I gave the following lecture (really a series of meditations) at the University of Notre Dame on the occasion of a Pastoral Symposium sponsored by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, designed to help bishops reflect and pray about the topic of "Reclaiming the Church for the Catholic Imagination". Bishops do not have many occasions to think aloud about the challenges the Church faces in our time. My thanks to Dr. John Cavadini and his associates at the Institute for Church Life for organizing this occasion.
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Belonging
to the Crucified: The Beauty of the Church in Image and Reality
To talk about the Church is dangerous for us. I mean, we are
not the announcement, God the Most Holy Trinity, revealed in the act of saving
us, is. The Father’s mercy offered us is in Christ Jesus and is made actual by
the Spirit he pours out abundantly. As Saint Thomas, commenting on the poured out rivers of wisdom referenced in
Ecclesiasticus 24, says beautifully in one place:
I understand these overflowing rivers to be the eternal
processions, by which the Son from the Father, and the Holy Spirit from each,
proceed in an ineffable way, […] Comes now the Son and the
enclosed rivers in a certain way overflowed by his making known the name of the
Trinity.(1)
Primarily the New Testament is the state of one who lives the
grace of this Trinitarian overflowing. Only secondarily is it a series of
books. The inspired texts are at the service of the renewing grace. The Son’s
embrace of us, when accepted in faith, saves us by engendering the outpouring
of the Holy Spirit who enacts the life, communion and mission of the Son in us.(2) The Spirit thus makes us
instruments of the Kingdom’s coming even as he prepares a place for us in the
Father’s Kingdom come to fullness.(3) To this renewal Saint
Thomas bears theological witness and summarizes the Tradition East and West.
This, too, is a kind of overflowing river.
The Church is the historical body constituted by this dynamic.
She is endowed with gifts and graces that enhance her joy at being called into
Trinitarian life, and that aim at advancing the universal call to the nations.
Hence, though the Church is not the message, she is essential to the economy of
salvation. She is not an afterthought. Yet, we have to grasp her beauty by a
kind of side-ways glance. She is known in the act of her being. She is known in
the act of imparting the Trinitarian participation, itself identical with what
the Lord offers by saying:
This is the time of fulfillment. The kingdom of God is at
hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel (Mk1:15).
Part of what preoccupies us today is the difficulty we
encounter in trying to convey to the generations entrusted to our care the
beauty and joy of this life we have received. In large measure that is why we
are dedicating these days to prayer and theological reflection. What I offer
this evening is conceived as a side-ways glance; it is more a series of
meditations than a lecture; more examination of conscience than prescription.
If the examination of conscience part helps you, all the better, but I mostly
aim that part at myself.
I.
CONFIRMATION
We spend an awful lot of time as bishops confirming people in
the faith, yet bishops and theologians talk and write very little about this
pivotal moment and gift. It is the personal consummation of the Trinitarian
enactment I just described; it is Pentecost applied, and thus the completion of
the Paschal grace of the Risen Christ given to a Christian. It solidifies and
missionizes our being in the Church. I speak to Confirmation candidates mostly
about this gift as one that enables them to take up the mission of Jesus and
thus bear witness to the Kingdom. By a kind of pastoral spontaneity, I find
myself talking about this by describing how the Kingdom is
decidedly different from what we encounter every day.
At
some point in my confirmation homily I draw an explicit comparison between the
Kingdom Jesus announced and ushered in-- the very same Kingdom the Spirit comes
to make real in our lives-- with the spirit of the world.
I do not often call it the spirit of the world,
since I am not sure 15 year olds know quite what to make of such a phrase.
Instead, I talk about the obsession the world seems to have with power, money
and control. For a while I used The Hunger Games to help them picture the point. Saying
something like “life is not supposed to be The Hunger
Games”. For the most part they have either read the books, or seen
the movies, and so they tend to get that the fear that dominates the young
people in those stories is not what Jesus and the Spirit, and the Church are
about. I suspect they follow me in the Jesus and the Spirit part, but have not
really thought of the Church as somehow connected to the offer of something
that is described to them as “not The Hunger Games”.
My pastoral gut tells me they do not react negatively to my drawing the Church
into the vision I am trying to depict; rather, I suspect that they never really
have pictured it before. In some sense, this may be what our conference over
the next couple of days is about.
Quite
by accident, if you believe in such things, during a confirmation last year, I
didn’t say The Hunger Games, rather, I said
“life is not supposed to be The Game of Thrones.
The line drew a few giggles from the candidates, and a gasp from a parent or
two. This made me think that the candidates knew exactly what I was talking
about, and maybe their familiarity with it was not always with parents’
permission. But that is the world our
families live in. Well, instead of correcting myself, I decided to run with the
misspeaking, and mentioned that I have not watched the HBO series, though I
have read the books. I made them laugh when I said: Do
you know how hard it is to read a book and close your eyes at the same time? I
mean, you know, there is some pretty ugly stuff in those books: ambition,
treachery, murder, maiming, the good guys get beheaded, and the bad guys sit on
thrones, and then they get beheaded; and those are in the happy parts.
Well, I have taken to using The Game of
Thrones reference more regularly, since I think it makes the point
as effectively as a reference to The Hunger Games.
Teenagers and adults are fascinated by the gruesome display of how power,
wealth and control swirl in dark configurations in this fictional world. It is
both attractive and repulsive to them. Perhaps the popularity has to do with
the fact that a great many people imagine that, once you take away the smoke
and mirrors, the world actually operates this way. The popularity of dystopian
fiction, which is never far from apocalyptic themes, should tell us something;
and its popularity with the young is particularly significant. What is striking
to me is that The Game of Thrones actually
does hit the nail on the head with regard to saying something about the
difference between what people experience and the Kingdom. This is of course my
point in drawing the comparison.
II.
THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE UGLY
Saint Bonaventure, The Mind’s Road to God:
The mirror offered by the outside world is of little or no
value, if the mirror of the mind be not made clear and polished. Train yourself,
therefore, O man of God, by first heeding the biting sting of conscience before
you lift up your eyes to the shining rays of wisdom reflected in those mirrors,
lest from such radiant reflections you fall into a deeper darkness.(5)
There’s
a lot of ugly stuff in the world, I tell the Confirmation
candidates. I think when we draw peoples’ attention to this, be they teenagers
or adults, they get what we are talking about. I think they get it more readily
that way than if we say there is a lot of bad stuff, or if we say there are a
lot of lies in the world. It is a risky strategy, because the apprehension of
the beautiful has as much to do with the state of the soul as it does with the
form of the object. Bonaventure says as much in the text I just cited. Still, I
think we can trust the fact that human nature’s apprehensive capacities were
not completely lost in the fall, nor washed away by
the flood. People trust their gut more when it comes to the
beautiful than they do when it comes to the good and the true. As Walker Percy
might say, as a society we have surrendered judgments about the true and the good
to the experts.(6)
I do not think ordinary folks have yet similarly surrendered judgments about
the beautiful. This is why I guess Walker Percy focused on story-telling. And
certainly Tolkien trusted a great deal in a reader’s capacity to respond
spontaneously to the noble and the beautiful.
It is the metaphysical irony of a fallen world, though, that
it is easier to make the ugly fascinatingly attractive than it is to depict the
beautiful as conducive to joy. This is a phenomenon at least partially operative
in much dystopian fiction. It is also a phenomenon more easily observed than
analyzed. In any case it may help account for the economic success of The Game of Thrones franchise.
The human being looks at an ugly world and begins to falter:
maybe the ugly triumphs over our noble and beautiful dreams. As Pope Benedict
put it: maybe the beautiful is the illusion, and the
ugly is what is most real.(7) This uncertainty is a kind
of darkness, perhaps the most obscure darkness possible. To abandon hope in the
triumph of the beautiful over the ugly is another way to describe what we mean
by the word "despair".
Hope requires the recognition of a good that can be obtained
despite formidable obstacles. If the truth is that there is no way out of the
triumph of the ugly, than there is no stomach for putting up a fight against
it. The fear of the nothing, like an
aggressive entity, destroys hope. In the field of contemporary philosophy this
is a contest fought on the terrain of the radical deconstruction of meaning. I need
not go there now; it is enough to recognize its shadowy presence lurking in the
background of pastoral aesthetics.
All of this would be a mildly inviting topic for academic
discussion were it not for the fact that it is a life and death matter. I see it
mostly in the young. The triumph of the ugly is an option a teenager learns
about quickly. Gangs and a culture of violence are about power made glamorous.
Drugs, alcohol and pornography are about an escape culture made preferable to
reality; and the drug and human trafficking trade is about a wealth culture
that visualizes people only as buyers, sellers and commodities. The ugly will
not triumph in the end, -- he rose--
but it can triumph in the soul of a young person to the extent that it can
block out anything truly luminous. In that way it engenders despair, the soul’s
submission to the triumph of the ugly.
A soul tutored in grace knows that beauty is not understood
only under a physical aspect; but many of people do not see it this way. As the
Colombian writer William Ospina once said: when it
comes time to show forth the world, art demands realism not reality.(8)
With this phrase the poet
wanted to say that art has a responsibility to point towards the marvelous in
life, often present at the periphery of human perception, where the eye of the
soul can perceive the noble present even in an ugly reality. An artist lives to
point towards perceptible realities that exist at the periphery of what is
physically expressive.
In its greatness the beautiful invites us to gaze on a truth
pointed to by the image. Realism can trace and image something beyond the
immediately sensed reality. Thus, for the Catholic imagination, the reality in
our realm can be made to bear witness to the reality of another realm. Saint Bonaventure’s
metaphysics of resemblance, intensely at work in The
Mind’s Road to God, locates the ability to perceive these traces
and images within the renewal of grace. For Bonaventure, Saint Francis is an
icon of Christ precisely because he was pulled into total conformity and
resemblance, even unto bearing the marks of the Crucified. I think we misread
Pope Francis on the poor, and on creation if we neglect the contemplative
hermeneutic of graced resemblance initiated in the Franciscan tradition, particularly
in the theology of Bonaventure.
III.
BEAUTY AT THE EDGES
Pope Benedict XVI, who knows a thing or two about the vision
of Saint Bonaventure, speaking about two years before his election:
The one who believes in God, in the God who has manifested
himself precisely in the altered countenance of Christ Crucified as the love
that is faithful “to the end” (Jn 13,1), knows that beauty is truth and that
truth is beauty, but in the suffering Christ he learns also that the beauty of
the truth implies an offense, a sorrow and, yes, also the dark mystery of
death, that can only be encountered in the acceptance of the sorrow, and not in
its rejection.(9)
Pope Benedict, gathering up a tradition of Catholic reflection
on beauty, points us to Christ Crucified. There are few examples of cruelty and
ugliness that could be compared to crucifixion. The ugly exists; a Christian
neither wants nor can deny this. But the image of the Crucified in human flesh
invites us to perceive the reality that lies beneath the image, and that
radiates a luminosity perceptible even in the midst of the cruelty of the
Cross.
The Crucified invites us to contemplate the truth of love. And
because God embraced the human being precisely when he accepted to live and die
what is ugliest in our condition, the Cross of Christ shows us that love
transfigures. Charity specifies the image, gives it clarity and thus makes it
capable of signifying beyond itself.(10)
Bruno Forte thus writes:
The Whole has
made its home in the fragment because the relationship of love which
constitutes it as purest beginning of all that is has now offered itself in the
flesh: beauty is the arche of the Three, revealed in its
highest form at the hour of the abandonment of the Cross, where the suffering
of the crucified God opens the way into the depths of divine communion.(11)
Javier Sicilia, the Mexican poet/novelist/human rights
activist describes this mystery of the Whole of love made present in the
limited, crucified fragment in more dramatic terms:
Do you know what amazes me about the Incarnation? I
continued, that it is altogether contrary to the modern world: the presence of
the infinite in the limits of the flesh, and the fight, the fight with no
quarter, against the temptations of the devil’s excesses. You do not know,
Eminence, how much I have meditated on the temptations in the desert. “Take up
the power”, the devil told him; that power that gives the illusion of being
able to disrupt and dominate everything. But he maintained himself in the
limits of his own flesh, in his own poverty, in his own death, so poor, so
miserable, so hard. Our age, nevertheless, showing a face of enormous kindness,
has succumbed to those temptations. “They will be like gods, they will change
the stones into bread, and they will dominate the world”… to such an age we
have handed over the Christ, and we do not even realize it.(12)
This crucified love initiates the drama of the Kingdom; quite
simply, the choice before the world is between the way of seeking power to
overcome all limits, or the way of love shining in the beauty of the limited
fragment: so poor, so miserable, so hard.
The beauty of the truth implies
offense, Cardinal Ratzinger said. This is not far from what Pope
Francis means when he talks about the imperative of the Church’s identification
with the poor and relegated. The realism of the Cross, the element that causes
offense, is the same vision that sees the embrace of the poor as not just part
of the program of the Church, but the heart of her basic identity. It is her
reality that is itself the beautiful image, beautiful in the manner of the altered countenance of Christ Crucified.
This beauty gives offense. Christ Crucified and the poor are at the periphery
of the soul’s perception precisely because they are at the periphery of the
world’s stage.
Pope Francis says in Evangelii Gaudium
198:
This option for the poor, as Pope Benedict XVI taught, “is
implicit in the Christological faith in that God that has made himself poor for
us, so as to make us rich by his poverty”. That is why I want a poor Church for
the poor.(13)
To embrace the world’s rejected is to embrace the way of
beauty and to reject the way of power. As such, the Church refuses to separate
the Crucified from the world’s poor. By the poor, I mean what I take Pope
Francis to mean, namely all the “not-beautiful”, “not-useful”, “not-acceptable”
persons the world summarily ignores, manipulates, ostracizes, uses and then
throws away. Most dramatically, these are the ones whom the world seeks in
order to sell their unborn or immigrant body-parts. The world eats its own, in
a grotesque and hellish effort to live beyond its limits. The condition of the
Crucified is the condition of the poor, the ones sold and used.
A Catholic imagination drags the periphery to the center, so
as to make us able to perceive the truth that the center by itself eclipses. This
implies offense to the world because in this way the Church lifts up what the
world considers ugly and embraces it as beautiful. The saints know this by
instinct of grace. The image of Mother Teresa, and all who are like her,
holding a dying baby born in poverty is the image of the Church whose center is
made beautiful by the embrace of the periphery.
The artistic tradition of the West has for some reason of
providence dwelt on this depiction of the action in the Gospel. From
Caravaggio’s Deposition to Flannery
O’Connor showing us an abandoned soul in a puddle of water, wrapped in wire, it
is the drama of the act that communicates. Such representations project what it
looks like for us to act in likeness to the Lord.
If Dante breathed the air of the theological tradition that
kept guard over the unsayability of the
Godhead, it is because the Tradition held fast to something present in the
Lord’s own announcement of the Kingdom. There is a kind of transgression, a
kind of subversion, and indeed a kind of deconstruction that is inbuilt in the
Gospel announcement itself. Every positive description of the Kingdom is at the
same time a negation of what the figure of the world proposes as normative. In
this sense, the announcement of the Kingdom is inherently deconstructive. But
again, in Christianity, deconstruction is a radical purification, not a
demolition.
To present the beauty of the Church in this way is to both
offend the world and to unleash, so to speak, the grace that acts in prevenient
fashion. This is the grace that insinuates itself in what is left of the
natural apprehensive abilities of the human soul. Such images speak to the
secular world more powerfully than we know, or than the world will publicly
admit.
IV.
CONTEMPLATION AND PERCEIVING THE KINGDOM
Pope Francis in Evangelium Gaudium,
number 264:
The greatest motivation for communicating the Gospel is to
contemplate it with love, to linger over its pages and to read it with the
heart. If we approach it in this way, its beauty surprises us, and returns to
captivate us over and over again. For this it is urgent to recover the
contemplative spirit that permits us to rediscover each day that we are
depositaries of a good that humanizes, and that helps to live a new life. There
is nothing better to hand on to others.(14)
The Holy Father would have us contemplate the contours of the
Gospel frequently, and allow ourselves to be captured anew by its beauty. It
would be a mistake, though, to think of this kind of contemplation as a
perceptive grace focused primarily on glimpsing the timeless element in it. It
is true that Thomistic descriptions of the move from meditation to
contemplation emphasize the move from the contingent to the necessary, the
particular to the universal.(15) This has to do with the order of being, since
the end of eternal contemplation is the standard by which lesser contemplations
are measured.
Still, this theological truth must be seen in context of
Thomas’ insistence that the mixed life is the highest form of life available to
us; it is patterned after the form of the Lord’s own way of life, contemplative
surely, but active also, and most of all accessible.(16) Glimpses of the timeless
are ever present in the Gospel. The Iconic tradition of the East wondrously
pulls us into this perception. But the eternal in the text is distorted for us
unless we remember that our being pulled upward is simultaneous to eternity’s
moving downward into our realm, in dramatic and apocalyptic fashion. Somehow it
is necessary to capture in contemplative ways something of this drama as well,
as it forms part of its essential beauty and power to attract.
The artistic tradition of the West has for some reason of
providence dwelt on this depiction of the action in the Gospel. From
Caravaggio’s Deposition to Flannery
O’Connor showing us an abandoned soul in a puddle of water, wrapped in wire, it
is the drama of the act that communicates. Such representations project what it
looks like for us to act in likeness to the Lord.
The Kingdom Jesus announces is abrupt and not easily imagined.
But He spared nothing to help us picture it. The parables are depictions of
grace in motion. When you think about it, grace can only be conceived as a
movement. And as with all movements, it has a beginning, a middle and an end.
The parable of the Prodigal Son is all the more dramatic for our not being told
what the older son will do after his Father’s pleading. The parables are
infinitely nuanced, with that human nuance that escapes the learned and the
clever (and many a scripture scholar), but which delights and instructs the
crowds.
A preacher struggles to find the images that can convey
something of the Kingdom’s grandeur, its majesty, its promise. The challenge is
closely related to the theological aesthetic I have been talking about. For
indeed, a great deal of the Lord’s preaching of the Kingdom centered on what
lies at the edge of human perception.
In his announcement of the Kingdom, the image speaks more
efficaciously than does the theological statement. In searching for a language
to describe this mystery, I find myself either focusing upon what the Kingdom
is not: The kingdom is not like The Game of Thrones.
Or I find myself trying to derive similitudes that remain close in form to
those used by the Lord himself: the Kingdom of God is
like the Rio Grande River.
When outside my diocese, I am frequently asked: where exactly is Brownsville? I have taken to
giving the same answer: Brownsville is there where the
Río Grande River gives up its life in the Gulf of Mexico. I like
this description because it turns the mind to the great mystery at the center
of the Kingdom announced by the Lord: If you would
have life, you must lose it or give it over. Even nature
reflects this mystery in the way the River first touches then gives itself to the
Gulf. The Kingdom is like that. It is a
stretching toward another that simultaneously is a pouring out. In so many
different ways, throughout his public preaching, the Lord spoke of this. The
Kingdom comes to birth in the pouring out that fulfills, the self-emptying that
like the grain of wheat, dies and bears much fruit.
Christian contemplation glimpses the self-emptying of the Son
as the movement of a moment in time that by a sideways glance shows us
eternity’s ceaseless pouring forth. Its beauty in time and in eternity is
charity.
V.
THE KINGDOM AS TRANSGRESSION
Thomas says somewhere in De Veritate:
Whatever our
understanding conceives of God falls short of his representation; and thus what
he is always remains hidden from us; and this is the highest knowledge of him
which we can have in this life, that we know God to be above all that which we
think of him.(17)
William Franke wrote a remarkable book
entitled Dante and the Sense of Transgression. As he guides us through
Dante, he champions a recovery of a patristic and medieval apophatic theology. I agree with what I
understand of Franke’s argument, namely that our best response to contemporary
philosophical attempts at the radical deconstruction of all meaning lies
precisely within our own apophatic tradition.
Deconstruction is a movement that seeks to undermine meaning because it
conceives of it as a pure construction of the mind; meaning, thus, is something
like a human institution. At root, for the deconstructionist, meaning is
idolatry, an aggressive kingdom that keeps its subjects under a controlled
dominion. In that sense meaning is an extension of the power-play. The Game
of Thrones, whether conceived so or not, is a parable of deconstruction.
Apophaticism recovers the Christian critique of meaning by relentlessly
resisting its being idolized within the confines of the world. The wordiness of
meaning is relative to and must find its way back to the One WORD from whom all
words have any hope of sense; this is the One WORD we cannot conceive. From the
Greeks to Bonaventure, Thomas, John of the Cross and beyond, the not knowing,
or the silencing of the words, is the vehicle of our sideways glance at the
fullness of beauty and truth. To embrace the unsayable is to purify the
legitimate meaning of the world. This is so because without a trace back to the
source, meaning becomes idolatrous, and can become a tool in the money, power
and control game that I tell confirmation candidates is not what the Kingdom is
about.
Franke says the following:
The scattering and forgetting in question are
transgressions and destructions of the entire regime of poetic representation
and theological revelation of truth that subtend Dante’s poem and its
intellectual and cultural tradition. It is through resolutely transgressing
every order of presentation and representation that Dante finally delivers his
divine vision. Most deeply understood, it is a non-vision –which, nevertheless,
in its very forgetfulness casts a shadow of infinitely rich and nuanced images
that are glimpsed in the act of disappearing.(18)
If Dante breathed the air of the theological tradition that
kept guard over the unsayability of the
Godhead, it is because the Tradition held fast to something present in the
Lord’s own announcement of the Kingdom. There is a kind of transgression, a
kind of subversion, and indeed a kind of deconstruction that is inbuilt in the
Gospel announcement itself. Every positive description of the Kingdom is at the
same time a negation of what the figure of the world proposes as normative. In
this sense, the announcement of the Kingdom is inherently deconstructive. But
again, in Christianity, deconstruction is a radical purification, not a
demolition.
Every generation must come to grips with the subversive
element in the Lord’s preaching, both in its form and in its content. We must
become nimble with the way the Lord both proposes and negates in order to
provoke a vision of the Kingdom. The Kingdom is not like the Rich Man’s table;
it is like Lazarus’ vindication. The Kingdom is not like simply fulfilling the
Law; it is like selling all you have and giving to the poor. The Kingdom is not
like Pilate’s judgment seat; it is like Christ scourged and giving taciturn
witness to the truth.
The Lord Jesus, in all of his parables, sayings, gestures and
teachings tries tirelessly to help us glimpse a vision of the Kingdom. The
urgency of this announcement is paramount: Foxes have
lairs birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.
He has not come to build a cozy place of comfort; home is the act of bringing
forth the Kingdom. Let the dead bury their dead,
as if to say that the works that matter are for the sake of life. He does not
come for the sake of making a better status quo
where, in the end death demands our surrender. The Kingdom is not about the
closed orb of the world where filial piety is the best nature can do to tame
the unflinching specter of death. And he who puts his
hand to the plow and looks back is not worthy of the kingdom.
No, in the Kingdom if we see only what we leave behind, we will never glimpse
the presence of the Kingdom that breaks through by means of the love that
endures the Cross and triumphs over death.
And thus the announcement of the Kingdom is inherently
apocalyptic, that is to say it is a break-in that opens up to the final
breakthrough. I ask myself if my speaking about the Parousia is in proportion
to the Lord’s speaking of it. As an
Argentinian preacher I rather enjoy put it:
Forgetfulness of the Parousia—that powerful
engine of all the religions that have ever been—sterilizes and confounds
contemporary religion. Hope remains truncated. Man necessarily looks forward;
and from now on there is nothing for humanity except horrors, which want to
pacify us with the abstract and colorless idea of a “personal heaven, which for
most people is unimaginable.(19)
This privatized comfort zone that passes for
eternity these days is simply the closed-in world projecting a lifeless
self-image into eternity. The Lord transgresses by offering something else, the
apocalyptic communion of the Eternal Banquet. How do we invite to a banquet a
world that would rather eat alone?
VI.
WHY DO YOU SEEK THE LIVING AMONG THE
DEAD?
Pope Benedict, writing about 15 years before his election, identified with
characteristic succinctness an important aspect of the current situation faced
by the Church:
For the great
part of the people, the discontent with the Church has its origin in the fact
that it is an institution like so many others, and as such, it limits my
freedom. [...] The anger against the Church
or the disappointment that it provokes, have a specific character, because from
her is expected, quietly, more than is expected from other mundane
institutions.(20)
There exists a cultural resentment against the Church. The
Church seen as an authority participates in the resentments that authorities,
even good ones, can engender. And as an authority she is perceived as the institution among institutions.
Being an institution is not the problem, though, any more than
meaning in the world is the problem. The problem is construing the institution
or the meaning without reference to its original source. In the case of the
Church, her form derives from the Kingdom of the WORD, just as in apophaticism,
meaning is derivative and relative to the WORD beyond human speaking.
Once again, William Franke helps us.
Transcendence is realized in the world through the infinite
critique and deconstruction of worldly powers. This is a vital truth of the
Christian religion as rediscovered particularly in our time.(21)
Perhaps we have need to understand ourselves better as an
institution that is inherently deconstructive, which is to say, prophetic and
subversive in its critique of the powers of the world. The Church is an
institution but she also participates in the Lord’s refusal to absolutize the
order of the world. For some reason, people do not perceive that aspect of the
Church’s life so clearly. There is something of Chesterton’s The Man who was Thursday in our position. Seen from behind, the figure of Sunday is brutish; seen from the front, angelic.
I take William Franke’s point to be not far from the terrain René
Girard plowed when he argued that the Gospels are an unrelenting deconstruction
of archaic religion and its sacrificial system.
Here indeed is
the true difference between the mythic and the biblical. The mythical persists
as a deception of the phenomena of the scapegoat. The biblical unveils its lie
by revealing the innocence of the victims. If the abyss that separates the
biblical from the mythic is not identified, it is because, under the influence
of an old positivism, it is imagined that, for them to be really different, the
texts should refer to different subject matters. In reality, the mythic and the
biblical differ radically because the biblical breaks for the first time with
the cultural lie par excellence, up until then hidden, of the phenomena of the
scapegoat, upon which human culture was founded.(22)
Nothing brings to our people the subversive element that is
the grace of the Kingdom than the Lord's open accessibility to the poor, the
strange and the outcast. In the Kingdom the world's rejected are the favored.
The sinners, the tax-collectors and the prostitutes will
enter the Kingdom before you. In Girard’s lexicon, these are the
scapegoats. The invited will not come because they no longer sense that it is a
gift to be invited. The poor know, because they know what it is like to be left
out. The lepers know because they live what it means to be shunned. The
publicans know because they realize what it means to be judged unfit for the
first pew.
Unless we are blind to the drama of the Gospel, it is
pervasively clear that Jesus enjoyed the multitudes and they enjoyed him. Women
could yell to him from the crowd: Blessed is the womb
that bore you. And he could shout back: Blessed
indeed is the one who hears the word of God and puts it into practice.
The poor and outcast liked him and he like them. For all of our exegetical sophistication,
sometimes I think we miss this most obvious of things in the Gospel: Jesus did
not just love people, he also liked them, which in this world is perhaps the
more remarkable feat.
Jesus’ love for the poor is God’s embrace of the outcast. And this
love for the forgotten is manifestly the source of his critique of the
established powers that governed their daily lives. Whitened sepulchers
he called them, over which people walk unaware (Lk 11, 44). And in Matthew 23, 15, he says:
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You are
like whitewashed tombs, which appear beautiful on the outside, but inside are
full of dead men's bones and every kind of filth. Even so, on the outside
you appear righteous, but inside you are filled with hypocrisy and evildoing.
He was publicly subversive, not for the sake of gaining
popularity, but for the sake of engaging the greatest enemy of the Kingdom,
namely the leaven of the Pharisees.
As the Argentinian preacher once said:
He personally reserved to himself the preaching of the
commandment “love of God and neighbor”, and left the rest to his disciples. He
came to do battle against all manner of vices, evils and sins; but he
personally battled against pharisaism. He took it on himself.(23)
Have we become deaf to the dramatic conflict that unfolds in
the Lord’s battle with externalized, hypocritical religious observance? Have we
let the Lord’s promise of mercy eclipse the need we have to see his battle with
the closed-in institutions of his time as precisely heaven's brutal critique of
earth's perennial power-game? The pharisaical masquerade is the deadly game: it says some people are
important and others aren't; that some people deserve respect and others don't;
that some lives merit protection, and the rest are commodities. This battle was
for him to the end; and he gave not an inch to the falsities that perpetuated
all that was and is ugly in the world.
And the Argentinian preacher continues:
They contradicted him, of course; they denigrated him,
calumniated him, accused and misconstrued him, persecuted him, spied on him,
and publicly reprimanded him. And then, the serene speaker and magnificent poet
raised himself up to full stature, and they saw that he was fully a man. He
protested their accusations, responded to their reproaches, confounded their
learned with scorching replies. And making the polemic livelier each time,
against those enemies that could do what they willed against him, the Young
Rabbi took on enormous proportion and magnificently faced them body to body,
with curses and whips.(24)
We must ever seek a grace of purification to free us from this
contagion, all the more necessary if we are to be equipped to critique the
false masks that governments and gangs, economies and ideological colonialists
use to justify discarding the voiceless.
VII. BELONGING
TO THE CRUCIFIED
Pope Francis in Evangelii Gaudium:
The key criterion for authenticity which the Apostles
indicated [to Saint Paul] was that he not forget the poor (cf Gal 2,10). This
great criterion, so that the Pauline communities not let themselves be devoured
by the individualist style of life of the pagans, has a great relevance in the
present context, where there is a tendency to develop a new individualist
paganism. The intrinsic beauty of the Gospel cannot always be adequately
manifested by us, but there is a sign that must never be lacking: the option
for the last ones, for those whom society rejects and throws away.(25)
Perhaps we complicate the Kingdom too much. It is as simple as
reaching a hand to give comfort to another, an act of coming out of my splendid
isolation in order to enact a communion of the living, itself a sign of the
Kingdom. This is a work of the Spirit. We miss the most important part of the
beauty of the works of mercy if we focus only on the good that it does for the
one who suffers. For in the condition of the world, the one who resists to
offer mercy suffers also; that one also is poor, perhaps the poorest of all. He
or she suffers the wire-marks of isolation. Even were such a one to be dropped
into heaven, the experience would be hell.
Saint Thomas, on why the Cross was necessary:
In the first place, man knows thereby how much God loves
him, and is thereby stirred to love Him in return, and herein lies the
perfection of human salvation; hence the Apostle says in Romans 5:8: "God
commends His charity towards us; for when as yet we were sinners . . . Christ
died for us"(26)
Salvation consists in the response to the Christ Crucified,
gracefully perceived as the extreme giver of love. Thomas, following Paul,
never disassociates the death of Christ from the work of the Spirit, gift of
the Risen Christ, inciting us to a real sharing in the love there manifested on
the Cross.(27)
Christ did not need to be embraced to save us; but we need to
learn to embrace him to be saved. Salvation is what it has always been, our
response to him, a spontaneous embrace that makes possible our belonging to
him. The embrace becomes an image that truly signifies the reality of the
Kingdom if it shows itself in the realism of the here and now. The efficacious
response in the Spirit to Christ on the Cross is pictured for us in Matthew 25:
31-46: what you did for the least of mine, you did
for me. Judgment for us will be about whether or not at
eternity’s gate one of the world’s forgotten is willing to speak well of us.
The poor, the misfits, the ones nobody would miss if they disappeared, they
already belong to the Crucified. We cannot capture the center unless we go to
that edge where the rejected dwell, where he is. It is beautiful there.
I give the last word to the Mexican poet:
Yes, Father, no one can be further away from God than that
One who was made a curse for us. Yet despite this, underneath that horror, in
the depth of that silence, the Trinitarian union resounds like two notes
separated and melded at the same time, like a pure harmony. That One is the
Logos, the Word through which all was made. When we have learned to listen to
that silence we will grasp it in all its fathomless depth. Only those who persevere
in love can hear it.(28)
+ + +
+df
(1) ll texts cited
that are originally found in Latin or in Spanish were, for purposes of this
lecture, translated by me. Scriptum super Sententiis, Prologus: Flumina
ista intelligo fluxus aeternae processionis, qua filius a patre, et spiritus
sanctus ab utroque, ineffabili modo procedit. Ista flumina olim occulta et
quodammodo confusa erant, tum in similitudinibus creaturarum, tum etiam in
aenigmatibus Scripturarum, ita ut vix aliqui sapientes Trinitatis mysterium
fide tenerent. Venit filius Dei et inclusa flumina quodammodo effudit, nomen
Trinitatis publicando, Matth. ult. 19: docete omnes gentes, baptizantes eos
in nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti. Unde Job 28, 2: profunda
fluviorum scrutatus est et abscondita produxit in lucem.
(2) Summa Theologiae, III, q. 46,
a. 3
(3) Summa Theologiae, I-II, q.
106.
(4) Saint Athanasius, On the
Incarnation, (Christian Classics, 2009, electronic format) no. 30:
Dead men cannot take effective action; their power of influence on others lasts
only till the grave. Deeds and actions that energize others belong only to the
living. Well, then, look at the facts in this case. The Savior is working
mightily among men, every day He is invisibly persuading numbers of people all
over the world, both within and beyond the Greek-speaking world, to accept His
faith and be obedient to His teaching. Can anyone, in face of this, still doubt
that He has risen and lives, or rather that He is Himself the life?
(5) Itinerarium
mentis ad Deum, Prologus, no. 4: Praeventus igitur divina gratia, humilibus
et piis, compunctis et devotis, unctis oleo laetitiae et amatoribus divinae
sapientiae et eius desiderio inflammatis, vacare volentibus ad Deum magnificandum,
admirandum et etiam degustandum, specula- tiones subiectas propono, insinuans,
quod parum aut nihil est speculum exterius propositum, nisi speculum mentis
nostrae tersum fuerit et politum. Exerce igitur te, homo Dei, prius ad stimulum
conscientiae remordentem, antequam oculos eleves ad radios sapientiae in eius
speculis relucentes, ne forte ex ipsa radiorum speculatione in graviorem
incidas foveam tenebrarum.
(6) See, Signposts in a Strange Land,
(Picador USA, 1991): “Science, Language and Literature”.
(7) Ratzinger, “La Belleza” in La Belleza, La
Iglesia (Ediciones Encuentro, 2006, electronic format): Hoy tiene mayor
peso otra objeción: el mensaje de la belleza se pone completamente en duda a
través del poder de la mentira, de la seducción, de la violencia, del mal. ¿Puede
ser auténtica la belleza o al final no es más que una mera ilusión? La
realidad, ¿no es en el fondo malvada? El miedo de que, al final, no sea el
aguijón de lo bello lo que nos conduzca a la verdad, sino que la mentira, lo
que es feo y vulgar constituyan la verdadera «realidad», ha angustiado a los
hombres de todos los tiempos.
(8) William Ospina, "García Márquez, los relatos y
el cine" in EL dibujo de América Latina, (Literatura Random House,
2014, electronic format).
(9) Ratzinger, “La Belleza”: Quien cree en Dios, en el
Dios que se ha manifestado precisamente en los semblantes alterados de Cristo
crucificado como amor «hasta el fin» (Jn 13,1), sabe que la belleza es verdad y
que la verdad es belleza, pero en Cristo sufriente aprende también que la
belleza de la verdad implica ofensa, dolor y, sí, también el oscuro misterio de
la muerte, que sólo se puede encontrar en la aceptación del dolor, y no en su
rechazo.
(10) This is
reflected, I think, in the order of Pope Benedict's encyclicals on the
theological virtues. He began with charity which is proposed as beautiful, then
to hope (proximate to the good), and then faith, presenting itself as the way
of truth. In the end the true and the good are contemplated and lived as
beautiful, but the age calls for the luminosity of charity to lead us back
toward the good and the true. It is in the environs of charity that the Spirit
grants us joy, and so I think it is part of Pope Francis’ aim to extend the
reflection of Pope Benedict on the beauty of the faith that operates in love,
to the joy of this love lived out in the concrete circumstances of human life. Evangelii
Gaudium is replete with references to the beauty and its attractive force,
as is, obviously, Amoris Laetitia. Laudato Si is
particularly directed toward recognizing the beauty of the gift of creation,
and responding to the call of this gift to a kind of care and stewardship that
is rooted in the truth.
(11) Bruno Forte, The
Portal of Beauty, Towards a Theology of Aesthetics, (Eerdmans, 2008,
electronic format), Chapter Two: “The Word of Beauty, Thomas Aquinas”.
(12) Javier Sicilia, La confesión: El diario de
Esteban Martorus (Debolsillo, 2016, electronic format): Sabe qué me maravilla de la encarnación? —continué—, que es
todo lo contrario del mundo moderno: la presencia del infinito en los límites de la carne, y la lucha,
la lucha sin cuartel, contra las tentaciones de las desmesuras del diablo. No
sabe cuánto he
meditado en las tentaciones del desierto. ”‘ Asume el poder’, le decía el diablo; ese poder que da la ilusión de trastocar y dominar todo.
Pero él se mantuvo
en los límites
de su propia carne, en su propia pobreza, en su propia muerte, tan pobre, tan
miserable, tan dura. Nuestra época, sin embargo, bajo el rostro de una enorme
bondad, ha sucumbido a esas tentaciones. ‘Serán como dioses, cambiarán las piedras en panes, dominarán el mundo’… A ella le hemos entregado a
Cristo y no nos damos cuenta.
(13) Evangelii Gaudium, 198: Esta opción —enseñaba
Benedicto XVI—«está implícita en la fe cristológica en aquel Dios que se ha
hecho pobre por nosotros, para enriquecernos con su pobreza»[ 165]. Por eso
quiero una Iglesia pobre para los pobres." The reference to Pope Benedict
is from Discurso en la Sesión Inaugural de la V Conferencia General del
Episcopado Latinoamericano y del Caribe (13 May 2007).
(14) Evangelii Gaudium 264: La mejor motivación
para decidirse a comunicar el Evangelio es contemplarlo con amor, es detenerse
en sus páginas y leerlo con el corazón. Si lo abordamos de esa manera, su
belleza nos asombra, vuelve a cautivarnos una y otra vez. Para eso urge
recobrar un espíritu contemplativo, que nos permita redescubrir cada día que
somos depositarios de un bien que humaniza, que ayuda a llevar una vida nueva.
No hay nada mejor para transmitir a los demás.
(15) See Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 180, art 4.
(16) See Summa
Theologiae IIIa, q. 40, and II-II, q. 182, a. 2.
(17) De veritate 2, i, ad
9m: Quidquid intellectus noster de Deo concipit, est deficiens a
repraesentatione eius; et ideo quid est ipsius Dei semper nobis occultum
remanet; et haec est summa cognitio quam de ipso in statu viae habere possumus,
ut cognoscamus Deum esse supra omne id quod cogitamus de eo.
(18) William Franke, Dante
and the Sense of Transgression, (Bloomsbury, 2013, electronic format), Ch
6.
(19) Leonardo
Castellani, “Nietzsche” in Cómo sobrevivir: El olvido de la Parusía -motor potente de todas las
religiones que han sido- esteriliza y confunde la religión contemporánea. La esperanza queda trunca. El
hombre mira necesariamente hacia adelante; y ahora adelante no hay nada para la
Humanidad sino horrores, los cuales quieren zenzarnos nos con la idea abstracta
y descolorida de un «Cielo personal» para la
mayoría
inimaginable.
(20) Ratzinger, “La Iglesia”: in La Belleza, La
Iglesia (Ediciones Encuentro, 2006, electronic format): Para la mayor parte
de la gente, el descontento frente a la Iglesia tiene su origen en que es una
institución como tantas otras y que, como tal, limita mi libertad. […] La ira
contra la Iglesia o la desilusión que provoca tienen un carácter específico,
porque de ella se espera, calladamente, más de lo que se espera de otras
instituciones mundanas.
(21) William Franke, Dante
and the Sense of Transgression, Ch. 18.
(22) René Girard, El Sacrificio (Ediciones
Encuentro: 2012, electronic format), cap. 3: He Aquí la
verdadera diferencia entre lo mítico y lo bíblico. Lo mítico permanece como el
engaño de los fenómenos de chivo expiatorio. Lo bíblico desvela su mentira al
revelar la inocencia de las víctimas. Si no se identifica el abismo que separa
lo bíblico de lo mítico es porque, bajo el influjo de un viejo positivismo, se
imagina que, para ser realmente diferentes, los textos deben referirse a
asuntos diferentes. En realidad, lo mítico y lo bíblico difieren radicalmente
porque lo bíblico rompe por primera vez con la mentira cultural por excelencia,
hasta entonces oculta, de los fenómenos de chivo expiatorio sobre los cuales se
ha fundado la cultura humana."
(23) Leonardo Castellani, “Sobre tres modos Católicos de
ver la guerra Española” (1937) in Cómo sobrevivir intelectalmente al siglo
XXI (Libros Libres, Juan Manuel de Prada, ed, 2008, electronic format): Él personalmente se reservó la prédica del mandato: «Amor a Dios y al prójimo»,
y dejó los demás
a sus discípulos.
Vino a luchar contra todos los vicios, maldades y pecados; pero Él personalmente luchó contra el
fariseísmo. Lo tomó por su
cuenta.
(24) Leonardo Castellani, “Sobre tres modos”: Lo
contradijeron, por supuesto; lo denigraron, calumniaron, acusaron,
tergiversaron, persiguieron, espiaron, reprendieron. Y entonces el sereno
recitador y magnífico poeta se irguió, y vieron que era todo un hombre. Recusó las
acusaciones, respondió a los reproches, confundió a los sofisticantes con
cinglantes réplicas.
Y haciéndose la polémica más viva cada
vez, con unos enemigos que contra él lo podían todo, se agigantó el joven Rabí magníficamente
hasta el cuerpo a cuerpo, la imprecación y la fusta.
(25) Evangelii Gaudium 195: El criterio clave de
autenticidad que le indicaron fue que no se olvidara de los pobres (cfr. Ga
2,10). Este gran criterio, para que las comunidades paulinas no se dejaran
devorar por el estilo de vida individualista de los paganos, tiene una gran actualidad
en el contexto presente, donde tiende a desarrollarse un nuevo paganismo
individualista. La belleza misma del Evangelio no siempre puede ser
adecuadamente manifestada por nosotros, pero hay un signo que no debe faltar
jamás: la opción por los últimos, por aquellos que la sociedad descarta y
desecha.
(26) Summa Theologiae, III, 46, 3, c.: Primo enim, per hoc homo cognoscit quantum Deus hominem
diligat, et per hoc provocatur ad eum diligendum, in quo perfectio humanae
salutis consistit. Unde apostolus dicit, Rom. V, commendat suam caritatem
Deus in nobis, quoniam, cum inimici essemus, Christus pro nobis mortuus est.
(27) This is described
in great textual detail in Saint Thomas’ commentary on Romans 5.
(28) Javier Sicilia, El díario: Sí, padre, nadie
puede estar más lejos de Dios que aquel que ha sido hecho maldición. Y a pesar
de eso, por debajo de ese horror, en el fondo de ese silencio, la unión
trinitaria resuena como dos notas separadas y fundidas a la vez, como una armonía
pura. Ése es el
Logos, la Palabra por la que todo se hizo. Cuando hayamos aprendido a escuchar
ese silencio lo asiremos en toda su insondable profundidad. Sólo quienes
perseveran en el amor pueden escucharla.
