Per Caritatem

Rowan Williams’ little book on the church, Why Study the Past?  The Quest for the Historical Church, is a must read for anyone interested in understanding the historical and theological complexities of the continuity and discontinuity of the Church.  As usual, Williams does not offer overly facile solutions, nor does he tell a triumphalist story in which the Church marches forward untainted, having never soiled herself along the way.   Rather, Williams admits the various failures of the Church—from the early fathers misogynistic tales to historic Protestantism’s “embarrassing record of collusion with uncritical nationalism” (73) to the Church’s overall failure on the issue of slavery.   Nonetheless, Williams does not leave one in despair.  He emphasizes throughout that the Church is founded and sustained by divine action, particularly one divine action which is both “a set of historical events and an eternal act, the self-giving of the Son to the Father in the Trinity” (96).  If the survival and resilience of the Church depended solely on humans, the story would have ended some time ago.  Thankfully, it doesn’t; yet, Christians must be active and continue to put themselves, the Church and the world into question.  We must study our past, our tradition, our Scriptures, (and, as St. Thomas taught us, truth wherever it is found) bringing to light our failures and learning how to translate what is true, good and beautiful into our present contexts.  Williams, attentive to the interplay between historical contingencies and the ways in which history “makes” us on the one hand, and the reality of transcultural (yet contextually-applied) truths on the other, denies that we are stuck in a hermetically-sealed present or unable to break into a hermetically-sealed past.  As he explains,

To engage with the Church’s past is to see something of the Church’s future.  If we relate to the past as something that settles everything for us, something whose meaning is utterly and finally plain, it is to treat the texts of the past as closing off history, putting an end to our self-awareness as historical persons involved in unpredictable growth.  If we dismiss the past as unintelligible, if we read its texts as closed off from us by their alien setting, we refuse to see how we have ourselves been formed in history; we pretend that history has not yet begun.  And in the specifically theological context, we shall on either count be denying that we can only grow in company, can only develop because summoned by a word that is not ours.  That word is made concrete and immediate for us in the human responses that have constituted the Church’s history; all of this has made our present believing selves possible.  T.S. Elliot, faced with the glib modern claim that ‘we know so much more than our ancestors’, riposted, ‘Yes; and they are what we know.’ As was said in the first chapter, we must become aware of our hidden debts for who we now are (94-95).

If only Williams’ critics would actually read his works with care.

In the final section of Billings’ book, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift:  The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ, he suggests various ways in which Calvin’s theology of participation might speak into our current theological milieu.

While Calvin’s theology of participation is wide-ranging, it is distinctive in relation to contemporary discussion, because it brings together what are usually held apart:  organic images of transformation into Christlikeness by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit with forensic images of God’s free pardon; a strong account of humanity’s sin with a soteriology based on the restoration of a primal uniting communion with God (p. 196).

Throughout the book, Billings has been at pains to demonstrate that Calvin’s theology of participation, contra the claims of “Gift theologians” (e.g., Milbank) involves an inner transformation of the believer as s/he is incorporated into the Trinitarian life of God.  In other words, given Calvin’s understanding of the duplex gratia, imputation does not necessarily rule out ideas of infusion and partaking in the very life of the Triune God (including feeding on the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist).  Billings also points out the importance of the corporate dimension of the Christian life for Calvin’s doctrine of participation-being united with Christ necessarily unites us with our fellow Christians in a genuine and mystical bond.  Hence, concerns for social justice and love of neighbor are intrinsic to Calvin’s understanding of participation in Christ.

Regarding the “common ground” that Calvin’s theology of participation offers, Billings writes:

While Calvin’s theology of participation brings together what many theologies of participation hold apart, it also has a great deal of common ground with Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Eastern Orthodox theologies of participation.  Calvin’s soteriology gives a central place to the problem of sin and forgiveness, but it is not fixated on those themes.  Rather, those themes occur within a larger vision of salvation that is, in many ways, a catholic vision.  Calvin is concerned, along with key patristic writers, to affirm the goodness of creation and that redemption is a fulfillment rather than a disruption of the originally good human nature.  Calvin offers a soteriology that is Trinitarian from beginning to end, continually returning to the way in which we are united to Christ by the Spirit, revealing the Father.  Calvin’s theology of participation is both sacramental and ecclesial, emphasizing the centrality of the Word and sacraments for the life of Christ’s body, which can receive the sacraments only in the communion of the church (p. 196).

Though Calvin’s theology of participation is in many ways a rather complex combination of scriptural, patristic, and medieval teachings, it is also from another perspective very simple.  It speaks of a life of Trinitarian participation, in which one is united to Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit and receives the gift of pardon and forgiveness from the Father.  “As such, the life of faith is a life of voluntary gratitude, made possible by the God who restores to sinners what they have lost, and reunites them with God” (p. 197). 

What was the only chapter topic never altered in the many revisions of John Calvin’s Institutes?  Was it predestination?  No.  Was it his discussion of human depravity in our postlapsarian state?  Wrong again.  It was his discussion of prayer, which is also the longest chapter in the Institutes.  As Billings explains in his excellent book, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift:  The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ, Calvin opens his chapter on prayer “with a Trinitarian portrait of prayer’s significance” (p. 110).  When a person has been brought to see his or her need of Christ, which is a need for something other than what one is, a gift is bestowed-the revelation and gift of Christ Himself.   Describing this gift  as he begins his discussion of prayer, Calvin writes:

 

The Lord willingly and freely reveals himself in his Christ.  For in Christ, he offers all happiness in place of our misery, all wealth in place of our neediness; in him he opens to us the heavenly treasures that our whole faith may contemplate his beloved Son, our whole expectation depend upon him, and our whole hope cleave to and rest in him.  This, indeed, is that secret and hidden philosophy which cannot be wrested from syllogisms.  But they whose eyes God has opened surely learnt it by heart, that in his light they may see light (Institutes, 3.20.1, trans. Ford Lewis Battles). 

The following passages are taken from George Tavard’s book, The Starting Point of Calvin’s Theology.  Tavard’s work is a significant and unique contribution to Calvin studies, as it introduces readers to Calvin’s practically unknown book, Psychopannychia, which examines the immortality of the soul.  In addition to highlighting Calvin’s thorough knowledge of the Church Fathers and Scripture, Psychopannychia also reveals “Calvin’s rootedness in the medieval mystic tradition and his deep catholicity, even as he took steps that would define him as a Reformer.”[1] In chapter 10, Tavard highlights the orthodoxy of Calvin’s Trinitarian theology. 

The originality of his presentation of Trinitarian doctrine emerges from his understanding of the notion of “person” in God.  This had been a point of debate in medieval speculation.  The stream of thought that originated in the writings of Boethius and was chiefly represented by Thomas Aquinas understood personhood as “a distinct subsistence in a rational nature.”  A person is that entity which is endowed with reason and subsists in itself.  On the whole, reflection on the dogma of the Trinity has mostly followed this line of approach (p. 177). 

Another stream of thought, however, that goes back to Richard of St. Victor in the twelfth century, and was chiefly emphasized by John Duns Scotus at the end of the thirteenth, understood personhood as, seen negatively, the incommunicability, or, positively, the uniqueness, of a spiritual or rational being.  A person is that spirit which is itself and no other.  Personhood belongs to the order of existence rather than of subsistence. In the God of the Christian revelation it designates a dimension of divinity that is so unique that it cannot be communicated and shared.  That there are in God three such dimensions is at the core of the revelation of Christ.  Abba, the Father of the Logos incarnate, is neither the Son nor the Spirit, and vice versa twice repeated.  The Father is known to believers in a glass, darkly, through the further revelation of the filiation of the Second Person and the procession of the Third” (p. 177). 

According to Tavard, the 1559 version of the Institutes appears to bring these two approaches together. 

Starting with the Greek term hypostasis used in Hebrews 1:3, Calvin explains in the Latin versions:  ‘There is no doubt that he [the Apostle] designates some subsistence in which he [the Father] differs from the Son.’[2]  This is further clarified with the remark:  “Person I call a subsistence in the essence of God, which, related to the others, is distinguished by an incommunicable property” (p. 178).[3]  

However, in the French version of 1561, Calvin adds a new aspect and attempts to explain the term “subsistence” in terms of indwelling.  “This word [hypostasis] implies a subsistence residing in the essence of God, which, being related to the others, is distinct from them by virtue of an incommunicable property.”  So interestingly, for his French readers, Calvin explicates subsistence by the term “residence”-a term that is “borrowed from the well-documented spiritual experience of sensing God ‘indwelling’ in the Christian soul” (p. 178). 

Tavard goes on to say that due to Calvin’s pastoral concerns, he tended to focus his biblical commentaries in a moral direction and that this aspect of Calvin has been advanced by his predecessors more so than the mystical roots of his Trinitarian theology. 

Nonetheless, the indwelling of the three Persons in the soul was the model he followed when he explained the Father, the Son, and the Spirit as three mutual indwellings in the divine ousia.  Each Person is a specific indwelling, a residence, in this essence of God. ‘But as it [la Parole, the Word] can have been in God only as residing in the Father, this shows the subsistence of which we speak, which, though it is joined with the essence by an inseparable link, nonetheless has a special mark by which to be different from it.’[4] The divine Word subsists and dwells in God the Father.  [...] It remains that the writing of Psychopannychia had turned his theological perspective in the direction of the soul’s interiority, exactly in that inner dimension of humanity-Augustine’s ‘intimiority’-in which Christian faith and experience have located the indwelling of the Three Persons (p. 179). 

Notes

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[1] Quoted from the back cover of the book.[2] Inst. of 1559/61, I, ch. 13, n. 2.

[3] Personam voco subsistentiam in Dei essential quae, ad alias relata, proprietate incommunicabili distinguitur (I, ch. 13, n. 6). 

[4] Inst. of 1559/61, I, ch. 13, n. 6. 

Summarizing his findings with regard to art and human beings in the final chapter of his book, Redeeming Beauty:  Soundings in Sacral Aesthetics, Aidan Nichols says the following:

Art has been a feature of human society since prehistoric times. [...] Art discloses what we think our society is like, or what it is not like but ought to be like.  As the main expression (other than childbirth) of human creativity it can be said to take further the original creation by bringing into being new realities of intrinsic worth.  Above all, it is or can be a pointer to transcendence in three main ways.  The first [...] by making us go beyond interpretations of this or that thing or event toward an overall reading of the world.  The second was to see the world as having as its own precondition a fundamental meaningfulness beyond itself.  The third (after we had noted the possible moral effects of art in making us go beyond the limits of our present character) was that art might be regarded as a kind of epiphany of divine presence, divine light. [...] The arts reveal the human world, either as it actually is or as it ideally is.  They express the creativity of man when the artist adds to the things of intrinsic worth in the world, or the art-appreciating public makes the artist’s vision of what he has made live again.  The arts point to transcendence, not just the way the world as a whole is wonderful and presupposes a meaning greater than itself, but also by enacting divine presence sustaining the special density of meaning that art, literature, music can contain (pp. 145-146). 

Nichols then relates his findings to three aspects of the person and work of Jesus Christ.  First of all, Christ makes manifest or reveals what humanity is.  “As the true Adam, he shows us the reality of what the human species should be like and on the Cross discloses the range and power of the evil which inhibits our being as the first Adam was meant to be, in God’s image and likeness” (p. 148).  So Christ reveals what the postlapsarian world is like and (thankfully) what it ought to be like.  Second, Christ’s redemptive work transcends nature “by bringing into being a further dimension of reality,” viz., salvation and “new resources of grace and life” (p. 148).  In other words, just as art advances and elevates creation, so too does the work of Christ.  Third, in Christ the meaning of the world as a whole is revealed and points to the “Father’s wonderful plan to bring about the nuptials of heaven and earth, the uncreated and the created, in the sacrificial joy of the Kingdom.  He points to the source of the world in a pre-existing divine truth, [...] Moreover, he enacts that truth-the truth which is the Holy Trinity-in his own person” (p. 148).    Though only the Son took on flesh, the Son is eternally “co-defined by the Father and the Holy Spirit.” Hence, “Jesus is always the Trinitarian Son, essentially related to the Father and the Spirit in his work on earth” (p. 148).  In fact, the whole redeemed creation shall one day enter into the eternal dance of the Trinity, as captured in Rublev’s famous icon of the Trinity (p. 148). 

The risen and ascended God-man is the true predestined goal of all creation.  Here the capacity of artwork to be the vehicle of divine presence in the material form of words or sounds or shapes and colours is super-filled.  Christ is, then the perfect art work in the sense of that reality in whom is realized those goals that all artistic making has as its explicit or implicit ends.  Because he is infinite meaning, life and being perfectly synthesized with finite form, the cave-painters at Lascaux, or Hesiod penning his hymns, or Beethoven working on his last quartets, were all gesturing towards him through they realized it not (p. 148). 

In my preparation for a paper that I will be presenting at Baylor this Fall on von Balthasar and Christocentric friendship, I have been thinking about the ways in which the claims of Christianity with regard to love and friendship go beyond the possibilities offered in classical philosophy, viz., the philosophy of Aristotle. Though my paper focuses on von Balthasar’s view of friendship, I mention in my introductory paragraph that whether we consult Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics or St. Augustine’s Confessions, we find the affirmation that human beings are social beings and that friendship plays a crucial role in shaping a person’s moral development. After discussing a number of topics in von Balthasar (e.g., the relation of originary, Trinitarian love to human love, being awakened to love by Love, etc.), my plan is to return in the concluding paragraph to briefly discuss the ways that Christian claims with regard to love and friendship in the broadest terms offer something beyond that which is possible in classical philosophy (again, primarily with Aristotle in mind). Below are a few of the ideas that I am tossing around, and about which, I would love your interaction (be it critical or positive).

In Aristotle’s Ethics, as he unfolds his account of the vicious or dissipated person, that is, the person who was deprived of a virtuous upbringing in which good beliefs were fashioned, and consequently, whose corrupt desires and opinions form a perfect harmony in which no resistance is present, it seems that such a person is in an utterly hopeless situation. In other words, a person in this condition is, as Aristotle says in book VII, paragraph 8, incurable.[1] The vicious person is doomed to his fate with no possibility of breaking free from destructive cycles which may have been part of his family line for generations. Having grown up in an injurious environment, a person in such circumstances has experienced and in turn acts out perverse versions of love and friendship. From this perspective, Aristotle’s view that the dissipated person acts with a kind of necessity rings true. Yet, when we bring the Christian tradition into the conversation, whether appealing to St. Augustine or Balthasar, we find that there is hope for the vicious person, as well as any person who has experienced being bound and fragmented by his or her own will. Turning briefly to St. Augustine, in book VIII of his Confessions, Augustine provides a kind of phenomenology of the will in which he vividly describes his own inability to choose the good, which was the result of many years of debauched living.[2] However, for Augustine, as is the case with Balthasar, the Trinitarian God via the Christ event can and does overcome the power of destructive habits and heals not only the will but the whole person. In his taking on of flesh and giving of His Spirit, Christ, so to speak, works from the inside, and thus, is able to effect a transformation that far exceeds any extrinsic solution or mere modification of one’s behavior.

This transformative healing of course comes at a great cost, and the cost was the life of the Son by way of the Cross in which His experience of utter abandonment has never been surpassed. The giving over of Himself to death and willingness to be forsaken by the Father, brings us to a second point of departure with Aristotle’s philosophy. Would, for example, Aristotle’s magnanimous man or his contemplative philosopher voluntarily relinquish a state of perfect bliss and give his life for his enemies? Would such an act be perceived as virtuous or foolish? Yet, this radical self-donation and self-surrender to the Father’s will are constitutive of the Christ event. Not only did He die for those who hated Him, but He offered (and still offers) His adversaries an unfathomable inheritance—i.e., He is willing to bestow upon them all that His Father has imparted to Him. As St. Paul says, perhaps one would die for a good person; however, Christ’s love exceedingly surpasses the possibility of dying for an upright person, which when said and done leaves us with little cognitive dissonance. Christ’s act, on the other hand, as far as the Greeks are concerned, is difficult understand as anything but the apex of foolishness.

Speaking more directly to the implications of Christ’s radical self-giving in relation to friendship, in John 15:12-16, Christ instructs his disciples to keep his commandments, and specifically highlights that they are to love one another as He self-sacrificially loved them. Furthermore, He says that his disciples are now called friends because they have been brought into the circle of intertrinitarian love (see John 15:5ff). Then in verse 16, in the exhortation to live fruitful lives, there is an implicit invitation to participate in Christ’s ongoing mission, a mission that is characterized by loving God and loving one’s neighbor. Here we see that in Christocentric friendship the vertical and the horizontal are inseparable with the latter flowing out of the former, and by implication, serve as a necessary conduit for the full actualization of the self. This Godward/manward nexus highlights the essentially communal and social nature of Christian philia—a philia that has been and continues to be transformed by divine agape. In other words, in Christocentric friendship, the “I” and the “thou” are seen neither as a threat to one another nor is the other instrumentalized (as is the case with some forms of modern and contemporary philosophy, e.g., Sartre). Rather, the relationship between the “I” and the “thou” is a dynamic, reciprocal encounter of love in which both are brought closer to the realization of the particular person that God desires them to be. Since both share a love for Christ and a common mission, they are aware of the fact that human love is a reflection of a more originary, perfect love shared among the members of the Trinity. This divine love, manifested to us in the Person of Jesus Christ, is itself not static, but dynamic because it is the love of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.[3] Or to use Balthasar’s words, “the archetypal identity which we discover in creatures within a clear separation of persons who are held together by love, is a creaturely imago trinitatis, veiled and yet not wholly visible.”[4] As Balthasar gathers together the stones of his mosaic of friendship, the final form takes on a distinctively Chirstocentric and hence Trinitarian shape in which the love held out to us in the Christ event is a gift—a gift that involves no less than an invitation to participate in the love of the Trinity, and in so partaking, one naturally engages in a vertical expression of love that is friendship.

Notes
[1] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, p. 133 [Sachs translation].
[2] Augustine, Confessions, p. 200 [Boulding translation].
[3] Bonnici, Person to Person, p. 36.
[4] Balthasar, Unless You Become Like this Child, pp. 17-18.