Jesus, humanity, the cultures and the religions

Given our faith that Christ is not only the historical Jesus, but also at the same time the Lord who will come again, the process of the Christian Fact is not finished with the original event, even if it received from this event its definitive and permanent norms. If we were to move closer to the conceptions developed by the Greek Fathers, in their attempt to reach a global understanding of the Christian Fact, we could say that the process of the Incarnation, of the assimilation of the human on the part of the divine manifested in Christ, began in him, but did not end with him. Yet again, in other words, borrowing modern categories, we could express the same thing by saying that the encounter of humanity, starting with Jesus of Nazareth, continues as long as there are human beings; it is only in the course of this encounter that it can develop itself in all its possibilities. (J. Ratzinger, Il problema della storia dei dogmi nella teologia cattolica, Natura e compito della teologia: Il teologo nella disputa contemporanea Storia e dogma [Milano: Jaca Book, 1993] 118-119)

Earlier versions:
Das Problem des Dogmengeschichte in der Sicht der katholischen Theologie (Koln-Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1966).
"Il problema della storia dei dogma nella teologia cattolica," Storia e Dogma (Milano: Jaca Book, 1971) 11-34.

The highlighted text is extremely interesting for its world-ecumenical implications. If the assertion is true, then the encounter of humanity with Jesus continues in every religion, in every age, in every culture. And only in the course of this encounter can it develop and unfold in all its possibilities. 

Challenges from the religions

The challenge from Hinduism: can the Absolute enter space, time, language (the world mediated by meaning)?

The challenge from Judaism and Islam: can God be beyond our reason? (the challenge of rationalism - allowing God to be truly God, to be beyond the normal human reach of intellect)

Purely natural religion

To be added in a consideration of Lonergan's early thinking on religion:

Natural Desire to See God, 1C 88: is a state of pure nature, a world order in which no one receives grace, a concrete possibility? Lonergan talks about a religion that is natural. At 1C 90, he says that a world order without grace is a concrete possibility; but that this is not a central doctrine but only a marginal theorem. Renaissance theologians magnified this marginal theorem in Aquinas into a central doctrine: the state of pure nature.

The symbolic and the sensible in religion

Here is what Lonergan has to say about the symbolic and sensible component of the divine solution to the problem of evil:

The divine solution to the problem of evil "will be not only a renovation of will that matches intellectual detachment and aspiration  not only a new and higher collaboration of intellects through faith in God, but also a mystery that is at once symbol of the uncomprehended and sign of what is grasped and psychic force that sweeps living human bodies, linked in charity, to the joyful, courageous, wholehearted, yet intelligently controlled performance of the tasks set by a world order in which the problem of evil is not suppressed but transcended.
     "Further, since mystery is a permanent need of man's sensitivity and intersubjectivity, while myth is an aberration not only of mystery but also of intellect and will, the mystery that is the solution as sensible must be not fiction but fact, not a story but history. It follows, then, that the emergent trend and the full realization of the solution must include the sensible data that are demanded by man's sensitive nature and that will command his attention, nourish his imagination, stimulate his intelligence and will, release his affectivity control his aggressivity, and, as central features of the world of sense, intimate its finality, its yearning for God." (B. Lonergan, Insight CWL 3:744-745) 

Rossi de Gasperis speaks, with Ignatius, I suppose, of the 'spiritual sense.'
The body of Jesus here. Interacting with the environment.
Our bodies are a flux. We are not contained in our skins. We are the ‘crossroads’ (De Smet) of a thousand schemes of recurrence.
This land, this history – they were part of the body of Jesus. That is why Rossi de Gasperis can talk of pilgrims kissing the stones. And PierVito’s testimony during the IME retreat at The Beatitudes, Galilee: "I laid my shame aside and embraced the stones."

And see also "Joseph and the splendor gloriae" at http://ivocoelho.blogspot.co.il/2013/03/joseph-and-splendor-gloriae.html

Rossi de Gasperis can help fill out Lonergan on the symbolic and sensible component in the divine solution to the problem of evil. See Sentieri di vita 2.2:568ff on the sacramental dimension of the faith and of the Catholic liturgy. See 2.2:123: people kissing the land, anointing the stones, touching the places in the sanctuaries of Israel and of Palestine... 2.2:120-123: Il 'qinto esercizio' di Ignazio. L'applicazione dei sensi. Application of the senses.

Authenticity, major and minor, and missio ad gentes

Thinking about Lonergan's distinction between major and minor authenticity, I was wondering: could we identify 'good conscience' with minor authenticity?

The distinction might also well be applied to missio ad gentes. We need not question the minor authenticity of people: they might well be good Hindus, good Buddhists, good Muslims. But proclamation of the Good News of Jesus raises the question of major authenticity.

Or perhaps: it may also raise the question of major authenticity - especially if the tradition in qustion has no place for such a revelation. E.g. the rationalism that seems to be to be inherent in Judaism and Islam - by which I mean that both these religions seem to me to remain within the bounds of what Catholics call 'natural theology', and there is the inbuilt temptation to say: nothing beyond, which where the rationalism thing comes in. Perhaps also Hinduism and Buddhism - though with these, especially with Advaita and Buddhism, the question of whether the finite can bear the weight of the infinite also comes in (here Ratzinger might be helpful). 

The natural and the supernatural in the religions

Joaquim’s paper Jacques Maritain e la mistica natural Indiana,” a reworked version of the article we printed in DJPE, makes very clear the position of Maritain: Christian mysticism is supernatural; Indian mysticism is really an experience of the self, and purely natural. However, he does admit that there could be ‘mixtures’ – mystical experiences that have ‘touches’ of the supernatural. How, I have to read further to understand.
I was asking myself: how does this position compare with that of Lonergan? Perhaps this way. In his earlier writings, Lonergan would talk of natural, relatively supernatural and absolutely supernatural solutions to the problem of evil. In his later position, he would take the clear (Christian) stand that the actually realized dispensation is absolutely supernatural. He would go further and state that the absolutely supernatural gift of God’s love is given to all, and therefore is available / given in all religions. He would say clearly that, in their positive moments, all religions are fruits of the gift of the Spirit.
I am thinking now that even in his earlier position, on the hypothesis / faith assertion that the actually realized dispensation is the absolutely supernatural one, he might have envisaged such a position. It is not said, and he does not say clearly, that any religion is natural. Hoever, he does talk / imply that Islam has no place for the supernatural mysteries. But then the mysteries regard the content of faith, perhaps? That position, in that case, would not really exclude the possibility of a truly supernatural gift of God’s love given even in Islam.

The religions - natural as well as supernatural

The anomaly has been, I think, satisfactorily resolved. The question now is, what has been gained, apart from the infinitesimal contribution to Lonergan exegesis?

I think: a clarification of the natural-supernatural debate about religions. Are some the religions merely natural? Are they supernatural? The traditionalists tend to say they are merely natural. The others tend to regard them as supernatural. Lonergan has this contribution to make: they are all of them fruits, at least in their positive moments, of the gift of the Spirit, which is the gift of God's love. As far as their beliefs are concerned, they might well be natural. In crude terms, we could say that the religions might represent a range of combinations of natural and supernatural, with the proviso that, "in the present order," all would be, at least in some sense if not in all their dimensions, absolutely supernatural. 

The state, the consent, and the religions

Why am I spending so much time on Doran's thesis?
Or: in what way is it relevant to my paper on the Natural and the Supernatural in the Religions: Lonergan's Evolution?

Perhaps it can form a separate paper, with an identity of its own.
Certainly it is relevant to the questions I have had since 1988, about the gift of God's love, and the state of being in love with God: the suspicion that, in a very real sense, God loves us into loving him.

Habitual grace as operative - as a technical way of speaking about God plucking out the heart of stone and putting in the heart of flesh - seemed fascinating and full of promise in this direction. As Lonergan says somewhere, the heart of stone does not want to be replaced!

Also, the reversal of the priority of knowing over loving - or the major exception to Nihil amatum nisi cognitum - this also seemed promising. God stealing a march over our knowing. God loving us into loving him, "before we know what's happening" - and before even the moment of our freedom, our free response.

But, we might ask: is this kind of love - in which we are loved into loving someone - is this truly love? Is not freedom a constitutive part of loving?

On the other hand: is it not true that we are, even in our ordinary human experience, sometimes loved into loving? Not always, it is true. Sometimes people love us, and we are absolutely unmoved. But there are some cases when the love of someone overwhelms us, and we find ourselves loved into loving, and that loving is something we find ourselves in, rather than a product of our choosing. Certainly after this we can still choose to accept and confirm or to reject.

Encouraging remark of Doran's:

Before I close this paper, may I suggest that we must turn to human love to find the analogy by which we are able to reach some further understanding, albeit imperfect, of the reality of grace as we have presented it here. The positive dimensions of the analogy would be at least twofold. First, the reception of the love of another person for us changes us in such a way as to enable us to perform operations and experience states which previously were not within our capacity. I have made some initial forays into expressing this in chapter 8 of Theology and the Dialectics of History. Second (and this I still have to work out even in incipient fashion), the love of another person for us is somehow constitutive of us (without, of course, involving the indwelling of that other person in the same manner as the divine indwelling), and not in the manner of a formal cause, but in the manner of inviting us into a relation to the one who loves us, who would thus be one term of the relationship. [Essay 1:34.]

So how is all this relevant to my paper?

Nature-grace and natural-supernatural

Sean Doyle, in Synthesizing the Vedanta: The Theology of Pierre Johanns, S.J. (2006) speaks interchangeably of the nature-grace distinction and the natural-supernatural distinction.

This needs to be explored, but I think the two are not coincident. Grace may be operative in both natural and supernatural religions, for example. The natural-supernatural distinction is based on proportion: truths that are proportionate to human nature are called natural truths; truths that are beyond the proportion of human nature are called supernatural truths. This distinction was drawn by Thomas. And Thomas admitted clearly the possibility of God revealing not only supernatural but also natural truths.

Vatican II clearly admits the possibility of grace operative in non-Christian religions and even among atheists. But that hardly does away with the natural-supernatural distinction.

Still, a certain amount of confusion followed after Vatican II. Having accepted the operation of grace beyond the boundaries of the Church, theologians did away also with the natural-supernatural distinction. I am not sure that this follows. And I am not sure whether maintaining such a distinction is politically incorrect. 

Tukaram and J.E. Abbott

Extraordinary chat with Tony George, SJ, yesterday. He is preparing a paper for a Tukaram symposium at Pune University. He has come up with a wonderfully creative approach.

The background is the usual attitude of Hindus. They feel that people like J.E. Abbott, the one who opened Tukaram to the West, are only subserving their Christian missionary goals. They feel Tukaram opens the way to introducing the gospel in India.

Tony takes a different approach. He begins from Cassirer's idea of 'soul-making.' All great literature is involved in soul-making. Tony's thesis is that the reading of Tukaram contributes to soul-making in the Christian. Abbott, for example, is a Protestant; he does not have much to do or say about the feminine aspects of the Christian mystery, because, being a Protestant, he has no place for Mary. Tukaram, instead, speaks of God as mauli, mother. The Protestant Abbott reading Tukaram is led, therefore, to fill a gap in his own religious experience. The paternal and masculine aspect of God is complemented by the maternal and feminine aspect from Tuka. So soul-making continues.

The Hindu, on the other hand, might find in the West and in Christianity a better appreciation of the social aspects. It is strange, Tony pointed out, that Tuka, despite calling God mauli, despised women. He thanks God for not giving him the body of a woman, for example. Here is something that Hinduism might learn from Jesus, who manifests a deep and extraordinary respect for women...

Wonderfully fresh and creative approach, one that I found very respectful, and yet talking about what two traditions might learn from one another.

Faith and progress

A stunning line from Lonergan:

For faith and progress have a common root in man's cognitional and moral self-transcendence. To promote either is to promote the other indirectly. Faith places human progress in a friendly universe; it reveals the ultimate significance in human achievement; it strengthens new undertakings with confidence. Inversely, progress realizes the potentialities of man and of nature; it reveals that man exists to bring about an even fuller achievement in this world; and that achievement because it is man's good also is God's glory. (Lonergan, Method in Theology 117, cited in Lovett 189. Emphasis mine.)

Religion and the political

The undoubted welcome for existential and personalist versions of the message is read by Metz as an index of the degree to which late industrial society has succeeded in forcing religion to the private sphere. Human existence is, he insists, a political problem. (Brendan Lovett, For the Joy Set Before Us 187)

The enthusiasm for existential and personalist versions of religion - see the West flocking to the gurus and godmen and women of India - there is no doubt about it.

I ask myself whether all religions are in need of such a critique - that of locking themselves up in the personal and the existential, and ignoring the social and political. Thus a young swami can consider drinking and sex as the greatest of vices, but remain blissfully ignorant about ongoing interfaith and intercommunity violence.... And Christians of the West can be terribly exercised about abortion stances of their politicians, while at the same time rooting for military interventions with faith-filled fervour.

Lovett in fact goes on:

However, once the religious a priori is conceived as protest against suffering, the issue of pluralism may need to be recast. In this perspective, all views, theological or otherwise, of what the human ought to be are not simply to be welcomed but must be subjected to critical and dialectical analysis. Otherwise, the concrete and practical character of the human problem will not be addressed effectively. The challenge is not simply to understand the plural world but to change it, to make of the Church a fit instrument of redemptive recovery. (188)

Religions and the supernatural

In my paper on Francis Xavier and the missions (Boston 2006), I pulled in an older reflection / comparison between Christianity and Islam. There was much discussion on that. I said that Islam was a religion that could easily fit into what we used to call natural or philosophical theology, because there was nothing in it that 'exceeded the natural capacity of the human mind.' In that sense, Islam was not a 'supernatural' religion.

Scholars like Pat Bryne and also Fred Lawrence, I think, were not so sure about that. They said that all religions were supernatural.

I have still to get to the bottom of that. However, I think it is a question of defining 'supernatural' very clearly.

In Regis 1962, Lonergan seems to be distinguishing supernatural acts from supernatural objects. He says, for example, that de facto, because there is need of gratia sanans, and because of the way grace is granted in this order, there will normally be supernatural acts before one reaches the reflective act of understanding (which is supernatural when it is a question of divine faith). Still, he goes on, the objects prior to that reflective act of understanding need not be supernatural. (Lecture 6, Section 3.3: Human and Divine Faith).

So maybe in one sense (as far as acts are concerned) the religions are all supernatural, while in another sense (as far as objects are concerned) they are not all supernatural.

But I need to master here the distinction between acts and objects: how can an act be supernatural, when the object is not? And what does supernatural mean in the case of the act here?

In fact, I might have misunderstood Lonergan above. He says, for example: "it is at the point of specification of the act by a supernatural object that per se, that is, in every case, one is having a supernatural act." And again: "There would be nothing supernatural quoad se, quoad substantiam, in any of the acts and, consequently, not in the praeambula."

Derrida, religion, the slippage

Derrida speaks of 'my religion about which nobody understands anything' 'any more than does my mother,' 'but she must have known that the constancy of God in my life is called by other names.' Caputo comments: God, the name of God, is not dismissed by Derrida, who would not have the authority to dimiss a word that belongs to such a deeply inscribed vocabulary that goes back to time out of mind... (Caputo, Philosophy and Theology 62.)

When we say God is love, does that mean that God is one of the best names we have for love, or that love is one of the best names we have for God? Augustine might have opted for the latter. As for Derrida, "there is an irresoluble slipping back and forth between these names and no place to stand that would give us the leverage to arrest this play." (Ibid. 62-63.)

Here is where the atheist thing comes in. 'So that I quite rightly pass for an atheist.' Why not say outright, I am an atheist? Because that would be to arrest the play, and would amount to what Derrida called 'atheistic theology,' meaning dogmatic atheism. (Ibid. 63.)

And Caputo: there is always an atheist within me contesting belief, and there is always a believer within me contesting my professions of unbelief. That is why Derrida says that the name of God is the name of a secret that is withheld from him. Still, he 'rightly passes' for an atheist - by the standards of the local priest or rabbi. Rightly enough. But Derrida does not want that to harden into a dogma. Echoes of Kierkegaard: I do not pretend to be a Christian; I am only trying to become one. (Ibid. 63.) - Yes, true: our authenticity is bound to be ever a withdrawal from unauthenticity.

Derrida even lets slip that he prays, that his life has been a long history of prayers, that he has lived constantly in prayer, in tears. 'Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.' (Ibid. 63-64.)

He shares Augustine's restless heart, but, unlike Augustine, he cannot bring it to rest upon a singular object of love, like Augustine's God. (Ibid. 64.)

He would speak of a 'pure messianic,' the pure form of hope and expectation, in contrast to the concrete messianisms, both religious and secular. (Ibid. 65.)

So what is the difference between Augustine and Derrida? Not in their faith, nor in their prayer, says Caputo. But Augustine is able to say You, meaning the historically identifiable God in a concrete tradition of faith; and further, he is able to pray within a community of faith, with the words and prayers and stories of that community. Derrida does not have this, does not want to have this; it would be determining the undeterminable, naming the unnameable, arresting the play. (Ibid. 65-66.)

Caputo dares to say: if prayer is a kind of 'wounded word,' then Derrida's Circumfession is even more prayerful than Augustine's Confessions, because he lacks the community and the assurances of Augustine. (Ibid. 66-67.) In another key, Sartre had said: we atheists are the real heroes, for we do good with no assurance whatsoever and without hope of any reward... In fact, it is a poor faith that will act solely for the reward. The parable of the workers of the eleventh hour and the indignation that it provoked and still provokes... Or Tony De Mello's story of the indignant Lay Brother...

So Derrida would have a religion without religion, more heroic, mpre precarious, more pure... (Ibid. 67.) My question is: so is that ultimately a choice? Or is there not the unprogrammable initiative of an Other, the irruption of the Other?

True, as Caputo says: the difference between Augustine and Derrida is not the difference between faith and faithlessness, but between two kinds of faith. But I would add: a world of difference, anyway. True, maybe, as Augustine said, you would not be seeking me if I were not already drawing you to myself... But it is a difference between grace and human effort, human choice. One cannot make it into a theory that the play cannot, should not, be arrested. That cannot be an option.

At any rate, Caputo says that what the author of the letter to the Hebrews called 'the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen' (11:1) is not only the principle of our lives but also a principle of a postmodern faith, of a philosophical theology or of a theological philosophy, that is as old as the Scriptures. (Ibid. 67.)

The postmodern as postsecular

Caputo notes that there are both theological and anti-theological motives behind the emergence of the postmodern, the former having roots in Kierkegaard and the latter in Nietzsche. Whichever way, however, if modernity led to secularization, the postmodern is also the postsecular, and so reopens the space for religion and for theology. (Caputo, Philosophy and Theology 44.)

Scotus and the separation of philosophy from theology

Caputo continues to surprise me! See, for example, this note:

When historians look around to determine where to point the finger for this disaster [the sidelining of faith and theology and the rise of atheism, cf. Caputo 33] even Thomas Aquinas, who gave reason its own play, became suspect. But if the idea was to pinpoint the precise moment when philosophy, and hence reason, began to twist free from theology, John Duns Scotus (d. 1308), the great Franciscan master, is a still more interesting suspect. That is because Scotus was the first philosopher to hold that both God and creatures come 'under' the common idea of 'being,' which is at root the same sort of thinking that led Descartes to say that both God and creatures both come 'under' the principle of causality. That implies a certain shrinking down of God to fit under the canopy of reason and hence the subordination of theology to the jurisdiction of philosophy. Thomas Aquinas, however, was a deeply theological thinker from this point of view because he held that compared to the very being of God, the idea of being in general was just an abstraction. (Caputo, Philosophy and Theology 76, n. 5)

Will Caputo go the whole hog and trace the influence of Scotus on Heidegger, and perhaps cast light on Heidegger's diatribes against 'onto-theology'?

Incarnate religion

With Kant's kind of natural or rational approach to religion, what went out of the window were things like sacraments, dogmas, liturgies, hymns, candles, miracles, sacred stories... in short, what Peter Lourdes likes to call the 4 C's: creeds, codes, cults, communities - what he also calls the 'external trappings of religion.'

Peter is not the only one to demote the 4 C's in favour of what is 'truly significant' - the inner core of religion, perhaps described as 'religious experience.'

Two comments. First, it is good to be aware that this kind of (now very common attitude within the Indian Church) has roots in the Enlightenment championing of a rational religion, a religion within the limits of reason alone. Second, this kind of a religion just forgets that we human beings are more than reason, and certainly more than 'pure reason' - that we are flesh and blood, embodied, incarnate as well as spirit... The 4 C's are very much part of the wholeness of being human. But not even Heidegger, that champion of the return to the concrete, saw his way to affirm such a religion - though, enigma that he was, he did manage to evoke powerfully and beautiful some of what he had spent his life excluding, in his very beautiful and poetic later reflections on poetry, on poets, and so on.