Tuesday, September 29, 2009

David Brooks: "The Next Culture War"


David Brooks penned an op-ed piece (nyt Tuesday September 29, 2009 A 39) entitled “The Next Culture War.” The burden of his remarks is the projection that “(b)y 2019, the federal debt will amount to an amazing 83 percent of G.D.P. (before counting the costs of health reform and everything else). By that year, interest payments alone on the federal debt will cost $803 billion.” In the light of this, he argues that “the goal will be to make the U.S. again a producer economy, not a consumer economy. It will champion a return to financial self restraint, large and small.

“It will have to take on what you might call the lobbyist ethos – the righteous conviction held by everybody from AARP to the agribusinesses that their groups are entitled to every possible appropriation, regardless of the larger public cost. It will have to take on the self-indulgent popular demand for low taxes and high spending.”

I would suggest that, once again, virtue as economic restraint is not enough. The dynamic explosion of productivity in this country came from the search for God in ordinary life. Supply that need, and you will have restored enterprise to the common weal. Pace appearances, enlightened self interest by the unencumbered self has not been the engine of creativity in this country.

September 29 - Ss. Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, Archangels


Opus Dei is “a little bit of the Church” that has the mission to form persons into being “other Christs” in the secular world. The task of that formation was placed under the patronage of the three archangels.

“It was early in October 1932 [the 6th]. I was on a retreat in the monastery of the discalced Carmelites in Segovia, in complete isolation as was my custom, without anyone to accompany me or direct a meditation. I spent long periods of prayer in the chapel where the remains of St. John of the Cross lie buried. There in that chapel, I had the interior motion to invoke for the first time the three archangels and the three apostles whose intercession all the members of the Word beseech each day in our Preces. From that moment on they have been the patrons of the three works that make up Opus Dei.”[1]

Since the entire corporate existence of Opus Dei was to provide formation to people, “(a)ll the future activities of Opus Dei would fit into one of these three categories, which Escriva would call the Work of St. Raphael, the Work of St. Michael, and the Word of St. Gabriel.”[2]

Also, since Escriva experienced that his raison d’etre consisted in forming people in their irreducible heterogeneity – particularly as laity and ministerial priests - by engendering them into the experience of becoming “other Christ,” he was called “Father” from the very beginnings. Pedro Rodriguez commented: “what truly defines Opus Dei’s prelate is his ‘fatherhood,’ his role as a pastor who is a father to all the prelature’s faithful. That is why in Opus Dei he is usually called ‘Father.’” [3] Rodriguez goes on to point out that “its pastor’s role, precisely owing to the Church’s sacramental structure, had to be radically that of a father, who would be a kind of ‘living sign’ of the love God the Father has for us in the Son.[4] The meaning of “sacramental structure” is the ontological difference that obtains in the faithful because of the sacraments of Baptism and Order. There is an ontological relationality in Baptism that is an ordering of self-gift to the world, while in the ministerial priest, the ordering of self-gift is in service to the lay faithful, and not to the world. Equal as priests, their dissimilarity as lay faithful and ministers is in the order of the difference between male and female. As “a little bit of the Church,” Opus Dei is an unum that can be achieved only by the radical self-gift on both sides. This could only take place by the engendering in love and affirmation by the “Father.”

Angels:

All of this is principally in the invisible hands of the Angels. John Henry Newman is a supreme interpreter here:

Sermon 29. The Powers of Nature

"Who maketh His Angels spirits, his ministers a flaming fire." Psalm civ. 4.

{358} [Note 1] ON today's Festival it well becomes us to direct our minds to the thought of those Blessed Servants of God, who have never tasted of sin; who are among us, though unseen, ever serving God joyfully on earth as well as in heaven; who minister, through their Maker's condescending will, to the redeemed in Christ, the heirs of salvation.

There have been ages of the world, in which men have thought too much of Angels, and paid them excessive honour; honoured them so perversely as to forget the supreme worship due to Almighty God. This is the sin of a dark age. But the sin of what is called an educated age, such as our own, is just the reverse: to account slightly of them, or not at all; to ascribe all we see around us, not to their agency, but to certain assumed laws of nature. This, I say, is likely to be our {359} sin, in proportion as we are initiated into the learning of this world;—and this is the danger of many (so called) philosophical pursuits, now in fashion, and recommended zealously to the notice of large portions of the community, hitherto strangers to them,—chemistry, geology, and the like; the danger, that is, of resting in things seen, and forgetting unseen things, and our ignorance about them.

I will attempt to say what I mean more at length. The text informs us that Almighty God makes His Angels spirits or winds, and His Ministers a flame of fire. Let us consider what is implied in this.

1. What a number of beautiful and wonderful objects does Nature present on every side of us! and how little we know concerning them! In some indeed we see symptoms of intelligence, and we get to form some idea of what they are. For instance, about brute animals we know little, but still we see they have sense, and we understand that their bodily form which meets the eye is but the index, the outside token of something we do not see. Much more in the case of men: we see them move, speak, and act, and we know that all we see takes place in consequence of their will, because they have a spirit within them, though we do not see it. But why do rivers flow? Why does rain fall? Why does the sun warm us? And the wind, why does it blow? Here our natural reason is at fault; we know, I say, that it is the spirit in man and in beast that makes man and beast move, but reason tells us of no spirit abiding in what is commonly called the natural world, to make it perform its ordinary duties. Of course, it is God's {360} will which sustains it all; so does God's will enable us to move also, yet this does not hinder, but, in one sense we may be truly said to move ourselves: but how do the wind and water, earth and fire, move? Now here Scripture interposes, and seems to tell us, that all this wonderful harmony is the work of Angels. Those events which we ascribe to chance as the weather, or to nature as the seasons, are duties done to that God who maketh His Angels to be winds, and His Ministers a flame of fire. For example, it was an Angel which gave to the pool at Bethesda its medicinal quality; and there is no reason why we should doubt that other health-springs in this and other countries are made such by a like unseen ministry. The fires on Mount Sinai, the thunders and lightnings, were the work of Angels; and in the Apocalypse we read of the Angels restraining the four winds. Works of vengeance are likewise attributed to them. The fiery lava of the volcanoes, which (as it appears) was the cause of Sodom and Gomorrah's ruin, was caused by the two Angels who rescued Lot. The hosts of Sennacherib were destroyed by an Angel, by means (it is supposed) of a suffocating wind. The pestilence in Israel when David numbered the people, was the work of an Angel. The earthquake at the resurrection was the work of an Angel. And in the Apocalypse the earth is smitten in various ways by Angels of vengeance [Note 2].

Thus, as far as the Scripture communications go, we {361} learn that the course of Nature, which is so wonderful, so beautiful, and so fearful, is effected by the ministry of those unseen beings. Nature is not inanimate; its daily toil is intelligent; its works are duties. Accordingly, the Psalmist says, "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth His handy-work." "O Lord, Thy word endureth for ever in heaven. Thy truth also remaineth from one generation to another; Thou hast laid the foundation of the earth, and it abideth. They continue this day according to Thine ordinance, for all things serve Thee." [Ps. xix. 1; cxix. 89-91.]

I do not pretend to say, that we are told in Scripture what Matter is; but I affirm, that as our souls move our bodies, be our bodies what they may, so there are Spiritual Intelligences which move those wonderful and vast portions of the natural world which seem to be inanimate; and as the gestures, speech, and expressive countenances of our friends around us enable us to hold intercourse with them, so in the motions of universal Nature, in the interchange of day and night, summer and winter, wind and storm, fulfilling His word, we are reminded of the blessed and dutiful Angels. Well then, on this day's Festival, may we sing the hymn of those Three Holy Children whom Nebuchadnezzar cast into the fiery furnace. The Angels were bid to change the nature of the flame, and make it harmless to them; and they in turn called on all the creatures of God, on the Angels especially, to glorify Him. Though many hundreds of years have passed since that time, and the world now vainly thinks it knows more than it did, and {362} that it has found the real causes of the things it sees, still may we say, with grateful and simple hearts, "O all ye works of the Lord, O ye Angels of the Lord, O ye sun and moon, stars of heaven, showers and dew, winds of God, light and darkness, mountains and hills, green things upon the earth, bless ye the Lord, praise Him, and magnify Him for ever." Thus, whenever we look abroad, we are reminded of those most gracious and holy Beings, the servants of the Holiest, who deign to minister to the heirs of salvation. Every breath of air and ray of light and heat, every beautiful prospect, is, as it were, the skirts of their garments, the waving of the robes of those whose faces see God in heaven. And I put it to any one, whether it is not as philosophical, and as full of intellectual enjoyment, to refer the movements of the natural world to them, as to attempt to explain them by certain theories of science; useful as these theories certainly are for particular purposes, and capable (in subordination to that higher view) of a religious application.

2. And thus I am led to another use of the doctrine under consideration. While it raises the mind, and gives it a matter of thought, it is also profitable as a humbling doctrine, as indeed I have already shown. Vain man would be wise, and he curiously examines the works of Nature, as if they were lifeless and senseless; as if he alone had intelligence, and they were base inert matter, however curiously contrived at the first. So he goes on, tracing the order of things, seeking for Causes in that order, giving names to the wonders he meets with, and thinking he understands what he has {363} given a name to. At length he forms a theory, and recommends it in writing, and calls himself a philosopher. Now all these theories of science, which I speak of, are useful, as classifying, and so assisting us to recollect the works and ways of God and of His ministering Angels. And again, they are ever most useful, in enabling us to apply the course of His providence, and the ordinances of His will, to the benefit of man. Thus we are enabled to enjoy God's gifts; and let us thank Him for the knowledge which enables us to do so, and honour those who are His instruments in communicating it. But if such a one proceeds to imagine that, because he knows something of this world's wonderful order, he therefore knows how things really go on, if he treats the miracles of Nature (so to call them) as mere mechanical processes, continuing their course by themselves,—as works of man's contriving (a clock, for instance) are set in motion, and go on, as it were, of themselves,—if in consequence he is, what may be called, irreverent in his conduct towards Nature, thinking (if I may so speak) that it does not hear him, and see how he is bearing himself towards it; and if, moreover, he conceives that the Order of Nature, which he partially discerns, will stand in the place of the God who made it, and that all things continue and move on, not by His will and power, and the agency of the thousands and ten thousands of His unseen Servants, but by fixed laws, self-caused and self-sustained, what a poor weak worm and miserable sinner he becomes! Yet such, I fear, is the condition of many men nowadays, who talk loudly, and appear to themselves and others to {364} be oracles of science, and, as far as the detail of facts goes, do know much more about the operations of Nature than any of us.

Now let us consider what the real state of the case is. Supposing the inquirer I have been describing, when examining a flower, or a herb, or a pebble, or a ray of light, which he treats as something so beneath him in the scale of existence, suddenly discovered that he was in the presence of some powerful being who was hidden behind the visible things he was inspecting, who, though concealing his wise hand, was giving them their beauty, grace, and perfection, as being God's instrument for the purpose, nay whose robe and ornaments those wondrous objects were, which he was so eager to analyse, what would be his thoughts? Should we but accidentally show a rudeness of manner towards our fellow-man, tread on the hem of his garment, or brush roughly against him, are we not vexed, not as if we had hurt him, but from the fear we may have been disrespectful? David had watched the awful pestilence three days, doubtless not with curious eyes, but with indescribable terror and remorse; but when at length he "lifted up his eyes and saw the Angel of the Lord" (who caused the pestilence) "stand between the earth and the heaven, having a drawn sword in his hand stretched out over Jerusalem, then David and the elders, who were clothed in sackcloth, fell upon their faces." [1 Chron. xxi. 16.] The mysterious, irresistible pestilence became still more fearful when the cause was known;—and what is true of the terrible, is true on the other hand of the pleasant {365} and attractive operations of Nature. When then we walk abroad, and "meditate in the field at the even-tide," how much has every herb and flower in it to surprise and overwhelm us! For, even did we know as much about them as the wisest of men, yet there are those around us, though unseen, to whom our greatest knowledge is as ignorance; and, when we converse on subjects of Nature scientifically, repeating the names of plants and earths, and describing their properties, we should do so religiously, as in the hearing of the great Servants of God, with the sort of diffidence which we always feel when speaking before the learned and wise of our own mortal race, as poor beginners in intellectual knowledge, as well as in moral attainments.

Now I can conceive persons saying all this is fanciful; but if it appears so, it is only because we are not accustomed to such thoughts. Surely we are not told in Scripture about the Angels for nothing, but for practical purposes; nor can I conceive a use of our knowledge more practical than to make it connect the sight of this world with the thought of another. Nor one more consolatory; for surely it is a great comfort to reflect that, wherever we go, we have those about us, who are ministering to all the heirs of salvation, though we see them not. Nor one more easily to be understood and felt by all men; for we know that at one time the doctrine of Angels was received even too readily. And if any one would argue hence against it as dangerous, let him recollect the great principle of our Church, that the abuse of a thing does not supersede the use of it; and let hint explain, if he can, St. Paul's exhorting Timothy {366} not only as "before God and Christ," but before "the elect Angels" also. Hence, in the Communion Service, our Church teaches us to join our praises with that of "Angels and Archangels, and all the Company of heaven;" and the early Christians even hoped that they waited on the Church's seasons of worship, and glorified God with her. Nor are these thoughts without their direct influence on our faith in God and His Son; for the more we can enlarge our view of the next world, the better. When we survey Almighty God surrounded by His Holy Angels, His thousand thousands of ministering Spirits, and ten thousand times ten thousand standing before Him, the idea of His awful Majesty rises before us more powerfully and impressively. We begin to see how little we are, how altogether mean and worthless in ourselves, and how high He is, and fearful. The very lowest of His Angels is indefinitely above us in this our present state; how high then must be the Lord of Angels! The very Seraphim hide their faces before His glory, while they praise Him; how shamefaced then should sinners be, when they come into His presence!

Lastly, it is a motive to our exertions in doing the will of God, to think that, if we attain to heaven, we shall become the fellows of the blessed Angels. Indeed, what do we know of the courts of heaven, but as peopled by them? and therefore doubtless they are revealed to us, that we may have something to fix our thoughts on, when we look heavenwards. Heaven indeed is the palace of Almighty God, and of Him doubtless we must think in the first place; and again {367} of His Son our Saviour, who died for us, and who is manifested in the Gospels, in order that we may have something definite to look forward to: for the same cause, surely, the Angels also are revealed to us, that heaven may be as little as possible an unknown place in our imaginations.

Let us then entertain such thoughts as these of the Angels of God; and while we try to think of them worthily, let us beware lest we make the contemplation of them a mere feeling, and a sort of luxury of the imagination. This world is to be a world of practice and labour; God reveals to us glimpses of the Third Heaven for our comfort; but if we indulge in these as the end of our present being, not trying day by day to purify ourselves for the future enjoyment of the fulness of them, they become but a snare of our enemy. The Services of religion, day by day, obedience to God in our calling and in ordinary matters, endeavours to imitate our Saviour Christ in word and deed, constant prayer to Him, and dependence on Him, these are the due preparation for receiving and profiting by His revelations; whereas many a man can write and talk beautifully about them, who is not at all better or nearer heaven for all his excellent words.


Notes

1. The Feast of St. Michael and All Angels.
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2. John v. 4. Exod. xix. 16-18. Gal. iii. 19. Acts vii. 53. Rev. vii. 1. Gen. xix. 13. 2 Kings xix. 35. 2 Sam. xxiv. 15-17. Matt. xxviii. 2. Rev. viii., ix., xvi.
Return to text




[1] John Coverdale, “Uncommon Faith” Scepter (002) 116.

[2] Ibid.

[3] P. Rodriguez, “The Place of Opus Dei in the Church” in Opus Dei in the Church Scepter (1994) 56.

[4] Ibid

Christological Eschatology as Context for Benedict's Three Encyclicals

The three encyclicals of Benedict XVI, “Deus Caritas Est,” “Spe Salvi” and “Caritas in Veritate” are situated in an epistemological drought of the experience and consciousness of God. That being so, the hope of “development” into becoming “another Christ” has morphed into an itch for “progress.” Instead of an “attitude” of relation to other, there is absorption with self, aided and abetted by information technology. Bored and alienated because of imprisonment in the self, one agitates for distraction by sound and screen in the enforced solipsism of self-sufficiency.

Benedict XVI sets the intellectual provenance of this state of affairs to be the work of Joachim of Fiore in the 13th century. He remarked: “I have tried to show in my professorial dissertation that this was what was believed concerning the theology of history throughout the first millennium of Christianity. The division of history into ‘before Christ’ and ‘after Christ,’ into redeemed and unredeemed time that seems to us nowadays the essential expression of the Christian consciousness of history, for we think we cannot formulate any concept of the redemption, thus of the keystone of Christianity, without it – this division of history into periods is in fact simply the result of the great change in thinking about the theology of history that occurred in the thirteenth century. This was prompted by the writings of Joachim of Fiore: his teaching about the three epochs was indeed rejected, but the understanding of the Christ-event as a point in time separating different periods within history was adopted from him. The change in the overall understanding of everything to do with Christianity that results from this has to be seen as one of the most significant turnarounds in the history of Christian consciousness. A reappraisal of this will constitute an urgent task for theological study in our time.”[1]

It is principally Bonaventure who explicitly rejects Joachim’s ‘third age’ of the Spirit because it destroys the central position of Christ. Ratzinger wrote in his thesis: “If is justified to say that for Joachim, Christ is merely one point of division among others, it is no less justified to say that for Bonaventure, Christ is the ‘axis of the world history,’ the center of time. Even though Bonaventure accepts and affirms the parallel structure of the ages which had been rejected by Thomas [Aquinas], he is led in this by a completely different tendency than that which led Joachim to his structuring of time. If Joachim was above all concerned with bringing out the movement of the second age to the third, Bonaventure’s purpose is to show on the basis of the parallel between the two ages, that Christ is the true center and the turning point of history. Christ is the center of all. This is the basic concept of Bonaventure’s historical schema, and it involves a decisive rejection of Joachim.”[2]

Ratzinger understands the Parousia (the “advent” – “presence” of Christ) to be “already-not yet.” We cannot see Him because we have lost the likeness to Him whereby we experience Him in ourselves, and therefore, “know” Him. Not experiencing Him in ourselves we cannot re-cognize Him with our external senses. We are scandalized by His “absence” and we lose hope. We are alone, thrown back on ourselves, and alienated in the world. The three encyclicals are calling us to conversion so that we begin to experience Him as Love, hope in His presence and power, and exercise that presence and power as self-gift in the world.

The Most Concrete Proposal: to live the spirit of becoming “another Christ” in the exercise of intramundane, ordinary, professional work as communicated to the Founder of Opus Dei. And since the Kingdom of God is not “up there” or “at the end of history” but a “Person with the fact and name of Jesus of Nazareth”[3] who is present in the world now – and working -, not only in the Eucharist or grace, but in all the persons who make the gift of themselves to God and the others in the service of ordinary work and rest, the Kingdom of God is present “already” – “not yet.” “Not yet” in the sense that, although Christ has come and is present, the number of those who are to become “other Christs” is not yet complete. The Kingdom is not a structure, certainly not an ideology, not even the Church, but the continuous conversion of persons into Christ by beginning again and again to make the gift of self in work and ordinary affairs.

Such action is the subjective experience that creates a change in “attitude” and consciousness of everything. It is the response of a call to holiness in the world. And of course, the rub is here. What is at stake in the pope’s mind is the universal call to holiness. Who today would agree that these world crises are crises of saints? Yet, that is exactly what is up at the present moment. The relationality of the human person in the image of the Triune God, turning work into an experience of gift and gratuitousness, “a new trajectory of thinking” (#53) which will be the “presence of God” is the deep work of a radical transformation into Christ in the middle of the world. Fundamentally, this is what’s up.



[1] J. Ratzinger, “What It Means to Be a Christian,” Ignatius (2006) ftn. 35-36

[2] J. Ratzinger, “The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure,” Franciscan Herald Press (1989) 118.

[3] John Paul II, “Redemptoris Missio” #18.

Monday, September 28, 2009

The Working Person as Solution to Global Development and Economy


“Being More” By Giving Self


Overall Eschatological Context of the Encyclical: The Experience of God (or Lack Thereof).

The three encyclicals of Benedict XVI, “Deus Caritas Est,” “Spe Salvi” and “Caritas in Veritate” are his attempts to recover the experience of Christ in history that has been lost since the 13th century. It actually began to corrupt at the split of the Church into East and West. He wrote: “I have tried to show in my professorial dissertation that this was what was believed concerning the theology of history throughout the first millennium of Christianity. The division of history into ‘before Christ’ and ‘after Christ,’ into redeemed and unredeemed time that seems to us nowadays the essential expression of the Christian consciousness of history, for we think we cannot formulate any concept of the redemption, thus of the keystone of Christianity, without it – this division of history into periods is in fact simply the result of the great change in thinking about the theology of history that occurred in the thirteenth century. This was prompted by the writings of Joachim of Fiore: his teaching about the three epochs was indeed rejected, but the understanding of the Christ-event as a point in time separating different periods within history was adopted from him. The change in the overall understanding of everything to do with Christianity that results from this has to be seen as one of the most significant turnarounds in the history of Christian consciousness. A reappraisal of this will constitute an urgent task for theological study in our time.”[1]



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The State of the Question ( from Ratzinger’s “Eschatology” – CUA (1988).

Current State of the Eschatology Question: Eschatology has come to dominate the entire theological landscape. Its first move to prominence came with Albert Schweitzer’s rediscovery - after the rationalist Enlightenment had dismissed it as the brainchild of eccentrics - that Jesus’ preaching “was soaked through with eschatology.” This new eschatological awareness has been subsumed under the rubric of “Hope.” The driving force of it today is the “emerging crisis of European civilization.” Since the turn of the century, human minds have been increasingly aware of a decline and fall, like the premonition of some imminent earthquake in world history” (3). World War I undermined the dominant Liberalism of the late 19th century. Then followed Existentialism (a philosophy of preparedness and decision… offering itself as a reasonable interpretation of the real meaning of Jesus’ message about the End.”

Then came Marxism, a greater realism, resembling Old Testament messianism, now gong anti-theistic. Barth separated faith from religion and gave us a choice between theology of the future or a theology of God. Hence, there is an eschatology of the future that says noting about death, judgment, heaven, hell or purgatory. But Ratzinger says that “these omitted topics belong intrinsically to what is specific in the Christian view of the age-to-come and its presence here and new” (94).

Historical Presuppositions of the Present Situation:

There was a past apostasy. Eschatology was not about hope but about death, judgment, heaven and hell. But the early Christians invoked the “maranatha” and the mediaevals invoked the “Dies Irae.” The first was joyful hope; the second was fear of judgment. Ratzinger indicates that, in the 19th and 20th centuries, “Christianity [had] been reduced to the level of the individual person(…) to the detriment of what was once the core of both eschatology and the Christian message itself: the confident, corporate hope for the imminent salvation of all the world” (5). The point is that eschatology was reduced to the motto “Save you soul” and not all of us together.

Also, the body was part of prayer in the early Church (6), as it was with the Jews. When the Jew prayed, he turned toward the Jerusalem temple. “By contrast, early Christians prayed turned towards the East, the rising sun, which is the symbol of the risen Christ who rose from death’s night” (6). It is also the sign of the returning Christ who thus establishes the Kingdom of God in this world.[1] Note that the Kingdom of God is already in this world: “Heaven is not a place but a Person, the Person of him in whom God and man are forever and inseparably one. And we go to heaven and enter into heaven to the extent that we go to Jesus Christ and enter into him. In this senses, ‘ascension into heaven’ can be something that takes place in our everyday lives.”[2] Hence, faith in the resurrection and hope in the Parousia are intimately related. “The two are one in the figure of the Lord who has already returned as the risen One [who] continues to return in the Eucharist, and so remains he who is to come, the hope of the world.

What does this mean? “Christian hope is not some news item about tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. We might put it this way: hope is now personalized. Its focus is not space and time, the question of ‘Where?’ and ‘When?’ but relationship with Christ’s person and longing for him to come close” (8).

Ratzinger asks: “However did we arrive at that tedious and tedium-laden Christianity which we moderns observe and, indeed, know from our own experience?”(8)


The answer
: We became progressively rationalized after the split of East and West in 1054. We progressively lost the experience of Christ as God-man in history, and with this loss of consciousness of God, the theologian Joachim of Fiore prevailed by solidifying it in the theory of the three ages: Christ is not present now. He is in the past, and will come again at the Second Coming. The Parousia is not now, but will occur at the end. Hence, we are alone, alienated, bored, religiously superficial, and, unable to endure the lack of authentic development as persons, we seek distraction in the technology of the media. The collapse of global economy is one symptom of the failure of development of the human person into Christ Himself.

Schema of eschatology from Middle Ages to early modern period and then to ourselves:

Joachim of Fiore (c. 1130-1202):

- I Age of the Father: Old Testament

- II Age of the Son: The Church

- III Age of the Holy Spirit: The Church living in spontaneous fulfillment of the Sermon on the Mount through the universally efficacious activity of the Holy Spirit. Chiliasm: the expectation, founded on the Johannine Apocalypse, of a thousand-year reign of Christ on earth before the end of the world and the final judgment. Joachim revived this and it became a program of practical action in that one could work toward the awaited third age by founding suitable religious Orders. It was taken up by a segment of the Franciscan Order, but underwent increasing secularization until eventually it was turned into political utopia. The notion of utopia has flourished (not least in Marxism) since the 19th century and today has taken the form of “progress.”

The “well-being” – blessedness - which faith promises to the whole person has been diluted into the “salvation of the soul.” “‘Well-being’ had once meant a totality: the well-being of the world through which I too am happy. But now the soul’s salvation is but a fragment, and happiness another, and soon these two parts will be seen as natural enemies. The future salvation of my soul is the adversary of my present happiness, the Christian promise an impairment and menace to the earthly present. This opposition is the source of the resentment one can sense among many theologians against the doctrine of the last things. The traditional eschatology is felt to be suspicious of human happiness which it would fain whittle down by appeal to the specter of uncertain tomorrow” (13-14).[3]



[1] I hasten to add that the understanding of “The Kingdom” as the very Person of Christ, and all who become “other Christs” in this world are the way in which the Kingdom becomes a reality. Notice, the Kingdom is a phenomenon of “persons.” It is not a “thing” or “Christendom.” It is not a clericalized structure or state but a secular presence of the “Ipse Christus” whose intramundane Body we are.

[2] J. Ratzinger, “Dogma and Preaching,” Our Sunday Visitor, (1985) 62-62. See also “Eschatology:” “Heaven… must first and foremost be determined christologically. It is not an extra-historical place into which one goes. Heaven’s existence depends upon the fact that Jesus Christ, as God, is man, and makes space for human existence in the existence of God himself. One is in heaven when, and to the degree, that one is in Christ. It is by being with Christ that we find the true location of our existence as human beings in God. Heaven is thus primarily a personal reality, and one that remains forever shaped by its historical origin in the paschal mystery of death and resurrection. From this Christological center, all the other elements which belong to the tradition’s concept of heaven may be inferred. And, in pride of place, from this Christological foundation there follows a theological affirmation: the glorified Christ stands in a continuous posture of self-giving to his Father. Indeed, he is that self-giving….” (234).

[3] Joseph Ratzinger, “Eschatology” CUA (1988) 1-15.


* * * * * * * * * * * *


It is principally Bonaventure who explicitly rejects Joachim’s ‘third age’ of the Spirit because it destroys the central position of Christ. Ratzinger wrote in his thesis: “If is justified to say that for Joachim, Christ is merely one point of division among others, it is no less justified to say that for Bonaventure, Christ is the ‘axis of the world history,’ the center of time. Even though Bonaventure accepts and affirms the parallel structure of the ages which had been rejected by Thomas [Aquinas], he is led in this by a completely different tendency than that which led Joachim to his structuring of time. If Joachim was above all concerned with bringing out the movement of the second age to the third, Bonaventure’s purpose is to show on the basis of the parallel between the two ages, that Christ is the true center and the turning point of history. Christ is the center of all. This is the basic concept of Bonaventure’s historical schema, and it involves a decisive rejection of Joachim.”[2]

Ratzinger understands the Parousia (the “advent” – “presence” of Christ) to be “already-not yet.” We cannot see Him because we have lost the likeness to Him whereby we experience Him in ourselves, and therefore, “know” Him. Not experiencing Him in ourselves we cannot re-cognize Him with our external senses. We are scandalized by His “absence” and we lose hope. We are alone, thrown back on ourselves, and alienated in the world. The three encyclicals are calling us to conversion so that we begin to experience Him as Love, hope in His presence and power, and exercise that presence and power as self-gift in the world.

The Most Concrete Proposal: to seek sanctification in ordinary work. To become Christ in the world by the exercise of self-gift in ordinary work, and by so doing instantiate the Kingdom of God in the world.

I. The Supreme Statement of Christian Anthropology: The Trinitarian and Christological meaning of the human person:

“There is a certain parallel between the union existing among the divine persons and the union of the sons of God in truth and love. It follows, then, that

if man is the only earthly creature that God has willed for itself, man fully finds himself only by the sincere gift of himself” (Gaudium et Spes #24).[3]

II. The topic of “Caritas in Veritate” is “integral human development in charity and truth.” That is, the topic is the recovery of Christian anthropology before the split between East and West.

Benedict XVI takes the theme from the message of Paul VI’s “Populorum Progressio” (1967) which had taken the theme from Gaudium et Spes #24 (above). Benedict says as much: “The publication of Populorum Progressio occurred immediately after the conclusion of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, and in its opening paragraphs it clearly indicates its close connection with the Council.”[4] In this regard, Benedict remarked “I too wish to recall here the importance of the Second Vatican Council for Paul VI’s Encyclical and for the whole of the subsequent social Magisterium of the Popes.”[5] And so, we would expect that the Trinitarian and Christological anthropology of GS 24 would be grounding what Benedict means by “integral development.” Benedict goes on to pre-empt Weigel’s accusation of a “hermeneutic of rupture” by saying that “The link between Populorum Progressio and the Second Vatican Council does not mean that Paul VI’s social magisterium marked a break with that of previous Popes, because the Council constitutes a deeper exploration of this magisterium within the continuity of the Church’s life.”[6]

Let’s not be afraid to point out that in Vatican II, there was a paradigm shift from the Aristotelian-Thomistic anthropology – “individual substance of a rational nature,” that is Greco-Roman philosophy derived “from below” by sensible observation – to the “(s)ocial doctrine…built on the foundation handed on by the Apostles to the Fathers of the Church, and then received and further explored by the great Christian doctors.” He then asserts: “This doctrine points definitively to the New Man, to the ‘last Adam [who] became a life-giving spirit’ (1 Cor. 15, 45, the principle of the charity that ‘never ends’ (1 Cor. 13, 8).”

Development for Paul VI, following Vatican II, means to “do more, know more and have more in order to be more.”[7] Benedict asks “what does it mean ‘to be more?” He answers: “Christ” and quotes Gaudium et Spes #22 (below): “Christ, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself.” More fully: “it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear. For Adam, the first man, was a type of him who was to come, Christ the Lord, Christ the new Adam… fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling… Human nature, by the very fact that it as assumed, not absorbed, in him, has been raised in us also to a dignity beyond compare” (Gaudium et Spes #22).

To “be more” is to be Christ. But then, who is Christ? For this, let’s go to the 5th Chapter of the Encyclical. Here he announces that “One of the deepest forms of poverty a person an experience is isolation” which produces “alienation:” “All of humanity is alienated when too much trust is placed in merely human projects, ideologies and false utopias.” At this point, he paraphrases Gaudium et Spes 24: “As a spiritual being, the human creature is defined through interpersonal relations. The more authentically he or she lives these relations, the more his or her own personal identity matures. It is not by isolation that man establishes his worth, but by placing himself in relation with others and with God. Hence these relations take on fundamental importance. The same holds true for peoples as well. A metaphysical understanding of the relations between persons is therefore of great benefit for their development. In this regard, reason finds inspiration and direction in Christian revelation, according to which the human community does not absorb the individual, annihilating his autonomy, as happens in the various forms of totalitarianism, but rather values him all the more because the relation between individual and community is a relation between one totality and another.”[8]

To the question, who is Christ? The answer must be: He who is the pure Relation to the Father. Benedict explicitly ties the idea of development with being relation, because such is Christ, and such is man as imaging the divine Person of the Son. “The Trinity is absolute unity insofar as the three divine Persons are pure relationality. The reciprocal transparency among the divine Persons is total and the bond between each of them complete, since they constitute a unique and absolute unity.”[9]

A New Trajectory of Thinking

And then, Benedict explicitly demands “a new trajectory of thinking” for the meaning of man (anthropology). He announces: “God desires to incorporate us into this reality of communion as well: ‘That they may be one even as we are one’ (Jn. 17, 22).

He is asking for Gaudium et Spes #24, and he is asking for a new metaphysics of relationality. Instead of the Aristotelian-Thomistic understanding of the prime meaning of being as “substance-nature (to-be-in-self-and –not-in other) that has come down to us in the last millennium, he is a asking for “metaphysical interpretation of the ‘humanum’ in which relationality is an essential element.”[10] In a word, he is asking for “man to find himself by the sincere gift of himself.”

This formulation of the meaning of man taken from above rather than from below is the defining meaning of Christian sexual ethics as well as the entire corpus of the social doctrine of the Church. In the social doctrine, two principles spring from Gaudium et Spes 24: solidarity and subsidiarity.

Work: The Prime Relational Act of the Created Image of Son.

As created (and sinful: turned back into self), the creature is not its own act, but only capable of it. Therefore, there must be a dynamic of 1) Receptivity: being loved (grace) and therefore receiving an “I”; 2) Self-Determination: As “I,” mastering self in order to get possession of self; 3) Self-Gift: governing self to be gift of obedience.

Magisterium: “Laborem Exercens”

  • “Only man is capable of work…work bears a particular mark of man and of humanity, the mark of a person operating within a community of persons. And this mark decides its interior characteristics; in a sense it constitutes its very nature” (“Introduction”).
  • “human work is a key, probably the essential key, to the whole social question…of ‘making life more human’[11][“Not only does he (Christ) arouse in them a desire for the world to come but he quickens, purifies, and strengthens the generous aspirations of mankind to make life more human and conquer the earth for this purpose.”[12]].

I “become more” human the more person I become. But I become person by increasing relation as giftedness, and this because I have been created in the image of the Son who is pure relation to the Father. I achieve this only by exercising the agency of being a self by having been loved by God (grace) and others (primarily parents). Having received my “I,” I am empowered to exercise agency to master myself, own myself and make the gift of myself. The more this is done, the “more” gift I am, and ultimately, the more Christ I am. Jesus Christ reveals the divinity of His relationality to the Father by His Self-gift to death on the Cross.

The Metaphysical Anthropology: Self-determination

Wojtyla described this anthropology: “When I am directed by an act of will toward a particular value, I myself not only determine this directing, but through it I simultaneously determine myself as well. The concept of self-determination involves more than just the concept of efficacy: I am not only the efficient cause of my acts, but through them I am also in some sense the ‘creator of myself.’ Action accompanies becoming; moreover, action is organically linked to becoming.”[13]

And then as John Paul II, he wrote magisterially, “Man has to subdue the earth and dominate it, because as the ‘image of God’ he is a person, that is to say, a subjective being capable of acting in a planned and rational way, capable of deciding about himself and with a tendency to self-realization. As a person, man is therefore the subject of work. As a person he works, he performs various actions belonging to the work process: independently of their objective content, these actions must all served to realize [actualize] his humanity, to fulfill the calling to be a person that is his by reason of his very humanity.”[14]


HolyMass (Cross): Prototype of Work


Since the supreme “Work” of Christ which was self-gift to death on the Cross in obedience to the Father, the Mass is also the supreme “Work” as the center and root of the work day, empowering the baptized person to heroically sanctify the ordinary and the small turning it into gift, and therefore, prayer. The Mass sums up the entire hidden life of work in Nazareth. It is the supreme act of human work. It empowers me to turn the ordinary, quotidian, humdrum boilerplate into the gold of divinization.

By it, I become another Christ. Escriva says: “Understand this well: there is something holy, something divine hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it is up to each one of you to discover it.”[15] As “another Christ,” I become “co-redeemer” of the present moment. In fact, being “another Christ,” I become the Kingdom of God in the world – now.

Consider that the audible locutions Escriva received (August 7, 1931; October 16, 1931) to be “another Christ” involved instantiating the Kingdom of God in the world – now.



[1] J. Ratzinger, “What It Means to Be a Christian,” Ignatius (2006) ftn. 35-36

[2] J. Ratzinger, “The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure,” Franciscan Herald Press (1989) 118.

[3] John Paul II commented in 1986: “As the year 2000 since the birth of Christ draws near, it is a question of ensuring that an ever greater number of people ‘may fully find themselves… through a sincere gift of self,’ according to the expression of the Council [above] quoted. Through the action of the Spirit-Paraclete, may there be accomplished in our world a process of true growth in humanity, in both individual and community life” (Dominum et vivificantem [1986] #59.)

[4] “Caritas in Veritate” #10.

[5] Ibid

[6] Ibid 12.

[7] Populorum Progressio 6: loc. Cit., 260.

[8] Caritas in Veritate #53.

[9]

[10] Caritas in Charitate #55.

[11] Gaudium et Spes 38.

[12] Ibid

[13] Karol Wojtyla, “The Personal Structure of Self-Determination,” Person and Community, Lang (1993) 191.

[14] John Paul II, “Laborem Exercens,” #6.

[15] St. Josemaria Escriva, “Passionately Loving the World.”