Per Caritatem

Baylor University is hosting a Radical Orthodoxy Colloquium on November 13-15.  All lectures begin at 2:30 (Tues-Thurs) and include the following speakers:    Conor Cunningham (Univ. of Nottingham), Aaron Patrick Riches (Univ. of Nottingham), John F. Montag SJ (St. Louis Univ.).  For more information, contact [email protected].

If any of you are planning to attend the Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies Conference this Fri-Sun in Philadelphia, please drop by and say hello.  I will be presenting my paper on Augustine and Gadamer on Friday afternoon.  The featured speakers are Denys Turner (Yale University) and David Burrell (University of Notre Dame).

“Karl Barth turned to the book of Romans in the hope of hearing the Word of God and in the hope of finding a new starting-point, and principle, for theology. Instead of interpreting the Bible as an expression of human religious experience, as was typical of theological liberalism, Barth turned to scripture not so much to discover God but to be discovered by God. Whereas ‘religion’ concerns humanity’s search for God, the message of Christianity was, for Barth, that God ‘found the way to us’. God is not an ‘object’ of human reflection but an active subject. Theology’s task therefore is not to formulate human thoughts about God but to explicate God’s thoughts about us. The challenge for Barth was to affirm the reality and activity of God while at the same time forestalling its becoming an object of human historical or rational investigation. If God is God, he must remain free to make himself known. [...] Historical critics, he says, are not critical enough; they do not penetrate as far as the text’s distinctive and unique subject-matter. They do not perceive ‘what there is’ or ‘what stands’ in the Bible. The meaning of the words in the biblical text can only be determined in relation to the Sache of which they speak. To read for the human author’s intention fails to do justice to the freedom of God’s Word speaking in scripture. Schleiermacher, in suggesting that the Bible was an expression of human experience, got the subject-matter exactly the wrong way round. Barth’s aim, in his own words, was to bring the reader ‘face to face with the subject-matter of the Scriptures.’[1]The subject-matter of scripture is not merely history, a system of morality, or religious piety but the God of the gospel: the message of what God was and is doing in Jesus Christ for the sake of a fallen world. This is a crucial point, for it is the driving assumption and material insight behind Barth’s biblical hermeneutics. The subject-matter of theology is not merely historical but eschatological: the ‘world of the text’ (Ricoeur) is the ‘world of God’. The Bible is about the breaking-in of God’s world (the ‘kingdom of God’; ‘real history’) into the world order (‘so-called history’) in order to judge the world and renew it. However, though God enters the world he continues to remain God; he is in the world but not of it. By the very nature of the case, then, this subject-matter is not under human control. God’s self revelation is not a matter of ‘clear and distinct ideas’, but of God-in-communicative action.  ‘Real history’ – the time and space of God’s making himself known – is beyond the reach of the historian. The Sache of the Bible is not an object at our disposal. Interpreters are not merely ‘spectators’ of God’s Word but, in God’s grace, participants that may be caught up into the subject-matter (viz., the fellowship creating triune economy).”

(Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “Discourse on Matter: Hermeneutics and the ‘Miracle’ of Understanding,” pp. 11-13).

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[1] Barth, The Epistle to the Romans trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (London: Oxford University Press, 1933; repr. Oxford, 1968), p. x.

 

As we continue to journey with Dante, we read in Purgatorio, Canto IX of Dante’s dream in which an eagle descends, picks Dante up, and then the two mysteriously become one in an image involving fire.  As we read further, Virgil informs us that Dante’s dream actually reflects allegorically what happened while Dante was asleep. That is, St. Lucia, who appeared to Dante in the opening scenes of the Inferno, came to Dante’s aid so that he might continue his journey successfully.  Here St. Lucia appears to point to the sinner’s need for grace and to the fact that God in his mercy provides such grace to those who desire to follow his path.  Again we are faced with seemingly insoluble mysteries, viz., how can one repent or even prepare oneself for God’s grace when via natural reason alone one cannot reach the knowledge of the Christian God?  As St. Augustine phrases this (a version of this) dilemma, how can one love what one does not already know?  On the one hand, even the preparation for God’s grace seems to necessitate God’s prior acting on the soul; yet, on the other hand, Scripture is replete with examples and exhortations that suggest that individuals must freely choose God and live virtuously-all of which highlights the importance of human responsibility.[1]  In other words, Scripture presents God’s sovereignty and election side by side with human freedom and responsibility and does not attempt to resolve this dissonance (cf. Acts 2:22-23).  Perhaps Dante in allowing these tensions to stand is simply echoing Scripture and in an indirect way acknowledging that God’s way of doing things infinitely exceeds our ability to fully comprehend.  Thus, faith requires worship rather than a demand that God’s will bow down to the law of non-contradiction (see Romans 11:33-36).

In the passages and examples that we have examined thus far, the complexity of the relationship between faith and reason, as well as the perplexing role of Virgil as Dante’s spiritual guide is evident.  In closing, I want to mention one final confusing issue related to the character of Virgil that leaves me with more questions than answers.  As Dante the author presents Virgil in the Inferno and the Purgatorio, he is one without hope whose destiny is forever one of exile in Limbo.  Yet, throughout the Inferno and Purgatorio, Virgil continuously serves as a source of hope and strength for Dante the character.  Moreover, if we accept the idea that Virgil’s fate is sealed and that his eternal home is Limbo, then we have no reason to think that Virgil gains any spiritual reward for his actions in helping Dante.  In other words, Virgil seems to be acting simply for the sake of the bonum in se, not for the bonum sibi (the good for his own advantage).  This leaves the Christian with a great difficulty, viz., how is it that a pagan is able to act in a completely unselfish way apart from God’s grace?  As Allan puts it,

To expect to enjoy as directly as, and added to, one’s own-and therefore to hope or pray or work or suffer for-the supreme happiness of another:  this is the essential Christian act as presented in the Comedy.  Virgil’s suffering for the salvation of Dante is, if you wish, higher in one respect-in being disinterested-than any other such human act in the poem.[2]

I tend to believe that Christian theology has a satisfactory answer to this question; however, I am not at this time convinced that Dante’s Divine Comedy (i.e., what I have read of the Divine Comedy up to this point) presents adequately such an answer. 

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[1] Charles Williams engages this conversation from a slightly different angle, yet his point is well-taken and brings the tension of our postlapsarian condition to the fore-particularly the tension of our own ability to properly think about our postlapsarian condition.  “[T]here is in us, since the Fall, a kind of necessity of sin, and repentance is by no means so necessary.  The unfairness of existence is precisely in this-unless indeed we shared in the Fall and were ourselves personally responsible for the first sin.  Even Christ’s own mysterious submission to injustice on our behalf does not seem quite to do away with the injustice; we did not ask to be tempted; we do not want, in that sense, to sin.  He wishes us to be tempted?  very well, but then do not let him blame us.  Any yet in the first vision of the glory we were, perhaps, reconciled, and not as guiltless but as guilty; then indeed, for a moment, we lived from another root.  Romantic Love at once sensitively exposes our guilt, and makes it both tolerable and intolerable.  The passage of Purgatory is a passage to justice; in sin the universe is always unfair” (The Figure of Beatrice, pp. 147-148).[2] Allan, “Does Dante Hope for Virgil’s Salvation?,” p. 196. 

 

Next we come to an interesting scene in Purgatorio, Canto V.  Here a group of late-repentant shades approach Dante and are amazed by his ability to cast a shadow.  As is the case with most of the shades in Purgatory, this particular group pleads with Dante to send word to their friends and relatives in the world above with the hope that those living loved ones will pray for them.  As these last minute repentants tell their story, they explain that they all died violent deaths and sinned until the final hour.  However, they go on to say, “then light from Heaven granted understanding, so that, repenting and forgiving, we came forth from life at peace with God, and He instilled in us the longing to see Him” (Canto V.53-57; emphases added).  In this account, it seems that the limitation of natural reason is being accented, as the ability to repent, which is described as an act of the understanding, is impossible apart from divine illumination.  Likewise, the very longing to see the Christian God (the beatific vision) is itself a gift of God that must be instilled by God into the person.  Though it is the case that ancient philosophers spoke of a desire to “see” the divine and be in union with the divine, the fact that Virgil ends up in Limbo seems to suggest that such philosophers were not longing for nor did their arguments properly lead to the Christian God. 

In Canto VI of Purgatorio, we have another interesting exchange between Dante the character and Virgil.  Here Dante asks whether the prayers of the people in Purgatory are without hope. That is, given that Virgil himself wrote that prayers are ineffective once divine justice has so to speak settled the issue, Dante wonders as to the efficacy of the prayers of these souls in Purgatory-are they simply engaging in a futile activity?  Virgil’s answer is rather perplexing.  He claims that when he had formerly written on the ineffectiveness of prayer, he was speaking of those who prayed “without a passageway to God” (VI.24).  Virgil, a few lines earlier, had stated that “the peak of justice is not lowered when the fire of love accomplished in one instant the expiation owed by all who dwell here” (VI.37-40).  I understand Virgil to be speaking of Christ’s propitiatory sacrifice on the Cross on behalf of those who are in fact guilty-as 1 Peter 3:18 says, “Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.”  In other words, Virgil seems to be claiming that what he meant at the time of his original writing applies only to those who attempted to reach God via their prayers apart from Christ!  Here one would want to ask (1) how Virgil, who lived prior to the Christian era, would have had such knowledge and (2) if he did in fact come to this knowledge, why he himself didn’t act on such knowledge?  One should also note that after giving his explanation to Dante, Virgil quickly defers to Beatrice and urges Dante not to be content with Virgil as the final word with regard to a “quandary so deep” but to “wait for the word that she [Beatrice], the light between your mind and truth, will speak” (VI.43-46).  Here Beatrice seems to serve as an image of divine revelation, yet one wonders why divine revelation would be between Dante’s mind and the truth instead of being described as the Truth itself which is “above” or surpasses Dante’s mind?  When one couples Virgil’s mysterious answer above with what seems to be a purposed attempt on Dante the author’s part to evoke pity in the reader for Virgil given that he is barred from Heaven “for no other fault than [his] lack of faith” (VII.7-8), one cannot help but wonder what Dante the author is up to?[1]  After all in the Inferno, part of what Dante the character had to learn from Virgil himself was that sin is not to be pitied.  Unbelief (with reference to Christ) is of course in the Christian tradition considered sin, so why does Dante the author continue to wrestle with Virgil’s condemnation?  Perhaps one might suggest that though Scripture clearly condemns unbelief as a sin, the examples that are typically given in Scripture itself are of those who were confronted with Christ or the proclamation of the Gospel and yet refused to believe.  In the case of Virgil, however, he was simply by God’s providence born at the wrong time and had no opportunity to hear the Gospel.  Here one might postulate that Dante’s theology is being pressed to its limits and that he himself has not found a satisfying way to explain the justness of condemning such a virtuous pagan given that Virgil had no choice as to when he would be born (viz., in a pre-Christian age). 

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[1] For an interesting alternative view that argues against the commonly held position on Virgil’s damnation, see Mowbray Allan’s article, “Does Dante Hope for Virgil’s Salvation?,” MLN Vol. 104, No. 1, Italian Issue (Jan. 1989):  pp. 193-205.