At the Oracle at Delphi, pilgrims were told to “know thyself.” Saint Antony of Egypt, the founder of Christian monasticism, embraced this command and reiterated it. “For he who knows himself knows God: and he who knows God is worthy to worship Him as is right. My beloved in the Lord, know yourselves. For they who know themselves, know their time: and they who know their time, are able to stay firm, and not be moved about by divers tongues” St Antony of Egypt, Letter IV, in The Letters of Saint Antony the Great. trans. Derwas J. Chitty (Oxford: SLG Press, 1991). As Christians, we are called to understand who we are, to know that we are made according to the image and likeness of love, that is, according to the image and likeness of the Holy Trinity. To know oneself is to know love, to act in love, to be love. We are made to share in the divine life, to experience the fullness of the revelation of love that unites the persons of the Holy Trinity. We are called to share in that love. Like the example of the persons of the Holy Trinity, who give of themselves completely to each other, we are give our complete being to others, to love even as we are loved, to reveal who we are just as the Holy Trinity reveals themselves to us. The more love we have experienced, the deeper the depths of the Holy Trinity we have discovered, the more we realize what a bounty there is left for us to know, because we realize even more of the depths of God we have not yet experienced. To experience God’s glory, we must cleanse ourselves of our own self-possessing tendencies which block that glory, to give ourselves and all we have back to God. Then we will be open and free to experience the glory of God anew. “To love the invisible God is to open passively one’s heart to Him and to await His active revelation in such a way that the energy of Divine love descends into the heart” Pavel Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth. trans. Boris Jakim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 62. A closed heart is one which is afraid; it fears that the little share of joy they have experienced will be lost if they let go of it. Such a heart does not know how to love. What little such a person has, while good, is not the final good; it is only a limited good, and not what God desires for ourselves. This good becomes cut off from its source, because it is not free to return to it, and so in turn slowly but surely becomes, as it were, spiritual rot which slowly destroys the individual who does not let it go free. To be pure at heart is to be an open lover, receiving the joy of love, but also giving all of oneself in return; it is the only way. For it is only in this purity that we truly are open to receive and learn from God, and it is only through giving the very fiber of our being to others, that we keep our heart pure.
From all that has been said, we can begin to understand why inter-religious dialogue and religious liberty are both mandated by the Catholic faith. Both are necessary for the free development of the human person, a good which the Catholic faith nourishes. Indeed, through the sacraments, the Catholic Church provides the means by which this development can reach its proper end in God. Catholics believe, as we will explore later, that God has been at work throughout the world, and people have encountered God in a diverse number of ways. But this encounter, full of truth and riches which the Church respects, finds its proper end in God, when a person is united with God in the Spirit through Christ (and become the Body of Christ, the Bride of the Lamb). Not only will they find the truths they have been given fulfilled in their eschatological union with the rest of the People of God, but they will find their own experiences of God have a place with the People of God. The human person exists as a relational entity; there are many ways this relational character can be described, but fundamentally, it is nature is rooted in love. We find ourselves relating to God by being called to share in the love of the Trinity. We reach out to others with the love God has shown us, desiring not only for others to experience the interior life of the Trinity with us, but for them to describe to us their experiences, to see the glory of God from the vision of another. Just as in the Trinity the “I” and “Thou” needed to become a “we” to experience another “thou” and share in that love of that second “thou” in common, so we need to experience the love of God not just as individual egos, but as the communal we.
Despite claims to the contrary, God has engaged all peoples, all cultures, all civilizations, from the beginning of time to the present. Clearly not all engagement is of the same kind and of the same quality; God meets us where we are at, constantly calling us to an ever greater experience of Himself. Salvation history as recorded in Holy Scripture presents to us the central point of this dialogue as it finds itself in the encounter of God with Abraham and his descendants, leading to the final, eschatological revelation of God in Jesus Christ. But other peoples have also had experiences of God and so have something to contribute as a result of that experience.
Indeed, it can be said that God the Father throughout all history engages humanity through both Word and Spirit, that is, through the Logos and The Holy Spirit.The two are complementary in their action; the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ, preparing the way of the nations for Christ and sanctifying those who are incorporated in Christ. Yet, in their personal, complementary acts of revelation, the experience humanity has had of them differs according to their personal missions.
Through the Logos the Word of God, all things were made. As the Logos He is the Form of Forms. He is the principle (logos) in which all things are made. All the forms of existence (logoi) are united in the Logos because the Logos is the foundation of their existence. “If by reason and wisdom a person has come to understand that which exists was brought out of non-being into being by God, if he intelligently directs the soul’s imagination to the infinite differences and variety of things as they exist by nature and turns his question eye with understanding toward the intelligible model (λογος) according to which many things have been made, would he not know the one Logos is many logoi? […] He will also know that the many logoi are the one Logos to whom all things are related and who exist in himself without confusion, the essential and individually distinctive God, the Logos of God the Father” St Maximus the Confessor, “Ambiguum 7”, pgs 45 – 74 in On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ. trans. Paul Blowers and Robert Louis Wilken (Crestwood, New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 54 [1077C].
Because the Logos is the ground of all types of existence, in and through all things we can have an encounter with the Logos. If we are receptive to God, we can experience Him through creation. While human reason is limited and incapable of transcending itself, it still can be used to encounter the Logos, the Son of God, because human reason is itself in the image of the Logos. Certainly not all encounters with Christ based upon human reasoning will be the same, yet even the simplest encounter, one which provides very little revelation, is an encounter with Christ. Those who have embraced what they learned from this encounter and use it to develop a closer, better relationship with God, are indeed followers of Christ, even if they do not recognize the fact that it is Christ whom they have encountered. St Justin Martyr beautifully portrayed this fact in his First Apology (in chapter XLVI). All people throughout the world, from the beginning of time, have been capable of encountering Christ as the person of the Logos. The Logos has always been there, dwelling amidst creation. He has always been showing us His love and waiting for our response.
Because Christ is the underlying principle of all things, Christ is everywhere present; there is no place we can be without the presence of Christ. Likewise, we find that the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, the Spirit of Christ, is always with Christ. The Spirit is everywhere present acting as the giver of life. All are called to experience the Spirit, because all are given life by the Spirit. All are called holy by integrating the Spirit into their life; the more we embrace the Spirit, the holier we become. Even in pre-Christian times, we find the work of the Spirit present among the nations. Scripture indicates the fact that not only with the Jews, but also with the pagans, there were remarkable individuals who embraced the Spirit enough to be considered holy. Cardinal Jean Daniélou, in his work, Holy Pagans of the Old Testament, provides us, as it were, a bountiful representation of these pre-Christian saints: “Abel, who is commemorated in the Canon of the Mass, was of course anterior to Abraham; and so were Henoch and Noe. Lot, whose fult is mentioned by the pilgrim Etheria in the 4th century, was a relative of Abrahams, but he was not a party to the covenant made by the latter. Danel and Job, mentioned by the prophet Ezekiel side by side with Noe, were the one a Phoenician and the other an Idumean. And the Queen of Saba, who Christ declared would judge the Jews at the Last Judgment, was a princes of Arabia” Jean Daniélou, Holy Pagans of the Old Testament. trans. Felix Faber (Baltimore, Maryland: Helicon Press, 1957), 1-2. The Spirit does not only make us holy, but guides us, and the more we open ourselves to holiness, the more we open ourselves to the guidance of the Spirit. “The full receptivity for the Spirit is always full readiness to receive him and make a home for him – an a priori availability for everything the Spirit will send and dispose” Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Discernment of Spirits,” pgs 337 -51 in Explorations in Theology IV: Spirit and Institution. trans. Edward T. Oakes (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 342. The Spirit wishes to reveal, to enlighten as the Spirit of Prophecy: the Holy Spirit speaks to the person open to the Its promptings, and reveals to that person what It wills. Indeed, the Spirit spoke through the prophets, a list of which must include Balaam (Numbers 22 -31) and the Sibyl (as sung in the Dies Irae). As the Spirit of Love, the Holy Spirit unites us with Christ and with each other, working with Christ to reveal to us the interior life of the Trinity, the life of Love. “So the love which is from God and is God is distinctively the Holy Spirit; through him the charity of God is poured out in our hearts, and through it the whole triad dwells in us” St Augustine, The Trinity. trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, New York: New City Press, 2002), XV.32.
The encounters people have had with the Logos and the Spirit have been the inspiration for the truths which lay behind religious texts and practices of the people all around the world. “The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men” Nostra Aetate (Vatican: 8-28-1965), par 2. Recognizing that the Word has been abroad, and that the Spirit moves throughout the whole of the earth, does not indicate any religious relativism; instead, it is a rejection of a dualistic worldview which denies divine omnipresence. What is good and true in these religious traditions, what has helped establish good conduct and a faith in God, demonstrates the work of God and should be honored and respected. “It is necessary to recognize and appreciate the full value of pagan piety, expressed in the search for God, in prayer, sacrifice, and good works, for ‘God is no respecter of persons, but in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him’ (Acts 10:34-35)” Sergius Bulgakov, The Comforter. trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdman’s, 2004), 236. Some people might suggest that pagan piety cannot be accepted because it would be aimed towards demons and the demonic. Yet, as Sergius Bulgakov points out, Scripture in its presentation of St Cornelius comes to deny this absolutist claim: “because of his prayers, he was deemed worthy of seeing the angel of God. And what is said about Cornelius applies to all of pagan piety, which despite its inevitable and fatal opacity, bears God’s blessing, expressed in the fact that the barren pagan church was called to Christ in the commandment ‘teach all nations’ (Matt. 28:18), in the fact that the apostle Peter’s first Christian sermon resounded in all languages” (ibid., 237).
We must not think that this means that in all religious traditions the fullness of revelation has been received. Nor must we believe that the revelations given to the peoples of the world have been preserved in their pristine purity: throughout history, human responses to the Logos and Spirit have been mixed; even within the Catholic faith, which follows the full, final general revelation given to humanity through the person of Jesus Christ, human sin works to create confusion and division. All religious traditions demonstrate the frailty of humanity. Even the Catholic Church needs to be in constant diligence to overcome the ramifications of human sin. “Christ summons the Church to continual reformation as she sojourns here on earth. The Church is always in need of this, in so far as she is an institution of men here on earth. Thus if, in various times and circumstances, there have been deficiencies in moral conduct or in church discipline, or even in the way that church teaching has been formulated-to be carefully distinguished from the deposit of faith itself-these can and should be set right at the opportune moment” Unitatis Redintegratio(UR) (Vatican: 11-21-1964), par 6. Our sin, as UR points out, causes confusion, and indeed, is used by our separated brethren to justify schism. Since our sin has caused it that “the radiance of the Church’s image is less clear in the eyes of our separated brethren and of the world at large, and the growth of God’s kingdom is delayed” (Ibid., par. 4), we should not be surprised when we find confusion, misunderstanding, and error among the non-Christians, because we have it among ourselves.
On the other hand, as is clear from what has been said, we should not be surprised when we find truth amongst non-Christians, and not just any truth, but life-shaking, soul-searching truth which calls out to God and finds God answering to them. The loving response of God in the life-enriching work of the Holy Spirit motivates the nations of the world, providing for the spiritual foundation for the diversity of cultural experiences and traditions of humanity. When Christ is joined with the cultures of the world, something great and new happens. Because they are already grounded in the Spirit, they are capable of being purified and transfigured, but they also have something to offer the Church in return: the bounty of their heritage, once it has been purified, enriches the Christian encounter with Christ even as it is enriched by Christ. We learn through them new ways to see, experience, understand and celebrate the truth. Time and again Christians have gained in their encounter with other nations, from the Greeks, Romans, Germans, and Celts, to the Chinese, Japanese, and Native Americans. Thus, even as cultures “are prompted to open themselves to the newness of the Gospel’s truth and to be stirred by this truth to develop in new ways,” John Paul II, Fides et Ratio (Vatican: 9-14-1998), par. 71, so too we, as Christians, are prompted in return to open themselves to the positive values of others, and indeed, apply them in our religious life. While it is true that the fullness of truth is possessed by the Church by her relationship with Christ, this does not mean our own understanding and appreciation of it is full, and it will not be full until the eschaton, when humanity has fully been made one in Christ.
Inter-religious dialogue, therefore, frees us to learn and be enriched by others, not as a denigration of our faith, but as a full embrace of it, where we show our love for others, our desire to understand them, our desire to learn from them, and our desire to be one with them. We do not denigrate their faith, but look to understand it, to see what is good and true within it, and to embrace with them, in whatever way is possible, the God of all. In return, just as they share with us what they know and understand, we share with them the truth we have in and through our own encounter with God. We do not go in boldly demanding conversion; instead we seek mutual understanding. Certainly, if someone in such an encounter embraces the fullness of our faith with us, we will rejoice, but again, that is not the point. Because we are made in the loving, dialogical character of God, who reaches out to humanity to encounter us in dialogue, so we too, made according to the image of God, must reach out to the rest of humanity, and engage in loving dialogue with them about what is most important to us. Just as God listens to us, so we must likewise listen to them.
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