Sunday, September 13, 2015

"You Are The Christ" and "Laudato Si"

The theological  epistemology of today’s gospel  Mk. 8, 27-35) – clarified by Lk 9, 18 that shows Simon praying with Jesus to the Father - + the understanding that Christ is the cosmic center of creation and holding it all together, gives a strong clue that  the only way to know  the sensible, material world as it really is undistorted, comes from prayer which enables one  to say: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Mt. 16, 16). That is, how could I truly and adequately know and understand a physical sensible world of which Christ is the center holding it all together without  knowing Christ. I can know Christ only by prayer, and therefore I can know and understand the world only. The clue is to go out of self praying in order to know the material world as an extension of the humanity of Christ, i.e. subject, and not merely as object. I believe this to be the burden of “Laudto Si.”
                Robert Barron offers the epistemology of Newman and his Illative sense as the way in which people really come to know reality, i.e. “not by knowledge of premises  and inferences upon them – this is not to live. It is very well a matter of liberal curiosity and of philosophy to analyze our modes of thought: but let this come second, and when there is leisure for it, and then our examinations will in many ways even be subservient to action. But if we commence with scientific  knowledge and argumentative proof, or lay any great stress upon it as the basis of personal Christianity, or attempt to make man moral and religious by libraries and museums, let us in consistency take chemists for our cooks, and mineralogists for masons.”[1]  I believe the burden of Laudato Si  is to  bring the Church and humanity back to a mystical perspective of the world as created and sustained by a Person



[1] J.H. Newman, “The Grammar of Assent,” UNDP

No comments: