Belonging to the WORD made Flesh (ACPA Address)

Belonging to the WORD made Flesh

Address to the American Catholic Philosophical Association, 2017

+Daniel E. Flores, STD

Bishop of Brownsville in Texas

I will spare you an overwrought explanation about why I am speaking at this meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. Briefly, I am not a philosopher. My studies were in Saint Thomas, but the bulk of my overly long dissertation aimed at trying to approach Saint Thomas as he primarily understood himself, namely as a Teacher of Sacred Scripture. That I am a bishop does not make me an obvious entry into these corridors either, given the fact that at least since 1277 bishops are not often encouraged to give a push one way or another to philosophical discourses. The thematic for this year’s convocation, “Philosophy, Faith and Modernity” suggests that there is hope that I might have something to say about Faith in relation to both philosophy and modernity. I will let you be the judge of that. I am, though, a friend of Tom Hibbs, or Dr. Hibbs, as we called him even when we were undergraduates at the University of Dallas. He was very good to me in those early days, and we had many a good laugh. He used to urge me to write in shorter sentences. I am still trying to do that. He asked me to come, and because friendship is an enduring habit which gently binds the willing conscience, I am happy to be here. It is not irrelevant to my purpose this evening to open with references to Thomas the Teacher of Sacred Scripture, the dawn of the 14th Century, and to friendship.

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I will start with Thomas, specifically with his commentary on the Letter to the Hebrews. His exposition of that letter is a beautiful expression of Thomas’ exegetical mind. It is also a text that has been somewhat neglected by both philosophers and theologians. This may have to do with the fact that within the commentaries on the Pauline corpus, Thomas’ commentary on Hebrews presents unique textual difficulties; it is transmitted to us through two interpolated reportationes.(1) This is vexing to the reader for reasons I need not go into here. For my purposes this evening I would simply point out that in the first lecture on chapter one, the received text reports Thomas commenting on the sense of the verse: 

In times past, God spoke in partial and various ways to our fathers through the prophets; in these last days, he spoke to us through a son, whom he made heir of all things and through whom he created the universe […]

Thomas uses the occasion to explain that God’s speaking is first of all the eternal generation of the Word. Further, this eternal conceptum is expressed in three ways: First in creation, secondly in the revelations to the angels, the saints and the prophets of what lays hidden in the WORD, and thirdly in the Incarnation itself. Within this three-fold movement of expression that issues from the eternal WORD, only the latter two, revelation and Incarnation, have the character of a word, properly speaking. 

Thomas says explicitly that this is because the latter two are ordered ad manifestationem. The first expression, he says, namely creation, is not ordered to manifestation but rather to being, and thus does not have the character of a word spoken. It is never said in Scripture, Thomas notes, that God speaks by creating creatures, but rather that he is known by creating them: numquam dicitur, quod Deus loquatur creando creaturas, sed quod cognoscatur. Rom. I, 20: invisibilia Dei etc,... (2) In short, creation is an act of the Word, but it is a speaking (Let there be light) producing something that is not quite a word. 

This way of describing reality puts into play the existence of knowers other than God, namely angels and human beings. Because even if Scripture does not ever say God produced a kind of word by creating creatures, it does say that he is known in this creative act. Creation is capable, and in the divine wisdom was meant to convey something beyond itself, to other knowers. We might say that this expressive power of created being, in the long run, is fairly meager, for although it can express beyond itself, it never quite allows us to know the who behind all the whats. 

When moving from expression to word, Thomas describes how God’s speaking ad manifestationem makes known more about the speaker than what his works convey. What characterizes this “more” made known by words is the manifestation of interior intentionality. This is equivalent to saying that God’s speaking to angels and prophets is variously ordered ad cognitionem sapientiae divinae. Thomas thus preserves the word “word” as an intentional revelation of a prior intellectual understanding, by its nature interior to the speaker, to another intellectual being. Thomas, not surprisingly, refers in this context to Augustine’s discussion of the verbum vocis being a manifestation of the prior Verbum cordis. The Incarnation, of course, is the singularly perfect self-expression to us of the Verbum cordis of the Father.

What is implicit in this account, unspoken we could say, is that we human beings are capable of putting words together to describe expressions, that is to say, realities that are not words. This is the primordial grandeur of the human creation. Our first words are words about what is. And when it comes to other persons, our words are about who the what is.

Apparently, when speaking to human beings, the only way available to God is that of adaptation to our understanding. And this involves adaptation to the way signaled by our own prior exercise of the speaking power, which in turn derives from our interaction with created things and other speaking human beings. But to speak of God having to adapt to our way of speaking, while true, is not the most fortuitous way to say this. It is more accurate to describe Thomas’ wisdom here by saying creation was conceived originally in the WORD precisely to serve as the gentle medium of God’s speaking to us about what lies hidden in his heart, the verbum cordis.

Creation is the language God conveniently uses to address us precisely because he made us word capable beings who already interact and put words on creation. The sensible, intelligible and imaginal species granted to the prophets are communication via figuration, that is to say, meanings conveyed by images drawn from our experience of creation and specified to say something about the speaker. Part of what he speaks has to do with the deeper rationes governing creation (ad esse) in the first place. 

Thus, the interpersonal use of wordy images to say something to each other makes it possible for God to specify created knowables to say something about Himself to us. Think of Hosea 11:4:

Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, who took them in my arms; I  drew them with human cords, with bands of love; I fostered them like one who raises an infant to his cheeks; Yet, though I stooped to feed my child, they did not know that I was their healer.

We have to have had some interaction with cords and bands to understand their relation to love, and we have to have some concept of familial fostering to understand that God is saying something about himself beyond what our human interactions can express. Again, in the divine wisdom, creation is the medium through which God can speak a word to us.

Thomas, we should note, reserves a particular phrase for describing the Word Incarnate, viewed precisely as a Word. His coming in the flesh is ordered ad expressam manifestationem. With delightful austerity of words, Thomas says of the WORD: Et se nobis expresse manifestavit. The adverb expresse for Thomas implies a kind of literal directness. Jesus is the historically literal expression of the divine wisdom. Human nature is a created expression of image and likeness, but by the incarnation the human creation is elevated to become a word. And the concrete human nature of Christ becomes the word addressed by God to us. Indeed, the whole of Christ’s living, dying and rising (the acta et passa) is creation becoming the most expressive word from God to us. 

In short, we could say that neither things nor persons could ever tell us how much love sustains the existence of all that is were it not for the WORD made flesh who in time showed us his heart.

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Maritain wrote a remarkable little work entitled An Essay on Christian Philosophy, based on a lecture he gave at Louvain in 1931. I am sure you are familiar with it. In it he forthrightly distinguished between the nature of philosophy as a discipline of the mind, and the conditions of its exercise. As a discipline of the mind, we could say, in the language of Thomas on Hebrews 1,1, that it is the worded consideration of creation’s native expressiveness.

I think Maritain is fundamentally correct when he goes on to say that Christian philosophy is an intelligible concept only if we take into account the historical state of the philosopher thinking. Faith, considered as the state of a thinking person, cannot help but influence the kinds of things we think about. Most basically this is as unpremeditated as deciding where to look when standing in front of a sunrise. There are reasons we look one way or another, though I suspect we are not always aware of those reasons. Directing the gaze of the philosophical beholder is part of what faith does for us.

When writing about the conditions of its exercise, Maritain illustrates how the Christian faith of a philosopher has historically impacted the turn of his or her gaze in philosophical matters. We are all familiar with the principal examples he proposes: the metaphysics of existence and the philosophical inquiry into the meaning of person. Both of these are powerfully at play in the exposition of the letter to the Hebrews I just alluded to. But that is not exactly where I wish to focus right now; rather I want to highlight another aspect of the condition of philosophy. At one point Maritain says the following:

The philosopher’s experience itself has been revitalized by Christianity. He is offered as a datum a world that is the handiwork of the Word, wherein everything bespeaks the Infinite Spirit to finite spirits who know themselves as spirits. What a starting point! Here is, as it were, a fraternal attitude towards things and reality, -- I mean in so far as they are knowable – for which the progress of the human mind is indebted to the Christian Middle Ages. There is every indication that it was this attitude which laid the groundwork for the flowering of the empirical sciences on the one hand and for the expansion of reflective knowledge in which modern times pride themselves on the other. (3)

A fraternal attitude towards things and reality. Here, Maritain refers to a stance before creation. Christianity brings to the believer a conviction that the universe we dwell in is at its deepest root a friendly and intelligible place because it is an expression of the WORD, who for the believer has laid bare the intentions of his heart. 

The difference and distinction between philosophy and theology, human interaction with the world and faith in the word spoken by God to us and proposed by the Church is vital for us. But the seamless character of Thomas’ thoroughly theological account in the commentary on Hebrews is part of its attraction and persuasiveness. It establishes the perimeters of our fraternal and friendly attitude towards things and realities.

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A pronounced feature of the current configuration of modernity is a nearly complete cultural evaporation of this conviction about our fraternal relation to things and reality. Perhaps it is only through the condition of this cultural waning that we realize how much Western culture has taken for granted the Christian sources of our once having felt “at home in the universe”.

The optimist narrative of the Enlightenment has given way to a post-modern cultural narrative of skepticism and isolation: a cultural deconstruction that stares at the abyss and blinks. Indeed, it is cruelly ironic that the attitude which, on Maritain’s telling, early on emboldened both empirical and reflective knowledge has brought us to this place.

A growing literature of contemporary historical study describes the condition of post-modernity as the manifestation of the slow philosophical collapse that unfolded as a result of theological options taken in the 14th century. John Milbank, Brad Gregory, Michael Gillespie, Thomas Pfau and others have contributed to a reconsideration and reconfiguration of the post-modern narrative.(4) In these accounts, the Scotist insistence that the term being be applied to God and creation univocally, and Ockham’s focus on the distinction between the potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata of God variously initiate shifts in intellectual inquiry. These, in turn, affected subsequent political, social and cultural configurations. 

In differing ways these authors identify the decisive turns in late medieval theology that set the gaze, so to speak, of the philosophical discourse in the ages that followed. The more recent historical narratives focus on the philosophical, literary, political and cultural effects of intellectual roads taken and not taken. It is the tale of the move away from what Thomas describes in his commentary on Hebrews 1, 1, as the fitting relation between creation and the God who speaks to us. And, it seems to me, it is the narrative genealogy of what could be described as the opposite of Maritain’s fraternal attitude toward things and reality. In this sense, it is the tale of the maturation of our current cultural condition, appropriately called the aggressively adversarial. 

The balrog never went away, he only slept. But the dwarves dug too deeply in the mines, and he was awakened.

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In the reading from the Gospel of John that I often use at Funeral Masses, after saying to Martha I am the resurrection and the life, the Lord asks her: Do you believe this?” When I say Funeral Masses I sometimes experience what I call a suspended moment. The suspended moment happens especially when the Mass is for an elderly grandmother or grandfather, lifelong communicants, with the 8 or so surviving children present, and the two hundred or so grandchildren and great grandchildren, cousins and grand-nieces and great-nephews. I gaze at the younger ones, the teenagers and young adults. Some are devoutly participating in the Mass, others are present but in some way are looking in from the outside, aloof and perhaps bewildered by the Gospel read and the unfolding liturgy. As I look across the expanse of the Church, all are in sorrow, and many could say with Martha, “Yes Lord, I have come to believe”. Others, I think, cannot say it; they would like to believe, but for some reason, at this juncture in their lives, they cannot. And so in a suspended moment of blankness, I wordlessly say: Lord, you know better than any of us how it is hard for them. 

Grace, of course, can insinuate itself in the most inhospitable circumstances, as rain can give life to the most parched land. I am in no way suggesting our time is particularly adept at frustrating the surprising ends of grace. I am suggesting, though, that the Church as a communion of self-moving agents, needs to understand more deeply how the parching manifests itself, so as to better offer our graced agency for the advancement of the the Kingdom. Is the difficulty today due in part to a sense that the final hope for a reconciled universe in Christ Risen seems “unreal” to so many, especially young people, today, given the way they experience life? And is this perhaps related to being born into a culture of adversarial presumptions? 

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There’s a lot of ugly stuff in the world, I say to Confirmation candidates. I think the young people I speak to, and their parents for that matter, get what I am referring to when I say this. I think they get it more readily than if I were to say there is a lot of bad stuff in the world, or if I were to say there are a lot of lies in the world. It is a deliberate strategy, because I am banking on the fact that the apprehension of the ugly and the beautiful can still have a spontaneous impact on human experience. People trust their gut more when it comes to the experience of beauty and ugliness, 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. I do not think ordinary folks have yet similarly surrendered judgments about the beautiful. 

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. As Pope Benedict put the question: maybe the beautiful is the illusion, and the ugly is what is most real.(5) This is the question I know a great many teenagers in my diocese ask themselves in one form or another. To abandon hope in the triumph of the beautiful over the ugly is another way to describe despair.

In Laudato Sí Pope Francis makes the almost apocalyptic argument that we are witnessing the normalization of the notion that goodness and beauty are synonymous with utility. It's an old human threat, but technical prowess and economic power make the grasping manipulation of ourselves, our neighbor and our surroundings monstrously achievable. This limitless commodification of reality for purposes of provoking limitless consumptive desire in turn stimulates adversarial stances that mark the relations between the wants of wanters and the wanted. The voracious advance of this age of usage makes human ecology increasingly hostile to humanity itself. The first sign of this hostility is the manipulation of the poor. Vulnerability is a synonym for poverty in this situation. For power is identified with the ability to use the less powerful, and to defend oneself from being used by others. The second sign is the devastation of the natural ecology. We are deeply down this road. 

Another sign, not surprisingly, is the cheapening of words. In the world of the young people I meet at funerals or at confirmations, words are mostly experienced as things aimed at them, strategically designed to provoke their consumptive desires, or more sinister still, to seduce them into accepting someone else’s consumptive desire. This aggressiveness holds powerful sway, and suggests that our cultural moment despairs that words, bodiliness, and the whole of material creation, in the end, are anything more than instruments of power. In this environment the Church in her intellectual endeavors and in her moral and social witness must be particularly conscious of how suspiciously people today view the use of words.

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Cultural awareness of this phenomenon addressed by Laudato Sí is at least partially expressed in the enduring popularity, especially with the young, of much dystopian fiction. Sometimes in confirmation homilies I say something like: “the world was not supposed to be like the Hunger Games or like the Game of Thrones". Really good dystopian fiction, somewhat apocalyptic in form, places in plain view what a lot of our people suspect is underneath the mundane order we currently inhabit and participate in: the ugly understood as adversarial dominates. And I think this is one of the reasons young people are attracted to such stories: the levers they suspect operate beneath the superficial niceness of the world they experience run about undisguised.

Of the two, the Game of Thrones is the darker, and I am not sure what to make of its final intentions. I am waiting, like many others, for the final volume. My read of the novels to date suggests the subversion is aimed at any notion that goodness has a recognizable face in this world. Except perhaps for Ned Stark, there are few likable characters. Early on Ned is killed brutally in plain view, as if to tell us at the outset that in these stories do not expect the unexpected arrival of the eagles, nor any other sign within history to prefigure better things to come. Motives and alliances, plots and plans, the use and abuse of power and the exploitation of the desires for power, sex and revenge are so intricately complex that the narrative forces the reader to suspend judgment about any basis for discerning the noble in life. The novels teach the reader that the surest sign someone will die brutally soon is that the author graciously grants them a likable trait. 

The Game of Thrones, whether conceived so or not, is a parable of deconstruction. As a philosophical, literary and cultural phenomenon deconstruction is a movement that sees meaning as a pure invention of the aggressive mind; meaning, thus, is something like a human institution. And like institutions, words must be shown for what they are when deconstructed: at root, words are tools of an aggressive kingdom that keeps its subjects within a controlled dominion. In that sense worded meaning is an extension of the human power-play. This distrust of meaning is extended to the Church in a particularly intense way because she is perceived as the paramount institution that proposes meaning. 

Being an institution whose intellectual tradition is inherently protective of the claims of signification is not the real problem, though. The problem for us is construing the institution and the meanings without relation to their their original source and final end in the WORD eternal. The various versions of deconstruction admit of no such original source that lies behind and above both meanings and institutions. We, in fact, do admit of this source, which is why the fruit of our labor should be hope. Deconstruction, thus, is an apophaticism that cannot conceive of the WORD both before and beyond human wordiness, and that cannot conceive of love as relevant to the question of meaning.(6)

For the Catholic, therefore, the idolatry of worded meaning is a temptation, as is the rendering of Church in her temporal form as an absolute. In the case of the Church, her form derives from the Kingdom of the crucified and risen Christ, just as in apophaticism, meaning is derivative and relative to the WORD beyond human speaking. Temporal meanings and ecclesial forms are necessary for us as vehicles toward that which they both sacramentally signify. Words and the Church house us in a forward moving fashion. Their form will give way when they have served their poor yet noble purpose. 

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Before I let you go in peace this evening, part of our current situation that I would like to address involves the reduction of social relationality. An individual's relations to the world outside are increasingly difficult to account for, apart from our having willed them. As a consequence, our wider social and political culture has no basis to talk about mutual concern and compassion apart from the language of purely willed associations. These willed associations resolve to the isolated individual who tends to view relations suspiciously. 

In our current social predicament, for example, law is conceived as primarily a matter of discerning how to avoid the evils that unrestrained relationality might cause to the good of national sovereignty, community safety and individual rights. This state of affairs is precisely the result of the dropping out of our political consciousness a sense of legally expressed positive norms that govern the prior good of human relationality. Law as aimed at promoting the good ordering of relations, so that goods can be achieved by individuals and families within a community, seems to have passed out of our perception of social order. This makes it extremely difficult, for example, to discuss legal reforms that address the human goods of immigrants and immigrant communities. Moral claims based on the responsibilities that flow from our common humanity are unintelligible to large parts of the population.

The eclipse of human relationality as a fundamental given of politics and law is the legacy of a post-Kantian search for an expression of law that serves as a kind of individualist imperative derived a priori and applied universally. The tragedy of our age is that the a priori universal that seems to govern our moral/political discourse is that of individual autonomy and the radical freedom of the will. Limitation of freedom by secondary laws is permitted only in so far as the freedom is perceived to cause injury to another. At present the “perception of injury” that society permits to be legally prohibited capriciously excludes vast swaths of the population, from the unborn to the comatose patent, with the poor and the immigrant standing temporally somewhere in between.

The adversarial is at work in the world precisely as a competitive human paradigm: Resources are limited and so the world belongs to those who know how to attain and use them to construct for themselves a modicum of security. Thus Darwin has become popularized into a kind of eschatological frame. Survival of the fittest is the destiny of man. Theological neglect of Christological eschatology has left us in a void that philosophical eschatologies, based on faulty accounts of human relationality, have filled in the popular mind. 

The stark question that hovers unnoticed over moral and political discourse is this: Is the human a conflicted animal in search of communion, or a conflicted animal poised to fight the final conflict so that the stronger individuals may survive. I would note that the last writings of Rene Girard tended to frame the apocalyptic question this way.(7) Yet, whether or not one accepts the basic premises of Girard’s theory of mimetic violence, the setting into relief of the importance of competing eschatologies is of great value. For the simple truth is that as human beings, the future we believe in decisively informs the present we work for.

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Thomas Pfau’s book Minding the Modern is both a joy to read and deeply instructive, but of all the elements in that volume that impressed themselves on my memory, the most striking is a comment he makes late in the book, almost in passing. While discussing Emmanuel Levinas he says the following:

Levinas rejects modernity’s leading paradigm of knowledge as “thematization and conceptualization.” For in taking possession of the object within a categorical framework we invariably account for it in terms of what it is not (as per Spinoza’s omnis determinatio est negatio), thereby conceiving knowledge as something altogether “impersonal.” The result, in Levinas strident phrase, is a “philosophy of injustice” (TI, 46). Plato (as indeed Coleridge himself) might have simply called it a philosophy that no longer offers a conceptual or imaginative space for love—which might itself be the most salient characteristic of philosophical modernity.(8)

Pfau describes the one thing modern philosophical project has left unattended: “a philosophy that no longer offers a conceptual or imaginative space for love.”  I would like to hold this text in mind while further invoking something else Thomas says in the first lecture on Hebrews 1,1:

What is said, in many and varied ways, etc., shows forth that all ordered multiplicity should be ordered to One. Thus it says that granted the mode is multiple, nevertheless all is ordered to this newest thing.(9)

This “newest thing” (Istud novissimum)to which Thomas refers is the coming of the Word made flesh. 

There is a kind of “belonging to the Word” which establishes our inherently relational condition as creatures. This belonging inclines us toward a fraternal attitude towards things and reality. A Catholic philosopher, it seems to me, must find sources in the faith of the Church to breath deeply this air. This means that his or her life must follow the dynamic of grace and dwell in this world as one belonging to the WORD made flesh, the expresse manifestavit se of the Incarnation. Christ the Lord seeks to permeate this natural yet wounded relationality with the breath of Trinitarian love. No dystopian deconstruction can eclipse this outpouring, unless we, unsure of our agency in grace, let it.

There is a kind of evangelization of the mind that we need to pursue. It takes as its starting point the fact of charity unleashed upon the world by the WORD made flesh. This is the principal condition affecting the work of a Catholic philosopher, a Catholic theologian, a Catholic novelist. The WORD, who in the end shows Himself as the WORD of love, seeks to work Himself, as love, into the fabric of being. It is this love, the basis of friendship with God, with one another, and with creation that has its own attractive power. 

There is an Augustinian text from the Tractates on John that Jean-Luc Marion is fond of citing : Ista attractio, ipsa est revelatio, Saint Augustine says: This attraction is itself the revelation.(10) We forget how extraordinary the original Christian claim of a loving God inserting himself into a broken but at root friendly universe was to the pagans. The adversarial character of our surroundings was never far from a great deal of ancient mythology. And it is not far from a great deal of contemporary mythology. The announcement that proposed dispelling the darkness while accounting for it was, and is deeply attractive. The truth itself is attractive, but its attractiveness in every age must be manifested against the backdrop of a kind of wounded resistance: The philosophical task is to let the faith gently guide our gaze at creation, so that its expressiveness might be properly worded. That wording is our noblest service of love both to God and to the world he seeks to befriend.

Thank you for your kind attention.

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Notes:

1) The Marietti printed editions, and the Busa electronic versions that convey this text to us most readily, make note of this feature of the textual tradition.

2) Super Epistolam B. Pauli ad Hebraeos lectura a capite I ad caput VI instructa a Remigio Nanni. Textum Taurini 1953 editum ac automato translatum a Roberto Busa SJ in taenias magneticas denuo recognovit Enrique Alarcón atque instruxit (corresponding to Marietti no. 15): […] Prima autem expressio, scilicet in creatione, non ordinatur ad manifestationem, sed ad esse, Sap. I creavit Deus ut essent omnia. Cum ergo expressio non habeat rationem locutionis nisi prout ordinatur ad manifestationem, manifestum est, quod illa expressio non potest dici locutio, et ideo numquam dicitur, quod Deus loquatur creando creaturas, sed quod cognoscatur. Rom. I, 20: invisibilia Dei per ea quae facta sunt, intellecta conspiciuntur. 

3) Jacques Maritain, An Essay on Christian Philosophy (Translated by Edward H. Flannery, Philosophical Library, 1955), 23.

 4) See John Milbank (Beyond Secular Order: Wiley and Sons, 2013), Charles Taylor (A Secular Age: Belknap Press, Harvard, 2007), Brad S. Gregory (The Unintended Reformation, Belknap, 2012), Michael Allen Gillespie (The Theological Origins of Modernity, University of Chicago Press, 2008), Thomas Pfau (Minding the Modern, Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions and Responsible Knowledge, Notre Dame, 2013)

5) 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.

6) See William Franke, Dante and the Sense of Transgression (Bloomsbury, 2013).

7) See esp. Rene Girard, Battling to the End, Michigan State, 2010, translated by Mary Baker.

8) Thomas Pfau Minding the Modern, Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions and Responsible Knowledge (Notre Dame, 2013), Ch 20.

9) Marietti no. 14: […] Quod enim dixerat, multifarie multisque modis, etc., ostendit quia omnis multitudo ordinata, ad unum debet referri. Ideo dicit, quod licet sit modus multiplex, tamen totum ordinatum est ad istud novissimum.

10) Opere de Sant’ Agostino, commento al Vangelo e alla prima epistola Di San Giovanni (Nuova Biblioteca Agostiniana, Citta’ Nuova Editrice, XXIV/1, 1968/1985.) Tractatus 26, 5. Pg 600. See Jean-Luc Marion, Givenness and Revelation (Oxford, 2016), Ch 2. 

Remarks at Joint Catholic-Lutheran observance of the anniversary of the Reformation

The following are Homily notations I used during the joint Catholic-Lutheran prayer service in observance of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Notations like these are used by me to guide the discourse, though I occasionally elaborate extemporaneously on particular points. 

The service was held at St John the Baptist Catholic Church in San Juan, Texas on October 29, 2017; it had both a penitential and a hopeful character. Obviously, Catholics and Lutherans look on the Reformation through different eyes. This does not, however, preclude our speaking to each other about it in amicable ways. That is part of the way forward.

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The vine is Christ. 

The Baptismal creed we will commonly recite shortly witnesses to our common faith in the saving work of God. By baptism into this faith we are inserted into Christ, the firstborn of all creation. We have been grafted onto the Vine by the grace of faith, as St Paul so clearly teaches. 

1. The primacy of Grace

Years of ecumenical dialogue have clarified some misconceptions. Among them, I think, our mutual acknowledgment that we both profess the primacy of grace ranks as the most significant. The primacy of grace means that we profess that we are saved by the free gift of Christ, the WORD whose coming into the world is the primordial gift. Our response to him in faith is also a grace.

The Catholic Church has reason to lament that this primacy of grace has not always been transparently evident in all places and times in our 2000 year history; this lack was partially responsible for the divisions that the years since the Reformation have brought.

Catholics hold that the Church was promised the grace that she would not err in matters of faith and morals; but this does not mean that she will always and in every place be transparent to the faith she professes. In this sense, for Catholics to recall the Reformation is to hear a call for continual examination of conscience. 

Yet, it is also true that how we Catholics and Lutherans live this primacy of grace differs in significant ways. The practice of the Catholic Church is not always the expression of a shortfall; in certain matters it is a manifestation of the gift that is the faith of the Church.

Catholic practice, for example, with regard to the Eucharistic Mystery differs from that of the Lutheran confession. These differences are reflections of a difference in what we believe about what Christ has given us, and they are too important for all of us to seek facile, nominal solutions.

It is mutual respect and not recrimination that bids us, purified, to recognize the differences that remain, and how these differences at times touch on deep matters. We still have a way to go before full reconciliation. Better to say this at the outset.

Indeed, we both share responsibility for the fact that after 500 years of argument, the culture we live in tends to equate faith with strongly held opinion. Our Western culture largely thinks that there is no sure way to support a claim on behalf of truth by either Catholics or Protestants. 

Yet, faith for Luther or Zwingli or Calvin, as much as for Pope Leo X or for Erasmus or for Cardinal Cajetan, was not simply a matter of opinion. It is a graced adherence to Christ. It is more certain than anything known by the natural sciences. What we believe mattered to them as it should to us. One of the things the current moment calls for is a common witness to the importance of truth, and its proper expression. We do this by embracing the grace that will sustain the hard work ahead. We still have a ways to go. 

The grace of this time is present in the fact that we move forward with realism, amicably, in a recognition of what we profess in common.

2. The faith we live and pray together.

Our common and deepest tradition is rooted in faith as adherence to a person, namely Christ Jesus, in whom, by the Spirit, the Father has revealed his love. We believe that God speaks through the Word that is his Son.

Our common faith flows from the love shown by Christ on the Cross:  it is not that we have first loved God, but rather, as St John says, it is that “God has first loved us”. In this we believe. We must not lose sight of the importance of witnessing together to this truth in the midst of the world today. For we are in a time when it is not simply that many young people do not believe in God, but, perhaps more radically, they are losing faith in love. 

We have lost much in the last 500 years. And the culture bears witness that we lost it together. Part of what has been lost in the West is the conviction that grace and truth are words that mean something; they are not place-holders in a nominalist lexicon. They are realities that flow powerfully to us through the Word Incarnate and by his Spirit.

This is part of the witness our age needs: Grace is the gift of Christ Jesus himself; his unmerited coming changes the life of anyone who by faith accepts his coming as the gift of the Father. We have much to offer by giving this common witness.

During these days my mind has turned spontaneously to two witnesses who are signs for us as we move forward: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and St Maximilian Kolbe. One a Lutheran Pastor, the other a Franciscan evangelizer. Both Bonhoeffer and Maximilian Kolbe gave witness in the darkest hours of World War II. Bonhoeffer would recognize no party or führer as absolute ruler. In his own way he witnessed to Christ the King. He was killed in 1945. Kolbe died in Auschwitz, some short time before Bonhoeffer, having given his life, in a supreme act of charity, so as to die in place of another condemned man. 

They both testify to something we hardly knew but which we have always known. That our common fidelity to Christ is yet a powerful sign and carries with it a merciful grace. In this windswept house, where the thought of God is banished and human dignity forgotten both Bonhoeffer and Kolbe made their profession of faith.

In this our time, their common witness to Christ was inseparable from their unshakable conviction that the assaults on human dignity represented by Auschwitz and the other human atrocities unleashed at that time was an assault on the Christ himself: “What you did for the least of mine, you did for me..”

The Ecumenism of blood is not about us, it is, rather, about Christ and the world he desires to save from itself. Without him, we are lost.

The Sacrifice of Christ founds the Church. Bonhoeffer and Kolbe show us that our common sacrifice for Christ will guide us to a fuller reconciliation. Their sacrifice points forward to a reconciled horizon, which when it comes, will be a work of grace because it will be a fruit of the Sacrifice of Christ.

3. The eschatological horizon of the baptismal creed:

The Apostles Creed we will shortly profess concludes, as do all the ancient creedal expressions, with a view toward eschatological finality, the hope of the Church. 

We believe in a world that will be reconciled by grace offered and accepted, and we acknowledge that we have a duty to reconcile and be reconciled in this grace. Not simply for our own sakes, but really for the sake of Christ.

But, like a mother and daughter who have not spoken in a while, the way back to each other is also a way forward together. It involves acknowledging our common source of life in grace and our call in grace to witness to his presence in even the darkest moments and places our world constructs.

There is still a ways to go, but how we must go should be clearer to us. Bonhoeffer and Kolbe show us that the path to reconciliation lies within the eschatological horizon of our common witness to Christ. The more we try to be transparent to the God who gives all for the sake of the world, the more clear will be our path forward.

Fidelity to Christ in this way of common and eschatological witness opens a way that is unclear beyond our immediate next steps: but we pray “Lead kindly light.” When full reconciliation comes it will be by way of grace, by way of the person of our Christ Jesus our Lord.

May the truth that is Christ in person, come and set us free.

Amen.

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Red Mass, Archdiocese of St Louis: The Advocate Will Remind You

Red Mass, Archdiocese of St Louis, Oct 1, 2017

 

John 14: 15-16, 23-26:

Jesus said to his disciples:  "If you love me, you will keep my commandments.

And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always. [...]”

“Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him.

Whoever does not love me does not keep my words; yet the word you hear is not mine but that of the Father who sent me.

"I have told you this while I am with you. The Advocate, the holy Spirit that the Father will send in my name - he will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you."

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I am grateful to the Archbishop for the invitation to preach this year's Red Mass in the Archdiocese of St Louis. I am from the Diocese of Brownsville, Texas, at the border with Mexico, where the Rio Grande River pours its life into the Gulf of Mexico. As I am sure they are here, our people are generous and kind. Most everyone in my Diocese, to one degree or another, speaks or understands both English and Spanish.

It is good to be here, because it witnesses to the fact that every place is different yet not so much as we might think. And though we might speak different languages at times, we rejoice to be able to pursue a common language of justice.

The human drama of a people who desire what is just and right for our children and for those who come after us is lived with great intensity in my diocese, as I am sure it is here.

And as believers we pray for our judges and lawyers and all who work in our justice system, that they be given light and good judgment. The Red Mass here, as in Brownsville, is an expression of that prayer. To pray for the judiciary is to pray for the good of the nation and a renewal of justice.

1.  The question of Justice does not arise in the abstract. One probably first thinks of it after an experience of having been wronged.

Long before Plato, in the Odyssey, Homer described Odysseus faced with the injustice of Penelope's suitors. He built his epic narrative around restoring the right order of the human relation in that place. We cannot really speak of Justice without speaking of relation and right order.

Often the sense of injustice is pre-reflective, that is to say. It strikes the gut before the mind has time to think about why. But sooner or later a judgment is needed, an act of the mind that reflects on the "Justice of the matter". Because experience shows that our gut is not infallible, and in many instances must itself be judged and purified by reason.

From Aristotle to Shakespeare, the humane tradition has seen the intimate relation between how we judge the things outside ourselves and the relational order inside ourselves: passion and reason, will and intellect, appetite and right judgment. Odysseus had to in some sense be just in order to judge justly.

For a Christian believer, relation and right order are not only things to be observed outside ourselves but are also realities within ourselves.  And so the first reason that brings us together this morning: a believer prays for an interior rectitude, a good ordering of mind and heart. And a believer involved with the legal profession, with argument and judgment, prays with particular fervor, knowing that his or her judgments can affect for good or ill the lives of many.

2. The ancients knew there are a couple of major problems afflicting human judgment: First, ignorance of the human good and secondly, self interest.

Odysseus' family life and possessions were threatened by the unruly suitors, and thus a human good was at stake. Homer and history seem to judge that Odysseus had reason on his side. There is self-interest in protecting one's own human good, ultimately related to the principle of self-preservation. For preservation of family and property are understandable goods only in relation self-preservation, the first principle of the natural law.

A 16 year old who flees drug gangs in Honduras knows this principle of the natural law, as does a premature child struggling to breathe. Both witness to us that it is good to live; we know this even before we know how to articulate it as a principle.

But the self-interest of the suitors shows a side of self-interest that is at times unbridled. They knew what they wanted, and they wanted it intensely. Homer and the philosophers after him saw this as a great threat to justice. For not everything that a man says he needs or deserves can stand as an absolute. Circumstances must be weighed in the light of principles in relation.

And thus the arduous task of those who serve the court system. You must use your wits, as St Thomas More described, to weigh principles and pursue just human relations. You must be passionate about justice even as you use your mind and will to help enact it.

3. The short answer to the question "why have the Red Mass?" is that we still struggle to discern rightly the true human good, and we still need to be on guard against the corrupting influence of unbridled self-interest.

We can be sure that many people wonder nowadays why lawyers and judges and indeed so many public servants come to Mass on a given day to pray for a good judicial Year. Some may shy away from such a gathering, thinking this a medieval trapping that the Church unfairly and surreptitiously uses to influence civil servants, who after all, should not let personal religious views interfere with justice and judgment.

Maybe some are afraid that if given the opportunity, the Church would put Crucifixes in all the court rooms and impose dogmatic teaching on litigants. Such fears have a long history here and elsewhere, and this pulpit is not the place to argue a case for Catholic participation in public life.

But what if a judge or lawyer has a crucifix in their office? Or around their neck? Is this not also a sign that religion is trying to creep into civil matters by a back window? Well, the question itself is a sign of our times.

In an age that seeks to privatize religion, the more pressing concern is that believers themselves doubt the place of their faith in their lives as public servants. The greatest danger in disputes about the place of religion in public life results when we as practicing Christians and Catholics are confused about how our faith appropriately impacts our life of public service.

4. What if every human being were viewed in the courts as worthy of a hearing and worthy of as good a judgment as is humanly possible? A judgment that respects their voice and their concerns? One that hears the opposing argument as an appeal to reason and not as a reflection of the status of the side arguing? No one would object to that.

But what if every judge and lawyer had uppermost in their mind the truth that he or she too will be judged on the fairness of their judgments? That the eternal God is both the source of goodness and justice and expects us to see beyond today into eternal consequences. Does this hinder the civil proceeding? In no way. On the contrary, it would seem to put it on a more solid ground, and in the believer, at least, provide a good incentive to frequent examination of conscience. 

The Red Mass is so named because of the Red Vestment that is used in Masses of the Holy Spirit. And today Jesus calls him by the name Advocate, one who pleads in favor of another. We ask him to advocate for us, for we are all too aware of our weakness. We do not see the human good as clearly as we ought, nor are we always conscious of how our likes and dislikes can camouflage as right reason.

5. And what if every judge and lawyer thought that in the most powerless, voiceless individual that seeks a hearing, one perhaps marred with spit and blood, we have before us one with whom God in the WORD made flesh consciously and personally identified? Would Justice be disturbed? In no way, rather it would give judgment a guide against the prejudice of the powerful and would give to the poor and voiceless reason to hope: "What you do to the least of mine you do to me."

The Advocate's mission is to remind us of all Jesus told us. His telling is more than his words, it encompasses also, as St Thomas Aquinas teaches, the whole mystery of who he is and why he came, what he did and what he suffered.

It is this reminding that we need also from the Advocate. There are many in this world who are invisible, powerless, and subject to manipulation. With just such as these the Lord identified, for he was judged in a foreign court by an administrator who could barely hide his disdain.

Some of our people do not even have standing in our courts: The comatose, the elderly, the homeless, the multitudes whose documentary status is as complex as the laws we have written to describe them, and the little ones, minutes before or minutes after birth.

We need to be reminded that the Advocate pleads on their behalf, and face the sobering truth that these will be the ones who judge us on judgment day.

6. None of these things I mention cause injury to the pursuit of justice. They do call us to keep good custody of ourselves and our consciences. Our nation is better for it if we heed the truths that put our interior life in good order.

You must work to interpret and apply the law, and we pray for you. But as citizens we must all try to make the laws we write more just.

There is a potential conflict, however, in that the Gospel account of the human good, elaborated by 2000 years of Christian preaching, living and teaching, is at times at severe variance with what the popular will or what the legislated order of law currently commands.

We cannot ignore this, for the variance will intensify in our foreseeable future. Most of you will not be called upon by providence to judge cases that place your conscience in dire dilemma. But some of you might, if not now, in some future.

There is a reason St Thomas More, family man, advisor to the king, jurist, and ultimately martyr, is the patron of the legal professions. A good conscience that knows it will be judged by a just God cannot lightly acquiesce to what expediency dictates. Fidelity may require a sacrifice.

May God spare you an hour of trial as severe as Thomas More faced, but if He does not, may He grant you the grace to bear faithful witness to the truth that the justice of God is no threat to men, and the suffering of Christ is at work in the world even now.

7. And so we offer the Mass to ask for the grace of the Advocate, the Spirit that makes us more humane in our judgments, "For the law was made for man, not man for the law."

To be a Catholic of good conscience does not separate us from those who seek justice in our court system, it draws us closer to them. It does not prejudice our judgment it frees it to serve. "You shall know the truth and it will set you free."

May the Father who judges hearts keep you mindful of eternity as cases come before you.

 

The Derision of Christ

Jan Gossaert, 1527

May the Son who took our humanity in its most wretched state remind you of the dignity of every one who comes before you

And may the Spirit enlighten your mind and strengthen your soul to give faithful witness to the truth that the justice of God is not our enemy but rather, most assuredly, our best Advocate.

Amen.

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