by the mere letter of the text; trying to impose only one interpretation upon the narrative is to make the mistake that those who engage a simple literal take of Scripture makes. That is, we would limit what the Spirit can and will reveal through the text itself. We should expect there will be many complementary interpretations of the text, each using the carefully crafted telling of the story to lead us to transcendent truths which cannot be fully put into words. This highlights why the text is best understood as being mythic and not positive history, for myth always is about serving as a revelation of the truth in a way which transcends a simple literal reading of the tale. Early Christians understood this, which is why they were focused more on the allegorical interpretation of Scripture than its literal meanings.

Today, we might not be as interested in allegorical interpretations of Scriptural texts as many ancient Christians were; we might be more interested in positive history, that is, in discerning the historical facts behind the narrative, but we must not let ourselves become trapped by such an interest, thinking it can provide all that we should ever want to learn from the texts themselves. If we do so, we will find ourselves struggling to find out what the text could provide us, how it can lead us to the living water which we need, the nourishment which satisfies our spiritual needs. What is important are the theological truths which can be apprehended in and from the texts. Discerning the historical facts which helped in the creation of the story certainly can offer us one means to do so, to be sure, but it does so only to a limited degree. Every interpretive scheme has much to offer, but they work better in unison than apart. This is why modern Biblical criticism and its questions should not be ignored, just as ancient ways of engaging Scripture should also not be ignored.

While Scripture does not merely give us a presentation of empirical facts, we should not take that to mean the text is pure fiction. Rather, we must understand Scripture to be historical myth, where history is used to create narratives which point to those great, transcendent truths which will help nourish the soul. Biblical criticism will help us discern the history, and other interpretative schemes will be able to point out the truths the Spirit can and will provide us from the text if we but let it

[1] St. Augustine, Tractates on John in NPNF1(7): 104 [Tractate XV.21]

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December 9, 2021

December 9, 2021 By

Mr.TinDC: Constitution In The National Archives /flickr

Two different, but similar, temptations turn us away from the needs of the present moment. One is to have us dream about some utopian future, thinking we can and will produce the perfect society. Such futurism, of course, is denied by those who feel the world and everything in it is falling apart, becoming worse by the day, so that instead of looking to the future, such people look to the past for their ideal society, creating a romantic vision of what they believe things were like, saying that we should find a way to return to the past if we want social perfection.  Both temptations turn us away from the present moment, from the good found in it, so that we either look forward or backward to find solutions to the problems at hand, of ideals which we think we can enact instead of dealing with them with realistic expectations. While both temptations have elements of truth involved with them, so that we can and should expect some of our problems to be solved (after all, we have seen how science has cured many diseases), and we can learn from the wisdom of the past and how they dealt with similar problems, we must recognize that the root problems of the human situation such as selfishness and greed will remain with us until the end of time.  Any belief we can do away with them  is pure fantasy. It seems to me that it is the temptation to reconstruct the past and use that reconstruction to impose upon the present an unreal expectation which is the most common of the two temptations; futurists which look to and ponder the future with hope at least understand such purity has yet to exist and realize if it is to exist, it will require evolutionary change to get there, making them less likely to expect that they can instantly turn the present into their ideal society. It is this temptation, this desire for some ideal past, that can also create the greatest harm in the present, because the present has situations and contexts which could not and would not be understood by the way things were in the past. This means that those who try to recreate the past will end up demolishing and destroying the present and all those situations which cannot neatly fit with the past they want to recreate, and in doing so, there is likely to be much violence, both from those who try to impose their order as well as those who resist it knowing that it cannot and will not work in the present. This is exactly the problem which lies with those, either in religion, or in politics, try to impose some sort of “originalism” or false “tradition” as the means by which  religious or political decisions are to be engaged.

J.R.R. Tolkien understood the problem of originalism in religion. His criticism of those who try to appeal to some form of primitivism in the faith and impose it upon others applies to those who try to follow the same sort of primitivism in secular society. The past is always going to be a construct, and so how we interpret the past will not be the past as it really was, but the past filtered through our own desires. This means that we are projecting ourselves and our wishes upon the past, using the past as a cover to hide that fact. But, as Tolkien also pointed out, even if we could properly reconstruct what things were in the past, it is never good to try to impose the way things were in the present situation because our context is much different. Thus, he said, the church is like a tree; it has its foundation as a seed, but now it grown with a trunk and limbs; it would be wrong to try to take the tree back to its origin,  to compare the tree as it is now as with the way it was in its foundation and demand us to become as it was when it was just a seed:

The ‘protestant’ search backwards for ‘simplicity’ and directness – which, of course, though it contains some good or at least intelligible motive, is mistaken and in vain. Because ‘primitive Christianity’ is now and in all spite of all ‘research’ will ever remain largely unknown; because ‘primitiveness’ is no guarantee of value, and is and was in great part a reflection of ignorance. Grave abuses were as much an element in Christian ‘liturgical’ behaviour from the beginning as now. (St. Paul’s strictures on eucharistic behaviour are sufficient to show this!). Still more because ‘my church’ was not intended by Our Lord to be static or remain in perpetual childhood; but to be a living organism (likened to a plant), which develops and changes in externals by the interaction of its bequeathed divine life and history – the particular circumstances of the world into which it is set. There is no resemblance between the ‘mustard-seed’ and the full-grown tree. For those living in the days of its branching growth the Tree is the thing, for the history of a living thing is a part of its life, and the history of a divine thing is sacred. The wise may know it began with a seed, but it is vain to try to dig it up, for it is no longer exists, and the virtue and powers that it had now resides in the Tree. [1]

It is not, of course, Protestants alone who fall for the temptation to seek after an ideal “primitive” church; it is the root problem of so many so-called “traditionalists,” Catholic and Orthodox alike, who do not understand the living dynamic of tradition. The church has always been changing to deal with the context in which it is found; in doing so, there will always be good which it produces, and bad which will cause  it problems, bad which will need to be excised as the church continues to develop until  the end of time. Tradition, and the teachings and wisdom found in it, can and should be engaged, but it should be engaged with prudence, looking to see how it works within the present context, how it can be adapted while remaining true to itself. This is what keeps tradition from being legalism.

The problems which prevent us from finding an original, pure form of the faith which can be imposed upon the faithful today are the same problems which underlie those who claim to follow “originalism” in a political context, such as those who embrace “originalism” in the United States legal community. Once again, they try to create an ideal past, an ideal, original “interpretation,” of the texts which they claim to follow and use; but the reality is, there was no one interpretation, no one original intent; one can find a diversity of beliefs, practices, wishes and desires for the United States by the so-called “founding fathers” and no matter how one can try to do so, their diversity cannot be simplified to one single position, one single interpretation to use in judgments. Likewise, it is clear that many of the “founding fathers,” like Jefferson, did not think the United States should limit itself in its understanding based upon what they said and did, but understood things would evolve, and interpretations and legislations would have to change, so much so, they even believed that the Constitution would have to be rewritten. Originalism, therefore, ignores and rejects many of the opinions and understandings of the “founding fathers,” and in doing so, shows itself to be self-contradictory, similar to the way “sola scriptura” is self-contradictory because the principle of “sola scriptura” is not found in Scripture. What those who follow “originalism” do is exactly the same as those who try to recreate a pristine primitive version of the church to follow: they ignore all counter-evidence to their own interpretation so that they can impose upon the present their own desires.

Originalism, in its religious form (so-called “traditionalism” which tries to reify tradition through an overly-simplified and imaginary interpretation of it) as well as in its secular form (such as found in American conservative circles) is a farce; it is a rhetorical device which hides the truth from those who use it, that is, the truth that they are imposing on their own present ideology upon society while falsely claiming its source is to be found in the past instead of themselves. They can and will cite examples from tradition to support their view, but they will do so ignoring the greater, more complex tradition, and often they will do so through equivocation (because the meaning of words have changed, and they will forget that as they interpret what was written in the past). Thus, Michael Dorf was right in saying, “ In the most hotly contested cases that come before the Supreme Court, arguments rooted in original meaning typically serve a rhetorical function. Justices invoke them to justify decisions taken on other, ideological, grounds”.[2] Indeed, it can be said that it was a racist ideology which served as the foundation for present day American “originalism.” Social justice developments in the twentieth century angered many of those in power, and so, as a response to Supreme Court decisions, they created their originalism as a response to deny what the Supreme Court decided. Thus, as Stern pointed out, originalism was formed by racists upset that their racist policies were no longer supported by the Supreme Court:

All of which raises an important question: Where, exactly, did originalism come from? Its proponents frequently assert that it is a reaction to freewheeling liberal judicial activists imposing their own views on the Constitution through an approach often called “living constitutionalism.” In a groundbreaking article published in American Political Science Review, however, University of Chicago Ph.D. candidate Calvin TerBeek argues that modern originalism arose out of the backlash to Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision prohibiting public school segregation. TerBeek’s research—which spanned 14 archival collections, thousands of newspapers and magazines, and interviews with key players—all points in one direction: Originalism has fundamentally racist roots.[3]

And so, through his analysis of how originalism formed, and how originalism works, Stern noted that it continues to be a subjective theory used to justify the ideological desires of various conservatives:

The politics of it never change. You can go from original intent to original public meaning, but the same politics are always driving the bus. It’s not an objective theory. It’s a deeply, inherently political one. And what that move did more than anything else, theoretically, was give conservatives a wider terrain of space to have a more proactive originalism, one that was not simply interested in cutting down Brown and the Warren court but also laying the groundwork for a more muscular, proactive conservative jurisprudence. [4]

This is why we find ourselves in a dangerous situation in the United States when so many Supreme Court Justices claim to be originalists. At best, they are trying to recreate a past which did not exist, falling for the failure of all those who engage some sort of primitive idealism, but at worst, they are nihilistic relativists who know that originalism is self-defeating but use it as an excuse to justify their own rejection of the authentic, living tradition of the state. Certainly, we have to take what they say with as much charity as possible, so we must respond to the way they describe their originalism, when they do so, such as when Amy Coney Barrett explained what it meant for her:

Barrett, who declared herself a “constitutional originalist” had no trouble answering: “In English that means that I interpret the Constitution as a law, and that I interpret its text as text, and I understand it to have the meaning that it had at the time people ratified it. So that meaning doesn’t change over time and it’s not up to me to update it or infuse my own policy views into it.”[5]

The problem of Barrett’s originalism is that it leaves us with a hermeneutical problem; the context she comes from is vastly different from the past, so her reading will never be the same as those who read the texts when they were produced. She is infusing her own views upon the past, just as so-called “traditionalists” impose their readings of tradition to justify their own ideological perspectives and reject the church and its leaders when  they do not follow their ideology. Thus, there was no one meaning for the Constitution when it was ratified, just as there was no one reading and understanding of Scripture by the saints, and so what she, and others like her, do is selectively read the past, take what they want from it, and use it to justify their desired conclusion. And as so many so-called “traditionalists” do not understand the hermeneutic problem and the way they project their views unto the past, it is quite possible, indeed, probable Barrett meant what she said, but she is not conscious of what is going on in her readings of the past. It is an ignorance of the past which allows for this, the ignorance which Tolkien said lies in those who try to follow some form of primitivism. This is why many who respond to Barrett, and other so-called originalists, just as those who respond to so-called traditionalists, will follow their own example and respond to them in kind, showing them the tradition and interpretations they have ignored. Harry Litman says, within the American legal system, this means everyone has become, in some sense, an “originalist”:

The terms of the battle will be the determinative sense of “original meaning.” I expect that we will see Kagan and others on the left battle with the majority on the originalist playing field, but with arguments, derived from cases such as Bostock, that highlight the evolved social understanding of the import of fixed constitutional terms such as equal protection and due process. Those terms, it is commonly agreed, set out unchanging principles; but social understanding progresses over time in a way that necessarily alters our best judgments—and a court’s—of which practices those terms reach. A court must apply original meaning, the Constitution’s unchanging principles. Yet it can’t ignore changes—or to use a dreaded term, evolutions—in social understanding of what those principles require in practice. So we may all be originalists now, but not in the way many originalists themselves might imagine it.[6]

Litman is wrong in trying to equate those who respond to the originalists with being originalists themselves. Responding to them in kind, showing how faulty their originalism is, only serves to overcome their ideology. This is because it shows that their interpretation and conclusions do not necessarily follow what they claim to hold, that is, the original opinions of those who established the Constitution. By doing this, their critics are not embracing originalism, but offer its repudiation through deconstruction, just as those who engage the full diversity of religious tradition and learn from it are not to be confused with the so-called “traditionalists.” The critics of originalism and so-called “traditionalism” do not disagree with the interest in and examination of the original context and interpretation, but they see and understand, when that is done, the original context itself denies itself as being a limit to be imposed upon future generations. Those who accept the way things change and develop follow tradition because the origin of all tradition came from such change and development, while those who try to halt such development in the name of tradition end up being its ultimate critic and denier. This is why originalism (and so-called “traditionalism”) is a farce, for it must reject the method and mode of engaging the world found in tradition to form its reified presentation of tradition itself. But this is also why those who do this kind of criticism are not originalists themselves (just as others who embrace tradition are not “traditionalists”), because by following the method and expectation of the past, they allow for proper development and change, to make sure that the needs of the present are met instead of cutting them off because they could not have been seen or understood in the past.

[1] J.R..R. Tolkien, “Letter 306: To Michael Tolkien” in J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981), 394.

[2] Michael C. Dorf, “A Question By Justice Thomas During The Second Amendment Argument Inadvertently Exposes A Weakness Of His Originalist Philosophy” in Verdict (11-10-2021).

[3] Mark Joseph Stern, “The Conservative Movement’s Favorite Legal Theory Is Rooted In Racism” in Slate (4-06-2021).

[4] Mark Joseph Stern, “The Conservative Movement’s Favorite Legal Theory Is Rooted In Racism.”

[5] Mark Ira Kaufman, “Trust Me…. I’m An Originalist” in Daily Kos (12-05-2021).

[6] Harry Litman, “Originalism, Divided” in The Atlantic (5-21-2021).

 

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November 17, 2021

November 17, 2021 By

Cbrenner21: Field Hospitals From World War I / Wikimedia Commons

The church is full of the spiritually sick and infirm, that is, sinners. As Pope Francis explained, it can be and should be seen as a field hospital. We are its patients. The church, with the graces given to it, has the spiritual draught that not only can heal us, but give us strength to become better than before. However, our sickness is not just our own. When we are sick, we can infect others with our spiritual disease. It can form a spiritual pandemic, leading to many suffering from the same malady as we do. Indeed, just as with physical illness, those who come in contact with the sick can find themselves infected by the illness they have come to cure. Even doctors can get sick, and sometimes, even though they are sick, their patients need them so much they still continue their work despite their illness.

Within the church, many of those who have been given a special charism to serve the needs of the community, and so have been granted special authority in order to make sure they can fulfill their role, not only are sick themselves, but often, their illness is worse than others because of the way they abuse the authority given to them. Priests and bishops can be great sinners. Nonetheless, the medicine they have to offer can still help those who receive it because it does not rely upon the character and quality of those who offer it to be effective. But yet, when such doctors are spiritually sick, that is, when they are great sinners, it should not surprise us that many will flee from them and seek aid elsewhere. This is a problem older than the institutional church itself. We find throughout history that those who have been given some spiritual authority, those who have been given various elements of grace to share with others, often are the ones who need it most. Instead of taking it in, cooperating with it, they resist it themselves. Thus, many today who have what we need are the cause of many of our problems, as their sin, their sickness, spreads quickly throughout the church, causing many to follow after them in their sickness, leading many astray, hurting everyone as a result of their sin. This is why we must be cautious. We must respect the charism and grace which is offered, but we must not do so in such a way as to fall for clericalism. This is why Jesus, when dealing with spiritual leaders of his day, acknowledged their charism, but warned his audience not to be like them:

Then said Jesus to the crowds and to his disciples, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat;  so practice and observe whatever they tell you, but not what they do; for they preach, but do not practice. They bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with their finger.  They do all their deeds to be seen by men; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long,  and they love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues,  and salutations in the market places, and being called rabbi by men” (Matt. 22:1-7 RSV).

Jesus, in saying this, has shown us the proper response to Donatism. We do not have to ignore the problems which exist within the institutional church. We can and should recognize that many ecclesiastical authorities are causing trouble for the church itself. However, we should also realize that the grace of God is greater. God is still at work in and through them, offering us the spiritual medicine which we need. God, of course, is not bound by those gifts and the normative ways in which they come, that is, God is not bound by the sacraments. However, we can and should recognize that if we receive them, we will receive grace, despite the character of those who give them to us. We do not have to worry about grace. Those who cause scandal and turn people away because of what they say or do will find that the words Jesus said concerning the spiritual leaders of his day applies to them as well:

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you tithe mint and dill and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith; these you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.  You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel (Matt. 22:23-4 RSV).

Law, justice, mercy and faith should be what is promoted by those who have been given the spiritual charism which places them in positions of authority in the institutional church. The law should be the greater law, the law of love, the law which tells us to love God and to love everything and everyone through our love for God. Justice should promote harmony, a harmony which promotes, as it were, the middle path between extremes; if we truly love God, we would work for such justice, and find ourselves praising God in and through our promotion of justice:

St Dionysios the Areopagite says that God is praised through justice. This is true, for without justice all things are unjust and cannot endure. Justice is sometimes called discrimination: it establishes the just mean in every undertaking, so that there will be no falling short due to over-frugality, or excess on account of greed. For even if over-frugality and greed appear to be opposites, the one below and the other above justice, yet they both push us in some way towards injustice. Whether a line is convex or conclave, it still deviates from what is straight; and to whichever side the balance tilts, that side gets the better of the other side. [1]

Mercy, of course, works with the law of love and justice, making sure that those who want to overcome their sins, overcome their injustice, will have the grace needed to do so. For without such grace, without such mercy, many who would otherwise repent would feel so burdened by their sins that they will be overcome by despair. Then, thinking they can do nothing to fix the problems they have created, they will not try to do so. Mercy, and the forgiveness which comes with it, allows them to see that their efforts can be fruitful, that they can indeed repent and change their ways and work for justice; they will be shown that even if they are not capable of doing it all themselves, they will find that grace will supply what is necessary so that their work for justice, their work for reparation, can lead to their own justification.

When love, mercy, grace, and justice are promoted, people will have a reason for their faith; those priests who follow these principles,  therefore, are among those who help us keep our faith despite whatever sickness is currently infecting the institutional church. This was J.R.R. Tolkien’s understanding; he said that all the experience he had with bad priests was overcome by the charity of one imperfect priest,  Fr. Morgan:

I have met snuffy, stupid, undutiful, conceited, ignorant, hypocritical, lazy, tipsy, hardhearted, cynical, mean, grasping, vulgar, snobbish, and even (at a guess) immoral priests “in the course of my peregrinations’; but for me one Fr. Francis outweighs them all, and he was an upper-class Welsh-Spaniard Tory, and seemed to some just a pottering old snob and gossip. He was – and he was not. I first learned charity and forgiveness from him; and in the light of it pierced even the ‘liberal’ darkness out of which I came, knowing more about ‘Bloody Mary’ than the Mother of Jesus – who was never mentioned except as an object of wicked worship by the Romanists. [2]

Tolkien did not discount all the evils found within the church; he knew and understood how the failures of priests and bishops, and others with spiritual authority, have caused many to lose their faith. He did not disagree with those who were critical of such abuses; he only thought that we must look beyond them and look for those who best represent the faith in action, those who follow justice and mercy, because it is in and through them we see the full reality of Christ’s teachings and what they have to offer if they are properly lived out. Tolkien, in this instance, was in agreement with Dorothy Day:

What I feel about the institutional church for instance. For me it is the place in the slum, in our neighborhood, where it is possible to be alone, to be silent, to wait on the Lord. The sacraments mean much to me. The daily bread we ask for is there. To sit in the presence of the Sun of Justice is healing, though I have to force myself to remain in fatigue and fullness and misery often. But the healing is there too. No matter how corrupt the Church may become, it carries within it the  seeds of its own regeneration. To read the lives of the saints has always helped me. We’ve had corrupt popes and bishops, down through the ages, but a St. Francis, a St. Benedict, a St. Vincent de Paul, a Charles de Foucauld will keep on reminding me of the primary of the spiritual. Peter Maurin used to tell us to study history through the lives of the saints. [3]

The reform of the church is always to be found within the seeds of grace which have been given to, or placed within the church. Those who cooperate with grace will seek to constantly reform themselves and the institutional church. They will become the saints of the present age, the saints needed for the present day. Through them, we will see that the charisms given to the church can be effective, for through them, we see many great sinners become great saints, doing work which transcends our expectations. When we come in contact with such saints, we will see the value of grace, for we see the practical effect of such grace in their lives. That is, when we see their transformation, it will be impossible for us to deny the effectiveness of the spiritual medicine which is offered by the church. We need the spiritual food which it offers. And so, even though many within the institutional church will cause scandal, because what the church offers is grace, and grace is greater, grace will offer us the means to transcend such scandal and work to make sure the church itself is put back on track. We are all called by the grace given to us to do this. We are all called to be saints. We might now be sick, but hopefully, when we come to the field hospital, we will receive the medicine we need so that, with it, we will not only become better, but we will also be able to help others, in and outside of the church, receive the grace which they need for their own spiritual health.

[1] St. Peter of Damaskos, “Twenty Four Discourses” in in The Philokalia: The Complete Text. Volume Three. Trans. G.E.H. Palmer, Philipp Sherrard and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 258-9 [Discourse XX: Justice].

[2] J.R.R. Tolkien, “Letter to Michael  George Tolkien. January 6, 1965” in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981), 354.

[3] Dorothy Day, “Letter to Karl Meyer. August 13, 1981” in All The Way To Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day. Ed. Robert Ellsberg (New York: Image Books, 2010), 491-2.

 

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September 29, 2020

September 29, 2020 By

Gausanchennai Beautiful Peacock Fathers / Wikimedia Commons

St. Basil the Great tells us to glorify God as the “Master Craftsman,” for he created a wonderful, indeed, beautiful, world for us to live in. When we glorify him this way, we can be led from the beauty found in creation to the transcendent glory of God himself:

Let us glorify the Master Craftsman for all that has been done wisely and skillfully; and from the beauty of visible things let us form an idea of Him who is more than beautiful; and from the greatness of these perceptible and circumscribed bodies let us conceive of Him who is infinite and immense and who surpasses all understanding in the plentitude of His power.[1]

Goodness, truth, and beauty are the three great transcendental. All of them have God as their source.  Because God establishes them, through his actions, he can be described by them, so that he can labeled as  the Good, the Truth, and the Beautiful. Thus, as St. Gregory Palamas explains,  even though God’s essence transcends all the categories of human thought rendering it is incomprehensible, we know God through his energies, through his actions, and we can use such actions and what they tell us about God to talk about God.

God’s beauty is made manifest in the beauty of his creation; the beauty we see around us participates in the beauty of God:

From the beauty of the limited creature, God makes known his own beauty that is in no way limited, so that the human being can return to God by these very same vestiges by which he turned away from him, in order that, because he turned himself away from the form of the Creator through love of the beautiful creature, he might return back again through the beauty of the creature to the beauty of the Creator.[2]

Just as limited goods participate in the  Good, so that we should not undermine the Good by preferring lesser goods to it (which evil tempts us to do), so limited beauty participates in Beauty, and we should not undermine Beauty by preferring limited forms of beauty to it. Beauty, by nature, is attractive. Lesser forms of beauty have their attractions, so that someone of lesser character can use such beauty to lead people astray. That is, though beauty is something to be cherished, just like we should cherish whatever good we find, we should cherish it in proper fashion. For just as the good can be subverted as someone becomes inordinately attached to a lesser good, treating it as a greater good than it is, making the actions of those who do so “evil,” so beauty can be subverted as someone inordinately attaches themselves to its lesser form apart from its proper, holistic place in Beauty. This is not to say, when someone does this, the beauty fades away. Just as attachment to a lesser good does not remove that good, so attachment to lesser beauty does not diminish the beauty which is being embraced. But what is not embraced, what is rejected, is where ugliness or evil can be found. Evil is the absence of a good which should be there, so ugliness is the absence of the harmony which should be found in beauty.

While Beauty and the Good can be said to be one, because they are one in God, and so what is beautiful is good, we can attribute our relationship with beauty as being either good or bad based upon what we do with it. Those charmed by some beauty can be led to do all kinds of evil out of hope of taking control and possessing that beauty for themselves, while others, looking into the world, and the harmony presented by beauty, can be inspired to seek after what is good and just and indeed, work for the salvation of the world. Understanding this, S.L. Frank suggested, when considering beauty on its own, we can see it as something “neutral;”  by itself, it will not save the world:

Beauty as such does not save him from the destructive forces of evil or from the tragic nature of human life. Beauty as such is neutral. In a sense it is indifferent to good and evil. Symbolizing some potential harmony of being, it peacefully co-exists with actual disharmony. Furthermore, according to Dostoevsky’s profound insight, beauty combines itself in the “divine” and the “demonic,” for wherever we are seduced by deceitful appearances, there we have dealing with the demonic. This lack of concord between beauty – esthetic harmony – and the genuine reconciling, redeeming essential harmony of being was manifested concretely with astonishing persuasive force in the tragic life-experiences of such artists as Botticelli, Gogol, and Tolstoy. We can say that beauty is a sign of the potential harmony of being, of the possibility of actual, fully realized harmony. And if the world were perfectly beautiful, it would be perfectly harmonious, in inner accord, free of tragic duality. Therefore the dream of the ultimate transfiguration of the world is a dream of the complete triumph of beauty in the world. But it is precisely only a dream, which is opposed by the bitter reality of the inner discord and duality of being. Beauty is only a reflection of “paradise,” of the ontological rootedness of all reality in divine total unity.[3]

Thus, there is the potential for demonic beauty, even as there is potential for angelic beauty. We can make a beauty which will impose fear and dread upon others as they look into it, using it to manipulate and control them. Tolkien, in the Lord of the Rings, represented this potential in the way Galadriel was tempted by the Ring – if she took its power, she would use it to lead the world with her beauty, but the world would be enslaved by it, enslaved by her and her charm:

And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair.[4]

Galadriel understood the goodness of beauty, but also the dangers contained within it. We seek after paradise, but we can easily become subverted by a pale imitation of it. If we try to establish and hold onto such an illusory form of beauty, we will find ourselves lacking much of what is found in paradise, and in that lack, we will find evil. Those desperate to hold onto a form of beauty instead of to be penetrated and participate in the fullness of beauty will create a shallow illusion, one which is charming and yet without hope, without the joy which we expect from beauty itself.

This danger with beauty, however, applies only insofar as our attachment remains with a lesser beauty, whether it is some external lesser beauty, or our own internal beauty, which we enjoy because of the glory we think we already possess. The beauty that is there, insofar as it is there, is good, but it should remind us of the source and foundation of all beauty. We must not confine ourselves to that lesser beauty but seek after the source of beauty. When we do so, we will find that the beauty we had, the beauty we liked, was itself a part of the presence of that greater beauty, so that like Augustine we can end up saying:

Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty so action and so new, late have I loved Thee! And behold, Thou wert within and I was without. I was looking for Thee out there, and I threw myself, deformed as I was, upon the well-formed things which Thou hast made. Thou wert with me, yet I was not with Thee. These things held me far from Thee, things which would not have existed had they not been in Thee. Thou didst call and cry out and burst in upon my deafness; Thou didst shine forth and glow and drive away my blindness; Thou didst send forth Thy fragrance, and I drew in my breath, and now I pant for Thee; I have tasted and now I hunger and thirst; Thou didst touch me, and I was inflamed with desire for Thy peace.[5]

Beauty is good and glorious, but our use of it is not always such. We should find the goodness in beauty. We should find out how it points to the source and foundation of all beauty, God and use it to direct us to God to find and attain that beauty which we love and desire, not just in its lesser forms,  but in its greatest form, one which is with God and so eternal. Therefore, let us glorify God, taking the beauty we find and use it to lift us up to the infinite  beauty and goodness found with God, a beauty so sublime, so great, we will never attain its limits and so it will always give us the hope and joy which we need to truly thrive.

[1] St. Basil the Great,  “Hexaemeron” in Saint Basil: Exegetic Homilies. Trans. Agnes Clare Way, CDP (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 1963), 19.

[2] St. Isidore of Seville, Sententiae. Trans. Thomas L. Knoebel (New York: Newman Press, 2018),40.

[3] S. L. Frank, The Unknowable: An Ontological Introduction To The Philosophy of Religion. Trans. Boris Jakim (Brooklyn, NY: Angelico Press, 2020), 196.

[4] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1966), 381.

[5] St. Augustine, Confessions. Trans. Vernon J. Bourke (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 1953; repr. 1966), 297.

 

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February 21, 2020

February 21, 2020 By

Anonymous: Reading Outside/ Pixnio

We all need to take care of ourselves. Leisure and rest are necessary parts of our life. We must not overburden ourselves with work, for that will only lead us to suffering a break down. Spiritual masters from Siddhartha the Buddha to St. Anthony the Great have not only come to this conclusion, they taught it to their disciples. [1] Thus, in Ecclesiastes, we are told there is a time and place for everything, including rest:

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;  a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace (Eccl.. 3:1-8 RSV).

This is also true in regards to our reading habits. While it is important for us to keep abreast with the news of the day so that we do not ignore the injustices which lie before us, we must understand there is also a time to put it all aside. Sometimes, we need a break from such serious reading, lest it overcomes us with despair. We need to be nurtured even as we need to nurture others. We need rest to make sure we have the strength needed in order to confront injustices such injustices. If we don’t know when to rest, we will find out that eventually, we will be so overwhelmed we won’t know what to do with ourselves.

If we only focus on what is wrong with the world, looking for something new to confront on a daily basis, we will end up feeling bogged down and useless. We need rest. We need time for ourselves, time to reflect upon the good things in life, to laugh, to enjoy what we have, indeed, to find joy in our lives. We need, therefore, not follow the news, we need to engage whatever books, movies, music which will lift us up in our spirit, transposing us beyond the tragedies of life.   We need to be reminded that life is more than a series of tragedies which we overcome. We need, as J.R.R. Tolkien understood, a way to escape it all and feel the jubilation which life can bring. The arts can bring this to us.

How much focus on the news, especially bad news, is too much? It depends upon us and our particular needs. Some, like C.S. Lewis, probably should avoid the news altogether. Others, like Dorothy Day, should moderate their intake of the news, balancing it out with something positive to help give us hope. Thus, during a time of war  Dorothy Day suggested that we put away the daily paper and read and study what is going on once a week while taking the time to explore a diverse amount of reading material in order to make sure we do not get caught up in the present without being nourished by the wisdom and joys of the past:

BOOKS [TO READ] IN WARTIME: Labyrinthine Ways. To The End of the World. Kristin Lavransdatter. Master of Hestviken. Jeremiah. 1 Kings.

People live, eat, sleep, love, worship, marry, have children, and somehow live in the midst of war, in the midst of anguish. The sun continues to shine, the leaves flaunt their vivid color, there is a serene warmth in the day and an invigorating cold at night.

Turn off your radio. Put away your daily paper.

Read one review of events a week and spend some time reading such books as the above. They tell too of days of striving and of strife. They are of other centuries and also our own. They make us realize that all times are perilous, that men live in a dangerous world. In peril constantly losing or maiming soul and body.[2]

We need to have a greater perspective than what can be found in the daily news.  Without such a broad perspective, it is easy to get entangled by the rapid changes happening around us. We would have no basis by which to judge those changes, making it that much harder to know what to do. It would indeed be easy to hear what is being said by those in authority without questioning what they tell us. We need to realize that there will be no golden age, that all times are perilous, but we also need to realize that many of the difficulties which lie before us today are difficulties which others faced and they can provide us with wisdom and advice concerning how to deal with it. Being stuck with the daily news, no matter the source (paper, internet, radio, or television) without a greater context only makes sure we are easy targets for propaganda, either by those who try to invoke a golden past which they want us to restore (even though it never existed and can never exist), or by those trying to invoke a golden future, a utopia, which no one has been able to produce (and would likewise result in many tragedies in the attempt to make such a utopia).

But we need to do more than that. We need to find hope in the present moment, even when there is so much wrong going on around us. We cannot neglect the needs of others, selfishly looking only for ourselves, but on the other hand, we need comfort and rest. We need to enjoy life. In the midst of so much evil like war, life goes on, and with it, the joys of life go on. We should not be ashamed if we rest and find things which we enjoy and use to lift up our spirits. The world is good. Life is good. We don’t need to read only serious works of history, philosophy, or literature; we can and should also take and read other things, from comic strips which make us laugh, to flights of fantasy which help us, even for a moment, make us feel free from the problems of life.  We are meant to enjoy life; it is a gift given to us by God and if we neglect that gift, if we ignore the good which is before us, we will fail to understand what it is we are fighting for when we fight against injustice.

As we fight for others, we must not neglect our own needs. We must balance them out. We must make the most of our time, as Paul said: “Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise men but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil” (Eph. 3:15-16 RSV).  The world is filled with wonderful gifts from God for us to enjoy; the world is also filled with all kinds of great treasures, great works of art but also not-so great works of art, all kinds of leisurely games and novelties made by others which we should also enjoy.

We must make time for ourselves, for it is only then we can truly be who we are meant to be, capable of moving on and doing the work which only we can do to help make the world a better place.

 

[1] See The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. trans. Benedicta Ward (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1984), 3-4 and my reflection on that saying in A Time To Rest.

[2] Dorothy Day, The Reckless Way of Love. Notes on Following Jesus. Ed.  Carolyn Kurtz (Walden, NY: Plough Publishing House, 2017), 93.

 

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October 25, 2019

October 25, 2019 By

In art, either as creators or participants, we are helped to remember some of the glorious things we have forgotten, and some of the terrible things we are asked to endure, we who are children of God by adoption and grace. — Madeleine L’Engle [1]

The proper story of man is everything. The proper study of man as artist is everything which gives a foothold to the imagination and the passions. —C.S. Lewis[2]

No author listed: Fear Halloween Ghostly Horror Scary/ MaxPixel

The Gospel is the story of the Logos, the Word made flesh. As the Word is the Word from which all other words flow, so the Story is the story from which all other stories flow. In it and through it are many side-stories which can be told, stories which connect to the one universal Story which have their own particular sub-meaning and content. These secondary stories are worthy of our own consideration because they are infused with and come from the Story; they present in various forms aspects of that Story which are needed at particular times and places. The Story reveals itself in these sub-stories, reaching down and meeting people in the complete variety of human activity and experience.

Some of these stories are comedies. Jesus himself, in his parables, demonstrates a sense of humor. Nothing defiles us than what comes out of us, indeed! The double-meaning is there, for those who have an ear and are willing to listen to it can laugh. Through such laughter much of the horror of rigorism is exposed and overcome.

Some of these stories are tragedies. In the New Testament, we can read of the mass slaughter of children. We can encounter stories of poor men and women suffering through their lives, dying without anyone showing them human love and compassion.

Some of the stories can be classified as horror, such as the stories of possession found throughout the Gospels. We need to be presented with the horror because it exists in the world. We need to realize that horror is often tragic, but even if it is not, it is difficult to overcome. There is no greater horror story than the death of Jesus and his descent into hell; there is no greater representation of the victory possible over such horror than Jesus’ resurrection. Horror is a part of the Gospel. Dark forces have their voice, even if they don’t have the last say. It is, after all, a necessary part of the story, because of sin and what sin has done to the world. We suffer from the effects of evil actions; we have to be shown what they can do but also that we can endure them and even overcome.

Dorothy Sayers, talking about artists of all kinds (including literary ones), pointed out that we need to recognize evil and have it within our stories if we want to be authentic to life: “The human maker, living and walking within a universe where Evil (whatever it is) is a part of the nature of things, is obliged to take both Good and Evil as part of his Idea. They are the medium with which he works.” [3] Horror grasps after that evil and seeks to present it. It shows us it is real, that it is powerful, and yet, that it is not omnipotent. It is in this light that horror is a legitimate genre for storytelling; it comes from and takes a part of the grand Story. As the Gospel story about the pigs which ran to their death show, not all horror stories have a positive ending. Not everyone will get out alive or unharmed. But, for the most part, the horror genre recognizes there is a limit to the horror, to the evil itself.  Most horror stories have some sort of victory against the monsters presented within them. Some get out alive. Some overcome and entirely put an end to the monster. The horror, the monster, however powerful it is, is shown to be not all-powerful; it has its limit. This is something which we all need to hear and understand, and in this way, though the way to get there is dark, horror stories often generate hope, more than many other sub-stories coming from the Story.

Even if they do not suit the tastes of everyone, we should recognize that horror stories are an invaluable representation of the great Story because they incorporate the Story into themselves. The better the horror, the better the tale, the more they are capable of bringing us into the Story, enrapturing and transporting us with grace. The monster might be something seemingly mundane, such as a serial killer, or it might be something fantastic, but because the Story itself is fantastic, transcending what the human imagination could produce on its own, it can be said the more fantastic the horror, the greater the story is in achieving its purpose and end. It is, indeed, important for stories to engage the fantastic dimensions of the Story, because in doing so, as C.S. Lewis understood, we are able to have our own lives improved by them:

The Fantastic or Mythical is a Mode available at all ages for some readers; for others, at none. At all ages, if it is well used by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power to generalise while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. But at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of ‘commenting on life’, can add to it. [4]

There is, therefore, something valid with the relationship between the secular celebration of Halloween, taking with it many horrifying pre-Christian images and ideas and cultural norms, putting them together with the Western Christian celebration of All Saints. The two go together. It is another way of presenting the Story in a form of the various sub-stories of history. The darkness is revealed in the light; the darkness assaults the light, it can cause great damage and harm, just as the saints themselves often died at the hands of cruel oppressors, but in the end, the power of the darkness comes to an end and the light wins. Those who suffered at the hands of the darkness find themselves glorified in Christ. The horror which happens before the glorification of the saints is important to remember and represent; without it, the greatness of the saints will not be properly understood. Christ is victorious over hell, but if hell is not horrifying, the victory is pyrrhic. Gene Wolfe understood this: horror, he said, is Christian:

Here’s what Tom ‘ Tor  — Tom Broken Collar – told me: Fantasy is a pagan empire; Horror’s a Christian kingdom, embracing Hell. There’s wisdom in that, but exceptions by the score. What of the host bearing the banner of Narnia, I ask you? Christian to the core, with the lion-likeness of Aslan nailed to the cross. What of Tolkien-Lifegiver? Fantasy languished till he brought The Hobbit, dwarves and elves, all three Speaking Peoples linked with humans in The Fellowship of the Ring. [5]

Horror is revealed in the descent of Christ into hell; yes, even before Christ, humanity knew horror, and there were plenty of ghosts and monsters believed to exist around the world, but in Christ, the horror is intensified and shown to relate elements of the truth to us. Horror stories, especially the most fantastic seeming horror stories, have been rendered real through Christ and his descent and conquest of hell; now it is a Christian kingdom, a Christian story taken in by Christ himself. Fear not what can destroy your body: such horrors are all over the world and come in many forms; rather, know the horror has an end, and you can survive and thrive and transcend it all. The serial killer can be captured.  Ghosts and goblins can be tricked by the great trickery, receiving their treats only to find their power over humanity is overcome by their apparent victory. The dead can rise again, but then they can be given back their souls, their humanity. The great desire to escape from the clutches of death (as Tolkien put it)[6] is demonstrated through the hallowing of hell.  But in the ascent from hell, we have to remember, the many layers of evil, the many possibilities of horror are also revealed and overcome by Christ.  And so, each layer, each aspect of hell, each demonic reality and possibility, presents to us another possibility, another sub-story for us to tell. Christ has overcome it all, yes, but if we want to truly appreciate that, then we will appreciate horror which he went through and accept it as an important mode for storytelling. We do not have to fear it, rather, we can embrace it as a way to participate in and imitate Christ himself.

[1] Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (New York: North Point Press, 1995), 19.

[2] C.S. Lewis, “On Science Fiction” on On Stories and Other Essays on Literature. Ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1982), 61.

[3] Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco,1987), 97.

[4] C.S. Lewis, “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s To Be Said” on On Stories and Other Essays on Literature. Ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1982), 48.

[5] Gene Wolfe, “The Ethos of Elfland” in Castle of Days (New York: Tom Doherty Associations, Inc. 1992), 396.

[6] And lastly there is the oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape: the Escape from Death. Fairy-stories provide many examples and modes of this—which might be called the genuine escapist, or (I would say) fugitive spirit. But so do other stories (notably those of scientific inspiration), and so do other studies. Fairy-stories are made by men not by fairies. The Human-stories of the elves are doubtless full of the Escape from Deathlessness. But our stories cannot be expected always to rise above our common level. They often do. Few lessons are taught more clearly in them than the burden of that kind of immortality, or rather endless serial living, to which the “fugitive” would fly. For the fairy-story is specially apt to teach such things, of old and still today. —  J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories” in The Monster & The Critics and Other Essays. Ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: HarperCollins, 1997),  153.

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May 28, 2019

May 28, 2019 By

Christoph Wagener: Pope Francis, Private audience of Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice CAPP / WikimediaCommons

As the results of various elections indicate, right-wing nationalists are slowly rising in power in Europe. In the United Kingdom’s European elections, the Brexit Party, led by hard-liner Nigel Farage, garnished the most votes of a single party, while in Italy, Lega Nord, the far-right “league” party headed by Matteo Salvini came out on top.  These nationalists often give rise to dangerous rhetoric against outsiders, with Muslims often on the receiving end of unjust bigotry. The rise of far-right nationalism in Europe should trouble everyone. Why are people attracted to it? There are many reasons; nonetheless, it should not be surprising that a part of it is the combination of a romanticism of the past combined with fears that outsiders are causing harm to society at large: outsiders are used as scapegoats by those who seek power and control.  It should be noted, however, that such nationalism, far from promoting Europe and its traditions, rather undermines the heritage and legacy of Europe and the lessons Europe learned in the past century. It can be said that an evil spirit, once thought exorcised from Europe, has returned with a vengeance.

It is in the midst of this crisis that Pope Francis issued important words for the world for his Message for the 2019 World Day of Migrants and Refugees. Hatred, fear, individualism, lack of compassion and solidarity with others, indeed, a blatant disregard for the plight of the needy, are at the core of a dangerous so-called populist movement. Pope Francis made his statements in part, to address these problems, speaking like a prophet against an ideology which threatens the world.

As Pope Francis spoke as a Christian, indeed, as the head of the Catholic communion of churches, it should not be surprising that what lies behind his message are the words and deeds of Jesus Christ. Hopefully, despite coming from a different religious tradition, non-Christians will find much value to his words and work with Christians to combat an insidious inhumane ideology that will lead to hell on earth if its goals were attained.

Thus, Pope Francis said that when we see migrants and refugees around us, we must not be afraid. We must see it as an opportunity to truly become the best of what we could be instead of following our worst inclinations:

“Take courage, it is I, do not be afraid!” (Mt 14:27). It is not just about migrants: it is also about our fears. The signs of meanness we see around us heighten “our fear of ‘the other’, the unknown, the marginalized, the foreigner… We see this today in particular, faced with the arrival of migrants and refugees knocking on our door in search of protection, security and a better future.[1]

Those who already have wealth and resources often are led to fear those who do not possess them. They fear that not only will society take from them, but society will take all that they have, so that those who have and those who have not will be switched around. Those in need are seen as an existential threat.  As a result, many respond to those in need with extreme cruelty:

“See that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I say to you that their angels in heaven always look upon the face of my heavenly Father” (Mt 18:10). It is not just about migrants: it is a question of seeing that no one is excluded. Today’s world is increasingly becoming more elitist and cruel towards the excluded.[2]

This, in some ways, is “the logic of the world.”  Many follow some form of Social Darwinism, saying it is a dog-eat-dog world, and one either stays on top by pushing everyone else away, doing whatever it takes to stay on top, or one finds themselves becoming dispossessed of all things and trampled upon by those in need. This logic, of course, is fundamentally flawed, because it leads to the destruction of all things: only by working together and trying to preserve the good together can we all find that peace and safety, that contentment, which we seek.  Pope Francis, therefore, explained that Christ came to overcome this mentality, to show us the better way:

Jesus Christ asks us not to yield to the logic of the world, which justifies injustice to others for my own gain or that of my group. “Me first, and then the others!” Instead, the true motto of the Christian is, “The last shall be first!” “An individualistic spirit is fertile soil for the growth of that kind of indifference towards our neighbours which leads to viewing them in purely economic terms, to a lack of concern for their humanity, and ultimately to feelings of fear and cynicism. Are these not the attitudes we often adopt towards the poor, the marginalized and the ‘least’ of society?[3]

Christians are called out of their individualism by being told to love their neighbor, to do good for the sake of all: that is, to embrace the common good. When someone is needy, we have to make sure those needs are properly and justly treated. If someone is wounded, we must help them be healed.  “As Jesus himself teaches us (cf. Mt9:35-36; 14:13-14; 15:32-37), being compassionate means recognizing the suffering of the other and taking immediate action to soothe, heal and save.”[4] This is true for all, not just the migrants. This is why Pope Francis constantly said in his message that what he was speaking about was not just about migrants. It is about us. It is about how we treat those in need, how we look upon them. Do we project our demons upon others, thereby showing the world how monstrous we are?

Likewise, the concern is not just about migrants, but about all those in need, how we should treat anyone who is in need. When we justify abuses against one marginalized group, we begin the process of dehumanization which allows us to mistreat others, until all but the elite are maligned, with the degradation and abuse of all people in need, wherever they are, being the final result. Pope Francis, therefore, offered four verbs which he said should be the foundation by which we treat not only migrants but all those maligned and abused by being in the peripheries of society:

Dear brothers and sisters, our response to the challenges posed by contemporary migration can be summed up in four verbs: welcome, protect, promote and integrate. Yet these verbs do not apply only to migrants and refugees. They describe the Church’s mission to all those living in the existential peripheries, who need to be welcomed, protected, promoted and integrated.[5]

It has always been understood that the Christian faith looks to the lowest among us and promotes them; there really is a preferential option for the poor (and vulnerable) within Scripture.  Expressing this point, St. Cyril of Alexandra said: “And Christ receives from the world, not by any means those who are honored by it or valued among men, bur rather he receives as many that are considered of low estate among them and those of less repute.”[6] Those who look to preserve what they have at the expense of others will find they will lose everything. We are called to work together with our neighbor, seeing that we are in this together, and this is the way we find ourselves moving heavenward, as St. Basil the Great stated:  “He wishes us to cling to our neighbors with embraces of charity like tendrils of a vine, and to rest upon them, so that keeping our desires always heavenward, we may, like certain climbing vines, reach the upmost heights of the loftiest teachings.”[7]

The message of Pope Francis is the message of the church since its foundation. Social justice has always been a part of the Gospel proclamation.  It is, to be sure, inherent within many other religious traditions, and in many secular traditions as well, which is how and why the words of Pope Francis should be heeded not just by Christians, but by all those of good will, looking for and hoping for a better future. The lessons of the past century should tell us the terrible road which is before us if the world continues to embrace the siren call of nationalism. Sadly, even those who fought against it in the past did not often do so with the best intentions and so, it was foreseeable that the fires of nationalism could rise again if they were not properly put out. If we do not stop the hate now, it is frightening to consider what the world will look like in a few years.

[1] Pope Francis, “Pope’s Message for 2019 World Day of Migrants and Refugees” (https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2019-05/pope-francis-message-world-day-migrants-refugees-full-text.html).

[2]Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid

[5] Ibid.

[6] St. Cyril of Alexandria, Glaphyra on the Pentateuch. Volume I: Genesis. Trans. Nicholas P. Lunn (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2018), 232.

[7]  St. Basil the Great, “Hexaemeron” in Saint Basil: Exegetic Homilies. Trans. Agnes Clare Way, CDP (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 1963), 76.

 

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