Per Caritatem

Thanks to all who participated in the recent Augustine Blog Conference! The essays were fantastic, as were the commentaries.  Perhaps I’ll organize another blog conference next summer.  Any ideas for topics/themes?

Commentary on Saunders’s Essay
by Dr. Joel B. Hunter

Bret Saunders has made some intriguing suggestions into how one might appropriate the insights of contemporary phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion to determine some possible thematic emphases for reading Augustine. For what kind of project? This is my first question, for it is not clear how Mr. Saunders delineates the areas of investigation he mentions. For example, he claims that Marion seeks “to develop a Catholic postmodern theology” by drawing from more ancient springs of Neoplatonism refracted in Christianity (or vice versa) to overcome musty Neoscholastic interpretations of the Fathers. But in the same section he claims that Marion’s ressourcement has a second edge with which to fashion a philosophy of “revelation/creation” that overcomes the bifurcations of modernity and the Heideggerean “silence” of postmodernity. Now, I would be one of the last persons to insist on dogmatically delineated fields of inquiry and impenetrable borders between Athens and Jerusalem; however, for the sake of preliminary theses, I’d like to get my bearings with what subject matter is under consideration. Or perhaps the question I have is this: what does Mr. Saunders think is Marion’s central concern, philosophy or theology? I can certainly cheer attempts to articulate a theologically inflected philosophy. And it may be impossible to do otherwise than a philosophically ordered theology. But is a “theological-phenomenology of the self” a bit of philosophy or theology primarily? I realize that this is a coarse question, and no doubt a bit impolite, but I think how one conceives the subject matter under consideration and the proper modes of inquiry (should they differ) will help order the significance of the several figures and philosophies Mr. Saunders appeals to for our orientation; e.g., phenomenology (what is phenomenology?), Neoplatonism (which one?), (post)modernism, Neoscholasticism, Dionysius the Aereopagite, Descartes, Heidegger, the ressourcement theologians, and so on. (In my own view, phenomenology-or at least Husserl’s philosophy-must be the touchstone for interacting with Marion, regardless of how one regards the importance of phenomenological philosophy generally.)

In the second half of the essay, Mr. Saunders focuses on a very interesting (and ancient) question; namely, “Can I know myself?” Mr. Saunders’ suggested line of inquiry is equally interesting, for he does not retread analyses which focus on the equivocity of the word ‘know’. Indeed, one kind of knowing is ruled out implicitly-ratio-that which “comprehends,” i.e., that which might be known exhaustively, without remainder. I cannot know myself objectively. My desires and actions exceed my rational grip on things, including myself, as St. Paul knows quite well (Romans 7). A person’s self-knowledge is opaque. So psychology and anthropology derive from ontology: what kind of being am I that chooses, deliberates, acts, and desires who I am and will be, all the while finding who I am and what I do-in some measure-incomprehensible? Mr. Saunders (and Marion) read St. Augustine’s answer in such a way that necessitates theism: I am a created being; finite and derivative, gaining understanding only insofar as I “participate” in the Creator. And this suggests one important distinction between philosophical and theological investigations of subjectivity that one might profit from highlighting: for philosophy, the Delphic maxim, “Know thyself,” is de rigueur; however, for theology, this must be a derivative question, approached, if at all, in light of one’s knowledge of God.

In Mr. Saunders’ reflections on capacitas in Augustine, I couldn’t help but be reminded of that principle central to Calvin’s theology: finitum non est capax infiniti (“the finite is incapable of the infinite”-a particular point of contention, for example, between Reformed and Lutheran dogmatics regarding the Eucharist). I wonder if Mr. Saunders (and Marion) think Calvin got capacitas (and Augustine) right in this formulation? For if so, then the implications for a philosophy of creation are significant for all Western Christian theologies. What is the relation between the Creator and the creation? Is there an inherent deficiency to creation (i.e., does the fact of a thing’s createdness entail defect)? Perhaps the nature of the Incarnation may become problematic. How does the divine “share in” or “participate in” the human…is such language even permissible? I think the answers to these questions require a starting point for the investigation that is christological (if the “theology-phenomenology of the self” is going to be specifically Christian). Moreover, given the Platonic sea in which Augustine and Calvin are swimming, what with the inflexible lexicon of infinite-finite, original-copy, absolute-relative, real-corporeal, and so on, one must ask to what extent such a reading of Augustine can be properly post-metaphysical, as Marion seeks to be.

The final theme Mr. Saunders takes up, and perhaps most likely to be unfamiliar to readers, is that of the saturated phenomenon. Marion deploys this technical term as summative of his describing the phenomenon of man’s own incomprehensibility to himself, but the association is cryptic. Mr. Saunders leaves the correlation allusive, which the limitation of space likely demands; however, a definition of a saturated phenomenon would help the reader at least begin to unpack what Marion might be getting at. If we’ve agreed that man’s own incomprehensibility to himself is a necessary ingredient for a genuine anthropology, then how does the formulation “man is a saturated phenomenon” further characterize and clarify the nature of this incomprehensibility? Quite apart from the question whether Marion is right about man being a saturated phenomenon, and whether Mr. Saunders is right about the analogy between the saturated phenomenon of revelation and Augustine’s analysis of memory, I think Mr. Saunders is right that this component in Marion’s phenomenology is a significant tool for a theology which seeks to be self-critical and undertake the task to begin again at the beginning (i.e., with that which has been revealed-again the necessity of christological beginnings!). Perhaps it is the imposition-character of the saturated phenomenon which one could elaborate. In Husserlian terms, the saturated phenomenon exceeds the commensurability always and already operative between that which is given to intuition and the intentionality that becomes aware of it. With that compact formulation, I must conclude these comments and thank Mr. Saunders for richly suggestive preliminary remarks and look forward to further elucidation of the themes he’s introduced for us here.

Reading Augustine with Marion: A Postmodern Ressourcement

By Bret Saunders, doctoral student, University of Dallas

For the sake of space, I must assume my readers know something about one of the most profound philosopher/theologians at the turn of this century, the French Catholic-postmodern author, Jean Luc-Marion, currently at Chicago and the Sorbonne.  The topic of the relationship between a great ancient and a great contemporary thinker would be worth studying at any time, but it is especially interesting in the case of Augustine and Marion, since this relationship is taking an interesting turn at present.   Until the last several years, Marion had rarely engaged Augustine directly except for several essays[1] and a handful of footnotes.  Following Von Balthasar, he preferred to develop his unique phenomenological theology in conversation with Augustine’s Eastern, near-contemporary, Dionysius the Aereopagite.[2] But as Marion turned from larger issues-Descartes and “onto-theo-logy,” theology after the “death of god,” the limits of phenomenology-to focus on love, the self, and the extent of self-knowledge, he interacted with Augustine directly.[3]

This “turn” means that the relation of Marion to Augustine must for now be somewhat speculatively posed.  However, I can make some general comments starting from Marion’s use of Neoplatonism.  Put broadly, it is the impetus toward negative theology, divine transcendence and creaturely participation that draws Marion toward Dionysius and Augustine.  In the spirit of Vatican II’s conservative wing, in opposition to but also in dialog with Levinas, Derrida and Altizer, Marion has attempted to develop a Catholic postmodern theology from these Christian Neoplatonic patristics and 20^th century phenomenology.  This ressourcement offers a double benefit: by reading the fathers according to the methods and concerns of phenomenology, Marion makes new connections and finds new meaning in familiar texts, texts often obscured by the surreptitiously modern readings of Neo-Scholasticism; conversely, Marion develops from these sources a phenomenology/theology of revelation and creation, a third way between modernity’s idolatrous blasphemy (Descartes and the theologians of “pure nature”) and postmodernity’s idolatrous silence (Heidegger).   I will now take a few short steps down this path . . .

Participation and Incomprehensibility in Marion’s (Augustinian) Philosophy of Religion

Marion’s work on Augustine to date concerns a theological-phenomenology of the self.  The early article on “the word capacitas in Augustine” is linked with the 2005 article on “the privilege of unknowing”[4] in that both describe a receptive, dependent, participating self in direct opposition to the active, (self-)determining self of modernity.[5] For Augustine, I am only myself insofar as I know myself in God, that is, receive myself from him.  Capax, capacitas is governed by a receptive semantic; it signifies the creatures ‘capacity’ to be filled by or participate (partem capere) in the Creator.[6] By contrast  Marion’s early interest in Augustine on this point stems from his far more extensive work on Descartes, who follows Suarez in altering the meaning of capax/capacitas to signify an active power of the self to know itself fully and to fully determine and know its objects.  Descartes borrowed this new acceptation from Suarez’s theology of “pure nature.”[7]

In the 2005 article, Marion probes the Confessions in support of a philosophy of religion centered around the incomprehensibility of man.  For Augustine, because man is the image of the incomprehensible God, he cannot determine himself or know himself fully but must be revealed to himself: “No one knows what he himself is made of, except his own spirit within him, yet there is still some part of him which remains hidden even from his own spirit; but you, Lord, know everything about a human being because you have made him.”[8] Marion sums up his thesis in this essay as follows: “[M]an appears to himself as a phenomenon that he cannot constitute, because he exceeds the field of every horizon and of every system of categories.  Which can be formulated as: man appears to himself as a saturated phenomenon.”[9] Here Marion shows how he reads the Neo-platonist Augustine phenomenologically, as part of a critique of modern (positivist) anthropology and the (secular) postmodern deconstruction of religion: just as the phenomenon of revelation-God or man considered as the image of God-”saturates” or “exceeds” the horizons of traditional phenomenology (whether Husserl’s “intuition” or Heidegger’s “being”), so for Augustine the “vast, infinite abyss” of memory exceeds the mind’s “narrow grasp” (Conf. 10.8.15), like the “eternal ideas” as the standards of truth and beauty and God himself exceed the created beings who participate in Him.[10]

Notes

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[1] See “La saisie trinitaire selon l’Esprit de saint Augustin.” Résurrection 28 (1968), 66-94; “Distance et béatitude. Sur le mot capacitas chez saint Augustin.” Résurrection 29 (1968), 58-60; “De la divinisation a la domination: etude sur la semantique de capable / capax chez Descartes.“ Revue Philosophique de Louvain 73 (1975), 262-293.

[2] In The Idol and Distance, trans. Thomas Carlson (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2001), 139-195.

[3] A collection of essays on Augustine, Au lieu de soi-même (“In [the] Place of the Self”) will be published this Fall.  But  Marion’s “Augustinian turn” appears already in “Mihi magna quaestio factus sum: The Privilege of Unknowing” (in The Journal of Religion 85 (2005), 1-24) and  The Erotic Phenomenon [trans. Stephen Lewis (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007)].  The latter alludes to Augustine on pp. 41, 42, 54, 71, 75(?), 87, 92, 95, 108, 114, 121, 128, 132, 135, 142, 144, 146, 182(?), 194, 195.  To give just one example: Marion employs Augustine’s “use/enjoyment” distinction on 127-8 to characterize the lover’s relation to the beloved as to a “flesh” instead of to an object.

[4] See fn. 1.

[5] And also of Heidegger, for which see Marion’s “The Final Appeal of the Subject” in John D. Caputo ed., The Religious (London: Blackwell, 2001), 131-44.

[6] See Confessions 10.8.15, wherein Augustine highlights the need of divine illumination for self-knowledge: “I myself do not grasp (capio) the whole that I am.”

[7] See “What is the Ego capable of?  Divinization and Domination: Capable/Capax“, in Cartesian Questions (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), 67-95.

[8] Conf. 10.5.7 (trans. Maria Boulding [Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997], 241).

[9] “Privilege,” 23.

[10] I warmly thank Cynthia Nielsen for the opportunity to ‘participate’ in this online conversation.

Commentary on Moorman’s Essay
by Dan McClain

Mary Moorman begins her erudite essay with a three point outline of Augustine’s use of the nuptial metaphor in his ecclesiology (about which I admit to knowing little). I was fascinated to learn that Augustine links his nuptial imagery not only to the cross but also the creation of woman. Following this logic Augustine states that, like Eve from Adam, the Church proceeds from the side of Christ toward a marital commitment to Christ that includes contractual and liturgical elements indicative to a marriage.

Moorman’s transition to Balthasar recognizes that Balthasar, like Augustine, sees the nuptial model as a helpful launching point for exploring the Church’s relationship to Christ. However, he goes further than Augustine in introducing the language of obedience as essential to the marriage between Christ and Church. “Von Balthasar insists that it is the obedience of the Church which is constitutive of her nuptial identity and purpose.”

Like de Lubac, Balthasar sees the Church as the vessel through which the whole world will be redeemed.  “There is but one turning wherein earth becomes heaven, and this turning point is the Church.” The Church’s public faith and obedience to Christ is not only a witness of Christ, but is primarily that for which the world was created. “The bond of our love is the meaning of the world.” Moorman suggests that here in the public nature of marriage, especially in the bride’s naked assent to the groom, we see the most explicit link between Augustine and Balthasar.

Moorman concludes with a reflection on Mary, the mother of Christ. She says, “if we trace a nuptial reading of ecclesiology back to the earliest tradition, we find that the nuptial covenant between God and humanity is somehow already completed in Mary’s joyful obedience at the Annunciation, such that it remains for the rest of humanity simply to echo her binding act of consent…The only condition- that the Church accept her bridegroom’s proposal- has already been met by the Marian fiat, and the fruits of this union wait to be enjoyed by all who constitute the Church through their participation in Mary’s own obedience.”

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this piece, not only for the interaction with Balthasar and de Lubac, but also for the opportunity to read more about Augustine’s ecclesiology. However, as my expertise lies more in former, I beg Cynthia’s and Mary’s forgiveness in limiting my comments to reflections on issues surrounding Balthasar’s use of the nuptial model. I’d like to offer just three critical reflections in conclusion, all of which stem from prelimenary concerns about what to me seems to be Balthasar’s deficient idea of marriage and, more generically, his use of typology.

First, it is dubious whether marriage includes all of the aspects that Balthasar imports into his nuptial ecclesiology under the concept of marriage. Most disconcerting to me is that his model of marriage presupposes mortifying obedience on the part of the wife. The Church as the Bride is called to total obedience, EVEN to the point of death: “Be my handmaid. Renounce your will and nestle, like Ruth, at my feet. Become obedient even to death.” I am not sure how the marriage metaphor leads to this kind of mortifying obedience. Likewise, the nuptial relationship shared by Christ and the Church leads to the Church’s adherence to her husband’s totalizing agenda, and thus to the virtual disappearance of her identity, to be replaced by her husband’s: “Be for the world my embodied obedience, shown forth visibly and sensibly throughout all ages. Be so obedient that to say ‘Church’ will be to say ‘obedience’.”  Moreover, in losing her identify, the wife becomes the visible identity of the husband’s invisible kingdom: “My kingdom is invisible, but I want to establish you, my Bride, before the eyes of men so visibly that no one will be able to overlook you.” While I don’t dispute that the Church is to have this kind of obedience, I have serious misgivings about whether the marriage relationship is an appropriate or beneficial metaphor for getting at this obedience. Roman marriage, as Moorman rightly acknowledges, is the reference point for Balthasar and Augustine. But is this Christian marriage?

Secondly, in borrowing from marriage to talk about ecclesiology, Balthasar risks a reciprocal interpretation or re-presentation of Christian marriage. Moorman points to the influence on Balthasar of De Lubac’s incorporation of the Augustinian cosmology – union with God as the fulfillment of the cosmos’ identity. But de Lubac’s notion of fulfillment does not look like the one-sided image of marriage with which Balthasar is working, although he is therein attempting to expand de Lubac’s (and Augustine’s) idea of cosmological fulfillment precisely through employing the marriage model: “The bond of our love is the meaning of the world. In it all things reach fulfillment.” Yet, the insinuation of Balthasar’s nuptial cosmo-ecclesiology is that there is something inferior or unfilled about the concept of “bride,” and conversely something  superior about the concept of “husband.” Balthasar exposes Christian marriage to a reciprocal reinterpretation by employing the marriage model to explain the relationship of the Church to Christ, indeed the world’s fulfillment in and through the marriage relationship between Christ and the Church. Christian marriage, in light of nuptial ecclesiology, begins to look not like two people engaging in a life long commitment to one another of mutual love and submission, but rather of wives submitting to husbands in order to be fulfilled by their husbands (analogously?) as the Church submits to Christ and is thereby fulfilled. As the Church relinquishes her identity, wives too ought to lose their identity in order to manifest the their husbands’ identity, they ought to mortify themselves in obedience to their husbands. These conclusions are ramifications of what appear to be an unsystematic or unrestricted use of typology. How should one judge the direction and the extent to which the typology is to be employed?

Finally, bringing Marian doctrine to bear upon nuptial ecclesiology, Moorman says, “if we trace a nuptial reading of ecclesiology back to the earliest tradition, we find that the nuptial covenant between God and humanity is somehow already completed in Mary’s joyful obedience at the Annunciation, such that it remains for the rest of humanity simply to echo her binding act of consent.” De Lubac and Balthasar are both fond of calling Mary the mother of the Church (see especially de Lubac’s commentary of Lumen Gentium in The Church: Paradox and Mystery). Mary in many ways could be described as the first fruit of the Church, demonstrating proleptic faith in her complete yes to the Christ-child – although it is clear that Balthasar would like to go further by equating constituency in the Church as participation in Mary’s yes. Moreover, I have concerns with how much being part of the church is repeating Mary’s yes versus imitating Christ. Nonetheless, the metaphors of Bride and Mother become distorted when Mary is both the Mother of the Church and the archetype of the Bride. How can she be both Christ’s mother and Christ’s bride? I confess bewilderment as to what it means to embrace both metaphors simultaneously when each refers to something antithetical to the other. De Lubac doesn’t engage the two quite as systematically as Balthasar does. Neither offers a satisfactory solution. As long as the two function typologically the way that Balthasar employs them, it seems unlikely that there’s a middle ground to be had by balancing between the two as the two can neither be equivocal nor dialectically opposed. They are, rather, metaphors that seem to be best when left unmixed.

Quando Tu and The Nuptial Creation:
St. Augustine’s Enduring Influence on Contemporary Ecclesiology
Mary C. Moorman, Ph.D. candidate, Southern Methodist University

Historians such as David Hunter have proposed that one of Augustine’s favorite popular metaphors for the Church, as we find in his sermons, is that of a virgin bride, contracted in marriage to her husband by the tabulae matrimoniales of ancient Roman jurisprudence.[1] Thus, although various scholars have held that Augustine’s concept of the Church must always be regarded rather tentatively, since his ecclesiology is constituted by a complex and dynamic nexus of interconnected distinctions, historian Peter Brown proposes that Augustine portrays the Church in the commonplace legal imagery of a legitimately contracted bride when it became most necessary to delineate a clear ecclesiology for his parishioners against the separatist movements of his day.  Brown urges that “the atmosphere of a courtroom will follow Augustine into Church when he preached against the Donatists… with the same unnerving confidence as Monica (when displaying) her own marriage contract, Augustine would now produce the marriage contract of Christ and His Church.”[2]

Augustine’s “nuptial” ecclesiology may be summarized in three key elements. In the first place, Augustine teaches that the bridal Church was born from Christ’s suffering body:

(Just as) God sent a deep sleep upon Adam, in order to fashion a wife for him from his side…in Christ’s case, a bride was made for him as he slept on the cross, and made from his side.  With a lance his side was struck as he hung there, and out flowed the sacraments of the Church.[3]

From various Ennarationes such as in Psalmos 30, Augustine continues that Christ speaks for the members of the ecclesial bridal body to which He has joined Himself, as its Head, because “by a great sacrament (the Incarnation) these two were united in one flesh…out of two people, one single person comes to be, the single person that is Head and body, Bridegroom and Bride.”[4]

Secondly, Augustine also holds that the bride of Christ is not merely born from Christ; she is also contracted to Christ in a mutual exchange of marital vows.  In this regard, Augustine describes the bridegroom at the wedding feast of John 2 as a metaphor for Christ the bridegroom in Tractate 26 on the Gospel of John:

For (even virgins) together with the whole Church, attain to a marriage, a marriage in which Christ is the Bridegroom…For the bridegroom in that marriage, to whom it was said, “You have kept the good wine until now,” represented the person of the Lord.

Finally, the content of the nuptial vows exchanged between Christ and the Church stipulate their binding relationship to one another, as Augustine describes in an Easter octave sermon of AD 400:

The sacred reading of the Gospel, year after year, points out to us the true Christ and the true Church, to make sure that we are not mistaken in either of them, (as) by introducing the wrong bride to the holy bridegroom, or by presenting the holy bride with someone other than her true husband.  So, to be sure we make no mistake about either of them, let us listen, as it were, to their marriage contract in the Gospel.[5]

On closer inspection, the content of Augustine’s metaphors relate in imaginative ways to key excerpts of modern ecclesiology. We note in particular that the procedural family law of the classical Julian age required extensive negotiations between the father of the bride and the prospective groom, which ultimately culminated in the body of the bride. While the social context on which Augustine drew for his metaphor excluded the bride from the negotiations in anticipation of her wedding, Roman law did require the expectant bride to signify her public and free consent to the contract arranged between her betrothed husband and her father. She showed her legal consent in multiple and recurring ways. She would have worn her betrothed’s bronze rings, symbolizing the durability and frugality of the empire that would be constituted in part by her future household. She would have clasped her betrothed’s hand publicly, face- to- face, in symbolic declaration of fidelity. Finally, following the ratification of the detailed deed of purchase by which she was bestowed upon her husband at his wedding, she had to pause one last time on the threshold of her husband’s home for her final and free public act of consent to his nuptial invitation, without which no legal marriage could take place. She said “Quando Tu, Ego”: “whenever and wherever you are, I am then and I am there; wherever you are, I am.”[6]

Against this context, the nuptial images from several of Augustine’s ecclesiological sermons might indicate that a key assumption in the grammar of Augustine’s ecclesiology is that the true bride and true groom, as true Church and true Christ, are identifiable from the content of their legal vows, with the groom being the one who offers, and the bride being the one who assents. In other words, against those who would supplant her, the true bride may be identified as the one who is already familiar with the terms of her betrothed’s marital contract, by which she had been purchased as a bride, and to which she has manifested her free and binding consent.

If we transition imaginatively from this paradigm for Augustine’s ecclesiology, we find that Hans Urs Von Balthazar’s chapter entitled “The Conquest of the Bride” in his Heart of the World of 1979 highlights an ecclesiological theme which strikingly resounds with Augustine’s implicit theme of the nuptial Quando Tu.[7] Here, as elsewhere, Von Balthasar unequivocally appropriates the Augustinian notion of the Church as sponsa Christi:

Our covenant – our blood-wedding, the red wedding of the Lamb – is already, here and now, the white bridal bed of divine love… You ought, in this way, to be my Bride and my Body, and it is my will to redeem the whole world in you…Be my handmaid. Renounce your will and nestle, like Ruth, at my feet. Become obedient even to death.[8]

From this understanding of a nuptial union between Christ and the Church that is characterized by obedience, Von Balthasar depicts Christ commissioning the Church in a sense which imitates the ancient nuptial formula: “Where I am, there you too are to be. What I do, that are you to do in me.”[9] Von Balthasar insists that it is the obedience of the Church which is constitutive of her nuptial identity and purpose:

You ought, in this way, to be my Bride and my Body, and it is my will to redeem the whole world in you, exclusively in you. Be my handmaid. Renounce your will and nestle, like Ruth, at my feet. Become obedient even to death… Be for the world my embodied obedience, shown forth visibly and sensibly throughout all ages. Be so obedient that to say “Church” will be to say “obedience”; for redemption is found in obedience, and whoever proclaims me must depict my obedience even to the death on the cross…So it is that I wish to teach you my obedience: a blind obedience leading you to abandon your every insight, your every love, your every faith, and through this obedience they will recognize who has my Spirit and who belongs to my Body. But this obedience will be but the pledge of my love for you and of your love for me.

Von Balthasar continues that this nuptial union is thus properly one that is publicly enacted and publicly ratified by acts of consenting faith:

My kingdom is invisible, but I want to establish you, my Bride, before the eyes of men so visibly that no one will be able to overlook you.”…I want to raise you up like the brazen serpent in the desert, like the rock against which hell itself is dashed to pieces… So there you stand, my Bride, truly a sign over the peoples at which fingers point, a widely known but little loved sign. Your failure redounds to me, since on your account my name, too, is blasphemed among the heathen…. in spite of everything, you will be my sign among the nations.

At this point we note that Augustine’s notion of the nuptial Church, as the corporation which performs public signs of faith to ratify her nuptial covenant, might also contextualize DeLubac’s contemporary description of the entire universe as a nuptial creature formed for the enjoyment of union with its creator. Citing Gregory of Nyssa’s references to o anthropos bios, DeLubac explains that “(the Fathers) seemed to witness (human nature’s) birth to see it live, grow, and develop, as a single being” both with regard to its origin, salvation, and eschatological end:

With the first sin it was this being, whole and entire, which fell away, which was driven out of Paradise and sentenced to a bitter exile until the time of its redemption.  And when Christ at last appeared, coming as ‘one bridegroom’, his bride, once again, was the whole human race.[10]

In brief, DeLubac’s sense of a nuptial consummation which recapitulates the entire creation is affirmed by Von Balthasar’s description of the Church as the one who can “gather up all humanity in order to present it to (Christ) as the one fruit in the libation-cup of (her) prayer.”[11] For Von Balthasar, the Church can unify and embody the world for Christ in as much as she is joined to Christ, who is Himself “the whole…the Head of the Body and the soul which unifies it.”[12] Von Balthasar elaborates further on the purpose of the Church’s nuptial union- as the consummation of the entire creation- in a manner which accords with DeLubac:

I have died once, and only once does my Body, my Church, pass over from death to life. This is the one turning. Each of your members must make it a reality in union with me, each in his own place, in his own century, but in the unity of the one change, in the transubstantiation of this world into the other world…There is but one turning wherein earth becomes heaven, and this turning point is the Church…Here the old man is replaced by the new. Here the world dies and another world rises… To you, my Church, have I entrusted this fountainhead…You yourself are the holy heart of the nations, holy because of me, but unifying the world for me, making my Blood circulate throughout the body of history. In you my redemption ripens, I myself grow to my full stature, until I, two-in-one with you, and in the bond of the two-in-one flesh – you, my Bride and my Body – will place at the feet of the Father the Kingdom which we are. The bond of our love is the meaning of the world. In it all things reach fulfillment.[13]

Von Balthasar’s contemporary references to the nuptial bond of love between Christ and the creation, through the Church’s responsive obedience qua nuptial assent, returns us to the implications of Augustine’s ecclesiological imagination, wherein the Church responds, with faith and public signs of assent, to Christ’s offer to all of creation. On Augustine’s metaphor, the Church does so in the same way as a Roman bride would have complied with the rituals of nuptial law by signifying her assent through public acts of compliance with her bridegroom’s offer. In this way, the Church signifies on behalf of the world the nuptial assent and faithful obedience that is required for its consummation.

What might we make of Augustine’s nuptial ecclesiology and the modern appropriations which emphasize the Church as the assenting creature who seals her nuptial contract on behalf of the entire world by her obedience to Christ? I would suggest that the strain examined here might turn modern ecclesiology towards a renewed consideration of Mary of Nazareth and the tradition in which she, as mater ecclesiae, is honored as the definitive nuptial agent who utters the consenting, responsive Quando Tu, Ego for the redemption of the world. In the mind of the tradition, long before the Holy Spirit hovered over the Pentecost community to inaugurate the life of the Church, the same Holy Spirit had once hovered over the first fruit of the Father’s promises to the Son, when a timid teenage girl in Nazareth paused at the threshold of her spouse’s household, and, to conclude the long series of free acts of assent made by the symbolic gestures of her ancestors, gave consent to the terms established: may it be to me according to your word. Thus, if we trace a nuptial reading of ecclesiology back to the earliest tradition, we find that the nuptial covenant between God and humanity is somehow already completed in Mary’s joyful obedience at the Annunciation, such that it remains for the rest of humanity simply to echo her binding act of consent. Thus, with her own definitive “let it be to me according to your word, wherever you go, I will go,” we simply join in: “Amen.” It is in this way that Von Balthasar’s modern ecclesiology rejoices that in Mary, the archetype of the Church, the door to the Father’s household has already been opened, the nuptial covenant has been ratified, the word has been made flesh in the body of the bride, their marriage has been consummated on the cross, and its procreative purpose is already unfolding in the weary world as humanity is gathered, more and more, into Christ’s nuptial embrace of His Church. The only condition- that the Church accept her bridegroom’s proposal- has already been met by the Marian fiat, and the fruits of this union wait to be enjoyed by all who constitute the Church through their participation in Mary’s own obedience.

Notes

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[1] David G. Hunter, “Augustine and the Making of Marriage in Roman North Africa,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 11.1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

[2] Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

[3] Augustine, Ennaratione in Psalmos 56.11.

[4] Augustine, Ennaratione in Psalmos 3, 4.

[5] Augustine, Sermon 238.  The Works of St. Augustine.  Sermons, Vol III.7 “On the Liturgical Seasons,” trans. Edmund Hill, O.P. (New Rochelle: New City Press, 1980). See also Augutine, Sermons 37 and 293,  Ennarationes in Psalmos 45 and 72, Tractate 26 on the Gospel of John, and On Marriage and Desire I.11.

[6] Susan Treggiari,  Roman Marriage: Iusti Coniuges from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

[7] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “The Conquest of the Bride,” from chapter 12 in Heart of the World (Ignatius Press, 1979).

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Henri de Lubac, Catholicism:  Christ and the Common Destiny of Man (Ignatius Press, 1988) p. 27.

[11] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “The Conquest of the Bride,” from chapter 12 in Heart of the World (Ignatius Press, 1979).

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

Commentary on Dagle’s Essay, “Augustine and Plantinga: The Civitas Dei, the Civitas Mundi and the task of Ecclesial Philosophy”

By James Gibson, Western Michigan University

Mike Dagle describes the influence of Augustine’s motif on Plantinga’s conception of Christian philosophy (Dagle’s essay).  The motif is one of two cities fundamentally at odds: “they are fundamentally different things (or places) with different values, concepts, and ideas… within the current context they have different philosophies.”  The denizens of the Civitas Dei seek to perceive themselves and all things in relation to God.  On Plantinga’s view (c.f. WCB), characteristic Christian doctrines may be known in a basic way, which is to say that they are not necessarily grounded on the basis of further reasons or beliefs but reasonably held because of the work of the Holy Spirit.  Compare other perceptual beliefs, e.g. that a tree is before me, held not on the basis of inference from other beliefs, but epistemically grounded by the fact that a tree is directly perceived.  If Christian doctrines are grounded in this (basic) way, the Christian is within her epistemic rights to employ everything in her epistemic arsenal to answer philosophical questions, especially (or exclusively?) when directed for the good of the church.  The Christian philosopher has unique resources, i.e., those Christian doctrines known in a basic way, as well as the tools philosophy brings, to aid the church in developing a view of how God relates to all things.

As Dagle notes, the Augustinian view blurs the distinction between philosophy and theology.  How so?  If philosophy is supposed to be the domain of reason alone, then by using premises, which employ content typically consigned to the realm of faith, it looks as if one is doing theology and not philosophy.  Perhaps this is appropriate, however, if all philosophical musing is religious in nature.

I must admit that the Augustinian picture of merging philosophy and theology is appealing.  Still, I have some questions about what Augustinian philosophy amounts to, particularly with respect to the role of the Christian philosopher and the Civitas Dei.  One way of understanding the City of God is by the telos of its philosophical inquiry.  Recall, the job of the Christian philosopher is to bring her skills to relate all things to God.  So should the Christian philosopher, on the picture presented, focus exclusively on these sorts of issues?  I can put this more forcefully: is the Christian philosopher making a moral mistake by engaging in philosophical questions like, “are there sets?” or “did Kripke misunderstand Wittgenstein?” when the answer to these questions are not obviously relevant to the church?  Aren’t there more pressing issues?[1]

Suppose it is morally permissible for the Christian philosopher to ask such questions.  If so, what is the distance between these two cities?  Perhaps there’s a third alternative to the Augustinian and Thomist approaches, whereby the Christian philosopher is more of a traveler between the two cities than a permanent resident of only one of them.  In this respect, I am regarding philosophy in the Civitas Mundi as one with distinct (or a smaller set of) concepts and ideas, excluding the Christian doctrines that permeate the premises of philosophical argument as found in the Civitas Dei.  How might the Christian philosopher travel to the Civitas Mundi?  Suppose the Christian philosopher might be among colleagues of the Quinean sort that advocate a principle like, every claim is revisable including this claim.  The Christian philosopher may object to the principle with an argument, the premises of which have nothing to do with the distinctly Christian doctrines.  After having presented such an argument, it might be argued that a Christian perspective has independent resources to think such a principle is false (if in fact the Christian perspective does suggest this).  So the Christian philosopher travels by using what is accepted by members of both cities in order to persuade the citizens of the Civitas Mundi. It would also be significant for the Christian to find grounds outside of Christian doctrine to think such a principle is false.

Is the Christian philosopher in this instance merely articulating the Christian faith?  Well, only if we understand the faith so broadly as to include any true propositions whatsoever.  It is more appropriate, I take it, to describe her role as coming to see new explanatory relations within the created order which derive from a smaller set of facts than those that include the dogmas of the Christian faith.  These explanatory relations may have indirect relevance to the faith, perhaps even yet unrealized relevance.  It might even be that the Christian philosopher realized grounds from her faith which should lead her to reject the Quinean principle, and this would then lead to the search for dialectically useful grounds for the citizens of the Civitas Mundi. Still, the new grounds are informative for her.

But isn’t this just the Thomist view of engaging in philosophy by reason alone?  Perhaps, if we think of the premises as lacking content that references revelation.  However, on the Augustinian view, the Christian philosopher should use everything in her epistemic arsenal.  So why shouldn’t she include “natural” facts as part of that arsenal?  It seems as if the Thomist and Augustinian pictures collapse when philosophical argument is done in this way.  Does the Thomist believe one can never use premises with faith-content for arguments and then call that “philosophy”?  I do not know.  But like many other philosophers, I’m not sure what philosophy is in the first place aside from thinking very hard about a topic, especially on “philosophically” paradigmatic topics.  It would be very uninteresting if one objected that a view is not distinctly philosophical simply by stipulation of the meaning of the word – a word without a clearly shared meaning.  In any event, I’m unclear on where the dispute between the Thomist and Augustinian lies.

Notes

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[1] A recent look at this issue is raised in Paul Moser (2005), Jesus and philosophy: on the questions we ask, Faith and Philosophy 22 (3), 261-283.