Per Caritatem

At the end of a wonderful section entitled, “The ‘Word of the Cross’ and its Logic,” Balthasar writes,

“If theology is to be Christian, then it can only be a theology which understands in dynamic fashion the unsurpassable scandal of the Cross. Certainly, such a theology will understand the Cross as a ‘crisis’, but it will see the crisis in question as a turning-point between the old aeon and the new, in the tension between the ‘world’s situation’ and the ‘world’s goal’. What ensures the connexion between these two is no immanent evolution, but that inconceivable moment between Holy Saturday and Easter. That can also be seen clearly enough from the side of anthropology, since ‘evolution’, no matter how one understands it, will never reunite the two extremities of interiorly ruptured man but at best must consider sick and broken human individuals as constituting the dépassé pre-history of a humanity progressing towards health. Jesus, however, did not come to encourage those who were well, but to cure those who were sick (Mark 2, 17 and parallels). And in any case authentic theology, faced with the ‘death of God’ in the Triduum Mortis is so thoroughly absorbed in its supreme object that it has no time to lose itself in idle questions” (Mysterium Paschale, p. 56).

Below are excerpts from Milbank’s article, “The Future of Love: A Reading of Benedict XVI’s Encyclical Deus Caritas Est,” that I found particularly interesting and encouraging. First, Milbank describes the relationship between faith and reason as the “yearning of reason towards faith.” E.g., Milbank writes:

“[the Pope’s] thoughts are in continuity with those of his predecessor, yet they are marked by the fact he is a theologian before he is a philosopher and a theologian in the lineage of the nouvelle théologie who tends to stress the implicit yearning of reason towards faith and the completion of reason by faith, even within its own proper sphere of human understanding.”

Likewise, I resonate with Milbank’s comments on Benedict’s awareness of the debates in theology and philosophy regarding the nature of love, giving and friendship. As Milbank explains, “Broadly speaking, these hover about the issue of whether love is primarily an agapeic self-oblation, or whether, to the contrary, it is an erotic reciprocity and mutual fulfilling of desire. Here Benedict adroitly holds a balance between both emphases, and in doing so also undermines completely the claims of those who see Christianity as the enemy of erotic love (emphases added).” Continuing and expanding the love theme, Milbank writes,

“The [Church] is the Bride of God the Son: hence the gospels are precisely, as Benedict says, a ‘love story’, the story of God’s seeking out of his lost love, the highest possible romance.

But even within his own Trinitarian life, God is not just a free-giving; he is equally a constant receiving. Thus Benedict insists that insofar as the Bible qualifies a Greek metaphysical presentation of the absolute with a personalist emphasis, it accentuates and purifies, rather than abandoning, the Greek concern with eros. As personal God himself not only exhibits preference but also receptivity.

Likewise, the Pope cunningly turns the conventional tables in the case of human agape also. To be sure, this concerns a love for the neighbour that must be self-sacrificial and include love for enemies and even the unknown. Yet how is such a superhuman and heroic love possible for us? Not because it is commanded. Rather, because its possibility is given to us insofar as it arrives along with our agape for God. But this love of God is overwhelmingly receptive and therefore has an erotic dimension: to love God is obviously not to meet his needs but rather is to encounter him in personal union that issues in a merging of will and purpose.”

Christian agape involves eros (e.g., Milbank discusses the “erotic” context of Eucharistic worship—our encounter with God within the social context of the church, which also involves encountering our neighbor and is a “celebratory foretaste of the heavenly banquet”). Then Milbank goes on to contrast these ideas with pagan religion. As Milbank explains,

“In pagan religion (he does not really discuss the role of eros in pagan philosophy) eros was ecstasy, in the mere sense of self-intoxication which often involved the gross exploitation of women. But in the Hebraic Song of Songs by contrast, the physically erotic is poetically intensified precisely because the erotic is now linked to preference for a single one, to fidelity and to commitment unto sacrificial death. Romance, one might say, is born here and not with the Greeks. Nor (and here Benedict is very acute) is this any neglect of ecstasy: rather the truly ecstatic is here discovered in terms of a self-abandoning movement towards the other that is also a paradoxical self-realisation. Far from this being a banning of pleasure, it is rather the first discovery of real pleasure – including, one could add, in a physical sense.

To put it bluntly: Benedict here boldly declares that not only is the Catholic Church not opposed to sexual love – to the contrary, it alone truly understands it and fully promotes it. In an epoch-making fashion, a Pope now declares that the literal sense of the Song of Songs, in other word its first intention of meaning, is indeed what the naïve reader would take it to be. The mystical meaning arises now only through a proper acceptance of the worth of this literal meaning, while at the same time the depth of the latter is lost if it is not read also allegorically: that is as pointing to the mystical marriage between Christ and the Church.”

Lastly, Milbank discusses Benedict’s views on welfare as a “proper aspect of the Church’s own life and cannot be altogether handed over to the state.” Though certain neoconservatives might as Milbank puts it, “read into this an encouragement for the privatisation of all welfare functions,” the Pope is not an “ideological dogmatist of the Right about welfare. He advocates collaboration with state and international secular agencies pursuing the genuine human good in every respect. So his insistence on the diaconate is not to be read as lining up with a privatisation of welfare, but rather as a new and typically nouvelle théologie stress on the Church itself as the fulfilment of human society: with and yet beyond justice the Church is the place of the exercise of charity. State agencies can never displace ecclesial ones because what the human person needs is direct attention and appreciation of his uniqueness beyond the mere just granting of him his due – and in the Catechism of the Church, which Benedict prior to becoming Pope oversaw, it is insisted that charity cannot displace the demands of the poor for justice. Moreover, Benedict suggests that even secular projects of justice will only reach fruition if they are infused by a grace-given sense of charity – by the sense that through the eucharist and in Christ we are becoming at one with an infinite and all-powerful love.”

The following article by Professor John Milbank, “The Future of Love: A Reading of Benedict XVI’s Encyclical Deus Caritas Est,” has been posted by our friends at TheoPhenomenon.

Jeremy Begbie makes the interesting observation that “in music, structure is built primarily on relations based not upon difference or contrast but on attraction” (Theology, Music, and Time, pp. 158-159). Music of course utilizes sameness and difference, and repetition is largely responsible for the sameness. Yet unlike other art forms, music “tends toward the pole of absolute sameness” (p. 156). In a musical score, one commonly finds entire sections repeated note for note at the command of a repeat sign. Begbie also points out that repetition comes in different flavors and types. Repetition can be of the concealed sort and one only becomes aware of this type with intimate familiarity. Other kinds are more “immediate,” i.e., the repetition is obvious and repeated in close proximity (e.g., a section repeated by means of a repeat sign). Then there is “remote” repetition (or “return”), when the section or motif recurs after a significant time interval (p. 157). To illustrate the way in which music “gets away” with repetition in the extreme, Begbie cites the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 in F major, op. 68, bars 151-162, where we find a rhythmic motif relentlessly repeated. Begbie then asks, “Why has this music claimed so much enjoyment? What is novel amidst the almost the almost obsessive reiteration? Prima facie it would seem that we should be thoroughly weary after only a few bars. Why are we prepared to put up with so much repetition?” (p. 158). Begbie suggests that though “variation of musical parameters” (e.g., changes in orchestration, dynamics, re-harmonization etc.) and a constantly changing musical “environment” in regard to the repeated unit are partial answers, they do not reach the heart of the matter, viz., “each repeated component of music will have a different dynamic quality because each occurs in relation to a different configuration of metrical tensions and resolutions.” In other words, Begbie is highlighting the various points of tension and resolution in both micro and macrocosmic view. “It follows the every re-iterated note, motif or whatever is going to possess a different dynamic quality. The repetitions ride the waves in different ways. This is where the fundamental novelty lies within tonal music—two occurrences of the same motif can be sensed as different because each relates to a different combination of metrical tensions and resolutions. Viewed from the point of view of metre, everything is ‘new,’ […] This is why, as Berleant puts it, ‘Repetition … becomes regeneration rather than reiteration’” (p. 252). Thus, Begbie concludes that the harmonic, dynamic and other alterations do not serve the purpose primarily of keeping our attention and staving off our boredom, rather “they bring to our ear the patterns of tension and release in metrical waves. We are left with a fascinating irony:
The tones do not alter for the sake of variety, that is in order to give the same thing an appearance of being different; on the contrary, because what is apparently the same is basically always different, the tones do not always want to remain the same” (p. 162).

Yet another delicious morsel from Balthasar:

“What is necessary today, after long experience of the history of theology is an effort at an authentic theological deepening of the particular mysteries of salvation in their incarnationally concrete character–without surrendering thereby to an untheological historicism interest, and, above all, without losing to view the Trinitarian background and so the functional aspect of the work of Jesus, which means no less than the relations within the Trinity that define his Person” (Mysterium Paschale, p. 41).

The following three “tunes” are from my senior recital (I’m not going to give the year, so don’t ask : ). The quartet consists of Manuel Castenada on alto/soprano saxophone, Kerry Wilson on bass, Joey Carter on drums, and me on guitar. (Unfortunately, the sound quality is fairly poor because I had to record the tracks from a cassette player to a MP3 player which results in a good deal of background noise. So you’ll have to use your imagination and abstract the distortion).

1. Some Time Ago
2. Lucky Southern
3. The Great Illuminator (This is an orignial tune that I wrote a few months after I was converted).