Bonaventure’s reduction of the arts to divine wisdom, with special emphasis on the seven days of creation and Hugh of S. Victor’s triad of divine attributes.

©TLOU, 2011

Admirable as it may be, man’s capacity to manufacture and produce useful objects even of the highest quality, such as the machines of our modern technological civilization, is not to be directly associated with human personhood. Perhaps on this point the contrast we have been making here between man as a person, on the one hand, and man as an individual thinking or acting agent, on the other hand, becomes more evident. The ‘creation’ of a machine requires man’s individualization both in terms of his seizing, controlling and dominating reality, that is, turning beings into things, and also in terms of combination of human individuals in a collective effort, that is, of turning himself into a thing, an instrument and a means to an end. Hence, it is only natural that the more collectivistic a society, that is, the more it sacrifices personhood, the better the products it achieves. But when we say that man is capable of creating by being a person, we imply something entirely different, and that has to do with a double possibility which this kind of creation opens up. On the other hand, ‘things’ or the world around acquire a ‘presence’ as an integral and relevant part of the totality of existence, and, on the other hand, man himself becomes ‘present’ as a unique and unrepeatable hypostasis of being and not as an impersonal number in a combined structure. Un other words, in this way of understanding creating, the movement is from thinghood to personhood and not the other way round. That is, for example, what happens int he case of a work of real art as contrasted to a machine. When we look at a painting or listen to music we have in front of us ‘the beginning of a world’, a ‘presence’ in which ‘things’ and substances (cloth, oil, etc.) or qualities (shape, colour, etc.) or sounds becomes part of a personal presence. And this is entirely the achievement of personhood, a distinctly unique capacity of man, which, unlike other technological achievements, is not threatened by the emerging intelligent beings of computer science. The term ‘creativity’ is significantly applied to art par excellence, though we seldom appreciate the real implications of this for theology and anthropology.

John D. Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, 216

This poem came out of studying The Cappadocians, three men and one woman who were 4th centery Eastern, Greek speaking xtians who had a huge part in the formation of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. They were affirming the goodness of Creation in the midst of all the muck and dung that we seem to endlessly make out of our lives and world. This has often been a great struggle for me. So there are Hebrew and Greek words referring to various human, social realities. Nietzsche has breathed in my ear in times of agnostic, nihilistic struggle in the past so he shows up dueling with Macrina. I wrote it during a rain storm outside the GF Java Cafe in my hometown of Jamestown, TN.

Like Mercy

“Sweet Rain…like God’s own Mercy…”

What exactly is the connection, the connection between a world of harmonic order and a world of suffering, decay…death?

The rain pours upon the earth, invading but belonging in every pore, awakening parched roots. Dry and dead now leap for joy, springing to the sky

Water pours upon the earth, dancing and splattering…splattering/dancing…dattering splancing upon the streets, rolling over pavement, falling over steps in the ever-moving niagra of spinning cosmos

Water…one of those fundamental elements…rolls over and into the pores of earth and…and thunder rolls, lightening strikes

Harmony or discord?

Walls fall, lifeless bodies collapse down the collapsing hills of collapsing houses of collapsing earth. Lifeless bodies of deer and cattle and dogs and cats and Adam and…and it would’ve been a damn good time to be a fish

Soul rolls over and into the pores of Adam, ish and isha, man and woman, mother and son, son and sister and father and neighbor and polis and oikos and agora and oikonomia and…creation…and out of the Alpha Rhythms of participatory love bodies are enraptured, so babies are born in the midst of heroic words like “till death do us part.” Homes are built, gardens are planted. Games are played while laughter is shared. Songs are sung and enraptured bodies move to the rhythms of the dance

Pointing and jumping, laughing I scream “look! Look! LOOK! Harmonic order!”

Soul rolls over and into the pores of Adam and all the ways and webs of the knitting together of Adam and…and reputations fail, economies collapse as bodies collapse as families collapse as marriages crumble as children collapse as cities collapse and as lies are told lust takes over, giving forth torture and greed, hunger and rape, famine and coldness

All of a sudden that madman runing through the streets that night with the silly mustache shouting” God is dead and we have killed him” seems not so far from of right. Adam seems to care much more about power games than love games…and people are torn and lives collapse and…and it still would’ve been a damn good time to be a fish!

Harmony or discord? What is the connection?

This fish feels the jaws surround and the darkness elbow out the light

And in the darkness I hear Macrina sing, pointing, shouting, jumping up and down, “look! Look! LOOK! Harmonic order envelopes chaos. There is not beginning, no arche, without an end, a telos.” And her voice echoes

“Get up Lazarus”

“Shall these bones live?”

“Where oh death is thy sting?”

“The heavens are telling”

“He is not here, he is risen”

“Sweet rain…like God’s own Mercy..Mercy that upholds it because it is good. It is fallen but it is good…

Discord or Harmony?

Macrina I hope like hell you are right because…because the deaf want to hear, the lame want to leap, the dead want to live and…and I am just so fucking tired of wanting to be a fish…Amen

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 St. Maximus Confessor and Christian Hospitality

Introduction

St. Maximus the Confessor (580-662 A.D.) understands the cosmos through a theological ontology of Love. All creatures in creation are unified through participation in the ecstatic Love that is the life of the Trinity. Participation in this Love unifies the difference of creatures into a harmony. As such this love is the “reason” or “logos” of creatures. With the fall of humanity this love is disrupted cosmically. The fall of humanity is key in this “cosmic tragedy” for humanity is the microcosm (micros-kosmos or “little cosmos”), which participates in the sensuous, creaturely dimension of being and the rational-spiritual dimension of the hierarchy of being. Humanity, the microcosm, is the center or crux of the hierarchy of being as it co-inheres in the second person of the Trinity, the Logos. It is the crossing of the divine and the sensuous dimensions of the hierarchy of being. Consequently, when humanity falls the harmony of creation is disrupted. This disruption or discord is healed or re-harmonized in the Incarnation of the Second person of the Trinity. In the Incarnation of the Logos in Christ the Love which orders the cosmos is shown or made concrete and the healing of humanity, the ‘microcosmic mediator,’ is accomplished; thus the goal (telos) of Creation, which the Triune God has desired from the beginning, is realized and made possible.

In this paper I want to show that for Maximus the Confessor the Cosmos (creation) is a creaturely mode of ecstatic love which participates in and reflects the Ecstatic Love that is the Life of the Triune God. I also want to show how, in this economy of ecstatic love, humankind is, for Maximus, what Lars Thunberg calls ‘microcosm and mediator.’[1] Humankind is a little cosmos who is a unity of body and soul as well as the one who is given the task of gathering in himself all the sensual and intelligible aspects of creation and, through the Logos, taking them and humanity itself toward its God-given telos of deification, which leads ultimately to a transfigured cosmos. Within the exploration of these two dimensions of Maximus’ vision I will show how his Doctrine of Christ is central to his theological symphony. Finally, throughout the process of this exploration I want to give a basic overview of some of the primary themes in the thought of Maximus Confessor. I will then connect the Maximus’ theology of deification with the Christian tradition of the practice of hospitality. In doing so I will show that there is a mutual enrichment which takes place. Maximus’ theology of deification is made more concrete by showing it as enacted by the welcoming of the other, while the tradition of hospitality is enriched by articulating it as a Maximian deifying practice which enables humans to participate in the very life of the Triune God.

I. Maximus’ Theological Ontology as the Mystery of Love[2]

At the heart of Maximus’ theological vision is his conception of love as both a cosmic or ontological reality and a theological virtue. This, in a nutshell, is the confessor’s crucial contribution to the present argument, which will be articulated in this essay. Maximus says as much as he begins his letter On Love to John the Cubicularius.

You, the God-protected ones, cleave through grace to holy love towards God as your neighbor and care about   appropriate ways of practicing it…For nothing is more truly Godlike than divine love, nothing more mysterious, nothing more apt to raise up human beings to deification. For it has gathered together in itself all good things that are recounted by the logos of truth in the form of virtue…[3]

In this letter Maximus briefly, but powerfully, delves into love, which is defined as the essence of the life of the Triune God and what the Confessor calls the logos or fundamental principle of the existence of creatures. According to Letter 2, when human beings live in harmony with love, and thus in accordance with the Trinity who is love and from whose love creation arises, they live virtuously. In other words, they participate in the divine life. In a way similar to Thomas Aquinas Maximus acknowledges love as both a theological virtue and the supreme theological virtue. The failure of human beings to live in accordance with love results in what Maximus calls tyranny (turannos). The introduction of this tyranny into the world sets in motion a history tied to oppressive power. For Maximus the exercise of this oppressive power of tyranny communicates phil-autia, or self-love, rather than the love of humankind, or phil-adelphia.[4] But let us not get ahead of ourselves. Let us explore further the rudiments of the theological ontology of love.

As alluded to in the quote above, Maximus’ Letter 2: On Love considers the all-encompassing or cosmic nature of the virtue of love. All things fall within its scope and exist within and in relationship to love. This is true whether creatures live in accordance with it or in resistance to it. Living in accordance with love means creatures live in an orientation of reception of the world and the things of the world as gift. To live in resistance to love leaves creatures in a place of self-love in which, rather than reception of creation as gift, all is seen within the horizon of self and thus possessed. To be rendered intelligible all else must be possessed.

In either case, all things still exist in relationship to love (in accordance with it or in perversion from it). In a Maximian vein, one might therefore say that love grants being to all that exists. It is the proton and eschaton of all things and as such is the ultimate principle of existence.[5]

Everything, every good, insofar as it is good is but an inflection of love. God is Love and love is in a real sense the goal of everything. “Love is the fulfillment of these, wholly embraced as the final and last desire…”[6] So love is divine in character. Because of this divinity it elevates to the level of divinity or divinizes (deifies) whatever orients itself in harmony with it. Love is, for Maximus and the other ancient Greek theologians, the very principle of theosis or divinization. Thus love’s very character is transforming or divinizing.[7]

It should begin to become clear now that love is part and parcel of the locus of Maximus’ thought. It is so central that it is not only the core of his understanding of God, and therefore the touchstone of that intimate contemplation of God that is theology (theologia), it is also the fundamental basis of his anthropology.  He conceives his inquiry into the human as “theandric.” This means that the human is one for whom being oriented toward and united to God is appropriate and fitting to it. This fittingness arises out of love. Love is what causes the reality of God and God’s creation to fruitfully converge. Like Gregory of Nyssa, this convergence does not do away with the simultaneous dissimilarity between the creature and Creator at the level of nature. For Maximus the distinction of Creator and creature is not a violent division of a purely extrinsic or parallel relationship of competition. Rather, the love rendered concretely in Christ Jesus brings the modalities of being of the Creator and creature into the most intimate possible union.[8]

 And he does human things in a way transcending the human, showing, in accordance with the closest union, the human energy united without change to the divine power, since the [human] nature, united without confusion to [the divine] nature, is completely interpenetrated, and in no way annulled, nor separated from the Godhead hypostatically united to it.[9]

It seems that for Maximus it is precisely the distinction between Creator and creature which love guarantees. The unity between God and creatures realized through the incarnation of God as a human is actualized precisely by bringing about the union that simultaneously draws creation and God evermore closer together while yet always maintaining the distinction between the two. A collapsing of the one into the other would no longer be a union, but rather an absorption, which would of course do away with union. The purpose of the union is to perfect humans as humans and the creation as creation. So the preservation of the enduring difference in union by the Trinity’s love is the modus operandi and heart of deification. This deification in love is rooted in the Incarnation of God in Christ. The love that is concretized in Christ, therefore, is the locus of creaturely identity, particularly human identity and this identity is such that when it is conceived theologically can only be comprehended properly in relationship to God.[10

At this point we may profitably ask, along with J. Kameron Carter, what sort of vision of human identity and divine identity is being articulated by the Confessor? Carter helpfully addresses this when he claims, for Maximus, it is an ecstatic understanding of identity. That is, love names a twofold ecstasy (ekstasis) for him. On the one hand, it names the "ecstatic" relationship that God as the Creator has with creation. The "ecstasy" within God or the"ecstasy" constitutive of both the Triune relations and the divine nature, which the relations enact though they are not reducible to it, produces an ecstasy beyond the divine nature.[11]

Put differently, the ecstasy of Love of the Triune relations produces the many, the difference which has contained within it the potential or possibility of all other differences. The primary ecstasy that is God gives rise to the secondary “ecstasy of creation, the ecstasy of the many.”[12]

On the other hand, the love concretized in Jesus Christ also names the ecstatic, transcendent relationship that creation reciprocally has with its Creator. This second understanding of ecstasy is an image of the first ecstasy. The Confessor claims that the unity of these two aspects of ecstasy occurs in Jesus Christ. In other words the loving ecstasy which is proper to God and that is causative of its imaging ecstasy, creation, occurs in the incarnate Logos. So, ecstasy is finally another way of talking about how incarnation is a phenomenon particularly specific to Jesus Christ and, for exactly this reason, is a phenomenon which is indicative of creation as such. Incarnation is not simply a foreign entry of either a distant or competitive deity (competitive with our creaturely existence, as if creatures and God both lived under a common category of Being), but is indicative of creation as such. It indeed communicates to us the destiny of humanity.[13]

[11] Carter, 349. Carter’s reading of Maximus here is crucial for appropriating the (broadly) poststructuralist notion of “the other” in contemporary theology. It is crucial in that Maximus, in the Christian theological tradition, offers an ontology or metaphysic which makes such language ultimate coherent. Often poststructural renditions of “otherness” seem to disavow metaphysics while assuming an unsaid metaphysics in which the “other” and the speaking subject are seen to be in a situation of irreducible violence, in which we can only be the least violent possible. But surely such a notion requires on to make overarching statements which look an awful lot like a universal metaphysic. For a Christian critique of postmodern “ontological violence” see John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005) and David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003). Both these works follow a similar line of argument (Hart relies upon Milbank’s earlier version of his aforementioned work), though perhaps Hart offers a more accurate reading of individual “postmodern” philosophers. For a work that seeks to not only critique but dialogue with and affirm aspects of contemporary philosophy and its nihilism see Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing and the Difference of Theology (London: Routledge, 2002). Maximus gives a Trinitarian ontology which allows for peaceful difference and sees violence in the midst of difference as ultimately the rejection of the gift of creation from the gifting Trinity.

[12] Cater, 350.

[13] Carter, 350.

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By Joshua Delpech-Ramey (The Land of Unlikeness)

The question Janet raises about whether Renaissance humanism, as found in Pico and Bruno, is really human enough, is very important to think through in terms of what we could call the application of sophiology in contemporary culture.

Pico’s emphasis on the polyvalent or indeterminate status of the human essence is not so much opposed to the Augustinian duality of divinity/humanity as the defining feature of human life as it is a setting of that duality in an epistemological situation that has complexified.  Augustine was adroitly skeptical about tying theology to the current dogmas of natural inquiry, whether it be inquiry about the difference between animals and humans or about the number of fixed stars or about any other subject of natural knowledge, including Biblical interpretation, where he advised much more caution about fixing the meaning of Biblical sense than future commentators would. Augustine’s is a profound hedge against the scholastic tendency to attempt to correlate too closely the realms of natural and supernatural reality (or to endlessly speculate on the border between philosophy and the sciences on the one hand, and theology on the other, ad nauseum).  What emerges from Nicholas of Cusa to Bruno is Augustinianism (and Neo-Platonism) in a more speculative approach to natural knowledge, one that blurs the distinction between natural and supernatural modes of apprehension, from within natural philosophy.  In other words, we in some sense –give up- the quest to know the border between divinity and humanity, in general, in order to explore its potential presence, in particular, beyond pre-conceived construals of its limits (even without taking the dynamics of self-consciousness as paradigmatic, as Augustine did in On the Trinity).  So it is not Augustinian skepticism about the limits of human reason that maintains our openness to knowing that we are known by God, but rather it is an experimental use of reason itself that breaks onto the terrain of the transcendent (the very same territory of transcendence Augustine preserved against the positivisms of his day).

This move has enormous practical consequences for spirituality and for science—consequences I think that Bulgakov desires us to discover from sophiology.  Magic was an important spiritual practice for the Renaissance, and perhaps was the paradigmatic spiritual discipline (as opposed to contemplative prayer, for instance), because it more fully situates cosmological dynamics within the mystery of the incarnation and the sacraments.  In Neo-Platonic terms, we discover the One in the All rather than in contmplative Nous.  What appears as an overly heroic, even stoic kind of humanity in Pico and Bruno is in a way just the desire to discover not only the self but the world in God, and this requires a certain foregoing of the psychological, interpersonal emphasis of traditional Augustinianism.  But what is interesting is that the emotional registers of Augustine are not so much rejected or abandoned, but rather pro-jected into a vision of an “impersonal” dynamic of becoming that, as Absolute, finally reveals genuine Personality but in the ultimate form of that Adam Kadmon or Cosmic Humanity that truly unites us across the divisions of ego, isolate consciousness, personal history, linguistic difference.

This is why I believe that the great visions of a post-human subjectivity, an impersonal or pre-personal form of trans-human being in Nietzsche, Bataille, Foucault, and Deleuze, among others, is no simple nihilism or quest to “outrun” the melancholy self. In an uncanny way the anti-humanism of post-Nietzschean philosophy has profound resonances with Renaissance humanism, accurately understood.  These more recent thinkers proclaim the death of God only to emphasize the death of any pre-conceived limit to the human, in order to emphasize the radically transpersonal and trans-finite (to that which is not locked within the strictures of consiousness).  Their subversive systems undermine the Victorian, bourgeoise, and Enlightenment liberal strictures put upon human life, and thus they link up once again with pre-modern archaic trust in a profound affinity of the self with the cosmos, one that embraces more of its dangers, risks, and seemingly chaotic elements than modern paradigms have been willing to do.  Or one might say that modernity incessantly allows for a minimal degree of chaos in order to survey and control it to the maximum degree.

A wilder science, a more natural religion . . . a kind of magic.  A more primitive or “basic” relationship with the elements. All driven by faith, hope, and love, where these terms lose their “all too human” resonances and begin to echo within the unknown of nature itself, in our affinity with that which we are “not” only because we participate in the All.  In the end, still an Augustinianism, but one that has become less of an autobiography and more of a tale of science fiction:  less TS Eliot and more Philip K Dick.  That is where, I would say, modern magic seeks out Sophia, and reconnects with Renaissance ambitions.  Our Sophia plays at the border between madness and desire, between delirium and hope, between despair and longing for that divine flesh so redolent and yet so elusive everywhere around us.

If according to Bulgakov this humanism is still pagan, this may be precisely because Christianity has yet to fully claim its status as -the- vindicator of pagan instincts—a project Bulgakov’s own Sophiology could finally help begin to complete.

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Cynthia posted the 7th essay in the Augustine Blog Conference yesterday, entitled “Quando Tu and The Nuptial Creation: St. Augustine’s Enduring Influence on Contemporary Ecclesiology”, written by Mary Moorman, to which I was asked to write a response that will be published on Wednesday, I believe. Please head on over to Per Caritatem and check out the proceedings of this excellent collaborative event.

UPDATE: you can read my commentary here.

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First, Janet quotes my early comment, and then responds to it:

“Rather, I think of it like participating in the sacraments. Our relationship to God through the church is starved if we deprive ourselves of the sacraments. Likewise, if we refuse to participate in the world in a way that conforms to our end, we lose something of the sacramentality of being in the world.”

Yes, I agree with you you about this “participation.” I suppose this is why Father Rodrigues was willing to hear Kichijiro’s confession and have him live with him in his little community.

The question, I suppose, is abut the forms and the realities, the letter and the spirit. How do we recognize charity or grace — or legalism or the spirit of death — when the labels start to get switched around. And as both Jesus and Paul warned, the labels of love and grace do get turned around and applied to phariseeism instead, over and over again in the history of human institutions….

I made my comments about grace (vs works) in relation to p. 187 when Inuoe says that Buddha always forgives, but in Christianity “you also have to be strong.” And Father Ferreira thinks, he doesn’t understand Christianity at all. I think this is the challenge of the book to Christians: to think toward the depths of how far divine forgiveness and love might extend. For Father Rodrigues, this is what is revealed for him when Jesus breaks the silence and speaks to him from the fumie…. Always it is the cross that is the ultimate silence, and speaking, of God. How do we “hear” the cross; what does it say to us?

So, do you think Inoue is right, that we “have to be strong” in addition to receiving God’s compassion and forgiveness? The sacraments are an interesting mention you made, because they are essentially means for receiving grace and love…. It’s hard to think of them as a kind of works or “being strong”….

I think I mostly agree with Janet. We definitely want to affirm emphatically the gratuity of salvation and theosis/deification. I’m not completey satisfied, however, that the “receiving” aspect of the sacraments entails or necessitates an complete passivity in practice. Hence, the idea of participation in God’s life seems to indicate a unique activity on our parts. I’d want to see a recognition that there’s human action in the sacraments and the church as well as Divine action.

It seems clear that Inoue does not understand this aspect of the Gospel, that Christ on the cross unltimately inverts human strength, as Janet mentions. But, once this revelation is made, we are called to receive the divine life. Yet we ought not dichotomize the divine action and the human action, as this would lose the meaning of participating in divine life that we are blessed with first in the church and then in heaven. So, it seems that, intrinsically, there is an aspect in which we are called to be “strong” as Inoue says, but this strength is not his strength but rather the strength of the cross, of the Father who sends his only Son to identify with his creation in a radically and sacramentally active yet vulnerable solidarity, thereby renewing and representing the creation link between God and those made in the image of God.

This is only my reading. Are there any other thoughts on this. Janet, how does this sound to you?

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Early in the film, Taymor appears to squarely pit social and militant activism and artistic creation against each other, and gives the impression that the infamous Love will side with the latter. It’s only an impression, and one that many on both sides mistakenly take to as the final word for better or ill. On one side, there’s the declaration of fealty to an ambiguous and numinous Love, the great fictional panacea. On the other, there’s the concession that Love is indeed ambiguous, impotent to effect change; the there’s an argument for the need for something else, something more jarring, even violent. And thus we have the polarization of the 60s set before us: the peaceful, inward, even insular arts culture on one side (Woodstock par excellance); and the boisterous and often violent activist movement concomitant and strangely akin to the oft harsh and violent government (Kent State/Vietnam). And then, in wake of this “revolution” there’s the late 70s and 80s, perceived by many, and certainly portrayed in the film, as the waning of Love and meaning – “You know, it’s gonna be alright, yeah”.

It’s clear to me that Taymor doesn’t settle on other side, but wants to re-present love. The films yearns to rise above the short-lived psychedelia and manufactured hysteria of the 60s. It’s not about a return to an earlier time: the ideal 50s suburban life is seen at the beginning as unsustainable and artificially limiting to human potential. And it doesn’t seem to be a trust in the future as beneficent: the characters are broken by the end of the film. Rather, if it’s a return to anything, its about seeking the source of the good, that which funds our actions and desires, that of which we continually fall short – “There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known / Nothing you can see that isn’t shown / Nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be.” We’re radically insufficient for the task. But all we need is Love. So, the question I was left with at the end of the movie was, “What is Love”. Now that we know we need it, all we need to do is figure out what it is.

Adrian Walker’s article “Love Alone: Hans Urs von Balthasar as a Master of Theological Renewal” helps us see Balthasar’s answer to this question pretty quickly. Love, throughout Balthasar’s corpus, is not only the object of reflection (Christ’s Love), but is the “source-architectonic” of all being, and as such it is the “intelligibility” of theology that not only explains the theological task, but is also “capable of illumining all of reality,” that which makes theology “universally relevant,” the principle that overcomes the static division between being and becoming. Balthasar’s answer to the two questions “What makes Christianity Christian” and “What makes Christianity credible” is

that the only ‘logos’, the only principle of intelligibility, which makes Jesus’ figure cohere into that single, compelling Gestalt whose luminous whole could captivate the entire existence of a Francis or a John Paul II – the only such logos is a love that comes uniquely from the trinitarian God… Jesus is the convincing Gestalt he is only because he is the appearing of trinitarian love in person, which means: only because he is himself the Logos of divine Love in the flesh.¹

In a footnote below that, Walker notes, “in light of other affirmation of Balthasar, that Christ is both the incarnation of God’s love for us and of our love for him – the covenant in person.”²

Some may fear that such elevation of Love above ratio somehow undermines rational discourse. Further, we may ask how this matrix of relation affects the nature of God’s attributes and our participation in them? If both Thomas and Augustine place the true over the good “in the manifestation of the intelligibility of being”, then is seems Balthasar is breaking ranks for the sake of novelty with grave consequences to both the way we understand Christ’s being the Word and “[Christ's] ability to communicate anything like a sacra doctrina that delivers to us the objective truth about God.”³

Walker argues that by “grounding truth in love” Balthasar has reclaimed for ratio entis its sense of “whylessness”. That is, the truth as characterized by the good, by gratuitousness.

The pulchrum … is the primordial appearing of love’s gratuity, which, as such, contains both the good (the beautiful is an appearing of gratuity) and the true (the beautiful is an appearing of gratuity, which therefore appeals to logos). For their part, the good and the true reciprocally ground each other as it were in the light of beauty: the good thematizes the gratuity that founds the logos-character of the true; the true emphasizes precisely this logos-character, without which gratuity would be irrational, and so could never be real gratuity at all. The oneness of the good and the true, already announced implicitly in the beautiful, then becomes thematic in the unum (which had always been present as the foundation of the other transcendentals)…⁴

Walker goes on to flesh out the rest of his proposal re: trinitarian relationships and the ramifications for a theology of nature that I may come back to at a later point. But, what I want to draw out here in closing is the robust essence of Balthasar’s concept of Love and its fecundity for reflection on Love as a theme or anti-theme in contemporary work. Love has lost its currency in modern work, whether because of its gradual decline in integrity as a concept, or its decline stature, matters little. If Balthasar is right that Love is the very soil in which the theological roots grow and then grow to reflect on, then it is certainly the responsibility of the theological program to reclaim and declare the universal relevance of love. What’s left is to discover how much such a recovery of Love would change the very face of the theological dialogue.

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1. Adrian Walker, “Love Alone: Hans Urs von Balthasar as a Master of Theological Renewal,” Communio 32 (Fall 2005): 524.
2. Walker, 524.
3. Ibid., 531.
4. Ibid., 532, f. 28

Yet, while the debates over modernity and its theological consequences drew on, the distance between humanity and world stretched ever wider, matched only by modernity’s maw, engulfing the world quicker than Christianity could respond and, some would argue, in ways Christian scholars and clergy didn’t know how to respond to. Christian (sub)culture was born, an enclave of fear of and loathing for the secular, an a-theism which Christian subculture bore to life and gave authenticity and integrity to the more it removed itself form the world.

The frequently brutal dismissal of the Church’s authority also in worldly matters of politics, of the planning of the world, and above all in matters of the spirit and science, does indeed correspond in part to an increasing falling away of the educated and of the masses from the Christian faith, but in part also to a process (acknowledged and justified by the Church herself) in which the natural orders and areas of knowledge assume autonomy, as was demanded by the Vatican Council itself in clear distinction between the natural and supernatural orders: duplex ordo cognitionis, proprio objecto, propria methodo.

In the most recent Books & Culture, and his new book Resounding Truth, Jeremy Begbie argues that, while the Christian subculture removed itself from the world, the world is not so easily shaken off, as if it were an old coat or bad dream. In fact, at the heart of the Christian truth is the deep understanding of the world as a gratuitous and ex nihilo “expression of divine love.”² As such, interaction with this world, this given reality, is sacramental, inasmuch as it is a graced reality. For the arts, this demonstrates a truth that reformed thinkers in the Dutch tradition like Begbie and Wolterstorff have been declaring for nearly the past 3 decades, that the experiences of the arts and artistic making are fundamentally “ways we engage the physical world… physical things… [that] have ultimately arisen through the free initiative of God’s love- they are part of the ordo amoris.”

As the church shrunk back from the world, both Catholics and Protestants had difficulty articulating this Christian view on the arts and the world. Begbie points out that the retreat from the physical often took the form of looking for an underlying spiritual value or meaning: “Commonly, the thrust seems to be to look beyond the material sounds to the order or beauty they reflect or point to rather than to welcome them as valuable embodiments of God-given order and beauty in their own right, with their physical character intrinsic to that value.” Later, even the spiritual would lose cred, and the hermeneutic tendency would look for meaning in the individual’s psychological experience of art – think here of those like Clive Bell and Sylvia Plath.

As art become more abstract, so too artists and the public alike more often practiced abstraction in seeking the underlying essence of the artifact from its physical boundaries. Even theologians programmed this dichotomy of the physical from the meaningful and spiritual.³ Yet all of this misses or regrets what is most characteristic of art, that it plays with and in the physical realm, that it is transmitted to us not by spiritual means, but by and through creation: “[B]earing in mind the long-standing legacy of thinking about music … which has arguably suppressed a great deal of music and led to unnecessarily negative attitudes toward it (not least in the church), we might do well to regain a sense of music’s profound physicality – its embeddedness in God’s given material world.” Although Begbie is addressing music in particular here, his argument easily extends to the other arts.

Furthermore, re-situating our relationship to art as physical helps us relearn the physical world in general as well as the human body itself, the last act of the original creation: “Our own bodies… are intrinsically part of musical experience. To insist that Christians are to be spiritual is indeed quite proper, but to be spiritual is not to renounce the body per se.” The acceptance of the body as creation and thus necessarily and constitutively part of this thing we call art has a dual fecundity. First, as it emphasizes not only artistic creation, but rather experience in general as a physical act, it leads us to an intimacy with art we may have hitherto reserved for the artist herself. And second, it explodes the individual nature of art, emphasizing the communal aspect of physicality, the “koinonia” of the created order. Begbie draws on the thought of Bonhoeffer to explicate the image of the Christian community, one not of cheap harmony, but of polyphony, sometimes difficult to grasp, but always rewarding. The emphasis is relatedness being part of the overall aesthetic creation, rather than the Romantic image of the artist as sole-creator in defiance of the heavens and the masses. “True enough, the self is always and already a social product… and yet the self is centered when addressed and treated as a distinct you by another person or other persons… Such is the ecstatic love at the heart of the Triune God in which we are invited to share.”

I would add that it is not only the community of believers or simply humanity that we join when we participate in creation and acknowledge our place within the created order. For, if even the stones would cry out in praise should humanity fall silent (Luke 19), it seems only “natural” that they also welcome our joining in the polyphony of the worldly community. The elements of creation seem to be actively awaiting commune with the other members, a vision that the land artist Andy Goldworthy seems to have focused on with his lens. His work carries a sense not only of an order or form inherent to nature, to physicality, but also the yearning of the natural for the supernatural koinonia to which Begbie alludes. The question is if and how one might speak of stones and wood and leaves singing in the polyphony.

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1. HUVB, “On the Task of Catholic Philosophy in Our Time,” Communio 20 (1993): 148; although von Balthasar was not the first or last to issue this warning.
2. B&C (September/October, 2007): 28-31.
3. Begbie cites P. T. Forsyth here.

Throughout the week, I haphazardly meditated on the idea of parenthood quite a bit. Aside from my direct connection to Father’s Day as a parent, I was privy to some really powerful experiences of parenting. Moreover, having recently read Balthasar’s meditation on a mother’s love and glance toward her child being the child’s awakening to the world, to the very idea of a “thou”, I had a helpful framework upon which to interpret my experiences.

The first instance occurred Wednesday night as I was biking home along South Street in Philly. I came upon a young mother and her child. The child, maybe one and a half, maybe a couple months older, was in the stroller. His mom, standing behind the stroller, was engaged on her cellphone in an argument, a cell-gument. I slowed, got off and walked my bike past the mom, up to the little boy.

“What’s up, buddy?”

“……” (crying)

“How’s it going? Are you having a good night.”

(more crying)

“What’s wrong?”

Tears streaming down his face, the boy reached toward me and said,

“da da…… DA DA!”

“uh, no, I’m not…”

I hopped on my bike, and headed for home. His confusion of me for his father was too weird, too difficult for me straighten out for him. I felt as if I had intruded, as if I had made things worse than they were already. Later that night, as I talked to my wife, I thought more about the situation. Of course, I wasn’t intruding. I was trying to help the boy out while his mom was occupied. Indirectly, I was also trying to help the mom out. I didn’t want to assume that she was intentionally neglecting her son.

But, the boy’s confusion and need, the mom’s indifference throughout my interaction with her son, the whole milieu highlights in a negative way Balthasar’s description of the role of the parent in the process of a child’s entrance into “this side of existence,” to quote a friend in a recent email.

The second instance happened on Thursday night, on the Metro in DC. I was heading home to my wife and son in Arlington after another week in Philadelphia. As I stood in the crowded train, I saw a young father wearing his son, about the same age as the boy the night before, in a sling. The son gazed about the train, and the father cooed at him, talked to him, and caressed his face. Eventually, the boy expressed thirst, and the father let him out of the sling to give him space to hold the bottle. After a few minutes of drinking, the father began to play a game with the boy, acting like he was going to steal the bottle. The father continuously engaged and interacted with his son in loving playful ways. For some reason, maybe because I’m a new father, maybe because of the event the night before, this sight was powerful in its effect on me.

The last experience I’ll share here was much like the first in that it included a young mother and a young child, probably about two years old. I was on the Metro Saturday afternoon, riding back to Arlington when the mom and child got on the train. She took a seat, positioning the stroller in front of her, the child facing away from her. The kid became agitated and began crying. She made a rather weak gesture to give the child his bottle, but he didn’t see her do it and continued to cry. Her flat affect seemed to indicate that at best she had resign herself to his crying, and at worst she didn’t notice it at all.

These three instances, in addition to my own joyous Father’s day weekend with CHW McClain (a.k.a Chewy), provided some fertile ground for a deeper reflection on this topic and Balthasar’s own writing on it. I won’t presume to understand this whole concept, but (hopefully) my meager reflections will urge some of you more literate in this area of philosophy to take the next step. In any case, for Balthasar, truth alone cannot capture the miracle of individual being, of why there are “some” instead of “none”. Rather, Love precedes all others in the ground of being, individual and general. Being can give existence, but can neither explain it’s own “existence” nor can it generate essence. Balthasar’s hypothetical engagement between mother and child demonstrates a child’s coming into awareness of its existence because of its mother’s loving and welcoming glance. The child’s whole interpretive schema is therefore predicated on the mother’s initial and continued welcome of her child, the other. From this welcome, the child understands not only its relationship with its mother, not only its relationship to the world, but also its relationship to existence as a gift, as a welcoming. The child understands both that its mother is a Thou AND that it is a Thou to the mother. As such, the child’s foundational experience of being, its ontological grounding is one of Gift and Welcome. It’s a beautiful description of the power, efficacy, and place of Love in the world, and it has had quite and impact on my own reflections of parenthood, both my own parenting, and parenting I witness.

Yet, of my three examples above, only one seems to gel with Balthasar’s understanding. Not to say that Balthasar didn’t comprehend the existence of parenting that lacked both in luster and substance. Rather, his explication serves as much as an ideal as it does as an endorsement of a kind of parenting, a rather non-Spartan kind – is Balthasar an early proponent of “attachment Parenting”?

Nevertheless, what does one do with the other two instances, of detached, unaffected parents who seemingly don’t care or don’t understand their children’s need to be welcomed, coaxed into existence and what are the ramifications of this apparent lacuna in these boys’ lives? One can only guess. But from Balthasar’s writing, I surmise that there is a component in their understanding of their place – I mean this in a thick sense – in existence in the world, and as future hosts of existents. I guess the obvious conclusion, or at least obvious to me as an urban dweller and an urban teacher, is that children who lack welcome, who lack the early formation of a concept of the Thou-as-gift (because of their own being-as-gift), will also lack the ability to welcome others, be they children, their own and others’. They may even lack the ability to show welcome to their high school teachers. Instead of conceiving the other as gift, the other is intruder, usurper, or at the very least unwelcome. The gunshot victim wasn’t someone else’s child who was a cherished addition to God’s gift of existence, but rather a …. well, that would be speculation to great even for me.

I have a friend who in recent weeks has lived out this conviction in his own life. I have been blessed immensely by his example. Thanks be to God for children.

pax et bonum

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