Memorial of Saint Bernard, Abbot and Doctor of the Church

Today the Church celebrates the liturgical memorial of the great Doctor of the Church, St. Bernard of Clairvaux. The abbot Bernard was the first Cistercian to be canonized. Being just about finished with Franz Posset's book about Bernard's influence on Martin Luther, the Church's observance of St. Bernard's memorial this year means quite a lot to me. He was born in 1090 and died in 1153 and raised to the altar in 1174, a little over 20 years after his death, by Pope Alexander III.

Bernard lived most of his life in the twelfth century. Because it is easy in the internet age to find biographical information on St. Bernard, I will just note that what Martin Luther admired about him was his non-scholastic theology, which was rooted in biblical exposition. Most of all Luther admired Bernard unabashed preaching that salvation comes by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. Almost four hundred years before Luther's heyday, the so-called Mellifluous (i.e., "Honey-tongued) Doctor was preaching and teaching a form of sola gratia/sola fidei.

The question arises that if we are saved by grace alone through faith alone and if faith, along with hope and love, being a theological virtue, is a free gift that God bestows on whomever He chooses, then what part, if any, do we play? The first thing to note about this, which distinguished Catholics and probably most Lutherans from Calvinists, is that God does not force His grace on anyone. While it is important not to reduce faith to mere belief, the free decision to believe, to initially respond to God's grace is certainly the beginning of faith. St. Paul's conversion, as recorded in Acts 9, gives us good insight into how faith is a response to God's initiative, which we call grace.

Christ embracing St. Bernard, by Francisco Ribalta

After seeing the flash of a bright light, which caused him to fall on the ground, and hearing the voice of Jesus asking Saul why he was persecuting Him by persecuting His Body, the Church, the Risen Lord immediately tells Saul, "Now get up and go into the city and you will be told what you must do" (Acts 9:6). As Saul and those who accompanied him understood it, "the city" is Damascus, where he was headed to continue his zealous persecution of Jewish Christians. We learn that those who were traveling with Saul heard the voice, but did not see anyone. Heeding the voice, they took Saul "by the hand" and "brought him to Damascus" (Acts 9:7-8). What we take away from this is that Saul, as well as those with him, heard the voice of the Lord and obeyed. Were they not all, including Saul, free to return to Jerusalem? I think this is a great beginning to understanding faith as our response to God's initiative towards us, even though we are forced to acknowledge that God, in His wisdom, most often uses subtler means.

What is saved, according to St. Bernard, is free choice: "Take away free choice and there is nothing to be saved. Take away grace and there is no means of saving.... God is the author of salvation, the free choice is merely capable of receiving it: None but God can give it, nothing but free choice receive it" (Liber de gratia et libero arbitrio "Book of grace and free will"). St. Bernard continued, "For to consent is to be saved. Where you have consent, there also is the will. But where the will is, there is freedom. And this is what I understand by the term 'free choice.'"

While there is certainly more to unpack here, especially within the context of Bernard's own theology, I find this convergence promising, a fertile field for the cultivation of Christian unity.

Jesus came to liberate you: faith and works revisited

Our second reading for this Sunday is taken from the Letter to the Hebrews. As in the Pauline corpus, the sacred author of this letter also goes to great pains to convince his readers(/hearers) that they are saved by Christ, not by our adherence to the law, that is, not on the basis of our own merits. As we read today-

Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us rid ourselves of every burden and sin that clings to us and persevere in running the race that lies before us while keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the leader and perfecter of faith. For the sake of the joy that lay before him he endured the cross, despising its shame, and has taken his seat at the right of the throne of God (Heb. 12:1-2)

St. Bernard of Clairvaux

This is something that easy for us, as Catholics, to forget, or, worse yet, never to know, which is a recipe for a lifetime of shame, guilt, and doubt.

Even today my insistence on this strikes many as "not quite right." One wrinkle, which I have noted before in broaching this issue, is that we do not believe that faith can be reduced to mere belief, to subjective assent, but that faith that is truly faith does not require, but elicits from the one who has it, which is a gift from God, good works. So, what we do matters, but why we do what we do matters just as much. Among the many reading endeavors I am engaged in right now, along with reading Balthasar, Wright, and a work of the late historian Dale Morgan, is finishing up Fran Posset's book on Martin Luther's indebtedness to that great monastic (read pre-Scholastic) expositor of Sacred Scripture, that Doctor of the Church, St. Bernard of Clairvaux: Pater Bernhardus: Martin Luther and Bernard of Clairvaux.

Of the three great solas of the Reformation (i.e., sola fidei, sola gratia, sola scriptura), the only one I definitively repudiate is sola scriptura. Why? Because, oddly, it is the only one that is not scriptural in the least. It's like the Vienna Circle of logical positivists who insisted on what they called the principle of verification. The principle of verification requires that in order for something to count as knowledge it must be empirically verifiable. Wittgenstein quickly dispatched this nonsense by pointing out that the principle of verification itself is not, even in theory, empirically verifiable.

It is not enough to point out that nowhere is it written in Scripture that Scripture is the sole rule of faith. It is necessary to note that it "is the church of the living God" that is established as "the pillar and foundation of truth" (1 Tim. 3:15). In 2 Peter, basing his argument on his experience of witnessing Jesus' Transfiguration firsthand, the sacred author asserts that the witnesses "possess the prophetic message that is altogether reliable. You will do well to be attentive to it, as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. Know this first of all, that there is no prophecy of scripture that is a matter of personal interpretation, for no prophecy ever came through human will; but rather human beings moved by the holy Spirit spoke under the influence of God" (1:19-21).

This is not to dismiss Scripture lightly. Far from it! Scripture is the written repository of God's revelation to man. Everything must not only cohere with Sacred Scripture, but be, even if implicitly, taught in Scripture. Hence, Scripture is normative for doctrine and life. As we read in Dei Verbum, the Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, "Sacred Scripture is the word of God inasmuch as it is consigned to writing under the inspiration of the divine Spirit" (par. 9).

Martin Luther

St. Bernard taught sola fidei some 400 years before Martin Luther. As Posset does a good of demonstrating, it is to Bernard that Luther owes this insight, a debt that Luther himself was not shy about admitting. In his 22nd sermon on the Song of Songs, Bernard preached, "He came down to you in your prison, not to torture you but to liberate you from the power of darkness... [ellipsis in original] By the 'righteousness that comes of faith' (Rom 9:30), he looses the bonds of sin, justifying sinners by his free gift (cf. Rom 3:24)... Therefore the man who through sorrow for sin hungers and thirsts for justice, let him trust in the One who changes the sinner into a just man, and judged righteous in terms of faith alone, he will have peace with God (Rom 5:1)... Who would presume that his wisdom, or righteousness or holiness suffices for his salvation?." Referring to Simon the Pharisee, in whose house Jesus had His feet washed with the tears and dried by the hair of a prostitute, St. Bernard says that "He did not realize that righteousness or holiness is a gift of God, not the fruit of man's effort..."

In his first sermon on the Annunciation, as Posset relates it, in addition to clarifying "the central importance of God's mercy and his non-imputation of sins," the Mellifluous Doctor re-emphasized "the significance of good works," teaching that "with regard to good works, it is absolutely certain that no one can perform them of himself." In his 51st sermon on the Song of Songs, Bernard preached that "there is neither fruit without flower nor good work without faith."

Understandably the response to such a bold assertion is incredulity. But I ask you to consider two things: Something that Pope Francis said in the homily that created a stir about everyone being redeemed: "We are created children in the likeness of God and the Blood of Christ has redeemed us all! And we all have a duty to do good. And this commandment for everyone to do good, I think, is a beautiful path towards peace." I also ask you consider something Katherine Hepburn said in an interview that was published in the October 1991 edition of Ladies Home Journal: "I'm an atheist, and that's it. I believe there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for each other," which evinces a kind of faith, perhaps more than Ms. Hepburn realized, and certainly grasps the imperative of walking the path of peace.

Is who you are made by what or by who?

As The Who memorably asked, "Who are you? Who? Who? Who? Who? I really want to know." Given that the times in which we lived are frequently described by means of the contradiction "post-modern," it is little wonder that so many people are left wondering who they are. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that we are told and even encouraged to invent and then continually re-invent ourselves, to try on identities like we try on shoes to see which one(s) fit and how they look on us. In my view, at the root of such a view of ourselves and the constantly re-shaped world we inhabit is self-deception. The main problem lies in too many people seeking to make themselves someone who is a walk-on character in the story of their lives, a person who is discontinuous with who they have always been, which, let's face it, restricts our possibilities to a certain degree. This often has the effect of making a person's life a work of fiction and usually not a very good, or compelling work of fiction.

An example of what I am trying to explain, despite the peculiarities of the story (every story has its unique features, which is what makes it this story and not another), is ABC News editor Don Ennis, who had a sex change to become a woman before deciding to "return" to being a man. I guess being a news(wo)man with amnesia, who believes (s/)he is living fourteen years in the past, which seems impossible on first glance, is the best proof of Qoheleth's milennia-old observation- "Nothing is new under the sun!"

I find it interesting and highly significant that one of the first and still very influential purveyors of this view, who said, "In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes," perhaps the inventor of self-reinvention, Andy Warhol, seemed to know who he was and never really drifted from being the son of Slovakian immigrants from Pittsburgh with a creative flair. Many are still surprised to learn that Warhol attended Mass almost daily at St. Vincent Ferrer Church in New York City, though it does not appear he was a communicant. According to the remembrance of the parish priest, Warhol sat or knelt towards the back of the Church, keeping a low profile. Warhol stated his reason for so doing was that, as an Eastern Catholic attending a Roman Rite liturgy, he didn't want to been crossing himself right-to-left in the Eastern Christian manner... but I digress.

I believe this whole phenomena of self-invention and re-invention is an attempt to reduce, or over-simplify one's self, to reduce what is irreducible. As human beings we are complex creatures. Very soon after I first posted this, my dear friend Fred, who is always more insightful than I am, quipped- "the quickest way to becoming annoying is by fixating on one's self-concept, e.g. identity politics including the hideous phenomenon of Catholic identity." It would be easy to cite many passages of Scripture to support this, especially from the Psalms, like this from Psalm 8:

When I see your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and stars that you set in place—
What is man that you are mindful of him,
and a son of man that you care for him?
Yet you have made him little less than a god,
crowned him with glory and honor.

Sexuality is perhaps the most pervasive of post-modern pseudo-identities. By using "pseudo" I do not mean to suggest that our sexuality is not a constituent part of our human personalities and identity, it certainly is, but it alone does not constitute, or, as many would have it, dictate, who we are in toto. What and who we desire sexually does not tell another person everything about us they need to know. Our sexual desires and proclivities are not even the most interesting thing about us, let alone what completely defines us.

I ran across something just this morning by Brendan O'Neill, who is an atheist himself, written a few days ago for The Telegraph, about how atheism has become one of these invented identities: "How atheists became the most colossally smug and annoying people on the planet." By posting this I am not blind to the fact that Christians are often very annoying and, at times, quite smug. In fact, also this week, I heard and then read about the arrest and subsequent acquittal of two pastors in California who were reading the Bible out loud to people who were lined up outside the California DMV office in Hemet, California. As a U.S. citizen, I readily concede that this seems to be well within their constitutional right speak freely. However, as a Christian, I find such ham-fisted approaches to sharing my faith (I refuse to call it evangelism) probably more frustrating and annoying than most non-Christians, many of whom are probably all too happy to have a certain stereotype and caricature confirmed.

What struck me in O'Neill's piece was his diagnosis of what has "gone wrong with atheism." I think he is quite right to assert up-front that atheism itself is not the problem, correctly noting that when you cut-to-the-chase atheism is simply "non-belief," it is "a lack of something." What turns simple non-belief into what he describes as "today's monumentally annoying atheism... is the transformation of this nothing into an identity, into the basis of one’s outlook on life." Those he describes as "today’s campaigning atheists" seek to make their "lack of belief in God... the be-all and end-all of their personality." As he notes, while it is possible, it doesn't make much sense to base one's view of the world, of life, of one's self on a negative. He contrasts the so-called "new" atheists with the atheism of non-believers of previous generations, whom, he insists, viewed their lack of belief in God "as a pretty minor part of their personality, or at most as the starting point of their broader identity as socialists or humanists or whatever..." Now, whether this is a wholly accurate assertion of past atheism I do not possess enough expertise to tell, but he contrasts this with "today’s ostentatiously Godless folk constantly declare 'I am an atheist!' as if that tells you everything you need to know about a person, when it doesn’t."

The inverse does not hold true, however. Being Christian is the basis of my identity. It is constitutes who I am. Based on Jesus' exchange with Nicodemus in the third chapter of St. John's Gospel, Christians believe that in baptism a person is re-born as a child of God. As Archbishop Migliore once said in a homily I heard him preach in Jersey City, "You're not really born until you are baptized." Being God's daughter or son is an identity and ought to shape how we live, which is according to the very challenging teachings of Jesus. This is something positive, not negative; not a lack, but a life-giving abundance for anyone who cares to heed the Lord's invitation- "Come, and you will see" (John 1:39).

It's quite unintentionally been a week focused on metaphysical questions here at Καθολικός διάκονος. There is no topic that is of more interest in this field than that of personal identity.

"Where's your guts and will to survive"

For some reason I awoke wanting to listen to The Ramones. Hence, their song (not one of their huge hits) "We Want the Airwaves" is our Friday traditio because a paean to rock n' roll seems fitting to me at the end of summer even at this point in my life. The other song I considered was "I Don't Want to Grow Up."

Not too much else to write about this, except that it is pretty normal for me to want to bring it down a notch after participating in and serving at the altar during a magnificent liturgy, such as the amazing 6:00 PM Mass for the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary we celebrated last evening in The Cathedral of the Madeleine.

Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, by Mateo Cerezo

By ancient and venerable tradition Christians both East and West today observe the great solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.I could not consider myself a respectable Catholic blogger if I let this day, which I spent with my family swimming and then at the Utah Olympic Park, slip by without posting something. Additionally, it would be a personal expression of ingratitude to my Mother, who has been so good to me. I already feel bad enough not posting anything yesterday on St. Maximilian Kolbe's memorial.

For us Roman Catholics, it is fitting to remember that on 1 November 1950, Bl. Pope Pius XII proclaimed the Blessed Virgin's bodily assumption into heaven as a dogma of the faith. His proclamation was the first and, to date, only infallible dogmatic proclamation made by a Supreme Pontiff since the formal definition of papal infallibility was made during the First Vatican Council in 1870.

The proclamation was made via the Apostolic Constitution Munificentissmus Deus.

And so we may hope that those who meditate upon the glorious example Mary offers us may be more and more convinced of the value of a human life entirely devoted to carrying out the heavenly Father's will and to bringing good to others. Thus, while the illusory teachings of materialism and the corruption of morals that follows from these teachings threaten to extinguish the light of virtue and to ruin the lives of men by exciting discord among them, in this magnificent way all may see clearly to what a lofty goal our bodies and souls are destined. Finally it is our hope that belief in Mary's bodily Assumption into heaven will make our belief in our own resurrection stronger and render it more effective (par. 42)

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death

"Clearly this is no ordinary question"

Despite my meager results, blogging is difficult work for me, a work of fusion, synthesis, and hopefully, at least from time-to-time, some value-added insight by this intensely curious, but not very bright deacon. In looking again the section from Von Balthasar's Seeing the Form on "The Spirit and the Senses," there is a bit from the tail end of his excursion into Romano Guardini's 1950 book, The Senses and Religious Knowledge, in which Balthasar pulls in the great Protestant theologian Karl Barth, citing his magnum opus, Church Dogmatics, to support his positing of a great reversal that occurred in Western civilization, while not attempting, at least not here, to describe how it came about.

I believe it is necessary to understand this reversal so that we can open the door to some possibility of recovery which, it must be noted, can only come through what has transpired and not in spite of it, let alone ignoring that it ever happened. In short, while a recovery, it cannot mean going back.

While it would be too much to lay the entire burden on the shoulders of Descartes, his cogitio certainly marked the moment when this reversal reached its peak, thus propelling Western culture and thought downhill ever since; reducing being human to a being who thinks. With the so-called Cartesian revolution, the clarion call of which is cogito ergo sum (i.e., "I think, therefore I am"), human consciousness was set on its head by locating all cognition in our heads. One attempt at a philosophical recovery was made by Wittgenstein, who was convinced it was a mistake to locate everything in our heads and who, in his Philosophical Investigations (693), insisted that "nothing is more wrong-headed than calling meaning a mental activity!"

Von Balthasar observed-

Karl Barth had expressly pointed to the primitives' image of the world, in which 'nothing is represented as totally material and nothing as purely spiritual' and which 'maintains or anticipates the vision' which 'was unfortunately lost by the so-called "higher" religious world-views with their various abstractions'. Guardini repeats this allusion to 'primitive peoples, for whom all empirical affirmations are integrated with religious affirmations... [ellipsis in original] Only later is the ominous reversal achieved whereby cultural acts such as knowing, acting, and creating detach themselves from this context and the religious act becomes an act in itself... [ellipsis in original] What formerly had been the first datum now becomes a conclusion (Seeing the Form 390)

I think citing this concludes a coherent thought about humans as spiritual beings, which implies we are religious beings. It is because you are a human being that you cannot be spiritual and non-religious. Any genuine human spirituality needs to be enacted, embodied, which is precisely what religion is. Being spiritual is not, as we now popularly suppose, the opposite, the antithesis of being embodied, that is, material. Such a thought is yet another result of the dramatic reversal not described, but invoked and alluded to by Balthasar here. I am tempted to label this popular bifurcation "Platonic," but it really amounts to rank dualism of the crudest sort.

Since I invoked Heidegger, who, along with Edith Stein, studied under Edmund Husserl, in my last post it seems fitting here to bring up his famous lectures on metaphysics, delivered at the University of Freiburg in the summer of 1935, which began with the question of being, the question Heidegger sought to pull back into the center of the philosophical inquiry (something he believed he had to destroy all metaphysics since the pre-Socratics to achieve, but I digress). In Ralph Manheim's translation, the first lecture begins- "Why are there essents [i.e., existents, things, etc.] rather than nothing? Clearly this is no ordinary question." Somehow I think a term paper that answered this question by concluding, "Just 'cuz," would not have passed muster.

Who will liberate me from myself?

Yesterday in recommending N.T. Wright's book Simply Jesus, I mentioned that Wright was correct to point out that it is difficult, perhaps impossible, for most people living in technologically advanced Western societies today "to imagine what it's like to live within a long story" in the way the Jews of Jesus' day did. Wright also noted that perhaps the only thing analogous in our day is the widespread and dubious belief in "progress." Artur, writing on Cosmos the in Lost over the weekend, in his response to Rachel Held Evans' piece "Why millennials are leaving the church," noted another factor, which is really just an effect of the cause, namely that "recent studies suggest millennials remember much less than senior citizens."

As I make very slow progress re-reading the first volume of Von Balthasar's theological aesthetics (a mix between savoring and being plain lazy), in a section on "The Spirit and the Senses," which comprises part of the larger section on the subjective experience of faith, he draws attention to Romano's Guardini's The Senses and Religious Knowledge, published in 1950. The point of Guardini's that Balthasar seeks to get across is the former's insistence "that the capacity of spiritual knowledge has 'largely been lost' to man in the course of cultural history." This has happened, according Balthasar's reading of Guardini, because we no longer truly see. He offers as evidence for this the poetry of Rilke, described by Guardini as an "activity without image."

Guardini's point, at least as grasped by Balthasar, is that human life is no longer shaped "in accordance with nature's great images" which are rendered "alien and insubstantial" to us "because of technology." Quoting Guardini, Balthasar notes- "We no longer exist in images. Concepts have taken the place of images that can be contemplated." Lest someone is tempted to argue that the "virtual world," which happens in "cyber space," is image-driven, consider this, which is also part of Guardini's more than sixty year-old insight: "Machines have taken the place of embodied images, and segments of time the place of living rhythms" (Seeing the Form 389-390), which does more than an adequate job of explaining the displacement of the natural world from the center of human consciousness aided and abetted by virtual reality.

As for progress, Von Balthasar observes, "There is talk of progress" and, turning again to Guardini, notes, "but whoever looks beneath the surface knows what nonsense that is. Truly, if he follows this road man can only become sick because his interior being can...[ellipsis in original] live only on images," real images of what is substantial, what exists in the actual world, what is created by God. Guardini also noted, "This dislocation into abstract conceptuality and sensualistic corporeality must be overcome so that the living human reality can again emerge" (390). Here, I believe, Guardini is pointing us to our need to recover the analogia entis (i.e., "the analogy of being"), which constitutes the heart of traditional Catholic epistemology, arising as it does from our worship, which itself has been grossly denuded, thus contributing to our spiritual stupidity (the good news about stupidity, as one of my better professors once informed a class of his I was in, is that it is remediable) and blindness.

Anna Karina as Marianne in Godard's Pierrot le fou

Thirty-three years after the publication of The Senses and Religious Knowledge, Walker Percy's book Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book was published. It can accurately be noted that Percy re-verified Guardini's insight. Writing about that strange modern discovery: the atomic "self," specifically about its tendency to become bored (a concept on which Heidegger notably expounded), Percy, commenting on his observation as to "Why the Self is the only Object in the Cosmos which Gets Bored," asks,

Is it because there is a special sense in which for the past two or three hundred years the self has perceived itself as a leftover which cannot be accounted for by its own objective view of the world and that in spite of an ever heightened self-consciousness, increased leisure, ever more access to cultural and recreational facilities, ever more instruction on self-help, self-growth, self-enrichment, the self feels ever more imprisoned in itself - no, worse than imprisoned because a prisoner at least knows he is imprisoned and sets store by the freedom awaiting him and the world to be open, when in fact the self is not and it is not - a state of affairs which has to be called something besides imprisonment - e.g., boredom. Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself

I read Percy's chapter on boredom Sunday night and this morning read this passage from the book of the prophet Isaiah in Wright's book, which, in turn, takes it from the fourth chapter of St. Luke's Gospel, which is Jesus revealing His Messiahship:

"The spirit of the Lord is upon me
Because he has appointed me
To tell the poor the good news
He has sent me to announce release to the prisoners
And sight to the blind
To set the wounded victims free
To announce the year of God's special favor... Today this scripture passage is fulfilled in your own hearing."

In pointing you to what you can read about Jesus that is useful because it is credible, I would be remiss if I didn't also recommend Benedict XVI's Jesus trilogy, to which Wright's book can serve as prolegomena: Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives; Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration; Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance Into Jerusalem To The Resurrection. Since we are in Year C of the three-year Sunday lectionary cycle, which focuses on the Gospel According to St. Luke, I also recommend reading this Gospel. If you're looking for a good companion volume to St. Luke's Gospel, I recommend the late Fr. Gene LaVerdiere's Dining in the Kingdom of God: The Origins of Eucharist according to Luke.

Read Walker Percy, whose work, apart from The Moviegoer, which I read years ago, I have only discovered this year, at any time. He is good for what ails the so-called post-modern, that is, the bored, alienated, spiritually stupid self. Our point of reflection is, How much does being spiritually stupid contribute to boredom and alienation?