Lumen Fidei: the witness of Father Abraham

I wish that Pope Francis' first encyclical Lumen Fidei had been made public, promulgated as it was on 29 June, the great solemnity of the Apostles Sts. Peter & Paul, prior to me composing my post "Our need to separate how from why," if for no other reason than being able to cite this passage from it:

God’s word, while bringing newness and surprise, is not at all alien to Abraham’s experience. In the voice which speaks to him, the patriarch recognizes a profound call which was always present at the core of his being... For Abraham, faith in God sheds light on the depths of his being, it enables him to acknowledge the wellspring of goodness at the origin of all things and to realize that his life is not the product of non-being or chance, but the fruit of a personal call and a personal love. The mysterious God who called him is no alien deity, but the God who is the origin and mainstay of all that is (par. 11)

Since I am currently leading on Bible study on the Letter to the Hebrews, it bears noting that, as Christians, we acknowledge Abraham as our father in faith. Because of faith (which can only be faith in the true and living God), not being his genealogical descendants, he is our father.

Abraham is first mentioned in the Letter, which most New Testament scholars believe is really an ancient homily, in the second chapter (2:16), but only in passing. He is not mentioned again until the sixth chapter, where we read:

When God made the promise to Abraham, since he had no one greater by whom to swear, "he swore by himself," and said, "I will indeed bless you and multiply" you. And so, after patient waiting, he obtained the promise. Human beings swear by someone greater than themselves; for them an oath serves as a guarantee and puts an end to all argument. So when God wanted to give the heirs of his promise an even clearer demonstration of the immutability of his purpose, he intervened with an oath, so that by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie, we who have taken refuge might be strongly encouraged to hold fast to the hope that lies before us. This we have as an anchor of the soul, sure and firm, which reaches into the interior behind the veil..." (6:13-19)

Abraham figures prominently in the seventh chapter of Hebrews, but is not mentioned again until chapter eleven. It is in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, the chapter that begins by defining faith (i.e., "Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen" 11:1), that we read-

By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; he went out, not knowing where he was to go. By faith he sojourned in the promised land as in a foreign country, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs of the same promise; for he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and maker is God (11:8-10ff)

Milan Kundera on memory and conscience- Updated

In my post "Memory and Morality: God remembers all," I wrote about the central role that memory plays in the works of Milan Kundera, literary works that I cherish and to which I return time and again. Kundera certainly grasps the necessity of remembering in order for there to be truth. Nonetheless, he also grasps that human beings are, due to our limited nature, forgetful creatures. In this he would not differ with Pope St. John Paul II, who insisted that the purification of memory consisted first and foremost in remembering accurately and not evading evil episodes, or even trying to tidy them up, or explain them away. After all, to forgive can never mean to forget, at least not entirely. To do so would wipe away the significance of forgiveness itself!

In his second encyclical, Spe salvi, on the theological virtue of hope, Pope Benedict XVI noted something of tremendous importance: "justice and grace—must be seen in their correct inner relationship. Grace does not cancel out justice. It does not make wrong into right. It is not a sponge which wipes everything away, so that whatever someone has done on earth ends up being of equal value. Dostoevsky, for example, was right to protest against this kind of Heaven and this kind of grace in his novel The Brothers Karamazov. Evildoers, in the end, do not sit at table at the eternal banquet beside their victims without distinction, as though nothing had happened" (this also serves to remind me that I need to re-read Derrida's "On Forgiveness," something I read last fall on an airplane and prompted many thoughts).

Reading from the same book of Kundera's essays, Encounter, last night I read something that helped me to tie up a loose end concerning memory and the gap between believing and not believing in God. The essay that contained the clarification is entitled "The Total Rejection of Heritage, or Iannis Xenakis (a text published in 1980 with two interventions from 2008)." The enlightenment comes from Kundera's first 2008 intervention, when, remarks on his initial response to re-reading his essay on what the musci of Xenakis meant to him after the 1968 Soviet invasion of his native Czechoslovakia:

Reading my old text, seeing the phrases "my nation had just gotten a death sentence" and "the catastrophe that had struck my country...and whose consequences will be felt for centuries," I felt a spontaneous urge to obliterate them, since these days they can only seem absurd. Then I got a grip on myself. And I even found it rather disturbing that my memory should think to censor itself. Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth...

Russian tanks roll through Prague, Spring 1968

... if we we forget our state of mind back then, there is no way to understand anything

Of course, his desire to revise what he wrote in 1980 clearly arose, in 2008, from the fact that Czechoslovkia no longer existed, there is the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic, neither of which are under either Soviet or communist domination. In other words, he was tempted to see his 1980 observations as incorrect, inaccurate, in need of revision, or obliteration. He realized that such a revision is a gross violation of conscience, what happened in the interim notwithstanding. It also reminded him of the transitory nature of all earthly things. Does this not reveal the beauty of Eastern Christian response to someone's death, "May his memory be eternal"?

Update: Just this morning, as I resumed my initial reading of Pope Francis' and Pope Benedict's collaborative encyclical, Lumen Fidei, I was struck by this (which, in my view, is pure Ratzinger)- "The question of truth is really a question of memory, deep memory, for it deals with something prior to ourselves and can succeed in uniting us in a way that transcends our petty and limited individual consciousness" (par. 25).

Pope St. John XXIII, pray for us

It really was not my intention to give Pope St. John XXIII short shrift yesterday. To make amends, below is a list of posts going back several years, with a preponderance from last year, here on Καθολικός διάκονος concerning Good Pope John:

30 Nov. 2006- "Papal Coronation of Blessed Pope John XXIII"- links to videos no longer active (you can find them on YouTube)

28 Oct. 2007- "Il Papa Buono-Bl. John XXIII remembered"

1 Nov. 2007 (All Saints Day)- "Good Pope, bad assessment"

5 Jan. 2012- "Bl. Pope John XXIII and the convening of Vatican II"

1 Feb. 2012- "Bl. John XXIII and the plight of Italian hens"

3 Feb. 2012- "The Council and updating canon law"

3 Feb. 2012- "The surprise of Vatican II"

20 Feb. 2012- "The task of Vatican II: Regum Dei"

20 Feb. 2012- "Libertas ecclesiae: freedom for the truth"

11 Oct. 2012- "Year of Faith"- whole text of Pope St. John's address to open the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council

Pope St. John Paul II, pray for us

Oh glorious day! Pope John Paul II and Pope John XXIII will be added to canon of saints!

Pope John Paul II, I have no doubt, is one of the main reasons I am a Catholic. In my estimation, he was the towering figure of the last half of the twentieth century. I have shared this here before, but I have a most vivid memory of Pope John Paul II's election in October 1978, when I was in seventh grade and staying at what was then my grandma's fairly remote farmhouse. It was like I felt a jolt of electricity pass through me when I saw this man, having no idea who he was apart from being the new pope.

Since today marks the public promulgation of Pope Francis' first encyclical, Lumen Fidei, let's look at Pope John Paul II's first encyclical, promulgated in March 1979, Redemptor Hominis. Here is the opening sentence: "The Redeemer of man, Jesus Christ, is the center of the universe and of history."

What else would I post today for our Friday traditio except this from Pope John Paul II's 1979 Apostolic Journey to United States, delivered in Boston, his first stop?

Pope John Paul II's fellow Pole, Artur Sebastian Rosman, on his new and very worthwhile blog, Cosmos The In Lost, posted something very good about what the witness of John Paul II at the end of his life means to atheist psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, "Kristeva’s Declaration of Dependence: On JP2.". I urge you to read the whole thing, it is really quite amazing, even stunning in certain respects, but I was struck by this, referring to John Paul II in his last years, Kristeva wrote, 'the body of the handicapped pope was and remains and invitation to know life up to its limits. And to develop this solidarity with people who are dependent–the handicapped or the aged–which modern humanism has so much difficulty doing."

My lovely wife and I have started to plan out pilgrimage to Rome. we marked our twentieth anniversary last month, but didn't have the opportunity to do anything befitting such an auspicious event. I think perhaps this was in the cards all along. The date has yet to be announced.

None of this is to slight Good Pope John, but Pope John Paul II's canonization is something very personal, even immediate, for me.

Encyclical Letter Lumen Fidei

ENCYCLICAL LETTER
LUMEN FIDEI
OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF
FRANCIS
TO THE BISHOPS PRIESTS AND DEACONS
CONSECRATED PERSONS
AND THE LAY FAITHFUL
ON FAITH

29 June 2013

1. The light of Faith: this is how the Church’s tradition speaks of the great gift brought by Jesus. In John’s Gospel, Christ says of himself: "I have come as light into the world, that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness" (Jn 12:46). Saint Paul uses the same image: "God who said ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts" (2 Cor 4:6). The pagan world, which hungered for light, had seen the growth of the cult of the sun god, Sol Invictus, invoked each day at sunrise. Yet though the sun was born anew each morning, it was clearly incapable of casting its light on all of human existence. The sun does not illumine all reality; its rays cannot penetrate to the shadow of death, the place where men’s eyes are closed to its light. "No one — Saint Justin Martyr writes — has ever been ready to die for his faith in the sun". Conscious of the immense horizon which their faith opened before them, Christians invoked Jesus as the true sun "whose rays bestow life". To Martha, weeping for the death of her brother Lazarus, Jesus said: "Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?" (Jn 11:40). Those who believe, see; they see with a light that illumines their entire journey, for it comes from the risen Christ, the morning star which never sets.

READ THE ENTIRE ENCYCLICAL

Our need to separate how from why

This thought, prompted by an email, despite it's conciseness, is worth a blog post rather than a Facebook status update. It's something I can't wrap my mind around: How can someone seriously assert that everything happens for a reason while simultaneously denying the existence of God?

Implied by the modern atheistic assertion that there is no God is the belief that everything happens for precisely no reason, that is, everything is accidental and without an underlying "reason." The implications that flow, in turn, from that assertion are horrifying. This is true whether you move in a determinist or non-determinist direction.

In a world godlessly conceived everything happens for no reason, or, to play a bit of a semantic game, nothing happens for a reason! Either way, why are we so intent on always looking for the reasons that things happen? Such curiosity is part of the structure of human consciousness. I believe that in order to make sense of this we must separate "reason," what we might call final cause, from efficient cause. This is merely to recognize the difference between how and why.

To illustrate this point I'll use something that pops up pretty regularly on FB, which is from Aaron Sorkin's show Newsroom: "I only seem liberal because I believe that hurricanes are caused by high barometric pressure and not gay marriage." This is to confuse how with why, to make a category error. It is this kind of smugness that short-circuits our human quest every bit as much as what it seeks to refute, perhaps even more.

I, too, believe that hurricanes are naturally caused and that earthquakes are the result of plate dynamics. But when an earthquake hits Haiti, or a tsumani swamps a lowly-lying South Pacific country the day after Christmas, or endangers a nuclear power plant in Japan, my questioning goes deeper than merely "How?", but extends to "Why?" This is what makes "Why?" the most human of all questions. We might even say that our need to ask "Why?" is constitutive of our humanity.

As to the why, we need to seek answers in a deeper way, which does not mean taking it upon ourselves to inflict God's punishments on the world, but in the way David Bentley-Hart, writing from an Eastern Orthodox perspective, sought them in the wake of the 2004 tsunami in his book Doors to the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsuanmi? Bentely-Hart takes on the cognitive dissonance that follows such an event, prompting, as they do, the question, How can an all-powerful and all-loving God be reconciled with evil and natural disaster?

As Rich Mullins, who was only a ragamuffin songwriter, lamented in his song "Hard to Get": "I know it would not hurt any less/Even if it could be explained," but only after acknowledging, "I know you bore our sorrows/And I know you feel our pain." At least from a Christian perspective, the former is more important than the latter, as the sacred author of the Letter to the Hebrews passed along: "Because he himself was tested through what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested" (2:18).

An unfocused reflection on liberty and freedom

I have to admit that I find it difficult to wax poetic about Independence Day this year. While I don't consider myself an alarmist, I do not see the state of our union as being a good, healthy state. At a fundamental level I think this is due to the fact that we have collectively come to hold not only distorted, but destructive, views about liberty and freedom. It seems to me that we are collectively regressing to a kind of societal adolescence.

Liberty and freedom are not synonymous. Far from being an exercise in pedantry, this is an important distinction. One of the greatest problems in our society is the inability to make important distinctions. Liberty is the condition of being able to exercise one's freedom in peace without undue interference. It was precisely undue interference, which impeded freedom, that caused the colonies to declare independence from Great Britain. Our declaration was collective, not individual, which is important. One cause of destructive distortion is forgetting, or, more to the point, obstinately refusing to remember, seeking to situate ourselves always in an ahistorical moment. This is why tradition, what Chesterton dubbed the democracy of the dead, matters so much.

At the beginning of our second reading for Mass last Sunday we heard, "For freedom Christ set us free" (Gal. 5:1). Christ is our liberator, the One who makes us free by making possible the forgiveness of our sins so that we are not condemned on the basis of our own unrighteousness, that is, our inability to make ourselves righteous, but are justified by His. Nonetheless, St. Paul went on to note that we should not use freedom as an excuse to do evil and that living by the Spirit, as opposed to being subjected to the yoke of the law, does not mean doing whatever I want, whatever my flesh (not to be conflated with my body- though sins of the flesh are enacted with our bodies) bids me do. In another place Paul wrote,

"Everything is lawful for me," but not everything is beneficial. "Everything is lawful for me," but I will not let myself be dominated by anything. "Food for the stomach and the stomach for food," but God will do away with both the one and the other. The body, however, is not for immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord is for the body; God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power (1 Cor. 6:12-14)

True freedom is freedom for, not freedom from. Freedom for fulfilling the end for which I exist. Fulfilling the end for which we are made presumes that there is an end for which we are made, this is what is meant when we discuss the need for a transcendent conception of the human person. Otherwise, as philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has chronicled, especially in his book After Virtue, things tend to devolve to what he termed "emotivism."

Take the word "equality" for example. As Cardinal Camillo Ruini, recently stated in an interview, "Equality understood as the negation of all difference is something that goes against reality."

Last Independence Day I re-posted something I wrote about the fact that our constitutional system is rooted in a transcendent view of the human person (see "Constitutionally transcendent redux"). This is evident at the very beginning of our nation's seminal document, which if the Constitution is the foundation, serves as the cornerstone, the Declaration of Independence: "When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

"Nature and Nature's God" as the source of human equality strikes me, indeed, as a very Biblical, that is, a uniquely Christian idea, derived from the teachings of Christ and of His apostle St. Paul. Take this passage from Paul's Letter to the Galatians: "For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (3:27-28). What is the apostle getting at here? Is he really saying that human beings are not different from one another? No. He is saying we are equal in dignity and status, that the baptized are all children of God through Christ. How can I say this? Look at St. Paul's Letter to Philemon, in which he urges Philemon to welcome his escaped slave Onesimus, who was also a Christian and who had run away to join Paul, back and not punish him. While this does not constitute a ringing endorsement of slavery, it is a case where Paul certainly recognizes the distinction between slave and free in one sense, even while reminding Philemon that because he and Onesimus, along with Paul, were brothers in Christ and children of the Father.

Freedom, if it is true and good, is subject to nature, which is a way of being subject to God, even without explicitly professing faith. Cardinal Ruini was absolutely correct when he observed, "We are fooling ourselves if we think we can banish nature with a personal or collective decision of our own." It is one thing to be tolerant, respecting another's freedom demands this, as does charity. It is another thing entirely, the abdication of liberty that leads to a violation of freedom at a fundamental level, to be forced to approve a recognition that is contrary to reality, especially in the name of love. I will end by letting His Eminence field that one too:

_______________________________________________________________________________
Q: The battle for equality feeds on emotional reasons. There is an idea of love that goes beyond the differences of gender, of the distinction between man and woman. It is love that makes itself an institution and a perfectly equal right. Is this an irreversible decline?

A: Love is a beautiful word, but it can have many meanings. States cannot, evidently, command or prohibit that one person should to love another, and in this sense the laws cannot directly concern themselves with love.

They can and must, however, seek to regulate in the way most useful and most in keeping with reality the behaviors that are born from love but have a public significance.