What Takes Place in the
Act of Faith? [1]
The
Transformation of the Believing Subject into Ipse Christus
“I am referring to the
statement in the Letter to the Galatians in which Saint Paul describes the
distinctive element of Christianity as a personal experience which
revolutionizes everything and at the same time as an objective reality: ‘It is
no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me’(Gal. 2, 20). This affirmation
stands at the end of that brief spiritual autobiography which Paul sketches for
his readers – not in order to boast but, by alluding to the story of his own
relationship with Christ and the Church, to make clear the nature of the gospel
which has been entrusted to him. Beginning on t he outside, this apologia pro vita sua leads him, so to
speak, farther and farther inward. He first presents the external events
surrounding his vocation and the subsequent direction of his life. Finally,
however, this one phrase, like a sudden bolt of lightning, reveals in its light
the inner event which took place in those outer events and which lies at their
very foundation. This inner event is at one and the same time wholly personal
and wholly objective. It is an individual experience in the highest degree, yet
it declares what the essence of Christianity is for everyone. To explain it as
meaning that becoming and being a Christian rest upon conversion would still be
much too weak a way of putting things. This is not to deny that such an
interpretation is indeed aiming in the right direction, but the point is that
conversion in the Pauline sense is something much more radical than, say, the
revision of a few opinions and attitudes. It is a death-event. In other words,
it is an exchange of the old subject for another. The ‘I’ ceases to be an
autonomous subject standing in itself. It is snatched away from itself and
fitted into a new subject. The ‘I’ is not simply submerged, but it must really
release its grip on itself in order then to receive itself anew in and together
with a greater ‘I.’
“In the Letter to the Galatians, the fundamental
intuition about the nature of conversion – that it is the surrender of the old
isolated subjectivity of the ‘I’ in order to find oneself within the unity of a
new Subject, which bursts the limits of the ‘I,’ thus making possible contact
with the ground of all reality – appears again with new emphases in another
context….
“[When considering the offspring of Abraham” (Gal. 3,
16)] he emphasizes quite vigorously that the promise was issued only in the
singular. It is intended, not for a mass of juxtaposed subjects, but for ‘the
offspring of Abraham’ in the singular [my emphasis](Gal. 3, 16). There is only one bearer of the promise, outside of
which is the chaotic world of self-realization where men compete with one
another and desire to compete with God but succeed merely in working right past
their true hope. But in what sense is the promise the object of hope if it
applies only to one individual? The Apostle’s answer runs like this: ‘For as
many of you as have been baptized into Christ have pout on Christ. There is no
longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male
or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then
you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise’ (Gal. 3, 27-29).
It is important to take note of the fact that Paul does not say, for example,
‘you are one thing’ (my emphasis), but rather stresses that ‘you are one
man [person].[2]’
All of the above is
to suggest the depth of the act of faith as a series of acts of the
transformation of the self into the Self of Christ, so as to be able to be
experience and be conscious - as St. Paul and St. Josemaria Escriva, among others – of
becoming and being alter Christus, Ipse Christus. How does this take place? By a lifetime of acts of self-gift in ordinary secular work and family life: the repetition of the life of Nazareth.
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