Fruits of Study 8: The Notion of Love

Our faith is based on love, and love is the foundation of our whole life. Of course we know what it is, but trying to describe it is not always that easy. Can we at all give a definition of such an all-embracing, profound notion?

One who did exactly that was Eric Fromm. Born in in 1900, he witnessed two world wars with all its horror and life threatening violence. He came from a Jewish family with strong academic traditions, and he did his formation as psychoanalyst in Germany before moving to the United States in 1934. His religious background and insight in the Talmud strongly influenced his elaboration of the understanding of humanity. In a time where hate and contempt for the dignity and worth of the human being had marked the world society, Fromm sought an answer to the question of the fundamental needs of humanity. He was opposed to the Freudian understanding of the human being, claiming that it is not sexuality, that first and foremost constitutes the drive in humanity, but the deep need of belonging. Fromm developed a humanistic philosophy based on the Biblical story of Adam and Eve becoming strangers in front of God, each other and even themselves. From the moment of the fall, life becomes a struggle to reunite with the world.

Fromm explains how the human being may unite with the world in many different ways; many of them false, others resulting in a limited freedom and peace. (Examples of unsatisfying ways of uniting with the world, says Fromm, can be found in narcissism, submission or domination. The most common way of our time though, is what can be called a herd conformity which in its ground is rooted in a rather primitive feeling of clan identity.) The only way that can fully answer this the deep desire of belonging is love. And we are not talking about being loved, but developing the capacity of loving. Fromm confronted the same difficulty as we started with: What is love? Fromm introduced four notions to describe the quality of loving, each of them describing a certain attitude: care, responsibility, respect and knowledge. These qualities lead man out of himself and draw his attention to the other. Through care he is concerned with growth and happiness of the other person. He takes responsibility by responding to the others articulated or non-articulated needs. He respects the other person and sees him objectively (and not the way he wishes to see him), and he search to know the other sufficiently to see the world from the perspective of the other. This is the fundamental attitude that every human being can take part in, and it should be underlined that this not only to applies to certain people, like the ones we prefer, but to all of humanity. Fromm writes: 'if I can say "I love you", I say, "I love in you all of humanity, all that is alive; I love also myself". Self-love, in this sense, is the opposite of selfishness'. This kind of all-embracing love is in its nature a brotherly love; an equal, respectful and caring attitude, always leaving the other person free.

Egypt: St. Menas designated by Christ as his trusted friend and adviser. 6th century

This is a way of describing love that we as Christians are invited to meditate upon. It corresponds to the Christian notion of love which is at the same time universal and personal. Fromm's description helps us to see clearer how love should be realized, yes, it can even be used to prepare ourselves for confession. After all, we often fail in meeting with those around us, in one or several of the notions that Fromm mentions.

If you would like to know more of Eric Fromm, I recommend his bestselling book, The Art of Loving, which through a simple language describes the depths of our inner selves.

Fruits of Study 7: Esse and Essentia

St Thomas’ second argument in the Summa for God’s existence goes along the following lines: in the universe, everything we sense has some cause, nothing can cause itself to exist and there can’t be an infinite series of causes. Therefore there must be a first cause, and this we call God. This cosmological might at first seem susceptible to some serious objections: if God can exist without being caused, then why can’t other things exist without being caused? Why can’t there be lots of first causes? Aquinas’ argument for the distinction between esse and essentia in his short work, De Ente et Essentia can help us to respond to these objections.

Essentia and esse are rather technical terms for St Thomas, but roughly speaking they correspond to the two operations of the intellect: we can understand what something is, and we can understand that something is. Essentia is that within something by which we understand what it is; the essentia determines the specific manner of somethings existence. Similarly, esse is that within something by which we understand it to actually exist; it is because of a thing’s esse, because of its act of being, that something is actual, real, existing. Everything that exists must have an essentia and an esse.

The fact that we might understand what a unicorn is (its essentia) without knowing whether it exists (i.e. has an esse) suggests that essentia and esse are different. But does this difference in our understanding correspond to something in reality, or is it just the way our minds work which makes us think essentia and esse are distinct? St Thomas says it’s the former - esse and essentia are really distinct. He uses a rather subtle argument to show that essentia and esse are distinct in reality for any essentia that can be in more than one thing. For example, human nature (an essentia) can be in two different human beings, and therefore there must be a real distinction between a person’s essentia and their esse. A corollary of this is that there can be at most one thing whose essentia and esse are identical. Such ‘a thing’, if it existed would be pure existence. In De Ente et Essentia, the question of whether God exists is the same as the question of whether pure existence exists. This is not obvious – after all Aquinas doesn’t believe in pure whiteness or pure heat, so why should he believe in pure existence?

His argument for pure existence is rather like the second way argument in the Summa: everything that belongs to something must depend on its essentia or arise from something extrinsic to it. For example, a person’s tendency to laugh depends on their human nature, but a person’s knowledge also depends on some external reality. Now everything possesses an essentia and an esse, and a things esse cannot come from its essentia because the essentia depends on the esse for its actuality, and so a things esse comes from something extrinsic to it. This extrinsic thing must also have an esse and essentia, and so we can apply the same argument again to show that the esse of this extrinsic thing must also be caused by something else extrinsic to it. Now this argument can’t go on for ever; the argument can only stop if there is something whose esse and essentia are identical. This is the first cause. It is unique, it depends on nothing else, and everything in the universe depends on it. And this is what we call God.

Fruits of Study 6: Suffering and Love in St Catherine of Siena

Catherine of Siena (1347-80) was very practical and focused and on how to help people be saved and sanctified in the concrete situation of their lives. For her, suffering was a daily reality and one that can be crushing and an obstacle to a life of faith. She wanted people to see suffering in the light of God’s truth and goodness and then use it positively to produce a life of love and other virtues. As with other themes she relates this to the Crucified Christ, the centre of her thought.

In the Dialogue, chapter 14 (D 14), she explains Christ’s saving work through an extended medical metaphor. We are wounded, indeed have puss in us which is deadly, and God steps in as the divine healer. She makes it clear we are too weak to suck out our own poison (the roots of our sin) and so heal ourselves. She draws on a medieval view of medicine that considered that some medicines are too strong for a baby to take. (‘Bitter’ is her own word which may be selected in view of the application she is going to make of the practice.) However, if the mother or wet-nurse (again a common practice in her day) is willing to endure the bitterness of the medicine then she can pass it on to the baby in a less bitter form along with the nourishing milk from her breast. She specifically says that God joined the divine and human natures together in Jesus to ‘drink the bitter medicine of his painful death on the cross so that he might heal and give life to you [us] who were babies weakened by sin (D 14)’. She sees God feeding us in this way as we come to the Crucified Christ and feed at Christ’s opened side or breast. (Catherine is applying striking feminine imagery to Christ and his saving work.)

God’s intention in the redemption then is not just to show respect to Divine honour or to declare us just but also and importantly to really heal us from sin and to actually give us life, life that comes from God. But this is done through the work of the cross and it is only the God-Man who is able to endure the bitterness and so feed us with its medicine. To what bitterness is she referring? It seems the bitterness must be suffering and indeed death itself.

The cross of Christ demonstrates both God’s love and Christ’s virtue and very importantly it also allows us to be formed in virtue. According to Catherine, it builds us up on the foundation of Christ’s love, shown in him freely suffering for us. We love God in return for God’s love for us, and so are called to move from a state of selfishness to one of selflessness, that is to a life of real love. A life given over to such love will produce a life of virtues, love being the mother of virtues. And virtues grow as they are tested. Suffering, difficulty and adversity test them and so a human can grow in virtues. Thus patience, for instance, which Catherine sees as being at the heart of charity ‘is not proved except in suffering (D 5)’; ‘Justice is not lessened but proved by the injustices of others … Likewise your kindness and mildness are revealed through gentle patience in the presence of wrath … Steadfast courage is tested when you have to suffer much from people’s insults and slanders … (D 8).’ To love perfectly is to accept anything from God, any adversity, and to do so with a response of love, full of such other virtues as are required to live such love.

(Citations are from Suzanne Noffke’s translation of Catherine’s Dialogue, SPCK, 1980)

Fruits of Study 5: Creation Ex Nihilo

The much referenced 'science versus religion debate' has at its root a timeless question which we humans feel compelled to answer: where do we come from? Philosophers, natural scientists, theologians, to name but a few, have all quite rightly grappled with this tantalising issue. In recent years it seems to have become more polarised. Creationists and secular Darwinists look across a spectrum of other positions with the Church somewhere in the middle but broadly speaking you're seen to either be with the science crowd or the religious.

Creation would then seem to be the pivotal issue. However, we would be wrong to think that this debate is somehow new: we just have very short or very selective memories. When Thomas Aquinas was penning his Summa in the thirteenth century the same controversy was very much apparent in the new universities. Indeed, a scientific revolution was under-way across Western Europe as the works of the ancient Greek natural philosophers and mathematicians became available in Latin for the first time. Specifically, many held that there must be a fundamental incompatibility between the claim of the Greek naturalists that something cannot come from nothing, and the Christian teaching of creatio ex nihilo, creation from nothing.

Aquinas couldn't conceive that there could be an incompatibility between the two positions – what we now may call science and religion. Christian doctrine maintains that God is the author of all Truth; the aim of rigorous scientific investigation is to find the Truth. Why should one side fear the other? In fact, are we not on the same side if we believe in Truth at all? Well, it wasn't to be that clear cut then and it doesn't seem that much has changed. In straightforward terms, the problem would appear to be complete confusion by what we mean by the nature of creation and natural change.

Thomas, when speaking of creation, is not pondering how one thing came to be from another thing but what is common to all things in the universe, namely existence. But what is the cause of all existence? Is it a cause in the sense of a natural change or of some kind or an ultimate bringing into being of something from no antecedent state whatsoever by Divine Agency? Here lies the fundamental conflict; there is simply a major misunderstanding in the use of the term creation. By seeking to ground it solely in the realm of the natural sciences and being unwilling to admit it has a place in metaphysics and theology we will continue to grope blindly in the dark.

The Greeks were in fact correct, nothing comes from nothing, if we understand rightly that 'comes from' implies a change. Change from one natural state to another requires some pre-existant material reality. A possibility for change must lie in something, there must be potentiality. Creation on the other hand differs as it is the radical causing of the whole existence of whatever there is in existence. We can see the difference if we look at how being the cause of something's whole existence must in fact be different from causing a change in something that exists. In other words, we are not talking of God taking a bit of this and a bit of that and putting a universe together. Creation then, is not a change in matter but a cause; God produces existence absolutely ex nihilo. This act of creation may also be seen as one of conservation, that is God did not simply create in one distant moment and exit the next. Creation is a continual action by which he gives existence as he upholds the world in being.

Without God, the Cause, there can be no effect. The ability that creatures have to act only comes by virtue of their existence. So yes we can make some things, change some things and observe change in other existing realities but we cannot create. Creation accounts for the very existence of things not for changes in things. Only God can create, he is like the ultimate power source that if it were to cease then out would go the lights – only there would be no lights!

Fruits of Study 4: The Development of Doctrine

Blessed John HenryNewman wrote his famous Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1848) against the backdrop of a multiplication of Protestant sects and chapel congregations in nineteenth century England. These protestant groups rejected the elaborate liturgy and theology of the Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican Churches, dismissing these developments as a corruption of the pristine teaching and practice of the early Church. Instead, these reformers claimed a lineage of praxis with the apostles arguing that their simplicity of life and doctrine represented the distilled essence of the faith, free from the later dilutions and contaminations of 'tradition'.

For Newman, this notion that the history of the Church from the end of the apostolic age onwards was a sorry tale of degeneration and decay until finally the light of the reformation freed us from the dark tyranny of tradition, was contrary to the very notion of revelation itself. Newman argued that whilst God's revelation to Mankind at the Incarnation was perfect and complete, our capacity to receive and comprehend this revelation was and is decidedly imperfect and finite - at least in this life. We receive the Gospel not as an easily digestable package of propositions that can be clearly demarcated and defined, but as a truth that transcends us. This transcendence means that whilst we can make some true statements about the coming of God as man and the implications of this Incarnation for each one of us, we can never say everything that is true about this Good News, this Gospel.

Rather than being a clear and distinct idea that we possess and comprehend, then, the Gospel is more like an active principle within us that comes to define who we are and how we live. As we go through life, the Gospel, this 'active principle' that organises our lives, is continually re-applied and re-expressed in the new contexts and situations that we face. In this process of re-application of the Gospel in the lives of Christians and Christian communities, the doctrinal and liturgical tradition of the Church is deepened as new perspectives on the Incarnation of Christ are uncovered.

For Newman, then, doctrinal and liturgical development is not a sign of contamination or decay, it is a sign of life. We do not live our Christian life in a vacuum. We live our Christian lives in a world that is continually changing. Fidelity to the unchanging content of the Gospel, then, means developing and changing ways of expressing and articulating that same Gospel. As Newman himself puts it: 'To live is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often'. To put this same point another way, Newman is offering us a quasi-organic understanding of doctrinal and liturgical development. The Catholic Church is the tree that grew from the mustard seed. Whilst it may now look very different to its first manifestation, there is a direct correspondence between its primitive state and its contemporary state. The Protestant sects and Chapel congregations of Newman's day, in contrast, whilst they may have superficially looked more like the early Church than nineteenth century Catholicism, were in fact fundamentally as different from the Church of the apostolic age as a mustard seed is from an acorn.

Fruits of Study 3: Re-enchanting Education

The following review, by Fr Vivian Boland OP, was published in Faith magazine in January 2011: 

Stratford Caldecott, Beauty for Truth’s Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education, Brazos Press, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2009, 156pp, £12.99

In their struggles with Christianity, the pagan philosophers of late antiquity presented Pythagoras as their answer to Jesus: here was a good and spiritual man whose knowledge and wisdom became foundational for all later philosophy. In this fascinating manifesto on the re-enchantment of education, Stratford Caldecott also appeals to Pythagoras, but to a baptized Pythagoras, his thought about mathematics and music transposed into a Christian key, something already underway in writers such as Boethius and Augustine.

Taking as his starting point Benedict XVI’s appeal for a liturgical understanding of human existence, Caldecott shows how the rationalism that has reduced western education to something purely utilitarian, will be overcome through a fresh appreciation of the transcendentals of truth and goodness, but only where the neglected transcendental, beauty, is allowed to work its influence. The perception of form is fundamental if the elimination of meaning is to be reversed.

A first chapter considers how the medieval quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, became separated from the study of philosophy and theology, as if the quadrivium was an end in itself rather than the way in which a person was made ready for the study of philosophy and theology. A true appreciation of ‘liberal’ education was thus lost, as was a strong sense of the rootedness of the higher disciplines in the study of number and its relationship to physical time and space. The Pythagorean inspiration of the vision proposed is clear and so too is the liturgical destination of education, where time and space are made holy in the worship of God. Caldecott is not making a romantic or antiquarian proposal: ancient and medieval understandings need to be adapted to where we find ourselves now in the story of human understanding.

A second chapter argues for the education of the heart and imagination not just to feel but to know. This is crucial for science too as C.S.Lewis, Charles Taylor, and others, have argued. There follow two chapters developing this theme of the reintegration of science with the poetic mode of knowledge. This requires appreciating anew the nature of symbolism, the analogy of being which it presupposes, and an alternative vision of mathematics, what Caldecott calls ‘the lost wisdom of the world’. He speaks about the symbolism of numbers, the ‘golden ratio’ or ‘golden section’ that is found throughout nature, and symmetry, in which complexity and unity converge. Mathematics connects directly with theology, he continues, showing (following Augustine) how pointers to the Trinity are to be found everywhere. Much of this is inspiring and convincing though some of it feels contrived: Caldecott acknowledges that some of the speculations he records may appear forced.

The fifth chapter considers harmony, another element in the classical definitions of beauty, and he reflects on it in music, architecture, ecology, and astronomy. There are many beautiful thoughts and applications here as he sketches a Christian cosmology whose principles and values are at once scientific, practical, moral, aesthetic, and theological. He is happy to call the one who subscribes to such a vision a ‘Christian Pythagorean’ (p. 115).

A final chapter considers ‘the liturgical consummation of cosmology’. The philosophical and theological roots of ‘secular modernity’ continue to be exposed and examined, and Caldecott calls on many contemporary thinkers in support of his diagnosis. The way forward, he believes, is in recovering a sense of revelation and worship, in particular in recovering the ability to pray. This cannot be done willfully, of course, but emerges spontaneously from a particular way of appreciating the world: as an objective and beautiful thing, a symbolic reality whose fabric reveals, in a great variety of ways, the forms or archetypes of the world’s order (pp. 13, 125). A sense of the sacred, celebration of the liturgy, wonder and gratitude: these are the things in which we need to be re-educated not just for the joy of living in an enchanted ‘Liturgical City’ but because it is the only way to keep our education humane and our life civilized.

Like all manifestos this book is relatively short but clear in its diagnosis and in its prescriptions as well as being pregnant with many suggestive lines of thought. Anyone concerned about the condition of the perennial philosophy, or the future of Christian civilization, ought to read it.

Fruits of Study 2: Why Do We Have a Clergy?

The presence of clerics within the Catholic Church is, to many critics, inside and outside the Church, a problem and stumbling block. From the outside the Roman Catholic Church can seem like a “notoriously clerical affair”. It is often perceived that having a ‘clerical class’ amongst the people of God, acting as “rulers of God’s people”, is in direct opposition to Christ’s call for his followers to be characterized by profound humility. However to understand the need for bishops, priests and deacons within the Church, one must start by showing that the clergy was divinely established by Christ and present within the Apostolic Church.

The obvious starting point for any investigation into Orders is Jesus’ appointment of the twelve. All three synoptic Gospels describe Christ commissioning the twelve and John refers to Thomas as “one of the twelve”. The synoptic gospels portray the calling of the twelve as a major point within Jesus’ ministry. Jesus set aside a group amongst his followers, as an inner circle. In doing so Christ commissions the twelve as his heralds within the new Kingdom. In appearing to the twelve after His Resurrection, Christ establishes them as office-holders within his court and their special role is evident from the embryonic beginnings of the Church.

In St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, special mention is made of the relationship between the Risen Lord and the twelve. St Paul reminds his readers that the Lord appeared first to “Cephas, then to the twelve”. He stresses that the Good News he received and now passes on is received through a direct line from Christ through the Apostles. It is obvious that from the beginnings of the Church the apostles had a “special authority” in the preaching and teaching of the Faith, as the “accredited recipients of the message”. However they are also entrusted with a special authority in the field of “the worship or cultus of the New Covenant”. The Risen Lord, states that: “All authority in Heaven and on Earth has been given to me. Go, therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptising in my name”. The phrasing of the great commission displays a link between Christ’s ultimate authority and the authority of the disciples to baptise in his name. Baptism is of course a liturgical act. More importantly at the last supper, Christ passes the obligation to celebrate the Eucharist, in His remembrance, to the twelve. The New Testament shows that Christ gave his closest disciples the authority to baptise in his name and celebrate the Eucharist. Finally Christ institutes the twelve in matters of power and governance of the New Kingdom.

In choosing twelve men, Jesus establishes the twelve ‘new tribes’ of the new Israel. They however will govern and rule in a new way; a way based on humility and service. This is most clear in the Gospel of John, where Christ’s washing of the disciples’ feet could be considered a consecration of disciples in Christ’s life of service. Jesus makes it clear to Peter that if he does not accept this washing then he has no part in Christ. He then commands them to do as he has done. These structures of leadership or ordines have been and continue to be “perpetuated in unbroken succession through the sacrament” of Holy Orders and the laying on of hands in the manner of the Apostles.

Fruits of Study 1: Christology

We teach …  that the one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, is to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not split or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten God, the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ ...

So teaches the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451) about Jesus Christ. At first glance, it could seem rather obscure, an argument about the philosophical terms of nature and person which surely, we might think, can’t have too many implications for most Christians and their practice of the faith. And yet, on closer consideration, we realise that this teaching on the person of Jesus Christ lies at the very heart of our faith. Now, as Pope Benedict has frequently reminded us, ‘Christian faith is not only a matter of believing that certain things are true, but above all a personal relationship with Jesus Christ’:* this doctrine, then, is central because it tells us something about who that person Jesus is, namely that he is fully man but also fully God.

The Christological doctrine of the Church leads us deeper into the mystery of the Incarnation; the heretical opinions on either side of the orthodox doctrine detract from the fullness of that mystery, by denying either that the Word made Flesh could be fully human (i.e. denial of two natures in Christ), or that God and Man could truly be united in one person (i.e. assertion of two persons). In both cases, the mind-blowing truth of the extent of God’s love for us shown by his truly taking on our nature is watered down.

As Our Lord himself teaches us, ‘the truth will set you free’ (John 8:32). As he also tells us, he is himself ‘the Truth’ (John 14:6), and it is the only in the truth of the fullness of the Incarnation that we see Christ’s power to save us. In the words of St Leo the Great, ‘If he were not true God, he would not be able to bring us healing; if he were not true man, he would not be able to give us an example’.

* Message for the XXVI World Youth Day, n. 2

Fruits of Study: Introduction

Study plays a central part in Dominican life, and informs all our writing and preaching, so that it could all be called the fruit of our study.

In this series, however, the Godzdogz team hopes to share more directly with our readers the fruits of our study by presenting particularly useful or striking insights gained in the course of our studies at Blackfriars.

We hope you will find the new series interesting!