Time out for a couple of reflections that have nothing directly to do with the Conclave...
Man's greatness and glory
by Father James V. Schall, S.J.
March 12, 2013
He (the Father) rescued us from the power of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of his beloved Son. Through him we have redemption, the forgiveness of our sins. (Col 1:13-14)
Here is man’s greatness, here is man’s glory and majesty: to know in truth what is great, to hold fast in it, and to seek glory from the Lord of glory.
— Basil the Great (d. 379 A.D.), Homily 20.[1]
The proper understanding of man’s “greatness” stands at the heart of the modern age and its image of itself. With the arrival of what we now call modern science, it was hoped that we could find the causes of recurrent human disorders as we find the causes of human diseases.
Once we find such causes through systematic investigation, we can set about remedying what is aberrant. We can, with a hint of Platonism, “reorder” or “reconstruct” our family, our economy, and our polity in such a way that will eliminate all human disorder. The cause of disorder was external to us, not within us. It was generally held that Christianity with its talk of sin, free will, suffering, and disorder of soul was an impediment to this project.
Prayers and fasting would not cure us. We needed to find a solution that was in man’s hands alone. He could not be alien to himself. His being could not depend on any god. He must be free to make himself into what it is to be “human,” to what he wants to be.
A branch of “humanism” arose that fancied itself to be an “atheist humanism.” Thus, man had to be autonomous. He gave himself his own nature and his own laws. His greatness was Promethean. He not only stole the fire from the gods, but he captured fire for his own glory.
The theme of man’s “greatness” is an ancient one. Basil the Great’s formulation begins within the Greek philosophical tradition. Man’s glory is simply “to know the truth.” This is the transcendent purpose of mind that we find in Plato and Aristotle. Once we know truth, we are to “hold fast to it.”
But this glory is not something that we erect by ourselves. We are great because of something else. We are great because we recognize that the origin of truth is not in ourselves. We discover it. We do not make it. If we seek “glory,” we understand that it comes to us because it is already there. We reflect it; we do not make it. We seek it as being, as what is. And this is the deep joy of our being, that the greatest thing that we encounter in reality is not ourselves.
If we are honest with ourselves, we know of our own finiteness. We do not cause ourselves to be or to be what we are. We know that an understanding of our being as autonomous is a death-wish, a limitation of ourselves to ourselves, a refusal to wonder about the real source of our greatness.
In recent years, it has been my wont to go over and over again in my mind the classic question: “What is it all about?” Implicit in this question is the further question: “What is it all about for me?” “Am I merely a stepping stone to someone else’s happiness down the ages? Or is there something transcendent in every human life, no matter how insignificant by worldly standards?”
In this context, I am conscious of the plot of Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings in which the great things of this world are often carried out in obscure places by relatively unknown and insignificant people, such as Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam.
I have often sought to come to terms with this question by beginning with the Creation, with God’s fundamental intent to establish something outside of Himself. This ultimate transcendent origin must likewise have its place. The tradition of the Alpha and the Omega is, I think, a valid one. “In the end is my beginning,” to recall T.S. Eliot’s phrase.
Here, I would rather proceed from what Christians call the Redemption, an event, something that took place in a known time and place, when Augustus Caesar and Tiberius Caesar were Emperors of the Romans. We might call it a “second” beginning, or the completion of a plan. Thus, we begin with a situation that already occurred before our time.
Chesterton said that we do not need any proof for original sin. All we need to do is to go out into the streets and open our eyes. Ever since we have recorded history in any language, and archeological indications before it, we find men attesting to the fact that they do “what they would not,” as St. Paul put it. The history of mankind is not simply a record of wars and rumors of war, but it is a record that unvaryingly includes that dire history and often worse abuses of human worth.
If we begin with the Redemption, however, we start not from man’s glory but from his seeming lack of it, from his need of it to be what he is. Christian teaching tells us that, in spite of the Fall, man is basically good in his being. The Fall of man, as it is called, thus had to do with something within a good being, not a fate outside of it.
The Fall did not make man’s physical being to be evil. That is the Manichaean position. It did “darken” the clarity of man’s seeing. It attested to the fact that our actions, good or bad, affect not only ourselves. We are social beings even in our sins.
Evil, as such, has no “being.” It is precisely the “lack” of good in what ought to have it in its fullness. This lack, moreover, is put into being not by God but by man in the freedom he has that is made possible through his reason, through the kind of being that he is. In this sense, God relates to man’s freedom both as its origin and as to its possible correction if it chooses against God.
The idea that God should intervene to save us no matter what we do, that our thoughts and deeds have no consequences, is a very tempting position in theology and philosophy. It is equivalent to holding that the creature we know as man does not exist in the first place. Man is truly a secondary cause of his own actions, real actions, not merely a funnel through whom things beyond him flow.
Creation and justice
In a sense, if we start with the Redemption, we start with political philosophy. Why is this? Political philosophy began outside of the Christian orbit but came also to exist within it. Political philosophy began with Plato’s concern about the death of Socrates.
Why did the best existing city kill the best man? Must it always happen? At first sight, we might think that what Plato, as a young man, saw in Athens was simply an illegal trial in which an innocent mentor and friend was condemned to death by his city.
Some, no doubt, read the death of Socrates as originating in his fault, not in that of the citizens or officials who condemned him. They maintain that Socrates was a threat to Athens by proposing a perfectionism to which no human being could arise.
Socrates maintained that it was never right to do wrong. The alternative is, no doubt, that sometimes it is necessary and therefore not wrong.
But Plato’s concern was real. He came to phrase the issue as a contest between philosophy, the pursuit of truth, and politics, the power to rule in spite of philosophy. This was most graphically depicted in the
Gorgias and the first book of the
Republic.
But Plato’s problem was more far-reaching than we might otherwise suspect. He was not merely concerned with the death of Socrates, a good man. His real concern was whether the world was made in justice. If it was not, then, logically, it really did not make any difference what we did as no ultimate consequences could be found for our acts, good or bad. Indeed,
the very distinction between good and bad is senseless if it does not make any difference which one we choose.
What is the problem here? Why is it a political problem? Plato’s reasoning went something like this. If the citizens of Athens, in a legal trial, could unjustly condemn Socrates, a good man, to death, we cannot complain about it unless those who cause these injustices are themselves judged. However, the experience of mankind is that many crimes take place within its boundaries that are not punished in this world and many good deeds are performed that are not recognized or rewarded. If this is the case, the world must be created in injustice and therefore must be incoherent. If it is incoherent, then anything goes. Callicles and Thrasymachus are right. Power is the sole determinative of what we will do. The notion of a higher law or judgment is ridiculous.
What was Plato’s answer to this situation and reasoning? He proposed that the soul of man was in fact immortal. Death was only the separation of the soul and body. It was the body that seemed to cause all the problems. Yet, the cause of evil remained located in the soul. Thus, at death, everyone had to be judged in how he lived. All souls were immortal, both of the good and the bad. If someone had lived a good life, if he had chosen to do so in this life, he would live immortally in the Isles of the Blessed. If not, he would be eternally punished, or at least until such time as the man against whom he sinned would forgive him.
The doctrine of immortality, in other words, is a Greek philosophical issue that is located in political philosophy. Speculation on the immortality of the soul arose out of a practical dilemma, either the soul was immortal or the world was created in injustice.
Christ’s identity on trial
The relation of the trials of Socrates and Christ is often noted. Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI have remarked on it. Both were, on the surface, trials of good men in the best cities of their time. Rome was famous for its laws. Its justice system is still somewhere behind the legal system of most countries. The Romans had proceeded in the previous centuries to conquer a good part of the old empire of Alexander the Great. Indeed, because of Alexander, we have in effect the New Testament written in Greek.
Among their conquests, the Romans found themselves ruling Palestine and an unruly group of Jews who never seemed to be satisfied with anything. When the Romans tried to appease them by putting a statue of their God in the Pantheon in Rome, they complained that they did not have any statue of their God. They were forbidden to have one. So the Romans just left their niche empty and went on as usual.
The Roman governor of Palestine, one Pontius Pilate, found that he had to deal with a squabble among the Jews about their own law. The Romans tried the best they could to let the locals rule themselves. They reserved to themselves only cases that might cause greater problems, such as revolts or refusal to pay taxes.
Both of these issues came up in the life of one Jesus Christ, who seems to have been particularly troublesome to the Jews for some reason. The Romans did not want to be caught up in religious controversy. It was all babble to them. If the Jews wanted to execute this man for some quibble in their own law, let them do so. But the Jewish leaders at the time tried to make Him out as an enemy of Caesar. Pilate examined the case but could find “no cause” that violated any important Roman concern.
Christ did claim that He was a king but not in any political sense that threatened Roman rule. His kingdom, as He said to Pilate, was “not of this world.” Some people still want to make Him primarily a political revolutionary. But the New Testament has very little to say about politics. Indeed, it even says that there are things of Caesar, which seems but another way of saying what Aristotle said in his
Politics, namely, that we can figure politics out by our own reasoning and experience. We do not need special revelation to do it for us. We can deal with those things that belong to our nature, though sometimes, often, our vices interfere.
In any case, the Roman governor was satisfied that he could “find no guilt in Him.” But he found himself boxed into a corner as the Jews could make it look back in Rome that Pilate was not dealing with a political threat. So in the end, Pilate washed his hands, in a famous scene. He let the Crucifixion, which the Romans reserved to themselves, go on under his authority.
The special issue that comes up in the Trial and Death of Christ, of course, is who Christ was. In one sense, Christ and Socrates were both good men unjustly executed in their respective polities. The same issue arises: “Do those who are responsible for this injustice get away with it?”
But Christ is not just another Socrates. In his
Jesus of Nazareth, Benedict XVI is careful to state exactly why Jesus is different. After all the evidence is in, after all the strands of interpretation have been exhausted, Christ is who He said He was. He was born into the world of a woman. He was the eternal Son of the Father. The world is different because of this event and fact.
Truth, redemption, and human freedom
The best way to understand the difference between Christ and Socrates, I think, also comes from Plato. We have already seen that the immortality of the soul is a Greek philosophical doctrine designed to answer the question about whether the world is created in injustice.
Christians find this position philosophically useful in order to explain the continuity of the individual through time and eternity. Without the immortality of the soul, we either have to say that the resurrection takes place immediately after death. Or we claim that souls keep finding new bodies or that God has to recreate us anew at the resurrection. But if this latter were so, there is no relation between our earthly life and our heavenly one. The whole point of Christianity is that the same person who is conceived, born, and dies is the one who is resurrected, whether to glory or to punishment.
Plato understood this point also. In the P
haedo, we have one of the eschatological myths that Plato uses to explain his teaching about immortality and the consequences of justice. In this account, the man who is being properly punished for his admitted crimes is in the river of the underworld. The only way that he can get out of this punishment is if the man, against whom he committed a crime, forgives him. If the man does not forgive him, he continues his punishment forever.
Why this Platonic scene is interesting for Christians is that it brings to the fore the fact that two things are involved in every sin: 1) the individual sins against someone and 2) the sin also against God.
In the Christian dispensation, Christ comes to save all sinners, but on the condition of their own freedom. That is, they have still to acknowledge that they do not make the law that distinguishes good and evil. They have to accept the punishment for their sins as a sign of repentance, as Plato also argued.
Where does this approach leave us? It leaves us with the divine initiative that addresses the issue brought up by the philosopher about the nature of sin and its forgiveness. But what it also does is to bring up the question of what exactly sins? Is it merely a soul, or is it a whole person? And if the latter, does not this fact mean that both reward and punishment have to include the whole man? The sin itself always has a divine component that only God can forgive, hence the mission of Christ in this world.
Here is where the issue of the resurrection of the body comes in. The logic of Plato’s argument about whether the world is created in injustice would suggest that the whole person is punished or rewarded.
The immortality of the soul is a valid element in the understanding of the continuity of a single person once in existence. It does not cover the more complete recognition that what we want is not just our souls but our whole being. This realization is why Aristotle is most helpful in this matter. He understood that the human being is essentially composed of body and soul but it is one being or person. If this is the case, as it seems to be, then, when revelation directs itself to human understanding, it does so at a point where human reason seems to fail to explain its own reality.
The external proof of this approach comes from a remark of Benedict XVI in
Spe Salvi. The Pope was talking of the logic of the resurrection. He pointed out that two famous Marxist philosophers, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, each had granted the argument that flows from Plato’s
Republic.
The solution to the justice problem cannot simply be the immortality of the soul. It has to include the body. The resurrection of the body, in this light, is in fact a logical and reasonable proposition. The two Marxist philosophers do not accept Christianity but they do accept the logic.
This astonishing analysis brings us back to the issue of man’s greatness and glory. Man’s greatness is to know what in truth reality is about. If revelation instructs us, gives us a hint, of what is the solution to the deepest of philosophic problems of whether the world is created in injustice, we cannot simply walk away as this logic never existed. It is not only the logic but the truth in which that logic is founded.
In this sense, the redemption takes us back to the creation. We are redeemed in the manner we are, that is, as fallen. We are redeemed through the Incarnation and Crucifixion, as the unexpected divine response to human freedom.
We are originally created to participate in the inner life of the Trinity. But we have to do this freely. Our very being requires it, the being that God gave us. The drama of our salvation is thus not only an explanation of our being but also a stimulus to and a healing of our reason. Only with this grace can the things that are in fact logical actually be understood and accomplished by us.
We need to acknowledge that we are not ourselves the makers of what our own freedom and destiny consist in. Yet, we are the causes of whether we will freely accept what is given to us as a gift, a gift that includes our creation, our redemption, and, yes, our glory.
Father James V. Schall, S.J., author of more than 40 books, retired in December after 35 years teaching in the government department at Georgetown University.
The Transfiguration, Raphael, 1520.
The transfiguration of the Church
by Rev. George W. Rutler
March 12, 2013
Years ago, an Oxford don, not rare as an eccentric but singular in his way of being one, kept in his rooms a small menagerie including a mongoose to whom he fed mice for tea, and an eagle that flew one day into the cathedral and tried to mate with the brass eagle-shaped lectern which was cold and unresponsive.
It is claimed that the choristers at that moment were singing “O for the Wings of a Dove” by Mendelssohn, who had recently dedicated his “Scottish Symphony” to Queen Victoria. No dove is safe around an eagle, and the dove and the eagle represent in iconography very different aspects of the spiritual life. The oldest eagle lectern in Oxford is not in the cathedral but in nearby Corpus Christi college chapel, and there are eagle lecterns all over the world, symbolizing Saint John whose record of the saving Gospel soars on wings not of this world.
Curious it is then, that Saint John is the only evangelist who does not record the ethereal mystery of the Transfiguration, and especially so since he was there: “…we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father” (1:14). Some of the mystical writers explain that the entire Fourth Gospel is one long and radiant Transfiguration.
If the event is a lacuna for John, he makes up for it by being the only evangelist to record the Marriage at Cana, which in some ways is a prototype of the Transfiguration. Before both events, Jesus had assured his apostles that they would see a great glory, and on both occasions he spoke of an approaching hour that was his destiny. “This beginning of signs Jesus did in Cana of Galilee, and manifested His glory; and His disciples believed in Him” (John 2:11).
In a sort of yin-yang contrast, the wedding miracle is soon followed by the violent cleansing of the Temple, just as the Transfiguration leads to a wild encounter at the foot of the mountain with an epileptic.
A Russian proverb holds that when the Lord builds a church, Satan pitches a tent across the street. The endless agony of Lucifer without the Light is that he cannot get far enough away from the eternal brightness, and yet he is helplessly drawn to it, like an ugly moth to a lovely flame.
There is some of that tension in those who talk incessantly about why they will have nothing to do with the Church. A Christ who does not inspire will seem to haunt. But only ghosts haun,t and Christ is not a ghost, for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as he has. This strange obsession is from a darker source.
The Church Militant, which in its weakest moments may seem like a scattered and tattered regiment of the Church Triumphant, has supernal guarantees that the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.
Any reformation of the Church that is not a transfiguration by the light of that confidence becomes a deformation.
With the best intentions, sectaries spring up to fix the cracks they see in the Rock which is Peter, using some principle other than his power to bind and loose. This is not to impune the moral protocols of those denominations, which often excel the practice of Catholics.
Ronald Knox observed, and almost boasted, that only Catholic churches had signs saying, “Mind your umbrella.” But the Catholic Church, by being Catholic, cannot succumb to polemic, for she is not founded on any theory, and when Anti-Christ attacks in ways carnal or psychological, his battering rams only bolster the barricades.
Sinners in the Church’s ranks sin most easily when times are easy, while martyrs, apologists, and doctors flourish best in the worst times.
Christ’s glory filled the sky as he predicted his death, to strengthen his disciples for the time when the sky would be darkened. Peter wanted to stay on top Mount Tabor in its afterglow, like a fly in amber. Christ had more in mind: not nostalgia, but tradition, which passes the glory on to the disciples, filling them “with all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:19).
Nostalgia is the climate of Quietism, the anemic spirituality that basks in God’s goodness without doing anything about it. It does not go down from Tabor to go up to Jerusalem. It inverts the Christian life by being of the world but not in it. This is religion as a virtue turned into religiosity as a vice, confusing grace with rectitude and sanctification with perfectionism.
The perfectionist wants to be good, and that is a subtle blasphemy: “Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. If you would enter life, keep the commandments” (Matt. 19:17). This same Christ, who cannot contradict himself, had already said: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48).
Goodness is from within, while perfection is from without. The perfectionist wants to make himself good, better, and best. But the Perfect Man said, “…apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). That is why He gave us the Church as His Body, and by so doing saves mortal man from the degradation of trying to feel good about himself.
Perfectionists are easily scandalized by what is not good. Saints are scandalized only by what is not glorious. We may say in cliché, “nobody’s perfect,” but the fact is, saints are perfect, and they are precisely so because they do not try to be good, better, and best. The more they are transfigured by the Light, the more they seem to themselves bad, worse, and worst.
Perfectionists resent the weaknesses that saints boast of: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). The perfectionist misses this whole point and so, like the narrow kind of Pharisee, he casts a cold eye on the failings of humans, as if the failings abolish the humanity.
The saints, having seen the glory on the mountaintop, do not gaze at themselves, but “see only Jesus” who, rather than transforming them into goodness, transfigures them into glory. From his own lofty height, Saint Maximos the Confessor could say, “All that God is, except for an identity of being, one becomes when one is deified by grace.”
And he was not the first to say it. Peter, who wanted to tarry on the mountain would soon enough be speaking of “precious promises” by which “you might be partakers of the divine nature” (1 Peter 1:4).
In clumsy hands this language would become superhuman rather than supernatural. Under wrong impressions and bereft of inspiration, the Mormon version thinks it means becoming another god with a personal planet. This requires a heavy editing of the Word of God.
A “Bible Dictionary” of the Latter Day Saints notes that “the Cambridge University Press granted the Church permission to use its Bible dictionary as a base, to be amended as needed.” In that editing, the Mormon dictionary says of the Transfiguration: “Few events in the Bible equal it in importance. A similar event occurred on April 3, 1836, in the temple at Kirtland, Ohio, where the same heavenly messengers conferred priesthood keys upon the Prophet Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery.”
as I am of this, I am persuaded that the Transfiguration illuminates the salutary crisis of the Holy Catholic Church in our time, with Christ flanked by Moses and Elijah, shedding light on law and learning.
In his last Angelus address, Benedict XVI said that he is now going up the mountain as did Peter, James, and John, and there he will pray. He knows that at the foot of the mountain are all kinds of noise and foaming, and these are the growls of the Prince of Darkness paying the Church a tribute he pays no other reality: his hatred.
While he mocks men and scorns their pretensions, he reserves his bitterness for the Church, which is the only thing he fears in this world. His backhanded compliment is the distress, gossip, and corruption he sows among the disciples.
This is why dissent within the Church can be far more raucous than assaults from without. Those who never discovered Catholicism are not as caustic in their disdain as are those who claim to be recovering from it.
Georges Bernanos said, “We do not lose our faith. We simply stop shaping our lives by it.” The life that has lost its shape can be more destructive than the life that was not shaped at all, and this accounts for the “recovering Catholics” who are more bitter about why the Church is wrong than those who never thought the Church was right to begin with.
Those who knew not what they were doing were forgiven from the cross, while the man who knew what he was doing hanged himself. The same Paul who told the Athenians that God overlooked their ignorance of the Gospel, cursed those who twisted the Gospel (cf. Acts 17:30; Gal 1:9).
Christ can be double-crossed only by those who once were marked with his cross.
When things seem especially confused in the Church and scandals abound, that is a hint from Heaven and a murmur from Hell that something profoundly blessed is about to happen. Christ prays for Peter when the Devil tries to sift him like wheat, so that when Peter survives, he will confirm the brethren in a lively tradition of glory.
“We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ but we had been eyewitnesses of this majesty…We ourselves heard this voice from heaven while we were with him on the holy mountain” (2 Peter 1:16-18).
Father Rutler is the pastor of the Church of our Savior in Manhattan and an author of several books.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 13/03/2013 12:27]