Hans Urs Von Balthasar’s Trilogy Analytic Table of Contents by Mark K. Spencer The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics Volume 1: Seeing the Form I. Introduction I.1. Point of Departure and Concerns (p. 17): Beginning as the primal decision that includes all later decisions for persons, whose lives are based on response and decision—Confronting the wholeness of God’s truth requires a first word, ‘Beauty’ that can include all subsequent words—Beauty’s lack of place in philosophy, theology, and modernity—The detriment to love, truth, goodness, and Being as light (Thomas), and spirit when beauty is forgotten—Words regarding beauty tend toward ‘form’, ‘figure’, ‘shape’, and ‘likeness’—What transforms these is splendor and radiance that shines forth and renders love-worthy—Involves gathering and uniting, and self-utterance of one who can express himself, with pre-eminence, freedom, sovereignty, out of interiority, particularity, and essence; interiority and communication, soul and body, freedom and law; symbol not allegory—This is the primal phenomenon—One cannot get at it by analyzing or abstracting it into realm of pure spirit (Plato) or material forces used by spirit—Spirit is simultaneous with what allows its self-expression (Aristotle)—Hierarchy of life is a deepening of interiority and freedom of expressive play of forms—Man is in world through body, and is a being whose condition is to be communicated, and only thus does he gain himself; a response and an expression governed by the laws of beauty that he does not impose on himself—His form is identical with his spirit and freedom—Failure to note this leads to aestheticism—Schiller and Kant on spirit’s splendor in the beauty of form—Origen on the mystical light in revelation—Rilke on how form within spiritual space is beauty—By empathy, beholder’s spirit influences the efficacious reality of the beautiful; by being looked at dully, the radiance of art and holiness can be diminished—Hölderlin on reviving beauty. (p. 23): Neither persons’ natural form nor their forms of life are extraneous to them or arbitrary or forcibly imposed, but the expression of their soul—Living without such a form shatters the law of being—Having such a form requires spiritual perception with awe—Such a form bestows nobility on everyday life, rather than just piercing through that life to the Absolute—Certain ages have more clearly seen and incarnated these forms and the kalokagathon—Our age is suited to the fragmentary and quantitative; we do not see man as capable of achieving form—Primal form is identical with existence, beyond open and closed, I and Thou, autonomy and heteronomy, encompassing God and man—Embracing the primal form, seen in God’s Humiliated Fool, raises everything else into the light—First principle is the indissolubility of form—Second principle is that form is determined by many antecedent conditions—Historical and material processes produce material that is subsumed by the form of man, which must be grasped in its totality—Responsibility for the genuine form lies with Christians—Marriage transcends and contains individuals’ cravings for self-assertion, based not on their freedom or biology, but on a form that includes all, from the biological up to the Holy Spirit—To be a Christian is a form, because a grace, a mission of each individual—This form, seen in the saints, is most beautiful, but requires eyes rarely found now—Supreme object is form of divine revelation in history leading to and deriving from Christ—Seeing this form requires that we first have natural eyes for essential forms—Gratia perficit naturam non supplet—Incarnation perfects ontology and aesthetics of created Being—Christ expressed God and the Father; He is the former not the latter; this paradox is the fountainhead of all aesthetics—All the content of Christ’s reality is there to be seen in Him, but this image in its self-evidence takes shape only with the coming of the Spirit—Scripture is the Spirit’s testimony regarding the Word, from a marriage between Spirit and human eyewitnesses, and so its form is canonical—Criticism of psychological, philological, and source criticism—Their failure point us back to the form; Scripture’s form is embedded in the context of everything effected by Christ—Only what has form can rapture; this is at the origins of Christianity, as especially seen in John—Beauty explains Christian foolishness—To understand them requires that we see what they see, a sort of esotericism of the saints (Symposium), which can exist in the Catholic church of the people. I.2. The Aesthetic Measure (p. 33): The form of the beautiful, because of its transcendence and charis, moves with perfect continuity between nature and grace, theology and philosophy—The beautiful in this world is spirit making its appearance, and has a total dimension that calls for moral decision, and a response to the question God poses about man, involving God’s free judgment—Theology must be obedient to revelation, which directs aesthetics, metaphysics, and ethics to their proper place—Inner analogy among stages of beauty, inspiration, formation—The Spirit aims at creative form, not a Hindu dissolution of the world—Creative form or art is God’s work and ours inasmuch as we make ourselves available to and concur with God’s action, as in prophetic existence especially in Mary, rather than with something unformed—This analogy can be misused by not respecting God’s sovereignty e.g. by subordinating revelation to a this-worldly aesthetic, i.e. what strikes us as beautiful, and so turning a Theological Aesthetics into an Aesthetic Theology—Rather than restrict beauty to the inner-worldly relations between matter and form, or what appears and appearance, we should think of beauty as an analogous transcendental—The Fathers and high scholastics did this: 1. They attributed aesthetic features of creation to God preeminently; 2. Their theology of redemption and perfection ascribed to God’s highest work the sum of creation’s values—Theology of beauty leads to beautiful theology and methodology—Wrongly criticized as Hellenism—Iconoclasm warns against equating beauty of revelation with that of the world. (p. 41): Scripture comes from a time when all discourse is poetic, our most expressive form of language (Hamann, Herder)—Wisdom books are a contemplative moment between Old and New Testaments, Protestant and Jewish criticism notwithstanding; here, the Holy Spirit reflects on creation, the past, and Himself, casting an aesthetic light on all of these things—All prophets are artists, though all artists are prophets only analogously, an analogy that allows the Spirit to use all forms of human expression—Interpretation requires inspiration—Philological method also requires a method unique to Scripture—Biblical sophiology is continuous with patristic and medieval, contra Harnack and Bultmann I.3. The Elimination of Aesthetics from Theology: Protestant Version (p. 44): Luther made the doctrine of justification in Galatians and Romans the axis of Biblical interpretation, an attack on the Catholic and aesthetic dulling of God’s Word—Luther thought the death-and-resurrection dialectic had been replaced by a non-dialectical Neo-Platonic aesthetics—Luther saw as most important points of Bible: 1. Free sovereignty of Creator; 2. Incomprehensible turning of God toward the sinner in Christ’s descent into God-forsakenness, which must be grasped by blind surrender in trust; 3. The absconditas Dei sub contrario—Philosophizing about this in terms of analogy and harmony removes the scandal of the cross—All forms disintegrate in light of the divine contradiction—The dialectic can be understood as: 1. Outpouring of God’s love that places all human art at the disposal of God’s art (Richard of St. Victor); 2. A cold methodological protest (Protestantism as opposed to evangelicalism), which leads to a new Neo-Platonic view that God contains His opposite (Böhme, Schelling, Hegel), which is rejected by Hamann and Kierkegaard, segregating the aesthetic from religion entirely—Many in 19th Century saw aesthetics as supreme value of any worldview, but separate from logic and ethics, leading to rejection of aesthetic worldview as contradictory by Kierkegaard, Bloy, Blondel, and to rejection of ethico-religion by champions of aesthetic—Kierkegaard and Hegel on the attributes of spirit; their purported conflict, and actual agreement—Christianity as historical process (Hegel) vs. Christianity as formless, anti-aesthetic process of personal inwardness centered on decision of faith through awareness of being seized by the existential pro me of Christ’s death and resurrection (Kierkegaard, Scheler, Brunner, Buber, Bultmann); the latter leads to anguish, the end of Protestantism—Barth draws on and overcomes this opposition, and restores beauty as divine attribute i.e. arousing pleasure, creating desire, and rewarding with delight, through considering glory in Scripture, moving beyond pistis to gnosis of faith—Without beauty, revelation is joyless—Following Anselm, theology is most beautiful science, since revelation’s form cannot be separated from its content: 1. God’s form is perfect; 2. Trinity fulfills Hegel’s principles of truth and beauty are fulfilled as identity of identity and non-identity; 3. Seen in Incarnation—In the Crucified, God’s beauty encompasses what we call beautiful and ugly—Barth moves prior to the Reformation. I.4. A Protestant Theological Aesthetics (p. 56): Luther’s approach is actualistic, anti-contemplative, attempt to penetrate to the event of redemption whereby Christ takes my sins on Himself, in the flash of the simul justus et peccator, hidden sub contraria specie—Calvin’s God of double predestination of Whom we can have no contemplative vision—Exiles doxa and theologia gloriae to the coming age, but doxa returns in Pietism and Idealism (Fichte)—Nebel (and Otto) attempts Protestant aesthetics—Makes event fundamental ontological concept; an analogy of event, not being, whereby God appears in beauty as non-static event, freely given, not gained by us through myth—God can appear through the mask of the beautiful e.g. in Greek myth—Criticism of notion of Being, and response on behalf of Thomas—The intermediate realm of the daimon, not to be identified with demons, discloses the wholeness of Being, but only as God’s good work, His gift and achievement in which He is satisfied, yet of which He repents—Daimonic beauty conflicts with protological or eschatological beauty proper to faith—Beauty is surpassable by death and resurrection, but the fact of the Word is not; beauty only takes us to the threshold of the terrible (Rilke) in that it can point us to Christ in the analogia eventus pulchri et Christi—Nebel consigns the beautiful to the realm of intoxication and dreams (Freud, George, Nietzsche), a celebration of night and woman, the daimonic realm that is inherently weaker—In Nebel, Protestantism can be a corrective to Catholicism, though his categories are a product of his time; he assumes that beauty first belongs to man or creaturely Being, not transcendental—If the latter, beauty would be most proper to God, and appear most in His revelation in Christ—Otherwise, contemplation and inchoate vision are lost to us. I.5. The Elimination of Aesthetics from Theology: Catholic Version (p. 69): Only theology can have transcendental beauty as its object—Philosophy narrowly conceived, not as the Greeks or Fathers conceived it, can only arrive at Absolute as limit of worldly ontology—Question of how far philosophy can go without revelation is raised only by rationalism; philosophy then has no driving enthusiasm of its own, but can only be driven by theological eros orienting it beyond itself—Until Descartes, intelligere is in the service of credere (Anselm, Thomas, Cusa); after Descartes, the question of possibilities for reason without revelation, and nature without grace—Some seek to find harmony and congruence between geometrical reason and theology (Pascal, Leibniz), though this descends into condemned views of traditionalism (Drey, Deutinger) or rationalism that places faith at origin of thought (Hermes)—Theology came to be specialized science, opposed to philosophy, or subsumed under history, a human science that cannot attain the content of revelation; theology requires participation in grace, because only thus can the form be seen—This is overlooked by modern Biblical scholarship; this approach leads to a new Judaism in which only the doctors, not the simple, can interpret God’s Word—True theologians are amateurs i.e. lovers and enthusiasts—Canons and definitions are not theology but guidelines for theology—There is a fluid transition from scholarly to free spiritual forms, from acquired habit to infused habit and gift of the Spirit, the latter informing the former, the former influencing our image of revelation. I.6. From an Aesthetic Theology to a Theological Aesthetics (p. 77): ‘Aesthetic’ in the sense of an aesthetic theology, as opposed to a theological aesthetics, is not a Biblical value—The attempt to understand the Bible through “art” came in the period that marked the demise of the attempt to have a theology that included philosophy organically (Cusa to Schelling)—In this period pulchrum became an object with a science of its own (Bruno, Shaftesbury)—German Idealism sought to join the theory of beauty with Christian revelation—Can secular aesthetics be purified, or should it be abandoned? (p. 78): Hamann tragically sought to join Lutheranism and classical culture in a theological aesthetics so that the aspirations of worldly beauty are fulfilled while all glory is given to Christ—The Beautiful can be seen as the primal nature of the world (Klopstock), yet nature is alienated from its origin—Only God’s Word in the form of suffering reveals God’s glory—Glory as kenosis is found in Christ, creation, the Spirit, the pagan gods, Socrates. (p. 81): Herder sought to bridge poetry and theology, which coincide theoretically and in their historical origins, in opposition to Enlightenment rationalism: 1. Bible is poetry and can be reconstructed only as a world of images; 2. Bible contrasts to other religion and poetry—Human beings are moving images—In the image, not allegory, man can see himself and God—Images are transparent in the Spirit to their maker; this requires imagination, and yields a philosophy of beholding—Revelation is revealed signs—The power to image is God’s name in us—Herder integrates Greek philosophy into Near Eastern culture—Bible is manifestation of all human truth and beauty—Truth is image—Biblical events are but particular manifestations of what should be proper to man universally (p. 88): Chateaubriand seeks to rehabilitate feeling and imagination against Voltaire, but preserves difference between revelation and beauty against Herder—He is an aesthetic apologist; sets tone for century of French apologetics, challenged by Bloy, Péguy, Claudel, Bernanos—Christianity in itself and the poetics of the Christian reality i.e. its fruitful manifestation in culture—Criterion of truth, including Christian, is beauty—Outline of Génie du Christianisme—Uses worldly criterion of beauty found in fulfillment of nature, rather than revelation bringing its own beauty as criterion for the world, so fails as apologetics, leading to problematic French religious-political integralism and then to laicism. (p. 92): Gügler perfected Romantic aesthetic theology, building on Herder, in The Sacred Art—God’s presence in all things can be sensed, and the world is God’s art, manifested in cultural art, especially the Hebrew—Man is a horizon between interior night world of mystery (Novalis), freedom, and conscience and exterior day world of the senses and reason, joined by fantasy, which only the Hebrews did not misuse, because not bent on exteriorization—Art and philosophy other than inspired revelation obscure God, though redeemable—History is a diversified and dynamic human totality, whose truth is given by Scripture; fullness of time transfigures history—Art is the exterior manifestation of the feeling of infiniteness, the total dependence of the finite on the infinite I—Education is the process of being informed by the primal form, being attuned to God to perceive divine things, the goal of revelation—Exegesis is the return of all that history forms to the original Light, and its interpretation by that origin—Theology loses this contemplative spirit—He falls into Neo-Platonic and Idealist philosophy of identity of object and subject (Fichte, Schelling) and into Augustinian illuminism—Nature is identified sacramentally with the Body of Christ, and predestination with freedom—No clear account of analogy. (p.102): Romantic theology failed to distinguish creation and revelation, and fell into an aesthetic and religious monism, and fell to Neo-Thomism—Both had roots in Plotinus and Augustine—Scheeben brought Romantic concerns into Thomism—His theology is more scientific, but with aesthetic form and content, and so gives the outlines of a methodical theological aesthetics—Strict separation between nature and supernature; to deny it would introduce contradiction into nature—Natural anthropology of spirit is Platonic, so spirit naturally seeks to escape matter; grace gives us a partaking in God’s nature, with its glory and beauty—Only with God’s eyes can we see creation’s beauty—He tends to focus on the beauty of the soul’s interiority, apart from the drama of real existence—God descends and man is elevated in a marriage or interpenetration of nature and grace; a theology of eros—Creation is readied by grace for transfiguration and in-formation by grace, seen above all in Mary, in light of which all Christianity must be interpreted—Philosophical concepts are transfigured in theology, not formally applied—Grace is not just a moral invitation (Molina) or just a physical impulsion (Bañez), but a pondus, form, or energy that moves the will in its depths like a fructifying seed; God’s activity is illumination and inspiration—Similar relation between natural and supernatural acts of faith, and reason and theology—Grace and faith are expressions of God’s marriage with man, seen most in Christ in Mary’s womb—Christ’s divinity informs His humanity, so His natural reality has a supernatural foundation, and in His person, all relationships find their highest form and ground—In man and in human generation, he emphasizes union of physical and moral-personal; naturally, latter is superior, but supernature underscores physical eros—Sacrifice is transfiguration through love, not destruction, contra Baroque theology and in accord with Romantic—Cross and Resurrection are two phases of one sacrifice; splendor of Cross is not a means but a representation of God’s love—Predestination is summary of all mysteries—He fails to take seriously sin and fallenness, that the Bride is also the magna meretrix, and darkness into which Christ plunges—He represents how an aesthetic theology can be refined into a theological aesthetics. I.7. The Task and the Structure of a Theological Aesthetics (p. 114): We should not now go beyond original layman’s insight into beauty, so as not to prejudice inquiry philosophically or theologically—Two elements of the beautiful: 1. form or species; 2. light or splendor—Form is materially and numerically graspable, condemned by Protestantism—Form is sign and appearing of depth, but requires concepts of true, good, being—Delight in it is based on the manifestation of truth and goodness—Appearance of form unites: 1. real presence of depths (emphasized by classical); 2. real pointing beyond itself to those depths (emphasized by romantic)—We see form as splendor or glory of being; we never leave the horizontal for the vertical—Can be applied not univocally to Christian theology, but analogically—We perceive God mediated by the sacramental form of the mystery of the incarnate Word, with a new light seen along with the form; we do not just hear and believe—Leads to eros for things unseen, a movement of our whole being toward God through Christ; the Spirit enthuses and inspires us for collaboration—Denys holds that eros captures the transport of our being better than agape, from us to God, and God to us—Both Neo-Platonic and in accord with Biblical covenant theology—Since God effects what He reveals in His signs, and since Plato and Aristotle’s metaphysics join, we can’t approach Christian beauty and eros from a merely Platonic basis—Christian enthusiasm is appropriate to realistic being, not idealist or aestheticist, but also pneumatic not worldly—Christian beauty embraces even the Cross, sin, and hell—God and Christ can never be separated from salvation history, or negative from affirmative theology, or vertical from horizontal, or theologia from oikonomia—2 inseparable phases of theological aesthetics: 1. theory of vision or fundamental theology; 2. theory of rapture or dogmatic theology—Self-evidence of facts of revelation first perceived in light of grace unfold according to their own laws. II. The Subjective Evidence II.A. The Light of Faith II.A.1. Pistis and Gnosis (p. 127): Pauline and Johannine theology interpret Christian existence in terms of faith, including both subjective act of faith (fides qua) and object of faith (fides quae), the total response in grace to God’s revelatory address—OT converges on faith as response to God—Faith includes knowledge and experience, first historical and second individual, and, between these, the experience of clinging to God in suffering (Job)—Training in faith is an act of total self-surrender to God, in which promises are fulfilled experientially—Contra Gnosticism, increase of knowledge strengthens faith—For Paul, we are pilgrimaging from justification by Christ’s death and resurrection to His return; certainty of faith is based on the evidence of divine truth i.e. having been grasped—For John, faith resulting from signs is a vision or epiphany of God’s glory in Christ itself, grounded in the Trinitarian relations; circumincession of pistis and gnosis—Biblical gnosis is not confined to the praeambula fidei; Biblical faith is solid, rather than fides quaerens intellectum; it is both quaerens and inveniens. (p. 132): Alexandrian theology perfects pistis—The true Christian is a gnostic, not a mere pistic, enlightened by the Logos with the divine truth, beauty, and glory; faith is turned to its interior authenticity i.e. faith in a proposition becomes faith in a person—Clement: Christ as teacher, faith as foundation on which gnosis is built; gnosis cannot dispense with the Son, and mere pistis is insufficient—Alexandrian or Biblical gnosis is not Hegelian or rationalistic knowing, or mysticism narrowly conceived; gnosis of faith is theoria i.e. contemplation—Theologies that abstract the act of faith from insight and understanding are unsatisfactory and disincarnating, though they were an understandable reaction to Idealist, Romantic, and Modernist theologies that made the difference between faith and philosophical knowledge one of degree—Faith cannot be just believing propositions in obedience to authority, but must bring man to understand God and himself—Idealism omits divine gift—Divine authority and doxa are one, revealed in but transcending ecclesial authority and proclamation—The act of faith is the total attitude of concrete man toward God. II.A.2. Delineating the Form of Faith (p. 137): Seeing or knowing and believing are equated—An account of act of faith as total attitude toward God must exclude extremes: 1. As contradictory or absurd, destroying all logic, in Hegelian or Kierkegaardian senses; 2. As intelligible naturally or rationalistically—No complete analysis possible of faith or psyche i.e. depth of man before God—Response to God’s revelation is related to man’s ultimate philosophical attitude, as in the Platonic relation between myth and logos—Philosophy’s detachment from mythic revelation was a realization that in or behind myth, one touches universal, unconditional, necessary Being—Attempts to unnecessarily go beyond the Platonic and German (Hölderlin, Schelling, Heidegger) unity of myth and logos: 1. Biblical revelation as taking over or ending all mythic or philosophical revelation of Being; 2. Rationalistic philosophy turning myth into allegory without allowing Being a true revelatory character, but rather reducing it to a concept, as in the (Christian) split between philosophy and theology, which eliminates eros from philosophy and renders theology a positivistic, historical science, rather than sapiential—Biblical revelation does strip worldly myths and philosophy of power, but it occurs at the same anthropological locus where mythopoiesis and the struggle with Being occur; formal object of theology and faith is at the heart of the formal object of philosophy and myth, the self-revelation of the mystery of Being, Who in the Word fulfills our philosophical and mythological questioning—Ultimate knowledge lies in turning toward the concrete phenomenal existent, the only place the mystery of Being shines forth for us bodily and spiritual existents, and through one positive-historical, spatio-temporal form—Christian form of revelation can be read: 1. Seeing in it historical signs of an acting God, which are persuasive, but without a prominent divine quality; 2. Focusing on the formal object of faith i.e. God in Himself and in revelation, built on the spiritual subject’s cognitive dynamism toward the vision of God (Augustine, Thomas, Blondel, Rousselot, Maréchal, Scheuer, taken to extremes in Modernism), and the illumination proper to absolute Being which is already received by the natural intellect as a sort of grace and revelation—In 2, history is integrated into exchange between God and soul, without externality and heteronomy, faith is both natural and supernatural, but faith is too oriented to experience and inchoate vision (Garrigou-Lagrange, Origen, Augustine)—Both 1 and 2 grasp only one side of Christian faith and its vision: in 1, history is not within light of God’s Being; in 2, they are so transparent to it as to be devoid of interest in themselves—Both wrongly think of history as mere pointers, a deficient notion of truth made up for by God’s goodness, where love is the innermost light of Being—Dualism of ostensive sign and signified light can be overcome with forms and categories of the Beautiful, where the light breaks forth from the form’s interior and depth; form reveals and veils mystery—Aesthetic reason unites and completes practical and theoretical, Greek and Hebrew, true and good; beautiful form gives us the freedom that all allows that form to be desired in its being-in-itself, not just for-me—Christ is a true form which can only be perceived by grace i.e. participation in its depth—Emmanuel bestows Himself theologically not just economically, the material and formal object of theology; in His finitude we grasp the infinite—The resurrection of the flesh opposes Gnosticism and Idealism, and vindicates the aesthetic-poetic view, requiring a decision between myth and revelation. II.A.3. Elements of the Form of Faith (p. 150): Order of the ontic foundations of faith is Trinitarian order—Interpenetration between philosophy and theology, myth and revelation, Christian and non-Christian mysticism—Subjective evidential force of revelation is dependent on objective evidence. II.A.3.a. God’s Witness in Us (p. 151): John describes God’s testimony as both interior and external to believers—Lumen fidei is the innermost ground of faith—God’s light can shine in us without its proper object being illumined, but rather myth or philosophy being illumined, leading some through them to the truth of revelation—Faith cannot be explained psychologically, but is the free self-disclosure of God’s interior life—Spiritual nature means participation in unveiled-ness of all reality, including divine reality, not deducing it; to attain real Being is to touch God, for spirit’s horizon is ens analogum, the foundation of all proofs for God—Philosophical ekstasis includes both dread and rapture—The divine light deeper than the light of Being exhibits its freedom, freeing us to respond or not, eliminating the dialectic of ekstasis, though philosophical ekstasis is a sort of faith, analogously (Philo, Plotinus, Proclus, Lao-Tzu), where philosophical objects can be illumined by faith (Guardini)—Thomas, Albert, Eckhart on the light of faith: the human spirit empowered and proportioned connaturally to grasp the mysteries of God, ontologically assimilated to God’s being—Our dynamism does not demand grace, but grace claims us—The interior teacher (Augustine) is the sensorium conferred in revelation that perceives what revelation means; aesthetic experience includes humility, not just delightful vision, and submission, which demonstrates our connaturality with God, yielding zeal for God’s divinity—The recognition of the convenientia of dogmas and divine freedom is like recognition of aesthetic necessity in free artistic creations, starting with the givenness of the completed work—Both faith and natural intellect are not heteronomous to us, because they are openness to light of Being, never seen as an object yet seen in all objects; this justifies submitting to external authority (p.160): 1. Only this light must give evidence of itself in theology; the Christian thinker must renew His primal act of a priori faith—By the proportioning light of faith, we proportion our thought and work to the proportions of the object of faith determined by God. (p. 160): 2. The gnosis that grows from pistis is a matter for the Christian saint—Theology of the saints was explained through the categories of the voluntative and affective (Augustine, Bernard), but is better explained through categories of existential and total personal; by will and affect are meant not what compensates for lack of intellectual evidence, but engagement of the person in his depths—God primarily bestows Himself, not truths about Himself—Pascal on raisons du coeur—Newman on deeper than notional apperception by whole person. (p. 162): 3. Religious a priori must be rightly understood as the ability to understand all existents in light of Being as analogous and pointing to God, so natural ontology is generally a natural theology—Theological a priori elevates this into light of interior fullness of God’s life—This dawns on all, not just on Christians, because all are called to vision of God, and are placed by grace in interior relation to revelation; what is often called religious a priori in other cultures already includes grace—Christians should expect that this same light is found in other religions, philosophies, and art, and leads their adherents to God, though they are not God’s immediate historical self-witness which demands faith—Aesthetic and religious inspiration are difficult to distinguish, as are experiences of Being and God—We should be indulgent with founders of other religions and their followers, and we can baptize elements of those religions, but we should remember form of God’s light can be obscured by: 1. Sin; 2. Mythic and aesthetic delight; 3. Spirit of the world and underworld; 4. Titanic self-redemption not self-surrender; 5. Good forms being pressed into bad service; 6. Lowering of pure intuition such that God the Limitless comes to signify the annihilation of all worldly limits—Christ is the measure and redeemer of religious forms, but thereby they are judged. II.A.3.b. God’s Witness in History (p. 165): The fullness of Being unfolds and manifests itself in the cosmos of natural kinds; in man, this fullness is fulfilled, so God’s fullness can reveal itself in man—The form of revelatory salvation-history can be seen as it is by faith as the masterpiece of the divine fantasy, the revelation of the inner depth of God through the reflection between word and existence, which could not be invented by man, unlike myth—The central question of apologetics is of perceiving form i.e. an aesthetic question, not of asking for the rational basis for belief in Christ—Truth of revelation is existentially verified by human existence coming to its own truth and fulfillment; should not be played off against historical-critical dimension—Kantian or formalistic apologetics are joyless and anguished, and so unconvincing—Rousselot on eyes of faith, and dynamism of spirit (Thomas, Blondel) based on antecedent knowledge of Being; grace strengthens the natural power of sight, so that from the evidence the conclusion is seen (Newman)—The interior light of faith is wholly oriented towards the objective form of faith to arrive at its content; the former does not contain the whole substance of faith, contra Modernism and existential theology—Comparison to experience of art as subjective taste and externalization of images versus objective perception and interiorizing external images—Comparison to philosophical experience of moving from youthful wonder at Being to disciplined but still wondering consideration of beings—Belief must seek out the correct form, and then one must integrate it existentially into oneself—Power of belief is primarily in the indwelling God, not in the believer—Act and object can be distinguished but not separated; every share in belief, even among non-Christians, is through the objective form of Christ—Jesuit objection that light of faith does not penetrate to consciousness; Augustinian-Thomistic response from the analogy between lights of reason and faith: in former, light of being envelops and identifies the two; in latter, light of Christ comes from object and draws subject into itself, an efficacious participation, not extrinsic Protestant juridical belief—God appears externally, in history, so convincingly—This form is not purely paradoxical or invisible, but intuited in Kierkeaagrd’s aesthetic, ethical (Socratic, Zen Buddhist, Taoist), and religious (Christian) stages—Doctrine appears in the master sacramentally, but with the danger of becoming technique—Contrast between God-filled masters and Christ; in latter, proximity and distance are visible—The first intention of the self-revealing God is to reveal Himself, not to cause assent to truths—His incomprehensibility is positively seen property, like an artwork of dazzling genius or a lover whose mystery cannot be exhaustively described—Invisible mysteries are fitting necessities of faith (Anselm)—Christ discloses the entirety of Trinitarian life through the Spirit—Faith perceives: 1. Supernatural quality; 2. Interior rightness or objective, demonstrable beauty of all proportions and relations, which are complexly intertwined—The praeambula fidei is the incipient understanding of the form of revelation, which natural reason cannot ignore and can confirm to some extent, but only fully with faith, being drawn by God. II.A.3.c. Witness, Exterior and Interior (p. 185): Interior light of eyes of faith can become one with fulfilling exterior light of Christ—Believer’s response is enacted by God, not a second word alongside Christ’s, but it is also his greatest and most personal act—In fides Christi, God and man show their highest covenant fidelity to one another; He is subsistent covenant, in which the believer is already present as image in archetype—Encounter of subject and object of faith is transpersonal because Trinitarian—Self-surrender of faith is rooted in interpersonal love, in immediate encounter—Love solves all practical and theoretical problems with faith; this love is not like love between humans, which is demonic if absolutized, or ontological pull of philosophical love for God or maternal-protective nature, or loss of personal consciousness in Nirvana; love for Christ, one existent, is joined to love for Being, founded on hypostatic union and Trinity’s Being-as-Love—The structure of worldly Being is founded on love—God’s free revelation makes Christianity a step beyond pantheism; Christianity on the model of worldly love (Scheler) makes it below pantheism—The Trinitarian Father replaces and surpasses the philosophical-mystical Ungrounded Principle, though often reduced Neo-Platonically or Idealistically or Hinduistically, overcome only through hypostatic union and procession of the Spirit—The uniting work of the Spirit is the foundation of conscious act of faith; He gives freedom to the believer, which is then exercised by the believer—The Church too freely consents as bride, represented by those who believe with love, first Mary—Dogmatics is the act of faith coming to understand itself—Relation of believer to object of faith is social, founded transpersonally in Spirit—Trinity is foundation of all salvation history—Super-temporal beauty can encompass the death of the beautiful in time, which belongs to the form in which the former in manifest. II.A.3.d. Form and Sign (p. 192): Christ’s is not an isolated form, but imbedded in context of truths of His preaching, promises He fulfills, and promises He makes, which are situated historically and dogmatically, from which it cannot be detached—His horizontal power encompasses all time and space; His vertical power makes the Father visible. (p. 193): 1. Signs point to Him, find their meaning in Him, or derive from Him, including miracles and words—Faith in Christ as Son of God i.e. beholding His form is prior to and contains faith in His words which express unverifiable mysteries—What appears specially at His transfiguration and baptism can be seen in His everyday form—Spirit in Church and saints is object of perception, not just faith—Perceiving the Spirit presupposes knowledge of the Spirit, through faculty of discernment of spirits, given with maturity of faith—In Christ, the New Age of the Resurrection becomes visible, with a new kind of evidential force through grace accommodating man to it, leading to fullness of faith i.e. surrender to the Person Who is the center of all evidence—Sacramental forms are rooted in Christ’s and the Cross’ form—Task of ratio theological to bear witness to these mysteries and harmonies that all derive from divine glory. (p. 198): 2. What is true of mysteries we believe through Christ’s words is true of miracles and prophecies—Miracles and prophecies call attention to Christ’s form (apologetics) but can only be read in context of faith (dogmatics)—Form of Christ moves to the periphery to draw others to the central form, but also run the risk of not seeing it; for those who already see the central form, miracles are its glory—Augustine on reading miracles—Thomas on evidence of signs: intuitively compelling for the demons; symbolically compelling for us—Miracles are expressive signs (Blondel), experiences of the living God, not measured by natural idea of God, see in relation to revelation—Theological reason must be aesthetic and holistic regarding relation of OT to NT, especially in light of modern Biblical research; harmony between them presupposed not proved by particular texts—OT is not just types for aesthetic contemplation, but an interior progress toward Christ, a drama or conflict for the sake of life and decision, of which Christ is the key. (p. 204): 3. Relation between ecclesial faith and faith in Christ must be treated in light of relation between sign and form—Normal way to contact form of revelation is kerygma, through which Word of Christ is heard and believed—Church subjects believers to God not to herself—Infallible dogmas and definitions are for presenting God’s revelation in Christ; their conceptual and verbal form take the form of God’s Word as their archetype, which cannot be exhaustively reproduced by rational construction—Christ unites doctrine and life; Church represents Him doctrinally in Petrine magisterium, vitally in holiness of Marian Church of the saints, which are oriented toward one another—We believe in God’s revelation, not propositions, and we can believe even through false propositions, through the completing work of grace; requires a non-culpable ignorance of the intrinsic nexus between word of revelation and ecclesially binding expression—Ecclesial life is social community of love pointing to Christ; magisterium serves this life—Grace derives from and participates in hypostatic union—Saint can be transparent to Christ because he does not confuse himself with Christ. (p. 208): Object and light of faith must be dealt with together; the two can’t be opposed, unlike in all other religions—Light of faith is not just immanent in us, but is radiance of uncreated light and grace present in us, not abstractable from the Incarnation—Christianity is the aesthetic religion par excellence—Requires a radical objectivity and self-renunciation, based on ekstasis of love, allowing for a death-transforming enthusiasm—Christ is God’s total doxa, which dwells in Him corporeally, light and form, Spirit and ecclesial norm—Faith, in looking at the form of revelation, can make man an adequate answer to God’s Word. II.B. The Experience of Faith II.B.1. Experience and Mediation II.B.1.a. Theological Analysis of Existence (p. 213): Question of experience of faith is necessary if faith is encounter of whole person with God—Absolute model of faith is in act of existence of Christ—Beautiful requires reaction of whole man as responsive space for the event of beauty occurring within him, both for human and divine eros and sumpatheia—Faith attunes us to divine content whereby we correspond to God according to archetype of Christ—Beauty requires obedience, both of artists and believers—Beauty’s development through individual form and law (Simmel) not absolute autonomy—The form of the free God in Christ cannot be reconstructed from any human form; experience of human depth does not open up Christian experience of faith, though the former is incorporated into the latter—Experience as event, not state, of entering Christ claims obedience—Can we experience our own faith?—Augustine and Thomas: yes, through psychological data of interior vision, not clearly a supernatural experience—Jesuit school tends to hold faith cannot be known; Christian experience here is movement away from self—Existence of self-surrender gives the believer a new form of Christian certitude and experience—Pauline proof of faith is not psychological, but it is shown through life that in the believer’s weakness Christ can show Himself strong—Christian existence is proven as an existence that rings true because it is in faith i.e. in act of continuous self-surrender—Goal of salvation is grasped in flight toward it, not in static certainty of salvation (Bergson), but in hope, nor in a individualistic sense, but as anima ecclesiastica—This is experience in deepest sense, as insight acquired travelling to a place, surrendering oneself to the movement of journey through the Sprit, not feeling or irrationality—Dogma is demonstrable within pneumatic existence; the perfect Christian is the perfect proof of Christianity, an obedient splendor of Christ, vocation as office—Experience of faith or possession of the Spirit or love is common to whole Church, not particular to a charism—Experience of spirit is deepest experience of oneself, a dogmatic not psychological experience—Spirit’s groaning within man to God is not Hegelian dialogue of finite and infinite spirit—Failure of analysis of religious experience outside Christianity, which can be judged by Christianity. II.B.1.b. The Experience of the Logos (p. 226): Pauline spiritual world is agitated; Johannine is the calm of what abides, fulfilled eschatology—Johannine theology is aesthetic: 1. Divine glory appears in the flesh, in an unsurpassable individual form, a Thou; 2. Absolute Being appears in this form—Aesthetic experience unites concreteness of individual form with universality of meaning and epiphany of mystery of Being linked to a kairos—Christian understanding of kairos removes all impersonal categories—Personal is identified with ontological—In incarnation, God is both self and other, but not in Hegelian sense—Love that believes is gnosis—For John, good and evil relate as Being and non-Being i.e. existence in withdrawal from God; faith is living self-surrender to incarnate Beloved—Contemplation is both aesthetic and ethical, bliss and self-sacrifice are identical—Truth is found in self-abandonment—Faith that loves is experience of eternal—In worldly beautiful forms, moment is eternity, yet includes the sorrow of the gods and tragic contradiction; in John, the death of the Beloved is not tragic but is the expression of His love, leaving anguish behind, except anguish over whether one has really surrendered oneself—Christian experience is not just Lutheran experience of God being able to establish correct relation to man; it is complex, of progressive entrance of believer into faith (Mouroux, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Newman)—In everyday experience, life’s irreconcilable aspects are integrated, not through illusion—Beautiful shines from where real has acquired form, beyond illusion and disillusion—Totality of existence is mystery not enigma, a luminous space he has embraced—Law is the sternness of love toward the one who does not posses it; command issues from Being i.e. Father—Ascent based on descent from Father to Christ to my brother—Sacraments as ontic aspect of interpenetration of Being that makes relation of Christ and Church extension of Trinitarian Being-in-one-another—Johannine experience is beyond eschatology and mysticism, already having eternal life. II.B.1.c. Christian Attunement (p. 235): Christian experience can be grasped: 1. In relation to totality of life that integrates all acts, and allows the truthfulness of what is believed to emerge; 2. In terms of the power peculiar to what is believed that impresses itself on and transforms the believer—Both together connote totality, attunement to or consonance with God in the heart, which is not a feeling alongside intellect and will, but the heart of human wholeness where all human potentiae are rooted in unity of forma substantialis—Distinctions among powers should be made only to understand better their underlying unity, reciprocal compenetration, and penetration by the soul that acts and suffers in them—Feeling is not beside or beneath spiritual faculties; in man, we distinguish: 1. Primarily sub-spiritual acts or states, including senses and dispositions of the soul; 2. Acts that predominantly belong to the whole person into which sensitive-vegetative expressions are integrated—Man is attuned to the Thou as a whole—Thomas: attunement to Being as a whole is an a priori concordance, a consensus prior to assentire (II-II 15.1) and deeper than delectatio, a feeling or experience, prior to distinctions of active and passive experience, impression and expression, desire and fear, a relation to Being not beings, where God is not a particular being but analogically related to creatures, where the latter direct us to Him—Primal attunement to God is not epistemological intuition or logical inference—Theology errs in thinking feeling is an isolated act rather than integration of person’s whole life; rather, God-relationship is based on man’s total disposition—God has initiative, creature is passive but with an active receptivity, where creature’s fundamental act is ability to receive—Fundamental assent and ontological joy are criteria for discernment of spirits—Spirit creates in us the faculty that can perceive the form of Christ—Ontic and experiential go together—Within the beautiful, one experiences oneself possessed by it—Perfecting of creation perfects man as indissoluble unity of body and soul. (p. 241): 1. Grace is ontological elevation and transformation of man, and personal indwelling of Spirit in him—Supernatural participation in divine nature creates connaturality with divine things; structure of thought remains the same, but standpoint of person’s being is changed, with indirect impact on consciousness in new readiness—Conversion and sacramental baptism and illumination coincide (Augustine, Cyprian), giving man a new sensorium as gift, sapientia as experience of sapor divinus, through consolation and desolation, a transformation of feeling under norm of passive readiness to participate in Spirit’s feeling—Thomas and Paul on gifts of the Spirit, arising from within and given from above, fulfilling natural aesthetics—Attunement is aesthetic and theological, concordance with God’s rhythm. (p. 244): 2. Attunement to God is mediated: 1. Man sees God through man’s intentional acts, transformed by God; 2. God expresses Himself through creaturely by becoming man—We do not surpass the Son to the formless Father, for the Spirit is of the Father filioque—Church is formed by Son from His blood and thoughts; Scripture and sacraments are form from His form—Christian must be attuned equally to God, Christ, and Church—Christian feeling has Christological measure, attunement to accord between Christ and His mandate from the Father, a sensorium for Christ’s obedience—Christian’s disposition derives its unity from Christ’s disposition, that of one who has become expropriate for God and man, whose subjectivity coincides with his mission (Barth, Cullmann), and so cannot be understood psychologically, but only in light of dogma of Incarnation into which the believer is incorporated—This impressing by the Spirit is more beyond activity and passivity than the relation with Being, based on structure of Spirit’s proceeding—Church is Christ’s prolonging in the world, and so our minds must be determined by a sentire cum Ecclesia, which is the feeling of Christ—Identity of objective and subjective in the Church is found in Mary and the saints (Teresa, Thérèse). II.B.1.d. Remarks on the History and Criticism of Christian Experience (p. 250): Christian experience involves self-criticism, due to extreme forms from which the magisterium must distance itself—Incorporation of the believer into Christ and the Church involves renouncing one’s own experience and having all experience in the beloved; allows for objective rather than subjective experiences, consigning them to Christ and Church—Objectivism should be based in love, unlike false forms, and is not for beginners. II.B.1.d.i. In Scripture (p. 252): In OT, all encounters with God involve whole person—Covenant is intimate, vital knowledge of God, like that between husband and wife—Bodily experience of God’s wrath or blessing, based on response to proposal of covenant—Experience of the whole people becomes individualized—Eye-witness, archetypal, theophany experiences bound those who had them to the community—Differences in NT because: 1. God has appeared in a man, and so sensing Him is part of the normal faith experience; 2. Faith experience is assimilated to experience of the Word made man, experience of renunciation, obedience, suffering—Biblical experience includes, like all religious experience, human experience of reality through suffering (Aeschylus), and the experience of divine things (Aristotle, Philo)—In Christ, God learns and suffers man, so that man might learn God through suffering—Man, including Christ, only knows God and himself through suffering—Christ is exemplary man, and His experience is law for all who follow Him; Christ is primary subject, in Whom we and our experience participate. II.B.1.d.ii. In the Fathers (p. 257): Irenaeus extends OT experience to whole order of salvation, experience of nearness of God through remoteness of God, experience of good and evil mediated by experience of bodily self; to be man is to experience in the temporal process of becoming—2 Neo-Platonic Patristic accounts of experience: Origen/Evagrius and Macarius/Diadochus—Origen gives Neo-Platonic account of experience of existence removed from God—Evagrius holds that prayer is the theological act par excellence, an enstasis to the God within our spirits beyond all sensible and spiritual forms, an anaisthesia through apatheia or spiritual sensibility—Macarius Symeon and Diadochus of Photice develop notion of spiritual senses on basis of idea that same spirit experiences spiritually and sensually in its fallen state—Macarius distinguishes himself from enthusiastic but heretical Messalianism by focusing on possibility of repeated falls and need for constant battling for the good—The Logos’ condensation into corporeality is not just an occasion for us to be spiritualized (Origen) but through the sensual we come to know God’s love (Macarius)—For Macarius, experience of Christ is stigmatization—Self-abasement is the mystery of the vulnerable Heart of God, leading to the bridal mystery of reciprocal empathy—Biblical events are applied personally and existentially to the individual soul—Two-fold experience: 1. God is palpable in His grace; 2. No distance between our effort and perception of God—What Manicheanism calls two realms is two aeons between which redeemed man sways; we have a taste for heaven, yet are not assured of salvation, for we should not rely on our experience but only on God—Diadochus narrows the horizon from Macarius because: 1. He is a Chalcedonian, and so does not use a Christology of metamorphosis for his theology of experience; 2. He is a bishop, and so emphasizes the objective grace of baptism; 3. He regards his mystical experience as the normal development of Christian life, even coming close to Messalian thesis that greater experience means greater grace—But mysticism is inseparable from ordinary spiritual experience of realized assents (Newman)—For Diadochus after Chalcedon and contra Macarius, the divine nature is not condensed so as to be perceptible to the senses, and man has his own physis and spirit, rather than being a spirit fallen from the pleroma; we experience God, and the memory of Him, in the depth of our hearts, even while the demonically perverted will and bodily passions float above, i.e. dualism—Discernment or sense for spirits gives experiential knowledge of opposition between divine and demonic spirits, of oneself, and of God’s ways—For Macarius, there are 2 prosopa in man i.e. 2 aspects, nature and grace, not 2 persons—For Diadochus, 3 stages of spiritual life are introductory joy, then sadness dear to God, then perfected joy, expanded to a fivefold schema, moving dramatically from an indefinite feeling of presence to an experience of depths. (p. 274): Maximus influenced by Evagrius and Denys, but less concerned with immediate experience of God than with movement of temporal existence beyond itself to rejoin its origin—There are spiritual and sensible peira and aisthetesia, and conceptual and supra-conceptual religious experiences; the latter is fullness of perception, and the movement of spirit unites theoretical and practical, toward the divine unity of true and good—Byzantine mysticism (Palamas) moves between views that faith should become a realized experience (Origen, Macarius) and that God is inexperiencable and faith transcends knowledge and feeling (Denys). II.B.1.d.iii. In the Middle Ages (p. 276): The Middle Ages went beyond the Fathers in theology of experience in exploring its dogmatic implications and in critically delimiting it, tasks still incomplete partly due to exaggerations of Protestantism and Modernism—Augustine deals with experience without using the word; he is most interested in existential aspects of Platonism, expressed through spiritual senses—Gregory on spiritual senses in a theology of longing—Anselm on experience over conceptual knowledge—Bernard on sapientia as truth savored through experience, love as principle of knowledge, conscientia not scientia as comprehending—William of St. Thierry draws on Augustine on self-experience of Trinitarian image in soul, and Gregory of Nyssa on the transition from image to likeness through infusing of Trinitarian Spirit in baptism providing the power to perceive the uncreated Light in one’s soul through ecstatic love—Christ brought spiritual taste to His Body—Inspired experience of God already contains vision of God—Idea of wisdom that savors and abandonment to God’s love is developed e.g. by Cistercians, Victorines, Hildegard of Bingen; idea suffers when removed from contemplative monastic context into the schools, which psychologize the idea, and consider in terms of degree of certainty, reducing knowledge through experience to probabilistic knowledge or strong opinion (e.g. Abelard, Langton, Godfrey of Poitiers)—Franciscans reject speculative certainty but allow fallible affective certainty—Albert and Thomas reject immediate experience of grace without special revelation—Discussion has shifted to subjective experience not objective evidence, without wider totality of Christian experience found in e.g. Macarius—Exception is theology of gifts of Spirit, though to be aids from which virtues developed until Thomas, for whom they are given in baptism but actualized through progress in virtue, allowing for an autonomous Christian psychology—For Thomas, the place for experience is in love confirmed through trials—In e.g. Macarius and William, experience threatened to swallow up dogmatics and faith, without attending to the historical form of God’s glory; God’s beauty cannot be measured by our longing—Three strategies for Catholic theology against absorbing objective evidence into experience. (p. 286): 1. Thomas carefully uses concept “(quasi-)experimentum”—Wisdom is founded on ontological compassio or connaturality with God—Missions of Son and Spirit need not be actually but only habitually cognized, though we can have affective or experiential knowledge of God (II-II 97.2)—Gifts of nature in going forth from God, gifts of grace in returning—All knowledge founded on connaturality between knower and known—Grace presupposes and elevates nature. (p. 288): 2. All powers, including bodily, irascible, concupiscible, imaginative, etc. are divinized by (e.g. Gregory of Nyssa, John of Salisbury, Philip the Chancellor)— Whole man responds to whole form of revelation in whole of creation empowered by God. (p. 289): 3. Fathers, Middle Ages, and Baroque did not divide mystical experience from that of ordinary faith; former is outgrowth of latter—Example of Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises, attuning whole man to mysteries of salvation, an existential Christianity which is a higher middle way between religion of feeling and rationalistic religion—Middle way subsequently lost (e.g. Francis Borgia, Alvarez, Rodriguez, Lallemant)—Critique of Christian experience is best performed by those with deepest experience (e.g. John of the Cross, de Sales, Fénelon). (p. 291): Reflection on original unity between mystical and ordinary experience led to delimiting mystical phenomena—General experience cannot be relegated to sphere of psychology; there is both separation and continuity—Christian experience in itself has been insufficiently explored, often presented as impoverished mystical experience (Mouroux)—Full Christian experience is within the Church, personal history embedded in greater history of Church (Mouroux)—Founded in non-mystical archetypal experience of God of the Bible. II.B.2. Archetypal Experience II.B.2.a. The Archetype as Model (p. 293): Biblical experience of God is that the invisible and unapproachable God enters sphere of creaturely visibility in Himself, the Formless takes form in world and history—Contra Gnostics, God does not just deal with us through intermediaries—Contra Platonists, Incarnation will not be superseded in eschatological vision of God—Incarnation is eschaton, the Son is the visibleness of the Invisible One—Requires aesthetic analogy—Father is seen within transfigured Son as Being within existents—God’s revelation is homogenous, based on revelation in creation, which is not surpassed by revelation of grace and glory; world is stage for encounter and collaboration of God and man—Christological form is form of encounter between God and man, a totally human form—Christ embodies experience of what God is and of what man is, both as God wanted man to be, and recapitulating everything forgetful of God—We are initiated into this archetype, which is both inimitable and what must be imitated—We can accept the Christ-measure only by being measured by it, not by surveying the relationship between Christ and His disciples—Sphere of Biblical experience of God participates in the archetypal nature of Christ—Christ’s archetypal experience is a super-faith, the vision of the Father; God-experience of disciples is an imitation of this, a faith in Christ and a total human vision of Christ and in Him of the Father; Church’s and individuals’ experience of God imitates the eyewitnesses’ experience—The experience of the Mediator must be mediated; no archetypal experience is self-contained—The more one participates, the more one must and can communicate, in a unity of ascent and descent—Perspectives on testimony of eye-witnesses: 1. In itself, as integral parts of objective form of faith, belonging to God’s appearance in the world, for we cannot abstract from historical situations and persons which whom God dialogued; 2. From viewpoint of inclusion of ecclesial faith i.e. considering manner in which each believer is represented in situation of concrete human encounter, which requires raising question of spiritual senses. II.B.2.b. General Reflections on Archetypal Experience (p. 300): An archetypal experience of the God Who reveals Himself is necessary for faith (Cajetan)—Thomas contrasts certainty and faith, using scholastic terms—In Scriptural terms, there is an analogy of faith between the archetypal and imitative experiences; even mystical experiences are experiences of faith—The definition of faith in Heb. 11:1 is not univocal—Archetypal is connected to imitative experience through tradition, the reception of faith immediately i.e. sensibly (Maximus)—Hearing is connected to imitative faith, seeing to archetypal; within latter, hearing to OT, seeing to NT; hearing to earthly faith, seeing to realized faith in new aeon—But all such sense assignments are inexact and often based on theological prejudice—Sight expresses man’s innermost longing, but by an audible word a person is known—Three points regarding Biblical experience of God. (p. 303): 1. God Who reveals Himself is perceived in a manner both sensory and objective—God’s transcendence and invisibility comes to light on the basis of His condescension and visibility (Markus Barth)—God’s holiness is not abstract but in the context of His relationships with creatures—God’s visibility and invisibility are not connected necessarily as in a worldly aesthetics, but on His own initiative, yielding a theological aesthetics—Examples of use of the senses from appearances of risen Christ—Different kinds of proofs from different kinds of experiences—What is important is that what is established, with sobriety, is that what is perceived is objective not imagined—The ability to so sense is not a possibility grounded in the one who has the ability, but in God’s will—Object of faith effects determination and concordance—Point of contact between natural and supernatural charis. (p. 305): 2. Biblical perception of God cannot be spiritualized, culminating in putting fingers into Christ’s wounds—Unlike other religions, Christianity abides in the flesh and blood—Tendency to demythologize this (Valentinus, Alexandrians, Bultmann) in the name of history of religions, symbolic interpretation, ecclesial economy—Anti-incarnational element in Platonic aesthetics and eros, and its influence on Christian mysticism’s focus on vision of formless God and rejection of forms received in contemplation (Evagrius, Augustine, Thomas, John of the Cross) and on anthropology e.g. Augustine’s tripartite corporeal, imaginative, and spiritual perceptions—Christian mysticism belittles form of Biblical vision, and led to periods of de-fantasizing and de-mythologizing faith and God-experience, culminating in existential theology—Primal lie of theology and spirituality is equating human spirit with Holy Spirit, and abstraction with resurrection of the flesh—Archetypal Biblical God-experience is more than a material metaphor for a higher experience of pure faith—Sensory beauty is not surpassable, but is spiritualized in itself, with analogy between them. (p. 309): 3. Biblical experience of God always anticipates eschatological experience, within context of promise—Already but not yet fulfilled eschatology—Forty days after Easter point to Kingdoms of the Holy Spirit and the Father—Earlier epiphanies are concealments in relation to later ones—More interior epiphanies have their place within perception and apostolic orientation—Biblical experiences of God are analogically related—Ecclesial vision is between Biblical and eschatological—Contemplation of image of Christ is theoretical and practical—Proleptic character of perception of God does not render them unsatisfactory, but more than fulfilling, because of their superabundant content—Even worldly beauty is not merely self-gratifying, but enrapturing, majestic, fearful, containing a promise (Shelley, Keats, Claudel) or condemning to melancholy—Total structure of beauty can be redeemed only by the resurrected Lover. II.B.2.c. Jesus’ Experience of God (p. 313): Jesus’ experience gives the form that conditions all other experiences, and is set apart from all other God-experiences—He is sent from heaven; He is the form of God’s revelation, rather than encountering that revelation as object—He is the one who comes from and returns to the Father, with no third intervening phase, or phrases before or after—What He heard from the Father is not prior to, but in His coming and going, experiences inseparably divine and human, not experiences of anamnesis—Jesus is theophany, and the one who perceives God—In the existence and experience of this man, God interprets Himself for us—In Jesus’ sensing and suffering, man associates intimately with God, and God can be sensed—Experientia Dei incarnati is both subjective and objective genitive, identical in hypostatic union, on which rests all experience of God—The man Jesus increasingly understands Himself to be the Word of the Father directed into the world, experiencing God in His humility, poverty, and simplicity, His self-disposal not self-reflection, rooted in Trinity, not in self-annihilation, where glory of the Father reveals itself through his humility—Avoid Eutychian coincidence of God- and self-consciousness, and Nestorian schema on which Christ’s humanity can only experience God as other—Son allows us to partake of this experience by imitation, a communication of the unique—What illumines vision is faith, which both eye-witnesses and later believers can have—Christ is both human and human assumed into God, perfection of creatureliness in its ontological and cognitive distance from Creator—Man here participates in self-consciousness of Son proceeding from the Father—He experiences his human experience of God only as an expression and function of divine person, conscious of divine person only in functional movement of his mission—His experience of distance from God is an expression of God’s experience within the Trinity in the distance of distinction of Persons—Mutuality of vision between God and man, summarized in videntem videre (Augustine) i.e. vision of God follows and is included in being seen by God—Christ’s immediate vision of God fluctuates between modes of manifestness and concealment—Jesus’ statements about what he has seen are made in the context of His constant coming from and returning to the Father—1. He bears witness to what He has seen and heard of the Father, and demands faith—2. As the Word always becoming flesh, He witnesses to what He says with His existence, which can be repeated bodily, and must not just be contemplated, but repeated through imitation of discipleship—3. Jesus’ experience comes down from the Father, and refers us to the Father. II.B.2.d. The Old Testament Experience of God (p. 323): Experience of God in OT is underway to Christ—As basis of new covenant, it: 1. Contains structure of new covenant in advance; 2. Retains provisional character with respect to Christ—Implies: 1. OT is to NT as flesh to spirit, and sensory type to supra-sensory antitype; 2. OT is education and approximation to NT—Adds literary aspect to theological, genuine experience and literary elaboration can only be distinguished with difficulty—Theophany narratives were both de-mythologized and sensualized—OT experience could not have been a communication of spiritualized concept of God, but of God’s freedom and lordship over corporeal-spiritual man—Most important are revelations to whole people, and ritual visibleness of God—Israel’s everyday relation with God does not have a sacred and profane side, but all is sacral under God’s grace—Living reality points forward to Incarnation—Theophanies in OT are not private revelation, but normative—The ability to see the living God belonged to the whole people, so anyone could be chosen as an eye-witness—OT experience, which is canonical for the Church, cannot be surpassed: 1. Sensory visions of the Prophets considered by the people as their own experiences of God, without opposition to observance of law and feasts, as the God Who is to come and Who has come; 2. These archetypal experiences, which have the structure of an anticipated Christology, are not a lower stage with respect to Christian experience, due to their sensoriness and symbolism, recognized e.g. in Apocalypse—Solidarity between experiences of seers and people is part of archetypal structure of Israel’s experience of God, a structure that cannot be reproduced in the Church, hence private revelation’s relation to the magisterium; archetypal experience must be imitated by whole Church, since hierarchy belongs to Apostles qua authority, not qua eye-witnesses—Prior to OT is myth and worldly aesthetics of ground and form (e.g. Amenophis IV), posterior to OT is Incarnation and theological aesthetics, in between the transition including the awakening of a sense for God’s immateriality. II.B.2.e. The Marian Experience of God (p. 330): Marian experience of God is at point where OT meets NT—She is point of super-abundant fruitfulness where Zion passes into Church, Word into flesh, Head into body—Incarnation occurs in her faith—Her experience begins with that miracle in a blind sense of touch, the most reliable of senses, then extended to other senses—Mary’s (all mothers’) consciousness of self and child as imitation of Trinity, 2 natures of Christ, seeing and being seen by God, extension of faith—No closed experience of self, but including self, other, Word—Nature is radically other to God, but intended to experience His goodness in submitting to becoming (Irenaeus)—All experience of thou grows from body to spirit, but presupposes original relationship of spirit; at the origin is a miracle by the Holy Spirit beyond physical-personal or corporeal-spiritual dichotomies, whether infusion of soul, or generation of the Word in Mary—In Mary, fluid transition from archetypal to imitative experience: 1. Mary’s is same as Abraham’s and all Christians’ faith; 2. Mary encloses and brings forth all Christians and their experience of faith in a physical relationship, for her experience of being dispossessed of her Child, and of experience, is for all—Mary’s experiences, founded in her natural virginity, are had by the Church not personally or psychologically—In her motherhood, faith becomes incarnate in a way it cannot for the male Apostles—Physical substratum of spiritual solidarity allows experience of one to belong to others, as in OT and the Communion of Saints—Mary’s experience is unique but open to all, from within the Church and from without in her as a visible, legible, multiply interpretable figure. II.B.2.f. The Apostles’ Eyewitness (p. 334): Apostles are first eye-witnesses, the ones with Him, original cell of God’s realized promised community with man, into which all those who want to have community with God must become part—Community not imposed from above, but realization of covenant partnership, wholly formed—Fundamental form of eyewitness in sensory experiences of Triduum and Resurrection—Association with Christ on earth belongs to fulfillment of OT—The use of parables and their definitive exegesis through Holy Spirit—Apostles had to accept things in their factualness that they could only interpret later, when they saw analogies between OT and NT—Apostles prior to Resurrection are archetype of faith that stops with hearing, that does not have spiritual senses adequate to object of faith—Experience of Passion and scattering of the sheep. (p. 338): Paul is witness to analogy between pre- and post-Easter testimony, the decisive step forward—Paul’s conversion and being given over to sensing risen Christ—Paul at boundary of apostolic and ecclesial eras—Latter involves private revelation and personal sanctity—In Paul’s period, the Holy Spirit becomes sensible—Paul’s proof from power is based in the Trinitarian structure of grace, and the pneumatic, but not spiritualizing, experience of Christ. II.B.2.g. The Church and the Christian (p. 341): Church as subject is not outside of believers that constitute her, and so her quasi-personal unity is based in spiritual character of Holy Spirit—Concrete unity belongs to her members, and since members of the Communion of Saints have archetypal experiences that they deposit in the Treasury for common use, a privileged participation in Christ’s experience—How is archetypal experience incorporated into the Church so others can participate in it?—4 interpenetrating relations between Biblical-archetypal and ordinary Christian experience, and only in their context can mystical experience be considered. (p. 343): 1. Petrine Tradition. Petrine writings convey eyewitness to the Church through kerygma and its realization in Christian life—Light of prophecy wholly enters light of Tabor—Community constituted through obedience as existential priestly ministry making Christ visible—Archetypal experience of Christ tends to become moral example—Faith of the Church is non-visionary—Perspective of hierarchical tradition incorporates Apostles’ eyewitness into Church through kerygma and sacraments. (p. 345): 2. Pauline Tradition. Petrine tradition is horizontal, Pauline is vertical, since Paul is inserted into the Apostles vertically—Tradition of unforeseen vertical irruption of new charisms in the history of the Church—Church more clearly vertical for Paul than Peter; we are above already in a hidden way, a living anticipation of eschatological promise—Sanctity as charge that ecclesializes and depersonalizes one—Such missions submit to Peter as sign of authenticity but derive from Jerusalem above—Vertical Pauline Church interpreted in Platonism of Hebrews and its account of spiritual senses as functions of faith that has received vision and knowledge and can read the form of revelation, aesthetic contemplation for the sake of discipleship; this is Pauline mysticism for everyone. (p. 348): 3. Johannine Tradition. Synthesis of Petrine and Pauline, earthly and prophetic-heavenly and contemplative—No Petrine contrast between those who have seen and those who have just heard, nor Pauline contrast between the I that imitates Christ and others who imitate Paul, but just the we community—John’s direct vision is contemplative, not just historical, overflowing into faith of his followers—No opposition between corporeal and spiritual senses—John is par excellence the one expropriated for love who communicates his experience entirely to others like Mary, but also a prophetic seer—Angelic world is both part and mediation of revelation—John finds earth and faith enacted, not just seen, in heaven, from its perspective—Idea in other religions, Judaism, and early Christianity of every person having a heavenly double, and link to the little ones’ angels (Mt 18:10)—Claudel and Peterson on earthly liturgy as anticipating in faith what the angels accomplish in vision—Faith as object of Incarnational apocalyptic prophecy, not ordinary intuition. (p. 353): 4. Marian Tradition. Threefold Apostolic archetypal experience is permanently sustained by Marian experience—Because of her immaculate nature, she always feels and senses what is truthful, requiring no corrective in transition from faith to vision—Péguy on overcoming of tension between immaculate and sinful Church—Communication of Marian experience to Church is most efficacious and unnoticed—Experience of lived unity and repose in faith despite sinfulness through confidence from Mary—Because Mary is bodily, the Church must be—All 4 experiences converge in Church—Spiritual senses express oscillating center of interim period between Incarnation and Second Coming, but synthesize spiritual experience and archetypal sensation. II.B.3. The Spiritual Senses II.B.3.a. Aporetic of the Spiritual Senses (p. 356): Questions regarding subjective evidence of revelation culminate in spiritual senses—Only in and through the senses does man perceive and acquire sensibility for reality of world and Being, and it is there that God appears—Profane senses must become spiritual, and faith sensory so as to be human—Not a contradiction to perceive the spiritual—The death of God in this world corresponds to mystical abstraction; spiritual senses, imagination, and heart, no less that intellect and will, belong to risen man—This is the subjective echo of objective fact of faith—Experience is found both in senses and mysticism, united by spiritual center of the person i.e. reason and freedom, which also separates them; aesthetic experience gives the impression of uniting them, but only by suspending that center, so we must begin with Christianity. (p. 359): 1. Origen invented 5 spiritual senses on basis of Platonic-Biblical system—There is general sense for the divine, differentiated to kinds—Two kinds of senses in us for Origen, corruptible and spiritual or the heart—5 senses are the fallen version of an original capacity to perceive God and divine things, which always come in modes—Difficulty of reconciling Biblical and Platonic Origen’s—Spiritual senses are not just spiritual cognition or mystical (contra Rahner, Evagrius, Diadochus)—Object of spiritual senses is whole upper world manifested in Scripture, not Deus nudus—For Origen, every Christian virtue includes acquired and bestowed aspects, not dualistic, in the new man Christ creates in us. (p. 362): 2. In medieval period, spiritual senses tend to be interpreted as mystical intuitive experience of God—William of St. Thierry locates spiritual senses, especially taste, in mens and the sensorium of love—William of Auxerre has just one spiritual sense—Alexander of Hales makes spiritual sense an intellectual virtue—Albert and Bonaventure understand spiritual senses mystically, acts of intellect and will grasping God in contemplation, perfected by habitus of virtues, gifts, and beatitudes; they are not higher faculty alongside the corporeal senses, but an act of ekstasis of love beyond all intellectual experiences of God, a unification of dark immediacy—Later tradition based on this tends to unify not diversify the acts. (p. 364): 3. Ignatius’ Exercises call for application of senses to mysteries of faith: 1. A meditation on the senses, imitating the senses of the New Adam and Eve; 2. Applying the senses effects composition of place for each meditation, both for concrete scenes and abstract truths, involving imagination and affections, leading to both external observation of drama, and internal realization of objective mystery of salvation—Experiential feeling and tasting of mystery of faith is most important—God’s worldly and corporeal form can only be realized in a fully human way—Examples of meditations on hell and Incarnation—Sensibility must become all-embracing, extending even to Godhead—Interpretations of application of the senses: 1. Mystically, following Bonaventure, as spiritual senses of higher reason (Juan de Polanco) or prayer higher than discursive meditation, love making the thing present (Gagliardi); 2. As an easy, slow initiation to prayer, or descent from mystical heights, following Ludolph of Saxony (Aquaviva, Roothan), in naïve, affective contemplation—Both interpretations assume either/or between corporeal senses and mystical sensibility—Spiritual senses are opposed to radical union, which is contrary to Christianity, and presuppose bodily senses capable of transformation—Augustine’s Confessions and Thomas’ In Philippians on spiritual senses—Requires taking theological anthropology of the Bible seriously, despite philosophical objections; Bible locates man’s essence in concrete, indivisible wholeness, not in abstract specific difference, which leads to a priori acceptance of Platonism, even by Aristotle and scholastics. II.B.3.b. The Spirit and the Senses (p. 371): Karl Barth says Biblical anthropology treats man in his vital act and engagedness, not in himself or his abstract rational nature, or sensible and rational perceptive capacities—What is important is man before God—Man’s essence and humanity revealed in Christ is being-for—Creation and covenant present man as being-with-others, I and Thou or image and likeness of God in its specialized, corporeal form as man and woman—Any seeking of an essence prior to being-with seeks to interchange man and Creator, hence problems with Patristic and scholastic anthropology following Greek not Biblical anthropology—I attains itself only in encounter with Thou, looking the other in the eye, seeing the Thou as exceptional, particular person in the midst of the cosmos, not as a thing—Being in encounter, open to the other, is specifically human moment, a reciprocal linguistic event in affirmation and demand, and a reciprocal being-for-one-another in helping and being helped, all done gladly—Condition of fellow-humanity is corporeally concretized in difference and for-one-another and being-together of man and woman; not sufficiently accounted for by any humanism, and in the Bible not primarily about sex or children, but foreshadowing union of God and Israel, inseparably spiritual and corporeal—Total human image is founded entirely on God’s covenantal intention—Barth fails to include social element in human nature beyond reciprocity, and the religious element in Being—No relation is purely spiritual, seen in Jesus as archetypal whole man, whose soul and freedom live fully in His senses and emotions, while His body participates fully in His soul, maintaining hierarchy between soul and body; hypostatic union is supereminent archetype of analogous order between soul and body—Biblical man has his totality in receiving the Spirit, the event and dialogical principle that orients him toward covenant from his creation, a microcosm—Soul cannot reflect on itself without sensory turning to the things i.e. others, a corporeal act—Soul without body is only possibility of soul—Perception is undivided thinking and awareness, involving soul and body, inasmuch as man is spirit, called to partnership with God, where God is mediated through created world, and is primary object of perception—Contra Markus Barth, Karl Barth holds that more important than archetypal experience is shared human experience—Split between spirit and senses is due to sin; prophets and apostles reveal unified, natural perception—Sensual desiring and spiritual willing likewise are naturally one undivided act, where God sensible in His works is the proper object, hence anthropomorphism—Such sensing and desiring frees us for God, hence bodily imagery e.g. hunger, bowels of mercy. (p. 380): Romano Guardini deals with same question as religious phenomenologist and cultural critic—We have lost notion of spiritual knowledge, where seeing is now just observation later abstractly verified e.g. in activity without image (Rilke)—Images are now replaced by concepts, embodied images by machines, living rhythms by segments of time—Our interior being can only live on images, hence primitive material-spiritual, empirical-religious images, often lost in higher religions (Barth)—We sense forms, not secondary qualities, which are both corporeal and spiritually determined e.g. by laws, values, functions; all this is seen, at least imperfectly, not requiring later work of intellect e.g. we see life and soul in plants, animals, man—Sensing is life, encounter with reality—Beholders encounter objects with their own forces that compel response, and they must either conquer or serve the truth—Senses run all the way from corporeal forms to seeing unchanging light of idea (Augustine)—We should see, following Paul, God’s power and glory in His works—Sensing is always accompanied by thinking that compares, distinguishes, orders—Move from OT to NT is move toward more human perception of God—After ascension, epiphanies or experiences of presence of Christ, are the face of the saint (Stephen), kerygma, liturgy, which are normal for Christian or graced existence, unlike rationalism. (p. 384): Gustav Siewerth deals with this philosophically—Words are rooted in images, and should not be watered down by abstractions—Cognition moves from senses to memory to imagination to synthetic intellect or logos to reason, where the essence of senses is openness to the world; forms do not awaken senses, but occur in their open landscape—Senses perceive things, not themselves; perception and sensing or feeling is both act of perceiving and objectivity of perceived, both subjective and objective—Thomas on sight, touch, hearing; hearing is the center—In each image, an existent manifests itself—Essential forms, as formed images, shape themselves from and in matter, and so emerge and appear, constituting both revealing and veiling of individual being—Depth of things corresponds to depth of memory that sustains the senses—World takes shape in interplay between sense and object, recollective recognition, and imaginative distinction and reunification—Heart’s love confronts beings and is actualized through senses: 1. Heart is a womb, like matter for form; 2. Conception occurs when Being is received—Vision moves into what is other, and is foundation of light and Being, the return of reality to itself—Space is operation of form of nature extending into what is other, especially in vision—“To take something into oneself” is not to make it subjective, but to open oneself to Being in the image, to empty oneself into the light of the real—Images can be understood as figure of essential depth only in light of Being—Senses open heart to world, which opens reason to perceive in the foundation of Being, where this synthesizing perception is not something alongside the senses—Reason and Being are not God or the One, for Being effects itself in the other, and reason can perceive Being only by gazing on nothingness—The word exists in equilibrium: 1. Between essence or Being that expresses itself in images, and life that expresses itself in utterances, between impression of things into knower, and expression or exteriorization of knower into things, between effort to circumscribe and order, and remembered depth, between indication and interpretation; 2. Between word as apparition of thing itself, and as sign or representation at disposal of freedom, and this is the beautiful as radiance from depth of Being unified in freedom; 3. Between human and divine word. (p. 389): Paul Claudel treats perception of the divine starting from basic experiences of creatureliness and of conversion as compelling claim made on one’s whole being by God—He is interested in whole man, not nature and grace, in drama of ontological flight from and nearness to God—Experience of conversion intensifies experience of Being—We know that God is, and that we are what He is not (Denys), that we represent Him in community, for each is what the others are not—Common not-being-God is ontological completion and knowledge, or connaissance from co-naîssance—Sensations of being oneself and being alien take shape as life, sensibility, reason, conscience—God sees us and calls us to vision, with a particular name, which we respond to with the attitude of peace in the humility of not being God—In Christ, God has come to side of non-being—The blind Father—The Eucharist is adaptation of our being to God by descent of the Word into our substance and flesh below our senses—Premises for sensory perception of God: 1. Body is expression and extension of soul in matter, though which soul experiences and shapes the world; 2. Christ places Himself as the disposal of our interior senses, as He placed Himself at the disposal of the mob; He moves from exterior to interior senses—Through correct use of exterior senses we can encounter God in everything in this world—There is a supernatural, sensory perceptive faculty that can sense the divine essence because founded on Incarnation and Eucharist—Spiritual-sensory olfactory sense and fragrance of Being, sound and music, vision as more than objective but a reciprocal influence and encounter in struggle—God creates by vision, where each being is a translation of His creative glance, and each form a responding glance; our religious life is attention to God’s intention in calling us into existence—The creature, like the mystics and Mary, feels God’s hand—Taste as the particular and unique experience of another being, such as a beloved body; Mary as communicating to us the taste of God. (p. 396): Each thinker conceives man as sensory-spiritual totality, understanding these two from a common center where the living person stands in relation of contact and interchange with God—Sensory knowledge is justified with move from higher and interior to lower and exterior—Relation of senses to unified center, replacement of missing senses, superior animal senses—1. Man is not isolated soul, but experiences world and God with body and soul, within the real, where the really real is the Thou—2. God brings man to a halt by confronting him through His Incarnation in the senses, as the unavoidable neighbor—3. The Word’s flesh encounters man as God’s self-emptying and humility; the senses perceive the non-sensual sensually, and are thereby prepared to die for the Supersensual, but thereby possess the warrant of their own resurrection—Senses are exteriorization of soul, Christ of God; the poverty of Being and its sensibility reveal its treasure, love. II.B.3.c. Mysticism within the Church (p. 398): Mysticism is the last experience of faith in the Church that is somewhat archetypal, first seen in Paul and John, not just as extension of OT prophecy, but as sign of new Holy Spirit—There is analogy but separation between Christian and other mysticism, if mysticism can be legitimately spoken of in Christianity—That revelation concluded with the death of the last Apostle does not mean that God’s revelatory activity, i.e. eventfulness of His self-disclosure, is past; rather, now preparations are over, and main drama can begin: pouring out of Spirit on whole world allows Father’s creation and Son’s reconciliation to show themselves with full form and power; Christ-form is unsurpassable, but only attains its fullness through Spirit and Church—Church’s participation in fullness of revelation is participation in Biblical prophetic and charismatic experience: 1. Determined by object participated in; 2. Determined by participant, subject to the Church and in the Spirit, where all charisms are founded on differentiated membership in Mystical Body and so on Christian love—Mysticism of charisms is mysticism of gifts of Spirit, and should be vitally integrated into Church, whether external/visible or internal/invisible experiences—We need to move away from suspicion of senses and imagination in mystical experiences, which is a decision for a mysticism of the individual against ecclesial charisms (Augustine, John of the Cross)—We need precaution against the damage that native acceptance of charisms can do—Characteristics of the normal truly living Christian experience of faith—Mysticism as experience of non-experience, e.g. in dark night, as participation in archetypal experience, and as possessing gifts as privation i.e. as stored up in heaven—Charisms are not for individual to give away, but are functions in Mystical Body: some unmystical e.g. hospitality, some ecclesial offices, some charismatic i.e. gratis datum e.g. supernatural sensing of part of revelation—Individual with experience must feel himself and behave as expropriated member of whole—Ecclesial mysticism is eschatological, anticipatory glory; beauty of the world of the Resurrection, not abstract beauty, is offered to the mystic—The legitimacy of mystical sensory experiences e.g. visions, where the object takes shape on its own initiative—Mysticism is within the freedom of the Spirit, and so cannot be classified, but also integrated into tradition—Time of the Church is not time of naked, visionless faith, but rather eternal Beauty pours itself out in superabundant irradiation beyond all demand and expectation. II.B.3.d. Integration (p. 407): Because faith is not vision and God is sovereign and free, and all aspects of revelation bear the stamp of that freedom, there is no system for subjective theological perception—God will continue to be active in the Church and sacraments, but this is always a miracle; symbolism of signs does not compel the event, but freedom is not opposed to guarantee—We encounter God through purification of subjective attitudes—Subjective evidence must remain open to objective evidence of revelation—1. By the nature of Christ as God’s epiphany in the world, provision has been made for divine glory to appear to whole world; Christ as image of images arranges world’s images around Himself, which the believer sees, so that creation is a monstrance of God’s presence—2. Christ is not isolated but appears in the Church, which is not just illumined by Him like worldly images, but actively radiates Him to the world, mediating between Christ’s form and spiritual senses, as real, empirical community, and, deeper, as Marian and maternal, teaching us the meaning and incarnational concreteness of the Word; feminine philosophy and theology of image against historical-critical, overly masculine, imageless and valueless facts and concepts—3. Within Mother Church, Christ’s gestures reach all as those of the liturgy, the sacraments making the event sensibly present, their fittingness given by Christ and elaborated by the Church—4. In the image of our fellow man we encounter the Redeemer with all senses, here faith is tested and confirmed sensibly; love communicates the form of Christ, even if not explicitly—5. Love seeks to obey, not realize revelation as image in prayer; all must die and rise with Christ. III. The Objective Evidence III.A. The Need for an Objective Form of Revelation (p. 419): Subjective and anthropological considerations have their meaning only in clarifying the object, not in themselves, unlike if the object were limited to God in Himself—God’s revelation must have an objective form, due to free creation and Incarnation: 1. Due to His freedom and subjectivity, God remains transcendent and interior intimo meo, believed and surrendered to not just seen; difference between human Thou with whom there is community and of which the I is an example, and divine Thou with whom there is no community of nature—2. Creation is a manifestation of God, and so the form of the world i.e. the Being of things is the form of that manifestation of the invisible God, not just part of Him, and His glory; revelation in creation is for the sake of revelation in Christ, so the form of the world becomes the temple for the kâbôd of God—3. Form of revelation in Christ is first characterized as perfection of form of world, when seen in faith as appearing of Trinity, the appearance of infinitely determined super-form, not limitation of infinite non-form, a hypostatic union between archetype and image: form of all forms, measure of measures, glory of glories—General content of “form” must be suspended here in view of its particular uniqueness—The form of revelation here is Christ’s revelation-body. III.B. The Form of Revelation III.B.1. As Fact (p. 424): Subjectivity unity of Christian faith and vision elucidated and conditioned by unity of objective revelation, which is unique and unrepeatable, while OT and creation revelation could occur in many ways—Christ is the point of intersection of words of Being and history because He is more than factual man Jesus, or supra-historical Logos, but their unity—Radiance and impressed form are founded in logos and sophia (Wis. 7:25), indicating reciprocity of divine persons, not pantheism; form that unites them is Primal Beauty—No separations or distinctions in the form of His radiance as to what He is as man or God; we grasp His eternal glory because He receives it as man—Trinity in itself is just the background for Incarnation (John, Paul)—Here there are no signs that point beyond themselves to something signified e.g. Jesus the man pointing to Christ of faith; humanity of Christ is expression not instrument, and His matter, or the matter of sacraments or ecclesial institutions, does not conceal the heavenly (contra Platonizing, Idealistic, 2 truth theory versions of Catholicism)—Eschatological Jerusalem belongs to God and the Lamb, the glory of the former never separate from the latter—Augustine on spirit perceiving spiritual realities corporeally, sensibly, and in the corporeal world—No matter the dynamism it contains, the form is more than Platonic symbol or Protestant disguise (Luther, Kierkegaard, Hegel)—The modality of God’s image in a sinful world presupposes its expressive revelatory character—In God’s revelation of love in flesh and blood on the Cross, He shows that He has committed Himself unsurpassably, prolonged in Eucharist, Resurrection, divine marriage. III.B.2. As Revelation in Hiddenness (p. 430): Form of revelation has irreducible but analogous tensions: 1. Between manifestness of body and hiddenness of spirit—2. Between cosmos and God in order of creation—3. Most concretely, between sinner and God revealed as Redeemer in concealment of Cross. III.B.2.a. In the Revelation of Being (p. 430): The order of external material appearance and inwardness that appears, e.g. spirit, animal or plant soul, spontaneity in matter, establish mystery of beauty in the paradox that what is manifest is at the same time non-manifest—Beauty includes measure, number, and weight of organized material, energy of organizing agent, and glory of free and loving self-gift; seen non-manifest depth gives beautiful its enrapturing character, and ensures the truth and goodness of the existent—True of beauty of nature and art, including abstract art—Factors in interpreting art, as revealing artist or worldview—God can represent only Himself because He is identical with each of His possible worlds, yet there is an infinite gap between creation and work, bridged not even by general concept of Being—Considering God by analogy to human artist yields Deism; what is also needed is analogy to natural beauty, which points to God’s sustaining fidelity—To read a form in the world, we must see the invisible—In totality of beings maintaining equilibrium, we see mystery of Being that cannot be reduced to neutral existence—As spirit, we know this because the laws of the macrocosm are within us; but to attain the womb-like night of the world soul/natura naturans, we must give us spiritual clarity and entrust ourselves to loving intimations, anima rather than animus, known by artists and lovers through docile ignorance: love beyond infatuation reveals the beloved’s profound interior self—Through one’s individuality and personality, one’s nature expresses itself in all of human life; the person as representation and expression of law of life or Being acting in Him, especially in ethical responsibility—Knowledge worthy of man cannot bracket substratum of unknowing and mystery, contra exact sciences, though they have their place, so long as they recognize that the mystery cannot be dissolved, and is further concretized with more knowledge—Worldly knowledge includes knowledge and natural faith, so faith in God and Christ are not radically new (Theophilus of Antioch)—Every being is unknowable, graspable only in its utterances (Gregory of Nyssa)—Kant’s bracketing of the unknowable is violent—Supernatural piety presupposes a piety of nature and of Being. III.B.2.b. In the Revelation of the Word (p. 436): Creation is unique mode of revelation of God—Constitutes foundation of philosophy—The not-being-one of beings points beyond them to true unity, the fundamental existential experience—By its being, creation shows its non-necessity, contingency shows freedom of Creator—Cataphatic theology allowing all creaturely Being to be an utterance regarding God leads to comprehensive apophatic theology; step beyond requires grace beyond natural theology, for we cannot determine how much God’s manifestness in active splendor of creation coincides with supernatural revelation—Two words addressed to man: as creature come forth from God, and personally as child called to heart of God; no human existence placed nakedly before ciphers of existence—As creature, man first knows revealed and concealed God as Lord—Every human implicitly knows and loves God, revelation in concealment, though without intuition of divine being—Mystery of Being invites creature to move beyond itself and surrender itself to the mystery—If intuition of Being were just of finite Being without relation to Absolute, it would be absurd; evidence indicates analogia entis, absolute dependency, being a content of an infinite thought, and a finite freedom—In natural faith, an interior dimension of natural knowledge of God not a new power, natural finite reason is directed to infinite freedom that it knows to posit it and which it obeys—Here the Word touches the creature, addressed to the ecce ancilla. III.B.2.c. In the Revelation of Man (p. 440): Revelation of grace is not new form in created world, but a new manner of God’s presence and intimacy—Adam’s supernatural faith through interior inspiration (DV 18.3)—Natural inspiration from Being is the vessel for inspiration by grace—After fall, exterior, historical words needed penitentially, though this, including Cross, is unconditionally the interior and organic fulfillment of God’s plan—Examples of internal and external words and miracles in OT, in which revelation is already incarnate is cosmos and history—Presence of God fulfills form of man: Gloria dei vivens homo (Irenaeus)—Faith experienced in believing man, who expects reward because of the form of faith, where supernatural faith includes natural and created law—Israel hopes for eschatological verification not yet seen—In history of Israel, God reveals Himself as incomprehensible—In Christ, God’s revelation in concealment reaches perfection, on which paradoxes of creation and salvation history converge; God’s revelation as Himself in human form cannot be super-human, but must be an ordinary man in the crowd, a man for others—Trinitarian character of revelation: Son reveals God as servant, Spirit reveals glory of this form, with support of Father’s witness—Christ cannot be understood at level of character—Revelation in the Word has its place within not alongside revelation in creation, because God takes on human nature as His own; God is Wholly Other and Not-Other (Nicholas of Cusa) and so does not use nature in alien way—Christ-form demands of those that encounter it that they accompany it in all its dimensions—Only after seeing dialectic of revelation and concealment in form of Incarnation as such should one grapple with particular modality of this sensory form, e.g. stemming from sin, as function of glory of love—Cross ends worldly aesthetics, but even the latter must come to terms with nocturnal sides of existence e.g. ugly, fragmented, etc.: only by being fragmented does the beauty reveal the meaning of the eschatological promise it contains—The form of the Redeemer takes on itself the modalities to fallen existence to transvalue them by redemptive suffering—Greater dissimilarity than similarity varies from philosophical negative theology, to negative theology within theology of revelation, where God’s incomprehensibility is the positive manner God determines the knowledge of faith, and part of objective evidence not of the darkness of earthly faith—Kenosis in light of doxa. III.C. Christ the Center of the Form of Revelation III.C.1. Plausibility (p. 451): Center of form not in relation to periphery; center means reality that lends form total coherence—That Christ is center and content is rooted in character of Christianity—Church is incomprehensible except in relation to Him (contra Action Française)—Center must offer objective, non-probabilistic evidence i.e. evidence from phenomenon itself, not satisfying subject’s needs, though there are subjective conditions for the form enlightening one i.e. correspondence of one’s existence to Him—Latter does not constitute object’s evidence; God makes Himself known on His own initiative—No time or culture is privileged with respect to this phenomenon—Decisive illumination is in the phenomenon: 1. The figure Christ forms has interior rightness and evidential power like that found in artwork or mathematical principle; 2. This rightness can illumine the perceiver so as to transform his existence—Historical-critical research, or opposition between Jesus of history and Christ of faith, cannot see this, for all parts of form are interrelated—To understand the given, we must accept what is given as it offers itself. III.C.2. Measure and Form (p. 455): If measured and measure are parts of a whole, we say the whole measures itself—Form consists of parts adapted to one another and measured by the whole, which is the distributor and consumer of measuring—Insertion of complete form into larger context cannot destroy form—Christ can only be measured by Himself; He measures all other measures—He causes one of His aspects to measure another, to show their being-in-tune, which is reciprocal; disposition or pitch applied to psychic sphere, to persons and events, and to Christ’s mission and existence through obedience to Father’s will—Attunement between divine task and human execution is human and divine—Jesus transcends prophets or Greek gods by identity with His total task and movement toward death; this harmony shows that He was not an invention of the Apostles—No split between Synoptics, and Paul and John—Failure of extreme eschatological thesis and of view that Sermon on the Mount is just an interim ethics—Solidity of His words is from their coincidence with the totality of His existence as the Word Who from the beginning has reckoned with the kind of death proper to His existence—Jesus is the concordance between His existence and mission, the norm and form of the justitia Dei, which can only be shown not measured, a living, dynamic, dramatic event whose subject is God and that allows man to happen before God in His subjectivity—This dynamism of event is the descent of God into flesh and ascent of flesh into spirit, a commercium and conubium effected simultaneously but non-reciprocally from both sides—God’s turning to us, the Incarnation in its descent to the most extreme suffering, is a definitive and permanent event, not state, which possesses Being—The power of God is first manifested, and then submerged in impotence as it is resisted; He enters the created to the utmost, using the creature’s measure to measure His eternal relationship to man and world, and even His Godhead in a sense, since He does not eternally stand in indifference to all possible worlds, but has eternally decided on this world, having measured it by His descent—Taking on man in all the dimensions of God-forsakenness is an adaptation of man to the measure of God; man responds and corresponds to God’s speech, rather than being passive, and is attuned to God by being dynamically inhabited by Him—Unity of kenosis and doxa—The form, which includes God, becomes plausible and the abolition of contradiction between God and godless world—In Christ, God possesses inspiration and mortality in one figure, and so this figure includes all humanity, concluding and completing the universe—The double act of measurement, ascending and descending, is form and figure—This beautiful object is revelation, the beauty of God in man, and the beauty of man in God, according to the unique mode of the revelation, not an abstract schema, revealing what the terms of aesthetics really signify—Christ responds to God from our nature, affecting us from within, transferring us from the monological sphere of sin into the dialogical, where things are right and attuned—Christ’s image unifies God’s power and man’s impotence, rather than leaving them fragmented, because He does both out of obedience not hubris, an epiphany of Trinitarian obedience—If God did not have form in Himself, no form could arise between Him and man; finite would be absorbed by infinite, as in non-Christian mysticism, which is in conflict between the mystical and the aesthetic-political, and so is demythologized and dies for lack of images—Relation between God and creatures comes to participate in natural indissolubility of love between Father and Son in the Spirit; Trinitarian union and hypostatic union give to free love an ontological form shaped by love, which becomes most striking in the Eucharist. III.C.3. Quality (p. 468): The measure Christ embodies is qualitatively different from every other—Requires an eye for quality, analogous to eye of connoisseur, which is bestowed with the phenomenon whose light illumines the subject—Sense that perceives Christ’s incomparable quality develops: 1. As contemplation, where the form unfolds itself; 2. As verification of form of faith in existence, where the form’s power and vitality emerges; 3. As form’s self-differentiation from all other religious forms; 4. Seeing why and how the form is overlooked. III.C.3.a. The Form Unfolds Itself (p. 470): To do justice to this require rehearsing all Christian thought and contemplation, a world withdrawn from the eyes of the world, having its radiance from within, rather than from the worldly power of persuasion—Criterion for authenticity of self-revealing form is that it not do violence or compel, but make us free, by the evidential power of love belonging to the form—Hiddenness is essential to Christian evidence, for the world exists through Christ to teach about fallenness and redemption, not just about God’s divinity; clarity would please reason but harm will (Pascal, whose Christian theoria is midway between Augustine’s Platonic theoria and Luther’s latere sub contrario)—The law of the manifestness of God’s hiddenness in Christ organizes all evidence around itself, and resolves all paradoxes regarding Being of man and world—Glory and hiddenness in Mark and John—Christian contemplation as change of beholder into beheld, not distanced consideration of image, and Christian life is not a second moment to this theoria; this change is receiving Christ’s form, supremely in Mary’s ecce ancilla, not action or work, but contemplative obedience that passes over into Passion—Christ-form proves itself i.e. contemplation cannot find a mistake or disharmony in it, avoiding naïve enthusiasm and its implausible harmonizations, and historical-critical rejection of enthusiasm and its seeing only contradictions—Simplifications of the form cancel each other out in favor of lectio difficillior—Unity of complex form cannot be seen all at once, but only in its self-expression, allowing contemplation of one aspect of faith, without losing sight of the whole form—Aesthetic analogies to impenetrability of inspiration of great artwork, and to seeing mystery of reality through artwork; as in artwork, divine freedom coincides with supreme necessity—Freedom of Christ’s form exhibited in effortlessness in self-representation, humility out of magnanimity and love (contra Nietzsche), a simplicity no technique could master—Infinitude of Christian contemplation—Theological imagination lies with Christ, the image and power of God. III.C.3.b. The Inherent Power of the Form (p. 478): The power of the Spirit gives the image depth and vital force to take root in believers’ lives—Cannot accept power of “Christ of faith” without image of “historical Jesus”, without making Spirit and Word different gods—Dimension from historical Jesus to Christ of kerygma and written Gospel is traversed by objectivization by the Spirit and by eyewitnesses, where this objectivized form includes only a selection of historical events, not a total reproduction of the Word in words, but this is sufficient to produce life i.e. original participation and full initiation i.e. concordance between simplicities of Christ and of faith (John)—Historical Jesus is full of Trinitarian dynamis, which fills Christians, and which is its own hypostasis but is bound to the Incarnate Lord (Paul)—Paul’s Epistles demonstrate the fullness and fertility of the Spirit’s power—Letter/historia and Spirit in Alexandrian theology; former need not be historical factuality, but are put there by the Spirit for spirit, to have their effect for me—Origen de-letterizes/de-mythologizes, yet sees the connection between historical letter and spirit, and the form between them—Spirit is of the Word/Utterable and Father/Unutterable, form and enthusiasm/love, the locus of beauty of God—Avoid extremes of Dionysian cults and of Ronald Knox, tension between precision and enthusiasm as grasped by the saints not the manuals—Spirit is ignored by philosophers and historians of religion, and so fail to understand the spread of Christianity, and its form stamped on history down to our own day. III.C.3.c. The Uniqueness of the Form (p. 483): God can use human forms of religiosity, but we should not be relativists in philosophy of religion—2 different things: 1. Ascent of religious man to transfiguration and revelation (Buddha, mystical religions); 2. Descent of God’s message, clashing with human sensibility (Jewish prophets and Mohammed to some extent, prophetic religions)—Does Jesus’ unique form exempt Him from typological classification?—1. Form of Christ and OT are one revelation, but Christ is not subordinated to it, since promise only shares in uniqueness of fulfillment—2. Christ recapitulates and is image of all cosmic and historical images, so their content will be transformed in fulfilling form—3. Jesus is a historical man arriving at a horoscopic kairos, Who is accessible through historical categories, like other religious founders, and Who builds on the history of Israel, which builds on history and phenomena of religions in general and of its geographic environment—Understanding the Word requires a uniqueness within general historical determinateness, for salvation history moves from general to unique, which can only be seen by believing eye, without which the uniqueness is subject to historical critique as a type—If Word became flesh, it cannot be ascertained scientifically or phenomenologically (van der Leeuw), since phenomenology with its epoche cannot make a unique form visible, which requires faith, not methodological participation—Do all religions’ revelation transcend comparative classification, since they represent a ray from the abyss of the mystery of Being, expressed in symbolic form? (Otto, Buber, Przywara contra Jung)—Forms/gods are revelation of mystery of being, not archetype of collective unconscious or personification of forces, embodying fullness of universe—Experience of gods (Michelangelo, Goethe, Keats) or angels/daimones necessary for religion, including Christianity (contra Augustine, to some extent)—God’s silencing of the gods (Isaiah, Paul), inheriting Christianity from the gods/theophanies (Rilke, Hölderlin, Schelling, Hopkins, Maximus, Victorines, Eastern theology)—Christ as Unique One renders all other forms similar to one another, and Himself progressively isolated and irreducible—1. Other religious founders point to a way e.g. myth, doctrine, but Jesus is the Way uniting teaching and form of life, with irrupting transcendence (contra Schweitzer), identity between myth and history—2. Other founders are credible through account of their conversion or enlightenment; Christ’s baptism cannot be so interpreted, without missing the whole form of Christ as the one Who has descended; Christianity teaches salvation in, not from, death, as expression of love, unlike in other myths of dying gods—3. Myths of salvation are naturalistic and protological, but Christ’s deed is historical, fulfilling Israel’s historical religion and other cosmic myths; mythic systems can only either abolish the world or focus just on its laws, but Christ’s free deed of love makes moral demands, abolishing alienation from God not the Being of the world, safeguarding the world in God not revealing a law—4. Other religions are caught in dialectic between God/One and world/many e.g. remaining midway between them (Mohammed), abolishing Many for One (Sufism), incorporating One into Many (polytheism, pantheism), but the free Trinity and Incarnation overcome these by containing otherness, and making creation an expression of Trinitarian love; Trinity is only possible theodicy—I cannot exhaust God by understanding, but His incomprehensibility is an eternal source of insight and love—Everything in human world is referred to absolutely unique Christ-form by fulfillment through judgment: Bible emphasizes judgment as God takes possession of man and history; theologians of history emphasize Christ’s illumining of mythical world (Justin, Clement, Eusebius, Alan de Lille, Cusa, Schelling, Hegel, Calderón)—Myth cannot transcend itself to Christ on its own, hence the limits of the silence and sorrow of the gods (Rehm)—Myth and concept both await Christ for fulfillment, hence their usefulness for theology and Christian art. III.C.3.d. The Form’s Hiddenness and its Misapprehension (p. 496): Anyone who rejects the form of Christ has misapprehended it in whole or part, though this does not allow others to judge the one who rejects, though the believer can see that the other’s failure to apprehend—Failure to see Christ when one confronts Him always involves guilt, as with His rejection by the leaders of Israel—Blindness to objectively visible as punishment, and parables as exacerbating blindness—True scandal is the opposition of one’s subjective opinion to objective evidence, the judgment that the object cannot be what it claims—Prerequisite for seeing form of Jesus is faith in God i.e. making space for omnipotence including in oneself, for the form of Christ—Art of total form required to see place of each aspect; heresy selectively disjoins parts—Failures to see Christ cannot withstand looking at that form, done by putting a screen before Him e.g. historical-critical method and schemas, Christians as one has encountered them (Nietzsche), faded image of Christ (Schleiermacher), Christian culture (Chateaubriand), polemics and apologetics, rhetorical preaching—For those who have seen the form, their existence is comprehensible only as function of Christ-form. (p. 502): 1. How does evidential force of Christ-form relate to its hiddenness?—Gospels present Christ as intending to conceal and reveal Himself—In Mark, Christ seeks to preserve a messianic secret, commanding others to keep silent; these commands are not obeyed, cannot be obeyed, or contradict the intrinsic meaning of the sign of salvation, since it is contrary to Christ’s tendency to proclaim His divine mission—Hiddenness makes manifest His fulfillment of prophecy otherwise than the Jews interpreted; the manifestation of God’s incomprehensibility must conceal its need to be manifest, in order to be manifest—Christ’s wrath as that of one Who is free yet under the destiny of the sinful world, yielding suffering, the manifestation of the violence that sin inflicts on God, as He is made sin—What is contradictory in Mark, is united in John as the interior working through in suffering of the contradiction of love in a world of sin from the beginning of Christ’s life, a drama beyond the dramatic, a love that is light in darkness—Hiddenness of Christ-form was never invalidated, even after Easter or Pentecost—Glory of the Son can only be seen by believers, who sees the evidence shining forth from hiddenness; revelation of God cannot be by dazzling but banal theophany, but only by mystery of love bearing world’s burden in suffering—Church cannot be clearly Body of Christ, but includes sinners; a more redeemed appearance will be a matter of more or less. (p. 509): 2. How do guilt and resulting blindness relate to hiddenness?—Failure to see Christ form is due to guilt of darkness—Guilt requires Son to reveal Himself in hiddenness, which is the judgment of guilt, which intentionally looks away from the form of suffering—The image of hiddenness confronts guilt with its culpable self-concealment and its exposure by grace—Required is turning from one’s image to God’s—Question of whether crucifix is an image for individual conversion, while community should have image of Risen Christ, or if the Church as persona Ecclesiae should be confronted with crucifix in her memoria passionis—Every encounter of sinner with Redeemer is a contemplation of His form through conversion by grace—Contemplative life unites aesthetics of faith with mystery of suffering, belonging first to Church as Bride—Negation of vision is apostasy, which denies what it has seen, but is branded by that image. III.D. The Mediation of the Form III.D.1. The Mediation of Scripture (p. 512): When Son came into world, His form became intertwined in various ways with interrelated historical and natural forms—His form is in world to shape it, and cannot be grasped before its act of shaping; we see what the form is from what it does—Part of what the form is, is provided by its attestation—Witness of Father and Spirit are interior to Christ’s being and so to His form; likewise for witness of salvation history whose promise He fulfills, and of cosmos whose essence and existence He brings to their innermost idea, anchoring it in His being in a manner internal to Him—Fourfold attestation is in part the foundation of His form, though none are identical to His Person; these testimonies witness to a deed that reveals its figure in effects—These results that mediate the shaping deed are the Christ-form, yet in their communication to the world are affected in their form by the world that receives them e.g. in human mediation, which is not external to the Christ-form—Christ’s mediating form is multiple in its results and exercise, which expresses only the one form—Form unfolds in multiplicity according to corpus triforme: 1. Physical body or form of historical Jesus formed as instrument of universal redemption which suffers and thanks the Father for giving it as is already identical to the Risen Body and Eucharist; 2. Body of Scripture or scriptural form; 3. Body of the Church or ecclesial form—Each form is not just a result but an event and power of Christ-form—Relation of Scripture, Eucharist, and Church as mediating forms, but as currently provisional, making Christ-form present, pointing forward to perfect embodiment of Christ-form—Mediating forms not of equal value: Church is outworking of risen Christ through forms of Scripture and Sacrament, from which risen Christ can only inadequately be separated—Eucharist is pure mystery of faith, marginal to doctrine of perception—Scripture and Church are perceptive expressions of Christ-form/body, and in both sinful men share in their formation and communication—Prior to Enlightenment, Bible was considered entirely infallible even in its literary modes, but Church un-mutilated only in skeleton; now, both seen as temporally embedded—Inspiration of Scripture as ecclesial charism—Scripture more determined by men than sacraments. III.D.1.a. Faith and the Becoming of the Image (p. 518): Scripture was seen as masterpiece of God with regard to its power and the form it comprises—Layers of human working now seen, and coloring by human viewpoints and ecclesial faith—Enlightenment’s Historical Jesus is not credible as a form compared to Christ of faith (Kähler)—Bultmann’s tragic dualism between history and contemporaneity, allowing theology to be based not on Incarnation but on faith’s self-understanding—Self-annulment of research into the life of Jesus based on historical-critical outlook unprejudiced by faith—A work of art can only be objectively grasped within a subjectivity that corresponds to it; the world can unfolds its objectivity only in medium of subjects, so no difference between naïve realism and pure subjectivity—Unlike in physical world where impulses of matter stand behind secondary qualities, no analogous historical Jesus behind Christ of faith in realm of spiritual—Taking seriously the reference faith makes to history requires that we eliminate this dualism: in theological domain, only faith can guarantee objective or rational knowledge of things as they are—In older theology, Scripture was seen as God’s Word to the Church; now, as expression of faith’s reflection on historical revelation; both join in a necessary unity of form: revelation is received into womb of human faith effected by revelation, seen especially in OT—Covenant partnership is not that of a speaker and a listener, but the Word of God is implanted into us; Mary is archetype—Only faith in/as resurrection can read the form that took shape while Jesus was on earth—Purity and clarity with which the Word presents itself is in proportion to transparency and purity of medium of faith that receives it and from which it creates its form e.g. in His humanity and in Mary, and in Church bearing Scripture through objective not subjective memoria i.e. not a self-reflection but a subjective faith and objective tradition that go back—Scripture is testimony of revelation, not revelation, yet also Christ in the Church, part of Christ’s humiliated form, revealing God by concealing Him—We cannot grasp the body behind the form of Scripture, though that form is loose and perspectivisitc, contra form-critical analysis—Scripture makes possible continued impregnation of souls by Logos—It is futile to seek a neutral “photograph” of historical Jesus; that is a physical process, not like the writing of history, which asks questions about meaning, and cannot attain more meaning than it invests—Development of unique reality in OT—Event of salvation reaches down to foundations of history and embraces even letter of Scripture, effecting miracles through it. III.D.1.b. Image and Canon (p. 529): By 4th century, ‘canon’ meant Scripture by which truth of faith was to be measured; Paul meant by ‘canon’ the event of salvation—Ecclesial faith requires conversio ad Scripturam and so anew receives illumination as to what is to be believed and done—Principle nihil in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu nisi intellectus ipse has theological analogy: abstraction of theological truth from Scripture is not theological sensualism, but presupposes a facultas entis where Being is an unbounded reality and images are manifestations of it—Image has significance inasmuch as it makes present the forms and proportions of the original, living reality; Scripture’s form is relevant insofar as it is testimony of revelation of God in Christ through Spirit, not an autonomous form intelligible in itself, though a form chosen by God—Proportion between forms of revelation and Scripture not open to literary or aesthetic analysis, but to eyes of faith—To literary analysis, NT collapses into collection of diverse forms of literature—Scripture does not strictly have sacramental-Eucharistic form, but is closely linked to Sacrament; it is vehicle by which Spirit actualizes total historical form of revelation—Canonicity is a promise that the believer will encounter Christ in a theological remembering making Christ present through grace –The transition from OT to NT is a new creation of meaning through death of Logos, a transposition of literal sense to spiritual depth for me (Bultmann), a Christian in the Church—Spiritual sense of Scripture is a universalization, not abstraction, of history by being assumed into eternity where incarnate Logos becomes Pneuma; by these senses, traditional theology met today’s existential concerns (de Lubac)—Reasons for Scriptural predilections of the Fathers e.g. for Song of Songs, based on spiritual not literary understanding of totality—Dangers of influence of Denys’ negative theology and of Neo-Platonism; response that Denys is aesthetic and Christological, unlike Evagrius Ponticus’ quasi-Buddhism—Canonical image of revelation is closed because God’s gift to the world cannot intensify beyond that given in Christ, but the image is open to ever deeper penetration, though all faithful see the whole, and so there will be no decisive shifting of proportions of image of Scripture—Development of understanding of this image, dogma, and spirituality are fitful externally, organic internally—Possibilities of deviation; whole Scripture tests deviations against original form—Scripture’s theologies and experiments with form cannot be reduced to abstract concept; provides criteria for new ecclesial thought—Ecclesial kerygma, including pastoral and dogmatic teaching, renders primal form visible; theology also does not have an autonomous form, despite its mandate to interpret Scripture and demonstrate legitimacy of magisterial kerygma, but is a meditative act of homage to Christ: theology must be open existentially i.e. only the saint is truly a theologian, ecclesiologically i.e. ascetically toward all Church teaching, meditatively i.e. toward total act of prayer and contemplation. III.D.2. The Medium of the Church III.D.2.a. Form and Transparency (p. 541): From viewpoint of Gospel, Church has only relative form as medium of God’s form of revelation in Christ—A truly successful technical or artistic work has objective, autonomous form independent of subjectivity of its creator—Church is not like this, for She is not created from union of subjective genius with objective world-spirit, but from the being of Christ—Church as new Eve, deriving both body and personality from God, including all offices, unlike man and wife who are two self-enclosed persons—Ecclesial institution is not a formal timeless skeleton, but is relative to love, and develops toward eschatological form—Church should see herself as medium, uniting contrary properties like Christ—Church is not Christ but has Christ’s figure—She mediates between God and world, and should be transparent to both—In the Church, all historical positivity loses its fortuitous character, as in an artwork, in that it becomes the self-revelation of God and man to one another; this is not Enlightenment rationalist elimination of positivity—Analysis of forms of Christ and Church not meant to destroy form in favor of concept, for only in image and form do concept of God and man become concrete for us, subjectively and objectively—In Christ and Church one can see how 2 poles of God and man become visible in unity—Christ-form can be grasped by intellectual dividing and composing, and when it is impressed on other men if not sinfully opposed, especially in Mary, archetype of Church, showing that Christian sanctity is Christ-bearing—As Marian, Church and believer immediately legible pure form—Place of Mariology in theological aesthetics, against Protestant objections—Mystery of co-operation between God and creature, not two people working alongside, but Lord and Handmaid, obedience, watchful waiting for the Lord, active readiness, not passivity—Mary as prototype of what ars Dei can do, a feminine life, without independent form, not dissociable from surrounding mystery, its doxa seen by faith—Immaculate Bride as only image of Church offered by Gospel, without compromise with sinners—Failure of institutional Church, gap between person and office; Church’s institution under Marian veil—Institution belongs to existence of man in world and his social nature; what needs absolution and humiliation is its abuse—Pauline existence makes Church institution credible—Institution is meant to be means for preservation and intensification of relation between Head and members, not an evil (Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor)—What would be needed to write history of Church from standpoint of discrediting Christ’s intentions. III.D.2.b. The Eucharistic Cult (p. 554): Church is born when Christ exercises His power to lay down His life and take it up and gives this surrender for His friends the form of a meal, the fulfillment of His love which is glorified in handing itself over and gives thanks to itself—The meal seals His corporeal death—Insertion of sign of Cross into the meal is sign of the sovereign freedom of His self-surrender; this form is permanent and as social act constitutes interior form of the Church—Fulfillment of all sacral and cultic meals—God is here at man’s disposal—Ecclesial cult is memorial of the passion of the Lord (Newman) which constitutes the Church and looks to His return, all made present—Primary act of Christ making himself present encounters Church’s secondary act of remembering and making subjectively present—1. Center is in this encounter, the event of eating and drinking, not in transubstantiation, which is a means—2. Emphasis on constitutive event between Christ and Church, not on celebrant, who is just a minister of service, while Christ is true Priest—3. Liturgical particulars should be regulated in light of these emphases—Christian cult is more spiritual than anything man can devise, and salvages corporeal element in increasingly desacralized, disembodied, technicized world—Emphasis on Incarnation, and direction of Eucharist to the Father—Figure will be legible if liturgy is celebrated soberly. III.D.2.c. The Sacramental Form (p. 559): Fundamental law of sacramental form is that everything the Church does to give visible form, its manner and measure is determined by event made present in the form—No autonomous form to replace Christ-form, nor is grace in sacraments formless in itself, but all grounded in Christ-form; every res in Christ is already res et sacramentum, to which every ecclesial sacramentum must adhere interiorily and exteriorily—All sacraments are a saving act that God performs in Christ for the believer, distinguished by the way Christ has brought salvation—Example of Matrimony—Pauline Baptismal theology (Rom. 6:5): relation between archetype and image is not external or purely symbolic, but internal conformation (School of Marialaach: Casel, Stricker)—Image-form is sacramentally realized event mediating as form between Christ and man—Everything institutional in the Church is centered on the event it mediates, aimed at the individual subject—Image’s symbolic content points to Christ’s corporeal and spiritual gesture, which the believer understands—Problems with infant baptism grounding Christian existence in quasi-natural, unconscious fact; justification of the practice requires seeing universal cosmic character of the Church and its responsibility to all humanity—Penance’s figure cannot be eroded, since the heart here is the sinner’s conversion; with Christ, penance has received its full sacramental form, not obscured by absolution through Christ’s delegate—In Confirmation, Pentecost becomes an event for one who has reached adult responsibility; in this and in marriage, holy orders, and anointing of the sick, universal human situation becomes secondary occasion for God’s sovereign action—Sacraments are essential parts of ecclesial aesthetics; they are not instruments separate from Christ-form, nor spiritual artworks in themselves, but rather in them a person is in process of formation whose form is Christ. III.D.2.d. Faith and Dogma (p. 567): Apparent contrast between personal commitment to God and man, and dogmatic ecclesial content of faith—We must be able to see from expression of faith to Jesus, the whole rather than the apparently opposed parts—1. Continuity from John the Baptist’s proclamation to Jesus’ of Good News; faith in God must allow Him absolute pre-eminence, Who has proved His covenant-fidelity—2. Jesus is there to initiate men into this faith; total faith gives power over God since one offers no resistance to Him, similar not to Hindu magic but more to Zen total non-voluntariness but with a personal absolute—3. Jesus lives this reality to show it is possible and imitable, though phenomenologically this takes us only to Him as teacher wielding divine power, not Kierkegaard’s either/or between Socrates and Jesus—4. Jesus’ whole existence is turned to love for me, to communicate to me this power in and unto God; Son of God is now called only-begotten of the Father, because this is the illumination by love of a reality already there (contra Buber), hence his surrender for the world is the love of God (John, Matthew)—5. Paul adds the painful and blissful experience of the convert, able to do all things in Christ, in accord with the Gospel, not open to interpretation as simul justus et peccator, and in continuity with OT since accretions to law are not genuine Jewish religiosity, and faith of Abraham and Christ have same formal structure—6. Whole structure of faith, that one can absolutely trust the God Who has given us His Son, is proclaimed by Apostles and successors as Good News, and their word demands a decision for and obedience to the Word through the Church, while Churcj is object of faith only inasmuch as Christ lives in her as total sacrament; apostolic authority can, within in the Church i.e. among free believers, establish order in conscience—7. Kerygma is already dogma, demanding a decision for special faith in God’s self-revelation and surrender in Christ, and dogma must be further secured and formulated, but these must be traced back to dogma that appears in Gospel—Eyes of faith able to perceive form of faith and supported by ability to read history critically needed—Ancient faith proleptically contained Christian faith—Foundation of all dogmatic ‘faith in’ is fidelitas of God and His people, of Bride to Bridegroom. III.D.2.e. Proclamation and the Other Ecclesial Forms (p. 576): Apostolic proclamation is archetype of all ecclesial preaching, which is ministry to the Word, allowing the form of God’s Word to prevail in those who hear it, with no intermediary form—Same goes for Christian rhetoric and art—Distinction between preaching to unbelievers and believers; in former, order of nature is not outside Christ but is founded in and made possible by Him, and the hearers are already within sphere of Christ’s Lordship without knowing it—Preaching and liturgical-Eucharistic anamnesis, both founded in Cross—Authentic preaching shows Christ present in preacher, the Word gaining presence from preaching out of preacher’s lived Christian existence, not artistry—Styles of preaching and celebration of Sacrament are decided by making the Lord present in our remembrance, not a theological construction, which hinders contemporaneity with Word (Kierkegaard)—All other forms of ecclesial existence can receive and express the Christ-form, but can also resist it through man’s recalcitrance: 1. Hierarchy should be both opus operatum and representation Christi in single figure; 2. Canon law, rooted in Apostolic jurisdiction and not explainable just as socially necessary discipline, but both lay and religious obedience as manifestation of Christ’s obedience, all coercion founded on deeper freedom; 3. Same principles that establish hierarchical jurisdiction, establish religious life, whose evangelical counsels are founded on creative power of Christ’s form, prior to anthropological basis, and are public living of precept belonging to all Christians, based in ecclesial love, which is ultimately Trinitarian love; 4. Theology is an event that gives form, deepening pistis into gnosis, in obedience to Christ, without ever rising above the analogy assigned to it e.g. in univocity, and having proper limits from faith, best drawn from equilibrium between personal effort at intellectus fidei and participation in object of faith in one’s life-experience (p. 585): Mediation of the form, in Scripture and Church, is attestation of the form, testimony of the Holy Spirit—As work undertaken by God, it’s possible that they are complemented in conjunction with Christ the principle form as one total form, with Christ delineated in them, more strongly in Scripture than in Church, so that form of Christ can become dazzling in testimony of Christians—Perception of Christ-form in Scripture and Church objectively points beyond itself—Perception of Christ, or anything beautiful, leads to joy and ecstasy: Spirit transports form of Christ into Scripture and Church, and man into them and so to Christ, the abmirabile commercium et conubium. III.E. The Attestation of the Form III.E.1. The Testimony of the Father (p. 588): Form of Jesus as form is attested from within; this attestation establishes as the form of the manifestation of God, through testimony of: 1. The Father; 2. OT; 3. Works and power over cosmos, the “powers”, angels, and death and consequences of body’s fallenness; 4. Holy Spirit and, relatedly, sacramental water and blood—In the Son, the Father first witnesses to Himself—Father’s witness constitutes Son’s form/eidos; Spirit’s witness constitutes His glory/doxa—Jews should have seen Father’s form (Jn. 5:37f.) in Christ (Jn. 12:45, 14:9) not just through OT figures seeing God face to face (Jacob, Moses)—Pistis and eidos require one another—Fundamental principle of theological aesthetics is that just as revelation is absolute truth and goodness, so it is absolute beauty, and this does allow analogical application of human categories and images of logic, ethics, and aesthetics to revelation, though not reduced to those categories—The Son in the testimony of the Father is eidos/form of God and so aesthetic model of all beauty; in Him, the one, concrete, divine nature is revealed, in Sending, Sent and that which unites them in a vital way, appearing while not appearing—God is absolute mystery in His revelation that His being and nature is a relationship that is tripersonal, identifying relation-to-self and to-other, eternal repose in self with eternal striving and loving—Here, categories of aesthetics are not destroyed, but exalted in incomprehensibly positive way—Every creature is a manifestation or representation of itself and its own depths, and the good, true, and beautiful are founded on this interior to exterior movement; every act of appearing illumines a being’s ground and measures the space between light and ground, so that this measure becomes word expressive of being’s nature that reads itself and makes itself into a value and communicable gift: light of Being as source of bliss, and measure of Being as source of truth, but only insofar as each being is for others, striving beyond itself, and becomes a reality only in openness and interchange; in the ground’s appearing and returning to itself, there is the freedom where the self gives and receives itself, the necessity of Being is transcended by the eternal wonder of being allowed to be: Being is grace, gratuitousness, beauty, love—This is not deduction of Trinity, but to be kept in mind if relation between Father and Son is revealed in Son—Son is exegesis of Father, narrating and representing personally and ontologically, related to praise and glorification—The Son’s act of revelation by giving form and glorifying is the activity of the Father in Him, expressing and glorifying Himself in the Son’s form and word; every statement of the Son’s is a statement of the one divine nature, and in the Son’s servant form is manifested the Father’s form of lordship, though with reciprocity in obedience and in power conferred on the Son, where Son’s humiliation is already essentially the glorification of the Father and the Son, ratified through external glorification of the Resurrection—Identity of nature in union with personal opposition makes expressive relation between God and man and expressive relation in God—Only the work can attest to and accredit its validity and authenticity, so only the Son in his interior form can authentically accredit God, seen in His humility which shows that He glorifies another, and the Father accredits the Son; this phenomenon is seen in the ontological difference in Jn. 1:1—Christ’s apparently paradoxical statements are not contradictory when seen from within—Christ bears witness to Himself and to Father inasmuch every form in revealing its content reveals itself as form—Truth is Father, expressive relation between Father and Son, and Son as Word and Expression of Father, for which the appropriate word is ‘Love’ since God’s love for the world expressed in self-surrender of Son is shown to be love of Father for Son, and of Son for man, and as communication of love between Father and Son i.e. Spirit, and as man’s response in Spirit—Love’s essence assumes expressive form of going to the extreme (Jn. 13:1), in which the axiom bonum diffusivum sui is fulfilled and raised to a potency beyond all our imagining; creaturely dispositions, e.g. dying, prayer, are manifested in their divine archetypicity, such that Jesus’ and Father’s witness is no longer exterior, but an open interior space which shows the reality, where phone and logos coincide—Every form is an interior communication from which alone the objective order of the form can radiate; to experience form, one must become interior to it, especially for a Thou (Scheler, Buber), and supremely for the form of God made manifest—We cannot add to a form; by contemplating it, we can interpret its meaning unboundedly. III.E.2. The Testimony of History III.E.2.a. Figura: The Old Testament (p. 601): This testimony of history i.e. OT is not necessary to Jesus, but is used for men’s sake—History points to Jesus, not vice versa, though it belongs to Him and His form internally, and can only be understood through Him—Son’s allowing Himself to be joined with history in one form is not just the general historical fact that every man in spite of His irreducible individuality is the product of ancestors, people, time, environment, but the act of free Incarnation in the Spirit, as one Who is not thrown but enters the condition of the thrown—Liberal theology fails to see this (Harnack, Bultmann), as did the Fathers who made His relation to OT just one of comparison—Problem of relation between continuity and discontinuity in early Church, which opted for Pauline theology of discontinuity, though with secondary consideration for theology of continuity of James and the Jews; Paul too stresses total Biblical context for Jesus, though we do not gain access to Him only through Judaism—OT must participate in Christ’s singularity, though Christ’s uniqueness must contrast to OT, for the reality of grace that He brings is different from the first covenant’s expectant faith; OT is Kierkegaardian aesthetic compared to decisiveness of Christian existence—Everything in OT is figure/type for Christians, even disobedience and punishment—Platonic understanding of tupos is just an analogy for OT understanding, since OT faith is already hidden NT faith—Etymology of tupos, figura, and prototype as first sketch; promise is image compared to fulfillment—Contra Fathers, grace is not yet fully present in OT prophets—Jesus as form in the midst of creation cannot be without historical connections, while that history rises above the rest of history and points to Him (Irenaeus)—OT existence must understand itself historically, but also in images in which it objectifies itself, including in a dramatic inspiration of the events themselves (Benoit)—Israel cannot be integrated completely into surrounding cultures or Church, without threatening figural character of OT—Christ’s hypostatic union embraces transitory earthly form and imperishable heavenly form—Every figure points to grace and charity (Pascal)—Everything prior to Cross is an image underway that demands that we move on in faith, or cling to them in scandal—Messianic figure is progressively fragmented, a sphinx’s riddle that can only be solved by the new Oedipus. III.E.2.b. Myth and Prophecy (p. 611): Only Scandinavian school (Mowinckel, Pedersen, Engell, Widengren, Nyburg, Bentzen) has related OT figural existence to unified essential figure, which may not do justice to multiplicity of tradition; theory says all ancient religions experienced existence as conjointly mythical, religious, and political, expressed in cultic form: examples seen in ancient Near East religions, and in Israel—Claudel on link between Christ and Chinese culture—For these ancient cultures, time is vertical, not exactly cyclical—Figures of mythical king, historical suffering ebed Yahweh, and apocalyptic/eschatological son of man—We can systematize OT by reference to on point of convergence, and then it becomes a myth that was Israel’s—Mythical and Christian bearers of salvation form one complete image and mythical Christology—Israel borrows messianic ideas from ancient religious heritage, but weakens them—Point of convergence by which total, universally valid typology becomes visible is in sacral primal age—Israel’s distinction is in mediating movement between myth it repels, and second point of convergence its strives for without being able to construct, from mythic type to Christ as antitype—OT is time of irreconcilables (Hegel) pointing to creative unification of what cannot be united; it prepares the fragments of an image-to-be—Mythical experience of time is replaced by irreversible, linear time of salvation-history (von Rad) as history of God, historicizing cultic cycle (e.g. Deuteronomy) and then, in the Prophets, the idea of a supernatural kairos, a knowledge of historical situation by grasping God’s decision in it; assurances of salvation are transferred from past to future: God will establish salvation if the people weathers the historical situation as God intends, but then this antecedent is transcended in light of what God has decided to do (Jeremiah), through seeing will of God in politics and obedience—After exile, eschatological as beyond time opens in ethico-spiritual and apocalyptic de-temporalizations—Israel’s dynamism produces succeeding spiritual forms; history of chosen people educates and unfolds Christ’s dimensions, though they are irreconcilable within OT—Prophetic conception of free God not bound to cycle of feasts is most living reality attainable by pre-Christians—Prophets lead to decay of legalism, sapientialism, apocalypticism, but also to ascent that made possible final redaction of OT—Examples of apparently irreconcilable elements of OT—In natural evolution (Goethe) and salvation history, heightened forms flow from one another by mysterious logic and qualitative leaps, requiring a final definitive leap, while human combining of forms just produces the hybrid forms of the fable: in both nature and salvation history, forms fan out and coexist, not surpass one another—Errors of philological scholarship regarding transition from OT to NT—Adam’s dependence on animals according to nature and lordship, and independence from the animals according to freedom shown in the dependence; Jesus’ analogous relation to OT—Images of OT and NT not on same level—Figural reality of OT is singled out from “imagelessness” of the rest of sinful humanity—Veil over Israel removed by turning to the Lord with the eyes of faith, so that the tupos can be seen. III.E.2.c. Seeing the Unseen (p. 625): Through the transitional character of its eidos, OT mediates myth and Christ—Israel shatters mythic world, which is created man as homo naturaliter religiosus et areligiosus, pius et magicus, who cannot prescribe future revelation—Mythic and Christian time are vertical time, but myth represented this in liturgical drama, while Christ’s drama is invisible to the world—Apocalypse only opens dimension between eternity and history in form of visions—Form of Christ is revelation of final dramatic action between God and world in the invisible mystery of judgment and grace; He gathers all religious forms, and has effect of overwhelming superabundance and darkness from excess of light, an eschatological accumulation of all absolutes—OT transposes relation of God to world into horizontal, impressing the only authentic form in all history on the continuity of time, such that relation between time and eternity becomes visible, which presupposes: 1. World is not sub-personal self-representation of God, but His free creation and medium at God’s disposal for self-revelation; 2. Temporal moments are not theologically identical, since at moments God works particular acts of salvation-history, allowing for memory, hope, and prophecy—Allows a created relation of being and essence as 2 poles within temporal extension—Sacramental, identical not analogical, relation of OT to NT—Theological aesthetics culminates in Christological form of salvation history, where God inscribes His sign on medium of historical existence—Ways Christ, NT, Christian liturgy build on and use OT, where no myth or philosophy could substitute—Divine light makes invisible visible: 1. What man and world are for God: In OT, man reveals his nothingness and perversity before God, without self-destruction, but a need to let God dispose one, a weaning away from myth and man’s own glory; OT is a judgment that must yield to NT, where judgment is disclosure of God’s view of man, and reorientation of man to God and His salvation; in OT, man fails to correspond to God’s idea of man, for only in Christ does light of judgment radiates as light of grace; History makes leap from judged to judging man visible; all ‘no’s’ of OT have their purpose in definitive ‘yes’—2. The last destiny of man and world in and through God: Israel’s focus is eschatological, not on ethical or mythical representations of afterlife, and transitory, without center, without focus on life after death, except for a few breakthroughs (Enoch, Elijah), and after Hellenization and moralization of Torah; this is removed only by Christ, leading to open eschatology of NT, where what was eschatologically formless takes form; OT existence is existence in typo, foreshadowing NT existence, but also the reality whereby all human existence assumes a form oriented to Christ—3. What God is for the world: points 1 and 2 are the manner whereby intra-divine mystery enters visibility, not merely education of human race or process of manifestation of Being, but the self-interpretation in form of God of supreme freedom and love, free to point of contradiction but also as lover Who suffers most at ruination of His chosen form, Who rejects and cannot reject Jerusalem; a tension between God of power and God of love in OT (Irenaeus contra Marcion, Mani), which opens interior space of heart of God, fully manifest in Christ; vitality of God cannot be rationalized, and periods of history cannot be assigned to Persons, for the Trinitarian God is the Lord of history; no image of God can be abstracted from His intervention in historical event; figure of Israel is legible only on Christian grounds—To those who contemplate and love this form, total testimony of history is perfect drama and harmony; relation of OT and NT is sumphonia, consonantia, leading to delectatio, foretaste of eternal bliss, so this contemplation realizes in itself the movement of history—Protestantism sees beauty only as eschatological, and so shatters this symphony, but the eschaton that is Christ has appeared in history. III.E.3. The Testimony of the Cosmos (p. 641): As Father’s first and last thought concerning the world, Christ gives cosmos its conclusive form—Testimony of cosmos is testimony of glorification—Form of Christ can only triumph in Church and synagogue after resistance is overcome, since they enter a historical-existential dialogue with Christ, but cosmos was from all time created for Him and must acknowledge Him Lord, a soteriological deed: applies both to sub-human world, and forces and powers that rule world as intelligences—Submission of world is willingness of matter to receive and express the saving signs of grace, grudging submission of forces and powers, and bending the knee of heavenly intelligences to Incarnate Risen Lord—Miraculous form is clarification of His living form communicated to human partner. III.E.3.a. The Power and the Miraculous (p. 642): Jesus’ figure and NT cannot be removed from His confrontation with the powers; to do so would be flat moralizing—Through rationalism, modern man has lost what mythic man had by intuition, and what Romanticism and Idealism called the world of spirits—Forms of thought that have life in historical kairos are often most true; there the beautiful dwells between mythos and ratio—Historical genealogy of Biblical forces and powers: in NT, they are personal but also exemplars, and they exist as power, which has sought to be autonomous from God, with historical effects, e.g. paganism, heresy, and rapturing force, and which include sin and death—Christians know the extent to which these powers dominate existence, through knowing what Christ has delivered them from—They can only be banished, not given form—Prior to Cross, Christ appears to powers as one Who reigns in glory—In the desert, Christ tastes the illusion of power, and rejects its doxa for God’s Doxa; here lust for power contends against beauty of adoration and service—Jesus comes in fullness of power, and the powers are cast from illusion of eternal perdurance to time; this is manifest in the miracles, which are about epiphany of messianic power over powers and signs of restoration of natural order, not primarily about social concern—No de-mythologization possible here—For Bible, no interest in natural laws, for world is where God reveals His glory, which Israel can see; miracles are power over powers, not natural law (Augustine contra Thomas), though order of coercion established by powers is expressed in natural laws, so miracles cut across nature in modern sense—Jesus’ miracles are not preternatural acts like those in other religions and their techniques, but are a whole epiphany of God Who is historical and free, not cosmic—Jesus is sign and glory, which can be read only by self-commitment faith, concentrated in kenosis, hence relation of faith to miracles; no neutral proof of Who He is i.e. no detached sign, but only total revelation that He is, and its sacramental reality that corporeally contains full spiritual truth—Miracles are occasions of faith in themselves, but must be seen with the word and the unified form—In Christ, a new creation breaks through the old one that had been subject to powers. III.E.3.b. The Form of Glory and the Angels (p. 651): Functional Christology can be constructed from human form that Christ assumed wholly as instrument for saving deed for world (Barth, Cullmann)—Christ’s form is emptying out of divine form and appearing as its opposite, but equally bringing near and making visible of divine form, since submission to Cross is human realization of divine disposition—Transfiguration shows the structure of humiliation as function of glorified form; makes visible metamorphosis from servant to divine form and vice versa—John unites Cross and victory—To gaze of love, concealment is unveiling (John, Cyril of Alexandria)—In the humiliation and Cross, we glimpse nakedly bodily the mysteries of Song of Songs, divine eros seen through divine agape, a double dispossession of God into human form and man into divine form, containing most concrete possible life—World had to surrender its most sublime fruit in sacrifice for God to consume and fulfill it; world is order around this new center inserted from above, a submission belonging not to its creatureliness but to an overtaxing of its being by a potentia obedientalis it has in God—World conforms to apocalyptic laws so it can be resurrected—In OT, angels are mediators; in NT, just accompanying servants of Christ—Angels belong to His heavenly glory, and make visible social character of Kingdom—These angels do not need to be overcome, a testimony to living Kingdom that belongs to form of glory of Son of Man; they are the living splendor that witnesses to His heavenly and eschatological form—Angels see depth of God in Cross and Church, the Invisible in the visible (Gregory of Nyssa), in the Bridal exchange of contraries—As the angels of little ones behold Father, so men behold for angels the beauty of God made flesh. III.F. Eschatological Reduction (p. 659): Mythical and eschatological understandings of world see it as sacred theophany—The world is body of God on basis of hypostatic not pantheistic union—Second Adam is fruit of the world, but also transcends this by freedom, and takes up all forms of creation—The natura naturans that gives rise to man is the natura naturata that the divine imagination has brought forth and belongs to nature of man, and so will last, as will cultural forms, and forms in realm of grace—Some of latter are transitory e.g. some ecclesial offices, but others are oriented entirely to a form in eternity—Structures as such i.e. objective spirit has no claim in itself on Kingdom—Judgment levels all earthly forms, and only intercessors remain, as in medieval image; judgment realized only in solitary face-to-face with Christ, where definitive form of Christ is given as a purifying fire—Whatever has already attained to love of Christ will not be judged, but is on side of love that judges: some part of judged man stands with Judge, and sinner will fall into right and left side: the supra-personal part belongs to the Church, the other will be thrown into fire—Bride comes with Christ down from heaven, in the form and splendor of heaven (her uranometry not geometry), where all is made new. Volume 2: Studies in Theological Style: Clerical Styles Introduction 1. The Concern (p. 11): One can and must consider Christian revelation of God from point of view of its ineffable beauty, as well as its truth and goodness, which forms an analogy to but exceeds worldly beauty, which its epiphaneia i.e. splendor breaking forth in expressive form from veiled yet mighty depth of being—In Christ, God’s greater unlikeness is read in the form—God’s free manifestation is a gift, love, self-surrender; the via negativa of the ineffability of the gift speaks of the greater via eminentiae that overwhelms man in that God wants to be with, for, and in me, and this is the dazzling darkness of divine beauty—Grace perfects natures, conferring on them their final meaning, and revealing transparence of worldly to absolute being, and so worldly beauty is drawn into God kenotically pouring Himself out into the abyss of godforsakenness—God’s advent releases and already contains the greatest drama, in which faith requires participation, not mere spectating; the ethical is realized in the aesthetic. (p. 13): Abstract account of theological aesthetics requires historical color and fullness—Man has seen in Christian revelation the glory of the Lord in diverse ways—Theologies and world-pictures considered here chosen for the intrinsic excellence and historical significance—Only beautiful theology has transformative impact in history—Focus on glory of revelation, not beauty of theology; focus not on where beauty is explicitly treated, but on original vision and central point of theology—Among theologies, tensions almost to the point of contradiction (e.g. Irenaeus/Dante vs. John of the Cross)—Non-decadent official theologians who treated radiant power of revelation after Thomas are rare; after 1300, lay theologians do this, as members of an ecclesiastical “opposition” to clerical narrowness or academic specialization—Scholastic theology was largely commentary, in contrast to traditions of saints, artists, and liturgy that bear the stamp of divine glory. 2. Those Selected and Those Missing (p. 17): Reasons for choosing Irenaeus, Augustine, Denys, Anselm, Bonaventure, Dante, John of the Cross, Pascal, Hamann, Soloviev, Hopkins, Péguy—No possible continuous history of theological aesthetics, but rather total visions, as in mysticism and philosophy—Others who would have been worthy of presentation, from Origen and Gregory of Nyssa to Bernanos, Newman, and Chesterton, but this would have led to repetition—Use of aesthetic values does not always crystallize into original theological aesthetics e.g. Thomas achieves a philosophical, not a Biblical revelatory theological, aesthetics, except implicitly; others did not give their strong sense of harmony of revelation a structured or non-paradoxical aesthetics e.g. Erasmus, de Sales, Chesterton; others’ original vision were denied historical or ecclesial effectiveness e.g. Hildegard, Mechthild of Magdeburg—Each picture is relatively closed and self-sufficient, though with fascinating dialogues, but not resulting in an overall system, for man cannot attain an overall perspective on revelation of living God, but just a harmonic symphony or concordance in opposition played from same score, which transcends and embraces them. 3. Forms, Styles (p. 22): Formal object here is glory of divine revelation in itself, in multiplicity of its manifestations and understandings, and in its transcendence over secular beauty, not choice of secular means of expression by theologians—Visions can be ordered by their view of formal object of theology, and where in them glory primarily falls, e.g. God in Himself (Evagrius, Gregory, Eckhart, John of the Cross, Fénelon), God’s revelation (Origen, Denys, Maximus, Cusa, Soloviev, Thomas), Christ (Bonaventure, Péguy, Pascal, Hamann), engagement of Spirit of God with spirit of man in Spirit of Christ (Joachim, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Möhler, Pilgram). (p. 24): There are also shifts in secular resources of style as used for theology e.g. lyric (Augsutine), impersonal liturgical music (Denys), verbal skill (Nazianzen), Roman legislation (Tertullian), axioms (Evagrius), proverbs (Silesius), summae, anti-systematic work (Pascal, Newman), double form of poetry and prose (Boethius, John of the Cross)—In some contrast to forms of expression of beauty of nature though they too are freedom expressing itself (Schiller), freedom holds sway in human art and expression, with greater freedom where technique does not yet rule; what is enjoyed in the beautiful is not primarily immanent harmony of number, but considered manifested and “necessitated” freedom—Analogously, self-expression of divine freedom has bodily manifestation which is a miracle of appropriateness, but not bound to form, but a play with all forms of expression at hand, thereby sanctioning them; necessity and convenience here must be understood through aesthetic analogy (Anselm)—Since its content is expression of God, theology is expression of expression, both obedient repetition and creative free sharing in bringing-to-expression of Holy Spirit, without willfulness or chance; fixed points here are: 1. Form of revelation; 2. Teaching of Church; 3. Charisms in which theologians share, as inner form of a theology, the aesthetic side of a personal calling. (p. 28): Focus here on inner not external form of theologies i.e. active-passive radiance of divine glory from form of revelation—Through secondary form of words, concepts, images, and patterns, primary form is made present—Each new form breaks anew from the center, though certain historical lines can be drawn, though not without exceptions—No theology can dispense with natural theology, and must engage with i.e. be mutually involved with the thought of its time, witnessing to Christ through new incarnation. IRENAEUS (p. 31): His work is birth of Christian theology as reflection on world of revealed facts as complete organized image in mind of faith—Thinkers in first 2 centuries gave occasional works (e.g. Clement) or mere chronology (e.g. Theophilus of Antioch), though important preparatory work done by Justin, who gave Irenaeus a form to work with—Irenaeus had a creative sight of the core against a radical falsifying of the truth, Gnosis, a different sort of “enemy” from ordinary paganism and Judaism with which early Christians to some extent agreed—Gnosis was the opponent Christian thought needed to find itself; since theology is of a historical revelation, it is always conditioned by its situation, and this gives it vitality—Turning away from aesthetic allows us to see true beauty (Ireneaus following Plato). 1. The Aesthetic Myth (p. 33): Valentinian Gnosis is a regression from Platonism toward turning being into a myth, projecting man’s structure and suffering into heaven to redeem man by contemplation of himself in the drama of the fall and redemption of divine wisdom—Unknowable, groundless, primal Father, its eternal image, the three syzygies or pairs produced from them, the pleroma of 30 aeons produced from them, the last of which is Sophia, who is a drive to understand Father, which when it meets Limit or Horos or Cross, sheds part of herself as fallen wisdom, in response to which Christ and Holy Spirit are produced, where Christ is union of all beauties and redeemer of fallen wisdom, though from her passions the demiurge makes the material world—This system is basis for interpretation and integration of Christian theology in Gnosticism: Christ unites four orders of heavenly, pneumatic, psychic, hylic; all earthly things, including Christ’s apparent suffering, point to heavenly things, and all Biblical events are interpreted in this way—Gnosticism includes all that could move a man of late antiquity, or any man (e.g. Shelley, Blake, Wagner)—Valentinus fails to distinguish God and creature despite rift between them due to divine emanations in God and deified pneumatic Christ and Church in world; unclear whether world is shadow of heaven, or heaven a projection of world, with a heavenly Cross and “painless pain”, and no clear distinction between person and idea, substance and accident/state—The divine in Valentinus includes suffering, drama, and darkness, always overcome by light (similar to Schelling), and man is a part of this eternal drama, and his passions have absolute character—Irenaeus attacks from overall point of view, leading to his calm development of theology of divine and human patience, and his impatience with Gnosticism, which is a falsification of the truth, unlike other heresies, paganism, and Judaism, for the Gnostics do not know God—Criticisms of Gnostics, especially that they prefer seeking to finding, and they cannot deal with unity of Scripture or Church—All heresy is a denial that the Word became flesh—Unity of reality is proved negatively by tendency of Gnosticism to disintegrate—Since heresy presented itself as perfection of Christianity, its refutation belongs to dogmatics, especially due to its roots in the situation of revelation in Simon Magus—Unity of apologetics and dogmatics due to unity of mysteries of God, while in Gnosticism all is arbitrary—Power of Christianity is its irrefutable and irresistible internal obviousness—Irenaeus’ thought, like John’s, is a circling within the sphere of mysteries, where one can move in any direction without loss of clarity; the form of his thought is the crystallization of its content, which points to all the continuities in Christianity e.g. between nature and grace, creation and salvation, world and Church—Here we find beauty, and how holiness is greater than gnosis. 2. The Birth of Theological Form (p. 45): Gnosticism attacks Being and dissolves it into visionary apparitions; theology begins by seeing what is, and so is realist, unlike philosophy which tends to idealism by imposing categories—Videre for Irenaeus is standing before the clarity of the facts, not Platonic contemplation; whoever wants to see, can, though it is also eschatological promise—Seeing is revelation of Father in the Son through the Spirit i.e. Trinity’s being for us—Revelation relies on eyewitnesses, and is directed toward perfected vision of God for both prophets and, in a new way, in Christ; seeing the Son is seeing in faith, and the vision of God is not theoretical or ecstatic, but the life of man and sensory—Thought prepares for seeing, which is the path and goal of the man advancing to God—Ways in which truth is manifested, God’s ostensio and our parrhesia i.e. free access, unlike in Gnosticism—Principle of clarity drawn from clarity of object gives 2 victories: 1. Christian teaching is a holy, public secret, unlike the Gnostic secret tradition; 2. Scriptures and those who speak in them have a fixed standard of truth and even give offense, rather than, as the Gnostics claim, adapting their message to the weakness of their times—Irenaeus’ most characteristic feature is his ability to see things in relation to one another, in a concentrated whole, which does not falsify because it keeps the whole in view, speculation in the original sense, not abstraction but spontaneous creation though entirely traditional and Biblical—Irenaeus focuses on theological relation of promise and fulfillment, fall and restoration, not just aesthetic harmony, e.g. in 1st and 2nd Adam, Eve and Mary, etc.—His central concept is recapitulation, the formative element in world and history, receiving its meaning from a power immanent in a temporal flow, not just from a supra-temporal noetic unity i.e. Christ binding disparate strands into unity of essence and meaning that justifies them before eternity i.e. giving meaning to time itself, not just to a content drawn from time. (p. 52): (a) The perfection of a process, e.g. Christ, gives the beginning of that process, e.g. Adam, scope for perfection and clarification—The outline receives the impress of unity—Christ brings perfection because He recapitulates the unfolding of men. (p. 52): (b) The fulfiller has active power to give every emergent thing scope within itself to bring it to its fullness by assimilating it to Himself, an active attraction required for recapitulation—Christ gives the whole of man scope in Himself and so raises fallen man in Himself, and fulfills the prophecies in themselves, working back in time—Adam is taken up into the Redeemer bodily, not just representatively—All His acts have absorptive power. (p. 53): (c) Christ’s integrating power would not be human if it did not have an analogy in created man, which is recapitulates—Theological necessity that Adam be saved—Adam is formed from virgin earth, and Christ from Adam, from virgin earth of Mary, who matches Eve’s disobedience with obedience—Christ shares Adam’s archetypal mode of origin—By entering bread and wine, Christ recapitulates nature and cosmos—Christ sums up all things in Himself, in man. 3. Stilled Center (p. 55): Irenaeus wants to see reality as it is, placing his trust in the logos of Being; beautiful surface of his subject is the true revelation of hidden depths—What is true, sure, and reliable is what is close to God e.g. Scripture, faith, ordo traditionis in our hearts—Irenaeus avoids allegory in favor of reality, unlike Alexandrians— Father bears Word and world, and so man as creature and image of God can bear God as God accustoms him, but this could not be the case if Gnosticism is true. (p. 58): (a) God is the one totality, and there is no autonomous void separate from Him—Contra Gnostic idea of pleroma, God’s fullness does not include void or unfulfilledness—God is not the totality of the world, but its free unknowable un-transcendable creator—God is incomprehensible because Trinitarian—God’s attributes do not proceed in logical order from Him like the Gnostic aeons—God has communicated Himself in most real form of knowledge, in love, without prejudice to His unknowability; the unknowable Father revealing Himself through His 2 hands, Son and Spirit, when He makes Himself accessible to us in historical self-revelation of love—Son and Spirit as 2 cherubim or seraphim on the Ark of the Covenant, the 2 supreme dunameis of the one God; God’s worship of God spills over into heavenly and divine worship, in a Trinitarian universe of worship—Inconceivability is an attribute of God’s concrete presence—Irenaeus draws from Gnosticism the idea of conceivability and inconceivability of God, but included in God is not the divine part of the world, but the Son and Spirit and their knowledge of the Father, into which we can be drawn. (p. 62): (b) All communion between God and creature based on fundamental oppositions between creating and created, being and becoming, eternity and time, so that God needs nothing but man needs communion with and entrustment to God to be perfected—Creature’s action rests on deeper passivity to God—Difference between spirit and matter pales in comparison to difference between creature and creator—Center of universe is man, not angel; true man is soul in body and grace/Spirit in both, eschatological man is risen flesh, not disembodied soul, though soul is immortal—What distinguishes the creature is being formed by God’s hand/art, seen especially in human body, which shares in God’s power—Whole man, body and soul, is image and likeness of God, contra Platonizing Fathers; the likeness recovered by Christ’s recapitulation, for the Son is the image of God—No sharp division between static image and dynamic process of acquiring likeness, since human nature is embedded in time and becoming, through which man receives being gradually, the Son working objectively and the Spirit subjectively, God guiding toward a goal unattainable and unclaimable by man or nature—Man’s freedom seen in how God guides; man has a natural sensibility for God and for his createdness. (p. 67): (c) While for Gnostics and Augustine “wheat and chaff” is interpreted statically as 2 classes of people, for Irenaeus they are 2 stages of process—Gnostic views that separate being into valuable timeless part and valueless temporal part destroy meaning of mystery of existence and salvation—Christ unites heaven and earth, Spirit and man, as fruit of Father and of earth—Flesh needed to be saved, and could only be saved by flesh, by Christ taking on all ages of man, including humiliation and going into Hades, and so revealing the Father—Pain and martyrdom are demonstrations of the truth of God in us—Only because the Cross is set on the whole universe (Justin, Timaeus) can there be the Resurrection. 4. God’s Temporal Art (p. 70): Irenaeus binds apologetic method, essential content of dogmatics, and Christian aesthetics—Christian reality is inseparable from history and time, in which proportion, order, and beauty must be found—Human nature is taken into God and given beauty there too. (p. 71): (a) God must have made creatures in his own image; if according to another form, infinite regress results—Sin would be a problem for His art only if He could not raise and fill fallen creation—God creates all in proportion and rhythm, for the Trinitarian relation is the original proportion or measure—God needs no ideas or emanations, or heavenly numbers above earthly proportions and rhythms; God’s work manifests His power, wisdom, and goodness—The Pythagorean music of Being is the harmony of created world giving glory to God by its existence; what is true of creation is also true of Scripture—Symphony of Being and history in Scripture has as supreme law recapitulation of man through Christ, formed by hand and art of God—Center of divine art is man for whom world was made; in man the receptacle for action of God, soul is artist, body instrument, each requiring its purity, in proportion—Glory is mutual glorification of God and man, man by surrendering himself to artist to become His work, and the artist in His proportionate work—Goodness is not ours by nature, and so we perceive its beauty and glory as we must strive for it—Everything has its place, where it is glorified; the world is capax gloriae Patris. (p. 76): (b) Temporal economy cannot be mutual revelation of God and man until it unfolds to become God’s art—Qualitative difference and uniqueness of each temporal point/kairos/aptum tempus in which a being or event is placed depends on and points to free decree of God; kairos is Trinitarian, since Father’s pleasure and art are translated into time by Son and Spirit, so that man can approach God by encouraging his freedom—Man is like a child and acquires wisdom only by experience of injury, the loss of God’s grace, so that he can be trained to appreciate it by knowledge of its opposite; fall is necessary within God’s free order of salvation—Even for spiritual man, experience of existence is close to earth and senses, not yet distinguished into spiritual senses (closer to Claudel than Origen)—Man becomes accustomed to obey God, bear Spirit, be a pilgrim in the world, follow His word, even becomes accustomed to eternity eschatologically; Mediator accustoms God and man to each other, in salvation history—This economy, unlike spiritualizing, shows God’s goodness; spiritualizing replaces natural with positive precepts—This theology prefers congruence. (p. 81): (c) Central exposition of God’s temporal art takes place in theology of 2 Testaments—OT is paidagogos eis Christon, requiring all to happen at right time as proper course of instruction; multiplicity of kairoi reveals rich multiplicity of one God—Unity of Testaments consists in that one God concerns Himself with one human race from beginning to end—Because Father creates world through Son and Spirit, all OT theophanies are Son and inspirations are Spirit; OT’s Trinitarian structure is hidden and revealed by NT, and Christ is present throughout—Totality of fulfillment in Christ present in outline in Noah and Abraham, with whom Christ has personal association—Place of prophecy and law—Everything new in Christ was announced but did not come in OT; in Christ, it became person and fulfillment of OT, human, and physical nature, for Christ transposes everything verbal/symbolic into living existence, and recapitulates it by giving it concrete form, so enhancing its reality—Roots of all aspects of NT in OT; relations shown by drama among people on the threshold e.g. John the Baptist, Simeon, Mary—Indissoluble mystery shows God’s action as a ripening but also a return to childhood—Paradox of the Church, rooted in apostles, esoteric yet public, the body of the Spirit, with eternally young beauty, receiving concrete form anew in the Sacraments—Goal of process is merging of redemption and Church in eternal life; Irenaeus has the Platonizing perspective of Hebrews on which earthly is image of heavenly, made perfect heavenly i.e. eschatologically—Irenaeus is a man of the present Roman Catholic Church, attached to its earthly form, seen in letters to Popes. 5. Limits and Strengths (p. 90): From the center and unity of the Church, every deviation can be judged and limitation exposed, but no theologian can exhaust this unity but is always limited. (p.90): (a) Irenaeus’ Scriptural interpretation is based on wording of texts and literal correspondence, which impedes historical understanding of revelation e.g. prophecies are taken as bare prophecies without relevance to their own times—What corresponds are timeless texts, not historical situations of the kingdom of God, obscuring account of kairos—Modern historical research removes this accidental defect in Irenaeus—Christ is tied too much to wording of text, without fully appreciating His freedom or the freedom of secondary causes—Development from OT to NT is too linear and focused on understanding, not a dramatic or dialectical form; corrected by modern exegesis. (p. 92): Irenaeus’ eschatology of the 1000 year reign as final secure occupation of the land is a clumsy expression of his Christian anti-Platonic attempt to tie God’s salvation to man, earth, history—Rightly, he is anti-spiritualizing advocate of new earth, which often pales in Christianity next to heaven—Potential problems with distribution of redeemed among mansions, drawn from Valentinian eschatology, though Irenaeus’ focus in on God being everywhere according to worth of beholders, who are still progressively drawn by Son and Spirit to Father—Important for dialogue with Israel and natural science—Irenaeus allows Pauline and Johannine theology to sit side-by-side, not forced into system—Carefully juxtaposes God’s universal salvific will, mysteries of His free choice and of human freedom. AUGUSTINE (p. 95): Augustine’s conversion is less a move from aesthetics to religion, more from lower to higher aesthetics—No one has so praised God as supreme beauty in words and erotic action and enthusiasm—Essence of knowledge is seeing, wanting to see, being able to see; reason is aspectus, looking toward, without control over whether object show itself, and only when object reveals itself by its pleasure does it come into sight/knowledge—Debate over when Augustine first saw its all-important sight; he sees 2 things simultaneously: philosophical form and Christian teaching which is the content the former frames and structures—Later elaboration of Christian content against heretics just develops what was implicit, as seen in various early works—Confessions are on subjectivity and so do not provide key to theological seeing—Rational construction of Christian faith similar to Anselm. 1. The Eye, Light and Unity (p. 98): God is true light, like the sun, though the sun can be an object like others, and God cannot; He illumines soul so it can see all things—This light transcends all things, and directs the mind primarily toward interior unity than exterior plurality, as it purifies itself of the latter—Soul can only see God by essence, not by a power, where memoria, intellectus, and dilectio coincide—Reason has its own eye and light, but can only look at eternal beauty if ethically prepared; theory and ethics converge in aesthetics—In the light of God’s beauty, the beauty of the world reveals itself to the one who loves God; beauty of world is worth contemplating, but is primarily a means/path: training in seeing proportions allows spiritual seeing of God in His works—Plurality of world can only be understood in light of God’s unity (Plotinus), which grounds apology for Christianity’s unifying power over all things, even those things outside the Church, thereby revealed as the complete manifestation of omnipotent God, which we must see—In Church, living God appears moving us individually and collectively historically from external life to a free, lived, integrated existence: history reveals the essence and unity that was always already there—Movement from body to spirit, appearance to being, fall to redemption—Manichaeism rightly saw the division of humanity into two kingdoms, but wrongly substantialized this—All movements of unity in oikonomia must be seen in relation to unmoved unity of theologia, free and creative unity because it surpasses all things, to Whom we must conform not dialogue—Movement of alienation is inexplicable because nothing; no account given of soul’s origin and fall. 2. True and Good (p. 106): Universal movement to unity is given Augustinian stamp by his anti-skeptical search for starting point of intellectual reflection—Augustinian cogito (unlike Cartesian) intuition points to unity of hierarchically ordered being, living, understanding, which requires preference, risk, choice; fundamental being is in consciousness, without tension between being and thinking, concept and existence, thought and life (contra much modern thought)—1. Fundamental sense of quality, value, hierarchy, based on ability to see, schematized in Thomas’ 4th Way; intelligere transcends cogitatio to reality—2. Triune experience of being implies freedom and order—3. Hierarchical movement shows human non-absoluteness—4. Opens religious-aesthetic path to see God in and over all things; supreme activity of human freedom is to prefer God—Triad object-power-act reflects being-life-mind, for act judges object—Cogito requires illuminatio of absolute mind, and relation between infinite and finite mind is both philosophically transcendental/necessary and theologically personal/free—Illuminatio comes from Son, but is not vision of essence of God, but is openness of kingdom of absolute truth spontaneously open to all, but requiring subjective preparation by the Teacher (conta Donatists)—Tension between innatism/anamnesis and idea of created mind as pure active potentiality for every intellectual content; we are estranged from simple authentic spontaneous knowledge of presence of God, but led toward it by Son—Structure of mind is not lost in fall, but capacity for authenticity and free loving choice of God is (contra Pelagians)—God’s transcendental and transcendent character guaranteed by its supra-subjectivity; truth is universal but personal—Good already contained in and springs from true, just as freedom from order in original intuition—Concepts of truth and happiness imprinted on our striving, as that striving, not as innate idea, so that we know our debt without infinite freedom destroying finite freedom. 3. The Beautiful (p. 114): Beauty in the aforementioned themes still lacks form, loving finite form as revelation of the infinite—Image of Trinity in that every creature exists, has a nature or form from speciosus and formosus, and is placed in order—1. All that exists derives from creative action of highest Being/Beauty—2. Immanent structure of all that is has image of His unity—3. All resemblance points to absolute similarity in God—Being outside of God requires quasi-nothingness of formless matter out of which God made all things; this conflates what Thomas will distinguish, i.e. form-matter vs. being-essence, since Augustine is working in Platonist terms—Participation in being is participation in unity; form and beauty can be seen in numerical terms, for number is pluralization of unity—This is not a translation of being into mathematics, for the unity that number reflects is the qualitative as such—Causality is from above to below: informing intuition of mind into senses, and then into world; likewise, number irradiates into material world, all analogously—Harmony of finite form is container of being, while infinite space and time is mere product of distorted imagination (contra Pascal)—Aesthetic view of being exalts measure and moderation, founded in God as supreme measure—Applications of metaphysics of numbers and beauty in bodies, time, music, OT and NT—Unlike Pythagoras, Augustine does not draw correspondences between number and sensible qualities, which he mistrusts, hence his depreciation of soul between mind and body, imagination i.e. true seat of images between sense and reason—In Plotinian theory, higher contains and does not need lower, but this is inadequate for Incarnation and Resurrectional view; he has only weak eschatological elevation of imagination and sense—Later, Augustine comes to see Christ’s bodily kenosis as revelation of beauty and fullness of God, where number is only preparatory. 4. The Reality of the Image (p. 123): Contradiction of Platonism including Augustine is between God and world, not mediated as in Aristotelianism, monistic descent of One and ascent of eros, only joinable by erotic dynamic, without which it becomes Cartesianism, Idealism, and mathematicism—Enthusiasm fills the theoretical gap by looking at the world aesthetically—World of sense and imagination lacks genuine truth, including art and sense-dependent metaphysics—Augustine with Plato and OT, rather than Plotinus, against art, theater, but not music, as being-less illusions, and even mystical experience is to be de-mythologized, in favor of philosophia and philocalia—Dualism between higher intellectual and lower material world means that culture and the state lack true freedom, since they have only indifferent connection to God, and so are mere appearances—Truth of Being embraces all; lower is illusory when it is not understood in terms of higher—All is part of the beautiful, even sin and hell, from God’s perspective—Aesthetic theodicy reduces the Biblical data, and leads to darkness of Gottschalk, Calvin, and Jansenius. 5. The Dynamic and Development of the Idea of Beauty (p.129): One can accept Augustine’s dynamic model of truth and love without the tragedy of his static numerical aesthetic model—Divine light is original truth and beauty—1. We love only the beautiful; like is known by like (Aristotle, Posidonius, Basil); number leads upward from material numbers in external object, to rhythms of sense and memory, to bodily rhythms produced by soul e.g. heartbeat, to intellectual numbers—2. By virtue, soul returns from alienation to authenticity by being transformed into its own likeness, life united to reason, the eurhythmy of the soul, whereby created unity comes to resemble divine unity Who gives all unity and uniqueness and Who is justa pulchritude—3. Divine beauty is captivating beauty of intellectual light that makes everything light in conferring truth and existence on all things, so that relation to truth is a relation to love, resulting in frui in His presence to the believing soul—4. Culmination of equation of number and light is mystery of transcendent Trinity immanent in world of creation and redemption; light is absolute love not just interiority of absolute subjectivity; Augustine’s psychological images for Trinity and God’s greater unknowability—5. Conflict between Psalms 45:2 and Isaiah 53:2, and various Fathers, over whether Christ is beautiful; love can be for what is not beautiful, since Christ’s love and our love for Him produces beauty in us; Christ’s beauty is all the more loveable the les it is physical beauty; for love of ugly Bride, the Bridegroom made Himself ugly, but by confessio the Bride becomes beautiful—Early aesthetics needs revision in light of these points—Decisive point is eschatology, when posse peccare and division between uti and frui will be abolished, and then rhythms can vibrate harmoniously and analogously through whole. 6. Harmony and Analogy (p. 139): Balance between pathos of rhythmical proportions and pathos of infinity achieved ultimately in Christian, personal existence—Harmony predominates despite presence of destructive Platonic and Manichaean dualisms—Certainty of vera religio resises in seeing the rightness (as in Pascal, Soloviev, Newman)—A picture of analogical hierarchical world-order, irreducible to mathematical identity or mystical monism—Harmony of God and world based on participation in original numbers, and on that infinite God has measure—Personal and free form bestows freedom and selfhood on created person as gift, with analogy of personal beings; God freely chooses, man freely rejects or ratifies choice, and God’s law is positive and natural: God guides all things, and rewards and punishes, internally; providence is organic—Augustine builds on Irenaeus by integrating periods of personal life into ages of salvation history, whose beauty is appropriate to them—Relations and analogies can be seen throughout the universe, based on rhythm, e.g. between soul and body, relations of information and expression or inclusion and control—Truth requires penetrating to higher; lower derives from higher, but does not automatically reveal the higher—All historical being is tied to 2 movements, caritas and cupiditas, and this pilgrimage alone is important in history. DENYS 1. The Phenomenon (p. 144): Denys is unique case in theology due to his concealing of identity through which he exerted his influence, which is unforgiveable for modern German philology, though theological scholarship on him continues in France—Attempts to identify Denys with others e.g. Severus of Antioch result from failure to grasp his style—Denys’ writing and person are wholly indivisible, such that there is nothing made up about him—Medieval philosophy and theology up to the Aristotelian renaissance is derived from Augustine and Denys; with Thomas, Aristotle supplies the categories, but Denys the fundamental structure, the sense of sacral and sacramental, and the union of theology and aesthetics that was never wholly lost in any scholasticism—Denys is no forger, but rather in humility entirely absorbed in his function and task, without any engaging in apologetics; his Christianizing of Neo-Platonism is a side-effect of his theology—All his personal relationships are identified with people in the Apostolic age, which all find a place in a form, an immediate relation to the original that the Apostolic age possessed, like the relation of Deutero-Isaiah to Isaiah without the former becoming Pseudo-Isaiah—Denys calmly appropriates thought forms once controversial e.g. Gnostic, Mithraic, Neo-Platonic (Iamblichus’ theurgy, Plotinus’ emanation, Proculs’ triadic ontology) to express universal theology, liberated from historical context—His use of disciplina arcani and Hellenistic mystery-language, while maintaining that all his wisdom is drawn from Scripture—Theology is liturgy i.e. actualization of divine mysteries where they assume supra-temporal form as in ecclesiastical celebration, requiring art and aesthetics. 2. The Structure of the Work (p. 154): Platonic thought had an aesthetic religious structure since cosmos is experienced as manifestation of hidden transcendent beauty of God, fulfilled in Christianity following Philo—Order of his extant and missing works, the latter recapitulated in the former, all within a systematic, all-encompassing vision—Denys opposes some views of his teacher Hierotheus e.g. the latter’s Stoic view of Trinity on which each Person has distinct function in the world, though he is also unfolding Hierotheus’ statements--Theological Outlines dealt with unity of God, unknowability of Trinity, Incarnation and names of Jesus, twofold mode of communication in Scripture—Divine Names on creation as communication of and participation in God, presupposing relation between communicable and incommunicable in God: transcendent God gives all things degrees of share in Him, while safeguarding immanent order—Symbolic Theology dealt with names of God applied to God from sensible things, unlike intelligible names dealt with in Divine Names, though distinction is inexact; works were linked by On the Objects of Spiritual and Sensible Perception—Theology is celebration of the divine, so its archetype is heavenly liturgical hymns; treated in Divine Hymns—Denys deviates from Platonism in speaking of nature as a whole, not world-soul; soul for Denys (more clearly than for Augustine, Origen, or Gregory of Nyssa) is spirit bound to body with perception conditioned by body, appearing in a symbolic ecclesial and social hierarchy—His ecclesiastical hierarchy is more a social structure than Bride as bearer of mystical life, with no clear relation to Mystical Theology or On the Soul, which has consequences in Western mysticism—On Just and Divine Judgment would have linked judgment/krisis to providence/pronoia: God’s justice is His election of allotting to each being a particular limited existence and destiny; evil and sin (as for Augustine) do not upset divine order, but contribute to its clearer revelation—Christ is veiled unveiling of unknowable God, yet Christology is like a mere appendix to Denys’ system, with no treatise on it—Schema of works—No creaturely ontology other than that which conceives world as having God completely as its goal, movement of being as procession and return. 3. Aesthetics and Liturgiology (p. 164): Movement of Being is manifestation of unmanifest, where manifestation is real communication and work, not Indian maya: as manifestation, it is procession; as of the unmanifest, it is return—External splendor of the beautiful is splendor of mysterious depth of being, life, spirit—There is proportion suitable to creature, but also gradually increasing infinite transcendence—The One is necessarily everywhere announced and visible, but also mysterious, hidden, incomprehensible in His manifestations—The more deeply wonder experiences unmanifest God, the more the aesthetic relation is transcended, the more the truth of the aesthetic emerges; ascending negation over affirmation is kindled by God’s descending manifestation and self-imparting—Objective hierarchical taxis is the form of God’s self-manifestation, so no flight from world even for mysticism; mystics’ praise is development of Church’s praise, so both are liturgy—Saints/divine artists must look to God as archetype constantly so as to show what is to be depicted, while publically veiled—Only the one who can show the truth as a whole is beyond refutation; passion for partial order shows one lacks the calm of total order. (p. 167): Object can only be grasped by circling movement—Mystical method is not renunciation of aesthetic method (contra Plato)—Aesthetic transcendence from sensible manifestation to spiritual manifest is formal schema for mystical transcendence from world to God, just as body is image of soul—Analogy between world and God never abandoned, though it is irreversible: things are like and unlike God, but God unlike things; God is in all things by immanence, but transcends them all—The more an image reveals, the more in conceals; knowledge of God requires deeper penetration into image and transcendence beyond it, fully integrated—God goes out of Himself ecstatically, but need not to know the world—God does not set another thing alongside Himself as efficient cause, but creation’s intimacy requires participation—Creature’s movement, reflecting God’s, toward God/unity is held together with its nature complete/unifying in itself. (p. 170): Theology is exhausted in the act of wondering adoration before the unsearchable beauty in every manifestation—Gnosis answers mystery of beauty in beautiful/fitting/symmetrical fashion—For Gregory of Nyssa, eros exceeds all limits in striving for God; for Denys, eros is limited by possible and permitted: measure is optimum, which can be upset by love of evil and presumption to a divine manifestation other than that harmoniously offered—Methodical harmonia is an appropriate analogia/relation between revelation and capacity/worthiness for receiving, given by analogous providence, a harmony between giver and receiver, not a reward, being and nature rooted in allotted grace—Manner of theology is holy measure, and its sound is holy celebration/hymn/dance, without Augustine’s lyrical-subjective mood or theoretical dryness, except in treatise on evil—Theology is always vision through protecting and concealing veils, which are for the sake of more intimate initiation into mystery—Arrangement of heaven and earth around the throne, the silence of the Word; in the end, speech is inaudible and one with the Inexpressible—Proclamation must embrace divine stillness, liturgy must be contemplative even in the movement of the bishop to the congregation—No isolated opus operatum, but the moral must be one with sacramental; priest and theologian must live out grace of office (similar to Tertullian and Donatists)—Sin just provides raw matter for Church’s activity—Relation between OT and NT is liturgical: Christ is consummation of theophanies; history is eternal sacred picture, and Church has no proper history, but is a heavenly concert—Union of world and God ultimately in Incarnation whose efficacy is continued in Eucharist justifies the multiplicity, historicity, and existence of world—Denys’ poetic tone and theology of monasticism, not priestly or lay—His hierarchy does not include the Pope, but is concerned with degrees of consecration/authority. 4. Theological Symbolism (p. 178): Three stages of theology are material stage of symbols, intellectual stage of affirmative expression, divine stage of negative expression, which condition and complement one another, and all of which refer to God, and in each of which there is tension between cataphatic and apophatic theology, between man as divisible body and indivisible soul—Unity of need to have and dissolve images shows that Denys is not iconoclast or allegorist; he sees God in things, which are loved even if given up, rather than things being mere occasion to see God—Some images seem to make immediate reference to God, others by their striking inappropriateness invite us to reject them as elevate ourselves from image, though they are complementary and interpenetrating; perfect inadequacy of some images lessens danger of being content with affirmations—Inappropriateness applies to symbols of cosmos, Bible, sacraments—Penetrating contemplation of symbols allows a concrete picture of God different from that of many abstract conceptual theologians e.g. in images of fire, fragrance, color, beasts, human body—Scripture is a symbolic cosmos, a better education in things of God than nature, and so images are found there that strike by their discordance—Liturgy contains more appropriate translations of spiritual into sensible: spiritual Word must precede sensible communion—The Mysteries contain and cause what they signify; Scripture and cosmos contain but do not cause—Pictorial character of liturgical action belongs to its sacramental effectiveness, whose forms are content of true formation—In liturgy, Platonic dialectic of image is stilled; liturgy and Christ cannot be spiritualized away. 5. Theological Eidetic (p. 184): Symbols speak of God only through mediation of spirit, first angelic and second human, which understandings names of God in cosmos which are God’s true communication and self-explanation, for the sake of which God spoke of Himself, theo-logia—All understanding is of the incomprehensible—God’s Trinity is in darkness of mysterium, with no creaturely image of Trinity (in sense of Origen, Tertullian/Joachim, Augustine, or even Proclus)—The incomprehensible is found in the comprehensible, both in God’s totality rather than that some aspects are one or the other, or that we just understand God ad extra not essentially—World is both act and result of divine communication, both divine names and divine order. (p. 186): Act of creation by which God lets beings shared in His being is God Himself—Participation without participating—Turning of God toward creature is what it participates and its truth i.e. creature participates in God’s allowing it to participate; creaturely being includes ontological difference between what participates and that in which it participates—The participated, e.g. Being, Life, Wisdom as highest intensity of Being, are not angels, gods, divine ideas, but the reality of the world qua consisting of principles that share their reality with the essences that participate; best understood as Thomas’ actus essendi, which is identified neither as creature nor with God, and is always embraced by primordial determination, the Good; not emanations of the One but world-principles that effect and mediate participation in God—Good is embracing principles of divine communication, while God is beyond all such principles e.g. being, nature, even divinity: what creatures participate is that in which they cannot participate, or they would not be participating in God—Denys considers neither creature nor God in themselves, but God creatively manifested—God is called by all names and is of all forms, while nameless and formless—God makes Himself available as hierarchical gift—Structure of Divine Names and order of names from Proclus, Constantine, and Bible, with One and Teleion at the end, within realm of Good, Beauty, Eros, so as not to be an Idealist view: divine Yes to the world cannot be attenuated in favor of negative theology—The wholes/hola are not demigods but aspects of concrete reality, containing individuals without threat to their individuality, and forming the All only with them; God is immanent in but transcends the hola, mere, and pan—Cosmos as concentric hierarchy around God, but this makes Christ as man subject to angels, and distance weakens revelation; yet God is personally immediate in love to all creatures, undermining Gnostic/Neo-Platonic mediation in a Christian way, and hierarchy is understood as communion of saints—God is essentially a unified depth of mystery, revelation of which is clearest to highest creatures but also more secret because more intellectual—God is in being as beyond being, and in nothingness as beyond nothing; His increasing darkness in revealing Himself to the lower reveals anew His true nature. (p. 194): Denys emphasizes limits—God is beyond all oppositions, and so there is no direct opposition between Him and any creatures; He safeguards unity of both wholes and individuals, ultimately through Resurrection—Chalcedonian concepts are broadened from Christology to whole conception of world/Being—God is savior already as creator preserving all things in their finite, unconfused positions; all things, especially believers and priests, called to their place in beauty and harmony—Concept of station—Rootedness of being, knowledge, and action in God; knowledge linked to illumination, action to purification: our spirits can illumine, purify, and unite others to God, because God has done these things for them—Active-passive pattern expresses holy ordering of religious progress of individual—Relations and hierarchies that emerge from stations and stages of progress—Hierarchy not rooted in Trinitarian relations or functions of Christ, but in God’s 3-fold turning to world—A gap in the mediating order is that from each step there is an immediate way to God—Missionary/mediating character of Christian grace—Each hierarchy contains three orders of equal rank, graded according to foundation not subordination—Thearchy means principle of divine being, hierarchy means principle and effective form of holiness and sanctification—Spiritual and visible order is cosmic beauty in which thearchic beauty is made manifest—All nations, even Israel, have their angels; all history is included in salvation history; the legal order is subordinated to the Church, the place of peace, reconciliation, and union of all Being with God, just as the peace of God overtakes the natural war among limited beings—Denys’ world-picture is a picture, and any attempt to penetrate beyond it eschatologically would endanger its symmetria—No clear view on damnation. 6. Theological Mysticism (p. 204): Mystical theology is high-point of Denys’ theology, required by his doctrines of God and Church, but it does not relativize or question symbolic or intellectual theology: exoteric and esoteric theology require one another—Even dogma must be understood in terms of the ever-greater unlikeness of God and ever-deeper mystery—We know God only in His self-communication, though we really know God—Perfect ignorance is knowledge of the One beyond all knowledge—Essence of each being is ecstatically/erotically toward God, and this determines its individuality at the deepest level, and imitates the ecstatic divine eros, so mystical experience is realization of what is: mystical experience is not exceptional in itself, though it may be psychologically—God of dazzling darkness is God in Whom there is no darkness—Relation of creature to ever-greater God is not denial of all relation, but a relation established by creation that the creature can know by removing veils of creaturely being, of which apophatic method is the hollow reverse, inseparable from positive mystical experience; this is all an experience, not a method of thought—Step of transcendence is the proof of the superabundance of God and union beyond knowledge, beyond all affirmation and negation—Unclear relation of this always mediated knowledge in this life, even for Moses and Paul (contra Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine) to eschatological vision of God—With Augustine, Denys is classic representative of theological form in the West—His unproblematic use of Platonism and Scripture—Following the humiliation of Christ especially in daily martyrdom—Sanctity of Christians results from harmony of hierarchical order, knowledge of revelation, and apostolic activity—Prayers is resignation to God in order to be moved by His will, union of office and spirit. ANSELM (p. 211): Anselm realizes theological aesthetics in purest form—His reason is Benedictine i.e. communal and dialogic, a life stamped by freedom, contemplative and beholding—He contemplates highest rectitude of divine revelation in creation and redemption, God’s beauty in freely fashioned form of the world—Beauty of the reason God became man—Problem of expressing this beauty is secondary to fact that it is found by contemplative reason on pilgrimage of longing in dialogue with eternal truth—Philosophical method, but the subject matter is free dealings of God with man freely created and brought into freedom by Christ, seen in catalog of his works. 1. Aesthetic Reason (p. 213): Contemplative Christian reason whose subject is the truly real grows out of ancient contemplation of Being, Biblical theology is the perfection of pagan philosophical theology—Wrong question whether Anselm is philosopher or theologian: he is after anti-pagan polemics, and before scholastic separation of disciplines—Ancient philosophy was rooted in concerns about the One, Christianity knows He is free, loving, creative, personal—In the face of depths of reality, it is irrelevant to ask what reason or faith can do alone—Free God expresses His inner being, so everything begins by accepting His word in faith, which demands understanding, prior to vision, as defense against unbelief and as promoting of Christian life and contemplation, requiring total commitment. (p. 215): 1. Life for the sake of truth means loving devotion to thing itself, requiring freedom from sin which renders us insensible—Certainty regarding God requires right will, which requires prayer and humility; practical perfection and experience of life required for theoria i.e. sensory realization that I, a free person lacking in freedom due to sin, face infinite free God—Philosophical major dissimilitudo of God joined to theological fallenness; prayer to the absent yet present God relies on analogia entis and restoring grace—Analogy and experience of God and fallenness for Anselm joins and goes beyond Denys and Augustine. (p. 219): 2. Anselm emphasizes effort of understanding as obligation of gratitude in response to revelation; requires epoche of faith and Bible to disturb comfortable life of pistic: if Logos became man, whole meaning of Being must be made manifest there—Reason within the epoche is not pure, but sinful, redeemed, colored by history, in contact with revelation—Anselmian reason is not Patristic intellectus or Scholastic ratio but spirit’s capacity for sight—The many verbs Anselm uses for sight, revealing, and radiance of the truth—Dialectic that plays with unclear concepts or parallel images is bound to sensory level, and cannot rise to aesthetic reason; pleasant beautiful images require a solid foundation on fittingness—4 steps to thought: 1. Ostensive naming; 2. Thinking name; 3. Spiritual apprehension of thing through imago; 4. Spiritual apprehension of thing’s universal essence through ratio—Nominalism is self-contradictory—Though moves toward immediate insight, when subject appears with total clarity, but this requires process of analysis and synthesis i.e. gathering what is separated (legere)—Unifying vision judges what belongs together; subjects have degrees of compellingness to intuition, though the degrees are not in subject but in its manifestation to subject—God’s self-revelation unfolded in total freedom and necessity, and we can perceive only a fragment, which still guarantees the whole: analogia entis in which we comprehend most evidently that God’s knowing and fashioning are incomprehensible—Both being of existents and ground of God’s love and freedom are opened incomprehensibly—Threefold structure of mind can only be understood as reflection of higher archetype—Monologion is ascent from philosophical vision to vision of Christian theological reason: deduction of creativity and ideas from God, not from below; expression and ars divina are placed in God’s “fancy” within Trinitarian work, not just in His making—Emphasis on God’s total freedom, infinity, apatheia and immanence/personal presence—Striving for happiness is aspiring after God Who gives Himself and comforts the seeker; encounter is based on divine decision; natural appetite for God is Christian faith, hope, love, faith being incorporated into love/eros, and spirit’s nature being clarified only in dialogue between eternal and created spirit—Proslogion’s ontological argument presupposes that there cannot be a concept/conceiving of God or being, though these are the presuppositions for thought and concepts; comparative id quo majus cogitari nequit points to a dynamic movement of thought with a never-attained horizon—Thought about essence is function of thought about existence; we cannot deduce existence from concept—Aesthetic reason of faith or vision is always overwhelmed by incomprehensibility of divine love. (p. 233): 3. Joy at beauty of God emerges from structure of aesthetic reason, seen in glory of world and salvation: joy both evidentially satisfies reason and is gratitude for its gift in grace—Joy appears when one had despaired of finding a solution, as the evidential form of truth offered to the despairing shines out of the abyss of incomprehensibility—The light now given e.g. in proof for existence of God, is not eschatological face-to-face joy (de Lubac), the positive fulfillment of comprehending the incomprehensible—We will enter the ever-greater joy of God, for sheer excess of joy for ourselves and for others, and because the harmony of God’s work is founded on suffering of the Son, which explodes every perceptible proportion and casts us into the love of God. 2. The Radiance of Freedom (p. 237): Anselm’s most important treatises are on freedom, the central concern of Christian understanding of reality which contemplates relation of absolute and relative in light of self-disclosure of absolute—Analogy of freedom between God and creature; for latter, freedom is being allowed to enter communion with the other, requiring being drawn into God’s freedom, ultimately to will what God wills in concordia by being integrated into Trinity—On this eschatological view, sin lessens freedom—One must exert effort to attain creaturely freedom—Due to contingency of creature, the ground of its freedom must be God’s, which comes to creature’s as law and grace—Rectitudo governs true, good, beautiful; freedom is power to preserve the rectitude of will for the sake of rectitude: beyond autonomy and heteronomy, this is participation in divine autonomy—Formally, natural law is God’s will—God’s self-grounded truth, goodness, rectitude, and freedom, always fitting and rational, neither of which is prior to Him—Adam’s freedom required act of will in obedience to divine Good, the rule in the act qua morally good and beyond the act qua obedient, grace: we are indebted to God in the act of freedom for giving us the act; God gives will and rule to the creature in creation, so if these and rectitude are lost, the creature cannot restore them, but only grace can—Human freedom is penetrated by divine, which makes relation of man and God dialogical, and becomes the incomprehensible mystery of taking God into one’s being—Rectitude and freedom ultimately for love—The fruits of the will in union with God or with the devil, like a woman between her husband and an adulterer—Analogia entis becomes analogia personalitatis vel liberitatis—God owes no one anything; obedience of Son is based on spontaneity of love, unfolding its inner necessity, which gives it its worth—Assumption of worldly necessity into necessities of divine love—Man has withheld from God the honor he owed, disturbing the order and beauty of the universe, which must be made good in the right measure, though no evil can diminish God’s glory, though Anselm goes beyond Augustine on evil—Material/human order not simply a replacement for fallen angelic order—God’s love not honor suffers loss; God profits and is grateful to the lover for his love, conceived as mutual rectitude, for love is what is most proper to the will, and so what ought to be offered to God—Anselm’s doctrine of redemption/satisfaction is not juristic, but inner ontological union: if man were to go to heaven in debt, he could not be blessed, and in order to be just, man must pay for himself—Emphasis is on covenant between God and man, and obligation that God has placed on himself that man remain an authentic partner, requiring a God-man redeemer, Christ the effectiveness of the covenant—Reckoning cannot be on level of debt, for we owe everything to God; the mystery of salvation is understood aesthetically and monastically in terms of a freely-offered vow in ever-deeper love of one’s whole person and freedom, modeled on the spontaneous obedience of the Son—Freedom is between two scales of value, the moral and the agreeable, between which we must choose, the will being both efficient cause and effect, leading to the diabolical sponte and the sponte of eternal love in God in Christ. 3. The Victory of Prayer (p. 253): Anselm’s prayer illumines his whole work, which aims at the eschatological point where human will becomes one with divine, a willing where we are granted anything within our sphere of willing, without sin—He prays from hell as existential reality, where he is at enmity with God and all creatures created good, in abyss of God’s judgment, his sin, and the eternal state of being lost, and where Christ descended—He appeals to concordia between Son and Mother, through whom God made Himself our brother—Prayers to Mary, Peter, Paul, Christ as mother, John, Magdalene—His prayers enter the omnipotence of love which is approachable in the analogia libertatis—His letter draw the correspondence into the concordia of love, which makes them present to one another—At roots of investiture controversy: Concordia is the uncompelled freedom of the Bride; king is advocatus and defensor not dominator of Church—Perspectives of older Anselm—The final thing here is being seen, not seeing. BONAVENTURE 1. The Seraph and the Stigmata (p. 260): Bonaventure of all scholastics most offers scope to the beautiful in theology, giving expression to his experience in his own concepts—Influence of Augustine, Denys, School of Chartres, Richard of St. Victor, Anselm—Trinity truly revealed in overflow into the world and as a priori ground of all that exists—Influence of Bernard’s nuptial theology: Bride is Church, believing soul, Mary as personified Church and soul; and his sapiential theology where sapientia is above theoretical and practical—Influence of Joachim of Fiore’s theology of salvation history—The event that is the living organized center, sun, and mission of Bonaventure’s theology is Francis. (p. 263): Origins in experience of overpowering by fullness of reality and endlessness of interpretations of revelation, whose depths are only plumbed by uncreated Wisdom—4 rivers of paradise: 1. Flowing of God in Trinity; 2. Flow of creation; 3. Incarnation in which Christ flows out of and into Himself; 4. Sacraments, the stream flowing from side of Christ; each also symbolized as depth of sea, 4 hidden things, 4 dimensions of Eph. 3:18-19 and of Cross—Revelation’s relation to philosophy, and, due to its superabundance, its apparent lack of order, which is its beauty and divine order, like the order of nature in growth—Difference between Bonaventure and Thomas on order in theology—Bonaventure’s concepts lack necessity, for revelation cannot be mastered, and always leads to excess and rapture, and thus to beatitude not failure—Closer to God is higher experience of beauty—Grasping divine things involves being grasped; only what exceeds its power to grasp satisfies the soul, which requires 6 stages: belief/faith, thinking, wondering, contemplating, being transported, comprehending; all this for us, Christ’s soul, and the next life—Study of theology requires devotion, wonder, exultation—Analogical ecstasy as highest knowledge and docta ignorantia, union of love beyond apophasis—This is human realization of objective revelation, the fundamental experience, similar to grasping message of artwork. (p. 270): Fundamental experience is crystallized in St. Francis’ stigmatization—Divine glory is beauty of His wisdom (Augustine, Denys, Bernard, Victorines), and this is applied to Francis in form of the Crucified in the seraph, whose 6 wings represent paths to Wisdom, which must all be through love for the Crucified—Via negativa as Franciscan poverty—Key concepts of Bonaventurian aesthetics are expressio and impressio: Seraph expresses Himself by impressing Himself on Francis, because Francis was already an expression of love, and God puts His expressive sign/image in a spirit that can thus express itself—Stigmata are put on body while soul is in rapture, because when form of divine beauty is seen, it receives its form in the world: ecstasy opens world for God or reveals that world is already grasped by God—6 ages of the world, its Sabbath, the 8th day; 6 associated illuminations, 6 capacities of the soul, doubled Trinity organized around OT and NT—Christ’s drunken love for His Bride drives Him to expose Himself to shame naked on the Cross, ultimately for me—On Cross occurs His marriage—Abyss of Christ’s suffering calls to abyss of Christian compassion. (p. 276): Calling of the abysses is center and goal of Wisdom—To go from insipid learning to wisdom requires holiness, experiential practice—Bonaventure sees the end of sapiential Platonic theology, and looks for a time when the only preaching will be holiness, but he mistrusts modern Aristotelian reason (unlike Thomas), and seeks to keep it within limits—True metaphysics is knowing Trinity, true ethics is knowing Christ; philosophy is ambivalent until brought into Christian life, but alone it is a prideful drive for unitive experience i.e. intellectual harlotry rather than marriage with Wisdom—Reason is only precondition of God communicating His Word to us, Who is objectified as Verbum incarnatum et inspiratum, the latter being the Holy Spirit—Theology is comprehension of objective revelation in Church and its appropriation in the individual—Faith is inspired imprinted word of God, giving highest certainty, based on seeing of angels, apostles, prophets, Mary i.e. both intellectual and bodily seeing—Apologetic witnesses are just a supplement to 12 mysteries of faith—Faith requires proportionality to and presence of God in spirit, which gives knowledge like resemblance which is imprinted not abstracted—Glory of the Lord in unity between expression and impression: a theology of excessus, the believer confronted by the ever-greater fullness of God—Giving away everything is most exact answer possible for man to God’s act of total abandonment on the Cross. 2. Trinity, Idea, Reductio (p. 282): Bonaventure’s intellectual world is entirely revelation of Scripture—World and man are intelligible in their Being only on the basis of the Being of God—Every worldly expression is a foreshadowing, image, material directed to end of God’s perfect expression in Christ—Trinity is cause that makes all possible, in which relation of expression is located—All imperfect expressions must be brought into relation with perfect Image of the Father. (p. 284): 1. It belongs to perfection of Being to bring forth what is same kind as itself; highest blessedness requires highest form of self-communication in love, without multiplication of Being, so otherness of Person must be compatible with unity of Being—Bonum diffusivum sui refers to God’s absolute Being, so worldly natural kinds can be traced back to their origin without being absorbed in it—Relations of expression and generation among creatures point to absolute relationship—Weakness of the 12 creaturely generations: 4 means of elemental radiation, 4 means of expression, 4 means of vital reproduction, each of which is defective in some way, but each of which tells us something about the fullness of the absolute relationship of expression; 12 reducible to 3: word, image, Son—Terminology expressivus, expressus, expression—Concept of beauty always in ontology of expression as fecundity, self-abandon, love of Being—Image always imitation of original—Because God is only one substance, Image must be absolute unique expression, rooted in His nature as Spirit not in His free decision, though not contradicting His freedom, and as loved—Primitas and fontalis plenitudo belong to Father, Whose Godhead can reproduce Itself out of its whole essence, which can be one in many—Twofold generosity, that of creatures and that of Spirit; twofold exemplification, that of creatures and that of Son—Word is expression of everything, Son is unifying center between Father and Spirit expressing both His own begetting and the spiration of the Spirit, the perfected end of divine process, for the Word surpasses itself in love; Son is place of truth and beauty in God. (p. 291): 2. On relation between Trinity and creation, Bonaventure is closer to Greek Fathers than Augustine: God acts externally as Trinity, with common actions that still express individual position of the Persons: appropriation indicates propria of Persons i.e. articulations of God’s self-communication—Act of creation is grounded in act of generation, avoiding subordination and absorption of natural in supernatural—In Son, Father expresses His whole power and capacity as in His artform; the Son contains all possibility and reality, so anything outside God only has possibility and reality through Son, and for this reason he adopts Platonic formulae about truth of creatures in eternal art, and creatures being lies in themselves, on which expressive similitude is based his whole analogia entis—There is proportionalitas not proportion between God and creatures, who have nothing in common—In expressive similitude, Word knows each thing better than it knows itself: self-utterance of a creature succeeds only when embraced by self-utterance of eternal light—Bonaventure between Plato and Luther on creatures—The one unique Word is the sum of all the ideas of the world, down to the most particular details and most distinct expression—Innumerability of divine Persons and Ideas—Archetype is already expression; individual being is goal of particular intention of divine expression—All created expressions based in generation of Son, all gifts in procession of Spirit/Gift—Appropriation of Beauty/species/formositas to Son as image: we ascend from beauty as harmony and proportion in world, to beauty as aequalitas between archetype and image in God—Species means passive expressive image, active image that imparts knowledge, beauty: Son is beautiful in relation to Father and to world—2-fold beauty of image: 1. If it depicts original well; 2. Its luminosity i.e. if beauty of original clarifies and expresses itself well in image. (p. 299): 3. Word of God is archetypical world: 1. He expresses origin perfectly; 2. He is expressive medium of origin; 3. In Incarnation He is expressed in outward form by origin without losing immanence in Spirit as idea of what was intended in creation—Creatures are multiple and so deficient copies of original form of image in God, hence the creaturely hierarchy of vestigum, imago, similitudo based on degree of representation of God, for each is reference to and representation of archetype; hence 6 stages of Itinerarium, which determines the theological aesthetic—In imago, God’s objective self-expression returns to Him subjectively—Human fulfillment only in faith—God is not only motivating and transcendental object, but also the object at the source/objectum fontanum—Image found in turning both to God and self—Image cannot be lost substantially, but can be lost if it fails to be actualized intellectually—Relation between Word/archtype and copy is personal not formal relation, realization of which by created spirit is fundamental and most worthy act of thinking and being—Return to our origin can only fully happen through free revelation of Christ the inner teacher, only partially through philosophy—Christ the one teacher in all hearts, present to all souls and understandings; we know Him through impressed species, not abstracted concept, though we generally fail to notice what we first see—God is present to every act of understanding not as seen openly (contra Ontologism), or as unknown medium (contra Gilson), but as principium and objectum et ratio motiva and light, as having form, of which we are implicitly aware as transcendental subject-object (Gerken)—Clarifying this object as theological transcendental reduction of condition of possibility of all knowledge and striving—Attending to earthly things attains rationes aeternae only ut moventes; wise/pure man attains them ut quietantes i.e. as shining with their own finality in itself; both only the basis of full Being—Reductio as our route to God and His to us, seeing us in the Son. 3. First and Second Adam (p. 309): Man is crown of world’s process of coming to be, of the appetitus in matter—Highest perfection is not reach until rationes seminales, intellectuales, ideales are united in one Person i.e. in Incarnation—Man cannot reach full stature without grace. (p. 309): 1. For last time in theology, world is considered in close relation to Scriptural revelation—Human being and existing of things in mind is midway between material world and God—Book of creatures sufficed for Adam, but for fallen man Scripture illumines all things, and Christ includes both—World is ordered to man; matter is not privation but includes beauty and light—Proportion between human body and soul—Animals and plants are mediators between matter and man, so they cease eschatologically, but until then share the fallen or redeemed state of man—Mediating power of light—Aesthetic significance of the rhythms of time and history, the arrangement of which requires Christ’s birth at a determined point in time, so as to synthesize all time—Cosmos as evolution toward God-man, perfect from imperfect. (p. 315): 2. Man is midpoint and summary of world, not a spiritual flight from world—Uniting of spirit with matter is not accidental, fallen, or shameful; organization and nobility of body requires nobility of spirit—Man is goal of all that exists—Intellect reflects whole world, will encompasses and surpasses all cognitive faculties—God is better represented by midpoint of world, not by angels, and uniting to matter shows His mercy—Link between glory and humbling in ethics and anthropology—Man is microcosm, and its eye open to God, capax Dei, eternal as body and soul—Man’s rational and fleshly senses, movements reigning in will and executed in body, visible and invisible possessions—Knowledge of God through world and senses and delight—Union of outer and inner senses seen by considering man in heaven, who needs body for full happiness; they are rooted in common intellectual-material nature of man, in which general character of each sense is based, as gradations of sight (on which Bonaventure and Augustine are wrong: senses develop from touch), differentiated through material elements—Spiritual senses bestowed with grace and gifts of Spirit; their object is Word in His nuptial relation to redeemed man—Spiritual senses in Breviloqium, Itinerarium—In presence of God, where love and ecstasy exceed knowledge, touch, taste, and smell become higher, because more affective—Spiritual senses and their asceticism not proper to faith or ecstasy, but middle state of sapiential contemplation. (p. 326): 3. Verbum incarnatum is midpoint of all things as mediator, all things have their place in Him, and He recapitulates all things, in Whom all things have stability—Condescension out of love, so that we could see, love, and imitate Him, for we fell because we tried to imitate Him—Christ as self-witness of Trinity—Descent into act and ascent into contemplation perfected in Him—Midpoint of humility and poverty in the Cross, descent revealing loftiness—Christ is only midpoint by mediating, and so He continually makes Himself nothing by pointing in Spirit back to Father—Christ mediates Being from Father to Spirit, and explains how there can be a plurality outside God: Christology as true metaphysics—Christ as the midpoint for every discipline—Christ is in our midst as the one Who measures and brings reconciliation, as the rectitudo of all things, and because He can make what has deviated resemble Himself—Full concept of beauty requires divine expressio and answering resolutio from world, more than righteousness and aequalitas numerosa—He is primal beauty as world of ideas—He brings creation back to archetypical glory—Christ as tree of life. 4. The Structure of Beauty (p. 333): Bonaventure has no systematic treatment of the beautiful because his Trinitarian thinking uses unum, verum, bonum as scheme of appropriation, and so he has no place there for pulchrum—He does think it is transcendental, for it is present in all categories, and in a circumincessio in the other 3 transcendentals (Karl Peter, Assisi Codex) not just as founded on the Good—Beautiful completes and expresses inner development of Being in itself—He derives the 3 transcendentals from the relation of being to itself; on this basis, beautiful would have to be the basis of Being’s physical appearing, which would elevate sense perception to the rank of irreducible Being, which Bonaventure would not do, though one could philosophically talk of sense perception as “direct act of permitting to appear” at any level: sensibly, intellectually in simplex apprehensio, mystically—Theologically, though, we should focus on the movement of the act of presenting itself, not the one who meets it in its becoming visible, so as to preserve the place of Beauty as midpoint of Trinity, in Son, as midpoint in suspension, as species—Appropration of Persons to kinds of causes according to triads modus-species-ordo and mensura-numerus-pondus. (p. 337): Analogy of beauty in gradations of beings, in physical beauty and beauty of soul based on purification which makes the soul a mirror transparent to God and a hierarchical embodiment of the Church, containing and reflecting the whole universe including the Word. (p. 340): Macrocosm enters man the microcosm through the senses, which correspond to mixtures of light with four elements, proportionate with the world in different ways for each of the five senses—In gradation from sight down to taste/touch, perception of beauty passes more from object into subject, though also from perceiving image down to perceiving reality—Results in a 3-fold joy—Appearance and delight point to Trinity, in which all is based in proportionality between Father and Son in Spirit, which becomes objective for believer, is assimilated to him, and leads to 3-fold joy by analogy to 3-fold sensory delight of beholding, intimacy, and receiving fullness, though man’s participation in grace—3 ways of approaching theologically beautiful: 1. From concept of Being and its transcendentals; 2. From levels of Being and the Beautiful; 3. From sensory experience of Beautiful to absolute structure of Beautiful—Ascent to higher beauty requires renunciation of lower/familiar—Metaphysically, beauty has to do with unity and number; in context of levels, with truth; in context of subject-object relation, with good. (p. 343): 1. Definitions of beauty based on unity comes from experience of objective conformity of things, and appearance of unity in numbers, for the numerable is beautiful by its reduction to and being held together by unity—In this way, number is the greatest exemplar in the mind of the Creator (Boethius)—Pleasure of number is not primarily from the quantitative but from e.g. suavitas coloris and representation of Trinity, pointing to pleasure of act of begetting by Father. (p. 345): 2. Truth is not demonstrated by formal agreement, but by generative, creative self-illumination, revelation, expression of depth of substance, based on absolute self-utterance of God—All Being, since grounded in Word, is revelation—Mystery of things to emit an expressive image of themselves into medium, shining and revealing themselves to potential knowing subject, with innumerable species, an ability to be outside themselves; rather than mystery of agent intellect (Thomas), the mystery of objective self-disclosure: in being light, things resemble God, Who expresses Himself in them—Light as creative power of revelation—Infinite power in invention and certainty with which everything is set forth by God into what is not God—Ability of things to be outside themselves in creative revelation of species is the double danger of beauty: 1. That one might be satisfied with reflection and neglect reductio to substance; 2. That one might stop at substance instead of seeing it as reflection of absolute truth and beauty; Both banished by Christ: to see nature of world in Verbum incarnatum is to understand it genuinely as expression and to see its proper beauty, as Francis did—In Spirit, illumination of Son transcends itself in becoming gift—Act of expressing is integrated into the outcome of expression e.g. Father in Son. (p. 348): 3. To explain beauty as expressio, there is required harmony, revelation of depth of Being, diffusio sui which is impressio in the other i.e. aspect of Spirit—Not a mere useful satisfaction of need: every offer of beauty includes gratuitousness, disinterestedness, freedom; response to beauty is not self-interest but reverent marveling—Ecstasy is not for the soul’s own sake, but is a leading to the essence and idea, still not in sense of use—Only the pure heart can interpret beauty rightly in its appearing—Ecstasy includes adoration, joining negative and aesthetic theology, a longing above all form—Bodily beauties can rightly be causae inducentes, but one cannot stop with them—Beauty of things objectively has further reference to God—Beauty, the radiant appearing of the essence, can shine so brightly that the testimony of God in it is overlooked—Beauty always affirms something final and conclusive, so it is harder than with the other transcendentals to remain in the analogia entis—Requires control of senses and dark night—Beauty of what is immeasurable can express itself in measure—God is beauty past all hope (Gregory of Nyssa). 5. The Heart, the Cross and the Glory (p. 352): Augustine and Dionysius contributed to expressing the central point of the structure of beauty, but the intuition that fully expresses it is Franciscan—Father has power to be one and the same God in antoher than Himself, so He does not cease to exist when He makes the total gift of His being as God; same power allows His expression outside Himself in His humility and condescension in creation, revelation, grace, Incarnation, Cross—Cross is key to all things: sin, man, God—Self-humbling is height of imitation of Christ and experiential knowledge of one’s own reality—The list of traditores Jesu—Christ’s stepping out into nothing makes Him Christus deformis, yet He is beautiful within, though this does not perhaps take into account His inward suffering—Christ’s heart is capable of total solidarity in suffering with God and man—God’s going forth into danger and nothingness reveals its vulnerability at its origin—This concealment in humility and poverty is highest power of expression, as seen in Francis’ stigmata; poverty makes room for God’s beauty and unity by removing the multiplicity of the world—Bonaventure is only interested in hierarchy and liturgy of the Church as useful for souls in making present the death of Christ, and the nuptial mystery between the poor God and the poor man, ultimately eschatological—The idea that the Cross’ nuptial poverty reveals the heart of God crowns Bonaventure’s view of beauty—In pouring itself into nothing, God glorifies Himself and fulfills glory of Being, based on transcendental power of self-expression—Fulfillment of eros—Bonaventure cannot envision another world-order than this or other reasons for the Incarnation that those that took place; Christ’s actions are always fitting; though ordo naturae purae is not denied, but not theologically interesting—Only in Christ do we experience God’s plan for the world—God has imprinted on us the requirement of the resurrection of the body. Volume 3: Studies in Theological Style: Lay Styles DANTE 1. Untrod Paths (p. 9): Dante as last really influential theologian, as opposed to later scholastics who are just philosophers or commentators, perhaps founder of new theology alongside those of Thomas and Bonaventure—Dante’s fascination with exploration, climbing, flight—His methodical exploration and esperienza of the hereafter—His awareness of the uniqueness of his project and his sense of mission, based on experience of the medieval synthesis as something new, open to the future—Dante as synthesis of scholasticism and mysticism, antiquity and Christianity, sacral empire and Franciscan Church, courtly Minnesang and scholastic wisdom, ethics and aesthetics, but in excess of all these. 1.a. Conversion to the Vernacular (p. 13): Historical significance of conversion to the vernacular, translating knowledge of reality into changeable but natural vernacular as opposed to eternal but artificial Latin—Love of mother tongue as link to parents and place, leading to desire to glorify and reveal its nobility—Uses dialects to create a language both alive and valid—Dante seeks to be the legislator of a living culture, not a professional theologian: learning in service of action and common people. 1.b. Conversion to History (p. 15): Conversion to history requires transcending Minnesang, scholasticism, and philosophical study of essences—He wants to leave mark on present and future history—Throughout Commedia real history, persons, lands, and institutions appear in their true importance—Man is organic body not pure spirit who loves the time and place of his birth, the horoscopic kairos of his appearing—Highest faculty is la discrezione, the eye of the soul, understanding of present moment—History is not just empirical facts, but unites in God—Dante is most interested in historical totality, with two aspects, Church and Empire, the latter expressing a vision of supranational unification of man, above the nationalisms of his day—Man as horizon between earth and heaven has 2 ends: happiness in this life and happiness in eternal life—Empire perfectly realizes earthly order and law, rooted in real Adamic and ideal Platonic unity of human race—Human law rooted in openness to universal and love—All individuals and communities ordered to integration in one community, where the Emperor should be the embodiment of caritas, particularism surpassed by universal—This is an opportunity the monarch’s dignity gives him—Order is human rights given at creation—Empire not mediated by Church, but given power and office of justice by God—Christ was lawfully condemned by the Emperor, a knot that can only be resolved in God’s loving decree: God uses human justice for His own purposes—Donation of Constantine is null because it tried to concede a right that Emperors cannot concede, and the Church cannot accept temporal things—Church’s form is life of Christ—Christ is Lord of earthly kingdom, but not responsible for it—Church’s beauty is in its humility and obedience, not its structure; so Dante, the lover of all embodied form and radiant beauty, has no interest in Church’s visible beauty—His criticism of worldliness of medieval Church and its theocratic ways e.g. by Boniface VIII, which make it the whore of Babylon—Dante’s childlike love of sacraments and Word and Church of Christ, and his longing for her purification. 1.c. Conversion to the Laity (p. 24): Conversion to the laity means turning from study of essences to reflection on reality and conditions for possibility of authentic Christian existence and an ethnopolitical existence in the world, in contrast to mendicant or mystical approach—Since him, this is the route of every historically effective theology—This reflection deals with Dante’s personality, destiny, and eros—Dante’s personality in contrast to Thomas’, for whom personality intentionally disappears: to Dante nothing human or divine is alien—Dante’s fame and humility, nobility and vocation—Nobility as virtues rooted in attitude or fundamental disposition—Heavenly powers as decisive agents in human generation, with God only completing their work—Union of nobility derived from nature and grace—Man must lay hold of his nobility by realizing the good that he is, and trusting the horme in his heart, which is an impulse from grace—Natural magnanimity must submit and unite to Christian vocation—Nobility rooted in spiritual, not physical, ancestry e.g. Dante’s in Vergil—Sense of nobility as kairos between medieval and modern times: scholasticism finds its vernacular source, and the Minnesang finds its redemptive truth in love-song for Beatrice—Love for the ancients; paralleling of antiquity and Christianity is an advance on Secunda pars: Dante appropriates not only ancient ethics as foundation of Christian morality, but its history and mythology too, rooted in Dante’s eros whereby he knows himself indebted to both worlds—Nature is cosmos permeated by divine eros—Personal history and first-person poetry, rooted in Augustine and Boethius, not Abelard—The injustice of his humiliation—Earthly life as seen from Paradise—For the first time in theology, the theme of individual, personal, fateful love, which is also theological, love carried to the throne of God, transcending the Neo-Platonic scheme of via positiva, negativa, eminentiae (Charles Williams)—Beatrice is symbolic, but not just symbolic: their love requires all theology and cosmos for its fulfillment, through this love Dante learns what eternity is—Finite love can be incorporated into infinite, but only through suffering—Dante sets ethics above metaphysics (Gilson), ethics as building individual perfection on basis of soul’s perfection/nobility/eros—Supreme ethical concept of giustizia—Superiority of ethics is not praxis over theoria, but concrete personal existence over essentialist scholasticism. 2. Eros and Agape, or Who is Beatrice? (p. 34): The Comedy and Beatrice are key to earlier work, integrating them—Love of wisdom for its own sake, not for the useful or pleasurable—Love in earlier works is universalized so that universe receives true form, that of love—Dante’s purported total faithfulness to Beatrice—Contrast of Dante to Goethe’s Faust, comparison to Claudel’s Le Soulier de Satin—Beatrice’s unique purifying power as eros transfigured into agape, requiring both descent and ascent, contra those who accuse Dante of Averroism—Canzionere as aesthetic anticipations or presentiments in a dream of the later conscious totality—Love turns the lover to what is worthy and unique, but it brings pain, though this is sweet; unavoidability of beloved’s death—Beatrice as embodiment of the number 9, as God’s radiance, and so her return to God is God’s calling back what is His own—Beatrice and Dante’s humility; to meet Beatrice is for Dante to enter the heart of Christianity i.e. charity, Christianity in an atmosphere of aesthetic reverie, without distinguishing dream and reality—Platonic motifs for the beloved in early works—Love as hypostatization of enclosed world of human emotion (Rosetti) similar to Petrarch, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Tristan, though Dante preserves for Paradise a transfigured eros cleansed of tragedy and decay—Anticipations of Inferno in Canzionere—In order to live after Beatrice’s death, love needs mediation/intermediaries e.g. philosophy, another woman, though there is only one eros and Beatrice is the goal of intermediaries—Setting aside Dante’s actual love life and marriage—Erotic-anagogic beauty of philosophy, whose form is love and matter is wisdom—Love’s resemblance to faith and hope—Philosophy’s glance and seduction—Eternal striving is impossible and morally outrageous, for striving concludes in the communion of lover and beloved, though eros draws us every upward, since the beloved is with God—Looking wisdom in the eyes means not stopping until one has encountered the object of God’s approval; Beatrice is that object, a part of divine wisdom, but where all things interpenetrate there are not parts, so she is that Wisdom—The grace encountered in Beatrice is a manifestation of eternal grace that first loved us—Sophia eternalizes Eros in God, as the fulfilled archetype of erotic reciprocity between man and woman—Wisdom/philosophy both are and are not God; they are “prostitution” when joined to others still on the way to God, they are perfect participation in God for the one who is in God—Ultimate Christian truth cannot be attained through distinction between literal and allegorical senses—In Convivio, Dante is led upward by glance and smile of philosophy; in Comedy, by those of Beatrice—Dante’s singular grace of his journey—Mary mediatrix of graces and the laws of the communio sanctorum—Comedy as existential theology, not curious adventure story—Dante’s journey is: 1. History of his redemption from perdition; 2. Discovery of how his first and deepest love can become eternal in a Christian way; these are one for him: the Christian is given an experiential anticipated incorporation into eternal life, realizing the inner path of theological virtue—The blessed are forgetful of sin, all events being transfigured in grace—Dante’s existential identification with Catholic dogma, with Beatrice as his model, as the anima eccelesiastica or even as the Church preexistent with God, given her Mariological and Christological attributes and that the theological virtues attend her—All requires theological not aesthetic-symbolic interpretation. 3. Purgatorio, Confession and Inspiration (p. 54): Comedy structured around meeting Beatrice in purgatory, so Paradise is in most difficult aesthetic position: it must disclose the structure of their meeting—Confession is purifying fire, and purgatory is final existential confession, a confrontation with real love, destroying all pretense at love, descending on not practiced by man as judgment, possible only in the Church—Transcends ambiguous world of Tristan and Parzival—Hell seems like sleep, yet Dante is wakened repeatedly to his own bodily reality—His fear in hell—In purgatory, unlike for John of the Cross, the via purgativa and via illuminativa are one, drawn up by desire—Gate of St. Peter/of confession gives purgatory its form, whose angel incarnates the objectivity of the sacrament—Acknowledgment of sin and absolution occur only in meeting Beatrice—Sins are either ways in which love failed its purpose or lacked proportion—The scene with Beatrice, the heart of the Comedy where eros grows out of its subjectivity into the objective form of a sacrament, which unveiled is love; personal love coming from the center of the Church will not tolerate subjectivity until it has been purified, ordered, and gathered into the subjectivity of God—Perverse love must be trained to conform to norms of true love by methods both natural/ancient and supernatural/Christian—Purification leads to eschatological absolution where sin becomes a forgotten thing of the past, to judgment of sinful historical Church, to intimacy with Beatrice, and to negative forgetting of guilt being replaced by positive knowledge of good he has done—Poetic inspiration and Catholic veneration of the saints flow necessarily together—Dante always turns towards gaze of his beloved to see if his plans are right, a sign he is truly autonomous for she opens up for Him the perception of reality, as she is a mirror of God, turning him to all the cosmic and political orders that God established—The ancient gods are only principles, but Beatrice is pure personal reality. 4. Paradisio. Ancient Cosmos and Christian Cosmos (p. 65): Organization of hell and purgatory seem to be poetic license; ten sphere of Paradise seem to be based in ancient cosmology, just as Neo-Platonic aesthetics of his earlier work was—During Middle Ages, cosmic power were believed to constitute in their entirety the world-soul i.e. the way God’s activity and power are present to universe, determining the life of all non-spiritual things—In Paradise, souls/saints belong to the cosmic qualities marked by an intelligence, and thereafter influence those on earth born with that quality—God’s direct and indirect effects are the same, as are man qua nature and qua person—Souls move from place of God’s glory to place of their mission, brining glory with them, revealed in light of stars—Chains of forces of eros descend from and ascend to God—Cosmic order expresses divine love, and is for this reason loved, so love for one’s fellow creature can be a permanent positive way to love of God—Simultaneity of angels, form, and matter, since angels work upon matter and so find their perfection—The angels represent the reality of the ancient gods—This cosmic aesthetics seeks to support a Christian aesthetics—Dante’s look down through the spheres—Not clear if Dante saw all this as symbolism, saw the spiritual sense predominating over its expression—Soul has attractive power over matter even after death, and so it fashions itself an aerial body in anticipation of the resurrection; this idea even a demythologized theology must take seriously contra Platonism and Thomas—One can question whether ideas behind Platonic-Aristotelian-Scholastic cosmology are superseded by modern natural science; what the latter removes is what hinders authentic Christian theological aesthetic—Anticipation of the resurrection and spatial distance from earth allow unprecedented sensory delights in Paradisio, yet it is more a representation than an idea with profoundly Christian content—He explores every possibility of taking up the Neo-Platonic into the Christian—He breaks with the abstract scholastic theology of visio beata, and has Beatrice weeping over the world and St. Peter in anger—Eros transformed in purgatory is compatible with paradise, as seen in sphere of Venus; it concludes the covenant, and it is and gives form—Souls long for their bodies and the solidarity of generations—Dante’s supreme image is the luminous Rose that is the seat of the Godhead, described in terms of ranks and orders, but not spatially separated—Against all aimless infinity in desire (Faust, Don Juan), Dante’s love for Beatrice is final; the law of the form of being with its entelechy is obedience—All natural desire is limited, and the ancient limits on existence are here transferred to a Christian ethos; avarice as most severely censured vice—Dante is constantly overwhelmed, especially by Beatrice’s increasing beauty; even the limit to being overwhelmed has a poetic form: moderation born of withstanding the immoderation of the object, submission through renunciation to overwhelming force; form of blessedness is submission to divine will, identical to divine wisdom: lovers love the incomprehensibility and impenetrability of divine plan, in the mystery of love, not submission to fate—God by rewarding crowns his own grace—Nuptial reciprocity of eros and agape, for both are amor, God’s proper name—Marian form of Paradise—Reality of Cross not met in Comedy. 5. Inferno: Between the Times (p. 82): Inferno calls above interpretation into question—There may be predestination to eternal damnation and eros may also rule a kingdom where love is eternally excluded—A poem about hell is aesthetically possible only if theologically possible i.e. if it can be justified by eros—Dante depends on same objective cosmology of order and law as Thomas, Boethius, and Augustine (Hugo Friedrich), a theodicy whose supreme achievement was affirming the cosmos in its totality, though it is questionable whether it can be adopted by Christian theology burdened with the problem of eternal hell—Fails to account for Greek and mystical non-Augustinian views, and the fact that the Gospel is one of redemptive love—Augustine saw even sin as a work of God, as harmonizing with goodness (cf. Sir. 33:14)—This heightens cosmic/philosophical vision, lessens Biblical/dramatic; what counts is order, not man (Friedrich)—Hell can be justified by abstract theology, but less so by the existential theology of a man descending into hell and meeting his former enemies, a test for theodicy; requires the establishment and breakdown of communication with those he meets—The form of punishment lays hold of the sinner and attracts him so as to be complete expression of his guilt: a confession without love, absolution, or grace—Hell is artistic creation of a rigidified love, of which there remains only form—Personal communication requires gift of the heart i.e. love, so Dante can offer nothing to the damned except fame i.e. nothing Christian—Journey is objective information gathering, and initiation into objectivity away from compassion not in order with reality, to compassion subordinated to reason (Augustine); here piety to divine order requires no pity for the damned—Dante’s battle against his own pity, and his adaptation of feelings like contempt and anger to the divine order i.e. all feelings adapted to the divine will, apatheia beyond that of the Buddhists, who are compassionate to all—If this cannot be reconciled with a Biblical vision, it is the scholastic system’s reductio; all later depictions of hell depend on the dialectic that Dante exposed—Nothing can happen in Dante’s hell because it lacks love, the inner motive of all living things; existentially, all events in the Inferno are meaningless—For Luther and Jansenism, Dante’s hell is expanded to the world, without animation of love, and with degrees of value meaningless; only facts are present—In hell, God’s love is entirely veiled by justice and vendetta, world of law, satisfying to those who see it—Dante resists the theological vision he inherited through aesthetic construction of landscapes and personalities in hell, emphasizing differences in value—In hell, there reigns an ancient nostalgia for the beautiful life close to the sun, and fame/earthly immortality—Theologically strange in Dante is the numberless host of futile existences too unsubstantial for either divine reward or punishment—Reasons for a person’s being in hell or purgatory unclear—Communication among and transfers between the kingdoms (Adam, Statius, Cato, Trajan, Ripheus), so there is baptism by desire for Dante, a participation in theological virtue before Christ not sharply distinguished from natural morality—Understanding hell existentially is impossible—Unclear if Dante hopes for Vergil’s salvation—Precedents for descent into hell (Aeneas, Visio Pauli), which Dante does through weeping intercession of Beatrice—Aesthetic credibility of Dante’s first-person experience, and his mission to shed eternal light on temporal matters—The complete objectivity of his vision consists in its kerygmatic function (like Apocalypse)—The sorrow of those in hell is that they have nothing to be shared (Bernanos)—Those in hell are lifeless effigies, incomparable to our sufferings—The alternative between humanitarian compassion and the viewpoint of divine justice is not Christian: it overlooks the 3rd possibility, the Cross, substitutionary death of Christ, unless Christ is always prepared to abandon redemption in surrender to Father, a sort of amor fati (Hugh of St. Victor)—For Dante, hell has not been transformed in its structure by Good Friday and Holy Saturday, unlike in Eastern image—Theological inadequacy of fitting redemptive events into mythological and cosmic image—Lack of Christological and Trinitarian influence on whole Comedy, but rather focus on moral restoration and divine eros; image of God here is not Trinitarian but intensified Christian version of ancient eros that embraces all. 6. The Eternal Feminine (p. 101): Ground of being and its expression in created form meet in Beatrice, who mirrors heaven—Eternal Feminine is real, not just allegory, extending through all grades of reality up to Mary—Legitimate image if not aestheticized but recognized as mediating seriousness of Biblical message, including Cross and conversion—Truth is masculine and goodness feminine for Dante, and beauty their union and expressive form, a sacrament of deeper mysteries—Ethics and beauty require one another; erotic beauty does not replace ethics—Eros for Beatrice is not libertinism, but goes beyond states of this life and unites them in Paradise—Beatrice in place of Christ leaves her mark on hell. ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS 1. The Perfect Adventure (p. 105): Carmelite reform is response to Lutheran revolution, and somewhat to Columbian revolution; Pascal will respond to Copernican revolution—Luther banished aesthetics from theology; John of the Cross, an ascetic, and Pascal, influenced by Jansenism, will restore it—Columbian and Copernican revolution destroy the perspicuity of the analogia entis, found in Dantean cosmos; new authors resist Lutheran sola fide but combine his radicalism with new aesthetic perspicuity—John draws on Eastern Christianity, Dionysius, Gregory: mystical way is the way to God, including in it Platonism and Buddhism—Carmelites oriented to personal, experiential, and psychological i.e. modern categories—Pascal unites Augustinian approach to modern science—Both stress experience of faith over assurance of faith—Illuminatio no longer unites philosophy and theology; they are united only from above by faith, and natural theology and the God of the philosophers have lost all existential force—God alone suffices, and man is for participating in God by God’s love becoming the creature’s loving action, so that the soul becomes God by participation, though still distinct from God—Only a few here respond to this natural vocation—For John in his exclusivism, every natural or supernatural truth and good that is not God Himself is relativized and must be abandoned for love of God—Every objective form in revelation is God making His interiority present, an attempt to pierce through to the Absolute reminiscent of Evagrius and anticipating Hegel—John shows us the eternity already present in life, in Christ—Unlike Dante’s Hell, John’s dark night is a demythologized night, God present to the soul in the mode of privation and dispossession—Abandonment experienced as Hell or Purgatory—Love penetrates and purifies the soul into an earthly paradise, and then into an anticipation of Heaven, transported to glory—This is Dante deprived of images and concentrated in single interior experience—John’s work is a summons to the necessary adventure of the Dark Night—Imagery of islands from Conquistadors—Existential interpretation of OT—Importance of secrecy but not secret knowledge in imageless incomprehensible God; secret is proclaimed everywhere in the Church, but can only be recognized as objective eternal mystery, which is what mystical theology is about—The secrecy consists not in the knowledge but in the love it mediates, which is the refuge from world and soul’s own acts and habits—There is always more to fathom about the Trinity and Christ—John uses medieval notions of ascent, but goes beyond them in being closer to Denys—The night is the permanent means of making the absolute spiritual jump, and is identical to contemplation, as the poems more than the commentaries make clear—Poem “By the Waters of Babylon”—Nada-Todo and God as Non-Aliud transcending opposition between subject and object—Searching for God requires leaping into death with Him, and being caught by His love. 2. The Paradox of Mystical Poetry (p. 120): Poetic beauty can blossom from negation because of the love that must undergo every death to survive—John responds to Luther’s destructive dialectical Word with the constructive poetic Word—Commentaries refer but do not do justice to the poems, which John in turn draws back to Scripture—John draws on lyric poet Garcilaso, allegorized by Sebastián of Córdoba, in the milieu of late humanism and early Baroque synthesis of classical-worldly and Biblical-spiritual poetry, and on folk poetry, which speaks directly to the heart, in context of all of which the Song of Songs takes on its original, pastoral freshness—With all of this, John’s poetry emerges from the Word and Spirit dwelling in his soul, supernatural inspiration awakening natural creativity, both the splendor of grace—11th stanza of Canticle and its interpretation, which shows superiority of poetic over prose statement, where the latter points to the former’s divine spiration: the poem is the echo of the mystical act and does not go beyond revelation—Poetry at this high level should not be separated from holiness, whose origin is imitation of Christ; this poetry bears witness to the renunciation of the “aesthetic”, following the Gospel’s hatred of all for love of the One, more than Bonaventure or Francis—John’s work isolates paradox of mystical aesthetics. (p. 127): 1. Throughout John’s work is a negation/reduction: no created thing is God, and all forms must be surmounted and abandoned to reach the vision of God—No sense can attain God, and neither can intellect, since it naturally requires the senses—Clear supernatural knowing can only come after death, so pure faith takes its place—Absolute oppositions between God and creatures, so creature must entirely transcend itself to attain participation in Godhead that God bestows on it, and to attain taste for God, both by its own exertion and passively, so that God noetically and existentially, not just ontically, predominates in the creature—In nuptial love, the otherness allows for exchange and reciprocal indwelling; overwhelming of human eros by divine eros is positive, as is destruction of the natural faculties, which is ultimately for their perfection—Attack on attachment to creaturely values is to educate one in exclusiveness of love for God, freeing us (as in Asian mysticism) from creaturely thirst—All creaturely experiences, even consolations and exalted visions, can harbor evil or ambiguous spirits, so one must be trained to complete poverty—All forms must be rejected for formlessness of theological virtues; if from God, forms will have their effect without our having to assent; we must seek Giver, not gifts—John is unlike St. Theresa, who was much longer concerned for experiences; on her view, we need not be dead to the world to seek God, allowing an anti-critique of his critique of forms. (p. 133): 2. John’s critique of forms if for the sake of transcendence, which he identifies with theological virtues, which are the single reality of participation in God, differentiated according to 3 powers of soul—Triune attitude of these virtues is the supra-psychological experience of God and contemplation, following Denys and Bonaventure—Loving faith makes world transparent to God, but since God’s light then strikes no object, and He is not an object, He is experienced as dark night—Desire for assurance and understanding robs faith of its character, an interiorization of ecclesial fides ex auditu—Fullness of open faith/contemplation is one general pure act, not particular acts, though particular knowledge can be inserted into this general knowledge without danger—The night is first subjectively death, but always objectively unchanging resurrection and light: even the Cross and descent into Hell are purest, glorified light—God is prepared to open perfection to all, but only the elect attain it—Psychological stages in the night are unimportant—Active and passive stages are not essentially successive, but impinge on one another, as do nights of spirit and senses, and the purifying and illuminative ways, even if temporally they may be long separated: loss of taste for sensibles is already a beginning of tasting God in Himself—Generality that is negation of particular is not abstract universal, but an opening to Biblical living God—Gulf between highest earthly experience of God and eternal heavenly vision is stressed because a certain logic suppresses the distinction—The phases of the night form a curve, whose common element is love whose only longing is to do will of the beloved, and which is union and vehicle of vision in non-vision—As love, will surpasses intellect; will/love are heart and center of person, and is quieted by being touched by God, a contact between Person and person, touches like wounds—John’s mysticism has Trinitarian context to avoid pantheism and making union with God just accidental acts; through infusing of Spirit, one becomes a participation in divine spiratio, so that Christ awakens in my innermost soul, and I can enjoy and know creatures better in dispossession i.e. possessing them with liberty—Man’s relation to God is neither opposition nor immersion; within Trinitarian distance of Persons there is something like a form that is the formless glory of substantial union in love—The divine attributes as lamps of fire—Union with God is incorporation of whole being of creature into depths of grace—The games of the Spirit—Only purpose of identity is to allow reciprocity of giving. (p. 144): 3. Act of faith as non-vision and non-comprehension is identified with act of contemplation as vision and love—Soul knows by anticipation the unbearable beauty of God, and her own incapacity for vision, and that at heart of the night is the generous creative eye of God—Fluidity of love is the general nature of faith, which surpasses all understanding and is glory of God—Night is the flight of love, and a drama, an intense activity and inchoate vision between initial and terminal vision—One does not raise oneself to God by ancient/medieval anagogical contemplation of creatures, but by rediscovery of creature in vision of God alone; only anagogical method in John is love, which ultimately finds Trinitarian love—God creates in haste, but directs His attention to Christ; only in Him does God look at creatures, clothing them with beauty by His glance, by imparting to them supernatural being: the world gains its beauty from above, and the contemplative sees beauty of God, beauty of world, and analogia entis—The world awakens in the soul along with God; all creatures move in unison with God and reveal themselves with Him when He reveals His glory—The most radical renunciation is compatible with aesthetic spirituality; for John, beauty is end and means, though he rediscovers beauty of world through beauty of God—John and Theresa’s love for nature and nighttime; John’s moves from natural imagery to mystical paradoxes shows that he see contemplates God directly, not just anagogically, in nature, natural images being elucidations of divine attributes—1st movement of soul should be to raised all sensory things immediately to God—John’s love for and skill at art—John against Protestant iconoclasm and Baroque passionate art, in favor of medieval art, which is transparent and simple; his criticism of artistic and other devotional aids, in favor of faith: images have no power of themselves, but only through devotion—God uses preachers to bring His Word to men, but the efficacy of preaching depends entirely on the internal spirit, not choice of words or sublimity of thoughts—Unlike in Byzantine theology, no quasi-sacramental presence in images, places, customs, parts of liturgy; all is referred to freedom of Spirit—True beauty is in contemplation i.e. all-embracing reality of self-communicating God—We should be transformed so that our beauty is His and vice versa. 3. Value and Limits (p. 159): For John, Jesus is absolute norm, so there is no place for average norms—The theological virtues are the norm and ideal of Christian life—Negatively, faith is for God alone to the elimination of all form; positively, it is night of contemplation i.e. existential relation to God—For both, he is dependent on Christian tradition back to Evagrius, perhaps also influenced by Sufism, though he goes beyond tradition in turning to modern age, superimposing his own experience on tradition, leading him to make enormous demands—Unlike philosophical tradition rooted in Denys, philosophy is absorbed in experience of “I”. (p. 160): 1. Faith that hopes and loves is infinite divine power that requires all finite figures to be surmounted—This is crucifying for earthly man, freedom of love for heavenly man—The Crucified, Incarnate Son of God is not surpassed here, but determines the whole mystical way—Christianity is a call to the Cross, where Christ experienced death to senses, natural death, and abandonment in His soul without consolation or relief, bringing about reconciliation at the moment He was annihilated in all things—Foundation of spiritual life is desire to imitate Christ in all things, in humility—We should not desire new revelations and answers from God, since He has said all things in His Son—John’s mysticism is theocentric through being Christocentric, drawing on the Bible through the existential experience of love’s death on the Cross—Only the image of Crucified Love is the authentic image of God in the world—John’s image of the Crucified hanging down into God’s night, interpreted by Florisoone—Unlike Theresa and Thérèse, John does not present the work of contemplation in its social or ecclesial aspect; for Thérèse, the Carmelite is the heart of the Church and mother of souls, but this is found nowhere in John—The Church, love of neighbor, and communion of saints are presupposed, not forgotten; what we often forget, the seriousness of the Cross, is what John emphasizes—But perhaps John does not sufficiently appreciate the reality of the images, of the descent, and is too close to Neo-Platonism. (p. 167): 2. Identification of night and contemplation leads to a similar crisis—John emphasizes absence of pleasure for the sake of complete poverty in worldly things, so that all things may be come transparent in God’s light, not for the sake of suffering—One experiences privation in the core of one’s substance, and so feels God’s touches—All techniques are replaced by God’s gracious action, and the only activity of the soul is to remove obstacles—Question whether contemplative way is one particular way among others, or the one way of Christina life: John sees his way as the way par excellence; non-contemplatives participate remotely in this way in their piecemeal purgations—But Christ is beyond contemplation and action in love, and so contemplation is one charism among others in the life of the Church (Thérèse), though it more than others has normative value for whole Church—Charismatic aspect of John’s experience, and so its particularity, is seen in relation to its archetype, Christ—1. As giving religious actuality to analogia entis, John’s experience is normative for everyone who seeks to realize existentially relation of absolute to relative being—2. As making real the infused, transcendent character of theological virtues, John’s experience is archetypal for all Christians—3. As bearing witness to exalter realization of contemplative way, it is a guide for all contemplatives in the Church, so long as God is given freedom in all souls, and John is not seem as imitable in the strict sense—All this shows more the aesthetic character of his work—He is Doctor of the Church as poet. PASCAL (p. 172): Pascal identifies with no school, but is like Erasmus in seeking primitive, evangelical, patristic tradition against scholasticism, with a religious bridge to modern science, unlike Cartesian dualism, joining all in a single Baroque structure—Lay French context—Jansenism, Augustinianism, Jesuit laxism, and Pacal’s greatness—Tension among contraries. 1. The Basic Themes (p. 174): 1. Pascal strives to return to the source, to God ever new—Continuity of infusion of grace like the continuity of begetting of the Son—Essence of being Christian is to strive after and preserve alive God’s ever-new love; no adequate degree of perfection—Christ offers an everlasting sacrifice to the Father (Condren)—Early Christians had to realize sacramental baptism existentially—Jesuit casuistry concerned with minimum, Pascal with maximum; former dispenses even of the love of God, which accomplishes the mystery of iniquity—Augustinian ethical criterion of caritas or cupiditas; all natural ethics are determined by the latter, accommodating all things to self-love (compare to Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor)—Need for return to life of Jesus and to the mystery of the suffering love of God, penetrating all veils of speculation to the center of the fact—Identity between death and end of the world, and of the Church with each Christian, conversion and judgment. (p. 179): 2. Descartes is a thinker, but Pascal a seer—Distinction between mathematical and intuitive mind; latter sees in a single glance—Three levels with senses lower and perceiving effects, and mind higher and perceiving causes, and intuition/heart in middle—3 orders of body, mind, and charity/sanctity—Seeing in not seeing, veiled seeing, seeing unity of apparently incompatible things; geometry, science of bodies, is a form of seeing in not seeing, unlike school logic, which is pure abstraction—We must consider how thoughts exist in minds e.g. difference between Cartesian and Augustinian cogito—New arrangement of ideas. (p. 182): 3. Pascal’s theology and formation are linked to Jansenism, which developed a one-sided Augustine, despite Pascal’s attempt at a middle way between Calvinism and Molinist Pelagianism—But Pascal still grasped the whole spirit of Augustine—Pascal’s le coeur can only be understood in light of Augustinian cor, not as theology of feeling, but a sensorium for the whole and for God—Theology as confessio, dialogic and existential—Reduction of ethics to principles of caritas and cupiditas, reduction of history to the 2 cities: the civitas terrena is an image of the civitas Dei but outside it, related as image and by estrangement—Israel as divinely appointed figure of Christ, containing the civitas Dei since the time of Christ—Method of immanence i.e. analysis of human existence in concrete historicality as the place or starting point of theology of revelation—Man is not in himself: divertissement and cor inquietum—Relativization of philosophy and asceticism in light of redemption and grace—For Pascal, bridge over abyss of relative and absolute truth can only be supernatural grace from free, electing, reprobating God (following Epictetus, Montaigne)—Descartes draws on Augustinian illumination and ideas, Pascal on Augustinian free grace, caritas, hiddenness of God, night of the heart in which only the Cross shines—Pascal and Augustine on beauty of number: Christian aesthetics oscillates between beauty of number and of grace. 2. The Figure in the Infinite (p. 188): Pascal is caught between modern science and the Reformers/Jansenists, without a unifying philosophy of Being, due to anti-scholasticism, and so falls into dualism of science and piety, both requiring renouncing of philosophy—What could still unite them is the new Stoic Humanism, the ideal of nobleness of heart, proportion and poise, heroism revealed in the beautiful, ethics and aesthetics in agreement—Pascal’s Stoic ethical-aesthetic anthropology seeks to avoid extremes of dogmatism and skepticism, and dualism; a form made visible in latent, lived philosophy e.g. proofs for existence of God are dismissed not as invalid, but as lacking existential power of attraction—He leads us from understanding of man’s situation to the living God; he seeks the forms of things, where the form of man is to be a middle point looking down on scientific form and up at God—Geometry or exact science is bound to experience and cannot prove its own principle; any definition of man is more obscure than what can be known spontaneously about him—Conic sections and infinitely divisible and extendable space, which can be read off the phenomena (contra Kant): finite figure requires infinite medium to exist, but the finite is unfixed in the infinite, including the finite man, and so there is disproportion between them; we do not know why we have the limits that we have, or find ourselves in one place or time: the finite is contingent, always threatened by the accidental—Because of our medium position, everything here is partly true and false; we need moderation in all things—Dread before the infinite is not before the infinite spatial vacuum, but before our metaphysical situation where we cannot grasp our foundation—God has imprinted incomprehensibility on all things, and this is the background for all knowledge—His opposition to the notion of horror vacui, due to the prior nullity of Being—Greatness and smallness only meaningful in relation to the middle, man in his incomprehensible unity of body and soul, neither graspable apart from the other—Fundamental concepts are the ways the material world presents itself in the finite composite figure—Every being is nothing compared to Being; everything natural, however great, is nothing compared to grace—Pascal seeks to convert the atheist materialist as a dramatic theologian—The world is strange to the man no longer at home there; qualitative distance between spirit and body is basis for recognition of all quantitative distance e.g. between point and line: the higher includes and presupposes the latter, and thereby the lower becomes a figure of the higher—The fall moved us from order of truth to that of images, but we must use what we have to raise ourselves—Theological aesthetic rests on a relationship established from above, with key concepts rapport, proportion, measure, correspondence—Rhetoric is based on rapport between our nature and things that delight it; certain proofs are not proportioned to the heart: the honnêtte homme strives to find right, attainable relation between whole man and whole spiritual world—Proportion is the soul of the argument of the wager—The higher fashions and surveys the lower—Infinity-nothing dialogue between Christian and atheist where the Christian seeks and the atheist opposes proportion between God and man; the Christian draws similarity between numerical infinite and God—Christian justifies faith by showing that decision is demanded by existence and only the decision for God is rational, based on probabilities—Ascent to God and ecstasy of negative theology are rejected—Pascal’s apparent reformed fideism is faithful to his geometric analogy; philosophy is a function of the personal relationship with God. 3. Proportion of the Disproportions (p. 205): Man can be read as a form, but not simply by analysis of being, because what emerges is formlessness, contradiction, monstrosity—Seeks to show cause and transcending of disproportion, through intellectus fidei, true vision in true blindness—Man as musical organ—True image of God in man, Jesus, is delineated against background of imagelessness, disharmony, absurdity—No fully plausible way to reconstruct the plan for Pascal’s work—Ontologically, man is suspended in the infinite; epistemologically, man is in a void he cannot understand, unable to root real knowledge in the Absolute or the whole—Man is both one with world as body, and other than world as spirit, and so is disproportionate to things—Our intermediate state is reflected in all our faculties, not just the spiritual ones—There is truth in popular opinion and law, but not the one we imagine; we have no solid image of true law and justice, but only have images (Montaigne, Cicero, Plato), but for Pascal there is no light or anamnesis illumining the images—Coexistence of grandeur and misère—Man is monster not primarily as depraved, but as indecipherable, each feature revealed and threatened by its opposite—Man transcends the human by participating in God by grace, and can only be understood in his transcendence—Man’s greatness is seen in that even apart from grace he is able to produce a tableau of charity—Man has a double nature, and must love and hate himself; both self-love and genuine Good are in us: seeking greatness in oneself is a perversion of true greatness, found in God, and a caricature of true humility—Self-estrangement of reason from its Christian self is folie (Erasmus)—Divertissement always involves flight from self-presence, communion with God, redire ad cor; present to oneself, one feels one’s emptiness, boredom, despair, and cannot rediscover lost source, cannot even long for God, without grace: emptiness of love is opposite of loving longing—To have fallen from love is mystery of original sin—Anthropology can only bring us to the point where we recognize the incomprehensibility of our situation—The conclusion of philosophy is that we must concede to Epictetus and Montaigne their conflicting views on man’s greatness—Dogmas are unbelievable without revelation, but content of revelation strikes the heart immediately as truth: the method of immanence—Christ must be read as God’s free act of grace that nothing in the world could demand, suggest, construct; in Christ, bassesse is the expression of grandeur, and in Him, everything even death finds its due proportion—The Cross establishes the harmony of opposing truths, beyond all aplogy; Christ’s sufferings are beyond what sinners cause in Him: they are suffering of a God in human form caused by God’s self-abandonment in wrath, which last until the end of the world—The rational justification of existence is the embracing of all contradictions in mystery of Christ; the act of love of God confers both meaning and form, creating and simultaneously fulfilling figure. 4. Hiddenness and Love (p. 218): In Christ Crucified is revealed ever greater love of incomprehensible God and sin that appears ever greater in this light: double hiddenness becomes really manifest. (p. 219): 1. God by nature, as Scripture says, is deus absconditas, not apparent in natural things, contra proofs for existence of God—He ordinarily hides and rarely reveals Himself; increasing hiddenness correlates to increased revelation of love—God wills to be sought and found only by love—Perfect clarity satisfies reason, perfect obscurity satisfies faith—Encounter between God and man is in the heart, without being compelled by logic—In Christ’s unity of evidence and hiddenness is the mystery of predestination—Assurance of love requires, for many Western hearts, the darkest Biblical judgments. (p. 221): 2. Hiddenness of God in Christ has color of judgment because of sin; God hides Himself in forms that can be confused with sin, and does not place Himself in the light, and perishes humanly, so as to be recognized as the hidden one—Proportion between human mediocrity and dazzling darkness of God—Dialectic of exaltation and humiliation. (p. 222): 3. The motives of Pascal’s thought converge on exact perception of actual proportions combined with sharp separation of mutually related orders—Relation of OT and NT are double witness of God’s historical truth, because figurativeness is function of whole figure—1. Charity is not figurative precept—2. All that does not lead to charity is figurative, so charity is of a different order than figures—Historical form integrates other proofs—Problem is that the promise to Israel must be within order of charity to be proportioned to fulfillment, yet it must leave the door shut, only able to be opened by the Redeemer, and so must be in order of figure—OT is a picture of love without excluding its opposite; synagogue was a figure containing the truth, but only a figure; Jews were like the Messiah to prefigure Him, unlike Him so as not to give suspect witness, and so they were deceived as to His true greatness and humility—Only Christ reconciles all contradictions, including the contradiction between Him and His figure—Ciphers as having double meaning, one clear and one hidden; OT is a cipher, a medium between nature and grace—Nature is figure of grace, which is figure of glory, which has degrees; the Church can decode history, but still shares in hiddenness because she is image of glory (rooted in Augustine, anticipates Péguy)—Only the pure heart penetrates the truth to love. (p. 228): 4. Truth is love, beyond the figurative; this is God’s action that makes Him manifest—The poor man is the hiddenness of Christ, legible in love as His sacrament, a subsistent miracle—Mystery of predestination is divine and does not concern the loving man—Church is integration through self-opening love of persons who exist for themselves—The Church is always already built up in her Head, but Pascal does not advocate a mysticism of the invisible—The visible (Roman) and invisible aspects of the Church are inseparable—Model of the Church must be preserved through all variations and defections—The saints, who have the closest unity with the Spirit, are the frontline of the résistance, but because they love peace, persecuted by the Church, but saving the Church—Yet Pascal sought to transcend even the stance of résistance—The leap to the higher order that makes seeing the truth in love possible is a leap into the invisible, renouncing our own viewpoint; the context for his probabilistic arguments: on the basis of our thrown-ness into existence, we must decide for or against the existence of God. 5. Pascal’s Aesthetic (p. 233): Pascal’s aesthetic is given only in fragmentary sources, yet he is always concerned with beauty and harmony; his aesthetic is always theological—Pascal’s greatness is not his being torn apart, but his throwing bridges across abysses—Foundation of his thoughts is justesse, rhetoric in its all-embracing sense, a convergence of ethics of convention and logic or metaphysics of existence—There is objective measuredness for the thing itself, and for the relation of object and observer; the ideal or model imposes itself on the faculties—The homme universel or honnêtte homme is not a specialist in a particular field, but corresponds in the completeness of his relation to reality to the model or correct relationship, though this homme is considered rhetorically or apostolically, not aesthetically, though he is amiable (Chevalier de Méré)—The either/or of cupiditas and caritas runs through beauty—The heart, eros, and woman unify; animals are not automata, and one cannot reduce vital powers; the heart is aesthetic and ethical, because organ of love—What is needed an aesthetic that has room for asceticism HAMANN 1. On the Eve of Idealism (p. 239): Hamann is in background of Idealist movement, but also transcends it, for none of the Idealists or Kant understood his purpose, and he anticipated Kierkegaard and Bloy—He seeks to defend Christianity from breaking down into humanism of any sort, though all the Enlightenment and Idealist humanists were his friends—For him, aesthetic means the bodiless attitude of the Enlightenment, that finds the fleshliness of Christianity unrefined—While Kierkegaard divided aesthetic and ethical and then sought a balance, Hamann allows the aesthetic to regain its inherent religion and Christian fullness: he confronts a withered with a full-blooded aesthetic, without Kierkegaardian dialectic, for he holds that aisthesis is the original religious act, for all things are God’s language—For Kierkegaard, Socrates is the human not divinely human; for Hamann, Christ appears directly through Socrates, for the Christian and theological may appear in the secular and philosophical—He wrote no aesthetic treatise, but after his conversion in 1758 he saw the world only as glory of God’s love, emptying and abasing itself, which our speaking translates—Man has invisibility in common with God; the body’s form has a Trinitarian nature—The world has its place given to it, man by freedom is destiny and event, and in man existence unfolds itself within history—Man can only be interpreted protologically and eschatologically, coming from and going to God—In the Fall, aesthetics becomes fiction and unreality; the scholar must collect the fragments, the philosopher interpret them, the poet imitate them or give them a destiny—The role of man as such is to reassemble the fragmentary world and give it a destiny—Beauty is a transcendental constituted by analogy—The revelation in the flesh is the midpoint of everything—We require a supernatural change to think rightly of Christ. 2. Beauty and Kenosis (p. 247): In Christ’s unity He represents the unity and Trinitarian nature of God, and unity and multiplicity of the world—Incarnation is canon of all aesthetics, with principle qualities: (p. 247): 1. God’s appearance in Christ is free—As grace, not nature, it cannot be reduced to worldly categories e.g. content and form—Human language, unlike animal, joins organic relationship and free determining act, allowing both likeness to God and the Fall—Subhuman nature contains images of human life, providence, and divine attributes, but the only key to their understanding is redemption—There is harmony and freedom in expression between expressing body and expressed soul, and even more freedom of expression for divine Spirit—He turns (contra Herder’s naturalism) from human organic character to his judicial and magisterial dignity; here, Hamann draws on Aristotle: as transforming sensible material into spiritual revelation, man is living soil and seed, son of the soil and king of the field—Man can, must, and wants to learn to direct all his limbs and sense, where learning is neither invention or recollection—Human language is a function of possibility and necessity of freedom, and the human word is always a right or wrong answer to word of self-revealing Creator—God has revealed Himself to men in nature and in His Word, each declaring and supporting the other, though Scripture higher than nature. (p. 250): 2. God’s Word in creation finds interpretation in Incarnation, and this note rings on in Word of Spirit in Scripture; the immeasurable height and depth of this note are the simultaneity of exultation and abasement—God reveals His all in His condescension to our nothingness, His love and glory in utmost humility, both in creation and the Cross, God’s final kenosis; hence the foolishness of God in coming to our wretchedness, even in the form of sinfulness (following Luther)—The Spirit abases Himself through the writers of Scripture, the Son through the form of a servant, the Father through creation; to see God’s glory through these disguises requires not admiration, but the eyes of a friend or lover—God has emptied Himself to write a children’s book for us—Through the simpleness of childish stammering God’s simplicity becomes visible to the self-emptying simple act of faith; reason must pass away in Socratic/Pauline ignorance—Faith is the organ for the reality of the living hidden God, which allows us to transcend reason and good/evil to affirm the whole world and God in the world: an insight into the inner analogy of the aesthetic; God is everywhere, even in darkness, which is His creature—Against Enlightenment aesthetics that seek to imitate the beautiful in nature, Hamann seeks the whole of nature, especially its physicality, irrationality, Sturm und Drang, burlesque, the marvelous: like OT law, Enlightenment aesthetics must be transcended. (p. 256): 3. In the descent of the Logos, stress is placed on flesh, senses, physicality, on which faith rests and which make contact with reality—In receiving and creating images, man is an analogous fellow creator with God; hence the mythical and poetic vein in all religion which is offensive to philosophy (e.g. Genesis)—His anti-Gnosticism and anti-sensualism in favor of Christian senses—Theology was originally poetry, lost in the Fall; prior to the fall there was psychological unity of body and soul, God and man, word and dialogue, all things image and symbol—Realm of senses centered in begetting/knowing and giving birth, now sundered into dualism of reason and sensuality, expressed in knowledge of good and evil, as opposed to naïve acceptance of faith—Fall introduced contradiction into sex—Sexual lust and lust for knowledge—Reason’s contradictory dialectic is the dilemma between nothing and something, one and many, based in abstraction; thirst of knowledge, covered with a fig leaf by Kant, is usurpation of divine judgment, and must become dependent on Socratic/Pauline ignorance for salvation—Early tendency in Hamann to return to paradisial innocence regarding sex—We are the disgrace of God, and we cannot cover our shame except by Christ Who has already uncovered and borne disgrace in His flesh—Later Hamann turns from protology to eschatology, where sexual split between logos and life can be overcome—Christ as Bridegroom; eros finds shelter in agape—Language is begetting by spirit in nature, and by nature into spirit; hence Hamann’s critique of Kant’s split between sensibility and understanding, which nature joined, and which come from a single organic-spiritual root, whose original language was music, respiration, pulse (a non-Platonic Pythagorianism/Augustinianism). (p. 263): 4. Reason does not extend into decisive areas of truth; reason is entirely dependent on senses and cannot transcend them; it forms the matter of nature—Something truly new can only arise with revelation, not in reason, which is as old as and coextensive with nature—Only faith can grasp God and real historical man—Reason contradicts itself when it pretends to mystery—Contra Kant and in accord with Hume and Socratic ignorance, faith is immediate experience or sensation of reality proclaiming itself immediately and sensibly, but it also transcends into religious sphere—Language is freedom’s self-expression; the immediate experience of the world is word and dialogue—Experience and revelation are one, simply and in childlike manner abiding in the truth that is God, contra Jacobi who wants faith to burst out of the bonds of reason, the response to which is enjoyment not speculation, existence of things not of concepts—Experience of presence of things is overpowering, a presence of the Infinite, which transcends its vehicle, and so requires past and future, the spirits of observation and of prophecy—Philosophical genius undresses present objects so that they become concepts; poetic genius transfigures visions of past and future so they come present depictions; true attitudes of criticism and politics balance both, and consider reality in its historical, ontological, protological, eschatological dimensions, giving experience in all its profundity—Contra Mendelssohn, analogy between God and creatures is analogia temporum, requiring historical knowledge—Biblico-historical and existential interpretation of reality—Unbelief is the only sin against the spirit of true religion—Linguistic reading of Biblical events for our own lives—Golgotha as place of begetting and birth of highest art—The whole life of a Christian is the masterpiece—Hamann’s longing for the kingdom of Heaven to be incorporated into the structures of the state, and his observation of the degradation of the Enlightenment—Hamann’s aesthetic has its sole nodal point in Christ; coincidentia oppositorum (Bruno) as his final formula; truth appears abstractly, but in concreto it appears in the form of a contradiction—To read Christ, we need a new grammar. 3. The Evangelical Doctrine of Analogy (p. 273): The principle to which Hamann relates everything is analogy (Bengel, Young), attributed to Socrates as Kierkegaard attributed irony—‘Analogous’ means corresponding, in accordance with—God as first cause of world, so all that happens in world is divine and human; there is similarity of word between God and men—Man’s obedience to God’s word as analogia fidei—The infinite wrongness of man’s relation to God finds redemption through communicatio idiomatum in the Spirit; everything in nature and history must and can become a redemptive image, organs of Christ’s revelation—The relation of poetic disorder to disorder of Spirit cannot be said to be strictly either an analogon in itself, or just one through the Spirit—Genuine prophets among the heathens—Nature and supernature are in a relation of hiddenness and openness: poetic inspiration is hidden prophecy, language is hidden divine revelation, human senses conceal the Incarnation, sexuality is hidden mystery of eros of Christ and Church, genius is hidden Pneuma, beauty hidden eschatological transformation—All Christian speech and thought should be based on Scripture—Limitations on his thought. SOLOVIEV 1. Vision and Form of Work (p. 279): Soloviev was heir to all that occurred in century since Hamann e.g. French Revolution, German Idealism, Feuerbach, Marx, Comte, Darwin, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Hartmann, expansion of East-West dialogue—He has an urgency and level of thinking like Hegel—His system aims at bringing a whole ethics and theology to perfection in universal theological aesthetics, a vision of God’s coming to be in the world—Alone among Russians he gives an aesthetic system, for he had a feeling for the Roman form of the Church, from an ethical-social perspective—He became Catholic because it linked: 1. Hegelian idea that subject is person only because it becomes objective spirit, which mediates subject to what is outside it, and has structure and form, the latter of which must become universal not nationalistic, unlike slavophile Orthodoxy; 2. Hegelian law of process as the progression determination of undetermined, so that determinacy and universality develop simultaneously—Process and evolution are the concepts in which temporal/historical consciousness encounter metaphysical question of meaning; it stands at center of Soloviev’s system: meaning of world’s evolution is development of humanity and world into cosmic body of Christ, realization of eschatological mutuality between Word and Sophia, who through Word becomes His Body and Bride—Divine Idea is progressively embodied in world; God’s limitless determinacy conquers abyss of yearning cosmic potentiality—Basic model is integration, not Hegelian/Protestant dialectic; integration preserves what is transcended, the eternal ideal kernel of each person, including bodily form: no absorption in single subject—Soloviev draws on all systems of thought, even Gnosticism and materialism, integrating them by finding their place in the whole—His concept of God is beyond personalism/free hen/Judaism and pantheism/pan/Greek—Participation by grace requires opening in full consciousness of finite spirit to God’s total plenitude—Schelling’s Idealism set Soloviev free from limited forms of medieval and Eastern Christianity—As Valentinus built Christian doctrines into alien system of Gnosticism, Soloviev integrates gnosis into Christianity, also joining Indian thought to Greek—India and Schopenhauer present negative account of pan-unity and freedom, world as infinite potentiality—Greece presents God as Idea, which answer the Drang—Plato cannot follow eros to its proper conclusion, for he does not know what begetting in the beautiful is, which requires conversion by Biblical religion and descending agape: in Christianity, Plato’s ideal world is transformed into living, active, incarnate Kingdom of God; here God seeks us, rather than just us seeking Him—Greek Patristic thought’s definitive form is in Maximus the Confessor, who makes Chalcedonian dogma the foundation of entire natural and supernatural structure of the world; to this, Soloviev adds German Idealist idea of dynamic evolution—Maximus and Soloviev on human freedom—Soloviev’s similarities to Husserl, Blondel, Scheler (but without collapsing into dualism of impotent idea and powerful spirit), Freud, Teilhard de Chardin (but with apocalypse, lacking in the latter)—His use of both German/post- Cartesian Idealism, and Feuerbach’s materialist humanist critique of the former: since human spirit developed from nature, material aspect of man need not refuse to be justified, since Christianity sees our material nature as necessary foundation for realization of divine truth; this view sets us free from slavish materialism—Christological, not materialist, socialism—Schema is encounter between divine and human, both in their maximal concrete fullness, a sacred marriage/syzygy between Christ and Sophia—History of Sophiology from Valentinus to Kabbala to Böhme, Swedenborg, Baader—Sophia is eternal feminine in world, object of God’s love, essence of the world, emerging in its proper selfhood in Mary, then broadening to be real principle of redeemed humanity and creation—Sophiology and Mariology, apparitions of Sophia and Mary—Theosophy joins philosophy and theology, not absorbing them into Idealist absolute knowledge, but based on idea that free acts of God are revelation of highest rationality: everything in history and nature then is intelligible in light of redemption and divinization in Christ, so Christian doctrine can be developed into perfect philosophical system—We know the actual reality of Christ the center by experience, not understanding, which only knows its necessity; God’s essence is accessible to reason and experience, His existence only to faith—Soloviev’s friendships with Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Leontiev—His loss of faith in progress, and turn to the apocalypse standing between us and the ultimate Kingdom of God, which shows his opposition to Hegelian dialectic—For Hegel, evil is ignorance; for Soloviev, saying No to love, which explodes cosmic progress in a battle—Three periods of his life, and a review of his books—Primacy of ethics as integration of God and world, and identity of ethics and aesthetics—Task of humanization is solution to an aesthetic question. 2. Logic and Metaphysics (p. 300): Only the independent subject can philosophize self-reflexively, an activity with as much reality as the subject—Subject belongs to common nature and sociopolitical life, which the subject cannot invent; the subject can move outside himself in aesthetic work—Suprapersonal relations e.g. noesis-noema should not be identified with subject himself; rationalism (Descartes, Kant, Hegel) and empiricism (Bacon, Hume, Mill) have absolutized either concept or experience, and so turned formal element into reality, or abstract function, e.g. reason or will, into concrete performer of that function—Matter cannot be pure extension or passivity, but requires active principle in it (Leibniz)—Schopenhauer breaks through cognitive formalism, but pure will too is a contradiction—Crisis in Western philosophy comes in allowing self-reflexive finite subject to make claims as conditions for its possibility: 1. On object side, a need for a total reality that is volitional but not identical with particular subject as real condition for subject’s existence (world-soul); 2. On subject side, a need for a subjective reality in which two moments of finite cognition, form and content, become identical; This is God—2 is grounded in interior experience of faith or direct intuitive perception—3 postulates for comprehensive ontology: 1. Commitment to achievements of modern philosophy regarding world process, without identifying subject of process with God, but rather which subject called world-soul, cosmic will, humanity or Sophia; 2. God’s existence as other than this makes possible love: God is for Himself as totality of all outside Himself; 3. Individual ego degenerates into unreal formalism when separate from God, and must recapture fullness through integration. (p. 305): 1. God is independent and unconditioned reality, unlimited by others but able to be Himself in any other reality, sovereign over others, not their actual being—He is Father as ground of all that is, Son as paradigm of existing reality, Spirit as what unites these (following Schelling)—Finite subject can attain God only by subjectivity transcending itself toward Father and in movement toward absolute object, the Son—Son is perfect reproduction and self-presentation of totality of the Father—As Good, He wishes to give freedom and power to His potentialities, letting it attain real plurality, allowing chaos to share His life—Early writings seem to make creation a necessity, mitigated in later writings—God’s relations to Himself yield His Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, but so do His revelation in the otherness of the world, where Beauty is God’s full actualization of selfhood in the other, His full materialization: Being affirms ideal as Good and bestows on it through mediation of Truth a realization in Beautiful—This ideal reality/totality is Sophia, but does ideality eternally include reality? This question is insoluble for Soloviev, for in God idea is His own reality, which draws imperfect creation to Himself—In Logos is world of ideas where the pure intelligences have only ideal individuation, in Spirit is sphere of responsive activities that constitute the spiritual world where spirits exist in themselves subsistently—Personal is properly ideal, generic is material—Sophia is divine substance qua pan-unity, body of the divine, including the power of uniting fragmented being of the world as feminine consummation of every entity, not as active divine Logos, existing eternally substantially in God but coming into actuality through progressive realization in the world through the vehicle of the world-soul, defined through tension between God and His Kingdom—Humanity is three-fold: man, woman, and society; its union with God is 3-fold though forming one divine human essence: Sophia incarnate in Christ, feminine complement in the Virgin, universally extended by Petrine Church—Maria-Ecclesia is personal and social form of Sophia—World-soul as structured by Sophia and as Sophia herself, as complete universal and individual organism, total humanity as eternal body of God and soul of the world. (p. 310): 2. Coincidence of fall and creation i.e. creatures’ emergence from God and ideal form (Maximus)—World-soul is subject of world-process, which begins from state of fragmentation, which involves guilt and turning from God—World-soul is uniform inner nature of world as real subordinate principle with psychic nature of aspiring and imagining, as source of determination for atoms; fundamental energy goes out of itself and makes room for others, becomes real for others and others for it, so no pure matter or mechanism, but matter’s blind striving always includes tendencies to receive form and to resist it and move toward chaos—Astral, geological, and biological evolution toward humanity are under activity of Logos, such that the matrix of forms gains deeper interiority in each of its products; impossible to say if its products are more from the Logos or the world-soul—Original striving matter does not know what it should aspire to, and Logos cannot realize its ideal purpose in divided matter; both require mediation of world-soul—There cannot be a single act of creation, and evolution requires pain and fatigue, because of freedom; world-soul first becomes free in man, and all that precedes is process of hominization—The fall of the world-soul and the fragmentation of elements is fall of (eternal) humanity (Kabbala)—Man possesses elements linking him to natural world, ideal consciousness of unity linking him to God, and freedom because he unites exclusively neither with one nor the other and by which he can will to exist beyond himself like God—Universal humanity is a general and individual man, by whose sinfulness humanity is scattered; single human nature is split into many individual natures (Maximus)—Temporal world process depends on supra-temporal decision of same reality i.e. eternal humanity; unified essence of man entered time, in which preexistence and immortality are same—World-process is Sophia coming to be, like Augustine’s City of God. (p. 316): 3. Creation established pure matter as matrix of all things, after which creative Logos/ideal world/divine Sophia bestows form; creation is removal of God’s triumphant power by giving freedom to chaos (Augustine, Schelling) so that finite essences can have their own life, though they are not indifferent to His will but remold it to conform to their particularity, so that His will becomes both His expression and belonging to objectified form in its particularity—Soloviev’s account of will is similar to Thomist limitatio actus essendi per essentiam ut potentiam, with all the problems involved in this limitation; world-soul is divine act of being transcending itself in the Other—World is God Who is coming to be vis-à-vis God Who eternally exists contemporary to all things; God is wholeness in and outside Himself—Difficulties arise in the notion of the separation and taking for self by creatures of the divine will—Evil enters world through fall, seen in contradiction between infinite blind urge and finite forms, leading to life based on sexual desire, killing to survive, ending in death; the world’s condition is evil since all things burn with hellfire of insatiable craving, and only from God can the world receive definition and limit—Adam’s 3 conditions: 1. Wholly real in God and potential in himself; 2. Real in himself and as such only having potential ideal reality in God; 3. In Christ, real in Himself and in God, in 2 natures—Clinging to ego and separateness puts individual existence outside the truth and condemns it to death, by wanting to be both all reality and one’s own self, in opposition to corporate fulfillment of nature; overcome in Christ and Mystical Body, at best masked in sexual relation—Authentic love is beyond both marriage and negative asceticism—Matter as absolute separation is a limit concept, will as kernel of life is in reaction to this, cosmic process is deliverance of will from its perverse potentiality, perfected only in historical/apocalyptic decision for or against Good by man—Stages of cosmic process modeled on Schelling and Hegel—God creates only through world-soul—Stages of world are steps leading to man and Christ—Forms of matter: gravity, ether and its active electricity, organic forms, man; each represent Logos in different ways—Then evolution of idea of God: abstract Indian, Greek, Jewish, Christian; each corresponds to stage of matter—What is original in Christianity is not ideal structure, but its embodiment in a personality—Christ is Godmanhood’s unique all-transcending peak, grounded in reciprocal sacrifice in God entering man and vice versa; this is perfection of human love and freedom—In His kenosis, the Logos determines the human principle by interior self-limitation, not extrinsically; divine kenosis gives human kenosis space in God so that human consciousness can entirely give itself to God, freeing man from all sinful isolation, through loving dedication, not Promethean will of Absolute Spirit—This kenosis requires God’s two-fold will—Renunciation of a glory deployable at will is attainment of authentic glory in all-conquering love—The law of spiritual man’s being is that he gains his life by losing it, and thereby gains also the divine and worldly total unity itself. 3. Ethics and Ecclesiology (p. 325): Realization is the becoming real of ideal, and descent of heaven to earth, setting man free for God by God becoming man—Theoria is transcended as God reveals Himself as realissimum—God’s becoming real man is historical and empirical fact, not able to be transcended rationalistically—Worldly reality is unfolded and secured ethically: to exist, man must act, and so his existence must have meaning, which requires a giver of meaning; we can do good if we believe in the Good, which is presupposed by all religious ethics—Kantian rigor and eudaimonism only each take one aspect of total phenomenon—Basic phenomena of shame, sympathy, and pietas support virtues, duties, and human integration—Kingdom of God requires evolution of man from state of savagery; question is why Christ comes so early, not so late—Soloviev is not Pelagian, and his view threatens to dissolve nature in grace, but his goal is to integrate all freedoms in one Mystical Body—Integration of humanity bound to reality of Church, God-Man really living in community of love realized ethically and sacramentally, pattern of ideal universal form of Kingdom of God, and natural humanity transubstantiated—Everything depends on integration of humanity into Church so it can receive share in form of divine-human universality, and on Church’s integration into humanity to shed the abstractness that is foreign to it; Church has form of universality i.e. non-nationalism, but the form is not itself abstract, but culminates in papal infallibility and is grounded in Mary, embodied in concrete order; Church is most real through love—Church is above natural organisms, but shares with them qualities belonging to all life in the world e.g. a body, which involves: 1. Component elements; 2. Organic form; 3. Vital energy—In Body of Christ, elements are humans, form is Church, vital energy is Divine Spirit; through form, the Spirit elevates humans above their limited existence; invulnerable vital organs are Christ, Mary, and saints—Ethical task of all in the Church is conforming their life to divine life—All provided by Church is unconditional, its form includes: 1. True faith; 2. Right relation to all through hierarchy; 3. Human destiny to rule cosmos and mold it into Body of God, for which Church carries the seed in the Eucharist—Church is Kingdom in state of becoming, not fulfillment; grace has always been at work in the world, but it is visible since Christ: not all in Church is divine, but the divine is visible in it—There must be an interpenetration of immutable structure with living evolution of same structure—Visible forms in Church were at first imperfect, though whole plant was present in the seed—Church is a free theocracy, not an aristocracy or democracy—Great Schism, the cause of Rome, and Eastern Church’s self-enslavement to the State and consequent loss of catholicity, confusing the essential in ecclesiastical structure with the contingent—Peter the Great, the schism with the Old Believers, and the opening to the West and German Idealism—Rome is living form of the sacred, counterpart to frozen Byzantine icon, but is more Christ-like the more it is like a servant; Rome’s temptation is exploiting power to achieve spiritual goals, leading inevitably to Protestantism, which does not have character of a Christian Church because it refuses an objective universal ecclesial form—Rome is necessary for the Church, but the Church cannot be united by force—Greco-Russian East preserves past, Rome the present, Protestantism the future, though this view differs from Tractarian branch theory; only pure love, ethical self-denial by persons and nations, can overcome these problems—Soloviev’s profession of faith to the Roman Church on behalf of all Russians. 4. Aesthetics and Apocalyptic (p. 338): Rome has the form of catholicity that alone can unite the world and lead it to the Kingdom of God; this form should be applied in the free subordination of states to Peter—Realized secular achievements should be opened to a unified self-aware Church in free reciprocity, united in a total free theocracy—Soloviev’s theoretical work sought to open the whole of philosophy to aesthetics; aesthetics as realization of good and true, a science of the apocalypse, which is close to glory: free union of God and man realized in all humanity—In early work, apocalypse reduced to aesthetics as ultimate harmony; early work defined by overcoming power to say No—Notion of historical process is too abstract, and, even if entirely guided by Logos, history might not be progressive; room must be made for serious creaturely free spirit, who alone can be demonic—Total aesthetic scheme is God as God-man and man as man-God opened to each other in apocalyptic depth, though which reciprocity there is justification of the good—Resurrection of the dead was so Soloviev’s focus that he overlooked the realism of death; realm of death and sex is sub-spiritual, and the earthly crucifixion is viewed in terms of painless heavenly crucifixion (Valentinus), the spiritual power that overcomes all suffering. (p. 342): Realization of pan-unity in external actuality is absolute beauty, a task for humanity realized through art, technology, and mysticism/theurgy—Against classicist idealist aesthetics—Goethe and Dante’s visions not sufficiently living and concrete—Genuine embodiment of idea necessary for perfect beauty e.g. literary realism: Dostoyevsky as pledge of future poetics—Ideal being merits to be and so shall be, and has unity: 1. Elements are complementary and in solidarity, not exclusive; 2. Elements maintain their existence on common ground of whole; 3. Ground does not suppress elements, but gives the full play by developing itself in them; this being is true, good, beautiful, i.e. love, and in any of 1-3 are lacking, falsehood, evil, ugliness arise—This idea of beauty eternally real in God, and in Kingdom of God; Christ (Logos Incarnate) and Mary (Sophia Incarnate) represent perfect primordial form of beauty—Christian love is union of eros and agape, and true, good, beautiful are its images—Progress allows beautiful to be perfected as free living organism, the basis of eschatological hope for cosmos—Beauty is objective in form and subjective in experience, encountered anywhere spiritual reality overcomes material and makes it transparent, with ever greater interiority, both physical (ugliness covered with beautiful exterior) and spiritual; requires embodiment worthy of existence, ultimately in resurrection—Human art does not copy nature, but imitates natura natrurans that forms images; true and good press toward embodiment—Only one who believes in immortality and resurrection can ascribe ultimate meaning to art; otherwise, one should see it as subjective illusion of imagination—Today, no third way between Christian hope/faith and materialism—Authentic personal love of man and wife as central theurgic work of art, aspiring to a superhuman purposive wholeness, above enslavement to concerns of species and sexuality, with no direct proportionality between sex and eros; resumes Western theme of androgynous unity in humanity (Plato, Dante, Böhme, Novalis, Baader): eros can perceive ideality of personality of beloved i.e. how God sees him, and strive to make it real, according unconditional significance to beloved which no empirical or temporal nature as such can have, and eternal meaning for his love, restoring God’s image in material world—Model of androgynous eros subsumed under twofold norm and prototype of God’s relation to world as divine Sophia, and Christ’s to the Church as incarnate Sophia; love must be open to whole world—Late Soloviev has apocalyptic foreboding of immanent incarnation of evil in history—Individual salvation requires collective salvation—Skepticism regarding effectiveness of Tolstoyan non-resistance—Modern Christianity makes itself boring through moralization—Historically, apart from resurrection, Christ’s effects are more evil than good—Antichrist blurs edges between morality and the cross, progress and resurrection, will bring peace not sword—Soloviev’s story of the Antichrist and ecumenical resistance to him—Soloviev abandons idea that the process comes to perfection within history; Christ Himself is the integration of all things. HOPKINS 1. Oxford, Ignatius and Scotus (p. 353): Hopkins is in great contrast to Soloviev; he administers English inheritance, but retains great freedom—His early Romantic, Victorian, Pre-Raphaelite influence; nowhere else had the word ‘beauty’ so magical a sound as in England at that time—English theology, because of its empiricism, retained native rights of imagery in religious thought (Coleridge, Newman, Farrer, Mascall), unlike in continental conceptualism; English thought is based around mistrust of universal concepts, which receives particular, non-necessary expression in e.g. Locke, Hume, Wordsworth, Pre-Raphaelites, Oxford mythologists and Platonists—Hopkins set aside 19th and 18th centuries (Swinburne, Browning, Keats, Blake) for Milton, Purcell, Shakespeare, Scotus—The key to these is their penetration through all laws, Platonic ideas, Aristotelian forms to incomparability of this individual; universals only touch ground of reality in haecceitas: glory of God shines out in the unique and irreducible—Ancient consideration of form in general is just preparation for unique oneness of individual form that emerges in Christ encounter between absolutely personal and free God and fully personal creature, an experience that leads to Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises in which all clouds of myth are parted to reveal hard reality where alone glory of Being shines forth—No conflict between his religious and artistic vocation (Clemen), complete congruence between theoretical concept and poetical conceptus (Rinn)—Through his isolation, he knew himself to be a beginning—Underlying experience of primeval, wild English landscape, not cultural, romantic, or mythic landscape; to achieve impression of harsh, brute beauty, he developed sprung rhythm, based on rational foundations—Authentic school for poet’s senses is language of nature expressing itself free of hindrance, not romantic feeling, with a desire for objectivity laying claim to the whole man—Mutilations of pure, wild natural form—The ascending bird as Hopkins’ signature—All human culture drowned in nature’s wildfire—Four stages to Hopkins’ life. (p. 362): 1. At Oxford, he was at home in world of kalokagathia of the Greeks, which dominated every sphere of existence, which totality English poets always had in view—Ruskin’s goal of total aesthetics, to discern all the forms of the world as objectively as possible, from scientific observation to Christian contemplation; ethics and sociology subordinated to soul’s harmony, against industrialism and isolation of economics from human harmony, robbing man of capacity to understand nature as it reveals itself as the glory of God—Early work on harmonic laws and anti-positivist/psychologist/materialist metaphysics—Hopkins foresaw return of these concepts: 1. Return of type/species, rather than pure transitionalism of all forms, presupposing fixed quantitative and qualitative difference, providing form and meaning to continuum and development; 2. Basic forms must be starting point for thought; 3. Opposition to atomic personalism—His great admiration for Aristotle, for whom Platonic idea is entirely incarnate in nature; he retained this even when for him Aristotelian morphe became Christian personal self—His coining of notions of ‘inscape’ and ‘instress’ in an essay praising Parmenides; with these concepts, being is experience en-selfed as person—To words belong their prepossession of feeling, definition, and extension; first has to do with instress, the deep unique act and power of things that establishes things and holds them together, which requires in subject an answering stress, so that he can have communion with them, experience them from within, and through feeling of their nature find the word that exactly expresses them—Inscape is form of a thing, released from its creative source and shaped and held by it, from which the whole form can be brought to contemplation; Hopkins aspired to the inscape of things in art, inscape is an objective word, beautiful in itself. (p. 367): 2. Negative theology, not inscape, dominated his Anglican period and led to his conversion; a focus on night and poverty—Theological incoherence of Tractarian position on Rome—Bad aesthetic taste in Catholicism, but closed aesthetic world in Oxford—Hopkins’ concern for the poor of England, and his somewhat Communism; his abhorrence for miserable cities—His self-offering to the real God of the Cross and of this fearful world, and his offering of his love of beauty and art—Early poems have immanent aesthetic—The abyss of ascent to God in early Jesuit years, beyond all worldly forms, so that later perception of glory of God in nature and Church is pure, non-necessary gift. (p. 370): 3. No convincing poet since Spee, Balde, Bidermann—Hopkins’ refusal to Dixon to have his poems published—Poetry and culture as means to God’s glory—Greatness in certain areas, but not brilliance, of famous Jesuits (Campion, Suarez, Bourdaloue, Ignatius)—He urged his friends (Bridges, Dixon, Patmore) to publish and that poets should seek spiritual power for moral reasons, but claimed for himself the opposite—His failure in the order, including because of his Scotist leanings—His melancholy and loss of inspiration; his justification of all this in light of Christ, his vows, and Jesuit indifference and obedience, including regarding his poems—Conflict between divine consolation in prayer and poetic inspiration; first could overflow into second, but he did not will it—He was ashamed of his poems, because of his Kantian-Victorian crypto-Jansenism (Devlin)—The God of majesty and fire is also the God of tenderness, the wounded Heart of the world—His deep love for the Exercises, but more for Scotist than Ignatian reasons. (p. 374): 4. Reading Scotus was the beginning of the confirmation of his own vision of nature—Scotus was first to maintain philosophically the uniqueness of things, without dissolving them into universal laws, forms, or ideas; Hopkins’ object was to express or evoke the irreducibly unique, which had the danger of oddness—Where distinctiveness is emphasized, the world becomes essentially surprising—Scotus’ vision outstripped his power of expression, leading to his becoming disregarded—The centrality of the mystery of the “I”, the being of the self in its determined irreducible uniqueness, the proof of God’s free sovereign creative act; the distinct incommunicable taste of the self, without any similarity to others—He hypothesizes that the universal spirit of nature or world (Averroes, Hegel) is enselfed in my self—The center and periphery of the self—God the highest self indwells all created persons, but only because He has freely singled out these selves and set them in being—Myth in here transcended not by demythologization but by transmythologization: because of the immanence of the absolute, the free self in all determined selves is the truth of the impossible, imagined, romantic self as a whole—God’s utterance of Himself in Himself is His Word; His utterance outside Himself is this world, whose purpose is Him and whose work is to name and praise Him (Bonaventure, Scotus)—We must move beyond philosophical analogia haecceitatis et personalitatis to theological problem of who the self is in the face of God’s gracious election in Christ. 2. God’s Thought of the World and Vision of the World (p. 377): Self is intrinsic oneness of a thing, prior to its being; person is a rational self—Self needs nature to exist, but, as an intention of the Creator, self is already something positive and distinct from every other possible self—Same nature can be imparted to different selves with different destinies, but the act through which God elects a self in its uniqueness is indivisible and imparticipable—Personal self must determine itself as the self it is (freedom of pitch) within the area that nature grants it (freedom of play) to which belongs a range of objects from which to choose (freedom of field)—We should choose what God has chosen for us from eternity (Ignatius, Scotus); contra Thomism, we do not have a freedom of indifference without constraints of pre- and self-determination—For each person, we must take seriously the videre personas and videre locum of Ignatian contemplation—Sin is to fail to choose what is chosen by God, to murder God, and so related to the Cross—The core of our personal pitch is in the supernatural, requiring gratia praeveniens, concomitans, perficiens/elevans/uniens; prevenient grace operates on the voluntas ut natura which moves naturally to the Good, rehearsing our consent in us, opening a new plane of freedom for us—Our decision for this highest self is a mere sigh or wish of consent, and an acknowledgment of prevenient grace in us, the infinitesimal free act on our part that bridges the gulf—Links between 3 graces and the Trinity and the stages of Christian life—The sacrifice of the Son is God’s first thought of the world (Bonaventure, Scotus), in actual world order, in which God’s self-emptying of His Trinitarian being is manifest externally—For Scotus, quantity secondarily signifies being of parts outside themselves, but primarily the relatedness of parts to one another in a being i.e. harmony or corporeal form, so God has power to cause Eucharistic Body of Christ to be preset at any point in space and time, and so possibly there was the Eucharist before the Incarnation; the eternally universal temporality and spatiality of God sacrificing Himself in matter is primary—Christ’s embodiment in the angelic world; simultaneity of aevum and time—All cosmic realms, even angelic sin, based on Christ’s incarnate sacrifice—Whole cosmos has Christological form; Christ can come and truly is through all the raging of the elements—Christ undergirds chaos in His descent, but also determines decisive selving of all persons who achieve their pitch in victory over self for Him, which for the elect is determined beforehand, while the damned have but half being and are shut up in their own selves, experiencing them as “myself unholy”—Christ is enselved in all His members; this is theological center of Hopkins’ aesthetics: all truth grounded in Christ and all beauty belongs to Him—The power of beauty, especially human beauty, can be bewitching but also safeguard our speechlessness at the sight of things, especially persons, which we encounter but let be for eternal beauty and grace—Christ as ethical and aesthetic judge—God’s glance is the glance of His grace and election, where man’s sigh of ascent is included in His picture of election—The true instress of all things is Christ, and His grace and Spirit is the stress within them, and God Who has the true taste of the self in His mouth; God’s stress comes to us mediated by the temporal history of the Cross, which is imposed by men by grasped by God as a sign—The great sacrifice is the light of faith—Christ prays to us more than we to Him, He admires us more and more justly than we do ourselves, He sees in us true i.e. His beauty, grasped undialectically and un-Protestantly—The interweaving by grace of the human/Marian act of assent into the Redeemer’s act of assent, which is one with the assent of Trinitarian love; Mary is thus everywhere present, like the air we breathe, and in her all creation is objectively beautiful and worthy of God. 3. Sacramental Poetry (p. 390): One can only read natures and selves objectively in relation to Christ, in Whom they are integrated and from Whose glory their glory flows, Who is their ultimate inscape and instress, and for Whom they are fashioned and determined, without confusing nature and grace in this account of their concrete telos—The living Christ stands in place of the eternal idea shining through the phenomena—Christ as hero—Christianity as inspiration expressed ethically as love of neighbor and aesthetically as exact experience and interpretation of forms; what is interpreted is images not concepts, poetically—Reading the forms of nature subsumes aesthetics, mysticism, and science under higher Christian law—Creative Christian unity with things is higher than Romantic or Idealist, founded in faith and sacrifice—Hopkins’ theological language was unintelligible to Bridges, Patmore, Dixon, but he felt language must be reequipped to express the unique and extraordinary even if not all at first go along with it—Language must reach beyond immanence because mystery of God is made flesh, and is not something incomprehensible behind the forms of the world—Dogmatic definition does not eliminate mystery—Mystery of God takes form in the world through the sacramental, which is more than the symbolic, containing the stress of the primordial form in itself—Mystery of Christ is not allegory, but of infinite depth to all the levels of Being, and infinitely dramatic event in that kenosis redeems and deifies matter and man—Cross as fundamental ontological presupposition of all natural processes—Simple Christian cosmic experience of God immediately visible in beauty of the world, similar to Claudel—In the encounter of nature and beholder the mystery of the great sacrifice is thrown up in each of them; the contrariety and perverseness of things proclaims the glory of God—Impossible to say where natural perception of God ends and supernatural, dogma-presupposing perception begins, due to faith’s deep involvement in flesh and blood—Transparency of nature to mystery of salvation—Mary as mediatrix—Poor men and women as sacramental form of God, in their threatenedness and their homecoming to God; in the neighbor, obligation and inclination, ethical self-transcendence and aesthetic rapture are one—Shipwreck poems: the shattering of all worldly images, yielding final picture of the sacrament of the world as perishing and ascending to God, Resurrection in death. PÉGUY 1. The Basic Pattern (p. 400): Charles Péguy conducts within Catholic sphere a polemic against systematization like that of Kierkegaard; like the latter he is existential, but more radically rooted in the Bible, and so avoids separation of aesthetics, ethics, and religion—More than for Hamann, for Péguy, the ethical is identical to aesthetic on the basis of Incarnation: the spiritual must put on flesh—Takes up Augustinian-Anselmian rectitudo in his justice and justesse—He unfolds what is Christian in extreme left-wing Hegelianism, not by synthesis or compromise, but by living form, with fundamental concepts pur and pureté—What drove Péguy from the Church also brought him back, not by development, but by approfondissement, undergirded by the mystery of his secure character despite his personal trials, the Catholic renaissance occurring in him as a sinner, a man of the parish, not a saint—How this was seen by Gide, Alain-Fournier, Copeau, Rolland—His work reaches out to pagan, Jew, Christian; its aesthetics inseparable from ethics and religion—He is within the Church in partibus infidelium and so outside her too, rooted in depths where world and Church meet and interpenetrate; he places Church firmly in the world, against Platonism, with a clarity of vision for the world as it really is in its grandeur et misère, in Pascal’s wake—He plunges below secondary oppositions: Communist and traditionalist, internationalist and nationalist, Left and Right, ecclesiastical and anticlerical, mystic and polemicist; all converge on a central point where he indulges an all-pervading humor (better than Chesterton or Claudel) and peasant shrewdness—He is an individual (like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche) rooted in family and race—What nation is naturally, communion of saints is in Christian sphere, where saints have stamp of authoritative vocation, with focal shape of Joan of Arc, intersection of secular and sacred, and her related exemplars Louis and de Joinville—Representation is presenting oneself by making someone else present, standing forth on behalf of all men, solidarity, love as service: here belongs ethical and aesthetic life, the life of saint and hero in relation to sinners or people, or sinner representing saint or hero by depicting and imitating him—Joan and Christ do what is spiritual in worldly fashion; Christ fulfills eternal concern of Israel, obscured by Platonism (returning us to Irenaeus)—Church is people of all mankind, in solidarity with all; solidarity allows analogy between secular order with genius and hero, and sacred order with martyr and saint—Problem of eternal damnation for some—Charité can only understand itself as solidarité—A religion that can resign itself to damnation of some without regret is egoistic, bourgeois, capitalistic—Earlier Christianity laid hold to the idea that the same blood and conscience animates whole Body, they lived solidarity in their friendship, a vertical structure of representation and rootedness in life of the people, not a horizontal “dust-storm” of individuals—Péguy both attacks Augustinian-bourgeois charité and calls for Christian organic form of society rooted in depth of living spirit—No viable aesthetic in individualistically abandoning some to damnation and aesthetically justifying it (Augustine, Dante); a viable aesthetic stands or falls with principle of hope and solidarity—Two wars in Péguy’s life, carried on with others: 1. Against clericalist bourgeoisie, socialism as program for changing world (OT) and as personal solidarity (Christ’s Cross); 2. Against philistine anti-clerical socialism, solidarity is best achieved as Biblical charity—Christianity needs an earthly socioeconomic revolution for the sake of eternal salvation and personal freedom, against the power politics of the socialists; revolution is deeper entrenchment in wellsprings of life—His loneliness after leaving the Church and then also leaving socialism, but his defense of his work—His retreat from direct involvement in 1905-1909 to better view the event of the present—His inspiration drawn from Antiquity, Christianity, French history from middle ages through the Revolution—Modern world characterized by view of man as calculating intellect, Kantian formalism, Hegelian systematizing, over-specialized German philology, psychology, and sociology instead of philosophy, loss of relation with God and roots, shallow victory of math, progress, and money; critique of modern non-culture similar to Nietzsche, Bloy, Chesterton—He resisted pacifism and internationalism—Renan as the embodiment of apostasy and father of modern insubstantiality in his dreams of absolute progress toward divine consciousness by way of cosmic evolution (similar to Teilhard)—Constructive ressourcement needed, hence his mystery plays and poems on Chartes in which interpenetration of flesh and spirit is realized in Mary—His distance from the sacraments due to his marriage; prayer and sacrament as two halves, the distinct character of each sacrament, emphasizing Eucharist and confession—The demand for purity in his life and experience of falling in love with another woman preserved him from any aesthetic transfiguration of earthly eros and led him to true Christian resignation; his faithfulness to an indissoluble marriage without any transfiguration; this experience no less important for his aesthetic than the relationships of Kierkegaard, Dante, Claudel, without here a transfiguration of or flight from eros—His penetration into the tenderness of God’s heart. 2. Prophecy and the True Israel (p. 415): Péguy’s destiny and thought are bound to Israel—Two major impressions at start of his career were Dreyfus affair and philosophy of Bergson, which gave him his categories mystique/original intuition/lived truth and politique/subordination of truth to other ends/untruth—Bergson showed him direct intuitive contact with reality beyond all conceptualization—Péguy was working his way toward the Jewish prophetic tradition (Bernard-Lazare): the misunderstanding of the prophets by Israel yet the leading of Israel by the prophets—Jewish virtue summed up in exiledness that is half terror, half courage—Only the prophetic vision can attain the springs of history deeper than what scientific history attains, can accompany the movements of spiritual reality—History of the Dreyfus affair, symbol of world’s injustice, of mystique betrayed by politique, of a people falling into mortal sin—Sin and guilt can be an enveloping reality for an individual or a nation, rather than a finite act, as in modern world—Jews as prophetic race condemned to reality and to playing heroes, living at intersection of horizontal and vertical (like Joan and the everyday Christian), but fear their own greatness, and so use politique against their own mystique; when Christian evade the pain of the intersection, Jews remind them of their mission—NT is to OT as nature to grace; neither former term can be disposed, and wealth is opposed to both, and God’s wrath to wealth—Attaining right balance between spirit and flesh starts with fact that Jesus was a Jew, in solidarity with His people and their destiny; the clergy have tended to disrupt this balance toward the spiritual, and so abandon Israel, but Jesus was inseparably spiritual and worldly—Spirit as a source of nourishment, a force for transformation—His friendships with Jews e.g. Benda—Bergson as inspiration: 1. Through creative evolutionary optimism leading to Teilhard de Chardin; 2. Bringing Aquinas to life in conjunction with Blondel, through Maritain, Sertillanges, Maréchal; 3. Péguy not interested in either, but in historical existence of humanity and religious thinking of Bergson, which matured in Bergson under Péguy’s influence—Reality is inexhaustible, contra discursive science; courage to engage with reality directly and without defense is humility, the pristine impulse of science (Husserl)—Choosing as intuition and artistic medium—Prophetic books witness to coincidence of ethical and aesthetic, interior spiritual decision and exterior national political decision; all ancient poetry is sacral, but in Israel without mythological fog—God’s pronouncement in situation of decision becomes one with potential precision of human as he makes determinate decision for himself and so becomes one with immanent condition of the world; prophecy as knowing what God’s righteousness demands in any instant and how to assign all things their place in the overall pattern—His journal of public, mutual confession: externalizing oneself opens one to the signs of the times—Analogy and common roots between poetic and religious inspiration so long as poet tells a story for whole nation, and is not a private aesthete—Beauty is found only in exact self-presentation of what emerges from accuracy of innermost vision—Genuine exactitude as found in ancient Greece has given way to mathematical rigidity; classical equilibrium between pagan and Christian worlds, ethics and aesthetics (Corneille): the exact and classical is what is correctly placed in relation to an axis, the place of justesse, where heaven and earth, time and eternity, spirit and flesh penetrate each other as realities that internally require and condition one another, a point achievable by decisive involvement of whole life, not by process of thinking—One cannot enjoy Christianity or see it as culturally viable (Action Française) without deciding for faith and discipleship—Seeing beauty of faith requires eyes of faith—Anyone who totally commits himself will find his way to the ground of reality (Descartes not Kant)—In the un-universalizable enterprises of selfhood we alter ourselves and reality—Artistic inspiration is directed to inspiration, and ancient art has its place in Advent hope; incarnational tendency is found even in post-Christian naïve paganism, as in Hugo’s story of Boaz and Ruth: Incarnation not as being communicated from eternal realm, but as emerging bodily maturation from pagan and Jewish realms, as ultimate point of infusing of eternal into temporal as seen in Matthew and Luke’s genealogies of Jesus from begetting of creation—Pagan prophecy in the “osmosis” between realms of genius and grace; genius is defined by its power to look into deepest origins of things, and bring fruits out of that against all forces of alienation and existential obsolescence—Similarity between mysterium of theological problem of Incarnation and psychological claims regarding dual personality of genius; genius is immanent stage on road toward destiny that exceeds our longings—Genius like ancient kinds represents whole nation; saint transfers virtues of hero and genius onto higher plane—Analogy between eternal and temporal is transformed from external to internal by Christ, Whose eternal blood was also temporal; grace is in blood, and is not without blood—Analogy between culture and Christianity requires prophetic mediation of Israel, or one falls into Gnostic view of Christ dropping out of heaven without race, and culture is dispensable. 3. The Metamorphosis of Hell (p. 435): Péguy left the Church over eternal Hell, but does not change this in returning; prophecy is formal focus of his world, Hell its material focus—His early proposed socialist cité harmonieuse is a civitas Dei from below in which there is no more possibility of exile; his play of Joan is interior overcoming of exile through total engagement on behalf of condemned brethren to point of interior experience of Hell—Aesthetic eschatological harmony as supreme value, art fashioned by whole humanity, with a purity based on renewed personal and social relation to life, a sense and style of life, unlike in Christian purity—Persons discover their freedom in communal life, communities develop personalities; defense of personal world against Jaurès’ Socialist Party—Horizon of spirit is still immanent in early work, but transcendent not ruled out—Social apparatus should be subsidiary to free creative working of art, science, philosophy; socializing production allows leisure, so these need not be socialized—We teach through attraction of beauty, not horror of ugliness (contra Zola), and the beautiful should ignore the ugly, though this is later surpassed by goal of inclusion—It is part of greatness, health, and harmony of human spirit to suffer—Progress from Socialist to Christian plays on Joan just required clarification; Joan sees destructive power as violation of the soul and as damnation, and she sees the loss of those who work their own damnation as an eternal void in her soul, and so she offers herself—Jesus’ infinite Godforsakenness on the Cross for the despair of Judas; the eternal battle against forces of Hell must be fought on earth—The one called by God answers to God alone—Joan’s accusers play with predestination and damnation, and proceed to justify using torture to save her soul—Even the purest soul cannot remain spotless in contact with earthly reality, which gives Joan guilt and so solidarity with the damned, the willing acceptance of damnation in the night of the spirit—Once Christianity raises it, the question of hell cannot be silenced, for Christianity makes the measure of value infinite—Questions raised early by Péguy include whether any member of humankind can be lost to the realm of God which is also realm of humanity, and whether the saved will not feel the lack of the others—God’s infinite hospitality and mercy, seen in Pascal’s desire to serve on earth as long as possible, not hasten to heaven—Question of the immanent Hell of the destitute of the earth; bourgeois charity that lowers itself to help is inadequate: such misery should cease—Hell is deprivation of all time and hope, Heaven is infinite openness to all companionship and fulfillment, and includes Purgatory; earthly destitution is more than an image of Hell, knowable as infinite only from within—There is no relief after dispensing with the dogma of eternal Hell because destitution, exile, and hopelessness are still there—Depictions of destitution from the outside, however bleak, are given by a conscientious tourist, who needs sin and evil to make things interesting (e.g. Zola, Dante, historians of war), but the sinners are ourselves—Demands of the Russian workers in 1905 compared to Oedipus Rex—Suppliant is superior to the fortunate man menaced by fate, for the former is a representative no longer existing as himself because of his dispossession—Turn toward the existential after 1905—The mortal people have their immanent temporal salvation in the genius—Only talent, not genius or the people, can be sociologized; conservation of status quo requires only talent, but revolution of the depths of national life requires genius, and eliminating this power is the program of the modern world—Socialism’s vocation to destitution is more Christian than affluent Christianity, similar to Jewish destiny—Following Bergson, everything rigid and conceptual is a degenerate form of what is living and intuitive; all existence is a transition from originality to habit and loss of authenticity and individuality—Genius requires completion in receptive response—The muse of history is incapable of halting disintegration; two alternatives for history: 1. Great events perish entirely; 2. Great events become powerless in the memory of the succeeding generation; the only other option is grace and salvation from God—Bergsonian and ecclesial language match in calling spiritual death a process of hardening, but the Church has promises that in Her saints She will not succumb to her aging process, crushed by memory and bureaucracy—Péguy encounters reality of Hell in his experiences of his expulsion from modern world, and modern world’s expulsion from authentic life; the illusionism of the modern world is an expression of the general frailty of finite being that he experiences in himself as solidarity with the modern world he hates; in the modern world, everyone is modern, even those who struggle against the modern—Under rule of money, there cannot be a spiritual marriage with poverty—Problem of de-Christianization: 1. Loss of individual soul within Christian community, to which there can be no resignation; 2. Excommunication, which still leaves a mystical-juridical bond to the community of salvation; 3. De-Christianizing of the world in toto, managing entirely without God—Equilibrium and complementarity between secular and spiritual requires principle of incarnation: the rooting (enracinement) of divine and spiritual in secular and carnal by means of representation, acceptance of world’s descent into Hell, and mortal anguish; deadly sin is the refusal of enracinement, the agonized effort to spiritualize and desecularize, to reach Easter as a springtime illusion of eternal rebirth without Good Friday, bracketing out the eternal anguish of God, out of a dark instinct of self-preservation—God’s eternal choice for anguish unto death—Only the believer can see this phenomenon on which all else depends; the challenge of enduring it brings one face to face with Christ, bound to His Body, to Which all things are bound by innumerable connections—Saints and sinners constitute pattern of the Church and are complementary qualities of it, with the possibility (contra Dante) of the representation of saints by sinners (e.g. Joan by Péguy) in ultimate solidarity—Summary of second Joan play—To save the world one must not withdraw from it—Everything in His life moves towards Christ’s cry on the Cross, which thought more terrible than the pain of the damned, is fruitful suffering—The best of medieval Augustinian theology allows just prayer, sacrifice, resignation, and following behind Christ, but Joan dares simultaneously a total fiat and a plea to God, prayer and struggle, which requires a Trinitarian solution—The earth is the stair to heaven, just as the church steps belong to the market and the church—The door into the mystery of hope—God and the one to be saved enter dependence on one another; when man fails God, God fails man. 4. The Enracinement of Christian Identity (p. 465): Characteristic movement of Christian life is God’s approach to man, to the highest degree in suffering and life in the public eye; the whole point is embodiment, becoming concrete and flesh, which rarely succeeds—Every idea needs a material carrier—Péguy’s anxiety over the possibilities for Christian existence and orientation in the modern world. (p. 466): 1. Natural roots of Christianity are as much in classical antiquity as in Jewish Scripture—Christ as founder is the heir of philosophy and Roman universalism—Péguy emphasizes rootedness in native soil against rootless socialistic internationalism—Model for earthly life is not cloister but family with its self-containment, fertility, direct contact with happiness and powerlessness, responsibility for temporal existence—Life in the family, people, and polis has deep nocturnal roots in sleep, privacy, contemplation, prayer, hidden work (contra Laudet)—A quality of celebration, frugality, property, areté, proper pride belongs to an existence with proper roots—War is an inalienable form of human proficiency, struggle is coextensive with historical existence, for there solidarity emerges: war presupposes fellow feeling, not hatred—Péguy did not have a romantic yearning for a new Middle Ages, or for preserving traditions (contra Action Française) but was a revolutionary socialist seeking a breakthrough into the future, but in the foundations of human existence God has revealed Himself; Christian heroism draws from natural man what latter cannot attain—Heroism as play and engagement of whole life, as seen in martyrs, doctors of the Church, medieval chivalry, and Christian classicism; life as noble game is not Kantian-Kierkegaardian anguish between duty and inclination, but at most Corneille’s conflict between honor and love, free human involvement out of a sense of decency—Chivalrous generosity and the generosity of sanctity—Task of representation presupposes rootedness in the hidden—In the vertical network of solidarity alone there is perfect communism—Struggle against modern world is struggle against deracination of natural order and of Christian man into politique, shift to horizontal, false equality, mechanism, interchangeable parts, quantitative progressivism, loss of philosophical and Christian contact with reality, internationalism and pacifism as loss—At such a time the Christian can only be the individual—Great civilizations are maintained by the poor and personalities, not by parties—No living tradition can succeed without an almost despairing act of self-giving—Blame for de-Christianization lies with the clergy, who spiritualize everything in Christianity, underrating the complementary elements of the created world—Civil war in the Church—It was required of Péguy to exercise peacetime and wartime virtues simultaneously. (p. 474): 2. Highest aspects of humanity can only be realized through enracinement in soil of time and history—Historicity, the moment, the event are not (contra Kierkegaard and idealism) the vertical breaking of eternal meaning and activity into time, but Catholically and classically as categories of transient time that bring their wealth in their poverty; all actual time is alienation from divine through aging, and real duration is theological—Amid official history, there are points of absolute clarity where man must abide and from which he learns to prophetically interpret history; remembrance (remonter) is vertical—True philosophy sticks to reality and makes the concept redundant, moving metaphysically from the phenomenally to the truly real; systematic philosophy moves toward unreality and so divides into many schools, moving from the phenomenally real to a less phenomenal ideal of truth—Historical records cannot lay bare the origins of events, for reality is inexhaustible; recollection bars us from lingering over the unique moment—The peak of human existence is death, misery, risk, for even God has risked Himself—Deluded progressive hope is a reflection of eternity: God demolishes intra-historical hopes to show their ultimate ground—Faith is nourished and draws a vocation from culture, both resting on mystery of death—Modern world as campaign against risk, and so destroys freedom, which requires the glorious insecurity of the present—But perhaps in the desacralizing of hope true divine hope will prevail—Péguy’s late works replace Cleo the abstract muse of history with Eve the real individual who has experienced both paradisial and fallen time; lost time is restored in Christ (redemption of Proust): only major attempt since Civitas Dei to deal poetically with three existential conditions of man, treated through solidarity between Eve and Jesus, and through Agape of the Cross, yielding a natural-supernatural tenderness—The atmosphere of paradisial creation where all is abundant plenitude—With sin, existence becomes meager and Eve a provider with anxiety, with the characteristics of Clio, and from her work the modern world springs, ordering the futility of the world—Judgment lays bare the discrepancy between ordering things and the underlying disorder; all is hollow in the vanity of time— Contrary to theologians of original sin, the path toward the Incarnation seen from below, and the solidarity built on it, drawing on Greek Fathers’ sermons on descent into Hell—Christ’s shedding of blood in solidarity with all those who shed blood needlessly and were heroic; men are molded by God from earth, and so He is not surprised to find them earthy (Irenaeus)—The interpenetration of nature and grace, time and eternity—Image of Christmas, Christ the fruit of a mother’s womb and sheltered by nature and history while He sleeps—In Jesus, the world’s movement toward death and nothingness is arrested—Rome is reestablished in Him; the praeparatio evangelica includes not only Hellenic philosophy but Roman politics, jurisprudence, strategy, roads, spears—Christ is heir of ancient not modern world—Duality of road to salvation: innocence and suffering (Thérèse), both equally of people and soil, and in each the earth is glorified—Only two bodies, Jesus and Mary, travel back along the road to Paradise—In his supreme Chartres poems, Péguy appeals from fallen time to unfallen time in Mary; his pilgrimage to Chartres—Sacrifice as submission, request for fidelity and honor in service, not alleviation of suffering—Against enracinement stands theory of evolution, sociology, tele-technologies—Christianity involves no progress, only the modern world does. (p. 489): 3. In the midst of dissolving time and nature are resources that are a token of eternal life and foretaste of redeemed existence e.g. the child—Focus on the source experience of responsibility and ungraspable fruitfulness of fatherhood, rather than on experience of spousal eros (confused in Claudel and Bloy, overlooked in Bernanos and Péguy); relation of father and son is terrestrial point of entry into inner mystery of Trinity—Christian consummation of enracinement leads to Cross—In Christ, there is identity between heroism and holiness, natural kinship and grace—Péguy’s “Ballad of the Beating Heart” celebrates heart as center of life and being, point of unity between flesh and spirit, pride and humility, pleasure and pain, a symbol of every creative source, not transcendent but alive and active in the midst of our own reality—In modern world, all that is left for Christian is ultimate courage and weary hopefulness. 5. The Heart of God (p. 493): In Greek Fathers, human solidarity was developed through character of Incarnation, but God was overshadowed by philosophical idea of immutable, self-diffusing goodness; in Augustine, predestination ruled out any ultimate solidarity—Péguy sought a comprehensive theology of hope, at once natural and supernatural, which influences by a shift in whole theological edifice—Principle of hope inherits legacy of Bergsonian philosophy and Israel—Hope embedded in mystery of father doing anything for his children (Mystery of Hope)—Christian hope from the beginning intermingles with human hope—Socialist solidarity is for Péguy built on universal solidarity of communion of saints, whose apex is Mary; this mediation assumes an Incarnation of spirit: to have bodily form is to be already in contact with Body of Christ—Risky venture of soul’s enracinement in material world is inasmuch as the soul is free a respond to deeper risk of Divine Spirit putting roots into nothingness of created world and freedom: in the heart of God, there is only hope, not power to exploit powerlessness, for that would reduce the whole to a game—Faith and hope are the preserving of the God Who risks Himself in oneself—God has already experienced our emotions, in creation not predestination—This is the truth of what Hegel says transferred to the sphere of reciprocal love—God plays “loser takes all” against man—The sinner is always in contact with and enveloped by God’s heart—God must train man in freedom; men must work out their own salvation or they would not be men, but they must not be left to choke on sin, so they must learn the generous character of love, so as to respond to God with liberality—God’s largesse takes the risk of humiliation; holiness is the profoundest health—The saint is Jesus’ representative and only thus the sinner’s representative; the glory of sanctity is the reflection of God’s holiness i.e. the hope that risks the most—God wants us to reach the moment when we sons can encounter the Father on equal terms as free men, in the same spirit of risk that constitutes His own heart—God’s heart is wounded—Péguy’s Christology is ambivalent between God’s revelation to man and man’s to God, and his theology of freedom holds that man’s merit will be fully taken into account: creaturely fullness of power has Trinitarian form, for the saint finds his own wishes in the Father’s heart—The Son’s “Our Father” leading all other prayers in a “fleet” as an “assault” on the Father’s heart, binding His justice and loosing His mercy: the true glory of God is His mercy, the expression of His omnipotence in its powerlessness, on the basis of which we have power with God—The night in Péguy’s theology (John of the Cross, Novalis, Bergson), saturated with divine presence, the supportive basis for the days, the basic form of creaturely existence in which man becomes again a child and from which man draws his strength, and into which God falls on Good Friday—Time is formed from and interrupts eternity; for the resolution of time, salvation history is needed—The ultimate point is not soothing sleep, but the youthful blossoming of eternity; the holy innocents have the highest place in heaven (contra Dante), for they represented Jesus and witnessed to Him without losing their primordial innocence—Prayer is a dialogue with God that develops into a monologue of the Father; theology as Trinitarian conversation—Péguy can make God speak as he does based on analogia fidei; in the Spirit, the Church can put words liturgically into God’s mouth, and the liturgy is full of this simplicity—Dialogue is Péguy’s basic form, as monologue was Kierkegaard’s; Péguy discusses issues only in dialogue with those who have considered them, for the basis of history is dialogue among persons, and truth is not abstracted from persons—Tendresse i.e. essential gentleness as it belongs to the child, to hope, and to all the mysteries in being, is the mark of the Catholic—His love for France; his links to Thérèse. 6. Aesthetics and Sanctity (p. 509): Péguy’s fragmentary work, often like a litany (Gide), stylistically like Kierkegaardian repetition or Bergsonian continuity, the experience of the unfolding of the never-ending stream of reality—Starting point of his aesthetic is in earthly substituted for city of God, where harmony won through ethical struggle is the highest ideal, where beauty is gift gratuitously given—Beauty’s primary location is not in form but in blossoming of life as it reveals its victorious achievements in achieved forms—Aesthetic is ultimately rooted in the religious—Prophecy and aesthetics—Classicism i.e. perfect human proportion developed from within out of primordial proportions of human nature (Corneille) rather than Romanticism i.e. passion, morbidity, secret cruelty (Racine)—No beauty in sin or in pure form, but only in grace—Jesus’ human finitude, His particularity rather than being a compendium of the virtues, which leaves something for others; He is not just sum of perfections, which could not be the canon of classical beauty, but is one in a series with prototypes, witnesses, and imitators—Relation between OT and NT decisive for aesthetics: OT’s perspective focuses on lordship and rises to Christ, NT on service and descends from Him—His relation to Pascal—He cannot be a Christian without landscape and locality, but not in the sense of Hopkins’ wildness, but an ethical, cultural French landscape, organized with human and divine order and solidarity—Christians as most human reality, and their music is a wretched music performed by saints and sinners together. Volume 4: The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity Introduction The New Tasks (p. 11): The 12 testimonies of the last 2 volumes cannot produce a complete system—Glory cannot be defined—Glory is fundamental in Scripture: God is glorious in Himself, in His appearing, in what He has established i.e. man and Church—Universality of Biblical glory must confront universality of human spirit from creation, open to all of Being and its transcendentals; Being is majestic, sublime, hehr-lich (André, Schlier)—To make a claim of absoluteness, Christian proclamation must have roots in historical and metaphysical sphere—Metaphysics must be taken broadly, as in the Greeks, not separated from holy knowledge about origins of the world i.e. mythos, and in the breadth of what is alethes, agathon, kalon, coming in three interpenetrating periods, the mythic, the philosophical, and the religious, and including the generation of art from myth—All great art is religious, an act of homage before the glory of what exists; loss of religion and the glorious leaves mere attraction and beauty (Goethe to Riemer)—Systematic aesthetics/callistics (Hegel) in its idea of absolute knowledge deprives the summit of glory—What is Christian is both in solidarity with human thinking and religious metaphysics, and isolated from all human thought—Biblical glory must have an analogy in general intellectual sphere, or it would be incomprehensible and a matter of indifference—History of metaphysics runs from pre- to post-Christian; Christian period presents us with analogical concept of glory; Christians must present both Biblical glory and metaphysical depth of Being drawn anew from revelation. Dos moi pou stân (p. 15): A standpoint is sought allowing communication on all sides without compromise—Unity, unique to Christianity, between deciding to believe in revelation in Christ, and obligatory universal affirmation of metaphysical-religious truth, demonstrates its correctness only when put into practice—Characteristics of the standpoint: 1. Truth of mythology and history of religions can be displayed without resulting in a unified, progressive (Romantic, Idealist) history of revelation of God, for positive character of revelation is not destroyed by God being at work beyond the Church, and historical form of God’s self-revelation has function of a sign of salvation in the cosmos—2. Can do justice to requirement of penitence and conversion (Luther, Kierkegaard, Bultmann) and also giving glory in contemplation, without sinking into Neo-Platonic aesthetics or existential grief for one’s sins at the expense of self-understanding in Christ—3. Simultaneously sees Christ’ revelation as taking on form and radical destruction of form (Is. 53:2), for in the Cross is the universal decisive breaking-forth of God’s glory, though this has analogies in other cultures—4. Guarantees an unhindered freedom to see the Gospel without denying the tradition with its pre-Christian implications, and without superficially opposing Greek to Jewish thought—5. Is not blind to world’s blindness to God’s glory without justifying this blindness by holding that we belong to an epoch of de-deification, but rather the Christian of today must exemplify in his life the experience of Being and glory, as the guardian of glory—This standpoint is more classical than sterile classicism, and more modern than modernism, and more ecumenical—Heart of revelation in Christ cannot be seen by one who takes cosmos or man as final meaning of revelation, but leaves the final meaning disinterestedly to love of God as it shows itself in devotion and self-emptying, seeing oneself and the world as a function of this love (Love Alone is Credible)—God has no other end in creation than the proclamation of His glory, and all else, including all finality and evolution, is secondary to this—This method is one of integration not evolution, where the latter denies the old to break through to the new—Christianity must be bound in a health-giving way to its historical origin through humble listening to the Holy Spirit, not in light of the “needs of modern man”, which requires a sensibility for human tradition. Transcendental Aesthetics (p. 19): Aesthetics was part of metaphysics before its reduction to a special science (Baumgarten, Kant)—In metaphysics, fragmentary worldly truth, goodness, beauty are rooted in eternal truth, goodness, beauty: a beauty dwelling with archai of Being i.e. gods, divine, God—This transcendental aesthetics, in which the kalon is a transcendental, lasted from Homer to the Baroque—Biblical revelation can enter into dialogue with transcendental not partial aesthetics—The supposition of the transcendentality of beauty seems to be contradicted by the ugly and mediocre, and to require utopianism, heroism, or faith—We receive the whole as beautiful in an all-encompassing wonder, rather than performing a subjective act of transfiguration; this is from Rilke, echoing Homer, Sophocles, Vergil in their vision of glory in destruction—Transcendentals hold sway over totality of Being, indwelling (circumincessio) and making themselves heard in one another—There are stages of their integration from Homer through Plato to Vergil and Plotinus, preserved somewhat in medievals, Baroque, Heidegger—In Greek cosmos: 1. World is understood as epiphaneia of divine to man and man’s being broken open to grasp this appearing, and only later does order of heavens direct us to this epiphany; from epiphany comes moral standard and light to make darkness bearable, for an objective brightness flows from things and events (Homer, Sappho, Pindar)—2. Order of world rests on what is just, fitting, right (dikê, themis), and man’s nature is brought into action where he acknowledges this ordering and is faithful and loving to the god; ethical-political and aesthetic imaging of the truth of the world are formed in relation to one another (Dempf)—3. In poetry, world is revealed as charis, even with justice built into nature, turning law into play, and allowing moments of unhoped-for success when failure seems to be the rule; charis shines as charm and divine favor in the beautiful form—Here the kalon is one with good and true, and all this is included and transcended in definitive revelation—As Plato criticizes poets, so Biblical revelation critiques metaphysics: the breaking of God’s law is far more deadly, and God’s charis bestows a greater transfiguration, than the world can see, opening a theological transcendental aesthetics—In Biblical revelation, object of contemplation is not ordering between God and man, but living God as only subject of act of revealing, and giving of law and grace; this requires a doctrine of seeing and rapture (Volume 1)—Metaphysics and concrete conscious art direct man to the divine, while abstract art is alienated from Being and itself—Relation between transcendences of philosophy and of Christian belief cannot be reduced to their lowest common denominator: God cannot abuse laws of Being, but latter cannot anticipate the free opening of the heart of the innermost mystery of God—Eros is perfected in, but does not determine, caritas—Attempts to reconcile metaphysics to theology generally accompanied by confidence in power of thought, and so tend to extend metaphysics to cover both (Erigena, Cusa, Leibniz, Hegel); when risk was seen, Christ tended to be seen as way to perfected metaphysics (Origen, Augustine, John of Salisbury)—Modern autonomy of reason has not been able to recover classical glory—Loss of Patristic, medieval, Baroque syntheses forces us to reflect on what is decisive in Biblical glory; requires dialogue with Luther, who sought to limit to what is Biblical, with a denial of metaphysics, leading to revenge of Pietism, rationalism, idealism, with his denial of analogia entis and overlooking of beauty—Christianity can use catastrophes to make visible what is distinctive in itself, but cannot take comfort in them, even when the beautiful seems to belong only to bourgeois comfort, and the great in the Church of today (Thérèse, Charles de Foucauld) live a Christianity of poverty and exposure—The theme here is not beauty but glory; it does not matter if this generates art that is beautiful in worldly terms. Transcendentality and Form (p. 28): No metaphysics of being and its transcendentals is separable from sensuous concrete experience: in encounter at true thing, a thing that is both good and lacks goodness—From the senses we know that the beautiful exists, and this experience discloses and conceals it in depths e.g. in something attractive, then hidden in suffering, then appearing in the crude and meaningless—Great tragedy forces the viewer to bring what is most terrible into an act of acceptance; great classical art includes an open wound in the heart of being and man in which being is illumined (Häberlin)—A form is a totality grasped as such, which requires surrounding world and being as a whole, whereby it is a contracted representation of the absolute (Cusa)—History of form from Plato to modern German psychology—Every being has its being and its measure in itself, which can only be discovered by the spirit, not the senses (Goethe)—We cannot grasp the concept of the existence and perfection of the most circumscribed being, because it is a participation in complete existence—Experience of the sublime—The light that shines from a form and reveals it is the light of the form and of Being; the higher the form, the more light shines from it and points to the mystery of the light of Being as a whole, which can be expressed metaphysically, aesthetically, and religiously, and which law Biblical revelation cannot escape—Transcending the struggle between Biblicist orthodoxy and liberal Hellenism, allowing a less small-minded de-mythologization, and a more relaxed relation of art to Christianity—It is problematic to exclude metaphysics of form in favor of direct confrontation of modern criticism and natural sciences with Biblical revelation—Form includes forms of time e.g. music, drama (Augustine, Ehrenfels), and so is not opposed to concept of history and event—Biblical revelation shows itself as God’s art by being simultaneously in motion and definitively fixed in a way that not just refer but gives utterance to the absolute—The character of event belongs to both art of time and of space e.g. image of the god that makes present the god’s epiphany, the triumphal arch that reminds one and raises hopes for victory; these artworks gather together time—The beautiful has a protological-eschatological character that makes it open to, but not anticipating, Biblical revelation—Vergil’s Aeneid as example of gathering together time to show the meaning of existence in memory and hope; its openness to Biblical revelation—The mixed blessing of the science of aesthetics—Abstraction and loss of tradition in the twentieth century—Problematic compromises: 1. Holding that poetry and theology are the same at root; 2. Making the Church’s historical form absolute, equal or superior to the form of Biblical revelation; 3. Identifying mythical form of thought with sacramental thinking, not maintaining analogy i.e. similarity yet greater difference; 4. Trends toward the univocal formless e.g. Bultmann, transcendentalism, functionalism, evolutionists (Teilhard), emphasizers of rhythm alone (Przywara), Asian philosophies; 5. Thinking that the crossing out of form in Christ is not the decisive revelation of the hidden God, and that that is giving form in the chaos of sin—Metaphysical history of aesthetics requires decisive decisions—Beautiful seems to be ephemeral transcendental, because the last, but as the last it guards the others: nothing is ultimately true or good without the light of grace of what is freely bestowed—Christianity cannot be reduced to propositional truth, or eudaimonist or utilitarian good; the glory that is the foundation of the saints guards against this—History of aesthetics here is a history of continual, hidden decisions, the history of the apocalypse/opening of the decision of the intellect for or against God. I. Laying the Foundations I.A. Myth I.A.1. Homer (p. 43): Only the West was born under sign of a perfected cosmos in which religion and art are one, the cosmos of Homer’s epics—Lack of aesthetic ordering, education of the heart, binding image of the divine in Gilgamesh and in great Indian epics; Israel first discovered absolute divine freedom, but Greece provided language of images for other cultures e.g. Israel, India, Christianity—Homer at the root of later philosophy, art, drama, Greek and Roman religion—Through Vergil, Homer gave form to all epic; through the tragedians, he gives form to other drama and poetry—Fundamental modes of Greek existence e.g. theoria, eidos, nous, etc. in Homer—The self-evident credibility of Homeric world even today. I.A.1.a. God and man (p. 45): Structure of forms gives an interpretation of man in his relation to the divine and so gives him being and self-understanding—Articulations of structure: 1. Separation of man and God; 2. Man’s transcendence into sphere of God where he finds his salvation and glory—Movement toward immortal god discloses world as manifest and shining—A universal framework of day and night sustains spheres of gods and men in single coexistence in being—Real separation of mortals and immortals, despite divine descent of some men, and divinization of others—One cannot force oneself over the barrier of death; only in this life does man reach into divine sphere, both in Homer and OT—The unconscious existence of dead souls; Homer’s description of the lamentations of the dead runs through all Western literature—Homer renounces metamorphosis in next life, and intensifies man’s relationship to gods with interiority stripped of magic (Kullmann)—Hero as not privileged aristocrat but model of man, imprinting his stamp on all his followers, representing them, as courtly society understood—Homer constantly thinks of God’s power, presence, action in all things both exterior and interior; ritual reflected only in personal relation of hero to absolutely free god, revealed in signs, and enacted through trust and prayer, in a humbled holding-firm in obedience to the will of the gods—Man’s essence is to be in need of God; real sin is arrogance of wishing to live one’s life without God—Victory and the fame or dignity or glory of the living (kudos) are gifts of God; this glory belongs to the one who is together with the god (sun daimoni) and blessed by being indwelt by the god (eudaimonia)—In this free indwelling by the god, man experiences elevation that fulfills him in the transfiguration of his mortal lowliness, making him beautiful and good—The starting point for understanding the beautiful in Homer is not external shining things or light itself, but the relation between god and favored man who is thereby made able to see his dignity i.e. the immediate experience of human well-being expressing itself and shining forth as radiant charm, heroic greatness, love, or virtue—Divine quality exists in misery of mortality and horror of threatening death; life of man is suffering in struggle, and man is ephemeral and frail, unable to trust himself, though Homeric man does not rebel against death or measure himself against the gods—It belongs to the gods to elevate or humble man, and each, as in the case of Odysseus’ concealment by Athena, is not an external trick but a declaration of the man’s reality, which is to be humble and patient before the gods—Both glory and form of humbleness belong to providence; the poet can discern the good meaning in the allocation of evil lots to men by the god. I.A.1.b. The personal God (p. 55): Odysseus’ relation to Athena is characterized tenderness, reverence, intimacy unrivaled in non-Christian poetry—Each hero prays to his god, but also to all the gods, and no god’s work is restricted to a single man, though mysterious alliances and elections occur, a non-erotic, maternal love—The gods spontaneously and providentially direct their chosen heroes to particular works—Athena’s protection of Odysseus from afar, in hiddenness, though her love for him is more clearly revealed than any other relation of god to man; her hiddenness is required out of consideration for other gods e.g. Poseidon; she guides him yet requires him to think things through for their common task; her revelation at Ithaca of his native land, and of her constant presence to him—Sufferings are ordained out of the inextricable combination of fate (Moira) and the will of Zeus; the goddess knows, permits, and cooperates in ordering suffering—Odysseus as the patient man who has gained knowledge through suffering while holding firm, to which he is ordered by Athena; Telemachus and Penelope are included in this endurance and in Athena’s protection—His endurance inspires faith and hope in others—The day of vengeance brings judgment on the wicked like a divine parousia of the patient sufferer, where judgment is left to him. I.A.1.c. God and Gods (p. 62): Greeks and Trojans both pray to the gods, with contradictory prayers, but both prayers reach Zeus, though he can only grant one side victory—Theme of Iliad is divinity caught between prayers of men, rent by tragic contradictions of the world though also transcending contradictions by their decrees and rule—Homer’s is a unique work; the tragedians remove the personal element of the divine rule, Christians have scarcely developed the problem of the personal particularization of God’s will within the framework of his oneness, except e.g. in medieval dramas about Mary’s intercession at last judgment, or in Calderon’s dramas in which modes of the presence of the personal God dialogue about the world—Zeus sees all, though he, like Yahweh, can look away, but his insight is his will, though he admits prayers, Moira, and Keres into his universal will; his will is irresistible and unknowable to men or other gods, except to the divinely inspired poet, who sees all in the light of the divine theoria which transfigures all things and events, making them beautiful—The plan of Zeus unfolded in the fortunes of Achilles, in which the humbled are exalted and vice versa; the real drama is in Zeus’ heart—Only contradictory means are available to the poet in describing the gods’ fight—The passions of the gods, even of Zeus; the gods change inasmuch as events change, and heaven really goes along with earth, and into this prayers flow, and the compassion of the gods sets events in motion, though for all this the gods are free—It is prejudice of philosophical monotheism (Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Plato) but not of Homeric polytheism or Christianity that sorrow for man and need to constantly decide lowers God (Reinhardt)—Despite blindness (Ate) sent from the gods (like the evil spirit sent by Yahweh e.g. in 1 Sam. 16:4), Homeric man is free; gods have initiative without depriving man of spontaneity (contra Snell)—Everything is gift, even evil, but especially what is noble—In rising to the gods in an act of original admiration, the grace and beauty of being are experienced; there is a great power for contentment in admitting the gods exist without claiming immortality for the mortal. I.A.1.d The poet and the forms of God (p. 71): The essence of the world’s beauty in the image on Achilles’ shield, beauty both in the artwork and in what is represented; not a static beauty because the figures seem to move—Form and content are here one; the worldview is of world elevated into divine sphere, contemplated because of the gift of the god to the poet, through the god’s grace i.e. free election of the poet—The poet invokes the goddess/muse, who draws him back to divine truth, and allows being to become word, taking the poet into the sphere of eternally valid, imprinted expression, through the mania of the muses, directed to the rapture of his hearers—Only destinies of suffering and tragedy are worth living and singing of and honorable—The hero and the poet are most truly themselves in being penetrated by the god, in virtue of which the poet can make the god appear authoritatively/canonically—Homer becomes fully authoritative origin of all representative art, for he is prior to Greek temple statuary (Schefold)—Canonicity of Homeric theophanies; the pious tenderness of relation of gods to men not captured by eros or philia—The gods appear incognito, to test good and evil, and judge the world in a hidden way; there are degrees in the ways that gods become visible, but always spontaneously—The act of taking on a body by the god—The measure of the hero in suffering and death; complaint and consolation arise only there. I.A.2. From Hesiod to Pindar (p. 78): After Homer, glory of Being is derived from and rendered credible in mode of encounter of hero and his god—Later thinkers asked whether this model is universally valid, whether it extends to all, whether divinity as such can be understood on this personal model; they sought an answer that takes account of entire human situation, and more universal posing of question allows philosophy to clearly emerge from myth. I.A.2.a. Hesiod (p. 78): Hesiod encounters Muses’ commission to write poetry as Amos receives his prophetic commission: unexpectedly and while going about his daily tasks as peasant—The Muses breathe into him a more truthful kind of art, giving him the song of Olympus—Homer began with the shining center-point of divine-human situation; Hesiod, like the OT and anticipating cosmic philosophies of the ages of the world from the Eleatics to Schelling, begins systematically at the beginning, singing over against light and darkness—Coming forth of earth, eros with its cosmogonic function, and night from chaos; night as progenitor of dark forces, in whose power lies the enjoyment of love—Not answered how everything comes from emptiness—Center of poet’s attention is not eros but Zeus i.e. overpowering of dark forces of disorder by Olympian realm of order and justice, through force, might, and divine generations—Zeus’ realm is dependent on older realm of the mother, Hecate or Magna Mater, celebrated similarly to OT Wisdom—Primordial chaos is where the fallen powers sink, where are the boundaries between being and non-being, night and day, and where the sources of all are; the gaze of the poet and artist penetrates even here: unclear if light overpowering or fascinated by demonic—Prometheus as symbol of man’s precarious situation in realm of Zeus’ justice, who has made us seek out our necessities in care; Pandora is punishment as deceitful beauty of woman through whom evils come, so marriage is at best balance of good and evil—Unlike in Homer, relation between man and god is order of justice expressed as guilt and punishment, all in the divine plan, as are descending ages of the world—Law dwells in heaven, and must be inspired by Muses in kings and judges, just as poets are inspired, but it is obscured by primordial injustice: evil strife (eris) among men is sent by Zeus, though there is also good strife (agôn) for what is better e.g. in diligence of work—We should keep to what is measured e.g. the peasant’s year; all beauty is lastingly rooted in rightness of life and work—Hesiod has commands similar to Decalogue—Close link between dike and Zeus prevents justice from being reduced to abstract world-principle; gods and men must both struggle for an ethical world. I.A.2.b. Poetry (p. 84): Archilochus: Founder of lyric poetry but also hommé révolté of ancient world—The gods acts effortlessly to raise us or cast us down—He advocates composure and self-control out of not yielding to fate—Merciless criticism of self and others—Zeus’ will is the inescapable rhythm of existence, with which it is wise to agree (similar to Eccl. 3:1). (p. 86): Sappho: Nuptial poems vividly convey the mythic wedding ceremonies, but bring suffering and self-denial to the poetess—The soul to which she calls Aphrodite is filled with love, both sensory and sensuous, but also spiritual through pain and self-denial not rational abstraction—Eros is nature’s beauty—The lover is always set harmoniously in the whole, not set apart in a place of tension—The presence of the gods is felt not with personal definition, but like the aspect that a moment takes on when illumined by love—Could be interpreted sophistically as man is the measure of all things—Some similarity to Song of Songs, but lacks Biblical openness to the future. (p. 87): Solon: Gives most elevate expression to beauty as face of order and justice—In ancient world, beauty and ethics e.g. justice (Sappho) or valor (Tyrtaeus) are one—Distinguishing mark of noble citizen in public behavior is eidos—Genuine beauty as valor that does not seek to save its own life—Ethics and art constituted by eros and destruction, on which depends the being of the polis—In Solon, battle song becomes public speech—Divine justice (dike) is world order that must be restored, looming as approaching judgment on current disorder—Solon praises harmonious regulation of society, which order and shapes all things of men—Similarities to OT prophets—No one is blessed, and evil invites Zeus’ swift judgment—The day of the Lord is the beautiful sky—Fate cannot be warded off—Solon like Homer differs from many lyric poets, who lack conviction, give only platitudes regarding the illusory nature of all things and the need for enjoyment, and leave religion in the background—Lyric and fable becomes a trivial art only seldom with glory from above. I.A.2.c. Pindar (p. 90): Pindar understood his lyric poetry entirely as form of glory, as glorification of what is sovereign, victorious, and glorious in the world—Total glory is necessary consequence of 2 kinds of glory: what transfigures and what is transfigured—Victory in the games moves the polis, the whole Hellenic race back to its divine origins, and existence itself, justifying life and the world, which victor and poet turn to celebration—This harnessing of cosmic energy makes sense only in closed mythic universe, which is assumed and presented anew, though in context of period of philosophical criticism of the gods and games; here, Pindar retains the Homeric view of relation and difference between gods and men—Victor’s achievement is both ultimate achievement and pure grace, a dialectic solved not in the abstract but by back-and-forth movement—Pindar does not see gods as deriving from universe, but as divine, in a concrete monotheism; offensive elements of myths are removed—Designs of gods are unfathomable by human philosophy; Pindar believes in pure radiance of heavenly world bestowing grace on men, which transfigures all despite its fragmentation: these are different facets of revelation—Only what naturally derives from divine origins can receive divine blessing in the agôn, where alone nobility of mind appears—The noble man should reach for what is highest, but within his own status: he should not desire to immediately become or oppose a god, but will receive grace if he resigns himself to human ephemerality—Having good blood is itself a grace; these secret origins will darken in the Tragedians to an inherited guilt, similar to how election in Israel became emphasis on personal responsibility in Ezekiel—In the victor, the divine becomes corporeally manifest, for the victor exceeds his form with a transcending radiance breaking out from within and without—In Greek pederasty, eros invades this victorious center, causing the moment of victory to descend into what is conditional, non-agonic, private—Except in sculpture, fixing transfigured corporeality is not possible before Christ, so Plato’s eros intellectualizes—In body-soul union of areta, virtue and competence unconditionally require each other; original radiant wholeness (kalon) is comprehensive health: tested virtue has radiance in its objective claim to honor and its subjective reception of honor—All beauty dependent on victory in struggle, and poet through poetic grace can perceive this light and give it a form of expression—Homer and Pindar wholly dedicated to truth (alatheia) not appearances, so the poet gives immortality, because he knows (sophos)—Harmonious bond (philon) between value and renown, between grateful, joyful recipient and giver bestowing victory, is charis; reciprocity among men is also gift of gods, the Charites, mistresses of celebrations and so imperative for preservation of world and making life worthwhile in elegance and joy, always in concrete situations—Celebration of victory rests on fellowship (koinon) and friendship (philia)—Most important expression of charis is poet’s gift—Only when kalon is joyfully received in same spirit as it is produced does it gain validity—Poet does on earth what God does for the world: praising and thereby fructifying new virtue, administering charis—Charis is the nuptial character of existence—All noble and precious things in worlds of gods and men included in cosmic celebration, including contest, daring, and danger, but not suffering, death, and everyday philistine existence—Problem of death and survival solved through Orphic transmigration of souls, and Elysium that complete ethic-aesthetic transfiguration of the world—Pindar’s images taken up by Paul, where glory will deepen into God-Man who contains in triumph victory and defeat, anointed for eternal contest and celebration. I.A.3. The Tragedians I.A.3.a. Tragedy and Glory (p. 101): Greek art culminates in tragedians and then collapses—Whole Greek inheritance is under sign of Euripides who is end of high tragedy and its descent into bourgeois psychological self-understanding of man in himself—Absolute gravity of great tragedy and its glory is subsumed by drama of Christ; Greek tragedy not philosophy is the great valid cipher of the Christ-event: it is not a law or idea, nor is the temporal merely apparent, nor is it aesthetic or allegorical in Alexandrian or Enlightenment sense, but a mystery play by and for believers representing divine glory—Tragedy is born from Dionysian religious rituals i.e. the intoxication of the form-destroying god; this darkness is not banished from the world or removed to its origins—Kings and heroes now must represent Everyman, and enact for each the “Know Thyself” in its human desperation and loneliness—Tragedy retains Homeric doctrine of man’s distance from and devotion to the gods: being cannot be enclosed in identity, nor man in himself—Concern for truth and justice (like Solon) which emerges in suffering (contra Pindar) laying man bare in vulnerability, which only a great man can bear: when broken, there arises from him the fragrance of pure humanity and being—Suffering is not denied as mere appearance or shunned for the sake of eudaimonia, but the way to the god: the valor of the unshielded heart, which philosophy lacks, is in direct relation to Christ, and is rewarded with a glory in art never again attained, a glory in the knowledge that Zeus who contains all things exists, and in pain emerging into light of eternal, which not even joy can do (Otto)—Christ performs the tragic role to perfection, so after Him there can be only the Kyrios appearing in guise of old myth (Calderon, Shakespeare, Corneille, Schiller), or Stoic world-theater where only man in his actions and freedom appears without religious ritual—In cultic tragedy, plot is known from beginning and not determined by hero’s free decision, and it is peeled away until the truth emerges of how man appears to the gods; tragedy serves epiphany—Man is truly free and guilty because his freedom is part of the whole—Everything turns on present, not prior or subsequent life (different from Orpheus and Plato), where solution can only come from within the event: a contained glory that gives the tragedy its sacramentality—In tragedy, divine presence is announced in suffering and absence; problems given to man by god can only be solved by the god—Emphases: cosmic resolution at cost of suffering (Aeschylus), isolated man and god of wrath, endured in courageous piety (Sophocles), cruelty of god in handing man over to suffering, leading to questioning of obedience (Euripides)—Heroism not of strength but of the defenseless heart reconciled to necessity, standing before fellow man and the gods—Examples of the situation of the hiketes, the one who is abandoned and radically exposed and who craves protection, from Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides—Contrast in Euripides between those given up to their fate in the darkness of meaningless destruction, and those who willingly sacrifice themselves—The hiketes is impotent and there is good reason to refuse him refuge, but the glory of Athens is to offer refuge to the persecuted against all political interest. I.A.3.b. Aeschylus (p. 113): Aeschylus’ tragedy is pious feast of glorification even when he lays bare dark theological antitheses, through suffering as mark of authenticity, not through philosophical synthesis—Zeus is above and contains all, and so must be greater than Homeric Zeus, through subjugation of all to him—Grace is forced by the god into the unreconciled heart—Victory of Zeus is still in process of happening—Prometheus bewails his agony not to the gods but to the older cosmic powers, the primal ground for all that is in the likeness of a god (Hölderlin)—The gods or spirit opposed to nature are unjust, as they use might to triumph over might; hence Prometheus’ defiance of the gods, and the amazons and centaurs as symbols of pre-civilized world subdued by Olympian spirit—Cosmic eros unites heaven and earth—All things are Zeus, who proves himself vital in all darkness and contradiction—Links between dark maternal earth and the dead, human sacrifice, nocturnal goddesses of retribution and blood—Conflict between ancient hostile feminine world of Titans, and light ordered Apollonian world of Olympians, reconciled through cosmic and political act of founding Athenian Areopagus and transformation of furies into Eumenides: tension reconciled through personal divine act of grace and human-divine justice—Images of the gods as revelation that establishes order in chaos by reclaiming the old, not by superior strength—True glory of the gods can only be called by abstract names e.g. justice, order—Mercy as link between unknowable gods and the human heart. I.A.3.c. Sophocles (p. 122): For Sophocles, possibility of reconciliation based on acknowledgment of conflict and suffering by deity—His vision of sublime, distant, concealed god is seed of negative theology; against this vision of the god stands the terrifying outline of suffering man—He prefers view of human figure beaten out by divinely-imposed destiny to Aeschylus’ reconciliatory structure—Oedipus bears his fate as destiny, the work of God, not as his responsibility—Man is rendered impotent before God, torn by the god from his natural shelter, having lost his self and his power; from the transcendence of suffering, everything human seems meaningless, nothingness, a curse in contrast to divine glory and eternity—Love require the inflexible standpoint of eternity; the wound of guilt breaks open at boundary of time and eternity, which is not contrast of duty and inclination, or of noumenal and phenomenal or real and ideal I—Principle tragic theme is barrier between God and man; to be confronted by the will of God is to be cast into a place of death, the image of God in man: contra Buddhism, pain is the very medium of transcendence, and the possibility of reconciliation even with enemies—The glory of these images has formed all Western art not for classicist reasons, but because they open new horizon to human existence and transcendence—Sophocles affirms that reality is good, God eternally just, and the power of being revealed in man’s humiliation whence he is raised up—In the exposure of man’s inescapable guilt is the revelation of grace and reconciliation; when the hero is excommunicated from man, he becomes source of salvation and sanctity, as seen in Oedipus and Antigone—Glory appears in suffering death, in bearing the burden gracefully, and this glory brings earthly salvation, not dissolving into an intangible other world. I.A.3.d. Euripides (p. 131): Euripides is often said to no longer believe in gods, and to tend entirely to the theatrical, unlike Sophocles, since Euripides is a friend of Socrates, who ended tragedy (Aristophanes)—He provides normative form for European theater—Glory in Euripides turns to resignation—For him, death is not just a terminus, but the center, the question to which man must discover an answer—From him, the path leads directly to Golgotha. (p. 133): a. Man becomes credible in suffering, so Euripides puts his characters in situations of improbable, unforeseen suffering e.g. Heracles, Oedipus, Orestes and Electra, Hecuba—It is not clear if Zeus is moved with concern; all collapses vainly and senselessly at the center not threshold of death—The plight of those who have lost all that is precious in life, cast out from their own place e.g. Medea, Iphigenia, Helen—Rapid swings of fortune, and the lack of love and eudaimonia on earth; even friendship fails to unite inner minds and is easily broken. (p. 136): b. Compared to Sophocles, Euripides’ souls wage a more desperate but secretly loving struggle with the torturing gods—Theological center of gravity shifts from gods to men: sometimes a concluding epiphany or deus ex machine, sometimes not—The gods lack nothing for Euripides; everything including suffering comes from the gods, against whom there is no appeal, and his characters serve the gods though they claim that the gods are unjust to them—Faithful piety burdens the god with responsibility for suffering, and even raises its voice in complaint and revolt, but the gods can have nothing to do with the burden of guilt that rests on them—Ultimately, man comes to have the place of the god, being more virtuous than the gods; man is challenged to find in his own heart a solution. (p. 141): c. Two ways of cleansing atmosphere of unbearably heightened pressure of suffering: wrath/revenge and love/self-sacrifice—These are approaches to religious reconciliation seen from man’s point of view; OT and NT see this from God’s point of view—Massive revenge does not incur guilt but an act of desperation by those on whom inhuman suffering has been inflicted—Unique motif to Euripides is a willing, sacrificial death, presented in all its variations and motivations, unified by freedom as assent beyond fate and necessity out of the heart’s own unfathomable resources—Themes in Alcestis: saving of a life through sacrificial death, and hero’s struggle with death who loses his victim; victory over death through passion and action, unified in Christ—In Euripides, Alcestis has promised to die for her husband, but many years of contented domesticity intervene, drawing out the promise excruciatingly, revealing the glory of a humiliated heart; the question of whether the husband was aware of her sacrifice: we were not asked to consent first to Christ’s sacrifice for us—The final return of love in its transfigured, resurrected form, guaranteed beyond death by immanent meaning of self-sacrificial love—Human sacrifice can be demanded by the gods, but it can also be offered out of personal love—Decisiveness of freedom in dying for others without knowledge of afterlife, especially in dying for love, and with those one loves—Human sacrifice is a crime, for Euripides, but the emphasis is on Iphigenia (the Greek Isaac) consenting to die for Hellas; similarities to stories of Isaac and Jephthah—Golgotha between the symbol and reality of human sacrifice—Fragmentation of the world and absolute divine commandment are eclipsed by reconciliation in sacrifice of love, radiating more gloriously from human heart than from divine world. (p. 151): d. Emergence of mysterious radiance of glory occurs in subjection to abandonment and inescapable death: in choosing that, one chooses the beautiful that is luminous with its own truth, not the beauty compatible with ugly, evil deeds—External beauty is a good, but it causes tragedy (e.g. in Helen) and is not the final glory—The vision of divine beauty destroys; worldly beauty is a delusion, like the Buddhist Maya, and so there is no eudaimonia on earth—But we do not turn from suffering on account of the fragility of the beautiful, but endure the ultimate in horror, in knowing that being is worth absolute loving assent—Only the renown of self-sacrifice is truly radiant, for renown is not extrinsic but the eternal dimension that belongs to the mortal dimension of a self-transcending act. I.B. Philosophy I.B.1. Transition to Philosophy (p. 155): World of myth is dialogical—Tragedy of Greek art was its attempt to understand how even the most extreme situations are encompassed by the divine, until the power of the human heart exceeded and so perhaps created the gods (Rilke)—Myth rested on tradition, received in faith, along with prayer, cult, and rite—Knowledge is that for which man possesses justification in his reason; philosophy undertakes to lot its limits (Plato), and its realm can be fitted to that of myth: its fundamental question is whether the act of transcendence has found the transcendent object—Negative answer sees reason as monological act, cutting off dialogical act of prayer and keeping to itself, separating the limited beautiful from glorious/sublime—To assure itself of its own transcendence into being and the divine, reason must Titanically bracket the act of glorifying God (Laws 701c)—The ferocity of philosophy’s ethos in Heraclitus and Parmenides is refined to irony, humanism in use of myth, almost a salon philosophy in Plato’s middle dialogues, though the danger of all-inclusive immanence is transcended in later dialogues—Xenophanes’ monotheistic purism. (p. 157): Parmenides of Elea: He transposes Xenophanes’ monotheism into philosophy of one Being, the birth of philosophical ecstasy out of world of appearance into realm of truth of thought and Being, controlled by dike i.e. fairness of consequences—Contrast between true world of philosopher contemplating pure Being without potentiality, and seeming world of light, night, eros which begins hateful begetting—Contempt for the common man—Similar to Indian thought, but the violent breakthrough shows this is not the stillness of Nirvana. (p. 159): Heraclitus of Ephesus: He identifies the Absolute with the Logos which is the unity underlying the contraries that flow ceaselessly into each other and condition each other—He finds in eternal becoming the contrasts meeting in harmony—Only the philosopher can see the beauty in the rubbish heap of the world—Even greater contempt for the common man than in Parmenides, leaving each in his own common world, fit only for reincarnation—Complete renunciation of myth—Wisdom is separate from all things—The divine is the proportion or harmony that endures in and governs change. (p. 163): Pythagoras: Combination of Orphic religious ethics and mathematical understanding of the world—Correspondence between qualitative/musical and quantitative; music brings harmony to soul, as seen in quadrivium, foundation of theology and modern science—Theory of recollection. (p. 164): Three new themes with which philosophy emerges and replaces myth: 1. Claim of knowledge to totality; 2. Ascent/transcendence of a posteriori in a priori vision, driven by eros, formally opposed to mythical theophanies; 3. Harmony, proportion, all-embracing qualitative-quantitative mathematics, the key to philosophical beauty. I.B.2. Plato I.B.2.a. The Witness to the Truth (p. 166): Plato tells us the beautiful is difficult; it is beautiful to strive for what is beautiful and to bear suffering (Phaedrus 274a)—What is beautiful to the poets is not binding; they compose/make not by wisdom but by natural, unconscious inspiration like prophets—He cites poets and playwrights, but not as authorities or to allegorize them—The primacy of truth—The dramatist contradicts himself because he is involved in all his characters; the legislator dramatizes a noble, perfect life—In Socrates, tragedy and comedy move from stage to real life, as he philosophizes out of eros on border between life and death—His unified obedience to the daimonion and to laws/tradition—Because the philosopher unconditionally serves truth/reality (aletheia), he divides men into those who serve truth and those who let truth serve them, between truth and power, seen in Callicles, Thasymachus, Glaucon, Adeimantus—The just man on the cross, stripped of everything but the truth, where the just man is not unworldly but a call to decision in the midst of the polis—Socrates’ concern to confer the greatest benefits on others, preferring to suffer than do wrong, not seeking his own glory for the sake of the truth—God as refuge of sufferer—Reality can be seen only by those who care only for the Good and for their immortal soul—The philosopher shakes himself free from poetry and myth to come out of realm of imitation to that of original, becoming like God, having nothing in common with those who seek power and pleasure—Service of God is best service of the state, because the same order rules soul and state; the philosopher orders reality from his theoria of truth, and sees his superiority as a service requiring descent to praxis—Difficulties of philosophy and establishing the kallipolis—Form of life imposed by truth requires common ownership of goods, wives, children, total obedience; the heavenly state foreshadows Church in its questions, but fails in solution, showing the limits of philosophy: the holy becomes pragmatized, its heaven a caricature. I.B.2.b. Knowledge and beyond (p. 175): Poet and sophist both claim to speak of everything, but are outstripped by any plain artisan, who provides the model of knowledge, which is determined by object/reality/objective value/nature: man is not measure of all things—Only thus can one attain the excellence/beauty/rightness of anything—Knowledge is open readiness/service/submission before things, even in highest reality (contra Kantian transcendental idealism); a standpoint derived from myth: spirit can secure something self-authenticating/self-disclosing/epiphany, up to the Good—Stages of eros and knowledge—Philosophical knowledge uniquely attains aspect of reality called eidos, idea, ousia; every thing partakes of Being and becoming—Knowing presupposes grasp of Ideas, which corresponds to structure of object not just insofar as it exists (Aristotle), but also insofar as it is not knowable in its essence unless it participates Absolute Unity, Truth, Goodness, Beauty: in every transient thing there is something eternal and beautiful that opens itself to participation; in the being and the way things are, there is a light prior to thought, shining forth as their being and reality, but itself beyond being, unhoped-for beauty (Heraclitus, Gregory of Nyssa)—Understanding comes only with grace—This is more than an a priori at heart of reason—No sharp distinction between scientific understanding and mythical statement. (p. 181): 1. Theory of recollection, immortality, and reincarnation in Meno, Phaedo, Phaedrus, and Timaeus—Opposition between God and man in myth, kinship in philosophy—Universe as participation and image; divine power in man—The created, rationally ensouled gods of the Timaeus—The sufficiency of the Good and the Just for the philosopher, and his demythologiziation of death and Hades—Piety as devotion to sovereign, universaly providential Good—In the Laws, one is to become like the gods, fighting for virtue, worshipping the gods ceremonially, but not doing magic, praying, sacrificing—Proofs for existence of gods based on spirit as self-moving, which is true of human and divine spirit. (p. 186): 2. Ambiguity and irony of theme of inspiration, applied to both Bacchic frenzy and philosophical act of seeing reality—Eros as a form of madness in the Phaedrus, linked to recollection and prenatal vision: soul remembers beauty and truth it once beheld in both infatuation and philosophical act, inclining to divinization of beloved, finding best state in taming sensual/sexual powers and seeking combination of tenderness and distance, suspended between heaven and earth—Stories about eros in the Symposium, which are preparatory steps culminating in Diotima’s speech that eros is between God and man, transporting human things to God and divine things to man, mediating each to the other, a philosopher i.e. a lover of the beautiful, on the way to beauty; longing for the beautiful is not just desire to behold the beautiful (as intellectualized Christian theology describes eternal eudaimonia) but to beget in it and to be immortal: sex is an image of fruitfulness of finite in Absolute—Alcibiades’ speech confirms the idea of eros as metaxu—Possibility of reciprocity in passionate relation to wisdom, a mysterious and unheard-of opening softened by irony, but an opening to Judaism—Socrates does not understand his daimonion but does not call it a god: it is particular not universalized, a relation of obedience without irony; religious syncretic attempts to understand it as immediate contact between God and man, whereby God becomes friend to man and man becomes daimon (Plutarch), do not clarify, in contrast to Socrates’ sober obligation—Interpretation as new stage of spiritual self-consciousness of subjectivity of freedom (Hegel, Kierkegaard) is questionable; rather, the demonic breaks through the world of beauty (Goethe). (p. 195): 3. Myth belongs where philosophical reflections stretch beyond its grasp, and so its form must be poetic—In myth, things are clarified that philosophically can only be seen to be true when made concrete; poetic is substitute for concretion of revelation—The necessary conversio ad phantasmata cannot be made by historical illustration, whole of history, kairos of philosophy: only Christian revelation can synthesize poetry/myth and philosophy; prior to that, philosophy must make and take back myth, as eros overflows in ways not rationally justifiable e.g. in Timaeus’ ambiguous positing of personal God still subordinate to Good, in conflict between prayer and theoria, piety and virtue—Necessary proofs for God’s existence as complement transcending reason—Myth’s grades of existential seriousness—Philosophy is undermined when one views it in context of human totality. (p. 197): 4. Knowledge as act of judgment by spirit, which knows about being and non-being, identity and difference, beyond all change—Plato’s appropriation of Heraclitus and Parmenides—Philosophical knowledge as reverse side of eros, as above the politeia and below God—Integrating objective knowledge within horizon of Being as being, concerned with Being’s inner difference, rest, and movement, a totality containing every non-totality: an answer to Aristotle, purifying Parmenides, the foundations of Neo-Platonism—The ascent here takes becoming up into Being, a most-beautiful whole—The striving for the beautiful that already belongs to it finds rest beyond deprivation and possession (Lysis 221d)—All fulfilling rests on final Between—Kalon and agathon as ultimate expression of existent and all. I.B.2.c. The Breadth of the Kalon (p. 201): Kalon includes more than our notion of beautiful e.g. right, fitting, good, appropriate to a being, that in virtue of which a being has its security, health, integrity, and as embracing and proving all this, beautiful—Kalon is transcendental (Symposium, Laws)—Attempts to define kalon in Hippias Major: problems with definition through examples, and through definitions as fitting, useful for the good, serviceable, what pleases the eye and ear: each are aspects but not whole of kalon—Beautiful approaches the good (kalokagathia); all goods are beautiful, but beauty requires inner measure (Timaeus 87c) which is objective and found in all levels of reality: gracefulness in body, virtue in soul, grandeur in cosmos and divine i.e. measure, number, power, contra those who make the standard pleasure—Good’s reward in itself and its objective inner rightness and joy (eudaimonia, makariotes) not pleasure i.e. not what fills lack—What measures is over what is measured, leading to questions of God’s relation to world—Mystery of the beautiful irreducible to harmony, but just participation in absolute Beauty, an unspeakably illumining presence made known in order, seeking which leads to satisfaction, forgetting the mystery—Relations among parts of soul and state, and their virtues, in Republic; virtue as four-fold master of right relation, and Bildung or paideia as drawing youths into ethical-aesthetic harmony: what is aesthetically right founded in what is ethically right: the place for learning harmonies of music, gymnastics, sexuality, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, dialectic—Critique of poets justified by interpreting kalon as dikaion: we must suffer for the true and for perfect Beauty even to the point htat all other beauty vanishes—In the order of the kosmos all things are held together by communion and friendship—Sin as aesthetic asymmetry and ethical shamefulness. (p. 210): Timaeus’ myth goes beyond Republic’s with respect to proportion and analogy between Idea of Good and beautiful world; difference between Idea and universe is found in self-sufficient God, and soul can take part in eternal realities—World is not just image of archetype, but quasi-sacramental representation of the gods and perfect proportion and symmetry, with a world-soul related to world-body analogous to our soul and body, with equality between our soul and world-soul—Pedagogical movement to Good is through beautiful, rhythm, dance, joy, all of which is given by the gods; we must accommodate our taste to objective, immutable canons of beauty; highest art is eurhythmia that links gymnastic and music i.e. what spreads joy (Laws)—Rules for artists—An aesthetic ethic immanent in the world, in which divine and human appear in identity, in harmony of balance; lays foundation for all of Western humanism, which seeks to draw out the glory of God in the direction of a human/cosmic sublime. (p. 213): Final Platonic touches given in Epinomis, which equates cosmos with God and Ideas with immanent numbers—Contemplation of the dance of the stars—The daimons as intermediaries subject to passions, within a pantheistic identity—Wisdom identified with mathematics, primordial wonder is now at glory of stars, not Being (a forgetting of Being). I.C. Religion I.C.1. The Bridge Never Built (p. 216): After philosophical breakthrough in Socrates in Plato, with no new breakthrough in their consummation in Aristotle, there is long period of religion i.e. search for synthesis of philosophy and myth—To be a valid form of observance and spiritual life, myth needs transposition of meaning given by philosophy, but philosophy tends to present itself in mythic terms at its borders: uniqueness of religion is found in this mutual tendency of philosophy and myth, as a bridge from both these piers that never quite meets, whose essence is always syncretism—Varro on mythic images for the sake of philosophical concepts, and physical religion as better than mythical and civic, but contra Augustine there is no purely philosophical religion, for philosophy must depend on existing forms of cultus—Mediating concept of tradition, and its wisdom, helps in bridge-building (Cicero) i.e. through consensus of mankind, epiphanies of divine, and prophecy—Yet gods of nations can be reduced to natural phenomena or aspects of all-encompassing Godhead—When philosophical abstraction is applied to myth, it evacuates myth of its content in favor of its own: gods cancel each other out in favor of Fate, or philosophical or political hegemony (Hegel)—Normative beauty comes from mythic revelation; Hellenistic-Roman art can only copy in abstraction, without glory and radiance—Philosophy neutralizes myth, and myth becomes just fantasy, or enthusiastic gnostic-mystical sects. I.C.2. Philosophy: One Piece of the Bridge I.C.2.a. Projection on to myth (p. 220): Dogmas of philosophy-based religion, across philosophical schools: 1. Divine as all-encompassing (Aristotle) or all-pervading (Stoicism); 2. Synergia as human-divine relation—Required move from Plato’s mythic language to Aristotle’s scientific discipline which can be religious metaphysic, ethic, aesthetics, mystical discipline—Rapid development of politics and poetics at Aristotle’s time—Aristotle extends late Plato: God’s presence in world, especially in eternal laws of heavenly bodies, for the contemplative spirit—Wonder before the heavens makes whole cosmos appear as temple—No myth needed to see God’s revelation in cosmic law (Philo), yet Aristotle sees with a vision schooled in myth, a vision Paul also has (Rom. 1:19-20)—The world in its eternal aspect is divine, and this is the source and homeland of the soul—The Aristotle of the dialogue followed later Plato in criticizing dualistic doctrine of Ideas—Scientific contemplation leads to relaxed calm of understanding wonder, glory made manifest to it as order, meaningfulness, purpose; points to Stoic ethical kosmopolis: one knows law of God on the basis of one’s existence and human-divine dignity—Through particular sciences, Aristotle found divine order in sub-celestial world (PA I.5); project of tracing logos in the world corresponds to mythic experience—This tendency leads to Stoic vision of the world, to identity of soul with God, being and eros, virtue and wisdom: a leveling Yes to all things, without the Platonic-Aristotelian subtle hierarchy of virtue—Allegorizing interpretations of myth, and Stoic cosmic demythologization; different from Christian allegorization of Scripture, which draws out eternal meaning of historical events (DeLubac)—Stoicism reduces the other to another I, reducing all differentiation to ultimate ungraspable unity: the arrogance of philosophy separate from myth; religion here strains to subordinate individual to cosmic reason (Epictetus, Pascal)—Marcus Aurelius’ arrogance vs. Cleanthes’ dialogical humility and unconditional Yes to everything, the essence of wisdom, ethics, and aesthetics, since cosmic order turns all disproportion to the glory of its proper measure: a mythically-formed devotion—Philosophy of identification must project itself back into myth—Neo-Platonism sought to see reality as glory, yet within a final all-encompassing unity, without the glory of an absolute personal other Thou. I.C.2.b. Dialectic (p. 227): Uneasy dialectic of philosophy of identity between pantheism and atheism; scientific wonder leads to mastery, before which the religious aura gives way—Stoicism turns religious consciousness into ethics, Neo-Platonism into mysticism, both of which cannot escape dialectic of identity, and both of which involve bursting individual limits to embrace the universe: soul is in a way all things (Xenophon), even God (Trismegistus, Asclepius), the essential identity of all things being ecstatically experienced or enstatically experienced i.e. by indwelling of God into soul to point of absorption—Sextus Empiricus’ rejection of pious reserve before the gods (Epicurus), saying they are all human inventions, calling on us to take the future into our control, rejecting the beautiful and the yearning for self-transcendence it yields—Egyptian magic/theurgy (Asclepius) attempted to reinstate religion through power to create gods, yielding a pseudo-dialogue with the gods we create. I.C.3. The Second Pier: Myth I.C.3.a. Projection on the basis of philosophy (p. 232): Alternative to philosophical-scientific reconstruction of Platonic myth of world creator (Aristotle) is reading of those myths to open mythic consciousness hidden in them; 2 paths available: 1. God as literally looking up to world of ideas, and so hierarchy and tension between God and superdivine, or between God as creator and God as source of all Good (links back to Pindar, Aeschylus, Hesiod, forward to Gnosticism); 2. Closer to philosophy, God as revealing Himself only inasmuch as He conceals Himself, sharing Himself and preserving Himself intact (Neo-Platonism)—In a mythology that has developed into a philosophy, revelation exists as inbreaking of light from above, presupposing hierarchy of being, in which outflowing divine powers are substantive realities extending in an unbroken chain from God to men—Prior to philosophy, there could be vision of wholeness of being from a particular aspect of world or history or sacral/sacramental image; after philosophy, myth cannot dispense with it, since philosophy focuses on the totality, to which is related Good and kalon—After Plato, ultimate reality must be the Good; dualistic cosmic forces are sub-spiritual, and particular gnosis is always transcended by universal philosophical gnosis: particular Gnostic claims are not universally valid, and the cosmic struggles they depict are either unserious or not divine—Gnosticism is just the objectification of existential experiences—Mystery cults are more mythic than gnostic, only claiming a sectarian, timeless consciousness, and in that sense are modern—Fundamentally syncretistic structure of religion seen in play of myth and philosophy disguised as one another e.g. in hermetic writings that present orthodox philosophy as lecture by a god, in the change from Hesiod’s mythic account of signs rooted in farming life to Aristotle’s more scientific account of signs—Porphyry and Iamblichus give oracles and other superstitions philosophical undergirding, and equal weight to philosophy—De Mysteriis is both close to and farthest from Christianity: knowledge of God is beyond subject-object judgment and opposition, and myth and I-Thou relation of prayer and theurgy encompassed by pantheistic identity; no psychological reduction of religious a priori possible; the gods show us grace given in love, and all religious activity is an opus operatum, a symbolic action whose meaning is grasped by God alone—Human imagination is here given its rightful religious place, but this rests on idea that whole cosmos is perfect incarnation of God; this allows even obscene temple rites, interpreted symbolically—Still impossible on this system is that the divine should humble itself to serve the human: the divine is never changed when it allows others to participate in it (Iamblichus)—Christianity and paganism borrow from one another—Hegel takes up this philosophy of identity at a higher level of reflection. I.C.3.b. Openness (p. 241): Self-subverting dialectic of pantheism and atheism is not last word of pre-Christian world; if it had been, Christianity would not have had such a struggle with ancient world over meaning of glory, and would have been able to complete bridge between philosophy and myth—The unfinishable, “torso-like” nature of world’s constructions is unsurpassably authentic and definitive expression of humanum—The conceptual images that make sense of incompleteness have lasted: only as Jews or Gentiles do we become Christians, and we proclaim the Gospel in the antechamber world of Jewish or Gentile understanding—God has become human and so come into positive contact with religion (contra Barth), philosophy (contra Kierkegaard), myth (contra Bultmann), as seen in the Bible, which took shape in the age of syncretism; “purifying” Christianity of these things leaves something pitifully abstract—Syncretism of OT and NT; human thinking requires concepts and images, and the relation between religion and revelation is intimate interior penetration—Removing anthropomorphism from the Bible requires either the more crude mythologoumena of science, or irrational existentialism—Declining classical world clearly saw how precarious a characterization of existence was, as it had tried to keep the dark aspects of reality before its eyes, yet still say Yes to all experience, to see all reality as good and beautiful: this Yes is not an arrogance refusing to put up with a defective world—Divine honors given to state rulers from Alexander on is in context of intermediate sphere of theion i.e. divine brightness over the world—Inability of artists to identify with the state, and consequent bitter or obscene but technically brilliant work (Catullus, Martial, Ovid, Horace)—2 rise above this turmoil and point toward Christianity in trying to affirm the universal, Vergil and Plotinus: they stand as heights in West and East, Vergil underlying all subsequent national epics, and Plotinus being the one through whom the Cappadocians read Plato, and underlies philosophy up to Shaftesbury, Rossetti, Goethe; they crown their age in being open to wider perspectives, clearing a space for their disciples to flourish. I.C.4. Vergil I.C.4.a. The Glory of the World (p. 249): Vergil shares but transcends previous categories of myth, philosophy, and religion—He finds at the source of all things a path into an open space, a place of healing and holiness; a vision uninfected by Plato’s critical doubts, which progresses through 3 stages on the road to real freedom: Bucolics, Georgics, Aeneid—Lucretius’ materialistic epic spurred him to imitate it in a wholly opposed way—His rejection of aesthetic pastoralism and Epicurean philosophy—As a Roman, not a Greek, he is concerned not with myths or ideas but historical res surrounding humans, with revealing the limited reality of the present until it reveals its face, which requires labor and perseverance—Not the Alexandrian perfect treatment of obscure or trivial objects—Bucolics are a vision of the whole seen from Earth: the conflict between brutal contemporary history and rural peace, the disproportionate violent character of eros insensitive to human pain, a longing for a world-redeemer and a Golden Age, an amor beyond eros—He creates a pure poetic-aesthetic world of symbols beyond any Greek achievement, but his ideal landscape is penetrated on all sides from beyond, and is only a cipher for the depths of actual reality, since the flight into the aesthetic is futile—The ambiguity of eros who ignores Jupiter, which the West will repeatedly match against Christian caritas—Vergil’s unrequited love, a reverence before nature and fate, a willingness to share all suffering, which is not Buddhist or Stoic compassion, like chivalry; to this self-effacing presence, all things become visible in their proper worth and capable of being celebrated by the poet, revealing their glory, but not an insubstantial glory apart from real objects—Pietas as reverence for all that binds humans together, distinct from eros and pure duty; entirely foreign to this attitude of Aeneas’ is the Dionysian attitude, though Venus is Aeneas’ mother—Convergence of human and divine love is here inconceivable—Though Vergil uses the imagery of the cyclic cosmic year and the return of the Golden Age, his view of time is actually contradictory to this in its historicity. (p. 256): The agricultural poems of the Georgics take Vergil back to Hesiod, and the Aeneid back to Homer to start over differently from that point—In Georgics a view of real life in its harshness and beauty, combining the serious and the playful that illumines the serious, rooted in the soil of Italy, in 4 books on soil, trees, livestock, and bees, the last of which represents the divine presence—Not out of punishment but out of love God ended the Golden Age: his grace is found in cura and the difficulty of tilling the soil—The courses of the stars both orient our year to what is not passing, and are signs of the historical times—The fertility of the spring, and the harvest as festival of thanksgiving; the vegetable world preserves the marks of original righteousness—The melancholy of animal life, for mating implies mortality, eros leads to suffering, and animal life is threatened by climate and plague—Bees elevate nature beyond itself into a realm of purity and radiance; bees are magnanimous in their self-sacrifice for their city, and their life is love, celebration, glorification, a pledge of immortality, only faintly associated with Stoic immanent Godhead—The tragic dimension of love that cannot be consummated, the beloved gone into the realm of the dead (echoed in Rilke), though nature may show us a way to resurrection; Vergil refuses resolution, only juxtaposing these—The poet’s Yes to all life, both harsh and beautiful, in response to Being’s barely audible Yes. I.C.4.b. The Glory of Mission (p. 261): Bucolics sought transfiguration of world in timeless beauty, Olympian apotheosis, lost origins, hoped-for consummations, utopian Arcadia—Georgics are settled in this world, vigilant in struggle, but with a trace of nostalgia for lost primordial age and final peaceable kingdom—In both, the historical world of Roman reality is conceive from outside; in Aeneid, the poet enters the real world, exposing himself to experiencing its heart: a coinciding of present and past, ethical and aesthetic, engaging Rome in its becoming, longing, renunciation, preparation for its destiny, starting with defeat—Static symbolic relation between beginning and ending, with former dynamically transcending itself and foreshadowing something beyond itself, understanding itself in terms of responsive obedience to something wholly other, the Roman ethos and virtue—The human being is a temporal historical creature, an anticipation of what is to come, whose unique path is a task and mission serving as sacrificial construction of a greater reality, in service to the people—Homeric heroes are unrelated individuals; Roman heroes personify service to the people, as ethical functions of the people, pius to their fathers—The God who directs this destiny has no form, but only provisional functional epiphanies—Aeneas embodies a faceless renunciation of high-profile representation, a self-transcendence in which Vergil is educating the people and the emperor—Parallels of Aeneas and Abraham: each is mission and service, while the one to come is power and glory—Aeneas’ prophetic openness to the future—The mystical privilege of a founder is to see his descendants, a vision that turns hope into certainty while remaining hope—Vergil desires for Rome openness to the indefinite, while retaining national identity—Rome is matter for the form of kairos and fortuna. (p.267): 1. Aeneas’ mission is laid upon him; he does not move to Italy on his own initiative, and when with Dido he seems to forget his mission, he is harshly recalled to it divinely—He has no option but the obedience laid on him, requiring Roman indifference in order to sacrifice what he loves for the mission—Patient endurance is fundamental human virtue—The command is not an external burden, but requires assent from the heart; Aeneas struggles out of love that is his own, to move toward his patria—As father of the race, he suffers the entire future fate of his people, bearable only through hope and knowledge of final consummation. (p. 270): 2. Fatum is divine act of sending and mission that accompanies it conceived in advance—It cannot be understood in terms of Homeric myth or Stoic philosophy, but directs us to a mysterium—Appears in oracles—Destiny appears in distinct, even contradictory, levels and senses, opening a polytheistic perspective, deriving from experience of mission; divine powers arranged hierarchically, with Jove at the head, and Juno as power of opposition to be won over by sacrifice and piety, and what she represents is integrated into will of Jove—Jupiter’s will cannot be opposed, and can be called God or Fate; he can grant prayers and even declare himself vanquished: this conception of God goes far deeper than philosophical abstraction—There is an inarticulable relation of love between God and man, which must be revered in silence; there is sorrow and pietas in God—The visage of the gods, while deriving somewhat from peasant religion, reflects the light of the faithfulness of the obedient hero—Only the mission has three-dimensional form—Tragic conflict between Dido and Aeneas represents struggle of Rome and Carthage, Anthony/Augustus and Cleopatra, seductive Hellenistic East and Western Roman missionary energy—Parable of particular historical mandate of Rome to unity Italy—The glory of imperial Rome is transcended in another order of glory unknown to Rome. (p. 274): 3. While tragic humiliation was against a lightless heaven, and Homeric endurance just the trial of individual hearts, Vergilian humiliation contains a meaning because it occurs in context of obedience to God, though it nearly borders Hegelian meaningless sacrifice of individual to the state—But Vergil retains earthy sense of man as close to the soil, inglorius, the humility of mission; Rome is rooted in the worst of ancient defeats—Unlike Odysseus, Aeneas must remain in foreign places, reduced to poverty—Vergil’s awareness of Homer towering above him, like Goethe with Shakespeare; the balance and limits of the Aeneid—Vergil’s devotion to Augustus, to whom Aeneas the gods as functions of Roman mission point—Vergil has a quality of quietness, vulnerability, humbling from within, based on his awareness that his work and world are poised over the depths of his selfhood; in the radiance of his inner love he is father of the West and of the spiritual concept of Europe (Eliot, Curtius, Borchardt)—Christianity saw him as poet par excellence second only to Scripture—The only imbalance in him is his identifying true glory with Augustine Rome. I.C.5. Plotinus I.C.5.a. God in All and Above all (p. 280): Plotinus, unaffected by Christianity, tries to integrate all ancient philosophical and religious awareness, not syncretistically but through return to sources where everything is still undivided—Being is the divine; its total revelation is so glorious it outshines all particular myths, though the single complete revelation appears in each of them—Through him Classical thought is transmitted to the Fathers; his effect on scholastics, humanists, Hegel—Seen by Christians as theological philosophy, by moderns as identity philosophy. (p. 282): His awe before the glory of the cosmos as a vast ensouled organism in which all individual souls have their share, throughout which radiates presence of eternal spirit in which noesis and noema are one, and in which a generative mystery is at work, revealed and hidden, present but unapproachable everywhere; everything struggles in eros toward this—The explication of God into the world is not (contra Gnostics) a fall in the Creator or the world; God is seen as much in multiplicity as unity—No world-weariness in Plotinus’ longing for the primordial source—Problem of reconciling early and late Plato—Intellect and World-Soul do not undergo process, and are beautiful as they are—Individuality is positive, ratione formae not ratione materiae—Fall of the individual soul, which nevertheless is within the World-Soul: i. Soul as such cannot be evil, and something in it always remains above; ii. Descent of soul is freely chosen change to form what is below it, in which it benefits even from unpleasant experiences; iii. the All is not diminished even in relation to this falling away—Providence is a universal Logos interior to the All as a just order and harmony—We are within, not distant from, the Truly Existent; each hypostasis (One, Intellect, Soul) has the next highest one at its heart—In the perfect drama, nous triumphs over anagke—Concepts of necessity and freedom do not apply to this drama of God unfolding in multiplicity; God is Good Itself, not one who acts according to the Good, beyond reason and will—His manifestation is the epiphany of His own inner necessity or unconditionedness; He is ground of all substantiality and that which alone is free, the primordial energy of things, brimming over with life—Qualifications and negations of the “brimming over” image: God remains the same in Himself, so Wholly Other that He is Not-Other (Cusa, following Plotinus), not separated from anything, immanent in all because transcendent—The higher always has the urge to unfold itself in the lower superabundantly while remaining in its own place—This theological ontology provides formal structure for subsequent Western thought; its relation to immanence and creation in OT and NT. I.C.5.b. The Defining of the European Mind (p. 291): Intellect is essential act of pure thinking separable from accidental thinking in the life of Soul as the latter’s precondition; pure thinking is unity-in-duality of noesis and noema, which eternally is resolved through identity: subject contemplates object in eidos—Intellect is identical with its objects, eternally discovering itself in its objects and returning to itself—The form that is thought exists purely insofar as it is thought, its energeia is in the energeia of thought; in pure thought and Being, every potential is always already actual—Complete reciprocity between thought and Being, which never does away with presupposed otherness; these claims seek to comprehend Plato, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Aristotle, an idealism-realism that grounds Being in its logical nature—Intellect strives in all its thinking for the One, who is never other to thought—Being as it encounters thinking is form/ousia/eidos/morphe, always something definite and beautiful, so the One is formless and beyond Intellect, Beauty, Form as their common source—Form of Being is formless inasmuch as it is not an individual form of a specific thing, but form inasmuch as object of Intellect; both Intellect and Being are infinite but secondary to the One, in which they participate, both including a spiritual materiality i.e. something formed, but perfectly actualized, belonging to both noesis and noema: the root of St. Thomas’ comparison between matter and possible intellect—Intellect’s eros for the One is an eternal quest which is also immediately eternal discovery, eternal movement and eternal rest, lacking nothing; Plotinus puts the fulfilled and unfulfilled side by side, concluding the themes of Antiquity and opening Western philosophy—Intellect eternally finds itself, but it then seems that Intellect just is the One (Hegel); all that would be needed to encounter glory is the right way of looking/theoria, affirming the world as the loveliest it could be, and all things exist for theoria—Stronger inner act and self-possession yields more powerful energeia radiating from it—Theoria is total absorption in/submission to being as noema, but also return to oneself/encountering oneself in the object—God is the inner depth and source of things, the light of which things are the radiance—For Plotinus, centers of Soul, Intellect, One coincide but are also hierarchical, without fall from or collapse into the One (contra German Idealism): a non-mythical divine self-manifestation breaking forth from the depth of Being itself: Glory breaks into Being and Intellect from above, bestowing on them their transcendental Beauty—The radiating of Beauty is theological more than philosophical (lost sight of by Idealism), drawing on Greek myth which views Being as divine epiphany, later taken up by Christianity, which sees God in all things, because it sees the glory of God in the flesh. I.C.5.c. The Beautiful and the More-than-Beautiful (p. 302): Plotinus stands speechless before the miracle of Being that transcends all reason; the clearest revelation of the groundlessly self-giving Good is that there is a world of immense wonder—To know oneself is to know the Father, one’s origin; the intellect perceives what is marvelous beyond its own being, what is nameless, unconceptualizable, imageless, though we call it the “One”, it is unlimited plenitude: we know of it only from what is posterior to it and what it is not, and even thinking belongs only to nous—Things cannot have come to be without such a primal source; all worldly truth, goodness, beauty point to it, all eros depends on it—To attain the One requires going beyond Intellect, being caught up, a yearning that freely cuts loose all seeing and conceiving so as alone to encounter the Alone—The language of love and enthusiasm; to turn to things other than the One is infidelity, and we should touch God with our whole selves—What we yearn for is more-than-beauty and excess of beauty: the Beautiful kindles desire in us, the Good is already present in us long before; the Beautiful is around the One like a veil—The proper existence of the Beautiful is in the realm of nous, form, mutual transparency of subject and object, but also an epiphany of a higher mystery: there is form and splendor, and no beauty without glory i.e. the more-than-beautiful; the fascinosum i.e. radiance sent forth by beauty signifies that in beauty there is something beyond it: in “in” is not voided of force by the “beyond” or reduced to pure appearance—What is generated by the One is necessarily Intellect—The infinite interplay of subject and object, concealment and unveiling, wonder at the other and discovery of what is one’s own, eros and identity are the play of beauty, which can only occur in the light of the Good giving its pleasure, brightness, inexhaustibility, which desires to be recognized because no individual form satisfies—Interpreting early treatises on beauty in light of later—Symmetry cannot be basis of beauty, but only expression of deeper unity and idea, as color is too—Existent reality and Intellect are both source of light and illumined from deeper source—Flight from sensible world in early works, risking idealist aesthetic, but Plotinus also stresses immanence of the Beautiful everywhere—Philosophers, musicians, and lovers are receptive to divine things—In later works, form is found in intellectual interiority of nature and intellect of artist imitating nature and beholding God in the manner of producing, which silences Plato’s critique of art—Beauty of a living substance is no surface quality but something radiating from within, an inner unity and simplicity containing external form in itself—Recollection directs us to the realm where outer and inner, lover and beloved, merge—The inner inexhaustibility of beauty, which permits no satiety or weariness, inspires Gregory of Nyssa’s theology of love—Being is longed for because it is identical with beauty, and beautiful is fit object of love because it is Being; here, both are fragile and becoming, but they point to realm of identity, the first Beauty in which the One is present and beyond—Contemplation of the beautiful involves self-contemplation, and being contemplated by and present to the One—Plotinus joins the strands of Greek heritage in his vision of being as Beauty because revelation of divine—His theology is a kairos containing risk and fruitfulness of future ages—Christians take over his basic frames of reference for understanding Trinity, mystical Christ, conversion, 3 stages of spiritual life, love of God. II. Elaborations II.A. The Theological A Priori of the Philosophy of Beauty II.A.1. The Christian Starting-Point: The Fathers (p. 317): Christian event as goal of Biblical story ushers in completely new, unique experience of divine glory, transforming it, not just adding a new dimension, dispensed from above, unattainable from below—All mythical, philosophical, religious knowledge of Antiquity was theological, ultimately with a loving faith in the all-embracing goodness transcending all—Christianity is the gracious fulfillment of all of humanity’s seeking after God, and so it uses the conceptual resources of Antiquity e.g. the concept of glory from late Hellenism: in this encounter is the greatness and tragic questionableness of Christian theology, art, culture, and politics—Christianity sees itself in foreign categories, the price for Paul bearing the Gospel directly to the Gentiles; hence the cosmological tendency of first millennium Christianity—Biblical glory of God is expressed in ancient categories of glory, which was already a complete theology, taken up as spolia Aegyptiorum, a monstrance; in this way, Christian culture can become the focus, exhibiting but not expressing the central mystery, brought to crisis by Luther, and not alleviated by the turn to anthropology and human freedom—Christians feel themselves the heirs of all revelation of and ascent to God, since there is only one God sought by all—Themes from Antiquity passing unbroken into Christianity: 1. Procession and return of creatures from and to God (Origen, Aquinas); 2. Eros as fundamental yearning of finite creature for transcendence in God, the primal unity and beauty (e.g. Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Bernard, Dante, Ficino); 3. Indestructible beauty of the spiritual soul and virtue, and eschatological marriage between Christ and Church/Mary/soul (e.g. Origen, Ambrose, Bede, Luther)—The Biblical eros motif leads to heart of Christian mysteries and their Conciliar expression, and the justification for the spolia Aegyptiorum—We must see relations between these themes and philosophical beauty and Biblical glory—Focus on the monstrance leads to iconoclasm, which fails to solve the problem because it contradicts universality of Christian truth—We must see how ancient theological aesthetic was transformed through mediation of Christianity into modern apparently purely philosophical aesthetic, seen in Renaissance and Reformation, and whether the latter can recover the presupposition of Antiquity and Christianity that Being itself is kalon i.e. glory endlessly to be affirmed, which the modern age cannot do. II.A.2. Entry into the Middle Ages II.A.2.a. Harmony between God and the world (p. 325): Boethius: He is foundation for medieval aesthetics, and chief witness of Neo-Platonic and Aristotelian-Stoic Plato, in texts and as suffering as Socrates did: philosophy proves herself in the face of death, as other dying philosophers showed (e.g. Zeno, Seneca)—Poems in Consolation revolve around beauty of the world: concordia/amor is the law/order that rules the world, ever present throughout time, the sunken copy of the simple presence of eternity—Only man strives against eternal law in his attachment to the transient and illusory, and to the benefits of Fortuna, providence reaching down into matter and there taking on the form of destiny and accident, but remaining in pure form in the pure heart and the heavens; goods of fortune are just fragments of an exploded unity—The good man, not the evil man, achieves the blessedness, renown, honor, veneration, sufficiency he strives for; it is more powerful to be capable of good only, not evil also—Foundation of idea of transcendentality of the good and the beautiful i.e. venerable, radiant, blessed—God is most glorious, and has fashioned world as glorious after his model of goodness and beauty; man achieves innermost participation in God, which is beautiful—Man is to stake his powers on goodness and inner unity, and await the blessedness that radiates from that—Transcendental demonstration is not formal/a priori, like an ontological argument, but based on revealedness of God in the glory of cosmos (following Antiquity): we see, not infer, the essential dignity and beauty of a thing, making accessible Being’s self-disclosure, not just conclusion of reason (lost sight of first with Duns Scotus)—Boethius is scarcely beyond Cleanthes; the transcendence of eternity over time, and the proper attitudes that result e.g. hope, prayer, humility, are not from Bible but from creature’s self-experience—Mystery of evil here is that of non-being; sin, Christ, and cross are missing: Platonic cosmic/ontological, human/virtuous, and instrumental music is the redeemer leading to ethically harmonious joy—Music is more spiritual than sensory and rooted in heart-beat, though the art of the ear is privileged over eye—Harmony in the self and with the cosmos are joy; suavitas is how convenientia or consonantia are experienced, rather than being a separate psychological aspect of aesthetics. II.A.2.b. Divine Majesty and Religious Awe (p. 332): Cassiodorus: He mediates Romans and Germans, and puts liberal arts and theology into monastic mold, drawing on ancient aesthetics, but also authentically on Bible, picked up with a Roman ear and echoed in Roman liturgy not medieval theology—He admires cosmic and sensory beauty more than Boethius, but majestas is the basic word for God and His manifestation—His incomprehensible majesty gathers together the harmony of the world; the blessed behold how His majesty arranges each individual thing—Math is most certain and governing in this world, but God transcends number; the music of the world is the appropriate response to God—Cassiodorus has ancient feel for beauty of body in its paradisial nakedness, but also in its Christian functions—The clear shining of the Trinity and of souls as images of that truth; soul is a music that sounds through grace—Link of Pythagoras to David, music to commandments: music rises from nature and teaches us to think with measure, speak beautifully, move gracefully; it is a parable of the ineffable. (p. 336): Benedict: His pattern for image of God and man made a greater impression on the West than the great thinkers: his God is the Biblical God, his man is formed by standing before this God without protection—Forms of antiquity are not a second rule alongside the Biblical one—Rule opens with call to listen and obey; man appropriates God’s gaze and call in ever-deepening humilitas, descending into creaturely nothingness and call of Christ, founded on obedience i.e. response to calling word: annihilating one’s own personality, and then receiving the form of Christ, without resistance from the abbot—The Rule is the form of the incarnate God, a given measure—God meets us in grace as one who gives, as love, in the guest, the stranger, the sick—The gloria dei manifest in the world is the form of the measure of God in our lives, in brotherly love—In/through love, God is to be feared with Biblical/Roman piety; an awesome distance is the closest position to the Father. (p. 339): Gregory the Great: He inherited spirit of Benedict, Roman style, Evagrian asceticism of ascent and mysticism—Active and contemplative stages related by governing experience of overpowering glory of God, centered on revelations in Job and Ezekiel—Focus on the pondus or kabôd i.e. the weight or glory of God, Whose weighty majesty holds sway in and over everything, Who sees but will never be seen as He is—Dialectic of seeking in finding is found not only in earthly life, but also in heavenly (following Gregory of Nyssa); at the deepest level, the lover wills the invisibility of God, ever longing for and being satisfied in the beloved—Gregory never fully realized that God’s glory goes into exile and lowliness: the descent from the form of God to the cross is glory—For the patristic and medieval period, the descent of God is the means for the ascent of man, but glory is blessedness and transfiguration of the world i.e. a cosmocentric account. (p. 342): Isidore of Seville: As theological glory recedes, philosophical beauty is more ready to be drawn out—For Isidore, beauty of the world becomes most excellent way to God—As love of creatures alienates us from God, so through beauty of the creature we can return to God—Hence Carolingian affirmative engagement with classical art (contra Byzantines) as worldly, rather than sacramental, glorification of God—Christian freedom attained by allowing partial validity of classical approach in a Christian whole—As sensible beauties are easy to love, so God should be more easy to love (Alcuin); the greater love is right (Augustine), but this justifies including classical in Christian beauty (Alan of Lille and Dante, beyond Augustine). II.A.2.c. The World as the Interpretation of God (p. 343): John Erigena: Western presuppositions here are flooded with Greek speculation (Gregory of Nyssa, Denys, Maximus), the philosophical world-picture made into a Christian utterance (followed by Nicholas of Cusa): Plotinian material is rendered dynamic in a Biblical and historical way (Origen)—Christ brings an eschatological stress into static philosophy of Plotinus—God is uncreated and creating nature, archai are created and creating nature, sensible world is created and not creating, eschatologically God is uncreated and not creating; could be interpreted as saying God’s explication comes to an end (Spinoza, Hegel)—In Christ, whole truth of God is manifest as personal inclusive concept and pinnacle of philosophy; veritas is in vision not concept—God in His sublimity cannot be seen entirely by any creature or even by Himself, but He does not go out in archai, categories, and individuals to conceive Himself; in all epiphanies, the non-manifest appears and the inconceivable in conceived, the invisible remains so yet makes itself known in signs and parables, divine Spirit enters us and becomes other while transcending this form—The world is composed from contradictories, and God is their ground, reconciling all in harmony—God’s freedom is secured by His transcendence over every particular manifestation, so any introduction of particular divine decisions into the history of the world is blasphemous (contra Gottschalk’s double predestination)—Hell as self-destructiveness of sin and the glory of God made known in relation to evil, which ultimately transforms all evil into good; Christ’s redemption is here thought of cosmically, following Greek thought (Heraclitus, Plotinus)—Philosophical insight into God’s glory is brought to bear on unique form of revelation of God in Christ—Cosmological and Biblical motives are ordered within category of symbol, both nature and Scripture are inadequate to mediating God—Laws of nature, Scripture/OT, and grace/NT (Maximus), where first is already implicitly Christian, and last just its final consequence; natural love already has to do with primordial image of God in Christ—Christ is imago, man is ad imaginem, so love of man is directed to Christ—Creation splits the one Idea into many ideas/world-principles, from which things are poured forth, with a kernel of striving to return: resurrection belongs to grace and nature, ascent to God without mingling of substance or annulment of individuality (Maximus) so that God is all in all—The risen Christ already fills the world, which requires demythologization of cosmic eschatology: everything is resolved in glory of God in Christ filling the whole world with the brightness of His appearance—Erigena means to speak of creation ex nihilo, but he rejects all matter, and is content with radiations of first principles out of whose union individuals come to be: this is inadequate to Biblical free encounter of Creator and creature; harmony of the world is expressed by amor: this is inadequate to God’s immanent love in nature and caritas in Christ—Erigena distinguishes datio of creaturely existence and donatio of participation in good and beautiful: this theological preconception of the creature is inadequate to Biblical view—God is reduced to fixed point of world’s harmony—Erigena on music—Erigena at the roots of subsequent Western philosophy—In appropriate classical concepts and formulas of experience, Christian thought does not take over something needing demythologization, but an encounter with God through the cosmos into which it injects its own revelation; this thought affirms being in any form (contra Asiatic weariness), and traces everywhere the kalon and agathon—Confusion over beauty and glory: the glory of crucified love is presupposed not contemplated; at the point when the latter could be recovered, then Platonic vision reemerged, but if latter is lost as in Luther then mankind is lost. II.A.3. Transitions to Philosophy II.A.3.a. Sacral Monism: The Victorines (p. 356): Hugh of St. Victor: Inner form of Scholasticism given not by Anselm but by the view of human existence from Boethius and Erigena—Anselm took Christian mysterium out of philosophical monstrance, so historical revelation would yield its inner logos on a pure theological basis; this has no successor, since even Bernard clothed his theology in classical mysticism—Unity of classical and Christian contemplation rules School of Victorines, centered on Hugh, whose aesthetics sees Boethian eros as with division from caritas, for cupiditas and caritas are 2-fold direction of amor, the vital-subjective side of world harmony rooted in God—Only God/the One can love and be loved uniquely—Desire to penetrate all veils to the abyss of God is softened in Hugh to love for the beauty of the world, whose things are simulacra invisibilium, as bridge to beauty of God—Form, the ordering of unordered stuff, is more like God than the formless—All existence is music and pleasure, all for man’s delight to be used and contemplated in ordered love anagogically so as to be raised to God; only he who sees/reads, understands the signs: the experience of beautiful forms in all senses is the universal approach of God’s inconceivable love, God’s call (kaleo) through world’s beauty (kalon)—Both nature and grace have objective beauty, but only latter can give power of sight/spiritual senses along with truth—Imagination mediates body/symbol to spirit/truth. (p. 359): Richard of St. Victor: He more strongly emphasizes mystical experience where excessus is super/praeter rationem, because God is more dissimilar than similar, and folly of human reason results in Christian intensification of eros’ madness casting itself into the world with Christ—Biblical allegory and use of eros pressed as far as it can in Richard and other Victorines without clouding Christian purity: an emphasis on eros, human passion, enthusiasm, admiration passing immediately into caritas, wisdom, theoria—A vision of unity and infinitely wide beauty is spirit of the age, embracing both those who advocate architectural simplicity (Bernard), and those who advocate great magnificence (Suger of St. Denys); a world-view of unbroken sacrality (Hildegard, Gerhoh of Reichersberg). II.A.3.b. Discovery of the World (p. 362): School of Chartres: meditates on origin of world (Timaeus, Genesis) shifting interest from God to cosmos symbolized by goddess Physis/Natura, who has derivative third place behind the Father/opifex who makes matter and the Ideas/goddess Noys who adorns matter, and is theological Holy Spirit and Platonic World-Soul—Vision directed not infinity of God but to center of cosmos i.e. man the microcosm (Bernardus Silvestris) to whom Physis gives the elementary part and Noys the divine part—Intersection of matter and form, embodied Idea, is marriage of heaven and earth, eros, harmony; matter’s ascent and Ideas’ descent awaken many world-potencies/daimones, behind which God/tugaton fades into unreality. (p. 363): Alan of Lille: Man’s corruption is sodomy not sin against God—Nature is God’s viceroy and takes over His attributes—Union of matter and form is described in marriage terms, drawing attention to erotic undertone of the concrete—Nature is handmaid of God, but is unfamiliar with theology, which often teaches something different from Nature—Nature wants to bring forth a perfect man who is also God; his fashioning and final battle against the vices—Christ is important yet ultimately excluded from this vision (Huizinga) because of the mythic sphere placed next to the Christian—Importance to Chartres of ontological aspect of problem of universals i.e. question of how divine Ideas come to form in things—Alan’s reduction of theology to axioms, taking up God as identity of converging world-lines (Erigena) without classical tremor before the ineffable; sounds pantheistic, but is just result of concept of God derived from world-convergence—God is forma essendi of things because all forms are indifferently established in that form (Thierry of Chartres). (p. 366): Gilbert de la Porrée: God is pure form without matter from whom forms proceed first as Ideas, then as formae nativae/concretae—God is not id quo for creatures, but for the id quod of tripersonality (countered by Bernard)—Contra Gilbert, form of Being should better be thought of not as God but as first arche or emanation (Denys)—School of Chartres led to pantheists Amalric of Bène and David of Dinant. (p. 366): Peter Abelard: Abelard supplants objective problem of universals with subjective problem of how universals are recognized in individuals—Focus on abstraction demystified universals: they are not ultimate reasons/archai next to the Godhead, but general properties mastered by the individual mind—This view lead through Thomas to Ockham: philosophical focus on this-worldly makes space for incomprehensibility of God; development of logic allows both theological rationalism which allows defense of everything in theology, and a defense of mysterium through method of sic-et-non—Knowledge as mastery of the world is felt in theology seeing God as ultimate cause, object of axioms, model of worldly being in physics of light. (p.368): Robert Grosseteste: He sketched philosophical dimensions of theory of light, drawing on Fathers (Basil, Philoponus, Augustine), Arabic sources, and Latin extension of physics into theology—Light is matter, and extends timelessly from a point—God must only position one point of light to create the world, and as it expands, space expands; bodies arise from reflection of light back upon itself—Light is most like God in its self-revelation and self-multiplying/begetting; a physical justification for world-soul (anticipates Schelling, Soloviev, Teilard)—Light is fundamental element of beauty and adornment—Contrary to earlier tradition, sound is here rooted in light; truth requires eternal light—He takes up idea of divine radiance i.e. God as form of all things; creation is process of imprinting and expressing form of God in all individual forms, an artistic process that awakens concept of beautiful—Earlier tradition (Augustine, Denys) saw God’s glory appearing in light, but did not, unlike some medieval thinkers, see light as applying univocally or straight-forwardly from matter to spirit/God—Attributes of light as revealing attributes of God—This metaphysic of light only retains a few Biblical references—Cosmologies overtaken by Aristotelianism, which sees creatures as one and good in themselves, not as dissection of God—Out of encounter of Aristotelian existences with Platonic/Proclean being flowing out of God is born philosophy of transcendentals of high Scholasticism, which as philosophy knows itself distinct from Biblical theology, and affirms that all being is one, true, good, beautiful. II.A.3.c. Transcendental Aesthetics (p. 372): History of thinking on transcendentals, especially beauty from Philip the Chancellor to Denys the Carthusian and Nicholas of Cusa; question of transcendentality of beauty silenced mostly among Scotists and Nominalists: the question arises in Dionysian Renaissance (Alexander of Hales, Albert, Thomas, Ulrich of Strasbourg)—For Thomas, ens commune or esse is not God, sum of worldly beings, conceptus entis, but first created reality proceeding from God in which all beings participate and which only subsists in them i.e. theophanic being in classical and Pauline senses, creaturely reality qua seen and conceived by all-embracing manifestation of God; other transcendentals are not properties of it at its disposal, but with which ens commune refers to primordial ground of Being of which it is the image—Transcendental philosophy points back to pre-Platonic Hellenic revelation of God: beauty is transparent to esse subsistens only comprehensible as mysterium, radiant glory—Thomas secures the elevation of God over Being, against all pantheism, securing glory a place in metaphysics; Platonism attempted this, but without the sublimity of God revealed as absolute freedom God was dragged into dialectic of in-itself and out-of-itself—Thomistic transcendental philosophy is higher center and mediation of classical and modern metaphysics and is most valid representative of distinctively Western thought—All metaphysics, even Asiatic, agree that Being is One, which does not distinguish God and Being—That Being is True, not maya, is characteristic of Western thought from Homer on; only on that basis is Being Good and Beautiful—Trinity is guarantee of Western transcendental philosophy, since only a Triune God can make a world outside Himself credibly true and good, while remaining free and independent; philosophical difference points to revealed theological mysterium—Exemplarism is the heart of metaphysics (Gilson)—It is difficult to find a place for the beautiful because one, true, good point back to persons of Trinity; beauty oscillates among the other transcendentals as ineffable preciousness of Being, though some see it as a form of good or true, which is still a way it can be transcendental. (p. 378): The Franciscan Impulse: Human existence is confirmed a posteriori by the beauty of the world—Leap from sensible/spiritual beauty to beauty of Being as such was first attempted by Franciscans, drawing from experience of Francis, Chartres, Denys. (p. 378): Francis of Assisi: Francis wants discipleship of Christ in His humility and poverty to the point of need, so that one can receive everything as a gift—Franciscan life is pure glorifying praise for glory of God’s love and grace streaming from every being, as seen in his Rule: we give thanks for all things and orders of society—Similarities of Franciscan and Dionysian God as dazzling ocean of light—The one who praises makes himself able to experience all being as flowing love of God; poverty is what does not resist this flow—God’s beauty is revealed in procession of his virtues, including humility, the wisdom of self-spending love. (p. 381): Alexander of Hales: Everything true, good, and beautiful in creature is gift of Creator, and these are names of Him formally, and of creatures only by denomination and analogously; Being as said of God cannot be participated, since ‘being’ is said absolutely only of reality of particular thing—As in Chartres or Erigena, work of creation is distinct from work of endowment with truth, goodness, beauty; this analogia entis starts with equivocation, and like Gilbert this wavers between abolition of analogy and emanationism: only Thomas will do justice to Francis’ concern to find the glory of God in humility-poverty-beauty of all things—For Franciscans, the transcendentals are found a posteriori in things—Beauty is identified with authentic good, aspired to for its own sake (Aristotle, Cicero) because it is diffusivum sui (Platonism), giving participation in its unity, and so is true and useful; beauty related to formal cause (Plotinus, Hilary, Augustine), distinct from good in affinity with true, where truth involves accord with the universe, and nothing is true for itself alone (Assisi Anonymous)—Beauty is transcendental because it intersects with one, true, good but cannot be identified with any of them—God is so much the Good for us that He remains beyond any fulfillment offered to us, unique and unapproachable, the Good of letting be out of love, not just the Good of the love of union—The beautiful is the seal of the Western charisma—Beauty is what pleases when seen, and has to do with the cognitive power (William of Auvergne, Thomas)—Augustine’s definition of beauty mentions color, which Scholastics interpret as transcendental enchantment of Being, though often more in natural philosophy than metaphysics (Thomas of York). (p. 385): The Dionysian Impulse: Dominicans through Dionysian inspiration achieve transcendental aesthetic with clearer contours than Franciscan because of its Aristotelian basis—Albert converges Aristotelian harmony aesthetic and Plotinian aesthetic of light, Ulrich gives Denys upper hand, Thomas achieves true balance through metaphysics of esse and essentia, and of secondary causality. (p. 386): Albert: Drawn from lectures on Denys heard by Thomas and Ulrich, definition of beauty is splendor of substantial form over proportioned and terminated material parts; it exercises charm and draws longing, gathering all together—A worldly definition that sees form of world as aesthetic, but also applies to God as creating through Himself i.e. as quasi-formal cause—Claritas as radiant, illuminating nature of form of Being, self-mastery of a being, in virtue of which it is good—Form includes physical light and metaphysical light/dignity—Being and form dynamically and reciprocally include one another—Since God is infinite goodness and beauty, the creature can progress eternally in them. (p. 388): Ulrich of Strasbourg: In offering a doctrine of transcendentals, Ulrich emphasizes God not Being—Beauty (following Albert) is consonance of proportion of form over formable, which resists form—God is absolute beauty because form-light of His Godhead informs (following Gilbert) three supposita in real identity, and so He radiates forth: this is dangerously Neo-Platonic, only overcome in Thomas—Ulrich sets light above form; Thomas avoids category of light as universal key to spiritual, though he applies light non-metaphorically to spiritual realm as manifestation of the truth in them. (p. 390): In all these scholastics, the universe, even including Hell (Bonaventure) and the ridiculous (Denys the Carthusian), is an unsurpassably beautiful work of the eternal artist—Transcendentality of beauty as theophany of God’s glory reinforced by Biblical mensura-numerus-pondus and Platonic modus-species-ordo. (p. 391): Mechthild of Magdeburg: With Platonizing, she describes Christian experience of God as inexhaustible flowing fountain which dissolves the creature in the torrent of longing—Flowing of God is Being in and out of itself, glory and humility—God in His longing goes out of Himself into the God-alienated and awakens soul’s longing in a universal-becoming of the soul: the blood of God and Mary’s milk—In Neo-Platonic era, wounds are given to Francis and Mechthild is hurled through incarnate love lest love of living God should lose through philosophy of beauty the power of its glory. II.A.4. St. Thomas Aquinas II.A.4.a. The Posing of the Problem (p. 393): On one level, Aquinas has no original aesthetics, just a synthesis of Augustine, Aristotle, Denys, Boethius, Albert; on another level, everything is original because transcendentals are reinterpreted in light of his definition of esse and its relation to essences—Esse is non-subsistent fullness and perfection of all reality, supreme likeness of divine goodness—God is not Being of real or ideal things, except as their efficient, exemplary, and final cause: He is Wholly Other, and all knowledge of Him is surpassed by a greater unknowing—Progress of knowledge is aided by new light of faith—Since esse is detached from God, God cannot be first known (contra Ontologism); this view safeguards negative theology against reduction to conceptual dialectic between God in Himself and God for us (Erigena, Nicholas of Cusa, Hegel)—Distinction between esse and essentia allows clear distinction between beauty of the world and divine glory, unlike Eckhart’s God of absolute subjectivity, Ockham’s God of absolute free will, and Nicholas of Cusa’s God as the point of intersection of all the lines of the universe, none of which is the God of glory—In Thomas, ontology is genuine philosophy, distinct from theology of revelation, but building on theological ontology of the Greeks and early Scholastics—Man’s nobility is to be suspended between nature and supernature, accentuating Being’s fluid transcendental openness to God—Thomas stands between old monistic world and new dualistic world that makes theology and philosophy each a totality—Thomas sees that revelation elevates and completes, rather than invalidates, negative theology—Manifestation of Word and Spirit in realm of ens commune shows how God’s essence does not belong to that realm. II.A.4.b. The Inheritance (p. 397): Thomas, as wise man, orders the tradition’s material—Denys’ definition of beauty in terms of consonantia and claritas; Augustine’s coloris suavitas is the material mode of appearing of claritas—Beauty is extended transcendentally even to truth—Under Albert’s influence, he relates beauty to form—Under Denys’ influence claritas as transcendental is related to divine claritas—Under Augustine’s influence, beauty is objective: loved because beautiful, not vice versa—Beauty is appropriated to the Son (Augustine, Hilary, Bonaventure)—Aristotelian symmetry and appropriate size interpreted in terms of perfectio—Incorporation of all aspects of beauty in discussions of the Son—Boethian idea of God conceiving world’s beauty in His own beauty, sending out rays of participation into the world—Evil must be fitted per accidens into all-embracing harmony of cosmic order—Pulchrum is within and beyond transcendentals verum and bonum; it is pleasing not to me, but in itself as seen: it pertains to cognition and the splendor of knowledge. II.A.4.c. Being as the Likeness of God (p. 400): The development of Thomas’ theory of beauty, including the turn to Denys even as he has an increasingly Aristotelian view of God—From Denys is derived doctrine of actus essendi as primary cosmic operation of God and processus essendi from God into all existing things—Being, life, and wisdom per se are not hypostasized emanations, but being per se is first and more dignified than life and wisdom per se: procession of Being is procession of act-uality not just “Being there”—In relation to esse every essence and concept can be united—Esse is not external addition to complete possible essence, but roots possibility of possible things in reality in that an essence can participate in real existence; esse is most common, perfect, interior, foundation of unity, embracing, inexhaustible: it realizes natures insofar as it realizes itself in natures, but this self-realization of the real is not actualization of a potency, but natures are potential to act of being, though natures are not esse’s possibilities—Forms are seal of the divine knowledge in things (DV 2.1)—New kind of intimacy of God in creature made possible by distinction between God and esse: participation of natures in reality is not diminution of God’s being or fragmentation of reality, but positively as determined by God’s freedom rooted in His love; only as separate from God is creature really loved and gifted by Him—Esse is total fullness as God’s proper effect, and total nothingness as not itself existing—Link to Nicholas of Cusa’s noting of the imprecise below all precision, and Pascal’s grandeur and misère—Active humility as foundation of any metaphysic: we have but cannot master the truth, we attain the real which only is by participation—Metaphysics after Thomas cannot sustain this tension, and so collapses to rationalist conceptualization of esse or pantheistic idealistic identification of esse with God; both destroy philosophy, and leave man as the only glory: the logical and essentialist reductive analyses of Being destroy its supra-logical and supra-essentialist mystery, and the image and likeness within Being—De-essentializing reality (Heidegger, Thomas) extends in philosophy the illumination by Biblical revelation of God as creative principle; esse is suspended without confusion or limitation before the free God, liberating the creature before God to love Him without denying its finite essence, as was demanded by Greek, Arabian, Indian, and German philosophy—Thomas’ metaphysics is the philosophical reflection of free glory of living Biblical God, and interior completion of ancient i.e. human philosophy, celebrating the reality of the real as a mystery pregnant with God’s mystery, and shot through with the light of love. II.A.4.d. Metaphysics as Aesthetics (p. 407): Thomas uses beauty to define Being—Essentialist aesthetics is justified by fact that reality realizes itself in essences—Due to structure of human knowing, starting point for aesthetics is necessarily corporeal beauty—Essences can only be synthesized and grasped at supra-essential level, so no precise distinction between ordo essentiae and ordo existentiae (contra Neo-Thomism)—Light of agent intellect is light of esse, within which intellect grasps essences; essential categories of aesthetics express both themselves and mystery of proportion between esse and essentia, which is transparent to free creativity of God, the source of all worldly beauty: Aquinas can appropriate Denys’ aesthetics without risk of pantheism—Definitive aesthetic concepts center around relation e.g. order and proportion, not form; reality realizes itself in incomprehensible proportionality, the foundation of all form—Passive potency of recipient need not be commensurate to either artist or design—Creature is proportion between esse and essentia, and its proportion to God is proportionalitas i.e. proportion of proportion or suspension of suspension (DV 2.3)—Being and essences as co-principles of one another—All order is immanent and transcendent—God causes claritas by letting things participate in His light, and consonantia by ordering all thing to Himself and to one another—God is principle of others not through need but through love of His own beauty and desire to communicate it—Due to God’s wisdom and omnipotence, He wants to freely manifest His goodness in the world, and so He bestows on essences what His wisdom and omnipotence have decreed to belong to them: all merit in creature rests on prevenient grace; everything that has esse in any way is guided by God’s providential care—Modern science has a ready metaphysics in Thomas’, so long as it does not absolutized laws—No definition of transcendentals, even beauty, but a circle of allusive concepts entered through senses but recognizable only by free and rational mind (ST I 91.3). Volume 5: The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age II.B. The Aesthetics of Transcendental Reason II.B.1. The Parting of the Ways II.B.1.a. Origins of the Modern Period (p. 9): This is inquiry into what happened to classical experience of God’s glory, excluding element of Christian glory as much as possible—Review of history of early and high Middle Ages’ reception of classical notion of glory—Idea that the reflection of eternal goodness and beauty is seen in all Being is lost after Thomas, whose experience of Being was without imitators—Turning point due to Averroism as scientific attempt to see how far human reason can inquire into grounds of Being while excluding revelation—Christianity’s distancing of itself from philosophy (e.g. in Condemnations of 1270 and 1277) shows it finally began to set forth its own irreducible notion of glory, and also shows conflict between Platonic/mythic and Averroist/rationalist approaches: latter proves a God without freedom, knowledge of creatures, or distinction from the world, which eternal recurs (Siger of Brabant)—Later theology largely accepted this proudly self-limited philosophy without natural revelation—Social and ecclesiastical darkness of late Middle Ages (Huizinga); its cynical approach to existence as a dance of death, and philosophy as consolation in the face of death, with predominance of Stoic and mystical elements—Only rarely does suffering enter a Christian light so it can be understood as glory (e.g. Catherine of Siena)—Conditions are established for Christian tragedy attaining metaphysical heights of Greek tragedy in Shakespeare—In Thomas, transcendental aesthetics reaches balance; without balance, 2 possible results: 1. Formalize Being into comprehensive concept/category of reason so that it is highest but devoid of meaning (Scotus, Kant, Hegel, modern science) in which case it can be true and good, but not beautiful, and transcendental glory must be alien to it; 2. Identify Being with God (Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa) leading to mystical self-annihilation since world cannot exist outside God, and so His glory is questioned because it is without space to become manifest—These are 2 forms of pantheism of spirit or reason, in constant dialectic with one another—3 intellectual events of this Germanic age: 1. Scotus-Ockham-Suarez and Eckhart-Nicholas of Cusa-Ignatius of Loyola; 2. Luther-Erasmus-Shakespeare; 3. Kant-Hegel-Marx—Strong influence by Christianity on the age—Interrelation between classical tho-philosophy and Christian theology of revelation—Thomas on bringing them together in paradox of being able to attain perfection of our natural desire only by God’s free self-disclosure—Platonic and Christian influence continues in modern age—Catholic response to Protestantism in terms of Baroque Augustinian catholic world-culture—Enlightenment and Idealism strip Christianity of dogma so that it is absorbed into transcendental philosophy—In Barth’s theology, Christianity steps beyond severe anti-universal contours (Calvin, Bañez, Jansen), and feeling for glory re-emerges. II.B.1.b. Being as a Concept (p. 16): Duns Scotus: He is concerned for the formal object of philosophy in the face of Christian theology: if reason grasps Being as first unlimited concept, then it is capable of natural knowledge of God, is not unprepared for the Word the free God utters, but cannot anticipate that free Word—Concept of Being is logically and metaphysically universal in its objective content/essentiality, which is neutral to its distinctions; analogy applies to its differentiations and concrete reality—Being is ideality not reality, indeterminate but determinable by nothing besides itself—This paradox is formal object of philosophy, and it achieves too much in raising itself above the Absolute, and too little since it reduces reality, even individuality/substantial haecceitas, to graded formalities/essences—Being as Being is assigned by theology to the philosophers, making room for the revelation of the living God; a posteriori proofs lead, on Scotus’ view, only to Primus without personality or freedom—He does not see this will lead to Averroistic philosophy outstripping theology—Theology here is a practical science, dividing God of the philosophers and necessity from living Biblical God and freedom—Distinctively Christian glory could have manifested, but it was denied the medium in Creation to do so, since existence is neutralized; contemplation and gnosis yield to practice and pure pistis—Sovereignty has its own rationality, but without its doxa being manifest—Ultimate principles are seen by the philosopher neutral to God and world, approached only as intentions (William of Alnwick). (p. 19): William of Ockham: Though Scotus’ most acute opponent, he draws the conclusion from esse univocum defined in ultimate differentiation as haecceitas—Accordingly, species and other classes are purely subjective—Empirical access only to individual (tradition leading to Locke, Berkeley, Hume)—Possibility of individual is through God’s freedom and sovereignty; a theological basis for positivism, which does not ask beyond mere givenness—Contra Platonic and Aristotelian tradition, opposed to absolute freedom is world of irrational points of reality, removing all contemplative fides quaerens intellectum, making theology fideistic and practical—Franciscan God as love beyond knowledge degenerates into God of fear in His freedom (Holkot, de Mirecourt, Gregory of Rimini)—Christian experience is now without philosophical mediation, even requiring a different logic than secular thinking (Holkot)—Removal of Aristotelain substance and causality apart from immediate sense experience and formal logic opens up return of atomism and thence to natural science (Autrecourt, Buridan, Nicolas of Oresme leading to Copernicus, Galileo). II.B.1.c. Being as Neutrality (p. 21): Direct descent from Scotus to Suarez, father of Baroque and Neo-Scholasticism, in whom univocity and indifference of Being emerges anew—Indifference is detachment of German mysticism, commitment to Franciscan poverty, which is in a line of descent from Stoicism, the Tragedians, and the Odyssey, where indifference is the proof of man’s nature as spirit: both a blind faith and an exaltation of the whole person in unity of thought and life—In Christianity, self-transcendence as yielding self to unfathomable divine love; apatheia as preparation for flow of heart into God’s ever greater glory of love in the Cross (Augustine, Benedict, Francis, Ignatius)—Excludes overpowering of God through conceptual or mystical technique—We must consider how charisms of the great religious founders found philosophical expression: indifferentia rarely found philosophical expression, since intersubjectivity did not find adequate philosophical expression in classical period—Examples of incommensurability between Christian thought and Christian inspiration from Augustine, Benedictine, Franciscan, and Dominican traditions, and Suarez. (p. 23): Suarez: Ens ut sic is simplest, most universal concept and object of metaphysics—Turning to analogia entis from univocal concept would threaten clarity and certainty of metaphysics—Metaphysics can develop a priori the transcendentals without turning to Being’s inferiors i.e. God and the world between which there is analogy and causality—God is purest realization of Being, and so is precise material object of metaphysics—Gone here are Scotus’ limits on metaphysics, and Ockham’s concern to make room for God’s freedom; this naïve Neo-Scholasticism is foundation for Descartes, Spinzoa, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel (Siewerth)—Modern metaphysics is founded on conjunction of heart’s inward Biblical idea of God and Greek speculation on Theion and Pan, leading to apparent academic qualification to know all about God and His acts, founded on established dogmatic and scholastic tradition; symptom is controversy De Auxiliis in which apparently the theological metaphysician can peer into interactions of first and second causes, which is ancient Gnosticism—Loss of philosophical and theological mystery and feeling for glory; effects on ecclesial life, mysticism being reduced to subjective experience of glory—Sensorium for glory of Creation as aesthetics was lost to Neo-Scholasticism, passing to the poets (e.g. Dante, Petrarch, Milton, Keats) and natural scientists (e.g. Kant, Goethe, Teilhard)—Conceptualization of Being annuls experience of reality and encloses thought in sphere of predications, analysis and synthesis of concepts; real is reduced to compossible, actual to positio extra causas, or else all that is possible is actual and the creature has constitution, particularity, and freedom beyond God (Molinism)—For Suarez, concepts are abstracted intentions, objectified representations of things, from which a short step to Descartes and Kant; subject becomes legislative reason, leading to ultimate identity of finite and infinite reason (in various forms in Spinoza, Leibniz, Fichte, Hegel)—Position extra causis is irrational and valueless (following Ockham); matter in Suarez is actual Being, passive mass, the precursor of Descartes’ res extensa, the precursor of materialism which realizes the unreality of conceptual realm; allows mastery of world through number, because world has been stripped of living depth, spontaneity, truth, goodness, beauty. II.B.1.d. Being as God (p. 29): Eckhart: Father of modern intellectual history and spirituality through disciples Tauler and Suso; like Origen, his condemnation did not prevent his bearing fruit, and also like Origen, his originally pure Christian piety was clothed in poor garments, here of scholastic philosophy, as he quarries all past systems—His claim that God is Being is an expression of real religious devotion, but it had consequences from Luther to Hegel, because it sounds like Being really comes out of God; mediation of Thomistic non-subsistent actus essendi is lost—All Being, transcendentals, and glory is transferred to God, based on an experience of glory, defining his theological aesthetic: 1. God is beyond all explicable by good or true, as the Whyless, what is appropriate to Him is a whyless act of homage (Angelus Silesius: “the rose is without why”), and love, freedom, thought, and form are also whyless, making them uncreated in the creature; 2. Whylessness is seen in wonder of eternal Being and its fontal character seen in Son’s generation, Who should be born in me; 3. Being a Christian means letting God be born/happen in me passively not possessively; 4. Man is meant to be built up beyond himself in God, moving toward divine sonship—Eckhart is in line of those who emphasize pure transparency to God (Benedict, Francis, Ignatius)—He recasts every philosophy and Biblical text into central theological mystery of divine birth, using Augustine’s methods of Scriptural interpretation—All philosophy points to the mystery of absolute, creating Love—Man should grasp God in all things, and should impoverish himself so the true God, not a conceptual God, can fill him, one can will all that God wills: obedience is greatest virtue, and when one is wholly in God’s hands, one becomes actually in free self-realization quodammodo omnia and capax Dei—For this one must be gelassen; spirit of Gospel is poverty of spirit, indifference, Gelassenheit, the organ of universal receptivity, and so noblest because most universal, having God’s love through Christ—Such a one receives suffering transfigured from God: perfect sorrow because suffered in God’s will, total self-gift, not Indian-Greek-Arab apatheia i.e. self-preservation from sorrow—Gelassenheit in a Marian light, making oneself entirely fruitful, virgin, receptive for conceiving God: analogous to prime matter or the potential intellect—Gelassenheit in Trinitarian context, in the receptivity of the eternal procession of the Son in which createdness has its roots and in which human nature is suspended, and which is the root of human freedom and ethics—Exterior work gives testimony to but does not add to the interior work (closer to Luther than Aquinas)—Content of ethic imprinted on us is ever greater self-dispossession, poverty, humility—Eckhart goes beyond Aquinas on love of God, using paradox, hyperbole, contradictions from various philosophies, but from a worshipping heart, not the Idealism his followers drew from him—Since God is Being, creatures are pure non-being or nothing; the world adds nothing to God: relation of God to creature is light shining in darkness without the latter comprehending the former—God constantly preserves the creature through the perpetual event-act of His presence; to be creature is to constantly thirst and drink God—The more active God, the more passive the creature must be, participating in the act of begetting and being begotten, the one event of the Godhead—All natural events have Trinitarian character of active and passive generation and the mutual love within it—Since God is pure event, Being does not suffice as His name, but Intellect/Spirit per/ad se; knowing/second act is the foundation of His being/first act, because nobler: He is because He knows—What is in thought is intentional not real being, so God is an absolute identity in thought, spirit and freedom beyond Trinitarian process—Spiritual creature is grounded in this ineffability, so the little castle of the intellect is uncreatable, requiring a return to where there is no opposition (cf. Plotinus’ nous)—Good is deeper than True—Eckhart’s theory here falls into crisis, turning to Parmenides and Erigena, elevating intellect above love and making intellect not will primarily free, interpreting creaturely perfection as pure relation to God, converging on abolition of created nature, reducing everything to God, and eliminating divine glory (affinities to Indian thought, Luther, Hegel, Heidegger)—Luther alters Eckhart by saying that creature remains sin and darkness even in God; to be good is adhaerere Deo, and greater sin makes God gladder in forgiving them (shows Platonic, not just Nominalist roots to Luther’s doctrine of justification)—God becomes real subject of faith and justice (Barth), relation of finite to infinite spirit ceases to be love and abandonment, and exterior sacramental relation disappears in favor of interior relation—Blurs lines between theism, pantheism, atheism—Prayer is reduced to speculation, and so glory wanes, a waning that characterizes post-Christian modern philosophy—Standing before glory of Christian God allows Christians to preserve glory of creation; non-Christians stand before abyss of reason and freedom, but stave off moment of decision regarding glory of God’s love through invoking ancient glory. II.B.2. The Metaphysics of the Saints II.B.2.a. Christology and Tragedy (p. 48): Eckhart rejects ancient idea of relation with God mediated by cosmos in his desire for immediate contact with God (step toward Idealism), leading to critical reflection on Christian relation with God: a critical turning point in intellectual history at which distinctively Christian metaphysics emerges for first time—This point is characterized by mistrust of Aristotle, prior to Neo-Platonic resurgence, but still asking question of transcendentality—The face of tragedy emerges: human existence, even when authentic, is suffering, because exposed to indecipherable superhuman destiny, which requires patience (Odysseus, Aeneas) or Gelassenheit—Earlier, Christ was seen as an existent within existence, the proper way to the Father, agape as fulfillment of philosophical eros, leading to a suffering of God (Aristotle, Denys), interpreted metaphysically as liberation from finite existence to pure imageless Being (Evagrius, Palamas)—Objective openness of act of Being (Thomas) becomes interpreted in terms of subjective openness of spirit/intellectus agens, freedom of intellect (Eckhart); leads to Idealism’s absorption of finite in infinite spirit—Another possibility is interpreting human freedoms’ relation to God Christologically; indifference is tragic patience in face of obscure divine destiny, surrender to divine providence: both despicere mundum (Buddhism, Platonism, Stoicism) and despici a mundo—Unlike in ancient tragedy in which divine decree seemed unjust and the sufferer greater than the one who cannot suffer, Christ’s suffering is God’s, and here suffering takes on meaning because it is substitutionary, a love affirmable even in night of indifference—This metaphysics can explain ontologically the ontic event of salvation, which is historical, personal, universal—Based on Eckhart’s Christian life not speculation is the Metaphysics of the Saints (Bremond) i.e. a theological metaphysics of Christian spirituality (Ignatius, de Sales, Fénelon, Newman), which goes behind Plato to Greek tragedy, entering dialogue with existential situation of real man, and allowing real dialogue with Asian metaphysics, which Neo-Platonic abandonment could begin but not conclude: the West surpasses the East when despicere becomes despici and gnosis becomes love. II.B.2.b. Abandonment (Gelassenheit) and Imitation (p. 52): John Tauler: Opposes Christian spirit to free-wheeling reason, the latter of which loves natural light as if it were God and our own possession, false freedom and light which seduces one into arrogance; the just are characterized by humility, fear, abandonment—Rationality sees Christ as a way one passes through, but no one can get beyond image of Christ: a good man never thinks he has got beyond anything—Metaphysics of indifference is doctrine of discernment between abandonment to decrees of Holy Spirit and one’s spirit’s transcendence—True abandonment direct all to supreme activity of worship which the Son offered to the Father, and which surpasses all reason, liquefying the heart; false abandonment is prayer-less, petrifying the heart—True abandonment gives in gratitude back to God everything He has given us, acknowledging our essential poverty, letting go of all that is not God, rather than ascending into God’s darkness (contra Denys)—Even our autonomous activity transcends itself in abandonment to God; the virtues’ roles in this, ending in indifferent unconsciousness of virtue, which expropriation of possession of virtue makes the soul ready for God, Who works in our non-working, and Who calls and seeks us first: the hunts of men and God for one another, and how consolation and desolation are involved, suspending us between heaven and earth: raised to heaven in our higher powers, darkened in our lower powers—One witnesses to Christ when greatest and lowest are thus one, and such a one is shipwrecked on God by God—The man who has reached deepest self-abnegation in surrender to God is pillar of Church and world, existing wholly in inward movement to God contemplatively and in outward movement to sinners apostolically, an in and out movement that is the fruitfulness of love, a Eucharistic work. (p. 58): Henry Suso: Distinguishes true and false reason/freedom—False reason reduces all to God, but God only allows order, distinction, irreducible opposition of Creator and creature—He pledges himself as in marriage to divine Wisdom—Higher school of abandonment/Gelassenheit expresses itself as human torment and calumny, and feeling of eternal damnation—We know God’s general will from Scripture, but not what is best for any particular person—To imitate Christ’s sufferings, we cannot be equal to Him—Christ’s suffering is most exact revelation and representation of His most extreme, exalted, hidden love and glory; those who suffer have complete glory/joy in God’s will, so they desire nothing else, offering themselves so all the world’s pain may become a hymn of praise to God—Wisdom of God reveals itself fully in folly/weakness of the Cross—Two mysteries of suffering and self-sacrificial abandonment are the Eucharist and compassionate soul of Mary. (p. 61): Theologia Germanica: Written 1370 by anonymous member of Teutonic order in tradition of Eckhart, edited twice by Luther—Essential doctrine is differentiation between self-sufficient reason and reason belonging to God: former imagines itself eternal light, does not choose Good for itself, says it passes beyond Christ’s sufferings to impassibility—God is Being of beings, Life of all living, Wisdom of all wise, loving Himself selflessly as the Good, tri-personal to surmount self-hood/presumption in self-giving prodigality—Freedom is to belong to no one, because it is absolute and universal, and is poverty, the contradictory of poverty—God grows in us when we love all things—Christ’s human nature in itself is in attitude of pure acceptance of activity of divine nature, though which God can be completely Himself as love and simultaneously experience by suffering the sinful—No creature or work of a creature, but only disobedience, is in conflict with God—Absolute, unfathomable abandonment of Christ to Father’s will is model for every authentic relationship with God—Humanity of Christ is place of God’s manifestation, for God in Himself is only Being and source, not operation—The creature must be distant from God so that God may be God above it, but in God the creature has no God (Eckhart)—Temptation to think that God needs the world to prove His Goodness is love, and this line is pursued in Christology almost to the point of Monothelitism—God’s grief for sin cannot happen without the creature, so it happens in Christ; Christ’s suffering is a state of God that God wants to have—Christ’s abandonment means He lets God be free in Him—God does and man should act not for advantage or achievement, but for the Good our of love, a why-less ray of the Good and freedom (passed to e.g. Luther, de Sales, Fénelon, Spee, Hölderlin)—Imperfect ethic of sinners derives its form from perfect love of God in Christ—The only happiness here is resting in will of God, which Christ did even during His passion—When man makes no claim to anything, there is no longer anything that is not God or of God; for this, the sinner must like Christ descend inconsolably into hell—This descent is awareness of selfhood experienced out of abandonment to eternal, electing Goodness. II.B.2.c. In the Whirlpool of Glory (p. 67): Ruysbroeck: His influence on e.g. Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life, Tauler, Blosius, de Sales; his opposition to misuse of Eckhart (Bloemardine), and rootedness in Christological, ecclesial, sacramental background opposed to essential deification of creature—Key to fathomless depths of God is not abandoned suffering poverty, but in indifferently living for God’s glory, that glory erupts in personal experience of kabôd/shekinah—His allegory on the tabernacle is similar to Hugh of St. Victor—Fundamental experience is supra-rational contact with God, Who fulfills spiritual nature and freely bestows grace, and so is center of metaphysics and theology—Man is united in God as living and preserved, having spiritual acts, and as embodied spirit—We are elected in God in the eternal procession of the Son; philosophical self-understanding is transformed into theological dialogical understanding—The finite I is grounded in the eternal I, Who is also its eternal Thou, and is already eternal I and Thou in itself—Cosmological image of the movement of the heavens—Nuptial encounter between I seeking its own ground and moving inward and God disclosing Himself and moving out from within—NT virtues, rooted in indifference—Nuptial meeting is shining forth of God’s glory, prepared by soul’s abandonment to seeking all things through God’s glory, through recollection—Man always falls short in worship and service, metaphysically (anticipating Neo-Kantianism and Idealism) and dialogically before the glory of the divine lover—God gives Himself through mediations of nature and grace, but also immediately and gloriously as uncreated grace touching the soul at its most inward point—We then formlessly rest in the abyss of God calling out to the abyss of our selves, but are also more aware of being sent in service, making life of love an eternal systole and diastole—When both abandoned to divine glory and sent in service, man does not think of Himself, but only of the honor of the One Who sends, trusting in the love of God, with Christ as his model—The truly Catholic man, flowing into God and back into the world, is constantly active and at rest, robbed of form in that movement: psychologically an oscillation between super-ego, mind, and heart; metaphysically, an egressus-regressus model elevated Christologically and in Trinitarian manner where the divine essence is the rest in the activity of the processions—Indifference makes apparent pantheism just one pole in total disponibility; Ruysbroeck never absolutizes this appearance—The whirlpool or fire of divine love; God shining over the lover in a complete zodiac—Rejecting Quietism, man is before God in God. II.B.2.d. Espousals in the Night: The Women (p. 78): Ruysbroeck and John of the Cross’ experience are personal, and lose their validity when schematized/depersonalized—Tauler’s Christian themes, through abandonment, illumine the essence of spirit as quodammodo omnia in analogy of finite and infinite spirit, not just interpreted according to standards of eros, with a dynamic light within, and suffering divine things; rather, a passive readiness or apatheia to receive any positive impression made by God—Glory is no longer ascent of eros to the eternal, but encounter of spirit as handmaid of the Lord with the descending Son—Themes were developed in commentaries on Canticle, but now reach their historical kairos: 1. Dimensions of Christ’s Passion are amplified from particular event with universal validity to concrete normative defining attitude of historical fallen creature; Christ’s death displays what sinner’s remoteness from God means, the night of judgment, not the metaphysical night of Dionysius: I. Sinner’s consciousness of existence as sinister and destructive; II. Growth in awareness of paradoxical presence of God as One Who abandons, forsakes, judges; III. This experience is assumed into night of Christ’s sinless experience of suffering, transforming distance of God from sinner into difference of love between Father and Son; IV. Participation of members of Christ in the experience of the Head at the other three levels of experience, including pedagogical aspect of night, a Christian experience of the abyss of existence long before modern existential experience— 2. Gelassenheit is feminine and ecclesial, handmaidenly on creaturely level, bridal on level of revelation of God’s love, allowing for prominence of women in Gothic to Baroque spirituality: experienced characterized by defenseless open heart, not self-transcending mind, as in earlier, masculine spirituality—3. Ancient and early medieval piety was search for God’s Wisdom hidden by revealed as philosophia in Christ, but in attitude of abandonment and exposure Wisdom takes on traits of folly, the folly of sin and the folly of God’s Wisdom broken on the Cross: so the fool/buffoon is image of man, whose glory is greater than the classicist ideal man of wisdom and beauty—History of spirituality from Gothic to Baroque based on representative figures (left out are e.g. Gertrude, Bridget, Joan of Arc, Teresa), for whom glory appear for/in indifference as loving disponibility for God. (p. 82): Angela of Foligno: In her, Francis’ understanding of poverty expands to metaphysical dimensions—God is supreme Being, everything exists inasmuch as it derives its existence from Him Who Is—She sees God in an inexplicable non-seeing—Unshakeable constancy is given more from what the soul does not have/feel/recognize than what she does; what the soul understands is nothing compared to what she sees that she cannot comprehend or perceive—This recognition comes in Christ: what breaks out of His eyes is the incomprehensible identity of divine glorious fullness and divine humility shining forth in Christ’s humiliation for sinners, Whose pain is rooted in His ineffable divine light and decree and is seen in His word of abandonment—The Cross lasts His entire life, and so His pain was without relief, the foundation of His human existence—Christian love is enkindled in the face of God’s humiliation, transcending all eros, transforming the creature into the properties of God’s humble love—In the humility of God, she sees herself as just pride, unworthy of humiliation, feeling herself damned; these experiences are felt to be just, and only overcome by a deeper incomprehensible transcendent experience of Christ—God is and accomplishes all good in the creature; only in recognizing this can the soul love God and all things for His sake, becoming supremely free and obedient, a double descent beyond abyss of self-knowledge into abyss of God’s goodness. (p. 85): Julian of Norwich: Bridge from Angela to Catherine—Contemplations of Christ’s suffering and divine goodness are linked—God makes and preserves all things for love, seen in Christ’s blood and in Mary, who is greater than the universe—She is initiated into love of Jesus and Mary through alternation of consolation and desolation, through both of which He keeps us safe—Anyone who chooses God may be sure God chooses him—To love all one’s fellow Christians is to love all; to fail to love one is to fail to love all—Sin has meaning in the Cross: it is initiation into self-dispossession and love of forsaken sinless Son—Concern for universality of redemption—Even through the hidden portion of her visions, God’s mercy shines through: all will be well, but we do not know how for the present—Her visions are representative of and for all—We should surrender concern for particulars to God’s universal providential love, and contemplate Him more in all than in particulars, though perfect prayer unites them—This wide, generous attitude of loving glorification of God taken up later by Elizabeth of the Trinity, Marie des Vallées, John Eudes. (p.88): The Cloud of Unknowing: Rooted in classical theology (Denys, Bernard, Victorines), flowing into devotio moderna, unintentionally offering a glance at late scholastic understanding of spirituality—Cloud of unknowing is an attitude of transcendent indifference in a “no-man’s-land” between world and God, with a cloud of forgetting between one and creatures, based in a love stretching upward in naked faith beyond all bodily and spiritual senses—Every thought about what is, even about Christ’s passion or one’s own sin, must be set aside as distracting—We must hide from God and even conceal from Him our passionate longing for Him, but have pure naked love, persevering in emptiness before Him, utterly passive to the work of contemplation, one’s only thought being praise—Similarities to formless void hiding inconceivable fullness in Indian/Arabic traditions, though the Cloud’s indifference is humble Christian love; similarity to univocity of Being, but the Cloud forbids all metaphysical reduction of its doctrine—Cloud presents universality and Catholicity of love which is real heart of Christian indifference, incorporating at a higher level Buddhist compassion; in this work, all are one’s friends. (p. 91): Catherine of Siena: Her Dialogue is the purest form of the metaphysics of the saints i.e. aesthetic of Christian transcendental reason, a dialogue between infinite and finite reason i.e. triune God/the Father and universalized anima ecclesiastica, whose attitude is at once total indifference to God’s will and urgent love identifying itself with His saving will, an obedient attitude of self-offering and disponibility for the work of mercy—Prayer of passionate indifference is penetrated and imprinted by expository, explanatory utterance of the Father—Here a voice rings out only ever heard again in Péguy, but the echo of the Biblical Word, the Word heard as the self-verbalization of the infinite depths of Being: threatening but comforting, accusing but without compromise of supremacy—All within atmosphere of familiarity of Christian revelation, in betrothal and marriage—Contemplative passion of Catherine (like Joan of Arc) is background for active passion in the world; by means of her life, the Father expounds His Son to the Church, which requires total ecclesial indifference: she is stripped of her will and clothed in His—Indifference is desire, longing, thirst, but not in a Platonic-Augustinian ontological sense of desire to possess, but a desire to correspond to God’s expectations, and for the salvation of all i.e. the whole world, not just the Church, in obedience to the revelation of God’s boundless mercy—The finite cannot penetrate infinite love: man’s works are finite, but God demands infinite works, and the gap is bridged by Christ Who gives us the capacity for infinite love in imitating Him—All are bound together by chain of charity—Love for neighbor in Christ is humiliated love, exposed to persecution—Twofold nothingness in creature: 1. Of itself, as created ex nihilo; 2. Reinforced nothing through nothingness of sin—Root of true love is in self-humiliating acknowledgment of this nothingness, to which Christ humbled Himself, a humiliation that makes no distinctions—Christian love is in the form of evangelical counsels, whose norm is Christ: poverty as awaiting all from God; chastity as rooted in dignity of our flesh made His, and in eschatological incorporation of our bodies into His flesh; obedience is ecclesial incarnation of disponibility—Concreteness of love culminates in blood (different from Mechthild, for whom it is light) which reveals the infinite love of Christ’s heart, making God’s glory visible, which the whole world offers God whether they will it or not. (p. 99): Catherine of Genoa and the Path to Luther: In her experience, God is Being and self-diffusive Good, Who gives form to all things; creature of itself is nothing and sin—All glory is God’s, all malice is man’s—Beauty by mixture with the creaturely becomes dark and rotten—Worldly existence is a torment, the body a prison—Love here is more eros than indifference (similar to Ficino); love is higher than the powers, and the latter feel best when under love’s influence—In ascent, love is encountered as burning judgment, leading to dialectic of infinite attraction to God and torment of seeing one’s unworthiness and need for judgment and purification; one would rather be sent into hell than encounter God with sin—One flees the flame of God only to flee into it, for it alone can purify—Simultaneity of fullness of God’s glory and creaturely poverty and shame, which leads to Luther’s simul justus et peccator, building on Ockham’s view that man naturally cannot think of God while God can declare man to be whatever seems good to Him. II.B.2.e. Ignatius of Loyola and ‘Representation’: Glory in the Age of Baroque (p. 102): Like other founders, Ignatius’ vision is drawn from Gospel, but his focus on indifference as principle and foundation of the Spiritual Exercises shows how he stands in late medieval tradition, in continuity with earlier apatheia and Gelassenheit and later abandon—Indifference here is detachment from creatures for the sake of immediate union with God, placing man in Cloud’s situation of neither world nor God and Theologia Germanica’s hell of self-knowledge—Imitation of Christ decided for individual in personal call from Christ, heard in attitude of total indifference, bestowing on each a mission and form of life (as in Catherine of Siena)—Ignatius draws on German and Dutch spirituality from Ludolf of Saxony and his Bonaventurian imaginative-affective mode of meditation—The Imitation of Christ as rejecting scholasticism, mysticism, Biblical multiplicity, and worldly sphere, leaving only personal-ethical sphere, leading to resignation, not openhearted readiness, a flight from the world without home in Christ—Ignatius’ abandonment is not given metaphysical formulation where God is form and creature matter, which where found is sign of latent monothelitism or pantheism; rather, God as all in all is pursued as God’s universal cooperation with active, not just indifferent, cooperation of creature in abandonment, surrender, and service—In election, creature choose what God gives us to choose, which is accepted by God, rather than the creature just returning to its eternal idea in God—This fulfills Eckhart’s vision of God’s whylessness, transcending teleological ethics in pure disinterested adoration and love; man is defined as created for adoration, praise, worship—Religious kernel of Baroque culture is that to be a Christian to be at the disposal of God’s greater glory—Ignatius’ move from metaphysical to spiritual allows modern spirituality and evangelical attitude of receptive fruitful contemplation to survive in modern world and active apostolate—Ignatius was first to propagate this notion of contemplation, which took form of “representation”: one places oneself indifferently at disposal of Christ’s will, without ceasing to be a free human subject, becoming for himself and others a representative of the Lord, a person entirely transparent to the One Who sends him, rooted in Thomist secondary causality and analogia entis—Ignatius thus synthesizes scholasticism and mysticism, and lays foundation for Baroque culture and theatre and missionary activity, separate from Counter- Reformation and political absolutism—Representation brings about new awareness of manifestation of divine glory in the world, which need not destroy its receptacle to reveal its uniqueness (contra Eckhart, Ockham, Luther)—Through Christ, the Triune God appears as inexhaustibly ever greater—Ignatius’ Trinitarian prayers and visions—Mutual relations of God and world have cosmic comprehensiveness (similar to Denys), God present in all things as Creator or Giver, Indweller governing all things, as working at every level of reality and history especially in the Passion, and as pouring Himself forth as Father of Lights—The Order obedient to Pope, finding God in all things, but especially the Church—Ignatius’ wise humorous patience with the Church, in contrast to Luther’s impatient reformation—Bellarmine and Baroque art made ecclesiastical structures and institutions definitive form of manifestation of divine glory—After Luther and coming of empirical science and critical philosophy, Denys could not be summoned back, so despite radiant power, celebrating ecclesiastical forms as icons seems somewhat contrived, unbalanced compared to the Gospel, and so objectively untrue, especially since it treats Cross in terms of worldly beauty, and Church and cosmos now reflect from one another a borrowed glory—Substitutions and exchanges of representation comes to embrace ecclesiastical and political spheres, the latter being understood even in its imperial and absolute forms as Christian service, but the role played in indifferent representation cannot be confused with the essence of glory, requiring discernment of spirits—Indifferent opening to the God Who elects can be wrongly interpreted in light of mystical tradition, and so to a focus on passive contemplation against action (Araoz, Alvarez, Lallemant); opposite tendency to spontaneity of action and ascesis arose in reaction (Rodriguez) reducing indifference to Stoic-Buddhist achievement—Genuine Ignatian indifference is obedience beyond passivity and activity, adherence to will of Christ, beyond opposition of light and darkness, enabling me to see with the Church what I cannot see on my own by identifying with the Church concretized in the superior. II.B.2.f. The Final Systems (p. 114): Francis de Sales: Spirituality originating in Germany reaches its climax in Grand Siècle France, where it influences everyone—Positively, these are systems of dialogue and transcendence, mind and heart purified and illumined for openness to God leading to union with Him, where abandonment or indifference are a humble love ready for suffering, man’s ultimate act in relation to God, leaving things to God rather than an erotic striving—Negatively, these systems tend to discursiveness, refinements, psychologizing, shifting from Godwardness to reflection on transcendence, taking self as object while trying to transcend self, leading to a religious critique of religious reason; most fruitful aspects of Reformation destroy this excessive introspection, but did not come to anything—De Sales’ masterpiece is Treatise on the Love of God, which focuses on our love for God as response to His providence and as perfection of our virtue, powers, and potentialities—This spiritual theology takes an anthropocentric point of view, leaving out salvation history, events of Christ’s life, the Church, though it takes itself to be theocentric, secretly presupposing univocity, and leading to pietism, with the superlatives of the Salesian style—De Sales says very beautiful things about love for God in His beauty not for the pleasure of loving, but loving God for His beauty runs the risk of confusing Christian with aesthetic disinterestedness—Spiritual writers from Eckhart to De Sales speak of a supreme point of the spirit where God touches us, which sounds like a natural organ for contact with God, which risks reducing real transcendence to transcendental psychology or Idealism—De Sales is not tied to this, but is interested in how the human will enters divine will by love and indifference. II.B.2.g. The Metaphysics of the Oratory (p. 119): Pierre de Bérulle: Founder of French Oratory in 1611, in which all theology is rooted in analogia entis expressed as religio, realization of God’s majesty over creature’s nothingness, toward God and Christ, the response of homage to God’s will for glorification, not based on creature’s free deliberation and self-reflection—God makes us adore Him not only in its own acts, but in His Spirit acting in our spirit—God’s apparently contradictory attributes—Analogy and cooperation of finite and infinite subjects, with Christ as bridge between infinite and finite, glory and adoration, full reality of analogy ontologically and psychologically, which is knowable apart from consideration of man’s sinfulness—In Christ’s being and consciousness, glory is perfectly transformed into worship and infinite adoration in His abandonment and servitude, without any selfish interest—Christ’s unity is a “state” i.e. the psychological/existential dimension of His ontological reality, with His actions revealing His being; all states of human experience are shaped into expression of His adoration of God, finite being’s act of homage being performed with divine validity—What is essentially temporal in Christ becomes eternal (Casel); Bérulle holds that Christ’s temporal acts and states emerge from His permanent fundamental attitude as perfect adorer, His incarnate love being grounded in the eternal Now of Trinitarian procession, all His human states including suffering being taken into life and glory, each forming on earth a kind of grace for those souls chosen to share it—The life of faith is a transcendent participation in ontological/psychological state of perfect Adorer—Christ as Mediator and Substitute has capacities for fullness of God and for souls whom He contains in Himself and gives life in Himself more than in themselves—Gives metaphysical foundation for idea of indwelling in Christ by faith, without the Platonism of Eckhart and Ruysbroeck; our spiritual capacity is explained by Christ’s capacity for us—Potentiality of faith must be realized by grace and experienced transcendentally or non-categorically (Rahner); Christian experience of existence is interpretation of faith of all that happens as a modality of Christ’s life, training one in perfect adoration—Mary as example of one incorporated in Christ and His states—John Eudes on fundamental mystery of abasement. (p. 124): Charles de Condren: His childhood OT experience of the glory of God, to Whose grandeur the only worthy response is the disposition of offering oneself and all things with Jesus the Victim—The world will be reduced to flames for sin, and God looks with joy only on Christ and His Spirit; Christ’s sacrifice fulfills the zeal of those who wish to sacrifice themselves but are incapable of honoring God—Experience rooted in Eckhartian analogia entis: God in being all is so glorious that everything else is and wants to be nothing, God being more in us than we are—Sacrifice is primarily ontological not soteriological, the will to represent the truth that God is all inasmuch as the action comes from the creature, who cannot represent being assumed and transformed by God, but only sacrifice itself and leave the consummation of the sacrifice to God—In perfect sacrifice, Christ is annihilated, consumed, liquidated in surrender to the Father; His immolation is the creaturely mode of the divine incandescence, and the precondition of ours—Our passing over into divine life in us is death, not experienced, to which pure faith, adhaerere Deo, is appropriate response. (p. 127): Fénelon: For Bérulle, creature had to become pure relation to God, like Christ’s human nature to the divine Person; for Condren, creature had to become like Eucharistic accidents, with Christ as one’s substance—Identification of God with Being led to these conclusions, influencing Quietists, and ultimately Fénelon, whose doctrine of amour pur were condemned by Bossuet—Metaphysics of the Saints was contemplative, but saw the active efficacy of abandonment—Unlike in Eckhart, Catherine, Ignatius, the French were so preoccupied with personal encounter with God that Catholic openness to the world receded—Influenced by classical poetry and philosophy, Fénelon’s indifference has pre-Christian, aestheticizing features—With Madame Guyon, he saw indifference as a secret tradition, unnecessary for ordinary Christians, for whom ordinary doctrine is sufficient—Eros is not sinful as such but incapable of loving God purely for His own sake, and must be overcome by agape/pure love: giving God preponderance over the I, based not on grace, but ontological status of spirit as open to analogia entis, capable of choosing the beloved—God acts only for His glory jealously, but creature can do nothing for its own glorification without idolatry, and can only love in Him; we must want His glory more than our own happiness, even if we will never be happy—Absolute love of God without promise of eternal life, somewhat like OT heroic hope, although that already contains Messianic promise, and so more like Spinoza’s and Hegel’s intellectual love, without hope for individual spirit; mysticism and atheism disdain human finitude in interest of Whole—Fénelon’s monotonous emphasis on mortification, becoming small, self-abandonment, the mediocrity of virtue and the purity of faith, without Christological emphasis, a mysticism in danger of theopanism and pantheist univocalism, beyond I and Thou—The glory of God fails to shine in this aesthetic theology, since the search for selflessness is to self-concerned—The place of his condemnation among those of other French and Spanish—In the Metaphysics of the Saints, only Ignatius got the balance right, avoiding Idealism. (p. 132): Caussade: In commentary on Bossuet, Caussade expounds heart of Fénelon’s doctrine and the entire Metaphysics of the Saints—Indifference or abandonment are love, being at God’s disposal in openness to His providential will, a sustained passive act terminated in every case by Him in active finite conduct—Inner work of openness, like Mary’s fiat, which sums up OT spiritual theology, and which does not want to decide for itself or know anything, founded in hope not certainty on the basis of Christ’s merits—This rediscovers the content and act of Biblical revelation, and sees importance of the moment (Kierkegaard) as continuation of that revelation in the Spirit’s exposition of the Word—We must follow God as Abraham did, and not rely on a compartmentalized theology—To attain God’s order and standards, we must lose our own; to initiate us into docility of total faith, God wears strange masks, so that God can dwell in us in a poor way, without the accessories of sanctity that make souls a cause of wonder—Act of revelation and nuptial union occurs whenever God’s will meets soul’s readiness—All things are God’s words and ideas, and so sacraments, mediations of grace, His hand feeding me: everything makes perfect sense and is full of meaning, an aesthetics in the night of faith—When God wills it, rays break out of the hidden beauty revealing accidentally the hidden substantial glory of Christ and the saints, though many saints remain hidden—God speaks a mystery, which sacrifices my senses and reason because it is contradiction for them, but is life for the heart through faith—Divine goodness and our surrender require amour pur: God does not tell us to despise happiness, but to love Him for His own sake as well—Caussade’s avoidance of Quietism, not denying the activity of the creature, but also not denying the radicalism of the Metaphysics of the Saints; a proper dialogue partner for Sufism and Asian mysticism, but not the definitive form of Christian metaphysics. II.B.3. Folly and Glory II.B.3.a. Holy Fools (p. 141): Question of what image of God should be canonical for (post-)Christian art when the Metaphysics of Saints gains validity, as seen especially in literature, the art-form that reveals what living man is and his measure—Attempts to reassert antiquity’s canon, the gods, including the contribution of Germanic and chivalric myth—In many Latin and vernacular legends, the saints are canonical image of man, but abandonment in transcendence to open will of God cannot be put in epic or dramatic form, but only its incidental effects, and saint cannot correctly be interpreted as hero—Adventure stories are entertaining but do not answer metaphysical question about human nature—Dramas of rifts between saints and emperors reveal split between heaven/ethos and earth/power, but do not give a figure—The figure of the fool and buffoon (Parzifal, and the fools in e.g. Shakespeare, Dostoievsky, Chesterton)—Classical hero is beautiful but boring, melancholic, and not glorious, but the real fool has gleam of unconscious sanctity, nearer the saint than the moral man concerned with his own perfection, but he cannot be confused with the saint, and has no danger of purism or exclusiveness—The longing to be fools for Christ in the Apostles, Francis, Angela of Foligno, Ignatius of Loyola; call to folly is to be indifferently accepted not sought—Seeking to be a fool among Byzantine saints e.g. Simeon the Fool, Andrew the Fool, who expose the folly of the world by a game of folly, with annoying symbolic gestures, but also capable of approaching others for Christ without official, fossilized forms of piety. (p. 146): Jacopone di Todi: Died in 1303, the only non-Russian Western fool, making songs to God’s foolish love, leaping beyond reason, prior to Dante, understanding through His folly God’s Whylessness—Earthly frailty taken to the point of the danse macabre, the glory of God’s love to the point of Franciscan embracing all of creation—His resistance of Boniface VIII—The importance of Giovanni Colombini, Philip Neri (to Goethe), John of God and his voluntary madness. II.B.3.b. Gallows-birds and Duellists with Death (p. 147): François Villon: For the Christian, death confronts one with the mystery of God’s death out of love, and so demands and reminds one of love—Behind the medieval songs that are parodies or eroticized versions of sacred songs is the humble voice of the Prodigal Son certain in his knowledge of grace (Rutebeuf, Cecco Angiolieri, Villon)—Villon (b. 1431) criminal, writer of most beautiful Marian hymn and crudest brothel songs; he measured in himself distance between heaven and hell, baptism and sin—He surveys the failure of his life from the point of view of death, presenting his knowledge of all things but self, due to the paradoxes that prevent the latter—He beseeches forgiveness for all the hanged—We submit to death rather than trusting God. (p. 150): Johannes von Tepl: He called death a fool, and entered a debate with Death upon the death of his wife (1400)—Though death has similar arguments in his own defense to Boethius’ Lady Philosophy, this is not a consolation but a bitter struggle—Death counsels detachment, for all that is earthly is transient, vanity, concupiscence—Man’s counterargument is that death is not pure nature, but a merciless unjust enemy, which cannot destroy humble glory of pure love, but denigrates man and so God; man gives the lie to death by his faithfulness—Both man and death are servants of God, and death is the instrument of man’s glory and honor; philosophy of death is not that of God (contra Boethius)—Glory towers above created being’s transience—Love of man and woman overcomes death and hides praying in the bosom of eternal life. II.B.3.c. The Transformations of the Fool (p. 152): The theme of the fool gets its first metaphysical treatment in Wolfram, who gives the Parzival legend its theological depth, though its fundamental conception of folly is already in Chrétien de Troyes—The theme of the fool is not a tragic theme; tragedy had its place in ancient world of eros—Parzifal theme rooted in fairy tale, which is rooted in myth; in Christ, all myths and fairy tales become transparent to Him and lose their weight—In Christian literature, comedy outweighs tragedy, especially the light of humor; irony presumes to take God’s perspective, and satire exposes pharisaically the faults of one’s neighbor—Christian humorists know the mysterious relation between engraced wisdom and sinful folly. (p. 153): Wolfram: Values of his epic of chivalry come from beyond world of chivalry, the Aristotelian and Christian mean—Parzival’s folly moves from being a deficiency to excess; chivalry is ethical-aesthetic measure, and archetype of beautiful world—Parzival’s desire is always inseparably for faithful love of both God and his lady—Kingdom of Gral as symbolic and eschatological anticipation of perfect unity of religious and secular, renunciation and fulfillment, availability and wealth—Chivalry’s Utopianism is exposed by Cervantes, but it also hearkens back to Irenaeus’ eschatology—Wolfram’s chivalric ideal is tension between immanent Kingdom of Arthur, for which transcendent is in and above it as ideal, and transcendent Kingdom of the Gral, which raised us immanent with itself as inner form; the intertwining of these seeks to join temporal and spiritual, Christian with pagan and Muslim, in a beautiful humanist lay world—The earthly and human are ambiguous, and God alone can divide the crooked and straight; all things are double e.g. all love is joy and sorrow, yet without tragedy—Key notion at foundation of Parzival’s folly is Biblical and cultural notion of einvelt i.e. heart’s capacity manfully to withstand world’s contradictions, heart’s simplicity, an indifference or Gelassenheit for the heart, the mean as basic for beauty surrounded by glory—The great diversity of folly (Cynics, Denys, Nicholas of Cusa, illiterati e.g. Wolfram) all of which falls short of folly of the Cross—All pervasive color and light in Wolfram’s poem: human beauty, especially purity, experienced as radiance of light, as is God Who shines through all things as serenity—Glory is not first hidden—Parzival’s supernatural simplicity is the sense of unaffected openness to God of someone who will be called for a purpose; his natural simplicity rooted in his knightly breeding but artificial ignorance of courtly things—Episodes of folly, failure, and simplicity from the legend—No one can open himself to God by simplicity alone, without a choice, which when made by fallen man encounters his fallenness; only appropriate and wise attitude is fidelity to God, hence the stupidity of the homme révolté—Link between individual guilt and objective sin/original guilt, leading to awareness of the abyss between one and God—Containment of falling in love within fidelity, while to absolutize it (Gottfried’s Tristan) is the reversal of truth—At the end of the poem, care melts into joy, and the story moves among celebrations and reconciliations. II.B.3.d. The Analogy of Folly (p. 164): Erasmus: For Wolfram (1200), the mutual symbolic relation of sacred and secular is not utopian but adequate account of reality—Dante, Ockham, Eckhart cannot develop theme of folly—Danse macabre puts all under sign of vanity—Many 15th and early 16th century humorists have little to do with the glory of the Lord (e.g. Eulenspiegel, Brandt, Murner)—Erasmus’ Encomium Moriae raises folly again to metaphysical levels, a polemic against gloomy scholastic wisdom, humanist learning, and love of apatheia, while hallmark of reality is folly, which includes everything beneath the mind and in which it is rooted, the whole splendor and vitality of life, love, and youth, and everything above the mind, all that is gratuitous, playful, graceful, the world of the gods—The Christian meaning of supra-rational folly is the interpretation of evil on the Cross as not knowing what they do—The rootedness of many facets and masks of the theater of life in the sub-spiritual realm; every quality turns out reversed to be its opposite, all of which relativities tend to be sanctioned by reason, which thus shows its ridiculousness and guilt before grace—In critiquing the Church, the analogy of folly shifts to the pole of God’s folly, exposing modern Christian reality as an evasion of reality and flight from the truth—The folly of the Incarnation, Cross, evangelical counsels, Christian piety—Erasmus shows his own folly of ending by fleeing inexplicably into a Platonic realm of pure spirit, closing his eyes before the radiant glory of true folly. II.B.3.e. Ridiculousness and Grace (p. 169): Cervantes: Don Quixote cannot be reduced to a theory, but is many-layered like all genuine humor, deliberately susceptible of many interpretations, but resisting philosophical ones: it is both absurdity or burlesque and light of grace descending from Christian love—Cervantes resists ideology of chivalry and analogy of knight to saint, yet he preserves the folly of that ideology—This is the myth of the Christian era: the merry myth of the ridiculous knight fighting for the Kingdom of God—Quixote’s folly, unlike other purely human madness in the book, closes gap between idea of Christ’s redemptive grace and reality of allegedly world-transforming acts of Christians; Quixote is patron saint of Catholic Action, a dogmatics expressible in Catholicism with humor, but only tragically by Luther—Quixote’s simplicity and service in answer to perceived divine call to knighthood as God’s minister to those in distress, carrying out the monk’s prayers, though not as virtuous as the monk; he sees himself as establisher of grace, though the result of his interference is generally that things get worse—Loyola’s affinities with Quixote—Quixote’s constant humiliations, which he bears patiently so as to be the model of all future knights; he bears the ideal of the virgin lady Dulcinea, the sum of all beauty, to whom he prays and whom he serves for her own sake, who has been transformed into an ugly peasant in the form of abasement though he hopes for an eschatological dis-enchantment—The knight alone sees things in their true light and worth, and so is aware of his own dignity—The legends described the knights not as they were but as they should have been, and Quixote bears them all in himself; his folly is penance for all that was unconsciously foolish in them—His reason is foolish, yet his foolishness is sensible and systematic (more than e.g. Hamlet)—Cervantes is scourge of ancient chivalry and modern pastoral and erotic idyll, and their ideal of beauty—Quixote shows life of knight as integration of all Christian virtues; he is a better Christian because subjectively he does not claim sanctity, and objectively it is impossible to count his ridiculous deeds among Christ’s solemn deeds: he recognizes absolute distance between them, knowing his own folly by God’s mercy and experience. II.B.3.f. The Fool as Rogue (p. 180): Grimmelshausen: In Simplizissimus, Christian fool is at the center; his main character’s natural and supernatural development—As a Christian obeying e.g. Christ’s command to love his enemies, his inability to understand the world, as would the Apostles were they to return today—Themes of contradiction between God and world, and of gravity of appalling chaos of war—The fool’s freedom to tell his superiors the truth, even Christian truth—Simplicius does not remain the pure ideal fool like Quixote but becomes the wily rascal who adapts to the world and enters a godless life, a mirror of human inconstancy, tossed between remembrance and forgetfulness of God—His inward quality is calculation; Grimmelshausen retains a Protestant mistrust of virtue as hypocrisy or holy joking—Influence by picaresque novels, whose goddess is Fortuna, who rules both lower and spiritual worlds, so no conversion is definitive—The final word is not contemplation but a wisdom hectically involved in changing world, whose final garb is that of the fool: dazzling darkness is the foolishness and roguishness of divine glory—Grimmelhausen and his character’s conversion to Catholicism were sincere, but he remains reserved about multiplicity of denomination; the only real madman in the book is the one who wants to unify the churches by his reason—He reserves his right to wait to decide among the religions until he has more information (like Lessing); there is only disobedience in division: he is a faithful Catholic but tolerant because of his belief in God’s unlimited mercy—The world is eschatologically open, war-torn, only God knows the way out of the labyrinth; God is not the devil’s opponent, but transcends all positions and oppositions—The harmony of the world, which even the screeching of dark forces wants to join in praise of God—The monastic life and the preservation in foolish roguish wisdom in the world—Man explains himself by the ascent to the God of mercy. II.B.3.g. The Christian as Idiot (p. 188): Dostoievsky: Classicism did not develop the theme of folly, but confined itself to the finite natural human form, as in the novel in which the hero develops from folly to wisdom through human providence (e.g. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister)—Idealist romanticism is in tension between finite and absolute subject; latter can inspire former to genius that appears foolish but is actually superior intelligence (Kreisler, Hofmann), or can use spirit-less materiality (Baader, Schelling), or can punish people with madness for not understanding reality (Jean Paul), or, in the fatigue of Idealism, all intellect becomes madness (Schopenhauer) and one no longer confronts real existence (Wagner)—Folly motif reaches a climax in Dostoievsky’s The Idiot, which roots beauty in glory—Beyond the classicist and romantic attempts to reduce glory to beauty, which collapse into atheist and materialist aesthetics (Marx, Tchernichevsky)—Dostoievsky’s near execution, exile, novels of which The Idiot contains the others in kernel; it is a portrayal of a truly perfect and beautiful human being, though there is only one ideal and positively beautiful figure, Christ: he seeks to show a reflection of that miracle—Beauty is not a straightforward transparency to the divine, but can also be a mask and sacrament of the devil—Differing responses to beauty of nature by Myshkin and Ippolit; the latter’s refusal, like Ivan Karamazov, of cosmic harmony and his place in it: the ancient aesthetic argument (Plato to Hegel) has lost its force—Myshkin’s consciousness of his ancient princely lineage, though his simplicity is by nature inserted into humility—His similarities to Quixote and Pushkin’s Poor Knight—Myshkin moves naturally in the world of sinners, but has no will to sin, but only to be undistanced from but simply and unreflectively alongside the sinner—Experience of absolute certainty of the one condemned to die, and of the supra-temporal elation before the epileptic attack, an ambiguous experience not clearly one of identification with God or reality—Holbein’s painting of the dead Christ as symbolic diacritical point between and identification of faith/Christianity and unbelief/atheism, eternal life with eternal death—Psychology establishes things, but Myshkin understands by overlooking, forgetting, forgiving, loving, which makes him look like an idiot: he trusts even when he is shamelessly deceived—His love (e.g. for Nastasya Filippovna) is compassion, not eros, for compassion is the chief or only law of human existence; Nastasya feels to the depths of her being that she has been insulted, but Myshkin lover her non-erotically as she pierces his heart, and so can see through the game she plays with the world, but she must give up that game to love him—Rogozhin’s erotic love to the point of madness and murder, as Nastasya flees from honor to dishonor—Myshkin’s love cannot be kept within limits proper to marriage—His worldly folly regarding money; his unconscious living of the evangelical counsels—Myshkin’s solidarity with and defense of Rogozhin, Nastasya, Ippolit, like Alyosha with Ivan and even his defense of the Grand Inquisitor—He unconsciously lives in three state so absolute isolation: execution, epilepsy, the Holy Saturday picture; people feel the uniqueness of his state, even if not the Christian character of it—Catholicism and socialism as begotten of despair, using force, and making nonsense of Myshkin’s state in life—The essence of Christianity and whole idea of God is love as communication with the sinner, communion with his guilt without the desire to distinguish himself from him, exchange of crosses with the sinner, Holy Saturday when Love died the death of sin with and for sin, which no atheism can touch, where love conquers in silence—Even Dostoievsky cannot stand by his idiot, but puts nationalist speeches into his mouth—Myshkin’s foolishness shows the foolishness of pride—His idiocy eludes all psychological explanation because part but only part is caused by illness, which veils the Christian mystery from himself and others—The most important thing about Myshkin is not his charismatic discernment but his simple love that cannot be at home here below—Dostoievsky is master of the Christian theme of the fool, though it is deepened theologically and ecclesially in Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest, though Bernanos’ priest loses something of Myshkin’s delicacy and lightness—Graham Greene’s whisky priest in The Power and the Glory continues the line of Simplizissimus rather than Myshkin. II.B.3.h. Christ in the Clown (p. 201): Georges Rouault: Rouault first attempted to represent Christian things in beauty, but Léon Bloy showed him glory breaking forth from humiliated and offended alone, in order to express which he smashed the canonical form—The clown is the most open image of human existence, wandering without a homeland, revealed in simplicity in the ridiculousness of his costume—He perfects a theme began in Watteau and Mozart—Similarities to image of the gypsy (Beckmann, Picasso, Rilke)—What is comic and grotesque is tragic, and the artist’s revolt against the disfiguring of men becomes compassion—The clown sums up the humanly grotesque and so his portrait becomes that of Christ—The greater immanence and transcendence of glory in Rouault’s painting as compared to Classicism or Impressionism, leading to coincidentia oppositorum expressed through identical gestures—In his paintings of skeletons, the metaphysics of the fool and idiot is superseded: the destiny of the lonely individual becomes that of man, taken up by the divine Idiot on the Cross, imprinting on everything His form of divine mercy, for which it is a matter of indifference whether its glory is manifested invisibly in earthly beauty or ugliness. II.B.4. The Knot. Nicolas of Cusa II.B.4.a. The Remaining Themes and the New Beginning (p. 205): Neither the metaphysic of holy reason/indifference of the saints nor the metaphysic of foolish reason/thrown-ness of the fool can claim to make sufficiently visible all of human existence—When worldly reason is mocked a priori (Erasmus), the analogy between created and uncreated reason is precipitately identified with the contradiction between fallen and divine reason—Both metaphysics skip over the reality of the world, seen as a nominalist-positivist wreck, and seek divine glory in immediate supernatural, along with the third line of the Reformation, which rejected philosophical mediation—Classical philosophy becomes vital necessity for existence of Christian culture, which requires something unifying beyond confessional hostility, and so leads to liberalism and Enlightenment (Heer)—(1) First movement from 15th century humanism to Winckelmann, Schiller, Goethe, Schelling, Hegel was cry for help to mediation of antiquity from Christian community; darkness of late medieval life and scholasticism made some think that they were seeing glory of the cosmos for the first time: Plato and Plotinus, with their revelation that obscures boundary between natural and supernatural, come to be seen as fulfilled in Christ, and ancient gods are partial aspect of God, and doctrine of Logos spermatikos is applied both to non-Christian philosophies and religions, which Christianity just as highest example of universal bridge from God to man—(2) Second movement is in dialectic of contradiction with the first, and is theme of speculative doctrine of God proceeding from experience of immediacy between infinite and finite I, seen in Kabbala rather than OT, and in Spinoza, Maimon, Cohen, Boehme, Baader, Fichte, Rothe—Infinitely varied combinations of both themes, in all of which classical and Biblical glory pales—(3) Third modern theme is evolution: since the world lies in gap between finite and infinite I, the world and man are just the goal of infinite I’s Odyssey of self-discovery, but thereby divine freedom is lost and man become unique divinum in thought (Feuerbach). (p. 209): Nicolas of Cusa stands at beginning of the modern themes, joining in a knot Hellenism and Christianity, past and future—The primal philosophical act is the analogy of Being: God is in all because over all; the world is explanation of inexplicable/explicatio of complicatio—Eckhart offered counter-theme to classical foundation of Plotinus, Proclus, Erigena of joining infinite and created spirit: man becomes a sort of second god, creator of realm of numbers; Nicolas never moves to idealism of identity, but prepares way for that—Nicolas roots Christian theology in total cosmic metaphysical revelation—He designates himself idiota in contrast to scholastics, not in terms of ideal of folly, for scholasticism fell from the spiritual to mere understanding, so he seeks to synthesize Western and Eastern (including Koran) traditions to shape future thinking—For last time in Catholic thinking until Blondel, historical revelation is enclosed in paradox analogia entis, which is paradox of coincidentia oppositorum in God’s transcendent Being, and in Incarnation, Church, faith, grace, theology, Trinity—He saw act of faith as pinnacle of philosophical act, in inner analogy of philosophical and theological faith, which could endure no breach, like that of Luther—We must consider possibilities that glory of God is sacrificed to aesthetic cosmic scheme, or that here cosmic universal view of glory is made possible—Nicolas encounters in all things a God who combines Plotinian universal features, Homeric lights, Sophoclean darkness, and Virgilian longing in the Biblical event, willing to be sought lovingly by all in all. II.B.4.b. Total Glory (p. 213): For Plotinus, Proclus, Erigena, the world is sovereign manifestation/shining forth of the unmanifest God, based on His love, so the relation between Father and Son, and God and world, is bridal—Nicolas uses resplendere and relucere to express God’s hidden revelation in the world: one infinite form shines in all things as precise original of every individual, and as truth in our mind’s representations; creature is God’s creative resplendentia—In God as Not-Other, all other things shine forth as likenesses in original, and as legible words and audible speech of Father through Son in Spirit—Philosophical quest for quiddities of things will fail so long as they are not seen as intentions of freely self-communicating God; a necessary first cause cannot explain the contingent—The Creator wills the manifestation of His glory, though He is beyond all worldly beauty—Nicolas draws on Albert’s understanding of beauty as radiance of form beyond proportionate parts of matter, and as drawing longing to itself and uniting all things; Nicolas applies horizontal dimension of consonantia and vertical dimension of claritas to God’s relation to world—Only mind not senses can have idea of beautiful and judge degree of concretely beautiful—Whereas eros strives for beautiful because it does not possess it, mens/nous is a created copy of divine primordial beauty and must know itself as beautiful to be spiritually beautiful, which self-mastered beauty is intra-divine beauty is in the Spirit, by which glory God knows all that He begets, and knows it as harmony—In the science of praise, the created mind knows itself as ray of glory of God—Though intra-divine glory shines forth in creation, it is incomprehensible so long as God in His freedom has not freely unlocked His mystery by grace, which requires creature’s free response, and the medium of Christ—Glorification of God is by faith alone, not by our spirits’ own power; God made men and made them frail and sinful to prove His power by means of them—God’s glory and beauty are one, as are philosophical longing and Christian love, eros and caritas—Even beauty of God with which beauty of the world has no comparison is essentially determined by vision of the world; light from above is refracted in harmony of cosmic numbers—Cosmos is harmony/coincientia of two contrary movements, descent of identical to non-identical, and ascent of non-identical to identical—Mind as proportioned divine number mediates between God and sensory world; man is creative unity in effect on matter as mathematician, technician, artist, but is the many for uncreated unity. II.B.4.c. Training in Analogy (p. 222): Nicolas provides provisional sketch of period’s structure from Renaissance to Hegel—His renewal of antiquity is retraining in lost articulations of human thought; his philosophy between spirit and God is transcendental in modern sense—His thought accomplishes analogia entis from classical philosophy of being and modern philosophy of mind and freedom. (p. 222): 1. Classical Point of View: Renewal against Scholasticism blind to mystery of Being, and so renewal of esoteric theology, for true God is encountered in rapture, and so theology cannot be entrusted to books—Scientific knowledge of God is a knowledge that all creaturely knowing about Him is mirroring, parable, images, conjectural outline, requiring experience of metaphysical thinking and learned/most sacred ignorance—Concepts are finite and cannot contain infinite, but intend the infinite which announces and conceals itself in the concept, participating in the imparticipatable; the nameless God can be called by all names—To be created is the eros drawn to God i.e. esse and infinite desiderare coincide, where this desire is excited e.g. by sermons—Indestructible stretching-forth is either fulfilled by God so that the spirit is ever moved in most blessed longing, attaining what it can never have enough of, or not fulfilled by God and so is torture; this retains analogia entis, which proceeds from inconceivable fact that God is all, yet the world exists without adding to God’s reality: God is all reality in creature, but without being immersed or mingled in it, rather being restlessly immanent in it because He is in simple totality all that it is in its unfolding—God is really all possible being i.e. everything in an enfolded way, not requiring unfolding (contra Hegel)—Creatures are God and also others to their co-existents; God is Not-Other, supposed before all things—God is coincidentia of worldly opposites, but not perceivable as point of convergence of those opposites, but prior to and transcending them: otherness without otherness in unity, contradiction without contradiction in infinity, with nothing different from or opposed to Him—Building on Eckhart, God is not essence but essence of essences, and form of forms of formable things, transcendence expressed in immanence—He is in every other the fundamental/transcendental not-other; this avoids pantheism, and anchors analogical character of all worldly being and knowledge, but does not transcend the pre-Christian Proclean starting point—In God, there is perfect reality and precision, because He is the one only idea of everything; creatures are inexact, parabolic, speculative—Exact science unfolded by the mind in unreal and only approximately applicable to reality; knowledge of reality is only conjectural—This hearkens back to Plato’s mythological thought, and anticipates Renaissance artistic element in thinking—Enigma of thought leads Nicolas to perpetual unrest—The blessed touch of God is the pleasure in all that is pleasurable and beauty in all that is beautiful—Manifold things are theophanies—To avoid pantheism, unfolding of unity of God in the world must be a self-descent; receiving of gift is by way of descent, with no receptive matter over against God, with no positive cause for otherness or finitude: the finite becomes contingent and enigmatic likeness of God, without explanation in orders of formal, final, or efficient causality, and only deepens classical analogia entis in a Christian manner. (p. 230): 2. Christian point of view: Christian solution appears in De Possest and De Apice theoriae, after radicalization of classical view in De Non-Aliud—Creaturely contingency corresponds to Absolute freedom, the purposelessness of the radiance of the Good (Plotinus)—Incomprehensibility of God of negative theology is interpreted in incomprehensibility of God of Love, the positive incomprehensibility that God wills to have need of me; there is greater happiness to find in learned ignorance that the love-worthy beloved is incomprehensible than to find it comprehensible—As simple Being-with-Himself, God is universal vision and so seems to continually gaze just at me, his gaze being the uncontractable contraction of all contractions—Analogy of Being is analogy of freedom: God does not compel my freedom except inasmuch as His givenness can only be received in a choice for self and God—Man’s seeing of God is a finite participation in God’s vision, a real but analogical and enigmatic vision: to look at God is to look into one’s own truth; to be perfect is to be seen by God—All direct concepts of God are shattered in the coincidentia oppositorum, behind which the beholding God unattainably hides Himself, which leads back to the classical concepts—No worldly being is its own capacity to be, but there is a place, God, where its being and capacity coincide; this is the experience that for Thomas manifested as real distinction of essence and existence, but now God through power of being is identical with being as act (though Nicolas remains largely an essentialist, without a real distinction)—Created essences are posited only by a positive intention—Classical aspect is creation as emanation of Being, Christian aspect is the reception by that which in the creature corresponds to freely-apportioning possest of possibility of receiving i.e. Being as infinite over-mastering of itself and disclosure of whole infinite realm of Being in which God is Himself outside Himself; this capacity is ground of every ground, Being is the manifestation of the Good, Spirit, Freedom, and Glory appears as posse ipsum—Only Capacity-itself manifested in glory can still the longing of the mind—Nicolas raises classical glory of God to glory of free Christian God, and causes creature’s intellectual capacity for sight to be transcendentally established at summit of his desire for glory—The dynamism/eros of our reason never, for Nicolas, yields to the indifference of the Metaphysics of the Saints, though it cannot attain its target without grace i.e. personal self-disclosure of God i.e. Christ as Word of the Father—Faith and epistrophe of classical philosophy pass without break into Christian faith and humility—Separation of philosophy and theology of Thomism is annulled for sake of total classical metaphysics; dogmatics risks becoming rationalist mysticism, Christology becomes Origenist, God becomes Leibniz’s central monad, all moves toward Hegelianism. II.B.4.d. Conjecture or Absolute Knowledge? (p. 238): Moving beyond Platonism, for Nicolas human spirit does not appear in ascending hierarchy, but just as God is to unfolded real world so spirit is to unreal world i.e. world of numbers developed out of its own unity, the only area where there is exact science not conjecture—As uncontracted spirit, created spirit is to God not as subject to object, but as finite subject participating in absolute subject holding sway within its intuition—Both God and spirit are complicatio complicationum, and spirit is not finite explication of God but image of divine explication—Sensible world exists to be measured by finite spirit, in order to grasp in sensible form the glory of divine reason; mens is a living mensura (opening to Descartes), reflected all-exemplarity, a second God representing divine countenance in creation—Man is complicative as spirit, explicative as soul and body; through world of number, man is co-origin of world harmony: through that world, spirit knows itself as image of eternal, an ever-deepening metaphysical self-knowledge so as to see the archetype of the image (Gregory of Nyssa)—Through self-questioning man become ultimate puzzle, the point from which all world-puzzles derive—Following Eckhart and Lull, Nicolas seeks a total science fashioned of philosophy and theology—Call to divine sonship sinks creature in Trinitarian process of begetting, and conjectural knowledge in mutual intuition of Father and Son all the way to participation in omniscience; the son is present in the Logos in Whom possibility and reality coincide, for in God every creature is God, and God is not an other for the creature—Anticipating Hegel and echoing Erigena, nous brings every noema to noesis, for every object of nous is nous, and sonship annuls all difference in the One—Because of analogia and docta ignorantia, the conceptus absolutus of God is unattainable from below, but grace and Christ make up for that; hence the a priori construction of the Incarnation from union between absolute greatest and greatest in the world, as opposed to earlier view that concept of greatest in the world is contradictory, making possible an exact proportion between God and world—Nicolas’ criticisms of the Schools can be applied to Nicolas e.g. to his formal Trinitarian speculations; faith becomes a means, and the tendency becomes stronger to pass beyond negative to positive theology, to an anticipation of eschatological vision of Father in Son—Nicolas is not tied to this because it contradicts analogia entis, but he is not fully aware of the dangers of this path: he means it in Anselmian way, but it opens to Hegel—The many gods are explications of the one God, contra the absolutizing tendency of popular religion; all contradictories, even atheism, are incorporated as fragmentary utterances into the total system—Nicolas’ conception of representation of Logos on earth varies between universal-philosophical, juridical-philosophical, and constitutional (Jaspers), as he seeks to understand Church like Incarnation against cosmic background—All religions have a share in Logos, all are seen against background of the philosophical, with Christ as the perfect teacher of Wisdom, which brings him and e.g. More after him close to liberalism—Platonic glory cannot do justice to Biblical glory, and modern age showed the consequences of thinking so. II.B.5. Classical Mediation II.B.5.a. Refuge with the Past (p. 247): Better to examine relation between metaphysics and glory in the modern period from a bird’s eye view than in detail; from that perspective, what look like great moments from below, appear to not disturb the flow of the advancing stream, but just to be waves in it; one of the most glorious periods in history, but disturbed by its contradictory forces, which destroy many greater thinkers (e.g. Spinoza, Schelling, Scheler)—Classical antiquity ultimately loses, as does speculation about God, which reveals itself as a Promethean human construct—But modern history cannot be disposed of—Christianity has the only key to the glory of antiquity and to God’s mysteries (contra Hegel, Feuerbach)—False Either-Or led to la querelle des anciens et des modernes—What can be developed for thought avoids error only within horizon of tradition in which depth of Being has been opened (Heidegger), but no over-powering of the forms of the world makes up for the Goethean/Aristotelian vision of things’ forms, contra all scientific/sociological/cybernetic/evolutionary advances; no real quarrel between Aristotelian forms/finalities and evolution—The real Either-Or is between Christianity/Glory of Being and nihilism: the gods hold sway only where God’s personal love in the Son of God is acknowledged—The present’s enormous lack of glory (Picard)—Humanist appeal to classical antiquity for more inward presence points to depths of anxiety to which Christian consciousness had fallen prey—Humanist literary program stood neither in service of clerical theology nor in conflict with it, except with decadent scholasticism—Rediscovery of Greek Fathers and classics, along with more ancient sources (e.g. Orpheus, Hermes Trismegistus, Zoroaster) witnessing to universal-theistic revelation (Plethon)—Mythic poetry hailed as second theology (Mussato), contra scholastic problem of veiling of truth in images, it is hailed as higher than the liberal arts along with theology (Petrarch, Salutati, Boccaccio) since the prophets and Christ speak in images and parables, and so the poet becomes the modern type of the saint—They seek a total poetic-theological symbolism which by Nicolas of Cusa broadens to form a general cosmic horizon. (p.252): Marsilio Ficino: His system is sincerely both Christian and Plotinian, reading both through the other, each understood ultimately as identical beyond analogy; though he never mentions analogy of Being and makes Being in practice highest universal, he does not exclude analogy either—He identifies eros, agape, and Platonic friendship, but not so as to make eros annihilate agape (contra Nygren), but rather eros in its highest form is selfless—All being is Beauty, the gracious self-radiation of the Good as eternal love—God is the Good, and the beautiful is mens/nous, anima, natura, material; pulchrum is identical to splendor, claritas, fulgor: glory and beauty are identified, the world being the manifestation and streaming-forth of God—Authentic intellectual act is both contemplation and love, made to perceive the Good in the wonder of the Beautiful—Each beautiful form fascinates and disappoints, so as to point to God, who shines in each form—Creation is first discharging of chaos/matter from God, and second is called back to Him to obtain His form in epistrophe/eros: a circular movement of beauty attracting to God and love flowing back to Him, for all love, even sexual or friendship, is religious—Since eros is always response to call of grace, it is agape—He interprets Christ through Plotinus and Denys, since every love is a death to self to live in the beloved, mediated by beauty—Not clear how this can handle Christ’s love for sinners in their ugliness, as Pico della Mirandola noted, though he then left out Christian love. (p. 256): Leone Ebreo: Ficino gave the troubadour cult its theological-philosophical justification more than Dante, initiating the trattati d’amore e.g. of Ebreo—He was son of great Jewish Biblical commentator Yitshaq Abrabanel, and created worldview based on intense love of OT with ancient worldview, like Philo and Maimonides before, and Spinoza, Cohen, and Bergson after—A monism of religious love for which all is transparent for God in act of theoria, which unites dynamic transcendence of each individual form through longing with symbolic gaze at beauty of individual form in which infinite beauty shines forth; highest beauty is one with world-being/soul/appetite—God as bello bellificante is raised above cosmos as bello belificato, as father of the world, or as Good explicated in the beautiful—Beauty is idea/form shining through to awaken eros for infinite, not proportion (contra artists like Alberti)—Light is first manifestation of primordial spiritual light—Most comprehensive idealist aesthetics before Hegel (Menendez y Pelayo)—The rungs of Being are objectively of beauty, subjectively of love—Dying to individual being and surrendering to the One, acts of intellectio, amor, and fruitio are one; descent of God is ascent to God—Problem (Pico) of how creaturely love can be quenched if it, but not God, is essentially longing—The communication of God’s love to the creature is a glorification/super-fulfilling of God’s love as lover in beloved, but also the need/lack of God burning fiercely in spiritual creature is form of participation in eternal love: Biblically not Platonically, God is archetype of eros as knowing and willing. (p. 260): Giordano Bruno: This renegade Dominican is secret father of modern religion of cosmos (Spinoza, Leibniz, Schelling, Herder, Goethe) following Nicolas of Cusa, but moving to identity beyond analogy, though he draws on classic formulations of negative theology and metaphors for God (from Parmenides through Thomas to Ficino)—Everything occurs between two trinities: chaos, passive potentiality, matter and Father/pleroma, nous, and light/spirit—Cosmology (following Heraclitus) arises in mystery of unity of opposites—Prayer is replaced with feeling of the hero who attains union with the universe, and eros becomes heroic ardor flaring up from absolute fire, and ascent is replaced with circular movement toward center beyond form within infinite space—The myth of Diana and Actaeon as symbol of relation of God to matter: by being torn to pieces, matter ultimately becomes God, the true essence of the being of things, where this destruction is sexual passion—Since Dante, God made manifest is feminine; Bruno likens himself to the obscene fauns and satyrs penetrating his object—Contra Platonic and Biblical rapture from above, God is only found in the cosmos, in the heart overcome with enthusiasm: an attitude contrary to prayer, a masculine creative conquering attitude to Being (Goethe’s Prometheus and Faust)—Bruno’s move to the Presocratics makes him forget his Neo-Platonic starting point, hence his move to atomism or Leibniz-like monadism; anticipates modern materialism in which lower trinity entirely gives birth to higher as its superstructure. II.B.5.b. Eros: The Glory of Melancholy (p. 264): Image from Dante, Petrarch, Ficino of eros transfigured and divinized by agape, anticipated in ancient world only by Sappho—In Platonism, love of one beautiful body cannot illumine the ascent, conditioned by Christianity only inasmuch as only Christ can make Godhead present in single form—Courtly love was the idea that agape could take eros into its service—Late pagan antiquity had made eros a cosmic principle—Hidden Christian a priori explains un-self-conscious manner of Christian use of ancient gods from late Middle Ages to 19th century, not just as decoration or allegory, but without equating them with one Mediator—By being equating with agape, eros takes on aspects of Biblical glory, grace, mercy, ability to forgive and transform the world, and its furor and madness are interpreted through NT faith to the point of martyrdom—Absolute post-Christian eros can only be melancholy, with a hidden Christological structure, making it immediate unity of finite and infinite, beloved man and God: in “sacrament” of beauty in worldly form is the gracious presence of totality of divine beauty, so the “moment” has to last and be exhausted (Faust)—Only in post-Christian period can aesthetic emerge in opposition to ethical-religious (Kierkegaard)—Yet in Christian terms, eros too can be redeemed in marriage and in God’s covenant with man in Christ and in man’s longing for God—Relation of eros and agape is a point of decision for the West (Titian, Wagner). (p. 267): Gottfried of Strassburg: Eros problematic appears most clearly in Tristan poem, which sets eros of man and woman face to face with Bernard’s Christ-mysticism of Song of Songs—Eros is here, for Tristan and Isolde, the content of life, without goal outside itself, highest suffering and bliss, transcending all other loves, an esoteric doctrine only for a few, suffering as the self-glorification of love, as its resurrection and eternal life in its enjoyment of its absoluteness—Gottfried inverts cloistered contemplation, as Petrarch did for Augustine’s Confessions and Hölderlin for Swabian pietism: everything profane becomes sacred, for everything Christian has been taken without remainder into eros—This inversion continued by Guillaume de Lorris’ Roman de la Rose and Jean de Meung and their accounts of the god Amor and the goddess Natura—Future comes not from this learned allegory but from Dante’s metaphysical symbolism—Petrarch’s uncertain and sinful tension between religious sublimation and self-consumption in fantasy—History of love treatises from Dante through Cavalcanti to Bembo, Castiglione, and Tasso does not teach as much as the greatest, Michelangelo and Shakespeare. (p. 269): Michelangelo: Dante and Petrarch’s symbol-schema is a framework out of which he creates—Content overflows form: the melancholy has Christian depths and is broken by Christian guilt—Platonism in form, but humbled by letting go of the symbol to surrender it and himself to God. (p.270): Shakespeare: In the Sonnets, Petrarchism is shattered—Love is accused of mad devastation, indissolubly tied up with hatred and virtue—His love longs for what longer nurses the disease of love, and the beloved shows herself “as black as hell”—Besides the heroic feats of eros is a playful Christian culture in society, making all things gentle—Arthur still celebrates resurrection in Spenser’s Fairy Queen. (p. 271): Torquato Tasso: Platonic-heroic furor of love is rendered harmless as occasion of social conversation—Tasso’s desire to create a Christian epic seems a tragicomic misunderstanding—World-historical commission of Aeneas/Augustus is shrunk to making possible peaceful devotion in the Holy Land—Eros is all-pervading atmosphere—In his Conclusioni amorose, Tasso equated beauty and goodness: beauty is goodness attracting to itself through longing—He wavers between Platonic, realist, and Christian accounts of grades of love, including charity; lyrical eros is a univocal all-sustaining reality despite its division into good and bad love-enchantment—God calls heroes, and his angels like the Homeric gods engage in decisive fighting, heal miraculously—Tasso paints the Devil and his kingdom with much more human sensitivity than Dante, inspiring Milton—Real moving force is bewitching eros; the lovers kindle his poem’s lyrical pathos, and its sublimity, heroism, and humanity: the focal point of the mania of eros is not God but the human heart—Bittersweet eros (Sappho) smolders throughout modern classicism: the moment contains eternity though in unredeemed form, since the moment gathers contradictions in its own glory, without anything higher. (p. 274): Giordano Bruno: Eros is the divine coincidentia oppositorum where self-glorification and self-destruction, begetting and decay, love and hatred, coincide, and the hero can endure this unity of opposites in his furor and love of fate and his destiny—The hero does not balance opposites feebly, but suffers under their excess, strives for the most extreme tensions, like Bruno at the stake, oscillating between heaven and hell, like Ixion and Icarus, like the moth to the flame, perishing in the ardor of love—The hero unites necessity of fate with free virtue—This is reason’s game with its own sacramental form, everything balanced on drawn-out reciprocity—The image of the pain and pleasure of erotic passion, the union of torture and satisfaction. (p. 277): Kleist: His drama Penthesilea does not draw on Bruno but on classical tragedies and the post-Christian absolutization of eros and its coincidentia oppositorum of tenderness and cruelty, divinization and annihilation—Eros here has a haughty feeling of triumph, the opposite of service of agape, leading to self-annihilation. (p. 278): Goethe: He rejects Kleist’s piece; Goethe’s Achilles sought to transfer ancient myth of Achilles’ wedding and death from religious to private erotic sphere, like all Baroque dramas that always eroticize classical material, showing the poverty of this period of Christian culture—Goethe realized the distance of his vision from the world-historical vision of the Iliad—Only Claudel’s Satin Slipper successfully lends eros a cosmic dimension—Faust’s cosmic form is unsuccessful, achieving only private or allegorical eros—Kleist’s understand of eros in its self-glory and autonomy as mean between heaven and hell, life and death is achieve also by Racine, Grillparzer, Byron. (p. 279): Hebbel: He made German heroic song about double tragedy of eros through his Nibelungentrilogie, placed at the turning point between German myth and Christianity—Unlike Goethe and Schiller and Wagner, he can give to myth true power from the elemental power of eros—Wagner’s Tristan is apotheosis of post-Christian absolute eros in furor of eros as unity of erotic passion and death—This disintegrating decadent harmony is broken in Strindberg, and here the West passes into Buddhism—Absolute self-glory of eros grasps eternity in a moment, eliminating thought of individual immortality—Movement toward greater uncertainty regarding immortality from Greeks to moderns, obscured by pantheism, empiricism, and eros. (p. 281): Paul Claudel: A final solitary success and synthesis of tradition of world drama—Unlike Goethe, he is able to given universal meaning to eros of two lovers, out of a personal experience of existence including love and exile—The tragic glory of absolute love as complete impossibility of fulfillment, pure long, but also presence of eternal blessedness—Claudel’s mission was to say farewell to Western Platonism, taking it once for all into service of Christian grace—Purification of eros into agape that just wills what God wills allows the lover to lead the way into death—The global geography of the drama—The unreality of earthly imperial glory—Claudel manages to associate humor with furor of eros, which historically was almost never done—He gathers and sets his seal on the Western tradition—Once heroic eros is no longer mediated in the post-Christian period, it loses all glory, descending into psychiatry and cold contradiction (Sartre), undeserving of notice. II.B.5.c. Retreat to the Human Person as Center (p. 284): It made sense to call on powers of classical antiquity in battle about God’s glory, because antiquity was seen as valid for all persons, but it was a failure as a strategy to save total Christian culture—Mediation of antiquity has 2 points of view: 1. Embedding Biblical revelation in theophanous cosmos; 2. Embedding agape in eros—Both broke down at point of overwhelming of supernature by nature—2 inroads on mostly intact world-view: 1. Christendom as sacrament of unity of love of Christ torn by Reformation, and so leads to English retreat from smashed form of revelation to personal piety; 2. Metaphysical consequences drawn from Galilean and Newtonian science including atheism and materialism—In anthropological reduction, theophanous character of cosmos can be denied while retaining religious phenomenon in man, which then leads to rejection of all heteronomy and relocating religious in spontaneity of the heart and autonomy of reason i.e. in ethics (Shaftesbury)—Anthropologizing metaphysics is still dependent on antiquity (Plato, Stoics), though here man becomes focus of glory and God’s darkness appears—Cusa on man as second god and measure of all things—Pico della Mirandola on man’s free self-determination surpassing cosmic laws and self-sculptor/poet—The need to create a society out of one’s own powers (More, Campanella, Bacon)—Construction of man out of original historical situation (Hobbes to Rousseau)—Man as point of reference of all classical and Christian benefits of culture (Rabelais, Montaigne)—Philosopher as advocate of man of autonomous religion (Bodin, Castellio, Franck, foreshadowing Kant)—Sovereign autonomy of man inspires three great aggressive ideologies fought by liberal theisms: 1. Niccolo Machiavelli drew on Roman idea of boundaries imposed by objective intelligence, since man as form of greatness can fashion man as matter; 2. Francis Bacon transfers Machiavelli’s manipulative political harshness to man’s relation to nature, for knowledge is power and contemplation is useless; 3. Thomas Hobbes synthesizes them, drawing on Thucydides’ doctrine of rightness of might, leading to method of subjugation of bodies and the state under one imposed form: material substrate conceived of as mechanical and atomistic is given a priori geometric forms through extreme nominalism and sensualism, all derived from Protestant and Bacon’s methodological presupposition—Bases of man are cupiditas for power and instinct to avoid death, a chaos subdued only by absolute social form of power: what the form includes is good, and what it excludes is bad; this form of power is humanity rising above instinct and structuring itself by its own rational power, leaving religion and revelation and theology in a vacuum—Cartesian mind-matter dualism is a starting point for Hobbes, and for Cambridge Platonists, especially Ralph Cudworth’s return to Platonic-Christian ethical-aesthetic worldview best preserved in Anglican England: Cudworth opposed atomism, defended that God and the vestige of the Trinity knowable only by faith underlies all natural religions so that man must ascend to this truth—Christianity is here the revealedness of the Glory of God archetypally in heaven, veiled on earth, mediated by Christian death (Cudworth, Butler, Oxford Movement, Farrer, Mascall); but this tradition is not historically dominant, but rather purely anthropological anti-materialism, which strips down Christianity to universal human truth measurable by reason, a secularization of the city of God (Herbert of Cherbury, Locke, Toland, Tindal). (p. 291): Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury: He synthesized Enlightenment anthropological reduction with cosmological-aesthetic antiquity, founding classicizing, humanist, cosmic religion of age of Goethe—He fought Hobbesian materialism, humorless theological dogmatism, and humorless OT God unworthy of a free man, all being projections of melancholy—Ethics within classical cosmology is independent of and able to judge atheism and revealed theology—Good humor best fits with dignity of man’s freedom, brings him into contact with divinity in universal nature: this is harmony of soul and with universe, Platonic irony, and Enlightenment self-possession of free self-determining spirit—Ethics, like Descartes’ cogito, is a standpoint from which one can judge any doctrine of world or God; atheism is neutral to ethics, revealed religion can perfect it but tends to threaten it: God is either pure selfless good and self-radiance or is nothing, and we look to Him in an ethical-aesthetic intuition of the whole—World-harmony involves ascetic temperance as does individual enjoyment of virtue, which rests on triumph over self for the sake of the general—He identifies the good and the beautiful, and sees eudaimonia as an earthly possibility through ethical renunciation through choice; thus he links Plato and Aristotle through Kant to e.g. Schiller and Goethe—The moral good is its own reward, and beauty is non-functional and meant to let be: following the main line of the Western metaphysics of glory, he holds that the glory of the intrinsically worthy good is the only legitimate starting point for hope of immortality—His misinterpretation of Judaism because of its concept of reward—Ethical starting point establishes relation to God immanent in the world which is necessarily identity, where prayer is enthusiasm—Glory of God manifests itself everywhere in the cosmos, but especially in our own love in which we feel God’s presence and inspiration: God is completely kenotically present in men (anticipating Hölderlin, Rilke, Heidegger)—Bruno’s influence on Shaftesbury, especially the symbol of Prometheus for the creative artist, the poet as a second god (Scaliger, Cusa); this language continues, in Klopstock, Herder, Goethe, and develops so that Prometheus is seen not as “under Jove” but above him, in von Steinbach, and grows into world-philosophy in Fichte, Schelling, Hegel—Unlike the Greeks who thought in terms of analogy, this is philosophy of identity; this identity makes the Titan and the citizen of the Enlightenment essentially good—If not for this identity, the characterization of feeling as relation to God (Shaftesbury, Rousseau, Jacobi, Goethe, Schleiermacher, Hölderlin) could be seen as continuation of Acts 17:27 and the spiritual senses tradition II.B.5.d. Hölderlin II.B.5.d.1. ‘Glorious, Holy, Divine’ (p. 298): In modern times, Hölderlin has most urgently and tragically championed cause of glory—He combined Christianity, antiquity, and German Idealism through subjective reduction of antiquity as dominant form and objective reduction of Idealism as higher center—Drawing on Schiller, he inspired the earliest program of German Idealism (Schelling, Hegel) which sees reason’s highest act as aesthetic act postulating sisterhood of truth and goodness in beauty alone requiring new mythology of reason—Yet he rejected Idealism’s destruction through cold speculation of the experience of theophanous reality—Though he took his stand with Parmenides, Heraclitus, Homer, Pindar, Sophocles, Plato, he remained part of modern philosophy of identity—Christian revelatory glory is transferred to ancient glory and seen through theophanous nature-cosmos: Christ is emptied out into Diotima and Empedocles, leaving him a mere brother god at the feast of peace, who must leave the eschatological work to the cosmic world-historical Germanic spirit—He contemplates with Christian eyes and heart the glory of the ancient world which spiritualized in art a total experience of God in the cosmos, seeing it as the glory of love—“Hyperion’s Youth” transposes Pauline hymn of praise in 1 Cor 13 into a classical-idealist hymn—Beauty is the name of God who is One and All, who parts Himself and sets Himself opposite Himself—Glory is the unity of the holy and the beautiful; classical difference between gods and men dissolves into Idealist difference between absolute spirit and nature, and so the glorious is equally holy and divine when spirit as when nature: glory descends from plenitude to poverty, changing from self-sufficiency to love; the Christian depletion of God becomes God’s pantheist-cosmic depletion—Unclear whether Greek-Idealist language expresses or overwhelms Christian experience of faith—God’s love proclaims itself equally in pouring rain and flowing blood as single flowing world-substance—In early poems, ‘glorious’ is used extravagantly, in later poems, ‘pure’ and ‘clear’ more often and ‘glorious’ more sparingly for the sake of glory disappearing inside the compressed language; a catalog of things called ‘glorious’ in the poems, especially heroes e.g. Diotima, Hyperion, Homer, Achilles, Empedocles—Things are holy insofar as they point to present of Spirit and intimate His infinite worth; catalog of things called ‘holy’ in the poems—Falling under ‘holy’ is ‘majesty’, and other key words point the way into the mystery in its totality, all comprehended under ‘divine’, which applies especially to nature, man, the mystery at work between those who love each other—Time and history are not divine as such, and the present especially is godless; the divine, holy, and glorious are present only to one looking back with longing and forward with presentiment—Intensity is the state of surrender to the wonder and mystery of Being which contains the experience of being touched by God, binding the single heart to the heart of the All, despite the detachment required by sober daily life, action, speculative philosophy, and inspiration as state requiring critical limitation—Prayer has passed into enthusiasm (Bruno through Kant to Hegel, Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin) for the “I” cannot adopt an attitude of prayer to its own intelligible inner being or to a divine being whose awareness depends on man, so eros reduces to identity (Novalis); yet this theory, interpretable in terms of Plotinus, Fichte, or Christian eschatological perception of God by God, pales before Hölderlin’s attitude of prayer: he risks his existence for the presence and urgency of an infinite love in the mystery of the world’s being—The poet stepping bare into life as priest, in complete self-devotion to the departed being hovering around him; hence his experience of aether, air, wind, the air as sister of the Spirit: this touch of divine breath is just a particularly convincing and joyful experience that confirms but is inseparable from all other experiences of the world—Even dark forces e.g. storm and lightning become heart of revelation: the cosmic theophany is compressed from early experience of whispering spirit to Platonic-apocalyptic moment of discharge—The “I” elevated above nature is eternal, and the descent of the spirit into the servant form of defenseless need is ultimate truth and glory of being—Even though the other two poles lead to poetic tragedy, he cannot abandon either because Christian pole determines how he lives and feels, and enables his work to be prayer—Young Hölderlin finds refuge with Christ from Spinozism; he sees the feeling truest to Christ as the feeling that we and the Father are one—Christianity can find its original meaning and be saved for the feast of peace only by entering into pre-Christian divine intimacy (Empedocles), which holy office Hölderlin assumes, learning to give thanks for everything, in total exposure—Following Fichte, yet also anticipating Péguy, he contrasts the oriental god who requires prostrations with the free Christian upright before God, but he also calls for humility—In all his poems, his faith says an all-embracing ‘yes’ to reality—His Greek circulation with Christian meaning as hope that God may return and be all in all is stronger that Fichte’s eternal asymptotic progress—For Hölderlin, unlike Schiller, no tradition appropriated without existential content—Christ as the last theophany, the quiet genius who leaves humbles gifts of bread and wine, but also fulfilling the heavenly feast—He sacrifices none of the cosmic theophany for the sake of the Christ-revelation. II.B.5.d.2. Poor Love (p. 320): Hölderlin’s Christology is only perceivable dissolved throughout the whole existential statement, within an often contradictory framework e.g. absolute spirit is unconscious, needing suffering heart of man, for only if the One-and-All is drawn asunder can god be god and man be man—Hölderlin refers objective idealism (Schelling) back to Homeric God-world analogy interpreted through Parmenidean-Heraclitean identity—The spirit is just one element in the whole, which must acknowledge the poverty of its descent into love; both its descent and ascent are glorious, a transformation of Christology into classical-idealist ontology and equation of economic with absolute Trinity—Through its latent Christological element, kenotic humility in all worldly love and form receives divine radiance, but the shadow of transitoriness and melancholy fall on the godly; nothing appears in its original reality, but only in its weakness, and can only be poetically depicted as such—Alternation of tones between tragic involvement of eternal in transitory and heroic elevation of transitory into eternal—Heart is all-important mediator of heaven and earth, source of truth that joy finally speaks in sorrow; eros unites will to infinity, and the loving heart is a sacrifice in the midst of hate—Stages of development of “Hyperion”—Hero must leave beloved object of beauty as it is, and lover must be free from self— Hölderlin’s movement beyond Plato and Fichte—Man’s glory is to endure the long wait of eternally dissatisfied progress between self-sufficient poles of nature and idea—In early work, no room for love: abundance is sufficiency beyond love and poverty is self-preoccupation falling short of love—Being is lost blissful unity that can only be recovered by approximation in action but is always already present in form of beauty—Later work expresses marvelous paradoxes of love—Revival of ancient world in German Idealism is green crest of decayed root—Nature’s eternal return, without focus on personal immorality. (p. 327): “The Death of Empedocles” moves deeper into identity of contradiction—Love for the All rather than the love for a woman in “Hyperion”; a self-opening to the All in absolute feminine intensity, self-surrender to holy powers of aether, air, sun, earth: a harmony lost in a fall—Death, surrender of existence, alone can appease profaned deity; it dissolves into intense immediacy, grace of reconciliation of heaven and earth—Paradox that guilt of spirit distancing itself from nature is its nature and so guiltless—In later version of poem, Empedocles betrayed a mystery of oneness/being a god to the people/public sphere of state and church; here, Empedocles’ sacrifice calls out from nature the spirit—Third version of poem moves from natural to historical sphere; guilt here is exclusive self-sufficiency, and exclusive devotion to all-enduring nature leads to death—For anyone else than the “only One”, this death would be sin, but for the “only One” it has epochal significance, handing down Greece as a promise to bear fruit in German aeon—Hölderlin places the innermost treasures of Christ at disposal of messiah of identity with divine All, who resolves to death for sake of love and atonement; here Johannine Christology is alpha and omega of Idealism (late Fichte and Schelling, early Hegel): eternal Logos is in the world in the form of poverty and humility, glorifying Himself through suffering and death, then ascending whence He came—Difference is that Christ acts and dies in Father’s name not His own, and His ultimate testimony is His mission not His religious experience, and His kenosis is His mission, not dialectical guilt; all of which presupposes analogy and divine freedom and Trinity, not identity. (p. 331): Hölderlin’s uncrystalized Christology’s ultimate horizon of experience is that all being is born of abundance of eternal love, and this love enters poverty out of love—Euripides asked how painful love can prevail over painless love; Christian clue is that the divine penetrates suffering—This is raised to necessary metaphysical law, not remaining tied to worldly experience: the Whole feels itself in its parts only when it exceeds their limits, and suffers completest possible separation, the parts becoming vessels of the whole—This metaphysical law implies the Titanic concomitant, the spirit, raging in its confines, while the heart is broken. II.B.5.d.3. The Apocalypse of the Spirit (p. 333): In Christianity, the Redeemer receives glory in history from the Spirit, and it is good the earthly form vanishes so the Spirit can come—Despites his monism, Hölderlin is prophetic-eschatological in thought and feeling: the kingdom of the spirit must/will come—Hölderlin, not Hegel of Schelling, kept their early eschatological faith with its utopianism, hoping for the holy glory of love triumphing over egotism—A longing for the holiday at the end of time, the feast of peace—He rejects view on which the giver of revelation does everything by himself, and the receiver may not even rise to take it; rather, with the help of the spirit, humanity will come to own the gift from within even if first its excess leads further astray—The sense of power in the gift will first lead to mastery/technologization of nature, while the nearer and dearest love will not be won until the end—Emphasis on divine immanence to the point of naïve view of the gods—He maintained his attitude of prayer and total affirmation even in dark night, for the classical-idealist metaphysics of beauty provides a path back to apocalyptic vision of the end—Celebration of wild discord/old forming chaos striving from below; a return in late poems from formed Greece to chaotic mother Asia, the origin of love and great prayers, towards a marriage of West and East—This reaching into the distance signifies a twilight toward a destructive spiritual darkness: his seeking to do justice to glory of being was, despite his humble thanksgiving and praise, hubris, dissolving Christ in the cosmos—The cold winds of nothingness burst into his glory, anticipating Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: a darkness inseparable from all thinking based on identity—Yet still he is absorbed in a moment where he is exposed before God. II.B.5.e. Goethe II.B.5.e.1. The Mean as a Form of Resistance (p. 339): The Curve: Goethe stood like a rock against a mighty current: all his religious expressions, despite their ring of affirmation, sprang from a primal “No”, rejecting pietism and Enlightenment materialism—He found refuge in Italian classical world where Nature and form are in harmony—Productive dialogue with but ultimate rejection of Idealist philosophy of spirit (Kant, Fichte, Schiller, Hegel) because it lacked something in his cosmic experience—Freedom lies in revering something above us; his God-Nature religion is a religion of awe, hence his rejection of the French Revolution—Rejecting Romanticism and embracing renunciation, he stood by the Western tradition—Rejecting technological science, he developed an organic morphology and a Plotinian theory of color—Last secular manifestation of heritage of glory; though he never prayed, he lived within analogia entis not identity, experiencing God’s presence in every worldly form, which requires a faculty of vision that penetrates life in its manifold forms, which often occurs only in momentary inspiration in a few—God is the unattainable source of ordered beauty, but also so much the universal essence that Goethe does not attribute to Him a private will or need for prayers—Prayers of Iphigenia, who listens to the voice of the god in her heart—Dialogical awe fades into gesture of awe, the essence of religious act. (p. 344): A Break through the Middle: For young Goethe, poetic creation is the act that joins heaven and earth; creativity in nature and in genius have one source—Later he saw happiness as requiring self-limitation—In Italy, he felt himself a dilettante who never learned the appropriate crafts for his work or devoted enough time to it—Several works span this break e.g. Faust, Master, Autobiography, and the break is represented by Tasso, which embodies the poet’s completeness, an ideal continuing tradition of Florentine Academy—Here eros is medium of inspiration; the cost of completeness is exposure of defenseless heart: the poet discerns the harmony of nature, but also every tarnishing of the moral order—An ontology of poetic existence: tension between ideal and real worlds, with the problem of eros concentrated in the moment that gives timeless/unreal glimpse of Absolute, without which poet could not created anything real—Faust wishes to win the whole, and so rejects piecemeal knowledge of the four faculties in favor of magic (Porphyry, Iamblichus)—The analogically organized macrocosm does not give Faust immediate identification, so he invokes the earth spirit, not the universal spirit; the earth spirit’s cosmos is one of demonic identity (Bruno, Heraclitus) based around action not contemplation, which requires creative negation, and so takes on a sense of illusion—Absolute act should have been suicide (like Existentialism and Ippolit in The Idiot), but Faust instead make the contradictory pact: he wants moment of identity, but also curses it—He ends up understanding that he was wrong to seek earth spirit and path of pathos of contradiction (Bruno), and should have stood alone before nature—In the world of the earth spirit, God’s glory alternates with darkness, which allows eros to emerge—William Master starts with theatrical vocation, which turns out to be a mistake, a show and no more; for young Master, theater is a symbol for the world—After early successes, Goethe sought a German culture based on the stage: the artist builds the ecclesial/spiritual house for the nation—Master’s rise through all the stages of theater, with Hamlet the real training ground, in which a soul is burdened with a deed too great for it, shifting focus from subjective to objective sphere: as Shakespeare not Hamlet control’s drama’s course, so Master’s vocation is a role in a destiny greater than himself—Later, Goethe saw that the stage cannot create a true people; the vocation becomes a search, and destiny no longer has a core in Master: here, Goethe condemns his earlier life—But failed vocation become part of meaningful Bildung of a fully-formed human being—Later, Goethe bans theater from education (Plato) due to its ambiguous origin—The idea of role is transition from actor playing a part to man as plaything of universal world-theater—The nobleman can live by representation but is not; the common man cannot represent but is: he must sacrifice his whole self and drawn on loyalty, the source of all wealth, and so achieve and create; Goethe seeks a middle way—The ideal is classical paideia: awe not love has the final word—There must be classical-stoic renunciation in favor of citizenship of the world, so that everywhere is home—Goethe’s use of the mysticism of astrology, which returns us to the macrocosm but not as magician but as human being free from self—The Autobiography holds the key to Goethe’s work: everything that delighted or tormented Goethe felt the need to change into a poem, and all his myths refer to himself, and he made of himself a substitute myth and identified himself with Nature—God appears in glory in the apparently insignificant features of our lives—Character formation is primarily seen as bringing out innate capacities but also as determined from without, microcosm and macrocosm, both nature and talent from same source: great art is a sublime work of nature, and in both God is at work, as in Prometheus, welling up in the direct experience of the moment—Goethe was unable to forget, and rejected concept of memory: great and beautiful encounters must not wait to be recollected, but must become one with our innermost being, for actus purus is the origin of existence, a procreative reality in eros and coincidentia oppositorum beyond good and evil—The glorious origin of nature and creative-transforming love, the origin of poetry: eros is the vital medium for experiencing kalon and agathon of existence, in unbroken continuity with agape—Link between love and suffering/renunciation—The formation of the genius’ embedding in all-embracing nature, the proper site of glory, which consists in the truth that the graven form displays from within itself the infinitely mysterious idea which remains the divine beyond all appearing phenomena—This led to his morphology, especially in the theory of colors, but also in his other research; here above all he stood against his age (like Thomas): his aim was to combine precision of scientific research with awareness of totality apparent only to poetic-religious eye of reverence and sense for cosmos—Contra Newtonian science, Idealist view of nature as a priori system, and Romantic irrational feeling of whole. II.B.5.e.2: The Form of Nature and Glory (p. 363): God and Nature: Goethe does not separated God’s immanence from transcendence; he does not explain convergence of Nature’s entelechies by a universal soul distinct from God, nor is he a pantheist, nor polytheist or believer in multiple ideas, so he is left with God-Nature: God reveals Himself in His organ, Nature—The poet looks beyond the appearing phenomenon to the single mystery within—He speaks of glory without the ecstatic mystical apotheosis of Hölderlin—Many things in Italy are described as glorious, though so are things in Germany, but more from the heart in his writings on natural science, juxtaposed with ‘holy’ in The Metamorphosis of Plants e.g. in his description of the mystery of fructification, and of how height induces growth—The Metamorphosis of Animals deals with the immanent natural order, the morphe not the eidos, how life takes shape under wonderful necessary limitations—Man can scale the heights of universal nature’s highest thoughts e.g. in the lines on Schiller’s skull, in which shell dwelt a holy meaning and noble essence—Nature has no secret she does not bring before some observer; realizing this truth brings one halfway between desperation and deification. (p. 368): A Cosmic Alphabet: Goethe claimed to actually see ideal forms in his head, a seeing that required observation, experimentation, and hypothetical empirical laws, a method that goes beyond empiricism and Kantian idealism: through observation of creating nature, we spiritually participate in her products—Nature is mutual reciprocity and indwelling of subject and object, and something more—On his aesthetic theory, law holds in freedom under its own condition and thereby brings forth the beauty of objects, requiring worthy subjects to apprehend it—Sensual and spiritual spheres are related not as lower and higher but by identity in tension; reality and division are synonymous, but all have equal rights through a midpoint that manifests its secret existence through harmony among parts and with itself: the fundamental structure of polarity, drawn from Fichtean Idealism—Theory of colors, drawn from Plotinian tradition, based on identity-in-tension of objective and subjective light, the latter the sun-like eye, for like is known by like; the analogy and transitions between subjective, subjective-objective, and objective color/sight/light are the context for everything that happens in the world—Priority given to objective light over sight, for light is the manifestness of existence, implying beyond horizontal polarity the principle of height—How all the colors result from light and darkness—Finitude and perfection belong together, and to darken is to intensify and so illumine—Goethe opposed the Newtonian theory of color, on which color is a random phenomenon reducible to number, but measurement cannot constitute a phenomenon, but transforms living into dead, and cannot express qualitative shape—Mechanism cannot explain art of painting—Drawing on physiology, Goethe thinks of organism in terms of function and shape, the unfolding of original ideal form, but a function cannot be isolated from totality, required for comprehending object as it is and for scientific exactitude—Objective forms take objective decisions; plants are unforeseeable non-mechanical variations on original ideal form—All language, even of conceptual philosophy, is purely symbolic; philosophy is secondary to poetry—Understanding the world starts in observation not construction—Two poles of reality are quality and quantity; extreme mathematical view reduces principle/height/analogy of quality and analogy of God and world—Higher than color is music. (p. 374): Classicism: Goethe’s theory of art tends to confine forms, especially in his middle high classical period, stressing man as middle/apex to which Nature relates, for the highest purpose of art is to show the human form in all the sensual grandeur and beauty it can—No world except in relation to man, so not art except what reproduces that relation—Hierarchy of three artistic forms: elementary imitation, manner, style—Ideal form is invisible entelechy present in shapes and movements—Rennaisance struggle between Aristotelian (Leonardo, Alberti, Raphael) and Platonic (Ficino, Mannerism) theories of idea/inspiration; subjective idea can be innate/divine inspiration or intuition of nature—Gian Pietro Bellori gave the canonical formulation of Classicism in 1664: the Idea of the painter is the refinement of natural beauties superior to Nature, in imitation of highest Artist, and in recreation of Idea, nature and art are mutually dependent (Aristotle cooperating with Plato), reaffirming artist’s priestly role (Petrarch, Boccaccio), bringing to light man’s true likeness to God and unveiling world’s paradisial nature (Poussin, Rubens, Lorrain)—Winckelmann distinguishes naturalism from higher ideal beauty, and Greece as synthesis of ideal and reality, a noble simplicity (Plotinus)—Beauty is multiplicity within simplicity; Winckelmann looked for examples of this simplicity in various postures, gestures, and situations, calling for a ultimate catalogue of sujets; this failed, but inspired Goethe’s humanism—Karl Philipp Moritz inspired Goethe’s broader metaphysical horizon for art: the microcosm of the genius must be coextensive with the macrocosm, depending on a creative power beyond thought, imagination, sense, to capture totality in a single focal point, felt only at moment of work’s genesis, for only there is beauty present—Thought, imagination/taste, and senses seek the beauty above them, but cannot capture it; it appears as abysmal, glorious, sublime—Beauty is to be produced not understood, though empathy/taste is for the original totality by the pleasure of contemplation, which compensates for pleasure of creation—But taste is not creative power, and artist should not aim at pleasure/self-interest, for beauty has no purpose—Higher life-forms absorb lower things into their own existence and then return them with new beauty to the world; highest beauty would be organization of nature—This synthesis (which Goethe later rejected) is between classical (Plotinus) and modern-Promethean (Bruno), between transcendental glory and immanent sublimity/majesty—But relation of microcosm and macrocosm is brotherly intimacy, without place for worship—Goethe’s aesthetics not natural philosophy are anthropocentric—Winckelmann held art can assemble the transitory and confer on them eternity, preserving and deifying nature’s greatest work, man’s beauty—This is a dialectical conception of experience drawing on empiricism, Aristotle, Plato; Nature and Idea cannot be divided without destroying art and life. II.B.5.e.3: Glory as Reflection (p. 381): Being and Celebration: The inner dimensions of Goethe’s thought as opposed to its essence as a manifesto in favor of resurrection of the classical in a post-Christian age—Renaissance and Baroque experience exceeded ancient in vitality: existence was then a celebration, and a triumphal element was sought and celebrated in every great work—Example of Mantenga’s “The Triumph of Julius Caesar”, which unifies classical greatness and natural characterization, noble spirit informed by primal force of Nature: this is Goethean ustvity—The trionfi of Goethe’s life: the early fairs, where everything is much and nothing, a City of God amid the tumult of the world; coronation celebration as metaphysical experience, the joining of earthly majesty and heavenly might; the festival of the Roman Carnival, to which the people gives itself, where freedom and equality are enjoyed in the giddy swirl of madness; the Catholic feast of St. Roch, with its confusion of the spiritual and the worldly, a communal celebration in a Christian landscape; culminating in Faust with its three celebrations, the demonic First Walpurgis Night, the celebrations at the Imperial Court, and the classical-cosmic universal feast of the Classical Walpurgis Night which ends in a song of praise to cosmic eros (Symposium’s Pausanias): a competition among the various parts of the poem to give the highest celebration of Being. (p. 386): Semi-Reality: Whenever Goethe most elevates beauty, a shading of reality becomes necessary—He though the world’s highest truth is its revealed beauty, which, by learning to see things/art as they are, leads to personal truth, peace, clarity, contemplation, critical understanding, self-construction from within—What Goethe admires is an immanent transcendence alienated from its true transcendent origin and use; the truest beauty gives the dreamy impression of semi-reality—Example of the Helen act from Faust, which describes the design/germ of reality as neither wholly ideal nor real nor in God’s Mind, but in the undefined potentiality of nature/matter, which gives an aura of ghostly unreality to Helen—In the theory of colors, semi-reality produces a half-light that produces colors by weaving between light and darkness—God represented as the sun is a devouring coincidentia oppositorum and only its reflection is called glorious: a shrouding factor that Goethe projects even into Italian clarity that he love; hence his favorite nature-symbols, mist and cloud—God’s creation initially divides into light and darkness, and then dawn/unifying eros produces colors; another mediating image is the rainbow, for man cannot bear the Absolute and must be content with images—Ugliness cannot be banished from the world, and so art consigns it to the ridiculous—Homer was always in contact with the Divine; the Nibelungen has no reflection of heaven—Idea is closely connected to image/illusion i.e. Idea clothed in minimum of concrete form, which invests finite things with religious aura—Glory is just beauty’s power to illumine, attending visible form and eros only while they last. (p. 391): Fragment and Renunciation: The early Goethe emphasized the moment as contact with reality; in his middle period, semi-reality, the nothingness and fragmentary nature of reality, and the need for renunciation—Even fiction cannot varnish reality forever, and even the greatest experiences are transitory and ultimately disappointing—Ruins showed Goethe man’s futile attempts to preserve itself against nature, time, and his own conflicts—Even memory, even of the beloved, eventually flickers and goes out—The logical ending to life is the way of renunciation (Stoicism), surrender (Christianity), or between them Spinoza’s amor dei, Spinoza representing a pre-Christian Jewish tradition in a Christian context. (p. 394): Pandoa is a draft of a festival drama of eschatological conception, whose theme is the possible integration of man—Pandora brings only eschatological ideals of integration; Prometheus is not interested in them, but only in action and technology, divided from his brother Epimetheus, who represents contemplation—The other symbolic characters—Eros is the longing for the once physically present but now unattainable ideal, which absent wholeness is symbolized by Pandora, who is thus unlike Beatrice—A more hopeless pathos than in Michelangelo and Shakespeare—The dawn offers a glimpse of promise. (p. 396): Electoral Affinities offers an ethical anthropology, a rule for life based on renunciation in love, by which we can be purified and attain integration—Characters range from renunciation being forced on them to those who need not think in terms of renunciation but have this trait present in selflessness of her nature and love; the former unable to deny himself anything—Renunciation of eros in favor of marriage—The character who does not renounce because of her selflessness, Ottilia, is forced to sacrifice herself, and becomes a sacer i.e. a consecrated person who with a terrible evil threatening, only has recourse to the protecting power of the Holy Presence; she transcends, and eros is integrated into a perspective that includes death as a necessary but superseded element, yielding the self to a comprehensive grace—The meeting point of Christianity, Spinoza, Homer—Goethe’s fascination with Spinoza is not from a flat pantheistic reading: everything in man is joined and raised toward eternity—Essential to Goethe’s religion are selflessness and reverence. (p. 399): Years of Wandering has no final form, but includes peaks of wandering, renunciation, cosmic mysticism, and above all at the basis of religion, rather than fear, paideia or the three-fold reverence, not innate but adopted reluctantly: 1. Reverence for what is above us i.e. ethnic religion; 2. Reverence for what is like us i.e. philosophical religion; 3. Reverence for what is below us i.e. Christian religion, an ultimate achievement in human destiny, respecting even suffering, sin, and crime, because they help the Holy—Final fruit is reverence for oneself, beyond Pascalian self-hatred and Spinozistic self-forgetfulness—Three religions mapped to persons of the Trinity—Varro’s three religions are just the springboard here—Goethe rejected Jesus’ divinity, and he saw images of crucifixion as insult to the Sublime. (p. 402): Goethe’s attitude to the Bible displays advantages and disadvantages of liberalism—God shows His love and glory in His descent in becoming man, so need for a reascent and make Him God again—Love is the eternal content, and all human symbols e.g. sacraments, dogmas, are only its vessels, relevant only so long as they speak to human feelings—Positive elements of Scripture interpreted naturalistically, rejecting Protestant supernaturalism and legalistic moralism—Goethe wants to restore Catholic sacramental cosmos and monasticism, and did not celebrate the Reformation, but Catholicism is not ideal and is a Babel; he maintains Christ would be crucified today were He to come—The Bible remained for him a great testimony to human belief—The history of the world is between belief and unbelief: epochs that emphasize the former bear fruit, the latter vanish; even superstition is preferable to unbelief—He sought a universal not domestic piety—His praise of St. Philip Neri, veiling his brilliance, uniting the spiritual with the worldly—The mystery of the world can only appear in the polarity of inner and outer experience; eros does not soar up to God, but moves between poles in the world and between the sexes—Polarity and limitation are related to decision, not negative notions as in Plotinus—Glory is founded on goodness and reflected in nature, man’s universal home—Poem on the event of the rose contrasts miracle of nature with restlessness of science—Goethe communicates with the Lord of Creation not through prayer but through reverence and consciousness that the All i.e. nature i.e. Being is ultimately good—In Goethe’s sense of existence, dependence is the function of a cosmic polarity—Eros years for physis not hen; glory passes from God to the cosmos i.e. Being (Heidegger). II.B.5.f. The Final Period II.B.5.f.1. The Legacy of Goethe (p. 408): To the extent that Left Hegelianism has not been determinative, the 19th and 20th centuries are influenced by classical-Goethean view of nature: in former, spirit comprehends nature and commands it by scientific-technical means; in latter, universe is the comprehensive landscape where spirit encounters the Absolute, which makes it reverent and creative, setting limits to its technical supremacy—But now the universe is ambiguous, not pointing to a transcendent Plotinian unity; it has its own unity and glory, and eros does not seek to go beyond it, an anti-Christian eros—Man’s gaze turned to the world as it is, is greeted by horror, and it is to this world he must say Yes and Amen, his heart bent back into the ring of eternal recurrence—Because of receding Classical substance, philosophies of spirit and nature must live from Christian material even as they reject it—An anti-Christian universal philosophy that will not eschew religious pathos must return via metaphysics to mythic origins (Creuzer, Görres, Lasaulx; Nietzsche; Heidegger)—Here we find innerworldly humanism of Bildung of which Goethe is the model; this celebrates scientific triumphs in psychology and sociology, and overruns art with realist novel of man growing in a world (e.g. Scott, Dickens, Keller, Mann, Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Pushkin, Tolstoy) with neither the heaven-directed gaze of foolishness nor the thrust of transcendent eros: the former submerged in wisdom of Bildung, the latter in interpersonal problem of love taken captive by psycho-(patho)logical analysis (Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Freud)—Here, an immanent anthropology dissolves and must increasingly have recourse to perversity to awaken any tension—Beyond this, an attempt to reawaken myth through power analogous to classical or Biblical prophecy, but in Wagner it degenerates to human symbol, and in Spitteler the gods are against the backdrop of a materialist ananke, as in Schopenhauer an attempt to awaken glory of form against a barren background—Other attempts at raising up myths (Hartmann, Scheler, Hitler, Rilke, George, Klage): the closed culture lacks what is essential for its realization, and myths are rendered ambiguous by becoming ciphers (Jaspers)—Final stage of metaphysics of classical tradition (Cusa, Ficino, Bruno, Hölderlin, Goethe): 1. Comprehensive universe as biological universe; 2. Comprehensive universe succumbs to power and creativity of artist as Weltinnenraum (world-inner-space); 3. What is comprehensive is Being, not universe or subjectivity. II.B.5.f.2. The Philosophy of Life and Weltinnenraum (p. 413): First two ways of grasping comprehensive principle move one to the sea that engenders forms but only as solidifying from and dissolving into flux—Forms are intensified (Goethe) as spiritual intensification of life, and as having vertical and horizontal polarity as their formal principle; this is confirmed both in extreme Idealism and evolutionary biology—Prior to evolution, religious view of nature held that macrocosm of divine being divided into spheres of rationality and nature, and man as microcosm strives for participation in divine world-thought through both empiricism and speculation (Oken, Carus)—Evolution led to Christian-inspired God-Nature organism (Fechner) or anti-Christian enthusiastic religious aesthetics (Wille, Bölsche)—Universal Biologism entered metaphysics with Bergson and his tension between living duration and conceptual thinking—For Simmel, Being is life; as for Bergson, objectification is stream of life in reflex on itself, but Simmel hopes for an even higher stage of unity of metaphysical life—All of this is defenseless against its transformation into mechanism and materialism, proving the need for a worship-worthy Absolute—Nietzsche shows this by dissolving objective truth into the lies that life needs, praising annihilated Being as eternal affirmation of Being, eternity as eternal recurrence, intensifying man to the superman—Dionysian principle and contradiction—Nietzsche wants to break beyond Platonism and Christianity to what is greater than what has ever been thought, and finds himself trapped in eternal recurrence, eventually holding together in fatum extreme happiness and disgust—His solipsistic polarity between being God and being a buffoon, shuddering only at his abysmal depths, unlike Goethe’s erotic polarity. (p. 416): Rilke: Similar to Nietzsche, he rejects Christianity, and takes up evolutionary foundation along with psychoanalysis, an imperative to stay true to the earth, a searching for overcoming current world-condition eschatologically, unifying contradictions on the basis of creative powers—Lou Andreas-Salomé’s affairs with Nietzsche, Rilke, Freud—Rilke’s striving for an intransitive love without a Thou aiming at infinite space to give birth to a god, rather than Goethe’s erotic love that grasps the glory of the world each time in a real Thou, nor Nietzsche’s non-erotic love at a distance; a monological love as basis for capacity for wholeness, without community or fidelity—Hamonization of world in poet’s soul—Prayers of the Book of Hours are based on instinctive mystical piety that can easily turn to atheism, covering post-Christian core in Christian-classical clothing, addressing the god who will inherit the tradition of art, but is already present in the radiance of poverty; this attempt at poverty does not set Rilke free for his fellow man, but only for his own work—What he intends can only be solved by Trinitarian love—He transforms the crude world into an eternal form, a Platonism from below, distilling the idea from the most sensuous forms of experience—Though anti-Christian, he constantly uses Christian forms as a decisive part of man’s experience—His replacement of faith with feeling with Christ and Mary, in a way similar to his explorations of myths—Inseparability of praise and lament—In Duino Elegies, lament predominates; with Sonnets to Orpheus, it explores potential for wholeness of temporal, finite existence—He conceives of angels as narcissistic totalities enclosed in themselves, containing a world, only figuratively having conversation (like angels in Dionysius, Dante, Aquinas; like Leibniz’s monads)—No descending chain from angels to us, and so eros cannot reach upward, and no continuity between beauty and glory, which is now just terrifying; angels are unattainable and so unreal—Eros from below is an absolute that prevents any revelation or agape from above, so there remains only inner-worldly information—The framed feeling of lovers is not eternal; we must cling to our contained human reality, though even that is questionable in light of biological-psychological depths of the blood—Images of child, voyagers, lovers, hero; the hero is saved by avoiding temptation to reflection, and dares to praise the world as glorious, gathering all the shameful nights and transforming them into inner reality—His praise of human achievement, though technology suppresses what can be experienced, substituting an imageless activity—Like Bergson, he sees human existence as not open to the stream of life like animals and embryos, but turning in on itself and becoming spirit through alienation; for Thomas, reflexio/conversio ad phantasmata limits and sets free, but for Rilke, it is the tragedy of existence: we have sunk, in a theological sense, from our primal state of animal remembrance, but we have a salvific force too—Only in suffering do man and world attain glory and the mythic landscape of lament of actual being in which the spring of joy flows—The infinitely disenchanting backdrop to the world—In the Orpheus poems, existence becomes glory for him through his art/creative power—Lament can only move in the sphere of praise, which is the world-inner-space—God is scattered throughout the world, and His transcendental harmony drowns out hatred of destruction in this state of fragmentation; man hears and poetically utters the harmony of the world only because of the prior mystery of the fragmented God, the a priori of creation in its kenotic aspect—The diametrical mirror relation between world and soul is fulfilled when Narcissus penetrates the mirrors; in Heidegger, this becomes relation of Sein and Dasein—Images for this relation including systole and diastole; in all the images, Being’s fullness permeated by nothingness is present and reveals itself—We must remain aware of abundance in the midst of renunciation and anticipate all departure, renounce the present God to engender the future God; what is ours is what we let go and do not wish to hold on to: we are just when we praise. II.B.5.f.3. Heidegger (p. 429): The Way Back: Heidegger brings period of classical tradition to a close; like all in that tradition, he seeks salvation by a return to antiquity from fate of the world which is a product of Christianity and technology—What earlier Germans saw as Nature is Pre-Socratic phusis and all-comprehending Being, permeating with Christian motifs (as in Nietzsche and Rilke)—The return to Greekness is retrieval of origins of our historico-spiritual being—The destruction of Western ontology in Being and Time serves disclosure of more fundamental horizon, which can answer “what is Being?”; overcoming of metaphysics is really its fundamental appropriation, by rethinking tradition in form of a dialogue, so as to re-experience Being, which has been reduced to a concept by scientific metaphysics—He rejects: subjectivism, Kantian values, Hegelian glorification of reason against thought and onto-theology, phenomenology’s bracketing of existence, Cartesian cogito, Scholastic theology, Platonic subordination of aletheia to idea, philosophy of Spirit which is responsible for decline to materialism i.e. reduction of all that is to material that serves for work and objectification of real by man in his subjectivity—Elemental experience of mystery of reality is wonder/thaumazein; behind the question of their appearance/eidos is question of why there is anything rather than nothing—Da-Sein is located in the anxiety in which existence slips away to open access to question of Being; early on, Dasein is interpreted as finitude toward death and temporality, but later he unconvincingly interprets this period as laying bare permitting address of the question of Being—The emergence of Being is not adequately expressed in the Thomist distinction of essence and existence, which Heidegger rejects because Thomism understands essence as intelligible in itself and existence as dependent on God’s will—Heidegger removes phusis from realm of essence to more comprehensive Being emerging from its Urgrund or Abgrund prior to subjectivity, giving phenomenal existence its dignity; time and history are in Being itself, which emerges cosmically and in struggle as world; man rests in and is ecstatically open to this event, and so possesses true co-creating history—In the Western tradition, Heidegger spares only Nietzsche wrongly interpreted (Löwith), Rilke, Trakl, Hölderlin—Central concerns: link of Dichten and Denken and Danken, man and Being standing in one another, man’s homecoming to and recollection of Being, and a theory of kenosis and Christology—Goethe and Thomas’ harmony with Heidegger, especially Thomas on transcendence of Being and distinction of Being and existent, though after that their thought diverges; for both, act of Being is illumination and original locus of truth, intimum in greatest distance, nothingness i.e. non-subsisting, unity beyond number—Behind Heidegger and Aquinas stands Plotinus; Heidegger’s thought is fundamentally Western, rooted in metaphysics of the saints and German mysticism, even in his dialogue with East. (p. 435): The Mystery of Being: Heidegger seeks to penetrate beyond metaphysics and ontology, and to shake ousia/par-ousia, to reach recollection of Being, transcending the existent through participation of human existence in nothingness through anxiety—Existent loses essence and so the Otherness of Being is intimated, only through whose presence and indwelling is there existence or essence—The analysis of the jugness of the jug—The openness of Being in the fourfold earth and heaven, mortals and immortals; ousia is comprehensible only in presence of open space of Being, which as open space is absence and distance, and so Being attracts terms negative theology applies to God—The self-giving of Being as the most creative event; the graciousness/favor of Being preserves things in the radiance of the world—Language is as primordial as phusis, speaking out of Being and history, only authentic when it speaks-in-accord-with; it is the house of Being, as man lives poetically on the earth (Hölderlin)—Being can only bear weight as a word as the sound of silence and as evocation—Da-Sein is interpreted not as eros but as serenity/Gelassenheit i.e. what allows Being to be itself, allowing possibility of a-letheia, with this stepping back as freedom i.e. harmonization with the whole: all this rooted in Christian intellectual inheritance of freedom as indifferentia—Man’s essential poverty as shepherd of Being; his thinking is a thankfulness not for some thing, but for thanking, an act of praise—Use of Biblical categories, so the OT/NT category of glory is present: man is the one for whom Being is present and speaks, as God is present to Moses; Being and man belong to one another in hearing—Truth here is not just Greek un-hiddenness, but English trust/fidelity/betrothal: Biblical fidelity as precondition of truth/revelation, reflected in fruitful hermeneutic circle, structured toward reserved self-giving love/sacrifice—Self-giving of Being and philosophy are useless/unjustified or rather self-justifying/why-less (Eckhart, Silesius)—Heidegger extinguishes all classical/medieval aesthetics, since what is beautiful appears sacred in itself (Mörike); he renews aesthetics in Ontological Difference between Sein and Dasein i.e. the manifestation of Sein in ecstatic space of Dasein: in dialogue with Japanese, Being is what takes gracious form—Charis and Huld of Being—Free expanses of Being allow transformation of objective reality into easeful resting beside the hearth; we give ourselves to the open spaces by an objectless waiting—Biblical/Greek doxa is taken into service of Being; doxa means regard, fame, renown, putting in the light, glory, what every existent conceals and reveals in its appearance which opens possibility of mere appearance—Beneath all things is the abyss of the irredeemably mysterious character of Being, which is overwhelmed by its emergence into manifestation; forgotten mystery of human existence causes man to err as homo faber and homo sapiens and so error has dominated man—Foundations in Western tradition regarding God’s self-concealment and revelation, and kenosis linked to Ontological Difference—In alienness of angst we know home, and in estrangement we know intimacy, which all belongs to the glory of Being—Only the Christians not the Greeks knew the side of absence. (p. 445): The Loss of Gain: Attempt to incorporate Christian inheritance into ontology depends on interpretation of Ontological Difference—One distinction has many aspects e.g. objective illumination of Being and subjective illumination of freedom i.e. Dasein—Being as general (from the Greeks on) and Being as God both get the mystery wrong—The genuine difference requires the space of the actus essendi (Plotinus, Dionysius, and fully in Thomas) i.e. non-subsisting abundance that attains rest and realization from and within essences, and of essentiae i.e. attaining to reality by act without reducing or subdividing it, which does not reduce the difference to a mere real distinction (pedantic scholasticism); for Thomas, the structure is the sign of indeterminate non-absoluteness i.e. creatureliness—God both offers a share in His abundance of Being and from His absolute power and freedom devises the forms of essences as recipients of this participation—Intimations in Plotinus—Heidegger identifies negations of classical God with nothingness of act of Being which constitutes world, which makes God need the world, and allows no analogia entis between Being and existent, but only identity that generates and embraces distinction—Initially, Heidegger denied Being needed existent to become itself, but later he affirmed this, and then ultimate reality is the event, a self-supporting construct, in which man and Being attain to each other, and so the difference is raised to the absolute; as co-essential part of Being, man cannot wonder or be distinct from the gods—Heidegger banishes all that has to do with will from Being, leaving only thinking, and so the question of why there is something cannot run its full course, because it points to will—Early on, there is thrownness without a thrower; later, only PSR as leap from and into origin: analogia entis annuls itself and must come to terms with contradiction—Still, Heidegger’s is the most fertile modern project in view of potential philosophy of glory; he avoids all unmediated theism in favor of questions of how God enters philosophy, and of the difference: this is necessary for theology, which needs to hear warnings against technocracy/nihilism as it tries to dialogue with natural science—But Heidegger lacks courage, resorting to questioning alone, and so can offer the pragmatist no answers—Without theology of glory, Christianity must take his approach to avoid naturalism. II.B.6. The Metaphysics of Spirit II.B.6.a. The Other Possibility (p. 451): Return to antiquity in late Middle Ages would have worked only if it had been seen as Advent-like openness not as comprehensive form in which Christianity was embedded as a potentiality—Second way (Eckhart) makes everything dependent on personal relationship between finite and infinite spirit, and to interpret spirit as meaning of all sub-spiritual Being—This metaphysics of spirit is grounded in metaphysics of the saints, of indifferentia—Nicolas of Cusa took Eckhart further with analogy between divine and human creativity—With Nominalism, world lost its theophanic radiance: one only encountered God within oneself, and universe becomes mathematical matter—Philosophy of spirit is both fruit of and greatest threat to Christianity, for it tends to materialism: modern science’s technical triumphs do not require any mediation of Being, which moves toward a monism of spirit— 1. Descartes leaves the external world as mere matter/extension/automation and removes metaphysics to the cogito, from which he draws existence of finite and infinite spirit; universe is retrieved by an analogy of spirit (Spinoza, Leibniz, Berkeley)—2. Man is the co-creator of number (Cusa), but since matter is just extension, there is no difference between God’s and man’s creativity; spark of the soul as point of identity beyond analogy (Eckhart) is reached in Descartes and developed in Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel: since there is only one spirit, its glory over against the material world can only be self-glory—3. Finite subject as co-creator is an immediate involvement in causa prima whose inner form it possesses, with a distinction just between absolute form and worldly content as real evolution of nature into spirit developed by ideal aspect projected a priori by absolute spirit—Historical versions of this metaphysics have as their ultimate historical destination the ever more consistent representation of its concealed identity—The Christian feels himself, with a titanism of piety, empowered to philosophically constitute the world from divine grounds, on the basis of the Biblical self-revelation of those grounds. II.B.6.b. The Immediacy of the Man-God Relation II.B.6.b.1. Descartes (p. 455): The beginning of modern philosophy of spirit is retreat to the indubitable, our ideas—Retreat is a declaration of our freedom and ascetic power; intuition requires a pure and attentive spirit—That we can doubt proves the theoretical uncertainty of our existential situation, despite its practical sufficiency; even what is clear and distinct does not exclude possibility of delusion—Behind this is indivisible point where pensée and being coincide, so long as I think, and I think continually—Bald opposition between indivisible self and divisible world, as opposed to Porphyrian tree—Self-possessing consciousness has the truth directly, in an original clarité that develops scholastic claritas, though this cannot ground itself: I can doubt so my being is not perfect i.e. doubt is both capacity and incapacity—I depend on absolute consciousness of Being whose idea is inborn in me—Ontological proof and proof from contingency are one—Idea that objective reality must exist formally in its causes is an intuitive first notion—Ideas are only work of consciousness and so the idea of God is His personal mark in the cogito-sum—From emphasis on cogito, light falls on surrounding world from God; cogito reveals radiance of Being of the Good under Christian sign of free Creator—Descartes’ philosophical worship of the beauty of this God—God emerges from cogito as most intimately known, the cogitor visible in the cogito (Baader)—Primacy of Augustinian God and the soul—Being, goodness, and Thou emerge only in relation to God as Other, but no way to God via the world and human thou—All the noema are just objectified reality, never presenting existence (road to Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Husserl)—Truth is dialectical for Descartes—He holds Ontological Distinction between finite and infinite existence, seen in that man’s reason is finite but his will infinite; points to Christian Kantian distinction between finite conceptual knowledge and infinite dynamism of spirit (Blondel, Maréchal, Marc, Rahner)—Like spiritual metaphysics of his time (de Sales, Bérulle, Fénelon), he is forgetful of Being by ignoring world and fellow men, and so lacks defense against pantheism, atheism, solipsism in which freedom and necessity coincide. II.B.6.b.2. Spinoza (p. 463): Descartes gave external world to materialistic science so as to preserve inner world for philosophy and religion as site of analogia entis—External world as extension can be dealt with as form of external intuition, and truth as relation between concept and intuition—Spinoza anchors thought and extension as attributes of God; God and all finite substances are modi of them—1. Distinction of God and world reduced to substance and accident—2. Distinction of divine and human knowledge reduced to precise and imprecise concepts—3. Distinction of essence and existence reduced to dependence of finite on God and on conceptual whole—God is unity of logos and physis (Stoicism); eros must adapt itself to apatheia—Concepts can correspond adequately to object, and be real for God—God’s freedom is just His not being determined by anything other than Himself, though everything possible becomes actual by necessity (Erigena’s natura naturata), though the vulgar think of this as despotism—Human thought must participate in absolute thought of natura naturans in the natura naturata, and must raise itself above passions and transform them into self-possessed actions, overcoming distinction between passio and actio in rightly ordered love of self and God, each best when one does the other, since human amor is cupiditas; God does not love us in return except inasmuch as our love for God is part of His love for Himself: the pathos of Hegel’s absolute knowledge, Nietzsche’s Yes and Amen, modern emotionless and wonder-less realism—Material world contains nothing in which the spirit could find joy, but we can conserve or destroy it according to our advantage: absolute technicization of the world based on mystical form of realism, on which ethics is knowledge and power as self-mastery and mastery of the world—Being’s geometrical armor eradicates glory. II.B.6.b.3. Leibniz (p. 468): Leibniz’s is the Christian philosophy with the most triumphalistic claims to totality, to know and reconcile all things; he is advocate for God and world, and the splendor of his intellectual penetration and eloquence radiates the gloria Dei—He draws universally on all areas of learning and all historical theological movements; the ethos of his creativity is boundless affirmation of every partial truth, and courage and will for its integration, for truth lies in the disposition of things, with beauty and glory as its proof—He, not Spinoza, gave German Idealism its aesthetic ethos—He shoulders the burden of Cartesian dualism, the burden of modern natural science for the philosopher—Against atomism, he holds that all things have two aspects, considered by human and natural sciences, and so he tries to reconcile Descartes and Aristotle; all things, even God, take on a duality, though all things are indivisible, graded according to increasing preponderance of spirituality: spirit has a base in nature, and energy is dormant consciousness—This Pan-Atomism of Spirit’s cost is the windowless monads, each an eternally unique embodiment of Being, created by God with pre-established harmony—Parallelism of quality and quantity and unity of math and philosophy, mathesis universalis, make Leibniz mediator of tradition to modernity—Preparation for total evolutionism, including in history of philosophy: every endeavor is made for progress and smoothing differences that hinder it, moving toward an eternal progress of spirit (Gregory of Nyssa) in a unity of the future of the earth and kingdom of spirits with the eschatological kingdom—Opposition to pantheism, and fundamentality of experience of contingency—His latent nominalism, misunderstanding of Thomist distinction between esse and essentia, and his adoption of Scotist haecceitas for monads—But absolute question of Being breaks through: potentialities cannot explain or create existence; the gulf between absolute and hypothetical/worldly necessity can only be bridged by absolute freedom, contrary to Spinozist identification of divine knowledge and freedom—The becoming of divine willing of the world as integration of single acts of volition into supreme will subject to a law worthy of God, to create in freedom the best of all possible worlds, which can best display His grandeur and goodness—Christianity is included in philosophical process of knowledge of God—Metaphysical and Christian ethics in one, though metaphysics predominates—All evil is comprehended by God’s greater love (developed in Schleiermacher, Hegel, Barth), so that we should have non-exclusive trust in God: He is not arbitrary or despotic, contra double predestination—The world is constructed in the divine Spirit supposedly without threat to human or divine freedom—Vertical parallelism is methods of mechanism and finalism means that world is constituted not analogously but in the univocity of the monad, neglecting the Ontological Difference, resting on nominalism—His turn to the world through natural sciences can only catalog phenomena devoid of Being—Windowless monads commune only in God, view Being only from above in isolation, not from its own standpoint; a worldly existence for man without vulnerability to other beings, beyond the reach of tragedy, in the light of divine harmony: the Hegelian realm of spirits not the Augustinian civitas Dei—God has no need of the world, but man can so know the thoughts of God that he can directly benefit man and the glory of God—Scientific rigor applied in theology must lead scientists back to God: a confidence is discerning the world as the language of God—Never suspecting that it is possible to claim to know too much, this is a forgetting of Being in philosophy, and of the Cross in theology. II.B.6.b.4. Malebranche (p. 478): Caught between Descartes and Bérulle, he adopts a philosophy of spirit on which there is a pious, wordless realm of ghosts, showing the flaws of the metaphysics of the saints—From Bérulle, he learns creaturely nothingness and pure adoration of glory; from Descartes, the retreat to the pure ego as only guarantee of truth—Unlike for Descartes, here the idea is a given to the ego, as in Plato and Augustine, by an absolute thinker—The subject perceives a priori the Ontological Difference between God and world from God’s point of view—Knowledge of ideas is imaginative and sensory—No clear distinction between thought and real extension; God is archetype of extension—Too passive understanding of spirit (Leibniz)—For Malebranche, Jesus meets us immediately in all knowledge, springing over worldly being, so no experience of reality or of a thou (as in Bérulle, Fénelon), an unreal elitist journeying in a world of ideas without basis in nature. II.B.6.c. Kant II.B.6.c.1. Glory ‘Uncritically’ (p. 481): Kant’s early period following Leibniz, Newton, Wolff, though under attack from Hume, sharing Enlightenment vision of glory as seen in Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Lessing—Baumgarten’s science of aesthetics in confused sensory perception, developed into clear and distinct truth experienced by analogy with transcendent kalon, leading to aestheticism of German Idealists; Critique of Judgment as link between Enlightenment and Idealism—Critical rupture limits theoretical intellect, and aesthetic claims to being just for rational animals, making aesthetics a modern science—No longer a space for experience of worldly Being as epiphany of God’s glory; glory is replaced by moral/aesthetic sublimity—Consciousness of one’s existence and noble pleasure before the star-filled heavens (Critique of Practical Reason, 1755 Natural History and the Theory of the Heavens) in which the absolute spirit conveys concepts that can only be experienced, not described: a splendor both sublime and beautiful—Early Kant sees there ongoing creation—Primal atomic matter i.e. energy is author of its own space, monads being defined by their sphere of activity not by parts, drawing others by attraction and repulsion into ordering movement; beyond Newton, self-ordering matter is more worthy of God; mechanism glorifies the beauty of the world no less than omnipotence—Correlation between level of spirit and distance from sun—World approaches God asymptotically—Feeling for insecurity of world, and of its security from God’s point of view—Nature needs death as fertilizer of life, like it needs the sun that no living thing can approach—Early on he portrayed infinite worlds and infinite evolutions, later condemned by him as he calls metaphysics back to its small land it can cultivate responsibly (Voltaire)—Leibniz drew a scientific-metaphysical parallelism, which Kant rejects; metaphysics can only analyze experience of reality phenomenologically—Kant’s 1763 proof for God’s existence is based a priori on concept of possibility; implies an experience of Being on which existence can be eliminated and possibility remain, which points to absolute existence that can conceive of possibility—Essentialism comes to pervade Kant’s thought, because he is concerned with the phenomenalism/empiricism that follows from it, not concerned for the reality of the external world; he like Leibniz and Hume is concerned for objectivity/reality of concepts—Retention of an sich in critical system is based on experience of receptivity, an irreducible primal phenomenon, though reduced by Idealists. II.B.6.c.2. The Critical Recall and Negative Theology (p. 489): Kant could have developed a phenomenology of finitude with morality founded in feeling (Shaftesbury, Hutcheson), but there it’s unclear how empiricism relates to a priori math and proof for existence of God and to moral sentiment of obligation—Mathematics is a form of pure reason without aid of experience—Matter/site of human knowing/truth is the relation between chance sense experience mediated by forms of spacetime and necessary ordering processes within cognitive faculty, graded in a number of syntheses—Our reason can experience and calculate its own finitude, a more Columbian than Copernican reason—Unlike understanding, no synthetic a priori judgments of reason, so no theoretical metaphysics is possible; a world of reason enclosed in itself, aware of its own indeterminate situation—By discovering reason’s limits, philosophy is more for protecting from error than discovering truth by reason’s reflexio completa; thereby, reason no longer knows itself as faculty of transcendent Being (medievals, Descartes), and does not yet know itself as faculty that causes generation from itself of all that exists (Fichte, Hegel)—For Kant, transcendentality never offers itself unambiguously to interpretation: to be reason, reason must perceive the finitude of its theoretical knowledge but it cannot achieve this as pure reason—Antinomies require man to leave theory in order to win by action/self-commitment what cannot be achieved contemplatively; nature of reason demands that we be active, and metaphysics is implied by practical not theoretical reason—Practical reason can only postulate its transcendent presuppositions as revealed in obligation; despite its finitude, the inner sublimity of reason penetrates to the Infinite, revealing God to it—This points back to negative theology—Practical faculty cannot mediate objective knowledge; as a consequence of Leibniz’s vertical intersection binding human knowledge to natural science, positing of God in ethical law does not make Him cognitively present—Why/causality just imposes order on what is manifest, and cannot go beyond that—To know means to dominate, and so God as indomitable is unknowable—We comprehend (Anselm) not the necessity of the moral law, but its incomprehensibility—Kant’s pure faith of reason in postulates of practical reason, God, freedom, immortality, is like the Neo-Platonic pistis as devotion higher than knowledge—Purification of philosophy from empirical experience turns transcendentalism into a formalism. II.B.6.c.3. The Ethical-Aesthetic Sublime (p. 496): The Ethical Sublime: Kant, more than anyone but Eckhart, saw essence of moral freedom as self-apprehension of spirit-person—Aligning this with Christianity led to pantheism (Fichte, Schelling)—Central point of morality cannot be reached by example or superseded by religion—Free self-apprehension removes distinction between obligation/Sollen and desire/Wollen—Existence of God emerges a priori in absolute character of moral imperative—As in Platonists and Metaphysics of the Saints, eros must purify itself until it love good only for sake of good—Because of coincidence with desire, no obligation for a sanctified will, who is released from nature by understanding his freedom from ends; historical man must first actualize himself as his own end through obedience, leading to second categorical imperative—From distinction of obliged ego and obligatory good comes reality of other, a pluralism against eudaimonism and egoism—I am ethically autonomous so far as I obey the law, which is in me so much as I acknowledge it above me—There is in us a radical evil not attributable to the senses, reason, or their combination; morality and religion are a struggle for the victory of the good, in an eternal approximation to the idea of the saint whereby an ideal image descends from God as grace, embodied in Christ—Kant seems to humble the human spirit so as to raise it purely; we are humbled by nature’s superior power to ours but especially by critique of pure reason—Kant greatly esteems aesthetic harmony/incarnation of morality in custom, but worries that the sublimity of duty might thereby be forgotten; the law awakens respect and a sense of our nature’s sublimity, which ravishes us more than any beauty—The aesthetic constitution or state in which man should perform his duty is a joyful heart, the sign of authentic virtuous spirit—Absolute nature of commandment is sublimity in ethics, kabod in religion—Petitionary prayer is an illusion, but he advocates adoration on the basis of law, and contemplation of divine wisdom and the mystery of existence, which is sacred and cannot be theoretically proclaimed; everyone must make his own God to honor in him the God who made him: no religion can be based on pure revelation, which lacks for foundation a prior concept as criterion of judgment—Absolute Good is manifest in practical reason in me as autonomy and above me as sublimity, and in religion as mystery demanding adoration, but within me as a consciousness against which I can measure all religions, so nothing supernatural but the super-sensual in us can predominate, an object of admiration—Kant takes up Enlightenment idea of morality as measure of religion, but also ancient idea of unfinishable bridge of human religious project oriented to revelation—Initiates German Idealism’s judgment of theology by philosophy. (p. 504): The Beautiful: What constitutes the human in a person is the point where autonomy opens into mystery of relation of God and man—Aesthetics depends on sublime, which is connected to the beautiful—Theoretical knowledge consists in reciprocity of concept and perception in relation to object, aesthetic knowledge in relation to subject, without interest in object’s existence; aesthetic contemplation is self-enhancing—Difference of experience of beautiful from pleasant, true, good—Judgment of taste differs from that of senses in that it is secretly universal, triggering free play of cognitive powers in transcendental structure of subject, affecting their inner harmony—Aesthetic judgment of taste is suggested to but not triggered in all—We must isolate the phenomenon, to reach bound beauty: what the thing is i.e. truth, what it is good for, whether it corresponds to its own concept i.e. perfection; to reach free beauty, we do not presuppose consonance of taste with reason or goodness, retaining form of purposiveness without concept of purpose—Pure beauty is formal in that it ignores link between true and good, abstracting from every object and ethical interest to enjoy the form which possesses meaning in the pure formal harmony of our cognitive powers; in this, Kant is first theoretician of abstract art—In scholastic theory of transcendentals where objective communication among transcendentals by their share in common being requires unification not separation in art; in Kant, transcendentals relate to constitution of reason, which in its finitude loses anchorage in esse, and thereby the beautiful has the same indeterminate finitude: a pure play of finite existence in nothingness with itself, a play without interest, purpose, or meaning—Due to freedom from concepts, beauty’s universal validity can only be known by example—Center of soul’s powers is creative play of imagination—The theory of genius alone is the rule of art; nature is creative agent in genius, and originality its first quality: the poet’s images are exemplary and signify the truth but cannot be elucidated as concepts, the “veil of Isis”—The normal ideal and rational ideal of man, the latter drawing the beautiful beyond itself to sublimity. (p. 509): The Aesthetic Sublime: At the beginning of Christian era, an anonymous book in rhetoric On the Sublime summed up Christian era, and then concept disappeared until Burke, which stimulated Lessing, Mendelssohn, Herder, and Kant—Ancient work saw aesthetic sublime as largely determined by ethical sublime of magnanimity, whereby man feels himself a citizen of the world and exceeding the world; the sublime nears divine majesty—Burke grasps sensations of beautiful as pleasure, of sublime as pain later released in delight; he links both to materialistic ideas but also to God—Kant sees the sublime as what in being able to be thought proves capacity of mind to exceed senses, and also what refers to unknowable ideas: the sublime is what uplifts the spirit (Schiller)—Unlike Schiller and contra Burke, Kant sees fear as wrong frame of mind to wonder at God’s greatness, and sees sublime as belonging both to man and God—Aesthetically judged, the Good is sublime, evoking respect more than love—Kant does not embrace Idealist aesthetics of identity, retaining a concealed knowledge of the Cross. II.B.6.d. The Self-Glorification of the Spirit II.B.6.d.1. Schiller (p. 513): Schiller’s Idealism transcends Kant’s open-ended non-identity between phenomenon and Ding an sich, finite and infinite intellect, duty and desire—All glory of Being is now a self-glorification of Spirit; truth and freedom of Spirit coincide—In opposition to Goethe, he incorporates antiquity into his philosophy of Spirit: Goethe places man within physis, Schiller places man beyond it as Absolute Spirit in a process of becoming towards an end that he constructs. (p. 514): The Form of His Work and His Point of Departure: Schiller begins with Leibniz, understood in terms of pietism and enthusiasm—Schiller splits vertical section of the world into day side of the universe i.e. Idealism and night side i.e. materialism/radical transience—Under influence from Klopstock, praise for glory of God remains early on, but this is worship as enthusiasm in manner of Shaftesbury and Bruno, God and Nature being seen as exactly alike in containing all perfections, as in Plotinus, Erigena, Cusa—The universe is like a prism dividing the Divine Spirit; if the prism were removed, all spirits would bring forth God, by the unitive force of Love—Eros is the gaining of the self as God; the prismatic analysis of God is the spontaneous decline of Primal Being into alienation, revolt, and hell: philosophical contradiction becomes existential in Scheler—Either man is measured by heroic greatness lived in tension between God’s and world’s Being, or God prescribes a law for man which is the prescription of his self-realization in freedom; the latter both led Schiller to Kant and divided them—Stages of Schiller’s life—Wrestling of two forms of sublime: Prometheus and humility, irreconcilables united in Christianity; two ideals of the rebel and the hero who freely subjects himself to the law—The Robbers presents the majestic sinner attracted to terrible vice for the strength it demands; we can see the divine more easily in vice than in a harmonious portrait: both the performance of evil deeds in the face of accepted damnation, and final penitence in self-sacrifice—Fiesco’s Conspiracy at Genoa gives the hero the face of a tyrant, in the Promethean greatness of the moment—In many works, the Baroque court is abhorrent glory—Don Carlos is a family tragedy between absolutism and freedom/free love—Schiller wanted a modern counterpart to classical tragedy, and was also drawn by historical drama, and above all the Promethean theme: Prometheus represents the sublime, in his succumbing to the terrible without fear; tragedy makes heroes/divine men/suffering gods of us—Man bears lost paradise within himself as measure of all things—In Wallenstein, a philosophy of identity of guilt and innocence, the only wrong being self-contradiction. (p. 526): The New Interpretation of the Sublime: History of Schiller’s aesthetic credo from The Artists through his study of Kant and relationship with Goethe to Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man—Artistic beauty is for man in a vertical universe, sharing labor with animals and knowledge with spirits, and median point in history between nature and theoretical/scientific analysis of theory—Despite the loss of the gods, the poet’s office is the comprehensive form even in face of modernity; man’s center, once sought by Schiller medically and later poetically, is in center between body/nature and spirit—Through beautiful, spirit contemplates truth disinterestedly and learns to love; only through art does the spirit become religious: human beauty expresses divine—Laws of nature discovered by scientist are those of aesthetic harmony already within him, which he projects—In artistic act, man creates himself as man, leaving pure nature behind and incorporating himself into world of spirits—Man is alone in the universe, exposed to threat of death, projecting religion; all hangs on the favor of the moment, which is flash as beauty/spirit/God: truth is terrible and can only be endured as beauty—Ideal becomes real according to strength of human heart; the world itself is radically demythologized/de-divinized—What Schiller anticipates in Kant, and what he learns from Kant—The human heart is the sole glory; the aesthetic is harmony between spirit and senses, harmony of beauty and disharmony of sublime, anticipated totality and totality achieved through aesthetic education, naïve and sentimental—Sublimity of categorical imperative is rejected in favor of identity within ethical man, identity between God and creature in tension (Fichte); man’s moral, not natural, will makes him divine—On Grace and Dignity deals with harmony between senses and reason: body has technical perfection of nature for life and spirit—Representation of interests in man is more beautiful than in other organic formations, a grace that nature repays by allowing spirit to express itself in nature, where spirit is bound to contradict sensuality; grace bridges contradiction, as a favor morality shows the senses, and so beauty is citizen of two worlds, governed by law of liberality and play: Being is charis i.e. grace, favor, beauty, mutual gratitude and enrichment (Pindar)—Schiller stands by absoluteness of moral imperative, but not its imperative character: free man is his own and no other’s; the ethical belongs to the whole man (Aristotle) not just the single deed—Highest degree of grace is power to enchant, highest dignity is majesty/holiness, and before the one who can portray this we kneel—On the Aesthetic Education of Man adds historical dimension to these insights—Three historical epochs: mythic/sublime, classical/beauty, philosophical/abstract; beauty appears as mere transition, and never in a period with beautiful mores—Schiller opposes this empirical law in favor of a priori deduction of essence of beauty as central concept of culture: man is spirit-body, and a culture that strives toward spirit away from body is his destruction; the mystery of beauty is that of human wholeness—Ideal of the god is form that utterly permeates matter, and matter transformed into representation of Spirit without sensual desire—Examples of Juno Ludovisi and of the agon, ideal of play instinct—Aesthetic synthesis as indifferentia—Art requires first ethical self-realization of the artist—On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry deals with questions of whether history moves away from aesthetic to technical/abstract cultures, and whether orientation to antiquity or Nature is not lifeless romanticism—Art divides man from himself so he can return to himself through the ideal, which is infinite, requiring an eschatology for the deification of man—Schiller, unlike Hegel, saw the aesthetic part of Christian eschatology of the resurrection into God, though on his view man is always already God—Schiller follows Kant in making the beautiful the primal measure of the human, but it is not clear whether it is also ultimate measure of Being; focus is not on Being or God, but on man in agon, who has ideals not gods, and is his own myth. (p. 540): The Remainder of the Sum: Beauty is supremely charis, so we must ask who we should thank for this unhoped-for and undeserved grace; it is an incomprehensible universalizing principle, Spirit or Nature or Fate: Nature obeys Sprit, while Fate is the form of degeneration—In suffering the terrible, man, by his glory, makes it beautiful/sublime; in the sublime, our sensual nature perceives its limits, and our rational nature its lack of limits—In Bride of Messina, “God” seems to be a projection of human grandeur and guilt, and the anthropocentrism is even more apparent elsewhere; sacraments e.g. in Mary Stuart are sensual metaphors for sublimity—The pure transmission of divine revelation and action in The Maid of Orleans is presented in Amazonian not Marian terms, and in terms of the Kantian-Fichtean absolute formal Self; sanctity is distorted from Christian participation in God’s sanctity to an expression of moral self-sanctification. (p. 544): Counter-motif of obedience to others and unconditional love brings Schiller closer to Christianity—It is either a blind devotion to the strong or a self-offering to ideal commandment, rooted in both Kant and Theosophy—Interpenetrating motifs of religious obedience and devotion of friends, real love and ideal imitation—Schiller places man on his own without remainder, a finite spark of beauty without containing shell. II.B.6.d.2. Fichte (p. 546): The Titans Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, unlike Kant and Schiller, conceive man within the Absolute, which requires philosophy to be fulfilled and transcended through philosophical appropriation of Christian revelation—In the Bible God becomes I and man his Thou and a praxis praxeos as opposed to Aristotelian noesis noeseos—Revelation of God is revelation of Being; world is expression of God—The retreat to man as the center is Titanically pressed home—Christianity is conceived as pure philosophy and potentiality of man, history, and culture—Similarities between Idealists and Plotinus, Erigena, Cusa—Idealism lacks Biblical glory, what is decisive in Christianity and which depends on analogia entis: OT, Synoptics and Paul rejected for Johannine NT, and agape interpreted as gnosis, all beginning with identitas entis, leading to aesthetics as science. (p. 549): Fichte’s point of departure is self as self-possession and self-contemplation in the appropriation of its freedom/duty—Absolute appears as ego and as duty not eros—In development of Metaphysics of the Saints, man is he who knows and can perform will of God—The self that is Fichte’s point of departure is neither God nor man, and cannot be conceived as self-consciousness or personality; the self requires the world as opposing non-self—Aporia: what is not real makes the real world a prior premise of consciousness in order to attain self-realization in the process—God is not a person or creator, and only attains reality through eschatological synthesis of world of spirits—World is pure appearance from and for Spirit; difference of unreal and real is empty and filled (following Cartesian and Empiricist response to Hobbesian materialism, reducing matter to appearance): this external world/physis was not created by God and is not theophanous, but is inner dimension of self, and at its disposal—Idealism and materialism lead to same ethos—God is convergence point of man’s infinite approximation—Fichte’s atheism conflict—When man takes hold freely on himself in his eternal determination, the supra-reality of Being/Life/Light is that whereby he is determined—Vocational relation to Being is not purely contemplative (Plotinus) but historical and endless revolution: ever greater awareness of God in world and ever greater self-giving of world in God—Fichte thought there were two options, Spinozean fatalism or Kantian freedom, without considering view of God as unknown and irreducible to concepts—In Idealists, Christology becomes inner form of philosophy of creation, and God-man relation is assimilated to inner-divine generations—Christ shows human freedom as expression of mystery of Being as love (Fichte linking Ignatius to Heidegger) which first divides into two and then binds God and man—In early Fichte, God is absorbed into self; in later Fichte, self is reduced to pure empty space in God, to the point of sacrificing personal immortality—Where Fichte is pantheistic, we can discern an authentic Christian note of love and prayer in the dialectic of finite and infinite—In gazing on the one who sends us lies the ethical and the aesthetic—What is beautiful is being seized by a single idea—Scholar is heir to the prophet and the artist—Self, even God, has Being as its base: beauty emerges from it only as the tragic which eliminates and transcends itself; points to Schopenhauer (and Nirvana), for whom there is no glory, and beauty lies in contradiction and self-elimination. II.B.6.d.3. Schelling (p. 557): Point of identity is Schelling’s determining point of departure i.e. point where self as subject posits itself in primal act and comes to know itself as object: essence of man is absolute freedom, not an object—Consciousness coincides with Being, and has attributes of Absolute i.e. God (contra Jacobi’s defense of si comprehendis non est Deus): philosophy is insight into true mysteries, which remain mysteries; it is an unknowing, a pursuit of what calls forth absolute wonder, of what eliminates thinking because it transcends thought, though this (like Fichte’s Ur-Leben) does not transcend Idealist point of departure—Schelling introduces objective metaphysics of Spinoza into Idealism and so eliminates it—Point of coincidence of subject and object is existential, blending two attitudes in both of which self has final word; highest detachment oriented to God (Fénelon) is experienced as highest victory after highest struggle: every existent, even God, must be left behind—Here, univocal and neutral Being (Avicenna, Scotus, Suarez) is transcendental indifferentia and obliviousness to Being, on the basis of which absolute and worldly Being can be constructed (Hirsch: an ideal atheism)—The ideal is the universal, while contraction/condescension is the beginning of reality; as Absolute in identity, God is non-real, which reality exists in non-identity of generic and specific, so God needs world to be real existent—Everything within context of comprehensive ideality/conceptuality in which what would be contradictory in real world is constructible in light of loss of Being—Comparison to Nicolas of Cusa: question of how God can be everything when there is a world, or how God can be all in all without being the formal Being of things; for Schelling, God is essence of all essences, but is also individual being—For Nicolas, God is Non Aliud insofar as Possest; for Schelling, God has greatest analogy with human life, and He is eternal Being and Becoming—This contradicts classical God-world analogy, in order to avoid decline of world into unnatural God and godless Nature; leads to triple God: undeveloped God as all-embracing identity, God in the strict sense, Nature as lower order divine phenomenon—God and man evolve from common depth into light of ideality; contra Christian Romantics, night is here the womb of light, and matter is the unconscious part of God, while the ideal is the superstructure above matter—Final stance of philosopher is defiance in face of sibylline vision of abyss/anarchic/drive (anticipates Freud, Scheler; draws on Dante’s descent)—Schelling contains seed of complete materialism, as Fichte contains irrational philosophy of life (Simmel)—Both substitute conceptual identity for actus essendi, the first mystery in which God gives a share in Himself. (p. 565): Highest point of identity between subject and object, ideal and real is realized through progressive idealization of real, and vice versa: an evolutionary philosophy of Nature and a philosophy of Spirit becoming incarnate—Distinction is posited within absolute identity and is thereby transcended and transfigured: Infinite appears in form of the beautiful, which is interpreted with reference to Infinite; Schelling’s philosophy is most aesthetic modern philosophy, but of art not of glory—Genius is identified with God, and sublime submerged in beauty—Kalon is here transcendental, but really belongs only to the whole; truth, beauty, goodness, holiness are just ways of contemplating the Absolute One—Key to religion for Schelling is aesthetic identity between God and world—This kairos of aesthetic theology is key for Balthasar’s project—Schelling’s concern for mythology and Christ as end of myth, in Whose incarnation for the sake of self-sacrifice religion becomes historical—Myth is interpreted rationalistically, and as becoming exoteric in Christianity, while mysticism is Christianity’s inner core; myth is absorbed into philosophy of art—Others can stand where Christ does e.g. the future universal German—Distinction between God and world is necessary self-duplication of God in His unity—Synthesis of all contradictions is in God Who suffers of His own free will, unlike mythological gods—Theology is here subordinated to philosophy; freedom is just fundamental character of beauty—Christian discernment must distinguish philosophical mediation as identity from Christian reconciliation. (p. 570): Reacting to Hegelian panlogism, Schelling said he moved from negative to positive philosophy, but probably did not, since he retained univocity of reason, though as second stage, reason finds it can only generate idea of God not living God, and so generates latter through despair; reason can only desire but not deserve (contra Kant) the living God—Reason must die to self so as to allow Being precedence—Reason posits what has infinite existence but is thereby stunned by Being; resulting ecstasis is still work of reason—Infinite act corresponds to infinite potency of reason; Thomas and Maréchal agree, but only in negative philosophy i.e. natural theology’s construction of idea of God, not, as in Schelling, the positive philosophy of revelation, which presupposes univocity of reason, as in Hegel. II.B.6.d.4. Hegel (p. 572): Schelling contributed to building uncompletable bridge by understanding revelation as higher form of myth, but Hegel completed it, feeling himself commissioned by the World Spirit to open the future—In our age, Spirit has outgrown old form and acquired new one—Transformation of pistis into gnosis is synthesis of past and laying bare path to future—Hegel starts with Christ, and then absorbs what is of philosophical value into his system—Interpretation of divine life and world evolution in terms of love absorbed into absolute knowledge—As in Hölderlin, Christianity is absorbed into omnipresent kenosis of Being in which the unsurpassable glory of reality occurs, found above all in totality of Absolute Spirit—Hegel is final conclusion to interpretation of world as self-manifestation of God (Stoicism, Neo-Platonism, Spinoza, Herder, Goethe): object of religion and philosophy is God and His explication—Hegel’s intuition based on Cusa’ Non-Aliud, which leads all finitude/otherness to be integrated in Absolute: pan kai hen are identical not opposed—Faith/representation and perception/art see through finite to appearing/concealed Infinite, and knowledge of God is glory. (p. 575): 1. Early Theological Writings influenced by Lessing and Fichte—God is pure eternal love/light/life, absolute unifying principle transcending duality it presupposes; in love, man finds himself in another—The more forms of life, the more unity and love—Finitude is pain and opposition death, but only in a whole which posits contradiction to transcend it—His interpretation of Prologue of John in terms of opposition between God and Logos—What is contradiction in realm of dead is not in realm of life: in latter, a part is as much the One as the whole through mystery of integration; unification i.e. Being is unprovable object of belief—The child as promise of inseparability/testament to eternal unity—God’s vision as Himself is eternal creation, self-transcendence in love of what has been individualized—Comparison of Hegel pantheistic Christianity with Origen/Evagrius: for former, self-unfolding of God is goodness and return is judgment i.e. breaking particular becoming mercy i.e. integration; for latter, division into multiplicity is judgment, and reunification in Christ is love; Hegel has here moved more into mystery of Cross—The abysmal depths, and the wrath of God/destruction of Nature/Lucifer at being poured out, leading to evil, but then to purification—Combination of classical and Christian in Spirit of Christianity: individual lives become organs of infinite life, though the whole appears to each as fate, which must be suffered willingly; the final word is beautiful unification, the distinctively Christian aesthetic law—Highest freedom is negative attribute of beauty of soul. (p. 579): 2. Reconciliation of Greek with Gospel required eliminating Jewish dimension, the lordly elevation of God over world, Who acts, elects, and rejects in freedom, and so he rejects OT glory, Kabôd—Reduction of elevation of God over world leads to anti-Semitism: Jewish principle of opposition pulls God and world apart, making God empty and lifeless, but also makes Him claim for Himself all truth, freedom, and justice, so man is reduced jealously to a mere possession of God: to hate all foreign gods is to hate the human race—This total rejection mitigated by placing Jews within Oriental religion, which its abstract idea of God and its compensation with an alien splendor/kabôd, which leads to chapter in Phenomenology on master/slave—Sublimity is allocated to the past, a mere part of the history of art—Hegel sets Jesus’ principle of love against Jewish abstractness/legalism: to reject Jesus is to remain in contradiction/division—Hegel rejects the Church, which introduces a permanent contradiction into Jesus by belief in 2 natures and Resurrection, and so falls back to OT legalism and medieval abuse (a critique as in Nietzsche)—Jesus’ linking of faith to his own person is only a transitional stage on the way to unity with friends in love and Eucharist, but later disciples become attached to this one ego, and so the sacraments are not an authentic form of life—All forms of Christianity have failed to create a calm/fulfilled form of beauty between God and world—Historical Christ and Church rejected as hapless consciousness; what is retained is unity and mutual openness of God and world, formulated in Christology—In revealed religion, God is absolutely manifest, with no more mystery: faith is transfigured into philosophy—God becomes unique subjectivity, is dead, and thereby gives us His own eternal Spirit—Since He is totally revealed, thinking the totality of Being is a form of glory into which all sublimity is submerged: that than which no greater can be thought i.e. Spirit, is already proven and attained. (p. 585): 3. Hegel’s thought takes this achieved totality as point of departure—It can be developed as total metaphysics, genesis of total consciousness, as logic, as philosophy of nature and history, as history of philosophy, and as aesthetics; the last is just awareness of radiant blessedness of absolute knowledge—Beauty of Nature plays only provisional role, since only in man’s struggle for spiritual insight does gleam of Absolute break forth from finitude; aesthetics here is theory of artistic beauty: art is representation of concrete concept absolute to itself—Universe is anthropophanous not theophanous; man in theophanous in creative self-idealization, not natural being—Philosophy dissolves even aesthetic contemplation of idea by comprehending its true meaning—That there is a science of art shows that the high point of art has been passed, first by religion, then by science—Seriousness lies in idea that when absolute thought occurs in man, his concept comprehends absolute totality in itself, and he can construct representation of God, though it is unclear if this God is real—Being is concept and absolute emptiness; metaphysics develops in opposition of concept and intuition, general and particular—Absolute is everything, even transcending of absolute polarity; reason is self-mediating identity—Unstoppable progression from logical univocity/materialism to Left Hegelian atheism—Individual is transcended aesthetically in death/self-sacrifice for whole—Concrete/national Spirit of the People mediates total Spirit and monad; later this is Spirit of the State: hence Hegel is intellectual point of departure for Left and Right socialism, each of which gather the glory of absolute Being into their party’s absolutist claims. II.B.6.d.5. Karl Marx (p. 590): Marx performed historically necessary act of violently negating Hegelian philosophy, while, as with all such negations, remaining tied to what he rejected—The philosopher has the World-Spirit in his head, but cannot hear the cry of need of the man who stands beside him, which shatters all Idealism; it is our task to change the world not depict/construct it in thought—Rational man comes into being in encounter with fellow man, where absolute reality appears, and synthesis thereby leads to eternal/divine (Feuerbach), but Feuerbach remains with abstract man and can only acknowledge physical man within experience; he cannot hear proletarian man in his physical self-alienation, to whom unconditional act can be only adequate response: no philosopher of Spirit encountered Spirit to have it reproach him—The primal Christian/OT situation that Marx rediscovers as his theological/aesthetic a priori—Questions of existence are submerged behind problem of total deprivation—Man’s distinction from animal in his production of his own material life through producing food; objectified man is the result of his own labor, and expropriated man result of giving himself to business and of division of labor into masters and exploited serfs—Objects moved by men make history, and they are more than intuitions but stand in relation to man of existential effect and counter-effect: man produces himself by working into Nature and Nature into himself—Eschaton of historical process is where polarities cancel each other out, leading to ultimate state of society; here Marx is held by Hegelian essentialism—Ideal is not vulgar Marxism, but total humanization of Nature—Historical process leads to attitude to existence as a whole that leaves mere having behind, which requires first reduction to poverty, and then humanizing the world, and liberating oneself from possessing, through labor: the senses become social senses, relating to objects for their own sake—History is the work of educating the five sense—Fulfilling encounter between man and world is completed in encounter of man and woman, in which human essence becomes Nature and vice versa—Marx draws on disinterested Platonic eros and Kantian aesthetics/ethics in transcending having/enjoying in interpersonal love—Class division, class conflict, the age of money which inverts all things and universally prostitutes workers, are all unavoidable, since man attains true worth through humility and debasement—The subject of this real material process is unclear, neither Spirit nor man, so guided by absolute necessity, reality being reduced to material dimension of Spirit; capitalist and proletarian are both passive to sole active power of capital—Possibility of historical advance was missed by Christians and non-Christians. II.B.7. Aesthetics as Science (p. 597): What deserved the name ‘glory’ in metaphysics has been lost to view, beauty confined to univocal worldly reality; only thus can aesthetics be a science—German aesthetic science confined itself to good taste, but all painting but French lost all taste, confined through metaphysical confusion to deluded secure illumination of cozy room of existence (Hegel)—But this whole beautiful world of ideas is only manifestation of dark blind will, perverse site of disintegration of Being into nothingness (Schopenhauer, Wagner, von Hartmann, Mann leading to Nietzsche, late Scheler, early Heidegger, Sartre)—In classical-Christian analogia entis, where infinite being is unsurpassably elevated, and finite being hovers in incalculable distinction of Being and entity, then no exact science of truth, goodness, beauty, or concept of beauty, is possible—Every exact aesthetics’ theme is only part of total beauty, which can have authentic albeit fragmentary truth—Aesthetic rules can gradually be raised to level of metaphysics, myth, revelation, which last in its descent makes use of worldly and fragmentary—So even exact aesthetics can benefit a theory of glory. (p. 599): 1. Beautiful is appearance/epiphaneia—Seen this way by Greeks and medievals as appearance of the non-appearing One—In Idealists, Spirit more identified with human spirit, anthropologizing epiphany—Thus move from Hegelian absolute idealism back to Fichtean/Kantian subjective/psychological idealism (Visher): aesthetic synthesis of idea and appearance, infinite and finite, run through man the microcosm, revealer of macrocosm—Around this central axis are synthesized into beauty extremes (Solger), even ugliness (Rosenkranz)—Current attempts to show boundaries of beauty in ugliness are attempts to let something else shine through: God or nothingness—It must also be explained why what appears in its form is experienced as beauty, leading to aesthetic science of form—History of this science from Pythagoras through Boethius to Alberti then Schiller and Herbart—Leads to theory of values free of Being and concepts i.e. substitutes for Being and the transcendentals hollowed out by Idealism/Romanticism; values are given to forms, and so all that is possible here is a phenomenology of beauty—Another route is Pythagorean route of identity between laws of quantity and psychic quality, leading to Gestalt psychology and functionalism, which disallow epiphany, imprisoning freedom of act of appearing within ordered structures of appearance (Leibniz)—Unmediated parallelization of Spirit and matter (Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza) prevents distance in virtue of which Spirit could create genuine expressive form of itself in matter; rather, Spirit can only reconfigure matter—Hence abstract art which is oblivious of Being and Spirit is functionalized—Median of Spirit and senses is not heart but abstract harmony of powers in Kant—Aesthetics of form and value are fragment within aesthetics of epiphany, itself a fragment before what Being epiphanically heralds and brings to view, opening the mystery of total ontology/aesthetics, which cannot be systematized. (p. 603): 2. The appearance of what does not appear remains enigmatic, but we can turn to the production/poiesis of the beautiful by the artist; there is a primal act of generation in the spirit above rational/discursive faculties, since form is suddenly present in original intuition/unity, experienced as given in mania (Plato) or found/seen/posited (e.g. Ficino, Goethe, Schelling) in inspiration (Nietzsche, Dostoievsky)—Genius is Idealist counterpart to classical daimon (Weisse)—Croce identified contemplation and expression in this aesthetic/creative intuition as fundamental act of spirit; no space left here for analogy between original and copy of creative spirit, though this analogy contains true problem of tension between artist gazing on works of God and his activity being assimilated into God’s—Analogies between artist and prophets, artistic and sexual generation—Whoever grasps beautiful in an original manner is directed to a point of the origin of Being, from which perspective existence is justified, whatever terrible things is bears, superseding moral striving and striving for truth (Häberlin)—Schelling as precursor of Kierkegaard—Inner polarity of indifferentia of creative genius—Jean Paul distinguishes receptive and passive genius; he leaves open tension between self-giving to the objective and generation to the subjective, but he does not constrain the aesthetic into the ethical, and so is able to analyze the comic—He sees impossibility of resolving tension between idea and individual existence, for weight of existence can call into question idea and show the whole world of ideas to be folly—Humor is inverted sublime, and unlike irony it destroys small and great, showing that all is nothingness before the infinite; humor is existential testimony of unbridgeable gap between idea and existence—As a theoretician of folly, Jean Paul assimilated intuition of Christian artists into aesthetics, showing its openness to theology and religion—All problems of exact aesthetics must be transposed into this openness—Empathy (Lipps) draws object into subject’s sphere, but this point of view is limited and transcends itself, allowing object to give itself (Moritz Geiger), and the question can be raised of how and how much subject can give itself in order to experience Being as beautiful (Hartmann)—Here lies the full aesthetic significance of eros: it magically transfigures lovers and the whole world, but this is subjective; however, the lover has freedom to purify this love into something spiritual and universal (Plato’s Symposium): in the transition from categorical to transcendental beauty, the beauty encountered in the world becomes metaphysical glory, and Being becomes theophanous—Only background of metaphysical eros prevents particular eros from seeing itself as illusion. (p. 608): 3. Unresisting eros creates a space for another element of beauty, charis—The polyvalence of this word, open to the very different agones of Aeneas and Christ, extending from eroticism of Song of Songs to justification of the sinner—Charis is such a mystery that exact science can scarcely approach it; ancient and medieval definitions of beauty took account of this miracle by adding to “partium convenientia” the intentionally vague “cum quadam coloris suavitate”, which is a pointer we cannot grasp, more a remembrance and promise than actual presence, more a spur to memory than a gift, inaccessible to exact science, interpretable only from the point of view of the Being which embraces it, a fragment shining forth from within the unbridgeable Ontological Difference: when not a remembrance of mystery of Being, it causes the viewer to sink into melancholy—It is the hook by which we are drawn to eternity (Claudel); its science is a science of angels not men—Epiphaneia, poiesis, charis offer perspectives from which to discuss Biblical and theological aesthetics. III. Our Inheritance and the Christian Task III.A. The Site of Glory in Metaphysics III.A.1. The Miracle of Being and the Fourfold Distinction (p. 613): Meandering paths and fragments of Western Metaphysics can be simply centered on question “why is there anything at all and not simply nothing?”, a question posed by no science, and rarely by philosophy—Phenomenal world contains discoverable objective order and beauty; this is assumed and proved by every theoretical science with a practical application e.g. medicine, physics—Philosophy projects totality of sense on totality of Being, which becomes necessary, eliminating wonder that there is anything, allowing only admiration for beautiful order within necessity (Classical Tradition, Philosophy of Spirit); glory here is just totality of beauty, and this leap is in a tension of piety that world is good and Titanism of man imposing his own kalon on totality—Leap toward apprehension of Being and meaning gets phenomenon wrong; wonder at Being is permanent element in which thought moves (Heidegger), because Being causes wonder as something worthy of wonder (contra Heidegger)—Reflection while holding to wonder must be fundamental aim of metaphysics; approaching this reveals what in metaphysics deserves authentic name ‘Glory’. (p. 615): 1. My finding myself in world and in community of other existents is astonishing and cannot be explained by any worldly cause—Enigma of reproduction: from infinite prodigality/chance of act of generation, a new being is created which reflecting on its personal ego cannot regard itself as product of chance, for it can view Being as a whole from its unrepeatable perspective, though nothing in the world intended to produce this unique person—This question of why I and not another is here is unacknowledged but alive when the child’s “I” awakens in the experience of a “Thou” in its mother’s smile through which it learns it is encompassed in a sheltering and nourishing relation; consciousness is late compared to this basic mystery, awakening at the love of the Thou in whose bosom it has slept—It is right that the child should first glimpse God in its parents, and only then distinguish them—The child plays because it experiences Being and human existence as incomprehensible grace, not first as guilt and mercy; existence is both glorious and a matter of course, and everything else is an unfolding of that: no gravity of life goes further than first experience of miracle and play in the smile of the mother—Experiences of compulsion of duty, tragic oppositions in puberty; first mystery is unfolded in Angst (Heidegger) which is the way to pose question why Being should exist at all—None of this is changed if generative act is more technically controlled—I can never conceive of myself such that the world could not properly function without me: both spirit and Being nihilate with respect to each other, both are related but do not coincide. (p. 618): 2. All other existents stands in same relation to Being as I do, all partaking Being without exhausting it, even in forming a whole, which does not match my most primitive experience of Being—World totally participates in Being, which nihilates i.e. it is an identity with respect to every participation in it—Beauty of totality cannot be identified with glory of Being, but former only reflects latter; actus essendi has its bonum-pulchrum in which essentiae and world only participate, and to which my spirit is conformed and in whose light my spirit thinks: I do not bring essences into existence, nor does my agent intellect construct the world—Both concepts without intuition, and Being’s abundance without existent, remain empty: I cannot appease my wonder by gazing at Being, but wonder is directed at both sides of Ontological Difference—Being can only be interpreted within existence/Spirit, and Spirit grasps Being’s dependence on beings and its non-substantiality. (p. 619): 3. Because of Being’s dependence on explication in existents, Being cannot be attributed responsibility for essential forms—Being’s indifferentia contradicts any planning within Being; plans are in entities, not Being, though entities participate in Being: to interpret world as self-explication or expression of Being (Plotinus, Cusa, Idealists) is obliviousness of Being; only analogically can world be seen as expression of Being/fullness of reality, though the latter in no way expresses itself—Self-contained evolution can allow the ascent of individual essential forms, but not the inherent necessity of a single perfected essential form in which (contra Kant) pulchritudo and perfetio coincide; this work of creative Nature bears mark of original creative power unexplainable in terms of position within evolutionary process—Materialist and idealist explanations, either as development or as self-explication of Spirit, of animals fail: the former because it cannot account for glorious freedom of forms, latter because it cannot explain how an evolving Spirit could attain the perfection of the forms, which presupposes luminous intelligence and playful freedom exceeding constraints of Nature; none of these views explains why God should express Himself in these forms e.g. butterflies, and not others—Heidegerrian priority of Being over human existence does not mean responsibility for essential forms can be attributed to Being; closing circle between Being and essence eliminates glory, dissolving it into worldly beauty or eliminating its freedom to be itself: materialist criticism of Heidegger gets this, but they fail too to do justice to primal experience—Worldly expression is a category of the beautiful, which suggests the glorious, but can only inauthentically lay claim to sense of lordship and majesty—Ground of living entity is always mysteriously more than its phenomenal surface, though the mysterious more can be read from the surface—Being lets beings be and beings must allow Being to illumine—Elevation of Being can cause it to appear as alien, indifferent, fearful, value-less, meaningless, giving precedence to non-Being through experiences of guilt, illness, death, nature as Calvary of life and history as Golgotha of Spirit (Hegel); but elevation of Being can also appear as glory, of which expression and beauty are just an image, having infinite value, containing victories of lordly power over the merely possible, light over nothingness, and grace/gift of participation: Western metaphysics of light favor latter, late medieval and late modern metaphysics favor former—Being without kalon cannot guard against nihilism. (p. 624): 4. Existents are not integral parts of the Being, and Being/actuality of all does not generate entities from itself—Contra Heidegger, Ontological Difference does not rest in itself as an ultimate mystery; we must with Thomas penetrate beyond it to God-world distinction, where God is sole sufficient ground for both Being and existent in its form—Human existence, world, and Being are all insufficient grounds, all pointing to God’s ultimate freedom, which Being as non-subsistent and existent as always already constituted lack; glory of Being requires grounding in subsisting freedom of absolute Being, and dignity of each form requires grounding in God’s creative imagination—Gloriousness of Being’s “floating in the air” is the event of absolute freedom and grace in its open-ended sway, in which Being and existent each require one another—In the actual is a mystery beyond fullness and poverty, each of which accurately but inadequately expresses it—Fullness can unfold just once, in God, which does not need to encase itself against nothingness, but is pure power from whose potency all that is potential proceeds as abundance, and so is pure freedom not needing to guard itself but pure gift and love, which explains paradoxical existence of world alongside Infinite Being (glimpsed by Platonism, transparent only in Biblical revelation)—Personal and free depths of self-giving Being bring creation, the “fourth distinction”, to light: God is Non-Aliud Who covers all entities with His Being as participating in Him at an infinite distance—God-given Being and entities are each simultaneously fullness and poverty, reflecting God—In the positive side of the analogia entis, the finite subject already constitutes itself as letting-be of Being through an ekstasis from its own closed self, affirming the infinite poverty of fullness of Being, and of God within it—In this context takes place the Biblical process from God to man (Rom 8) as modes of radiant and universal love. III.A.2. The Theological A Priori Element in Metaphysics (p. 628): Biblical revelation rests on and fulfills metaphysics, which should not halt at preliminary stages—Questions whether glory of Being could be understood as abandonment not letting-be, why entity is sheltered in indifference of Being, and whether Being should not strive for its own self-elimination as in India—Both sides of choice of interpretation of Being, as protective accompaniment and uncanny alienation, command a truth, and so the choice cannot be decided by man—We cannot identify sides of Ontological Difference, or outpouring of Being with Christ’s kenosis, or human history with destiny of Being or dialectics of Spirit—To distinguish levels, especially creation and grace, metaphysics can at most refer to myth and religious eros—Taking seriously the address from Being allows man not to be submerged but to hear it as personal address (Homer, Pindar, Virgil) from God’s heart; all metaphysical fragments are contained in this unforeseeable speech, all oscillations (e.g. universality and uniqueness, failure and success, self-sacrifice and self-fulfillment) are turned upside down by Biblical God Who convicts man of disobedience, imposes on him a law, says things about him that would never arise in self-reflection, so that his self-concern is exceeded by the concern of Another, in which lies salvation—Revelation is the form of completion, so that the distinctions are at its disposal—Distinction between God and Being of existent is oscillation between giver and gift i.e. being given/received of the giver; nothing is substantial/subsistent but the radiant fullness of God’s Being in being given to the finite recipient (Franciscan and Dominican roots of this, contra essentialism)—To overlook noughting of Being in favor of essences is to blind oneself to the mysterious shining within Being (Mechthild), which is not but witnesses to the light—Pre-eminent place from which shining of Being is visible is receptivity of apatheia/poverty of spirit, though this can harden to defense against pain and so against love—Communication of Being, not of God or existents, in the child’s wonder at being permitted to be in the midst of what exists; permission to be as encouragement to believe in encompassing grace beyond all categories and laws, a more demanding categorical imperative than Kant’s: act so that you and all your fellow beings owed your existence to a boundless grace. III.B. Love as Custodian of Glory III.B.1. The Light of Being and Love (p. 634): The four phases of distinction are extension of what is present in child’s first act of consciousness, which already touches final end; all interruptions are just interpolations within first insight that I have been permitted entry, and second insight that we all have: much is real, but it is all not necessary within overarching Being, and within open light that is greater and more glorious than the beauty and terror of the world, which does not need us to see it—Within mutually conditioned freedoms of Being and the existent is the un/self-conditioned freedom of actus purus, which must be posited to safeguard child’s experience—God is shepherd and guardian of glory, creating the world without constraint, and imparting to it something of His freedom and power of gift i.e. love, so God can only “be” from love: to say anything else is to ascribe less to Him than is derived from Him—Fundamental metaphysical act is love within Ontological Difference; fundamental Christian act is love within God-world difference, containing and fulfilling metaphysical act—Love here is total human act of mind and body, of percipient intelligence—History of metaphysics as history of metaphysical love. (p. 637): Homer’s distinction between self-luminous gods and illumined men, and affirmation of enclosed darkness—Affirmation of distinction in Tragedians, but light turns to darkness in radicality of man’s exposure, and self-sacrifice included in affirmation—Pindar attains unity of distinction in agôn—First philosophers pursue unity of distinction, but Socrates keeps distinction open as does Plato, though the distinctions collapse in Timaeus and Aristotle, reawakened in Plotinus, for whom, though Being, love, and thought are one, both live in the grace of the One—As with earlier eros, Virgil’s amor is the light that discloses Being, love as pure ek-sistence of man in obedience to fate and as guiding gracious destiny in face of fate—Augustine takes metaphysics of Being-Light and Knowledge-Love into Christianity, light here being the truth that holds sway as openness of God, and man’s turning toward or away is determined by claims of love and man’s response—Dionysius’ paradox of God revealed in world as concealed, as light of divine eros; Erigena and Cusa have model of God-world as implication/explication, but avoid idealist rationalism by retaining the paradox, preserving space for love and awe in Benedict, Francis, Ignatius—Early medievals give first ontological attempts to see Being and existent as gift, leading to metaphysics of light, Thomas’ real distinction, and Metaphysics of the Saints; in all these doctrines of love, Dionysian darkness is still present—Testing of metaphysical love in late medieval nominalism and Gelassenheit—Thomas and Ignatius’ stress of God-Being distinction, and of spontaneity of spirit as quodammodo omnia as having freedom distinct from freedom of Being—Problem between human spirit’s active spontaneity and contemplative receptivity can lead to acts of folly as preference for God’s sovereign will, beyond harmony of cardinal virtues—Modern over-simplifications lead to loss of metaphysical act; Renaissance’s rediscovery of antiquity requires take world seriously in face of spiritualistic flight, and taking natural religion seriously in face of positivistic religion—But metaphysical eros (Ficino) is reduced to sexual, cosmic, or melancholic eros: wherever love does not second the metaphysical act, it collapses skeptically/agnostically, and glory is lost within beauty—Heidegger’s attempt to recover metaphysical love fails because he collapses fourth distinction into second, and no one would die for Being—Catastrophic philosophy of Spirit forgets Being in favor of Titanic immediacy with God, and glory collapses into self-glorification of Spirit, ending metaphysics and its love—All that remains is love among men, understood either as Absolute in the world (Marx), or as dissolved in the process (Hegel) for a greatest happiness goal to which my being-permitted-to-be and the Thou are subordinated as means to end, so we can give nothing in grace nor are we really permitted to be, so no real glory in interpersonal love, but only illusion that lovers should cynically or melancholically see through: no reason why it is better to exist where everything is reduced to constructible part of transcendental, technical, economic, or biological process/machine—Reducing metaphysics to science extinguishes Being and love, from which the philosophical act lives. III.B.2. The Christian Contribution to Metaphysics (p. 646): Christian faith requires philosophical inquiry: believing in God’s love for the world, the Christian must understanding Being in Ontological Difference as pointing to love, and live in accord with that—Most philosophers look for ground of Being within it, changing Why to What, leading to essentialization of Being (Aristotle, Heidegger); the Christian denies Being ultimate necessity, allowing it to hover in oscillation of non-having-to-be (contra Leibniz)—Christian is guardian of metaphysical wonderment that is origin of philosophy, which tends to reduce to marveling at beauty of existence/already adorned order/kosmos which is object of sciences (Plato, Aristotle) whose proud joy of discovery is not love, which loves Being a priori, receiving at as free gift in free gratitude—Eros is for the beauty of Nature, but its play is guided by intentions, and if love were just that, Nature would be a horror (Goethe, Hegel); metaphysical eros is for glory (Silesius)—Aesthetic theodicy that beauty and terror of world complement each other, on account of which God is justified as creator; when self-satisfied this is tasteless/intolerable, but it has grandeur when the language of a lover who perceives reflected glory in Being’s forms even the most hideous, and Christians must adopt this perspective in seeing glory and love of God most in darkness—Christians of today live in a night darker than the late Middle Ages, and must affirm Being theologically and metaphysically unperturbed by darkness, representative of all humanity, glorifying God in all things, and bringing light to dark areas of Being—The Christian is truest to his calling when he finds himself in the presence of the poorest and smallest area of love’s manifestation, to make present the sacrament of the eternal I-Thou relation in the most seemingly unimportant interpersonal relation; Christian love is not morally upright model for interpersonal conduct—Even in active engagement, the Christian just testifies to the light, and is its friend by being its servant—Faith authenticates and points the way forward for the Christian, who accepts a light of salvation which shines a priori from beyond light of pure reason, toward whose glory he is oriented receptively/attentively i.e. contemplatively—Freedom is founded in that man’s destiny is his being-determined; the Christian mystery between contemplation and action, between being absolutely determined by God and absolutely appropriating our own nature in freedom, decisively illumines Being and our place in it, active appropriation of destiny founded in passivity of self-denial/foolish and ever new detachment from both Being and existents (approached by Fichte, Heideger, Zen, Metaphysics of the Saints): no world-task excuses us from the need for radical detachment—Encompassing glory gives freedom with regard to worldly beauty; for the Christian, guilt and wrong appear as sin, against the background of eternal love that dies for it, and so sin can be drawn into glory of love that comprehends all things, unlike in cosmic eros or phenomenology of Spirit where sin is just compensated but not eliminated. (p. 652): On this basis, Christian has responsibility to develop comprehensive contemporary metaphysics: difficult because we have forgotten Being, easier because hidden premises have now emerged into light of day e.g. we see now our enslavement to matter/machine, that we cannot approach Being evolutionarily but only vertically, that no human wholeness can be constructed from domination of the world—Distance from work gained in orientation to Being is required for true mastery; only a distorted metaphysical perspective causes one to miss this—Transition from natural/agrarian-pastoral culture to technical culture is not responsible for loss of piety; latter has more profound insight into laws of Nature, and so it should appear more theophanous—What is needed is a Christian-led integration of service of the world into all-embracing openness of man to Being; service of the world must be measured by indifference, for man can only give himself once, as response to being permitted to be by the one Who wants man’s self—We can only experience gratuity of Being by experiencing vanity/uselessness of our selves, use-less so that it can be forgiven—The world and we Christians must be tested by fire; as thinkers we are brought by Christ to place of ultimate decision, for there is no neutral metaphysics, and as Christians we are always humans i.e. entities determined by the metaphysical act—Pre-Christian thought is advent-like open to something greater, Post-Christian thought has been determined by what is greater than itself: the Christian sees this without arrogance, and does not have ready-made answers to metaphysical questions, but rather must think—Christ’s openness to the Father shows the supreme exposure of God’s love and supreme decision of man for God, and this can cause the metaphysician to ask whether he thinks sufficiently openly. Volume 6: Theology: The Old Covenant Introduction 1. Transition to the Concluding Theme (p. 9): Concluding volumes arrive at theology of the glory of the living God, looking back to first volume’s aisthesis of glory that reveals itself, which theological act is shaped by its content, to which it attains in theological act of transcendence i.e. transport of creature beyond its natural cognitive faculties i.e. grace that allows the creature to withstand the Lord’s splendor—Though God uses creatures to speak in Scripture, nothing can be formal object of believer’s perception revelation except God qua God, as opposed to God qua horizon, the object of natural theology—Glory as God’s distinctive property; the more one encounters is, the more one extols it (Magnificat), and the more one knows it, the more one realizes His love transcends all comprehension (Eph. 3:19)—Paradox begins with self-communication of Wholly Other and ends with thanksgiving of overtaken creature; turning to creatures for salvation exists sphere of revelation—God’s relation to world presupposes no prior communion, since non-necessary created world points to free lordliness—God’s self-communication cannot occur on basis of neutral foreknowledge, but only through shock of God’s glory: his word has power to command obedience, but one can never get used to God (Sir. 1:14-18)—Object of theology is not mysteries/truths beyond reason (Scheeben) but the living God in His glory Who is all truth—At decisive places in Scripture, God’s glory/kabod manifests itself before His word is heard, and man encounters God through the power of God not of man, in a space opened by God made accessible beyond nature: only where God makes His habitation is covenant, existence according to God’s law/torah, holiness possible—Investiture with mission follows on vision of God’s glory, and all liturgical institutions can be traced to epiphany of glory on Horeb—Even before man is addressed, appearance of Absolute Subjet is not abstract/without relation to humans involved: glory discloses God’s holiness and their unholiness, so there is no reposeful aesthetic contemplation of God in Himself Who confronts, judges, and graces the world. 2. The Themes of Biblical Aesthetics (p. 14): To be obedient to Biblical revelation, we cannot detach theme of glory from context of revelation, which is colored by the emerging glory of the Lord, and cannot be isolated from other themes even if they at first seem independent—Second theme of theological aesthetics is God’s creaturely partner, His image and likeness; it belongs to God’s lordliness to be able to make an image of Himself, so certain traits of glory must be proper to the image (Ps. 8), and so the movement of revelation is to make image and glory coincide in Christ—Like tension of splendor and form in worldly aesthetics, there is here a tension between formless glory and formed image—Third theme is work that God has set between Himself and His image, the realm of grace, covenant, justification, instruction of how people can dwell in God’s realm—Question of how failing order of mortal existence can perdure before absolute order, how God’s indulgence in imputing righteousness to the unrighteous can coincide with real ontological righteousness; only NT can fully illumine these questions, but it develops in OT—Drama begins in contradiction between holiness and sin; only God’s glory, not the glory of gods, is opposed to sin and end that darkness—This is not meant to be a complete theology of OT or NT, or critical study of development of kabod. 3. Glory as Constant Biblical Theme (p. 17): Great transformation of idea of divine glory from Pentateuch to Johannine writings, but these phases constitute a whole and support one another—Individual epiphanies taken by themselves (e.g. that of Sinai) appear like contradictory compositions of mythical epiphanies, which do not allow access to original theophany—Further tradition of theophanies of Elijah on Horeb, Transfiguration, Passion, prophets, etc., with retrospective references—Various lines of theophany traditions in OT and NT, which give rise to hymnic, prayer, and liturgical traditions of images—The one thing at which everything else aims attains definitive form in Incarnation (Jn. 1), where glory entails fulfilled truth of image and grace of covenant, ultimately in unity of Cross and Resurrection; in John’s vision, tension between present contemplation of God’s glory and eschatological hope of it emerges as Christian’s penultimate experience. 4. Conclusion [III/2, Part 3 (*never written*)] (p. 19): Biblical theology develops into ecclesial theology, which must be taken in ecumenical breadth (Orthodox, Catholic, Evangelical)—Summaries of previous volumes of The Glory of the Lord: only Biblical theology is the center from which the 12 theological aesthetics can be interpreted/justified, but it is not a supra-system, and only the Holy Spirit can expound the glory of God’s love in Christ for all ages of the Church—Biblical theology took room in concrete human history of myth, philosophy, poetry; according to revelation, from the outset there is a supernatural relationship between God and created world/human spirit: because of grace’s hidden work, myth/philosophy/poetry can house an imitation of glory—In Bible, revelation takes up pre-existent religious forms: in myth, cultic worship, humanist wisdom, Greek thought; if it had not taken up these forms, revelation would have been suspected either of being historical or being just one form of historical utterance among others—In the Bible all these forms are denuded; the same can be said of philosophy in relation to revelation. (p. 23): Theoretical ecclesial/ecumenical theology’s foreground is liturgy and its postlude is Christian art—a. Liturgy grows out of revelation insofar as God’s demonstration of His glory is always necessarily answered by the glorification of God; no adequate distinction between God’s word and man’s answer, seen especially in Eucharist’s inseparable God’s gift to man and man’s return of the gift—Cultic liturgy is inseparable from liturgy of existence unto His glory, founded in faith, established on Father’s hidden will-to-salvation, on God’s love for everything opened in the Cross, and on admission into this realm through baptism—Sanctity is liturgy of life i.e. existence lived away from oneself in obedient recognition of God’s glory alone—Ecclesial and individual liturgy coincide in their meaning the glorification of God’s glory—b. The whole of an Ecclesial theology must show what glorification of God alone consists in—Scholasticism/Augustine problematically reduce Biblical glory univocally to pagan fame or honor (Cicero)—God’s glorification includes an eschatological kingdom of glory as manifestation as culmination of salvation-history of God’s self-glorification—A fruitful ecumenical dogmatics must rely on each Church’s theology being founded in glory—Catholicism’s projection over other dogmatics is decisive final deepening of faith’s understanding of God’s glory—c. Christian art raises question of relation of theologically beautiful and inner-worldly beauty—In Bible, artists are specially endowed with charism of divine Spirit—Wherever God’s free revelation intervenes in human context, the context cannot be reduced to theoretical laws or practical rules—The attempt to restore glory to theology must remain a fragment. I. God’s Glory and Man I.A. Glory I.A.1. Dialectic of Sensory Manifestation I.A.1.a. Appearance, Kabod (p. 29): Question of how revelation of divine can take place—To have an inkling of the divine at the edge of one’s finitude seems like revelation, bringing about piety and awe, a sense of a directing Meaning in one’s otherwise meaningless life—Inventions of gods—Question of how it would have to happen were God to disclose Himself to us on His own initiative, rather than us just attempting to penetrate His realm, in spite of us tending to put a finite form on all that approaches us—Beings in the world have the not-fully-comprehensible power of appearing/manifesting to one another in our existence and in our potency, like a spell around us; we each have/manifest/defend a secret, free, personal sphere, with a “prestige”, which pertains inseparably to both biology and spirit—Biblical sense of human kabod, weightiness, might, radiant center; divine kabod would have character of lordliness, sublime glory, unsubmerged in biological sphere—Theophanies in which God is sensed, but the sensory manifestation is a signal/symbol for presence of absolute spiritual might—In Bible, no purely spiritual revelations, because man is never purely spiritual, but appearing form is just the indication of kabod not kabod itself; kabod is inseparable from but not coincident with His holiness, might, name, countenance, expressing His will-to-salvation, identical to Him or His manifested attributes: all aspects must be seen in mutual complementation/interpenetration—Intimate connection between appearance and subject cannot be lost; appearing in a broken way, from a free subject, where freedom of appearance is an element of the beautiful—No distinction of concrete and abstract kabod; God’s coming into presence is only abstract (Hegel), as seen in the redactors of the Pentateuch not trying to harmonize different traditions more than superficially; what is essential is the theological dialectic that unfolds through the narratives’ contradictions. I.A.1.b. Knowing and Not Knowing (p. 35): In J, the name Yhwh is already familiar before Ex. 3; in E, it is introduced for the first time, so Moses is in a dramatic dialectic between knowing and not knowing—God’s name is dialectical: one name lacks content, the other is a promise of God’s self-attestation in a cult for the people: Israel knows God as freely acting for them without being able to be controlled—Dialectic of Moses seeing God’s behind, but not His face (Ex. 33-34). I.A.1.c. Seeing and Not Seeing (p. 36): Moses and the elders are said to have seen God face to face, and eaten a covenant meal before Him—The people saw His glory out of the fire, cloud, and darkness, but saw no form and only heard a voice; this applies also to the elders and Moses, who is spared a vision of God out of mercy—The vision of God is of His face and glory—Moses’ irradiation with God’s glory in being caught up in this vision/non-vision. I.A.1.d. Form and Non-Form (p. 37): Opposition of form/temuna and non-form—Things like fire, cloud, pillar have some form, but none compared to the gods—Moses not the people see God’s form; the Psalmist above all longs to see God’s form (Ps. 17:15), and in Job 4:14-17, there is certain knowledge of the presence of a form that is felt not seen—This form is not a temporary embodiment of God or a transparent messenger-subject (Num. 12:8)—The beauty/tub not the face of God is seen (Ex. 33:19): this is knowledge that is intimately disclosed even in its concealment (see Jn. 5:37, Hymn 26 of Ephraem of Syrian). I.A.1.e. Dazzling Darkness (p. 39): Images visible to the people move in alteration between blinding light and deepest darkness, deliberately joining different traditions without full integration: E emphasizes threatening darkness at core of appearance, J has fire and smoke at core of appearance; E’s has effect of tremendum, J’s of fascinosum—This fire and cloud are not volcanic, but descend from above—Transformations of the light-darkness motif—P harmonizes the traditions and calls the phenomenal appearance kabod-Yhwh in which God, in the form of fire and wrapped in cloud, is present to the people and founds the cult (Ex. 40:34-38); the glory is over and in the tent of covenant, and plays a role in sacrifices and judgments—This kabod with univocally fixed essence appears derivative and faded (2 Cor. 3:10); primary scheme emerges at Tabor, and in Biblical mysticism of Gregory of Nyssa, Denys, John of the Cross. I.A.1.f. Abode and Event (p. 42): Sensory manifestation of glory is dialectical in insoluble contradictions regarding spatial presence of God, presenting Himself as one Who dwells, descends, comes and goes, and is a fellow-traveller—In old cultic sagas, He presents Himself as one who dwells in special places and reveals Himself at times in dreams/visions—Even God of the Patriarchs also descended from heaven, and this movement opens a living relational space between God’s and man’s place—The mountain where God dwells is where He descends—Movement of encounter in the tent of meeting is an event not a state, as in the cultic or juridical context; in the tabernacle, the glory descends definitively to abide (shakan, hence shekinah)—Intertwined traditions that covenant was concluded on mountain or on the plain with the people: man ascends/transports to the place of God, and God descends to the place of man, and both in the sphere of the senses—From the decisive experience of God, the sanctified people take a memory, a permanent instruction, a representative of God, and God Himself: God Who has no history becomes involved in accomplishing men’s temporal and spatial movements not as observer, but as one Who journeys and experiences with them. I.A.1.g. Dialectic of Fire (p. 44): Paradoxes of God’s sensory manifestation fade in Israel’s later history, except for the paradox of fire, which constantly attains new depths of meaning—Fire is an excellent manifestation of the ineffable—Israel is the people which at the hour of its birth looked into the flame of God, but Israel could not withstand this, and so sent Moses ahead—The words of God burn the people (Jer. 5:14), but only because God burns in jealousy of a unique election, which directs us to the uniqueness of free, living, sovereign subject, whose election is a consuming love and fire of punishment—Deuteronomy intensifies both the wrath and care of this jealousy, intensified even further in Prophets, where God’s face is a blaze of punishment against the whole world, and also an eternal love, revealed when man allows himself to be entirely consumed—Dialectic of fire resolved in Cross and eschaton—Elijah is full of consuming jealously, capable of calling fire from heaven, and goes to heaven in a fiery chariot, but who leaves behind all sensory manifestations in His encounter with God; God is in the ultimate experience of being grasped by not grasping the gentle breeze, more non-vision than vision, but not a spiritualization but an intensification of the presence of the Awesome, the tremendous presence by which the contradictory signs are indicators equivocal in themselves, but deriving clarity from Him Who reveals Himself in them. I.A.2. The Divine “I” I.A.2.a. Integration (p. 47): No dichotomy between glory/God’s immanence and holiness/God’s transcendence in OT (contra Efros)—Sinaitic/Solomonic kabod-Yhwh is for P legitimation of/God’s seal on cultic/sacro-juridical order erected in covenant—This sign is not first or last word on God’s glory in Bible: forms of manifestation were present in E and J before their fixed form in P, and similar concepts were later used to express this same attribute of God e.g. doxa, so we cannot cling to kabod in developing God’s glory theologically; doxa previously meant opinion or reputation, so to the Greek translator, the element of renown (shekina, majestas) in kabod predominated over element of splendor (yekara, claritas)—25 Hebrew words translated with doxa, of which kabod determines the fundamental meaning, coloring the others—The sensory appearance is not a marginal phenomenon that could be suspended in favor of invisible, abstract, ethical glory; its origins are in a sphere where the sensory and the spiritual are indivisibly fused—P’s kabod-Yhwh is a dialectical not symbolic synthesis; the subject of manifestation, the divine “I”, cannot be given unequivocal expression in the human sphere—This “I” reveals itself as a speaking and an acting agent, and thereby truthfully discloses His unique nature/being; His glory is inseparably coupled to His modes of expression and His attributes which must necessarily be disclosed in His revelation—In His self-disclosure, God is ever more manifest as the Incomprehensible One; in process of integration, the more God’s aspects are differentiated, the more they interpenetrate—Historical revelation is most splendid introduction to theology, occurring under guidance of the speaking God/Theos legon; it would be deadly for faith if God were not the God of glory—Danger of God’s glory dissolving into collection of forces with no Lord or with God’s being unknowable behind them, as approached in Late Jewish hypostatizations of God’s attributes, Gregory Palamas, Gilbert de la Poree, destroying essence of revelation—Aspects are integrated as converging through time toward a point of convergence beyond OT, giving OT a peculiar suspension. I.A.2.b. Power (p. 51): Overwhelming sensory signs by which God proclaims His presence point initially and elementally to power—Signs amalgamated in phenomenon of the storm as expression of God’s might, though Yhwh is not a nature-god but a God who leads, chooses, instructs: nature points to but does not characterize His potency, which has tremendous freedom—Israel experiences His might first in war; He is a warrior-hero (Ex. 15:3) and victory in decisive proof that He Who chose Israel can accomplish what He began: God reveals His name only by pointing to His active presence, in proof-by-power—His glory is interlocked with His superior, imposing lordliness; union of power and glory preserved in NT—The divine subject has the whole space of freedom which allows Him to be present wherever He will, especially in covenant with His chosen friends. I.A.2.c. Word (p. 53): All sensory revelation of glory is directly oriented to word of God, a signal that points to quality of the speaker—Example of incorporation of Decalogue into theophany, and more close association of word and sensory manifestation in calling of Prophets—In its utterance and origin from divine “I”, the word is not dialectical, though it has two sides, a word of grace and of judgment; the cadence of the absolute subject’s word is that it immediately confiscates and undergirds its hearers’ whole existence (Sir. 17:13), expecting one response of assent and obedience, based on its lordliness, not based on hearer’s desire or agreement: a unique objectivity and totality, with total immediacy, challenging the subject with the most sensible and possible of realities (Deut. 30:11-14)—It non-violently summons the finite “I” to be fully itself, it gives the people the possibility of being a self—Isaiah is the first person in history to perfectly possess an “I” in his “here I am” (von Rad), and the more deeply the self awakens in its answer, the more boundlessly the absolute “I” opens in its glorious lordliness—The legal/priestly tradition is founded on God’s word of command, but it cannot resist new prophetic commands, and gradually comes under command that created “I” should be immediately at disposal of disposing “I” in total love—Word of God can be received and followed only by transport of man’s spirit into God’s or God’s Spirit being engrafted into man; by the Spirit one has fear of the Lord and knows the glory of the word—In both obedience and resistance, God’s word exhibits itself as deed: by dividing for man into promise/grace and threat/judgment, God shows His transcendental unity and power; His word is not frustrated by man’s opposition, but accomplishes all its content. I.A.2.d. Holiness and Name (p. 56): God’s self-utterance makes Him nameable and approachable, incomparable and unapproachable—With creature’s primal intuitive knowledge of abyss between men and gods comes primal concept of holiness/separation from world and so danger, requiring purification—This natural religion continues in Israel’s understanding of holiness/cult, in which ritualism does not fade with prophecy, but passes on to NT this primal form of incarnate religiosity, though prophecy revolutionizes interior understanding of holiness—God’s election of Israel and possession of the earth lift both out of the sacred/profane dichotomy, at least eschatologically; God is holy over against world, but He offers this as space where Israel is to dwell after being transported out of itself—God’s holiness is active, imposing, effective, self-glorifying and self-sanctifying, so there is a circumincession between glory and holiness, and so Israel’s obedience must be active, sanctifying/glorifying God, primarily by making room for grace—God manifests/communicates that He is God by revealing His holiness, and so reveals His name, which does not imply power over Him, since He communicates it entirely freely, though this revelation involves some reticence and esotericism; for God to give His name to someone is for God to possess that person: God’s name is a pledge of His presence, like the Eucharist—God is in heaven and only His Name in the temple, but He is still close and intimate to man—After the destruction of the temple, name, holiness, glory enter circumincession, which is maintained in NT. I.A.2.e. Face (p. 61): God’s face/countenance turns to and is sought by the believer; His face is light and not darkness (Ps. 89:16, 1 Jn 1:5), a love and grace manifested in His act of turning to the creature, an evidence of God’s manifestness beyond sensory vision or spiritual insight: all of man knows/perceives that God Who created Him is standing before him—Israel means God-seeing man (Philo, Irenaeus)—The most compelling evidence is having been looked on—Israel knew primitively what Christianity calls walking in God’s presence, the prerequisite for which is purity of heart and pliancy of faith: a seeing God based on being seen by Him—Knowing one’s whole existence, and that of the whole world, is open to God produces fright, then happiness, then a plea for this being seen to continue; God’s exaltation above the heavens manifests His glory, and His glance into the depths manifests His grace—Higher dialectic of His face being uncovered/turned towards one or concealed/averted, an experience which embraces the whole created world; when He is turned towards one, one’s experience of light is in this life, but His turning away is not a simple result of sin, but His personal decision (Is. 57:17, 64:6)—Seeking the face of God is not a merely metaphorical/traditional way of speaking; to see His face is first to come to the temple/procession of the ark of the covenant: Israel’s liturgies are not merely mythical analogies, but historically incarnate religion—Prayers for personally immediate seeing His face, at once a hope for and a certainty of face-to-face/heart-to-heart immediacy; hence the opposition to all images (Augustine)—These experiences do not contradict the claim that His face is invisible; unlike with the Greek gods, God never becomes wholly invisible: to see God is to see with God’s manner of seeing, and the search for God is the existential/experiential knowledge of God (Hosea)—Hence Paul’s anchoring of man’s vision of God in God’s vision of man and man’s awareness of being seen. I.A.3. Cosmic Liturgy (p. 68): We must also integrate into God’s glory attributes of God that express His relation as gracious to man, but also revelations of glory that take form of natural phenomena, all oriented to praise, witnessing to renewed presence of God of history and the universe—Language of such witness is not Pentateuch’s dialectical procedure, but in terms of emphatic symbols of self-revealing Lord—The many images show that Yhwh was never seen as a storm-god—Key is seen in Song of Deborah (Judg. 5:4f) in which the natural theophany is a theophany of salvation, and whose point of departure is Sinai theophany; later prophetic compositions assume this archaic form when comprehensive aid is expected from God, which requires just as powerful a revelation—Theophanies in the hymn of Ex. 15: God lays bare the bottom of the sea/abyss/nether-world, and so shows His power over it; joined to portrayal of natural forces of storm is historicized imagery from Akkadian myth of Marduk’s taming of chaotic waters/Tiamat—Ps. 29 draws on mythic images/hymns to weather gods, but for the sake of Yhwh’s glory, to Whom the heavens call “Glory!”; here, his victory over primal waters is without reference to salvation history—Israel can adopt such a song because it knows God’s name not from the thunder, but from His self-revelation—God’s ultimate attribute is holiness, and this is cause for jubilation—Post-Exilic psalms recall God’s great deeds by adopting an archaic tone, using myth to portray saving event, and natural wonder to interpret historical occurrence (Ps. 77); God’s glory is storm, but it is also creative force for Israel’s salvation, which is deliverance from Sheol/death, all theophany in the context of God’s attributes as savior, condescension, redeeming love (Ps. 18)—In His manifestation in marvelous/unfathomable natural phenomena, God is recognized as Lord of the world, both by non-Jews like Job, and Jews like Sirach and in Ps. 104: Ps. 29 is the sensory glorification of the abstract non-integrated kabod, and Ps. 104 is the sensory glorification of the concrete integrated kabod, a liturgy of man with his historical knowledge of God and unconscious nature with its mute encoded language—The Prophets transfer past/present events o the future with the idea of the day of Yhwh blending with traditional theophanic images—Hymn in Habakkuk 3 serves liturgical purposes and gathers archaic images, to express eschatological hope of redemption, taking up Exodus and Isaiah traditions, using storm and victory images, but what was a battle in nature is now God’s historical struggle against the godless—No sharp demarcations between historical kabod, prophetic kabod, cosmic kabod: these are integrated, but the first is foundational, and the experience is first sensory, then drawing on natural and mythic images; the vision of God’s glory in cosmos is vision of those who know God’s historical word/action and so see Creator in creation—God’s bow in the heavens is a bow as instrument of war, signifying peace similar to God in whisper not storm or fire; the rainbow is the revelation of God’s glory, a halo around Him (Apoc. 4:3): the glory of God as His return to judgment of grace. I.B. The Image I.B.1. The Image as the Creature’s State of Suspension I.B.1.a. The Figure of God’s Hands (p. 81): In addition to splendor, the beautiful needs figure and image: figure attests to Him who set it up, and image is beautiful as imaging forth of splendor beyond images—In beauty of nature and art is victory of form-giving natura naturans/human spirit over rebelliousness of matter—More than any other theology, Biblical theological aesthetics allows development of element of image, as something God set up with freedom over against Himself, which is to know God, freely respond to Him, lovingly welcome Him; this is possible only because eternal Trinitarian reciprocity of love—Only Biblical theology provides non-tragic justification for worldly beauty, since only here can image be secured in eternal Image, the image that transcends all images—Creature as image can only be understood through origin in and return to God, but creature is also given space to be at home with itself before God, an autonomy that is a world of its own with respect to God—On this basis we can turn to grace/offer of covenant, which definitively reveals God’s glory and explain why God made an image: a mutual priority of image and covenant, former as outward ground of latter, latter as inner ground of former (Barth)—Creature has a proper suspension: its nature is being-in-nothingness, and is cannot take a position over against God—The forming of man is a final victory over matter and crown of preceding edifice: God is depicted as sculptor/potter, and place for creature is reposing patiently between God’s shaping hands—That God breathed into creation the breath of life exceeds analogy with creative artist: God creates from nothing—As a fashioned image, man is similar to God; man’s image-quality includes body as expressing interiority, showing that God also has a form, which exceeds other forms-- Statues are divine because formed, but the relation to God here is more undefined/analogical: it is mysterious where the similarity lies, but it raises man over the rest of the world, so that he rules over the rest of the world—Man is representative of God’s power as ruler, but also man has immediacy/proximity to God, an ontological statement—Man does not loses his likeness by sinning—God also preserves distance as seen in His use of the plural in His “let us make men”: he turns to the heavenly hosts, but here the inspiration is more than the inspired writer can grasp, since the Trinitarian reading is the plenary sense of this passage, though the writer intends angels as second causes—Man is given a godlike element, though immortality is hardly hinted at: the key is man’s representation of and contradistinction from God. I.B.1.b. Crowned with glory (p. 86): Ps. 8 reflects on Gen. 1: image here seen as dominion over animals created by God—Wonder that God has put something of His heavenly kabod into man’s tiny being—Man is compared to the celestial beings, not immediately to God, though man is interiorily crowned by being related to God—Oscillation between lowliness and exaltation, God’s glory and the reflected splendor of that glory enfolding man—Both texts envision man as a whole, without isolating his soul; beauty can be used in place of glory (Ezek. 28:12f)—Beauty and form belong together, and both belong with God Whose form/beauty are incomprehensible mystery (Brunner)—With motif of image comes motif of eros, first of male for a being who possesses same reflection of glory as he has, then God miraculously fulfilling this yearning, and then in the one flesh; J presents eros as image implanted by Creator, and sexual relation between man and woman as greatest miracle and mystery of Creation, part of man’s distinctive beauty not a merely biological mystery—Greek Christian theology tends to locate God’s image entirely in spirit, leading to Augustine’s psychological trinity, and Protestant dogmatics tend to see the image as lost by sin or as identical to our being addressed by God’s Word—Contrary to these is Sir. 17:1-13, and only on that basis is there the law, covenant, and understanding of God’s decrees; Sirach sees man’s mortality and knowledge of good and evil as part of God’s original plan, without jeopardizing the image, which includes both senses and spiritual faculties—Governance here culminates in praise of God’s glory in creation and covenant—Takes up secular character of these Biblical statements pointing to general religious understanding of existence as in Egypt or Babylon. I.B.1.c. The Suspension of the Image (p. 91): All statements of man as image of God have provisional character; man may not do what God has done i.e. make an image/selem, which would have only human glory and distort the immediacy of God and man, within which man’s beauty retains the rank God assigned it—The image is an attribute of man as such, but it is essentially a reference to God as its origin and finality; it attains stability only in NT understanding (e.g. Ps. 8 transposed Christologically in Heb. 2:6-10)—OT theme of suspension has 4 dimensions. (p. 92): 1. In Gen. 1:27, man’s procreative ability is removed from God’s image to a word of blessing (von Rad), yet man and woman give definite contour to the image (Barth: to be human is to be with others)—Gen. 2 knows of relationship between man and God before woman, but with male creation is not yet completed—Woman is made by God for/from man; man and woman’s I-Thou relation not sexually derived is within man’s nature as God’s image: their existence-for-one-another, hierarchical but co-equal, constitutes human subject and partnership of God and man—In virtue of his nature and as receiving his partner, man is prepared for grace (Barth), but entirely suspended before NT when man-woman relation will be immersed in glory as incarnate relation between Christ and Church, an eschatological image in which marriage transcends itself supra-sexually to become virginal and Eucharistic reciprocity between Christ as Man and Church as Woman. (p. 93): 2. Second suspension is between nature and grace: God’s kabod over man endures through sin, but man by his revolt can also be robbed of kabod (Ezek. 28:18), stripped naked by God, exchanging glory for shame (Hos. 4:7)—But even then God does not take back His call, claim, or promise—We cannot reconstruct what existence in grace of Paradise was like, except somewhat analogically/dialectically (Schumann), and we cannot unearth wholly univocal structures of “nature” from our historical states—Our search for God’s intention in making this image in man points us to definitive image in Christ. (p. 94): 3. Third suspension is between being and act—The image as expressed in man’s mission to rule dictates a dialogical relation between knowledge of God and response to His call; the first is the I-Thou structure of reciprocal existence/Mitsein and is perduring being of image, but second can be broken off by sinner: man’s being is intact but his agency has collapsed—Being is punished by being reduced from lordship to servitude; this contains the salvation from the “servant of Yhwh”—In Christ is resolved tension of being and act. (p. 95): Everything is summed up in suspension between Adam and Christ—Adam’s glory as God’s image is legible only with reference to Christ, Who really entered old form of image to open it from within and bring it to perfection—This transcends all creaturely/worldly images, authenticating polarity between God as image-maker and creature as image through relation of Father as begetting and Son as begotten—Christ as icon of God for Whom all things were made does not abolish lordliness of man, but relativizes it into a kind of dominion determined by the Son Who takes on form of servant—Open suspension of image cannot be a clear self-contained concept, since the image of the Wholly Other elusive and free God cannot be ratified by creatures; the dignity of man as God’s image is that he cannot be pinned down absolutely, and only God can know/represent the image’s contents. I.B.2. The Image: To Be a World Before God I.B.2.a. A Sketch Book (p. 96): A concrete look at interior vitality of the image, the subject who receives the divine Word in the freedom assigned him, in his ability to be a world before God—In Bible, seen best in Israel’s period of humanism and enlightenment of the kings (von Rad)—After the emergence of man from subjection to a wholly sacral cosmos to distinctive humanness/profaneness and to interest in things as they are in themselves, allowing the distance necessary for history (Yahwist, narrator of story of David)—The miraculous here is seen in man as image of God standing and acting freely on world stage in proximity to or guilty distance from the Archetype—Parallels to Homer and Greek tragedian view of man—But tragedian who wrote story of David abandons all dependence on sacral myths—Intrusion of foreign myths in period of later kings is driven by purely human political factor—Everything in Bible related to development of image in its worldly character is related to Solomon and his secular, international education—Relation of image man to its Archetype can have great variety of representation (contrast David to Song of Songs/Ecclesiastes)—Contrast of Saul and David; the latter is allowed the free obedience to shape the world in responsibility to himself, which occurs tragically as rejection of sacral kingdom for kingdom of men—Judges is a series of rough sketches, and only later humanist period could weave them in as part of God’s history with His people, done through the Deuteronomist organizing material according to infidelity, decline, punishment, clamoring to God, deliverance: a pattern repellent to both the reader and God (Judg. 10:13)—Into this pattern are put the half-sculpted figures, topped by Samson (compared to Hercules, Enkidu, and the Decameron)—Divine frame placed by the Deuteronomist around the picture becomes clearer the less religious/edifying (e.g. drinking songs) the material he uses, and the parallels to later OT and NT figures become clearer: over all inadequacy the archetype is active in the image (Claudel’s Prakriti), for God’s Spirit takes pains to finish the form into which He can pour Himself, the man after His heart. I.B.2.b. The Great Theater of the World (p. 101): A king can be wholly royal and wholly do the will of God with God’s grace—Tragedy in David’s story, which are also developed with delight; in them, the great game of life is played out—The eye for beauty in the depiction of various figures—David and Jonathan (comparison to Achilles and Patroclus)—David’s gifts are friendship and Aristotelian, forgiving, captivating magnanimity/grandezza—Plot interweaves all possible motives for actions—The narrative disposes quickly of political events to make time for great human tragedy beginning with adultery with Bathsheba and murder of Uriah, following God’s assurance his house would stand forever, and followed by God’s curse (comparison to Eli, and to Greek tragedies)—David’s humiliations, especially the episode with Absalom (comparison to Jephthah, Agamemnon and Iphigenia, Christ’s Ecce Homo) and the deliverance of the sons of Saul to the Gibeonites (comparison to Antigone)—The action in this theater of the world is enveloped by God Who is not just spectator/judge, but is the hidden in the actions of His images and thereby participates in hidden and manifest ways, letting man explore his freedom, but also conducting events as play of His elections, and exhibiting tragic mask of the old king with the bleeding heart. I.B.2.c. The Splendor of Power (p. 106): Opening of Solomon’s reign with purges of new government, and his dream while offering sacrifice at Gibeon during his marriage to Pharaoh’s daughter; David’s unmythical kingdom must be secured in peace by political/cultural/commercial alliances: this cultural enlightenment is de-mythologizing, but cannot dispense of royal mythical draperies for reasons of strategy and prestige—Mimicry of Egypto-Akkadian ideology of the king has serious effects in important of foreign art, poetry, and Wisdom literature—Love is no longer subservient to politics, and the court becomes stage for courtly love—Transition from defensive, charismatically-led army to standing professional army subjugating foreign nations; secular power is religiously justified, and worldly prestige is related to God (1 Chron. 29:10-13)—Building of Solomon’s temple and palace, and his prayer that the kabod of Sinai come as legitimation of new sanctuary: God enters the action in the garment of darkness and hiddenness, and light is just represented as the temple: God occupies the temple only conditional upon living in His sight—The ark early as place of God’s presence and as source of primitive attitude to numinous, and later as God’s footstool, Whose throne is in heaven. (p. 110): A king represented divine order of world; God’s presence is concentrated in his person—Kings were seen as belonging to divine sphere or as embodiments/sons of gods in Egypt, Akkadia, Phoenicia; from the king on the basis of divine marriage emanates something of awesome divine kabod, but king is also resplendent mediator of joy, both praised in poetry of Oriental courts—In this context we should read Ps. 45, the Bible’s royal marriage hymn; there are bolder parallels in inscriptions of Assyrian kings: in his beauty and power, the king radiates the divine/Elohim—Esther introduces into Bible the kabod of the theophanous Oriental ruler (parallels in Enoch, Proverbs): the frightful splendor of offended majesty, and the gracious splendor of the approaching king, so the king is compared to an angel or even to God, for to see his face can mean death—Bride in Esther and Ps. 45 described in terms of beauty and glory—Deuteronomist is apprehensive at Solomonic mix of spiritual and secular, but he delights in unfolding of power, and the situation becomes problematic when eros trespasses limits of reasons of state; discomfort grips us when spiritual wisdom and earthly glory are attributed without distinction to grace of God: attempts at legitimating the glory of Christian empire (e.g. Constantine, Justinian, Charlemagne, Sun King) have been based on Davidic-Solomonic conception, without realizing it is problematic earlier for NT than OT—The Bible never condemns as hybris the attempt of the image to emulate its archetype; it finds the gifts of the Creator in all creaturely goods, and allows man to develop his freedom, but such that God’s glory envelops all human power so as to direct and dissolve it at the right moment. I.B.2.d. Wisdom of Life (p. 114): Education/enlightenment are part of splendor of royal court—Solomon’s wisdom in competition with the wise men of the “East” and Egypt—Proverbs’ rootedness is period of the kings and in Egyptian wisdom; it is a monument to new process of lay internationally-oriented education, with its focus on God/providence not historical revelation/covenant, for the sake of successful government career with religiously-based ethic: an anthropocentric liberal theology, a development of possibility of the image by emphasizing its counter-position to divine archetype, so that now international man as such has a place within total encounter of living God and Israel—This is neither titanic enterprise of unbelief nor in competition with God’s authentic revelation—In Egyptian wisdom books, order of the world rests on maat i.e. unity of truth and justice which God instilled into world and according to which men must live, who are copies of God and have God’s instructions in their conscience as shame; wisdom is embodied in superiors and the tradition, and the goal of education is Greek sophrosyne, sophia, andreia—God is hidden but only the fool denies Him because He is manifest in the whole order of nature; He alone judges, and no man is sinless—All this Egyptian wisdom is within the world, while uncertainty is over the beyond and the ultimate value of earthly life, so Epicureanism lurks behind the earnest moral teachings—These themes are taken up by Solomon: wisdom is art of mastering the world, though humility and modesty in God’s sight are needed for wisdom, requiring ability to listen and keep silent, leading to expertise in life—Egyptian conscience/shame is Solomonic fear of the Lord: God directs and leads, and one should entrust oneself to Him—Only God bestows wisdom, and here wisdom is personified as a sister/spouse/confidante/one calling—Utility of wisdom is emphasized, and earthly happiness/success is its reward, for order comes through immanent righteousness, of which order God is founder/guarantor—The poor man is despised, though the wise man has pity on him to honor the Creator, Whose plan founds the existence of both; the fool is beyond hope of redemption, for the book quite consciously just offers a limited doctrine of right behavior—Similarities to other Near Eastern pre-stages of Greek philosophy; Proverbs more than anything else in Scripture shows that god does not disown or reject his creature’s efforts to understand life and come into correct relation with Him, but He fulfills such striving by transcending it, even though nature must become foolishness to enter His wisdom (1 Cor. 1:18-31)—Proverbs not Wisdom introduces religion/ethics shared with pagans by which they can be judged, and so analogia entis; but this wisdom of life is ahistorical and so can easily be transferred among cultures. I.B.2.e. Eros and Worldly Beauty (p. 122): Song of Songs consists of youth and maiden disguised as king and queen; it celebrates beauty, resplendent, awesome glory of eros between man and woman—Eros here has no reference to marriage or children, having only the purpose of loving and being loved; it is the sense-related intoxicated lyrical condition of two existing for/with each other—It is self-sufficient and God is never mentioned, though the Holy Land is the setting; it is ahistorical and supralapsarian, with only death and the underworld as challengers—Its seeking and finding, describing one another, preparing new feasts for itself—No poet who intended to express Yhwh’s love for His people would have used this profane, areligious language in wholehearted abandon to the joy of the senses; allegorical interpretation arises with Rabbi Aquiba (135 A.D.), but was not reason for including the book in the canon, which was because of it was attributed to Solomon: only some like Theodore of Mopsuestia and Castellio defended its profane sense—Defense of profane thesis recognized by Richard Simon—Contra Herder it is not folk love poetry, but imitation of Egyptian courtly love poetry (Gerleman)—In this book, second creation account is unfolded, a pure eros without shame, writable on Barth’s view only from point of view of a new covenant in which God and sexual eros are brought into closest relationship—Here God is letting man live out his own possibilities, while the Holy Spirit sees to it that that purely lyric atmosphere makes it unfold with ahistoricity and abstractness excluding all infralapsarian elements so that pure eros emerges without sin, innocence, or concupiscence as a creative force—Eros here stands for itself, not for God; it enters twilight between divine and worldly (Plato’s Symposium, Gottfried of Strasburg)—Worldly aesthetics here enters Hebrew consciousness at same time as interest in power, international diplomacy, knowledge: these forces are allowed to unfold their own dimensions without historical grounding—With encompassing whole of Israel, eros is forced into historical reality: bound to the ethical, to family, genealogy, people, allowing for terrible abuse—Eros here has a prophetic meaning pointing to couple of Christ and Church/Mary, which will be the full historical incarnation of absolute love between man and woman as an end in itself not subject to law of genealogy, and thus the Church’s commentators are right in their reading of this book. I.B.2.f. The World’s Final Dance (p. 128): Autonomous glory of worldly/kingly being before God necessarily leads to Qoheleth—In Ecclesiastes, all glory has vanished from images of God and world, and wisdom concerns the nothingness of things—The internal logic of the writer taking on persona of Solomon—Man is wise enough to realize his radical finitude but he does not have power to transcend it; Qoheleth is a critical transcendentalist—The inevitable polarity of all things, which are subject to form of temporality—Man is the image of God as questioning beyond the present moment, and here most man feels his limitation—In pure dialectic of wisdom, wisdom is clearly superior to foolishness, but it leads to foolishness, through toil and fruitlessness—Goodness is not rewarded, nor evil punished, but we must maintain the farce of justice for the people—No universal laws can be imposed on future; we must return to the standard of the present moment and enjoy with gratitude and moderation the good things given at any moment, for we know they are finite, perishable, vain; good things include marriage and political activity—Relative infinities within the finite e.g. the eye not satisfied with seeing—Judging from what is observable in death, man has no advantage over beasts—Proper thing is always self-restraint adapted to standards of kairos: we should be moderate in both good and evil, with fear before God and circumspection in religious matters—Qoheleth’s God is a God of the philosophers, Whom one does not love, and so one need not love His gift of life—The Song of Songs’ eros is not agape, nor is Qoheleth’s empty and history-less time God’s fullness of time in history; this time knows nothing of stabilizing incursions from eternity, and contradictory temporal meanings balance out within a meaningless form of time—It is profoundly significant that the Holy Spirit included in revelation this conclusion of the ways of the divine image who set out to be autonomous world before God; the whole undertaking begins and ends in the name of Solomon, and what remains is a weightless wind/hebel not the divine breath/ruach—Stress falls on image’s unreality toward death not its substantial form-quality: the God of the philosophers and the wise man are abstractions to him, and the living God has subjected His image to vanity (Rom. 8:20) so that it learn that concrete reality is the grace through which God opens to His creatures a space for living. I.C. Grace and Covenant I.C.1. Concrete Glory (p. 134): The foregoing displayed the glory of the living God in abstract form—The glory of the copy is bestowed by the original; this glory grants the copy space, but only within an all-encompassing twilight, since it cannot perfect itself/give itself meaning, but only has meaning with reference to the original that reveals itself to it—The relationship only become visible when self-revelation of absolute subject takes on content/concreteness, when abstract beauty of glory and abstract true of divine presence are complemented by the good which as grace makes the beautiful beautiful and the true true, the transcendentals on the Hebrew view having total mutual compenetration, all as modalities of the good—The concepts that express gracious goodness are not sharply distinct but flow into one another—Priestly idea of sensory-liturgical kabod cannot be taken as standard for glory because of the awareness of the ethical-personal root of the concept, the greater universality of doxa in NT than in P, Israel’s thought of glory exceeds P’s: all revelation is glorious, since beautiful and good are only two aspects of same reality—Yahweh is glory of Israel—Grace has its own beauty which belongs to glory; Hebrew words corresponding to charis have dual ethical-aesthetic meaning, favor/gift-giving and attractiveness—Good/beautiful character of cosmos is inseparable from Creator’s act/gaze, but it is also a genuinely given gift, though requiring recognition/praise to be kept; good/beautiful is transcendent and immanent, affecting both recipient externally and internally: grace belongs to the creature inasmuch as it is ready to return the gift—Good nakedness before God and nakedness of being deprived of grace—Links of glory to covenantal fidelity, mercy, and the inseparability of fear and love of the Lord—All God’s qualities are integrated fully in freedom of absolute subject and are the radiant fullness of divine simplicity. I.C.2. God Allows His People Space (p. 138): Moses saw God’s glory from the rear; God’s entire disclosure is grace—The phrase “slow to anger” indicates that there is not a two-sided revelation, but wrath is a function of grace—Grace gives Israel access to God, the right to dwell beside Him—Primary meaning of grace is not bestowal of quality by God at a distance, but God bending to earth and raising man up to make space for Him in God’s own realm beyond all “rapture”—Israel gives some words that express this mysterious process, which cannot have conceptual clarity. I.C.2.a. Berith: Covenant (p. 139): Foundation of everything is idea of covenant between Yahweh and people—Difficulty in that this idea is of an agreement between two parties, but the idea of revelation is a one-sided initiative of free grace—Paths of interpretation: 1. Origin of covenantal idea is in religious federation of tribes by oath in presence of God, not an act whereby man and God obligate themselves; 2. See covenant-making as universally in the Orient an offering of alliance by a stronger party to a weaker party (Wellhausen, Begrich)—Chief event on which relationship of life between Yahweh and Israel is based lacks analogies, not like covenant among human parties whether equal or unequal; Moses as mediator is not God’s representative in the world, but servant of absolute Subject Who appears as freely acting with kabod: 1. God enters relation with men in a way that sets a mark of distinction on them through one-sided grace; 2. God lays claim to them unconditionally, both internally/ethically/cultically and externally/legally/ politically/incarnationally: in early clan period no question of separating these—Analogies to human covenants do not explain this relation’s terrible inescapable exclusiveness or God’s endless grace—The people gain admittance to God’s realm inasmuch as they accommodate themselves to God’s usages and attitudes, and the basis for this belonging goes beyond mere treaty among strangers; God alone can act and lead Israel, and the covenant is directed entirely to Him Who cannot be controlled—This is a terrifying adventure for the finite person who can answer only be stripping his “I” down to its naked kernel by presenting it in sacrifice, as far as the “Servant of God” of Is. 50—Deuteronomy between Sinai and the Servant: the one-sidedness of God’s grace establishing the community and the mutuality/love/obedience based therein—God’s commandments mark out the margins of a wide sphere of life without norms in the interior—Everything that is a part of the people’s existence, even the most profane, has role in the covenant—Pure relatedness of God and people, which isolates Israel from all other religions and all ascetic-mystical paths to salvation: this requires a genuine historical origin, even if we cannot precisely identify it with historical methods—History of Israel is of backslidings/substitutions for that moment e.g. image of bull as embodying natural power of generation for imageless God, sedentary Baal for wandering God, child sacrifice or later petrified cultic law for circumcision of the heart/living instruction from God—Immediate absolute I-Thou relationship requires/justifies concept of divine jealousy, requiring concrete exclusive love, without value on universality or tolerance, so as to open breadth of God’s freedom; Israel cannot bear this I-Thou relation and transfers it to Moses, inventing clericalism and distancing themselves: true history of covenant is history of individuals. I.C.2.b. Chesed, Chen, Rachamim: Kindness, Favor, Mercy (p. 147): Chesed is true substance of covenant on level of human relationships, belonging primarily to the Lord, but needing to be reflected in inferior partner; it is the relation of benevolence appropriate to the covenant between a lord and those who are his, a host and a guest—Legally, it is loyalty in a treaty, but more in a covenant, opening a sphere of mutual trust—After Hosea, it and grace has bridal tones—Closely linked to truthfulness/reliability/emeth, salvation/pacification/shalom, the mercy/rachamim freely bestowed to which we have no right—Later it loses legal overtones, and becomes pure favor/grace/charis/chen i.e. bestowal of favor—Rachamim is from womb/bowels, with affective and rational dimensions; covenant has inner richness, light, warmth, and it is without limit: intimacy whose only distance is that of reverence. I.C.2.c. Sedak, Sedaka: Right Conduct in Faithfulness (p. 151): Translating sedaka as dikaiosune/iustitia/righteousness is misleading; sedek is a transcendental quality of reality—In Bible, no ethical-legal norms that are absolute in Western sense, and resorting just to relational concept in naïve: merely formal relationship of righteousness is transcended for the one who watches over just order must protect the right of the weak from the strong, and there is an immanent righteousness in the order of the world—Deeds do not lie in our power, but take us into the sphere of their power, and deed and outcome e.g. blessing or punishment are contained in one another, so God’s sedaka is not a righteousness that deals out reward or punishment—But to say that Yahweh just watches over immanent righteousness does not take sufficient account of his freedom: God can transcend the immanent link by placing it in a larger context e.g. forgiveness/redemption—Immanent righteousness contains something impersonal, but absolutely free divine sedaka breaks through to create salvation with the characteristics of glory (Ps. 97, 99)—Relationship of sedek of man in God’s covenant to God’s sedek: the one who dwells in the covenant/realm of salvation is justified, requiring ability to stand firm—Sacramental form by which one can place oneself in God’s mode of being right, involving observing commandments and cultic behavior; man’s offer must be declared pleasing by God—Basis of covenant is obedience out of reverent and thankful love to God of promise/salvation on basis of his free love; righteousness reckoned e.g. to Abraham is not forensic, but shares in existential realm of covenant to extent that it obediently admits God is in the right in all. I.C.2.d. Mishpat: Right which Comes into Effect as Salvation (p. 158): Mishpat/mishpatim refers to what is traditional, customary, usual, or to correct/established legal judgment based in what is ethically right; later to what is unconditionally seriously right ethically and legally, similar to rectitudo (Augustine, Anselm)—With sedaka, the embodiment of hoped-for, urgent messianic goods/shalom—Source of mishpat is God, and it is a unity of civil and sacred law as extension of God’s customs within the covenant—God not as judge but as father moved by compassionate love to establish rights of the poor—The people ought to have found their orientation in God’s precepts/customs, but God allows the immanent righteousness they prefer to take its course in exile, which places Israel among the poor who have the first claim to God’s bringing about justice—Servant of Yahweh as mediator of mishpat to the world—Late focus on mutuality between justice of God and man, where every pious man can expect grace, obscures priority of divine justice in establishing what is right. I.C.2.e. Emeth, Emuna: Proved Excellence (p. 161): This concept (translated as aletheia or dikaiosune) expresses the joy that comes from taking hold of what is reliable such that one can enter a relation of dependency with it—God’s glory that has appeared is a place where one can dwell—God’s reliability requires corresponding reliability in man who enters covenant in conduct toward others and God—Emeth can be embodiment of God’s precepts and chesed, a characteristic of revelation close of God’s wisdom present in the world—This bears witness to unique experience of being able to utter unconditional “Yes” to God, creation, history on the basis of God’s reliability/promise, without any Indian/Greek uncertainly about world of appearance. I.C.2.f. Shalom: Purified Realm of Salvation (p. 163): In worldly terms, shalom denotes material well-being for whole people including political peace; for Israel, well-being of peace is gift of God’s salvation—Apart from man’s guilt, the world in itself is by God’s promise a pacified realm of salvation in entire cosmos; contra Greek philosophy, this peace is not a settling of a war inherent in all things—Struggle between prophets of shalom and of doom (Jeremiah, Ezekiel) is within this all-embracing understanding of existence—After the exile, when Israel has fallen on the far side of God’s judgment, shalom is the wide-open eschatological expectation, linked to appearing of God’s glory at the end of time, summing up all God’s attributes (Ps. 85, 1 Cor. 15:28). (p. 164): God’s qualities that make His holy sublimity concrete for man seem to eliminate His otherness—But it is never forgotten Who is the object of affirmation: as absolutely free and sovereign, God’s grace makes unheard of demand on creature, transferring him from land of servitude to God’s land, transforming all his concepts. I.C.3. Existence Outside Oneself I.C.3.a. A Dwelling-Place in God’s Life (p. 165): 1. Israel is chosen to dwell where God is—Abraham and Moses’ first installments in the land, and Israel’s limited inhabitation of the land before the exile as a result of its guilt; after exile, a non-definitive return: the land never corresponds to the promise, and Israel must live in relation to itself as a foreigner—God possesses the territory and the people receive it as his vassals, similar to old Sumerian/Sabaean ideas but here raised from primitive sacrality to sphere of unique covenant—Laws of Deuteronomy are precepts for existence on basis of hope, in a state of being taken outside of oneself and opened by God. (p. 167): 2. Tribe of Levi, without land, is embodiment of existence handed over to God further than Israel’s separation—This can be seen as curse or as blessing; sacer can mean accursed or consecrated—The Levites are mediators because chosen—They represent ebiyon, the poor man who is expropriated and must rely on God alone, embodying the covenant and knowledge of God in it. (p. 168): 3. Within this deeper expropriation, experiences of transcendence/ekstasis—In sphere of sedek, the poor man is fundamentally righteous, regardless of individual correspondence to ethical ideal—The quasi-sacramental confession of sin and priestly assurance of salvation, and of God as their food and drink: God’s love is better than bodily life (Ps. 36, 51, 63, 65)—Yahweh is the possession of the one caught up to him—The sureness of security with Yahweh strips concept of rapture of its mythological accretions—Leads to confidence that living community offered by God cannot be destroyed by death. I.C.3.b. Contemporaneity (p. 171): Deuteronomy tries to reduce all religious instruction, praxis, tradition to the covenant i.e. election by God in pure love and answering love in obedience: an attempt to win contemporaneity with origin tragically cloaked by Israel’s temporality, since only in new covenant will eternal be incarnated in time so that the historical can be valid for all times—All renewal in Church based on contemporaneity with Christ—For Moses, Horeb is the event utterly present today, when God shows His glory; embodiment of God’s loving offer, given in sensible theophany, can be answered by embodiment of man’s whole heart, soul, strength, and God’s offer of love releases in man the readiness to follow His directive—Fire of glory/jealousy of love excludes all images as higher than erotic love that takes possesses of its object; Israel is already handed over, holy/kadosh—Emphasis on present fulfillment of covenant promise: what is most spiritual has a reality that goes to limits of the material—Fissure at the point where the highest degree of unification seems to have been achieved: the people has seen the glory of God, yet still appeals the generally acknowledged claim that flesh cannot see God and live, and so they withdraw and send their mediator instead—Horeb establishes prophecy and law, and Moses promises another prophet as mediator, who will communicate God’s glory in an inner not sensory way i.e. as absolute love—Moses was denied entry to the promised land for his personal mistake, but now he suffers vicariously and in solidarity with the people—From Deuteronomistic absolutization of the covenant there grows the figure of the mediator/intercessor/representative of the covenant; OT examples in patriarchs, prophets, and post-exilic priests: each one’s place is at the heart of the covenant, not as disinterested third party, but as embodying the covenant of God over against people, and vice versa, based on taking God at His word, representing immanent/committed God against transcendent/free God—The mediator places the emphasis of his mediating work on the side of the sinful people, and so God can lay their weight on him, showing the depth of His commitment to the covenant, and the mediator’s absolute obedience—Israel both institutes office of prophetic mediator and unloads its guilt on them—Without mediation, immediacy of people to glory would not have occurred; in mediation, God has overcome the withdrawal of the people, so that the mediator must die in their place. I.C.3.c. Reaching Backwards and Forwards (p. 179): Mosaic covenant stands abruptly and unmediated in the midst of history of people of the world, and its self-understanding requires us to reach back into prehistory and forward into existence alongside others and the world as a whole, both related to God’s glory—Double movement displaying inner compenetration of creation and salvation history: lines of history converge on God and his covenant, and Israel exists for world not itself—God’s work in Genesis, in history of peoples, in nature. (p. 180): Genesis is primitive history from Adam to Abraham, and prehistory from Abraham on, given aristitic/dialectic articulation by the way J, E, and P fit into each other—These fragments show that twilight still lie over glory of God but God was already then in the process of coming wholly personally—The religion of Yahweh is rooted in soil of world’s religions—Some numina are bound to holy places where they appear, but others to tribal lord (Alt); analogy of latter form of union to Mosaic covenant—Links between early numina and polytheistic material to one God of the covenant, between early promises of the gods and their integration into the universal scheme of promise and fulfillment—In the midst of scenes in Genesis showing God’s providence, there are scenes of immediate encounter with God in fear and dread; the theophanies to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob—God of the fathers is to the highest degree a personal living God, Who sees and is seen even when man does not see—God appears as almost already incarnate in his loving guidance in Joseph’s acts. (p. 184): The prehistory has liberal tendency to show all surrounding peoples are originally related to Israel through Abraham’s clan; primitive history embeds latter in context of people of whole world: line from Adam to Abraham twice widens to universal dimensions—Free personal independent God is discernible as far back as creation—After Noah’s blind obedience in building the ark, there is the strange covenant with the cosmos in which both God and man are bound—List of peoples shows that history of the world stands under sign of salvation, which even titanic culture cannot call into question. (p. 185): The form of reaching backwards justifies reaching forwards carried out in songs of praise—Israel is exceptional form of something universal: intention of exclusive covenant is inclusion of whole world at its end, and other peoples (Ishmael, Edom, Melchizedek) have their blessings—Melchizedek’s Elyon/God most high can be understood as highest of gods or as the one Who is beyond compare; familiarity in pre-conquest Jerusalem, Phoenicia, Babylon with highest god, whose cult Yahweh inherits and other gods are reduced to His court—Universality is not a late development, but an element of Canaanite world’s veneration of highest god (Kraus)—Yahweh distinguishes Himself from other omniscient and omnipotent gods by His incomparability that He communicates in covenant, to which one can bear witness only by being caught out of oneself—Yahweh shows His own reality and legitimacy by raising the claim of the earlier El Elyon—From God’s free power in history, Israel arrives at affirmation that the world was created through His free word: He is lord of nature, and other gods are unspiritual nonentities (Ps. 135:15-17)—Only Israel can understand God’s grace in creation, and so can demand conversion of peoples who also have the graces of nature—Interpretation of cosmos in joy and admiration, including all apparently hostile natural forces, based on historical experience of God’s grace (Ps. 104); God sends His word twice: in nature and to instruct Israel in total transparency—God in/from Himself is revealed to whole world; God for man is revealed to Israel in the place of His cult, Zion—Early theology of Jerusalem as glorious city of God is replaced after the exile with eschatological theology in which Jerusalem will be sacrament of God’s presence among the peoples—Israel entered a mythical inheritance without being unfaithful to itself. I.C.3.d. Integration of Glorification (p. 190): God’s glory integrated in the grace of the covenant exists for Israel, and Israel is integrated in its answer i.e. thankfulness as glorification—All of God’s attributes are reunited in the phrase “kingdom forever” (Ps. 145) and human dispositions are integrated in will to give glorification/give back to Yahweh His kabod (Josh. 7:19)—All wisdom is based in fear of God i.e. affirmation of God as God; this is opposite of all mysticism of absorption into God—The one who lives through God’s word lives from meditation on God’s deeds, a continuous remembering, for God has founded Israel on tradition, just as Plato’s philosophy is a struggle against forgetting what has been seen in the presence of God—Man’s transparency before God at the point at which he accepts God’s instruction unconditionally, which is required for the mutuality required by word of God i.e. dialogue of mutual blessing in which man sends God’s blessing back to Him; God’s love cannot be exhausted when man does not forget Him—When Israel gives God’s word back to Him in unconditional praise, Israel is in the state in which God can make the answering word a word of God i.e. a word of revelation containing the divinely-constructed dialogue between covenant partners, a dialogue that is perfect when man accepts that it is to be determined by place of fidelity to covenant; even prior to revelation of Trinity, this dialogue is formally a Trinitarian revelation—Dialogue achieves its satiation in confessio in double Augustinian sense—Israel’s originality is being able to transform everything into praise, whose correctness is not surpassed in NT (Rev. 4:4); Israel’s fruit is the incarnation of the word as scripture—Israel’s universal mission is to give back God’s word to God in the name of the whole world, and therein Israel has freedom seen e.g. in use of metaphorical corporeal language—Aesthetic of the OT (von Rad): Israel’s most intensive encounter with beauty is in contemplation of Yahweh’s revelation and action i.e. in credenda, and in all creation, Israel joyfully considers God’s creative working; what makes the OT poet aesthetically joyful is not real things, but their relation to God made visible: the beautiful cannot be separated from the covenant but is something bestowed on world by God, conditioned by manner in which God bestows Himself, oriented eschatologically, perceived by faith, contemplating world/history with God’s eyes—Israel accompanies divine condescension/kenosis with statements about beauty, seeing splendor even in deepest kenosis of God’s action e.g. in Servant of God—By giving glory back to God in song, Israel fulfills itself as God’s image, and so knows why it cannot make a carved image of God: archetype and copy must stand uncovered in each other’s presence, making ready the space where God’s Word can become flesh. II. The Stairway of Obedience II.A. The Broken Covenant II.A.1. Sin and Malediction (p. 201): Everything up to this point only has abstract validity, because isolated from history, which convicts man as sinner and confronts God with broken covenant, and which permits us to see concrete reality of God’s glory in its response to sin—For Israel, central concept of evil is derived from fundamental experience/concept of God as latter’s negative mirror-image and counter-evidence of its uniqueness—Roots of evil are in infidelity toward God, and only on that basis in interpersonal ethical conduct; evil cannot be rooted in God, nor in the accusing angel Satan who is unimportant in OT: Israel is alone with God Who is sufficient, and evil arises when God seem insufficient to Israel and so it turns away—This is a fully theological understanding of evil that transcends all metaphysical/mythical understanding: theological guilt is incomprehensible refusal of answer of love to incomprehensible offer of eternal love—Vistas opened by OT to theme of guilt: 1. Story of golden calf where sin is an open “no” to God in the very making of the covenant, which is how J sees historical man as a whole; 2. Original sin of Israel is idolatry, seen going back to Adam and Eve’s sin of infidelity/ingratitude; 3. Deuteronomist historiography setting Israel’s history under chief commandment, in which Israel’s chief sin is read off cultic conduct—Grace of covenant is benediction, which is more vividly promised than the maledictions—Existence in flight from God is existence pursued by God Who cannot be escaped: in such flight, God’s glory is changed to wrath, a side of His salvific activity in which He rejects. II.A.2. Sheol and God’s Mobility (p. 205): Man’s “no” opens abyss of hostility to God—To fall from covenant is to fall into sphere of death; dialectic between question of whether God is absent there, but if He is absent then He would be limited—Mythical creation battle in which God disposed of all hostile powers, and so Sheol lies naked before Him, His glory overwhelming glory of the abyss—Sheol is boundary for life in time and boundary for relation to God which is available only for those who live in time, though Sheol casts shadows into life and God can save those in distress on its boundaries—Those that arrive in Sheol are finished forever (Is. 14; Ezek. 32), but God’s curses on Israel make it exist in the fire of His curse, not in Sheol—God can save Israel, but sin must intensify to the point that covenant counts as broken and so dissolved; knot of questions as to what then becomes of covenant and grace—God need not struggle against death, but it is asked must He not subdue chaos from within and below like the Sumerian/Babylonian descent of the gods to the underworld for His own glory—Man’s failure makes history of the covenant a history within God; God makes a stairway of obedience within men down into the godless darkness—God has mobility based in His incomprehensible inner freedom, both externally in wandering with the people, and inwardly in His free personal commitment in history; because of His mishpat, He is with the poor. II.B. The Obedience of the Prophets II.B.1. Abraham, Moses, Saul (p. 210): Essential point of image of Abraham and Moses is that they obeyed not that they commanded, unlike Egyptian and Mesopotamian kings in their dialogues with their gods—God of Sinai and the fathers breaks through magical continuum and replaces it with infinite difference between God and creature; to know God is to fear and obey Him: everything depends on this principles so it must be put to the test, as with Adam, Noah, Abraham—Abraham’s obedience is an abstract function of covenant of grace, but the Mosaic covenant is colored by the concrete stain of sin; Moses is in solidarity with the people in what is bad and good—Deuteronomy’s transformation of his punishment to his being stricken vicariously is consistent. (p. 211): The inspiration of the judges and Samuel as a transition away from the judges; Samuel offers sacrifices instead of leading the sacred war of resistance—King as full institutionalization of prophetic role of judges but still as one who obeys—Saul enters the guild of prophets and so receives the Spirit, but Samuel does not think that the charismatically bestowed Spirit can remain guaranteed to a continuing institution, resulting in dualism of prophets and kings: latter obeys political necessities, and former points to direct obedience; this continues in Christian history (Schneider)—Saul’s disobedience and rejection by God, though he was pious and offered sacrifice—The contrast between obedience and magic/witchcraft: in former, God is in charge, but in latter, man is in charge—Narrative about Samuel once belonged to saga material about Saul: Saul is so unhappy and rejected that he had to yield up even his own history of election to another—The institution of kingship/mediated theocracy replaced the immediate primitive theocracy (Buber) but needed to be bound to obedience of Abraham and Moses, by being bound to office of prophet, sharing with it both the Spirit and concrete incarnated obedience. II.B.2. Early Prophecy (p. 215): In period of judges, not distinction between bestowal of Spirit and political action; institution of kingship made prophecy enter history in opposition to politics—Early prophecy was characterized by ecstatic traits expressed in body and soul and communally, but also by obedience, and by willingness to hear; hence concept of word dislodges concept of Spirit—Early on, willingness to live in expectation of the word must be harshly inculcated, so that superior word is equated with that of God; by taking up scenes from the prophets e.g. Elijah’s calling of Elisha, Jesus shows that definitive NT obedience is already there attained formally—In great period of prophecy/kingship, God incarnates His word in those whom he has chosen for ministry of obedience; consciousness of prophets is broadened leading first to direct encounter with divine glory, and then to accepting mission to hopelessness of the erring people, so that the prophet can embody God’s word i.e. God in His majestic act of deciding, working, laying bare his heart—Prophet is drawn out of himself into God’s emotions (von Rad) including in the body e.g. Ezekiel, Hosea—The prophet suffers for the people more than they do, taking his place in the realm of what is opposed to God—Even in grand visions of divine kabod, the prophet is not curious, unlike apocalyptists, but in obedience only sees as much of God as God wishes to show; with Jeremiah, only God’s word of election and assurance, without vision of glory, is needed, and God entrusts His kabod to the capacity of the prophet as bridge—Prophet exposes word of God to the people, and God exposes Himself to sin in the suffering and dying of those obedient to Him: prophetic obedience leads to martyrdom (Lk. 13:33): God here creates the necessities that will make his own death necessary—Everything takes on unprecedented presence/contemporaneity: God issues demands and wants an answer now, and the past has significance as proof that God is living now; glory of God belonged to yesterday, but through prophetic presence becomes tomorrow (Novalis). II.B.3. Amos and Hosea (p. 220): In Amos, earliest literary prophet, shows Yahweh’s majesty with the power of the wild beast that is certain of its prey—The seven oracles of the opening of Amos—God’s judgment has gone out because His righteous ordering has been disrupted among the people; God is in solidarity with the poorest, and defends natural law: man is essentially the one who falsifies measurements, and God’s application of the measurement is irrevocable, and none can escape Him—In judgment, God acts alone, and has no necessity for showing favor to Israel. (p. 222): In Hosea, there is the same certainty that God alone will deal with Israel—Israel’s falling away from God to Canaanite fertility gods was a sinking down to a cultically justified fornication, ending in a situation where sexuality became central; here, God takes hold of Hosea’s sexual dimension to portray Himself therein in His supra-sexual relation to Israel: God makes the male-female gift of self in the flesh an instrument of revelation on the basis of the prophet’s total obedience, the opposite of the people’s whoring—Hosea’s prescribed actions of loving a harlot and an adulteress, integrating Canaanite focus on sexuality into superseding scheme, disclosing God’s relation to the people as burning and tender love appearing in the deepest humiliation—God’s divine glory is understandable as love, transcending both old covenant and myth—Hosea’s situation is that the covenant has been de facto dismissed and dissolved, and the people have lost the knowledge of God, through the fornication of the priests—God’s relation to Israel takes up a position under second symbolic action of weaning adulteress from her ways: the fertility mysteries are vain infertility, but this barrenness will be an act of love that heals her—The fertile land will become the wilderness out of which Israel came, where wilderness is linked with Egypt-Assyria superpower with which Israel consorts politically; wilderness is both place where Israel was not called, but also as origin of love between God and His people—God will strip Israel to the point of shameful nakedness, as the inherent end of her deeds which have encompassed her; she will be weaned from her prostitution to seek Yahweh, but will not find Him—This is the “nothing” of the Bible, oscillating between shameful judgment and love of election, a higher midpoint between John of the Cross’ nada and Indian nirvana—Unlike pagan gods, Yahweh does not return with regularity through sacrifices—Hosea criticizes the patriarchs, beyond whom we must go to emptiness that is the place of the prophetic word and encounter with God in every today, from which promises a new definitively faithful I-thou love flow—Unprecedented disclosure of God’s heart suffering under Israel’s affairs through Hosea’s mediating obedience; Yahweh’s kabod reveals its depths as love beyond wrath, having to do with God’s being God; this glory is profaned by human beings, because God’s love carries it to the point of defenselessness—Even in being expelled from the land, Hosea declares God’s foolish love running after a harlot, which will not stop until Golgotha. II.B.4. Isaiah (p. 228): Isaiah is the summit of OT prophecy, and his vision of God’s glory is midpoint between glory of Sinai/temple and eschatological glory, summarizing and carrying forward the tradition—In interpreting this vision, we must stick with prophet’s description: not clear if God uses familiar motifs in His self-revelation, or prophet uses them to communicate—It is a vision of what cannot be seen: God’s glory is so all-consuming it is inaccessible even for beings of fire, who can only incessantly utter what cannot be uttered—God’s kabod is unrestricted to the temple, but fills the whole earth; it is a primal presence of the dignity and worthiness of His holiness, which is perceivable and establishes His authority, communicating to Isaiah ineradicable knowledge of God’s exaltation—Isaiah experiences his solidarity with the impure people, and then an obedience prior to all reflection, freely apprehending and doing what God wills and needs, with nothing else coming into question; Isaiah is a pure instrument of transmission for God’s activity—He is sent to harden the people, to dismantle (like Hosea) until there is emptiness, the only place where the glory of the Lord can arise, in judgment—Isaiah’s private, including marital, life is fundamentally expropriated for his mission, though not as dramatically as Hosea, and in Hosea’s tradition; Isaiah’s children as embodied words of God and living testimonies: every possibility of human existence can be employed for revelation—In song of the Day of the Lord, everything that exalts itself will be humbled until God is exalted: terror and majesty are linked, showing that kabod has form of judgment, until prophet cannot see what further blows could be inflicted on Israel—Israel divides itself into majority from whom God hides His face, and small group of the faithful who set their hope on the God Who veils Himself, embodying the ethics that should be everyone’s including the king’s: the ethics of the one who allows himself to be humbled and so can perceive the directives coming from God’s sublimity, who has the inner stillness to give the word a place in himself and grant it an importance greater than all his opinions which press forward with lack of faith—The notion of the holy war in Israel, and the political relation to prophecy—The prophets are not wrongly meddling in politics, for Israel has only one King, to Whom kings are obedient servants, and the Spirit incarnates Himself in prophets before going to the people as a whole—The new kingdom God will establish, in genuine though scarcely visible continuity with what was broken down: salvation is the concrete end of the current concrete judgment. II.B.5. Jeremiah (p. 237): Jeremiah draws on northern kingdom’s Hosea and Deuteronomy until his prophetic commission takes hold and he is isolated: God’s nearness is so oppressive that it is experienced as incomprehensibility and new paradoxical distance; the incomprehensible Other attacks and lays claim to him to the very marrow of his existence, everything must be made available for God, in total obedience and virginity, sharing in God’s withdrawal, as a vessel for God’s alien feelings—His message of needing to capitulate to Babylon because God will not rescue the temple gives the picture of a scarcely humanly bearable demand by God, resolvable Christologically not psychologically—His gift of self comes too late, trying to catch up to his own vocation; in Jeremiah, unlike other prophets, struggle between God and prophet come to forefront: he is essentially sad unlike other prophets—Glory of God is like the sinking sun—Jeremiah is first to experience a supra-temporal burden of divine presence, simultaneous eternal fire and eternal love/covenant: he did not see glory like Isaiah, but received assurance God has personally chosen him in eternity, and already overcome his objections—God lays on him a burden that slays him: he must speak but with the certainty it is futile, and intercede knowing it is vain, so his suffering cannot be vicarious, and all seems futile to him—Prophet has to stand at once in and above time—Jeremiah’s duel or dialogue with God, not merely making space for Him—Three passages in which God replies to Jeremiah; question of whether God’s instrument becomes central here, so that transmission of God’s emotions suffers—Visions of destruction; what is transparent in Hosea and Ezekiel, that God’ glory/love blazes in the midst of fire, is obscured in Jeremiah: God attends to the people but without hidden love—The bridge between judgment and love is built in the prophet’s heart: his struggle with God in time is overcome above time, hence the prophecy of the new heart and new covenant—Jeremiah’s hiding of the ark of the covenant (2 Macc. 2:1-8). II.B.6. Ezekiel (p. 244): What takes place in Jeremiah under aspect of subjectivity, takes place in Ezekiel under aspect of objectivity of purely sacral ministry, allowing glory of God to become chief reality that makes itself visible in prophet’s existence expropriated for Gods’ service, explicitly emphasizing servant’s responsibility, and the harshness of the commission—Ezekiel’s theophany of glory in which heavens are opened and come down unequalled in OT; connections to exodus, NT, Kabbalah—The open heaven’s vitality and differentiation goes far beyond Isaiah; God drives the cherubim on to something ever new—The invisible God here has for the first time a form comparable to human—Prophets did not just copy from one another but there is a vision world with objective contents that transcend the world (von Speyr)—Ezekiel’s language makes it clear he is rejecting univocity and presenting something that imposes itself with sovereign force from above—Glory here arrives for judgment because of its mobility i.e. it is not bound to Zion—God’s glory is almighty so that it creates its partner and sets him on his feet; Ezekiel is called “son of man”, marking out distance proper to reverence, adoration, service—The commission is to do something futile without anxiety or hope, though God will still establish His power for His own sake: every relation in salvation history is grounded in God alone, the absolute divine “I” filled with its own glory—In the eating of the scroll, Ezekiel receives his mission in the form of communion—He is taken hold of more than other prophets in being made responsible for those whom he addresses: he unites the two natures of God’s anger and the one on whom God’s anger breaks; there is but a short step to the Servant of Yahweh and the Son of Man—God’s laying hold of his bodily dimension, showing that Ezekiel is Israel’s departure into exile and its existence scattered abroad—Symbolic actions of the prophets are beginning of what will be the sacraments of the new covenant, containing what they signify, with bodily existence expropriated in favor of incarnation of divine word/commission—Ezekiel has the Deuteronomist view that all sin is faithlessness to the God of the covenant, above all profanation of His holy presence through foreign cults, a faithlessness going back to Israel’s remotest times, thus expanding on Hosea’s theology of harlotry: Jerusalem is here the embodiment of sin, and will be the last to be re-established—The prophets’ use of vine imagery for Israel, en route to Jesus’ use—The titanic superpowers of the world will fall into Hell but Israel led into the wilderness, here a state of emptiness on the far side of death, in confrontation with God, only by passing through which can Israel find path back to God—God’s personal purification of Ezekiel, and the liturgical burning of Jerusalem; in judgment, God comes into shocking proximity with sin—God’s pitiless surgery on Israel is an act of secret tenderness, humiliating itself more deeply than ever, able to set up a pure kingdom only after utter desolation, purifying the people in their hearts—The eschatological temple. II.B.7. Liturgies of Lament (p. 256): After the glory departed from the temple, Israel celebrates the liturgy of the Lamentations, the desolation of Jerusalem making present the absence of Yahweh: only the one once chosen knows what it is to be rejected—Israel thus presents itself in shame and nakedness before God who has justly brought this about, without positively assessing suffering as fruitfulness or vicarious representation—The lamenting city has lost its beauty, splendor, majesty, because it has lost God’s glory; since God’s being is revelation, His absence is interruption of communication in law and prophecy—God’s raging against His people is the fulfillment of the promise—The liturgy above all discloses the terrible reality of sin, but also calls on the Lord to see, admitting He is right, in judgment on themselves, giving God the glory that He has withdrawn and veiled—Third liturgy opens up possibility of hope—Lamentations sketches absolute suffering, though very differently from Greek tragedy: measure of absolute suffering is not the capacity of the human heart to suffer, but the reality brought about by turning away from living God—Only choice to escape from this condition is to turn to the one Who has turned away (Augustine). II.B.8. Job (p. 259): In Job, all that is left of God’s glory is the tempest, where God was present also in Ezekiel and Isaiah, though not for Elijah; for Job, the God Who appears in the tempest is not the God Who appears in wrath, but one stripped of the splendor of His appearing, in a naked kabod that corresponds to Job’s stripping before God—Regardless of when composed, ideas of Job belong between Ezekiel/Lamentations i.e. departure of God’s glory and Deutero-Isaiah i.e. mystery of night of Servant of Yahweh—Like Noah and Daniel, Job is a wise man outside the covenant problematic, standing in integrity before God; the integrity of his “Yes” to God forms the framework for His struggle with God, Whose image is distorted to demonic form in the dark night of his suffering—Job comes into a condition unknown to Him, disproportionate with any of the states that can be envisaged on the basis of his previous relation to God; no dialectical reconciliation possible between his and his friends’ old experience and his new experience—Having lost his human kabod, and only God could have caused so deep an isolation—In Ps. 139 one encounters God’s presence everywhere; Job everywhere encounters the God Who is absent, an experience of God’s destructive gaze as parody of feeling of security in God’s embracing gaze—From Job’s perspective, his friends’ words indicate that God is now his enemy—Elihu argues that God is right a priori because as creator He has established all worldly justice; whereas Bildad praised God in mythic terms (Job 25, 26), Elihu praises God in nature and its obedience to God culminating in God’s epiphany in the storm for He is clothed in sublime majesty and is inaccessible to us (Job 36, 37), but both demand creaturely reverence which is the beginning of wisdom—Job opposes this watered-down fear of the Lord with elemental terror in the presence of God, but his friends see his sin in this fear—Similarity of Job 19 to Greek tragedy in which the cry of suffering finitude is a memorial in eternity; Job demands justice for himself before God, lamenting his lack of an advocate, and making his suffering his advocate: behind his legal language is an aesthetic intuition of the disproportion between his life and suffering, and God is responsible for such failures, and so Job appeals from reduced God to a total God truly worthy of divine name—God’s answer comes in the Book of Israel’s Consolation and the Servant Songs—Questions of who the non-Jew Job is—Job’s significance is in rejecting every solution that would quickly transfigure reality, and in giving a negative outline of conditions for possibility of redemptive synthesis—God’s response in Job out of the storm starts with tone taken by the rebel, exposing his inner contradictions, the source of the divine irony/humor; the response evokes the touchstone of every valid world-philosophy, the reason of the irrational animals: man lives in a world with a wisdom he has not established and which he cannot exclude from consideration so as to relate as isolated individual to God as His censor—Job is beaten before the divine omnipotence and wonder, but Job is also called God’s Servant, pointing toward the final synthesis between glory of God and uttermost abandonment by God. II.B.9. Deutero-Isaiah (p. 268): The anonymous prophet was introduced more deeply than any other into the mysteries of God’s grace in the night of the exile; his vocation is to console those who have suffered more than enough, to hear the cry, and to cry—God’s previous self-manifestation is now completed, and His glory is a new future reality for everyone; an absolute antithesis between eternal word of God and frailty of flesh and its loveliness: God is utterly incomparable and creates only for His own glory, and the creature can only entrust itself to the shaping hand of its Creator—God openly professes love without judgment, but the price of this is being stripped of historical form and expropriated as a model, experiencing its own nothingness; beyond all analogy is incomparability—Israel possess historical analogy between God’s promise and fulfillment, but is suspended within this proportion without power over it; the proportion is superseded and God is creating a new hidden future; Israel must go beyond Mosaic and Abrahamic covenants to Noahic and creational covenants—Anticipations of an intimacy with God beyond anything in old covenant, corresponding just to non-resistance on man’s part, a mystery of penetration beyond Jeremiah’s and Job’s struggles and Ezekiel’s being taken hold of—Cyrus as messianic eschatological incarnation of divine will, receiving external commission to set free—Servant of the Lord received internal commission; in him will be God’s glory and his glory in God, beyond his experience: in continuity with Deuteronomy’s Moses and Ezekiel, he vicariously suffers internally and externally—Like Job he had done no wrong, but unlike Job he did not open his mouth because he knows one cannot submit God to questioning; his bearing of others’ guilt is both public and a mystery, and he enters totally into the anonymity of the pure personification of the task to be carried out—God Himself now cries out with the prophet, accompanying redeemed humanity in its wandering; drawing a definitive image of the Servant is beyond OT. III. The Long Twilight III.A. Theologia Gloriae (p. 279): Five centuries before Christ had an impossible task; history of partially fulfilled covenant was a rush into catastrophe: God’s glory left its earthly sanctuary, and His people scattered, though there were revelations of union of glory and night—Prophets foretold salvation beyond judgment, but it did not come, and prophecy petered out in concerns of priesthood and cult (Zechariah, Malachi); question of whether endeavors not to lose e.g. clinging to Torah, wisdom teaching, sacrificial cult, apocalyptic, are willed by God or defiance: no positive historical continuation of form inscribed by God in Israel’s history—Twilight will end in Jesus Who accomplishes what is impossible for OT and reveals Father’s glory in abandonment of Son, but distance of long twilight needed so that definitive sign of salvation could be set up; twilight is failure and opening—Failed undertakings of Judaism are attempts to force hidden glory of God into the open: 1. Proclamation of messianic-historical glory of God; 2. Mystical ahistorical apocalyptic; 3. Hellenizing wisdom theology that tries to see glory in all creation and salvation history, creating bridge to the peoples, but losing what is distinctive in Israel—All three are mediators to NT, and permit historical form of Israel to become transcendent, though they also obstruct God’s solution; Christianity uses these but is not bound to them—Calling these ‘Theologia gloriae’ means that these are theologies that try to put the night of judgment behind them without integrating them; transition from theological glory to philosophical beauty/splendor of theion show the loss of substance. III.A.1. Glory Ahead III.A.1.a. The Glorious Image of Jerusalem (p. 282): Dynamism of Israel toward possession of the land and true presence of glory of God is brought to fruition in tragic futurist dynamics of post-exilic messianism—Return from exile is proclaimed as pure salvation, entry into mercy, with judgment behind, but it is disappointing as historical reality—Trito-Isaiah (Is. 55-66) proclaims salvation in the immediate historical future, using unprecedentedly lavish language of glory, with eternal divine marriage and exaltation, with new heavens and earth around glorified Jerusalem, earthly glory raised to a higher plane—Glory here is integrated kabod, salvation in the widest sense, together with sedaka, but kabod also becomes an unambiguous light, a mild revelation without war, the language having become literary, and the epiphanies spiritualized; but there is also emphasis on corporal works of mercy, glory involving doing what is required by God’s covenantal will, and there is a longing for intimacy, and a sense of being sent to the nations (similar to Jonah)—Baruch shows that that this spiritual situation did not lose its relevance, with extravagant use of language of glory, radiance, beauty, light, as also in Tobit and Judith—Great lines of thought are carried forward in prophets of second building of temple: Haggai emphasizes that they are in a period between glories, and God’s abiding Spirit meaning transcendence even in tribulation must now take the place of glory, but when the temple is built salvation will radiate forth from Israel as representative; Zechariah ends prophecy and begins apocalyptic, and prophesies (despite Nehemiah’s building of walls) that Jerusalem will be defenseless and without walls because of the glory within, in an expectation of immediate earthly Messiah in Zerubbabel; likewise concrete are prophecies about Jerusalem of last times in Deutero-Zechariah (Zech. 9-14), which opens to an apocalyptic that shows future reality proleptically present where God is, so that the holy city that will be raised up is the holy city descending from God in the radiance of His glory (Rev. 21:10-11). III.A.1.b. Messianic Hope (p. 288): Attempt to make the coming glory of God immediately follow the present is rooted in context of Israel’s ever-deeper reflection on covenant, so that they are confronted ever-more with glory of absolute subject to Whom no historical situation has been able to make proper response—In the origin on Sinai, there lay a power that pointed into the future and that directed the people to a new action of Yahweh—God’s personality finds a corresponding personality in the subject of the partner that translates into reality everything in the actual making of the covenant: the theological origin of expectations regarding the Messiah, which both are within and burst the bounds of history—Originally, Israel had no linear understanding of time; theological reflection led to this, but always such that it was transcended by the prophesied fulfillment, which lay both in the future and in another dimension of duration, which could only be made accessible through the total discontinuity in judgment, so all prophecy contained a germ of apocalyptic, and all prophecy has imminent expectation as its inner form in which lies fulfillment and transcendence of historical time which all stands under judgment: tragic dimension of OT prophecy cannot be removed—Hexateuch has naïve schema of promise and fulfillment, preliminarily fulfilled in David, but he then receives new promises—1 Sam. 8 on the questionable nature of the historical king, contrasted to Isaiah and 1 Chron. 28-29’s spotless image of king as sitting with full right on the throne of Yahweh and giving the honor and kingdom back to God fully; this king is characterized by divine justice and Spirit not words of glory—Messianic texts on the true king in Micah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Deuteronomy, Deutero-Zechariah, but Servant of the Lord/pierced one of Deutero-Isaiah/Zechariah and Daniel/Enoch/2 Esdras’ Son of Man who is pre-existent in heaven cannot be included in this image; reconciling them requires distance and silencing of prophecy so that its immanent apocalyptic can be seen. III.A.1.c. Poor Before God (p. 292): Messiah is to establish on earth divine justice/sedek/mishpat, which especially affects the poor man, whose exploitation in the time of the kings was seen by prophets as scandal for economics, ethics, covenant theology—Poverty is to be abolished; since Yahweh’s justice is incarnated in His people, idolatry becomes interchangeable with idolatry—Zephaniah raises poverty to a theological concept, making available the idea of spiritual poverty, which receives a visible model in Jeremiah; when Israel becomes poor in exile, it receives right of admission to God’s mercy—Then there resumes the unclarity/dialectic of OT in close connection between humiliation and triumph (Ps. 9-10, 25, 34, 37, 149), and thence to the visible movement of the poor after the exile—Proverbs establishes a clear relationship between humiliation and glorification, but it knows nothing of opening into life beyond death or Trinitarian foundation of lowliness and humiliation—The path can lead both to the Magnificat/beatitudes and to the Pharisees—Intolerable intensification of dialectic of poverty and Messiah in Qumran community—In OT, material poverty is evil to be avoided, and new evaluation by Christ presupposes new basis for concept of covenant. III.A.2. Glory Above III.A.2.a. Daniel (p. 297): Hope of glory in temporal future lacked a dimension, which was in the background in earlier prophets, but in Daniel’s visions an apocalypse/opening-up of space between heaven and earth, allowing us to see forces of history in God’s presence and the scene of judgment in heaven—Dan. 7 is something genuinely seen in a revelation, not derivative, but everything between (e.g. Enoch) this and John’s Apocalypse is literary imitation—No connection made between Son of Man and descent from David or Servant of Yahweh, but rather opens up Christological dimension—Battles in Dan. 10 outline a society of angels and men spanning heaven and earth, and a resurrection (Dan. 12:2) anticipated only in apocalypse of Isaiah (Is. 26:19): once space is opened between time and eternity is opened, history and individual destiny find their representation in eternity—Definitive judgment as depicted in Hellenistic-rhetorical images (e.g. 2 Macc. 5)—Midrashim on exilic stories in Dan. 1-6, with dissimilarities between Daniel and Joseph/Moses/Solomon—In all of Daniel, God establishes His sovereignty over all the great powers of the world—The seer and his states take on a thematic quality, and all mysticism is strictly related to commission of revelation, so as not to fall into gnosis/occult/human beings as theme of revelation—Daniel and Apocalypse are reserved regarding God’s glory, but other apocalyptic literature consider God’s glory inquisitively and in a tourist manner. III.A.2.b. At the Throne of Glory (p. 300): Messianic hope led to extravagant declarations of glory, and apocalyptic to experiences of heavenly glory, which is the still-hidden new age—Judgment is seen as the transition between the ages, from time to what is above time, leading to definitive separation of good and evil: the covenant decision for or against God leads to eschatology of heaven and hell; the old age, as in Ecclesiastes, is mixed and ambiguous—In pervading expectation of end of the world, Daniel’s vision opens up many more mystical experiences, attributed to the great fathers of the people preserved in secret writings, dealing with geography of heaven and hell, details of divine kabod, angels—The Essenes of Qumran’s use of apocalyptic literature in Jubilees; earthly liturgy for them was participation in heavenly liturgy, so apocalyptic becomes strict liturgism and cosmic legalism, so that one can be simul justus in the new age et peccator in the current age—New awareness of individual and original sin—Continuations of image of Son of Man in Enoch and 2 Esdras as judge but not as vicariously suffering, but as one on whom glory is poured out. III.A.2.c. Emphasis on Man (p. 306): Apocalyptic literature’s morbid interest in glory above, forgetting that earthly realm is God’s good creation; life in the covenant becomes unattainable, and there is a new focus on man as moral/ascetic subject or as existential rebel—Moralization of great figures of salvation history, and the use of sentimental/novelistic scenes with psychological sensitivity, with focus on virtue and good works, anticipating Sermon on the Mount; natural ethics is accompanied by natural religion: the last gives Abraham a meritum de congruo for his election—The patriarchs are made the teachers of the Egyptians and Greeks—Necessity of death as a major motif, as banishment from our glory, in which situation rebellion against dying is understandable, and Esdras even feels he is man’s advocate before God; the value of creation is questioned, as is why God does not prevent sin, for it would be better not to exist than to exist in unrighteousness; God’s answers are feeble, just emphasizing the need to implement His righteousness—Anthropomorphism leads to emphasis on sexuality, and in many texts to angelism, which is an apocalyptic pessimism about the world. III.A.2.d. The Barrier of Judgment (p. 314): Superior glory does not penetrate the final judgment; there is definitive dualism rather than the double-sided existential language of the prophets that proclaims judgment and salvation—The many are damned on the left, and only a remnant saved on the right, for what is precious is rare; at the judgment, mercy ceases, though Esdras vainly intercedes for those in hell: the medieval tormenting dialectic (Dante) has its place here, a dialectic based on a misunderstanding of OT election—Based on Daniel’s vision, predestination becomes a determining religious experience, but loses its function within salvation history—The mystic can have access to the future Jerusalem already present in heaven, so the contribution of the old age to the new is superfluous and despised; revelation becomes gnostic mysticism in flight from the world—In Qumran, eschatological division between chosen good and non-chosen wicked is already valid here; hence, their spirituality of purity through separation—The broadening of the horizon was indispensible for Christianity, but also lead to these distortions of the original covenant idea, which led to problems in Christianity. III.A.3. Glory Anticipated III.A.3.a. Success and Danger of the Wisdom Literature (p. 318): Indispensible for Christian mission is the broadening-out of Israel to the surrounding Hellenistic culture and sphere of metaphysics—Difficult contact because it required not rejecting Israel’s unique election or exclusive covenant; required contemplative distance to Israel’s own heritage without reducing immediacy of relation of faithfulness to God—Ambivalently Greek or Jewish statements in Philo’s attempt at synthesis of Moses and Plato—Similar attempts to mediate Israel’s religion and foreign religions/philosophies e.g. in Hosea, Wisdom literature—Sirach and Wisdom go further in forming a concluding contemplation of Israel’s reality in broadened perspective of dispensation of working of divine wisdom for the world—Contact between narrower kabod, broadened integrated doxa, and mythic-philosophical-religious kalon, mediated by Sophia as entire revelation of God in creation and salvation history—These texts can only speak of God’s glory in formal anticipation of what is to come; they cannot anticipate the Cross, and so practice a theologia gloriae that can be criticized by NT—They seek “glory all around” not ahead or above, a post-exilic continuation of the Psalms, though the glory they universally praise is ethereal, bloodless, bourgeois, un-heroic. III.A.3.b. Ben Sirach (p. 320): Daniel’s perspectives are closed to Sirach, whose flights of praise focus on this life and world—Man in the image of God has God’s sight to see and praise God’s works/doxa—Sirach experiences the glory at Sinai through tradition—The wise man dwells in wisdom’s shadow/glory/shekinah, and is the perfect contemplator and theoretician of God; everything including practical proverbs belongs to wisdom and is read off God’s Word, through a venatio sapientiae (Cusa)—Principal duty of His people is to give praise, done best by the lowly, and glorifying God casts a halo of glory and praiseworthiness on man, as seen in the history of Israel’s famous men; contra Qumran, the glory of heaven here becomes incarnate—Sirach joins two senses of doxa, kabod and tima/fame, and joins to doxa kauchema, charis, and kallos; this mutual compenetration of words best seen in praise of God’s glory in the cosmos: amazement is directed to the beauties of the world, which are admired as such, but thence to the Creator as their source—The Greek pantheistic to Pan estin autos is used for Isaiah’s claim that the earth is fully of God’s kabod, for God is greater than His works: God is both transcendent and immanent to the world, expressed not in abstract Greek terms, but in Biblical terms of the experience of the ever greater and more incomprehensible glory of the God of grace and revelation—Sirach does not know Essene doctrine of double predestination, which is opposed to ancient understanding of covenant; God’s total goodness is one with His righteousness/sedaka, and His judgment with His mercy: developments of Hosea and Deuteronomy—Abrahamic covenant is rooted in universal Noahic covenant; God is higher than inner-worldly contradictions, which are a sign that they are not God and are very good: Sirach’s statements about this are decisive for future linking of revelation and philosophy, incorporating Qoheleth’s relativism into a justifying context, allowing Paul (Rom. 9-11) to transcend consequences of doctrine of election into ultimate harmony—The interplay of opposites in the world (which does not include eternal damnation) is such that one cannot take away or add anything: we cannot know the whole construction, and through the world’s totality shimmers the more inscrutable totality of God—The creature is essentially ordered to obedience, though man is free, and knowledge of good and evil, and the link between fear of God and wisdom, belong to that freedom; fear of God requires poverty of spirit and repentance, and shelters the pious man—Sirach’s image of God brings him closer to the NT in many ways, but not so as to help the sinner—Life is a trial, and each will be rewarded in accord with his deeds—Wisdom’s education can only be borne by those who practice renunciation and discipline, as in Egyptian, Oriental, Hellenistic religions, but Wisdom is also the mode of God’s presence and providence for man—A hidden tenderness makes all morality appear as done out of gratitude and praise to God; we see here something of NT glory, though tightly concealed in the old: the wise man puts his shoulders under what educates him, not the Cross, though he knows all wisdom comes from God Who is unfathomable infinity of fullness. III.A.3.c. The Book of Wisdom (p. 331): Wisdom sounds the same note as Sirach, anticipating a synthesis that only can come with Christianity, and Wisdom is seen as disclosure of God’s glory—But barriers are erected: the depth of night opened in prophets and exile is closed, and eschatological division is sharpened, showing that God’s final word has not been spoken—Contact with Plato in analogical recognition of glory shining through all things—Wisdom is with God, only to be found the one who has fear of the Lord, but ready to be found, for she is gratia praeveniens: God’s agape encounters the praying eros of the one seeking wisdom, following the Psalms and Plato; one loves Wisdom because she is beautiful and because God loves her—Wisdom is presented with circumlocutions as something flowing that cannot be pinned down, without committing to the various Greek concepts used, attempting to express the immanence and indwelling of God in distinction and non-distinction from itself; anticipating Plotinus, Wisdom shares God’s property of being superior to all contradictions and non-aliud—This removes from God of OT (contra Hegel) the charge that God of OT is removed from the world by His personality and so is limited; rather, God’s sovereignty extends to all things without Him stepping outside Himself, and can be His own emanation/reflection in things—Wisdom of God multiplying itself in the world is the occasion for development of human sciences, cardinal virtues, philosophy of religion, proofs for God; all sins derive from idolatry, for sound ethics depends on religious relation to God—God loves all that exists, but only blessed Israel with light of His wisdom, the kabod being close to the light of the Torah—What is important is remaining true to the divine image, not long life or descendants, and so one is immortal; the existence of the one who trusts in God is eschatological—Concluding antitheses between Jews and Egyptians—Wisdom creates a formal synthesis that the NT will fill with its contents. III.B. The Present Day Without Glory III.B.1. The Empty Time (p. 338): The urgent need for glory can only arise from a great deficiency, which arose when prophecies were not fulfilled post-exile—The remnant that returns from exile does not feel itself to be embodiment of chosen people, so it must fashion as ideology for itself in Chronicles, though it lives in uncertainty about itself, heightened by silence of prophecy, and the experience that God can speak or not; Israel has enough material to meditate on through this long Sabbath—This time cannot be described in terms of presence or terrible absence of God; His glory is covered by a veil, a concealment revealed by passionate reaching for His glory—The appeal back to earlier events is no longer possible—The sign of God’s grace restricted by history must be transplanted into wider sphere to be basis for God’s universal salvific act, and the historical sign must become wholly a promise that transcends itself into a future that is pure fulfillment; this is seen in each of the three reachings-out/demands that God’s glory should come—Question of whether Israel as a whole ever shared this glory in any form other than deprivation, the glory of the origin no longer attainable, the only glory now being prophetic visions, the only testimony for which came from the seers; otherwise, glory was only a promise or the content of praise based in faith—Hence the attractiveness of apocalyptic literature, which is mostly bad literature, and which Israel realized is not canonical—Glory is always past or future, never present, and Israel only has faith, hope, love. (p. 342): Though God always reveals Himself through history, He puts His partner to the test by placing him in a period empty of history; that sacred history ceases in post-exilic period is one of the most terrible things in Biblical revelation, though there is a failed attempt to continue interpreting events as part of salvation history in inspired books of Ezra, Nehemiah, Maccabees—Question of how the period empty of significance for salvation history could be filled and shaped; contemplation is no substitute for Israel’s consciousness of time in terms of historical election; comparisons to Hellenistic timelessness, empty time of Ecclesiastes, and sapiential understanding of time in Sirach and Wisdom—This is resisted by priestly time of calendar of feasts, traced by P back to event of covenant-making, so as to make empty time a participation in God’s time; the more elaborate the rites, the more incarnate Israel’s covenant-relationship seemed, but as a form this is no different from other ahistorical religions e.g. P’s presentation of Moses seeing the tabernacle on the mountain is similar to Platonic thinking—Jesus prophesies the destruction of this self-radiant, timeless, architectonic-liturgical glory—Empty time is seen in terms of imminent expectation of being on the point of going over into fulfilled time—Daniel’s lack of interest in history, being only interested in everything’s orientation to eschatological point—Judaism’s continuing to set up the temple’s glory is an outliving of itself of something already dead. III.B.2. The Speech Event (p. 346): Two events, not just memories, retained their power when events were few: the events of the word of God, and of the blood of man and beast—The Bible received its fixed form, and the living word became an ahistorically solidified law—The speech events in Deuteronomy and Joshua in which the fullness of the word of revelation becomes an event for the people, as well as the rediscovery of Deuteronomy under Josiah, and the re-reading of the law in Ezra—Subjectivist trend of Northern Deuteronomy which understands word of revelation as act whereby God manifests His personal favor in turning to man in unmerited election and love, the only possible response to which is turning of man to God, with piety incarnated in politics and ethics—Objectivist trend of Southern cultic priestly piety which takes form in Leviticus holiness law regulating concrete bodily existence to remind the people that they live on the boundaries of the kingdoms of the world and of God, seen especially in circumcision and Sabbath—All of this is called covenant—Torah is not a sermon but official expression in words of divine will established in the realm of the covenant; both Torah and sermon are theological speech events i.e. divine revelation in human speaking—Process of enriching original Torah in words expressed by Moses (e.g. Ex. 20) with new material e.g. by P, which come to be considered as belonging to original making of covenant, but also the threat of new material concealing the event originally expressed in words, as seen in Jesus’ criticism with His clear exposition of fundamental covenant words—Development of old covenant is not process of hardening of God’s living word into dead law; each speech event is the original living expression in words of covenant—Judaism is the attempt in the absence of original events of salvation history to persevere in abiding speech event of interpretation, an event present inseparably in both sermon and cultic prescription; living relation to ancient words seen in Deuteronomy, Ezekiel, Chronicles, though Deuteronomy is the central speech event because it dares to make present in the 7th century the word of Moses, and its revelatory power is shown in its canonicity—The “todays” of Sinai, Moab, Samaria, Jerusalem are made the same; the history of interpretation is an essential aspect of the fullness of a historical event: the real thrust of a salvific event lies in the continuing generative power of the divine word as it interprets itself, in the inextricable knot of the words of glory and glorification, characterizing existence of Israel as existence in the word of God—The presence of the word of Yahweh is a Eucharistic mode of the active presence of God in history (Origen)—In this period, twilight/prophetic declaration of suspension of covenant dominates everything; hence, the people take refuge in the naked word, existence in the pure vulnerable receiving of each word coming from the invisible mouth of God, where the original covenant is the presupposition of every law—Original law is not law of state, but sacral ordering of tribes to God alone; post-exilic anxiety for separation in an attempt to continue faithfully ancient forms as much as possible—The best that non-inspired Jews could do (e.g. Philo) was to think/speak as a Hellenist, but believe/confess as a Jew, which could only be overcome by Christ Who is the inner telos of all religions, and Whose resurrection and sending of the Spirit are simultaneously historical and supra-historical—What is effected in the law is sanctioned by being assigned to Abrahamic and Noahic covenants, constructing an unequivocal tradition in order to remain within covenant, a historical conditioning Jesus is aware of—Will to remain within word event determined form of the Bible, which is meant to keep historical events in the present; hence the updating of various books to bring out hidden aspects: the texts cannot be divided into authentic and inauthentic (von Rad) because self-understanding of a prophet is only one way of understanding his oracle, and reference of divine word to historic event cannot be limited to historical situation—Invention of sermon as proclamation of speech event in ever new interpretation. III.B.3. The Blood Event (p. 358): God’s word demands to be followed even in its unglorious form as Torah, despite unsuccessful attempts by late Judaism to transfigure Torah with its own kabod—In uncertainty, one’s persevering action remains the foundation of hope, part of which actions are bloody sacrifices without spiritual development in self-understanding—Origins and prophetic crisis of sacrifices, but some spiritualization/interiorization of cult is not permitted to Israel—Expiation suppresses every other reason for sacrifices; by their relation to ancient origins, sacrifices help to quiet ambiguity as to whether they are still in covenant—Sacrifices best express provisional character of old covenant—Since one covenant partner is God, the covenant must bear traits of the eternal, which surpass man’s potentialities; God’s kabod for Israel wanders through the wilderness of temporality—Post-exilic theology saw the need and impossibility of crossing the boundary, hence the three theologies of glory; the awareness of the boundary of death is present in the blood event: true seriousness requires total commitment, including of blood—Use of blood places covenant on boundary of life and death, which is always escaping from light of divine glory, for God’s glory shines over the living in the old covenant—Like the speech event, the blood event is a naked instruction/obedience stripped of glory. (p. 362): Multiplicity of relations between Israel’s cultic blood events and their traditional origins and origins in other religions—Blood is sign of resistance and union, vengeance and reconciliation; blood and word stand together, the blood as the last word—Parallel of prohibitions on drinking blood and making images, both being given to God; man is God’s image and property, hence the punishment for murder is reserved to God (Cain), though he can hand this over to men so as to limit vengeance for blood—God’s preference for Abel’s bloody to Cain’s unbloody sacrifice, though his later requirement of both in the Passover: both first-born and first-fruits belong to God as creator and as judge, though this judgment is linked to salvation, especially of the poor; sacrifice of Passover lamb is the act of substitution carried out by God by which He wins Israel for Himself as His first-born—Israelite lex talionis not as part of Oriental civil lay law, but of sacral priestly law (Alt) whereby all existence is subject to Yahweh’s will, without any profane or neutral zone, such that all Israel is Yahweh’s first-born, and so not to be killed: the law is necessary consequence of Yahweh’s zeal and jealousy for His people; killing of Egyptian first-born i.e. first-born of oppressor is function of sparing first-born of oppressed—Sealing of Noahic, Abrahamic, Mosaic covenants with blood as cultic seriousness of the parties—Relation between covenant blood and circumcision blood, in that circumcision is covenant sign in living flesh, as interpreted Rabbinically; archetypical sacrifice is Abraham’s of Isaac: sacrifice is obedience and preferring Yahweh to all things, and in this sense Israel is bound to God in blood—On the ladder of obedience, God descends to man, and man is perfected—Link of Joseph to the Servant of Yahweh; subjective acceptance of the one who is bloodily done to death transcends objective call for vengeance of blood, and the mystery of solidarity in guilt build and overcomes double-sided righteousness of God—Despite continual sacrifice, the one drink that contains life is withheld; consumption is only possible when vicarious bearing of guilt to the point of bloody death becomes identical with perfect faith/acceptance: in Jesus, these paths from the old covenant converge, which cannot be constructed by reason alone, but is redemption and annihilation, absolute judgment on humanity’s failure and blood guilt, and ever greater measure of God’s mercy. III.C. Argumentum ex Prophetia (p. 371): By conclusion, every theology of old covenant must ask itself question of meaning of covenant history and sovereignty of God which appears and acts in it, whether it is just a fragment of human struggle and failure like other histories, or if it amounts to a form found nowhere else in history, and if the latter if the form is in Israel or beyond it—Historical-critical method has destroyed old form of argumentum ex prophetia in which sayings of old covenant are spoken with direct reference to Christ, but this leaves room for more splendid prophetical character of whole history of Israel; Christianity cannot be understood without old covenant—Israel’s formlessness transcends itself such that it comes into its own in the mode in which Christian Church knows it is a form—Development of argumentum: 1. Forms established by Israel converge on a point that is open and cannot be calculated on the basis of converging forms and their relations; 2. This point is occupied by one who lives there, although his primary interest is not to construct his existence as fulfillment of these forms; 3. Midpoint has its place through the crystallization of the periphery, and only thus does the periphery acquire form. (p. 373): Israel’s individual forms are subject to reservations e.g. in prohibitions on images and drinking blood; Christ will be true image and provide for Eucharistic participation—Messianic images cannot be joined in themselves; old covenant is a figura i.e. an aesthetic reality not an incarnated ethical reality—In old covenant, there is boundary of death, which has not been overcome, which will only be breached by Holy Saturday, removing the veil from the glory; in breaching this boundary, Christ’s life will be obscured for the world, since it is an eschatological event: He need not directly lay claim to the Messianic titles; He is justified by deeds not words—The Church’s use of OT images in expressing the incarnate Word in human words, involving a total vision of relation between covenants; the necessity of what has happened is deduced from how the formless takes on form: the kernel of spiritual understanding of scripture, which is not literary allegory—Jesus is not just another stage in OT process of transcendence, but of another order; every type has same immediate relation to antitype, though types only have analogy to Christ in their historical context—Whole relationship can be seen in its objective correctness only with theological eyes of faith, not from historian’s or psychologist’s point of view—Israel’s failure is not due to the finitude of existence, but due to God’s requirement of a choice between life/blessing and death/curse—Israel’s significance for Christianity and humanity as a whole; images are not dissolved/superseded in Christ, Who retains full historical form together with the images—One thing that cannot be superseded is knowledge of absolute sovereignty/glory of God, and man’s absolute creatureliness and character as image, with commission to glorify God in total obedience; OT forms are to be understood as opening onto a form understood on basis of covenant—More than just a hidden event between God and the human heart as happens everywhere in humanity, here the covenant God models a form that is definitive in the revelation of His glory in Christ—Israel’s religion remains bodily, unable to be abstracted from time or place; God’s becoming flesh is more fleshly than anything Israel dreamed of, descending into a formlessness to display God’s glory and lordship beyond all boundaries: Israel should have focused on the Servant of Yahweh, not the theologies of glory, and only John the Baptist resumes the proper history—God’s history with the people could not unfold as human evolution/education or as something able to be subordinated to a dogmatics with atemporal validity; covenant is oriented to mystery of coincidence of genuine time and genuine eternity, each entering the other—Paradox of new covenant is demanded by Israel’s manner of existence; every deed and word of God in Israel is both fulfillment and promise: the tension between these must be integrated into Christ—All breaches of fidelity by the Church are undergirded by indefectible nuptial fidelity in the resurrection of the bridegroom and the first-fruits of the bride. Conclusion (p. 383): The book summarized the path taken by the concept of kabod of Yahweh so that it could appear in new covenant as doxa Christou and doxa Theou, initially in integration of abstract-sensuous kabod and concrete-personal kabod, a concentration of free sovereign absolute “I” in its opening of its sphere of life for its human image in the covenant of grace—History of covenant shows that chosen people were incapable of existing in sphere of absolute love, but sent representatives as vicarious sufferers in keeping with the extent of their failure, holding out prospect of new eternal covenant—Only the entire Biblical revelation mediates in total form what God wanted to communicate to us of His glory. Volume 7: Theology: The New Covenant Preface (p. 9): This is not a rounded theology of new covenant, but an approach to it through theme of glory—Old covenant unfolds in history that can be followed; new covenant compresses everything into shortest space of time, with breakdown point called Triduum Mortis in external chronology, which internally is the shattering of all temporal categories, a point at which both Jesus the main subject, and the existentially involved believer, slip away: the event of Jesus Christ cannot be securely grasped or mastered through any methodology, and hence the “amateurish” style of the book, without clear traditional demarcations—All NT theologies are travelling toward the Johannine theology, though they all are also open to the never-ending meditation of the Church and to God. Introduction (p. 13): 1. Everything previously considered in isolation/fragment (Heb. 1:1) here collapses into a single decisive whole/transcending fullness (Col. 1:19) in Whom is bypassed distinction/reciprocity between archetype of divine glory and its human image, though God does not destroy the work he began, but perfects in the One the distinction without mingling of natures: this is more difficult to think than a final commingling or Hegelian synthesis—Everything depends on the dying and rising of the man Who represents and is God and world—Here basic laws of transcendental aesthetics fulfill and transcend themselves: a form is more valuable to the degree it is more transparent for the light of absolute being—Christ must go down to absolute contradiction of glory of the Lord to establish imperishable form beyond all that man can see as form, and so join God and world in new and eternal covenant—Concept of form is needed for this definitive encounter, as confirmed by NT, though its employment here is excessive; here most we need vision of form with eyes of faith, the simple eye/pure heart that can see the simplicity achieved by all multiplicity in final form of revelation, which presupposes unity of acts of seeing and living/obedience (Schlatter) which gives capacity to stand firm in the presence of infinite simplicity, and the first effect of which is adoration before glory—Theology is not to be mastered, but every approach is continually judged anew by absolute superiority of subject i.e. Trinitarian love disclosed/offered in Christ; through self-denial, knowledge attains what is beyond it. (p.16): 2. If you understand it, it is not God (Anselm, Schlier)—Methodological argumentation a priori: we provisionally bracket historical revelation in Christ in its historicity, taking it as phenomenological eidos, in order to establish how it surpasses/judges every possible human philosophical/religious sketch of thought—Contingent world can only be explained as product of un-jealous goodness pouring itself out, not as choosing best possible model of a world, but as dependent on unfathomable free love, which is seen not in OT, but in disclosure in Christ, Whose love raises Him above all bracketing-together with the world and gives the world its right to existence by taking it up into eternally flowing dialogue of love, leaving untouched essence of God and world in analogia entis; NT arguments point to this unsurpassable rightness, not logical necessities: the whole form has its being in the element of free love—Analogy of Being/transcendental and what is/categorical cannot be applied to relation between self-revealing God and form of His revelation: only in the unique form is the mystery of the super-form of the Trinity as absolute love/essence of God made known; though God does not need form of Christ to be perfect God in Himself, this form is not accidental, but revelation of absolute freedom as it is in God: no natural/necessary compulsion in Father to beget Son or in them to process Spirit—Here we see what divine glory is (2 Cor. 4:6)—Theological methodology cannot be genuinely deductive, since that would subject freedom to form of laws of thought, but must be inductive (Newman), showing convergence of lines toward divine simplicity—One might see simplicity of divine glory poured over whole form as in symbolic Greek theology, or one might use reasoning to follow paths from separate articulations to midpoint as in Western theology: these must complement each other, requiring look that carries us to and from the midpoint. (p. 18): 3. Theological aesthetics as criticism/fulfillment of philosophical transcendent aesthetics is fulfilled in final self-disclosure of God’s glory in NT, over which a ray of beauty as been poured, seen when the core of everything is seen to be God’s free love that justifies man i.e. God’s beauty, not human, corruptible, or mythological beauty—Joy present in hope: source of NT beauty is eschatological, and only deriving from this the source of beauty in harmony between promise/OT and fulfillment/NT—Setting aside aestheticism of some praise of NT beauty, and Romantic theology subject to Kierkegaard’s criticism, we can see: for John, grace leaves an ineradicable impression like that left by worldly beauty (Gulin); the artistically persuasive form of the Gospels requires something like the sight unobscured by vanity or greed before the beautiful (Weiss); only the concept of church can now the source of rediscovery of free space for freedom of art, education, friendship, play, giving Kierkegaard’s aesthetic existence foundation in the church (Bonhoeffer)—Barth’s treatise on God’s glory and beauty therein as conclusion to doctrine of God’s freedom/love: God’s glory is His proper dignity and justification, God in the truth, in the act in which He makes Himself known as God by loving, commencing in OT kabod and fulfilled in Christ as perfect image of Father’s glory and archetype of all creaturely participation in God’s glory, in Whom the kabod receives its midpoint/concrete form: the glory of God is the visible embodiment of divine perfection—Barth invokes beauty of God to explain His glory: things give delight because they are beautiful not vice versa (Augustine) and God is beautiful because He is God not vice versa; Biblical aesthetics receives its concept of beauty from God’s unique self-disclosure which transcends, criticizes, and fulfills every general aesthetic concept—1. God’s essence is beautiful in its form because of it unity of identity and non-identity, simplicity and multiplicity, and because He is identical with this form—2. This is more visible in the Trinity, the making-concrete of His freedom and love, identity and non-identity—3. Trinity comes into view for us in Incarnation as center, goal, and beginning of all God’s ways, in the man who has neither form nor beauty, seemingly opposite to God, yet where He confirms His unity with Himself: He is identical to Himself and free to be another, not in tension/paradox/dialectic/contradiction, but in beautiful form that awakens joy; beauty of God appears in the Crucified Who as such is risen—In Christ, glory and glorification are one, and glorification can give its thanks in the form of the church, a genuine i.e. beautiful form, whose fullness is still hidden—There can be no seeing without being caught up. (p. 24): 4. No metaphysical or OT concept can determine the path of enquiry into glory; fulfillment is a new creation—Retracting of OT trajectory in which all have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory: OT kabod/doxa displays downward slope/decrease in power, though broadening of perspectives post-exile was indispensible foundation for NT fulfillment, though by their inner exhaustion they tear open gulf between OT and NT, as Paul saw—We must follow the matter of glory, not just the words/philology—We must expect God will reveal what He originally meant anew, with everything else bracketed off; hence Synoptic focus not on glory but on momentum of presence/force/authority, calling forth anew terror before God at Sinai, and only after that do Luke and John lay claim to doxa again for NT glory, but we are taken back not just to Sinai but further to purpose of all revelation of glory, Trinitarian love—Dialectic of OT signs was not just concession to man’s sensible nature, but path to the Incarnation, which accomplishes all of God’s rejecting judgment to demonstrate His truest glory in having mercy on all—Structure of volume first considers matter of Christ, then application to him of glory, and then the response of the world i.e. the glorification of glory—Subjective and objective evidence applied here: power to assert/demonstrate/achieve acceptance for oneself belongs to original meaning of God’s glory; seeing and rapture are involved in each other, but in rapture one is just a cooperator of glory, and discovers one’s true essence, and true fellowship with others in Christ. I. Verbum Caro Factum I.1. Prelude I.1.a. The fragments of the old covenant (p. 33): Old covenant prepares for new covenant theologically and epistemologically—Single and indivisible content of Scripture is salvation through judgment—Fullness was not present OT fragments, but came about through synthesis possible for God alone—Review of argumentum ex prophetia converging on Christ—Covenant rests on His active Word of Wisdom that carries out His will, and on form that stands security for covenant and mediates between God and people, becoming clearer up to Servant of Yahweh, integrating ideas of personal go-between, priest, and sacrificed animal, integrated fully only in new covenant, where it becomes possible to combine necessities of living and dying, in dying and rising—Covenant was annulled, but God had to remain faithful to it, which required mediator, a coming together of God’s Word of Wisdom with the human form of the atoning mediator, joining speech and blood events: neither man nor God alone could accomplish this—These joinings are impossible from OT perspective, and even when they occur, they are a mystery never fully laid bare; now, without encroachment on creaturely sphere, world can find in Trinitarian life its own space—Lines from old covenant do not converge, but only from NT perspective; attempts at forced Jewish convergence are obstacles to God’s plan: Jesus and Paul must re-open God’s original intention in the faith of Abraham and the prophets and God’s final great act of judgment on Jerusalem, though while retaining what is genuine in Judaism, rejecting only human self-righteousness—The judgment on Jerusalem in 587 B.C. as type of eschatological event—Even more positive estimation of the law in Matthew and James see its wholeness only from NT perspective—Judaism’s 3 forms of reaching out for glory of God have a home in unity of new covenant only by being dismantled in the Cross; mortal Adam and the old covenant could not support divine/immortal content of covenant: ruin, death, and Hades had to be taken into covenant, so that righteousness of God may be established on earth as in heaven, and so God’s Word can return with whole harvest—In absolute suffering of judgment and its overcoming in rising, imperfect OT glory of God displays itself in NT as perfect glory of love that overcomes all things—Solidarity in insufficiency/original sin; deeper solidarity in atonement of new Adam, in which God’s righteousness passes from one to all, corresponding to Trinitarian solidarity. I.1.b. Drawing together and handing over: the Baptist (p. 40): So that heir of all things might not inherit ruins, original meaning and content of old covenant rose intact in a form and brought it to a close so that it might dispossess itself in favor of new form, person to person—Important here is the encounter, not the movement of John’s disciples; the persons of salvation history are personified missions/bodily ideas, bearing and dismissing epochs of salvation history in themselves: like all sent, the Baptist does not know who he is, but only knows his commission, which exceeds his disciples and his own understanding, and his form can only be understood as unique suspension between the covenants—In event of the Baptist, salvation history restarts after 500 year empty period, going back to prophecy not apocalyptic; like the great prophets, he has 2 sides of wrath and forgiveness in repentance i.e. abandonment of works righteousness, without looking to separation of two classes in judgment, a purely religious apolitical call, with ethical requirements that Jesus at first takes up, criticizing the Pharisees by going back to original understanding of covenant, clearing ground all the way back to Abraham, opening beyond Israel—Restoration/apokatastasis applied to John by Jesus, before applied to Jesus by Peter—Contrast of John to priests, Qumran, political messianism—His awakening of origin of Israel in concept of wilderness, the dreadful and glorious state of being handed over to God, the greatest temptation and greatest nuptial intimacy; a journey through the wilderness is unavoidable for Jesus and all Christians, the place where one learns to pray, where only a nomadic existence is permitted on earth—Humanly considered foolishness of John in his offering of himself as bottom step in stairway of obedience—His baptism between Flood/Red Sea and Christian eschatological sacrament—His forward movement toward the one pushing him from behind, Whom he does not know: only the coming, not the form, is certain, for even the Baptist cannot unite the many OT faces of God; his questioning uncertainty presupposes a hidden mysterious recognition/illumination of certainty begun when he baptized Jesus, Who accepts baptism in solidarity with repentant sinners: John loses his greatest to He Who is least in the kingdom of heaven, in this event at the origins of history—John as friend of bridegroom; even recognition of Jesus leaves doubts/questions, which are given to John, who is not a boundary line, but a sliding transition, or rather the old covenant transcending itself and finding the new covenant hidden in itself in disappearing, making room, and receiving its interpretation from the new—John’s being handed over like Jesus, and Jesus’ solidarity with him in his fate: in his suffering in obedience, John belongs to the restoration of the central reality of the covenant—Question of whether Jesus receives from John only baptism, or whether Jesus is awakened in this baptism to his own mission as he puts into practice following-after John, seen in the contemporaneity shown in the Fourth Gospel—Identity of Baptist and Elijah in context of expectation of Elijah as restorer and fore-runner, but also Jesus and John’s lack of interest in this identification—Old covenant contains surplus not possessed by Baptist, but seen in Jesus’ surpassing wonders; Baptist accomplishes his role in surrendering himself, as Elijah and Moses as real symbols are absorbed into fulfillment at Transfiguration—Drama between John and Jesus as between two free persons, who are indivisibly themselves, and only thus are signs, voice and Word; they are continually asked who they are: Who/persona means someone and therein one who plays a role (Augustine), and this is all seen in infancy narratives in Luke. I.1.c. Jesus makes his appearance: recapitulation (p. 54): Appearing of Jesus drawing near to the Baptist corresponds to Baptist’s appearing, where prophecy and fulfillment come together—Physical abyss of baptism is interpreted by spiritual abyss of temptations—Centrality of the Baptism as Creator’s designation of the one Who fulfills, for Mark, Matthew, Luke, including in relation to infancy narratives—In Jesus had not come from beneath/within interior of filia Sion, He would not have come from above; He is final word of history because He bears all history in Himself. (p. 55): 1. Baptism: Going to meet prophetic kairos represented by Baptism is Jesus’ first act of obedience to prophetic voice from John, though not to His Spirit which He has not yet received—Confession of sins and baptism of forgiveness as two sides of same thing—Jesus’ baptism inverts temporal/material order of preparation for His coming; it is fulfillment not rupture, involving John’s Marian obedience—Jesus’ descent into river as solidarity with the guilty and obedience to prophetic voice, and so incarnated obedience, which is immediately fulfilled, showing incarnation as encounter to the point of identification of Israel and descending God of the covenant—The voice from heaven has a soteriological not adoptionist nor dogmatic Trinitarian explanation, a reference to Servant of Yahweh—As subjected to John’s Baptism, Jesus becomes the one Who baptizes in the Spirit, Whose fullness He receives; Jesus baptizes in fire as the one baptized in the eschatological fire of God: his mission is to be burnt as a holocaust—The baptism recapitulates the proclamation of judgment by law and prophets and the situation of God as partner in covenant. (p. 58): 2. Infancy: Infancy narratives necessary to show that baptism is not by chance or adoptionist; incarnation of the Word must have taken place in conception and birth, bringing together birth from God and from people—Encounter of Baptist and Jesus is drawn by Luke into encounter of Mary and Jesus in the Spirit—Family trees as external connection/recapitulation of Israel—OT roots of Luke’s infancy narrative, and its structure of suspense between promise and fulfillment—Annunciations as anticipating encounter of John and Jesus, brought together in Visitation, when the women are filled with spirit of prophecy—Mary as embodied daughter/faith of Zion, the ark in whom Yahweh’s eschatological glory dwells, seen in her Magnificat, the summary of Israel’s history; links to Zechariah, Exodus, Isaiah, Daniel, 2 Samuel, Judith, Micah—Mary’s virginity as eschatological surpassing of OT motif of barren woman who gives birth through God, Israel’s obedience and faith made concrete/personal in physical form—Arguments contra Dibelius that unity of marriage and virginity are historically impossible—Mary is real symbol surpassing daughter of Zion, as Baptist is real symbol surpassing prophecy—Luke’s openness to the unavoidable theological concept of Mary’s prior redemption, the absolutely adequate correspondence of faith of Mary/Zion to incarnation of the Word is thinkable only on basis of prior purity flowing from the Cross; unity of Zion, Mary, Church in single form in Apocalypse—Midrashic structure of theology of transition from old to new covenant, suspended between OT theology of the poor and NT theology of carrying the Cross, with the meekness of the Gospel poured over all—Annunciation and virginity, birth and poverty/powerlessness before Augustus’ kingdom of power, presentation and obedience, which becomes Christological in the finding: in last event, dreamlike kabod of infancy narrative is replaced by real presence of kabod as weight of God, dividing even His family into the worldly and the class of God, as a fait accompli that makes visible the Church’s cruciform structure—Events of Matthew’s infancy narrative clothed in haggadic narratives of childhoods and persecutions of OT heroes, establishing Jesus in Davidic descent and as new Moses, the events all standing for entirety of salvation history, drawn from written Bible, preaching, haggada, all pointing forward to Jesus’ later mission. (p. 69): 3. Temptation: Baptism is allusive recapitulation of chief stages of salvation history; temptation is interior act of assuming situation of Israel in covenant with God: fittingly, symbolic-sacramental immersion is immediately followed by spiritual-existential immersion—Wilderness as being alone with God and perilous situation of temptation, an exposure to absoluteness of grace/requirement of God—Events left half-accomplished by Israel are now endured to the end—Temptation as recapitulation of events in Moses and Elijah’s lives—God as testing hearts through temptation, though Jesus instructs us to pray not to be led into temptation—Jesus’ temptations as recapitulation of Israel’s three trials in the wilderness (Dupont), but this does not determine shape of Jesus’ temptations, which are messianic not general human temptations (Riesenfeld), putting to proof Jesus’ obedience that Israel as servant/son owed to God’s glory—Essence of covenant involves just God laying himself bare and pure obedience in faith of the partner; here essential temptation is testing God—Not three temptations but one gradual intensification of same temptation, with which stairway of obedience reaches ground, the one is chosen responding to the one Who chose Him, guaranteeing that all that He does and suffers is the expression and accomplishment of the covenant—Unique messianic temptation draws together and transcends temptations of old people, and is basis for those of the Church, so that Jesus’ temptations can be seen in light of whole human situation to which temptation belongs, and in contrast to Adam; Jesus’ whole life as struggle with temptation and discernment of spirits, distinguishing true from false power and faith, continuing in Church e.g. over the law. I.2. Orientation I.2.a. Center of the Word in what is not a word (p. 77): One could read opening of Jesus’ ministry as a fulfillment that is just a purified synthesis of OT, but this is disrupted by the day of vengeance that arises through his solidarity with the prophets in Nazareth (Lk. 4, Mk. 6), opening the final drama—In Mt. 4-7, there is first apparent continuity with OT, but then hearers are taken into prophetic fate of persecution and disgrace, and Jesus opposes Himself to word of Moses, and makes Himself judge of end-times—For evangelists, promise-fulfillment cannot be understood purely on level of prophetic, but Jesus is in solidarity with the martyred prophets, but is more than a prophet: he is sent not inspired, and unlike the prophets, Jesus prophesies His own death, displacing the emphasis of His acts and words onto His death, which He embraces in a mission justified by Scripture; He is ready to pay with total loss of power (Mk. 5:30) for true miracle—As words, promise and fulfillment are secondary; what fulfills the speaking, promising, living God is Jesus’ death and silence, and the Resurrection does not just resume earlier speaking life, for death is definitive/final—Old covenant has an inner impossibility, since a covenant of the immortal with mortals has no meaning, leading to man’s rebellion at this barrier, or to theory of double predestination; hope requires bursting boundary of death that belongs constitutively to man: not-death in death, word in not-word, fulfillment in failure—In OT, God’s power is over against chaos of abyss; this is overcome when the dead lived as one truly dead and judged—What is distinctly Christian is not dialectics, but takes OT seriously and presupposes what is universally human, solving the unbearable universal contradiction that we touch the immortal yet die, its truth lying in the collision of absolute weight of God with what is other: here the images coalesce around the midpoint becoming intelligible in themselves and in their transcendence to NT unity that gives meaning, showing the incomprehensible power of the triduum mortis to bestow form, non-philosophically and incomprehensibly—Man is given his center point by locating him beyond himself in death; this difficulty can try to be resolved by insisting on Christ’s vicariousness (Barth) but then His fate becomes disturbing and anthropologically insignificant and inimitable—In Christ’s final inarticulate cry on the Cross, God’s word reaches its highest point, and the last wall of separation is broken as God pours itself out into a covenant that presupposes a two-sidedness; in this silence, the true message of God’s heart broken open is proclaimed, making visible an event of God: in this man’s death, God’s heart is immediately “affected”—The silence greater than all words remains, even in the Easter commissioning, as the only think essentially to be kept in mind, the knowledge of the love that surpasses all knowledge—The synthesis on the lips of Jesus is true only in Him for He is the synthesis, the primordial Word from which the multiple contents of Scripture are each only a part—The eschatological kairos in the air at the time of Jesus—In NT theology, all is interconnected; synthesis is given not discovered: a theological truth that did not show itself to be the incomprehensible breaking-in/through of Trinitarian love would be not truth, but a worthy victim of Hegelian rationalism or historical-critical exegesis—By bringing Himself as newness (Irenaeus), Jesus makes a breakthrough to a wholly new image of God and man, of which the old image of glory/kabod was just a shadowy pre-figuring; raises difficulty of who the subject is on whom the eschatological kabod breaks, because revelation of ultimate love is intended for it. I.2.b. The subject who receives (p. 89): The Son stands in the midpoint of God’s words to men, and in the midpoint of this one Word is death, the fullness of approximating words having as its goal a not-word above words—In OT, when Word was not yet flesh, receiving subject was historical people progressively reflecting on its history, finding harmony between word and response in praise, and finding its highest point in obediently giving back the Word, never thinking to unite Lord with servant, a breakthrough to identity found only in NT, where Christ is both immanent servant in the people of God and transcendent head over them—NT receiving subject, the body, only exists from the Head, though in the identity of the one organism, Christ is distinct as exalted over the members; unity is like one flesh of husband and wife: both wife is from husband, and they leave others to become one flesh; what in OT was people/house is now body/bride, though people/house can still be used analogically, and bride no longer has OT merely ethical/juridical sense, but is nuptial/one flesh—Immaculate bride made holy by Christ (Eph. 5:27), no longer just a physically unified collective or single people, but includes all of mankind, nor a unity that can only give approximate response but that can give exact response corresponding to incarnate righteousness of God—Solution is visible in Mary’s unreserved fiat, accomplishing one flesh union, and opposition between head/lord/bridegroom and body/handmaid/bride—Christ’s Church can exist only in dynamic crossing-over from Israel’s nationhood to entire mankind/cosmos, a universalized subject, but not simply objective spirit; the constitution of the visible Church—To arrive at point where we have no other place than Jesus, obeying all commandments through single act of obedient love that says “yes”, Cross and Resurrection are necessary—Jesus’ followers have internal structure designed to beyond itself to whole mankind—Cross demonstrates that Incarnation affects man in his being, and that God is now approachable/loveable in a man—In being filled with Spirit at Pentecost, Church grasped spirit of universal mission of Christ based on His love for all, and this is no longer “following” but “being in” Christ by being grasped/surrounded by His love; the Church is the living out of love to Christ and neighbor, leaving all things for His sake—This love as solution to intellectual questions led to the unifying of myriad streams of meaning, which historical-critical method seeks to unravel; the apostolic model of love between Christ and the core of the Church is the model from which post-apostolic development must be considered: apostle is representative and mediator of norm, the reminder that makes present force of God’s love that discloses Christ’s death and resurrection—In NT, dogmatic truth is never abstracted from ecclesiastical wrapping and reflection—Faith is an obedience that makes oneself dependent on force of love of God in Christ, making oneself a sign of absolute love—In Gospels, Christology occurs only in context of ecclesiology—Scriptures as spontaneous expression by Church of experience of in-breaking of absolute love—Historical structure of Church perseveres as subject that receives revelation; visible unity and the Petrine principle, and invisible Eucharistic interiority as bride, wife and, mother—Theological tradition as embodiment of relation to mystery of love, based on Scripture as first model; its countless inexhaustible new expressions and futurity, and the contrast between secular and ecclesiastical tradition (de Lubac). I.2.c. On the form of theology (p. 103): Biblical theology cannot have a different form from later ecclesial theology, each an interpretive act circling around a never exhaustively interpreted midpoint; no systematic NT theology possible, for that would be victory of gnosis over agape—No act/event behind the interpretive Word/hermeneutic of God—Factors dominating coming-to-be of Christian theology: 1. Interpretation of Christ as fulfillment of OT promise; 2. Apologetic and theological need to step from Biblical thinking to Hellenistic thinking of mankind: event of Incarnation authorized step to ecumenical/supranational horizon, though late ancient religious philosophies sought to turn it into one more mystery/gnosis/cosmic drama—Victory over extra-Biblical gnosis in Irenaeus and Tertullian, based on normativity of move from OT to NT, showing God dealing with man as teacher/by evolution—True gnosis is recognition of the mystery of love, unmasterable by philosophy, though the latter was brought into service of mystery by the ecumenical councils, which used metaphysics to avoid absorption of Biblical Christianity into universal metaphysical schema e.g. Nicaea’s use of ousia and homoousion against subordinationism, and to bring relationality into absolute being, allowing creation out of love not emanation—Translation of Biblical speech about historical events into ontological concepts is a valid expression of fact that in Christ and Spirit there has been highest self-disclosure of absolute being: this was a gain, but it also was a loss in that many ceased distinguishing level of living revelation from level of its theological expression, leading to deficient notion of Christianity as propositional doctrine, rather than a faith in God’s act of Trinitarian love—Parallel to conciliar dogmatic theology is theology of Holy Scripture, beginning with Origen, with relation between literal and allegorical senses as expression of relation of OT and NT, opening to tropological/existential and anagogical/eschatological senses: a three-fold transcendence allowing paths of development for theology different from conciliar theology—At heart of Biblical theology is leap from promise to fulfillment, but more from death to resurrection: Christ event has taken place once for all, but is also before us as our future, existing only in relation to Church event—Theology’s signification and moment of glory of divine love are unknowable outside circulation of love between bride and Bridegroom. (p. 110): Since Jesus’ history is superabundant fulfillment of God’s covenant love and fidelity, it cannot be comprehended except as it happened, and after the light of Easter must be understood in stages, in a period of discovery, transposing Jesus’ situation into the wider situation of the Church—Allows coexistence of theologies (Peter, James, John, Paul) with different centers of understanding, which cannot be unraveled, unified by their personal center—Inspired by same Spirit as the Church, the NT could only have Church’s structure i.e. multiplicity in unity, with the living principle of unity dwelling it because transcending it, so there can be more in a text of Scripture than the author consciously willed to express (Dei Verbum 3.12)—Spontaneous generations of dogma in NT, around which all later theologies crystallize, which can only be experienced via love. (p. 113): If momentum of glory of divine love is experienced in reciprocity of Christ and Church, and this experience is reflected on in theology, then kabod moves methodologically into midpoint of theology—This bring OT theology to its accomplishment—The paradox of the righteous one Who is made sin and Who justifies condemned sinners i.e. the unsurpassable momentum of divine love cannot be fit into any system, and is the center of theology, which thus is not a fundamentalism of facts of salvation, but immediate encounter of self-giving love of God in Christ, and the Bride who gives herself in receiving; this theology is also not a liberal existentialism—The encounter at heart of theology is never empirically comprehensible in existential or liturgical situation of individual or community, but must transfer itself to greater transcendent concrete reality of universal Church: per Mariam ad Jesum, per Jesum at Patrem. I.3. Word—Flesh I.3.a. The claim (p. 115): In the indissoluble nexus between event/Christ and interpretation/Church, each determines and is determined by the other: to know the truth of the event of Jesus requires faith; we cannot extract some brute facts behind the Church’s faith, but we must encounter the truth that conceals and discloses itself in the transition between acts of self-disclosure and believing comprehension/interpretation—The Church must assume for herself what was most urgent for Jesus, which requires that Jesus proclaims/is proclaimed—We must ask not what Jesus said/did, but what was the necessary presupposition for the act by which His community formed His words/deeds i.e. Jesus’ claim to authority, which kabod shines out through the interpretations; the question is not what Jesus’ chief concern in His preaching was, but what the chief impression was that remained from His earthly existence—Difference between Baptist and Jesus is that the former points to one after him, and Jesus does not and is identical with the content of His call, summarized as the claim that the Word became flesh—The Word in Jeremiah, Wisdom, Hebrews—The formal leitmotiv of the Gospels is Jesus’ claim to decide about/judge men/whole law/Sabbath; Jesus has strained out the most interior/formal significance of the Word of God, and He knows the hidden thoughts of hearts/reality that people confess to Him, requiring people to stand forth as who they really are: He sees in definitive final judgment—The NT theologically develops this without break in continuity from the confessional situation of narratives about Jesus—Man’s standing firm in the judgment due to his attitude to Jesus is an implicit Christology that expresses more than any explicit Christology (Marxsen), though the theological formulation exactly meets the confessional situation of the narratives, regardless of the answer to the question of the Messianic self-consciousness of Jesus—The fundamental idea of the fourth Gospel that the judgment of God is present in Jesus, though the judgment that takes place through His presence is not the aim but only the consequence of His presence—Matthew on Jesus’ kingship and move from immanent to eschatological judgment; doctrine of final judgment is an elementary teaching of Christianity (Heb. 6:2)—The authority/exousia of Jesus makes it possible for Him to be present Word of God, an authority appearing in His sovereign acts, and in the weakness of the Incarnation which is stronger than the strength that opposes Him: His whole giving of Himself/His Being would be impossible without the presence/indwelling of entire power of God in Him—For everything to be transparent to Him, Jesus must be fully transparent before God: He constantly looks to and proclaims the truth of the Father, and has emeth, an OT property of God, and so His transparence is in continuity with OT. (p. 126): To imitate Jesus, Christians must both discern spirits and make a decisive judgment, but leave the final judgment/sentence to the Judge, echoing Jesus Who judges and does not judge because He judges only as He hears, and He gives authority without giving up His—Our ideal, only to be realized eschatologically, is to be simple/transparent, not divided. (p. 126): From the judging transparence of Jesus which makes Him the incarnate Word of God, a futurist and a realized eschatology can branch off, which determine each other—Because of the freedom of the Judge/redeemer, dilemma of Christian eschatology cannot be resolved in time, but leaves us with hope and confidence based in the Cross, not certainty—Jesus was condemned for His presumption, regardless of whether He said ego eimi; Jesus’ “I” does not express direct identity with Yahweh but expresses more than anything in contemporary Messianic/prophetic categories: the only solution here is Trinitarian, where His ego is a concretization of His glory—Jesus fulfills all promises in salvation history and in creation e.g. struggle for justice, without gnostic schizophrenia between cosmos and salvation, but also without relieving man of need for exertion, but giving that exertion concreteness, summoning man to what is most human in himself. I.3.b. Poverty (p. 129): Formal element in Jesus’ life and Church’s kerygma crosses over not-word of His death, which He takes up in advance in His universal claim to be present Word of God—This leap across death would not be believable unless it were determined by Jesus’ behavior within this claim—Prophets educated Israel into division of mortal flesh and enduring Word, and into poverty so that Israel hoped for right/good only for God—Jesus goes to the poor ones/anawim, with their expectation that God will act on their behalf very soon; in His existence, the Word is present, though its accomplishment is future—Jesus’ paradox becomes visible when He claims to absolute poverty/vulnerability/renunciation of all earthly power/possession: He brings salvation/gifts to the poor, nothing for Himself—The sinner is joined to the anawim as helpless in his sin. (p. 132): Requirements to be poor and leave everything; human existence is essentially poor and dependent on God: we are kept safe in God and so must let ourselves be robbed/sell all, so that perfect poverty and obedience coincide—Jesus takes the place of the family bond—Unconditional leaving all things is necessary condition for readiness for all things—These apparently inhuman requirements presuppose that Jesus is absolutely poor, and so accomplishes the demands archetypally, representatively, inclusively (Irenaeus), and so can make others exclusively dependent on Himself, exposing them to complete poverty, to give them in return the absolute promise of God as responding gift/guarantee. (p. 134): Jesus’ poverty that looks to God is characterized by prayer, faith, Spirit—The parables and Our Father show prayer as the attitude of a beggar, demanding in the intimate terms of Jesus’ own relation to the Father that God’s power prevail where men are powerless; total dependence assures one of being heard—Faith is another word for poverty, and is active element in Jesus’ miracles, summarizing attitude of God as covenant partner; by fulfilling OT attitude of confidence in God, Jesus bestows archetypal faith, and transcends and founds OT faith: His word comes from God in authority and is directed to God in poverty—Spirit is God’s breath that drives the poor/obedient one, the presence of God in him blowing in divine freedom to meet God’s future: what poverty asks, it receives; to blaspheme the Spirit Who is bond between man and God excludes oneself from salvation. (p. 136): Jesus’ poverty is not only requirement/instruction but solidarity with: tax collectors, sinners, scandalizable, children, persecuted for His sake—Parables of solidarity: lost sheep, lost drachma, lost son (Lk. 15); they reveal the weakness of love in God’s heart, seen since Hosea, but without sympathizing with sinner qua sinner—Logic of God’s solidarity brings Him to the Cross for internal reason, He must be reckoned among the law-breakers because He put Himself at their head—In solidarity, we see in His existence a proleptic form (Pannenberg): unlike with the prophet who must trust in God independent of his person, God’s future to which He leads the poor is in Jesus—Jesus has a verification in advance, without the Gospels conferring on the miracles a direct eschatological legitimation of Jesus (Wilckens): that belongs to His final fate, which He is willing to pay from the outset, and in His criminal’s death, God’s kingdom comes—A fundamental trait of life of Christ/Christian is the exorbitant demand made on what lies within human proportions; what is Christian begins at the point where necessity, justice, thought of balanced settlement cease, as seen in many parables and sayings—Jesus loads responsibility on Himself, for all He has to pay with is Himself; the reality of the Word made flesh as poverty flows into total self-abandonment—For John, authority and poverty/obedience are unified in the transparence of the one Who is sent. I.3.c. Self-abandonment (p. 142): Distinguishing marks of Jesus’ existence, authority and poverty/powerlessness, are prima facie irreconcilable, though comprehended in Johannine transparency to the Father, but they lead to the midpoint of word as not-word i.e. word that abandons/dissolves itself—“The Word became flesh” first means that normal personal utterance took on a foreign form of being for flesh does not speak, or is just one of its activities; especially since word became flesh at conception, and so in silence, and moves toward death, and so is bound to temporality and futility: to live again, past words must be reincarnated in present moment; the idea that mortal flesh could give utterance as immortal word is contradiction that seems to destroy human existence—Divine and eternal word can give itself adequate expression in mortal flesh only if man places his entire existence in the flesh, including birth, death, silence, speaking, success, failure, etc., at the disposal of Word in self-exposition—If God’s Word has become flesh, then everything to be disclosed must become present in this finite, transitory existence, without any supra-temporal contents—The human life in which Word is flesh must be capable of infinite interpretation; he must bring into time everything God needs for self-interpretation: there is haste, but does not force the decisive kairos, but rather the momentum of His self-consciousness is not restricted by the tranquility that waits upon events/the hour known to God, and increasing consciousness as human of His mission leads to increasing self-abandonment/assumption of His own fate after Peter’s confession—Elementary sense of renunciation of one’s own doxa: He renounces the form of God, and takes on the form of a slave, who has no form but what he receives from his master, and so the effulgence of God’s glory is without any glory of His own (Justin), and so in His outward lack of form, His existence has some of the wastefulness that is a leitmotiv of many parables—As His involvement in His mission increases, resistance from men increases without cause, and Jesus takes His place under the general law of futility—Phil. 2:6-11 shows that the one Who was emptied received a share in the Father’s doxa through bestowal of divine title of Kyrios, and the reason for His exaltation is the opening of the empty space through which the doxa can send its rays; old ideal of power is a glory that is so much God’s property that He cannot be rid of it, is replaced by new ideal of powerlessness and ridding oneself of OT doxa to make ready the space of complete self-abandonment—Jesus’ entire formless/wordless existence becomes something God’s hand can form in its entirety into the Word of God: He gives Himself up rather than being thrown into the world—Abandonment is irrevocably accomplished in Eucharist and verbalizing of Jesus’ life in early Church, both the work of paradosis i.e. Jesus’ handing over of Himself so as to become what He should be for God and men. (p. 148): Eucharist explained through OT sacrifice—In giving His flesh/blood, Jesus gives something in a state of having been handed over/poured out: gesture and state are one—He gives Himself into the hand of the Father/Spirit, Who brings about the sacrament as He brought about Incarnation—We cannot play off Eucharistic powerlessness and Christ/Church’s sovereignty, for the victorious Lamb is none other than the one Who was slain: the Cross is embodiment/summing up of Jesus’ life-work, in light of which all His demands for self-denial/hatred make sense—Jesus’ Eucharistic self-abandonment is His act of renunciation of any definitive power to determine His own form, so it is idle to speculate about the sense in which He was aware of His identity as Son of Man Who would come in judgment—Jesus is Word-flesh i.e. Word that vanishes in flesh that is entirely dependent on God to be awakened by God to life—Handing over of fruit of His Passion/Resurrection belongs intimately to the distribution of His flesh/blood in Eucharist—Jesus is so liquefied in His self-abandonment that His reality surpasses that of a mediator; He is the forgiveness of sins, bestowed as Easter gift, given the form of sacrament of pardon, beyond ethical duty of mutual pardoning—Sacraments are handed over without defense to human misuse, the essence of which was constituted by the misuse in the Passion. (p. 152): Alongside sacrament stands re-verbalization of Word of God made flesh so as to be expressible in kerygma, Gospel, dogma, theology as work of the Spirit bringing to light all that is hidden in Christ—What is Jesus’ is the Eucharistic liquefying of the Father’s goods formed by Spirit to be definitive utterance about love of Father and Son, establishing continuity between Jesus of history and historic Christ: He Himself rises as body and word—The paradox of His person cannot be resolved by history of psychology, and no single Gospel has reproduces the Christi event in its whole richness, unified in love not syncretism—An inseparable whole is formed in the re-verbalization of what Jesus lived by memory and the light/backward prophecy shining back from Easter, requiring a transposition permitted by the Spirit that yields historical uncertainty but obeys theological truth—Due to different structure of period of Church from period of Jesus, words of Jesus must be translated from unique horizon of His period to horizon of period of Church, in order to remain valid for the Church—Charism of prophecy in early Church that held to imminent expectation and spoke in Jesus’ name was presupposition for coming into existence under Spirit’s inspiration of NT and canon law, and their norms—This is not to say that Gospels are free poetic creations of early Church, but have care to be historically correct, but bathed in light of Easter, transfiguring Jesus’ pre-Easter kabod of momentum into a doxa of pure brilliance: He had been more hidden than the Gospels show, just as God’s OT work of salvation was more hidden than OT shows; Gospels conceal by revealing, and God’s restraint constitutes His glory (Thibaut)—The verbalization uses contemporary thought-forms, but none of these suffices to verbalize what is unheard-of and unique; these thought-forms can use mythical forms, though de-mythologized, and always involving the creative imagination, which is required to relate what is past (Schlatter), and use of hymnody. (p. 159): In transition from Jesus’ self-abandonment, the one who is unique/inimitable becomes an object of imitation in all circumstances, based on His whole existence—If we were to follow transcendental Christology (Welte, Rahner, Ratzinger), nothing would prevent an immaculately transcendent human being like Mary from becoming a God-man—Rather, relation of Christian to Christ must follow obedience that allows what is possible only to Christ to be bestowed on him, and make an attempt at ethical obedience of imitation abandoning all things including self in total readiness for Christ—Paradox of Christ as absolute authority in poverty shows pure relationality/fluidity of Second Person of the Trinity, pointing to a divine self-giving that can be answer only with perfect fiat. (p. 161): We move here away from momentum of absolute claim in person of Jesus to preponderance of flesh that is not Word, but is form of Word in emptiness and silence—In the claim made with His seeing through men in judgment, the emphasis was not on speech, but on His kabod/prestige—Only the form that God gives to Jesus’ increasing poverty/self-abandonment in His Passion and Resurrection allows the Word that disappeared into the flesh to become the Word that was in the beginning, so that the momentum of the claim becomes the brilliance of glory. I.4. Momentum of Time I.4.a. The time of Jesus (p. 162): Time is one of the most difficult themes of NT exegesis—Various interpretations regarding Jesus’ words on time—It is of central importance for the theme of kabod as momentum: presence in claim/authority, future in poverty/self-abandonment—The Church makes explicit the meaning hidden in earlier strata; from this starting point, it is a secondary question how much Jesus was aware of His own fulfillment of prophecy: the momentum of His pre-Easter claim/authority cannot be made sense of unless He was aware that He was God’s final Word of salvation, and so it would be strange were He not aware of His fulfillment of prophecy—Jews and Greeks knew no purely abstract quantitative time as system of coordinates into which historical events could be plotted, though Greeks aimed at chronologically determined world history, and Jews only at salvation history/kairoi of divine activity and periods of recapitulation, with tension between God’s time and man’s time which always involves death: OT time is time set in motion—Time is qualitatively different through its contents, without dissolving quantitative substratum that unconsciously accompanies it—Period of Jesus is absolutely unique, with incomparable momentum. (p. 165): Jesus’ time is that of a single mortal man running unhesitatingly to death whose time is determined by God—Human periods are by nature embedded in and stand out from surrounding human period, and are constrained by finitude to limit undertakings—So Jesus’ mission is limited to Israel, but is also God’s definitive dealing with the world; His move toward death are toward the end of heaven and earth: in Jesus’ theological not psychological consciousness is present assumption of definitive judgment; if Jesus was not conscious that He was proxy for all mankind in God’s judgment, Church’s proclamation of faith in Christ would fail, though to what extent His consciousness developed is unprovable—Genuine Incarnation requires that He act only with means and powers granted by God, and from human side only with prayer, poverty, self-abandonment—Move beyond purely future imminent expectation (Schweitzer) and Platonist realized eschatology (Dodd): rather, eternal is present in each moment of this human life not as a timelessly valid idea but uniquely as what occurs here and now imposing itself at any price, giving Jesus’ life a momentum not present in prophetic-apocalyptic or Platonic understandings of time; this is the correlative reversion to His pre-existence—He is wholly seized and contained in God’s destiny for Him: through the “already” of His presence, the “not yet” of the end drawing near receives its inexorability, in a way more than in the prophets and apocalypses—It is difficult to consider question of how Jesus’ temporal horizon is to be considered theologically because of two apparently incompatible lists of statements: 1. Those that say end will come in this generation; 2. Those that require timespan between Resurrection and parousia—Rather than a compromise, we must attribute to Jesus a double temporal horizon: in Himself He attains the fullness of time in His death/Resurrection, but He also foresees a continuation of chronological time for others, a time transformed by the Spirit—Jesus’ time becomes psychologically timeless through His bearing of sin and descent to Hades, but His sudden Resurrection from death to eternal shelters/contains the time of others—Jesus does not experience bearing world’s sin until the Passion, and before that He sees its threatening timelessness from the outside—In the Resurrection, eternal life begins, or rather Jesus soars to the glory He had before the world was made: projected onto world’s time is the timeless or qualitatively different time, and Resurrection/Ascension/parousia are not temporally separated—Paradox of how Christian can share in Jesus’ earthly time, non-time of Cross and Hell, and perpetuity of exalted Lord—Ways that Jesus’ sayings cannot be explained away, and John’s response from Jesus’ perspective—Jesus’ time anticipated by prophets, made known through the Church, and inclusive even of the times of the worldly/heavenly powers. I.4.b. The time of the Church (p. 175): Church is the subject who receives revelation, and her time cannot be equated with punctiliar determination of individuals in their being addressed/responding to God’s Word—Jesus’ time as the analogatum princeps determines Church’s, as Word determines reply; Church’s time only has the momentum of Jesus’, whose time’s momentum is determined by the inclusion of God’s whole salvific will in His finite mortal existence—Easter appearances lack the open glory of e.g. the Transfiguration, allowing a place for failure to recognize and doubt, and for the practicality of commission and instruction; the light falls backwards to His existence toward the Cross—Resurrection events in the four Gospels—Easter appearances confirm double horizon of Jesus’ time; Church is a time within brackets of Resurrection and parousia, with a double certainty given through the Spirit Who is the present tense uniting these past and future events, without letting them disappear, contra various gnostic spirit-syntheses (Montanus, Joachim, Hegel), and without being timeless or a synthesis, kindling a hope that is not OT hope or definitive possession—Quality of end time is to break chromos as present and future, a shortened time, in which quality immanent expectation is rooted so delay of the parousia did not pose a problem, contra modern theologians who just think in a chronological manner and so get the theological essence of hope wrong—Jesus Who stands timelessly above Resurrection and parousia is the Jesus Who willed to have temporal existence with men on earth, not a Platonic idea; Jesus received His time only by sharing in universal human time/sphere of action, in which He chose those who would follow after Him: His contemporaneity with our time allows Church to share His eschatological perpetuity/supra-temporality—Jesus imprints on Church His form, that of the one Who became Lord of times by perfecting His own temporality through self-abandonment, and His Resurrection makes His going to the limit/self-dispossession the norm for all transitory time—Church’s time is a response in hope to the momentum of God’s eschatological act, whose absoluteness transcends all others, and as such can spearhead all worldly hopes and preserve them from stagnation: it can exercise social criticism without being led astray by it. (p. 182): Pilgrim state of the Church in the sacramental and institutional/official—Sacramental seen especially in Baptism, Eucharist, forgiveness of sins, as once-for-all and ever-new imprinting of form of dying and rising Lord—Presupposes office/participation in Jesus’ authority inseparable from self-abandonment, which ministerial authority must bear imprint of Cross—Church as people receives imprint of ministry and sacrament—Momentum of God’s definitive act on the Cross makes time of the Church not one particular time, like Israel’s was; its apparent brackets are actually opening of all brackets, embracing all times, overcoming the two-sidedness and twilight of OT: apparent dialectic of law and Gospel in Paul is actually abolition of all dialectic—Fully inclusive faith is in the promise of God Who can accomplish His righteousness in what is other than Himself, and includes even Abraham and the pagans—God is infinitely determined and unique in Himself and the one Who includes all things in His embrace—Church is not an entity closed in on itself but a moment in the time of mankind, but not formally determined by world history—Breakdown in immanent expectation brought Christianity to a better self-understanding: now qualitative immanent expectation is decision about seeking first the Kingdom: the Lord Who is already in the eschaton is immanent to the Church in history, by precedence of love. I.4.c. The time of discipleship (p. 188): Church draws life from Jesus, and the next thing that will happen to her, which she immanently expects, is always He—In each disciple’s life, momentum of Jesus’ time expresses itself as call to unconditional discipleship, following the pattern set in the four Gospels—But Christ’s vocation is to go to the Cross/abyss alone—Following seems inaccessible for those who were not eyewitnesses, and those men failed before the Cross anyways—Other apparent failures of contemporaneous discipleship; danger of leveling Cross to a level all can accomplish—Christ’s demands make disciples’ failure more blatant—True situation of the believer is a paradox, for it is impossible to situate himself over against world or Christ: he came too late to be with Christ, but against the world his time must be measured by Christ and His Cross—Evangelists’ reflections on the radicality of Christ’s demands; even without demand to leave all, disciples’ existence is a full-time calling of proclamation of the kingdom, expecting only the kingdom as a reward, for Jesus embodies the radicality of giving the coming kingdom predominance over all else—Jesus decides who will be with him, and He has responsibility for them, hence His preparing them for His Passion; He is the one Who bears sins, and the disciples are those who are borne—Breaking-off of discipleship at the Passion, and the disciple’s share in Passion and Resurrection. (p. 196): John casts a bridge over abyss held open by disciples’ flight; in Synoptics, the women represent what is full reality in Mary: accompaniment into forsakenness, which requires that she be forsaken—Because they received communion, the disciples too are present at the Cross whence the sacraments spring—In going to the end, love is most visible as love—The grace that radiates from Christ raised up on Cross/into glory allows Church, characterized by John and Mary, to accompany through the hiatus, and all later disciples have an archetype in this following (e.g. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises)—Promise of suffering does not eliminate difference between master and disciple, nor does it mean that suffering should be sought; we should entrust distribution of Christological graces of suffering to God (Ignatius), preferring in detachment God’s will to one’s own program of perfection—Faith creates distance since it means that God alone has reconciled the world, but it also unites the believer to Christ in suffering; one can be in the place of Christ only by being sent by Him, and participation in Christ’s work is just grace—Johannine expressions of this unity in love—Contemporaneity through faith/love only out of grace/momentum/glory of Cross. I.5. Momentum of the Cross I.5.a. The collision (p. 202): Every path leads to hiatus of Cross, and plumbing its depths in Hell: in the midpoint of the Word stands what is not word/form but can give form, so theology is not just reflection on words/concepts, and cannot pin down this midpoint—Form of Jesus’ time is entirely oriented to His death, and so, secondarily, are times of Church and disciple—Here we see what kabod as God’s momentum means in NT, and OT material-dialectic images of kabod receive their spiritual content, along with the contribution of the ladder of obedience—Purely historical narrative of a man’s crucifixion cannot lay the path to the inner event, and OT concepts/images can only provide starting point; the Cross in point of unity of converging lines of power—One cannot demythologize here, as one should in OT, though OT perceptions of divine wrath, curse, punitive judgment are not superseded nor incompatible with God of love Who wills reconciliation: the momentum of God’s wrath is taken up in momentum of God’s love: we must avoid seeing Christ’s suffering just as punitive rage against innocent victim or as manifestation of divine love—OT establishes that God’s righteousness/holiness/blessing is enduring attribute, but His wrath/punishment limited to individual acts of judgment; contra Luther, His righteousness is not penal righteousness, but saving righteousness (Origen, Dionysius, Anselm, Thomas)—Prophetic awareness of the day of God’s wrathful judgment; the awareness after the exile, confirmed by Jesus, that the covenant is broken—The wrath is not pretense but real, God’s “No” to the attitude of the world; only the sinless one could quench this wrath—Jesus’ vicariousness is efficacious for others not because of juridical imputation or physical solidarity, but because divine love out of love takes on itself the world’s sins as the love of both Father and Son, and this love attracts; imputation and solidarity are taken into this love—In kenosis, the one Who abandons Himself is entirely determined by the Father Who loads on Him the sin of the world/wrath of God, in the collision of burden of sin with the total powerlessness of kenotic existence: God prescribes what is opposed to God, in an inconceivable unity of sin and God’s will—The subject Who acts on the Cross in God using the instrument of sin, but God’s Word is dumb—God’s creating/electing love is unfathomable as is sin/the hate of the world, but the abyss of the former enters the abyss of the latter, fulfilling OT; the Word ceases to be word when He takes on total identity with the flesh of sin, to be a free space where the will of the Father may make its colliding impact, and to be reduced to transparency to the Father’s expression: only God can/has the freedom to go to the end of abandonment by God, so the Son must have already possessed divine dignity and only renounced enjoyment of it. I.5.b. Kenosis (p. 211): What is required for the subject on the Cross is that He be pre-existent (Phil. 2); what is expressed the is not doctrine of 2 natures, but succession of phases in continuity of one drama of salvation—Subject of kenosis is pre-existent Son; what is assumed is not creatureliness in itself, but concrete human destiny under curse of sin and death (Leo): He does not just bear general fate of death, but uniquely bears sin, obedient first to Father not to death—This obedience requires decision to surrender form of God; we must see how this is possible for the God Who cannot change, suffer, or obey in the manner of creatures: He must have a freedom to do more than the creature would suppose on the basis of concept of God—Hilary attempted to explain this on basis of power of divine nature, but this risks Docetism: better to focus on pure personal relationships of love and selflessness in Godhead (Bulgakov), where selflessness underlies first kenosis in giving freedom to creature, with view to second kenosis of the Cross in which He makes good and transcends consequences of creature’s freedom—Son translates dependence on Father into expressive form of creaturely obedience, and whole Trinity is involved: the Cross is inscribed in the creation of the world (Bulgakov)—The freedom of the kenotic decision cannot be deduced from or become a universal philosophical law, for only God’s free love can cause Him to create or redeem a world—God confirms He is God by entering the circumscription and misery of creatures, proving that He can do it without paradox or division, showing Himself greater than we thought: His Triune love shows that obedience is not foreign to God Himself, and the relation of obedience within the Godhead becomes God’s relation to a man (Barth)—Christ’s whole human life is not His suffering, for He receives and does not take on this suffering—Deepest experience of abandonment by God requires equally deep experiences of being united to God and receiving life from Him even as man, even if this does not imply beatific vision—He is martyr in His hour, but a already a witness/martys in His whole life through the momentum of being directed to that hour—Obedience already belongs to creatureliness, but possible only through Son’s kenosis; Son’s kenotic readiness is of a qualitatively different kind than readiness of free creatures, or otherwise Cross would just be realizing creaturely attitude not vicarious bearing of collective sin: even Mary’s fiat is empowered only by Christ’s—Jesus’ private and public life’s fundamental character is hiddenness, leaving His revealing to the Spirit and the Church; this hiddenness as needing to be depicted by the evangelists—Kenosis that forms Jesus’ existence cannot be explained by something prior to it, so He becomes a skandalon—In the Passion, the scandal of His hiddenness becomes visible—Jesus’s internal horror, when everything is reduced to obedience, and He becomes the one abandoned by God and men and self, containable only in Trinitarian context; the experience of such abandonment is timeless, definitive, silent, fulfilled in total giving forth, making Himself open for all to enter—Understandings of the Cross as judgment: establishment of God’s righteousness and condemnation of sin—Resurrection as new act but one demanded by inner logic of judgment of the Cross and so contained within it: raising on Cross and raising into glory are one event (John, Paul). I.5.c. Hell (p. 228): Step from old/temporary to new/definitive/eschatological covenant is in the annihilation of the last enemy, death, swallowed in victory; for OT, death and final separation of sheep and goats were boundaries that could not be crossed, though OT God’s power was not limited by Sheol, but His mobility against all that opposed Him could only find conclusion in descent of God to the lowest rung of ladder of obedience—Death is loss of living relationship with God; kenosis requires solidarity with death that is lot of all—Due to momentum of God’s will crushing the sufferer, there is no triumphant or struggling active descent, but a passive being removed, the sign of Jonah: the complete disarming of the principalities and powers can only occur from within through participation in absolute passivity of being dead, the Gospel being made objectively present to the dead—Jesus carries Father's saving will to the end where otherwise only servitude remains: the whole structure of this self-abandonment is built on the free non-psychological obedience that is His kenosis—Jesus’ inclusive being with the dead rests on what He has exclusively—Faith, hope and love can exist in Hades by the redemption brought by Christ so as to redeem lostness, leading to conditional Sheol (Richard of St. Victor); only Jesus suffered complete poena damni for all (Nicholas of Cusa) so that the abandonment of Holy Saturday is truly timeless because he is truly dead—Jesus had an interior visio mortis by force of immediate experience, which was most complete punishment in obedience (Cusa, Luther, Calvin), though for Calvin not Cusa the Trinitarian bracket is lost—Here NT concept of Hell emerges from Hades as Christological concept—He descends to the inactive part of creation (Irenaeus) and in that sense it is an objective triumphal procession without sentiment of victory, glory in what is the opposite of glory, in the loss of all communication; He becomes the judge Who has measured all the dimensions of man in His own experience and now can assign to each his lot eschatologically—Hell is the lot of anyone who recognizes the vicarious deed of God but rejects it; Purgatory is a possibility because an impulse of mercy has been mixed with eschatological fire that tests men; Heaven is a possibility in that the separation of Son from Father implies His return: journey into Hell changes timelessly in absolute instant of Resurrection into uttermost intimacy of Heaven—The act of wrenching fate and destiny from their axes takes place in deepest silence of death, and the Christ that rises is a new creature. II. Vidimus Gloriam Eius II.1. The Request for Glorification (p. 239): In NT, ‘glory’ appears 116 times and ‘to glorify’ more than 60 times; these must be understood syncretistically or just as adoptions of OT usage, but in relation to center of NT event of salvation, transforming and completing what went before—1. Every living and free being establishes for itself a sphere of power/gravitas, which radiates both intellectually and sensibly, and this can be transferred to God’s majesty and utterances—2. The beautiful is a transcendental property of Being that governs all that exists, and the glorious is a property of the ground of Being present in all that exists and transcending categorical definition: doxa is a cipher that transcends all words, holding sway over all God’s works but more in some than others, encircling His revelation, expressing His hiddenness and revelation, embracing even contradictions transcendentally—Like the perichoresis of the transcendentals one, true, good, beautiful, there is an indissoluble perichoresis of the theological transcendantale glory with God’s being one, true, good—3. God’s glory in good truth is revealed in Christ, especially in His obedience of Cross and Hell, the unique ray of divine love becoming visible in the unique momentum of that event, establishing the norm for the predicate ‘glorious’, integrating all the nuances of glory into itself though demythologizing what needs to be—From the midpoint we can see all that is Christian, and we can see the powerfulness in God’s doxa shine forth in complete powerlessness. II.1.a. Father, glorify me (p. 244): The Son carrying out His being sent by the Father in a unique kenotic obedience, fulfilled in His “hour”—His obedience to death is the glorification of the Father, which is one with the glorificiation of the Son by the Father; synthesis of the glorifications is based on the unity of Trinitarian act/being, which gives the Son’s petitionary prayer its unique infallibility: the Son’s request for glorification from the Father is born from understanding obedience of Son as glorification of the Father—The Father’s ruling authority take effect in lowliness of Son’s obedience—No seeking honor as luster of ego for oneself, for the Son is the one Whose entire existence seeks the doxa of the Father—In the hour, the unity of authority and poverty become self-abandonment: the genuine death on the Cross is carried by the commission/authority to lay down and take up life again, based on a decision made in advance of the entire earthly existence, all the way to the end envisioned by absolute divine will, effecting the Father’s majesty at the uttermost point, though anticipated by signs—The reversal in which the Father glorifies the Son, like a law of divine logic, infallible but made only in intra-Trinitarian dialogue of request: the obedient making way of the Son for the Father is the expression of the eternal love of Son Who makes way for eternally loving Father—Uttermost distance is the identity of obedience and love in the Son—Two lines of statements: dispensation in work of salvation, and following this unity to its final Trinitarian origin—The goal of Jesus’ work of obedience is the broadening of the Father’s sovereignty over Jesus to the whole world: His obedience is fruitful and active, even on the Cross, in drawing all things to Himself—Even in His return to the Father, the Son’s passive action does not become active action, and does not supersede His dependence on the Father—Supramundane love does not just fall upon but breaks out from the obedience of the Cross. II.1.b. The Spirit will glorify me (p. 250): The Son’s eternal love for the Father was the act of making space for the eternal love of Father for Son, but the distance between glory of love and obedience unto death came into existence because of world’s darkness—The work of exhibiting the identity that remains for the sake of the world believing must be done not by Father or Son, but by their mutual love i.e. the Spirit, the eternal fruit in God and fruitfulness in the world, sent by the Father into the world at the Son’s request, breathed forth by the Son passively in His Passion—The Spirit is set free for the world in the Father’s love handing over His Son and in the completion of the Son’s self-consecration in the opening of His heart—The Spirit as fruitfulness of love of Father and Son is bestowed impersonally by Father and Son, and bestows itself personally as free gift—In interpreting what is the Son’s, the Spirit glorifies Him and thereby the Father, and is not simply the self-glorifying love of God: Jesus’ glorification in the Spirit is the bringing to light of the love in obedience and identity in distance, leading us into the semper magis of the whole truth/love—Johannine symbolism of Spirit/water/blood shows that the truth is love, and the one glorified is the one crucified; the Spirit does not give only an external interpretation, but pours out the substance itself/its fruitfulness i.e. what is inseparably word/proclamation and flesh/sacrament: in the Spirit, Jesus returns in His fruitfulness, opening a new distance in identity between Christ and Church, so as Father is glorified in Son, so is Christ in Church through Spirit—Spirit’s interpretation of Jesus to world corresponds to two-fold world in John: the world turned away from God, and the world destined for faith/knowledge; Spirit is both witness and advocate, the one Who convicts objectively—When the obedience of Jesus bears fruit, there is not an external witness of God, but the fruit of God bears witness in the fruit of the world i.e. the Church—The Spirit as freedom whereby the children of God know a glorious permission not necessity to love. II.1.c. I am glorified in them (p. 255): Jesus’ personal characteristic is that He has never sought His own glory so He cannot secure His own recognition nor display His fullness through His obedience, but the Father and Spirit do this—The Spirit prepares a dwelling for Father and Son in Church, and Son prepares a dwelling for Church/world in Father—Radiance of Trinitarian love discloses itself as truth of God’s kabod and has its source in momentum of obedience on Cross; for crucified Christ to be glorified in the Church, the eternity of glory must be instituted in Church; Christian love is love out of participation in obedience of Christ, passing from slavery to freedom of sonship/friends—Obedience out of love is beyond natural “must” and “ought”—Momentum of Church’s love has its origin in entole given to Son by Father and its goal in momentum of laying down one’s life for the brethren, near to the Son and distant from the lord and master Who gives the command, the limit of which is martyrdom but the center of which is participation in Lord’s destiny; difference between this love from the world’s love is the opening of the inmost heart for the brother in deeds, the principle of Christian fruitfulness—Obedience passes over abyss between kingdoms of light and darkness—John sees embodiment of discipleship in love of brethren not neighbor, without watering down the Sermon on the Mount, since this shows Church’s love as continuing existence of Christ’s self-giving in love, with its fruitfulness, embodying Trinitarian love—To be glorified in the Church is for Christ to have revealed the Father’s love such that men have accepted it, and it has taken root—Trinitarian love is indivisible—Kabod-momentum of Jesus’ Cross is set forth through Father, Spirit, and Church—In NT, doxa signifies one reality in different aspects i.e. the eternal Trinitarian love that has come into the world; involves integrating obedient love lived in separation for the sake of salvation, and Church and redeemed world, into the original intimacy/joy of Father and Son’s dwelling with one another—Doxa is eschatological but present proleptically in lowliness/hiddenness: there is an objective anticipation of doxa as glory in momentum of obedience, and a subjective casting back of light of glory from Easter faith of Church onto hiddenness of the one Who humbled Himself—Doxa is a transcendental of divine revelation, in all NT theologies. (p. 261): Glorification of Christ is a question of the truth of Christianity, a proof of what His obedience was—Central concern of theological aesthetics is correspondence of obedience and love, of self-emptying into hiddenness and being raised into manifestness, based on perfect proportion established by Christ’s obedience, including theological truth and goodness in beauty—Christ’s glorification is entirely through His self-entrustment, and His concern only for transparency to the Father; only His poverty and self-abandonment can show His claim and authority to be genuine love: Christocentrism is transposed by theological aesthetics to final Trinitarian theocentrism in which Spirit has central place as the one effecting the mutual indwelling in love of Christ and Father, as the personal identity of personal distinction in God. II.2. The Substance of Glory II.2.a. Essence and word (p. 264): In John, Christ is revealed as lord of glory/kurios tes doxes; to see how the center is the center, we must measure the fullness of glory including periphery, including many things not called doxa by NT—Ultimately, there is not word/image but the face of Christ (2 Cor. 4:6) i.e. a human face that the face of the Kyrios, substantially that of the pre-existent Son. (p. 265): 1. The Son reveals Father as His word, but is a word that prays to the Father, and requests, adores, and thanks, without controlling the object of His utterance—Words about God’s glory must be cleared away to make space for the glory to give utterance to itself—In Paul, doxa is a term the most rich in content and transcending all content, the divinity of God as freely made known i.e. placed within an expressive form while bursting every form, the God before Whom one must ultimately be silent, but Who here has as ineffable placed Himself in the word, proclaiming His freedom and power, but with the danger of the word forgetting the ineffability—The intellectual creature on whom a ray of eternal glory rests bears in itself something of the structure of absolute being: its free self-expression/giving can reveal/bestow itself while retaining its inalienability/inexhaustibility of personal mystery, and this image can be followed to the archetype—The unutterable words and gifts that Paul received; in NT, there is cultic initiation, but into the single mystery of the love between Father and Son—We must attend not just to form of Bible as word, but to the approach-roads to God it indicates: childlikeness, peace, prayer, joy, thanksgiving, insight that God’s love is beyond all insight—The Bible continually passes into poetic diction, and in its close entirely into images; no theology can give a fully valid translation of poetry/image into abstract concepts, for the Bible’s verbal form is the only proper form for all that is said by Son concerning the Father and for all that is indwelt by God’s glory/divinity. (p. 268): 2. God of the Bible is first adorandum not tremendum/fascinosum; as living and free, He is present in His creatures and gifts such that He distances Himself from them to leave them a space of freedom: His attributes fill the universe and can be seen intellectually, but they permit the freedom to recognize His freedom or not—Interplay of transcendence and immanence as basis of Biblical doxa; distinction is between free creation and free gift to free creature, not ground and what is grounded, i.e. irreducible distinction of natural and supernatural—Sovereignty/majesty as God’s divinity in the world, sublimity/dignity as His permanent free elevation above the world, glory as His free turning of His personal divinity; variation and circumincession i.e. distinction with inseparability of His attributes within doxa e.g. holiness, eternal power, power to give appropriate expression to the otherness of His being, wisdom, righteousness. (p. 271): 3. God’s absolute and sovereign freedom to utter a word, ultimately a word of prayer and dialogue in Christ—This word cannot be replaced by a mere reflection or surrounding glory like the Nous to the One is Plotinus, and the word cannot be identified with a wordless presence of the ineffable in the world like the late Jewish theology of the shekina, or in theologies that take glory to be the powers/speculations that stand around the divine essence (Philo, Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius, Palamas); these underestimate God’s freedom to create for Himself a valid expression of His incomprehensibility—God first asks for listening faith not sight, but He also attests the credibility of His words in deeds—Since God has achieved fundamental praise through His Word, then human images can also praise Him so long as they are directed by the primary image of divine self-expression. II.2.b. Appearing and image (p. 273): 1. In becoming flesh, God’s Word changed from audible to visible word, though prepared by OT perceptibility of kabod, which was always seen as sign not mythical natural self-presentation of God—The appearing of the Word must comprise full freedom/personality of active Word of Yahweh, which can only occur in Trinitarian way—Categories like appearing and image cannot express a personal, intimately free act—Pagan theophanies/epiphanies especially in Iamblichus/Proclus in which the god has freedom to embody himself in shining form according to magical mystic’s capacity to perceive—Rarity of ‘epiphany’ in NT, but its place relative to other words denoting appearing, showing, etc.; all these words center on mystery of Incarnation of Word: everything in the one who appears is address, grace, demand for decision, requiring faith in the act of seeing: accepting the word who appears is more than physical act of looking at object, but is a knowing that inseparable integrates hearing and seeing—Epiphanies of the Word place man before decision of faith and so do not have superhuman character/overwhelming momentum of Sinai kabod, except in rare cases or when kabod is transposed into spiritual realm—Focus on interrelation of revelation and love in NT as perfect self-gift kindling active love in believers so that they yearn for second epiphany; epiphany in this context is historical appearance of Jesus oriented to second appearing: first appearance’s purpose is to change the existence of those who have seen into a flame that burns for the final appearing—Johannine understanding of epiphany as final word: only God’s love for the world has become visible in this epiphany, unlike in mythological/philosophical epiphanies, but fulfilling OT—1 Tim. 3:16 develops dimensions of the mystery through 3 antitheses: 1. Manifested in the flesh/Vindicated in the Spirit; 2. Seen by angels/Preached among the nations; 3. Believed on in the world/Taken up in glory. (p. 280): 2. Epiphany expression refer more to the act of appearing; image/eikon expressions to the result of appearing e.g. homoioma, schema, character, morphe, apaugasma—Wisdom and pre-Christian patter behind Col. 1:15-20 as preparing for Christ; the attributes and place of Wisdom among the quasi-hypostases that mediated God and world in late antiquity, and the history of concept of image after Plato in which image becomes natural dynamic emanation, either as subordination or with identity of substance as ray sent out—Cosmological speculations about imageless God becoming image through techne or physis, allowing consubstantiality with personal distinction: this whole eikon-cosmology is brought to transparency that goes beyond itself in reflection on love of God in Christ and so fulfilled in Christian theology: image makes visible the invisible but without idea of God being hidden behind iconostasis of hypostases, for in boundless un-static obedience of Son the boundless self-giving love of Father appears, so that level of image is transcended—What is glory in Christ is that He has fulfilled all the promises, reconciling the world to God in Himself. (p. 284): NT directs attention away from light of creation to light of revelation; regarding light, analogies to history of religions are unimportant—Complete openness of obedience makes the one sent both image and light, elevated above opposition of formless and formed in the Trinity—Light in opposition to darkness, light linked to life and fellowship; children of the light have transparency the reveals freedom of His obedience as love: in NT, talk of light is metaphor for divine love that is communicated, an ontological deepening of an ethical idea, set in momentum of Cross and Resurrection. (p. 286): 3. (a) The human person can grasp the meaning of a way of seeing God through His word/image that transcends all affirmations of God’s invisibility only on basis of understanding interpersonal relationships—Human seeing is more than sensory psychological act, but includes seeing intellectual connections in what senses perceive, and persons’ free statements (Scheler)—Rapture into Christian act of seeing is a unity of faith that loves God in Jesus, and fulfillment of command of love of neighbor—One truly sees when one is prepared to receive what spontaneously offers itself: it is a hearing that step-by-step penetrates the sphere of understanding from outside/inchoate to inside/perfect—God’s self-revelation has become visible in both human form and its salvific action—Our perception is based on archetypal seeing of eyewitnesses, whose sensory seeing points beyond itself to interpretation/understanding of the one seen, the presupposition for which is His return to the Father and no longer being seen—We cannot grasp the full meaning of a saying or of Cross/Resurrection until it is over—Presence in absence is not a dialectic that dissolves image/form, but a deep mystery of love, with a counterpart in understanding of human persons, beyond alternative of indirect or direct seeing: a person can only be seen in his self-giving, and in turning from his signs to signified; but in all of Jesus’ signs, all that is visible is His obedient love to the Father, and the absolute love of the Father for Son and world—We see these are not two independent persons getting together in a working fellowship, but that they exist from their origin in substantial fellowship of love—Seeing means the ability to interpret a person/destiny as epiphany of absolute love. (p. 291): (b) This love is not an object one can contemplate/objectivize from impartial stance, but can only be seen as what it is when one is seized by it: only absolute love can empower one to see it—The Son offers Himself to the gaze, but the Father must draw those who see Him—Since the empowering of sight is question of power to love, then the freedom for belief/unbelief is operative, since love requires freedom—Love of one’s brother as criterion for being in the light—Enrapturing power that draws those who believe/love and lest them share in its own birth from God, symbolized in many ways as transcending subject-object schema. (p. 293): (c) Superseding of rapture of one who sees into what he sees: latter determines power of sight in former, and determines/imprints itself on whole of former—God’s Word-image has form in a matter transcending form and demanding faith, so that it has the highest power to give form, the quality of form proper to absolute love displaying itself in transformation in Christ such that one becomes a new creation, through God’s active shaping power in Christ—Restful contemplation of the depths of the one Who shows Himself—For John, we can see doxa on earth, but sight does not go beyond faith or eschatological dynamic. II.2.c. Correspondence (p. 296): Contents of glory are contents of revelation of God in His divinity, but only truly seen where through response to Word, correspondence between God in Himself and in His world are is attained. (p. 296): 1. Goes beyond sphere of image and its imprinting on human person—Through sin, man lost not image but God’s glory, and man is reintroduced in Christ to higher than original quality of being an image and glory—New and final level in contents of doxa come to light, characterized by kinship between glory and righteousness/sedek/dikaiosune, such that world is subjected to God and He justifies it in Himself—Covenant is fulfilled beyond all analogy between archetype and image—From OT on, Yahweh’s glory and righteousness are parallel/interchangeable—Glorification of Jesus involves notion of justification that includes believers; Paul’s teaching on justification requires Christological explanation, including Christologies of obedience (Phil. 2), substitution (Is. 53), and mediation of whole cosmos (1 Cor. 8:6): Christology is oriented to all-inclusive theology of history of creation/salvation—Higher valuation of Cross and devaluation of law in light of Resurrection—Abraham’s faith as transcending barriers of law, flesh, death—God’s covenantal righteousness as taking His partner’s place and judging her enemies, having power to bring about justice—For Paul, eschatological act of reconciliation has been done by God alone in sacrifice of Christ; faith and baptism incorporate one into event of Christ’s dying and rising—The one who has been seized but is still in via does not judge himself, but leaves judgment regarding his fidelity to the Lord—Because the believer is conformed to sufferings of Christ and tied to sufferings of this age, he is not yet a whole person in the eternal life where he proleptically lives in spirit—Establishing justice in covenant/whole cosmos is a real mastery immanent in the world which does not exclude His free exaltation above the world: Israelite characteristic of oriental concept of immanent righteousness—The act by which God’s justifying act in Christ takes possession of man is also sanctification of the man in Christ, but it remains open to human freedom how it will relate to God’s free gracious deed. (p. 303): 2. Question of faith cannot presuppose that God’s law-giving freedom and creaturely freedom are in direct relationship over against each other; free initiative of God’s grace includes free self-giving of incarnate Son—Because Christ’s love is the love of the pre-existent Son, His obedient love has power to take on for God sin and curse prior to our awareness and consent; in His Cross, we have died i.e. been deprived of our sinful selves, and we must acknowledge that i.e. accept this action, which is faith, obedience to the Gospel, measured by power of God’s act of reconciliation, not power/willingness of human person—The force that can bring about obedience/abandonment of the hearer is the power of God’s love, working from within, freely transposing the hearer into absolute freedom, requiring the hearer’s obedient fiat/submission—Faith as eschatological event; the act of faith is the acceptance of what the fashioning power brings with it—Paul/Hebrews bases OT proleptically on eschatological faith: act of faith is admission of what God has antecedently accomplished in Christ. (p. 307): 3. The door through which faith leads opens onto superabundance of realities which are the goal of faith/justifying grace: eternal life, existence as share in God, pouring out of Holy Spirit, knowledge of revealed depths of God—We cannot reach full possession, due to eschatological reservation, but we must also abide, established by the steadfastness that is God Himself; all is grace: we dwell in Christ because He dwells in us, presupposing identity of love between Father and Son—Indwelling of Father and Son is result of love to which faith provided access—Images of believers as true temples and of super-abundance—Definitive descriptions of perfected justification of God in His covenant: communication of Spirit to believers and their being born of the Father with the Son—The creature as nature is completely indwelt in its inmost depth by God’s triune divinity/supernature, so that the image becomes space where archetype dwells and develops its powers as grace; it is meaningless to avoid synergism of freedoms here, for God’s aim is empowerment—Full correspondence/accomplishment of covenant is possible only when immanent Trinity becomes economic Trinity, when OT sedek is transcended/deepened to communication to creature of relationality of Triune life, where relation of Father and Son in Spirit is God’s Being: grace too rises above antithesis of relation and being; since in God, Being and being spirit/personal life/consciousness are one, knowledge/experience plays major role in communication of grace, the self-actualization in prayer/experience of received gift, so that knowledge and faith proceed together. (p. 312): Dialogue within our spirit between divine and human spirits contains element of distance which sets a measure—The believer experiences the overwhelming of God’s grace as act by which he is expropriated and given role for Church/body of Christ and people of God, an expropriation of faith and love, horizontally and vertically—Son’s mission is without measure, but measured to the individual by Christ, each ministerial grace being subsumed by analogy of faith i.e. of Church’s entire indivisible faith to those of individuals—Correspondence between earthly and heavenly measures—Decisively Christian element of theological aesthetics is possibility of combining measureless profusion of grace with allocation/measure, based in inner Trinity and Trinity coming forth in Incarnation; all this takes up and supersedes OT statements on measure—Beauty of revelation seen in God’s capacity for expression communicating itself both as measurelessness of life and light, and as order and measure; poles of tension of the beautiful, i.e. inner light and outer form, are embraced by Biblical concept of free appropriateness (Anselm) or seemliness/fittingness—NT examples of these concepts—Everything disposes itself with free necessity around the “hour”—Nothing more free and no logic more necessary that the Logos: God’s self-revelation destroys, transcends, and fulfills inner-worldly beauty at the point it goes to Cross/Hell; beauty means that God succeeds in justifying Himself and creatures in one act, so that He can set His law in the depths of their being through the Son’s obedience—We are still in via to God’s definitive victory, with His eschatological glory shining on us proleptically. II.3. Hiddenness (p. 318): The Johannine interpretation of entire event of Incarnation is as Trinitarian doxa surpassing all splendor, but there is a gulf between impact of naked Cross and this theology; we must consider what is inglorious in the form of a slave, and the lack of glory made present through absolute hiddenness—God is incomprehensible and becomes more so, the more He offers Himself to our minds: the folly of God in Christ that is a theorem for concrete, not just negative, theology. II.3.a. Hidden life (p. 318): 1. Doxa runs through every stratum of NT, eluding all direct representation; parallels in kabod, shekinah, memra—Synoptic links of doxa to Son of Man in wholly future-eschatological manner: Jesus did not claim doxa in His earthly life—In Luke, God’s glory begins breaking through, but this just makes explicit what was present without being mentioned in Mark and Matthew, though Luke remains, unlike John, at stage of OT figure in which glory is divine sphere that breaks through and clothes round, except in Luke and Matthew at Transfiguration in which Jesus’ inner glory breaks out—Suffering is included in glory of kingdom, but in Luke glory is not entirely appropriate word for Jesus’ earthly life (Ramsey)—In light of Resurrection, there can be no de-mythologization of characterization of Jesus’ life, but there could be a de-paschalization, asking how much Jesus’ sovereignty in lowliness had to be described in terms of OT glory, stepping over Jesus’ incognito, which was also God’s appearing in His mission, in a unique unity of disclosure and concealment—Place of His miracles in this, and the stylistic touches in their Gospel presentation as effect of Easter understanding. (p. 323): 2. Jesus’ sovereignty is the appearing of the free abasement/kenosis of God’s glory in the obedience/lack of freedom of the form of a slave; lack of freedom is recognizable in seriousness that leads to Cross, and is consequence of freedom of love—He cannot be fit into existing categories, e.g. of Jewish Messiah, without reinterpreting them; His sovereign freedom is obedient to Father alone, not to prophecies’ historical structure: this freedom as superiority to all forms of OT allow Him to be at once superior form that embraces all forms and lack of form that disappoints pre-conceived notions—Jesus is the mystery that appears as contradiction/paradox externally, but as unbreakable unity to faith/synthesis of salvation history: He displays Father’s will to save without loss to justice, and He bears human guilt by allowing Himself to be judged, but in training us for the Cross He makes humankind cast out into humankind redeemed—Things that Jesus knows without revealing so He can show the hiddenness of God, and things that Jesus cannot know in order to be genuinely like man, both simultaneous and expressible only in approximate circumlocution—No situation shows the whole, but can only be understood on basis of whole, though sovereignty/freedom is seen in each: not by direct/neutral perception but only by faith/gift/connaturality/interior instinct establishing proportion to unique object—Question of how God Who is love can make Himself comprehensible to a human who is in untruth/guilt/lack of love (Anselm, Kierkegaard) and also bring him to his own truth, which direct revelation of divine glory cannot do: man hungers for glory, and God must refuse this out of love, but must offer Himself indirectly in form of a slave/scandal, both to His contemporaries and those later, a small man expressing what God understands by compassion and wretchedness—Kierkegaard lacks Trinitarian and substitutional dimensions—The Church’s interpretation through repetition and intensification. (p. 329): 3. Literary/theological ways post-Easter community drew aspects of risen Lord into pre-Easter account because the risen one is the truth of the one who died—All that historical Jesus died is oriented to/confirmed by the hour—Necessary de-paschalization of historical Jesus, Who did not anticipate His glorification by the Father. (p. 330): Miracles/signs are certainly characteristic of historical Jesus, proofs of His commission initiating coming of God’s kingdom—In Judaism, deeds of power as God’s deeds in the one that He sends—Personalization of Jesus’ signs, which are bound to faith, where Jesus mediates faith to God: Jesus is verb, and becomes noun always present in verb only through Resurrection—Jesus goes back to Abraham’s faith, the simplest/most concrete situation of all, which infallibly touches God; Jesus is energeia that brings about mutual compenetration of faith/kingdom/covenant—Miracles belong with teaching on prayer and parables, but are not fully understood by disciples; various other responses to the miracles: none of this can be fully understood before Cross/Resurrection—Spectacular miracles are surrounded by atmosphere of calm/intimacy, and are concretization of Yahweh’s compassion, not magical but sacramental—Signs compared to unambiguity of words, and as pointing to Father Who works them—Miracles as first stage of but also really containing new covenant. (p. 335): Parables clarify and conceal, as words en route to their realization, and so as in need of interpretation; any form the word takes before Cross and Resurrection is parable, and so a continuation/surpassing of OT oracles, and a form of the entire incarnate Word, coming down irrefutably, going to the heart of the matter from a particular side, sharing the original impact of kabod though in hidden manner because prior to Cross—All NT words are put into all-embracing situation of futurist-presentist expectation of kingdom; it is difficult to define relationship between Jesus’ original word and ecclesial interpretation/transposition: Church is at once after and on the way to the Cross, and so must bring the words up to date for herself after Cross, though it is one and the same Jesus who does this—Jesus’ parables which are always calls/challenges can be freed from their historical isolation by being changed into ecclesiastical teaching, bringing them into sphere where they are grasped by Holy Spirit—Jesus appears in parables as verb not noun, speaking of accomplishment of event, embodying God’s choice, looking directly to the hearts of God and man—No tendency to reveal oneself gradually in history, but rather all at once—The ways in which the parables set others in a rage; they are words that disclose but conceal at a deeper level. (p. 341): Transfiguration is testimony to hiddenness of glory in its indissoluble tension between OT and parousia and reference to coming Passion, rooted in an epiphany in a sublime event—Cannot be seen as Easter event moved before Passion—Apocalyptic framework is just form of vertical penetration of temporality, opening God’s timeless/true world; interweaves suffering, Resurrection, second coming, with decisive contents from Mosaic kabod taken up into prophetic-apocalyptic form—Sayings in Matthew between Peter’s confession and the Transfiguration; Luke exposes this movement of thought with use of expression doxa, which is Jesus’ own glory, and by pointing toward suffering—The words of the Father from the OT, and the command to silence—OT doxa made present in all its stages and forms, OT glory concentrated in single point so that it can pass into NT glory, pointing to unity of Cross and parousia i.e. end of the world and what lies beyond it—Transfiguration is first installment of eschatological transformation of whole world, taking place in concealment, similar to night on Mount of Olives—Testimony in 1&2 Peter. (p. 348): 4. Miracles, parables, and Transfiguration are historical data in which paradox of sovereignty and concealment makes itself known, reflecting what the chosen witnesses experience in whole existence of Jesus—Mark’s systematic exploitation of Messianic secret, leading to often ineffective dialectic of disclosure and suppressions; his theory of obduracy, and his blending of historically irreconcilable Jesus as knowable Son of God and Jesus as not yet knowable hidden Messiah—Matthew raises sovereignty/majesty and makes lowliness more accessible, greater tension and comprehensibility: Jesus is a lived, embodied interpretation of OT, summarizing covenant with Israel, existentially fulfilling all righteousness, opening path of imitation ethically and ontologically such that ethics is inseparable from Christological unity of sovereignty and lowliness—Luke seeks to grasp from within disposition of Jesus and God the pull/yearning from sovereignty to lowliness/suffering, focusing throughout on ascent to Jerusalem; the boundless love of God as Jesus discloses it is poor/powerless/truly incarnate: hence the requirements of literal poverty/total renunciation, along with the atmosphere in Luke of praise, thanksgiving, joy, exultation, happiness in peace, in a world of prayer in which poor love can live in defenselessness, glorified in gift of self, but leading to both amazement and rage—The place of women in Luke: God’s love made flesh meets daughter of Sion made flesh in woman in a hidden nuptial embrace; basis of covenant is not Jesus alone, but Jesus as a man who takes up his fellow humans with their feminine fiat into his work, recognized by John and Paul: as woman is glory of man in nature, so Church is glory of Christ, as He makes use of her poor love. II.3.b. Hidden Easter (p. 354): 1. In Jesus’ eschatological horizon, Resurrection and parousia coincide—‘Glory’ never occurs in accounts of risen Lord, but only in subsequent theological reflection e.g. in Paul, Acts, Peter, whose language contrast with simplicity of Easter narratives, where Jesus’ appearance is pure concealment, with doxa indicated only by angels—No experience of being overwhelmed by divine eschatological impact—Hiddenness up to the Ascension—No one saw the Resurrection—Emphasis on fulfillment of Scripture and founding of Church. (p. 357): 2. Concept of glory, from Sinai to Apocalypse, is inseparable from sensibly visible divinity of God, as in the blinding light of the Christ that appears to Paul, which then takes a central place in Paul’s theology: glory is objectively visible on the face of Christ in a human sensory-intellectual way: Paul neither spiritualizes nor remains within OT kabod—In dialectic of openness and concealment, doxa is objectively visible in creation but is newly, more deeply visible through act by which God’s grace brings justification—God’s glory on face of Christ is accessible only in enlightenment of knowledge of this glory; Gospel contains its own light, but is visible only through openness/transparency of those who preach: service is expropriation, which is love, and this is the criterion to see whether a preacher is proclaiming himself or Christ—As answer to precarious system in which what is disclosed conceals itself, Christ’s flesh doomed to death becomes life-giving spirit, making concretely accessible and communicated the sphere of divine life—What is essential for Paul is Cross and Resurrection, not what precedes, which alone just makes Christianity an improved Jewish ethics or Greek wisdom teaching: only Cross reveals what Jesus’ life truly was, and only Resurrection reveals Cross to be redemption of the cosmos; for this no human Christology is adequate, but only the idea of pre-existence—Acceptance of Gospel is not extension of OT or philosophical faith, but is radical obedience undergirding all human existence, wholly based on Christological event: because it shares in the latter’s unity, paradox of Christian existence is no more contradictory than paradox of Christ; the consistency and indivisibility of everything lets glory of God in the folly of His absolute love take on genuine visibility—This cannot all be expressed in terms of Jewish apocalyptic or Platonism, since the eternal that is present is not timeless—Paul sees the lack of glory in the renunciation of the form of God in the Cross, but his emphasis on risen one shows that shame/curse of Cross have their part in shining out of God’s glorious love in Christ: only with Cross/Resurrection can Christ be called eikon of hidden God (Col. 1:15), the visibility of what is invisible/hidden—In the concealment of doxa in the one abandoned by God, He enters the most immediate relation to concealed doxa of Father, and then presented to the world as He rises into hidden doxa: the gospel of the glory of Christ places before man a new decision, requiring one to become aware of odors that lead to life or death—Cosmological dimensions of doxa, and its consistently Trinitarian dimension for Paul. (p. 368): 3. For Paul, earthly life of Jesus is without glory; for John, glory shines through everything in Jesus’ life: but the distance is not great because the glory of Jesus’ life comes from Cross, and thence from Resurrection/eschaton, from which light falls on Christian life and on Jesus’ life as hidden glory—Jesus is reflected splendor of God’s glory (Heb. 1:3), creator and heir of world: pre-existent Son who has gone through abasement is appearing of divinity of God in whole cosmos, and is bound to world as historical person—Hebrews clearly links suffering/death and glory, and OT view of man as God’s covenant partner is Christologically transposed; this is all seen as inner meaning of Christ’s abasement—Comparison of old and new liturgical cults, with Jesus as definitive high priest: new covenant is new creation because Jesus is both priest and victim—There is a sense in which one sees Platonic archetype through images, but now what is Platonic is obsolete because of historicization of world affairs in transition from OT to NT, and it is at most a bridge to uniqueness of Christ-event: Son’s absolute will to obey shatters Platonism and OT cosmos, for it opens to us Father’s eternity—In 1 Peter, oppressed community is locus that illumines Christological statements: the suffering community’s glory is, like Christ’s, eschatological and hidden; eschatological light falls on the second generation of Christians who never saw Him, and sufferings lit by invisible glory become for the world an illustration of what is concealed. II.3.c. Hidden love (p. 374): 1. John takes the step beyond Paul and draws the sarx of historical Jesus into synthesis of glory, and so points to hiddenness—In OT terms, the weakness of man’s flesh, although his magnificence, is what distinguishes him from majesty/eternal sovereignty of God—Jesus’ dwelling with us is interior entry into, and shining out from within, the earth—No glory of one’s own, but only what comes from God—Incarnation demands love of neighbor not because of analogy between human and divine dignity/freedom, but because creation is subsumed by Logos become flesh: everything comes into being and is interpreted and judged through Him—Roots of Johannine doxa in OT kabod and Hellenistic opinion/praise/glory, but in John they are unified (Cullmann)—The Son Who alone glorifies/honors and receives these from the Father, becomes the criterion/judgment of all horizontal human relationships—Son’s glory is mutual love between Father and Son, as seen proleptically by Isaiah; in the relational being of the Son, not in a created glory, He manifests the Father’s glory, which is not a tranquil glory, but the Father utters/manifests Himself in Son, Who reveals, rather than shedding light on Himself, and so is unknown/hidden as presence of absolute love—He is unknown, able to be seen only by the faith that entrusts itself to reality and possibility of absolute love; we see this faith awaken over the course of John’s Gospel, access to which is prepared by all-encompassing Trinitarian circuit—For John and Paul, all of Jesus’ life is an orientation to hour of the Cross: in worldly terms the end is death, but in divine terms the end is endless radiance of life/love; the wider circuit of Trinity applies its own law to narrower circuit of world—Final act of giving and being given of Father by Son and vice versa—Visibility of glory of love in Jesus’ life as deepest exposition of God to world, and as needing eyes of faith, with nothing convincing in worldly terms to be seen, but requiring being taken into original begetting of Son from Father, so that one can see that innermost poverty of self-giving love is absolute wealth—Gratuitousness of love answered by gratuitousness of hatred/blindness—Public character of signs refer to something hidden, and demand decision—Because of His relation to the Father, Jesus is judgment, the eschatological criterion for all human persons. (p. 381): 2. In the hour, salvation/judgment seen as love, which brings to light decision for or against Him—Power and powerlessness, concealment and revelation of love in the Cross—John as having static, non-dramatic quality through concentration of salvation history in the Cross, which includes eschatological situation—Word as monologue in John, that can be poured out utterly yet remain an eternal Word, the unsurpassable self-utterance/giving/portrayal of God, leaving all other images of God behind: the Cross is God’s total disclosure/concealment, and remains so in all post-Christian atheism/death of God theology—Despite rejection, the fact of His reception in womb and faith, which receive the form of the hiddenness of the self-utterance of God’s love, to which visible miracles are just a pointer. III. In Laudem Gloriae III.1. Glorification as Assimilation and Return of the Gift (p. 389): Theological aesthetics began as a coming to see the form in which God’s Word comes/gives itself to and loves us; in this seeing is rapture, not alienation of finite into what is other/infinite, but becoming no longer strangers to/closed off from absolute love, but drawn into glory between Father and Son that has appeared in Christ through grace and work of Spirit making life of love well up in us—Spirit is glorification of love between Father and Son, and only He can bring about glorification in the world; he brings about and abolishes distance between Father and Son, a tension made sense of through faith not dialectics—The Son is sent as other to us, and His dying on our behalf could easily lead to alienation, but the Spirit leads us within what took place outside us, and shows us that the Son’s vicarious death does not alienate His brothers from themselves, but relieves them of what is foreign to them, setting them free for self-gift—Christ reveals that the ability to be poor is our deepest wealth, and He makes the essence of being visible as glory—In giving up Son, Father makes self-gift possible, and Spirit makes it actual, by showing that the Son’s fullness did not consist in having but in “being=giving”/poverty. III.1.a. Trinitarian self-giving (p. 391): In OT, God and partner related as lord and servant, the latter glorifying the glory of the former made visible to him, giving back to God the glory he received from Him—NT and Ignatius’ calls to glorify Christ are in context not of lord-servant, but Trinitarian relation, which embraces relations of creation, and so determines ultimate meaning of glorification—Eph. 1:3-14 bases God’s glory entirely on His free pleasure/advance planning in Christ, Who bestows in the Spirit a blessing on us not in the condition of creatureliness but in the place of Christ, transcending the condition of the world, in which the condition of creatureliness was planned and chosen to find its genuine being—God’s prior decision for Christ to govern history, drawing it into fullness of God, by the establishment in Him of the whole tension between powerlessness in lost-ness of death and supreme power in Resurrection; Christ’s absolute priority and our growing into His fullness as His bride—Birth from God as Father’s letting go of Son and Son’s obedient proceeding from the Father, in which the Spirit is the personified handing-over/gift, arriving completely in the receiver, without identification between giver and receiver, but beyond identity as triumph of glory—God calls us in the Son by sending the Spirit into our hearts; this is decided on and aimed at before the foundation of the world, and so we have our home from the outset in God’s inmost depth/absolute being that is not foreign to anything: in our creaturely being we are destined beforehand to becomes sons in the Son, Who Paul only sees in relation to Incarnation, Cross, Resurrection—The Son does not become Son by His exaltation, but the only way in which He is Son for us is in His simultaneous act of becoming Son; our transference to Him before the foundation of the world is a return both to God and our true selves in perfected human being Jesus, by being shaped into archetypal dying and rising so as to arise at archetypal glorification—NT doxazein does not mean just following God’s law which is only a partial representation of Himself, but praising Him through our existence in Him as love that hands itself over—Human and divine existence have been unsurpassably revealed in Christ; eschatological glory is already in glory of grace, as seen in NT doxologies—Drama of redemption and succession of time have been integrated beforehand into the fullness under Christ’s dominion: a doctrine of transcendentals within and pointing to Trinitarian disclosure/mystery—God’s doxa is inner principle not object of NT doxazein: we are drawn into and empowered to give response planned/attained by God, for the theological virtues are the divine life lived in us and coming from divine glory; He glorifies His bride and we glorify Him by our mutual love with other Christians, which has an inherent relation to essential glory of God. III.1.b. Appropriation as Expropriation (p. 399): In NT, God fulfills OT promise to write His law of love on human hearts so that we would know God from within: this law of love is the Spirit, and by handing Himself over into our hearts, he reveals Himself as Father Who has always made self-gift to Son to the point of the Son becoming man and lost—We cannot appropriate God because He is personified handing-over, so to know Him requires being expropriated and handed-over; hence the struggle against gnosis—A beloved is loved in the lover’s act, who affirms him as he is in himself and as the one who is constituted this beloved person through this act; God loves us, draws near to us, and brings us into being through the act that is His Son, in Whom God gives entire self-expression and embodiment of our being: presupposes divine Trinity and human faith—Distinction between justification/working of Son and sanctification/working of Spirit, both as working of the Father—The Son’s work is limited by essential freedom of decision left to the other, though we cannot say neither “yes” nor “no”, and though Christ has entered the private space of the sinner and robbed it of its privacy—The accomplishment of Father and Son’s work in the Spirit; in the Spirit, the Son’s body is spiritual, no longer bound to earthly demarcations between I and you, and so can draw us in and expropriate our privacy, freeing us from egoism and addiction into service: God’s self-imposed boundaries are not nullified/disincarnated but spiritualized in Resurrection, so that we can enter and not be robbed of our freedom, and so that God will honor His first creation and so that we too can live in this Spirit—Fiat of faith is acceptance of a truth intended for the believer, which has dealt with his refusal from the outset, a fiat in the context of the greater fiat of the Church; in baptism, the believer is dispossessed of his own acceptance of love’s expropriation, but actively not passively, and so receives his own spirit of Sonship, and enters a dialogue between the Father and his spirit borne by the Pneuma of the Son and the Father, so entering into the place prepared for us from the foundation of the world, and so finding ourselves in absolute love—Coming to oneself without losing one’s finitude or bodiliness presupposes Trinity and Incarnation—Sexual intercourse/gender and the Eucharist as models of expropriation: historical/sexual existence including birth and death receive a home in absolute love—Simultaneity and exchangeability of terms for appropriation and expropriation, with substantial reciprocity, where indwelling is existence for the other; being carried out of oneself in faith clears space for love/being conformed to the Crucified: the life of God comes through the inmost dwelling of Christ in the believer—Concrete interweaving of soteriological, creaturely, and Trinitarian levels of thought: God does not alienate Himself from Himself in being Incarnate, and so Christ does not alienate man from himself in raising him from apparently closed substantiality of personal being into relatedness of divine life, but bring him into truth of his origin as distant imago trinitatis; God began with first level and then included others—God lets creation be nothingness, to sigh for Him, all in Trinitarian context, which annuls in his first decision man’s potential “no”—True reality of man and creation is freedom of creature and glory of creator. (p. 409): Parrhesia is candor or openness to God and men, the attitude of the Son to the Father given to us through faith in the Son, realized in Christian prayer; it gives deepest insight into openness of Father and Son where asking and receiving flow into and do not exclude one another—Our present parrhesia is on basis of hope for eschatological parrhesia and current non-deceptive down payment of the Spirit—Doxa shines through Christian existence that openly proclaims the truth with whole existence—Kauchesis is boasting or consciousness of one’s dignity, thought the ray of God’s doxa that shines upon one—But this becomes foolish boasting if cut off from primordial honor in God; Paul translates this OT concept into radical NT language: the Christian finds affirmation outside himself in Christ, which occurs when Christ is affirmed in the believer through grace—Paul’s reflections on the honor redounding to him from his mission, and Paul’s difficult task showing that his mission and person were coterminous—In John, Christ receives no doxa from men, almost contrary to Pauline kauchesis; in the letters, John becomes almost anonymous link between those who sensed the Word of life and those who through him enter fellowship: the emphasis in self-consciousness is on parrhesia and the commandment of brotherly love, so we have no time for self-identification. III.1.c. Giving back the fruit to God (p. 415): To avoid anthropocentrism, we must consider that man is a planting of God whose fruit belongs to God; man is a priori expropriated as participating in the fruitful realms of nature and grace—Glorification of Father through bearing fruit, for Father is the source of all fruitfulness, and the harvest belongs to and is expected by Him, as seen in parables; man bears fruit freely and responsibly, not naturally or necessarily, and so he can be called to account, but this free bearing of fruit is seriously shown in image from nature—Unfruitfulness as ungratefulness in Isaiah; to bring fruit is to give thanks for received fruitfulness i.e. it is Eucharistic: Christian thanksgiving is giving back to God the gift given through fruitfulness, showing the gift is a loan but also one’s own, beyond the alternative of a gift lent and one that is one’s possession—OT ethics is taken up into NT under fruitfulness image, but God’s gift is relocated to human heart, and it is Christ or the Spirit Who bear the fruit there: man is a womb endowed with divine principle of fruitfulness, through abiding on the vine; pruning and purification in the image of the vine for the sake of the branches/Church bearing fruit—Images of fruitfulness and birth from God in Synoptics, Paul, and John. (p. 423): In Paul, fruit abstractly denotes effect and produce of human action with or without divine working-principle—Notion of overflowing, a fullness that lavishes itself as a distinguishing mark of its being: bonum diffusivum sui understood as having the mysterious power to regenerate oneself anew at every instant in the giving, or being able to retain one’s identity only by bestowing one’s excess, for what has being is always more than itself, a prodigality for which the categories of purpose, goal, final cause, plan, execution are inadequate and limiting to the act of pouring oneself out for its own sake—Hidden examples from the Gospels, especially in Eucharistic self-distribution—Overflowing as mark of dispensation of grace—Superabundance in the context of dialectic of poverty and riches, suffering and joy, in 2 Corinthians—Charis denotes pure grace of God, and its incorporation in Christians’ hearts and attitudes, and the alms given from this attitude as fruits of grace; beggars can enrich others when they give their hearts to the Lord, for Christ’s riches and His giving away are one, and God is lord because He has freedom to be servant—Entering this divine overflow is a counsel not a command because generous love cannot be commanded, though we are bound to obey this law as Christians, all within a balance/equality brought about through exchange in the Church—Decisive fruitfulness is in inner disposition of generous, joyful giving, the opposite of anxious, miserly calculation: a Eucharist/liturgy of almsgiving. III.2. The Brother for Whom Christ Died (p. 432): The Church/world must be incorporated more strongly into Christological and Trinitarian disclosure of absolute being—God is a lavish sower who then watches to see what will come from the union of divine vital power in the Word and creaturely power in the world that receives it, a wedding that promises a fruit that humanly speaking God looks forward to; God’s throwing Himself away shows the principle of fecundity/generosity and the essence of His glory, and letting oneself be expropriated gives back to God the glory of His love—This all aims not at goal planned in advance but at what is endless/infinite, the dawning of the divine I-Thou-We in the creaturely I-Thou-We of human fellowship; the last things are the open demonstration of the (non-)attainment of the endless end—The vertically bestowed divine love is glorified horizontally in human fellowship, not needing to be subsequently raised into divine light to become radiant, but both are marked by realism—Few passages in NT link glory and love of neighbor—Light that has broken into world as love is always to be referred back to source: Church is to be moon not sun, transparent not attributing any radiance to herself—The love with which Christians give glory can never measure how much of God’s glory flows through it. III.2.a. Encountering God in one’s brother (p. 434): 1. Difficult to locate boundary in Synoptics on love of neighbor between preaching/example of Jesus and post-Easter catechesis—Jesus’ words meets those who know who know OT stages and carries them along this path, for He presupposes chief commandment to love God with all one’s heart, but removes limitation on love of enemies, which was based on particularist conception of covenant, which was based on deduction from incomprehensible election of one nation—Law and prophets are words en route to perfect word, and their positive kernel is extracted by Jesus, exposing their limits and making them transparent to God’s original will: God has mercy on the poor, but if the poor make a claim on God to receive their right, they become not poor in spirit—God’s mercy and kindness toward all as Creator, requiring kingly perfection to imitate; God is immediately present to all, superseding righteousness in relation to God: rather, simplicity/transparency is required—God’s impartiality presents itself as partiality for sinners—Love of neighbor derives from simplicity of Son’s transparency to the Father—Ways self-love and expectation of reward remain—Jesus’ spontaneity and breaking of boundaries, all towards His death—From now on, every fellow-man is the “brother for whom Christ died” and to sin against him is to sin against Christ; Christ has died for every human Thou and so can identify Himself with them at the last judgment, something not possible in OT or paganism, but requires I-Thou relation of Father and Son—Attempts to express glory of God through Western metaphysics is so marked by Greek thought that little room is left for Thou of God or fellow man, because founded in philosophy of spirit not person; discovery of alienation and barrier of I to Thou occurs in ruins of idealism with Feuerbach, Marx, Rosezweig, Ebner, Buber, Casper, Lowith, Bonhoeffer, von Hildebrand: only the Christian path attributes infinite value to the Thou because God did, basing it in triune love, the theological presupposition for love of neighbor—Jesus effects creative synthesis of vertical/love of God and horizontal/love of neighbor; He does not condescend to the poor, but takes on Himself their poverty—Christ’s death for every individual; His Incarnation and Cross are the final word that the Creator addresses to the world, contra Judaism, Jansenism, predestinationism. (p. 442): Hymn about cosmic peace in Eph. 2:14-18 in which Christ crosses over vertical and horizontal, divine and cosmic separations, through the Cross—Church is dynamic unifying all things, concretized wherever enmity is destroyed and the new man built up creatively, destroying legalistic separation and establishing peace, in the flesh through Cross and blood—Unity between love of God and neighbor established when Jesus crosses to sinners—Everyone Christians encounter has already been addressed as Thou by God. (p. 444): 2. Paul draws out consequences for Church, the place where conforming humanity to person/event of Christ begins, where men dedicates themselves in faith to this person, and are formed by Him sacramentally; here, the creative crossing-over of Crucified love is taken over by human persons—Themes of vertical grounding of horizontal, based on origin and goal of divine love in Thou—If one is carried by action of Christ’s self-giving one need not think of glorification/love of God in expropriation in favor of Thou, since one will already be glorifying/loving God: the closest connection of religion and morality without dissolving either—Unity of Church as unity of one Person/Body, existing by looking to a unity above herself, which bears with all—Love shows itself to be Christologically formed when it bears the other as other, sharing in Christ’s bearing the burden; it is difficult to bear with one another due to common sinfulness and to diverse gifts of grace bestowed on members—Love as highest knowledge; knowledge is not particularistic—Link between love, Church, and (weak) conscience of one’s brother: we encounter the Head in the weak; Rom. 14:1-15:3 as high point of letter’s instruction—Unity of Church consists in sedek, shalom, and joy in Spirit; extreme tension between weak and strong in Church must be endured/transcended: each has been borne by the Lord and so must bear others, the weak must be welcomed without absolutizing the point of view of the strong for that would endanger agape, and love requires one to open one’s judgment to God’s—Christian faith is obedience more than self-understanding—Paul demands more of strong than weak, as seen in Acts 21. (p. 454): 3. In John, love of neighbor entirely based on event of Christ, with no purely horizontal philanthropy: Jesus is love that flows from Father to men—All commandments are echoes of the commandment that Jesus received from the Father, which is the life flowing out in eternity—God’s love for world encountered in Christ in bodily form; Jesus demonstrates His love in deeds, which are captured in words—All Johannine dualisms e.g. between light and darkness, are only penultimate; we cannot say that hatred of God is unconscious/unadmitted love, but must just join the movement of divine love and to experience it as life that pours forth and pushes forward to the extent of Christ’s love—We enter this movement through leap of faith and baptism—Love of God is not just transcendental presupposition for love of brother, but in being born the child discovers that it is not the father, and that the love in him comes from a deeper source than himself, which he loves—Faith becomes love. III.2.b. Solidarity (p. 458): The encounter with the Lord in one’s brother takes place not in isolated I-Thou relationship, but in in embrace of both by global reality of the Lord, where the Lord glorifies Himself and is glorified by us—The most personal thing is what the individual achieves beyond himself, in self-abandonment, such that it is handed over to God—Glorification is not just eschatological, but begins in the Church now—Communion of saints in which individual persons are rooted in common, personal, universal life-principle; every personal element that comes to development in it is brought into sphere of universal solidarity, in which even sufferings and consolations are had in partnership—Johannine communio of Church generated by communio of Father and Son; Jesus’ indwelling gives the branches the personal character that becomes the communio that goes from vertical to horizontal—Transition from sharing in Christ’s Cross to sharing one another’s suffering—Christian fellowship of life and goods cannot be understood as a secondary social function of persons who are primarily individuals with direct relationship to God, contrary to the scholastic notion of merit, which creates the unnecessary problem of how to cross from personal sphere of Thou to the community; rather, the branches have the fruitfulness of the vine, and the thus they must bear fruit for others—As Head, Christ is sole redeemer of all, but the body is taken into His redemptive activity, hence co-redemption: even baptism is a grace into which one can draw others—Not universal fellowship of goods (Acts 3-4) but a disposition involving fellowship in material and spiritual matters, hospitality and self-expropriation, such that we offer to each other the disposition of the Lord, hence praying and interceding unceasingly—Social character of Christ confirmed in antithesis between Adam and Christ: Adam opens unity of sinfulness and is personally sinful, a negative model for Christ’s redemption—Sin dominates man with a super-personal power, but it is the powerlessness of man to will and aim for the supernatural goal set by God of unity in the Beloved, and so it is for all the loss of God’s glory; Adam is problematic solidarity in existence without glory (though original sin needs rethinking), Christ is genuine solidarity in recovered open access to grace, and the former is not really solidarity but isolation—Fulfillment is not in glory of paradise, but in crucifying encounter with crucified Lord in sin-distorted face of fellow man. III.2.c. Nuptiality (p. 470): Key expression in NT glory is face/prosopon i.e. presence of entire person for other persons/spiritual presence in total embodiment, word/logos when it gives expression to itself beyond the image offering itself without concealment in radiance of immediate appearance—OT kabod is so strong that its naked appearance kills—Our eye is as yet capable of perceiving only in fragmentary fashion, not yet mature enough to be looked at by God, though there is now in principle no veil between His face and ours—Pauline antithesis between glory of OT and glory of NT—Full incarnation is simultaneous with immediate participation in Spirit of God; faith, hope, and love are the way to see into the Spirit of God and His love, and they remain in eternity—Parrhesia allows divine and human love not only to look upon one antoher, but to sink into one another as nuptiality, fulfilling OT nuptiality between God and humanity—In pagan mystery cults, union of earthly bodies just reproduced spiritual wedding/syzygy in heaven, and sexuality does not play a serious role; Christ takes all images to new level, giving Song of Songs a position and justification in Scripture—Doubtful whether Synoptic Jesus applies nuptiality between God and Israel to Himself, though He seems to put Himself into the wedding parables—Sexual and nuptial union of man and woman is freed in Christ from legal casuistry and its unity is exposed as original work of God, unity in flesh/copulatio is unity in loving spirit/communio; marriage is not lifted out of creaturely order, but given new significance in that order, based in agape—Image of eschatological bridegroom in Johannine corpus—The Corinthian community as betrothed to Christ (2 Cor. 11:2), in Whom God’s husbandly jealousy is incarnate; marriage to abstract law is dissolved through Christ’s concrete body, and new marriage is sealed, with fruitfulness directed to God (Rom. 7:1-6)—Concept of Church as Body of Christ already contains nuptial element, and hence the great evil of fornication—Clash between requirement that women cover their heads in worship and statement that we all see the Lord with uncovered face—Eph. 5 establishes natural hierarchy of man to woman, but also immediate personal relationship to God, and mutual independence of sexes from one another: woman as glory of man, but man as helpless because needing woman; here, orders of creation and covenantal nuptiality are bound in NT synthesis, a move from sexual to soteriological sphere: marriage is subsumed by relation of Christ and Church, a point of reference utterly superior to itself—Agape is utterly above eros, but also brings it to fulfillment—Exclusion of gnostic eternal marriage of the gods in light of the Cross, contra Valentinus—After Christ, no sexuality that can suffice for itself as mystery; for the NT, it is time to cross from marriage to eschatological nuptiality: when one can live directly out of the universal truth of the incarnate love between Christ and Church, there is no longer need for detour via individual symbol of this truth; former transforms person into fiat—Trinitarian love is only ultimate form of love between God and men, and between men. III.3. Setting Out Towards God (p. 485): What has become for us a certainty that we have sensed still lets us only walk in faith and hope, in the movement between the presence and future of the eschaton—The contents of glory are Christ-in-you. III.3.a. The transition (p. 486): Gospel is transition from national religion to one for all humanity—OT people of God were a closed people that nevertheless had destiny transcending its particularity, in which God made visible His concreteness/uniqueness—In the flesh, Jesus fulfills promises to that people; but when rejected as Messiah and handed over to the Holy Spirit, He becomes blessing for all peoples—After Easter, Church is transcending remnant of Israel, though only the people of God in a paradoxical sense, because the Church is visible but has no law but the law of love, and no rites but the making present of Christ’s dying and rising; NT people are a provisional, wandering, expropriated people, searching for the polis to come, incarnating the Gospel for the world in public liturgy of word and self-gift—Only point of reference in present between historical past of events of Christ and future of parousia is the gospel which concentrates entire glory of Christian existence: glory of the Gospel is service of the Gospel—Question again of whether Church has a form; its form is in tension, pulled apart into contradictions, which no self-given form can do away with, for her glory is in the Gospel, and the Gospel has glory as the presentation of one Who is absent, Whose presentation is the work of the Spirit—Opposition between gramma and Pneuma in relation to apostolic existence (2 Cor 3:1-4:6); all of Paul’s power comes from the Spirit—OT rites, institutions, wars were glorious, but as service of condemnation; what is present in Jesus is an intensification that surpasses what existed before: we must turn from the old, where glory is visible but concealed, to the Lord to see glory without concealment and so take on that glory—The splendor and superabundance of God in our earthen vessels, for His credit, not ours (2 Cor. 4:7-5:10); both death and Resurrection can be displayed in time through the Pneuma of faith: the Gospel is dynamic transition by which Cross makes way for Resurrection, a formula expressing a breakthrough—Official ecclesial existence is service of Trinitarian-Christological event (2 Cor. 5:11-6:10), the awareness of having been uprooted from what was one’s own through Christ’s love, and having been bound in obligation to Him, so that one becomes His fellow-worker/sunergountes in a service that makes a complete existential claim, in which glory takes on its greatest fullness. (p. 495): Transcendence of new eschatological existence over national institutional religion that was closed in on itself; existence of Church and Apostle no long positioned between God and world, but come from within sphere of divine activity, without losing solidarity with the world—Glory of the Gospel affects world and Church, for its message is cosmic in a way unlike other world images, philosophies, religions, ideologies; it enters a sphere of freedom hitherto unknown, in comparison to which darkness defines all systems of law, which make man a prisoner—Preliminary Hellenistic Jewish understanding of nation opening onto oikoumene that embraces cosmos in Philo and Josephus, drawing on Stoicism and Platonism, but this either still subordinates man to cosmic law or becomes apolitical and non-incarnational, leading to cosmological or human cosmopolitanism, atheism, the emperor cult, or a flight from human existence—Hence the anthropological space opened by the victory over death of the man Jesus; one now lives only in nomos of Christ/free self-gift, and Christ takes the place of all sacral-political authorities—Church stripped legitimate political authority of its numinous quality, before the difficulties of Eastern Church-empire union and Western dualist state secularization—Present reality is heavy with promise for the future, neither Jewish/futurist messianism, nor Platonic timeless present, but history of world has goal in day of Christ, the breakthrough of the glory He already has begun to possess, liberating us from powers/laws of world through free obedience of love, not Stoic destiny—Cosmos is demythologized by not robbed of divine element—Christ requires a decision, and Platonic escape and remaining in the old age are not possible—God is creature’s life and freedom, and when the creature chooses for God’s expropriation he finds in God His home—Christ brings Adam into his genuine nature, which is not Platonist/individualist bodiliness but eschatological bodiliness of God’s nuptial partner, in God’s polis—Freedom is the glory of existence that has been given a home anew in its original essence; freedom of innerworldly self-determination/autarkeia versus freedom of self-giving in faith’s obedience to free love of God i.e. servitude/alienation from God versus being a pilgrim/stranger in the world, though even the former is God’s creature/potentially Christ’s redeemed brother—For the one who rejects Him, Jewish law and authority of the state remain in effect for his good, though without any divine glory; structures of civitas terrena are nowhere transfigured: no earthly copy of heaven, and no political theology possible in Christianity, but we can fill state structures with Christian spirit and life, and then blunt them a bit, honoring but not loving them—In itself, political power is neutral between citizens of heaven and earth, but it can become with economics a false glory, power in opposition to God, in the hour of martyrdom, when it becomes the “beast”, the perversion of the Church. (p. 503): Church is where thanksgiving of doxazein takes place—Church structures are entirely different from state structures, since they belong to rule of life of those who have made decision of faith—Apostolic-ecclesiastical admonishment involves juridical decisions, but always proceeds from mercy of God, bringing about His love and Spirit’s love—Paraklesis establishes and builds up Church, inseparable from particular charisms—Preaching, sacraments, and mutual service in this context, all doxazein, but not appropriation of doxa—Handing oneself over to God is never definitively accomplished until end of world, when all self-centered reflection will forever be excluded: Church is not en route to herself, but to her bridegroom, a goal that will be without preaching, sacraments, structure, distinction of Church from world, though Church’s structural geometry of OT and NT will remain, though we cannot look to theocratic polis of OT to accomplish this, but must look forward. III.3.b. The hope of glory (p. 507): Everything said points to hope/future—New covenant opens not on empty time but explosive, comprehensive fulfillment, which generates hope, satisfiable only by in-breaking of whole world into God’s glory—Through Christianity, an entelechy has been set into world’s foundations, which cannot be superseded by a wider horizon, surpassing the world and the most extreme utopias, for it offers us the past, death, and sufferings meaningless in worldly terms as the future and hope of glory, a solidarity beyond any socialism—Hope really anchored in believers’ hearts through Jesus’ Resurrection; what causes pain through delay is content of surest promise, a present reality in the Lord, giving Christianity a power beyond any evolutionism, for what is born of Christian/Marian hope is God—NT accounts of destruction on day of the Lord are just metaphor drawn from OT to describe process of subjection and forming anew; it is impossible that OT kabod attributes of Lord God could appear behind kingdom of Son: these metaphors are justified just as kernel of God’s sovereignty/free vitality/Trinitarian love, which can only have its way in the world through bloody suffering—The paradox that the victor still fights is theological presupposition for Christian form of hope—Christian hope located in tension between expectation and hope, with the Spirit’s sighing for the glory that is to come; OT and NT glory are genuine glory, but kindle in us hope for the future/for what is absolute superiority—Hope discloses the transcendent favoring of final state we await and our inability to escape vanity/futility/temptation/perishing, the condition into which man forced creation—Hope enters into something that cannot currently be conceived, but is indicated as revelation of glory in us, freedom of glory of children of God, redemption of our body (Rom. 8:18-23): only with the body are we saved, so no place for soul mysticism, or merely inner-worldly culture and technology—No gradual realization of eschaton, though man and creation are in the birth-pangs, though it remains a hidden glory present only in sighing pain and powerless hope, where all that has form in the Church is absent, but here all is taken up in Trinity, and Spirit comes to our aid interceding for us with wordless sighs, showing how God has made creation’s pain His own: Spirit experiences hopelessness of world with us and gives it a place as such in the Trinity, and this all occurs in our hearts—We are introduced by a hope that does not see into the inner depths of God Whose sole glory is self-gift—Goal of God’s election by foreknowledge is to conform us to the image of His Son, predestining us to have our home with Him—Time is real process but only has meaning in Alpha and Omega, and ultimately only final point is relevant where all-determining Triune love comes into contact with world’s destiny—Son is equal to God and us, and other to God and us; created world enters God in brotherly love—Commission at creation to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it, is inscribed on man’s being, showing world in state of evolution, including in creation race, kin, culture, technology, not forced by God into pre-determined synthesis; after Christ, sexuality and work receive new significance/orientation, but neither suffices to bring about kingdom of God, but these worldly forms are only fruitful when God’s grace breaks into cosmos: earthly futility and all social/economic/political struggles can be transformed into fruitfulness at the turning of the ages: God assumes His creature will be at work, but reserves for Himself the synthesis/application of that work—Son became man to prove to Father the goodness of Creation, proved in Resurrection. (p. 520): With unveiled faces we katoprizomenoi the glory of the Lord (2 Cor. 3:18) i.e. either reflect or contemplate, foreshadowed in Moses—Turning to the Lord disposes of veil over hearts, seeing the glory of the Lord, though not in face-to-face vision, being drawn into intimacy of Pneuma, changing us into the same image/being not in mystical vision but in being sent/given an existence that transmits eschatological splendor to the world—We anticipate (2 Cor. 3) though separated from (Rom. 8) the new aeon: the more glory streams in, the more painful it is to wait—Our hope can light up in advance all humanity’s endeavors to form itself in accord with the commission of creation—Principle of hope has last theological word to say about constitution of world—World and humanity can give birth to God only if this God is truly human, rather than a wholly future God, Who could not justify the Creator and so could not redeem; Christ is a brother like no other because He experiences all that occurs to the brothers, and for us to bear the world’s burden in genuine solidarity is a meaningful contribution for God’s kingdom. (p. 523): Question of how we know what we hope for—We aim at the Wisdom of God; the eschaton is our glory—God’s wisdom comes from His depths of freedom, requiring free revelation, which no human transcendence can anticipate—But we can understand divine speech because He has given us His Spirit: it remains folly for one who does not have the Spirit—We must think within the circuit between love and gift—Gift of God never becomes autonomous/commonplace—The one who receives Spirit does not ask how much he perceives/does not perceive in advance, but allows himself to be surprised by God’s love since God delights in surprising. III.3.c. The possible impossibility (p. 526): Heart of Christianity stands face-to-face with utopia, each of which knows that for man to be what he is, the impossible must be made possible; impossible and possible cannot be dissolved into empty human freedom to be anything, which breaks down when confronted with charge of caring for one’s brother, who is as much an impossible person as I am, and so with whom I must struggle—We know we are unfree and under alien domination, and a vertical intervention in horizontal futility must come, and this justifies hope—Those who advance utopia presume to be fathers of the future without having been children of the past, creating without receiving i.e. being God, laying claim to the paternalism they reject, and to righteousness, an OT name—Only the one who is addressed by NT love can reply to it—Vertical intervention of God’s kingdom has already been accomplished—Question whether one can live as a Christian in a human manner, in world history, out of faith in a definitive eschatological event that has taken place—The mission to bear witness to Christ must work, cannot work, but does work, making the obligation and the pain sharper—Christians are the interpretation of Christ’s condition as making Himself self-gift—Where our strength fails, we are borne toward the Kingdom; this is incalculable in worldly, psychological, sociological terms. (p. 529): 1. Power, powerlessness, presence—Power of Christ’s victory gives the disciples authority and makes them cooperative instruments with Christ—The saints’ will is one, united to God’s, though it is a utopia, kindling a few hearts, but ending on a via dolorosa—Their power is that of one Who was crucified and exalted, His power retaining the smell and taste of the Cross—Hence problems with programs of Christian revolution; to fight requires being near the powerlessness of the Cross—Church as a people is wretched, and this cannot be gotten around by Catholic action or political theology, and no statistics can encompass what the saints can do: the only way to convert is through contagious example of humility and selflessness—We cannot locate the glory we hope in, and so appear ridiculous—The struggle with the world proves the power of His presence. (p. 532): 2. Joy, suffering, bliss—Christian message is joy, from Incarnation to Resurrection, but encompassing sorrow unto death at its midpoint—The tribulation that loses all meaning in existence remains objectively meaningful for the world, and so contains a spark of eternal joy no longer accessible to itself—Christian dialectic of joy and Cross points to mystery in God’s heart where there reigns a greater joy in pardoning sin, to the point of the Father causing pain to Himself in abandoning His Son to have the joy of people believing in Him—Joy can encompass even Son’s cry of self-abandonment without eliminating it—Increasing mutual integration of joy and Cross, even in God Himself; hence the Beatitudes, which are universally human (Hegel, Marx), but without the Hegelian-Marxist paradox in light of Resurrection—Joy attained on the road of sadness, even for God; subjective suffering is disclosed as objective joy, from Easter perspective: joy in suffering is not psychological but objective, divinizing, ontological—“Yes” to suffering and night is Christological—Joy dwells in and makes possible lowest depths of abandonment by God—Behind the Son stands the Father Who allows His Son to go into total abandonment of Hell—The love rejoices that the beloved suffers as expression of His love, which could not have expressed its ultimacy in any other way, and the beloved rejoices that He is permitted to do this—The Church lives with Paul on the basis of Easter, but also with Mary and John on the way to the Cross, which is never left as past fact, but is eschaton—Christians may enjoy in carefree manner the earthly joy given by God, and do not need bad conscience in midst of joy; we leave the world’s rhythm where joy and suffering alternate, and enters mysterious sphere of affirming suffering in joy with/in God, while not depriving suffering of its depths of abandonment by God, and God does likewise in a mystery of His love—Anxiety before God is changed to service. (p. 540): 3. Form, splintering, superior form—We would like to take away the sense of exposure and gain an earthly feeling of security—The Church exists, is infallible, and something of eschatological security is communicated to the forms of her life e.g. in Eucharist and Word—Development of symbolism of barque of Peter—Transparency of Christian symbols must survive transition from sacred to profane thinking—Church’s institution and mission are based in Easter, but she retains Good Friday/Holy Saturday in her center, where human form/divine visibility are swept away and buried, so Church can only be tent of a wandering people—Church’s gatherings point to eschatological banquet, and so her structures can be corroded—Symbolism of shipwreck in Acts 27—Risen Lord has a visible form, but one that has passed through abyss, and from this visibility the Church has its spirit, a form alien to the passing world and that has its home elsewhere; she is reflection not the midpoint or the glory, she is response of glorification and to this extent is drawn into glorious Word, reflecting back in night light for hope of the world. Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory Volume 1: Prolegomena Preface (p. 9): Apologia to theologians and to men of letters—Seeks to influence a theology that has been epic—Phenomenon of theater: the fact that there is structured performance, and the actual substance of the play, all underlay by theology—Theater as more primitive instinct than aesthetic needs, rooted in child’s reaction to experience in theatrical terms/play—Reflections on theater (rarely) by philosophers, and by actors; theater’s similarity to grace and mystical experience—Relation between stage and Christianity in mystery plays (Gaston Bary), born from liturgy and involving whole people, an acting out of life in a Catholic aesthetics, rooted in Greek drama—Theater provides resources to be modified for theology—Theater is more promising point of departure for study of theo-drama than secular/social activity: theater attempts transcendence/transformation and so to gain clarity about himself, beckoning a revelation about himself I. Introduction: Orientations I.A. Dramatic Theory between Aesthetics and Logic (p. 15): Aesthetics describes the way we encounter the phenomenon of divine revelation in the world in the manifold forms of its glory—The phenomenon presented is one in which one has already been involved, which leads to a conversation/theological drama into which we must let ourselves be drawn: God’s revelation is not an object to be looked at, and we can only understand it through action—Aesthetics had to show the reality at work, anticipating the drama—What is encountered cannot be neutrally taught/contemplated; it is an invisible light, not a static beautiful object: aesthetic forms are insufficient to interpret the definitive form of revelation, but this requires the absolute commitment of the drama into which God sets us to play our unique part—Our acquaintance with drama from complications, tensions, catastrophes, reconciliations of our lives, and from the stage, which makes drama of existence explicit so we can view it—Logic of dramatic words guided by action—In the interplay of relations that is essence of the theater we see clearly the questionable nature and ambiguity of existence, but also the wealth of categories for displaying God’s action—Aesthetics is doctrine of perception, with boundary between object and onlooker regardless of how object impacts us; dramatic theory is concerned with what-is-going-forward/Agogik, making man really act on stage, and God acts on, for, and with man—Secular dramatic categories used only analogously. (p. 18): God only does what is good for man, saving us out of love which only seeks to give itself, and theo-drama is concerned with the Good—Perception is beautiful, utterance true, act good, in which there is real giving originating in giver’s freedom and designed for recipient’s benefit—Revealing beauty of God’s action also reveals its goodness, which can ultimately only be explained from itself, not within ambiguities of theater of life/stage, though penultimately, He is drawn into the latter—Analogy between God’s action and world drama is ontological, not metaphorical; thence, Gods’ action is affected by the world’s ambiguity and becomes a hidden good—The good is done, not contemplated or proved; it takes place only in the continually unfolding drama of world history—What is for/in us has been decided in itself, but the victory in itself cannot be separated from the continual battle for us, and the good God does can only be experienced as the truth is we share in performing, leading world ambiguities to single meaning of God—As a play within a play, our play plays in His play. (p. 20): Existence recognizes itself in the interpretation on the stage, and so it can realize it is playing a role in a larger play, and so transcends itself even if it cannot discern its meaning—Theater owes its existence to man’s need to recognize himself as playing a role and be delivered from seeing existence as closed in on itself, and so one acquires the habit of looking for meaning on a higher level, which is itself dramatic not static: existential character of existence cannot be relativized for it is part of all-embracing reality, or at least it raises this question—Biblical answer must be within horizon of man’s dramatic dubious existence; answer has already taken place in the form of the question/horizon, which is eschatologically dramatic—Dramatic cry from the Cross, not resignation before static absolute, and the definitive/eph-hapax response of Easter event—Christian requirement that existence should represent itself dramatically excludes dead faith of purely rational truths; now is the time for questioning and playing one’s part, not for a contemplation that fails to grasp the secular now within the horizon of what have been definitively achieved and that fails to carry out His will—Proclamation of word requires herald to fashion his life into dramatic word of testimony—Scripture must mediate the drama beyond and the drama here—Justin and Philo on the dramatic character of Scriptural prophecy, speaking from different angles. I.B. Trends of Modern Theology (p. 25): Using categories of drama to illumine theology might seem abstruse or banal—Shortcomings of traditional theology have called forth new methods, out of a desire to get theology unstuck from rationalist abstraction, each of which contains something right, though each is inadequate; all converge on theo-drama. I.B.1. “Event” (p. 26): Event principle characterizes theology turning from fundamentalist orthodoxy and historical liberalism—The real is an event, not a historical fact or supra-temporal essence; rather, it is God’s breaking in vertically and revealing His mode of being and acting—Aspects of the event in which one becomes a believer, seized by the event—Rationalism only got to the historical fact—Contra historicism, Christianity was not dependent on expectation of immanent vertical descent of God’s Kingdom—But focus on pure event does not do justice to genuine historical nature of Biblical revelation; historical relation between OT and NT was very important in early Christianitiy, but is not in Barth, Bultmann, Luther—There are genuine due times/hours appointed by God, qualitative time as seen in the Deuteronomists and Paul, who sees the series of times like the acts of a play—The vertical event-time refashions horizontal time so that the event is spread out dramatically, with the whole human race involved. I.B.2. “History” (p. 28): Similar to event theology, this focus takes what is valid/true to be what is required at each now, a situation ethics/theology, with the Church interpreting in each age how the absolute salvific event should be expressed/lived—Avoids relativism because in each age, God’s permanent transcendent salvific will is expressed; all situations/groups, including even anonymous Christians, contain a Christological a priori/existentiale—But here the individual moment is not brought out in its uniqueness—Here history is man’s nature as freely self-determining and being summoned to choose his own authentic being—History is insufficient to grasp what is distinctive about Biblical revelation; here the horizontal absorbs the vertical, without a visible trace of salvation in time, the form arising in OT and moving toward Cross and Resurrection is subordinated to category of history: but something has changed in the flow of salvation-time, for all ages after Jesus are marked by a Yes or No to Him—Focus on history dissolves into mere philosophy, losing Jesus’ unique time, even though His death and Resurrection do affect all men at all times due to their solidarity in history—Category of history loses the dramatic tension between the old and new aeon—Difficulties of interpretation of one’s standpoint in the multi-dimensionality of history—Questions of what is implied by God becoming fellow actor in world-drama, whether Absolute Spirit or Being are affected by history (Hegel, Heidegger), and whether man becomes God’s guardian (Jonas). I.B.3. “Orthopraxy” (p. 31): Many say Christianity has presented itself too much as a theory, betraying the incarnate, crucified, risen Word, leading to splintering of Christendom and scandal—Scandal can be removed only by praxis, decisively stepping beyond barriers of freedom and returning to Christianity’s meaning that God shows His truth by acting, and the Christian shows he is following Christ by acting in love toward fellow men, like the Good Samaritan—Genuine Christianity, on this view, is indifferent to dogma, only interested in practice of living like the Crucified (Nietzsche)—This view makes Christianity an ethics/philanthropy, failing to preserve distance between God’s praxis acting on man and man’s praxis directed by God, and failing to see the many roles on the world stage—What God’s primal act was can only be accepted and pondered in a faith prior to all personal initiative i.e. unconditional obedience/self-surrender; only in this dramatic field do Christian ethical initiatives have their place. I.B.4. “Dialogue” (p. 34): Dialogue is a fruitful approach to Christian life, rooted in the Biblical dialogue between God and man, in which man can say Yes or (absurdly) No, and in the dialogue allowed by the Incarnation between God in heaven and God on earth—Primal dialogue in God is presupposition for Christ-event—From earthly point of view, human existence is based on continual positive and negative interplay between people; what people know is fused with the knowing person, who communicates himself—But dialogue is just one element of life among others e.g. subjectivity, self-presence, unique solitary vocation—Ways in which dialogues are broken, as John shows—New dialogue arising from the Cross—Dialogue is not only category, and is inadequate to express dramatic action between God and world, Christ and Church, Church and world, and among men—Deeds, silence, and hidden guides of action in plays, though dialogue is never obsolete—Dialogue allows the other his otherness, and is closely related to hope; we must attend to hope’s Christian shape—Dialogue requires common ground, and without it, it fails, and then the Christian’s last word in the dialogue is the testimony of his existence or blood. I.B.5. “Political Theology” (p. 37): Insistence that Christian involvement/theology have a political side is meant to de-privatize them—Ancient drama, Shakespeare, Schiller are concerned with polis especially in relation to religion, and great characters carry burden of common good; this is seen in Jesus’ trial and in Acts—This all opens state to wider horizon and subjects it to eschatological critique—Buddha’s critique of world with apolitical horizon; Judaism/Islam’s infusing of politics with messianic/eschatological power—Christianity is beyond both, giving it a dramatic tension inadequately expressed by ‘political’—Individual and community must be bend all powers to the fulfillment of history, but it comes from God, not from history as a result of human effort; it comes from Christ’s death and so is a hidden present opening onto a critical future—The Christian can critique every community from eschatological point of view, but he is aware of the Kingdom’s basic outline—Attempts to build a static copy of it with the world’s materials (Constantine, medieval imperialism) are Platonic and lack the urgency of Gospel waiting; attempts to build a progressive realization of Kingdom fall into OT thinking—Christian political thinking in evolutionist context—Christians are concerned with politics because of solidarity, but cannot be classified in secular political terms; the Church can only be herself in going beyond herself to the world, but the world is designed from the point of view of the eschaton to transcend itself toward the Kingdom, though it is unconscious of this: both in a dramatic situation that goes beyond the political, complementing it with a tragic, utopian, or reconciling element—To be relevant to ultimate meaning, the political must be taken beyond itself and set in relation to the dramatic dimension of human existence. I.B.6. “Futurism” (p. 40): More than any other, the future attracts theology’s creative energy: the flight to the future is the only way out of the unendurable, practically a shattered evolution-optimism (after Teilhard de Chardin)—Technology interferes with natural balance while never allowing control of total range of forces—We should be borne by secular impulse to the future, which came from Christianity; raises anew question of relation between OT impulse and Jesus’ transformation of it—Need for balance between realized eschatology, Christianity before all ages, and the “not yet”—Links of theme of the future to utopianism and revolution; theology that is affected by this cannot retreat into epic theology of the summae or lyric theology of spiritual treatises, but must assume dramatic form—Key concept of apocalyptic, which is actualization of drama between heaven and earth, an almost mythic dramatization of Being; the theme of the future needs this framework. I.B.7. “Function” (p. 43): Functionalism attempts to do sociologically what dialogue does on personal level; focus not on free self-communication, but on rules of reciprocity/exchange that arise from social community (Levi-Strauss, Jakobson)—The functional-structural grid laid over historical contingencies to render them rationally accessible is not Kantian, because no absolute subject behind it, but it is based on reciprocities of existing subjects, including both the timelessly valid and the diachronic duration in changeability (Saussure)—Things exist by virtue of functional relation to all other beings (Claudel)—Tension between synchrony and diachrony leads to coexistence of meaning and madness (Foucault)—Application of structuralism/anthropology to primitive cultures, to reduce civilization to nature, and nature to physico-chemical conditions (Levi-Strauss, Levy-Bruhl), hence placing it between nature and civilization, idealism and materialism—Despite this, the topic of function can be useful, grasping the truth of subjects in matrix of relationships, leading to question of what the whole is in which function acquires meaning: it cannot be something finite like human society, which must ultimately acquire its meaning from something infinite/absolute implanted in its subjects—Structuralism’s use in demystifying things that are often sacralized like technology and sports (Barthes), but this can only be meaningful on basis of overall horizon of values and of Church, in which they do have sacralized character—Functionalism of the charisms, in which we are entrusted with a mission and then expropriated into the missions’ function, within the structure of the Church; only thus functionalism can promote theo-drama. I.B.8. “Role” (p. 46): The problem of how to find one’s role, and its relation to function, sociology, psychology, and the idea that life is a drama: question of whether one must identify oneself with one’s role despite being mysteriously not identical to it, or not identify oneself with it; hence the modern problem of search for identity—Being oneself has same origin as being-in-relation, and identification requires non-identity and bridging gap between them; difficulties with this examined by psychotherapy—Changes to my social role through society, cybernetics, biochemical means—In functionalism/structuralism, it does not matter who fills some constant function—“Who am I?” as the most pressing question, especially in light of technological change—Only Christian theology can be redemptive here. I.B.9. “Freedom and Evil” (p. 48): New urgency to problem of creaturely freedom and possibility of evil; traditional Christian theology proceeded from conviction that Creator is good, creaturely freedom is subordinate to Him, and evil is privation, hence the possibility and reality of damnation, where concept of God is not affected by these obscurities—In modern theology, darkness and fragmentation of creation is projected into God (Böhme) and human freedom is found to have element of absoluteness (Kant, Schelling), and so God and man have same absolute contradiction; as equal partner with God, we can accused the world of being contradictory and meaningless, or find meaning in protest against absurdity as homme révolté—Jung’s call for Trinity to become a Quaternity including the wayward son, the devil—Modern man no longer sees world transfigured by Christian faith, but sees the world’s dark side, and sin’s overthrow by Christ cannot be tangibly grasped—New intensity to question of relation between human and divine freedom. I.C. Objections I.C.1. Rudolf Kassner (p. 51): Objection to theo-drama that there is no analogy, but rather opposition, between dramatic/theater and Christianity (Kassner)—Post-Christian blend of personality and actor—Christ’s birth shatters the magic identity of world’s ground and divine form that separates itself from it, whereas ancient Dionysian tragedy splits man into spectator and actor while magically holding him together; Christ breaks this magical world-theater through conversion and sacrifice—For Kassner, healthy center of existence is imagination which sees and creates images, and this is deepened in Christian faith to an ability/freedom to let things be, suffer, endure; incarnation is opposed to all playing a part/disguise, transfiguration not idealist transcendence, and so the artist is replaced by the saint—Kassner problematically identifies magical world with world of creation/under omnipotence/Yahweh, and NT turns away from this to sonship, where God and man are two sides of a center that can be occupied by the saint i.e. a form of Gnosticism in which man redeems God—It is true that Christ’s fulfillment outstrips all dramatic polarities, but this cannot be alienated from God of omnipotence/creation, and so it is not meaningless to talk of Christ’s role/mission—Compatibility of Christian seriousness with play and its roles, a structure rooted in our enfleshed situation, which is more than just the acting/manners of civilization (Kant). I.C.2. G.W.F. Hegel I.C.2.a. Drama as the High Point of Art (p. 54): Hegel’s critique of analogy between Christianity and drama also depends on view of Christianity that jettisons aspects of theological significance—For Hegel, drama is high point of art: archaic age dominated by architecture, classical period by sculpture, Christian/romantic age by music/painting, but poetry equally present to all, first as national epic, then subjective lyric, then drama as transcending synthesis of both—The subjective and the moral in Greek tragedy, depicting consciousness of the divine and the conflicting action that appears in it, the former depicted by chorus and the latter by warring heroes—The actor must wear mask to appear at divine-heroic pinnacle, so as not to represent his own subjectivity—In Greek comedy, consciousness exhibits a well-being not found outside this comedy, but at the cost of showing the gods to be unreal, though in much tragedy they are little more than factors unifying the polis—As he steps from behind his mask, the actor shows himself to be just what the spectator is, both at home in the secular world, and this is the end of the theater, comedy having led to the dissolution of all art—Hegel against Schiller on Christianity as responsible for dissolution of art. I.C.2.b. Christianity Abolishes Art (p. 59): Drama presupposed the Greek manifestation of divine in finite form as principle of beauty—Reasons for art’s abolition: 1. It dissolved into Roman utilitarianism, where the gods of the Pantheon cancel each other out, and plays become mere spectacles, for the only reality is abstract power of the state as domination and law—2. In comedy, the world is deprived of gods, and the actor becomes human, leading to principle of the Incarnation/Christian anthropomorphism: an affirmation of subjectivity in God, uniting the claims that God is love and God has died, and so Christianity is the absolute drama, the truth of tragedy and comedy—3. Post-Christian/Romantic art including drama persists, but it is the manifestation of the dissolution of classical art, for the Christian phenomenon as seen in the Enlightenment is an image of the absolute process—Christianity replaces art—The story of Christ is only the image of absolute process; identity of God and man causes dramatic dimension to dissolve. I.C.2.c. Hegel’s Understanding of Christianity (p. 62): Hegel sets out Christian/Romantic art in three circles: abstract feeling, chivalry which fails to be sufficiently revolutionary, and that of the autonomous/firm subjective character that integrates an aspect of the world e.g. Macbeth, Othello, Lear but have a post- Christian interiority—Sphere of objective Spirit can only be treated indirectly on the stage in the hero e.g. Hamlet—All this falls apart into prosaic realism of ordinariness, mere technique (as in Dutch genre painters), the modern novel in which anything and nothing can happen, and the absurdity of pure subjectivity—Hegel contradicts himself in holding that the play continues the tragedy and comedy though not as a synthesis—Hegel’s fitting of Christianity into overall history of human spirit overlooks what it has in NT/Catholic dogmatics: real active power of Christ to give men participation in His mission—Hegel saw the aspiration to individual immortality/resurrection as egoism seeking privatization of everything. I.C.2.d. Catholicism Goes Farther (p. 66): No thinker before Hegel more profoundly experienced/pondered Christian revelation in dramatic categories, and from OT/NT Hegel read off his dialectics, and in Greek tragedy he saw the Absolute at play with itself, and earnestly at play in Christ; reality is action/self-portrayal of Absolute, who is the self-alienated god that returns to his own identity: a superseding of Christology/Trinitarianism in both Nestorian and Monophysite, Patripassian and Sabellian senses, and analogy is absorbed in identity—If the Passion’s efficacy for all and the possibility of sharing in Christ’s saving act are denied, then Christianity can only cultivate devotion, and secular action remains extrinsic—Hegel seems right because notion of real participatory mission has dwindled to nothing—If that mission were lived, it would open tension and so drama between total secularized world and universality of Christian mission—1. Ecclesial, world-oriented/embracing i.e. Catholic mission is rooted in Christology and Trinitarianism, and is reality, not devotion or character, though in devotion one makes it one’s own subjectivity—2. Distinction between substantial nature of whole Church and individual vocation, where Church is as chorus to ancient hero—3. Christian mission always has universal content and yet in itself is particular, leading to richness of dramatic tensions in/out of Church—4. Drama of each particular Christian reflects Christ’s mission, which Hegel failed to see; this requires non-Hegelian understanding of Calderon and Shakespeare: former reflects Christ back into myths and dramatizes theological/Thomistic epic as Sophocles did to Homer, latter fashioned great destinies of the world as expressions/extensions of Christ-event in a (post-)Christian myth or post-figuration of Christ (Schöne, Roston)—5. Questions of relation of economic Trinity to immanent Trinity/God’s drama in Himself, and of how God is related to world-theater by kenosis—Contra Hegel, new possibilities of drama open from angle of Catholic theology. I.C.3. The Death of Drama? I.C.3.a. The Loss of the Framework (p. 70): Hegel saw drama as bound to yield to prosaic serious of real history—But after Marx, philosophy becomes about changing the world, and the Hegelian horizon of absolute Spirit which was precondition for theater disappears, replaced by horizon of human plans and actions—Most times and nations lack elevated drama—19th and 20th century theater exists as commercial organ of public entertainment without ultimate raison d’être where the audience is not a society with a particular mental/spiritual horizon but an amorphous/anonymous mass gather to watch whatever—Desire to move drama from court to people in Pushkin, Lessing, Shelley, Schiller so as to educate an ethical consciousness, but this is not a serious proposition in globalized world; loss of unity in faith/Weltanschauung corresponds to loss of spiritual horizon for the stage that is precondition for meaningful play—Behind Hegel’s understanding of tragedy is Christianity’s idea of vanquished duality between man and destiny, as seen in Christ’s embracing of tragic death (Szondi), a framework that cannot exist after Hegel’s time—Modern polemical distinction of tragedy from Christianity/anything involving reconciliation (Steiner, Jaspers); contra this, Christ dies forsaken by God and one’s individual destiny is in doubt because dependent on judgment of one’s life—Tragedy collapses into irreconcilable opposition between objective and subjective (Büchner, Hebbel), absurd contradictions of subjectivity (Bahnsen), existing to deny the destructive Will (Schopenhauer), or just about conflict between individual and society—Dramatic action is ultimately only meaningful against background of absolute meaning, which cannot be rationally adumbrated/demonstrated in concepts, grasped only in leap of faith; Christianity is seen then as only way out of absurdity/theater’s self-betrayal, especially when in competition with other systems of meaning e.g. Lebensphilosophie, communism—Earlier drama shows that destiny that is purely private and non-political cannot be of ultimate interest; survey of broader spheres in various dramatists—Where there is no horizon of meaning, existence founders in revolution, and society cannot replace that horizon (Ibsen); meaninglessness as mode of action annihilates itself (Beckett), and absolute freedom dissolves in ennui (Sartre), while attitude of revolt is absurd if absolutized for it must assume what it negates (Camus): given absolute meaning must be presupposed to form the framework for drama. I.C.3.b. The Loss of the Image (p. 76): Heroes of ancient tragedy and in Shakespeare, French, and German tragedy are images, manifestations of divine world/daimon—Sociology/psychology erode/mutate the image of the hero, and to keep going, dramatists must borrow aura of ancient myth (e.g. Eliot, Kleist, Shaw, Gide, O’Neill) for various reasons—With Freud, irrational dimensions of destiny burst on the world from below, but now the daimones can be analyzed; but scientific explanations render existential questions more baffling than they were in myth: guilt/destiny has to be held responsible for things of which I am unaware (Pascal), and only the light of Christ can point us to an explanation and the possibility of being a saint beyond distorting psychology (Eliot), though this need not need not in specifically Christian terms (Faulkner, Camus, Garcia Lorca) for uncanny interconnections can become visible through very ordinary foreground realism, restoring heroes to the height that psychology robbed them of (Melville, Conrad, Wolfe)—Theater is not bound to appear in traditional form (Brook), but can take place in the market square, film, television, for life manifests a fundamental urge to observe itself as an action exhibiting both meaning and mystery. I.C.3.c. The Overwhelming Weight of Material Reality (p. 79): Theater seems to be an illusion/evasion because it seems to assume a dichotomy between a life that cannot satisfy itself and its own self-idealization; post-Christian, post-Hegelian man seems called to move on to the task of changing the world—For Comte, theater belongs to first phase of art, which positivism must extinguish as irrational and immoral—For Marx and Engels, commenting on Lassalle’s Franz von Sickingen, old drama had absolute horizon, which has now been swallowed up by revolutionary process where everything is part of the same real, material, necessary process, even apparent ideals, and God and man are only real in living totality of human species, so Marxist theater is anti-tragic, optimistic, anti-individualist—Counterbalancing this is monstrous weight of human suffering, which cannot be idealized theatrically: no one can write a tragedy about Auschwitz, but there can only presentation of the facts (Weiss, Kraus, Brecht) since now no one is responsible but the whole machine runs itself, leaving only grotesque, operetta, comedy (Dürrenmatt), which are theater trying to express our age’s dramatic tensions which cannot be humanly endured—Behind Marxist radicalism is Biblical prophetism, fulfillable now only in atheist form, so Marxism cannot be fundamentally untragic (Marcuse), which leaves us with the Christian approach which cannot be disarmed by any horror and can take even the darkest theatrical moments into itself as the germ of new symbolic representation—We can only abolish difference between material and ideal if material is seen as alienated by ideological superstructure, which introduces Gnostic contradiction into heart of material reality, as Nietzsche saw, or things lead to schizophrenia; for both Marx and Nietzsche, the individual, his question, and his private destiny have no right to appear on world stage—Thornton Wilder dispenses with pillars of classical drama, great personality and significant action, loving instead of idea the concrete individual human being however insignificant, because no distinction between significant and insignificant people, and the daily round of ordinary life then death, without evolution changing the same basic dramatic tensions—Bertolt Brecht takes seriously tension between solid weight of individual life and aspiration to redeemed humanity in communism, but here it leads to exclusions of love unnecessary in Christianity; for Brecht, there is a contradiction at the human heart such that good must take form of evil to be effective—The fear that after Hegel all ideals will be absorbed into material reality and all tension lost in one-dimensional world is groundless, however the tension is interpreted, whether as undermining contradiction or mystery imparting meaning to what seems meaningless: horizon remains open and so leaves room for Christian dramatic tension—Close competition between Brecht and Christianity—Polemics against middle-class commercial theater shows that people expect the theater to be a mirror where man can remember who he is, and so retain its ambiguity—Essential relationship between Christianity and the tragic (Przywara, de Lubac): existence needs to see itself mirrored, and so theater is a legitimate instrument in pursuit of knowledge of self/Being that points beyond itself. I.D. The Church and the Theater I.D.1. The Criticism of the Theater in the Ancient World and Christianity (p. 89): Opposition to theater seems inherent in Church, from Fathers to Bossuet—Plato sought to replace illusory theater with concrete state—By the time of Christianity there was unchaste mimus, humane comedy, mythic tragedy, but all unleashed lower nature, opposed by Stoicism, a protest in favor of inner peace and spiritual discipline continued by Christians—Plato criticized in Homer the ambiguities and childishness of the gods, contrary to paideia based on good and true, so that man can become a plaything of the gods, receiving from gods gift of harmonious rhythm of life; Plato’s concept of play is close to Christian grace, but Plato is incapable of regenerating the stage—Christianity was such a new beginning that at first it could not transpose/assimilate the mythic stage, but had to distinguish the Incarnation from everything mythic, and only later could it be seen as true drama, and could myth be seen as prefiguring it (Casel, Guardini)—Plato’s celebration/play in Laws is ethical-political existence, with no theater, an identity not asserted in Christian celebration: sacrament is more serious than anything Greek, but not the whole Christian life, and the priestly Church transcends herself toward the Kingdom—Tension between priesthood/sacrament/effective representation and its perfected truth in concrete life—Theater is necessarily an (anti-clerical) critique of Church and Church is necessarily suspicious of theater—Burdensome legacy of Church’s original “No” to theater. I.D.2. The Unsolved Conflict I.D.2.a. Between Plaudit and Proscription (p. 93): Tertullian begins Christian critique of theater, without acknowledging universal dramatic urge, but giving Stoic objections to arousal of passion; Christians already have enough literature and the dramas of virtue, liturgy, and the eschaton—In Rome, actors are inconsistently both extolled and held to be infamous—Novatian points to world theater of creation and salvation history, Clement likens Christological event to drama, and Methodius of Olympos sees our lives as festal celebrations and dramas of truth: but all these sayings are in literary mode—Opposition of Augustine and early Synods to acting, due to conflict stirred up by theatrical parodies (Reich)—The theater in the laws of Theodosius and Justinian, which continued contradictory Roman promoting and disgracing of actors, and of dancing; this contradictory attitude continued in law down to the 19th century e.g. during middle ages, actors like prostitutes were held to be public sinners, though Aquinas held it was not a sin if done decently, and bards and guilds of jugglers became free of infamy—Process of normalization of relation between Church and theater in Italy, England (and Puritan backlash), Germany (theater helped to join classes in these countries), France (e.g. controversy over Molière)—Controversy with Popes and French theologians over compatibility of theater-going with Christian life (e.g. Bossuet), where the Church spoke against theater on basis of unbroken but unreflective and uncritically accepted tradition—When she lost power, Church accepted existence of theater, but not clear if she overcame or just repressed former complex—Question of whether rivalry between man as appearance/drama of play and man as reality/drama of life is a fundamental theological problem, whether the actor represents dangerous temptation of not being ourselves and of having more than one “I”, projected by Plato/theologians onto profession of acting in order to free themselves from it—By the middle ages, theater had once more evolved out of Christian mysterium as it had once evolved out of ancient myth. I.D.2.b. From Mystery to Drama (p. 105): Cultic/liturgical drama developed aspects of theater, including the earthy and comic, leading to multi-day performances of Biblical episodes and lives of saints no longer in Church but in town square, run by laity, in the vernacular, imbued with the worldly: a clerical and middle class world of the stage—Emphasis on the visible, rather than Christ’s suffering on our behalf—Little influence from chivalry, but some from Byzantine Passion plays, via crusaders—Mixture of comic, grotesque, crudely satirical, and insanity e.g. Feast of Fools, with obscene parodies of clergy, celebrated even in the Church; Church saw this with good humor, until arising of professional actors for it in 16th century—Dialectic of folly (Erasmus) between Church and world e.g. in Les Blasphémateurs, in which Don Giovanni is rooted; Church alternatively applauded and forbade—In Spain, spiritual plays and worldly comedies both flourished, joined in Lope de Vega; the worldly and the spiritual go through the heart of the poets, the plays and the Church. I.D.2.c. Precarious Neutrality (p. 109): Tradition from the middle ages that took up everyday milieu tradition of Plautus and Terence e.g. 10th century Hrosvitha’s dramatic legends in the style of Terence—Terence recommended as inculcating urbane Latin and teaching good manners, though not morality, and embodying/mirroring practice of life, though not theory (Erasmus, Luther, Melanchthon, Gnaphaeus), so Biblical figures became moral examples; dramatization of Christian life in Reformation and Counter-Reformation, mostly on neutralized plane of respectable convention/Christian secularity—Tension between Christian existence and play of roles, so that it almost did not matter if ethical wisdom had Christian face; what was played was not faith but man in his loftiest moments: Everyman could be humanistic or Christian drama, Catholic works or Protestant faith approach. I.D.3. On the Theological Relevance of the Christian Theater in History (p. 112): We should relativize the hiatus between Christian existence and the stage—Hegel is right that the depth at which in Christianity the theological-dramatic plot thickens cannot be shown on the stage, nor can its effect of transforming the whole world; Hegel is wrong that there are no dramatic ways of depicting God’s incarnation and action on behalf of the world. I.D.3.a. The Drama of Salvation Rendered Visible (p. 112): Spiritual play emerging from medieval liturgy is initially contemplation that renders salvation history visible and makes it live—Drama shows that salvation history is really true, that I am there with its events in Kierkegaardian simultaneity, and that it all took place for me and it claims me—Staging salvation history obscures certain contents and illumines others: example of Easter plays, and their theological consequences for a dramatic grasp of descensus—When plays become independent of center in Eucharistic mystery and whole drama of salvation, they are in danger of becoming episodic, moralistic, or mere entertainment—Play cycles of whole salvation history were childlike ways of seeing whole ancient world in historical terms, in order to bodily be there—Examples: plays of Antichrist and Last Judgment, dramatically present today, with the power to decide eternal destiny. I.D.3.b. Centered on the Eucharist (p. 115): Spanish autos sacramentales take whole of salvation/world history and lead it back to Eucharistic center; the playwrights can take any subject matter, e.g. revenge, madness, ancient myth, and show it to be permeated with Eucharistic mystery—Calderon’s reductio mythologiae ad theologiam is equal to Bonaventure and Schelling’s endeavors—Analogies of secular and spiritual, of nature and grace made completely visible, founded on Eucharistic presence as universal consummation—Comedies can be re-fashioned into autos sacramentales, but not vice versa, for grace presupposes nature; theatre is the self actualizing the analogy between creation and redemption: full seriousness of truth is manifest as is fluidity of meanings/functionality and unreality of creation. I.D.3.c. Myth and Revelation (p. 117): Spanish theater dealt with historical subjects, but did not become real history, requiring another theatrical tradition setting forth sober toughness of historical situation under Christian illumination—Examples of primitive martyr-play which is always in political framework, of Polyeucte (Corneille), and of Eliot for whom direct passes over into indirect—In action, Christian always situated in discipleship to the Lord, and the testimony of his life is a dramatic mode of Lord’s presence, Who acts and suffers in His mystical body: a new dramatic dimension that attains fullness in context of Catholic concept of Church—Through momentous social or political situations we discern primal Christian drama between God and world in Christ, a postfiguration rather than a myth; allows a genuine Christian dramatic genre that can stand beside classical tragedy e.g. in Shakespeare—Connection with primal image need not be explicit or in playwright’s awareness, but one cannot abstract from theological horizon and reduce great characters to psychological categories as e.g. Goethe, Hegel do with Hamlet—Drama is not exhausted after Christ; an indispensible role is left to the believer—Artworks are a starting point for providing interpretive theodramatic categories for doing justice to Christian existence in its personal, social, and juridical dimensions, and for integrating Church history and hagiology into theology. I.D.3.d. The Christian, Ultimately the Only Partner Possible (p. 119): Church represents absoluteness of eternal divine plan over all revolutions/democratizations; this absoluteness is indispensible foil for genuine drama: tragedy requires immoveable laws, and while revolt is an intractable feature of world, it is not absolute, so there is no revolutionary tragedy (Schneider)—Schiller, Sartre, Shaw, and every homme révolté need at least a phantom against which the hero can try his strength—Essentially Christian tragic dimension is inadequate reflection of dialogue of Christ and Pilate, tragedy under grace as opposed to graceless tragedy: tragedy leads us to the boundary where the tragic law no longer operates; tragic relation to truth, which can only be understood as performed, is nerve of Christian drama, which is a judgment, for truth calls for readiness to die; dramatic and tragic quality of Christian life/faith has not yet found exhaustive expression, for that requires Church to recognize its commonalities with drama (Schneider)—Schneider goes beyond Hegel with his tragedy under grace/graceless tragedy, which applies to real life too: we are brought to ruin either by meaninglessness of by God Who shatters what we build (Eichendorff)—Man’s need to be entertained is not sinful illusion, but necessity and pleasure of seeing oneself portrayed in another, in a mask in which the person loses and finds himself; drama has been meant by Baroque, Sturm und Drang, and idealist playwrights, and by Brecht, as a moral institution—We must hold together the need for play and the serious attempt to discern spirits in the face of the veiled tragedy of existence, and then the stage will not profane the mysterium—Revelation is the precondition for existence to experience genuine tragedy that does not dissolve in meaninglessness. I.E. Theology and Drama (p. 125): Attempts to present dramatic content of Christian revelation on stage were of theological consequence, but had no fruitful influence on systematic theology; but all current theological trends converge toward theological dramatic theory: theology calls for this new shape, for it is explication of revelation, which is dramatic, the history of God’s initiative towards and struggle with world—Question of whether the outcome is predetermined or uncertain, a question on which everything depends: theology cannot give a finished conclusion, but must leave room for dramatic aspect—Two faces of theology always at work in tradition are: 1. Turned inward, contemplation leading to action/Catholic struggle for world’s salvation; 2. Turned outward in apologetics/criticism/polemics/dialogue, the latter leading to the summae, which were eventually overgrown by the monologue/handbook, though this in the hands of great theologians/exegetes (Augustine, Bonaventure, Thomas, Erasmus) does not replace the proper genre of theology which is questioning/open/searching, but is problematic when scientific theology is separated from exegesis and then apologetics only retains appearance of dialogue, but just provides ready-made answers, or hardens into dialectic/identity—Christ’s answers are so unexpected that they often do not sound like answers at all, for all answering comes from creative Holy Spirit—Theology is full of dramatic tension and requires a system of dramatic categories, which is presupposed by Catholic “dialectic” between nature and grace, in which natural dramatic dimension is presupposed by/prefaced to supernatural drama, which adopts former and brings it to its true dimensions, the former being based on freedom/natural knowledge of his origin given to man by Creator, so God is always dramatically involved in the world—Prior to Christ-event, the play is not purely secular, and can only be played with a view to the Absolute; man is placed on stage without being consulted, and in learning to speak is trained to play his part: one can only respond to questions if one has identified oneself with role/prosopon/person, and one must answer not “What is man?” but “Who am I?” before or during the play—Role/persona is borderline concept between immanence/transcendence, nature/super-nature—Plan for the Theo-Drama—We need a dramatic path between abysses of: 1. Systematics in which God/Absolute Being is only unmoved and the world’s drama plays before Him; 2. Mythology which absorbs God into the world and makes Him just a party in war of world-process; 3. Gnostic/Hegelian synthesis of these. II. Dramatic Resources II.A. The Idea of the “World Stage” (p. 135): Idea of “world stage” arises from Asiatic and European awareness of world—Many peoples have cultic/mythic drama e.g. Egypt, Indonesia, Japanese Noh plays, but in West there is continual propagation of stage image across worldviews. II.A.1. The Ancient World II.A.1.a. Mimesis (p. 135): Homeric world drama in which heroes as representatives of man struggle for victory before the eyes of the gods, who are involved spectators, following men’s fates with mixture of divine superiority and compassionate concern—Latter fades in ancient times, but notion of dramatic play before the gods remains down to tragedians, Plato, Stoics, Cynics, Seneca, Sallust, Epictetus, Paul, Marcus Aurelius: the gods desire to see hard heroic situations, the true philosopher especially in misfortune is a spectacle to delight men and gods—In philosophy, distance between divine spectator and human actor is mapped onto distinction between being and seeming, so that earthly events risk being reduced to a puppet play (Bhagavad Gita); for Heraclitus, what is beautiful to God may be ugly to us—Plato’s subordination of all things to theologico-ethical norm: we should not just play about, but seriously imitate/play the latter, for life is a play before God as education whereby we enter into divine life-rhythm, which is a gift from God, the real mover; play and education, not war and struggle, are closest to divine seriousness, for life is a celebration/liturgy in God’s presence—Puppet metaphor in Plato and Stoic/pseudo-Aristotle’s De mundo—Notion of role has not emerged. II.A.1.b. Ethics of the Stage (p. 140): Bion of Borysthenes introduces notions of role and theater of life/world from the point of view of anthropology/ethics not theology: like a good actor, the good man must play the role granted him by Goddess of Destiny—Implies distance between “I” and role, which creates freedom but calls for decent acting in all stages of life—Epictetus says our task is to play well the part we have been given, while the choosing of it belongs to someone else; there is a bond of mercy/gratitude between divine Giver of roles and human players, despite no sense of immortality—Play metaphor is not here seeing life as illusion, unlike in Egyptian Pallada—Question of whether it is God or Fate who gives roles—Plato sees a tragedy and comedy of life; Epictetus says the actor should not identify himself with his mask—Marcus Aurelius observes that the sights in the theater, like life, are always the same; his distance from life: one should not separate oneself from the organic whole, but play one’s part in it with appropriate seriousness, and we should know our limits and make friends with death; he despises the multitudes in the theater, but only has the image of the stage to express paradox between play and gravity, distance and commitment, where neither the decision for birth nor death lies with us, and so we should accept them smilingly. II.A.1.c. Metaphysics of the Role (p. 144): Plato attempted to shed light on mystery of distribution of roles, in myth at end of Republic—Myth introduces karma into Western thought, and reflects on interplay between necessity and freedom—From ethically indifferent kinds of life, the soul must choose which will facilitate the ethically best life, though they are affected in their choice by their previous lives; the choice is made in intelligent freedom mixed with fate—For Plato, eternal individuality belongs to the soul, distinct from its role in each life; these roles are both chosen by and suited to the soul—In earthly life, freedom expresses itself in, not in opposition to, the role, which is immutable, guaranteed by the daimon. (p. 147): Plotinus’ philosophy of man’s dramatic existence unites elements of ancient thought in a way that allows us to see boundaries of pre-Christian philosophy—Providence distributes itself, and so is at war with itself in its parts, but this war is controlled/permeated by all-embracing/infusing peace—Aesthetic answer that the parts must be graded for there to be a beautiful universe, as in a beautiful play—Hostilities at lower levels are result of individuation necessary in view of whole/manifesting the whole’s fullness, and violent death shows that death is nothing to fear, and is part of the action as on the stage: this aesthetic distance from world’s suffering is not of Plato but of the ancient world as it nears its end—The questions Plotinus raises and cannot answer within his aesthetic context—Distinctions between poet’s text and actor’s good or bad rendering of it, and in world drama between destiny assigned by Creator-Poet and the soul good or bad acting, leading to reward or punishment—Ancient metaphysics at its end is between untroubled ethics of Stoic Diatribes, and Christian theology; contrary to latter, Plotinus excludes possibility of improvisation, and freedom is only in God’s descending, not in ascending to Him. II.A.2. Christianity II.A.2.a. Athlete and Circus (Early Period) (p. 151): Christianity’s attitude to theater image not linked to Platonist metaphysics but to privatizing of role in popular diatribe and degeneration of theater into circus; originally, theater is entertainment of spectators, not serious stage play—Tension between enjoyment and grim seriousness/torture opens way to theme of theater in Bible e.g. Job’s torments, torments of the damned under God’s gaze, the joy of the redeemed in the spectacle of the torments of the damned in Jewish literature, Gregory the Great, Peter Lombard and his commentators—This eschatological situation reverses earthly situation where the righteous are exposed to gaze of spectators who treat their tragedy as comedy (Philo, 3&4 Maccabees)—In Christianity, victims are not just exposed to death for God’s sake, but with God in Christ (Clement), leading to tension between comedy and tragedy; Paul’s comparison of his suffering with comfortable community (1 Cor. 4) and the public exposure of community to the mob (Heb. 4, with reference to Aquinas and Brecht)—Image of athlete in the arena—In Christianity, theater metaphor could be used without intensity or with new depth and illumination, rendering pre-Christian theater transparent to Christian themes. II.A.2.b. Salvation History and Futility (from Augustine to Calderon) (p. 155): Theater of the world remained cryptic when Church was divorced from stage; theater signified a demonic paganism or an anti-Church (Augustine)—Examples of theater motifs from antiquity for futility and ephemerality of world, and even for God’s ecstasy as play, from Christian history (Maximus, Clement, Lallemant)—Augustine saw struggle between Church and theater as illustration of conflict between principles of world history, City of God and secular state, and the two ways of love; but still for him everyone has his role, so that theme of theater of the world claimed Augustine as patron (Otto von Freising)—Humanists brought tragic-dramatic view of world/history into contact with ancient metaphor of theater; John of Salisbury distinguishes three stages, with God behind all: lower which makes life a comedy for those who refuse warfare, those who refuse the comedy and whose conversation is in heaven, between them the world where comedy and warfare become tragedy; this view is turning point, leading to play of human life heightened in late middle ages to trionfi, and sinking to gloom of Dance of Death or frivolity of Feast of Fools or fading to nothingness—In Luther, dialectic between providence and fate is dissolved so that every bit of world history/authority is God’s mask, our actions illusory, the world drama is theo-panistic; God conceals Himself to allow us freedom out of love, and Christ takes on Himself the sinner’s alienness and opposed-ness, descending to the hell of the damned, a concealment that justifies God’s other disguises—In Erasmus, everything in human life shows two sides e.g. what looks like death turns out to be life and vice versa, but to look behind the mask spoils the play—For both Luther and Erasmus, there is no standard for judging between being and appearance, wisdom and foolishness e.g. God appears as the devil (Luther), and the folly of the world is absorbed into Christ’s (Erasmus): the Cross is foolishness, and blessedness is a madness, giving foolishness the last word about reality, a dialectic based in Christology not philosophy, though absolutized so no longer distinct from the natural order that is judged by it—Baroque literature cannot outdo this absolute dialectic, but inserts dramatic action into it, by taking seriously the possibility of a worldly representation of the absolute—Shakespeare sees the world as stage (As You Like It II, 7), with inbuilt ordering categories, a theme furthered by Ronsard. II.A.2.c. Theology and Metaphysics of the World Theater in the Baroque Age (p. 163): Migration of ideas from Ronsard to Calderon via Launey’s ascetical work on world theater, Cervantes, Quevedo’s reinvigoration of ancient theater metaphor/paraphrasing of Epictetus, Plato, Plotinus—Calderon theologically deepens the metaphor in Great Theater of the World, in which dramatic tension lies in vertical implications, not horizontal course of human action, the plot following the history of the world as a play made by God—Especially in the Christ characters in Calderon’s plays, role or mission is not mere donning of ephemeral costume, but retained eschatologically, an eternal/personal harvest of what is sown temporally, in contrast to Plato: souls come forth from God’s thought, rather than falling into their lives, and the instant they appear they can begin a dialogue, involving doubts and questioning, though what counts is not the role but how one plays it—In contrast to ancient view, God’s freedom, not soul’s, chooses roles and each person’s uniqueness, without initial cooperation by soul; the world then gives the role its accoutrements, but this does not determine anything: rather, the individual mission from God personalizes each individual for life in the world—Horizontal action is just a rehearsal, interrupted by God’s voice, admonition of law, comments of world; the beggar’s scene at the core of the action—Entire gravity of Christian play lies in divinely instituted tension/balance between poor and rich/powerful/beautiful/industrious; roles are commissions, not juxtaposed private matters or interlocking into politics, but are polarized by wisdom—History of theme of theater of the world after Calderon—Aspects of theater of the world in Baroque era, when theater was a true mirror/direct parable not a moral/aesthetic institution (Rütsch) for life is real theater; theater image at this time bring dramatic interpretation of existence close to that of Stoicism, and at this time a great deal of natural theology is built into Catholic and Protestant theology—Baroque world theater differs from Luther’s dialectic of the masquerade and Erasmus’ folly: 1. Genuine representation of Absolute in history; 2. This produces/governs dialectic between role and person. (p. 169): 1. Court is where world theater really takes place (Lohenstein, Racine), the drama no longer taking place in panorama of world history, but in condensed space and time, in the destiny of a particular person in a particular national court, within an ideal framework (Benjamin), a focus on the state rather than Stoic emphasis of private—If court’s greatness is based on power not right (Machiavelli) and its roles on lies (Molière), the courtier will try to break out into “truth” of utopian shepherd/hermit existence, or into Christianity/martyrdom—The angst that comes from death (Gryphius, Shakespeare, Bidermann, Schiller)—Loss of play dialectic (Hofmannswaldau) in which man has no particular role, but is a Proteus/chameleon, and all becomes a masquerade, with friction between power politics, eroticism, and religion, and where the order of world theater is just a formal framework; this Lutheran dialectic is mostly avoided in Catholic milieu, though problems arise there in relation to absolutes of throne and altar: these must be unraveled and reduced to Christian dialectic of City of God (Schneider, Claudel, Eliot). (p. 173): 2. When existence is interpreted as theater, the “I” is a role, bound to be seen as ambiguous, vacillating between inserting itself entirely in role, and seeing through role to the eternal—Representation means both seeing and concealing, requiring renunciation of unique personality, though this can be ethical or calculating—Baroque awareness of role goes about in mourning or burlesque: life is a dream, as a person can suddenly find himself in an entirely different role alienated from himself tragically or comedically; the stage shows the spectator who thinks he knows who the actor really is that he does not really know himself—Catholic theme of actor entering an alien role of being a Christian, and finding himself transformed by grace into its reality, rooted in legends of Josaphat, Genesius, Philemon, the play rising above tragedy and comedy to the standpoint of the true “I”, as what appears to spectators to be an acted role is a real role that comes from heaven—The individual always plays a typical role, in the Baroque drama as in the Republic—Example of Corneille’s comedy L’Illusion and its play within a play. II.A.3. Modern Times II.A.3.a. Idealism (p. 177): In Baroque age, play metaphor covers religious, areligious, ethical, and nihilistic worldviews, leaving open question of whether we play or are played by a higher power, whether God or blind fate (Balde, Czepko)—Questions of how transitory role, which man embodies too well, is related to God, and what God’s relation is to role-play; the view that He is only inventor, spectator, and final judge is far inferior to Christian/Platonist view—Enlightenment Cartesian/materialist view of deist god and l’homme-machine returns us to idea of puppet play—Contrasted to this is ever-intensifying sense of existence in which man experiences free enthusiastic unity with divine principle permeating universe (Bruno, Shaftesbury, Herder), which is only conscious in individual minds, which must act extemporaneously in the play of the world: the thrown-together Shakespearian event in which characters are both ends and means, rather than the unified Greek drama—For Kant, the intellectus archetypus cannot be constructed, but its absoluteness guarantees man’s freedom and points to postulated God, the two converging in Fichte’s “I”; Idealist problem of absolute and empirical “I” frightened many poets (Herder, Hamann, Jacobi, Tieck, Jean Paul, Kleist, Wetzel, Hoffmann, Büchner) for from the standpoint of Absolute the concrete world would seem a play of ghosts, and madness would lurk at the bottom of every “I”, hence the marionette version of the world theater at this time—Dramatic tension expressed in great symbols of Faust and Prometheus; finitude and death coincide with the experience of absolute moment, and the poet is a creator, but this is anthropocentric—Extemporaneity is only meaningful if there is one Spirit/Poet giving utterance in all the parts and harmonizing all the acting, but He cannot be external to us, but unveils and manifests Himself/comes to be only through the play of our freedom (Schelling); here the Absolute is the objective convergence/totality of all freedoms, and this shatters the metaphor of one Producer (Zeltner): leads to a secularized version of the wheel of history, and theme of perfect identity of nature/necessity and freedom (Schiller, Kleist)—Transcendental idealist reflection often understood as eliminating distinction between “I” and God, such that there is a deification of the “I” or a subordinating of empirical “I” to egoless/demonic/nihilistic Absolute: the light-hearted self-reflection of the “I” changed to what is dark/drear—From my point of view, the world appears as my poem, and I am actor and spectator too (Jacobi, Tieck, Jean Paul, Schlegel, Dostoyevsky), the principle of reflection eliminating all distinction between play and life, as I observe myself observing ad infinitum, and desire ever increases—The split in the “I” from radical reflection leads consciousness to vascillate between libertinage/identification with the Absolute and the sense of being subject to alien destiny/puppet play rather than world-stage i.e. sense that our existence is rendered unreal by an unknown/uncanny fate pulling the strings (Büchner, Hegel)—Idealism is between late Englightenment homme-machine and 19th century machine age, and so puppet image is replaced with robot/automaton (Jean Paul, Hoffmann, Immermann)—World-stage metaphor is demonically distorted by Wetzel: the “insane Creator of the world has unleashed this tragi-comedy of history, a ghoulish mardi gras in the madhouse”—More cheerful marionette motifs, themes of Stoic resignation, and Catholic insertion of extempore play into Christianity (Görres): the play is mysteriously ordered from within independently of the actor’s collaboration/knowledge through a free necessity, divinity wrapped in maya as in a lover’s veil—Image of the masked ball, and the transformation of theater of specters into living theater (Eichendorff)—Ancient theme of world as seen from above/from an airship (Homer, Virgil, Somnium Scipionis, Dante) continued in age of exploration and of Idealism as view not only of earth but of history (da Gama, de la Cruz, Jean Paul, Stifter, Saint-Exupéry). II.A.3.b. Disiecti Membra Poetae: Postidealism (p. 190): After postidealists Grillparzer, Hebbel, and Ibsen, it seemed inconceivable that Hofmannsthal would be able to write a world theater, but he was writing in Austria that never completely broke with baroque empire/theater tradition—Dramatists were bound to try, at least unconsciously, to evade Hegel’s verdict, though Christian notion of mission was no longer available, and it alone could reconcile finite personal destiny with infinite divine commission in service and freedom; what replaced this was yearning/Sehnsucht, intimations of totality, aspiration, straining for infinite through limitations of finite e.g. Goethe’s Faust has no governing idea determining the action—Faustian/Promethean claim to totality can be sustained philosophically only on basis of new monadology in which every “I” knows/feels itself to mirror/be identical with the Whole (Grillparzer), in which drama becomes a conflict between rival claims to totality, and between each individual’s ideal form and actual self-realization, the synthesis of which is unconscious, inaccessible to reason/action (Schelling, similar to Plotinus): absolute freedom and necessity coincide, and tragic dimension becomes absolute and so abolishes itself, leading to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Lebensphilosophie, Freud, absolute sociology where collective explodes ossified private “I’s” and opens them to totality. II.A.3.b.α. Franz Grillparzer (p. 192): Grillparzer operates in terms of Baroque empire—But in Bruderzwist he opposes a man with humble superiority (Rudolf II) to one striving selfishly for totality (Ottokar); the latter’s Baroque humiliation for arrogance is not the end (unlike in Shakespeare), but the last act brings the broken rebel philosophizing about the human being as a goal/self/world, unsurrendered to his role—Loss of imperial representation will lead to rule of the mob, where all are equal, because equally base—Historical tragedy in God’s work—Each “I” has an unrestrictive urge for self-preservation/perfection, and when two meet, conflict/evil arises; the “I” monad has idealist pre-existence, and must endeavor to preserve it on entering the realistic period of history, depicted in various ways in his plays—Contra Hegel, Grillparzer seeks a pre-cultural starting point where man is embedded in the totality and can practice magic/prophecy—Virginity here is not fruitful in a Marian way, but restricting life to oneself so as to be a self/world, for love alienates one from oneself—Example of Medea—Theme of life as shadow/dream—For Grillparzer, all-embracing totality is destiny, which concretely is fate not understood mechanically, but in terms of a negative theology on which links to the Absolute are inaccessible to human gaze—Destiny reveals a disturbed world order trying to regain balance through expiation, like the Greek hereditary curse and Christian original sin, an intensified urge in the blood toward evil that does not suspend freedom/moral accountability, though he often invokes the fairyland of childlike pre-existence in contrast to the transgression of eros—Life as a dream is a development of real possibility of freedom/creativity; points ahead to Freud/depth psychology, and the question of whether truth lies in unconscious or in waking life—In Grillparzer, human being comes to grief in haunted anteroom of unattainable unconscious identity of ideal and real: man must forever strive toward the infinite, and there is no Author to give him a role, but he does not (unlike Hebbel) put this tragedy in the Absolute itself—Grabbe gives us in his plays more isolated/metaphysically defenseless ego-monads than Grillparzer/Hebbel, but against the background of naturalistic, gay, chaotic depiction of popular life. II.A.3.b.β. Friedrich Hebbel (p. 198): Hebbel was impressed by Schelling’s philosophy of world-ages and myth, and opposed Hegel on the demise of art: philosophy could only overtake art if the latter were a comedy of characters transposed from external to internal theater, but it is realized philosophy as the world is realized Idea, and only in art, not Hegelian Idea, is world integrated into totality—God retreats into impenetrable mystery, revealed only in dialectic transposed into life—Individual is guilty because of unyielding self-seeking expansion—Totality always has this fissure, but the poet can unite broken life and spiritual unifying idea, condensing ideal factors into characters, representing inner event in external history—Drama illustrates life process when poet maintains tension between life’s two manifestations of being and becoming—Hebbel has tragic view that excludes historical progress, and focuses on end of one age and beginning of another, which is when great drama is produced, though these crises are only vehicles for what is perennially valid; he is suspicious of socialist utopias of Junges Deutschland, and he failed in his attempt to dramatize world history—He applies justice to an unguided world theater; the poet can be in the place where the world spirit failed to direct the extempore play if he does not hide himself in his “I” but allows the invisible elements to stream through him—Motifs in his tragedies: 1. Guilty attempt to lay hold of reality’s sacred origin, symbolized by masculine power craftily seizing woman’s inviolate, sacred, veiled depths, reducing her to free unfathomable integrity to a thing, an action that sets history in motion, which is retribution/restoring balance by annihilation; 2. Hebbel’s heroes are totalities that under finitude burst bounds of what is human because of inner wealth/depths not because of received mission, strutting on sense of self which includes love and hate, but with each sex alien to the other—Three dimensions of characters: pre-historical/mythical, Biblical/Christian/supernatural, universally human including abysses of unconscious—Mythical heightening is exhausted on modern stage, and Christian form lacks content and so collapses, both absorbed by psyche; psyches act on world stage by representing fragmentary aspects of the whole: expressing the hidden will of the whole, they reach something like reconciliation/justice, though the spectator is free to be convinced by it or reject it as subjective construction—Links from Hebbel to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche: post-idealist monads can be interpreted as alienated forms of unconscious blind Total Will in which they dissolve, or as expressions of will to life/power, both combined in Eduard von Hartmann, and thence to Scheler—Slide from metaphysics to psyche triumphs in sociological/psychological drama (Hauptmann, Shaw), breaking link to old theater of world. II.A.3.b.γ. Henrik Ibsen (p. 203): Episodes from the beginning and end of his life depicting man as idealist monad cut loose from metaphysical background, with freedom and truth verified anthropologically, and with man as the audience before whom he acts—Contradictions between strength/striving, will/possibility, past guilt/future action in Catilina—Ibsen looks to the Nordic sagas like Hebbel and Wagner—Increase of intensity over the course of his plays, especially those set in prehistoric setting; same intensity in modern setting appears as pathological distortion e.g. in Hedda Gabler—Ibsen’s shift to treating problem of personal monad in the present e.g. in Love’s Comedy, which opposes the ideal truth of poetry to the real truth of life, in the preference for the memory of love at its zenith to ongoing love—Transformation of picture of Christian saint who sacrificed everything to psychological view of absolute idealist in Brand, in the identification of life with mission, but without Christian faith and love it reduces to tragic caricature/pathos of having to choose two absolutes—Peer Gynt satirizes Faustian German idealism, a station drama in which the I reviews its situations in continual monologue, a technique perfected by Strindberg; focus on the Kierkegaardian desperate desire to be oneself—Later plays try to unmask society’s torturous insincerity but lead us to the truth and freedom of the personality, which in turn cannot be an absolute standard because of their relation to history/society; no person can aspire to absoluteness without guilt—A Doll’s House and An Enemy of the People have as their perverse ideal self-education and sacred duties toward oneself—Guilty personality leads by heredity back to the guilt of others, a theme taken up by Mann—The Wild Duck asks if there is any point/justification in unveiling the truth; the contradictions within the self, the hungers for boundless/infinite/unattainable, and only as autonomous monad can main character commit to interpersonal relationship—Last plays are all tragedies of autonomy: Hedda Gabler is desire for life made absolute as will to power without love and as a kind of sport, Master Builder makes himself equal with God yet his sense of autonomy leads him to feel guilt/angst, theme of autonomous idealism built on foundation of guilty egoism in later plays e.g. in When we Dead Awake, the dead awake in death to see what they have irrevocably lost—The symbolic but futile and empty upward thrust; the absolute ideal longing/will to power are ambivalent between good and evil, hence guilt, and can only be dealt with by psychology/sociology, which cannot deal with them—His excursion into metaphysics in Emperor and Galilean—Ibsen saw evolution as applying to human spirituality, but not with eternal ideals, even truth and freedom, for he surrenders the tragic-utopian structure of the human being in favor of future utopia. (p. 213): World theater metaphor is entirely dissolved in idealist principle e.g. of Goethe’s Faust and Prometheus—After this, stage is dominated by sociologico-psychological and utopian-absurdist drama, two forms of same thing: the former sticks to intra-mundane causes/motivations and assumes changed social conditions/roles can eliminate tragedy or solve problem of existence, dropping the metaphysical question of life’s meaning; latter asks question to exclusion of all else, destroying immanent dramatic action—But there remains interference between what is acted and the contemplative viewing of it that seeks ultimate meaning, and the question of who apportions the roles, so we cannot go back to naïve world theater metaphor—Two ways forward: 1. Present modern man with world theater metaphor whole taking account of psychological/sociological perspectives (Hofmannsthal); 2. Recover metaphysical implications of use of this metaphor (Von Balthasar). II.A.3.c. Hofmannsthal: The Final Production of the “Theater of the World” (p. 215): Miracle of appearance of world theater in 20th century, through Hofmannsthal’s encounter with Calderon—Hofmannsthal saw himself as heir/representative of Europe centered on Catholic monarchy of Danube/Spain, materially destroyed by Protestantism (ultimately by Wilson), but surviving as spiritual force as Hellas had—Shakespeare/Schiller focus on the character, but Calderon/Austrian drama focused on man acting in cosmic/religious relationships i.e. cosmocentric not anthropocentric because theocentric—The encounter with Calderon is in postidealist era when Prometheus has been superseded by Dionysius i.e. universal life imagining itself to be divine, and the “I” that comes forth from things and strives for totality, for Hofmannsthal an ethical performance of person in whom universe is concealed and thus is a riddle to himself—Early reflections on aesthetic pre-existence and world theater—Chronology of Hofmannsthal’s encounters with Calderon and the English Everyman—Attempt to portray whole reality of age in pitiless harshness and so as diagnosis/myth/prophecy contain and transcend world-theater—First, Hofmannsthal tried to solve question of “I” versus universal life through psychoanalysis and by breaking out of “I” to the other: in entering itself, the “I” finds a range of possible “I’s” and so becomes schizophrenic, eliminating boundary of “I” and world—As long as guilty and innocent are modeled on Lebensphilosophie/depth psychology, their opposition and that between dream/play and reality/seriousness cannot come to light; only Christian view can provide way out through distinguishing two principles of universal solidarity, Adam and Christ, which Hofmannsthal finally saw, e.g. in his Jedermann: his serious appeal to the Christian German tradition, and the first audience’s reaction—He gives back to the German consciousness a vision of things that are unutterably broken in the context of an unbroken understanding of the world: the Christological principle i.e. God’s death for our sake underlies the brokenness of the hear-and-now—In Jedermann, the means of all means i.e. money becomes demonically the end of ends: man’s fundamental relation i.e. to his possessions determines state of world and action in it; all destinies are interrelated—Objections to whether all this allows dramatic action—The greater depth to Hofmannsthal’s model than to Calderon’s in both Platonic and Christian directions, in terms of absolute interior and anterior freedom for choice of role in life embracing all freedom of choice—Violent seizing of freedom e.g. by proletariat cannot gain freedom, but requires gently yielding to God, and freedom comes in a transcendent future—Bleak portrayal of conflict between poverty in spirit and realities of power—In Jedermann the Christological principle intervenes eschatologically, in Welttheater man in revolt is attuned to it before he is born, in Der Turm it is embodied in a whole living figure, though here the battle between chaos and purity becomes a mere apparition: this is the world theater of Holy Saturday: the main character can only overcome hell by dying of its poison. II.A.3.d. Maschere Nude (p. 232): Theater has previously reached borderline of contradiction and self-dissolution, but most previously were only playing e.g. Luther, Erasmus—Role-play cannot be evaluated once Promethean world of Absolute Spirit is dissolved in Dionysian world of life II.A.3.d.α. Nietzsche (p. 232): Gives much attention to acting/masks but not to dramatic theory—Early on, he takes as starting point the Dionysian self-transformation fulfilled in Appolonian dream-vision; in tragic action, we gaze redemptively on sufferings of Dionysius—Being is appearance, life is play-acting—He needs to distinguish actor from mask so as to see through, but cannot because life is essentially seeming—The self-contradiction of the richly endowed man who can only act through masks, as with all virtues; universal affirmation is always a self-violation—The higher man’s loneliness/asceticism are greater than those of Platonism/Christianity—Life/will to power, eschewing logic and so the possibility of genuine new values, can only produce negating masks of itself/ennui—Nietzsche’s starting point in life that goes beyond itself yet gets no farther is inner form of Shaw’s drama. II.A.3.d.. George Bernard Shaw (p. 236): Combined puritanism and Schopenhauer’s pessimism with positive view of the world, founded on Marxism, seeking a vantage point about immediacy of existence—Attitudes of seeking to unveil private/social existence, to show what superior spiritual existence looked like, to exhibit mediation between life and spirit—Superior man’s morality is beyond everyday good and evil, judging and unmasking the latter—Meta-biological life-force is a biological urge that goes beyond itself, being only a will to power at lowest stage, but at higher stage being sublimated to transcend all individual/social forms/institutions; divine play, eros, dancing, art are only allowed at early stages, after which one seeks to become pure disembodied intelligence—Superior man as exterminator—1. First task is unmasking the lie (Ibsen, Marx); examples in early plays—2. Response to moralistic/idealistic/romantic tensions with claim that it’s not worth it, as claimed by his humanly softened, lonely supermen who are above everything—3. Dynamic meta-biological monism as answer to question raised by dualism of levels of life, the life-force striving for something transcendent—Human invention of death/finitude leads to evils/romanticism, and then to the attempt to overcome these—Ultimately personal being, love, marriage, economics, politics, death are illusory, lightened only by humorous resignation, lost in becoming spirit—Theater of the world cannot produce a meaningful play because what apportions the roles is a blind, unknowing life-force; the playwright can give meaning only by denying that there is intrinsic meaning in immanent action. II.A.3.d.γ. Luigi Pirandello (p. 244): Six Characters in Search of an Author reflects on question of possibility of dramatic construction, and calls for dismantling of ideology of post-idealist drama, in which God as one Who apportions roles is replaced by the dramatist—Playwrights like novelists often experience characters as living a life of their own—The pain the characters feel of not being able to find the level of being on which the tragic play can be performed; they refuse to enter a form that fixes/falsifies real life—Existence is negated, the real and ideal cancel each other, in their refusal to be trapped in a play; existence only becomes particular and concrete in a role—Pirandello’s other plays also show he unveiled contradiction in being—The identity-in-contradiction of play of the world and the theater of the world link to tradition (Plotinus) yet also break with it—Theater becomes farce which in representing tragedy includes parody of that tragedy; wretched nakedness looks out through all the disguises. II.A.4. Conclusion: The Dramatic Resources of the “Theater of the World” (p. 249): The theater of the world contains the elements that facilitate a religious/theological interpretation of existence (Seneca, Maximus)—Existence contains a reflection immanent in it, and which theatrical process just makes explicit; in the symbol of the theater, existence can directly behold itself, though this exhibits ambivalence between game and authenticity of existence itself. II.A.4.a. The Distinction between the (Temporal-Spatial) Finitude of the Performed Play and its Nonfinite Meaning (p. 250): 1. Play mirrors finitude of human existence; meaningful acting is necessary even when there is no clear signal for the action to end, while there is no guarantee the fifth act will be reached, and both actor and spectator are subject to transcendent evaluation after the play is over—2. Unavoidable ambiguity between stage play’s aspects of illusion/frivolity and seriousness/profound significance; through the play we can glimpse but not grasp an eternal meaning—3. Temporal succession of action has factors of determinism, but cannot vitiate freedom; the play harmonizes them, but in a suspension of tension between time and eternity. II.A.4.b. The Distinction between the “I” and the Allotted Role (p. 252): 1. This distinction, which is a basic experience of life, is at heart of world-theater symbol, involving both a dualism and a unity, seen in Platonic, Indian, and Christian judgment on the basis of role, though the I is disrobed of its role—2. Central task is to maintain identity while preserving distinction and distance, knowing that “I” and role are distinct, though latter affects former, and former performs latter freely—3. Each role involves social involvement with others, though every role also involves loneliness and incommunicability; play involves tension between unique I and social context into which it must freely enter for the good of all. II.A.4.c. The Distinction between the Actor’s Responsibility for His Performance and His Responsibility to a Director (p. 254): 1. Dramatist is responsible for play and roles within freedom; God is like dramatist giving roles and their meaning, but actors have both freedom and responsibility to Him, a freedom realized only in roles and in all-embracing social whole—2. Director cannot be passive spectator, though he does not enter the play; within stage metaphor there is distinction between author and director, linked to God’s immanence and transcendence—3. Questions of how director’s global responsibility and actor’s freedom, including rebellion, are compatible. II.A.4.d. The Three Distinctions Give Rise to the Dramatic Tension (p. 256): 1. Content of world theater must arise from these distinctions; it must be man caught between I/being and role/representation, with responsibility in each case to social context and to Director, responsibilities which can fail to coincide e.g. in martyr-play—2. As roles converge, the question arises as to where we recognize authentic representation of ultimate authority; important here is qualitative not quantitative time—3. Action on stage is always determined by how man in lowly role and master-servant dialectic are viewed. II.B. Elements of the Dramatic II.B.1. Drama and the Illumination of Existence (p. 259): In some peoples, only certain elements of theater are present e.g. masquerade, dance, epic, ballad, storytelling—Epic presents itself as complete and past, drama as completely present—Risk of hubris in synthesizing individual’s self-liberation through mask/dance and presentation of epic-dramatic mythic narration, as in annual cultic Babylonian drama involving whole nation, Greek performance of tragedy and comedy in Dionysian celebrations; gives spectator a tense expectation that something will be revealed about mystery of life, a tension built into existence, which gives rise to a faith that its tentative projects will meet with a satisfying solution, an action that presents life itself in which question and answer coincide—This synthesis is carried out in player/actor, surrendering on spectators’ behalf his questioning to existence’s solution incarnate in his role; actor joins reality of common humanity with audience with ideality of presented by play i.e. drama as artifact behind which is the author—Drama cannot just show life, but must show life as it ought to be, or why it is as it is, or not as it seems—Director transforms ideal unity into real concrete unity/performance, though author and director (and actor) can coincide, and some plays e.g. improvisations are acted entirely from below and as collective, where aspect of direction arises of itself, and spectators can even join in here; at other end of spectrum is play just meant to be read, where author absorbs director and actor into ideal form: these, as when director adapts play to his own worldview, are departures from norm implicit in nature of play as such—Pirandello’s departure from the norm in which author allows his characters to come into existence only as characters he has rejected, and the characters refuse to be interpreted by others by being acted. (p. 264): In theater there is two-fold intertwining pleasure in self-projection/transformation and in being presented with a solution, which make theater pleasurable even when moralistic, because they are grounded in man’s performance of existence, while allowing the spectator critical distance—Dichotomy between not immediately accessible core of person and one’s role played for self and society—Desire to escape role, and worry that role does not fit one’s core inalienable mission—Roles arise in part through interaction—Pleasure of having to play a role, and pleasure of being able to change role/phenomenal I/disguise; stage acts as a mirror, but with a meaning injected by author, and with action played by real human beings giving their own reality to a fictional role, so that revelation of meaning can interject itself into concrete world through them: in this, theater is different from epic, lyric, film, sport—Stage gives enfleshed but unreal model of meaning that given revelation incarnates in history, but cannot substitute for latter, since we cannot go back to theater’s cultic origins—Theater cannot be separated from task of indicating what gives meaning in concrete reality; even meaninglessness in theater indicates meaninglessness in concrete world (Beckett)—Reference to life keeps drama from being art for art’s sake, and this does not make drama purely edification; only a rationalistic view of existence, in which everything could be manipulated, could think so—Spectator’s expectation are not directed primarily toward morals but an order that freely bestows itself on us and gives meaning, a revelation which is required to sustain personal and social projects of self-realization; author’s given order points to an element of grace hoped for and almost tangible in concrete reality—In its playful/gratis nature, art suggests the all-sustaining gratis of life which transcends utile reality and destiny—Spectator’s pleasure refers to delight at sharing in existence that underlies all of life’s seriousness—Aesthetic realm comes close to the theological only if it maintains proper distance; art trains freedom (Schiller) when it does not try to change the world—Play always refers to reality, but does not lead to identity between author and God. II.B.2. The Three Elements of Dramatic Creativity (p. 268): Creativity only has meaning in in larger spiritual context; performance is for an audience, who is interested in something it hopes to encounter in this performance, rather than being interested primarily in this particular play. II.B.2.a. The Author (p. 268): The poet is God to his characters (Green), standing at the point where drama comes into being as a unity; primacy of unity in author is ontological over actor and director—Ways the author’s primacy can be obscured or attacked, dismantling and reconstructing play’s entire meaning—Poet’s knowledge of real life is material, unifying form lies in himself; he submits himself as true realist to Nature in its totality, not its momentary urgencies, and so shows himself a true idealist—He must guide characters’ interaction on basis of antecedent unity toward final unity, causing his characters, who depend on him, to say “I” when they are not his “I”; requires entering into each, in its contradictoriness, that they might be free, but allowing the poet to transcend the antagonists, without being able to formulate the synthesis (Marcel)—Viewing a play is to have a kind of providence (Blondel)—Best dramatic authors e.g. Shakespeare, Goethe, are self-alienated as they transform themselves into each character with equal truth and naturalness, while lesser authors e.g. Byron transform their characters into themselves (Schopenhauer)—Poet requires openness of spirit/worldview (Hegel)—Like World Spirit, Shakespeare penetrates the world, but unlike World Spirit, he does not conceal the secret prior to action (Goethe)—The epic writer e.g. Balzac, by contrast to the dramatist, sees each figure under the sign of destinies that do not touch (Hofmannsthal, Nietzsche)—The play is the poet’s word (Schiller) and the poet’s fundamental quality is magnanimity, giving room to variety of forms (Schlegel)—Characters appear to the author semi-passively, with an organic reciprocal influence (Shaw, Goethe, Claudel, Pirandello)—The mystery of inspiration is the alternation between encounter with characters from without and creativity and guidance of interplay from within; requires a theological interpretation (Green, Schlegel): God and the poet both allow evil and do no agree with all their creations do, and their characters do not understand the author’s intentions; God and author do not give to each according to pure justice, but by being and working in and above each—The author has the power to make himself present in the actor—Plays are performable, not something left to be completed by director and actor (Hebbel), though the latter condense the ideas into flesh; the author guides the actor and director in their freedom, rather than letting them pick up where he leaves off, and providing them with an area for creativity—The author’s prior understanding with the audience—Actor has task not only of role but of entering meaning that encompasses role (Stanislavsky); role’s given shape is open not limited, able to be reinterpreted, and able to be written for a particular actor—If author is God to his characters, he cannot be governed by their interplay, nor by sentimentality toward them, but must maintain a cruelty/sarcasm towards himself (Ionesco, Schnitzler). II.B.2.b. The Actor II.B.2.b.. Making it present (p. 281): Playwright’s work is potentially drama, made actual by actor, lending unique reality to dramatic idea, a reality not of everyday life but that makes things present, materializing the idea not just making it appear (Simmel)—The truth of what is represented in theater is neither reality nor illusion but making present, unlike film which is image (Lukács)—Work and performance are not separate, but former is made totally/exclusively present in latter—Bodily expression requires speech, from which action arises—Text seems to be just foundation in relation to performance, which is the artwork (Mann)—The actor can only inject life into what the author provides, but the actor is not the author’s servant, nor vice versa; the actor has, on the contrary, a creative human nature of his own (contra Monophysitism)—Script and performance are one—Making-present is creative not mechanical, requiring ethical/self-obligated freedom, allowing the actor to be truer to the work than the poet was—Actor is mediator to the audience, his goal is valid representation, requiring cooperation/communion with audience (Gouhier). II.B.2.b.β. The psychologico-technical problem (p. 285): Conflict involving Diderot over whether actor assuming role is empathy or technical mastery, Diderot favoring latter because he sought to free French theater of bombast and pathos, and his call for actors to abandon their paradigms in favor of those of their role—Even on empathy view, one remains in control when carried away by one’s character, requiring distinction between sensitivity of imagination and of heart (Baudelaire)—Theater is an art/technique whose material is actor’s entire physical, spiritual, and emotional self—Stanislavksy’s empathetic method requires total dedication of self to the role, a total availability/disponibilité, requiring exercises to achieve highest degree of awareness, an almost sacramental method—This disponibilité can be felt in different ways, leading to different theories e.g. experiencing being indwelt by or inhabiting roles, but never leading to split in consciousness—Phenomenon of acceptance is middle position between identifying oneself with role-character and remaining distinct from it; faithfulness to self and to character, to one’s art and to poet, are not easily reconciled—General paradox of art that highest technique must be surpassed under conditions of complete inspiration—A primal histrionic attitude that delights in pouring one’s personal life into an external, given, pre-existing form of utterance, such that we are all embryonic actors (Simmel)—Genuineness of human personality is test of genuineness of dramatic performance (Reiche), but the question arises as to how man can be genuine if always an actor. II.B.2.b.γ. The existential problem (p. 291): The way an actor puts himself into a role is an achievement of human truthfulness with body and soul, unmasking not masking, though only formal, not ethical or religious, truthfulness (contra Mauriac)—Question of whether actor’s personal intimacy is veiled or used as material in embodying of role—First person actors portray themselves in their roles; third person actors objectify their “I” in their roles—Exhibitionism goes with acting, hence the low regard for actors everywhere, and their linking to prostitution; an actor must make himself entirely available for fortuitous role and for pleasure of others—But actor’s surrender to role can also lead to naïve unconscious humility, an initium caritatis, like Christ’s life a Eucharistic existence for others representing the divine (Jouvet, Marcel); humility seen when we prescind from the lack of inhibition and need for applause in the profession—Ideal of forgetting technique and becoming the role in humility (Kleist, Rilke)—Incompleteness of human existence is reason for actor’s ambiguity between humility and vanity, mediation of higher existence and obstruction through self-affirmation—Difficulty of portraying saint except in weakness—Society’s response to actor of enthusiasm and reserve/mistrust/scorn; in liberal, naturalistic societies, actor becomes idol from whom intoxicating experiences are demanded, thereby again distancing actor’s life from society, and then seeing actor as pioneer in transforming society—Actor gives society possible models of freedom embodied by anticipation, a pointer to something that transcends his sphere (Mauriac). II.B.2.c. The Director (p. 298): Director bridges gulf between poet and actor by making play present here and now, guiding the interplay of actors, and coming up with a unified vision embracing drama and actors’ art, an art dependent on these elements it joins—Requires penetrating author’s mind and obedience to text, though not as fixed and finished thing, but as interpretable in living and spiritual manner—Actors can claim primacy over director inasmuch as they are responsible for bringing their roles to life, but director and author must keep before them their shared creative goal; directors should be mediators and elicitors not virtuosos or act like they are sole creators of performance: director is not a conductor, but should be receptive, self-annihilating (Ionesco), awakening the actors’ creative energies so the characters form a spiritual ensemble, with himself only as an ever-present atmosphere—Rehearsal as director’s proper sphere, where creative compromise e.g. among conflicting actors, and actors with poet, takes place; struggle should be present in rehearsal not performance—In premiere, play enters time as public event; director’s concern is to secure this actuality/making-present—The best works remain meaningful throughout the ages because they portray permanently valid situations; issues with transforming old plays for present—Question of how far a modern democratic audience can accept an older e.g. monarchial situation which determines the dramatic e.g. tragic action—Possibility of aggiornamento whereby modern approach inserts itself organically into older play and enriches it; director must make play both relevant and civilized, not equating relevance with narrow view of society, or political reality of theater with political propaganda—All theater is political inasmuch as concerned with public issues, seen especially in Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Coneille, Büchner, Gogol—Censorship and political ineffectiveness of theater—Great drama does not believe man’s fundamental nature can be changed, but appeals to individual conscience (Goethe, Burckhardt); attempt to adapt drama to political propaganda betrays the dramatic dimension. II.B.3. The Three Elements of Dramatic Realization II.B.3.a. Presentation (p. 305): All preparation is for the sake of performance, which hopefully will coincide with expectations of theater-going public; examples where this occurred in Greece, England, Spain, Italy, Austria—If play is to succeed, there must be communion between stage action and audience; actor acts in front of and for someone, and audience must actively enter action—Communion requires a kairos, and can be described erotically (Barrault)—Dependence of actor on feedback (Bartet, Jouvet) and experience of solemnity: unlike in sports, something shines through actor, which both actor and audience expect (Hölderlin). II.B.3.b. The Audience (p. 308): We go to plays to project ourselves onto a plane that gives meaning and be given our selves, to see and surrender to something that transcends and gives meaning to everyday life; dramatic presentation must do justice to this substantial pathos (Hegel, Claudel)—Beholding in the hope of learning about beginnings and endings—Stage action is for the audience, teaching the two inseparable functions of being a spectator and an actor in the play of existence; one can be unreservedly, rather than apathetically, open to all the stage offers: spectator’s senses should be drawn passionately, not self-lifted, to the action, with everything shown not imagined (Goethe)—Audience expects to be led into the open, having criteria for the play—Justified influence of some mediocre plays—Stage promises revelation removed from profane/everyday—Tension between knowing more and less in a realm that is more than that of the everyday creates the pleasure of theater-going—Techniques of communication between actors and audience in Japan, Greece, medieval mystery plays, resting on convention that stage represents world, and through serious play we recognize that poet’s Logos has become incarnate; this is analogous to the sacred, as theater is analogous to cult, involving purification, enlightenment, catharsis—Question of whether, when we see through the play to the theater of the world, and given our hope, there will be anything to see (Beckett, Tieck). II.B.3.c. Horizon (p. 314): Dramatist, actors, and audience are all related to a horizon of meaning, especially in high theater, which calls one into question in the experience of the play—One is struck by plays, as in Aristotle’s account of fear and grief in watching tragedies, or laughing at man’s/one’s own ridiculousness in comedies—Whether today’s privatized audiences can accept the opening-up of horizons in public—Against conventionalizing the theater. (p. 316): Greek theater as dramatic presentation of gods, leading to split horizon, which remains after philosophical demythologizing in the split between providence and fate—In ancient world, spectator’s gaze toward horizon of tragedy is obscured, no place where heart or thought could rest—Providence can only make use of fate where ultimate horizon is not just understood as almighty power, but believed in—Examples of providence versus fate in Seneca, Boethius, Shakespeare, Calderon; in latter, mysterious interplay between them allows us to see providence behind fate in relation between guilt and grace—Christian drama sets forth a horizon that has a more unified effect than ancient drama because of its clarified idea of God; in Greek tragedy, no god could speak for whole world, unlike Christ: pact between man’s interiority and God is here renewed, cleansed of pantheism—In Christianity, dramatic dimension bursts out of Absolute itself, imparting to human play an ultimate dimension, acting from within man; meaning breaks out of horizon into foreground of play—In German drama, horizon is incorporated into subject; difference between spectator, stage, and horizon is submerged in identity—For Christian believer, horizon opened by God contains richness of different vantage points within unity, a unity never available to the dramatist because it is God’s and is dramatically revealed, and so Christian drama can only act in God’s presence/embraced by Him—Christian drama that flows from horizon cannot be absorbed into drama that flows toward horizon; that leads to splintering of post-Christian theater, which is all fragment of drama that presses toward Christian horizon—All such drama is enacted before some authority e.g. death—All Christian fragments call for transformation of hearts and society, the perspective of the Spirit—Question in post-Christian era of how theater as public institution can bring together people who share different worldviews; theater still has power to place man in unavoidable situations and pose inescapable questions e.g. who he is in his terrible finitude—Theater as ecumenical. Excursus: Brecht and Ionesco (p. 324): Foregoing sections have ignored Brecht’s criticism of middle-class theater of escapism and illusion, his replacement of dramatic with epic theater, and of actor empathetically feeling his role with conscious distance of actor from character so that latter is just shown and handed to audience for critical appraisal—World’s situation has called into question theatrical activity—Middle class resists onset of new historical period and so seeks vacant escapism on stage; entering scientific age, we are called to adopt critical attitude, and drama must change not interpret world—Actor needs new technique of distanced demonstration, audience needs new technique of reflection: a socio-didactic theater not theater of amusement—What is worth retaining from Brecht, especially in his recovery of Greek and Baroque approach to theater, and theater as moral school—Problems with Brecht’s view of acting, that the actor is just citing not playing a role; basic contradiction between his materialistic determinism and his appeal via epic theater to freedom of audience to decide to change conditions: actor’s distance from character shows latter’s non-necessity and thereby other possibilities—Brecht’s is a negative freedom, that of being at home nowhere, resistant to all modern fascinations—One becomes somebody/personal only through obedience to the impersonal party’s summons; this is seen in the contradictions revealed in Die Massnahme, the only true communist tragedy, and this leads to schizophrenia between joy and harshness that characterizes his later plays, and his view of human person—The conflict he sees between future and present masks the vertical dimension—Ideological purpose of his alienation effect in acting fails because human person is not change all-and-nothing or a sick schizophrenic, but a person with genuine freedom, who can take responsibility for himself and accept a mission of service without surrendering his self. (p. 332): Ionesco was dramatist in same class as Brecht and consistently opposed him, but he too failed to reach dramatic dimension—Ionesco unequivocally rejected communism and every other ideology, hence his plays of existential contradiction—Existence is a fact of great wonder, an improbable thing given its height above the void, and the way the void threatens it from within: it is unclear why I am and why I am I, though I will die; externally everyone is replaceable, internally unique, each alone in face of death—Existence calls into being a floating state of overwhelming fullness/bliss, and a deadweight state of emptiness/threat, the two always related—Through the contradictions, which infect all political communities, runs thirst for Absolute—The world is fragile, and this is root of Ionesco’s tragic, not absurd, jests, but it also contains element of falseness, when we know we must die—Existence is a contradiction, both in experience and explanation—Drama originates in contradictions violently rending each other—Ionesco’s is a purely vertical drama in contrast to Brecht’s horizontal; latter gives fables, former abstract progressions/rhythms, drama not epic, similar to Beckett and Strindberg, existentialism and expressionism—The power of expression is everything for Ionesco, originating in loneliness of existence in death; primal reality can express itself only by continually breaking down walls between men—He gives us figures without character e.g. in The Bald Soprano—Fight against ideology in Rhinoceros and Thirst and Hunger; ideology is anything that sets limits by providing a formula that renders life’s riddle harmless, and this includes Brecht, Sartre, theology, sociology, politics—He had to destroy in his plays horizontal interconnecting action, the person, and ethics, though fear, anxiety, cruelty, and death remain—Contra Sartre, hunger and thirst are not the Absolute, but are related to something beyond them; seen in Macbett and A Stroll in the Air—The Chairs on the subject of absence, ontological emptiness, the continual disappearance of this world—The theme of death in various plays, and his longing for an anti-ideological singleness of meaning, similar to Buddhism/mysticism of unbecoming—His drama fails to set forth persons in genuine finite time—Death as absurd, purposeless epidemic in Jeux de massacre, where death triumphs over the action, and existence appears as something terminated. II.B.4. Finitude II.B.4.a. The Time of the Action (p. 343): Opposition between Brecht and Ionesco shows that drama’s mode of time cannot be pure horizontality in which fable is everything and I/death nothing, nor pure verticality in which things are vice versa—Characters in drama are limited mortal beings, locking into finite timespan, with vertical presence of human finitude, requiring final decision, and grounding dignity of moral human beings—Drama provides a metaphor for the dimension of meaning in all human finitude (Kant), and allows us to discern a vertical aspect of infinity—Aristotle’s requirements for drama, involving goal-orientation, not mere display of character; dramas project world and things, unlike lyrics which just recall them and epics which make them present and fix them—Drama has objective tension in inner transcendence of strict immanence, such that closed framework will be exploded by intrusion of absolute meaning; once action has started, it must play out to its end (Souriau)—Dramatic time is time of action within it, though essential action must be compacted (Goethe) including recapitulation/increasing unveiling of non-dramatized past and anticipation of open future, all of which fill the present with tension, further created both by anticipation and delay (Schiller), converging on crucial scene (Shakespeare) and involving turning and discovery (Aristotle)—Thrill of a play based on eternal destiny of man set forth in finite timespan, contrasted to thrill of detective thriller: we can return to former again even while knowing the outcome, due to distinction between external events and internal action manifested in external events; comparison to tension with past and future in music e.g. Mozart: in each note one senses presence of whole which simultaneously comes into being in time and in a supra-temporal realm always is—Contrasting but not incompatible recommendations for performance from Stanislavsky and Brecht—Paradoxes of dramatic time: what is played is unique event and a revelation of something timelessly valid, drama is not upset by presence of narrator, interplay of horizontal and vertical—Freedom as creation of meaning, possibility of varying biography—Deprived of vertical dimension, temporal decisions have no meaningful sequence, but are all comedy (Frisch), and so no drama/human interaction is possible, but only experiments with ideas. II.B.4.b. Situation (p. 353): Dramatic action is possible only within a given situation/constellation, which can be crudely classified (Gozzi), but given uniqueness of each human being acting with others, such classification is questionable—Field of tension is divided among humans with their free decisions, but every acting character and their totality is situated within framework of humanity as a whole, posing question of each individual’s meaning within totality and totality’s meaning within Being and Being’s meaning as such—Static model of the world with each person fulfilling situation given by nature (Republic, Dionysius), though this can be broken by personal vocations/daimones which does not allow each person to be integrated seamlessly into social edifice, hence the metaphor of body and its members: body of Church, state, or humanity involves interplay of free human beings, all of whom have received absolute commission, even as there is mutual opposition/contradiction among them; different possibilities for source of this commission—Inner freedom of vocation is brought to play against powers that contradict/challenge it e.g. (with examples of plays for each) one’s mindset, past, milieu, difference between person and role, situations that strip a man of his mission, conflict between vocation and society, ethical disintegration in the face of cultural collapse; antinomy is felt in the hero, not just between hero and society: hero requires aristocratic/tribal/social ethics of representation/honor—Situation is essentially determined by antinomies among persons and their decisions, made on the basis of worldview and vocations; examples of kinds of conflicts from various plays—No dramatic situation is fixed, but develops through action—Things can be natural or against nature depending on status (Thomas Aquinas, DV 13.1 ad1). (p. 358): The coordination of antinomian free decisions, neither of which can be superseded, requires superior authority that can judge them e.g. fate, nemesis, providence, though these are more hoped for/felt than known, and the subject behind these is not named e.g. as God, in dramatic theory; some kind of faith is needed to see the emergent form/constellation-in-destiny, which reaches for an ultimate horizon of meaning not accessible to rationality, a remnant of a religious worldview: drama would lose its essential dimension if all divine visibility in the world ceased and all questioning of God even via revolt or despair ceased—When destiny just plays with characters or is a fate/categorical imperative imposed from above, or where destiny is reduced to character/sociology, drama ceases to be of interest; “ought” in the hero’s heart must indwell him intimately as his personal task, carried out as risk of his entire empirical personality (Schiller, beyond Kant)—Christianity replaces categorical imperative with free inclination/representation of ethical beauty/incarnation of holy; from this we can take idea that “power” must operate not just above but in the hero—Existential experience of prey of forces of destiny, whether understood in pagan or Christian terms, can only become dramatic when dialectically opposed to possibility of liberation and related to saving power—This dualism can appear gnostic, but is already in NT: 2 aspects of vertical that are incarnated in but not identical to given horizontal situation, allowing even the most tragic human destiny to escape meaninglessness. Excursus: Fate, Freedom, and Providence in Calderon (p. 361): Greatest expansion of horizon within/before which man plays his part is found in Calderon’s plays—He has something of Roman/German drama of destiny, but in his plays net around man remains elastic enough to allow him power to choose/make distinctive human contribution—Destiny is not a curse, but embraces whole world and is embodied in certain figures of destiny, subordinate to God’s will, though having relative autonomy such that world falls prey to vanitas/man to original sin, though man can burst sphere of destiny e.g. in self-conquest/renunciation through prevenient grace—Man is recapitulation of mundane powers, not just able to know them all, and his powers are integrated only in dramatic argument; body and soul are in marital dispute, an ethical not ontological dualism—Since man is recapitulation of all, he is receptive to all analogies present in nature, and poet can play on these, since a thing’s place in cosmic network is established by poetic calculation (Kommerell), hence astrology, chiromancy, etc. in Calderon’s plays—Ancient gods are symbols of world’s energies, and so a hero’s destiny is outlined by struggle among gods—Considered as cosmic constellation, fate is not actual event but potentiality—Symbol of cave as hero’s pre-endowment before being tested through use of freedom—Potentiality can only incline not force people in some direction, since free will can lift itself above fate or mold fate so it is fulfilled in a larger context; examples from Daughter of the Air—Norms for approaching the horoscope: do not attempt to flee from destiny, and the horoscope should not be used impurely, but approached with reason, moderation, humility, wisdom, submitting to the test it places on man; from above, each of these are the operation of grace—No neutral destiny: either man is enslaved by original sin/powers of universe, or man lays hold of redeeming grace in humility that accepts fate of death but inwardly transcends it—Grace is omnipotent, and the man whom it chooses cannot escape it; Meditation on the Cross echoes the early modern disputes on grace. II.B.4.c. The Theme of Death (p. 369): Drama is spatiotemporally restricted because behind play/finitude of action is finitude of life i.e. death, the unavoidable end and the concluding event that man can arrange as highest expression of existential will in suicide, martyrdom, self-sacrifice—In drama, last act rids preceding one of its provisional character and confirms entire action—Death can change from radically passive to active event, presupposing a pre-knowledge of death due to its immanence in every moment—Death is man’s ultimate humiliation and possibly noble as offering/final form of existence—Question of whether death can give meaning to meaningless life when it seems most meaningless of all; death is either most natural or unnatural, independent of a person’s age. II.B.4.c.α. Death as destiny (p. 371): A play can consist of a living person being chased into arms of death; examples from ancient Greek and modern German and American drama—Or death can step forward in person as alien/external enemy of life (Lessing, Goethe) or internal enemy (Kleist, Auden, etc.)—Act of self-surrender at the end of desperate resistance (Duhamel, Wilder, Greene, Gorky, O’Neill). II.B.4.c.β. Death as the interpreter of life (p. 375): Death throws light on life retrospectively, ascertaining life’s special significance (Hofmannsthal), since it is the one concrete reality that will never pass away (Büchner, Wilder, etc.)—Death can show that lived experience is unique and unrepeatable (Lagerkvist, Sartre, etc.)—It can light up all of life back to its very beginnings (O’Neill, etc.), bringing all of life to consciousness, making all masks fall away (Lagerkvist, Salacrou). II.B.4.c.γ. The immanence of death (p. 377): Those who flee from death as something alien carry it within them (Hofmannsthal); life is saturated with death (Williams)—Maeterlinck’s static dramas portraying condition of man defenseless in the face of death—Philosophical descriptions of awareness death’s immanence in life as boundary situation/condition for meaning/ethical and aesthetic form (Jaspers, Lukács, Ernst, Gehlen, Bloch, Marcel)—Examples of plays showing the omnipotent presence of death from Shakespeare to Camus—Genuine gift of self to another is not something that can be revoked because of that person’s death; the survivor is constantly aware of something eternal through this absence, showing the eternal value of love: the absent person is strongest, and death takes part of the living into the eternal, pointing to idea of substitutionary death (Marcel). II.B.4.c.δ. On the borderline (p. 380): If death is part of life, then it seems that life participates in death, and death can manifest itself in life with active presence (Marcel); the dead can appear among the living (Shakespeare, Grillparzer), and the living walk among the dead (Orpheus, Alcestis), without falling into spiritism (Strindberg) or anthroposophy—Plays in which man is open to invisible supramundane reality (Sophocles, Shakespeare, Giraudoux) and in which the gods tear a whole in men’s lebensraum and undermine it—Psychological interpretations of descent into hell as into areas where I is dissolved in collective and living in the potential (Freud, Jung)—Plays in which a choice can lock us in a hell where no change is possible, even suicide (Strindberg, Sartre)—Plays in which a fatal deed is appointed to be carried out e.g. Camus’ Les justes with its conflict between love for concrete persons and love for abstract justice, and the observation it is easier to die than live from one’s contradictions (contra Sartre)—Anticipation of death as justifying criminal action on behalf of abstract justice is a perversion of mythical descents into Hades, in which love involved renunciation not contradiction—Shakespeare portrays return from the dead as pure gift to those mourning, the resurrection of the dead becoming the reappearance of those believed dead, a post-figuration of Christian elements into fluid metaphor for grace of existence, the Christian background diffusing an anonymous light over miracles of earthly love (Pericles, The Winter’s Tale). II.B.4.c.ε. Death as atonement (p. 384): Interpretation of death as atonement for guilt-ridden existence (Camus) at various levels: common awareness that it is meaningful to deprive a person of life for a grave crime, deeper awareness of the light that suicide can bring to confused situations e.g. death to make room for others, metaphysical views that death can expiate guilt of earthly existence—Examples from: Behan, O’Neill, Miller, Hebbel, Schiller, Wagner, Kleist, Hölderlin—Idealist drama aims at reconciliation rather than atonement—Sacrifice is the only way to overcome a situation in which God is remote. II.B.4.c.ζ. Death and love (p. 388): Death/eros and death/thanatos are close, as Greeks and Song of Songs knew; love’s finality is called into question by death, but love can use death to show its credentials, unmoved by the contradiction that death puts an end to it: the only problem is the conflict of love and death (Marcel)—Examples of lovers dying together or not being able to survive one another: Ovid, Maeterlinck, Yeats and Synge’s treatment of Irish epic of Deirdre, Shakespeare, Wagner’s Tristan in which eros bypasses marriage and is made absolute and so makes the Song of Songs a blasphemy when taken as a post-figuration rather than a pre-figuration of Christ, Claudel, Heiberg who sees the problem of eros as absolute which will not fit into bourgeois marriage and so calls for death—The topic of love and death, forced in post-Christian tragedy, is countered by plays in which life has upper hand over death e.g. Hofmannsthal (especially Ariadne auf Naxos), Fry; these light-hearted foils to the serious play are necessary lest we think we can attain immortality through the seriousness of love. II.B.4.c.η. Death on behalf of someone else (p. 392): Most exalted way to make death active is to die for another, either for beloved (Euripides’ Alcestis) or for common good (Euripides’ Heraclides); this is rooted in common human condition—Transformations of Alcestis by e.g. Lully, Handel, Gluck, Herder, Wilder—Claudel’s use of ordinary human substitution in his idea that only the one who descends to hell can save us—More muted cases of self-sacrifice in Marcel—Further examples of substitutionary death from Faulkner/Camus’ Requiem for a Nun, Kaiser, Yeats, Claudel—Greene’s redrawing of the dark night is perhaps not sustainable on Christian terms—Bernanos on Christ’s divinization of fear in the Garden of Gethsemane collapsing distinction between fear and courage, a supernatural fear embedded in communion of saints. II.B.4.c.θ. The unmaking of kings (p. 400): In classical drama, pathos of a king who falls from power is more impressive theme than portrayal of private destiny because king represents divine order/authority in the world, and by the king’s descent he acquires inner dignity, which grows as he approaches death—Themes from Shakespeare’s King Lear, Richard II, Henry IV, Henry VI, Henry VIII, with a relentless succession of deaths, on which he says all that can be said; compared to Gryphius, Schiller, Wedekind on the royal dimension of man inextinguishable even in the deepest humiliation—Only attempt at great royal tragedy of Shakespeare in second half of twentieth century is Fry’s Curtmantle. Excursus: The Drama of Generations (p 408): Dying is most personal/solitary act but not private: life goes on afterwards (Shakespeare), and a man is living cell in an organism of destiny, and a dramatic sequence cannot be understood just in realm of a single existence—Compression of an entire epoch’s or whole world’s events into single drama (Schiller, Schneider, Claudel)—This leads to the play cycle (Aeschylus, Sophocles), or a sequence like Shakespeare’s histories, Wagner’s tetralogy, or cycles based on French Revolution which is the transition to the modern period (Goethe, Rolland, Claudel). (p. 411): Drama can be expanded beyond portrayal of whole epoch since drama’s raison d’etre is to present existence (medieval mystery plays, Madach, Shaw, Wilder)—Plays can draw together all world history in a single moment (Frisch)—Most of these dramas of generations do not overstate the death of the individual, except in purely horizontal (e.g. communist, evolutionist) drama, which are actually contrary to dramatic dimension of human existence. II.B.5. The Struggle for the Good II.B.5.a. The Good Slips Away (p. 413): Drama is essentially human action as a way of imparting meaning to existence in its search for self-realization, where existence contains past and present and interprets itself with a view to the future, based on spiritual freedom not purely biological progress, its tension lying in the ambivalence of the present—In every case the goal of the decision is the Good, which exhibits gradations while we are in the flesh, though it points to absolute Good, and has concrete stopping point on the way i.e. best course of action under circumstances; these coincide in martyr plays and in non-Christian plays about absolute ideals (e.g. Camus)—Comedy deals with attaining only relative happiness that at best symbolizes absolute Good and attests to belief in it—Every good we strive for is attacked and relativized by other values/goods, even values posited as absolute; the offering of a life is open to many interpretations—We find available to us many choices among emphases in life: private or public life, visible or invisible/religious life, vitality or economics or aesthetics or morality in the narrow sense; this objective plurality of life becomes dramatic because of our subjective freedom to change our perspective on it, though this freedom regarding fundamental decisions can be hidden—Criteria for moral acting are grasped dialogically, not as if we were able to separate “good-in-itself” from “good-for-one”, though the dialogue is itself open to multiple interpretations e.g. egoistic or altruistic—Conflicts between self-assertion and desire to devote oneself to a cause (Schiller, Racine, Corneille), between persecuting love and lover’s personal attachment or among loves (Camus)—Conflicts entirely on political scene in which it is difficult to assess the greater good and take necessary action against evil (Shakespeare, Schiller, Weiss, Rolland, Camus)—With increasing rationalization of existence and concentration of technological/political power, conflict between justice and freedom becomes more problematic; plays calling for world transformation fail to see this, or can only portray individual’s angst in its face: drama is always concerned with the individual, who can always bear witness to Good glimpsed in all conflicts, even when one is stripped of power—Purity of conscience is not fundamentally affected by harshness/largeness of alternatives; good drama requires at least one clear conscience on the stage so the spectator can grasp the hierarchy of values: even when objective choice among values seems impossible, the decision made in subjectivity must be free and responsible, and in this the invisible/absolute Good is sought—The Absolute announces itself in relative goods/values, but eventually so clearly that no hesitation seems legitimate, requiring either obedience or disobedience to the light for genuinely human action, where this light is sometimes so bright as to transcend rational assessment—The ethical can be clouded by psychology and sociology—Strength or weakness of modern drama in the character as a sort of microcosm, following laws of its nature and confusing its inner light with the Absolute (Hegel, Shakespeare); fluid transition from these to more spiritually restricted and ideologically bound characters, all the way to naturalistic plays—Scale of values can be destroyed/distorted/shown to be practically unfeasible (Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Macbeth; Schiller)—In much modern drama, overarching heaven is distorted, misinterpreted as our demonic antagonist, so modern heroes seek not a Good above them but a God in their own breast, a convulsive absolute self-determination that ends in Sartre’s No Exit—In order to see imperfectibilty of all mundane Good and to seek the transcendental absolute norm, we must retain two poles of conscience or personal inwardness and norm or relation to environment/others—When decisive action is taken, the Good shines forth allowing us to judge by its light, though it and the judgment it allows can be obscured in various ways; drama should and can evoke both. II.B.5.b. Tragic, Comic, Tragi-comic (p. 424): Death has many partial meanings—It is hubris to claim knowledge covering the whole of existence: at best one feels one’s way toward all-embracing meaning; or islands of meaning founder in sea of meaninglessness—Tragedy, comedy, and tragi-comedy all have to do with meaning, though all can have to do with meaninglessness/horror too—In their Greek origins, no clear distinction between comedy and tragedy, and there is still much overlap. (p. 425): Three modes of the tragic according to Albin Lesky: 1. Tragic situation, in which man cannot see any way out of conflict, but then rescue comes (e.g. Aeschylus’ Oresteia); 2. Closed tragic conflict, based on irreconcilable opposition, though meaning can shine through from higher plane (Goethe, Hebbel); 3. Closed tragic worldview, which denies any overarching meaning to tragic action, since structure of world is seen as mutually antagonistic forces (Nietzsche, Scheler), though this absence of relation to non-tragic Absolute is the self-abolition the tragic (Sengle, Jaspers)—Genuinely tragic situations are possible for Christians (Lesky), though many deny it (Steiner, Jaspers, Haecker); Christianity, especially seen in Christ’s cry of dereliction on the Cross, allows the most profound doubt and apparent meaninglessness (Mack): the tragic dimension lies in man’s antithetical, paradoxical relation to God (Grenzmann), a tension between election and rejection—Christ’s abandonment on the Cross should not (contra Mack) be called doubt or unbelief, though it does underpin all that is called tragic—Modern dramatists like to see man’s freedom as untouchable by God (Salacrou, Barlack, Camus, Sartre), but this is a false opposition: real freedom is found by allowing God’s freedom to operate within one (Andres)—In second kind of tragedy, question of whether ruined man’s freedom constitutes higher level of meaning, of whether this level exists in itself: if former, this level reduces to third, though the spectator, from within this ruin, can take on an aesthetics of empathy, becoming aware of the power of Good of which we are capable within the experience of pain—The tragic cannot be reduced to interplay between guilt and expiation, nor is its ideal the hero’s inner mastery of tragic dilemma; Christian tragedy often has been one of these—Darkness must enter the origins of the world to the extent that the divine cannot remain uninvolved, if we are to avoid meaninglessness/contradiction in Being itself; the interpretation of the tragic must come close to the third kind of tragic while clearly remaining distinct from it—Tragedy arises out of Dionysian and Christian Passion (Przywara)—Secularization of the sacred and sublimation of life forces in Greek and Post-Reformation Catholic tragedy—All formulations of the tragic from Schelling to Nietzsche are aware of a necessary split in the universe/God/morality/will; ruin is tragic if it arises out of opposing forces, and if this loss ought not be and is not healed: only Christian theology can prevent this self-destruction of the tragic because it combined God’s initiative on behalf of the world/free creatures, and the unmerited/gratis quality of this loving self-gift—Tragedy requires dignity in the doomed character; he must fall from a height, due to tragedy’s religious origins: formerly a dignity depicted in character’s external situation, but after Enlightenment rise of tragedy of common life, in their inner quality—Modern theater, middle class, and socialism cannot build tragedy (Domenach), though the novel exhibits continued existence of tragic dimension in human condition, but without detachment necessary for theatrical presentation; tragedy can re-emerge only once we penetrate beyond ideologies, and encounter mystery of incomprehensible, ever-present guilt in relation between heaven and earth. (p. 436): Definition of comedy by reference to tragedy must suffice—Socrates, at the end of the Symposium, opines that the same poet should be competent in writing tragedy and comedy: consider Shakespeare, Corneille, Lope, Calderon, Lessing, Goethe, Kleist, but not Schiller, Grillparzer, Hebbel; post-Romanticism turns to the tragi-comedy, of which Socrates was not aware—Laughter is as much a part of life as weeping, as are jokes, pranks, poking fun, delight in the gift of the unexpected and unhoped-for; comedies rooted in these correspond to universal need and taste for entertainment—Comedy needs an immanent, foreground quality; the comic poet needs a good-humored limitation in love with the material world behind which the Absolute is hidden (Goethe)—But it is not tragedy alone that opens perspective on transcendence; comedy is rooted in life of the people, sustained by coarse/earthy aspects of life, mother wit not attenuated by intellectual schooling, material/spiritual imagination that has sense of quality of life as a whole, which makes comedy an approach to the fathomless meaning of the Whole equally valid with tragedy: neither can be dissolved in the other, and we cannot see where their lines intersect in infinity—Since second form of tragedy dissolves in the others, comedy should be compared to first and third—Comedy is at heart of first category—To be appropriate to laugh at a character, he must be a type out of harmony with life, not a pitiful individual; comedy becomes questionable when it moves from typical to psychological—Proper locus of comedy is hard to define since it is rooted in real social non-disinterested life, and in disinterested art; hence, Kant devalues comedy, especially in light of the spiritual content of great comedies, and that its enjoyment is a fundamental resonance of existence—Contrary tendencies to make tragic and comic universal principles, tendencies which cancel each other; in German Idealism and Romanticism, going beyond Kant, I and world are subjectivized, and comedy is included in realm of beautiful, as it induces the peaceful, clear, light-hearted stance of the gods (Schlegel, Schelling, Hegel): wit is the freedom of the I that plays with everything, seen in the “play within a play” (Schlegel, Tieck, Hebbel), or, alternatively, comedy is seen in destructive rage that expresses pure joy/vitality, so that the play becomes transcendental buffoonery (Schlegel), or in the grotesqueness and ridiculousness of human finitude, so that the play becomes a puppet play or a solipsistic monologue (Jean Paul, Hebbel, Novalis)—In Romanticism, both tragedy and comedy rest on contradiction within subject between finite and infinite; the humorous in the feeling of the complete contradiction of all things, the self-aware dichotomy (Hebbel)—Comedy and tragedy are here identified through contradiction, and so cancel themselves out—Romanticism’s only successful comedies stay away from speculation, and stand in tradition of genuine interpersonal conflict e.g. the traditional Viennese farce. (p. 443): Not every dramatic or real life sequence can be fitted into categories of tragedy or comedy; hence the arising of tragi-comedy or comi-tragedy, drawing on Plautus, mixed medieval play, Shakespeare (in all his plays according to Yeats), Dryden—Lessing takes step toward Idealist-Romantic subject in which the two coincide; it is most faithful expression of modern man’s mentality (Schlegel, Dürrenmatt, Ionesco): man is comic as a body, tragic as a soul (Hugo)—Tragedy can even be seen as funny (Hoffmann, Morgenstern, Pinter), leading to elimination of distinction among tragedy and comedy, and loss of their metaphysical dimension—Kierkegaard used Romantic identification of tragedy and comedy to go beyond them; we need balance seriousness/tragedy and humor/comedy to move spiritually in an appropriate way, but Christian seriousness goes beyond both, not allowing the comic bypassing of the ethical for the carefree metaphysical—Modern trend is to abolish the difference and make contradiction/tension of existence absolute (Büchner, Grabbe, Mann, Ionesco, Brecht); here, the tragi-comic arises from the nature of things—Tragi-comedy arises when there is a tragic fate in non-tragic form e.g. just due to strangling shapeless social conditions where no one is guilty, out of which an ethical person arises (Hebbel, Dürrenmatt)—Tragi-comedy affirms the ethical but refuses the metaphysical, hovering between despising and accusing God, accepting that the world has a meaning; but thereby the rebel appears as a fool—The way out of Idealist dialectic is through courageous human being who can still be portrayed today—Classical division of plays into tragedies and comedies is inadequate, but there are comic and tragic situations, lying close together; hence, the possibility of the serious comedy (Hofmannsthal). II.B.5.c. Right and Judgment (p. 451): Human action is governed by a desirable goal i.e. what seems right to agent in his situation; concept of right implies meaning, and thence ultimate meaning—Poet is like a judge working towards a just verdict, and drama tends toward external form of court process (Staiger); the spectator must decide if right has been done—Aristotle on ancient tragedy, which was not based on subjective guilt and did not aim at poetic justice in some cases—Early situations do not clearly distinguish objective and subjective guilt; there is a dike that goes beyond human horizon, though there are also inviolable rights e.g. of sanctuary and burial—Tragedy questions fundamental criteria of justice—Comedy has easier task, inclining in socio-ethical direction (Aristophanes). (p. 455): Considering the ancient world allows countering prejudices that moralization of drama was post-classical (Stoicism, Christianity) and that question of right/justice is identical to question of morality—Aristotle’s “noble” goes beyond narrow morality to all-embracing/transcendental concept of right or Good—But question of personal responsibility does acquire urgency in Platonism/Stoicism/Christianity; but Christianity has all-embracing view on which individual guilt and atonement cannot be isolated from common human destiny, and in Christianity ethical norms acquire such a clear profile from revelation that drama can show court scenes, all the way to the Last Judgment—No tragedies of pure revenge in Christian drama; judgment is very different if some authority appears onstage to exercise divine justice (Calderon, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega), even if it involves private restoration of injured honor as in many Spanish plays—At lowest level of tragedy, hero judges himself and sees no way to establish balance of justice on his own except by suicide, though occasionally a Christian path leads out of this self-sentencing. (p. 460): Question of whether human judgment is more than a necessary evil and a symbol/approximation of higher order of justice, necessary for livable moral order; it cannot claim to judge innermost conscience of guilty person, and so every court and dramatist must submit themselves to higher judgment—Only self-criticism/accusation qualifies the author to criticize the world (Schneider; failure to do so in Brecht)—Theme of flawed fallible judgment is necessary corrective to theme of judgment as representing absolute justice (Kleist, Gogol, Betti); great tragedies witness fragility of human justice—Case of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, which warns against transposing absolute justice into relations among human beings—Christian message still requires discernment of spirits, but also the limit at which judgment must be left to God; absolute justice shines through earthly, and there is an irreducible residue, Judas: cases of drama of justice in which a traitor cannot claim payment (Calderon, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Corneille, Masuccio, Lope de Vega). Excursus: Shakespeare and Forgiveness (p. 465): The “right” is the goal of human action, and it can go beyond account-balancing—In postfigurations of the Gospel, the possibility of allowing mercy to take justice’s place can be a major dramatic theme, seen especially in Shakespeare’s treatments of forgiveness—Only one of his plays, Titus Andronicus, remains in the sphere of justice—Periods of his plays, organized with regard to the theme of forgiveness: 1. Emphasis on mercy and grace from human beings; 2. In great tragedies, theme recedes but is still there; 3. In romances, forgiveness dominates, revealing grace of Being, though it has great cost, and so is a miracle, giving weight to what is otherwise a dreamlike, stage quality of existence. (p. 467): Forgiveness and pardon in Richard II—Treason and forgiveness in Henry IV and Henry V—Unfitness to rule due to mercy in Henry VI—Hypocrisy and mercy in Richard III. (p. 469): The histories treat forgiveness realistically, limited by reasons of state, but the preeminent quality of kings—In the comedies, things can be more ideal/fantastical, without concern for psychological motivation that leads to forgiveness/conversion/repentance—High point of the problem of justice versus mercy is Measure for Measure, a Christian mystery play; in final act, everyone is brought to judgment, and no one knows how things will turn out: all the characters undergo the seriousness of judgment, even the judge experiences this seriousness, and the guilty and the innocent must alike feel it, and even be interchangeable, so they can all receive mercy. (p. 472): The great tragedies yield less than the foregoing, though in each of them there is forgiveness at the climax, even when they are dramas of revenge (e.g. Hamlet, Julius Caesar)—Hardly any place for forgiveness in Shakespeare’s most well-constructed play, Othello—Coriolanus, a tragedy of a man on the border between magnanimity and pride. (p. 475): The romances begin with a puzzling blindness, an injustice, or an unnatural crime, but they rise above the tragic to look down from the level of divine providence, to unravel the problems with grace; the evildoers do not so much ask forgiveness as they are flooded with grace of forgiveness—Confused composition of Cymbeline is corrected in The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest goes further: in hardly any other play is there so much to forgive, and so much forgiveness actually given—Themes of self-forgiveness, find ourselves, and turning from self-alienation to authenticity—Pericles shows that the order of the world cannot dispense with justice—The ethical can be translated to a sphere where the good shines through; the Good can predominate without the world being reduced to an all-embracing formula—Both tragedy and comedy, justice and mercy must persist, partly in and partly in opposition to each other; highest good is found in forgiveness. III. Transition: From Role to Mission III.A. “Who Am I?” III.A.1 The Meaning of the Question (p. 481): Theme of theater of the world before God seems to belong to the past—Psychological and sociological notion of role (Goffman), now giving way to the notion of function; role captures the ubiquitous experience of dualism between what I represent/social clothing and what I am in reality, and interiorly between the particular character I have which is largely stamped by heredity and me myself (La Senne): the acting “I” cannot become itself except through the instrument on which it plays, the character which is not isolable from the environment—What I do or yearn for always contains less than me (Blondel); action allows the particular to enter into relation with the general, creating the concrete unity of each particular being by guaranteeing its communion with everything else (Bouillard): this leads to the problem of the I trying to coincide with itself, the question of who plays the dramatic play of existence, who are the “naked souls” that receive their roles in the theater of the world—The question is not “what kind of being is man?” but “who am I?” (Oedipus) which each of us can ask only as a solitary individual, and which science cannot answer because it cannot define the particular, and because the individual as he wants to be has his inaccessible secret (Kierkegaard)—Jean Paul’s experience of the sudden awareness of the “I”; the secret that each person is to every other (Dickens)—The mystery of the individual can be lit up in the loving encounter with another, but this affirms rather than removing the mystery; the unique individual can give something unique to another, but is not thereby rid of his uniqueness—Personalist philosophy just makes us more aware of the question, rather than answering it—Every other question presupposes this one, the asking “I” is never unquestioningly self-constituted but is latent in every question; one can weary of this, and commit suicide: no solution is found in a role or in withdrawing from a role—The “I” of which I am one seems cheap and most commonplace, but my own “I” is a locked prison that cannot be set aside, though this “I” can make contact with others, and can thereby enrich its personality, but this just pushes the question aside, though everyone hears it. (p. 486): The question is excruciating in that the individual must attribute his existence to a most fortuitous/chance act, the sexual act between his parents; our only necessity is biological, yet being able to ask this question, we can see that we are spirit, able to gain distance from our question—The world too appears as a question, interwoven with causal relations, that are puzzlingly non-necessary in themselves and as a totality; it is lazy or violation of reason to accept the whole as an unconditioned totality beyond questioning—The question of who I am stretches from worldly to more-than-worldly i.e. divine, so it is a theandric question (Berdayev, Soloviev, Baader)—Plato’s answer to the question involves freedom and destiny, but it is linked to the transmigration of souls, and so the answer is lost in inaccessible origins, and so Socrates only attains insight into his own ignorance; hence his wisdom to the Delphic Oracle, fulfilling the inscription ‘Gnothi Sauton’. III.A.2. The Ambivalence of the “Gnothi Sauton” (p. 487): Originally, the Delphic saying is admonition to consider God and be aware of human limitations—Examples of this interpretation from Pindar, Aeschylus, Xenophon, Plato, Epictetus, Plutarch, Seneca—Self-knowledge requires lively knowledge of one’s mortality (Seneca, Lucian, Philo, Juvenal)—In each case, the saying comes from God, Who shows man his proper place, finitude, mortality—Then, a new line of thought: man should arise from his forgetfulness and recall his nobility, God-in-us which is nous (Plato, Proclus, Julian, Philostratus on the Brahmans, Plotinus): to know oneself is to turn/look to one’s origins—This had a large influence on Christian thought, culminating in Augustine for whom to enter oneself/to know one’s soul is the way to God, though Gospel gives new interpretation. (p. 490): These two lines are not estranged, just as epistemology sees more and more that the outward movement to things is simultaneous with thought’s return to itself—The Delphic saying can be seen as summons to sophrosune (Plato)—This pattern of thought does not answer “what am I?” but just deals with general basic structures of knowledge—Stoics know both lines of thought: individual emanates out of totality; Neo-Platonists know both: emphasis is on the One, and all else is theater of shadows—Both ground the “I” in its own uniqueness, and are a foil to Christianity; we can see how far these approaches can be taken. III.B. Role as the Acceptance of Limitation III.B.1. Man as an Emanation of the Whole (p. 493): Stoics, especially Epictetus, comes closest to Christian solution—Alone in ancient world, Stoicism can comes to grips with uniqueness/irreplaceability of the “I”, for three reasons: 1. Its empiricist epistemology, which knows no universals in things, but just a sensory world containing unique individuals, which reason can categorize; 2. Individuals are emanations/members of the world’s divine being; 3. Man participates in world’s divine reason so as to contemplate providence and his own particular emanation from God—Stoics are interested in man’s rational essence, but also specially in uniqueness of individuals (Epictetus on Musonius Rufus)—Four masks/prosopa that must be integrated in finding/developing a self (Panaitios): 1. Human nature i.e. our source of ethical worth; 2. Particular nature given to each by physical constitution, which one may develop/harmonize within the bounds of human nature; 3. Whatever we acquire through chance/external circumstances; 4. Most importantly, what we make of ourselves by our decisions, especially the youthful life choice—In every individual there is the providential given, and the reasoning freedom by which one participates in God and whereby one uses and fashions the given (Epictetus); one must accept one’s role and freedom, true philosophy being doing not speculating: one plays one’s role best from the distance of freedom—Question of what the relation is between divine and human freedom; answer depends on who/what God is Who apportions roles—On Epictetus’ view, God is the whole, and we are parts closely associated with Him, needed for total constitution of the world, who have absolute freedom/autonomy, which even God cannot overrule, but I obey Him of my own accord, as a friend/adopted son, freely remaining at the post He has assigned to me even if it is a vocation to suffering, grateful to have been admitted to this wonderful world—This view is separated from Christianity by its Stoic framework: dualism between free spirit and fated body, unwillingness to open one’s self to suffering, cosmology (Poseidonios) of world as organism animated by divine pneuma, no immortality aside from one’s elements returning to the whole, resignation to taking things as one finds them and to playing one’s part then exiting. (p. 499): Stoicism/Poseidonios’ cosmology taken by up by Herder (though earlier in various forms by School of Chartres and Renaissance natural philosophers) in his account of Mother Nature; human nature remains the same over time, but for the “I” the vertical predominates, earthly existence being a stage on the ascending journey (draws on his naturalist/pantheist reading of Leibniz and Spinoza), and the world is a physical-spiritual emanation of divine life—Herder’s Stoicism comes out in his notion that human dignity is in obedience to natural law, in emphasizing instability of human achievement, in his optimism regarding humanity’s God-relatedness and providence’s guidance, in his acceptance of limits, in his grateful happiness over existence itself—Stoic coincidence of freedom and destiny, freely accepting destiny (Hegel, Goethe, Von Humboldt)—Herder holds that what is immortal is what emerges from the confines of the “I”/personality and is poured into the nameless treasury of humanity, the “I” dying for the Whole, a self that can live on in others; unclear what this selfless self is, though it is opposed to Christian person or Leibnizian monad. III.B.2. Psychology (p. 505): Psychology is concerned with what is common to human psyches, not individual particularities, yet takes the latter seriously, especially disparity between “I” and social roles; they see “I” as resting on and oriented to governing/sustaining vital substratum. III.B.2.a. Sigmund Freud (p. 506): Freud doubted if unintelligible comedy of life had meaning/value; life’s brutality wounds the human heart, and he longed for nothingness, though he stayed at his post, and clung to a single value, empirical science, though he emphasized how little was known about the unconscious substratum from which psychic phenomena arise—He saw unity of world as self-evident, and was too cautious to be a materialist—As a doctor, he concerned with his patients’ “I”, using data to discover types found in outline in multiplicity of life—In original pre-genital state, developing human being is closed like a monad, governed by pleasure-principle, but by being born its moves from absolute narcissism to perception of external world, with which one enters into conflict—Objects (never a “thou”) in world do not predetermine the “I” but are fixed by experience of dependency; in coming to grips with the world, the ego organizes itself as conscious part of psyche: ego drives come from same basic libidinal energy as externally-directed sexual drives/eros—Conscious “I” is only fragment, arising through repression, of former monad, internalizing parent’s authority as super-ego and conscience, and tyrannized by aggressive/sadistic unconscious “id” opposed to ego—Polymorphously perverse primary stage is a coincidentia oppositorum, not following logic, with contrary impulses together, giving rise to ambivalence of drives/feelings, mutually containing and transforming into one another—Man’s inborn tendency to evil, bisexuality, sadistic-masochistic relation between ego and super-ego—Auto-erotic primal phase cannot be regained, but becomes the “id”, the uncanny/dangerous/menacing, out of which our ego lives, and of which the ego is the outer surface in contact with the world; ego’s pathos, subjection to, and three-fold anxiety before external world, id, and super-ego—Nostalgia for lost paradise of narcissism becomes a death-wish, psychic reality a struggle between eros and thanatos, in which eros is a circuitous path to death, and death-wish erupts in aggressive instinct/urge to destroy (Schopenhauer)—Culture contains seed of death, inasmuch as it involves ever-greater distance from/restriction of immediacy of eros, channeling it into generalized love of fellow-men—Goal of analysis is to mediate between demands of instinctual id and external world, but ego is caught between these, with no “thou” that can bring one out of lonely isolation, only objects. III.B.2.b. C.G. Jung (p. 514): Four important themes in Jung are the “I”, the persona, the process of individuation, the self; must exclude here the personal and collective conscious-unconscious, the anima/animus, and the archetypes—The giant world of the collective unconscious on which the ego is carried along requires ego to find its meaning in ever-deeper co-existence with it; unconscious with its rationality takes place of Stoic physis—Jung does not go outside the psyche (Kant), but believes he is bringing to life again the mythico-religious world of symbols, as psychic experience or as a pre-condition for it; healing from rationalism and utilitarianism requires turning to those symbols, and for this therapy cannot be mere technique but requires to the therapist to be like a spiritual father—Jung is reverent before the mystery of being, whose problems he thinks insoluble—The “I” is a particular configuration of collective elements in stream of life, which is to the “I” as its shadow; identity of real individual can only be defined by process of individuation, its uniqueness being the mode in which elements are integrated into the totality—“Persona” can mean both “mask” and “role”, it is the mode in which the ego present itself in the collective, but it is a mask of the collective psyche, an illusion of individuality—He passes over the dialogical idea of becoming a self with one’s fellow humans to the totality of the self—Psyche’s energy is generalized beyond the sexual and illustrated in archetypes—One must come to terms with one’s good and evil, light and darkness, masculine and feminine; on Jung’s view, the Trinity is too exclusively good, light, masculine, and we need a more integrated God, containing opposites: in God coming together with world in Christ, Christ becomes historical archetype—Question whether projecting onto God of creaturely polarities (Cusa, Böhme) can lead conditional man to the conditioning unconditioned—Transcendence of empirical ego in individuation toward superordinate self, in relation to which we experience ourselves as objects—The self is central point of personality, residing between/in synthesis of conscious and unconscious, subjectively solitary and objectively having totality of universe for its background; homo totus is a process of self-realization/selving, leading to ultimate uniqueness/loneliness/limitation, but also incarnation of the totality into which we have transcended ourselves, exemplified by Christ and Buddha, though still retaining ambiguity—His last word is acceptance of limitation, not of role or persona/mask; we must accept that our attempt to embrace totality/divinity can never succeed in such a way that we identify ourselves with it, we can never represent its incarnation: we should avoid arrogance of the ego in favor of tentative modesty, for we are supernumeraries on the world-stage. III.B.2.c. Alfred Adler (p. 523): Adler broke early with Freud—Early studies on compensations for deficiencies in organs, a principle applied existentially to normal and pathological minds—Each individual is an indivisible whole, and talk of types only illumines a general area in which the individual case can be discovered in its uniqueness; the doctor must have a divinatory gift for grasping each individual totality, by intuition/artistic contemplation—What is unique expresses itself in a life’s freely chosen law of movement, which becomes frozen movement/shape/form/Gestalt; an individual’s law of movement is a matter of correct or incorrect attitude toward social environment: psychology is both individual and social, and converges with ethics—This renews the Gnothi Sauton, developing from and away from Freudian basis; man conceals from himself his understanding of life/law of action, becoming the victim of the fiction he has created (developed by Sartre)—Man’s initial situation is one of tension between individuality and community, and his free goal-seeking behavior leads to building character—Sense of community is inborn, sense of personality arises as striving for personal superiority: one shifts from healthy self-love to aggression toward society to compensate for inferiority of the child, which is also the basis of teachability; our primal anxiety is to be able to cope with life’s superior power, hence our ability to embrace neurotic goals like the will to power—Sense of community is biological inheritance, and must be developed so one learns to be an actor/player with others; uneasy question (Metzger) whether social sense arises out of weakness of isolated individual or if man’s entire constitution is oriented to solidarity, and whether cultural achievements product of urge for superiority or of interest in what is valuable to all—Freudian orientation to causality overcome by orientation to finality, hence reason is a planning organ; this leads to high assessment of man’s original constructive freedom from childhood, and denial that there is any predetermined fixed character i.e. spiritual approach to environment: one bears the persona/character required by one’s fictitious goal—Questions whether the indivisible unity we ascribe to ourselves is only a mask or is irreplaceable individuality, and if one finds one’s truth in cultivating sense of community then what becomes of one’s uniqueness beyond affirming one’s social role—Adler extrapolates person-society system into cosmic realm, seeing a tendency to be a whole even at atomic/cellular level, the whole being an evolution with creative energy found in every living being, and each being able to feel himself a part of the whole—Fellow humanity is praised as highest value (contra Freud), and we ought to progress toward an ideal community, though he contradicts himself as to whether this is unattainable: this is the Jewish limit; a Christian, Rudolf Allers, tries to solve the contradiction—Adler lacks Jung’s breadth on religion—Adler’s man must accept his limits and become one with social role, yet he centers on those values that lie in approaches to Christian worldview, and he recognizes that love is the most important resource in education. III.B.3. Sociology (p. 531): Sociology deals with what is common to all human subjects/their socialization, yet each subject is a unique “I” who can nevertheless participate in and persist through a universally accessible role of common humanity; role-sociology arises from difference between “I” and social role, and the self-alienation and self–vindication of the former, and it uses the theater metaphor—Its prehistory in sociology (Durkheim) and social psychology (James, Cooley, Mead), and its foundation in Linton, who distinguishes an individual’s status and role—Theatrical analogy for the person in Dahrendorf (drawing on Parsons, Curtius); dualism between “I” and “me”/role which is a bundle of behavior norms—Kantian anthropology on which autonomous man is alienated when he enters his roles: noumenal freedom can be asserted against planning/manipulation; Hegelian anthropology (Tenbruck, Plessner) on which man cannot exist in roles: when one takes the risk of self-alienation, one does not lose oneself, and this view leads to man the doppelganger—Self-identity seems to depend on social processes, but the expectations that one’s role is can change over history, and so one seems to lose one’s identity when the role changes (Habermas)—Some say role theory should presuppose relative stability of forms of alienation in the face of today’s society which is structured in purely functional terms (Claassens); question of whether role is elementary category, or one rooted in American society with its functional/changing notions of roles, or one rooted in traditional/medieval society in which each person identified himself with a role—Concept of role leaves room for every notion of the self—Identity appears as result of role-playing, whether one discerns identity in the ability to change roles, or one strives for a liberated “I” beyond the dichotomy with role and no longer imprisoned in identity (Adorno); distinction between personal and social identity (Goffman)—The rootedness of the individual in cosmic/divine reality so as to protect oneself from contingencies of socialization (Berger, Luckmann); they reflect on everyday world, structured in social terms, as highest reality, though it is a human product: society is objectivizaiton of reciprocal human behavior, institutionalized so as to be rendered ultimately meaningful—Social persons, like actors, must internalize their roles (Berger, Dahrendorf), though a process of socialization: primarily through significant others, then through generalized others, though some elements of subjective reality are not rooted in socialization e.g. one’s sense of being in one’s body (Simmel), and secondarily through institution-based subworlds e.g. school—Role-distance as only way to maintain dignity (Goffmann)—Individualism as phenomenon whereby, as a result of unsuccessful primary socialization, one must choose among realities/identities—Empirical sociology can go no further than sociology of knowledge, objectivization/institutionalization, and subjectivizaiton/internalization—Berger moves beyond man in society and society in man to philosophical area of freedom, from which point of view man appears imprisoned in concentric circles of society enforcing norms from without, though he seems to be liberated by internalizing society—As in psychology, role arises out of totality, but here totality is human social existence—Society is drama/meaningful only presupposing freedom, otherwise it is a puppet show (Berger); social reality is dependent on cooperation of many actors. (p. 544): To question “Who am I?” the answer that I am an emanation of the whole cannot guarantee personal uniqueness; acceptance of limitation is one element of human existence, but not end in itself, or key to whole picture—If we take our stand in eternity, all secular being, doing, and roles seems to become mere alienation. III.C. Role as Alienation III.C.1. The Return to Man’s Essence (p. 545): Stoicism sees man as essentially active, with the divine behind him; Neo-Platonism sees man as essentially contemplative, with the divine before him: the many represent but also are an alienation from the One, the tomb of all concepts (Fichte)—Plotinus’ “solitary before the solitary” expresses the expectation of finding one’s uniqueness in confrontation with the unique One, a paradoxical response to the Gnothi Sauton—What is higher causes and embraces more than generated lower, and has a higher authenticity in its origin than in itself, creatures being more true/living in God than in themselves (Proclus, Erigena, John 1:3-4, Augustine, Anselm)—Creatures have one life in God and another in themselves, but the latter adds nothing to God’s absolute life (Summa of Alexander, Rupert of Deutz)—Creatures have truer being in themselves, but their being in God in itself is truer/nobler (Bonaventure, Thomas following Dionysius)—Aquinas defended value of the individual e.g. providence extends to individuals, and the higher the intellect the more concrete individuals it can embrace with a single concept; but contrary to these ran Neo-Platonic and Aristotelian currents joined in Arabic thought—From Aristotle, the idea that agent intellect is always in act and enters us from outside (Alexander of Aphrodisias, Arabic-Proclean Liber de Causis, Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes), with ideas paralleled by Islamic mysticism on which the individual must dissolve in the One Absolute Subject (Al Hallaj)—Aquinas’ adoption of Avicenna’s ontology of God as actus purus, intelligences as composites of esse and essentia, man as composite of form and matter calls into question his ability to conclude the Christian struggle for dignity of the individual, for here human person is individual by reason of matter, and entities are more intelligible the more they are abstracted from matter and generalized, hence the problems with the activity of the separated soul. (p. 551): Aquinas’ efforts are thrown away by Meister Eckhart, who aims at obliterating difference between ideal being of creature in God and real being-in-itself; God is simply Being, and creation coincides with generation of the Son—The “I” here is dialectical; though God gives birth to me as His Son, the individual “I” must be renounced so as to not be opposed to the One—Eckhart holds that the Logos assumed common not individual human nature (similar to Cusa), so we must empty/alienate all personal qualities so as to put on Christ; self-identity is introverted/imprisoned in images/divisions: against this selfhood is the authentic self in God; man’s nature is more interior than his person, and by being de-personalized, one enters the Person of Christ, and so in the First Cause I am cause of myself (compare to Angelus Silesius)—As created, man is pure passivity to receiving the Son, but one is genuinely man only by having pure active divine power in him, neither created nor uncreated—For Eckhart, it seems that even Trinitarian Personhood is secondary to God’s essence, the silent desert/impenetrable darkness without differentiation, into which even Father, Son, and Spirit have not looked, and this is both God and man’s ground—Another aspect of Eckhart’s work seems to contradict all this, his doctrine of internal and external works, which oversteps distinction between contemplative/passive and active/cooperative—Contra Otto’s claim that Eckhart has a theistic foundation but a monistic superstructure, Eckhart intends to be Christian in everything, yet his use of Platonic/Arabic ideas causes man’s personal freedom to dissolve in the supernatural—Links of Eckhart to Indian and Zen Buddhism, in which role is certainly alienation (Suzuki, Shizuteru Ueda); in Zen, Platonic ideas vanish, authentic being of finite in infinite is absolute, and divine is annihilated in its un-ground, leaving paradox of world’s reality arising from and affected by sheer nothingness: simple affirmation of everyday life is not grounded in Logos and so mediation of language and possibility of giving reasons vanishes, allowing for pure secularity (links to German Idealism by Kitaro Nishida)—Links of Eckhart to Vedanta and Šankara (Otto): manifold of created being is true insofar as it is Being itself, but untrue of itself; the relation of Brahma to Maya remains undefinable. III.C.2. Idealism (p. 558): Eckhart, via Cusa, was important mediator of Neo-Platonism to modern Idealism, which has a tendency (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) to dissolve the empirical personal “I” in the essential/ideal, an alienation, even though Eckhart and the Idealists also try to attain what is noblest in man—The Idealists do not flee the world, but try to penetrate and master it—No need to consider Kant on immortality as personality infinitely approximating sanctity. III.C.2.a. Fichte (p. 559): On Fichte’s system, I am/become this particular person with this ultimate character because I freely make myself such, though the root of my individuality is that there is at least one other individual who can influence me; the answer to who I am cannot be found in psychological data—A person/material “I” with his sphere of possible free actions is just a limitation of the naked “I”, complete self-consciousness, from which we look to the act in which the “I” posits itself as empirically continuous, and ultimately identical with itself in perfect ethical action: the person moves from contemplation to full materiality, though philosophy can only establish the idea of the latter, and it can only be approached asymptotically—Man should be what he is, acting so that the maxim of his will can be an eternal law for him, dissolving himself in the idea with self-forgetfulness for the sake of the totality, humanity, the life of God—To the Romantic promotion of individuality, Fichte says that one eternal idea manifests itself in a new and previously unknown form in each individual, but this does involve this individual’s individuality being taken up into the idea—Ethics and politics aim at overcoming dialogue to achieve autonomy that is the same in all, a supra-individual conscience—Question of how original contemplation is possible without splitting the “I” into subject and object points to original unity of the two in life, the Absolute, prior to the “I”, ungraspable in concepts, because it is pure Being, like Plotinus’ One, in light of which reflection becomes non-absolute, a merely schematic representation of the unique, ungraspable real—Theory of knowledge is intermediate between God and the world; each person must leave behind appearances for the contemplation of God, and each must do this for himself: Fichte draws on the Johannine Christ to justify this—What is present and temporal must be rendered eternal, the secular is immanent in the contemplative surrender to the divine—We must not believe in or love appearance of multiplicity, which is God’s alienation from Himself, but we must be alienated from ourselves, and experience God as that which works in/through us—Fichte separates the historical in Christianity from the metaphysical, and there is salvation only in the latter, though this owes its historical breakthrough to Jesus; he rejects creation in favor of necessary splintering, as the way the divine fashions itself—An “I” with its limited will attempts to transcend itself in the direction of a higher divine law, so that man and God come to coincide in Monotheletic/Monophysite way: man must annihilate himself and sink into God—Once God contemplates Himself and becomes an “I”, God’s being necessarily splits into a world of “I’s”; everything takes place in thought, and so these “real” possibilities are suspended in God’s unique reality. III.C.2.b. Schelling (p. 566): In contrast to Fichte and Hegel, Schelling sought to work out a definition of essence of person, though not of individual as such—He thereby arrives at threshold of Gospel and faith, acknowledging significance of person of Christ—Three stages of his thought—In early period, with Fichte, he says the essence of the “I” is absolute freedom, and the “I” cannot be an object; multiplicity of “I’s” can only be explained by each one’s development of itself in freedom—Unlike in Fichte, this freedom is vertical, not influenced by relation to others—Spinozism overcome by contemplation of absolute “I”, a retreat to being without appearance in the innermost self; the highest good is the disappearance of the “I” in nothing (Zen)—In Greek tragedy, a mortal struggles against fate, and is punished for struggling against that to which he must necessarily succumb, and this punishment is a due honor paid to freedom—The Absolute is non-difference of subject and object, but also a knowing that is in itself unconditioned; all branches of knowledge are symbols of that eternal knowing, in which individual just plays an instrumental role—Schelling’s pantheist God/Nature is at rest when it comprehends all contradictions in itself—Origin of world is not positive creation but fall from Absolute; true essence of soul is God’s concept of it, and its individuality is a punishment: the religious attitude is to free one’s daimon/eternal idea—After the death of his wife, Schelling abandoned his denial of individual immortality—He argues that freedom is compatible with identity/pantheism: identity is synthesis, not coincidence, as in a subject-copula-predicate sentence; dependence does not eliminate independence/freedom, which in us is for good and evil—Existence cannot be deduced, is a miracle, can only grasped from itself in each individual instance of the real—God is unification/interpenetration of His essence and ground of His existence, which is in Himself, while man and Nature’s ground is outside themselves; in God, this ground is the yearning of the eternal One to give birth to itself, an intuitive will without reasoning—Form is constraint, the ground is chaos, which knows no rule—Selfhood is coincident with non-being, the shadowy, the dark principle—Coming-to-be of non-divine freedom is grounded in God’s ground of existence, that in Him which is not He Himself, on which God’s Spirit works, and which is like Plato’s matter, producing souls and organisms, ultimately human freedom—The personality is the connection between spirit/selfhood as such and self-ish man/this particular being distinct from God, able to exalt his own particular will over the universal; we must choose between will of love and will of the ground, and the solicitation of the latter brings about angst, though love needs the ground to operate—Possibility of evil comes from the dark principle in being—Man is his own deed, a decision made outside time, for man is an eternal origin (compare Eckhart, Plato’s myth in Republic, Hofmannsthal); on this view, temporal conversions are inexplicable—Since goodness involves dissolving one’s will in the universal, it is not clear how humans who choose the good are distinct—Schelling, like Eckhart, tries to bring the opposed principles in God back to an un-ground of absolute indifference without personality—God is universal being of all things but not as a general essence, but with His own individual basis/selfhood/egoism, which allows him to be concrete love—Man attains freedom only along a religious path, which requires acquaintance with constitution of his spirit: 1. Side turned to material world is feeling/gravity/dark principle/melancholy, which is also yearning for being/sensitivity; 2. Spirit in narrow sense, including one’s own will and reason, that which is personal in man, potential for consciousness; 3. Soul, which is highest and divine in man, the non-personal, what really has being, to which the personal should be subordinated ecstatically, divine bond/living intercourse between soul and body, my real self which I have been from the beginning, which can pass into the beyond, where consciousness disappears—Poetically, the state of the dead is described as intimate consciousness, a gathering not a scattering/alienation; our dark substratum is to be made luminous: even when we are in God, a part of us is not God, but is nature i.e. God outside of God, a perfect secularity of heaven, so the individual can be essentialized without being annihilated in the divine—Schelling came to see Christianity less as speculative and more as historical religion containing more than is to be found in reason. III.C.2.c. Hegel (p. 578): In Phenomenology of Mind, there is place for individual, but in Logic, only a place for subjectivity, not for individual in his distinctiveness—The God Who urges man to know himself in the Delphic Oracle is just the law of his own spirit, the purpose of all knowledge is that the spirit recognize itself in all things—Only Christianity arrives at absolutely free relation between human and divine spirits—Self-knowledge requires integration of particular into the totality of spirit as his truth; asceticism strips away all that is particular for itself—Hence the nation, the generalized individual, at the center of his thought, in contrast to the particular; private religion of Christ must become popular religion—Individual immortality is refusal of being integrated into totality of concrete spirit; in all our actions, we should have the nation/race in mind—But Hegel is interested in particularity of the individual e.g. the genius i.e. the decisive particularity that determines a man’s actions/destiny: both a selfish other over against the individual, and uniting with the individual to form an inseparable unity—But particularity is just a fortuitous amalgam of external and internal conditions; the apparent uniqueness of “I”, here, now, is also most unique: all “I’s” say “I”—Against Schleiermacher, the generalized individual is normative for religion; in that ethical world, particular individuals alone have freedom, so unlike for Husserl, the problem of intersubjectivity does not bother Hegel: “I and “We” are one, the spirit is the conscious performance of the interpenetration that is the “We”—Man and woman encounter each other only with a view to the family, the cell of the nation; hence conflict between family and common law, as in Oresteia and Antigone, which requires sacrificing existence for all-embracing reality of national law—In community alone is spirit self-subsistent and concrete, and all other consciousness is an abstraction from this, as in the initial stages of senses, perception, penetration to object’s ground, life and desire which penetrate through appearances—Two self-subsistents encounter each other only in struggle/conflict ending in death, the primal fact of conscious life, for war is an indispensible factor in ethical life of nations, and death is criterion of truth; God’s life would be nothing but playing with love if it lacked the seriousness, pain, patience, and labor of negativity: loyalty and honor can preserve themselves/prove themselves to be serious only through self-emptying/sacrificing of one’s existence-for-oneself, and in being able to die the individual shows itself above compulsion—Self-consciousness has two forms, seen in the master-servant relationship; freedom of self-consciousness seen in forms in which it has not attained reason: stoicism, skepticism, unhappy Christian consciousness which combines the two and projects what is unchangeable in itself i.e. God outside itself before which it abases itself: hence Christianity is a mere preliminary phase of spirit—The death of God is the form of reconciliation for the consciousness that is not unhappy but has realized itself as spirit, leading to perfect ethical behavior, beyond individual happiness, virtue, conscience, law, and order, all conquered by world’s progress—Reconciliation of particular and universal ultimately in confession and forgiveness, leading to reciprocal recognition of oneself as universal being and self-existent absolute individuality, and this is absolute spirit—Nation is fashioned after model of Christian community—Hegel’s spirit is universalizing, without personalizing vocations or personal rising from the dead: the “I” is alienated, sacrificed for the whole—German Idealism sees prayer as obsolete; no living God needed to render ethical acts intelligible—Hegel’s inner logic leads to Marx, and all attempts to interpret him in personalist sense (Weisse, Günther, Deutinger) are doomed—Dialogics is best able to mediate philosophy of accepting one’s limits and philosophy of alienation. III.D. Attempts at Mediation III.D.1. Representation: The King (p. 591): Previous two attempts to answer question of what I am fail because in each case, the personal “I” has to surrender itself to some all-embracing life/essence, and no necessary connection between “I” and life/essence is demonstrated—Two pre-Christian and two post-Christian attempts to reach a positive answer; former have an “advent” character, a “negative Christology” or closest possible approach to Christianity, though separated from Christianity by OT—For ancient people of Near East, the king can answer the question “what am I?” with some precision, the answer revealed by a personal god who begets or adopts this particular human being, and the king then lends shape to the individuals of his people and represents them before the god (Bernhardt, Gadd)—In ancient Egyptian view, the highest god becomes present in the pharaoh in his enthronement, and later the pharaoh comes to be seen as the son of the king of heaven, sharing his nature and power, placing him in relation of obedience to his father’s will, which is righteousness, not despotic—In other Near Eastern cultures, the king is the son of a god, but does not have physical equality of nature with the god; he is a governor of physical/moral order appointed by the god, as in the Code of Hammurabi and the Egyptian wisdom literature—Precarious, periodic re-investiture of the king by the priest in Babylon, symbolic re-investiture in Egypt, but in both countries kingship is drama between heaven and earth—In Akkadia, the shadow of God is the Man, men are the shadows of the Man; the king alone is the fixed “I” and others just reflect him, though the ethical conduct of the individual is taken very seriously. (p. 596): Influence of this Near Eastern ritual on Israel, though Israel sterilized this ritual: the king is not Yahweh’s representative/incarnation (Mowinckel); at most there is analogy to the adoptive relation seen in Babylon—No ritual paralleling Babylonian ritual in Israel—Position of the king was always contested in Israel—Representing God is a form of asserting an “I”, but an extraordinary/superhuman form that leaves other members of the nation inadequate, and it violently clashes with Christianity, so it dies out by late Roman antiquity, though it has echoes in Christian middle ages. III.D.2 Authenticated Status: The Genius (p. 598): What the divinity does for the oriental king, the genius does for everyone in the Italic view—Everything, including every person, place, house, tree, etc. has its own genius, so it is a very diffuse notion, and it suggests but cannot reach goal of providing basis for individuality of each person—It takes on aspects of Greek notion of daimon—Genius is a god given to each man as companion and protector, and after death is venerated partly as manes and partly as genius; it is a principle that goes beyond individual’s mortal being, but comes into being with individual (Apuleius)—In Stoicism, daimon is seen as the divine in the human spirit—In Homer, the gods are called daimones inasmuch as they apportion destiny—Hesiod and Heraclitus on daimones—Plato’s split notion of daimones as something between conscience and divine inspiration, and lesser gods mediating us and God, that is, between immanent and transcendent daimones—Later antiquity sees objective gods, daimones, and heroes, and subjective potential of human soul, both as graded emanations of divine power, relativizing opposition between quasi-personal entities and subjective layers of soul (Plato, Plutarch, Apuleius); here, the soul does not retain individuality as it passes over into God—Genius/daimon are ambivalent, and cannot be identified with or seen as entirely other from the human “I”—Hellenic and Septuagint understanding of daimones as angels or evil spirits i.e. personal beings entirely distinct from humans—Christian uses of genius/daimon in which angel plays the part of human he is guarding (Bildermann, Masen) or as mysteriously guiding the individual as an “I” we would like to be like (Novalis); genius as tutelary spirit and as spiritual essence of sonship given to us as both gift and task (Schelling, von Baader)—Goethe’s “demonic” as what impels the great creative artist, bringing him bliss and danger, a conception in which the Italic notion of genius is gone: this is not divine, human, angelic, or devilish, but is like chance or providence, and takes pleasure only in the impossible, which is not opposed to the moral world-order, but cuts across it (nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse), which is not an objectifiable world-principle but something operating in his person/life, placing him above identifiable categories—Jung’s unconscious as underlying God and anti-God. III.D.3. The Individual Law (p. 605): a. No living cultural awareness today of genius/daimon—George Simmel, at end of Christian/Idealist periods struggled for new expression of individuality/what-is-always-unique—While he sees Christian dogma as gone, he remembers that in Christian times, salvation/the Kingdom of God were presented to us as unconditional value/goal beyond all that was individual/fragmentary/meaningless; yearning for an intangible goal is the inheritance of Christianity, given that the personality of the Christian God is entirely new in history of ideas, which led to the sense of the here-and-now uniqueness of his image, the human person, seen in the sense of personal vocation and absolute responsibility for oneself before God, which is unbearable for most—Still, individuality is just one pole, the other being objective values/society—Every moment gives the Christian access to eternal life, and overcomes the death inherent in every moment—Simmel is locked in argument with Kant/Enlightenment, which substitute universal humanity/law for metaphysical personality, though a few still knew about individuality (Lessing, Herder, Lavater, Goethe, Schleiermacher: each individual represents humanity in a special way, and individuality is mirror not limitation of the infinite)—Fundamental problem: it is equally plausible to see world as absolutely unitary and all individualizing/difference is illusory appearance, and to see absolute individuality of each part of the world and all unity is mere subjective contribution by our mind without objective demonstrability; the oscillation between these views is seen in history of philosophy—Simmel’s opposition to the Porphyrian Tree, on which individuals are deduced ontically/noetically from universal—Opposed yearnings: to find the meaning of life in oneself alone against the highest authorities, and to be selflessly involved in the divine world-plan and so acquire some of the latter’s greatness/beauty/value—Sociological method of differentiation: elements of differentiated milieu are undifferentiated, and vice versa—Universal culture is means to individual development—Individuality is a specific inner quality/central metaphysical principle, not arising out of comparison with something else; particularly evident in art, which is concerned with the significance a thing has in its individuality, in contrast to everything else, and beauty is attributed to this very distance (Claudel)—Originally, universals seen in reciprocal relations, but then come to be seen in opposition to individuals (Stoicism, Enlightenment’s rejection of class in favor of universal human nature, Kant, Marxism, Idealism); he rejects these as sacrificing individuality: the individual should resist being commandeered by society, and the leveling tendency of socialism, for it is impossible to have freedom and equality at the same time—Social dimension is meaningful only in terms of relationship among individuals of intrinsic value; what is inwardly unique is incommunicable, but the higher the uniqueness/consciousness, the higher the forms of society possible, but also the higher loneliness—He is not an individualist, but opposed collectivization society tends towards--Simmel’s pessimistic view of history and technology; society tends to be incommensurate with personal life. (p. 614): b. Absolutely basic opposition between life principle and form principle (Simmel building on Bergson, approaching Baden Neo-Kantianism): even objective form is a protuberance of life; values/oughts are self-sufficient, but life is what has value—Conscious spirit is the highest stage of life, and is interpreted by means of reflection; this absolute life guarantees that all that is objectified by spirit is rooted in life (meant in Goethean not Kantian/Fichtean sense), a mutual reciprocal influence/fitting between subject and object, which come forth together from life’s ground—Unity of spirit and worldview are conceived as individuated from the outset (similarities to Poseidonios and Jung)—Simmel’s typological works on Kant, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Rembrandt: figures of unique, epoch-characterizing creativity—Even great normative individuality cannot escape contradiction at the heart of life, each side put forward in a different individual e.g. Schopenhauer’s horror of life, Nietzsche’s exultation, Ionesco feeling both at once, Kant’s world-mastery, Goethe’s surrender to the world; life’s contradiction, breathing in and out, pulsates in each living being, a conflict between whole and part that wants to be a whole—Going deeper leads to further contradiction e.g. between will and ought, not to the reconciliation promised by monism, and the only way to cope is by a certain superficiality—Even the hostility of things can appear as a unitary character of the whole (Heraclitus, Rembrandt, Rodin): truth can include the true and the false, reverence/totality of being encompass the good and the evil, super-aesthetic beauty encompasses the dualism of utility and beauty, true life unifies life and death and everything at the profoundest level—Unconceptualizable, pulsating life causes energies to flow in the soul that come from irreconcilable sources toward irreconcilable confluences: the tragic structure of the organism—Simmel works toward an affirmation that will embrace the whole of everyday life, both divine and non-divine aspects, in single religious attitude. (p. 619): c. The idea is unreal but present, one dimension of life, while the other is real; everyone carries his ought with him, not drawing it from outside realities or from law of reason, but it is woven into individual with ideal lines, following fundamental uniqueness of his life’s meaning—Objectifying ethical norms is a form of dying/hardening of life’s products—But life’s flow really appears as an ought, but it is a more severe norm than the ethical; it is not useful, the good has meaning in itself, in the self-actualization of personal life—The world does not fulfill the “I” yet the promise of being/to fulfill itself into a “total-I” is inscribed in it, hence the possibility of immortality, especially the more unique one is (Simmel following Goethe)—Romance type of individuation is the individual as particular representation of universal type; Germanic type of individuation causes entire validity of the world to arise out of inner personal unity: but Kant and Goethe mediate the two types—Purely individual law is actually a borderline case—Problematic concept of God interpreting God’s personality as absolute reciprocity/reflection of things in the world; He is complete personality because not part of the whole, whereas we who are parts and defined by relations cannot be complete personality, but then genuine immortality requires overcoming every other, and a situation where one no loner experiences i.e. no longer has one’s meanings fulfilled by external contents, abolishing duality and the sense of homelessness (Simmel drawing on Indian thought)—Boundary between man and God never really existed, and objective religion coincides with life, no longer needing the content of any religion—Here, individuality has dissolved in pure self-actualization of life as such—Just where Simmel ought to hold to the uniqueness of the personal, he slips into categories of the typical—Simmel’s initial problem suffers from abstractness that prevents the interpersonal dimension from expressing itself, the “thou” disappearing in a world of objects (as with Kant); dignity and significance are not guaranteed by being alone but unlike any other (see Stefan George)—Hence his ultimate despair: we know more about ourselves than any other, but we see ourselves as most fragmented/incomplete; despair, knowing we could know more, makes us human. III.D.4. The Dialogue Principle (p. 626): In 1919, one of the strangest phenomena of acausal contemporaneity in history of thought took place, the simultaneous emergence of the dialogue principle in very distant thinkers: Ebner, Buber, Marcel, Rosenzweig following Cohen (the discovery of the “thou” brings me to awareness of the “I”), Hans and Rudolf Ehrenberg, Rosestock-Huessy; all but Ebner were Jews, though it had non-Jewish antecedents e.g. Hamann, Kierkegaard, von Humboldt, Grimm, Jacobi, Feuerbach, and it is early on a theological line of thought, though it shifts to philosophy with Löwith’s critique of Heidegger, and with Binswanger and Grisebach, coming to an end with Jaspers—Buber sees the latter’s move toward the “thou” and link between transcendence and concrete reality as arbitrary, as opposed to the Biblical view, which directs the gaze toward both the finite “thou” and infinite “Thou”, while philosophy holds onto only former—A positive answer to question “Who am I?” can only come from Biblical revelation: the individual is only definitively distinct, a unique person not an individual of a species, through the name that God uses to address him; pre-Christian thought, mysticism, idealism, psychology, and sociology are not equipped to give this answer. (p. 628): Philosophical dialogism cannot give the precise answer that the “I” becomes a person through the “thou”: however fulfilling/destined an encounter with a “thou” seems, it remains fortuitous/transitory, many exclusive “I-thou” relations being able to succeed one another, in each of which the “I” receives a different name/nature, and only the eternal “Thou” does not allow communication to be broken off—“I” and “thou” in their original conjoining signify their entire world to one another directly/immediately (Löwith), but only by adopting a persona, relating not of themselves, but through their relationship, from the perspective/expected response of the other; we must go beyond to the “I” and “thou” themselves, which show themselves to be genuine freedoms—The more relationship comes to the fore, the more individuality diminishes, for the “thou” turned to the “I” is not itself; two individuals can maintain authentic independent existence only bye acknowledging their non-relational existence, but this renders reciprocal influence impossible—Grisebach reduces “I-thou” relationship to contradiction/limitation presented by “thou” to “I”, the “thou” showing its transcendence by vetoing the attempt of the “I” to appropriate it, so that the “I” can only listen to, and become the passive object of, the “thou”; this leaves only the relation of conflict, as in Sartre—Jaspers speaks only of the other self, not the “thou”, the one self reciprocally creating the other self, but with focus on the limits of this communication: one must learn how even in relationships to remain an independent, self-subsistent self, which often requires struggle/breaking off communication, but this leads to a contradiction that the self is both the product of being-together and exists outside it, so the “I” lacks a real name—Binswanger places the “between”/radical “we-ness” prior to the partners in relation, experienced as a soaring above the world, as in the unitive/ecstatic transports of eros, which is the dynamism of the relation itself, and this is the ontic primal reality out of which “I” and “thou” crystallize; this removes (as in Leary) possibility of being a person, for one is either above personality or an “it”/particular someone. (p. 632): Buber’s I and Thou claims to be philosophical but is filled with theological light, but it’s not clear if it’s Biblical faith or belief in universal humanity—Rejection of latter reading, which makes eternal Thou an absolutizing of shared humanity (Theunissen)—Encounter with God given as grace in “I-thou” encounter—The “I” exists in two modes of “I-thou” and “I-it” (Buber) or being and having (Marcel), which are like Augustine’s frui and uti, both belonging essentially to existence, the latter only becoming evil when the it-world becomes overgrown and unrestrained by the personal responsibility of the I-thou; if either relation encompasses the other, it appears as an injustice—Pathos in I-thou relation is similar to Simmel’s tragic relation between life-stream and form/ossified content, but Simmel operates in a monologue (Rosenzweig) and moves into a life that comprehends the dualism, whereas for Buber the “I-thou” is real, but the “I-it” unreal—The “between” is the prior place of encounter where both I and thou become themselves for the other, a relational a priori in man, an inborn “thou”—Buber draws on Indian ideas of mana and Brahman, and the NT idea of personal pneuma as a personalizing/divine medium of I-thou relation—Question of whether God is just eternal aspect of I-thou, or is Himself a pole of a relation; Buber opts for latter: a meta-cosmic law whereby universe both turns away from primal ground to maintain itself in process of becoming (I-it) and turns toward primal ground to redeem itself in being (I-thou), or I am in the hands of someone else, yet it all depends on me—Leads to tendency to turn religion into human acts, and to the view that God is only encountered as Thou within human I-thou relation, and so each religion should become more world-inclusive—Influenced by Ebner, Buber says revelation is vocation/mission, yet I and Thou lacks the idea of man’s being addressed/called/sent by God—Rosenzweig seeks to lift revelation out of idealism (compare Rosenstock), and he comes against the facticity of the human being which survives all system-building (Kierkegaard)—In a third-person world, one may not desire God to love him in return (Spinoza, Schelling), while man as “I” may and must desire God to love him in return or even love him first, the “I” awaiting the liberating word from God’s mouth, the “I” and “thou” of revelation, conscience, commandment, shame, readiness for obedience, repentance, prayer, redemption; in this context one see the other, not as “he” or “she” or “it” or as someone who shares the same nature, but as someone like me addressed by God in what is most individual to him: system leads back/reduces, but revelation creates a reciprocal relation between “I” and “Thou”—Star of Redemption replaces abstract logic with three-dimensional language of “I”, “thou”, “he” and facticity of death, love, action; in the vocative summons/commandment to me with my personal given name, man is denied every escape through objectification, and the personal name calls for other names outside itself—Ebner sees recognition of “I” in the other as most difficult problem for ethics, the “thou” posited as an ethical demand—Language is the medium in which the human being can become/be spirit, and in which man is creative, where he is ethically involved as one-who-speaks; the word is how the “I” addresses the “thou”, and all language is given by God, hence the Word becomes flesh—Disintegration is the unreal dream existence of man enclosed in himself, which philosophy/idealism constructs, over against which there is reality, which takes place in the genuine word between “I” and “thou”, spiritual/pneumatological realities—Word is the objective and love the subjective vehicles of the relation between “I” and “thou”, and the pneuma is their spiritual atmosphere—A humanity based in psyche could only be a species, a race, sunk from reality into dreaming, ego-enclosed, as opposed to if man lives in the reality of God’s address to him as an individual in God, and if the incarnate Word is an absolute unique instance not a mere type—Hence Ebner’s criticism of Buber: everything is rooted in relation of God—Both Ebner and Buber reject mysticism that turns its back on the world to find God, for that leads back to ego-loneliness, the most dangerous perversion of Christianity in churchiness or mysticism: the scandal of the Cross cannot be domesticated in Christian culture, as idealism and Platonist Christianity do, which have led to the unbelief of our times, whether American or Bolshevik. III.E. Concluding Remarks (p. 645): We needed to get away from an arbitrary role thrown over a colorless “I” like a coat, and arrive at an “I” that is irreplaceable as such and can take on a genuinely dramatic role in life—Without there being a unique name of the individual addressed by God, there could be no theo-dramatic theory, for God would lack a partner; this appears only in Biblical theology, since man is a produce to the dramatic tension that unfolds exclusively in the realm of the Bible—Only in Christ is it clear how profoundly this definitive “I”-name signifies vocation/mission; in Him, “I” and role become uniquely/ineffably one in the reality of His mission (Haecker): His procession is identical with His missio (Aquinas), and so the duality of being and seeming which runs through man’s structure is overcome in identity of Person and mission Christ, though the duality is not cast off but its aspects brought together in His humanity—The Spirit can close the tragic breach between person and role in mission; He makes the person a son, and is the socializing “between”, rooting human fellowship in a Trinitarian personal depth—Aloneness of “I” with God and opening up to the world are inseparable in Biblical event of mission—Individual Christian is always called in the community of those in Christ, and so cannot reflect on himself (Gnothi Sauton) without encountering Church and fellowship with others: he is an actor in an ensemble—More than in any other worldview, in Christianity finitude and death are part of action, and the battle for the good is waged at a more profound level—The aesthetic picture becomes dramatically three-dimensional—If obedient to one’s mission one goes into a world that is hostile to God, one is led to the experience of Godforsakenness—Questions of how in Christian terms the highest tragic action can be reconciled with a tragedy that has in fact been overcome, and of how the highest reality of earthly existence can point to an existence of God from whose perspective life’s a dream. Volume 2: Dramatis Personae: Man in God Preface (p. 9): The theory of theo-drama is based on Biblical revelation and reflects on the dramatic character of existence in light of Biblical revelation, based on widest horizon, in the drama which God has staged with the world, which can recapitulate/integrate within itself all the ways that man views himself and God—Concepts of God swing between two extremes, a mythological view in which God is embroiled in the world-drama which is a third reality higher than God or world, and philosophical view in which God is above the world unable to enter its drama; the theo-dramatic/Biblical God is neither mythologically mutable nor philosophically immutable—To examine dramatic character of existence as a whole, we examine not individual Biblical/historical figures, but the various conditions/status of man; all figures are preliminary sketches or consequences of central drama of Christ. (p. 10): One way to do this is by taking up theological aesthetics again, and examining history of Christian thought according to theodramatic approaches, elucidating relation between natural and supernatural dramatic action, and illustrating dramatic action specific to OT and NT—But one must always envisage the whole, and so the method moves from dramatis personae to the course of action to the final play—Reading the list of characters before the play starts just reveals empty relations, for only the action reveals who each character is i.e. who he is to become not who he always was; reciprocal relation between “was” and “will be”: agere sequitur esse but also esse sequitur agere (Beck), which is dramatically evident—Christianity is a supernatural story/play (Newman), which tells us Who the Author is by telling what He has done, and this is true even more of man/world—Attempt to adumbrate characters before the performance is anti-dramatic, regression to static/essentialist theology—God really reveals Himself, yet in this revealing remains beyond our comprehension: God expresses Himself, not just revealing His energies such that His being remains unknowable (contra Palamas); rather, we distinguish being and energies, but also maintain that God can be imaged by His Word, an unveiling of God’s heart in history (Cappadocians and Maximus contra Arianism/Middle Platonism)—We cannot describe man’s essence form a static vantage point, but only as he exists in history, participating in various status, the succession of which implies the dramatic dimension of human life: status naturae integrae, naturae lapsae, naturae reprandae, naturae reparatae, each participating in the others—Finite freedom cannot be rendered intelligible apart from Trinity and Church. (p. 13): Theodramatic theory is primarily concerned with acting not spectating/evaluating—Christ and Church are the only ones who carry out the role they present, because in them role and person come from God; in world, roles and what they embody are rarely in harmony (Maritain)—Saints are authentic interpreters of theo-drama, setting a standard for life-dramas of individuals and for the history of freedom of nations/mankind. I. The Approach (p. 17): Review of Prolegomena; in order to use its materials, we must complement/go beyond them—Author’s transcendence vis-à-vis his play is poor metaphor for God’s part, and equally inadequate are comparing God-man with the hero or Spirit with the director; in theo-drama, man is startled out of spectator’s seat and forced onto stage, and stage-auditorium distinction becomes fluid—God is the main character, so the question arises as to who can act and how can there be multiple actors, if God is on stage, and if we are one in Christ—Even the list of characters already speaks of actions—Aesthetics of form-and-light passes over into a dramatic interplay of dialogical freedom. I.A. Form, Word, Election (p. 21): The aesthetics dealt with everything under the theocentric standpoint of glory, and so human freedom to respond was considered only in terms of grace/reflecting God’s glory. (p. 21): Critics accused the aesthetics of clinging to essentialist aesthetic categories like species, lumen, expressio which would reduce Christ to an ossified icon—But that was not the place for a dynamic Christology/anthropology—What makes cognition/belief-in possible is the primal/irreducible phenomenon of “seeing the form”, understood from standpoint of encounters in which something uniquely precious/felicitous/beautiful presents itself to us, as when we see that things exist (Plato, Aristotle); beauty appears in exemplary identity with Being in its fullness (Siewerth), exemplary form taking precedence over the producing causality (Angelus Silesius): what emerges is all-sustaining foundation structure of spirit—Being in its totality can be present in/illumining/revealing itself definitively in an individual (Augustine), which provides basis for God’s revelation in Christ (Verweyen)—Form/light of Being can be read as meaningful and as an expression, otherwise (as in Zen) individuals remain unintelligible in their distinction from the Ground (Ueda)—Distinction between intra-mundane beauty and God’s absolute self-disclosure in Christ, but in both aesthetic opens/moves into dramatics—The beautiful is a transcendental, and the strikingly beautiful is only a particularly clear instance. I.A.1. Form, Expression, Meaning (p. 23): Beautiful form presents itself to us, attests itself/is attested, exhibits grace on the part of Being and the individual being—Direct path from Greek charis to Biblical grace, from chairo/to rejoice, for grace delights because of its objective gracefulness, interpreted as favor e.g. of gods or destiny, requiring response of gratitude, the second meaning of charis (Rilke), challenge to all that is mean/common, through its shining in itself/lack of ulterior motive that radiates to all around it (Mörike); grace and gratitude form a dialogue, and the upward glance turns the whole universe into grace (Diotima, Hölderlin)—Dialogue requires word/expression, and understanding requires freedom, not mere animal reacting to forms, and intellectus and readiness to accept message of form i.e. faith in genuineness of ground’s expression, attentiveness—The beautiful speaks to us from a region where language operates transcendentally in both its Scholastic and Kantian senses: Being reveals itself in its transcendentals, and this is language at the root level, and the fact that finite spirit in its cogito/sum experiences/follows this illumination is likewise the birth of language, and this is always for us both sensory and spiritual; in the world of the senses, the word has always become flesh (Borchardt, Eichendorff)—The attentive man knows that this root language is universal, though it expresses itself in but is irreducible to particular languages, which are both richer (because they make what is silent articulate) and poorer (because they abstract from the concrete) than the language read from the beautiful thing—Nature is a hieroglyph/chiffre, expressing something in a language to which we have no key: we can say this prior to the Word becoming flesh, after which we must ask if the chiffres resolve into the Word/ultimate meaning—Question of whether aesthetics is first a theory of perception (Plato to Hegel) that understands particulars as expressions of self-revealing Ground of Being and man as expressing himself by imitating divine creative activity, or whether aesthetics can be transformed into primary doctrine of man’s self-expression whereby man creatively explicates the originally inexplicable nature of being and existence—No human art can create meaningful, original forms unless the artist first receives a meaning, however encoded, from beings, without becoming destructive—In the center of the world/beautiful is the ugly/grotesque/demonic/immoral/sinful (Rilke); in pre-Christian times, the boundary between hidden glory of the Absolute and the personification of what is meaningless are very close (see Chinese or Aztec gods), suggesting that the meaning of the world is a mysterium horrendum et adorandum, but after Christ’s cry of dereliction, we must choose either hidden love or meaningless void—We cannot lock ourselves in aestheticism, for the hideous form/Ungestalt is part of the world’s form/Gestalt, and so must be included in themes of artistic creation (Othello, Troilus and Cressida, Surrealism, Expressionism): as in the Cross, the ultimate form-imparting word can be put together from non-words, a Word can encompass the world’s horror and dissolution of form—Analogia proportionalitatis between artist dealing with formless and God dealing with sin: the formless taken up into higher form/integrated into expression/word—In both language of beauty/art and language of Word made flesh, there is an already incarnated language of being/concrete existence; interpretation of writings, even sacred writings, is derivative, which at best put us in contact with language of life, which has depth/dramatic movement. I.A.2. Word, Freedom (p. 28): Form/word awaken freedom and bid us attend to call from form; from standpoint of form/word this is single act, but from person addressed, single act is twofold because there can be the Yes of willing attentiveness and the No that deliberately overlooks—Power of aesthetic expression liberates, and is not an overwhelming power; it requires receptivity—Work of art’s freedom can educate to freedom of seeing/responding, but the Word can directly create freedom; saying No to an artwork has few consequences, but saying No to God’s Word can turn into judgment of individual who freely ignores it—“L’art pour l’art” is derivative/depraved form of encounter with beauty: the gratis shining-in-itself of the beautiful thing is not meant for individualistic aesthetic enjoyment, but is meant to be communication of meaning and invitation to shared humanity—We fall silent before the beautiful just when its over-fullness cannot be communicated in human words—Drama is opening up or closing off to presence of light that radiates from existence—Confrontation of the power of the gratis with the power of the urge to possess/dominate. I.A.3. Election (p. 30): When one is struck by something significant, he is not placed in a universal perspective, but pierced at a personal level, called to change his life in response to this unique/genuine revelation, and he cannot return to the purely worldly world (as seen in myths and fairy tales); this is election—In aesthetics, there was interplay of beholding and being enraptured; in dramatics, election is added: no one is enraptured without returning from the encounter with a personal mission, and God shows Himself to someone to commission him—When the aesthetic fails to reveal the ethical within it, rapture is degraded to prettifying excuse; when a beautiful thing is radically beheld, freedom is opened and decision can occur i.e. I can hand myself over to the deciding reality—In being admitted to the sphere of the transcendent Logos, the most personal thing that can happen is also most universal: one receives a mission, the spark of the bonum diffusivum sui enters the man who glimpses it and makes him poured out—Only artificial inhibitions restrict the beautiful to elites; of itself, the miracle of Being is a holy mystery made manifest, like the Good of itself tending to public manifestation, and so it is the True—The hero’s uniqueness is not opposed to his universality, rather the greater the uniqueness the more universal the interest, given the movement from the Beautiful to the Good, for in a more unique case, the lens that focuses the universal light is stronger and can disperse it more effectively; the chosen one may have to be shattered so that the universality in his mission can be manifested—The paradox of how tears shed in tragedy give us pleasure (Augustine, Schiller, Brecht), for all are there obliged to breathe in something of the spirit of having-been-chosen for the Good, seen definitely in Christ (2 Cor. 5:14). I.A.4. Liturgy and Slaughter (p. 33): The Beautiful becomes the incarnated Word, electing those to whom it can communicate itself, but remaining what it was, even as it progresses to deed/drama—This simultaneity explains the phenomenon of the theater or the experience of an action in which the Good is striven for as beautiful, and it explains the phenomenon of existence which in the face of the Absolute can be simultaneously a liturgy of worship and a battlefield; seen best in Revelation—Many great interpretations of world tried to bring raging world drama into unity with divine stillness (Bhagavadgita, Heraclitus), yet through all contradictions we detect rhythm of eternal Logos (Stoicism, Dante, Milton, Goethe, Hegel)—Neither simple affirmation of contradiction, nor flight from it, nor man’s overcoming of it by striving, can explain mysterious, apocalyptic simultaneity of liturgy and drama—Holy wars of Yahweh or Allah bring about no reconciliation, but just create empty space where transcendent God can put forth his power; holy war in Revelation has no hiatus between powerlessness of being slain and power of conquest, but the latter comes through former—Grace shows itself as eternal love’s self-giving unto the Cross, where its triumph/vindication appears in Resurrection—Dimensions of theo-drama appear by setting forth problems with various freedoms, but this can only appear where genuine freedom of genuine Absolute reveals itself, in association with fully unveiled human freedom. I.B. The Unfinished Drama I.B.1. The Tragedy of Finitude (p. 37): A genuine human figure developing over a life is not given but built up through free decisions, though human freedom is conditioned in many ways: deep decisions happen only over long intervals, while determinisms render the intervening periods homogenous, though one still thinks one is no less free—Freedom is summoned only by responding to the personal and impersonal challenges of the world—There are degrees of self-determination, analogy in dramatic dimension of existence—It is very difficult to deduce noumenal un-form of a man from the phenomenal unfulfilledness of his existence—Maturation of human life-form within field of force shared with others—Two layers of freedom: one moving toward a definitive Yes or No, the other an inexhaustible space within which decisions fall; however definitive a decision is meant to be, it does not renounce that space, but just anchors one’s bond within it—The illusion of eternity presented by eros, through which one is deceived into thinking that one can lay hold of the absolute (Faust); from this vantage, drama of human existence can only be tragic: everyman strives and in striving errs, for freedom’s infinite space cannot be filled given an essentially finite existence broken off by death—No collective freedom: all are born, die, and account for themselves alone, even if they always aim at the community’s well-being, even if they attain relative universality (Claudel). I.B.2. The Overtaking of Tragedy (p. 39): For one seeking an overall view, the personal nature of the human drama is its teeming multiplicity and tragic dimensions constitutes unbearable limitation; hence, the seeking of spiritual paths that outstrip the freedom of the individual e.g. by embedding freedom in universal determining laws of life (Idealism, Naturalism, Socialism; Ibsen, Shaw, Brecht), an abdication of drama in favor of a narrative/epic history (Hegel, Marx, Teilhard)—This is a constant temptation that has exerted its greatest fascination on technological age, the age of a new Gnosticism (Le Guillou), absorbing personal freedom into interest in mankind’s total development, to which it is supposed to surrender itself, operating by methodological atheism which seeks to embrace all spheres of human existence—This is an attempt to synthesize freedom by changing conditions, but freedom is supposed to surrender itself so synthesis can be achieved, and then freedom is seen as arbitrary and can never be regained—Technological view seeks meaning of existence within its closed system, negating any Absolute above the world, Who Biblically is seen as the one Who gives meaning to human existence, and fulfills finite spirit’s absolute capacity—Man can understand himself by distinction between world/being and God/Being, or he can bracket latter, but even if he accepts the distinction, it is not clear he with life’s tragic drama can survive in face of Absolute. I.B.3. Chiffre, Mythic Ritual, Revelation (p. 42): Abolition of distinction ends by absorbing personal drama into universal drama; absolutizing personal drama leads to absurdity (Sartre), and breaking out of personal freedom of individuals-in-dialogue toward transcendental dialogics destroys drama (Idealism)—If the concept of Absolute/wholly other is taken seriously, the world cannot remain a play/retain meaning in the face of an impersonal or personal divinity; this brings atheism and theism into paradoxical unity: the only tension here is epic narration, not drama, and the world will be insignificant in the face of the motionless ground of the Absolute—Epic as an account of the many-hued diversity of life can seem close to drama (Homer, Nibelungenlied, Turgenev); the great epic writer or novelist can stress precious quality of what in its uniqueness will pass away, or he can stress the melancholy that resides in all earthly activity, and these can highlight one another and come in different shades (Mann): but in the end everything must be sacrificed in the face of the Absolute (Chesterton’s Napoleon of Notting Hill), before Whose stillness all the noise of becoming or passing away must fall silent—The act of renouncing what is past can have different meanings: an act of homage to what is passing before the God Who abides forever, or recognition of nothingness which robs the finitude of all value; one can transition mysteriously between Nothing and Everything (Nirvana): the Absolute does not come to meet the transitory world, but rules it by Providence/fate—Chiffres can come into view making the temporal existence that is sacrificed a sign of the presence of the eternal (Wilder), not as a decipherable form, but as suggesting the possibility of meaning—Man cannot answer the question of how to preserve the dramatic from becoming a defecting epic, but there must be a further factor in the Absolute. (p. 45): If the Greeks had genuine theater, their idea of God must have allowed Him to take part—Indirect links between myth, philosophy, OT, and Christian faith; the latter provides precise answer to the myths: God becomes man without ceasing to be God—Myth is born of ritual, which is the action by which primitive man feels he is one with active axis of universe; there would be no world if the plane of man in his pleasure and pain, and the plane of a God Who knows it from the inside, did not intersect—Greek tragedy exhibits human suffering to a divinity in the twilight between involvement and non-involvement, who is both above and in existence, and portrays the fate of individuals who fill the whole picture, who are not just types—Philosophy’s refined picture of God and science’s methodological atheism cannot approach the unique earnestness and naïveté of myth/ritual action/ancient tragedy, of no help to philosophy since it can only draw on what is common to all: the only way to continue the mythic hero’s claim to validity is via Idealism or Socialism, which both destroy drama—The ancient hero makes a catholic claim, on the basis of the catholicity of the mythic rite; drama is safe from epic so long as ritual remains living: every poetic-mythical drama tries to retain this catholicity, but often without intervention of divinity (Hebbel, Wagner, Kleist, Schiller, Brecht, Büchner), devolving into puppet-play. (p. 49): Question of whether Christianity can claim to have found what was lost since ancient tragedy as it claims to do: tragic dimension of personal existence is wrenched to its limit in the Cross, touching the divine without swallowing it (conta Patripassianism), and this brings to light and changes the meaning of all intra-mundane tragedy; the dramatic level becomes unsurpassable, and herein lies meaning of sacraments and Church as re-presentation of drama of salvation—Drama of Christ cuts off path back to multiplicity of myths, and recapitulates but ends Greek tragedy and OT, for myth claimed to be concrete universals, but the universals were in conflict—Drama of Christ makes a universal catholic claim in part by imparting its own catholic concrete universality to individual destiny, which is how Catholic Church sees herself, and the communication of catholicity is identical to communion of saints; every human fate in Christ is de-privatized, maintaining their plurality as function of unity—Dramatic dimension of human existence can only be taken seriously if it is dramatic at its very core. I.C. The Unfolding Drama (p. 53): Biblical drama is God’s initiative, with a leap not a continuous transition between our view of existence and His, and between other religions’ rituals and OT’s: no theo-drama from below, but created world is oriented to redeemed world, and the fragments of the former are unified in latter, without any human/tragic dimensions being lost, so human dramatic categories do help us get a better view of human-divine drama—Wherever God’s traces in the world are seen, mystery is involved—Theo-drama is distinct from distanced theological “epic”. I.C.1. No External Standpoint (p. 54): Central issue in theo-drama is that God has made His own the tragic situation of human existence down to its ultimate abysses, and so overcomes it without imposing an extrinsic solution on it—Parallel with Jonah—Epic view that Jesus’ suffering until the end of the world (Pascal, Bernanos) is merely indirect, in His members, and the Eucharist just calls to mind the past event of His suffering; clash between lyric spirituality (e.g. the method of Ignatian meditation) and epic theology, which deal with historical events merely as possible and draws from them their universal significance, but cannot rise to lyric exuberance—Precision rightly demanded of theology inclines it to the epic, hence the early Christian split between lyric edifying utterance for speech among the faithful, and epic mode used for external relations e.g. councils, polemics, theological treatises: in former, God is addressed as “Thou”, while in latter as “He” i.e. speaking about God, which places one, regretfully perhaps, over God, one’s subject matter—Even God’s transcendence is part of theological discourse about God—Alternation between theology and addressing God (e.g. Anselm) does not produce synthesis—Scripture seems to provide model of alternating genres—Theology’s tendency in an epic-narrative, and also judging and sola scriptura, direction—We cannot get beyond the opposition without the dramatic dimension of revelation i.e. the context of God’s action which takes over the believer and makes him a witness/martyr: in the Apostles’ witness, the form of their objectivity coincides with the form of their witness, testifying dramatically with their whole lives to the truth of revelation; in this way, NT reaches back to OT to draw it into dramatic action and reveal more of it—No standpoint from which we can observe and portray these events as it we were uninvolved narrators of an epic; that would put us outside the drama which has already drawn all truth and objectivity into itself—Even the objectivity of Scripture is part of the drama, and its content is the pneuma which is always greater than the gramma. (p. 59): Epic is always against a background in which opposites balance e.g. as Nirvana, Kismet, evolution, yielding a calm resignation/lofty benevolence/apatheia which is attributed to the mature man outside of Biblical religion—The drama of Christian life does not reject this epic attitude, but draws it into a new embracing attitude, Greek apatheia transformed into Ignatian indiferencia/availability, a distancing from any particular role, a paradoxical demand: the Christian must both accept all that happens without resistance and fight with spiritual weapons, with no clear distinction between the suffering and attacking modes of warfare, and even suffering/death are part of the drama—The battle against principalities and powers (Eph. 6:12) is right now, against forms of concentrated wickedness that have a terrible vitality (Revelation)—The perfect subjective attitude would be coextensive with divine drama in cosmos and history—The image of the Lamb that was slain—Christian revelation must fulfill inchoate yearnings of myth, but also banish its uncertainties. I.C.2. Convergence toward Theo-Drama (p. 62): Nine tendencies of modern theology tend toward but do not reach theo-drama; theo-drama cannot be defined, since it is the all-embracing context, but can only be approached from various angles—Theo-drama requires that beside/within absolute divine freedom there is some other non-divine created freedom, which shares in autonomy of divine freedom in decision for or against God—Man’s most ancient questions of how dialogue is possible if God is All/Absolute, and of how creation can be good but also forfeit God and itself; we find ourselves as neither God nor nothing, and we find ourselves free in the midst of a drama of good and evil, and we do no good if we invent theories that explain away this basic fact—Christ is the central meaning of this play of freedoms, but He illumines a kaleidoscope of aspects, and His light is unbearable to us: in the Cross, God is supposed to have reconciled world to Himself, yet evil seems to be more virulent—Perhaps nothing occurred in horizontal history, but just on border between time and eternity (Overbeck’s eschatologism), but why would God have become flesh just to direct our attention away from time/world—Categories of event (inbreaking of end-times and eternity on time) and history (removal of Christian phenomenon from timeless speculative theology and its restoration to horizontal time) are inadequate for what takes place in Cross and Resurrection; in choosing and authorizing the Twelve, there is both event and structure, which is meant to be permanent, and this is complemented and supported by Jesus’ creation-based ethics—Salvation event is essentially governed by the vertical but also corresponds historical/horizontal, developing a structure based on the vertical that imprints a normative character on the historical, including on the past, and on the eschatological/supra-temporal, and Christ becomes present in an ever-new way in subsequent history through the Church, and so continually brings past things to a new fulfillment: the step from Old to New Covenant is historically unique and of all times—Christ’s history cannot be made into a general law of history/being-in-the-world, or a highest instance or a symbol of such a law, for this would not present us with the unique event, and the ecclesial structure’s theodramatic element would give way to an abstract structuralism that has no events, but this structure is inseparable from vertical saving event—The Word of God is a fundamental act, and He institutes discipleship and authority, which are modes of participation in His existence as God’s act, but this presupposes faith/orthodoxy i.e. allowing God’s praxis to take effect in us, not a mere holding-as-true: orthopraxy is objectively anchored in Jesus’ dwelling among us; Church structure is the visible guarantee of Christ’s immediate presence by grace, and is not opposed to orthopraxy, nor is there opposition of call to discipleship and gift of fullness of power in it, the latter of which are a charism/role within Christological drama—In dramatically lived Christian live, no orthodoxy prior to orthopraxy, for living faith is commitment of whole person in drama of Christ, in which people are called to exercise discipleship with full authority: Christ makes room for the Church to play her part in the drama, as he did for Mary—It is not the case that Christian life is possible only after Christ’s drama has been accomplished, for then mere theoretical belief/dead faith would come before living faith, and teaching would have precedence over concrete realization; here is seen difference between Catholic teaching and both liberal and orthodox Protestantism. (p. 70): Extrapolation of Christ’s existence into every period of history shows its public/political relevance—Jesus’ mission is both to individuals and the nations, but always with spiritual weapons—Quantifiable or political success cannot be standard for Christian conduct, for this would shift drama’s center away from Cross and Resurrection to Messianic/Zealot activity; we have been commissioned to act without promise of success: Christianity is an initiative of God on behalf of the world, not of man escaping the world and clinging to God, of exposing oneself to the enemy not immunizing oneself by techniques against the world—God engages in dialogue, not monologue; Christianity, unlike Islam, is not a teaching, but an interaction/negotiation: God is willing to be profoundly affected by the world, a partner unfit for speech, to the point of the admirabile commercium on the Cross, on the basis of which we are rendered capable of dialogue with God—Through Jesus’ human capacity for dialogue, the Father reveals His divine capacity for dialogue, which he had already begun to show through the prophets—The procession of the Son is both generation and utterance, so the dialogical principle is deeply rooted in God—Man is created in the Word, and the word-dimension is part of man’s being, including the answer to the Word; one cannot, no matter how guilty, banish from one’s hearing the sound of the words that address one—Dialogue is incomplete until both speakers have indicated they have said their last word, and so long as man endures in history, his last word is inconclusive; the true statement that objective revelation ended with the death of the Apostles is quite limited: it means that God in His unique Word has uttered all that can be uttered, to the point of blood and water from the pierced heart, but in this definite Word a fountain of speech wells up to eternity—Once-for-all temporal history of Christ is mysteriously rendered present to all times, wholly operative/actual/open to development in all its parts, each disciple being rendered simultaneous (Kierkegaard) with the Master long ago, sealed by Christ’s real presence in the Eucharistic action/drama (Casel), the re-presentation of the once-for-all divine action—Holy Spirit is sent at exact moment the Word utters His last—If there is a growth in understanding of revelation (growth may not be appropriate idea) it is in in awareness of how inexhaustible it is, though this does not exclude the Church establishing normative signposts—Individual lives/Church’s tradition are never finished prior to death, and one can never rest on past achievements; the Church runs toward God’s future together with the world, but with more vision/hope, though the parousia is for all—Christ’s coming is so futuristic, that it can refer to any advent, not just the last coming—The mode of time in theo-drama is unique, and shows uniqueness of theo-dramatic action as a whole; the kingdom of God is actually arriving inchoately, and Christian hope is built on inchoate presence of Jesus-event, which not only guarantees things to come but contains them in their fullness—By emphasizing Christ’s chronological coming, early Christians did not preserve balance of entire phenomenon, failing to direct Christians’ attention to mankind’s future and sharing responsibility for it—The futuristic is a Christological not a cosmic category: Logos is not chronological starting point but origin, and not chronological end but the goal toward which everything is inwardly pressings; the futuristic has an exemplary/primal shape in Christ’s existence. I.C.3. A Single Drama (p. 77): Only in relation to theo-dramatic center can substantial trends of modern theology complement each other; otherwise, they cancel each other out—Question of whether this center can be seen in our spiritual gaze as a single Gestalt; this, like the aesthetics, requires moving from epic theology/distance to new way of seeing/contemplating that experiences in act, though God not man is prime determinant of course of theo-drama, requiring listening/receptivity in faith—Scripture testifies to uniqueness of drama enacted by God with creation, man’s action drawn into God’s, without requiring that my spiritual eye have an overview of the dramatic shape; standpoint of God’s word is so rich, it resists every attempt to tie it to particular schemata, but requires circling around it from many perspectives, though they do all converge, with gaps leaving room for dramatic movement—Example of the beginning of Ephesians: could be interpreted as epic, but it is a hymn that asks who the Redeemer is, a question that affects us in every fiber of our existence: the Resurrection is the theological cradle of Christology and ecclesiology; from the point of view of the fullness of time, we see men’s election and that all things are united under Christ as head, and looking forward we see that not everything has been epically decided: Christ’s victory is not yet victory for us, for we must be involved in the dramatic campaign, in a quasi-mythical battle—Once all things are subject to Christ, the Jew-Gentile distinction is operative solely in Him, where it is obliterated in His crucified body; in post-Christian history, the conflict between Judaism as subjection of man’s freedom to abstract omnipotence of divine law and pagan culture with its freedom of the autonomous individual: neither can be freed from its abstractions except by being lifted into the concrete Head—Jesus in His dramatic role encompasses all dimensions of world/history and becomes norm for every real/possible public/private drama; conflicts in the world, both comedic and tragic, are only provisionally soluble, since they must be lifted up to Him to discover its meaning—If Jesus is to be this norm, the abyss of tragedy must be plumbed to its very bottom, and in/transcending it we must discern element of gracious destiny that genuinely touches human existence; this yields Christological postulates: Christ’s being is such that He can descend into abyss of all that is tragic, and so the tragic over-stretching of His Person must be divine/absolute, and grace asserts itself in this abyss, which leads to absolute Christological paradox that in the horror of dissolution we are delivered from meaninglessness of suffering, and grace/reconciliation carry the day—Glory is the manifestation of the Father’s love for the world in the Son’s bearing of the world’s sin—In Christ, penetrating the whole doomed predicament of human existence, and being obedient to the Father, are one, to the point that all guilt/pain/remoteness from God are endured—All norms come down to Son’s unlimited capacity for obedience. (p. 85): All Gospel instruction is on basis of this norm, though it presupposes and does not narrow the space where human freedom decides on values according to worldly criteria, for these are already within Christ’s norm—From the outset, our shared humanity is permeated by Christological element: “What you have done to the least of my brethren…”—Conscience addresses not absolute freedom but a freedom indebted/responsible to the Word—Prior to Christ we can establish general norms abstracted from human existence that are relatively correct, but after Christ appears they are seen to be rays coming from Him: the concrete norm has universal application but leaves one free to decide, even as it points to the source of all true freedom in the Son’s readiness to do the Father’s will—The Father’s will does not have one meaning, but appears as both righteousness and love—Only Christ’s judgment can show how much the drama of law/lawlessness can be incorporated into His drama as aspects of it—The Christian will feel the gap between relative worldly norms and Christ’s absolute norm—Individual dramas can be rejected or within Christ’s dramatic action—Our eyes of faith can see the normative form unfolded dramatically as a form, a meaningful unity in a multiplicity of actions—Translation of Trinitarian mystery into cosmic mystery, which acquires political relevance and future thrust; the central world drama attracts every hostile power, the struggle between Jerusalem and Babylon, but the mundane drama can ultimately be enacted only on the Trinitarian stage, and so its final destination can only be the glory of God, which opens all things to the gratis of love—The mystery even when revealed remains mystery of faith, which require eyes of faith—Absolute knowledge (Hegel) is the death of theo-drama, but God’s love which surpasses gnosis is the death of absolute knowledge. I.D. Theological Hermeneutics (p. 91): Theology is interpretation of divine revelation, and can only be hermeneutics, but in revealing Himself in Christ, God interprets Himself/His plan, and this is hermeneutics, the first oriented to/regulated by the second, but the second cannot seal off human freedom and so is open to first, becoming intelligible through the Spirit, Who also allows an adequate response—For integrated interplay, God must involve Himself with man, and vice versa. I.D.1. Self-Illumination I.D.1.a. The General Human Horizon of Interpretation Is Transcended (p. 92): In theater or symphony we share experience of an action that interprets itself as it unfolds, and in neither is it normal to read script/score before performance, and doing so slackens by attention/diminishes my spontaneity, though those require education—Still, the work must interpret itself: a destiny opens which unites players/stage/auditorium (which cannot happen in Brecht’s epic theater)—In theo-drama, individual aspect is of absolute relevance to all, with no indifferent spectator, and none a mere instance—The universal horizon beyond all particular solutions to the riddles of existence is constituted by them, with no transposition across cultures; in theo-drama, in Jesus’ individual drama, the horizon is transcended in a movement from/to God: the Resurrection thoroughly interprets/clarifies the horizon of human destiny—Then man’s ordinary horizon of understanding seems overridden; but what seems ultimate in man’s horizon is taken seriously in theo-drama and thereby transcended in/as action of God—Convergence point does not become universally available human horizon, but is witnessed to and believed—The Spirit perfects the self-illumination of theo-drama. I.D.1.b. The Transposition of Horizons and the Theological Laws Governing It (p. 96): For theo-drama, the problem of transposing limited horizons into one another is secondary: generally, it is just a case of perspectives on one universal human horizon, along with the illusory hope that things that are part of that horizon, e.g. death, suffering, injustice, can be transcended—Still it is necessary to transpose from the spiritual horizon of Jesus’ time to our own—1. Every transposition has theological a priori, the Holy Spirit, Who universalizes Christ’s drama, though this calls for faith, but can be ironized—2. Where there’s no faith, there’s a tendency to concentrate on/make primary the secondary/time-bound elements in particular horizon of understanding, making them seem untranslatable and needing to be abandoned; but this apparently secondary aspect should be seen as organic expression of what is primary, and may even be primary: apparently time-bound utterances are intended to express something greater/different than what can be expressed in limited concepts of the time—3. Successful transpositions can’t be bought at cost of losing revelation’s substance/weight/uniqueness: what Jesus really meant can’t be limited to contemporary concepts—The notion of loss of weight in light of new dogmas formulated; one must base one’s judgments not on numbers of propositions to be believed, but, in the Spirit, on as sense of the whole and of God’s ever more self-giving, the regula fidei, which is neither the objective substance of the Creed nor the subjective act of the faith, but is superior to/mediates both. I.D.1.c. The Regulating Church (p. 100): The self-illumination of the divine drama remains constantly present/actual through history—Entire Church is given a regulatory organ for maintaining the integrity of revelation or God’s self-interpretation in Christ and embodying the regula fidei, the Church’s teaching office—This is concerned not primarily with the formulation, but with the charge it bears; definitions/condemnations are made to re-establish the endangered totality/catholicity—Not a matter of showing that this content was there back through the centuries, but of maintaining balance of truth as seen from within—Teaching office must be based on Scripture, and concerned with God’s ever-present/relevant self-interpretation in what He does for/with men, taking place in an ever-new now—Difference between teaching office and theology. I.D.2. The Place of Scripture in Theo-Drama I.D.2.a. A Word That Journeys with Us (p. 102): Objection that the Bible is an epic account; if this is right, then hermeneutics just establishes meaning of document, and confront it with contemporary understanding of existence—But Scripture’s real relation to theo-drama is more complex than can be reduced to a comprehensive formula—Scripture is not finished stage text governing enacting of real history, we do not fully know its history, and layers of tradition are found in a single text, showing progress not in revelation but in understanding it—Truth cannot be equated to naked historical facts, and truth’s self-interpretation in terms of ecclesial understanding cannot be regarded as secondary process separate from history; in light of Easter/Pentecost, each evangelist highlights what he remembered, though Jesus always possessed the fullness of the Spirit—The NT word is a word that journeys through death to resurrection, which every Christian disciple must take—Each layer of text has its own value, and so we should not prefer older to younger layer—After death of last Apostle, the Word is present in history in fullest form, but open to infinite interpretation—Problem of relation between words/deeds of historical Jesus and post-Easter prophecy in the Church; final redaction need not correspond materially/absolutely to Jesus’ words/deeds, but His inchoate words can be fleshed out in form appropriate to new understanding, under the Spirit’s understanding: these words cannot be reduced to something underlies them or a general abstract truth—God’s final word, resurrection, is so vast that it makes room for His silence too. I.D.2.b. A Word That Is Both Attested and Generative (p. 106): Testimony of Scripture is not external to events, which are words of God, a unity of word and event (dabar, rhema)—A word can be prior to the event i.e. prophetic, sovereign but aiming at the dialogical, a word within the covenant aiming at the Incarnation—Hard to tell whether steps forward consist more in initiative of God’s word or response of Israel/Church, which is itself ascribed to Spirit of God; each step contains something ultimate, not superseded—God’s word creates hearing faculty in dialogue partner, but also already contains answer in itself, even if a negative answer e.g. hardening of heart; the generative word can make use of/is not separable from the attesting word to make itself present to the individual believer—Bible is unsystematic/fragmentary, containing many genres, across which a net of links is created, within which the attested/generative word of God can traverse, though this net does not claim to be the whole content; Scripture is not vague, but just leaves things open for the Incarnate Word to attest Himself in/through Scripture—Jesus knows He is the Word uttered by/testifying to the Father, but He can also hear this word resounding from the OT: He sees the fixed written word as radiating with the fullness of divine power/decision, but also moving toward Himself. I.D.2.c. Gramma and Pneuma (p. 109): Stark Pauline opposition between gramma and pneuma is opposition between Old and New Covenants—The “letter” is the negative side of the old written word which must be transcended, as flesh is transcended by heart; this is not an opposition between physical outwardness and spiritual inwardness—To the transitory fleshly institution there corresponds a more profound incarnational fleshly reality in which through the Spirit God’s law is enfleshed in the heart—For NT, OT is definitively inspired by the Spirit, Who is already the Spirit of Christ; OT is fulfilled/reaches perfection in NT—OT and NT are ontologically different (Origen): OT is abstract, journeying to Christ, preliminary to His concrete existence; Christological paradox that whole fullness of deity dwells bodily in Christ governs shape of NT, which is one mode of enfleshing of Logos, along with His physical body and His ecclesial-Eucharistic body, which can all pass into one another, all integrated in total Incarnational form, and OT can be part of this form—In theo-drama, Scripture is not uninvolved spectator/reporter—Fundamental sense of Scripture is historical, but the spiritual sense is not a second meaning behind it, but the central Christological/pneumatological meaning contained in the historical, the grace that wants to incarnate itself in a moral sense in the life of the man who hears it and point him in an anagogical sense to fulfillment, with many intermediate points among these four senses—Only really Christian interpretation of Scripture is pneumatic—God’s entire purpose for the world is present in every stage of theo-drama, thought not in such a way that human freedom is ever upstaged, the entirety of the word is present in each word of Scripture, and each word is only understandable in light of the whole—Scripture is one aspect of ongoing theo-drama and so cannot communicate a dispassionate knowledge, but confronts us with a decision that has been made and not made—Scripture is active, interpreting its meaning. I.D.3. On the Structure of Theological Proof I.D.3.a. The Self-Attesting Fact (p. 115): Methods of theological proof that diminish dramatic character of Christian event show themselves failures, absorbing it into surveyable system—Historical fact is permanent point of reference, for in a contingent fact, the ultimate Logos has appeared—Theological proof can seek to establish historical fact in its uniqueness, and show that this fact contains a meaning that embraces/consummates/transcends every other meaning, a total unsurpassable meaning despite its historical/a posteriori character; the two can be separated into fundamental and dogmatic theology, but there are problems with this analysis—Jesus’ testimony shows that His Passion is part of its meaning, an integrating element of its truth, not a mere confirmation of it—A posteriori and a priori are inseparable here: only the Whole can bear witness to itself, and God shows His drama with man to be something than which nothing greater can be thought. I.D.3.b. Pointers to the (Ever-Greater) Totality (p. 118): The totality can only come into view where there is acceptance of/faith in the One Who is bearing witness to Himself—He remains free even in bearing witness, and is so free He is able to create beings who are free, which He can perfect by His own free self-revelation and self-giving: Soli Deo Gloria, but His grace glorifies itself in creation/revelation (Irenaeus)—Starting point for beholding the ever-greater totality is primal relationship between God and world/man: an analogia entis illumined by God’s infinite freedom that is not a pantheism, theopanism, pure dualism, deism, secularism, or God-is-dead theology; God is always He-who-is-always-greater, whose unconditional freedom does not threaten our conditional freedom—1. Creator remains superior to all creaturely attempts to grasp Him, but is not unknown to creature, though even new revelation just causes Revealer’s freedom to shine more brightly, the gift being unable to become man’s own possession: increase in genuine personal love leads to growth in intimacy and respect for the other’s freedom—2. A fundamental realism about the world, which with its suffering/ meaninglessness resists Idealism’s attempts to explain it away, Socialism’s utopianism, and all doctrine/techniques designed to overcome suffering; God’s deed endows suffering with meaning by sharing in it in Christ, a meaning destroyed by Gnosticism and Arianism—3. Realism of God’s suffering with the world in Jesus points toward mystery of Trinity and the unity of Father and Son in the Spirit; it also points to perfection of man, who as an ensouled body loses the possibility of giving meaning to temporal existence in his natural death, but who in Christ’s Resurrection is given hope of personal perfection as physical spatiotemporal existence, greater than immortality of soul, reincarnation, or absorption in Absolute, bound to hope for cosmos centered on man: we can keep faith with the earth without eternal recurrence or endless evolution—4. In the mystery of Christ, the particular and universal, chosen and un-chosen peoples are synthesized in an unrivalled way; the Gestalt that manifests itself in history is a priori without rival: after Jesus, salvation had to be entrusted to community that would preserve, proclaim, administer it, the Church that suffers/works with Christ for all, as sacramentum mundi—5. The basic presupposition for understanding existents and Being is relation between created and uncreated freedom, for created freedom is creature’s image/likeness of God and the concrete thrust of the analogia entis, and the glory of God fulfills itself superabundantly in creature’s freedom: Word’s perfect self-giving must elicit a perfect answer in/from the creature, which cannot be forced/overpowered; the Word presupposes and effects the full answer, but perfect self-giving/God’s absolute Yes faces man with a far more acute decision than all previous ethics: only after Christ is a definitive No/atheism possible—This is a formal framework for claims of totality/catholicity, which must be kept in mind in all theological proof. I.D.3.c. Inclusion and Exclusion (p. 124): All revelation has its point of unity in Christ (Hugh of St. Victor, Bernard), God’s final Word but in the midst of the world’s ongoing drama—Teaching of Jesus and apostles illumine one another—If this view is to be imparted to us, we must allow ourselves to be led by the word, not interrupting it to speculate or to important ideas apparently evident to man but not evident from perspective of God’s word, e.g. that God is not affected by world’s pain or sin, which do not take into account fundamental Biblical assertions—Contemporary theologian has an easier task here, from the point of view of modern man’s bankruptcy in the face of the question of ultimate meaning—One must allow oneself to be led in the attitude of humility/simplicity/Christian faith, making room for God’s self-disclosure in purity of heart, the best proof of revelation, and theological proof cannot be isolated from this but must approximate to it in spirit, and for this it must move/think in context of primal freedom/love which does not need to create, or even need, in the sense of necessity of nature, to generate the Son, for self-giving love is highest of all—Method of proof excludes all one-sided views that refuse to accept all things that can be integrated into free God/world totality/communio as interpreted by Christian revelation, and it includes anything that can be integrated, where communio is the primal mystery, which allows all the daring integrations of Catholic faith, which are not those of e.g. Hegelian thesis-antithesis speculation/rationalism—Theological proof cannot construct its own ideal of communio, but the model is established by God—Notion of the “ever-greater” is not original to Ignatius or Anselm, but is the Johannine comparative, which excludes everything that refuses to submit to it, but this just highlight the stronger inclusive power of God’s truth. I.D.4. The Freedom of Faith (p. 130): There are pointers, not overwhelming proofs, toward the ever-greater totality, lest freedom of act of faith be overridden in a rationalistic way—Problem of how convergence of pointers can harmonize with certainty of faith on basis of substantiated personal assent (Newman)—Newman’s move from idea of totality as set of propositions to living unfolding totality: revelation is not a system, but can be developed through a prophetic tradition that both interprets and supplements Scripture—Living Christ stands at revelation’s center, to be developed—Question is not whether Scripture contains entirety of the faith—Totality is recognizable in partial aspects in the convergence of the indicators/probabilities, as subjectively discernible through illative sense, the total person’s concrete faculty of judgment, which is more than inferential, and similar to sense, requiring a concrete image/Gestalt—Analogy to natural belief—This is not just an aesthetically narrow perceiving of Gestalt but an ethically demanded perception of form involving responsibility and freedom—Analogies to mode of knowing in mathematical physics, to juridical reasoning, and to conscientiousness in personal matters—Assent/unconditional freedom proceeds responsibly from whole person; one is free to see or not see—Grace’s psychological work. First Excursus: The Approaches Adopted by Early Christian Apologists (p. 136): These claims about hermeneutics can be illustrated by reference to first defenders of Christian truth: they attempt to show in the historical fact of Christian revelation the presence and self-manifestation of the primal mystery which a priori goes beyond every existing or possible religious or philosophical solution, and the analogia entis can only retain its mysterious character if Christian revelation is presupposed; they defend this in contact with ancient philosophy/theology, as well as in a Biblical/positivist and ethical manner—Aristides on analogia entis and Church as sacramentum mundi—Tatian—God needs nothing, and every man participates in the Logos, but only the one who knows the hidden mystery of the Crucifixion grasps the whole Logos (Justin); there is both an inclusive and exclusive side (Tertullian, Hermias)—Minucius Felix on analogia entis and the convergence of the logoi of the philosophers in the Logos; God finds it a glorious spectacle (Seneca) to see how man freely struggles and proves himself—Athenagoras on monotheism—Theophilus—Epistles to Diognetus and of Barnabas emphasize that God lacks nothing, yet He desires to effect a tender exchange with men—Tertullian on the incomprehensible God becoming present/seen in creation and the Logos Who is in all rational souls becoming genuinely intelligible only through positive revelation—Behind all the apologists’ approaches is the implicit idea that the Christian religion is the transcending unsurpassable totality of the logoi spermatikoi, fashioned by a God Who does not need the world but Who has perfected His creative work by freely surrendering to it (Irenaeus). Second Excursus: Truth Vindicates Itself (Irenaeus) (p. 140): Against gnosis, Irenaeus shows the historical/factual totality of divine self-revelation that constitutes world’s foundation/completion—Unity of individual human, of human race, and of Church, in dependence on Christ’s unity, and ultimately on economic unity of Trinity, revealing universal dimensions of Cross: this is true gnosis—His focus on the superabundant totality—The real/factual not speculative is locus of proof—Analogia entis is foundation/background of all things, rooted in the incomprehensible/invisible God, Who is free of all necessity—The Son’s relation to the Father; Son establishes communio between God and man, and Spirit between men and Son, which completes God’s work, without affecting divine simplicity—World is grounded in freedom/goodness of God, Who by His nature is the just Judge, and creation bears the imprint of its source—Theo-dramatic refutation of pseudo-gnosis; the pleroma/world of ideas is a mere shadow of the real world, not the other way around—Man is first free, and by nature has in himself something of the Logos and a relation to God; between inchoate and perfected image of God in man is drama of man’s coming to himself—Obedience to infinite freedom is measure of finite freedom, but the latter must undergo the testing of unnatural alienation from God, and suffering can become salvation; the Word experiences this alienation in a real way, for the sinner cannot reestablish right relation with God—Man is spirit, soul, and body, and all three belong to the image of God, so even flesh is capax Dei; Incarnation would not have been complete without death and suffering, so these must be real and for us—Redemption in the Son is for all men, for mankind is a unity, for all men share the same nature, are free, and need to be saved—The new thing Christ brings/is is gift of freedom, though not imposed from without, for God persuades not compels, i.e. our assimilation to the Son’s attitude to the Father—Man retains freedom to decide for or against grace; with Christ’s coming there is a heightening of danger in freedom/severity of judgment, and then satanic/anti-Christian powers arise, so drama of existence is raised to its full stature—The totality attains full actuality in the Church, which is also an aspect of that totality itself, and is also a structure, all of which is from and already in Christ Who indwells her—Irenaeus’ teaching on the regula veritatis, and expression of the analogia entis and God the ever-greater—Continuity between creation and redemption in Logos and sacraments—Continuity of historical ages, including OT and NT, and the ordered series of kairoi; the beginning is in harmony with the recapitulating end—Continuity between Christ/Spirit and Church, perfecting communio of man/creation with the Father—Incarnation accomplishes greatest possible, the total glorification of God and man in God. I.E. The Themes of Dramatic Theology (p. 151): Theology has always been aware that it has to do with a drama between God and man, but has been less aware it should adapt its form to this dramatic content, especially when it took its task to be explanatory—Theology can participate in the drama to various degrees of intensity, and can employ different literary themes/patters to represent revelation’s dramatic character, each embracing some aspect of the drama—Drama in OT, NT, Church period, and eschatologically. I.E.1. God’s Lawsuit (p. 152): God’s lawsuit against His chosen but unfaithful people reaches its climax in Christ’s life, death, Resurrection, with the background of the Covenant and the Law enshrined in it—As gracious events unfold, it has juridical element, linked to both God’s divine nature and man’s responsibility; the juridical has an abiding place in theology/theo-drama for judgment is a basic articulation of revelation (Anselm)—In covenant, any infringement of law draws down God’s judgment, though a desperate man (e.g. Job) can try to construct a case against God when he can no longer discern His justice—God’s lawsuit against His covenant people becomes concrete in a paradoxical way: it seems to be lost in Christ’s death, but then is won in His Resurrection—Legal terms in play here e.g. ‘witness’, ‘testimony’, etc.—Jesus as witness to divine truth, which unveils itself in/through men’s attitude, and is veiled through false witness/judgment—Broadening of limited picture of God’s lawsuit against/with man into all-embracing theo-dramatic interpretation of revelation. I.E.2. The Total Drama as Lawsuit (p. 155): Markus Barth seeks to embrace all of Scriptural meaning with lawsuit image—OT identifies grace and righteousness; justification/attribution of faith as righteousness is not a fiction nor different from inner imparting of new life, the two made one in the Resurrection—God’s anger/curse only brought about for sake of love/blessing; God’s manifestation aims at reciprocity, not monologue, seen in the covenant’s forensic character—First act: the court of judgment of God’s wrath, but if all fall short, then God will have failed as Creator and triumphed only at man’s expense—Second act: God sends His Son as advocate of the accused, and God’s curse lies on Him, and the tension between fulfillment and failure is taken into God—Third act: Resurrection, which has no analogy in court process, the Father proving His faithfulness to the Son—Fourth act: sending and work of the Spirit, during which justification is past, present, and future—Fifth act: the visible manifestation of salvation in the form of the last judgment, a thing being good only when God regards it as such—Barth’s account requires more of a reflection on nature of human freedom, and on the Mediator’s ability to keep covenant with God and solidarity with sinners. I.E.3. Christ’s Dramatic Struggle (p. 159): Gustaf Aulén expands soteriology to comprehensive theology—Three types of atonement doctrine: dramatic/classical (Bible, Patristics, Luther), objectifying/rationalist (Tertullian, Anselm), subjective (Abelard, Pietism, Enlightenment, Idealism)—First intuition: evil’s power is stronger than any human power, and it cannot be defeated by an external act of power on God’s part; the latter point was presented in now obsolete Biblical categories of elemental powers or Patristic categories of Satan’s rights over man, but today the point is expressed in phenomenon of homme révolté who opposes cruel God/anonymous fate, overwhelmed by life’s meaninglessness/emptiness, hence Luther’s question of how to find a gracious God: only God can deal with these powers—Second intuition: God’s opposition to evil must come from within history, but this cannot lead to Manichean dichotomy for God alone is absolute; there is conflict between love and wrath in God Himself, but the latter is overcome by Christ’s divine self-surrender—Contra rationalism, in Christ God is both Reconciler and Reconciled, and so dramatic dimension is ultimate category for interpreting history and God—Christ conquers by total self-surrender, and there is no place for legalistic categories e.g. work, satisfaction, expiation, merit (Tertullian, Gregory I, Anselm)—Subjective type is historically not theologically important, for it is monist, and makes Jesus just a human teacher/model—Aulén’s objections to mythologizing elements of classical view, though he retains idea that fundamental battle is between God and hell; problem with his view is that subjective and objective types are indispensible for man (Macquarrie). I.E.4. The Drama of Discipleship (p. 164): Human life personally and socially is shaped by the drama that determines history in its entirety—Origen’s application of Israel’s wars to Christian spiritual warfare—Similarity and difference between Christian and classical views of life as military service—Socrates and Stoics on life as warfare—Jesus’ awareness that he is conducting a war—Spiritual warfare’s move out of dogmatics into spirituality, as dogmatics is de-dramatized—The social dimensions of the disciple’s warfare fighting alongside Christ (Origen, Augustine), for the boundaries of the two cities pass through each heart—Echoes of this theme in Ignatius’ Exercises, which continues the Patristic program both as subjective and objective (also Erasmus, Scupoli)—The theodramatic can be presented in other forms than drama (Milton, Dostoyevsky, Strindberg, Dante, Bunyan, Hawthorne, C.S. Lewis). II. Dramatis Personae (I) II.A. The Stage: Heaven and Earth (p. 173): The stage of theo-drama is not neutral stage on which any drama can be played, but just one drama, which can only be played on this stage, which cannot be exhaustively described from outside the play—Starting from apparently uninvolved outside cosmological realm it invites us to penetrate to inside realms determined by vantage of characters, and their action and nature. (p. 173): World in Gen. 1:1 has two (heaven, earth) not three (underworld or hell); the latter come only with sin, like the sea in Gen. 1:9—Creation story draws on human traditions, but drops all mythical elements (Westermann), but emphasizes God’s creation even of heaven, which also worships Him and must not be worshipped. (p. 175): Natural world model in which heavens are above and earth below; the heavens are inaccessible to man, but man receives blessings from above, but his hubris must be limited by them: natural model where man looks up in limitation/dependence contains implicit religious element—Latter could lead to divinizing the heavens as in most pre-Biblical religions, or recognizing grace/salvation that comes from heavens’ Creator as in Israel—In Biblical de-mythologization, earth-heaven distinction must be seen as both dispensable metaphor and indispensable sacrament for man-God distinction (Karl Barth)—Man is on earth to be fruitful and develop technologies in daily work, but is essentially dependent on blessing from a realm that inaccessible and unmanipulable by him; man can only fulfill himself paradoxically through grateful dependence on a grace to which he has no claim—Despite God’s superiority to every creature, He wishes to be concretely present to man: the shared history of God and man becomes the shared history of heaven and earth—God binds Himself to a particular place, but we cannot do so. (p. 178): Translation of awareness of God’s superiority into cosmological view that God is in heaven, and of natural blessing from above into personal blessing, in OT—But also heaven is de-cosmologized: God is above heaven, the relation between heaven and earth comes to be seen in terms of events of revelation, and God really comes down to earth and some men e.g. Elijah go up to heaven or see it e.g. Isaiah—Man cannot release himself from limits of earthly standpoint, where he stands open to God, as his prayer or sin cries to God; only what comes from God traverses the stage between heaven and earth i.e. His wisdom and Word—In being de-cosmologized, heaven would become identical to God unless it were taken over by His creaturely host, who are involved in the theo-dramatic relation of heaven and earth. (p. 183): Elijah and Isaiah’s flesh-and-blood experience anticipates definitive form of New Covenant—In the Son’s humiliation and exaltation, the dimensions of the stage are worked out, and the third dimension of the underworld, which only comes into being through sin and death, comes into view, and is drawn into the theo-drama as an ultimate possibility for man; also in this, the poles that were statically related in OT take on motion, without this abolishing or confusing them, the cosmological giving place to the theo-dramatic—Both heaven and earth were created, and the latter given its own manifold power of conception, fruitfulness, blessing: if heaven alone were active and earth merely passive there could be no drama, but only Monophysite Christology and extreme Predestinationist doctrine of grace; rather, grace gives a new power of receptivity/conception so that earth gives birth to heaven, a self-emptying that is in accord with heaven’s nature—Closest possible interaction does not abolish field of primal tension—Every Christology from below presupposes one from above, and the same goes for soteriology and ecclesiology—Relation between heaven and earth can only be illuminated dramatically, not aesthetically or in Gnostic/structuralist manner—Augustine falls into an aesthetic account of how the whole is made more beautiful through its parts even evil—Gnostic/structuralist account in late Jewish apocalyptic, on which all things already exist hiddenly in God and then are just revealed—It is not possible to take up a standpoint prior or subsequent to the earth-heaven dichotomy, as Ephrem the Syrian tries to do in his entirely sensual/earthly and spiritual/heavenly Adam prior to the fall who is also the saved eschatological Adam, but this absorbs salvation history into Being/exemplary identity, which oversteps the dramatic—We cannot compare heaven and earth e.g. angels and men quantitatively—We cannot know in advance what stage will look like at the end, when creation and man will be thoroughly transformed—Much is already decided by the heaven-earth distinction—The stage is assimilated into the spiritual dimension of the actors. II.B. Infinite and Finite Freedom II.B.1. The Theme Defined (p. 189): Theo-drama is only possible when God or His representative steps onto stage as a person in the action distinct from other characters; this is seen in high points of drama i.e. mythic Greek/oriental drama and post-philosophical Christian drama of mystery plays, Shakespeare, Calderon, but not in philosophical periods where God is just the all-embracing One/nature—Question of whether Christian theo-drama can reassert itself in aftermath of philosophical reflection; it can do so only by evaluating all philosophical postulates having to do with God, but with two postulates of its own: that the Absolute is free and has a sovereign ability to send forth finite but genuinely free beings so that an opposition of freedoms can come about in a variety of forms, all without vitiating God’s infinite freedom (Chesterton, Claudel, Blondel, Kierkegaard)—Philosophical objection that this Biblical/covenantal view of finite freedom limits the infinity of the Absolute in a way irreconcilable with the philosophical view—The Biblical and philosophical views of God were in fact harmonized by Fathers and High Scholasticism, a necessary process, loss to dramatic element notwithstanding, and in this process the Christian position integrated and relativized the philosophical view; the Platonic Good/One becomes absolutely free and personal, under no compulsion even from His own nature to send out the world of finite spirits created to be free, seen best in Christological two wills—Popular, philosophically unrefined anthropomorphic view of God as one thing among many in His own place, is widespread, especially in atheism, when it protests against God in the name of science or freedom (Coreth) and thereby fails to even consider the Biblical events as part of a total religio-philosophical world of thought, on which God can be everything yet man is still something and free/having authentic selfhood—Theology should take seriously/cherish the explicit or implicit philosophy man employs when thinking about meaning of world/existence, and pursue its reflection on Biblical revelation in association with this mediating philosophical reflection—Adding the world to God does not make any “more”, and the world, even created freedom, is not in opposition to God: God is not “Wholly Other” but “Non-Other” (Cusa), though we “others” in our relation to God as we think of it, but not from God’s vantage, but rather He affirms us in Him; these are paradoxes we must keep in mind when we address God—God is other than me, but not in the way my fellow-men are, but rather as ground of my being, in and over against me, and we are most ours when most His (C.S. Lewis)—Anyone who reflects on revelation in Jesus must taken inherent philosophical thinking beyond itself, heightening contrast between infinite and finite freedom, and the abyss between holiness of infinite freedom and plight of fallen finite freedom, which can only be redeemed by the former; and also encountering the Trinitarian mystery of the “Other in the Non-Other” i.e. in the One divine Being—The two dimensions open up in the Cross where God is forsaken by God because of man’s godlessness: nothing godless is imported into God but man’s freedom is not overridden by a drama within God that seems to have nothing to do with him—The action of theo-drama is between what opposes God and what is internal to Him—Characters cannot be grasped apart from the action, but can pause to ask who they are; their nature is not a static essence, but is revealed by the action, though it is not the case that it only emerges through action (it is not the case that essentia sequitur existentiam) or coincides with action (essence is not identical to energeiai but really manifests itself in them)—All horizontal action raises vertical questions—Centers of action here are of unequal dignity and responsibility—The reversal (peripeteia) initiated by the Mediator Who is in a pact with both warring parties yet traitor to neither, Whose reversal does not mechanically unfold, but continually reveals new exciting unforeseeable aspects. II.B.2. The Interrelationship II.B.2.a. The Ancient World (p. 196): We cannot begin an approach to the dramatis personae through pure anthropology or theology, neither of which reveals the freedom of each party fully; but we can abstract from concrete dramatic conditions and inquire into the presuppositions of there being such a dramatic situation (Ricoeur)—In ancient world, fundamental question of freedom is not how free human being understands himself in polis, but how polis understands itself to be indivisible and free: “free” and “slave” are final terms in spectrum of status categories within freedom—Free citizen, and in Socrates/Plato the free individual, relates directly to divine nomos, contra Sophist libertines who criticize mythos and nomos—Later Hellenistic and Roman understandings of freedom—In Christianity, impersonal nomos is replaced by living and personal Lord Whose service is liberating, freedom being related to His love, and one can only love according to the measure of love received, and our freedom is illumined only when bound up with a personal divine freedom that promotes human freedom—Premonition of this in Greek idea of unlimited divine graciousness shining forth, expressible in only quasi-personal categories e.g. daimon, daimonion, eudaimonia (Democritus, Socrates, Plato), the latter requiring choosing what is best/noblest, received as gift of the gods. II.B.2.b. The Advance in Christianity and the Incarnation (p. 200): Within finite freedom is infinity/indifference to all finite goods or absolute longing for what is beyond our grasp; if this is not to become a Tantalus’ torment or smothered by finitude, it needs infinite freedom empowering it to realize itself as finite freedom—This cannot be done by idea of infinite goodness or a real infinite good divorced from all finitude (Aristotle, Plotinus) which cannot give but only emanate freedom; nor can it be done by finite freedom crossing into infinite and losing itself (Buddhism)—The Infinite and finite must be able to take one another into themselves, a problem the OT covenants cannot solve, but only in Christ where infinite freedom indwells finite without confusing or losing the freedoms (Chalcedon, Maximus): theo-drama has its center and history its climax in Christ’s two wills—Anthropology can only attain full stature/true measure from Christology: it must first consider relation between finite and infinite freedom, then the concrete shape of finite freedom as spiritual-corporeal being who recapitulates cosmos through movement of transcendence toward the Infinite, and finally reflect on how concretely this can only be accomplished in Christ—Finite freedom manifests itself essentially as community, a single finite freedom being inconceivable on its own. II.B.2.c. The Social Mediation and the Trinity (p. 203): Social dimension of freedom only asserted itself radically in Christianity, which made possible the declaration of human rights, which can only be meaningfully implemented on Christian basis—Finite freedom only exists in interrelationship since human beings only come to be and awaken to being human through free encounter with others—Finite man must relate to the One as both individual and community—Two forms of human unity, being-for-oneself and being-for-another, are inseparable but cannot coincide completely—Given that for Aristotle, the theoretical life is highest, however man’s relation to the state is developed, it fails to attain ultimate relation with the divine, as also in Varro’s philosophical religion—But it is the people of Israel that God primarily deals with, and individuals have value as members or representatives/mediators of this chosen people—Both one-to-one relationships become untenable, and must be transcended into NT idea of God: persons are unique and develop and attain value by opposition, and so cannot be solipsistic, but rather God must manifest Himself as personal self-surrender, self-giving and reciprocal love (Blondel)—This banishes view on which man sees himself as only individual or only community, but the unity of both unities is image and likeness of God; only on Christian view of God does community’s mediation of personal freedom have value intrinsic to and constitutive of freedom—We can investigate interrelation of two freedoms either starting with God or with man. II.B.3. Finite Freedom II.B.3.a. The Two Pillars (p. 207): It seems self-contradictory for something to be free and come up against the limits of its nature/action, but this is how our direct experience of freedom should be expressed; we have an irrefutable experience of our freedom, its limits, and our movement toward freedom—Grasping a true/good finite thing is accompanied by self-aware consciousness of being present to myself which is not something I only learn about through my acts, for the soul by its essence is habitually present to itself (Aquinas)—Aquinas’ supplementation of the Augustinian tradition on self-presence with the notions of agent intellect and synderesis—By this self-presence I know that I exist i.e. I know my being’s absolute incommunicability, and I know am open to all being i.e. I know Being’s unlimited communicability, which presupposes an illumination of knowledge i.e. a light disclosing all being and its transcendental properties—In the experience of being “I”, I pass beyond all limiting knowledge of my nature and touch being/reality in its uniqueness; I am unique, but only by making room for countless others to be unique, inasmuch as in self-knowledge the light of being expands me beyond limitation: being-a-person is unique outside the Porphyrian tree, rooted not in species (contra Aquinas on each angel being its own species) or nature but in existence as such—Communicated being is not only in general an image of God but an image of three-personal God in Whom the incommunicability of the hypostases is one with the unity of essence in each of them, which one can only know through God’s word—The person remains an individual of the human race, which gives rise to two perspectives: I am only an individual in the mass with my supernatural uniqueness added on; I was chosen to be this unique individual, and individuality is given to me so I can communicate with those of like species: both linked to creation in Christ—We have an inalienable core of freedom, an indivisibly intellectual/understanding and volitional/affirming light; every one-sided attribution of freedom to rationality (Stoicism) or pure will (Scotus, Descartes, Rousseau) leads back to instinctual level—Fundamental freedom allows us to affirm the value of things and reject their defects—Finite freedom/openness to being can only strive for what one understands as a good, but knowledge of good as good/bonum honestum removes interest from striving: indifference lets the Good be for the sake of its goodness, not to gain it for oneself—If self-possession comes first, all that follows could be seen as pursuit of self-satisfaction, but rather the whole is loved more than the self, and the right is desired for the sake of its rightness whatever enjoyment is involved—The first pole of freedom is given; the second given and laid on us, we being thrown (our Geworfenheit) into going out from ourselves to make decisions among fellow men and things, and how much we realize ourselves is up to us—If finite freedom remains alone, it become a hell like Tantalus’. II.B.3.b. Freedom as Autonomous Motion (p. 213): Greek thought explored finite freedom in all its dimensions, and the Bible takes it as a given—Starting point is the gift/task of self-possession including autonomous motion/being the source of one’s willing/choosing/motion, above all somatic conditioning and emotional drives (Plato, Aristotle) i.e. being causa sui (Gregory of Nyssa, Aquinas); man’s dignity is being-from-within-himself and governing himself (Seneca, Epictetus) and one is free when one wills what God wills in a fatherly manner. (p. 215): Christianity defended freedom against determinism, fatalism, Gnosticism, Manicheanism—First pole of freedom is autexousion, but in second pole it must realize itself in context of divine freedom—Creaturely capacity for self-determination is a power given/delegated by God, so that we can choose the good, and without which there is no responsibility/ethics (Justin, Tatian)—The Fathers never emphasize freedom for its own sake, but only as a fundamental premise for theo-drama. (p. 216): Man is created in autonomy from the beginning so that he can follow God’s counsel freely, without infinite freedom using force; finite freedom must experience all of its possibilities so as to know its finitude/poverty and so freely follow the counsels of God, and all of this occurs within divine love/providence (Irenaeus)–Origen sees the two poles, autexousion and kinesis, as closely united—God wishes us to be saved by our own decision (Clement), a non-Pelagian synergism, for it is possible only in God’s elective/perfecting pronoia—For Origen, similar to Secrétan and Sartre, creature is identical to freedom, and so the soul attains its own particular nature only on the basis of its free decision; freedom is linked to rationality, distinct from the motion of dead matter, plants, and animals—God in His providence allows evil things for a good purpose, including coming to know one’s weakness and dependence on grace (Origen); being sated with sin, one sees its harm and comes to attain salvation all the more surely (Irenaeus)—Basil and Gregory of Nyssa on the first pole of finite freedom: we are the fathers of our own choices, and so in a sense of ourselves; we can create something God cannot i.e. evil (Nyssa) and Adam is a created god in virtue of his freedom (Ephrem the Syrian) and so man can be a genuine dialogue partner with God, by his finite godlikeness—Evil must breed to its greatest extent before it comes up against its own limits, and the divine surgeon can lance the wound (Nyssa). (p. 222): Augustine holds that free will is the origin of evil, but in order to be free it must be subject to the eternal law, which is the eternal freedom that is the object of man’s love; self-possession is possession of God—His anti-Pelagian writings are grounded in earlier writings and develop the second pole of freedom more than ever before. (p. 222): Man is essentially rational and volitional (Diadochus of Photike, Maximus)—Distinction between natural and gnomic will, the latter caught between philosophical understanding and the lack of direction in the will in the state of fallen nature—Anselm defines freedom in terms of direction toward absolute good maintained for its own sake—Bernard sees an absoluteness in human freedom that breaks analogy between God and man in favor of identity, and this freedom cannot be lost—Either/or of autonomy or heteronomy is overcome at the outset of the Christian tradition: Spinoza/Leibniz and Schopenhauer/Sartre are subsumed in this synthesis of the two poles. (p. 224): Aquinas links the two poles in his central insight that esse grounds both self-being and communication with the Absolute—Two problems: freedom of will as such contra determinism; freedom of choice contra confusion of finite freedom with infinite freedom or pure spontaneity—Free will seeks things only under aspect of good, and searches all of being for the absolute Good, determined by itself alone, but presupposing rationality/judgment, unlike in animals’ conditional freedom—Man strives to fulfill himself in the Absolute, but although he is causa sui, he cannot achieve this by his own power or by any finite good (DeLubac’s Thomistic paradox), and so attains fulfillment in a dimension beyond its own striving—DeLubac shows that Pico della Mirandola’s view of freedom in his oration “On the Dignity of Man” is not modern; rather, on this view, freedom is given by God to allow him to determine his nature, though man is in tension between being the microcosm and transcendent to the world, the mundi copula, and his fulfillment can only come about by God’s Spirit—Newman holds that man is first cause/principle of creativity in the moral world. II.B.3.c. Freedom as Consent (p. 227): Second pole of freedom, seen in the first, means that we are free such that we occupy an elevated position of indifference, which can only be realized by making choices—Our going out of ourselves to the other is a sign of poverty and wealth, requiring choice between self-enrichment and handing oneself over to the Giver of free openness—We cannot/should not incorporate into ourselves other finite freedoms, but the freedom of the other must disclose itself by opening its inner area, a social interchange in which freedoms enrich each other in selflessness; ultimately, relation to infinite freedom requires its self-disclosure, since the infinitude of finite freedom cannot reach its origin by itself—Salvation history shows us a paidagogia that leads from estrangement to parrhesia i.e. free mutual openness, to which we have access, but of which we await the ultimate fulfillment—In OT, there is opposition between divine and human beings, hence an element of heteronomy in old law; only in light of post-Easter reflection on Christ’s preaching can we see what the fulfillment of finite freedom in infinite freedom means, though the Church must combat the alienating notion that God is one being among others, and his law one among others—Stoicism and Plotinus provided formal model of relationship between the One and the multiplicity that results from it, which corresponds to rational requirements of thought, but lacks living content of Biblical revelation, and Christianity heightens formal model into relationship between freedoms in which finite freedom arises out of but persists in primal freedom, really free because of its origin in freedom. (p. 230): 1. Christian answer to Parmenides paradox is the Holy Spirit, Who, when poured out into believers’ hearts, liberates finite freedom to embrace its own freedom, by initiating its participation in infinite freedom, a theonomic pole of finite freedom, which does not interfere with the autexousion—Man’s definitive/normative relationship with God is as child, heir, friend, with straightforward access to infinite freedom, an experience of infinite grace governed by free self-disclosure; a sense of being privileged swallows up all notion of obligation—Infinite freedom need not look for its perfection, and so it is blessedness, which gives a new experience of fully liberated freedom, a harmony of dispositions/compacitum/consensus—Absolute freedom’s immanence in finite freedom in experience of life was starting point for Augustine’s existential thought; finite freedom is only fulfilled in infinite freedom: the former cannot be compelled, and the latter is free to impart itself in grace—Pelagian elevation of the first pole is really a falling back from NT Spirit to OT letter, where the relation between freedoms remains external—Finite freedom remains eternally distinct from infinite freedom, but is fulfilled in and through infinite freedom which is freely self-giving love: we have become sons, yet we remain servants; command and gift mutually sublimate one another, in inspiration/simple presence of the Spirit in us—Heretical interpretations (Jansen, Luther) absolutize partial aspects and upset Augustinian balance. (p. 234): 2. Clement saw the Christian gnostic’s freedom as a stable ultimate condition, free from passions—Origen equated finite freedom with ability to choose good or evil, a pure mobility, where even God is a good that is not necessarily embraced, and one can be sated with the Good and so turn away—Gregory of Nyssa adopts Plotinus’ view that God is identical to His will, and that the finite freedom of nous is closest image of God, and is completely dependent on God—Augustine moves from Adam’s posse non peccare through sin and redemption to non posse peccare; Gregory contrasts finite freedom infinitely open to infinite freedom realized eschatologically in Christ, to mixture of this pure movement with pathic element introduced by God in anticipation of man’s estrangement from the good so that human nature will come up against its limits in temporality and evil—Finite freedom wells up from its source in infinite freedom eternally, and must realize itself by assimilation to its source—To be free is to be autonomous and without a master, that is, to be virtuous, which can only be in God—The innermost nature of freedom of choice is movement toward self-realization in infinite freedom, exemplarily in Christ, such that freedom can become fixed in the good, where in its genuine movement, kinesis and stasis/repose coincide, and since infinite freedom is ever-greater, Platonic-Origenistic satiation is no longer possible, and increasing virtue is no longer measured by time—Gregory’s achievement was to see what Greek thought saw as the poverty of human nature to be its sublimity; due to his role in the Origenism-Evagrius controversy, Maximus cannot follow Gregory on this, and falls back on Aristotelian view of kinesis. (p. 238): Aquinas synthesizes Eastern and Western views—To see how infinite freedom indwells finite, we return to primal act of self-knowledge/knowledge of being in soul’s self-presence; what really is, shows itself to be true and a good to be affirmed—The “I” always discloses not only Being as judgable/usable by me, but being-in-its-totality as well, within which horizon other beings are seen to constitute poles/self-being of their own—Soul, as “for itself”, is free, but only in virtue of the illumination of the totality of Being, which requires respecting/letting be the freedom of others, good inasmuch as I cannot absorb them into me—Soul’s self-possession, self-luminosity, judging, striving are transcendental modes of all-pervasive Being, which indwells the soul, but can only be in subsisting beings, but this requires a non-participative subjectivity disclosing itself as coextensive with Being-in-its-totality, possessing infinite reason/will/freedom; if this disclosure has already taken place, the soul is faced with a choice: to see the immanence of divine freedom in/as ground of its own, or to aim to be its own ground, surrendering itself to idolatry by fixing necessity of formal object of Being on finite beings—Buddha’s infinite thirst dispels philosophical illusion that man can fulfill by himself the desiderium naturale visionis, and this illusion is further overcome by divine self-disclosure—Finite freedom comes to see its spiritual, free acts rooted in primal depths of infinite freedom, Deus interior intimo meo. II.B.4. Infinite Freedom II.B.4.a. The Dawn of Infinite Freedom (p. 243): 1. Infinite freedom i.e. personal command of oneself, appears only in NT—Extra-Biblical views: Personal freedom of God/Zeus that remains anthropomorphic/limited; Supra-personal freedom of the Good that pours itself out but cannot judge ethical value of individual lives (Plotinus)—In OT, Yahweh is a liberating God, sovereign over all opposing powers, unlimited by creation, to Whose freedom ours has no inner access, though we can share His wisdom—Lack of reciprocity is broken down in Christ Who penetrates all things and is made to be sin—When they lose their path, Jewish speculation slides into gnosis and Christian speculation into voluntarism—Unlike in Greek thought, in Christianity, the world is not linked by necessity to God, nor is it the result of a fall, but just depends on absolute freedom/God’s good pleasure; the world of ideas is God Himself/an expression of His creative inventiveness—Contrast of Avicenna/Aquinas on God being known through the act of being, with Scotus/Damien/Ockham’s voluntarism and resulting nominalism, empiricism, positivism, or a-priorism, since divine freedom absorbs all rationality into itself—Descartes’ notion of the contingency of even “eternally” valid laws (comparison to Dietrich of Freiburg and Aquinas)—On Luther’s voluntarism, where the absoluteness of divine will appears in paradoxical justification of the sinner, and ultimately only God is free—Spinoza defines God as causa sui and so voluntarism disappears, but God’s willed self-positing (Descartes) reappears in the tragic dualisms he influences where the will is blind, free, irrational (e.g. Schopenhauer, Wagner, Scheler, Mann, E. Hartman, Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Bergson, Freud, Klages)—Rationalisms that systematize appearing in terms of functionalism or structuralism, cutting link between existents and Being (e.g. Wittgenstein)—The anthropomorphic view that the more perfect a being, the more free it is in determining itself, so the Absolute must be entirely free self-positing, and so God could have been something else (Secrétan, Hamelin); this results in view that freedom is annihilating void that defines forms/natures and then dissolves them (Sartre)—Another consequence of Christian idea of infinite freedom is doctrine of (double) predestination, where ultimate basis for outcome of human existence is sought in unfathomable abyss of divine freedom, which swallows up finite freedom as the final judge—NT is unacquainted with later problems, and we must keep before our eyes how infinite freedom was pleased to appear in the midst of finitude. (p. 251): 2. Philosophical suspicion that if the world now depends on God’s good pleasure, then it is arbitrary—In OT, God’s truth is His faithfulness (emeth), His word is one with His act in pursuit of man’s salvation; we can only have a reliable picture of the world through trust and inter-personal dependability, and logical truth cannot be abstracted from personal truthfulness—Jesus realized God’s Yes inherent in all His promises; God’s infinite freedom in the covenant between infinite and finite freedom rests on His faithfulness to His own nature: man is anchored objectively only in God’s truthfulness and subjectively in his own trust, and this attitude cannot reflectively assure itself of the truth, but must commit itself to the truth freely offered—In natural religion, the finite is fragile and insubstantial, and the Absolute supports all else, but without sense of infinite freedom; in Christianity, e.g. in contemptus mundi, the world is not unreal as such, but subjected to vanitas on account of man’s sin, but in itself is very good—Individual as such is affirmed as unique image of the free God; created reality, in Christianity, stands above itself in infinite freedom, which is final judge and which gives and says Yes to all things, including finite freedom down to its last detail. (p. 254): 3. We are aware of infinite freedom only through the Bible and philosophical reflection on its implications—God entirely knows/wills/affirms/grasps himself utterly, with no primal ground/un-ground prior to this; He is the reason for all finite things and Being, and He is not mere self-thinking or logic (Aristotle, Hegel) for reality is not simply thought (Plotinus)—Coincidence of infinite being and infinite self-possession moves us beyond necessity and chance/contingence: God’s freedom coincides with act-quality of His nature—God is also free to do what He will with Himself: He can surrender/share Himself in the Trinitarian processions; absolute freedom of self-possession can understand itself as limitless self-giving, and each Person is Himself by giving Himself or letting Himself be given/expropriated by another, and love/self-surrender is part of the bliss of absolute freedom: identity of having and giving, wealth and poverty, not one before the other (contra Idealism and Arianism)—Absolute freedom among the divine hypostases requires that there are areas of infinite freedom that are already there and cannot be compressed in unity/identity, with something like infinite duration and space in acts of reciprocal love so that life of communio can develop, though without temporality; there cannot be the fatal all-knowing attitude of “being in the picture”, which eviscerates the joys of expectation, hope, fulfillment, giving, receiving, finding oneself in the other, being over-fulfilled by Him, mutual acknowledgement and adoration (von Speyr), reciprocal petition and parrhesia in prayer—The divine nature is not a common untouchable treasure, but is defined through the modes/hypostases of divine being—There can be wonder/philosophical act in the Absolute—The hypostases are eternally open to one another, but not interchangeable; they are perfectly transparent to one another, but each possesses a kind of impenetrable personal mystery: each is as free as the others, but is also co-determined by the ordo processionis/Trinitarian unity—Each can do surprising things, and only in finitude can fulfilling an expectation denote conclusion and bring boredom/satiety, but in eternal life this is never possible (Nyssa) for God is always greater than Himself on the basis of His Triune freedom—Since letting-be belongs to the nature of infinite freedom, finite freedom can fulfill itself there without alienation. (p. 259): 4. Everything that arises from one freedom is a mystery for other freedoms because no adequate reason can be found for it but its own freedom; the more free, the more mysterious, hence the reason that even those revelations that are definitively disclosed are still the “mysteries of Christianity”—God is negatively incomprehensible in natural religion, but this is transformed into positive incomprehensibility by Christ—Christian familiarity with God, equally at home with most profound adoration and childlike closeness, for infinite freedom is both realm of incomprehensible sovereignty and inner-divine love, and so everything is both crystal-clear speech/clarion summons to responsibility and fairy-tale gift—World is created for nothing i.e. out of love that is free, with no reason behind it. II.B.4.b. Facilitating Finite Freedom (p. 260): While Trinitarian life is not a becoming, creaturely becoming is an image of that life—The ‘not’ in ‘the Son is not the Father’ is positive, as is not holding onto but giving away the divine life—So transition from infinite to finite freedom is not an absolute paradox—God does not need the world, even to display His omnipotence; God does not pour himself out by nature, but the freedom by which He wills Himself and the world are the same freedom—The world is made in the Son instrumentally and as its pattern and goal, a gift from Father to Son, as Godhead is, and an opportunity for Son to thank and glorify Father—Spirit is reciprocal glorification of Father and Son, and this also is implemented in creation. (p. 262): 1. The question of where there is a place for the world if God is the ocean of Being (Damascene)—Metaphorically, the Father is “empty” when He has generated the Son, and the Son is “poor” in that He can only receive not take the Godhead, and the Spirit as “breath” is insubstantial—Realms of freedom in God come from self-giving and letting be of the hypostases, the positive form of infinite love, not a retreat, nor is a retreat or kenosis needed for God to create; this is contra Cabbalists, who do not preserve immutability, and contra Blondel who anthropomorphically thinks God has to create space in himself first—Better is to speak of creation ex nihilo or that divine will is the “substance out of which” things are made (Irenaeus) or that things are the substantiation of divine will (Nyssa)—God thereby gives form to Himself/His supernothingness/superbeing in the world (Erigena), though this formulation tends to pantheism, though it captures the idea that the nothingness from which the world is made must be found in infinite freedom i.e. in omnipotence and in the Trinitarian letting-be of the hypostatic acts—The ‘not’ of the creature is not the same as the ‘not’ in the Godhead, though the latter secures the analogy between creature and God; distance between God and world is grounded in distance between God and God. (p.266): 2. The question of which world God decided to create—Universe is created in the Son, and we are chosen in Him since before the foundation of the world, and all is to be recapitulated in Him; He is the one “idea” that embraces, facilitates, and fulfills everything else, to which He is predestined not just by being exemplary, final, and efficient cause, but by His place in the Trinity, given that there is a world and finite freedom: He is infinite freedom in the mode of readiness, receptivity, obedience, appropriate response—Clash between philosophical analogia entis with its maior dissimilitudo and theological analogia fidei with its participatio divinae naturae; the incarnate Son is the concrete analogia entis—Difficult to see how Son can both receive freedom from the Father, and have it in the same sovereign manner: but all the Father “does” is the Son, and so in receiving Himself, the Son receives originless, self-possessing God i.e. fullness of being—Onto-theological categories cannot be replaced with personological categories—Self-positing finite freedom (Marx, Nietzsche) takes one outside the concrete analogia entis—Drama of finite freedoms requires that the Son be its ground and goal, determining its entire course; but since one idea can be infinitely split without being multiplied, there can be infinite differentiation in God’s plan for the world—It is not the case that God arbitrarily chooses one out of infinite set of possible worlds, for no one is best; one without sin would not allow Son to show absolute quality of obedient love in being made sin and crucified, but neither did God have to choose this world, nor is sin the presupposition of love’s epiphany—Though this world is best inasmuch as it was chosen by God; compare to great artwork which manifests freedom so we cannot say it is the artist’s best absolutely—Revelation is exclusively concerned with the real world, so we must abandon as fruitless all preoccupation with other possible worlds; possible only has value in keeping open real freedom—Personal idea of each finite freedom is a unique participation in Son’s uniqueness; one becomes more unique the more one approaches the prototype, an exemplary identity (Siewerth) mediated by analogy—Since prototype is divine Being/ipsum esse subsistens, then non-subsistent esse is in touch with all-embracing reality, so opening up to prototype coincides with abolition of limitation—Freedom is communication, and this opens up new realms of freedom and dramatic plot, all kept together by prototype which is most universal because most concrete—All this is true even prescinding from concrete historical modalities, but also in worst modality i.e. status naturae lapsae, in which obedience of Son represents concrete universal idea of relation between heaven and earth in form of crucified love, and so in highest contingency attains highest necessity. II.B.4.c. God is Latent in Creation and Accompanies It (p. 271): When finite freedom is conceived as non-divine, it seems to limit/oppose divine freedom (Renouvier), and require a self-limitation or even elimination of the divine (Hartmann)—The nearer a being is to God, the greater its autonomy (Aquinas), yet this requires greater gift from God, and God’s positing of limits only to remove them—Creation as tragic because requiring putting an abyss between God and creatures (C.S. Lewis), but finite freedom can also only realize itself in infinite freedom—God’s motiveless loving giving of creatures and making room for them is good, beautiful, glorious, full of meaning—They only gain room for freedom is God withdraws and becomes latent, not absent but incognito, keeping open many paths for freedom in reality. (p. 273): 1. God is latent as in the parable of the talents, giving them his wealth and an area to exercise their freedom/imagination—God is present in creation as evident but hidden, with Being as his present image but allowing His self-subsistence to be disputed, but also prompting us with a decision whether to be a pilgrim to the Absolute following the real (Philo, Hilary, Augustine, Aquinas) or to be resigned and bury the talent and see freedom as my own possession—Since to finite freedom God is latent, there is the possibility of profound error in the realm of the finite, allowing foreground goods to obscure greater but more distant goods, or even allowing one to refuse to think of one’s happiness—Question of whether by finite goods man could ever have found his way to the Creator—Man’s straying brings to light the center of God’s plan, that infinite freedom will follow man into utter alienation: this also facilitates man’s freedom, and is more latent—Erring freedom is put back into freedom both outwardly and inwardly by having the burden of its error taken by Another, but now the choice is confronted with the Crucified made available as food: God makes a greater gift of love and greater challenge to finite freedom—The Holy Spirit expands man’s power of seeing and choosing, but requires accepting humiliation of Cross—One must learn to see that God’s latency is God’s accompanying of man out of loving respect for his freedom. (p. 276): 2. Finite freedom is not in a void, but in infinite freedom, governed by idea of Son who uniformly permeates it as prototype of creation and accompanies it inasmuch as creation is in dramatic motion—Accompaniment is homogeneous and unchanging because embracing everything, is definite though we do not have complete view, and as Providence is dynamic. (p. 277): a. There is only one plan, embracing everything, for God is eternally present to every possible and actual time, always including God’s “answer” to every word utterable by finite freedom—This encompasses not just individuals, but groups, nations, states, Church—This plan is not a predetermining fate, but makes room for freedom: depending on what we do, we will encounter a different constellation of the same infinite idea, so God does a new work without having to make a new decision—No need to oppose immutability of God, or in general to oppose inchoate philosophical categories to revelation—The unchangeable character of God’s purpose is rooted in His essential faithfulness to Himself; eternal life contains superabundance of times and spaces for freedom to operate, and also for his plan—This is why the OT gives the impression that God can change, though all such situations look ahead to the Cross which is strictest justice and highest mercy—In theology it is best to avoid speaking of divine immutability so as to emphasize absolute freedom manifested in His plan to pursue us; from the world’s standpoint, the love revealed in the Son’s self-surrender is most permanent and moving reality there is. (p. 280): b. God’s idea of the world is both infinite and definite—Whatever God gives, even rewards, retains character of a free gift though it is a definite and ordered part of the plan—The laws of theology can arrange around the sovereignly free Incarnation/Cross/Resurrection all events of salvation history, world history, and nature—Vertical beam of Cross is Son’s readiness to obey Father, horizontal is that this obedience is internal norm of every human life/work: this is the infrastructure making worldly existence possible—God’s commandments are binding and liberating, infinite and definite. (p. 282): c. Infinite freedom/providence accompanies man: its possibilities are not static places to visit, but they journey and lead those who follow them—Providence, grounded in the Son, is progressive assimilation to the Son—Participation in the One is by individual and incommunicable and by universal Being, but participation in the Son also involves giving of an incommunicable name and fellowship among unique individuals that is no longer just community of Being but stamped by uniqueness of the Word as something simultaneously universal and particular i.e. the Body of many members—Providence accompanies man toward the Body of Christ which unfolds in many called, foreknown, predestined members—As non-subsistent Being embraces all finite entities, so the Word shared Eucharistically is the medium in which persons can subsist as unique individuals. (p. 284): No need to speak of change in God: the inexhaustible One can present itself in new forms at any period without change, except to our perspective—Providence includes both definite counsels to me, and our definite banishment to the trackless realm of the Son’s carrying out the Father’s commission. II.B.5. The Acceptance of Freedom (p. 284): By its nature, finite freedom is set on a path and pointed in a direction, given law and instruction internally by infinite freedom—The Giver’s gift is not completely latent, but is recognizable, even to the one who finds that all have the same experience of the world’s baffling givenness: our own self is a given, this can only occur in infinite freedom, and in this context finite freedom must make a decision about itself i.e. choose its own “idea.” II.B.5.a. Self as Gift (p. 285): If light of being is not obscured in him, the conscious free man will experience the fact of his existence as a good and as given without merit or contribution on his part; though other values can seem higher, consciousness utters an involuntary limitless Yes to its reality, with an awareness that another has bestowed on him the Yes of being, which is precious—Blindness of value of Being in Positivism, which regards reality as raising no questions and being “just there”, “the given” saying too much where there is no giver: death of philosophical and theological wonder—To awaken to oneself, an “I” must be called “thou” by another “I”, through whom is manifested an Absolute “I” who eternally generates Absolute “Thou” and is one God in the Holy Spirit with Him: this causes absolute holiness/preciousness of Absolute Being to shine forth in limitless self-affirmation and freedom; God is never “just there” but is always most “improbable” miracle in the self-surrender of generation and spiration, where the Holy Spirit is the hypostasis of all that is meant by “gift”—Only on this basis is finite freedom addressed as a “thou”; left to itself, the finite could at most worship and extol God Who as Non-Other is no one’s other, but the finite can address God as “Thou” only in answer to His “thou” in the Trinity—God is a good to me for I am a good to Him, and seeing this allows me to trust the gift of being/freedom and so affirm myself—Because of Trinity, worship is not threatened by being pantheistically swallowed up by the Infinite, or shrinking into mere ritualistic awareness of distance, or anxiety; we can be thankful in the Trinity—Cusa on gift of freedom—Bérulle on gift of life and deeper gift of the Son—Fénelon, Laberthonnière, Marcel on gift of the “I”—In Thomistic ontological difference, the entity has no preexistence in which participation in act of being is given, for both entity and reality are gifts; nature is not inferior to being for the latter totally permeates the nature: the difference is in its being admitted to/gift-character of existence—What is given to me is an incommunicable subjectivity, which can communicate itself—My act of gratitude is not to an anonymous Absolute Good/all-embracing reality, but to a “Thou”, which becomes intelligible when we know of God’s self-expression in the Word; words are not inferior to ineffable Being—Gratitude for gift of self means “owing” oneself i.e. realizing oneself by return to Absolute freedom, ultimately becoming identical to the “idea” reserved for the finite “thou” within the Infinite “Thou”; this involves no heteronomy or alienation. II.B.5.b. Answered Prayer (p. 292): Finite freedom can only realize itself in Infinite freedom, but it has no claim on it because it is free, but the latter is open to the former through pure grace—God’s pledge of faithfulness and accompaniment requires that we interceded; this holds in general, apart from particular kinds of petitionary prayer appropriate to fallen or redeemed man; most fundamental petition is that I will be helped out the masks of the empirical “I” behind which my true “I” is hidden even to me, so we can see the true path of the will of God (Heim)—To fail to pray is to fail to be accompanied in this way—God does not need to be mutable to take finite freedom seriously: as First Cause with all time present to Him, God has antecedent knowledge of all creaturely possibilities/decisions, and guides Providence so all secondary causes are taken account of (Origen) and He can enfold all the wanderings of the finite in His ever-richer infinity—Biblical theology preserves what is valid in philosophy and myth; philosophical critique of mythic/magical petitionary prayer, on which this prayer seems like just attuning oneself to what is good, or superfluous because one can only pray for what one God will already grant, and so it dissolves in either contemplation or ethical action, with resignation—Christian prayer cannot be split into philosophical and popular/mythic prayer—The immutability of the “God of the philosophers” can only be combined with vitality in the Trinity—Trinitarian God is never fate, but accompanies us so as to call us to deeper fellowship. (p. 296): This can be elucidated through Trinity’s self-disclosure in Jesus’ petitionary prayer—He is certain His prayer will be answered, and enfolds us in this too, an elevation above the mythic and philosophical—Jesus is unlimitedly available to Father’s will, but He is certain the Father hears Him always—Son’s obedience is the a priori of His human existence and His emptying Himself of the form of God expresses His obedience and His eternal will—What could be the case de potentia absoluta filii is impossible de potentia trinitaria i.e. that the Son overstep the bounds of His mission—Despite His certainty that His prayers are heard, He never dispenses with petitionary prayer/childlike receptivity: this perfect obedience is the pattern for Christian petition—Jesus’ human will is restricted by the Father’s, but His will of absolute obedience is not; the person with lively faith can experience something analogous—God expects man to ask Him, not on his own merits, but as belonging to the Covenant: God always prays to God along with finite freedom—Man can forgive because he lives in an attitude communicated to him by the God Who forgives, but he must always ask for grace—Circles of petition and bearing fruit/life, and of request and thanksgiving—The realization of Christ in the assembly is communio in the Holy Spirit, and so participation in Trinitarian circumincessio—Finite freedom can only “influence” infinite in realization of historical Covenant where the Trinitarian mystery is revealed; only this avoids God being rigidly immutable or mythologically changeable and so finite. II.B.5.c. The Form of Life: Being Born of God (p. 302): Once the decision to create a world is made in eternity, divine will no longer has indifference to the finite, for God has a particular will for each finite subject, though His act as such is indivisible, and its goal embraces in unity the plurality of the world—The incarnate Son is God’s primal “idea” in creating the universe, and it contains the primal/exemplary ideas of all individual creatures, through which those creatures are related to God—The abstract universal relationship is not false but incomplete, for finite freedom cannot concretize a relationship of this kind but must receive it: the philosophical/nature is perfected by/contained in the theological/grace; one must leave the accustomed world-stage and appear before the Master of the play, become indifferent/unmade, and receive its vocation/destiny, in an idea that is not created but an aspect of God/divine will (Maximus), and that has its truth from/for unity in Christ—The solution is the doctrine of the mystical Body of Christ to which every creature is oriented, in which every creature is incorporated—To be unmade is not to sink into the abyss of God, but to be fashioned in/according to the Son (Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises), for grace summons finite into infinite freedom—To be reunited with one’s idea that one has fallen away from requires the charisma of the Holy Spirit Who liberates man to understand his own immediately guiding genius, and which requires vows/covenants, which is both freedom and unfolding of a divine necessity (Staudenmeier)—In realm of sin/original sin, opening of finite to infinite freedom requires wearying effort of breaking through ego-entanglement, which requires emphasis on creature’s nothingness, but must avoid attributing creaturely non-being to universal Being of God (which Eckhart does not entirely avoid, but Tauler and Ignatius do)—Eckhart on acceptance of the path God sets—Ignatius’ life/form of life i.e. charisma/vocation is heart of Paul’s inner new man i.e. the substantial nature of the person in his earthly manifestation, for which we must leave everything. (p. 308): The “idea” offered to man comes into being only when the Father declares Himself in the Son, the mystery of being “born of God” in which the creature is adopted into the process whereby the Son comes forth from the Father—This becomes operative for the individual in the womb of the Virgin and thence in the womb of the Church, acquiring concrete forms in Baptism/Confirmation—Church with Mary as prototype, the totality of the Logos coming to be in the world, precedes the “idea” of her individual members and incorporates them into herself/Christ—The individual, in being born of God/conceived by Christ, must give evidence by life according to Christ’s pattern so as to become a fruitful “mother of Christ”—From our perspective, we allow ourselves to be refashioned/assimilated to Christ; from His, the Word allows Himself to take shape in the totality of His Body and in the individual (Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Origen, Methodius, leading to syntheses on being born of God of Maximus, Erigena, Eckhart)—If this Biblical idea becomes too Neo-Platonic, creaturely being is seen as just a variety of participations of the one Idea that is the Son, the nature/natural self-being of natural beings would threatened to merge with their participation in Christ through grace, and being created and being born of God would be just one process—Plurality of created beings is in potentiality to pluriform unity of Christ—Church belongs not to creatures but to the “First-born”; she is the organism through which He imprints Himself on the universe, and she stands in contrast to the created universe that has been put under His feet. II.B.6. Grace (p. 312): Existence of finite freedom presupposes genuine creation/gift of that freedom by infinite freedom, whereby finite freedom exists “in itself” with an essence/nature, not merely defined in relation to infinite freedom, yet remaining a gift—The more it appreciates it is a gift to itself, the more in will be thankful as it takes control of itself, but never so much that it does not fulfill itself, exercising autonomy in the Holy Spirit—We know nothing of another world of pure nature i.e. a world where God did not create all things in Christ; in the real world, finite being can always experience its own gift-character, whether through external or internal revelation—Autonomy can be developed either by annexing an area where no one may interfere e.g. in categorical imperative, or by realizing autonomy cannot be seen in isolation from infinite freedom, and that by trying to see it so one must either deny infinite freedom or see it as external law—Contra Deism, gift of finite freedom is not a final act from perspective of infinite freedom, but rather it is a constant continuing act, conservatio in esse, which produces the gift and proffers the Giver as its home—Thanksgiving is the proper, non-servile act of finite freedom; imperative to give thanks is constant reminder that it owes its autonomy to infinite freedom—Finite freedom must go to God and must transcend itself, but cannot annex itself to the infinite, but must continually encounter the gift-character of the divine realm in a new way; even if transcendence is rooted in our nature, it requires self-disclosure of the divine, our act being co-determined by infinite freedom—The creatures is “in” grace when it follows through its indebtedness for itself to its origin and its goal, but grace is withdrawn when it refuses this fundamental act and rests content in its freedom or regards this freedom as originating in itself and self-transcendence as possible by its own efforts—In speaking of God we are not restricted to personal categories as opposed to ontic, for the personal is ontic—Grace is offer of love and being (not thing) by God; God’s being coincides with His “being gift” and “being love”—Finite freedom’s absolute non-resistance to infinite freedom allows itself to be created from the Father with the Son (as in Mary’s fiat), allowing the Holy Spirit to enter in absolute fruitfulness, enabling perfect self-transcendence toward God, embodying God in the world, and overcoming distance of heaven and earth—Defective instances: 1. The one who in principle does not offer resistance but cannot carry out this principle totally, and so he shares in sanctifying grace (a habitus, albeit one that cannot ontically increase without increase in knowledge and love) but his fruitfulness is limited; 2. The one who offers no resistance because he has not reached age of reason, and who is born of God because of solidarity with Church in baptism; 3. The one who rejects infinite grace in him, fails to acknowledge what he owes to God, and cannot share in being born of the Father, but has within Him God’s offer of love in actual or prevenient grace, which allows him to embrace it or harden himself in the “No” of the sin against the Holy Spirit—Infinite freedom cannot fail to be present where finite freedom is; God’s immanence in latter through grace is not alien or other. Third Excursus: “The Image and Likeness of God” (p. 316): So far, formal freedom has been treated as including both men and angels, and is the formal presupposition of any theo-dramatic theory—Topics of image and likeness of God characterize pure dialogue-relationship between man and Creator prior to all action—Review of literature—Doctrine of imago Dei determines all theology and relation between reason and revelation, Church and culture, faith and humanity, and all philosophy and knowledge (Brunner, Hess, Görres)—There are various areas of tension in thinking about image of God—1. While phrase in Gen. 1:26 is important, it did not have a lot of influence on OT, and in NT it is used only in passing, but its importance to the Fathers is justified by the fact that it summarizes fundamental truth presupposed in whole Biblical drama of God and man—2. Tension within exegesis of selem and demut: for a long time, there was a priori interpretation of these as what raises us above animals i.e. reason, self-consciousness, free will, personality, responsibility; Barth interpreted them as image of Trinity in man-woman relationships and human relationships in general; others e.g. von Rad interpreted them as including both soul and distinctive bodily form from soul especially upright posture, drawing on Hebrew view of man as body-soul unity, and on Hebrew and other Oriental anthropomorphic ideas of God—But rather, “image of God” is an attribute of man by which He is in a particular relation to God as whole living body-soul being, as reflected in Ps. 8 and Gen. 9:6—As God cannot be defined, neither can His image (Epiphanius), but the two are ordered to each other in an analogia—Gen. 1:26 has to do with man’s essence, and so the image can never be lost (Irenaeus and Catholic exegesis, as well as that of Barth, contra Luther/Calvin) or at least formal but not material image cannot be lost (Brunner)—Barth tries to avoid analogia entis here with analogia proportionalitatis of relationship: as man must relate to man to be man, so God must relate to God to be God; this is still analogy of reality i.e. ens—Kaufmann on analogia historicitatis/dramatica: as man’s essence is determined by/determines history, so God determines Himself in His aseity—Thielicke on avoiding any attention to image that would divert from God—3. Likeness seems to involve man’s nature as spirit/person, reason and freedom, dominion—Some Fathers e.g. Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian see body as belonging to the image—Greek thought establishes what is proper to man in his spiritual nature, but absolutizes it; Biblical thought can affirm that the mortal body is part of the totality God wishes to save/share in immortality: philosophical is integrated into theological anthropology, and thinking about the Bible always involves philosophizing, as seen not only in Fathers, but even in Sir. 17 and Wis. 2:23 with their Platonic-Stoic influence—4. Withdrawal from God removed part of dominance through death, and so they made a justified distinction between image and likeness, though this cannot be read from the literal text, a distinction between ontic and ethical sides of the image—5. Distinction between OT image in man in general and NT image in Christ alone to which we must be conformed; the distinction between image and likeness must be combined with distinction between earthly and heavenly images, the first rooted in the second—This theme in Ireneaus: man lost likeness i.e. grace/gift of Holy Spirit, but gains this back in Christ, though essential constituent of man’s nature, body-soul and hidden image of Logos, cannot be lost—Contra some polemics, the image does have a natural and a supernatural element; in Fathers, salvation-historical categories and these analytic categories coinhere, and nature cannot be taken as self-subsistent in the sense of unrelated to God; William of St. Thierry on experiential element of image, and Richard of St. Victor on interpersonal perspective on image of Trinity —Distinction between inchoate image in Adam and unveiled image in Christ, the latter restoring former and allowing it to transcend itself and attain unexpected likeness to God—Possibility of defining image of God as finite freedom in rational nature, which must act so as to move toward God and realize its likeness or move away and lose this likeness (Tertullian, Origen, and later Fathers): Christ is the authentic image, and man at his best is according to the image—Freedom is not sublime indifference in choosing, but clinging to God i.e. what the soul of Jesus does—Finite freedom’s yearning penetrates ever more deeply into infinite freedom, progressively unveiling the image, understood Christologically (Nyssa joining Platonic and Biblical thought)—Infinite freedom is imageless (Plotinus)—Actual image in finite freedom persists as it transcends itself to infinite freedom in epektasis/excessus—Interior/ascending movement (Augustine, Bernard) has difficulty preserving distance between creature and Creator (Origen, Erigena, Herbert of Boseham), but this is balanced by thought that infinite freedom produces an image in the Godhead, and so the movement leads not to identity but nuptial union, not absorbing but setting the finite ideas within the Idea of the Son (Bernard, Bonaventure)—Staudenmaier on correspondence between divine idea and created reality, which are distinct yet inseparable, contra any idea of natura pura, and Drey on unity of natural and supernatural vocation in total Idea; subjective perfecting of man cannot add to objective divine perfection, but can only enter into latter: God has handed over His Idea to man’s fulfillment—Union with God/perfect likeness goes beyond imaging God; finite freedom is non-heteronomous within absolute infinite freedom—In man, nature and freedom confront each other as opposites resolvable only by revelation of higher Will, in which man can touch ground of being and of freedom: higher than existence and relation, being is freedom and vice versa (Deutinger). II.C. Man II.C.1. Man the Undefinable (p. 335): Finite freedom belongs also to angels, but man is God’s “partner” and the focus of Biblical interest; formal relationship between finite and infinite freedom becomes dramatic/concrete/real in man, and we cannot have an external vantage on it—We can ask about man’s essence only in the midst of dramatic performance of existence i.e. the only anthropology is dramatic, and so it could not emerge in theological aesthetics—First act was status naturae integrae, second was status naturae lapsae, current is status naturae reparatae, last will be stauts naturae glorificatae, though these are not entirely temporally distinct: 2nd and 3rd overlap, while 3rd shares in 4th by hope, and it is not clear how much saints share in 1st—Man knows he is condition of alienation/fallenness, as Plato and Indian philosophies know, though philosophies of microcosm/macrocosm ignore it, a continuum also represented in theologies, from those of mere spoilatio in gratuitis to those of corruptio naturae, leading to question of how much of man’s essence has been retained—Experientially, our personal freedom operates in universal spiritual nature that has its own rules, goals, values, though we do not participate in freedom of others, and our freedom rests on an organic/mechanical system, which is dependent on external world, and our freedom is limited by power of drives (Rom. 7:15, 23): man’s condition is one scene pointing to origin and destination—The contradiction/hiatus in man between his rootedness in cosmos by physical/sensory nature, and his transcendence over it by intellectual/spiritual faculties which are theoretical, practical, and ethical, the latter being contrary to/in conflict with former, not continuation of it (contra Nietzsche)—There are enduring good qualities, yet these are linked in society to failure/poor survival (Steinbeck)—Opposition of Socrates and Callicles in Gorgias, or between the Athenians and Melians in Thucydides—The price of man’s spiritual nature is opposition to laws of self-preservation (Scheler), being ex-centric rather than centric like the animals (Plessner); man is homeless and so he builds the house of culture, an artificial naturalness, but this cannot create a home—Man is compelled to come to a view of himself, and constitutes a task to be performed (Gehlen), and this is determinative not just of his “top-story” open rather than closed environment (von Uexküll) for this top-story determines him down to his foundations of body and sense—Man is prototype of whole of nature; no gradual approach/transition from closed to open environment, or nature to civilization, or instinct to promethean reason—Man’s biological ill-adaptation expresses man’s positive requirement that he take on himself the perilous nature of his own being (Gehlen)—Man’s compulsion toward freedom to embrace necessity (Hartmann), which faced with an open world is faced with question of where it will draw its norms for self-realization—We must hold both to fact that material/biological world of which we are a part is the stage on which we must realize ourselves, and to fact that our factual existence/being there in form of freedom points to our finitude and our being given to ourselves as gift and task; this gives us a relation to infinite freedom, assuming that the riddle of our existence is soluble—We find ourselves superior to all other finitude, yet unable to use infinite freedom as means of self-perfection—Biological data gives us no hint of the direction we should go—Man cannot be defined by anything outside himself, but must define himself (Nietzsche); we are part of the play without being asked, and it is as yet unclear whether we vindicate our self-definition only for ourselves or also for a judge—If play is to be meaningful, brokenness of current situation must be overcome, yet our experience of that brokenness, memory of unfallen state, and hope for future golden age are so varied—Totality cannot be synthesized by any combination of elements now at hand, and tensions in man cannot be brought to equilibrium at worldly/natural level but tend to polarize more—Man’s worldliness gives him distance from world, man is bound up with world but also a-cosmic. (p. 343): Only Christian anthropology can release man from the problem of envisaging man as not broken without sacrificing some essential aspect of himself, by inserting him into dramatic dialogue with God, so that God can cause him to experience His definition of man; man is shown how to plan/fashion himself, and what his end is—As seen in Christ, God, who both is (1) creator and (2) favors man, wants man to find his home in Him, and only in this way can man become the dramatis persona he is meant to be—(3) Sin, cross, and Resurrection must also be considered—In pre-Christian/pre-Biblical interpretations of meaning of human life, the mystery of Christ is hidden in myth/speculation—Post-Christian/modern philosophies are marked by Christianity, though they may reject it or ignore it or fall back into pre-Christian categories—Although it cannot be read off his essence, man is essentially related to the mystery of Christ, and without this relation, man must remain an insoluble riddle—In a negative anthropology (Sonnemann) that considers just man, negativity is a critique for opposing all objectified pictures of man e.g. Sartre’s absolutizing of finite freedom which undermines every definition of being; in Christianity, negativity is oriented to the positive ever-greater God, so as to see that His image, man, is more than what can be included in a conceptually clear definition, though it is not pointless to attempt definitions of man or God, though they can be integrated only by God. II.C.2. Man and Nature (“Pre-Christian”) II.C.2.a. Rooted in the Cosmos (p. 346): Anthropology as science is modern; in pre-Christian times, question of man is posed only in connection with question of whole of being, including both man and the divine, and it is unclear how far the latter is immanent in or transcendent to the cosmos, though it is certainly in contact with the cosmos—Pre-Christian man is always aware of qualitative difference between cosmos and theion i.e. a primal analogia entis and a natural awe of the divine; in all cultures speculations toward mystical identity are late in emerging—At natural level i.e. at level of existent being as a whole including the divine, order in the world is given and governs man’s being and life with others, and order imposed by man is secondary; in dike/maat/tao operative law is inseparable from justice, and hence polis with its dike can mediate man to cosmos: God not man is measure of all things (Plato)—The gods are representatives of divinity and helpers of men—Plato’s dualistic account of man is held together by unity of being embracing cosmos and divine (Phaedrus, Symposium, Timaeus)—On Aristotle’s view, spirit is added to biological composite from the outside/above, but this is not alien to the world’s being, the transcendent apex of which is the Divine/absolute—The pre-Christian fluid analogia entis cannot be reduced to dualism (Plato) or pantheistic monism (Stoicism, Neo-Platonism)—Pre-Christian anthropologies could be allowed to persist in Christian times because the relation between cosmos and theion survived (Aquinas, Dante, medieval empire), though there was no a more abrupt distinction between God and creation. (p. 349): Reciprocal relationship/correspondence between microcosmos and macrocosmos—Influence of Poseidonios and Galen’s cosmic thinking in medicine, drawing on Pythagoras and Democritus, on Philo and the Cappadocians—Man was rooted and secured by a relationship not subject to his own reflection—Polis is place where divine nomos meets wisdom that ought to govern man—The insecurity of the polis, cosmos, and man; hence either the universalizing of the polis (Hellenic cosmopolitanism) or drawing cosmos/divine nomos into the rule (Alexander, the Roman emperors): these lead to Christianity, and are superseded by the hexaemeron/civitas Dei/Christus Pantokrator—Even the latest pagan syntheses have a fluid character i.e. man-cosmos relationship cannot be pinned down, and so chaos/moira/apeiron threatens—The Aristotelian meson and classical tragedy in opposition to Titanism; moderation’s center hovers between the natural and the ethical e.g. in ideas like kalogathia, arête, eudaimonia, though Plato/Aristotle have much to say on man’s ethical struggle, anticipating Christian reflection on concupiscence, and showing that Greek ethos is dramatic—Man is the microcosm that not only images the macrocosm but penetrates it by virtue of his spirit, and so is superior to the cosmos and has affinity with the divine, without this being Titanic—Two senses of microcosm: 1. Man is the epitome of cosmic tensions/oppositions (Aristotle, Erigena, Hildegard for whom cosmos is “homniform”, Florentine Renaissance); 2. Soul intends comprehensive unity of the world (Aristotle, Aquinas)—Behind both man and cosmos appears the Divinity Who explicates Himself in both, and so man/deus humanatus acquires preeminence, with Christological significance, and so steps out of cosmos into a realm where he is unprotected. II.C.2.b. Spirit and Body (p. 355): We are spirit and body, man and woman, individual and community; in all three, we are built according to a polarity, obliged to engage in reciprocity, pointed beyond the polar structures—Przywara, following the late form of his analogia entis, brings together material on humanity that explodes every Gestalt that claims to be comprehensible in a single view—Man in spirit only as crown of series of forms that ascend from energies of matter, which he recapitulates in himself, involving dynamis and energeia and rationes seminales (Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, modern evolutionary biology)—Faculty of reflection implies such a distance from the vital/immediate that it fundamentally modifies this infrastructure, reducing it to a tool (Gehlen); the goal of the development is its meaning/final cause—An Idealist spirit struggling to attain self-consciousness cannot explain teleology of evolution; unconscious formative spirit in nature presupposes an absolute real Spirit communicating to it the idea of man that is aimed at—Dacqué on how primal prototype of Adam fell away from God and entered into demonic, primal matter, initiating the evolutionary process, and so man is epitome of evolution, though he is also alien to spatiotemporal natural world and seeks to regain the lost original world—What seems like a natural polarity is an unnatural dichotomy i.e. that between man formed of nature and endowed with divinity (Plato, Stoics, Philo, Aristotle, Origen, Basil, Maximus on the natural pathe that cannot be brought into harmony with spirit)—Temptation of dualisms against unity of man (Gnostics, Scheler, Klages), but these are blocked because the dualism cannot be between body and spirit, but is through the spirit, and the spirit needs the physical structure to reflect—Man is a boundary phenomenon/methorion, mediating and participating in both higher and lower, but also unable to attain a precise knowledge of either (Plotinus)—Either the worlds can be linked by man or they are utterly contrary, so either man is natural synthesis of the worlds or he must choose to relate to one of them: former upheld by Aquinas, Cusa, Ficino; latter by Nyssa, Nemesius, Philo, Kierkegaard—Question of whether human existence can be a single whole with one meaning—Aesthetic unity/gracefulness breaks down into dignity that has to be attained dramatically (Kant, Schiller)—Fundamental decision still requires that man fashion himself into responsible physical-spiritual being, and redirects him to meson, an upward movement without pure spiritualization: one cannot proceed in opposite direction (Epicurus, Feuerbach)—Unity requires drama, and a concrete blueprint that undergirds all possible falls from God, which allows one to move beyond the constraining Aristotelian middle, transfiguring rather than spiritualizing flesh/world, and which can demolish death, the ultimate riddle that torments us. II.C.2.c. Man and Woman (p. 365): 1. These tensions recur in deeper form in sexual differentiation, and this also brings third tension between individual and community into play—The fitting partner must be both cosmic/sexual and meta-cosmic/in touch with theion—Man can govern the animals, but not the counter-image of woman—Male and female bodies/empirical experiences/ego-consciousnesses are thoroughly male or female, sharing a human nature that never protrudes neutrally beyond sexual difference, no non-sexual/bi-sexual universale ante rem, two poles of single reality, two entia in single esse (Frank-Duquesne)—The human “I” is always searching for the “thou” and always finds it, but cannot possess it in its otherness, both because all human freedom opens only for absolute freedom, and because this impossibility is enfleshed in complementary constitution of the sexes—To think that human spirit rises above sexual difference is to see only the ascent from body to spirit, not the descent of spirit embodied—Before Eve, Adam lacks the relationship in which bodily things are communicated spiritually and spiritual things bodily—Naturally, sexually differentiated human being is microcosm, as seen in all cultures’ understanding of earth-heaven relation, though there is the danger of identifying male with spirit and female with matter, as occurred among Greeks and Christians, but was avoided somewhat by hieros gamos/I Ching—No metaphysical difference can explain sexual difference, because the relation between cosmos and theion is fluid, and so neither cosmos nor theion is prototype of sexual—The two creation accounts in Genesis contain and purify much legendary wisdom, but are far from Christian interpretation, and they give a phenomenology of the sexual in the framework of creatureliness: man is most aware of his contingency in dependence on other sex/“other” mode of being human which is not open to its counterpart, and this contingence is not suspended by sexual intercourse (contra Aristophanes, Feuerbach) for the issuance of children pushes the finality of the union beyond the subjective experience and continues contingence—The other side of creatureliness: every human being is begotten, born, and owes his existence to sexual process. (p. 369): First account puts first human couple at end of ascending process of creation—Assertion about “image of God” is between/separates subhuman and human fruitfulness—Statement about being male and female is under shadow of “image of God” and puts man back in framework of cosmic/sexual—Contra Barth, image and likeness cannot be identified with reciprocity of man and woman; rather, relation between image of God and sexuality is one of in-and-above (Przywara): a similarity with God revealing Himself in words of fatherhood, motherhood, nuptial relationship, but also similarity with sexuality of all created things—Attempts to separated two creation accounts e.g. that first there is an ideal man, then a sexually differentiated real man (Origen, Dacqué), but there is no trace of an ideal man in the first account, nor of any problem associated with sexual difference in first account—Problem of whether what the man and woman bring forth is an image of God; purely worldly being reproduce their whole nature in new members of species, but it’s not enough to say that human parents produce body but God looks after soul, nor is it enough to speak of union of two freedoms to bring forth new freedom (Fichte): rather, natural operation of human generative power reaches into divine creative power, and this is a “humiliation” of God, making His creatorship dependent on will of creatures—In Christianity, the child is no longer a res patris but in direct relation to God—Human child is not mere gift of nature, but gift of God (Gen. 4:1, 5:3), for the self is grounded in God and so it is not in our power to know ourselves (Hamann). (p. 372): Second account implies three things: 1. Primacy of man, though he contains woman potentially/unconsciously, but he cannot give her to himself, but must undergo kenosis; 2. Loneliness is not good, so there was not a primal androgynous being at peace with itself, and man cannot attain fulfillment by knowing and naming the world; 3. Woman comes from man, and man is fulfilled only by being robbed of part of himself—Man’s persisting priority is located in an equality of man and woman, and each has control of the other’s body—Dual existence is difficult to give without the light of relation of Christ and Church, for first Adam is for the sake of the Second. (p. 374): 2. There are radical sexual problems in Christianity that have been trivialized by saying they are just the residue of Manichaeism—We cannot re-construct supra-lapsarian state on the basis of current state, and this raises questions about our knowledge of human essence—Reciprocity of generation/birth/marriage and death (Augustine, Chrysostem, Fichte, Sherwood Anderson)—Hegel on how death is implicated in generation: 1. Reproduction looks to the death of the individual; 2. Division of species stimulates violent death; 3. Preservation of species requires individual death—Since individual can never be whole species, it seeks fulfillment in union another, and thereby dies as an individual (Hegel); individuality is illusory, and the species is constituted by the coming and going of individuals like the rainbow in the waterfall (Schopenhauer); the higher the individual, the more threatened (Scheler, Simmler)—Classical objection is that prior to the fall fecundity does not require death (Augustine): 1. Reproduction was not for successors but for adding to society; 2. Man was not faced with prospect of death, but transformation into angelic form/heavenly quality, yet this seems like a reintroduction of Platonism—Aquinas’ realism (compare to Hegel) in saying that man is corruptible in the body but not the soul, and would have been transformed, and that sexual intercourse before the Fall involved defloratio of the woman—Augustine rejects ideas that people before fall had intercourse whenever they had the urge, or that they suppressed the urge whenever reproduction was not necessary, which leaves possibility that arousal was at command of the will (rejected by Hugh of St. Victor on grounds that marital love not will prepares body for intercourse), or there was no arousal—A second solution is that current state of sexuality was the original state—A third solution is higher view (Nyssa, Maximus, Damascene, Erigena, contra Aquinas)—Theory that man was first created spiritual/sexless, and then created physical/sexual as a result of fall (Gnostics, Philo, Origen), and this was transposed into orthodox theology by Gregory of Nyssa: first, man is created in God’s image and likeness and here man includes all mankind including Christ in Whom there is neither male nor female, all of whom are present ideally/potentially in first man, though God created him with sexual characteristics in anticipation of his fall, for animal reproduction is a sign but not a consequence (contra Origen) of the fall—Maximus starts with link between pathos/sense-orientation and death, for the pathe entered man with the fall, and only then the procreation that involves sensual pleasure and death; man’s turning away from God coincides temporally with his coming to be concretely—Damascene agrees that the original command to multiply was not multiplication by means of intercourse—Erigena holds that the first, spiritual creation in the “idea” is not purely ideal, but also does not involve opposition of the sexes, and rather reproduction was angelic (see also William of Champeaux)—On Greek view, it does not do to say that death belongs to nature, for it is connected with fallenness/futility/vanitas, and sexuality cannot be lifted out of that context—They are not against sex, but drawing a line unavailable to us today through the sexual field between fruitful personal self-giving between man and woman and sexual union; but the sexual and the erotic, the two ends of marriage, cannot be divided, and thus contraception is wrong—Barth holds that Genesis 2 is about man and woman in their relationship as such, not about the family, pointing to the relationship between Christ and the Church, which has fruitfulness internal to it; Nyssa holds the sexual is only an echo of higher “idea” of total humanity—Question as to what sort of erotic relationship this is supposed to be if not sexual, whether it is Soloviev’s boundary concept or another form of fruitfulness as in the Greek Fathers; it is a question that must remain open. II.C.2.d. Individual and Community (p. 382): The most subdued tension in pre-Christian period, and in the Christian framework rendered more intense, for the individual is seen to be an eternal person and the community revealed in the Mystical Body of Christ/the life of God. (p. 383): 1. Community surrounds/protects the individual/zoon politikon, and as a framework fits into the cosmic-divine framework—Center of empire/polis coincides with center of cosmos (Eliade)—Founding a polis inserts a new community into the cosmic macropolis which exists from time immemorial, and this involves entering into/participating in cosmic act of foundation by the gods i.e. to settle is to found one’s own world i.e. ordered multiplicity, outside of which the individual is unthinkable, and which is always the center, all other communities being peripheral—Order of polis is precarious, oscillating between attempt to bring law of community into harmony with order of cosmos, and realization that conflict between physis and nomos is inevitable—In the cosmos there is one nomos that is paramount/the standard, that of the theion, discernible by the philosopher-king, but under threat from tyrants (Heraclitus, Plato, Hesiod)—Even a well-ordered polis cannot last long since human conditions are always changing, and the various areas of justice e.g. rights of individual, family, and polis are in tension—In pre-Christian times, the poles of individual and community are extrapolated to the law of the world, but the tension does not yet cause a rupture, but is seen in borderline cases e.g. the one expelled, slaves—Individual grows into the community, getting freedom at the price of obedience to the laws and preferring common good to his own—In pre-Christian times, mediator between divine and human law is the outstanding individual e.g. founder, hero, king, in whom alone is present individuality in its fullness i.e. power to sustain community and to transcend human nomos toward divine law, and expressed genealogically, prophetically, or by representation—This individual can be challenged through conflict between human and divine laws, or among human laws, or if he is isolated by guilt—Drama/tragedy arises when the notion of hero/king is still strong, but not unchallenged in their role as originators of the law—The ruler representative before God in Plato, Marcus Aurelius, and German Absolutism. (p. 387): 2. Christianity shows what is meant by ‘person’ in the sense of vocation/dignity, and also shows elements of pre-Christian individuality that prepare for notion of person—In ancient philosophy, the individual is ultimate because indivisible—Question of which is the principle, Being or the individual—Every human embodies whole concept of being human, including being an individual, self-aware, free, having something that excludes participation by others: concept is simultaneously common to all and exclusive to all—Man has a side-by-side external contact with others inasmuch as he has an Umwelt, but also can mirror the whole community inasmuch as he has a Welt: incommunicability is precondition of all spiritual communication i.e. latter requires recognition of other as other and also freedom to detach oneself from world/community and encounter it creatively, out of uniqueness of one’s own self—Beings existing for themselves simultaneously exist for one another, at a particular time, but not by its own volition, but only by being awakened by another, with different elements in inseparable unity (Günther): in the cogito/sum, the radiance of reality as such/as true and good discloses itself and liberated man to move toward it, and we experience the call to shared humanity, for the cogito/sum includes shared humanity—In experiencing the gift-quality of one’s own nature and one’s own relativitiy/response-character, one realizes that one is “for-himself-with-others” (Brunner)—Spirit is ex-centric to one’s self-experience; there is an individual I and a universal I in the spiritual person, the latter appearing in being together with others through first, second, and third persons concrete (Plessner) i.e. these appear not through analogy or empathy, but on the basis of his own mode of existing/a priori form of experience of the Mitwelt—Missing here is the original realization that we are not simply “there” but “gift” and “gifted”, which presupposes a “giving” reality i.e. an implicit knowledge of God (Aquinas, DV 22.2 ad1&2)—I am freely myself by embracing/keeping gift of being and exercising the privilege of being; in my cogito/sum I never cease recalling these things and giving thanks—Shared humanity and non-mediate presence before God, albeit mediated through shared humanity, are inseparable in every individual: relation with God is not purely a priori nor relationship with others purely a posteriori—Language manifests dichotomy/relation between individual and community, and lays foundation for tension in primary phenomenon of revelation of being, rooted in we-awareness, in tension between inherited common experience and unique individuality; being’s fundamental self-presentation as true and good is the primal word, and it is always greater than me, but it is understood by me inasmuch as my existence/Dasein implies inner assimilation of what is presented to it, and all this allows infinite conversation of community of interpretation (Gadamer)—State is not a restriction on autonomy, but something each individual carries in himself, and which must be affirmed for self-affirmation; appearance of coercion from above is just manifestation of divinely-willed creaturely form of the “we” (Rom. 13)—State as unifying law and morality, institution and sustaining by/not production by attitude of citizens (Hegel)—Difficulties of move from state to humanity (Bruaire)—Individuality and community are intertwined in originating act—Threat of death to the individual who has direct access to God but is also bound to community—Attempt to overcome paradox of death by regarding spirit/form as essential determinant of human being/originating in theion and the body as mere accessory (Plato, Indian thought), but then link to bodily community is lost—Death cuts across all three tensions, showing that this is a wound, not something natural, which cannot be healed by cosmic anthropology. II.C.3. The New Christian Reality (p. 394): Pre-Biblical man could rely on cosmos to understand himself; this is removed for Biblical man, with the “in-breaking” of a new reality, which de-sacralizes/de-mythologizes the cosmos, and shows itself to be active principle operating in whole of history: begins in ancient world, intensifies in Judaism and even more in Christianity, and is irreversible in post-Christian world—Genesis 1 indicates a sovereign freedom at work unlike anything else in history of religions; it ends possibility of merger between cosmos/man and theion, yet God is not distant, but is present in cosmos: God’s transcendence is absolute such that He is immanent in cosmos, and He alone, not anything in cosmos, provides standards/norms—Biblical heaven is not an exception to all this: one cannot consider heavenly idea/norm without reference to God—The “Our Father” shows both heaven and earth subject to God’s sovereign will—Creation out of nothing indicates God’s absolute freedom/aseity/self-sufficiency, while the myths just indicate that the world has a divine origin, without reference to freedom; world cannot originate in “idea” apart from freedom, for the idea is just a blueprint that God freely sets before Him—The image of God is the mirroring of this freedom, and so it loses objective visibility, and can only be understood by reference to infinite freedom—The Bible opens the abysses of finite and infinite freedom only to reveal mysteries i.e. true nature of idea of man as seen by God, stretching the tensions to their breaking point. II.C.3.a. The Heightening of the “Natural” (“Pre-Christian”) Tensions (p. 398): 1. Once absolute freedom creates a world with free man, His intention cannot be to leave things there; to be given a share in act of real being is to be entrusted with first word of message, and Biblically/theologically the message cannot end with the first word, which constitutes a rational/free subject capable of receiving/responding to further words—First word is inexhaustible inasmuch as esse is always richer than any totality of entities/essentiae but this richer realm apprehensible by spiritual being does not fulfill but promises by removing limits and pointing to a limitless but not indefinite realm—Realized spiritual entities are given as much being as they can contain, but also given access in principle to self-disclosure by absolute Being: in a supernatural way, subsistent Being opens to them its free inner life—Natural finite beings cannot understand such words, so if God is to communicate Himself, He must enable us to do so, and the communication must be participation in the Absolute: pariticipation/self-communication must be both ontological/substantial and verbal/addressing the mind—Even free self-opening of human subjects is incomparable to this—By being lifted above our nature to one that transcends us absolutely, we are aware of our creatureliness; in revelation, everything appears new, and the creature cannot have security/definition except in God’s free purpose—The creature’s inner composition is heightened, stretched between nothingness and infinity/God, and this is imposed on the creature by God—Creature becomes aware that first communication of being was for the sake of second act of freedom i.e. of initiating creatures into mysteries of His life, fulfilling the promise in act of being; any claim the creature would make on God would be too late—Objection that this is no different from pre-Christian situation of receiving cosmic norm, except that it is now free/personal: this shows the positive side of the analogia entis, but in Christianity the “great dissimilarity” of the analogy acquires new force—Participation in divine nature/being born of God exceeds all one could have hoped for, but never involves substantial divinization, but a paradox of nearness and distance. (p. 402): 2. The individual who receives the word/gift/new name of God becomes a unique person, a category that only comes to light in the Biblical-Christian dispensation; even the pre-Christian hero was not a person in this sense—Receiving a new name points to the fact that a man who naturally is an individual of a species is now entering a supernatural/direct relationship with God, receiving a personal call/endowment, having the radiance of God’s freedom/uniqueness fall on one, equipped for a task—This does not negate anything said about the hyper-cosmic aspect of every man, who is a spiritual subject; it is a question of terminology whether the latter or just the one called through grace is a ‘person’: if both, there are two forms/grades of personhood—Günther arbitrarily divides things here—Dempf asks if there is a double ground of individuation in the natural spiritual subject, a material and a spiritual/personal: both would be principle of individuation of natural subject/image, presupposed by supernatural calling that fashions the person/likeness—Tension between chance aspect of sexual cause and spiritual product increasingly felt in Christian/post-Christian eras (Jünger)—There must be a “place”/point of insertion in Trinitarian life where the giving of the name to each person occurs—The person does not cease to be a member of the species, so even his natural form of community is made to share in eternal Trinitarian vitality. (p. 404): 3. New intimacy/immediacy between called and divine persons gives new quality to every refusal—Prior to Christianity there are many kinds of guilt, but not yet sin; guilt is previously cosmological/ceremonial, even unconscious, and is atoned sub-ethically/magically—Sin requires that first God addresses core of man with commandment/participation in His holiness. II.C.3.b. The New Tensions Are Confirmed in the God-Man (p. 405): The Biblical assertion that the world is created from nothing and called to participate in divine life seems to rob anthropology of any foothold but God, but a new foothold is gained in Christ. (p. 406): 1. Jesus is the proof that the supernatural heightening of tension does not destroy his existence, but rather existence in tension is livable and solves the riddle of the “Old Adam”: He reveals true humanity of man and of God, and this is an open humanity that can solve the question of death from within—Christ seems to call into question the rhythm of analogia entis i.e. similarity within ever-increasing dissimilarity, since He is equal to the divine in His person—But the Son receives all that belongs to humanity including existing in relation to God in analogia entis, though He also transcends the analogy: the analogy goes through the center of His consciousness—Greatest intimacy can co-exist with greatest reverence, but this leads to temptation to leap over into God’s realm. (p. 407): 2. The Son enters human community to save it, as both individual bearing destiny of all and as someone unique—Since we share a world, in every human there is a formal inclusion of all other subjects, though they are excluded materially/as for-themselves—This implies an intervention in individuals’ private sphere: God bears their guilt and so something is changed in them without their knowledge; breaking the bonds of sin requires not just verbal forgiveness, but granting the sinner a new freedom/participation, through a judgment on sin, but this requires a death in which the judged man is cut off from God, to return the chaos of sin to its nothingness—This gives new value to natural death of individual of a species, to sexual generation/birth, to death from disproportion of spirit and body, and gives a new center to natural anthropology, a new wholeness to natural man. (p. 409): 3. Jesus’ unique “I” possess His “we” to such an extent He can draw His brothers’ sins upon Himself, not just as logos asarkos but as logos ensarkos, hence the appropriateness of the Eucharist—This mystery removes tragic side of individuation in corporeality, for now our bodies can communicate with one another not just biologically, but pneumatically, grounded in the Lord’s Resurrection and Eucharistic state—The God-man can permeate the Mitwelt from within, and gives us a share in it in the Eucharist, and so we can bear one another’s burdens and guilt, even without knowing how or where: communio eucharistica becomes communio sanctorum—This explodes the proportions of the human being, while fulfilling the pre-Christian i.e. moderation fulfilled in gratitude, humility, hope, boldness. II.C.3.c. The New Rhythm (p. 411): Wherever human existence includes an either/or, Christ can enter the human only in one pole, and then from there fulfill the other e.g. He becomes man due to the natural relative priority of the man, and by “assimilating” the woman to Himself from there. (p. 411): 1. Natural two-fold rhythm of body/nature rising in evolution to spirit and spirit descending into body/nature; this is overlaid by primacy of descent in the Word’s enfleshment/incarnation, informing the whole substance, contrary to all tendencies to dis-incarnation in which man would like to be “like God”—Descent of Agape is primary in incarnation, free, not responding to ascent of Eros; descent all the way to Cross, descent into hell, atomizing of bodily being shared in the Eucharist, none of which is revoked in Resurrection/Ascension, which transform the whole human form, spirit and body, into pneumatic mode of existence—Divine Pneuma makes definitive descent of the Word sacramental for all times—Through His physical nature, the Son can fashion mankind as His body by means of the Eucharist; movement toward enfleshment is completed by becoming ecclesial/cosmic, the physical being divinized/permeated by Pneuma/transfigured/transferred into kingdom of Son—Platonic Eros is overtaken by Agape, by con-crucifixion. (p. 413): 2. Purely personal love from above enters generative chain, and so robs death of its sting—Reciprocal fruitfulness of man and woman is surpasses by supra-sexual but not sexless fruitfulness of the “Second Adam” bringing into being His companion, the Church, on the Cross, in the consciously willed love-death—Suprasexual relationship between incarnate Word and Church is a human one—Allows a new fruitfulness of leaving the cycle of generation to enter the unique supra-temporal sexual relationship of Christ and Church, for the sake of a form of existence in which Agape with its nuptial aspect becomes all-inclusive total meaning of life. (p. 414): 3. Individual is transformed by being addressed by God, in the individual that is the incarnated Word, and this restructures the community: a dependence not just on species, but on the expression of a universality that indwells the individual, making one qualitatively unique, and thereby able to enrich the Body—Like the polis, the Church is greater than its parts, but charisms are given to individual directly by Christ not by Church, but through the charisms one is obligated to/expropriated for the sake of the Church—Since individuals are now more unique, the community is more closely knit, both rooted Christologically, in incarnation and Eucharist; Christ gives us a share in His unique surrender of uniqueness for many—Reciprocity between uniqueness of person and uniqueness of his self-giving for the sake of the community is concrete metaphor of Trinitarian life—Simplicity/uniqueness of God can only be shared in by unity of being in many existents, and unity of species in many individuals—Pre-Christian thought excluded the idea of the individual from what was knowable; in Christianity, the apparent irrational/incommunicable unity of the person is an image of God, and allows personalization/integration of community, though the persons remain individual substances. II.C.4. Man without Measure (“Post-Christian”) II.C.4.a. Gnostic Escalation (p. 417): Biblical perspective frees man from nature; man cannot make an image of God or an image of man from nature, for it contains no theion and Christ is the normative image—Post-Christian man can no longer take his standard from the cosmos since it is emptied of the divine, and refuses to take it from Christ, but wants to hold onto the heightening of the creaturely rhythms—Attempts to return to pre-Christian age only conceivable in wake of Christianity (Erasmus, Ficino, Bruno, von Strassburg)—The fatal character of courtly love borrowed from Christian mysterium (Kleist, Hebbel, Wagner, Claudel)—Men of antiquity in modern times (Goethe, Hölderlin) are really longing for intimacy of mystery of Christ—All the great anthropological systems take their standard from figure of Christ; opposed by materialistic evolutionism, but never in antiquity (Democritus, Lucretius) did materia have such a creative, ascending urge—No serious anthropology can be purely naturalistic, for man cannot be reduced to subhuman nature (Scheler, Plessner, Gehlen, Portmann, Weizsäcker, Wilder-Smith, Dempf)—People cannot rest content with unsolved problems, and attempt to reduce abyss opened by Christ to something rationally explicable in the Absolute (Gnosticism)—In Scholastic speculation, reason tries to penetrate the heart of God (Siewerth), though only loving faith can—In Gnosticism/Cabbala/Spinoza, antiquity’s reserve in the face of the theion is lost, and natural awareness of analogia entis is weakened or extinguished—Post-Christian Titanism (Böhme, Baader, Schelling, Russians) regards man as originating in divinity that then demonically split, drawing on but perverting Christianity. II.C.4.b. Titanisms (p. 420): On Titanic principle, man contests divine legitimacy of “new God” i.e. Zeus or Christ, and claims divinity for himself on basis of equality with God; in place of He Who is, the eternally becoming/living force is enthroned—Enlightenment’s focus on intelligibility and utility seems removed from Titanism, yet it is under the sign of the “Promethean principle” (Shaftesbury, Herder, Lessing, Goethe); the Faustian dimension was unknown in antiquity: it contradicts the Gnothi Sauton, and builds on Christian heightening of tension—Kant’s transformation of God’s gratis self-giving love into self-legislation; the debt of Kant’s general law to Christian theology (Schopenhauer)—Fichte’s interpretation of self-legislation as act whereby empirical ego assures itself of its absoluteness—Idealism/Lebensphilosophie from Schelling to Freud and Scheler show their origins in Christian theology in that reason cannot catch up with deepest layer in man, here act, will, or drive: the Promethean tendency to identify limited “I” with absolute “I” becomes Dionysian tendency because absolute “I” contains supra-rational vitality to which one must surrender, which in turn produces the theme of Eros-Thanatos—In all Titanisms, the person/individual is sacrificed, though their origin is drawn from Christianity—Feuerbach’s assertion that man’s sense-bound nature, finitude, and mortality is absolute, and the unity of I and Thou is God; Marx transposes this anti-Christian system into social terms, guided by idea of absolute freedom of man in community—Sartre proclaims absolute freedom as raison d’être of finite existence, perverting gratis self-giving into meaningless superfluity/absurdity: An-sich i.e. nothingness aspires to be Für-sich yielding contradiction, and every loving relation can be questioned and destroyed as a threat to my freedom—Attempts to reduce Christian heightening of tension to anthropology are interesting inasmuch as manifesting element of protest, but they ruin man; post- Christian thought rejects both Christianity and ancient openness to Being, or excludes theion from Being (Heidegger)—Church must claim catholicity, which attracts accusation of arrogance, and also post-Christian parodies as in positive humanist states sustained by “hope principle”, which shows the face of a Jewish not Christian Biblical anthropology. II.C.4.c. The Other Face (p. 426): Together with the pagan stream, the Jewish is prior to, foundational to, and more important theologically to, but continues to exist after the Christian interpretation of the world—Jewish anthropology presents itself like a tragic hero, and comes to an understanding with post-Christian anthropology i.e. Jewish messianism together with human desire to make “heaven on earth”—Impulses that place nation/class/humanity above individual are Jewish in origin—Jewish anthropology is unacquainted with flight from the body, though God manifests Himself in spiritual word of commandment/promise—Judaism hovers in an unfulfilled openness, between election and banishment; its prophets and leaders are persons in NT sense, but not individuals—Prophetic intensity/focus on nation persists even in atheistic Judaism. (p. 428): God is not just the “Other”/“partner” but so transcendent that He is “non-Other”—Man cannot be deduced from God, but has been given freedom that cannot be upstaged by God’s freedom, but must fulfill itself there—Man with his tensions seems doomed to tragedy—Theologically, anthropology is a function of Christology. Volume 3: Dramatis Personae: Persons in Christ Preface (p. 11): The volume has paradoxical position of trying to present characters without the drama, but the characters can only be known from their position in drama—Main characters presented in theological treatises, but these can only be “program notes”—It does not matter if the attempts at exegesis are successful, since this survey proceeds a priori on basis of whole NT Christology: Christ must have known the meaning and scope of His task, or we fall into schizophrenia of Jesus of history and Jesus of faith. Dramatis Personae (II) Introduction (p. 13): Anthropology is structured by analogy to historical event of Jesus; full doctrine of man/world, including angelic powers, requires reference to this Concretissimum—Even free persons are determined by the encompassing reality, which is free and includes a drama between human and divine—Characters only defined by drama, and so no essentialistic Christology with drama reserved for soteriology—But we must first consider characters so that afterwards they have scope to act e.g. Israel is not characterized from the outset as the one that rejects the Messiah and they did not have to—Freedom/drama within Christology seems to justify distinction between Thomism and Scotism on why the Word became incarnate—Christ is determined from below by whole world-drama but also is not determined since He is from above; everything He synthesizes was created with a view to this synthesis: He is caused by and causes world/history, and between these poles the whole world-drama is acted out—Insofar as He knows as man that He is Son of the Father, He has His own particular time measured by acceptance of Father’s will, but insofar as He becomes man, His existence is subject to general human/historical time, but also modality of time marked by sin/futility/vanitas; questions arise how He can both cleave entirely to Father’s will and surrender Himself to vanitas, and how to combine freedom of descent with unfreedom of resulting existence, intuitive knowledge of the Father with faith, obedience with horror—We only become the unique persons we are through free development of unique endowments in chance surroundings—In the divine “idea” of Him, Jesus is something utterly singular, God’s ultimate “Yes” to the world, yet from below He is just one man called to make the Word visible and audible in His circumscribed life including His death—Self-utterances of Jesus are only part of His totality as Word, and this part attains its totality only given a transposition—The framework “in Christ Jesus” must give us the greatest opportunity for interplay of divine and human freedoms—Only from the Bible do we know the interplay of absolute and finite freedom that is precondition of theological drama, and only from NT do we know the Epitome in Whom finite indwells absolute freedom—Being bound by God to single norm seems to render impossible freedom of action necessary for drama, and the latter seems to require removing the norm (Nietzsche, Biser)—The suspicious that the game is rigged can be dissipated from points of view of God, man, and Christ—God can only present Himself as someone infinite, the space within which finite freedom can reach completion, yet His will must manifest itself as finite to the finite creature, in finite commandment, as aspect of His sophia, identical to but also the projection of God’s essence onto created finite world, but drawing the creature toward and imparting to it an infinity: offer of grace creates genuine space for creature—From man’s point of view if divine sphere is not opened, finite freedom circles around its on unfulfillable transcendence, only able to solve its tensions by a resigned meson, and all its tensions are severed by death, which seems to not just be a punishment but an integral part of man’s link with nature; only God’s offer of eternal life within sphere of God’s freedom allows hope of fulfillment—Christ is the point at which divine Sophia touches and penetrates the created world, and so He is the consummating protagonist of the drama: on the Cross, He opens greatest possible intimacy and distance between God and man, giving man a new freedom to decide for or against God, leaving the final judgment of each individual open but not indifferent—Christ does not center everything on Himself—God’s free operations in the world refer to something that takes place beyond our grasp in free absolute Love; Christ unveils this and man’s proper attitude before/in God: service to the point of self-forgetfulness, obedient distance that reveals the distance in the Spirit between Son and Father, and this ushers activity of absolute freedom into the world—That drama is grounded in Christ is what makes it possible. I. Christ’s Position in Theo-Drama I.A. The Impact of the Meteor (p. 25): Enlightenment/historicism have made questionable the project of holding Christ to be central to history Christ’s central position in drama of world history—With the coming of Christ something has been done to man that continues to have an effect: man has been cut from cosmos and given freedom and relation to Absolute that he retains even when cut loose from Christ (Nietzsche, Bloch)—Pathos of great anti-Christian movements is a parody of Christianity (Marx, Nietzsche)—Attempts to relativize Jesus all desire to take the transcendence He opens and confine it to worldly immanence, as in liberal Christianity; a great phenomenon cannot be separated from its continuing influence (Blondel, Gadamer)—Words of Paul and Gospels point to Jesus’ peerless mission: for Paul, cosmos is created in Christ, He is central to history/salvation, and all characters are explicitly included in Him—Jesus demands followers, and is Judge, the sure foundation—Johannine and Pauline inclusion in Christ—The opposition He expected and reckoned with—The Cross as ruin in historical terms, and God’s transformation of it into success in Resurrection: His mission took place for a supra-historical fulfillment; His temptation was to resist this exaltation in favor of causing the plan to operate on an earthly level. (p. 28): Christ initiates history of liberation—What is essential is His transcendent exodus—We cannot access the real history of His influence; it is to be found in in a humanly adequate response to His word: in Mary core of the Church and the saints around her—Christ gave ethical instructions yet His main achievement is to be plundered and shared in Passion/Eucharist, and this is trans-ethical; the same is promised to those who abide in Him—There are saints hidden from themselves and the world who have had effects of the greatest magnitude on world history by simple acts of prayer/self-surrender; this cannot be deduced from Church’s visible institutional forms, nor measured statistically—The light of Cross/Resurrection shines indirectly onto world history—Where faith is not lived naively, but reflected on in secular environment, it is judged negatively—Christ/Christianity could not give a program for man’s future that would be satisfying on an earthly level, the latter being just a projection into earthly future what Christ aims at for God’s absolute future—Those who try to rationally construct history see something necessary about the time Christ came (Hegel; contra him, Löwith; contra him, Habermas)—World history distinguished from salvation history; even in latter, convergence of events on Jesus is grasped only a posteriori/conveniens—Jesus’ existence in history cannot be ignored, but cannot be deduced (contra Hegel); He holds up and guarantees a utopian/transcendent ideal—Jesus’ eschatological message cannot be surpassed within confines of history: all must be confronted, though not all will necessarily be converted. I.B. The Dramatic Aspect of Inclusion in Christ (p. 33): Creation, history, and all men are included in Christ—Christ irradiates inner form of anthropology, but now raises question of what is the path taken by man en Christoi—Whole mankind and each individual represent biological unity that cannot be designated in advance as unity of Christ; first man was not a spiritual man split into many sensible ones, nor is Adam the Alpha and Christ the Omega, but rather Christ the second principle includes Adam the first—Adam is historically prior and so not aware he is on the way to Christ (Eph. 3:5, 9) though he may be aware he is transcending towards something, but as created not begotten i.e. not in continuity of life with his origin, he is not aware of his origin, and is aware of his provisional, non-self-subsisting character—Christ is Adam’s inner principle, and so Adam is inchoate, able only to be fulfilled in an other Who is his goal/ground—Christ/grace presuppose Adam/nature, for grace must be accepted through influence by grace—Prior to Christ, man cannot deduce his ex-sistence/“thrown” into being necessarily from an absolute principle, but after Christ he can know he is begotten in grace with the Son, related to relations in God beyond freedom and necessity: man is granted to have life in himself, and so can acknowledge his indebtedness without alienating compulsion—Ratification of transition from Adam-principle to Christ-principle is entrusted to created freedom, dramatically: we can choose the freedom of being our own origin and not having any sufficient reason or goal for this freedom, or we can choose the freedom of continually acknowledging our indebtedness to absolute freedom; this all gives rise to the theo-drama—Only from the vantage of the end i.e. Incarnation do we see that Christ’s Alpha comes forth before Adam’s, but this is not visible in created reality; history before Christ is a process of the Logos becoming accustomed to living among men (Irenaeus), and on the Cross all the aspects/consequences of human nature are adopted and suffered—Incarnation of Word is completed when He returns to the Father, but it still must be carried out for man as a whole through sacramental mediation of the Church, which we can allow or refuse—No one-dimensional historical progress, but as we approach the end the battle becomes fiercer, which is dramatic not epic—In Christ God opens the personal sphere of freedom in which particular individual or collective characters are given their mission, but it is left up to them to play their part well or ill, but if Christ were not human roles would be simply allotted from above fortuitously/contingently, but as man Christ opens the divine sphere of freedom—Christ is rendered available at all times/places in the Eucharist: here his divine/human readiness for all the Father asks and the power of the Father to raise Him up in the Holy Spirit interpenetrate—Prospect of shared humanity that is eternal/divine—Circumincessio/inseparability between first Adam/creation and second Adam/grace/redemption; God’s purpose is to unite all things in Him, emphasizing neither all things nor Christ more than the other: all is fulfilled in one universe, not a different one alienated from itself. I.C. The Acting Area (p. 41): Christ is both the chief individual actor and the condition that renders the play possible i.e. He creates a stage i.e. a concrete and empty area, though only in Incarnation does concrete area for interaction of God and man come into being—Area as mediating medium has fundamental role in shaping characters as related to one another—Two sides of an essentially self-sufficient Absolute and a relative aware of its finitude: former need not offer itself as locus of latter’s completion or relate to latter; if no area of mutual relationship exists, the finite must either annihilate itself in the Absolute or absolutize itself in the sphere of the relative—Religion has always presupposed stage on which God and world can interact, and mediation is rendered concrete in mediator-figures e.g. king as representative (as in Egypt, Babylon, Incas) i.e. this is a negative/inchoate Christology—Step to fully developed Christology requires acceptance of Biblical testimony not speculation; in Bible, unlike theological speculation, possibility of a mankind that has not sinned and does not need atonement is not entertained: this excludes positivist understanding of Christ or envisaging other possibilities of action between God and man. (p. 43): 1. Jesus’ preaching summed up in His announcement of kingdom of God: in historical Jesus this kingdom is actually in process of coming-to-be, but until His death/Resurrection/end of history it remains future—Kingdom of God is coextensive with creation, but is also God’s self-disclosure to the world, established from the beginning in Christ-Who-is-to-come, but accomplished in Christ-Who-has-come: it is opening of the theo-dramatic stage, so that characters like the Church can appear on it; kingdom is a horizon not a particular form, but no form but the Church could appear in it (the truth in the saying “the kingdom of God was announced but what arrived was the Church”): Church transcends herself toward the ultimate kingdom—OT anticipations in kingdom of Yahweh, a kingdom ruling the whole world—For Jesus, the kingdom unfolds through Cross and Resurrection; for the world, it comes through the unfolding of that event through history—Every historical “kingdom of the spirit” (Montanism, Donatism, Joachimites, Enlightenment progressivism, German Idealism and materialism, liberation theology) reduces the transcendental horizon of the kingdom to a categorical quantity in time—Church is the germ of the kingdom, but she transcends herself in missionary and sacramental directions—Church must be assessed not just by visible boundaries, but by how she provides the model of a community living in love of God/neighbor (Augustine)—There is a realm against the kingdom of God, but we cannot clearly draw its borders, and there is the realm of the state, into which the Church must reach without either being absorbed in the other (Augustine contra Schleiermacher, Rothe, Ritschl)—Kingdom of God implies complete union of heaven and earth, and it is defined by person/work of Jesus. (p. 46): 2. The Cross is the concrete way God opens/keeps open the acting area between Himself and man, and it is present in all Scripture—Creation did not give creature power over God i.e. did not allow finite freedom to demand that God open His inner realm, though this is the a priori of creation; every demand that creatures make is exceeded by what God has already done—We cannot get behind the Cross to ask whether if man had not sinned God would have disclosed Himself and communicated Logos/Pneuma without Incarnation—God’s plan of salvation which occurs through making peace always took account of man’s sin even in creation—Scripture connects death to sin, yet death is so bound with our nature that every attempt to extract it is doomed to failure; at most we can find in it an element of nature and an element of guilt—If the play is to take place, what is now central is God’s overcoming of man’s death through kenosis, for on the Cross, the end of the world, God gathers back together the part of man i.e. body and spirit scattered by death (Melito of Sardis)—The Cross makes salvation and post-Christian history, and is a framework/horizon for the whole dramatic action. (p. 50): 3. The inner meaning of the Cross is made plain in the Resurrection, which reveals who Jesus really is, and is the proof of the legitimacy of His claim, though the act of legitimation by the Spirit by giving Jesus His entire being/history as the acting area for interplay of God and man—Then Christ can bestow the Spirit on His followers so that they can be seen to be unique, for outside of Him no one can conclusively identifies; outside of Christ, there is no guarantee of personal identity or lack of anonymity (Brecht), but in Christ each has a personal commission, and here alone role and person coincide (Eph. 2:4-10)—Absolute freedom has prepared a path along which each of us can realize our freedom—We are created for good works, and the condition for this is God’s free gracious action—To live in the sphere of grace is to live in the kingdom of God which is both present in Christ and coming—Struggle between the divine and what is hostile to the divine over the world; we are drawn into this decisive battle, which is the subject of theo-drama: in Christ we are enabled to engage in the actio in which the bonum shows itself to be transcendentale. (p. 53): The stage is the a priori transcendental precondition of theo-drama and it is opened in kingdom of God, Cross, and Resurrection—In Jesus’ coming into the world is God’s coming throughout history—Empty area between infinite and finite becomes a place inhabited by God so as to fashion us into a dwelling, but this only becomes visible on the Cross, when the meaningless end of the worldly play is imbued with power to become a meaningful interplay with God—Jesus’ departure to prepare a dwelling for us opens the play to many actors; the stage being empty of Jesus allows the sending of the Spirit—The acting area is an atmosphere of reciprocal indwelling of God and man/world, a non-static, perduring event—The finite world-drama in the open realm of the spirit (Calderon) whereby men are in harmony with theo-dramatic/Trinitarian meaning. (p. 55): These claims must now be substantiated in a Christology—First we must gain access to figure of Christ through NT—Then we can raise a speculative Christology and consider Chalcedonian model—Calling into question the method of “seeing the form” from Glory of the Lord; question of whether concept of form can cope with monstrous form of sin, suffering, Cross, and can it stand up to the historical-critical method. II. An Outline of Christology II.A. The Problem of Method II.A.1. Christology’s Elliptical Form and the Impact of Historico-Critical Neutrality (p. 59): Christology has elliptical structure because testimony of primitive Church to Jesus is testimony of faith i.e. only inner eye of Easter faith can see what Object of testimony really was, complete reciprocity between content attested and testifying form: critical scholarship shows how far this reciprocity goes i.e. presentation of Christ-event is completely determined by its content, so much that this content is determined by its presentation, the organ of faith co-fashions and perhaps re-works its content—Theology of Fathers/medieval was at home in elliptical form, the legitimacy of theology’s method grounded in reciprocity between revelation and faith: in itself, God’s word is radiant, self-evident, self-illumining—Faith discovers principles of theology’s development in revelation (William of Auxerre); light of faith functions like natural light of intellectus agens but is dim reflection of light of vision (Aquinas)—Schleiermacher’s new form of ellipse in Protestant theology lasting until Barth, opposing Enlightenment rationalism and Idealistic speculation which seek to supersede faith in favor of knowledge: person of Jesus radiates a physical/personal influence to the pious soul, and dogma is just an unfolding of this encounter, but what is necessary is the openness to an impression of the whole, which is proof against critical objections to Scriptural text—Christ here gives no personal summons; rather, knowledge of God is knowledge of His mercies, without any objectivizing rational knowledge (Luther, Melanchthon, Ritschl, Harnack, Hermann, Bultmann, Barth), for He can be grasped only in value-judgment—Barth gives this a Reformed stamp, bringing it back to harmony between word of God and faith: historico-critical method is obsolete since the word of God interprets itself directly to faith—Catholic Christology cannot exclude method in this way, but has always integrated the philosophical into Christology e.g. man is transcendental/open to God and God is free and ecstatic in relation to man, and Christ exemplifies both, in Rahner’s nearly a priori Christology—Balthasar’s approach in Glory of the Lord reflecting on correlation between God’s epiphany and eyes of faith: the ellipse includes philosophy and literature as pre-theology, but attention is concentrated on the Bible. (p. 63): Question of whether there is a non-committed appraisal of the literary sources for the phenomenon of Jesus i.e. a historico-critical view of post-Easter faith and pre-Easter stimulus, historical Jesus and Christ of faith—From fourfold form of Gospels it is clear a forming process occurred between the two poles (Simon, Reimarius, Lessing, Strauss, Wrede)—Question of whether process of early Church applying concepts to Jesus-phenomenon to communicate it articulated an original form/Gestalt or clothed a form-less core in a form (Strauss, Schleiermacher)—For Strauss/Hegel, form/myth is still the last step before absolute knowledge, it is produced by the total consciousness of a people as that through which we grasp the idea that we could not grasp in itself, the historical core being just a stimulus to poetry—The divine in man eternally becoming incarnate in all of mankind, and the lack of attention to secondary causality (Pietism, Scheliermacher, Strauss, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Daub, Marheineke, Weisse, Hase)—The figure/Gestalt of Christ as product of the Evangelists (Bauer, Feuerbach)—Critical separation of levels of interpretation from original event, and conclusion that Christ did not claim to be the Messiah (Wrede, Bultmann); pre-Easter substrata are irrelevant for faith vis-à-vis full Gospel kerygma, which concerns us even today so long as it is demythologized: kerygma has form/Gestalt, but historical Jesus is pale/formless (Bultmann)—Bultmann and Strauss are both uninterested in historical Jesus but are interested in demythologizing Gspoels to arrive at liberal/Hegelian idea or existential/faith-promoting kerygma—Barth and Schleiermacher are united in closed ellipse formed by reconciling image (either person of Jesus or word of God) and reconciled consciousness—Question of whether after historico-critical analyses the concept of Gestalt can still be applied to Jesus Christ. II.A.2. Overcoming the Hiatus between “Historie” and “Geschichte” (p. 68): Historie is exact science of history but its results are hypothetical, but Geschichte is the past as it influences the present and is experienced as living reality, able to be examined by methods of Historie but the latter cannot determine its validity (Wobbermin)—Reaction against Strauss’ devaluing of Jesus by emphasizing geschichtlich influence of Jesus, but against Bultmann’s geschichtlich interpretation based on Historie that bears the marks of the geschichtlich i.e. transcending the distinction (Slenczka)—Riesenfeld’s question of what kind of self-consciousness Jesus must have had to exercise direct geschichtlich effect on us today through Scripture but also to result in post-Easter events; recent scholarly depictions of Jesus are too superficial to be psychologically credible, but naïve reader has a more alive, traditional, plausible picture of Jesus: we can best approach Jesus’ creative self-consciousness through combination of critical analysis and creative intuition (Riesenfeld)—Gospels are new and unique, and so the personality behind them must have been so i.e. they could not have been invented; fourfold Gospel allows a stereoscopic view. II.A.2.a. The “Total Impact” of the “Personality” (p. 71): Nineteenth century is within Schleiermacher’s ellipse i.e. that of Jesus in history as man totally inhabited by God and of pious consciousness caused by that history; this has liberal and conservative, ecclesial and non-ecclesial forms, but the core of this Christology is unity of original prototype and historical individual—Great personalities mediate the divine life of the universe, so ultimate Mediator must participate in divine nature in same way as in finite nature—But he abstracts from Jesus’ historical particularities to concentrate on total impact of Jesus’ attitude to the Father; this excludes everything after Passion, and Jesus’ Person is equated with influence of His total impact regardless of details—De Wette on how faith in Christ is ideal/aesthetic not rational/justifiable, and Weiss on need for aesthetic receptivity to revelation: we can see at the core of Gospels Jesus’ great personality—Schweizer on how great personality of religions’ founders cause historical impulse, such that religion unlike artwork can claim universality—In Dorner’s Christology, there is a Trinitarian hypostasis in the background of Jesus’ historical personality, and thereby Jesus is central individual of mankind: a Platonic contemplation of Christ of faith in the historical Jesus; compare to Kähler—Ritschl identifies theological attributes of essence with influence or achievement—For Herrmann, Scripture is not fundamental but is object of historico-critical method, but rather what is fundamental is self-evident encounter here and now with believer and impact of Jesus’ person, and all dogmas are secondary to faith’s basis, for only faith can discern the salvific picture in the fragments left by exegesis—Only thing left to Kähler after historico-critical method is Bultmannian ellipse of kerygma and existential faith; historical Jesus is only partial aspect of total reality of Christ the living Lord seen only by faith—Unavoidable question of the extent to which the object of proclamation is a historical fact—Story of Jesus seems clothed in Hellenistic myths. II.A.2.b. “Continuity in Discontinuity” (p. 78): After Bultmann, the question of the total impact of Jesus’ personality becomes question of how we can reach pre-Easter Jesus through post-Easter faith-testimony, along with question of whether He understood Himself to be the One Who would die and rise i.e. question of how His self-consciousness is expressed in early documents, while the question of its effect on us is now secondary—Käsemann argued that a kerygma with no reference to historical person floats in a vacuum and cannot elicit faith, so many Synoptic passages must be historical; the decision Jesus urged others to make is echo of a decision He made and so His relation to God presupposes the Passion (Fuchs) and He displays sovereignty in every situation (Bornkamm)—Conzelmann’s “indirect Christology” in which Jesus seeks the kingdom taking effect in his deeds, but He does not preach Himself i.e. not a direct Christology—Nineteenth century Kantian exact scientific method has been jettisoned in favor of historicist understanding or phenomenological analysis (Robinson, Schulz); good historical research pushes aside much of philosophy of religions, form and redaction criticism, so the issue of Jesus’ personality’s total impact is once again important now as result of scholarship—Reflection on chronology between Jesus’ death and earliest Pauline Christology, during which more Christology occurred than in the next seven centuries (Hengel), and during which the disciples immediately used OT paradigms, implying Jesus understood Himself as complete exegesis of God’s word (Delling)—Contra the post-Bultmannians, there was continuity from pre- to post-Easter preaching/events, and this can be shown form-critically (Jeremias, Risenfeld, Gerhardsoon, Schürmann); pre-Easter preaching contained more than just implicit Christology—Question of relation between Jesus’ pre-Easter claim/self-consciousness that the kingdom had already come in His Person and Easter event that raised disciples’ faith to full stature—Only on this basis can we consider discontinuity, and only if this is established is there more than formal continuity. II.A.2.c. The Provocation of Apocalypse (p. 87): Weiss’ 1892 book was the end of the liberal timeless ethic supposedly inaugurated by Jesus’ personality, on the grounds that in the context of Jewish apocalyptic Jesus expected a future coming of the kingdom, and this impacted His ethics—View that Jesus felt that He failed to bring about the kingdom (Schweitzer, Kümmel, Bultmann); Catholic thinkers see this as unwarranted, but still grant that early Church could not integrate Jesus’ eschatological teaching, and so take something similar to Protestant path or deny that Jesus expected the kingdom’s immanent arrival (Linnemann), and hold that Jesus’ attitude is the “realized eschatology” of John’s Gospel—Those who would like to find in Jesus the eschatological concept of time characteristic of modern life, without a linear notion of time (Strobel, Conzelmann, Gnilka)—1. Fluid boundary between those who assume futurist and realized eschatology in Jesus’ mind—2. Many sayings testify to temporal expectation on Jesus’ part and cannot be attributed to post-Easter or to permanent expectation, but require theological solution. (p. 90): 1. Jesus attitude is different from that of John the Baptist or Jewish Messianism (contra Schweitzer, Werner)—Jesus heightens apocalyptic, and this brings us close to Jesus’ particular mission—The claims to the present reality of the kingdom give Jesus’ futurist utterances an inner meaning unlike Jewish apocalyptic—Many of Jesus’ teachings are not eschatological, but purely theo-logical or ethical, so theology must be not just personalist but ontological (Schürmann); Jesus’ consciousness of being the Son joins his theo-logical and eschato-logical utterances—Jesus lives in expectation of the kingdom, but also in the calm security of one living entirely for His mission. (p. 93): 2. Question of how apparently contradictory utterances can coexist in His consciousness—a. Problem of Mark 9:1, 13:30, and Matthew 10:23; Schürmann takes them to be hortatory, but rather they are an announcement of His timeless glorification—b. Jesus’ expectation of His hour, hence the genuineness of His Passion predictions, but also His ignorance of the hour though He is ready for it—c. Jesus announces a unique presence of the kingdom/final age that is bound up with His person/existence in the world, as signified by His healing activity and forgiveness of sins—d. What is most difficult is the unity of kingdom that is coming and has come, the single unity we distinguish as Passion and Resurrection and as end-time and return of Christ; Jesus predicts no interim period between Passion, Resurrection, and Parousia—e. Jesus saw world-time, including continuing world-time after His exaltation, and including destruction of Jerusalem, within the unity of His own eschatological destiny—The indivisible event/fulfillment in Resurrection/Parousia is not realizable for the Church, and this requires post-Easter bifurcation (Thüsing), and this allows the time of the Church to be incorporated into His duration—Attempts at dividing this structure into biographical sections/phases in Jesus’ consciousness become novelistic. II.A.3. Christology between Exegesis and Dogmatics II.A.3.a. Inadequate Solutions (p. 101): Question of apocalyptic/eschatologism destroyed figure of Christ, reducing Christianity to ethics/humanism—Either Jesus is seen as limited by His environment’s categories i.e. Jewish apocalyptic which requires demythologization to find the kernel relevant to us (Bultmann), or we must see Jesus’ preaching as lacking apocalyptic which was re-introduced by re-Judaizing early Church (Stauffer, Käsemann), or His time-consciousness is in tension between here-and-now and not-yet rather apocalyptic future-orientation (Kümmel, Cullmann)—Not clear if formal definition of last possibility can do justice to Jesus’ time-consciousness—Schnackenberg accounts for Jesus’ expectation of the immanent end in terms of prophecy not teaching i.e. not about points in time; but Jesus is concerned with His hour not prophecy—Harnack, Bultmann, the post-Bultmannians, and their opponents all agree that in Jesus God has acted—Schweizer holds that Jesus is the man Who explodes all systems/categories, both those of OT and those of Church: all of the latter come from later speculation, reflection, attempt at explaining Jesus, not from Jesus; as in Schleiermacher, Jesus is not just model but original ideal/Urbild: strangely, Jesus is both more than any interpretation, yet the event is also said to be nothing other than the fact that God acted in Jesus, so post-Easter reflection is simultaneously indispensible and secondary—The total impact of the person of Jesus withstands all erosions of historical-critical method, yet this person seems to depend on good pleasure of exegesis—Kessler as Catholic counterpart to Schweizer, including rejecting idea that Jesus really represented us in the atonement—We must counter Bultmann’s view that we do not know how Jesus understood His death with the whole thrust of NT (contra Vögtle): we cannot separate Jesus’ knowledge of His mission from awareness of the price He has to pay for it, even if in His obedience He neither can nor will reflect on what it may involve. II.A.3.b. Eschatology and Dogmatics (p. 109): From standpoint of exegetical search for historical Jesus, it is easy to regard early Church’s reflections as dogmatic overlay—Yet this “overlay”, including everything necessary for the Councils, appeared very early—In Jesus’ expectation of the immanent end, either He was wrong or He spoke misleadingly, and these sayings cannot be explain in existential or prophetic manner, so there is an “overlay” in exegesis too—We must bring into conversation the dogmatic “overlay” which centers on formula pro nobis, and exegetical “overlay” which centers on expectation of immanent end—Jesus’ consciousness of His mission was that He had to abolish the whole world’s sin/estrangement from God, and so all of His actions were experienced as part of this task, but also as moving toward an apocalyptic end, for which He must surrender Himself entirely to His Father’s will—The apocalyptic dimension, i.e. immanent expectation of God’s final judgment of the old world, is definitely concentrated in Jesus: His final hour contains all world-time—Contra Weiss, His mode of existence, and that to which He call us, is one of watching, praying, but not anticipating, His hour—The eschatological events cut across intramundane time: each time a man dies more history/time is brought into God’s presence (Lohfink)—Through the pro nobis of Jesus’ particular death, we are drawn into situation where all is fulfilled in kingdom of God—The issue of Jesus’ expectation of the immanent end is not a problem to be clarified philosophically or by demythologization, such that we can share it, but part of His unique destiny, which causes Him to bring the entire world into His temporal life/His unmeasureable Yes to God—The idea of representation in Paul, 1 Peter, and Hebrews from the point of view of cult, penal law, slavery, and obedience—We must appreciate the weight of the world’s total sin that falls on Him in order to adequately explain the abyss that opens before Him, the hiatus that robs His time of synchronicity with any other time, though He allows His disciples to somewhat share His time—Jesus claims to be measuring rob of man’s salvation or ruin, an identification of Himself with the Son of Man, not just a forerunner of the latter in the future—He saw Himself as one with an earthly mission He could carry out, but also plunged into a mission that had been eschatologically stretched in the hour with an unforeseeable outcome. II.A.3.c. Drama Regained (p. 117): This tension in the Christ-event calls into question polemics against Anselm’s satisfaction soteriology, polemics that fail to see that the Biblical foundations will not allow the harmless “epic” doctrine of redemption often proposed today, in which emphasis on God’s intervention on man’s behalf makes the Passion and Resurrection a kind of symbolic visual aid in God’s instruction/legal justification of man, and on which Jesus showed God’s attitude to sinners in solidarity with them, before His death (Kessler, Küng)—This makes OT concept of “wrath of God” and related concepts of punishment and retribution mere archaic relics—Post-exilic emphasis on God’s initiative in atonement paradoxically presupposes a God Who is already reconciled yet wants something from man to ratify the reciprocal reconciliation/performance of atonement—In NT, entire initiative seems to be left to God, and yet there is also God giving Christ up as a means of expiation i.e. not a mere sovereign act of forgiveness on God’s part, but indicating a drama in the heart of God in which God’s anger and mercy wrestle, which require God to be seared by fire of divine love out of the hellfire of sinful non-love—The One given up to death is both the One Whom God gave into the hand of sinners and the man Who expressed solidarity with them, a dramatic dimension not just in God but in the Covenant between God and man—The concept of representation, preferred by Protestants, brings into theology dramatic process of reconciliation within God and between God and man, as in Bonhoeffer on costly grace. (p. 121): The topic of representation entails man’s incorporation into Christ; action and suffering of the representative has inner effect on persons He represents—Hence He has entrusted the Church with the ministry of reconciliation. II.A.4. The Theme Transposed (p. 122): 1. If Jesus’ hour is unique, it is difficult to see what role it can have in his followers’ lives—2. If it is eschatological, it is not clear what time the post-Easter Church has—3. If Jesus’ life is entirely lived for this hour, it is not clear how the post-Easter Church should portray him—4. Since the Person of Jesus is transcendent, He cannot be held by the laws of temporal historiography, and so it is asked if his figure is legible in the plurality of interpretations—The questions are how we can follow/imitate one who is unique/inimitable, and how can one Who is transcendent be capture in a temporal form, and put into spoken and written word—NT sees transpositions as a positive structural law: the totality of the logos, intelligible because of the telos of Cross/Easter, was present throughout history, but the latter was encompassed in the former; the Word in fleshly form can be transposed into the Word in verbal form—Analogy between pre- and post-Easter relation to Jesus. II.A.4.a. Transpositions in Terms of Discipleship (p. 124): During Jesus’ earthly life, there was an explicit call to discipleship, but this was a call to follow someone unique/inimitable; it was a call to be Jesus’ companions and fellow workers in announcing the immanent kingdom—The one called participates in the totality of the mission of the One Who calls, Who identifies Himself entirely with His mission; parallel to call of the prophets—Jesus’ unique destiny differs from that of His disciples—Transposition made by those e.g. Paul who were too late to participate in pre-Easter discipleship, but also the permanent meaning of pre-Easter discipleship had to be made to those who came later, done by the Synoptics. (p. 127): Paul’s question of whether after Easter one should artificially create a repetition of the earthly approach to this event, or just live entirely under the sign of the new aeon—Discipleship as imitation or assimilating oneself to Christ and allowing oneself to be made like Him, involved with the Christ at work here and now (Betz)—We are not entirely in the new aeon, but death and resurrection is rhythm of Christian existence—Objective ecclesial sacramental event of baptism and Eucharist, and subjective entering into the event of Jesus’ death—All Jesus’ individual words are made flesh in Cross-Resurrection—Jesus’ life is substantial obedience—God’s authority in Christ and believer’s assimilation to Christ. (p.129): Earthly discipleship becomes a reality on the basis of the presence of the Crucified/Risen Lord in the Church, yielding a new synchronicity of all subsequent believers—The Synoptics’ realism in scenes of calling/discipleship, and the literal/incarnational response to Jesus’ call—Only on the basis of the dis-chronicity between Jesus meeting His hour alone and the time of the disciples, can there be the Pauline synchronicity. (p. 130): John projects the end mediated by Jesus back to the beginnings—One is called through the mediation of others i.e. the Church—Jesus is the Way in person, but we can share through discipleship in the mystery of the grain of wheat—Hebrews on Jesus as archegos, prodromos, and teleiotes—Jesus’ initially lonely path creates solidarity with us, so the path of the People of God through world history can be analogous to life of Jesus with His disciples. II.A.4.b. Transposition through Time (p. 130): The original choosing of disciples has become an unlimited discipleship that lasts to the end; the life of Jesus flowed towards His hour, which led to inbreaking of the Kingdom, but did not prevent Jesus from fulfilling His earthly mission in tranquility and care—Through Easter appearances, disciples participate in Spirit and in Jesus’ own existence, which opens possibility of permanent discipleship, which includes proceeding toward future eschaton and certainty of living at every present moment in salvation won by Jesus, not a purely future or present or apocalyptic experience of time—Resurrection was first experienced as first act of Parousia (Bartsch) by all but John—Paul’s insights on life en Christoi show us how to fill the unfolding eschaton with concrete substance—Dominant theme in age of Church is that delay of Parousia does not become crisis in consciousness of Christendom; a transposition of immanent into permanent expectation—In John, future is totally subsumed in present realization, not in Gnostic sense since crucifixion/Resurrection are absolutely historical events—Matthew and Luke on community as those who act in spirit of discipleship—Simultaneous development of ethics of martyrdom and life in peace of Spirit. II.A.4.c. Transposition from Jesus’ Horizon (p. 135): Difficulty of finding out how much of the Risen Christ’s self-consciousness/mode of operation has been projected back onto pre-Easter events—Point of departure is Jesus’ will to live as slave of all, given in his existential example, and secondarily in words, the ultimate heightening of prophetic missionary awareness—Sublime bearing, and simultaneous humiliation and exaltation, transparent to divine sublimity that desires to come close to us, must have been fundamental trait of earthly Jesus, unified in a Christological and Trinitarian way—Comparison and contrast of NT theology to 1st through 4th century Rabbinic theology on God’s self-abasement, self-limitation, and coming down to us, which helped NT theology along, but also paved way for Cabbala on God’s necessary self-limitation without incarnation, and for Boehme and Hegel—Key for interpreting Jesus’ sublimity-in-lowliness is figure of Suffering Servant; question of whether Jesus or later Church interpreted Jesus in this way, with argument for former—Jesus’ particular mission to Israel and the transposition onto the universal stage, which occurred in His own thinking/actions; there is a latent universalism there from the beginning, which develops that of the prophets. (p. 141): Thematic transposition by the post-Easter Church are less momentous than usually thought: things implicit in Jesus’ consciousness are made explicit by the Resurrection—To show the implicit explicitly makes sense theologically, and to prevent mythologization of what is real history—Shifting the Sitz im Leben of Jesus’ words from His life to that of the Church is an analogous shift, a working out of inner logic, not extrinsic shift; basis of analogy is between Jesus’ immanent expectation of His hour and that of the Church: most precise discipleship is through analogous transposition, and the Church can do this because Jesus has embraced Church’s time in His own—Jesus’ self-application of ‘Son of Man’ as basis of analogy to ecclesial setting. II.A.4.d. The Plurality of New Testament Theologies (p. 143): Plurality of NT theologies is not reversion to OT situation, because the Word is made man and speaks through His entire humanity—No individual biography can give an exhaustive presentation of the total utterance of a human life: a variety of complementary perspectives is needed; a fortiori for Jesus, since His figure does not make sense in purely human terms but is Word and portrayal of God, His figure speaks beyond a finite life in Cross and Resurrection, and the only response to it is ecclesial faith—Every portrayal of a life must point the way so we can see for ourselves, and it is to that extent metaphorical, though metaphors that are not blurred observations, and that have metaphysical weight, and are appropriate (Söhngen)—To give idea of transcendence of Jesus, there must be a plurality of NT theologies, even in a single writer like Paul—Prior to written NT is the Church’s confession of faith, expressed in simple formulas (Schlier, Trilling)—Diverse interpretations explicate a faith that is one, so faith is necessary to interpret the texts, and faith lifts them out of all literary categories (Auerbach)—Plurality of NT perspectives sums up disparate OT models and transcends them in new synthesis—There are not infinite perspectives, but they are coextensive with the Apostles’ preaching/supervision; theology presupposes a hidden inner unity—Each approach is finite; we harmonize them less on the basis of the principle of inspiration i.e. Jesus formulated things to be taken in different ways when He said them and to be written as such, than on the basis of inner fullness of word of God. II.B. Christ’s Mission and Person II.B.1. Mission as a Basic Concept (p. 149): We can only balance apocalyptic element in Jesus-phenomenon and theological interpretation of His Person if Jesus had a sense of mission that is eschatological and universal: that He would complete His mission to all creation within dimensions of human existence presupposes that His mission and the One sent are unique—We need a portrayal of this Person that does not preempt His action, nor falls into an ahistorical static essence Christology: in NT, the answer to “who is Christ?” is His function/Person not His nature (Cullmann); we move from His overt function to His covert being—He is never other than the One sent—This is a Christology from below, asking about conditions for what empirically took place in Him, but the answer may come from a Christology from above—Mission and Person are here entirely fused, and so it is an unexchangable role. II.B.1.a. Mission According to the New Testament (p. 150): Concept of Jesus’ mission is linked to His qualification as Son of God and God’s Beloved Son, and so His mission is qualitatively different from that of the prophets—His preeminence in being sent in Romans, Hebrews, John, and the Synoptics; “Johannine” passages in the Synoptics—Linking of sending to coming i.e. from God—Uniqueness of Person of Jesus expressed in two-fold uniqueness of Trinitarian relation to the Father and soteriological relation to His mission, taking the form of obedience within the Father’s self-surrender; Jesus is so dependent on the One Who sent Him that His being is in motion toward Him, returning to Him—Missio is rooted in processio: if Jesus did not have this self-consciousness, it could not have been the content of faith. II.B.1.b. Mission: Being and Becoming (p. 154): A sense of mission implies a distinction between the one aware of mission and the one who sends; it is not just an inner conviction that one must do something, and it cannot be given to oneself, though one can become identified with one’s mission—There are cases where a man’s nature is presupposed, but the God-given mission is not added per accidens, but rather is given a preeminence such that his life and being are instrumental; this is seen in Biblical cases where one’s name is changed, in which identity is given with mission: final and surpassing instance is Jesus’ baptism, though in Jesus imparting of being coincides with imparting of mission—Prophet Christology is only preliminary and already superseded—The One Who exhibits identity of Person and mission must be rooted in immanent Trinity—The whole Person of the Son is involved in His work in the world, and His whole human nature ministers to it—Mission requires a timespan, and so Jesus’ existence-in-mission manifests a paradoxical unity of being that has always been and becoming; since the subject in Whom person and mission are identical is divine, God’s being undergoes development (Jüngel, Schlier)—Effect in 19th century of idea that unity of divine and human nature has a history/manifests a process (Dorner, Welte)—Chalcedon expresses the immutability of the Ground, but we must now express the event-quality/unfolding of life in historical series of events; this puts it better than a mere interplay of His timeless and temporal elements: both elements express a single being, the streaming-forth of eternal life/super-event i.e. the ultimate presuppositions of the dramatic dimension that is part of definition of Person of Jesus lies in divine being, not just in the worldly side (Welte on Heidegger on the event-quality of Being)—The mission can only be fulfilled beyond mortal life, and so a chasm opens in the historical development of His mission, expressed by the doctrine of the two natures—Transition from state of humiliation to state of exaltation (Gregory of Nyssa)—Earthly Jesus was aware of His universal, eschatological mission, and identified Himself with what God expected of Him beyond what He was able to achieve: the eschatological is in Him, in His consciousness—Even while His status exaltationis was not existentially available to Him, He had an unshakeable awareness of whole of His mission, even if sometimes, in obedience, not knowing, i.e. his hour, is more perfect (Rahner)—His fate is the super-tragedy of ultimate God-forsakenness in descending to the hell of those who have lost a personal name i.e. mission, and for that reason He experiences a super-exaltation and receives the Name above names: this is His identity, and the matrix of all possible dramas, and this makes it clear that this Person is Trinitarian—Jesus makes room for others, and so His drama is imitable—The status exinanitionis is such that human freedom and susceptibility to temptation can operate, though the Christian’s identification with His mission is analogous to identity of Jesus, and so in abandoning ourselves, we can with full confidence find ourselves, based on Christ’s greater self-abandonment—Christology of consciousness addresses the soteriological work and person of Christ. II.B.2. Jesus’ Consciousness of Mission (p. 163): If Paul is right, Cross/Resurrection are at center of Jesus’ consciousness; consciousness of earthly and post-Easter Jesus are the same: He knows, in a mysterious but real way, for whom He gives up His life (Guillet)—We cannot use human psychology to try to discover when Jesus realized His death was inevitable and it would have a universal salvific significance (Guardini), though He leaves the universalizing entirely to His Father—His indwelling and being driven by the Spirit. II.B.2.a. An Absolute Consciousness of Mission (p. 165): It is irrelevant to ask what it was like to be God incarnate (Mascall); we can only uncover converging paths, but with the a priori positing of formal identity between Person and mission (Kasper)—Something in Jesus’ human consciousness goes beyond the human horizon, in His mission consciousness; He is aware of an element of the divine in His innermost self-consciousness, and this is intuitive but limited by mission-consciousness—His universal mission sees itself theoretically and practically as convergence/norm/subject/value of all particular missions in logoi spermatikoi and OT—Fundamental paradox of his self- and mission-consciousness: His “I” is identical with His mission, which is not imposed from the outside, and is not taken upon Himself as private individual: everything in Him, including mind and free will, is oriented to this universal task, and this orientation is not accidental—Concept of mission includes relation to the one who sends who is present in but not identical to mission, and mission’s future prospect which must be carried out with human energies/freedom of the one sent—Latter allows for Jesus’ temptation, as He is plunged into a world estranged from God—The mission indicates an “economic” revelation of a decision made by the whole Trinity—The Son always beholds in His mission the Father Who sent Him; identity of Person and mission excludes heteronomy: the more He unites to His Father, the more He understands His Person/mission, for the “I” of Jesus radiates the “I” of the Father—Prayer is part of the activity of mission, and mission the subject of prayer; prayer is necessary for Him, since the mission is not open to His gaze in its entirety, but is implemented according to the Father’s instructions in the Spirit; the decisive final stage is not in the Son’s power at all—Jesus exercises faith in the midst of the intuition of His mission, but this is not just perfection of OT or NT faith (contra Jewish portrayals of Jesus in Ben Chorin, Buber) since He, unlike us, is His mission, but still the definition of faith in Heb. 11:1 applies to Him: Jesus has fides lucida/maxima fides unlike our fides aenigmatica. (p. 172): The task of expressing God’s Fatherhood through His entire being, life, and death totally occupies His self-consciousness—He is comprehensor qua fully embracing/affirming His mission from all time, though not having a total view of it, but He is viator qua being on a path through His mission—Rahner says that the visio immediata of God is inner element of hypostatic union and of His self-prsence; Riedlinger objects that Jesus’ God-consciousness is directed not to Himself but intentionally to His Father, and that for his Sonship to manifest a permanent supra-historical radiance over His humanity would be in conflict with Him being a human in history—Rahner is right that self- and God-consciousness coincide, but this is restricted to missio i.e. economic processio, and this satisfies Riedlinger’s demand regarding relation to the Father; Jesus’ consciousness of mission is an inalienable part of His knowledge/self-consciousness: He constantly manifests the Father, but also His hiddenness. II.B.2.b. Jesus’ God-Consciousness and Its Historical Medium (p. 173): Question of how Jesus could awaken to self-consciousness without simultaneously implicitly knowing His mission—Fathers and Scholastics, based in Gospels, held Jesus to know, from the moment of His incarnation, everything knowable to man, or at least bearing on salvation, though this does deny that He also had acquired knowledge—Aquinas held Jesus could learn from things, but not from men; but this contradicts elementary truth of human nature that a child must be awakened to I-consciousness and to a spiritual tradition through a Thou (Nédoncelle): Mariology is relevant to Christology more than the Fathers grasped, for Jesus to be aware of His mission and Father from the first moment of consciousness—We must be cautious about accepting claims about Jesus’ conscious life in the womb (e.g. in Pius XII’s Mystici corporis), but we must also take seriously claims that soul’s presence-to-itself has no conceivable beginning and for which we have no concepts, such that even the embryo’s repose is an experienced psychic process, and such that mother and child are a community of life and love, not just a physical community (Siewerth)—Mary need not have known all about Jesus’ mission, nor does Jesus learn about this from outside, but it is necessary that the initial awakening be in harmony with the nature of self-consciousness, and so Mary must hand onto Him the religious tradition, with her motherly milk and care, and this awakens latent mission-consciousness: in Mary, the Old Covenant contributes to the Incarnation—Mary is perfect embodiment of the Daughter of Sion, the Virgin destined for her covenant spouse, and Jesus’ sense of His mission has no conceivable beginning: these considerations imply the virginity of Mary, for Jesus must owe His whole being, identical to His mission, to His Father, which would be impossible if He had an earthly father—In His temptations, the Old Covenant suffices to decisively dismiss them. (p. 178): Jesus’ mission has no conceivable historical beginning, but enters increasingly into history—The Christology that attributes to Jesus from His conception all the explicit knowledge of His “members” (Mystici corporis) fails to distinguish the status exinantionis from the status exaltationis, encouraged by Johannine theology, which sees each status reflected in the other, but without conflating them or denying that in former the Father’s sending is dominant—Jesus had general knowledge of His fellow men, and prophetic cardio-gnostic knowledge in each situation, a readiness to be affected by the whole temporal and eternal destiny of and divine intention for each, filtered through Jesus’ mission (Nédoncelle)—Blondel on the inclusion of all created consciousness in that of Christ—Nédoncelle on His knowledge of our temptations from within, but without concupiscence—Jesus’ historical learning process is paralleled by an inward learning/initiation into meaning/scope of His mission, as John shows us; He is not an apocalyptic figure, but understands that the Word that Father speaks is Himself: in His temporal consciousness, He experiences the gift of Himself as timeless, hence the “I am” utterances—The immediate horizon is the preparation and fulfillment of Israel, sees as program for Jesus’ public ministry, but Israel is by its nature eschatologically open to all nations—His awareness of His hour as God’s hour may have been prompted by external failure, making specific His total openness, and allowing Him to be aware that He is suffering on our behalf at times, and at times having that awareness withdrawn—Jesus’ existence in/for His mission is unconditional existence in poverty, chastity, obedience, which interpenetrate, and are childlike; Jesus accepts these modes of existence both a priori and a posteriori. II.B.2.c. Trinitarian Inversion (p. 183): Jesus’ mission, which He always knows, has been given to Him and requires total obedience i.e. handing Himself over to another, and this attitude is as primary as His I-consciousness: He freely becomes man, but not through any autonomy on His part—Apostles’ Creed “et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria Virgine” gives precise description between Son and Spirit in Incarnation (Luke 1:35): product of Spirit’s operation is described in passive participle i.e. Spirit is active, and Son is at others’ disposal and submits to events; the Father incarnates the Son through the Spirit (Irenaeus)—One cannot object that this violates law that order of economic Trinity corresponds to immanent Trinity: hypostatic union precedes His habitual grace, and effect of the sending of the Spirit (Aquinas, Mühlen)—Objections from Kasper’s pneumatology-based Christology: sanctification of Jesus by Spirit is presupposition of hypostatic union, and the Spirit guarantees the single common freedom of Father and Son, avoiding an unfree/Hegelian view of God’s self-communication; this is true, but does not do justice to the Son’s Incarnation, in which the Spirit brings the Son into the condition of humanity, in which the Son is obedient already—His handing-over of Himself is not pure passivity but an activity that requires total self-possession and initiative—From the beginning of the Incarnation, the Spirit retains a meditational form between Father and Son—Spirit eternally has two-fold face: breathed forth from one love of Father and Son as expression of their united freedom/objective form of their subjectivity, and objective witness to their difference-in-unity/unity-in-difference—Identity between Jesus’ I- and mission-consciousness points to mysteriously supra-temporal event of unanimous Trinitarian salvific decision (Mouroux), though we cannot speak of priority here: Father’s offense at sin, Son’s and Spirit’s self-offerings, are equally original, and cost the Father no less than the Son, though without Patripassianism—Absolute free consent between Son and Father is economic form of common spiration, though this must go into hiding in salvation history behind Spirit’s second aspect, where Spirit takes over presentation of obedient Son with the Father’s will in form of unconditional, even pitiless, rule, even to point of Father’s loving countenance disappearing, all based on their eternal decision—This shows difference of Spirit and Son, contra their identification e.g. by Origen and Hegel, based in two-stage Christology—Difference between relation between Son and Spirit in status exinantionis and exaltationis so long as we take seriously doctrine of the two status; Trinitarian/soteriological inversion is transcended in latter status—Worry that this inversion disrupts order of hypostases and leads to denial of filioque; Son receives His divine being from the Father, but also receives from Him power to send Spirit with the Father: reception of this power corresponds to first status of Incarnate Son, whereas actual breathing forth corresponds to second, without forgetting first, implying within Him a docility to the Spirit—Inversion is projection of immanent Trinity into economic plane, whereby Son’s correspondence to Father is articulated as obedience. II.B.2.d. Mission as the Measure of the Knowledge and Freedom of Jesus (p. 191): Fathers’/Scholastics’ concern for constructing a doctrine of Christ’s omniscience, against Arians and Agnoetae, resulting from His headship of Church, vision of God, and more-than-prophetic inspiration, has foundation in e.g. Jn. 16:30; but John equally emphasizes Jesus’ obedience—Fathers and Scholastics, except e.g. Theodore of Mopsuestia, have a static view of Jesus’ dignity, and so of His knowledge, even when like Thomas they emphasize His experiential knowledge—Bonaventure, early in his career, holds that knowledge of all things in the Logos are habitual, actualized only by what God shows to the soul of Jesus—Schell on mission Christology: it belongs to human perfection not to have all advantages from the beginning but to attain them through free personal initiative; mission is measure of Jesus’ knowledge, and so constant beatific vision and the double life it would lead to is speculatively impossible and inconsistent with Scripture, yet Schell allows to Jesus a perfectly illumined knowledge—Jesus knew His identity as Son of God from the start, but this awareness came through His mission communicated by the Spirit, which excludes beatific vision at least at periods—Union of theory/contemplation and practice/action allows us to not banish Jesus’ direct vision to upper region of soul, and to not hold that Jesus’ mission-consciousness evolves from it gradually—Jesus’ mission-consciousness allows every possible variation in His knowledge of God’s salvific work in the world as the particular situation demands, whether prophetic or intuitive, or restricted, as the mission demands; variations in mystical experience give inkling of possible forms of knowledge possessed by earthly Jesus. (p. 197): Question of whether Jesus’ human freedom can make its own decisions, or just ratifies divine decision—Decisions of Jesus are like inspiration: not as in the theory that the Spirit used writers of Scripture like passive instruments, but as in the inspiration of artist “possessed” by the idea and giving a absolutely clear personal stamp to the work, which “immortalizes” the artist, and which emerges out of his personal freedom; likewise, when Jesus fashions His mission, He is not obeying an alien power, but inspired by His own Spirit—This confirms that finite freedom owes its being to Another, but must also transcend itself by rising to fulfillment in infinite freedom that is its origin and goal: all the more, Jesus’ freedom transcends itself to receive His mission—Son’s eternal decision includes His temporal one, and temporal one holds to eternal as the only one that matters, which is a Triune decision that preserves hierarchy and consubstantiality of the Persons: the Son embraces the Father’s not His own will as God—The Son can be tempted because He sees Father not in beatific vision, but indirectly sees the Father’s commission by the Spirit, though being able to sin is not part of His freedom (Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas): as man, without anticipation, He must continually weigh partial values that present themselves against totality of mission, and so His obedience is meritorious, and He is example of patience, faith, and hope. (p. 201): In identity of Jesus’ person and mission is realization par excellence of dramatic “character” i.e. a figure who by carrying out his role attains/unveils his true/hidden face; He is the model for all other actors in the theo-drama—This identity makes the world drama a theo-drama: the sending of Son and Spirit, as modalities of their eternal being, opens up Triune God’s involvement in whole world drama—Christ as last Adam gives meaning to whole play and embodies man’s whole dramatic situation. II.B.3. Mission: The Aspect of Being (p. 202): Question of whether there are two persons in Christ, or of how a man can speak with a divine “I”, raises problem of nature-person distinction, a purely theological distinction—Attempts at philosophical explanation of it fail—Underlying that distinction is question of “being” of Christ i.e. whether it is single or two-fold: former seems contrary to analogia entis; latter threatens His personal unity—Question of relation between divine Person of the Logos and totality of human nature i.e. whether He adopted human nature as a whole, which leads to question of inclusion of all persons of theo-drama in Person of Christ; they are person in the full sense on the basis of their role/mission in theo-drama. II.B.3.a. The Conscious Subject and the Person (p. 203): We can do without the concept “person” longer than we think (compare de Basly)—All living individuals share in a specific nature that is indentical in each but in such a way that each instance is unique/incommunicable/for itself: all individuals are contained in a species, but the species only exists in mutually exclusive individuals (Gilbert de la Porrée, Aquinas, Hegel)—The conscious subject knows that he is human in a unique/incommunicable way; he may attribute to himself a qualitative, not just quantitative, difference from others, a haecceitas, “who” he is, but this cannot be positively described—(1) He can describe it through distinctive empirical characteristics (Marius Victorinus, Albert) which are really just a sketch or an accumulation of chance details contingent for this individual—(2) Or he can take the interpersonal path on which one is aware of one’s dignity (Roger Bacon) and uniqueness through one’s mother, but this affirmation can be withdrawn and so cannot secure permanent consciousness of being qualitatively different, and it only tells who one is for the one who loves him—Neither can give absolute meaning for one’s existence, but just chance e.g. generation and birth—All this self-consciousness belongs to nature, not person (Galtier)—At the level of natural individuation we have a feel for what is called “personal” in the non-Christian world e.g. unique historical personalities, unique beloveds, or chosen roles, but these are recognized within a shared natural reality; none of this touches vocation or the epiphany of God in Jesus—Temptations to sacrifice who one is for some larger totality in Stoics, Buddhists, Averroists, Idealism, and even those like Günther who just sets nature against the sphere of Spirit/self-consciousness—A guarantee for who the individual is cannot be provided by empirical world or fellow men, but only by absolute Subject: a conscious subject is a person when God tells him who he is and imparts a mission, as happened archetypically in Christ; others are persons only in relationship with/dependence on Him, though they are not identical to their mission, but just have part of the universal mission—We can participate in mission to greater extents, and missions are synthesized with us a posteriori, but this synthesis is not accidental, since this mission is what one is created for; we can also reject our mission—In Christ it is possible for conscious subject to rise above natural to super-natural person, which presupposes created spirit is image of God, but still needs likeness to God, and this bring man to himself (Staudenmaier, Marheineke, Blondel): person is my new name (Rev. 2:17). II.B.3.b. The Theological Concept of “Person” (p. 208): Christological controversies only resulted in describing the person, not yet distinguished from the conscious subject, as special, indivisible, incommunicable, for itself, or in itself—Trinitarian nature-person distinctions cannot be applied to Christological problems (Gregory Nazianzen, Meyendorff)—Difficulties from lack of precision: prosopon meant mask i.e. permanent stage role, persona moved from mask to role, and then to both rational nature and conscious subject (Cicero) though still with theatrical echoes—Ousia for Aristotle is individual being and nature of species—Hypostasis originally means a precipitate, and then substratum; hypostasis in Stoics, Poseidonios, Plotinus—Introduction of hypostasis into Trinitarian debates by Arians; struggle against Arianism is struggle against Greek doctrine of emanations—Incorporation into Trinitarian theology by Athanasius and Synod of Antioch; homoousios as end of Neo-Platonic framework as theological tool—Introduction of hypostasis into Christology by Apollinarius of Laodicea—Application to Trinity of allotting parts of a text to different roles (Justin, Hippolytus, Clement, Origen): prelude, with danger of Sabellianism, to concept of person-in-dialogue, though they fail to follow up this metaphor—Post-Nicaea period called for presence in Christ of truly divine Son equal to Father, and for distinction of Persons in one concrete divine essence; resulting problems in Cappadocians, especially Gregory of Nyssa’s account of Christ’s unity after Resurrection—Two models: (1) Emphasis on Jesus’ complete humanity which hands itself over entirely to the logos, in Origen, Antiochene theology, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Nestorius, though Nestorius was unable to distinguish individuality from person; (2) Ultimate ontological unity of Person of Christ, as in Cyril, though this adopted an Athanasian Logos-sarx Christology which was rendered heretical by Appolinarius, and was based on uncritical use of physis and hypostasis, which tended to Monophysitism—By “one physis-hypostasis” Cyril meant personal unity, but had no concept to distinguish this from nature—Question of whether concept of persona can distinguish divinity of Person from humanity of conscious nature, which is not just sarx, and question of whether persona does justice to the fact that this Person is the locus of God’s saving design—Severus of Antioch and the formula “in” not “of” two natures, and unique unity of Christ which participates in ousiai of God and of man—First task after Chalcedon was to get beyond horizon of antagonistic formulas and look to their object, the mystery revealed in the Bible i.e. to express how a perfect man endowed with reason and free will can be God, accomplished by Maximus against Monothelitism—Emphasis on divine Person after Chalcedon, with recognition of Theopaschite assertion—Second task after Chalcedon was to find concepts to express the Person beyond those of the Cappadocians, which remain unfulfilled: no advance beyond tension between genus and individual, and Leontius of Byzantium’s enhypostaton formula does not help, and only hid his heretical Origenism—Leontius’ use of terms used for the individual over against genus and species, and for multiple entities e.g. body and soul being in one hypostasis—Leontius of Jerusalem on the hypostasis of union, and his confusion about whether Jesus assumes human nature in general or an individual historical nature—Hypostasis can be applied at all levels of being as kath’heauton of an ousia, and at conscious level as the “who” that possesses a nature (Maximus)—Boethius equates person and conscious subject in his classic definition, but this catches him between the general and particular; Rusticus shows this definition seems to make Jesus’ human nature a person, and so he defines person, like the enhypostaton, as that whereby an individual raitonal nature can manere in seipso—Problem of how a rational, free, self-subsistent, self-possessing being can be the property of another—Neo-Scholastic solutions remain with horizon of genus and individual, and characterize person as property of nature e.g. as absence of dependence and hence openness to God and perfection beyond itself (Scotus, Blondel, C.S. Lewis, Van Broeckhoven, Rahner), positive self-subsistence so long as it is not appropriated by a higher-order person (Tiphanus), mode of subsistence rendering nature incommunicable (Cajetan, Bañez), positive substantial mode (Suárez), or act of existence (Capreolus)—Not clear what a substantial mode is, or how it elucidates personal being—None of these philosophical attempts to clarifies theological definition of personal being of Christ and of others in Him—Only God can define a subject in his qualitative uniqueness, only in Christo can each man become a person with a mission rather than remain a merely individual conscious subject; we who are mere images of God attain perfect likeness by being assumed by Christ, the perfect image (Irenaeus to Damascene). II.B.3.c. “Analogia Entis” in Christology (p. 220): There is an uncircumventable abyss between divine and created natures; it is a great mystery that the Person of Jesus bridges it without harm to His unity—Przywara on how the law he draws from the (perhaps misread) 4th Lateran Council both limits and stimulates all theological/philosophical thought: it gives Christology its route between Nestorianism and Monophysitism—Analogia proportionalitatis between divine and creaturely being does not affect the fact that creature owes its entire being to God by analogia attributionis—Contra Scotism, analogia entis means that terms cannot be traced back to generic concept, and this applies universally, even to our adoption and to Christ—Union of natures in Christ are the final proportion between the two, the concrete analogia entis—Christ’s unique grace and the communicatio idiomatum do not abolish difference between the natures—Analogia entis means that God cannot be compared to creature, which is entirely dependent on Him (Dionysius, Maximus, Robert of Melun, Robert Pulleyn, Simon of Tournai, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Scotus)—Concept of hypostasis synthetos (Antiochene Christology, Maximus, Damascence, Lombard, Aquinas, but not Cusanus) is limited: synthesis is free act of divine Person, not quality imposed on Person by the natures—Analogy excludes equivocation (contra Simon of Tournai): created nature, in openness of reason/freedom, is image of primal Image—Union of abyssally separated natures can be explained at level of being, but at level of consciousness it is more difficult—Malmberg’s view that God communicates something of Himself i.e. of being in every act of creation, so every such act is a partial Christology, but this fails to explain why this self-giving is in the Second Person and Jesus’ Trinitarian mission—Jesus experiences His human consciousness entirely in terms of mission; He reveals all God’s attributes regarding sinners e.g. anger, weariness, grief, forsakenness, and in doing this He reveals what man ought to be—Jesus reveals God at the behest of the Father, and reveals God by His essence but in the personal mode, in a way at every moment impelled by His mission/the Spirit, and simultaneously reveals His free decision to live solely for mission, like the artist or scholar who only feels free/himself when pursuing the vocation that possesses him—No alien decision prior to the world—The Theopaschite formula that One of the Trinity has suffered (Gregory Nazianzen, Justinian, John II): a Trinitarian Person can accept suffering to the extent of God-forsakenness as His own, and so it is not foreign to God/His mission—Lack of common proportion between absolute and contingent does not imply two-fold consciousness in Logos-made-man: the man knows that what He freely does is done by the Son; He does not obey Himself i.e. His humanity does not obey His divinity, but rather He obeys the Father—Mysterious obverse of Jesus’ identification with His divine task is the identification of the Logos with the consciousness of a human subject at a particular moment, a consenting to being sent to be this human being at the moment of conception—We should not split the Son into one who carries out His mission and one who remains unaffected in heaven looking down at the sent Son: His being sent affects Him as eternal Son—Kenosis cannot imply mythological alteration in God, but can express one of the infinite possibilities available to free eternal life i.e. committing to God’s keeping the form of God in order to concentrate on the mission that is a mode of procession from the Father: the infinite distance of forsakenness on the Cross is the highest revelation of the eternal diastasis between Father and Son in Holy Spirit—Aquinas’ conflicting texts on whether Christ has one or two esse, and interpretations, with Monophysite dangers drawn from the problematic philosophical/Neo-Thomist real distinction between essence and existence, from Patfoort, de la Taile, Malmberg—Parallel between unio hypostatica and unio gloriae (Rahner), but this does not clarify analogy of being; divinization cannot express whole relationship between divine and created being, for we remain creatures, but our creaturely nature does not mean we are alienated from our origin—Trinitarian analogy allows Son to represent God to world and world to God, as seen in Johannine Christology. II.B.4. Inclusion in Christ (p. 230): Only a universal mission can be identical with an I-consciousness, even if it takes the entire world-time to carry out; the “I” is then rendered an “area” where those are found who are touched, transformed by, and resettled in it (Bérulle)—Topics raised: 1. Relations of incarnate Word to human nature as a whole, illumined by His mission, in which all human subjects are not just negatively redeemed but positive endowed with missions/charisms, within Jesus’ Person, the very concept of which has a dramatic dimension; 2. Universal mission carried out through wondrous exchange (commercium) between Him and us (Augustine), which presupposes genuine action by us, and requires first topic, sealed by the Eucharist; 3. From realism of commercium we turn to ask what is meant by en Christoi; 4. Christ’s mediatorship in creation, His pre-existence, which leads to question of angels and hostile powers. II.B.4.a. Jesus and Human Nature (p. 233): Because he is conscious of the divinity of His “I”, Jesus is not a conscious subject of human nature like others, though He is one as well and not merely flesh—He towers above tension between species and individuality in which the species is possessed—1. Even natural individual participates concretely (contra Plato) in whole nature/includes all others despite its exclusivity (Plessner, Hilary of Poitiers, Malevez), and theologically we are all a single man in Adam (Theodore of Mopsuestia)—2. Christ enters human nature as one superior to the whole nature i.e. species/sum of individuals, for He is the Logos in Whom all by nature participate (Irenaeus, Origen, Athanasius), and Who communicates His dignity to the whole human race (Cyril of Alexandria)—On Logos-sarx model, Christ’s flesh mediates between Christ and us (Athanasius) so that we are contained in His body and the resurrected will literally share His glorified body (Hilary)—After Apollinarius, Cyril emphasizes flesh as favored site of union—Some took Him to adopt human nature in its entirety, through His personal unlimitedness, such that He lacks individuality, or is the central/archetypal individual (some statements of Leontius of Jerusalem, Gregory of Nyssa, Eckhart, Rothe, Göschel, Dorner) but this is opposed by John Damascene: though He is an individual, Jesus’ work is universal and His dignity is above all mankind, and these meet in the Eucharist. II.B.4.b. Admirabile Commercium (p. 237): The central feature of Jesus’ mission is the holy/wonderful exchange: He became flesh so that we could become divinized/united to God through His flesh (Irenaeus, Athanasius, Hilary)—In His Cross and Resurrection, all of human nature is con-crucified and co-risen (Cyril, Theodore, Gregory of Nyssa)—Christ bears all my misery in Himself, and so eliminates the evil, for what is not assumed is not redeemed (Nazianzen)—For the Greek Fathers, Christ as God cannot suffer, but the cry of dereliction is uttered in the name of the whole human nature, thought the Logos is always in control of these passions (Cyril)—Elements of theology of representation in the NT—On the Cross, there is a real exchange of places between sinner and Son, which is possible only if one of the Trinity suffers (Augustine, Anselm)—Contemporary objections to Anselm’s satisfaction theory, which diminish the fundamental mission of Jesus, and reduce it to a mere symbolic illustration of what is the case anyways i.e. God’s merciful love for the world—Jesus’ mission is reconciling the world to God, and reconciling the tension between species and individual in us, and this requires that He do this from the inside, taking on Himself the personal/social situation of the sinner: pro nobis means “in our place”—He does not just take on Himself the punishment others justly deserve (contra Luther, Barth, Pannenberg), but co-works and co-suffers with those who are estranged from God (Augustine, Aquinas), allowing the latter to be given a share in His salvific work en Christoi (von Speyr): it is not a penance imposed on the Son by the Father, but goes back to the free salvific Trinitarian decision—On Aquinas’ extension of Anselm, Jesus’ action on behalf of sinners is governed by the personal merit of the Person of Jesus as Head of the Church/Mystical Body; we must go further and say that presupposed in representative action is His freely accepting the guilt of the members—In the Eucharist, He gives back to us what He took from us and transformed into Himself (Nédoncelle), and as thanksgiving it shows that the Father is Lord of the Eucharistic banquet Who permits Christ to give Himself to His members, and it underlines the life-giving significance of the flesh and the abiding significance of the Incarnation in Jesus’ mission: the material in Him affects souls, the transitory events in His life have eternal effects, what is most personal in Him affects the whole race (Mersch)—Body is bearer of Spirit, as in devotion to the Sacred Heart, where heart is the personal center sustaining the whole reality of the Redeemer—Centrality of the pro nobis formula (Schweizer, Cullmann, Schlier): His death draws us into a mystical fellowship of death (Windisch), and this sets us free (contra Kant, Hegel)—We must develop the fundamental category of representation from the Bible, devotion to Sacred Heart, and Anselm’s juridical framework (Ratzinger). II.B.4.c. “En Christoi” (p. 245): This Pauline formula is held together by center of the life and action created by extension of universal mission of Jesus—Origin of use of ‘sphere’ in Deissmann and rejection of his interpretation—Being in Christ is event achieved by Him, implying and demanding a response to Him—Link of en Pneumati to en Christoi—Scripture speaks of the objective mysterion of Christ, not of mysticism—Reciprocity of ‘we in Christ’ and ‘Christ in us’, the latter being the essential result of His mission—In laying hold of Paul, Christ leaves him intact as a person, but expropriates him in order to personalize him—En becomes syn i.e. synergoi i.e. participation in Christ’s dying and rising—All share this expropriation i.e. acquiring personality only through being in Christ, through Christ’s work of dying on our behalf; Christ is the pattern/archetype of our new vocation—In Christ, we become one Person (Bouyer), which does not absorb the individual conscious subjects, but endows them with personality/mission from above that bring fulfillment, each being a participation through grace in unique/universal mission of Jesus i.e. in His personality as Son: one can only become a Person as brother of the First-Born i.e. universal personality is fundamental but also communicative/liberating (Hugh of St. Victor) and this leads to communion of saints (Salamancans, Nazarius of Cremona, Scheeben)—Christ’s mission opens the acting area as personal and personalizing area, in which He is main character. II.B.4.d. Christ’s Mediatorship in Creation (p. 250): Question of connection between Paul/John’s claim that Christ has primacy in creation and has pre-existence with historical Jesus—To say former is mythological splits NT—We must consider former as claims about His mission—Christ sees Himself as climax of prophetic missions i.e. horizontal line, and as revealer of God in incomparable manner i.e. vertical line. (p. 251): 1. Christ’s primacy in old and new creations is first an assertion of His universal mission of salvation—Question of relation between heavenly powers and Christ’s Body—The title first-born of all creation points to whole cosmos—Christ has primacy over Church and over universe, recapitulating old creation in the new—Through His mission, He is cause of all that is meaningful/worthy of existence. (p. 252): 2. Christ’s predestination is an archetypal predestination—Thomist-Scotist debate over whether Incarnation occurred solely for our redemption or whether Christ’s predestination is so absolute it would have happened regardless (Haubst, Martelet, Malmberg): Scripture includes both in that Christ came as Redeemer, but also to offer fullness of divine goods—Christ’s predestination is part of His mission, and cannot be separated from that drama; He is the guarantee of the success/goodness of creation—Distinction between the inseparable vantages on all this of the eternal Son and of the Incarnate One. (p. 255): 3. More to concept of preexistence than of predestination—It expresses His certainty in His mission of being epitome of Word of God to the world, so everything in John’s Prologue can be traced to Jesus’ earthly consciousness; a horizontal prae is linked to a vertical prae—No moment when the Logos is asarkos (Barth)—Coming forth from the Father and returning to Him express His mission-consciousness; nothing is external to the drama/mission. (p. 257): 4. Not only the Logos but Christ is mediator of Creation; all things can only be created with view to their being perfected in Second Adam (Barth, Blondel, Przywara, Rahner, Teilhard de Chardin, de Lubac), and this comes to light in His being/consciousness—No before or after, although in order of execution there is first a non-divine natural subject of grace; God does not owe it to natural man to raise him to grace, but only owes it to Himself to be faithful to His world plan—This is context to idea of Son as primal image of Father—Authentic primal idea of every human being is in incarnate crucified risen Son—In role of God, Christ is His valid exposition/presence in the world; in role of Son, He is interprets Triune God and makes Him present—This allows Him to allot roles to others, though this is not a separate function from revealing triune God, and others in receiving a role come to reveal God. III. Theological Persons III.A. Chosen and Sent Forth III.A.1. Election, Vocation, Mission (p. 263): Created conscious subjects become theologically relevant persons in acting area opened by Christ, and this requires a role given by Christ, but maintains freedom in God, and only thereby does one lay hold of one’s own self—Unlike Christ, there is no identity between their eternal election and temporal vocation/ mission, for one exists as potential conscious subject before being called in baptism—One is called to the task that one is apparently least suited for: Biblical examples of this; one can look back and see that one was prepared prior to one’s call, but God alone can give the call, even if through a mediator—Man’s reaction to God’s call is apparent when he resists his mission; election is an effect of God’s call on the person called—Relation of election to reprobation: refusal of vocation renders the person so distorted as to be unrecognizable—Analogy between personal election and call of whole peoples e.g. Synagogue, Church—The giving of a new name, for man is what God appoints him to be, not what he thinks himself to be; new theological name implies social dimension of service for others: one becomes what is most distinctive/personal in one by forgetting private subjectivity—Total response requires growing into it for us, though not for Jesus where vocation and mission totally coincide—Election, vocation, and mission are pure grace i.e. gift, though there are temptations to think otherwise e.g. in Israel—We are always called for service in salvation history, and no vocation is an absolute beginning (unlike e.g. Zarathustra, Mohammed) nor is any vocation a removal to a timeless realm—OT vocation took place with a view to Christ, and to future vocation of all the nations; Israel’s vocation, even in Mary, is always preliminary—Those called bear dramatic roles intrinsically/a priori, even prior to acting, dependent on the One in whom person and mission are identical—Tension between substance and personalizing mission—Acting consists in bringing innate non-identity into approximation to perfect identity, by forsaking one’s own “I” in obeying God—Possibility of sharing in Christ’s work of redemption for others, even specific others. III.A.2. Person, Mission, Community (p. 271): The individual endowed with mission participates, to some degree of intensity, in the universality of Christ’s mission, and is thereby de-privatized, socialized, made into a bearer of community—The theological person radiates as far as his mission reaches, and is not a monad as a natural conscious subject is: a theological person opens within his person an area where others receive freedom to act—Each conscious personal subject is quodammodo omnia, and so has access through love and understanding to all that is done/suffered/thought/felt by others with the same nature i.e. nihil humanum mihi alienum; even naturally, apart from personal mission, each individual can participate in experience of whole community—Election of individual and of community by God are simultaneous, though there’s a sense in which Church is called before individual (Ritschl, Barth), but the Church/community’s place is occupied by an individual, especially Mary, who is pre-redeemed—The cases of universal persons of Abraham, Moses, and Jacob, whose power of intercession rests on their election, not ethical personality, and each of whom receives something that simultaneously is given to a community—Israel has a special relationship to God, but this is relative insofar as other nations are not abandoned by Providence; Israel’s preoccupation with its own election is sinful, given its mission to the nations. (p. 276): Israel’s mission can only be understood if the acting area into which it is sent belongs to God—God’s faithfulness to/call of all creation, as seen in Noahic covenant, and e.g. in Job, Melchizedek, who are praised in OT and NT and celebrated in the Liturgy, but in these cases, there is personal providence not exactly vocation-election-mission, for those in cosmic religion are given a role but not exactly sent, except for those sent to Israel e.g. Balaam, Cyrus, Naaman, though God certainly can choose those outside Israel. (p. 278): OT characters foreshadow both Christ and possibility of being given a personal/social mission—NT characters are in a milieu with the stamp of the real Person of Christ, though their participation in the sacramentality of His Person is mysterious—The Christological constellation of Peter, Paul, John, and James, who are the pillars of the Church, undergirded by Mary, and linked to Mary Magdalen and Mary of Bethany, though there is something distinct about each, such that they are related analogically not univocally—They open space for apostles, disciples, prophets, and all the, largely invisible, qualitative missions, which again are analogical, and merge into the ordinary missions given to all Christians; invisible missions of prayer, penance, charity, and suffering are no less far-reaching in God’s sight. (p. 280): Mission in the Church has its origin in both Jewish and Gentile Christianity, but NT election is not coextensive with all creation/Noahic covenant; those called are sent to the world, and there is a distinction between Church and ultimate kingdom of God, though the world belongs to Christ already—The Church has a clearer missionary task than Israel, and sacramental structure unites the Church to the Son in one principle of mission—Sacramental bond explains new structure of person/community it creates: there is no longer just the community of shared nature or between the sexes, but every individual personalized in Christ has within him a sphere of community through his mission, and these spheres interpenetrate, and this is the communion of saints (Piolanti, Carlyle); each can be for one another, sharing in Christ’s unique action for all—Everyone who participates in Christ’s pneumatic body acquires an intrinsically ecclesial quality—After Christ, there can be real vocation/mission outside the visible Church: Jesus’ eschatological work can give grace to individuals/groups, for the visible Church brings light to others, but is not identical to that light, and it can already be shining elsewhere. III.B. Woman’s Answer III.B.1. Woman as Answer (p. 283): If God’s Word really became man, the man-woman polarity cannot be bracketed from or neutral toward the theo-drama, for this is naturally a cosmic reality that extends up to the theion—Questions of whether the Logos is quasi-feminine due to proceeding from the Father, and of whether as Second Adam He is incomplete without woman—He must be a man to represent the Father, and the feminine must come forth from Him as His fullness. III.B.1.a. Answer, Face (p. 284): Only with woman does man receive a reply from nature to his word, so woman is essentially an answer to man, the word that calls out, and that does not attain fulfillment except when understood, accepted, and given back as a word: though man is primary, the primary is unfulfilled without the secondary, and so the latter is of equal rank and dignity—Though the answer is latent in man, it can only be given by God as grace—What answer is in speech, face is in the visual realm—Eve is formed from Adam, so their unity is not merely external nor natural, but miraculous—Woman is not only man’s delight, but his help, security, home, vessel of his fruitfulness and of her own explicit but answering fruitfulness; there is a natural vocation for woman more than for man: woman’s missio to Adam continues her processio from him, though both are directly an image of God (Przywara)—Woman unites her fruitfulness to man’s, and is fruit-bearing principle in creaturely realm: in facing him, woman gives man something new, a personal answer beyond the I-thou relation, in reproduction, whether sexual or otherwise; woman is a double principle, both answer and fruit. III.B.1.b. Feminine Creature (p. 287): Creature is only feminine before God, though God, unlike Adam, does not need the other—Lack of external necessitation in the Trinitarian processions—As God’s image, creature must have its own fruit-bearing principle, like the woman, so every conscious creature as a natural mission. III.B.1.c. Wider Implications (p. 288): Since Jesus is individual, his relation to woman will be individual i.e. the woman he relates to is a particular woman, yet she will have a social aspect, representing mankind, female before God—As God, the Incarnate Word is not incomplete without a female complement; as divine Person Who is truly man, as with Adam, from His wounded side, the answering face of the woman is fashioned—Incarnation must be in context of sequence of generations, but He must also break the vicious circle of begetting and death: He can only enter mankind’s generations through conception, pregnancy, and birth, and so His Mother will be genuinely Theotokos—Question of relation between woman as mother and as helpmate—Man-woman relation cannot be overcome—Individual woman i.e. Mary and woman-in-community i.e. Church and their doctrines are essentially dependent on Christ/Christology and so to soteriology—Man as monad, woman as dyad—Mary and Church must share each of man’s status—Primacy of Mariology over ecclesiology, and of Mary’s motherhood over the Church’s (Ephrem the Syrian, Peter Damian). III.B.2. Prolegomena to Mariology (p. 292): There is no vantage point to give a conclusive definition of male and female, but must approach this polarity that pervades all creation, and allow each to shed light on the other—The further sense in which woman cannot be tied to a formula, as answer/face dependent on man’s word/look, though she is independent in virtue of her dignity, and her two-fold orientation to man and child through dialogue and reproduction—Cult of Magna Mater as reducing male fruitfulness to insignificance; analogy to ants and bees—Woman as oscillating principle/flux that men try to fix by theory into rigid principle (Rilke)—There can be no fundamental principle of Mariology from which all its features are deduced—In Mary, evil infinity of post-paradisal generation is transformed, in which motherhood and bridal state interpenetrate (Scheeben, Feckes)—Attempts at first principle in Mary as Mother of God, which obscures her role as the representative answering woman, or in Mary as Church’s archetype, which tends to subsume Mariology under ecclesiology; the only principle is woman’s inner historical nature: Mary requires time to develop from receptive bride to mother—Concrete Mariology requires narration e.g. of events of her life or of Church’s meditation on her—Mary’s early recognized Christological role and role as New Eve, though she is also a theological person; veneration of her has grown, but not doctrine (Newman building on Irenaeus)—Problem arising from the fact that God’s act of reconciling is first exclusively His non-collaborative initiative, but also creaturely femininity is fruitful, and so God needs its obedient consent (Aquinas, William of Newburgh), yet the grace for this consent must come from God’s reconciling: the solution to all this is the dogma of the Immaculate Conception—Question of how Mary’s cooperation relates to God’s operation in the Incarnate Word, and of the relation between their intimacy and infinite distance, and of how this all-pervading analogy could be summed up in words like mediatrix or coredemptrix—Oscillation in history of Mariology between lofty attributes and ebb that restores the level but could lead to forgetfulness, based in oscillation in woman herself between orientation to man and yet also equal rank with him, and in Mary between her role as lowly handmaid and the one all generations will call blessed, and in oscillation between infra- and supra-lapsarian realms—Two trains of Marian thought: Mary as type of the Church, then Church’s model/Realsymbol, then mediatrix/coredemptrix: the focus up to the 13th century; Mary’s position between the aeons, and hence the problems of Immaculate Conception, Assumption, and perpetual virginity: the focus from 13th century to now—Twelve Marian mysteries in the Gospels—Mary’s exuberant form of creaturely freedom, the finite freedom that hands itself over to infinite freedom, and so stands open through grace; unlike Jesus’ freedom which is always one with His mission, Mary’s freedom lays hold of her mission in time—The problem with asking if Mary could have said No: no finite freedom is freer than when giving unconditional consent to infinite freedom. III.B.3. Mariology I. The Woman for Christ and the Church III.B.3.a. Mother of Christ, Type of the Church (p. 300): Mary’s motherhood of the faithful and so bridal relation to Christ became explicit in medieval times, but due to excesses it is returned to ecclesiology by Vatican II—Augustine on subordination of Mary to the Church, as the latter’s type—Patristic focus on Mary as New Eve, as parallel to Church, and as indirect cause of redemption, but never as bride of Christ; focus on her physical motherhood, contra Gnosticism, but this motherhood is on basis of listening obedient faith: Mary’s believing consent is prototypical and unique, and hence she alone, not Church, is God-bearer, and we pray to her, never to the Church—Tendency to oppose her to Church, and other tendency to identify them; Mary must be seen as having a mission not to be compared to that of the individual members of the Mystical Body: the sphere of a theological person extends as far as that person’s mission, and this helps us avoid an excessively Christo-typical or ecclesio-typical picture of Mary, and the more we understand her unique relation to Christ, the more we see her as concrete epitome of Church—Her mission alone is Catholic, but as a woman’s mission cannot be reduced to abstract temporal principle—Problems with Müller’s attempts to comprehend Mary and Church in single formal principle. III.B.3.b. Mother of Believers, Bride of the Lord (p. 306): Change of emphasis from Christotypical to ecclesiotypical approaches to Mary is due to intensification of the cult of Mary during the Carolingian renaissance, though this is just importing things already in the East, or making explicit what was implicit, through medieval mystical realism; focus on Mary as Mother of Christians, and on the importance of her consent, attributable to no one but her (Ambrosius Autpertus, Bernard, Aquinas)—Mary, rather than Church, as Bride of Christ, as the bride in the Song of Songs, and as the woman of the Apocalypse, whose beauty entices God to become man (Autpertus, Paschasius Radbertus, Ildephonsus, Rupert of Deutz, Richard of St. Victor, Isidor Glabas, Bernardine of Siena, Lawrence of Brindisi, Claudel)—There is legitimate summing up of the Church’s attributes in Mary, in whom alone the whole idea of the Church is realized; Mary, rather than Church, as Helpmate of Christ (Hermann of Tournai, Albert, Dionysius the Carthusian, Bernard)—This is radicalization of man-woman problem, woman being now seen as unity of mother and bride, and helpmate promoted to equality with man (Scheeben); reversal of principle that whatever belongs to Mary passes to Christ (Gottfried of Admont), hence the universality of her intercession and power, even to the hidden divine counsels—Mediation from Mary to Jesus to the Father, and hence move from mediatrix to reconciliatrix to coredemptrix (Dionysius the Carthusian), building on the meditation on the compassio of the mater dolorosa, going back to the East, in which Mary dies with Jesus on the Cross, and in which she alone had the Church’s faith at the foot of the Cross (Binder)—Equality of rank between Jesus and Mary, leading to communicatio idiomatum between them (Theophanes of Nicea, Arnold of Bonneval, Engelbert of Admont)—Seeing Mary as a distinct hierarchy above the angels emphasizes her Christotypical side to the exclusion of her ecclesiotypical side. III.B.3.c. Distortions and a New Start (p. 312): From 13th to 20th century, no new content, but an oscillation between exaggerated Christotypism and a call to moderation—Excesses include Mary’s universal intercession being extended to quasi-divine omnipotence even over God and able to free the damned (Germanus of Constantinople, George of Nicomedia, Enthymios, Alphonsus Liguori, Richard of St. Laurent, de Montfort, Guilbert of Nogent, Legend of Theophilus, Bernardine of Siena), and that her substance is eternal and celestial, a co-creator (Glabas, Mary of Agreda), to whom we should be slaves; this all gets further from Catholic tradition—Voices of moderation emphasize immeasurable distance between God and Mary (Albert, Bonaventure, Aquinas, Gerson, Erasmus, Bellarmine, Pascal, Adam Widenfels, Bossuet, Muratori, Newman)—Marian dogmatic definitions, encyclicals, and the background to Vatican II on Mary in Biblical and Patristic scholarship; importance of the council’s teaching on Mary being part of the Constitution on the Church: Mary is subordinate to God and Christ, and only with caution called mediatrix, but is a unique member of the Church, and there is a separation between her earthly humility and her queenship only in heaven, though she is mother both of Christ and Church—The Council’s Mariology is limited in that while it acknowledges the Church’s bridal and material character, it does not consider Mary’s bridal character, and it returns o an Augustinian minimalism about Mary, seeing the relation between Mary and the believer primarily in moral terms, without consideration of Church reaching perfection in Mary: to say that Mary’s cooperation does not add anything to Christ’ work (Ambrose) fails to give full weight to the man-woman aspect; a deeper approach is needed, though the Council leaves it open. III.B.4. Mariology II. Mary as Dramatic Character III.B.4.a. Between Paradise and the Fallen State (p. 318): Mary is most a dramatic character because her existence lies between the states of human nature i.e. to OT, time of Christ, and time of Church, and to paradisal, fallen, and fulfilled states; she is only at home in Christ, Who endures and overcomes these tensions, or in Church which should endure them—Even the dogmatic statements do not explain how the synthesis of the various status are synthesized in her—Mary must simultaneously be of the race of Adam that needs redemption and be immaculate Mother—Some attribute original or actual sin to her (Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, Chrysostem, Athanasius, Fulgentius, Ferrandus, Philip of Harvengt), though most saw her receiving holiness through Jesus (Ambrose)—Question of when she was sanctified, whether at conception, in the womb, or at the Annunciation, or gradually over time, given, in the East, the Origenist view that our whole bodily constitution is a fallen state, or whether first her ancestors her purified (Palamas) or perhaps she needed no sanctification (Cabasilas), though the East fell back to earlier views in reaction to Western Immaculate Conception—The Western idea that original sin was sexually propagated (Ambrose, Augustine) barred the way to grasp the Immaculate Conception; Anselm’s preparation for doctrine of Immaculate Conception, and Eadmer’s formulation of it, though the Augustinian view of original sin still bars acceptance (Rupert, Bernard, Abelard, Lombard, Aquinas, Bonaventure)—Scotus’ thorough defense of the doctrine, for someone must be committed to Christ to the highest possible degree, and his view that Mary was destined to be Christ’s mother even before the fall—Man’s original state is restored through Mary, which enables her to live/suffer in darkness of faith, but also to participate without sin in situations the Fathers call sin, including lack of understanding—As Mother, Mary must have purity to mediate everything to Christ that He needs, but as Bride/companion, she must share His sufferings, which requires a purity that makes her vulnerable, and so a citadel of compassion: Christ knows sin from the inside, and she knows it in its effect on Him—Her privileged solidarity with mankind. (p. 324): At the Cross, Mary was given the spiritual fruitfulness of the Church which comes forth from the side of Christ—Mary’s transcending of the post-lapsarian law of sexual derivation, replaced by the original, absolute, supra-sexual relation between the sexes, for the Paschal Mystery overcomes death and hence the link between sexual generation and death, which did not exist in paradise, though we do not know what the man-woman relation was there—Patristic/Philonic view that the first sin was sexual because it upset virginal integrity and it introduced the vicious circle of birth and death; the Patristic view that man in paradise was only sexual through foreknowledge of the fall, and so virginity is the truly Christian form of life and final redemption ends sexual desire, emphasized by Bouyer against Aquinas and moderns—The Virgin Birth as central to salvation history, restoring non-sexual relation between man and woman. III.B.4.b. Between Old and New Covenant (p. 328): Mary’s continuity with previous generations—As the ecclesia existed since Abel but only appears bodily on the Cross, so Mary emerges with the proto-evangelium and is prefigured throughout OT—Mary’s situation between the Testaments becomes dramatic with her marriage to Joseph, which God uses and transcends—Unlikeliness of Mary making a vow of virginity—Her dramatic position between the two Testaments drawn out in various Gospel events: Christ’s transcendence over OT demonstrated by His turning His mother away, though always with a hidden acceptance, always incorporating her more into His inner humiliation, since she belongs entirely to NT. (p. 331): Question of her virginity in partu, to emphasize superiority of virginity, but this exclusion of birth-pangs and breaking of hymen seems a creeping Docetism and lessening of Incarnation’s realism, though not necessarily—Question of whether birth pains and anxiety in pregnancy are an essential part of motherhood, and in Mary as a kind of pre-Passion—This cannot be decided physiologically but theologically in the collision here of the two Testaments—The key is not physical virginity but Mary as Realsymbol and typos of the Church and place of new birth, so the Incarnation event is not merely sign but sacramental (Laurentin)—We must regain appreciation of the sign-quality of the human body and of virginity in particular; Mary realizes physically what the Church realizes spiritually—The Church’s consistency on her virginitas in partu—The meretrix Church being re-virginized is no more miraculous than the Virgin retaining her virginity. III.B.4.c. Between Time and Eternity (p. 334): The greatest tension is eschatological, between time and eternity, based in her having regained Paradise and yet giving birth to the faithful at the Cross: she is vulnerable and innocent in the midst of fallenness—The Marian side to the Woman of the Apocalypse, who is between heaven and earth; the Woman is oriented to eternity in herself, her Child, her adversary, and her offspring—Early legends about Mary’s death and elevation to heaven, replaced by reasoning by those suspicious of legends (Theodosius of Alexandria, Theoteknos of Livias)—Question of whether her death can be considered in categories available to us; her death is not a death of sin, and is compared to Adam’s slumber (Damascene, Andrew of Crete), a death between the aeons. (p. 338): Mary’s dramatic role emerges from her center as virginal Mother, and from the whole range of her being; Christ as human needs a woman as much as the first man did—Sexual complementarity is irreducible, not a result of the fall—Mary is typos of the Church to the extent that she surpasses Eve’s fruitfulness, though typos cannot be reduced to a single principle: Mary is fleshly model of the Church, but also the real comprehensive model for all believers, prototype and eschatological goal of the Church. III.B.5. The Answer of the Church III.B.5.a. The Church and Christ (p. 339): Jesus’ mission is universal, so the whole universe is to be reconciled to Him; raises the question of what the conditions are for the Church’s existence in light of the universal event of Christ—Man, as epitome of creation, exists in the image and likeness of God in twofold miraculous tension: sharing identical nature with other individuals but existing in this nature as a unique conscious subject, and man-woman complementarity where both are from God yet the woman is also from the man—Man is over against God, and this is image of Trinitarian hypostases: the image is not just in the nature, but in the complementarity of conscious subjects; all of this is foundation for Incarnation/redemption—From the world’s point of view, Christ is icon of the Trinity, and from God’s point of view, an icon of the world representing all conscious subjects; as conscious subject, He needs a fitting social environment, and as a man, He needs a helpmate that is “flesh of his flesh”, which can be seen as His Body insofar as she results from His crucified/eucharistized physical body, but He cannot see only Himself in her, but He must have the magnanimity/generosity to allow her to enjoy free partnership with Him—Since He is concrete, she must have concrete, particular shape in context of the whole world, which has been in principle reconciled in its totality, though she will transcend the form she has at any given time insofar as her goal is the fruitfulness of Christ that aims at all mankind—Question of who the person of the Church is: she cannot be reduced to the Person of Christ, nor presented as Gnostic syzygia, but be explained by mission. (p. 342): α. To say Christ and Church are one person is one-sided, confusing prosopological exegesis with Christological theology: in terms of the former, there are two roles, but in terms of the latter, one person (Augustine)—The Head can merit for the members because we are as it were one (quasi-)person (Aquinas)—Cajetan and others on how Christ is the Church’s final suppositum/hypostasis, so there are two aspects of the subsistence of Christ, one in Himself and one in us (Nazarius), though this can lead to anhypostasis of the Church (Barth) or identification of Christian with Christ (Pelz, opposed by Mystici Corporis). (p. 344): β. Some early Christian writers see Church as having eternal feminine being in partnership with Christ e.g. 2 Clement, Shepherd of Hermas, which can be orthodox, but becomes Gnostic in Origen, where the Church comes to be seen as existing in an adulterous form before Christ—Another one-sidedness in views that see the Church as built primarily by the Holy Spirit. (p. 345): γ. Attempts to establish balance between Christocentric and pneumato-centric explanatory principle (Journet)—Maritain’s stress on self-subsistence of the Church—Bouyer on supernatural superexistence of souls united to Church which makes them image God’s tri-personal unity in their communio, and following Russian sophiology sees Mary/Church as feminine sophia, eschatologically united to Christ—Mühlen’s emphasis on Spirit, the “We” of the Father and Son, as principle of the Church, though the Spirit is always Spirit of Christ, and so there is a Trinitarian principle of the Church, and on Mühlen’s view there are three main concerns: (1) ‘Person’ is used analogously for divine hypostases, especially for the Spirit, Who arises as the “We” of the other persons; (2) As Jesus in the Son, He is a person before receiving the Spirit, so Christians are created as irreducible persons before receiving the Spirit and being constituted as a “we”; (3) Christ becomes pneumatic and expands into the Church, so the Church is His Body, but is also set over against Him as His Bride, which can only occur by the Spirit, the Person from Persons who mediates intimacy—But Mühlen rejects Trinitarian inversion—On Balthasar’s view, every grace implies a mission, which has a personalizing, socializing effect, so that the persons become common property, as Christ does; we and Spirit form a common “We” through interrelated and interpenetrating missions, and the Bride has a voice not in any individual but with and in the Spirit. III.B.5.b. The Church from Mary (p. 351): Christ as man elicits a response, which comes not just from feminine created humanity as a whole, nor just from feminine Church, but necessarily from an individual woman, who must form a unity with principle of mutual fruitfulness, and who must be Church’s and Christ’s vessel—Mary’s handing the Son over to the Church in the form of bread and Spirit-word (Ephrem)—As creaturely and feminine, Mary’s mission is to let things happen—The priority of Mary’s immaculate consent owes its existence to grace, but the possibility of this grace on the Cross is due in part to Mary’s consent—As subject, the Church is inchoately present in Mary, who is also the personal center of the Church: she is not (contra certain reading of Vatican II) a mere member of the Church. III.B.5.c. The Church’s Inner Dramatic Tension: Bride and Institution (p. 353): With Mary, Church and individual bring Christ into the world—Question of what makes the Church fruitful: it is that that Church is institution, which makes possible the presence of nuptial event throughout history, and this is entrusted to men, who must see Church as their mother—Model for Bride’s emergence Bridegroom is supralapsarian emergence of Eve from Adam, but model for Bride’s being made fruitful by Bridegroom is infralapsarian sexual relationship: both are seen in surrender go Christ’s Eucharistic body to His bride, which has event-character and sacramental-institutional side. (p. 355): α. To be the partner of the Incarnate God, the Bride must have integral bodily structure that matches the pneumatic vitality infused into her, for there is never opposition between life and form—Office instituted by Christ imparts to the Church Eucharist and absolution. (p. 355): β. Even in which the Church is born from Christ is a continual event, guaranteed by the institution—There needs to be a tradition to transmit the words of life, a juridical structure of canon law for location of divine justification, and indelible character of certain sacraments. (p. 356): γ. Subjective love/holiness require objectified love/holiness, based on Trinitarian inversion—Church requires both subjectively perfectly holy Marian Church and objectively perfectly holy Petrine Church. (p. 357): δ. The call to the Cross/service is given to the whole Church, including in her Marian perfection—Intertwining between Bridal and official/institutional side gives Church an inner dramatic structure. (p. 358): ε. Tension between episcopal and prophetic offices (Newman)—Tradition/instinct of faith are of the essence of the whole Marian/Petrine Church—Episcopal office guards authenticity of prophetic, but must also learn from latter—Only Catholic Church has this Marian-Petrine structure, with dramatic tension between individual’s experimental knowledge from the fullness of Christ and authority’s official knowledge given directly by Christ, which presuppose one another—Advance installment of love on part of Marian-Johannine Church—Relation between ex opere operato sacrament, proclamation of Gospel, and pastoral function of Church (Bouyer)—Human mistakes do not destroy Church or justify distrust of institutional Church; Christ can lead us along the way of the Cross through authority’s apparently unintelligible demands—Disputes in the Church require understanding her innermost constitution. III.C. The Church of Jews and Gentiles III.C.1. The Church as a “People” Gathered from Many “Peoples” (p. 361): Church transcends the form in which she is discerned; she must be seen not just as quasi-person in the theo-drama, but directly as the concrete People of God consisting of Jews and Gentiles—Particularity of Jewish nation is opened to unlimited totality of mankind through inclusion of Gentiles, though Israel was already self-transcendent—Difference between Israel and Church lies not in universality, but in the tragedy unfolded in Gospels and Acts in which His own ethnic people did not receive Him—Church is a “people” by supernatural birth, not ethnically—There is also an Israel that does receive Him, a remnant that constitutes all that has lasting validity—The whole understanding of what is proclaimed as new in the NT is already in OT, but only as read in light of NT—Election is on the basis of pure grace—Redemption even in Israel is primarily from guilt not slavery—In Israel, there is her ministry to the world, atonement, strangeness among the nations, her quasi-personality, increasing prominence of new covenant and resurrection of the body and poverty of spirit (e.g. at Qumran)—We see here the presence of the Church since Abel, though old and new People of God are not equated, though organically related—Question of how much of modern Judaism is in response to Christianity—Primal rupture where the one People of God splits in two, though the remnant steps over the threshold—Christianity’s missionary activity to the nations is difference from the issues of understanding between Christians and Jews, the latter remaining dialectical—Monist tendencies in medieval holy wars and liberation theology, and dualist anti-Semitic tendencies—Two approaches: Prospect of conversion of all Israel as event in history (Journet, Bloy, Maritain, Féret) or as eschatological event (Peterson, Barth, Fessard)—Peterson on how Church and Israel live in two times, the former eschatologically and the latter in world time—Barth on how Israel and Church now exhibit the two sides of the event of the Cross, God’s judgment and mercy, but belong inseparably together—Fessard on Israel and Church as permanent existential dimensions of theological world history—Bouyer on Church’s early failed mission to Jews, and how she will not attain final form until rediscovering Jewish Christian Church—View that Israel will be absorbed into the Church in history is naïve regarding Israel’s structure, and is contrary to Pauline dialectical structure of history—Pascal and Augustine on the abiding witness to Christ of the unconverted Jews. III.C.2. Israel III.C.2.a. Chosen in Abraham (p. 371): All election-vocation-mission, including that of Israel, is within that of Christ—The problem of the choosing of Abraham—Israel is part of a larger reality, represented by Noahic covenant, to which it must transcend itself—Difficulty of expecting Israel to see the nations as eschatologically equal to it—Question of whether Israel’s self-transcendence includes surrendering its primacy. (p. 372): Jews can only be understood theologically (Schiler), though he also exists and is taken over by God physically, as seen in circumcision—Abrahamic origins make Israel a race by blood, but also make it a semi-nomadic people, theologically relativizing the racial aspect—Foundations of Israel and of the remnant in God’s promises made freely/through grace, which are not restricted by flesh/race—Paul’s use of the remnant concept—Distinction between Israel kata pneuma and kata sarka—Prior choosing of Israel is confirmed by prospect of the eschatological salvation of Israel via the Gentile Christian Church (Rom. 11)—Galatians on how blessing on Abraham’s seed refers ultimately to Christ, who fulfills both pneumatic and sarkic sides of promise to Abraham—Where the ethnic element enters the eschatological body of Christ, it loses its earthly/reproductive significance; Israel contributes to the Church of Jews and Gentiles by surrendering itself to/in the Church, and thus experiences fulfillment—Israel as the sarkic people in which God alone knows where the pneumatic element is. III.C.2.b. God’s Command in the Form of Law and Prophecy (p. 376): In the election of Abraham, law and prophecy constitute a single reality—Law and prophecy in the Mosaic covenant, which is a free act on God’s part—Ontic basis of Israel’s essence is the awareness of having been chosen from among other nations to enter relationship with God, long before they had the concept of election; this awareness is theological, without earthly analogue—Awareness of election objectifies itself by positing original event i.e. in the sagas of the Patriarchs, and final destination i.e. Messianic end-time—In time of exile, God’s commands become the law/Torah, and Temple cult is projected back into time of desert wanderings, and Davidic kingdom becomes spiritual/transcendent/ eschatological—This all makes it possible for Israel to cling to law rather than faith in God’s commands, and so fall into righteousness through works, a repetition of pre-exilic idolatry, and a reduction of God’s free righteousness with immanent law of justice where evil immediately punishes itself—Israel’s constant inability to comprehend itself, even in time of David—Paradoxes of Israel’s archetypes—Contradiction between separation from nations and proselytism, and the end to proselytism with Rabbinism and the Talmud—But there is no contradiction in Israel’s inner structure, for both the ethnic/particular and the prophetic/pneumatic/transcendent are in Abraham’s election, and throughout OT, Israel was shown possibility of existence without contradictions—Concentration on election leads to idolatry—Rhythm of conversion and falling away shows the difficulty of obedient listening and depending on God rather than trying to find a place to stand on by means of justification. (p. 383): Jesus and Paul attack idea of inherent dignity in Israel’s election/descent from Abraham, despite validity of circumcision—Even after the exile, some followed Jeremiah in poverty of heart, and this allowed a starting point for the Beatitudes—Israel could only reach its complete form through humiliation of rejection and God’s perfect freedom to choose whom He willed, for God can only elect the poor and humble—God hardens and destroys Israel, but this is a function of, not contrary to, election. (p. 385): Final redaction of Gospels took place when Israel’s turning away was established fact, but Jesus sought to woo Israel and won some individuals; the clear evidence for this conflict in John and in the Synoptics—In Matthew’s dogmatic theologoumenon, Israel as a whole ethnic personality/macro-I, not individual Jews, take responsibility for Jesus’ death, and this too only applies in part—Matthew on how Israel has been left behind, without possibility of conversion until eschatological time—Church as real, not new, Israel (Trilling)—Even severe chastisement is sign of God’s faithfulness to Himself and covenant. (p. 390): Luke at the beginning describes Israel receiving the Messiah with open arms, from Zechariah to John the Baptist, representing the Israel that believes and enters into discipleship of Jesus—OT doxa must surrender to the light of Christ; Israel receives its fulfillment only according to God’s plans. III.C.2.c. The Mystery of Israel’s Continued Existence (p. 391): The fact that Israel survives Christ in history is a mystery that cannot be unveiled, and its essence cannot be defined, even by Jews, though some emphasize the ethical component, and others emphasize the Torah—Various interpretations of the Torah, based on emphasizing relation to the land, or on emphasizing prophetic dimension, making Israel embodiment of principle of hope in history—Formal element that Israel is forsaken/left desolate yet retains privileges, which while fulfilled in Christ are not lost to Israel, and still have theological substance of God’s abiding faithfulness—Material element of an intra-mundane entelechy tied to ethnic/transpersonal principle embracing a Messianic fulfillment in which history is to be transcended without surrendering its worldly/fleshly nature, which appears utopian but which unity between pneuma and sarx is inscribed in Israel’s entelechy from the beginning, seen both in Israel’s waiting/suffering and explosive transformative power (Buber)—Waiting Israel tends to take the wandering people as the center, which leads to dangers seen in the Judaism of the Talmud, where God is held to need the people as much as they need Him, taken to extremes in Spinoza—The side of Israel that seeks to bring its destination about, without looking back to origins unlike the prophets, and so leads to secularized Judaism where the Messianic impulse is detached from the idea of God/law, and is joined to philosophy of life or of hope or to a Messianic dialectic of history—Debate within Judaism as to whether the people of Israel is more than a people. (p. 398): There is only one people of God, consisting of Synagogue and Church together (Barth)—Defining their relationship it is not enough to establish areas of agreement and raise secondary differences for the sake of dialogue, for the breach is based on Israel’s refusal to acknowledge the Church as its own fulfillment—Israel and Church represent two sides of one redemptive mystery of the Cross, the sides of judgment and grace—Temptation of Israel to see its No as necessary in God’s plan of redemption (Werfel)—Israel’s advantage in that its religion has no Magisterium or dogmas, but only a consciousness of its election, and so has an opportunity vis-à-vis mankind that the Church does not have—The notion of a third age of the spirit in Jewish thought and in Joachim of Fiore and his spiritual descendants, on to Messianic socialism, for Joachim was a Jew converting only late (Gottfried of Auxerre), and so Judaized Christian history (de Lubac): the spirit of Judaism challenged Christianity effectively to a spiritual dual which cannot be avoided by repressing or annihilating the Jews. III.C.3. The “Nations” III.C.3.a. The Biblical Perspective (p. 401): OT and NT seem to indicate the “nations” are not theological persons—In OT, there is only choosing of a nation in connection with Israel, unlike choosing of individuals outside Israel—For Paul, nationalities of those who enter the Church has no theological role, though he does not deny cultural differences, and God relates to the nations by general providence, not special election; individuals enter the Church “out of” the nations. (p. 402): In Israel’s prehistory, there is period of undifferentiation among men in the face of His general providence—Cultural difference is treated in Genesis sometimes neutrally, positively, or negatively—Pre-Abrahamic order of salvation is not natural and then becomes supernatural, but it becomes dramatic with Abraham, after which Israel’s history is determined by its election versus non-election of the nations—Growing realization of God’s almighty supremacy over other gods, who come to be seen as powers, angels, or “nothings”; other nations may have some excuse for following them due to the beauty of the world (Wis. 13:6-7) but Israel has no excuse—Israel’s unique witness, for Isaiah, draws other nations to it so no missionary activity is needed—In late period, prospects of salvation for the Gentiles is bleak. (p. 406): Paul too has bleak view of Gentiles, ultimately due to their godlessness, in contradiction to the manifestness of God, though they search for God, yet they then distort Him; ignorance is ambivalent for it both excuses and accuses—The evangelization of the Gentiles involves a reinterpretation of the OT concept of God’s forbearance/patience: God is not just postponing His wrath, but there is an economy organized in view of the appearance of Jesus, so forbearance occurred because of His redeeming work, and because of God’s will that all be saved—All the nations form one community (Nostra aetate)—God decided on this plan from the beginning, but it was only made known in Christ, and it developed in different dramatic ways for Jews and Gentiles. III.C.3.b. The Question of Mediation (p. 410): Question of what the natural law is in the case of the Gentiles—In a world where God wills all to be saved there can be no purely natural event either on God’s part or in man’s subjective appropriation of it e.g. no purely natural revelation, knowledge of God, or final blessedness; man’s spiritual nature, which even at the natural level has a transcendent openness to the absolute, undergoes supernatural modification, but it is questionable if it can be equated with an experience of grace (contra Rahner) for that can be lost—Objectifications of inner non-objective revelation in extra-Biblical religions can only be defective expressions of that revelation, yet as of the essence of the human spirit they must be willed by God and express man’s inner religions dimension in a way that does justice to his membership in the human community, and so extra-Biblical religion can be regarded as willed by God, in principle and insofar as it is meditational—If all this is right, then the nations in their diversity and contrariety are theological persons in the theo-drama, anonymously Christological, even given their corruption and sinfulness—Objection that extra-Biblical religions always fail in their attempt to objectivity the a priori transcendental inner word, since such objectifications are never guaranteed by special a posteriori categorical revelation. (p. 414): Proposed solution seems out of harmony with Scripture, according to which the word was not heard by the nations apart from Israel prior to Christ; the nations are without hope and are essentially naturally seekers of God—If God’s a priori self-manifestation were person, then it can be asked why individuals did not respond personally, and even when they did e.g. in prayer and rites and myths, these were often critiqued and replaced with impersonal religious categories e.g. the transmigration of souls—Only in Christology does the person, rather than the conscious subject, emerge as a theme, with the notion of vocation—The gods are man’s projections, according to OT, in contrast to living free God—We must go behind theorem of man’s supernatural existentiale/anthropologico-theological contstitution in which grace, revelation, and universal salvation history are implanted in transcendental a priori manner, to man’s creatureliness as conscious being, into which vocation to divine union is implanted i.e. the desiderium naturale visionis—De Lubac’s rejection of natura pura and his refusal to limit the horizon of rational creature to analogical ens ut sic, which would need to be elevated by supernatural existentiale to desire of living God, hence the paradoxical structure of the conscious creature: man has a destiny out of proportion to his nature, and he only knows his own essence under the divine light—Man’s nature as spirit is a search/ setting-out for the absolute—No need for a supernatural existentiale, since by reflecting on ourselves as images of God, we reflect on the personality of the prototype, though the light of grace is needed to make this consciously clear—Desiderium was made for visio, though by itself it cannot attain it—Nature is totally encompassed by grace, and everywhere grace elevates nature, enabling it to pursue its goal, and leaving traces in all the religions, though these traces are not the same as objective religious systems; they are evidence of a single plan for salvation, not multiple plans: the elements on the ecclesia ab Abel cut across the religions—The nations’ diversity is important, but the nations are not theological persons. III.C.3.c. “Coming Near” and Conversion (p. 418): Problem of how those who were “far off” can be incorporated into the Body of Christ without OT preparation—It is possible because Jesus embodies the OT schooling, incarnating all that was abstract in law and prophecy, showing how man must seek God without regard for himself, and how the one who seeks God’s glory is con-glorified with His glory—He is neither a seeker transported into a superhuman sphere for self-fulfillment nor one absorbed into identity with the divine, but rather He seeks God’s glory entirely for its own sake; His person concentrates and embodies God’s entire word to the world—The totality of His accomplished work can confront every myth/ritual claiming to mediate salvation, and this fulfills all man’s religious seeking, and so ends the other religions, even if they continue to exist—The end of the religions can be seen in the Enlightenment attempt to construct purely natural religion, which degenerates into atheism of pure reason (Feuerbach, Marx) that continues to confront Jesus (Nietzsche), while the great religions degenerate into sects or attempt to modernize or to plagiarize from Christianity—However developed a pagan religion is, it is still a search only fulfilled in Christianity—Christian universality is not a synthesis, but a single reality infused from above that transcends the plurality of Jewish laws and “truths” of the nations—Conversion is not a complementing of something already possessed, but a total turning around in which the fragmentary is left behind, and is found again only in the totality after a hiatus—The sum of all the fragments of truth in pagan religion does not amount to the indivisible unity of the Word made flesh; theology of mission must attend to this leap—The Catholic unity of the Church is in Christ not in herself—The nations can only receive mission and personality in Church; national messianism has no theological significance. III.C.4. The Church as Union III.C.4.a. Mystery (p. 423): Every socio-institutional aspect of the Church is grounded into ontology—No univocal definition of the Church—Salvation is from Jews not Gentiles—Prior to Incarnation, attempt to match lives to words in response to God results in Pharisaism, but after Incarnation, man’s whole existence can be incarnated faith—Israel’s advantage and disadvantage vis-à-vis the nations, as seen in encounter between Abraham and Melchizedek—Jesus is one particular individual and so is the Church in spite of her universality; the sending of the Spirit is necessary for her to realize her universality, but this can be distorted in terms of politico-Messianic claims—Jesus’ fullness poured out into the world—Church is founded before the Passion, but only called into life with Jesus’ implanting of Himself into her in the Triduum—On the Cross, the particularity of Israel is abolished, and the universal body of the Church is created—Paradoxical Catholic ecclesiology was lived out early on without any sense of its being a problem (Bouyer): Church is one yet realized in individual Churches, a unity that is gift of the Spirit, the hierarchy not hindering this, with a sense of living tradition and both sacramental liturgy and personal piety, with a clearly defined faith that admits multiple expressions, assured of the grace of election with missionary activity to the whole world; no tensions here due to rootedness in Christology, translating agape into communal terms—Vocation to the Church is personalizing and socializing: the human conscious subject becomes theological person through unique way he is addressed by God and taken into His service in theological framework—Church’s unity is unshakeable by being result of Christ’s self-dedication, and fragile by being composed of sinners: tendency of ministers to become overlords, and of the laity to focus on their maturity. III.C.4.b. Sacrament (p. 428): Church is mediating concept for Christ’s salvation takes effect in the whole world, and she is constituted by Him—The Church never exists in isolation but in persons, who receive their ecclesial being in the sacraments, which they freely ratify—Church is objectively instituted by Jesus in Cross/Eucharist ex opere operato, but she must ratify this in ever new ways ex opere operantis: Church is primal sacrament—hence promise of infallibility coexists with possibility of error—Church is instituted as single objective entity but exists in created individual subjects, who by accepting her law of life receive her full actualization—Ministerial office as permanent organ for receiving and administering the sacraments implanted in Church by Christ—Church receives Word of God, and so she is a listening Church that receives Him bodily, and she submits to His authority so as to be able to administer it—Christ is both one physical man and redemptive event, both of which are entrusted to Church, hence she has both Eucharist and baptism/penance; confirmation and anointing belong to both sides—Any reception of sacrament imparts Trinitarian life to the members—Holy Orders as guarantee of Church to speak, act, and judge in Jesus’ name—All apparent compulsion in canon law is discipline of penance—Though relation of Church and Christ is supra-sexual, it is not unisexual, but is a pattern for what is sexual, and so sacramental light falls on marriage—In sacramentals like religious vows, initiative comes from individual not Christ, but sacramentals should not be sealed off from sacraments—Why some sacraments are repeatable and some not—Church as sacramentum mundi, of which the individual is a real part—Struggle for social justice as one of Church’s tasks, but not what makes her sacramentum mundi. III.C.4.c. Transcendence (p. 435): The Church transcends herself i.e. her goal is the entire human world: Israel was a sign for the nations, but the Church is more—Dialectical relationship between immanent building of Church as People of God in herself and her transcendent effect: Church can only carry out her mission by receiving and assimilating the pneuma of Christ more profoundly, and this leads to succession of phases e.g. first more interior focus, followed by political dialogue and cooperation—Christianity, unlike OT, always rests on personal decision to follow Christ—Inevitable crisis from Christians trying to influence secular institutions, requiring either transforming these institutions so they are an expression of Christian values, or the route of protest and suffering, both of which are missionary—Drama of anti-Semitic and anti-Christian attitudes—Proper drama opens when Church moves beyond individual conversion to cultural/political/economic implantation; problem of whether Christianity can enter into culture and still retain its identity in removal from “the world”, or whether engagement with culture leads to privatization of religion, all of which problems can be removed only by constant self-transcendence—Entire missionary realm is already the Lord’s—As Church militant, the Church is required to confront all with the Gospel via testimony of holiness, not necessarily that the whole world with convert—Dangers to the Church in various ages—Institutional Church is provisional, for this age only, hence the image of the ship; at the end of the age, the impersonal institution will disappear, leaving only the living sacrament of the incarnate Son of God and the resurrected bodies, in which organic sacramentality all aspects of spiritual-physical creation that enter salvation will share, and the material will no long be just a sacramental symbol, but will communicate grace patently/visibly—Image of Church as net—When institution becomes means of power or magic, it becomes alienating/repellent; even her indefectibility can thereby become a stumbling block, hence her precarious nature as institutional—Dangers to the Church from within. III.C.4.d. A Divided Church (p. 442): Division of the Church brought about by sin is rendered easier because of distribution in her of various charisms/offices: these require selfless love by all, or they can disrupt the Church’s organic unity—Internal schisms lead to ultimate schism of separation from the Church, rooted in sin often centuries earlier—Question of when the Church ceases to be a single person in the theo-drama—Church as community of saints and as institution is equipped to save sinners in her, and must not separate from them as a Church of the pure; there is tension between her ideal and her fallen reality, trying to draw the periphery to the center—There cannot be a plurality of Churches of Christ, and such an empirical plurality cannot be theological persons—The unity of the Church is concrete, not that of a species—Plurality of the churches is not willed by God, and if ecumenism presupposes it, it is not theological (Barth)—Vatican II is right that elements of the Church exist in communities outside the institutions of the Church, but this does not make them separate theological persons—Question of whether Catholic and Orthodox Churches are really divided or if deeper unity has never ceased—Flawed arguments that there is some theological necessity behind schisms—Separation from the Catholic Church removes one from visible symbol of unity, papacy, and render those churches such that they have no official authority/representation—The chimera of the divided Church shows how shaky her self-transcendence is. III.D. The Individual III.D.1. The Pathos of the Christian Individual (p. 447): All that has been said about community leads to the question of the Christian individual—Christ is the unique individual in world history that becomes universally present/necessary, who receives a feminine answer, and only on the basis of this primal encounter does the community come about—Very particular pathos of the Christian individual (Kierkegaard)—In the Christian context, the individual is no longer just the solitary free creature before God’s freedom, but the dramatic person in Christ constituted by being chosen, called, and sent forth—The loneliness/solitariness of Christ and Church. III.D.1.a. Community and Mission (p. 448): Paradox of Church as community of Christ’s love and sent into the world by Christ’s command cannot be explained by secular sociology—The centrifugal force of this command in Paul’s life, and his invitation of others into his destiny, and hence their sharing his solitariness—John’s preaching of love in community, but also his exclusion from his community in 3 John—Paul and John’s isolation corresponds to the solitary, personal profession of faith of every Christian. (p. 450): The community of brothers is founded on Trinitarian not primarily interpersonal categories, but through the interpersonal, Christians become individual persons, as Jesus is a Person only in relation to the Father—Experience of forsakenness as part of Jesus’ mission, a form of the closest relationship, and the most fruitful part of His mission; Christian fruitfulness takes place in solitude and cannot be experienced by the one who bears fruit: it objectively takes place in Trinitarian fellowship, though it vanishes subjectively—Communio with the Father, and abiding in the Son/Father: Trinitarian fellowship, lived on the Cross, is origin of fellowship of the Church, and of each disciple of Jesus—Eucharistic parallel. III.D.1.b. The Situation of the Witness (p. 452): Church’s reality precedes her members in Mary, and is not merely their sum—Church is always there, and contains no mysteries inaccessible to one who wishes to belong to her: any individual sent into the world can represent the Church in her role in a non-Christian environment, not her authority: this has often been the task of the saints, both active and contemplative (Teresa of Avila, Ignatius of Loyola, Otto of Bamberg, Las Casas, Peter Claver, Mother Teresa, Madeleine Delbrel, Maximilian Kolbe, Alfred Delp)—Martyrion is always the individuals’ response to Christ, concretely representing the Church, the individual acting in persona ecclesiae—Tragic situations where the individual must accept a commission to give testimony from a Church that no longer utters a clear call e.g. where the clergy have entered a pact with anti-Christian power-structures (Athanasius, Maximus, Martin, Kierkegaard); when the Church’s witness is invisible, it is enough to have the will to steer by it, to have the word of the Cross echo in one—High point of theological drama is when the individual has to represent the Church without being seconded by her, or even against what wrongly imagines itself to be the Church (compare Luther’s failure to maintain dramatic tension)—The risk of the Church being secularized in trying to be leaven in culture, as portrayed e.g. by Reinhold Schneider and Charles Péguy. III.D.2. The Individual in the World (p. 456): Christian individual has a perspective from which he can move the world—Question of how modern post-Christian man, whether in sheltering inherited culture/tradition or alienated in technological barbarism, is related to Christ—No anonymous Christians—Philosophical structure in which the “I” freely grasps itself have Incarnational and Trinitarian implications, which are only intelligible if creation is in Christo—Post-Enlightenment conception of autonomy has no inner path to God, and conception of subjectivity has no access to authentic personhood, though our actual experience of freedom does have these elements, though consigned to neglect/oblivion, but these traces can be uncovered and man placed on path of religious awareness—Primal act of spiritual life is child being addressed by a Thou: 1. Awareness that being a self is inseparable from owing oneself to another, an awareness first at level of being, then consciously, first of owing self to mother, ultimately to infinite freedom; 2. Awareness that where freedom lays hold of itself, it lays of being at its deepest/broadest, but my subject does not exhaust this being that is all gift, but it is left open for other subject, and this structure of being is an image of Trinitarian constitution of absolute Being; 3. Having been addressed by free/loving Thou, I am given an answer and asked to make on in return, a gift implying a task/mission, foreshadowing how the conscious subject of Christ becomes a Person: These are the core of an ontology of finite freedom, in accord with both Aquinas’ real distinction and modern personalism, only needing an Augustinian natural desire for the vision of God—Only if the many individuals come from an absolute interpersonal Being is the leaving room for others not an evil infinity—The Thou does not endow the I with subsistent being, but enables it to lay hold of the totality of Being in which it has a share—Only the Christian picture of God shows us eternal reciprocity/ interpenetration—Convergence of rays of divine willingness to adopt all men on Christ; requires faith in absolute freedom/love—Post-Enlightenment positivism robs us of every horizon of meaning, leading to either animal passivity that asks no questions, or total protest against society, or religious interpretation of secularity, or the question of Christianity—Dialogue among religions is today unavoidable—We must discern how God’s epiphany in Christ is qualitatively different than in other religious epiphanies; seeing this often just requires one Christian who is really serious about his faith. IV. Angels and Demons IV.A. Preliminary Questions (p. 465): Man’s freedom puts him in direct contact with God, without Neo-Platonic potencies and emanations—Christ has unlimited dominion over any powers that may still play a role, either rendering them powerless or moving them into His service where their role is no longer governed by their freedom of choice—Central to revelation is drama between God and man with Christ at its core—Question of the “powers” presented by Scripture presented at key passages, whether they are characters of the play or aspects of God or of man or something else—These passages need a place, but not one that upsets the central message of revelation; we cannot demythologize them or put them into a systematic angelology/ demonology—Dark symbolic language is used to describe them, and this language has not been left behind by the post-Enlightenment world, which turns to the un-illuminated regions of the psyche—“Angels” in Rilke’s Duineser Eligien stand for encounters with beings in whom the brokenness of earthly existence has been transcended, yet like Aquinas’ angels they have a closed perfection, and so seem less than fragile transitory reality—Constant reality of confrontation with the demonic i.e. more than human/psychological power, of which people are existentially aware (Dostoyevsky, Bernanos, C.S. Lewis, Bulgakov, Melville, Hugo, Balzac, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Bloch, Kolakowski)—A theological account must take into account Scripture’s fragmentary/contradictory presentation—There are four approaches to the role of angels/demons in world-drama—1. Popular demythologization which assumes a priori that such beings are incompatible with the “modern world-view” (Bultmann, Haag, Duquoc)—2. No commitment to personality or non-personality of the devil (Rahner, Beinert, Semmelroth, Schnackenburg)—3. The demonic is what God has consigned to oblivion, but angels are characters in some way in the drama (Barth)—4. Start with revelation and Church’s interpretation—It seems angelology was theological development of the “angel of Yahweh” who was manifestation of God, and demonology a development of God’s wrath/evil spirit—There is a struggle between primarily speculative and primarily Biblical positions. IV.B. The Biblical Witness and Speculation (p. 473): The drama takes place not between world and God above the world, but between earth and heaven, and God is neither a prisoner of His creation, nor alone in heaven, but has messengers—Images in the prophets of contact between earth and heaven involving angels—Jesus’ presentation of angels and demons—In OT, God alone is to be worshipped/feared; angels e.g. Satan in Job appear before Him only to bring His righteousness into higher relief—In last two centuries BC, Satan appears as an evil angel, even to the point of the dualism at Qumran between parts of the world belonging to Michael and to Belial, and this all passes over into NT; this all may be praeparatio evangelica: angels minister to Jesus and Satan confronts Him, leading to a struggle to maintain His mission, and thence to the casting out of the prince of the world—The battle against the “powers” is no more mythological than Jesus’. (p. 478): One possibility is that angels are fallen gods stripped of their power, and demons are fallen angels—Opposition to this view by Barth who instead sees a transitory nothingness which has great virulence while it persists, where nothingness is a negative attitude on God’s part; he rejects the idea of the fall of the angels, and the abstract angelology of Dionysius, Augustine, and Aquinas: angels can only be perceived in motion, not defined, and they exist only in the service of God, and they are encountered whenever heaven bends to earth—Barth sees the Patristic tradition as wrong in attributing freedom of choice to them, for rather their freedom is obedience, and this is their perfection, but also their lack since then they have no history or aims of their own, and unlike earthly creatures, they cannot also belong to themselves—The tradition, contra Barth, thinks obedient freedom requires cooperation on creature’s part, and so possibility of sinning (de Lubac), hence the distance between image and likeness—Temptation of identifying angels with the Aristotelian-Arabian separate spiritual forms—Aquinas on how Aristotle is right that they are naturally perfect, yet they are created in potency to the supernatural, and must freely say Yes to God; no possibility of pure nature for angels, on Aquinas’ view, contra later Thomists—Barth fails to reach the Catholic distinction between nature, given in creation, and supernatural vocation, given in Christ: that distinction requires natural freedom and analogia entis—Barth’s view of nothingness is untenable; it is an attempt to re-Christianize German Idealism/Schleiermacher—What Christ bore on the Cross is evil, and evil’s overwhelming power over the spiritual creature can only be called into actuality by creaturely freedom—Attempts to distinguish chaotic nothingness from evil, and give wider scope to the former, land one in mythology (Krötke)—The history of Barth’s view goes back to Schelling, Böhme, Cabbala—But in the Gospels, Jesus has an adversary whose concreteness comes not just from God’s No or from the shadow cast by Jesus, an adversary that is a “thou”—We must accept NT images: the sinner finds himself under the spell of a contrary spirit—Alternative view from modern Hermeticism/Tarot that man brings demons into being by turning away from God, which then enslave him, but this is just a hybrid of theological and psychological theories—These spirits must be dramatis personae. IV.C. Dramatis Personae? (p. 489): Angels are persons who make free decisions, and persons in Christ since all things are created in Him, and their mission is subordinated/oriented to His—But it isn’t their drama that is enacted, but the drama of God and man, while their drama has been already decided; there can be no neutral angels—Question of whether their decision has something to do with our drama; most Fathers think it does, for they were tested in a way involving either Adam or the Incarnate Christ: both theories preserve the unity of the theo-drama, and the angels’ relation to the material cosmos—The question of the materiality/hylomorphism of the angels (Nicea II, Rupert of Deutz, Honorius of Autun, Alexander, Bonaventure, Rahner)—Angels both behold God and exist in the mode of mission—Debate over whether all angels have a mission to us, or some just have a role in the heavenly liturgy (Schlier, Barth, Bernard versus Peterson, Aquinas, Dionysius)—Angels as integral to salvation history in OT and NT; Neo-Platonist speculation about the perfection of the universe makes it hard to see the Christocentric account of angels in NT—Angels receiving grace in view of Christ (Suarez, Schmaus, Scheeben)—Scriptural and Patristic account shows that angels are dramatis personae, but unlike us, their definition cannot be deduced form the theodramatic action/drama of Christ: their destiny is connected to but not synchronous with the drama—Angels appear from heaven, with God shining through them, and they can represent heaven’s whole closeness to the material cosmos, and they can have power over all realms of creation/history, so they have an inherent relation to the material world, though they need not be thought of as made of refined matter—Exercising their mission does not interrupt their liturgical activity: we can think of angels as most concerned with our liturgy, but we should come to see all our activity and suffering as undivided leitourgia, and the angels accompanying us throughout. (p. 495): The reality of the demonic is latent in OT and re-emerges where interest turns to the eschatological conflict between good and evil, which comes to a head in Christ—Role of demonic in the Gospel is not sufficient evidence for it being a theological person, since ‘theological person’ has been defined in terms of positive relation to Christ, and in the theological person God’s Yes shines forth, and the theological person is oriented to a supernatural ultimate goal—Bonaventure on ‘person’ as adding to individual the dignity of being directly related to God—For the pure spirit to lose its goal is for it to lose its personality, since he conscious subject does not have a purely natural goal (de Lubac on Aquinas), and so the demon can only exist in a fragmentary form, as perversion, lie, the impersonal, un-person (Brunner, Ratzinger, Dostoyevsky)—Attempts to see the devil as engaging in personal communication are misconceived, for the damned have nothing more to be shared, nothing to remember or hope for, the timeless point that is the opposite of God’s eternity (Bernanos). (p. 498): We do not know how many angels or demons there are or how they are organized—What is hostile to God is both one and many, anonymous and amorphous e.g. the Antichrists, beasts—Paul’s principalities and powers can appear as evil, neutral, or good—Paganism and Judaism, on Paul’s view, remain prisoners of cosmic potencies, which is broken through by Jesus at His Resurrection—OT was mediated by angels—Idols are both purely subjective perversions by their worshippers, but also the dwelling place/expression of objectively perverted beings—Early Pauline writings and some apocalyptic writings see them as being annihilated, later Pauline writings as being subjected, though without their conversion or personal history; their nature, as “elements” of the world is left open, though they represent the will-to-power and its attempt to usurp divine power—Christ is high above all such powers. V. Deus Trinitas V.A. The Living God and the Drama (p. 505): God is at the center of the play—Christ’s relation to Father and Son is revealed to be a personal relation, so in Him, Trinity is already part of the picture—Question whether God can enter a drama in the world without becoming mythological, or can only be in heaven as spectator/judge (Calderon)—Question whether Christological concept of “person” can apply to God in His triune life; the Persons in God will never appear as persons in isolation—Question whether God’s inner vital triune life finds expression. V.A.1. The Economic and the Absolute Trinity (p. 506): The play is not just organized by God and produced for Him and in His presence, but God has actually appeared in the play in Christ, the Son of the Father Who possesses the Spirit without measure, so He can appear—Question of whether this means He gives up being the play’s director/judge (Hegel, Bloch); Christ shows us the answer is no: the Father is always the point of reference for Christ, and this can only be contemplated by being admitted to the sphere of the Spirit, the intimacy between Father and Son—In Christ, God can become immanent without ceasing to be transcendent, come under God’s judgment without ceasing to be judge, proclaimed without ceasing to be mystery, which requires the eyes of faith without this making Christianity a mystery religion—With the objective revelation in Christ comes a subjective initiation into the Spirit, though the former can be taken and distorted, as in rationalist Idealism—Jesus points to both Father and Spirit: only in Him is the Trinity made accessible i.e. only in the economic Trinity do we have knowledge of the immanent Trinity, and this shows the principle that theological persons cannot be defined in isolation from their dramatic action—We should be cautious about analogies for the Trinity from outside Christianity e.g. from Hinduism, for they lack an “economic” basis—The economic Trinity appears as the interpretation of, but not identical to, the immanent Trinity, for God is not part of the world process—God is involved in the world as Father, Son, and Spirit, and as God; He does not become love by having the world as His thou, but is love already in Himself: He reveals Himself and gives Himself to be loved in complete freedom. V.A.2. The Person and the Trinity (p. 509): Jesus is the Person in the absolute sense because in Him, self-consciousness coincides with divine mission, and so that mission is universal—We should not think that there are only persons when finite conscious subjects receive a divine mission—Only a divine Person can measure up to God’s cause and be God’s agent, and so take away the sins of the world—It follows that the difference between He-Who-is-sent and He-Who-sends implies a dual personality in the one God, and the Person of Christ must be as eternal as the Father’s purpose and decision—The conscious human subject in Christ cannot seize His mission, but must open to it as laid on Him from above as a task, an opening-up that has the quality of prayer; the area between the conscious subject and His destination is the Holy Spirit; though man may struggle to reach the decision to do his duty, the decision is a gift/grace—In God, radical reciprocal relationships can only be personal, and we see this from Jesus’ attitude to Father and Spirit—No need to call these “super-personal” and reserve ‘persons’ for finite subjects. V.A.3. The Course of the Drama and the Trinity (p. 511): Drama as progressive revelation of Trinity could involve the play’s acts as rendering God’s triune mystery more recognizable, or the individual characters emerging more; first possibility in Fathers and Hegel, second in tradition begun by Joachim of Fiore and is false because no Trinitarian event can cut Church history in two, and the Trinitarian Persons interpenetrate so they cannot each have their own age—1. While the mission of Jesus is accomplished in time, it remains infinite in substance and effects: the Son’s mediation, being slain, and missio are taken up into His processio, making the missio timeless—2. Christians are admitted to His marvelous light, and so there can be infinite progress in the New Covenant, and the play can mediate ever-deeper insight into the profound mystery of God—God is above the play insofar as He is not trapped in it, but in the play as involved in it; the Father is most profoundly involved by sending the Son and Spirit, and even after the Son fulfills His mission and seems to wait for the end, He fills the time with His kingly and bellicose activity, and the Spirit is involved from within, moving the dram to its solution. V.B. From the Person of Christ to the Personal Trinity V.B.1. From the Mission of Jesus to the Son (p. 515): In Jesus’ consciousness revealed in His unique claim/humble submission, we see His divinity and God’s self-subsistent tri-personality, included in the concept of mission, which illumines the paradox of Jesus’ simultaneous sublimity and lowliness, and how in His lowliness there shines forth the one Who sends Him—What is at stake is total salvation or forfeiting it, for Jesus can identify with every least human being and include each one in His mission, so He knows He is identical with His mission and He made His decision from the beginning of creation; divine initiative spring from primal simultaneity/love on the part of the divine Persons (Brunner)—If some finite achievement could be an adequate symbol of God’s reconciliation with the world, this would go against NT’s realism about sin—There must an identity in Christ between His free embracing of His mission and His obedient execution of it: He has divinity and freedom in the mission’s origin, and the goal of the identity implies He has full authority to identify Himself with the sin of sinners so His obedience can take the form of hard obedience learned through temptation and suffering—Only love can explain the Creator’s care for the world, and so the Son’s acceptance of His mission can only be the revelation of the Father’s absolute love for creatures i.e. making this love understood to others—We must move from the God Who creates to the Father Who eternally generates—We begin to discern the meaning of “fatherhood” in considering the Son’s task to reveal the Father’s love: fatherhood means giving way everything the Father has, including His Godhead, leaving His womb “empty”; in God poverty and wealth of giving are the same—As perfect image of the Father, the Son is apt to represent the Father’s self-giving in every respect; the Father cannot do this because He has handed everything over to the Son, and so can only hand over the Son to the world—The Son allows the Father to do His works in Him, but He does His own filial works too, which are as original and divine as the Father’s—The Fathers are right that we are not saved and God is not love unless Christ is God and man. V.B.2. From the Mission of the Son to the Spirit (p. 520): We cannot relegate obedience to Jesus’ humanity and sovereign freedom to His divine Sonship, for He does both because He is both, as seen in Scripture—Jesus both naturally has the Spirit in Him and the Spirit is over Him/descends on Him—The being of the Spirit in the Incarnate One is the economic form of the filioque—In the Trinitarian inversion, the Spirit of the Father must take an active role, while the Son lets the Spirit that proceeds from Him be in complete harmony with the Father’s will—The Son’s divine obedience to the Father rests on the equal-ranking initiative, which now is transformed into an indifference/ availability ready to embrace whatever the Father wills, an indifference that is prayer in/to the Spirit—The Spirit makes it possible for the Son to receive His mission obediently—The Spirit can act more as the subjective spirit common to Father and Son or as the objective third Person Who is the witness/product/ pledge of their relationship, and accordingly the Son can experience His mission as person or impersonal, and so can see the Father more immediately or in a more veiled objectified form; in taking on the sinner’s God-forsakenness on the Cross, while immediately remains a fact, it is veiled to the highest degree—After the economic Trinity is absorbed into the immanent, no inversion needs to happen again, but the temporal is lifted into the eternal: the Incarnation does not imply a mythical change in God, but rather the unchangeable God enters a new relationship with creaturely reality and this implies a new look to His internal relations, which is not purely ad extra, but the new relationship is hypostatically united to the Son, highlighting one of the infinite possibilities of God’s eternal life. V.C. The Trinity’s Presence in the World’s Drama V.C.1. “Likeness” in the “Image” (p. 525): The triune God appears onstage in other characters: the Logos appears only in the human nature of Jesus, and the Spirit only as the indweller of the temple that the members of the Church are; the divine can transfigure creation only because the creature is an image of God that cannot be destroyed even by sin: the more vibrant, communicative, and fruitful being is, and the higher up the hierarchy of being one goes, the more clearly it manifests its relation to God, and intensifying vitality shows that God is a fullness of life—The image of primal Life is hard to see because even the highest creature lacks the most divine attribute, self-subsistence, and is always many/dependent but thereby communicative/fruitful—We can develop the imago Trinitatis in the spiritual creature in two directions: the Augustinian inner structure of created spirit, and the movement of the “I” out of itself to the “thou” so as to constitute a “we”: only in such transcendence does the first image occur, and the many transcendences in human society burst any closed model and cross each other like waves—We should not say it is impossible for there to be “Thou” in the Trinity (Brunner, Scheffczyk contra Rahner), but we also should not make human relationships the pattern for divine (contra Richard of St. Victor)—The imago exists for the sake of the similitudo i.e. as a place where the divine Archetype can be implanted, so creaturely man can become a theological person, a socialized, de-privatized, universalized, ontological homo ecclesiasticus, who makes room for others and can be shared with Christ as nourishment for the Mystical Body (Origen)—Such a person participates in the triune in ever more new/profound ways, and the rigid form of the imago comes alive (John of the Cross, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale)—The whole Trinity is involved in this, and attempts to rationally distinguish them in the indwelling loses sight of their circumincessio—Anyone, even non-Christians, who is willing to do the good for its own sake receives a light that uncovers truth/communicates a life that is more alive. V.C.2. Transcendence and Immanence (p. 529): If God remained above the drama, He would be unapproachable, as in OT, but even more in Islam and Deism, able to make a covenant but not a living communion with the world—If God were only in the drama, we would be in the mythical world of historically changing gods—Trinity brings together truth of both—God is life/love/eternal fullness of communion Who does not need the world but freely creates/binds Himself to it, involved in the world without being confused with it: it is not His process—God can enter the drama; distance between heaven and earth is only economic within primary/immanent distinction among Persons: even God’s forsakenness by God on the Cross is an economic form of the personal relationship within the immanent Trinity—God can simultaneously remain in Himself and step forth from Himself, able to experience the anti-divine in His own reality; absolute obedience can be the economic form of the Son’s absolute response to the Father. (p. 530): A God Who is able to be immanent while remaining transcendent is a concrete/positive mystery—That a Person of the Trinity should adopt our nature is beyond reason, and so all His words and deeds have an aspect that calls for pure faith, beyond all rationalisms—We are presented with an identity between heaven and earth in the divine nature—The better we understand God, the more mysterious He is—In the encounter between two people who love each other, we see a pale reflection of this, and that this is how things should be—No abyss is deeper than God, and He embraces everything, including Himself. V.C.3. The Transition to the Drama (p. 531): The Christian God can be One, Other, and Unifying even formally, and so is the most dramatic of gods, and so what He makes is bound to be sublimely dramatic—This vindicates the dramatic resources form the Prolegomena: what takes place in the world, no matter how dangerous, is action, not feeling/ narration—Triads of author/actor/director and presentation/audience/horizon need Trinitarian interpretation, as seen through collapse of dramatic dimension in post-Christian age—First triad is metaphor for economic Trinity in theo-drama—Application of dramatic/acting theory, including Stanislavksy’s, to man: for man, coincidence between masterly technique and pure inspiration is living between humility and exhibitionist loss of self, thus the problem of the conscious self in search of a personal role—Only in Christ do person and role coincide absolutely—Ontologically, in Christ alone, there is the possibility of not just a psychological/sociological role, but unique mission—The director must listen for the spirit of the text and infuse it into the actors, and an “impure spirit” can spoil anything like many modern directors: the director must be a modest reflection of the Spirit, for the Father entrusts the play to the Spirit to be translated into real life, the Son entrusts Himself to the Spirit’s guidance, and the individual would not find his “person”/ authentic freedom apart from the Spirit’s direction—Spectators are not passive, but intent on the performance; in theo-drama, person are continually stepping from auditorium to stage—The pre-Christian horizon embodied on stage, with its tension between providence and fate awakening phobos/eleos/katharsis is illumined from within in Christian theo-dram, and expands to all-embracing event of economic Trinity, and so includes grace/forgiveness (Shakespeare), fate being found in the Cross alone—The two triads of the Prolegomena merge, the one revealing the Trinity, the other the way the Trinity draws the world-drama into itself. Volume 4: The Action Preface (p. 11): Prolegomena introduced dramatic categories for understanding revelation—Dramatis personae introduced tension that creature is free before God, yet this is a freedom in Christ; this leads to the conflagration that makes this book begin under the sign of the Apocalypse—Revelation shows that the action set in train by human freedom is not overridden/trivialized by the all-encompassing action of the Lamb: it is not a philosophical apokatastasis (Plotinus, Hegel), but facing an anti-Christian aversion to the Cross which is new since Christ; the final drama has not yet taken place—Concept of “representation”—Unity of glory and the dramatic in that God’s glory appearing in the world is not static or neutrally observable but manifests itself in the personal involvement by which God does battle and is both victor and vanquished: revelation is a battlefield, and those who do battle are believers/theologians. I. Under the Sign of the Apocalypse I.A. The Book of Revelation: Outline I.A.1. The Perspective (p. 15): Revelation concludes Biblical revelation-event not through Church history but through a vision separate from and integrating empirical history of all that is taking place between heaven and earth, seen from a neutral place between heaven and earth, representing not historical events or their archetypes, but images closely related to reality having their own eidetic truth—Truth here is given not developmentally but in absolute/fulfilled/accomplished form, a fait accompli, non-temporally (von Speyr)—Danger of Gnosticism in Daniel’s surveying vision of world history, but not in Revelation where John is involved (von Rad)—Vision related to OT visions, but original too, communicated from an objective world of images in God—Images here were seen, not composed e.g. from OT images, though OT images are taken up and given new life, and the seer is given the language to express the images too—Jesus is at the center of these events, and the OT is present not just in fulfillment/memory, but in its own figures/words e.g. in juxtaposition of penal justice and reality transfigured, even after Christ’s work is completed—Christ’s death becomes latent to allow judgment to take center stage, but also the salvific efficacy of that death summons all to the final conflict—Revelation shows the greater world of God that defies all systematization—Tension between the fact that the Lamb is always victorious, yet there is also a struggle in which everything is at stake, and the seer alternates between these—Revelation opens new perspectives, yet also continues what is begun by OT/NT e.g. the already-not yet tension—A stark characterization of opposing sides replaces transitional nuances of Christian struggle from Gospels and Letters—This book opens a more universal panorama, since the prospects of the rest of the NT are mostly existential—Historical interpretation in terms of events in Roman Empire is too narrow—The more Christ’s kingdom is manifested, the more it meets an all-embracing law/satanic counter-strategy, a law that also governs much in the OT—World history is not progressive integration but increasing polarization (Augustine) and it becomes harder to tell the poles apart—Contrary to secular events, the announcement of the victory of the Lamb does not end dramatic tension, but on this apocalyptic stage, it leads to the real dramatic action/ battle—Correspondence between this and persecution Jesus predicted for his disciples. I.A.2. The Place (p. 22): Acting area for apocalyptic drama is created world structured as heaven and earth—Heaven is the created place favored with God’s presence, a theological more than cosmological place; we cannot just say God is heaven—God’s throne and the holy things and persons depicted in heaven in Revelation—It is possible to be on earth and in heaven as well: the reality of the Church of the saints bridges the gap without annihilating it—The Johannine earth/cosmos as considered in sharp contrast to heaven is the world turned away from God, closed on itself, liable to be led astray by the powers of the abyss, impervious to conversion; it includes the sea, Hades, and the lake of fire—Movement from earth to heaven means becoming an instrument of divine punitive justice—Punishments veil heaven’s love for earth—The book’s negative verdict on all of human culture. I.A.3. The Time (p. 26): Many time concepts in Revelation e.g. kairos, chromos, hemera, hora, aion, and various timespans, but none fit chronology of world history—Christ-even is above not in history—Revelation draws much less sharp distinction between OT and NT than Hebrews; all of the former is an eschatological reading of OT prophecy—All time spans must be understood qualitatively not quantitatively, especially the concept “soon”—Vertical and horizontal aspects of the approaching eschaton: at every moment, quality of end-time is vertically present—The visions do not present or recapitulate sacred/secular history—Their movement toward judgment—Each vision and sequence of visions presents ever more concrete cross-section between heaven and earth, such that everything is more and more concentrated in the “now”. I.A.4. The Sequence of Events (p. 29): Importance of introductory vision of Christ for understanding meaning of sequence of events, from Whose embrace these events never slip—The four horsemen as presenting the norms that govern fallen world-order—The different conditions of human beings—Question of the meaning of the silence after the seventh seal—The golden censer and the seven trumpets—The plagues as fantastic portrayal of the demonization of human history—The two witnesses and the symbolism of the city—The coming of the Messiah—The community of the chosen as the Woman, and the devil coming forth in person; the chosen multitude is virginal and unharmed in the face of the beasts—Pre-Christian and post-Christian worlds are both embraced by the destiny of the Lamb—Satan’s beasts as principles of history, and the heralding angels—The seven bowls refer to the end of the time of the end and the intensification of the struggle between Christian and anti-Christian forces; heavenly liturgy is simultaneous with punitive judgment of the earth: this is the all-pervading leitmotif of the book, and shows how much heaven is involved with earth, but how little earth interrupts heaven—Divine anger penetrates sinner’s whole interior and exterior milieu, but this leads to greater hardening of heart—Babylon chapters as retrospective enlargement: Babylon is godless politico-cultural world power; fornication is both figuratively idolatry and literally that which offends man’s incarnational bodily being—This book should be read theologically, not as code—Contrary to other interpretations, the millennium is one aspect of Christ’s reign in His Church—Babylon’s fall is purely punitive justice: this is a judgment on essential injustice of all secular economic life, and a looking ahead to the eschatological cessation of all cultural/social activity—Each cross-section portrays total theological situation of history with regard to opposition of belief and unbelief, but also the situation as it moves toward the end i.e. judgment, but in each one from a qualitatively unique perspective; the cross-sections do not just recapitulate one another—Even the final sequence of the battle of the Lamb embraces all salvation history, whose center is the incarnate/crucified Logos—The “times” of these events are co-extensive in ways we cannot imagine: there is no time at which the Logos does not do all these things—The millennium is not to be simply equated with the Church’s history (contra Augustine)—The sotto voce description of the last judgment. I.A.5. The Framework (p. 42): The issue here is the struggle between absolute value and non-value, without attention to the nuances of love, grace, or struggle to attain them, so clearly the visions are not meant to give glimpse of actual history, but to help sustain the concrete struggle in the individual and community—Hence the seven letters, and the second part of the framework in the new heaven and new earth, and the downward movement of the New Jerusalem, exhibiting the same unimaginable union between familiar earthly things transformed into heavenly realities—This is already true of the Church—Christ is the complete framework for the drama that embraces world history and end-time. I.B. The Book of Revelation: Reflection (p. 45): Revelation presupposes Christ-events of NT and the perspectives they imply, and transcends and integrates OT prophecy—It is a vantage to survey form/content of theodramatic action: form is essentially form of this content, and content the concrete unfolding of this form. I.B.1. The Dramatic Form (p. 45): Other NT apocalyptic passages open toward this final book, and this book is held together by a beginning and end that speak of concrete love/life of Christ, a love that embraces/sustains the visions—The images cannot be sucked into the temporal course of history—1. OT images are reborn in Revelation in a process hardly accessible to human reason, though the images remain images/prophecy, never taken by into complacent possession—2. The acting area is expanded over the OT e.g. the scope of Hades is expanded as a consequence of the Lamb—3. A mixture of times occurs e.g. mixture of future victory and past divine wrath, like the immanent expectation of the Gospel, which cannot be reduced to constant expectation or the death of the individual—Looking at the visions alone, the book appears as a picture-book, not a drama (Wellhausen), but in bringing in the letters, it becomes a drama—The dramatic quality of revelation does not lie in uncertainty about the outcome, but in the uniqueness that God is above history yet in it—The theological law of proportionate polarization is that the more God intervenes, the more He elicits opposition. I.B.2. The Dramatic Motif (p. 51): No one can see God in OT or NT, even in heavenly Jerusalem where all things are illumined by light of divine glory, but this is not the philosophical divine principle of unity detached from the world, for the Son has been given by the Father to be slain out of His love for the world; the Lamb is God’s mode of involvement in/commitment to the world—The Father holds nothing back in handing over His prerogatives to the Lamb, reserving nothing to Himself, and the Lamb has the same authority to give gifts to others: traditio is a fundamental motif of the theo-drama, beginning in the Trinity where God already is a lover, not just hen or noesis noeseos—The first traditio of Father to Son embraces all costly traditiones flowing from it, for then God’s freedom can set free a creaturely freedom including the freedom to say No—Power can even be handed over to hostile forces, but this shows their dependence in their origin—Question of how liturgy of adoration can be connected with theme of slaughter i.e. question of union of aesthetic and dramatic—From the point of view of heaven, the worst of human history is a cause of jubilation, as it was in the OT—There must be continuity between glory and drama, processio and missio—Inseparable unity of God’s wrath and love; the beasts injure only God’s exterior not interior honor, and so they provoke His anger, and this cannot be ignored by a theology of atonement, for wrath is the sign of God’s involvement, and to that extent He suffers at the world’s hands: God’s wrath and the Son’s Cross are two sides of a single reality—In Revelation, only two classes of people: witnesses and those submitted to the beasts, those who suffer willingly and those who suffer unwillingly—The world must adapt itself to God, not vice versa—All the terrible things let loose in the book are preceded by the victory of the Lamb; even the No that echoes through the world is the result of God’s Yes. I.B.3. The Dramatic Rhythm (p. 56): Since God is ever-greater, there is continual raising of the stakes in the drama; only with Christ is there provoked the resistance of antichrists and hell—The persecutions of the followers of the Lamb show that they have won, but this is no argument against this rhythm—Hardening of heart not just as OT phenomenon but as a law—The ultimate extreme between the eternal lake of fire and the eternal heavenly Jerusalem, but then He Who encompasses all things seems to be encircled by the final act. I.C. The Confrontation I.C.1. Fire (p. 59): The drama in which God’s absoluteness touches the fragile creature is a drama of devouring or healing fire—Fire from Abraham through Moses and the prophets to John the Baptist. (p. 60): No chronicling in NT, but everything is summed up in final Word from God, but this Word unfolds dramatically in Jesus’ development, work, suffering, and Resurrection—All subsequent events are only a theology of history i.e. a demonstration/exposition of the truth of this Word—Jesus is the man Who burns with God’s fire and now this fire touches man in the innermost level—Tables of law jettisoned in Jesus being the law and the prophets—Man is not absorbed into God but given freedom to perform his true role, with exemplary identity and mission—When Word/Spirit enter a man, he is faced with dramatic challenge to make an appropriate response—All must go through the testing fire—Review of Theo-Drama I-III. I.C.2. The Race (p. 64): Question of why it is necessary to construct theological dramatic theory now if it was not before—It is only now that God is dead (Nietzsche) and Jesus killed Him (Bloch) when, with His “I am” took the diffused God that post-Christian transcendental theology would like to reinstate and centered it on Himself—It took a long time for the diffuse background to fade away and for us to see the alternative to Jesus as the great void i.e. Dionyos/eternal recurrence, absolutizing finite freedom—Borrowed substance of antiquity lasted a long time, bolstering man’s shrinking natural piety behind or instead of Christ; it worked in the Fathers and scholastics, but became problematic from Renaissance to Heidegger—While the all-reconciling Stoic-Platonic divine horizon was there, the Biblical world was like an episode r symbol of embrace of infinite and finite freedom; transcendental theologians today would like to recover that, but the stage has been cleared—This is not to deny natural knowledge of God—Modern technological civilization brings atheistic consciousness through the spell cast by manipulable machines; nothing, not even atomic war, can reverse secularity to religious naïveté, though some of this may be due to Biblical consciousness of being redeemed/released and to technology already in ancient civilizations—Theory of evolution leads to anthropocentrism that sees man as apex of evolution, mastering nature according to his own image in the ideal of positive humanism—All of this is after God made His final move in Christ; question of whether this is intelligible—Alternatives of transcendental theology and liberation theology, the latter building the Gospel into the temple of humanity—Fascination with Jesus outside the Church—The principle of earthly humanity undergirded by Christ, Alpha prior to Adam—Question of whether the true principles, Christ and the historical Adam, can be sustained—Emphasis on soteriology i.e. on trying to understand what happened on the Cross. II. The Pathos of the World Stage II.A. Horizontal World History (p. 71): Essential history is what is enacted in vertical plane between heaven and earth; largely excluding redeeming grace, it is an account of heaven’s anger with the world and the world’s blasphemy against heaven—Prophetic revelation necessary to unveil vertical history, for man experiences time horizontally/ anthropocentrically, surging among forms, free and unfree, individuals and masses, confused or reflective (Burckhardt)—A law/principle is needed for this to have a dramatic character: everything produced in history presupposes/seeks/posits meaning, but there is the question of whether there is an overall meaning, or just fragments/antinomies of meaning sparkling with life but without synthesis—“Natural”/pre-Christian man, even atheists, never pursued/understood horizontal history without vertical axis, the latter of which yields a totality, even if a tragic totality: even eternal recurrence could be endured due to the recurrence of vertical epiphanies of meaning—Difference with Christian revelation of meaning from above, and man’s refusal to submit, for then we are obliged to look for meaning at the horizontal level, and thence come post-Christian ideologies, attributing absolute significance to fragments of meaning in history—Pathos on the world stage due to man’s inability to throw off vertical relationship or to entrap the absolute; yearning for the absolute cannot be secularized, so in our age the pathos becomes grotesque/demonic. (p. 73): Living man cannot make sense of himself; he knows what meaning is, for it claims absoluteness, yet this claim is never fulfilled in the face of time/death—Tragedy is not enough, as the Greek need for grotesque comedy showed—Philosophy’s tendency to focus on pathetic aspects of tragedy, and be soothed by an overall vision oblivious of history, where history shrinks to a puppet play (Plato, Plotinus, Hegel); this philosophy wants to do justice to the claim to absoluteness in pathetic world events, but it destroys the pathos of the individual fact: philosophy cannot do justice to a real man being tortured, but can only arrive at an abstract absolute in the presence of which history is enacted, either theion or nirvana; it give a background to the pathos of finite figures, but then removes this pathos—Man is always looking for a solution, but cannot construct it or have an intimation of it—Attempts to construct Christian philosophy of history play down hopelessness of finite existence in the face of a transcendence that does not disclose itself—The fallen world was made for redemption, but this is not something of which man was always aware, even through his own transcendence—We must see the pathos of real time/space before considering God’s free response/turning towards a lost world, or we will fall back into the un-dramatic God Who is the eternally radiant Sun of Goodness (Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza) and into a picture of man as primarily determined by resignation (Stoicism)—The whole of history in each individual, and each individual as minute part of history; periodic avatars of the divine in individuals cannot do justice to both of these, and death must be in the solution. (p. 77): The wounds of existence are not simply negatives, but damaged positives—Time as ever new gift, yet subject to transience/futility/death—Positivity and negativity in death and freedom—Impossibility of unmasking and transforming evil from within history—From these, all human life becomes an uninterrupted chaotic searching/feeling after totality of meaning, but only finding fragments—God in His freedom has reserved the gift of synthesis—It is nearly impossible for man to renounce a claim to synthesis—As long as God-given solution is hidden, finitude claims absolute meaning and freedom cannot get out of the maze, and the latter has an effect on the manner in which finitude lays claim to meaning—Man is always himself and his neighbor, he must give an eternity an account of how he has lived, largely of how he has lived his freedom alongside his neighbor II.B. The Claim of Finitude II.B.1. The “Relative Absolute” (p. 81): Reason only exists against background of what is absolutely valid/true/good: judgments, like claims of love, are meant absolutely, even though he knows everything in time is shifting—Monuments to great events attest the validity of absolute power to inscribe symbols in the flow of time, but everyone wants to do this, externalizing something ultimately valid in one’s thinking/judging/acting—Everyone who exists in history feels confident to etch something on the stones of time that transcends life’s fleeting aspect—Here man rises above the animal, aware of Being’s unlimited horizon, and the constant fulfillment of Faust’s wish to possess eternity in the moment i.e. not mathematical eternity, but the presence of Being in every concrete existent/situation: every being-in-situ is in both spacetime and Being—Changes can obscure the supra-temporal ideas earlier periods wanted to express, but the bridge to earlier periods is always the universal intention of meaning, which transcends changes—The fundamental human paradox is the need to write the absolute upon the relative—Different relations to eternity and time in Indian, Greek, Egyptian civilizations—The tragic contradiction in Israel, Christianity, and post-Christian thinkers who ponder man’s fundamental situation and are not just ideologues of progress (Heidegger, Camus, Rilke)—The paradox is straight-forward everyday experience—History is qualitatively different from nature/bios—Contemplative epoch of Plato, Gnostics, Stoics; contrast of China, India, and Greece to classical Israel, the most notable memorial to man’s fundamental paradox, without metaphysics covering it over. II.B.2. The Mirage of Progress (p. 87): As far as man is concerned, what is distinctively Christian is just a response to God’s initiative—In Israel, for first time, history acquires horizontal dimension, where salvation is in the future, not just from above, understood first as waiting or pressing on, not as progress, an anti-religious notion, though later Israelite hope made a pact with the idea of progress. (p. 87): Later moments in the life of the individual incorporate or reject earlier moments, each of which is a “relative absolute”, and so one’s life becomes a drama i.e. an action of ultimate significance within a finite framework—As part of nature, biologically unfolding, man is un-dramatic; man can freely imprint spiritual meaning on the process, even with hereditary and environmental influences, toward or away from Being—There is negative progress (Hogarth) and positive (Bunyan)—At each moment, one can stamp the entirety of one’s finitude with a meaning that reflects the absolute, relative to the norm that will judge it. (p. 88): In world history, progress is found in technology, where subsequent generations can take up and carry further previous discoveries—Ancient views of the technical in relation to the animal and the political—Albert and Aquinas’ emphasis on progress in philosophical reflection versus Roger Bacon’s emphasis on experimental progress in natural science, and later Francis Bacon’s development of science as liberation, both of whom envision new technologies—Enlightenment ideal of limitless perfection, through a science directing and accelerating human progress (Saint-Pierre, Condorcet)—Kant’s plan for development of moral totality or social-ethical culture out of pathological nature—Post-Kantian favoring of race or objective spirit (Hegel, Marx, Comte) which changes politics and society’s entire life into technology, to which individual autonomy/dignity are sacrificed—The compulsion involved in ethicizing the individual (Machiavelli, Rousseau, Kant) was just based on power-superiority (Burckhardt), and though in the guise of progress tend to self-annihilation (Horkheimer, Adorno), the logical conclusion of making an instrument absolute—Technological development as part of our fate (Baden)—Tendency toward complete self-destruction of the human race e.g. from nuclear bombs, ecological exploitation (Butterfield), which would be new encounter with vertical history, as in Revelation—An ultimate goal of progress cannot be envisioned, but if reached it would reduce all the rest of history to purely instrumental value; belief in progress flees from everything that in time is eternal—Genuine spiritual progress/creative achievement never comes except by wrestling with obstructions, and creative genius is a matter of the individual not the collective—It is the individual, subject to biological development and aging but free, who can have qualitative progress e.g. in creative work, while the totality of history can only have quantitative/ mechanical progress (Spengler, Toynbee) e.g. in the dissemination of creative work. II.C. Time and Death II.C.1. My Time; Our Time (p. 95): Individual lives in finite time, which is given to him, within which he has freedom to act—The beginning of one’s time is a barely perceptible transition from unconsciousness to consciousness, but its end is abrupt—Question whether we have a priori knowledge of the finitude of our time or gains it from experience of transience of things and others’ deaths (Scheler): the two are not mutually exclusive—We cannot say we are locked in life as a prison, for unique irrevocable acts belong to our dignity: in every act we transcend the given, but the space of such acts is one’s restricted time—Risking one’s life and receiving it back are necessary conditions for beholding the sublimity of existence (Scheler)—Our far-ranging spirit is bound to a bodily existence lived out here and now, and from community we are thrown back into solitude of approaching death; we must relinquish things and the thou, for every man dies alone (Heidegger)—The time I live in is my finite time, and the fact that it fits into neutral chronological time is just one of its features, not its essence: my time is my mode of existence, yet it is withdrawn from me insofar as I have no control/access to my past/future, and I cannot give it its overall shape like a drama—Time as distensio held together by memoria (Augustine), as bifurcation of consciousness (Idealism), as now-consciousness with inseparable retention and pretention (Husserl), yet memoria which masters the past is itself in flux—Husserl’s view of time as absolute subjectivity assumes a time given to consciousness, not constituted by it, but rather consciousness is admitted to time—The time of the biological and physical can only be described approximately/hypothetically—Biological death does not imply that the drama of this existence is over—Many geniuses and saints die before their time, having come to perfection quickly, imprinting the absolute on their brief days so that they seem to acquire a definitive shape. (p. 99): Different persons’ times do not coalesce, but they do communicate, for they share a common humanity—The I awakens in response to the thou, so the thou is prior to the I, and produces in the I the ability to go beyond the I-thou and become a responsible part of a we; this is common to existential and social philosophy—Through the contact between persons with their death-bound times, a new now comes into being, in which each can be involved, that of common human destiny, for which we have shared responsibility—To be responsible for one’s own time is to contribute to the salvation of all, but not by forgetting one’s own being towards death: my time can never be absorbed in our time—Reason as the meeting point of personal and social ethics (Plato, Stoics)—Generally, society’s being towards death is overlooked, as Nyssa noted in his account of sexual reproduction as occurring out of fear of death—Factors in history that emanate from common human nature and are fundamentally intelligible include power, triumph, defeat, creation and destruction of worthy artifacts, beneficence of good and malice of evil—No way to plot curve of history, which is made by countless decisions—If technology so enslaved us that it could be calculated, we would have sunk back to biological prehistory—Seizing evolution freely need not lead to evolution according to natural laws (de Chardin, Huxley)—Man, alone in a dumb universe, is always faced with skepticism/destruction. II.C.2. Gestures of Existence (p. 103): Christian tendency to project Christian reality into all dimensions of creation, but there is not really this anticipation of the Verbum-caro—Man by nature has a relation to his origin/goal—Reason’s openness to totality of being/true/good and its innate necessity to orient itself to that totality can be conceived in many ways e.g. the nothingness of all that is, real Being, the core of being in the transitory, the law of development, highest reason, law of necessity, primal freedom, a god, absolute law—Many attempts to establish a relation/balance between absolute and relative, but they always take some relative shape, and all this leads to conflicts and ideologies, for finite reason can only experience one finite representation of the absolute at a time—We would be ultimately left in resignation or skepticism. (p. 106): Fundamental energy of eros, which rides on a natural foundation, and at the natural level aims at the maintenance of the species, and for this sake presents the individual with a beloved thou as fata morgana of the absolute—As sexual, this mirage vanishes, but as touching one’s core, the will to go on loving can outlast death—Eros as daimonic in the Symposium—The more we are aware the intoxicating moment cannot give what it promises, the more we participated in it—The child can manifest the absolute, but then he takes his place in the stream of generations; the couple can be seen as sufficient in itself, but then it becomes an égoisme à deux. (p. 107): Power has a foundation in natural selection, but in self-consciousness it is a means to imprinting the absolute on the relative—The absolute includes power and goodness, the latter being radiant, kind, and communicative—Power arising from nature is primarily self-affirmation, and involves subjugating others, so it deceives us about the true nature of absolute—Where it prevails thorugh oppression, it becomes demonic, failing to see the absolute as radiant sun of goodness/righteousness—Power can also have the same source as goodness, and so lead to peace/safety—World history is made of great, not little, struggles, where those regarded to be heroes appear: great symbols of the absolute come from the field of war, renown transfigures cruelties, the one elevated to greatness transfigures the world by gathering to himself beautiful things and calling them into being e.g. in architecture, painting, sculpture, music, opera, through the self-glorification of power. (p. 109): Art’s special place among human endeavors is close to the side of the absolute that is “grace”/free gift, but also fruit of highest human effort—The artifact becomes transparent, allowing the absolute/ permanent value to shine through—Yet art decays or becomes unintelligible (Burckhardt). (p. 109): Human drama is concerned with unstable balance between absolute standards and transitoriness, looking up to the norm and down to time, with contemplation and action—Secondary norms in relation to the absolute, and the absolute dazzling us from looking to time—Non-Biblical holiness is abandonment to the absolute, dissolving the finite form to reach the true inner shape, which dodges playing a role. (p. 110): The first Adam was made with a view not only to God but to the second Adam, the God-man in Whom the equipoise between absolute and relative is established—All attempts to interpret human existence circle around the unattainable permanent balance—Presumption of those attempts that come closest, failing to grasp humility, making some part of man divine, or saying God has become man without the test of death, or making only a mythical figure part of the cycle of death and rebirth—The Fulfiller can only be accepted if first rejected. (p. 111): Man is capable of basic gestures i.e. those made in light of Being as a whole, which is good/true/ beautiful, within experience of analogia entis—Light from the absolute can only be received by man’s free open reason through act of decision, and only then is there drama. (p. 111): Initial element in that decision is epistrophe/turning-around/conversion, in which one is first aware of the absolute light (Plotinus), which can be provoked by many things (Mozart, Schiller, Calderon). (p. 112): A second fundamental gesture has to do with the other with whom the “I” shared an unresolved drama, structured by passions, calculations, power, but which suddenly is seen in light of an absolute norm of the true/good, and thence arises a demand for a balance/unity between justice and mercy/forgiveness (Aeschylus’ Eumenides, Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus)—A theater true to life does not know cheap grace (Kleist)—In considering the all-embracing value of existence, death can be a constituent element of existence and part of the action—The events of conversion and judgment reveal the power of the absolute light of Being, even outside Christianity, since the law is written on their hearts, even though they fall short of Christological balance (Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine in their Roman plays). (p. 113): Love could be a third gesture or could be too ambivalent—It can be too light-headed/lavish in its avowals of eternity in the midst of transitoriness, or it can take itself deadly seriously as the star of all things (Wagner’s Tristan)—Question whether outside Christianity eros can free itself from mundane mists so the absolute can shine through—Conclusion of Symposium and Antigone are not clearly dramatic or eros anymore—All transformations where love can stand in the face of eternal judgment are in Christianity e.g. Dante with Beatrice—Eros must go through death to become agape to stand before judgment, for in itself it is too bound up with succession of generations, which it cannot throw off (contra Soloviev)—Question of whether earthly relationships will continue after death, or will be burned up (1 Cor. 3:12). (p. 114): Final gesture is confidence that there is an absolute light, the stance of hope or resignation, the clinging to the absolute in the face of all opposition, even death (Odyssey, Antigone, Alcestis), resisting even when there is only the nobility of endurance (Nibelungen) or its grotesquery (Don Quixote), longing to embrace the Infinite in the midst of finitude (Epic of Gilgamesh)—Aeneid as greatest example of this hope-filled endeavor—Titans in rebellion against restricting gods, which are only anticipatory forms that should be dethroned by man (Aeschylus’ Prometheus). (p. 115): Many gestures based on equipoise, balancing out creaturely states/attitudes e.g. laughter with weeping, shrewdness with folly, etc., the great theater of the world being also the great fair of the world (Calderon) depending on the distance between observer and actors—We either cannot imagine a utopia without antagonisms, or suspect it would be tedious—Ancients projected the golden age into the past, which is wiser than moderns projecting it into the future—Our ability to partially improve conditions in history does not remove the fact that we act on a finite stage governed by the law of the dyad/polarity, which is dependent on the monad, but cannot dissolve into the latter; worldly logos has a rhythm set from above between poles (Przywara)—Final gesture of creaturely being is yearning, the essence of nous (Plotinus) or of the creature (Augustine) or the natural desire to see God (Aquinas) though without this belonging to a certain faculty or supernatural existentiale, depicted perfectly by Michelangelo—God’s answer fulfills man’s yearning without being anticipated, and the answer is seen by most as pure folly. II.C.3. Death II.C.3.a. The Search for a Starting Point (p. 117): Death is ultimate limit and innermost certainly about existence—As biological, death is most natural to man—As looking to the absolute, death bring us to the inner contradiction of our existence, the paradox of the absolute in the relative—Acceptance of the paradox in OT and Stoicism—If we look beyond the paradox to a sphere resolving the unfinished business of life, we need a theory that deduces the violence/cruelty of human death from a Fall that must be transcended/expiated, and an account of the survival of at least the aspect of man that distinguishes us from cosmic life—Accounts of a fall can devalue life, and it is difficult to distinguish in theories of the afterlife what is properly anthropological from what is just imagination (Pieper)—Christian solution is to see Christ overcoming death/Hades but this presupposes their reality/evil effects on history, and their supremacy prior to Christ—Death’s absolute veil is partially lifted by acts of actual not just erotic love for a thou (Marcel, Wiplinger), but the destiny of the riddle of death is still linked to Christ; without that, all that is left are the desperate attempts of post-Christian para-psychology or de-mythologized reincarnation, which denies the uniqueness of the person, and which drives us back on pagan fantasies—Israel’s attitude is that man stands before God in covenant, without any prerogative to eternal life beyond the salvation provided by the covenant now, an attitude that was difficult to maintain, so the prophets gave intimations of ultimate revelation of resurrection—Starting with OT is difficult because of the connection between death and guilt/desire—We cannot theologically separate what is negative in death from its positive/natural state—If death is a punishment, the question of why innocent children and non-human organisms suffer (Dostoyevsky, Camus)—OT presupposes a relation to God so strong that it renders the thought of death bearable—In post-Christian world, paradox of existence appears nakedly, resulting either in finding meaning in the encounter with death, or the absurd without any binding meaning is elevated to the level of meaning, or the possibility of spiritual meaning is renounced. II.C.3.b. My Death; Our Death (p. 121): Tension between my death and our death is ultimate consequence of tension between my time and our time—Our way of possessing time/dying presupposes the distinctively human connection between organic life and spiritual being: with former, my death is one natural incidence among many, but with latter, it is the loneliest encounter that sheds light of absolute seriousness/Angst on all the time that remains to me (Kierkegaard, Heidegger)—OT attitude of it being enough to live in the light of the covenant, ancient philosophical attitude of existence being justified by the experience of Being in finite life, experience of being blessed at being reabsorbed into infinite light/Logos/One/Nirvana—In borderline situations, existence stands out in a moment of existential non-biological Angst and has a foothold beyond dying, yet at other times death appears as a friend (Jaspers)—Jewish renunciation of individual survival beyond death in OT, Maimonides, Spinoza, Buber—In OT, the nation is subject of thought, and in ancient world aside from Plato, individual is primarily produce of phusis/arche/apeiron, into which one is absorbed (Anaximandros, Heraclitus, Parmenides)—Platonic intuition that man may be brought to the divine sphere persists only with difficulty; doubts about individual immortality in Aristotle, Panaitios, Cicero, Seneca, Epicurus, Lucretius—Post-Christian man cannot return to the security of being part of a chosen people or an all-embracing divine world of nature, for now we experience ourselves as persons, not just individuals, and now death shows finitude as standing forth in nothingness and so in being/freedom (Heidegger)—Freedom as fundamental attitude of farewell precluding any great initiative (Weischedel) or as revolt against absurdity (Camus, Sartre) or as cry for redemption from absurd contradiction of existence (Adorno)—In post-Christian situation we cannot link mystery of birth to death; we have biological origin, but our transcendence shows that we cannot be attributed to this biological causality exclusively (Häberlin), and, unlike for the ancients, birth is unlike death, the former being living maternal warmth and the latter cold disintegration. (p.126): Collective death, death as an everyday occurrence, is no longer solitary: “one dies” is an empirical rather than existential certainty (Heidegger)—Death becomes a medical problem e.g. the ethical problem of euthanasia, and so it becomes unclear why free man should not be able to manipulate it; in this perspective, death has no relation to guilt or any paradox, the only ideal being a “salutary” and “natural” death (Feuerbach), but really such a death is the most artificial, reducing the human person to use-value, without the individual being able to claim any immortality (Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx) or respect from society—The renunciation of the tension between my and our death in favor of a one-sided focus on our death only seems to diminish the problem of the meaning of death, but actually intensifies it—Question of explanation of contrast between obscurity of birth/death and clarity of knowledge of true/false and good/ evil at the height of consciousness—We do not want to be just a soul or reincarnated or have infinite temporal life, but want to be taken seriously as flesh and blood men, having made free unique decisions, with a finite duration like a piece of music, with substantial experiences/decisions that have intrinsic value, and cannot be weighed against others—We cannot say that life’s meaning is the sum of its gestures or that it is meaningless; we must use here the Kantian notion of the postulate: man’s given-ness calls for clarification and justification given from within as grace. (p. 131): There is so much pathos in our life that the answer must involve pathos, given by the living God coming on stage (contra Calderon)—If the absolute becomes finite, then the finite is drawn into what is eternal in each of its moments: the heart of Christian faith is that the answering Word of God has immersed Himself in finitude/transitoriness/flesh, accepting/living the tension between my and our death, and so He can endow the finite with full eternal significance, his death being most lonely and most communicable—The prehistory of this event must be purified of all human projections/mythic anticipations of a solution, so the question/encounter could occur in all its pathos—Biblical doctrine of resurrection does not preclude philosophical reflection on something imperishable in man—Jewish apocalyptic postulates resurrection in end-times; we must distinguish the postulate and the fantastic/presumptuous anticipated solutions—Resurrection made visible in the Word is not a continuation of earthly existence, since that would relativize earthly existence, but rather it is the eternity content/eternal dignity of unique existence lived/died in bodily terms, and it has this quality in the midst of/perpendicular to world time—When Jesus’ existence is rendered eternal, it show the ultimate quality even of his death—In the midst of the forgotten Son’s question on the Cross, God provides the answer, which guarantees that existence in all its gravity is embraced/kept safe by God’s sphere, the totality being transfigured, even painful moments: our afflictions prepare/actually bring about the weight of glory. III.D. Freedom, Power, and Evil III.D.1. Freedom (p. 137): Powers of evil oppress man in a way different from death, since evil is not simply alien/external to man, but man is in solidarity with evil—Evil is always connected with power to gain dominance—It is hard to know when we are threatened by neutral powers and when by a threat put forward by a free intelligence—We know from experience evil comes from freedom that uses any available power, which is not itself evil, but is a temptation to evil—Question of where to being a review of finite freedom—Freedom is not restricted to mundane matters, but is open to all Being, including deciding for or against norm of freedom—There cannot be too much influence of a supernatural existentiale, given that most extra-Biblical religions do not connect the subjectivity of the finite “I” and the absolute, and post-Christian ideologies reject such a connection as betrayal of human freedom. (p. 139): Finite freedom has an absolute aspect, but no power over its ground or fulfillment; it possesses itself yet is a gift to itself, and so cannot catch up to its ground (Welte)—To be itself it must set out for the totality of Being—Consciousness is being that is aware of its indebtedness to a source beyond itself, affirming all that is/may be, pointing to the fact that its ground is sheer goodness, and that there is a connection between the good/true and its own self-possession/realization. (p. 140): The absolute must be self-possession i.e. Spirit—We are repelled by the idea of infinite consciousness only if our experience of is of finite consciousness confined within its subjectivity, and we long to end consciousness by plunging it in an absolute without the restrictions of subjectivity—The child cannot imagine that being is not goodness/truth or that being is an illusion, and to be like a child is to be receptive to the light that falls on us from the absolute, and we should conclude the absolute has the characteristic of a subject, even though this conclusion comes through the mediation of another i.e. parent (Soloviev); this conclusion logically precedes any supernatural self-disclosure on God’s part, though this conclusion can express itself psychologically as direct perception (Przywara, Newman on illative sense)—Our primary experience of self-possession in freedom is a sense of power. (p. 142): This primary experience shows that the spirit has a unique interior life that can disclosed to others as well, and so this must be all the more the case for absolute Spirit, Who must have an interiority that I cannot approach by my own power—Man is dependent on free self-disclosure of his fellow human beings to be himself, and he cannot force that disclosure, and likewise he is dependent on God’s self-disclosure for reception of absolute truth/goodness, which he cannot postulate, and this is prior to any supernatural existentiale, however true it is that nature is made for/ultimately explained by super-nature (de Lubac)—All preempting of the fulfillment envisioned by God is hubris. (p. 143): We might not discern this second element in the conclusion about the absolute—One might just concentrate on the absolute in one’s own free self-consciousness, and so see oneself as the Atman identical with the Brahman, or come to see the creaturely realm as what should not be, or see the absolute point as both above me and in me such that I must sacrifice my psychological ego to it, equating the movement beyond oneself with the absolute (Pre-Socratics, Averroes, Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, Marx, Fichte)—Both mysticism and atheism ignore the fact of creatureliness and the creature’s indebtedness (Barth)—If the desiderium visionis does not seek its peace in God, it leads to fanaticism/anarchism/terrorism, as in many Faust figures, and e.g. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, the spirit that sees all that exists as deserving to be destroyed. (p. 145): All these worldviews, from Buddhism to Marxism, want to resolve the paradox of the human being within human nature, which leads to a neglect of/flight from man’s relativity, temporality, incarnation, presence/present—Disincarnation dissolves the concrete human being in favor of an idea one has of oneself, being unwilling to endure the paradox one is; man is essentially dia-logical, and any mono-logical interpretation destroys him—Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death on man as synthesis of opposites and spirit/self as reflexive relation, established by God, and on various kinds of despair; balance/true freedom is only possible through recognition of creatureliness such that God shines through—Attempt to prescind form rootedness in God is attempt to seize power, sometimes encouraged by viewing God just as power i.e. omnipotence—But true freedom is self-giving; it is impossible to say how much we can move towards this insight naturally, and how much helped by God’s grace (Plotinus, Nyssa, Augustine). III.D.2. Power (p. 148): Freedom is fundamental expression of man’s power, and in this sense power is part of the goodness of creation, yet evil is so closely allied to power that power in one respect is itself evil—There is a higher power superior to the unity between evil and power—Power is the cause/sphere of decisions. (p. 149): Two poles of freedom, autonomy and necessity of indebtedness, are irreducible to one another: freedom is not heteronomous for the nomos is genuinely given to it, but it is given with a view to the absolute—In freedom’s givenness we see radiant goodness of absolute freedom—Berdyaev’s absurd view that human freedom comes not from God but a un-ground that is both nothingness and absolute freedom thus absolving God of responsibility for evil, but destroying second pole of finite freedom and robbing God of His omnipotence—Finite freedom is intrinsically related to its origin, which is the identity of absolute freedom and power (Spaemann)—Highest act of freedom does not mean that freedom should be defined as liberum arbitrium between good and evil, for man in God has a fully realized freedom and this choice is behind him, though every freedom does need to choose or it is robbed of dignity (de Lubac); God hides Himself to give the creature the opportunity to lay hold of its own freedom (Blondel)—Every system that circumvents the supreme act of freedom robs the God-creature relation of its dramatic tension—In laying hold of itself, freedom sees its power is inseparable from the good, and power is identical to self-giving, but then the possibility of separating power and goodness, and making oneself the standard of the good, suggests itself—If the desiderium naturale is separated from its goal, it results in relentless heightening of immanent power, hence the view that power is evil and unfulfillable, as seen in political context of states that are self-interested, not directed to the absolute (Burckhardt, Acton, Hobbes, Montesquieu, Augustine)—When separated from religion and culture, power is meaningless and evil, hence it must ally itself to ethico-religious and cultural values (Burckhardt). (p. 153): Augustine saw the area contrasting with the civitas Dei as oscillating between earthly state with duty to look after public good and civitas diabolic; Neo-Scholasticism saw the impure/compulsive/violent side here concerned with secondary natural law which presupposes fallenness—All that the state then can arrive at is a balance of power with other interests, the state then being a power structure protecting a “justice” that is only a partial aspect of goodness/divine self-giving, a collective egoism restrained by laws or limiting powers in various ways (Plato, Locke, Montesquieu, Rawls)—Today, there is opposition between state politics that balances interests and a disinterested “humanism” that is most fruitful when it refuses power. (p. 155): Personal dignity comes out clearly when the person knows his autonomy is a gift and he allows the image of God to radiate through him, so that he attains authentic power and those further aspects of power for which he is responsible e.g. parental, teacher, corporate—Social life operates best when power and goodness operate equally in the one who obeys and the one who orders—Today, this socio-personal power structure is in conflict with the emergence everywhere of instrumental rationality that aims at manipulating nature, reducing nature to brute fact: progression of this view from Descartes to Kant to Nietzsche, as seen by Heidegger, in which things are put in the service of the ego and rendered measurable and employable in machine technology; Descartes’ primacy of knowledge is really Nietzsche’s will to power—In Nietzsche, the pole of freedom that owes its existence to grace becomes a function, with that grace, of autonomous self’s exercise of ever-increasing power—Our age is unable to receive and thinks it can produce everything, and in contrast we can see man’s essence as pure receptivity for wealth and poverty of Being (Heidegger), and beyond this all post-Cartesian philosophy of scope of human power/ reason lacks a philosophy of prayer (Blondel, Ulrich), without which fundamental act power becomes a tyranny over the earth. III.D.3. Evil III.D.3.a. The Power of Evil (p. 160): What it would take for a dramatic struggle to be between the good and the better—Evil necessarily veils/misconstrues itself, and an absolute authority is needed for it to be unveiled: such an authority can be exercised to different extents, so there are analogous unveilings—If sin were not deeply serious opposition to God, it would not be necessary for the Son to die on the Cross, which shows the magnitude of sin’s evil, which is unveiled there (Barth), though in OT God tolerated cultic compensations for sin, which are found in pagan religions too. (p. 162): Human freedom is handed over to itself, and knows this, and so must acknowledge its debt and transcend itself in a single act of choice; in its polarity lies possibility of evil—Before the fall, man is “good” in a pre-ethical sense, since his freedom has not yet taken charge of itself, though this state is not angst (contra Kierkegaard); regardless of what he chooses (contra Idealists), he will enter self-consciousness—Negative option can be taken if the chooser regards the autonomy pole as absolute, making oneself one’s origin and goal, and this alienates something belonging to/inseparable from the absolute—Only power is then adopted, since goodness experienced as self-giving cannot be fitted into categories of autonomy, which comes to see the good as in its power, a contradiction since power and good are really one; this is a move to the will to power, which determines what is good and evil, depriving finite freedom of its relation to itself and to God—Finite freedom then either tries to abolish its finitude, or treats it as arbitrary to convince itself of its own omnipotence (Sartre)—These contradictions are transferred to interpersonal relationships, changing loving solidarity to relation among mutually antagonistic absolute entities—This contradiction remains hidden, since what is at stake is identity of one who refuses to acknowledge indebtedness: evil is the lie, and one cannot know the contradiction while accepting the results which would lead to a new kind of innocence—Primary consciousness is of what is true, and there is constant attempt to reassure oneself it is not true; it is suggested that liberation from heteronomy is necessary for intramundane “goods” to attain their full development: the lie is connected in Genesis to the production of intramundane hierarchy of values—The lie cannot abolish itself, since the power is usurped, and is actually God’s power over the usurpers, since to seize power is to be overwhelmed by it, being bent in on itself (incurvatio in se ipsum: Augustine)—Finite freedom is oriented to God but to be fully realized, God’s free self-disclosure is needed, and this requires something be added to finite freedom, God’s summons to open/disclose itself to divine self-disclosure, and this must be audible, not just a conclusion from image to archetype: this persists even when man turns from God, and so is a “supernatural existentiale”, which an invitation, more than a natural orientation—Being unwilling to transcend himself, the sinner excludes himself from this element of divine freedom built into his freedom—Repentance is due not to natural reflection on idea of God, but on effective power of God’s grace—The “power of darkness” is the sinner’s being overpowered by the power lent to him, which binds the creature more and more, and he uses all his power to sophistically prove his own self-righteousness—Dramatic tension between God’s ever-greater power and goodness, and the ever-more entrenched position of evil—Question whether analogy of sinner’s situation to God, based on distance from God’s revelation, is only subjective or also objective, such that deeper insight into God’s love causes sin to increase (see Luke 12:47-48). III.D.3.b. The Analogy of Sin (p. 168): Basis for analogy is assumption that God’s grace/self-disclosure are not shared by all with same subjective clarity. (p. 168): Sin arises for Gentiles because while they are bound to know God, by a law applying to all men, they do not want to acknowledge Him—Wisdom explains idolatry, the root and end of evil, psychologically and ethnographically, and so excuses it to some extent—On view of OT and Paul, Gentiles are not recipients of historical revelation, so they have to rely on ineffective reason—Essential ambivalence in pagan religiosity and sin, since man by nature cannot avoid making images of God—It is legitimate for man, a creature of spirit and sense, to make a picture of God to approach Him, and this anticipates the picture God will provide; when enlightened pagan religion demythologizes the images, it usually forfeits concrete relationship with the absolute; but, the static, artificial image distorts man’s living receptivity for God’s personal word—Twilight atmosphere of pagan cult/sacrifice, a mixture of genuine awareness of worship/atonement due to God with attempt to make relationship to God by man’s own efforts, or even to persuade/control God/gods: power in the deity is given priority over goodness/self-giving—Aside from idol worship, there is legitimacy of pagan religious institutions, since many of them are adopted by OT worship, but this does not indicate they have an origin like Biblical revelation—Only in NT is institution as such purified of ambivalence, though it can still be misused—Biblical verdict on sinfulness of the nations is not unequivocal: God consigns all to disobedience/judgment, yet Israel’s place in the judgment is lower; this assessment of their sin is founded on a naively anthropocentric view of their relation to God—Pagan egocentrism can be clothed in form of the golden rule, which can found both egoism and selflessness—Sins of pagans are not to be weighed in the same way as Israel since they did not infringe positive law from God, though they still receive death as punishment, and are damaged in man-woman relation perverted in homosexuality, and in relation with fellow men in all aspects (Romans 1). (p. 173): Sin in Israel can no longer be considered on purely anthropological plane for here God, or one speaking in His name e.g. Nathan to David, makes the sinner aware of his sin—Conscience is ambivalent in the sinner since it can be both uncover and bury, accuse and excuse—Israel’s covenant puts it under a harsh light that exposes everything: in all of history, Israel is the place where nature/burden of sin is most directly manifested, raised to its climax in Christ—Covenant with Israel is particular but its range backwards and forwards is universal—God’s jealousy and violent reaction to sin explained by His total investment of Himself and the indifference/rejection/hardness of heart from man—Faith’s surrender to God has absolute primacy over keeping individual laws—Israel’s culpable forgetfulness of God explains its idolatry, projecting its lusts and replacing the God that makes it feel uncomfortable: sin is man wrenching himself loose from divine power which is/calls for goodness, applying also to politics and society—The more God’s power over all nations is made manifest, the clearer pagans’ culpability becomes, showing all mankind’s guilt before God, so that it seems incapable of being forgiven—The prophet’s role in the heightening of this tension to the point it becomes unbearable, the prophet being caught between God and the people e.g. in the “Suffering Servant” or Hosea—Juxtaposition of prophecies of disaster and salvation express inseparable two-sided unity of divine action, for the same fire purifies and destroys, pointing to same goal, the “Day of Yahweh”—Post-exilic deepening of faith/piety on the part of the poor is a genuine return to the covenant, but “wisdom” is the attempt to reach a rational/complacent grasp on how God rules the world, regarding oneself as guiltless, a covert tendency to autonomy unmasked by Jesus. (p. 177): Sin in NT is final intensification of OT No to God’s Word, but also takes its vantage from vanquishing of sin and reconciliation of world to God, with a new luminosity/intimacy—Through Cross, dividing wall between Jews and Gentiles is torn down, and all of man is enlightened—In light of Christ, a true theology and anthropology including understanding of sin can fully develop, including full justice being done to pagan anthropocentric ethics and the golden rule—OT expectation of Day of Yahweh attains objectivity in NT, intensifying both promise of salvation and prophetic curses, making a more stark antithesis of choice, as seen in Jesus’ laying the nation’s leaders’ sins bare, thereby leading to His undergoing the fate of the prophets who were sent on a vain mission—The depiction of the Passion of Jesus, which is above emotion, objective, and liturgical, is designed to unveil the sins of man: Christian un-faith of Judas regresses to Jewish faith in Messiah, and that in the leaders regresses to pagan trust in power, and all who murder the Word try to slip out of their guilt, making the central sin of history also a lie. (p. 180): Jesus is made sin and “confesses” it in the first total confession, and in return at Easter He is given an “absolution” that embraces the world (von Speyr), and so preaching in Acts sees even in the deepest guilt the light of the achieved reconciliation—Paul sees grace abound in sin, and sets no limit to Christian hope, building it on fundamental reconciliation between God and men, Jews and Gentiles, though Christ’s war against Satan continue, and there is a region outside the community of salvation, and the conflict will intensify to the point where the power of godlessness is without restraint—With John, the core of the negative power emerges as open refusal to accept Jesus as Word made flesh, beyond OT eschatological imagery in Gospels and Paul—Hebrews, Jude, 2 Peter on the one who receives grace but goes on to despise it, for God has no further grace to give; the idea of mortal sin moves away from Jewish eschatological imagery to post-Christian final struggle, as in Revelation—NT criterion for right and wrong conduct is discipleship of Jesus, and sins are always betrayals of love as found incarnate in Christ; since creation and redemption are both founded in Christ, Paul can borrow from pagan ethics. III.D.3.c. “Original Sin” (p. 183): Peccatum originale has deep roots in OT and NT but is a mystery that can never be completely solved, and it casts further shadow over the world stage—Fundamental affirmation is that a decision of God by the individual that founded the family of mankind has plunged the whole family into lack of grace, the source of personal sin and inability to strive toward God—Difficulty in conceiving socially transmitted deprivation since sin isolates man—Schoonenberg on the idea of freedom-in-situation, on which the individual is physically free but morally unable to develop his freedom, so original sin is an existentiale; but this historical account of transmission does not explain how babies have original sin—Bible roots universality of sin in mysterious solidarity of all men, linked to descent, and this is seen also in Sumerian, Hittite, and Egyptian texts (Scharbert)—Idea of original sin, its unity with personal sin, and the hope that remains traced through OT—The Second Adam provides a new start for the whole race, but does not undermine the old solidarity/transmission of sin; God’s saving will was not conditional on sin but was from the beginning, and the structure of solidarity in sin is governed by grace that overwhelms it—The solidarity of the Body of Christ requires a creaturely solidarity derived from our first parent—Solidarity in perdition is accompanied by original promise—Even when sanctified, sexuality belongs to the sphere of the first Adam—Hereditary disorder arises whether through monogenism or polygenism, and results in a form of death, dying to God, not originally designed for our nature; hereditary death is only a symptom of the reign of sin, yet in Christ we see that this death is open to the world’s reconciliation with God—One’s natural desire for God is weakened by negative desire to be-for-himself: our constitution is agonal, and grace/dying to self is required for self-conquest—From God’s point of view, original sin transforms the offer of grace, being no longer based on Son’s mediatorship in creation, but on redemptive grace of the Cross and the Son’s bearing the world’s sin; there is only an interruption of grace from our point of view—Our solidarity in lacking orientation to God/grace caused/is necessary condition for God to make known to us a deeper/more painful form of his love, to show us to what depths His love is ready to descend once He has decided to give a share in absolute love/blessedness to His creatures. III.D.3.d. Guilt and the World’s Suffering (p. 191): Much suffering is inflicted by culpable human beings, and the sin that is its source must be expiated because in intending evil we damage order of being as a whole and our own good nature—Sin here includes ordinary everyday forgetfulness of God by comfortable people—Suffering educates us in the seriousness of life, to fight against it, and to love our neighbor, but suffering should not be domesticated in a petit-bourgeois rationalism: consider Job on the disproportion between sin and the suffering meted out to us, which becomes the Unendurable per se, out of our control, exceeding our comprehension—There are depths in creation man cannot dominate, and God can react to sin in a way far more divine than we can imagine—Revelation leaves behind the pedagogical aspects of suffering—The suffering inflicted on the guilty cannot be recognized as “just”, especially since there is the suffering of children (Dostoyevsky) and the exploited: if this is just, it seems a rebellion is called for, though this leads to a contradiction—Suffering cannot be integrated into an overall picture of world-harmony, nor can there be a personal escape route, indeed no answer constructed in words/concepts works (Bro)—If we are not to fall prey to the contradictions of rebellion, we must wait for God’s answer, which is the folly of the Cross, the only answer to Job (Sölle), which is not an explanation but God’s presence (Claudel). (p. 195): Beyond moral evil, there is the suffering of animals, geological catastrophes, in all of which, as apex of organic creation, man is involved—Man is in part subject to the grace-less laws of the biological world, and in part superior to them and obliged to submit them to moral control—Teilhard de Chardin on how all construction requires an equivalent destruction, evil present even in the generation of saints—Some try to explain pre-human suffering by finding preliminary sketches of freedom in physical and biological (Greshake), but this assumes all choice will be negative—Teilhard’s phenomenological suggestion that there is an excess of evil in the world over the normal effect of evolution, point to some primordial catastrophe; connection of this to the principalities and powers of the NT: this spirit world embarrasses us since it seems to make us a second-order creation, yet we can contribute directly with God not through them—C.S. Lewis on the relation of physical suffering to a redemption of the subhuman world; although this is speculation, God’s old creation will be transfigured in the new. (p. 199): Final problem is that if all this is just preparing us for future glory, the whole drama seems dissolved as it heads to an undramatic destination—In a sense, the drama is prelude to the real action, the being of the redeemed children of God in God’s world; the marriage of the Lamb is the beginning of a life characterizing the new aeon, portrayed in imagery implying action that is fulfilling/fulfilled—Yet all that we call our drama will be not past but present, made new, our present life still manifested in glory in its depth and truth—The core of the drama is the permanent, reciprocal interplay between finite and infinite freedom, not sin/opposition to God. (p. 201): Man’s attempt to manufacture redeemed existence leads to man’s self-dissolution, for we cannot remove guilt/suffering from existence as a whole—God’s pathos must enter the drama—God does not step on stage to show contempt for vanquished opponent, but to help us reach justice/freedom from within; even the abysses of what is hostile to God is not abandoned—It is both God and man that does this. III. Acting from Within God’s Pathos III.A. The Long Patience of God (Theo-Drama in History Prior to the Time of Christ) III.A.1. Fundamental Considerations (p. 205): Theodramatically, history before Christ cannot be divided into acts, the only tangible articulation being Israel’s election by God, setting the pattern before Christ; no other momentous world developments prehistorically or historically are theodramatically relevant departures—All references to God’s wrath and judgment are within the context of the Noahic covenant—No individual episode or divine attitude can be removed from the process/drama moving toward its center in the Incarnation e.g. God’s graciousness cannot be separated from His anger at sin—The concept of paresis, letting it go, overlooking, as attitude toward sin, hence the time of God’s patience in which He endures sin in virtue of the coming redemption, substantially but not chronologically different from the time of grace and wrath, a way in which God is there for the world—Man is both sustained and rejected, free and fettered in relation t God, as seen in Jewish law and law written on pagans’ hearts—Twilight of the pre-Christian world anticipates/reflects Christ; atonement in OT is not merely juridical or a postponement of punishment, human freedom was not so fettered as to allow no free activity vis-à-vis God—That something is a type does not rob it of inner truth (contra Protestantism), nor is some truth equal to Christian truth to be extracted from them (contra Fathers)—God’s saving involvement in the world converges on Christ—We can still ask in what way it is conveniens that Christ appeared in history when He did; optimistic and pessimistic Patristic answers to this question, building on either the Greek idea of paideia or the Greek idea of descending world ages: but historical phenomena of growth and decline are too tightly interwoven, and in light of current archaeology it is irrelevant whether the Incarnation came early or late—Though there have been civilizations from time immemorial, there had not been anything like one mankind, but this idea, the beginnings of a sort of “one-world consciousness” began in the Roman period; if this is true, the Incarnation’s particular point in time, at man’s axial time, is theologically relevant in history, the moment the two universalisms/“catholicisms” of Christianity and mankind/totalitarianism/universal religion enter dramatic competition (Augustine): the pre-Christian hidden antithesis enters qualitatively new stage with Christ—We can see theo-dramatic character of historical time before Christ by holding fast to Israel’s religious history, which is a model, both demonstrating and exercising relation between divine and human freedom, though it is not as though the same thing is going on elsewhere: it is a model in the sense of a light to the nations, and in the sense that its religious forms have analogues/are borrowed from elsewhere, so other forms are not entirely negative. III.A.2. Israel as the Model (p. 211): The form of the making of the Sinai covenant was already present in Hittites and Assyrians as the treaty of sovereignty which resets on grace of a king toward a vassal and on obedience of vassal; these conditions mean the covenant takes human freedom seriously, as do the alternatives of blessing/curse—Initially, the covenant seems stronger than law and the commandments were an event of salvation, but after the exile the law seems to be made absolute, though both aspects were actually there from the start—Israel’s history as breaches of the covenant followed by Yahweh’s initiative in bringing the people home, but this to-and-fro movement cannot be the ultimate purpose of the covenant; the prophets e.g. Hosea see that the time of God’s patience is at an end and the covenant is to be regarded as terminated—Hosea on the ambiguity of Jacob-Israel wrestling with God—Joshua’s dialogue with the people—Other prophets on Israel’s history as a long series of transgressions; Ezekiel’s joining together of God’s anger and judgment in God’s commandment (Zimmerli), which leads to Paul’s dialectic of the law—Tragic dimensions of the history of law in OT—All other aspects borrowed from other nations are in the same twilight between religion in general and NT faith, though the step from paganism to Judaism is less than to Christianity with its incarnational/pneumatic dimensions—Equivocal status of sacrifice and kingship in OT—After the exile what remain is the dialectic between genuine covenant faith/secret manifestations of divine possession (Qumran, Merkabah mysticism, Cabbala) and self-justification with its extreme in modern atheistic secular Judaism. (p. 216): Israel is a model of the twilight nature of all pre-Christian religion, though in paganism the twilight is not subject to critique; Israel is a necessary prehistory to the Incarnation—Paganism both has wonder at the glory of God in creation, though this goes so far as to worship His works, and an inability to deduce the Maker from the works—Pagan religions circle around themselves, but Israel is compelled by a divine barb to utter an ever-clearer Yes or No, and God’s judgment issues in salvation and rejection; how this looks from man’s side and God’s side in the prophets—The figure of the Suffering Servant; question of whether God could allow His Servant to be ill-treated without it costing Him anything—All forgiveness of sin in OT moves toward a promised goal—In God’s patience in pre-Christian ages, grace and wrathful judgment hover in indefinite state, all of which point to Good Friday. (p. 219): Question of expectation of redemption at end of OT history, and, remotely analogously, in contemporaneous antiquity—Review of Glory of the Lord on transitional post-exilic period’s dimensions of increasing hope of Messiah, apocalyptic, and wisdom, all of which are ambivalent—Analogy in pagan antiquity, also in Glory of the Lord, of the bridge never built between philosophy and myth, the longing for redemption in Virgil and Plotinus, all muddled by the hubris of self-redemption; all this can be refined only by Christian discernment of spirits. III.A.3. Pre-Christian Religion (p. 221): Everyone before Christ had to endure the long period of God’s patience—Other religions are not pure hubris resisting revelation (contra Barth), but neither is God’s salvific will timeless and transcendentally address every man regardless of his objective religious tradition; but all objective systems of religion are inadequate, and involve culpability extending to them from the subject, and then having feedback on the subject: this is a theodramatic element that must be added to Rahner’s view that all non-Christian religions are Christologies searching in the Holy Spirit for a subject—Non-Christian religions attempt to say what/why man is in relation to world and absolute, and so resist the answer God provides in Christ, summed up as Vorgriff; transcendental Christology cannot entertain the dramatic tension between these positive and negative elements: other religions did not want to find the answer in Christ—The imago Dei is a priori dependent on its archetype for fulfillment, and the empirical forms of the human being cannot be reconciled with his Gestalt which is drawn to/only fulfillable by the absolute; partial solutions absolutize some aspects of the imago and deny others, which involves man in guilt—The “advent” character of late antiquity—Spirit-body tension is explored by Plato: we can enter the divine, but we must lay aside our individuality, as in Stoic, Epicurean, and Indian thought, and leads to more pessimistic Hermetic and Gnostic view on which God does reveal Himself but only to the pneuma/spark of the divine, abandoning all else, which is subject to fate—Individuals and all mankind are tore into part receptive of salvation and part that is not, without the link between individual and community provided by idea of “person”, or any salvation for the body (aside from Parsism) so the body can only be ascetic or libertine—Plato has mythic idea of creation, but no existential relationship between Creator and creature, as in Israel—Man thinks he can find his ideal in self-sufficiency and so attributes this ideal to God, annulling a sense of distance from God—Duality of the sexes is projected into heavenly world, as in syzygy, but in a way that ignores link between reproduction and death, and retains subordination of women—Prayer and sacrifice remain in public/state religion, but without being able to distinguish pure/epiphanic elements from the negative/controlling/magical elements as e.g. Otto tries to do in focusing only on the former—To deal with suffering, most religions take a path opposed to Christ and try to avoid suffering or render it harmless, by trying to pacify the deity with sacrifice of a scapegoat, though this does approach the sacrifice of Christ in some cases (E.g. Menoikeus, Iphigenia, Alcestis)—Expiatory rites and ideas of religion in mystery religions were tied to the seasons—However close some religions come to Christianity in some respects, other elements are directly opposed; the logoi spermatikoi can only germinate after metanoia involving death and new birth—Rather than saying non-Christian religions have a positive function, we should say they are in the period of God’s patience when He overlooks perversity and makes it possible to wrestle with Him in a good and bad sense—Outside the Bible, we cannot find the rhythm/heightening that dominates Christ’s story—It is uncertain whether we can talk of a particular expectation of redemption outside the Biblical world at the time of Christ, given all the countercurrents, despite apologetics’ claims: Israel feels the weight of sinfulness, but other nations just feel general culpability of all being. III.A.4. Transition to Soteriology (p. 228): The nations’ rites, purged of magical influence on the deity, become part of the ideas that characterize Israel’s mind/heart—The background in God’s fundamental reconciliation with creation in Noah, but with the shadow of man’s heart being evil from his youth as a sort of natural phenomenon, and the requirement that if blood is spilled then in justice blood will be required—In subsequent covenants, God gives grace freely/unconditionally, requiring a response from His elect; final reconciliation event is within this tradition of election/covenant—When infinite freedom chooses finite, the latter must be genuinely free, under the demands of covenant righteousness, such that God alone cannot bring about reconciliation (Anselm)—Turn to atonement—Theological person can only play their part on the basis of the doctrine of reconciliation. III.B. Soteriology: A Historical Outline III.B.1. Scripture III.B.1.a. The Life of Jesus and the “Hour” (p. 231): Thrust of Gospels arises from tension between life of Jesus and the hour to which it runs (contra Schleiermacher, Hofmann, Ritschl)—Decisive turning point when Jesus asks Who men say He is and Peter gives his confession—Clear distinction between Passion and time of Jesus’ deeds, even in the Synoptics—Only within account of Who He is can Jesus unfold the necessity of His suffering/rejection—Jesus leaves knowledge of the hour to the Father and interpretation of it to the Spirit—Life prior to the hour is not a mere anteroom—Encounters with pagans shows the open aspect of His mission, which is otherwise limited to Israel—His authority when He speaks/acts is founded psychologically/theologically on the hour, and all his preaching ethically and theologically has the hour as its goal, so He confronts those who would follow Him with the overwhelming demands of a supra-temporal scale of values, for all of His life aims at the “timeless time” of the hour, so his teaching is different from the this-worldly wisdom of the OT—Jesus sees the hour as something immutably appointed by God which He, the Son, unconditionally must go through, so He longs for it with His whole being, so He must have been formally aware of its scope from the beginning, embracing the totality of the world to be reconciled. (p. 234): An hora is a special, definitive, favorable point in time appointed by God; in the Passion accounts, it is time of the Passion determined by the Father when the disciples should have been watching/praying with Jesus—The cry of dereliction is the complete unfolding of the qualitative/timeless dimension in Jesus’ life that constitutes His hour—His obedience makes Him wait for the hour like any ordinary man, yet from His lofty vantage He sees whether it has come; ordinary people do not live for any particular hour—The constituent events of the hour in John’s Gospel e.g. the High Priestly Prayer, which is not before/with regard to the Passion, but expresses the total content of the hour—There is both perfect unity and a deep incision between His active life and His hour, though His life is the result of His own initiative, but in the hour, His being given up dominates; what seems to be a passive letting-things-happen is a super-action that is one with a demand beyond all limits—What takes place in the hour is a mystery that can never be reduced to a system, hence the many theological interpretations/theolegoumena that circle around the transcendent core—We cannot separate Fathers’ soteriology into incarnational and staurocentric enterprises (contra Jossua), since any discerning soteriology balances His life and hour, being sent and having come; tendency in incarnational direction blurs borderline between life and Passion, so we must again attend to Passion’s inherent modalities—Resurrection is goal of Jesus’ existence, the radiant side of the Cross rightly understood—Primitive Church’s interpretation is in context of covenant—God cannot be unfaithful to His covenant, yet all the mediators He sent, on whom the people’s guilt were laid, were rejected by the people; judgment requires atonement, but grace triumphs through judgment—Pro nobis yields central interpretation of the hour, unlocks Christology and Trinitarian doctrine, sums up the covenant, and is center of theo-drama, toward which all themes of election in OT converge: NT atonement theology requires OT vocabulary, though OT concepts point to fulfilled reality that transcends their conditional nature. III.B.1.b. The Main Features of Atonement in the New Testament (p. 240): NT theories of atonement are open to one another, including Jesus’ pre-Easter understanding of His death to the post-Easter portrayal of it. (p. 240): 1. Reconciliation with the world presuppose that God’s only Son has given Himself up for all, and as a result gives us all things: Jesus actively consents in the midst of obediently letting things happen; He is Lamb and Priest, superseding all previous ritual sacrifice really not just notionally—His self-surrender is prior to any action on man’s part to send Him to death, as seen in institution of Eucharist. (p. 241): 2. He gives Himself for us to the extent of changing places with us, becoming sin/curse so we can share/become God’s covenant righteousness, so we are already reconciled to God in advance of our consent, ontologically transferred/expropriated. (p. 242): 3. Fruit of reconciliation negatively is being liberated from: slavery to sin, the devil, world powers, power of darkness, law, law of sin and death, wrath to come—It is described as ransom, propitiation, redemption, expiation through blood/violent death/surrendering of life. (p. 242): 4. Fruit of reconciliation positively is being draw into divine/Trinitarian life, sharing in Christ’s Sonship by becoming members of His Body—This is the only freedom envisioned by NT, which is imparted/lived in the power of the Spirit. (p. 243): 5. Reconciliation is attributed to God’s merciful love, not anger; love, not primarily covenant righteousness, caused God to give up His Son for the world. (p. 243): These elements belong together, but not in a system—1. No aspect can dominate and diminish the others, as is done by theologies of exchange, liberation, and reconciliation—2. Full content cannot be replaced by an alleged equivalent that is more intelligible to some epoch, as is done by theologians who replace the idea of exchange/self-immolation with solidarity—3. Tension must not be lessened for the sake of an illusory synthesis, but must be endured, unlike those who see self-surrender as a mere symbol for God’s love. III.B.2. Models in the History of Theology III.B.2.a. The Fathers (p. 244): Fundamental approach of the Fathers is the exchange: God becomes man so man can be taken up to God’s place—Idea of devil having power over man symbolizes element of justice that governs God-man relationship, the devil epitomizing enslaving powers—The dominance of this approach is due to the need to assert, in the face of Christological heresies, the Mediator’s full humanity and divinity, and to effort to secure full meaning of pro nobis—Question of whether the Fathers followed the theme of exchange through as radically as NT requires and so fully include all the other themes. “Admirabile Commercium” (p. 246): The model of exchange/commercium from Ephesus is formal/neutral, allowing different concrete expressions at different stages. (p. 246): . Baptismal exchange formulas emphasizing the pro nobis and God becoming man so we could become God/gods, and similar formulas in Irenaeus, Cyprian, Athanasius, Hilary, Nazianzen, Augustine, Leo, Cyril of Alexandria—What is not adopted by God in Christ is not redeemed (Proclus of Constantinople). (p. 247): . Incarnation is acceptance of entire human life, prone to suffering, leading to Passion/death, so in taking on our beginning He takes on our ending (Tertullian, Irenaeus, Hilary, Augustine, Nazianzen, Nyssen, Leo). (p. 247): . Incarnation expresses His solidarity with us, but Passion/Resurrection/sending the Spirit achives concrete, objective/subjective redemption (Irenaeus, Athanasius, Leo)—God’s joining to us in flesh (Cyril, Nyssen)—Redemption required assuming human nature, and could not occur on a mere signal from God (Athanasius, Anselm)—Jesus in assuming sinful human flesh became the epitome of sin/curse (Nyssen, Nazianzen), which may anticipate theology of the Reformers (Origen, Chrysostom). (p. 249): . With above implications, commercium formula unfolded with Council of Ephesus, and entered Roman Liturgy with Leo, but the idea is also in Augustine. Limiting the Theme (p. 250): Fathers do not consciously limit the idea of exchange, though they unconsciously assume a limit: in taking on likeness of sinful nature, He Who is sinless adopted only consequences of sin attaching to that nature i.e. non-culpable weaknesses/pathe/affectus—For Nazianzen, Christ is central figure of world stage, playing His role, but also portraying us in Him through appropriation/imprinting our fallen nature in Himself, consuming what is defective—Question of how far He identifies Himself with the role; we must be pointed toward true identification—For Augustine, Jesus adopts human emotions through free appropriation, for Augustine wants to maintain both realism of His emotions and that they are freely willed by Him; He experiences dereliction not in Himself but in us—Mystical realism of unity of Head and members in Ambrose, Augustine, Aquinas—Augustine wanted to avoid inner contact between purity of Head and sins of members, so ‘to be made sin’ means ‘to be made a sacrifice for sin’—Maximus distinguished consequences of sin that Jesus assumed from sin itself which He could not assume; He consents to real feelings of horror, and this shows His two wills, contra the Monothelites who say that Jesus only ascribed human will to Himself (Pyrrhus)—Damascene says Jesus takes on Himself the non-sinful pathe and the debts thus incurred; He takes on and speaks our role, and this is what it means that He became a curse for us—The limit that He does not take on sin itself is taken for granted, so the Redeemer does not completely fill out His role of representing the sinner before God, but this assumption is unconscious, so they want to hold fast to the whole realism of the Gospel—Constant use of pro nobis and pro me. III.B.2.b. The Medieval Model Anselm (p. 255): Anselm first develops systematic soteriology, integrating motifs from Scripture and Fathers, though he also tries to demonstrate that the Incarnation was “necessary”—Two-sided relationship between God and people, and juridical elements implicit in covenant through grace, become more abstract/ perspicuous once salvation history is methodologically excluded—Anselm is not legalistic, for he is educated in OT, which contains juridical categories—Anselm’s method makes it hard for him to synthesize the five Biblical themes—His central concept of satisfactio (Tertullian, Hilary, Ambrose) leads him to favor man’s liberation, and the exchange enters this context—Man’s initiation into Trinitarian life remains implicit and there is no express treatment of Resurrection/Holy Spirit—Anselm admits his methodological limits and atonement’s mystery quality—God’s external honor cannot be restored by mere forgiveness of sin on God’s part nor by mere remorse by the sinner; there is no opposition between juridical and personal aspects of God-man relation—Dramatic dimension of world’s redemption in Christ came out in Anselm’s theology as never before, both in form and content, a closed dramatic action with a necessity arising from the free character of the parties involved—In God, freedom is rectitudo, containing truth, goodness, justice, mercy; God owes it to His honor to end the disorder introduced into the world by created freedom—Transition from aesthetic to dramatic view, in move from glory to honor, beauty of the universe to order that must be established by poena or satisfactio—Since man’s guilt calls for recompense through work of supererogation, the Son must become incarnate—The “necessity” of divine freedom resides solely in nature of God and inner relationship between Him and the work He has undertaken with the world/man, and everything, including Jesus’ death, follows from this—Emphasis on the Son’s voluntariness in His death—If the Son becomes man, He owes the Father a life of perfect righteousness and suffering for that righteousness; only death is supererogatory since not being a sinner, death was not a debt He was required to pay—Jesus’ death is ultimate consequence of His initiative on behalf of righteousness, a link to theology of liberation—His humanity too freely chooses death—Distinction between objective reconciliation and subjective appropriation of redeeming grace—As God, He cannot profit, so He makes the reward available to others. (p. 260): Exchange is no longer at the center but ransom—What was unconscious limitation in the Fathers is now conscious: Christ does not come into contact with sin, but balances it out—Anselm has the strange view that Christ’s sufferings are exemplary not expiatory—He does not see that Jesus’ entire life/suffering are meritorious, and it is obscure for him how God’s decision and man’s obedient acceptance of that decision are related—He cannot explain why Jesus’ obedience is addressed to the Father not the whole Trinity; he does not organically ground the pro nobis in the act of the Incarnation. Thomas (p. 262): Anselm held that Christ’s work outweighs all the sin of the world and so is the perfect satisfaction for sin, and this is central to Aquinas too, though he opens Anselm’s methodological limits to include all the themes of Scripture and the Fathers, but recognizes the concepts are mere pointers, and so employs many—He emphasizes God’s love and the divine dignity of Christ’s person, but he resists the ideas of ransom price paid to the powers or of punitive action designed to appease divine anger—Aquinas emphasizes the grace of sonship given to sinners—Aquinas treats well Jesus’ whole life, but he does not take account of the Patristic exchange of places, nor is there any inner contact between Jesus and the reality of sin as such—The missing connection in Anselm between Christ and mankind is found in the organic link between Christ as Head and Church as Body in Aquinas—Aquinas accounts for Christ’s great sufferings, though in moralizing tone, and without Christ losing the beatific vision, and without emphasis on Christ’s abandonment by God, mentioned only once—Aquinas’ view of attribution of sin to Christ is same as the Fathers’—On Aquinas’ view, God was free to devise other ways to reconcile the world to Himself because of Christ’s infinite personal dignity, though atonement as a result of satisfaction by suffering shows more super-abundant mercy on God’s part—Christ’s humanity as the instrumentum of salvation, which has a mysterious reconciling influence on God: this leads to a circle of mystery like that of intercessory prayer; the Passion is the event whereby God’s anger is turned away from the sinner, even though God eternally specifies this as the means for that to occur: Aquinas brings together the poles of the paradox that God is untouchable yet can be touched by an earthly event—Emphasis on freedom of divine love manifest in the freedom of Christ’s love-death for sinners. III.B.2.c. Contemporary Models (p. 266): Two ways of approaching contemporary models: Biblical/ancient concepts are replaced by modern concepts, or attempts are made to bridge gap between person/work of Jesus and the rest of mankind contrary to the Patristic intuition of commercium, but these should be taken together to promote most satisfactory reflection on Biblical themes—But they seem to be opposed: the first model focuses on His solidarity emphasizing His humanity, the second on a more radical substitution emphasizing His divinity—Even in human dramas there is the solidarity that goes all the way to death (The Idiot, King Lear), and the representative sufferer (Faulkner/Camus’ Requiem for a Nun). Solidarity (p. 267): The word ‘solidarity’ is recent but the idea is older—Use in soteriology involves recasting what was formulated ontologically in terms of personal consciousness—Jesus has pro-existence i.e. is for/with others (Barth)—Question whether this “pro” is social investment or something more—Many Catholics use ‘solidarity’ as expression for Jesus’ communion with our sinful nature (Prat), similar to Aquinas’ gratia capitis (Alfaro), rejecting the view (Rivière, de Montcheuil, Rahner) that what is redemptive in the Cross is just Jesus’ love/obedience not sufferings, which overlooks His solidarity with sinful humanity; this use of ‘solidarity’ is acceptable, but the concept slides into a liberal Christology that emphasizes only His social solidarity with the poor, sinners, and marginalized, and says that the Cross is just the consequence of this solidarity (Socinius, Herder, Kant, Schleiermacher, Ritschl, Kessler, Küng), which reduces Jesus to being God’s “Advocate”, who did not understand that His death was atonement—Radical liberation theology makes this same move of putting solidarity with the poor at the center; this influences Christology into holding that Jesus thinks the liberation of others is more important than His own, rejecting ideas of satisfaction, redemption, and sacrifice, and seeing the meaning of the Cross as hope in/collaboration towards growth of the kingdom (Duquoc)—This theology draws on exegesis that says that we cannot know how Jesus understood His end (Bultmann), or that Jesus just understood His death as an extreme service to God for the cause of men (Schilleebeeckx)—Moingt’s version of this theology sees Israel as just hoping for abolition of alienation from God, with Jesus as comprehensive symbol of hoped-for new creation, since He includes in His faith elements of unfaith e.g. distance from traditional religion, temptation, being forsaken by God, and He manifests God’s will to save all, opens the future for us, and making genuine substitution, which brings his theology close to theology of substitution, though he does not bridge the gap since He approaches the Cross phenomenologically, placing Jesus’ divinity under the epochē, and he holds that Jesus’ pro-existence is rooted in the human person, which is characterized by self-surrender/kenosis to others. Excursus: The Soteriology of Karl Rahner (p. 273): Rahner tries to put theology’s fundamental structure in an ordered system with the philosophy that is inseparable from it, and so many traditionary elements of faith must drop out or be reinterpreted—He sees the Bible as just one instance of necessary self-interpretation of transcendental revelation/most explicit account of what by grace we already are and experience in infinitude of our transcendence. (p. 274): 1. Rahner rejects interpretation of pro nobis as representative expiation, since it is beyond our powers to conceive how Jesus takes our place in this way; he thinks all that is a late theology, and we need to return to original revelation i.e. simple Easter experience of disciples—He downgrades the entire high theology of NT/Church—As Vögtle shows, Rahner wrongly thinks Jesus did not think of His death as expiatory sacrifice—Rahner thinks that the immutable God cannot change from a wrathful to reconciled God by a worldly event like the Cross; he thereby reduces all the Scriptural passages about wrath to God’s free salvific will which is the a priori cause of Incarnation/Cross: God, for Rahner, is He-Who-is-reconciled, the Incarnation/Cross being only a final/quasi-sacramental cause, for in His death Jesus is the only human being to accept fully God’s self-giving—Christ, for Rahner, does not contain man to reconcile us to God through suffering, but the universal effect of His death is attributed to intertwining all human destinies—The hypostatic union is Jesus being a human that entirely belongs to God, embodying God’s absolute salvific will and man’s acceptance, but this encounter with God is not essentially different from what is intended for every person—Jesus represents us only in that one man is able to “be there” in solidarity for another—Rahner holds both God’s absolute immutability, and His ability to be changeable in another, and that the primal phenomenon of self-emptying is kenosis/genesis of God (cf. Bulgakov)—Similarity to Aquinas on intercessory prayer: the immutable God is affected by the freedom of the creature in that from all eternity He has willed to include the creature’s prayer in providence as contributory cause. (p. 278): 2. Rahner cannot conceive representation because he understands personal freedom as self-activation of the subject in its totality (Kant)—Only an act in which a human being surrenders Himself absolutely to God i.e. Jesus’ death can cause God to give Himself without reservation to the world—Jesus’ concrete death is the connatural manifestation of human nature’s sinful alienation from God; in focusing on death, rather than suffering, Rahner is following Anselm whom he criticizes—Discipleship is to die with Christ for in death all creaturely categories/world dissolve and the free subject can irrevocably hand himself over to God—It is unclear how Rahner means we can share in His death, or how he thinks Jesus’ self-surrender to death is unique, or why Mary would not also have the hypostatic union on Rahner’s view: Rahner retreats from traditionary/dogmatic understanding of Mary’s role in salvation—Rahner thinks human freedom must be objectified in alien material, which is characterized by collective guilt, but then there seems to be no reason why freedom should not be set free by one who endures the alienating alienation, thereby making it possible for us to be free for our own self-actualization. (p. 281): 3. Rahner seems to be proposing an extreme Antiochene emphasis against what he see as a crypto-Monophysitism that portrays Jesus as a God in human disguise—His problematic account of Jesus’ kind of identity with God on the basis of a unique encounter with God; there seems to be formal identity between anthropology and Christology on his view, hence why the pro nobis can be said only of God, not Christ—Rahner says it is only through his transeunt movement that God appears in the Trinity in three modes of presence, but he seems inconsistent on whether this movement absorbs the immanent movement into itself—The distinction between finite spirit’s naturally given horizon of transcendence as esse ut sic and the horizon elevated by supernatural existentiale, in contrast to de Lubac’s view that the natural desire is rooted in nature—Rahner’s system is concerned with God’s absolute pro nobis for the world/mankind, which has its final cause in Jesus’ existence-unto-death—He makes the hypostatic union something like the most successful instance of human nature—He lacks the decisive dramatic element beause he fails to take the sacrum commercium seriously—On his view, sin is only permitted as the condition whereby God’s all-embracing relationship to the world can be radicalized, which tends to apokatastasis, despite his allowance of the abstract possibility of eternal loss. Substitution The Radicalism of Luther (p. 284): Christology of solidarity slips into mere psychological/philosophical vein, while Christology of substitution is striking, seeing to try to fill the gap that the Fathers left in the admirabile commercium (Luther), taking the pro nobis to its ultimate conclusion, understood as an exchange, not in the divinizing sense of exchange of divine and creaturely nature, but between sinner and Christ—For Luther, faith unites Christ and the soul like bridegroom and bride, so that all that belongs to each belongs to the other, and so sin of the sinner belongs to Christ and is swallowed up in Him—Sins come to “lie” on Christ, and in bearing the sin of the world, He is both the sole just/holy man and the sole greatest sinner, taking on Himself eternal damnation—Two states of sin: 1. Sin as committed, which is not experienced as sin i.e. forgetting/scorning God, and this is not how Christ is made sin; 2. Awareness of sin awoken by the spiritual law, which is most keenly felt by the damned, and this is what Christ takes on our behalf—Luther says logical consequence of Chalcedon, Christ taking on human nature which is sinful/under judgment, is that Christ is the archetype of the simul justus et peccator—Luther reduces theology and anthropology to soteriology, which is reduced to commercium, the dramatic conjugal exchange between Christ and man—Christ’s sin-bearing is the bait swallowed by Leviathan, and he thereby absorbs hell in Himself: this follows, Luther says, from the communicatio idiomatum—Luther comes to grips with the clash of opposites in Christ with a Christological psychology: Christ endures genuine fear of death/hell and the temptation to blaspheme God, grace becoming embroiled in sin and sin imbued with grace, and He absorbs in Himself all that is evil and radiates from Himself all that is good—Anthropologically, Christ’s becoming sin is matched by man’s becoming righteous through sola fide: here the illogicalities of the Luther’s position begin, for faith is not synchronous with Christ’s act yet he tells us to sieze faith which looks like something achieved by us—Double righteousness of righteousness acquired from Christ through pure exchange/faith and of righteousness acquired on the basis of the call to holiness, involving merit/reward, following on Christ as sacramentum and exemplum (Augustine)—Looking only at first righteousness and first sin, we can speak of Christ and man only dialectically, in terms of the estranged communicatio idiomatum, and we can only speak of God sub contrario; then the second righteousness and second sin (i.e. sin that remains to be dealt with) cannot be taken seriously, for, even with the gift of the Spirit, it would lead back to the holiness of works, and so we must seek refuge in Christ Who enable us to meet God’s grace sub contrario—Luther’s drama suppresses the other drama that presupposes the existence of persons: man may be split in two with no continuity, no connection is drawn between Christ’s incarnation and becoming sin, there is no place for the primary love of the redeemed for the Redeemer since faith is always first, the unity of grace that both redeems and sanctifies is torn aprt, and the reduction to pro nobis obscures God’s self-disclosure in Christ and the divinization of man through grace of participation—Luther’s radicalism was not followed by other reformers—Another side of theology of exchange, Christ’s penal suffering on our behalf, was known before Luther. Vicarious Punishment (p. 290): Interpretation of Christ’s suffering as punishment accepted for us is in some Fathers, though they only mean the idea of representation (Origen, Victorinus Afer, Gregory of Elvira, Augustine, Chrysostom)—Aquinas uses the idea but only to mean vicarious suffering, and death for him is the epitome of poena—In discussing the commercium, Rupert of Deutz speks of Christ being accursed (cf. Abelard) and as a scapegoat (cf. Denys the Carthusian). (p. 292): Calvin accentuates traditional themes, speaks of transferring/imputing to Christ the curse due to us, and uses the image of the scapegoat to talk of Jesus being condemned to the agonies of the damned. (p. 292): Melanchthon on wrath of God appeased by Christ as in a pagan sacrifice (cf. Beza)—Grotius’ juridical/exemplary view—Quenstedt on Jesus experiencing eternal death but not in eternity—No break in line of Protestants down to our own times speaking in terms of Jesus’ penal suffering. (p. 293): Barth sees two sides to commercium: God electing/predestining Himself to fellowship with man which involves losing, and God predestining man to fellowship with Himself; rather than man being rejected, God is rejected in His Son: He treads the way of sinners in the limitless anguish of separation from God by delivering sinners/sin in His own person to the non-being/punishment that is properly theirs. (p. 294): Pannenberg sees Jesus as suffering universally/vicariously dying for all, though this seems too external to some; he uses the concept of inclusive representation (Marheineke) and equates Jesus’ being totally forsaken by men with eternal damnation—Moltmann gives the pro nobis more theological foundation, with all of human history brought into Trinitarian history with its climax in the dereliction of the crucified God; it is primarily God and only secondarily man who loads on Jesus the world’s sin in a vicarious bearing of guilt: in enduring hell, God is genuinely against God within the life of God, but this is just the suffering of absolute love: by taking on Himslef real life, He is under death, gulit, and sin—But Moltmann is more interested in liberation from poverty, exploitation, and meaninglessness than from sin, and so calls for a new political theology; he emphasizes God’s will to save the whole world and within that will Christian hope/action—Catholic tradition is unbroken from 15th to 20th century, within which there are three interpretations (Estius) of Christ being made sin: He is a victim of sin (Augustine), assumed sinful flesh (Aquinas), or was treated by God as a scapegoat/epitome of sin (Cornelius a Lapide, Garrigou-Lagrange)—We should not use external/juridical ideas here—Some Catholics e.g. Blondel, Daniélou, Martelet also hold that Jesus at least analogously experienced the poena damni in being forsaken by God—To express the Biblical affirmation, the notion of solidarity in insufficient without representation/vicarious suffering/substitution (Galot)—There is no natural analogy for this substitution, though the notions of sacrifice/expiation approximate it, though they are alien to the modern mind (Girard). The “Scapegoat” Mechanism (p. 298): Like Rahner and Teilhard de Chardin, Girard distills a total anthropology from an all-embracing Christology, though his is purely staurological i.e. marked by sharp antitheses: Christ fulfills all things hidden since world’s foundation, but only by radically reversing them—Heraclitus’ logos-principle is harmony through violence, John’s is the logos that renounces violence, Jesus being the only one Who has reached the goal that God intended for all mankind, living agapē to the end—Girard’s project always aimed at unveiling of truth in Christ, stimulated by Freud’s Totem and Taboo, with the goal of demolishing psychoanalysis, as well as structuralism, Hegelian-Marxist dialectic, Heidegger, and Frazer’s rationalist ethnology—On Girard’s view, history and all its values are based on a primal tragedy, which comes to a climax/turning point in tragedy of rejection of Christ: all institutions are rooted in religious ritual, which are rooted in the scapegoat—His use of drama/tragedy—The mechanism of the scapegoat is hidden/unrecognized, but not in terms of repression/unconscious; great poets e.g. Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare come close to discovering it, but then draw back into myth—Reversal of Nietzsche’s antithesis to the Crucified versus Dionysius. (p. 300): Unlike Freudian libido, man’s fundamental desire for Girard is unlimited/objectless, and is imitative, and this is the source of rivalry; power endows objects with their value—Primal phenomena of struggle between two brothers, the Doppelgänger, and the ambivalence of reciprocal intensification in the battle of desire—Accumulated tension in the battle of brothers in enmity can only be discharged quasi-fortuitiously onto a common victim i.e. scapegoat, which reestablishes peace through catharsis, the victim taking on all accumulated ambivalence e.g. being accursed and holy, extending into the transcendent, allowing the discovery of the sacral/religious, identifying what brings destruction and blessing, or what was regarded as divine being the thing that is sacrificed; two-fold transcendence of victim to the demonic and the divine—The ambivalence of the gods that are explained by the phenomenon of sacrifice, the most ambivalent of whom is Dionysius, the god of felicitous murder; religion is the circumscribing of culpable/illegitimate/immanent power by sacral/legitimate/transcendnet power—Girard identifies essential power/violence with anthropological being and the holy (Otto); ritual is man’s way of regulating sacrificial crises—Girard sees his hypothesis as the only solution to the problem of sacrality and the possibility of culture—Hominization occurs when imitation of the leading animal becomes mimesis of appropriation, instinct becomes trying to regulate the struggle of all against all: as in the Idealists, for Girard the Fall coincides with acquisition of consciousness—On these presuppositions, all institutions are based on phenomenon of religion, and all social insurances against repetition of sacrificial crises e.g. law aid the secularization of religious realities and are intensified by secularization. (p. 305): Abrupt transition from foundation of civlizaiton where the foundation is hidden to OT/NT—Only link between civilization and Christianity is scapegoat, thought Jesus fulfills this and gives it new value by being unveiled—Beginning with Cain and Abel and reaching climax with the Suffering Servant, Scripture sides with the innocent party, yet with an ambivalent picture of God e.g. God makes the Servant His scapegoat—Only with the NT do we reach the powerless God; Girard sees violence in NT apocalypses as just consequence of sin, and an opposition between openings of Genesis and John—Only Jesus fully unveils the sacral which He names Satan, and He says violence is forbidden to man because the Father does not use it—Humanity’s unanimous rejection of Jesus—Girard sees Jesus’ death as non-sacrificial, so the Church’s history/use of sacrifice is a partial return to covert scapegoating mechanism rather than each Christian making their final choice in favor of Christian defenselessness—The Cross is a sacrifice only in the sense of a self-surrender, not placating a god who requires violence—The unveiling of the mechanism as history’s secret motor, leading to the fading of the sacral, but also to greater knowledge of power and so to greater violence and naked power—Similarity of Girard’s closed system against religion to the theology of Barth against the analogia entis—A contradiction in Girard’s system is his acknowledgment of Christ’s divinity; his view that desire is totally corrupt breaks the dramatic tension/link between God and world, and it becomes unclear how Christ can bear the world’s sin—Unclear how the Church could offer Christ’s self-surrender to the Father in the Eucharist if Girard were right that God did not want the Cross. (p. 310): Schwager tries to defend Girard, but also to correct him by saying the transcendence of the sacral cannot be explained on the basis of power alone, and argues God is the real scapegoat on behalf of sinful humanity; for Schwager, sin were transferred to Jesus physically/morally not just psychologically—There was move over the OT from God of violence to a God who does not wield power but allows men’s power to have its effect on them—Question of why there must be the Cross if God forgives in any case—Problem of the relationship between God’s love and justice, especially in the Cross; God’s justice, unacknowledged by Girard, is different from power—The claim that sins, not just their punishment, are transferred to Jesus brings us to final elements of drama of reconciliation, but without satisfying conclusion. Final Approaches (p. 313): Bulgakov tries to grasp the kenosis of the Cross as the last of God’s self-utterances, after the kenosis in the Trinity and in creation—Christ’s humanity’s empowerment to bear all the sins of the world through hypostatic union with all humanity, through passive obedience to the Father—Through experience of sin he destroys sin—His suffering is hypostatic, and so supra-temporal/eternal. (p. 314): Feuillet thinks exegesis can only be done on the basis of faith—Fathers failed to draw out all the theological depths of the Mount of Olives narratives, and modern exegetes fail to do justice to the texts—Jesus is set upon by suffering, but he must voluntarily accept the offered suffering in complete forsakenness—The only solution is taking on the world’s sin vicariously, in penal substitution, the vision of the Father being veiled—In the triune God there is something that corresponds to suffering, in His total self-giving love in the Trinitarian processions and creation—Man is enjoined to participate in redemption. III.C. Dramatic Soteriology (p. 317): Reviews of five Scriptural motifs of soteriology—Fathers and moderns like Girard and Rahner did not do justice to Son’s self-giving, Anselm to Christ’s changing places with us, Luther to God’s love—Cross is not an event that comes down from heaven, but culmination of God’s covanent history with man, and so there is an interplay of gratia sola and freedom not eradicated by sin—Theo-drama must include God’s genuine involvement in the world and man’s genuine freedom, not just passivity before removal of sin; this requires many theological treatises’ boundaries to be removed—Trinity is ever-present inner presupposition of the doctrine of the Cross, which includes Resurrection, and ecclesiology and sacramental theology are also consituents of Cross-event. III.C.1. The Cross and the Trinity III.C.1.a. The Immanent and the Economic Trinity (p. 319): The Cross can only be interpreted against the background of the Trinity: the Father gave up His Son out of love for the world, and the Son’s suffering including God-forsakenness are attributed to this same love—The hour is a gift from Father to Son, and basis for Sprit for being loosed in/for the world—The Son appearing to lose the Father shows the seriousness of the immanent Trinity, showing the distance of Son from Father, and the Spirit/their We appearing in the form of distance; this is why Hegel incorporates world history into the internal history of God—Rahner’s view of God primarily as mystery, and the consequences of this for his view of immanent and economic Trinity: on his view, the Persons are not distinct self-consciousnesses and cannot call each other “Thou”; this formal self-communication is not credible as basis for God’s economic self-squandering—Moltmann holds that Cross is Trinity’s authentic actualization, not self-revelation (cf. Hegel), the Trintiy here being an open eschatological process for men, and thus he overcomes immanent-economic distinction (cf. Whitehead), God being only known sub contrario e.g. Father is forsaken, death is located in God, Son is most in communion with the Father when most forsaken—These views inevitably result if internal processions are lumped together with processes of salvation history, making God tragic/mythological—Immanent Trinity must be neither formal process nor entangled in world-process, but eternal self-surrender whereby God is seen to be absolute love in Himself—Father’s self-utterance in the Son is an initial kenosis underlying all subsequent kenosis (Bulgakov); the Father strips Himself of His Godhead and hands it over to the Son, and He is this moment of self-giving—The Son is the second way of participating/being the identical Godhead, and involves absolute infinite distance that can embrace all other possible finite distances, including that of sin—Father’s love includes absolute renunciation, not being God for Himself alone, having a divine God-lessness of love, which undergirds, renders possible, and goes beyond worldly godlessness—Son’s answer is eternal thanksgiving/eucharistia—The Spirit is their subsistent We, the essence of love Who maintains and bridges the infinite distance between them—No identification of world process with procession of Hypostases—We can only approach immanent Trinity through what is manifest in God’s kenosis in covanent/Cross; excluded from God is all mundane experience/suffering, but in God is the possibility of such experience/ suffering—What seems prohibited by negative theology seems required by faith—Son as infinitely other of the Father, in the Father giving over not just lending the divine substance to the Son, grounds/surpasses all that we mean by separation/pain/alienation and loving self-giving/interpersonal relationship/blessedness: He is not identity of the two, but their presupposition—Love is stronger than hell, since hell is only possible on the basis of the separation of Father and Son—In the Father’s self-surrender, He does not lose Himself: we see God’s infinite power and powerlessness in that He cannot be God in any other way than by this kenosis which brings forth God of equal substance—Son is/possesses Godhead/omnipotence/ powerlessness in the mode of receptivity—However the Son is sent into the world is part of His co-original thanksgiving—The absolute is manifest as We in identity of gift-as-given and gift-as-received; the gift is the presupposition and realized union of love—This primal drama is not static/abstract/self-enclosed, and does not acquire its dynamism just through created world/Cross/hell, for this is hubristic about man’s No; rather, the Trinitarian drama surpasses/encompasses all drama with the world—Eternal separation in God is not tragedy with Spirit’s bridging as comedy, nor must God go through a process to become serious/ concrete—We approach God both from negative theology and from world drama whose possibilities are grounded in God—Every risk is undergirded by powerless power of divine self-giving—There is something in God that can develop into suffering when it encounters a calculating, self-preserving freedom. III.C.1.b. The Creation, the Covenant, and the Cross-Eucharist (p. 328): God creates a genuine creaturely freedom over against His own, thus in some sense binding Himself; we can call this, and formation of covenants, new kenosis on God’s part—In responding to divine freedom, human freedom depends on nothing but itself: in saying both Yes and No, it shares in the groundless divine autonomy which has no further rationale beyond itself—Because it is not caused by anything but itself, the creatures can refuse to acknowledge that it owes its freedom to its Creator, and that it is analogy/image—Through creation, the reckless non-self-interested divine loving, positive Godlessness on God’s part produces negative godlessness—Within absolute love, God endures the refusal of His love, but will not/cannot suffer it—The creature’s No is within the Son’s Yes—Against identifying the Son with a purely intellectual procession and the Sprit with a volitional one—The Son’s spontaneous response to the Father is one of obedience i.e. readiness to respond/correspond to the Father, within a limitless generous Eucharistic availability—Father emanates/expresses His own fullness in the Son, and in responding the Son is ready to pour Himself forth in any way the Father may determine, but as an offer it excludes possibility of being forced by a will exclusively the Father’s—Creation is eternal decision of whole Trinity—Creation, covenant, and Eucharist only within the Son’s response to the Father, which surpasses them—God’s omnipotence does not stifle the creature’s groundless freedom to act within the covenant—The Son’s all-embracing eucharistia prevents God from being entangled in a self-dividing tragic role—Spirit wants nothing for Himself but just to be pure manifestation/communication of love of Father and Son: this kenosis makes possible all of God’s other kenotic movements into the world e.g. Incarnation—Man’s freedom is left intact by sin, and God does not overwhelm man but leads him to His goals: God’s powerlessness, identical to omnipotence, means He is above necessity to dominate/use violence; thus we see the powerlessness of the Cross and the omnipotence of the Resurrection together—Confrontation between groundless divine love and groundless human sin—Commercium is based in Son’s self-surrender, the economic representation of Father’s loving self-surrender, and this is the context for redemption i.e. liberation/ransom, and for our initiation into Trinitarian life. III.C.2. Sin and the Crucified III.C.2.a. On the Nature of “Representation” (p. 332): Traditional motifs for representation of sinners include head and body—Exchange of places is ultimately grounded in the immanent Trinity, which is not unmoved above the Cross as on views where Christ is above His abandonment by God and continues to enjoy the beatific vision, nor is Trinity entangled in sin as on process theology—Identification of the divine Logos with the man Jesus is in continuity with kenosis of the Word in covenant with Israel; kenosis remains God’s secret by which He reveals/ communicates His nature—Conditions for Jesus’ being forsaken by the Father are within the Trinity in distance among persons, though this is transcended by their common gift—Problem of sinful alienation from God can only be solved at the locus at which it exists, the distinction among the Hypostases: the Son does not need to change His place when undertaking to represent the world—Man, unprepared to be responsible, is the first to load sin onto the Son (Girard, Pannenberg), but the Son is first capable of receiving it by what He is/by His willingness—The Son’s hour calls for an inner appropriation of what is ungodly/hostile to God and an identification with darkness of alienation from God that results from the sinner’s No, so that in accepting the hour the Son can be overwhelmed by it even while being essentially bound to the Father in loving obedience; it cannot be the Son’s will to appear before the Father bearing the No of the world, but rather just to carry out the Father’s will into ultimate darkness—Trinitarian decision can only be carried out by Father making the divine will known to the Son through the Spirit, so it appears that the Father loads the sin of the world onto the Son (Anselm)—Because it is God’s truth/righteousness, the Son’s powerlessness is greater than all worldly power (Aquinas): Christ represents us where the omnipotent powerlessness of God’s love shines forth in the mystery of darkness/alienation between Father and Son—Christ does not overthrow our sin through pure merit/undeserved perfect death apart from the darkness of sin (contra Anselm, Rahner) nor does He identify with the No of sin itself (contra Luther) but it is a deeper/darker experience in the depths of the divine Hypostases—Jesus’s being forsaken can be said to be both the opposite of hell and the ultimate heightening of hell (Luther, Calvin, Quenstedt), being timelessly under the covenant curses (Pascal, Bérulle, John of the Cross)—If punishment cannot be given to an innocent man even if he is atoning for the guilty, then we should not say Christ was punished (Hilary, Ambrose), but His relation to the burden is not external, for He is in those who ought to be punished Eucharistically, and so He can subjectively experience it as punishment though objectively it is not—The Son’s experience is far worse than what the sinner would expect from God’s wrath (Feuillet, Bulgakov)—Since our No in the face of the gracious i.e. groundless Yes of God’s love is groundless, then the expiation for this sin must involve a transfiguration through suffering that is surpassingly/unimaginably groundless—We cannot envision an end to the escalation in which the greater the revelation of divine love, the greater the hatred it elicits from man, and so the Cross must be deferred to an endless end, raised up at the end of evil and hell. III.C.2.b. The Cup of Wrath (p. 338): The cup on the Mount of Olives is the OT cup of God’s wrath—God’s anger with the sinner on account of sin—Lactantius on God’s wrath against the Fathers on God’s apatheia: a God not involved with the world could not be happy in Himself, and if God only loved and did not hate evil He would contradict Himself, and we would not owe Him reverence, the foundation of religion and so all social order, and there can be no grace without wrath—Relation between anger and jealousy in covenant with Israel in OT, though both are a function of His mercy, and His divinity requires that grace triumph in Him over wrath—Anger is an essential and ineradicable feature even of NT picture of God (Stählin), for God’s love is absolutely opposed to anything that would injure it; Trinitarian form of revelation of love in Jesus shows necessary unity of love and anger: Jesus’ anger arises whenever there is resistance to His mission, for His anger is part of His mission—Examples of Jesus’ anger—Ever-greater mercy arouses ever-greater anger, which is mixed with compassion—In Synoptics, dramatic progressive revelation of Jesus’ love provokes resistance and this heightens wrath; in John, confrontation is fixed/immobile, similar to Greek tragedy, but showing the severity of offended divine love—In a way anticipated by the prophets, Jesus has drained the cup of God’s wrath, and so He rides to battle as Lion of Judah—God’s passionate initiative/pathos on behalf of creation not as attribute of His being, but of His personal engagement for creation/covenant, in a way irreducible to categories of Western metaphysics, a pathos that is not an irrational emotion, but identical to God’s ethos; the prophet is sym-pathetically open to God’s divine pathos toward the world, and represents God to the people and the guilty people to God, and so is rent asunder by Gods’ anger (Heschel)—Ever deeper obedience from prophets to Suffering Servant to Jesus is matched by ever deeper descent of God’s wrath on the mediator—We must say God unloaded His wrath on Jesus, Who even in life revealed the whole pathos of God, and now must bear ultimate consequence of His more-than-prophetic mediation, enduring the conflict between God and man from both sides; all subsequent divine judgment is a shadow of what happened on Good Friday, the real judgment of God (Barth). (p. 346): The unity of outpouring of wrath on the Lamb and Father’s love for the world illumines hard passages in Romans—Revelation of God’s covenant righteousness and anger are parallel/simultaneous—Rom. 9 is on absolute priority of God’s right to create His subjects for lofty or lowly purposes; even hardness of heart is part of God’s plan, and anger against Israel is eschatological anger, nonetheless encompassed by God’s forbearance—By removing godlessness and taking God’s wrath on Himself, Jesus the Deliverer (Rom. 11:26) transcends God’s plans for history that created vessels of wrath, and for Jesus’ sake God had forbearance. (p. 348): Romans 11 shows a vanishing point where God’s anger and love meet, which is possible only if object of God’s anger is seen in context of love relationship between Father and Son—Son does not abandon solidarity with Father or with sinners, drinking of latter’s God-forsakenness because He knows union with God: God’s anger shatters Him among sinners, creating His Eucharist, which alone really completes the Incarnation—The Trinity is taken to the point that God opposes God, yet borne and enveloped in the Father’s love (Althaus)—In Eucharist, God concludes new/eternal covenant with man—In Himself, Jesus experiences hopelessness of sinners’ resistance to God and graceless No of grace to this resistance: He depended entirely on the Father, but now is forsaken, for there can be no balancing out of light and darkness, the “for nothing” of grace and the feeling that it was all “for nothing”; at the end of absolute night/futility comes forgiveness—World’s estrangement is transfigured by being taken in to obedient estrangement of God—God’s anger encounters a love, the Son’s, that exposes itself to this anger and deprives it of its object—The problem that a sinner might so identify himself with his No that Trinitarian love could not undo it, and the fiery love that flows through Him remains eternal wrath, and this No is possible—Problem of how Christ’s representation affects the sinner—Representation in natural life exclusively relieves the represented of a burden, but ethically/inclusively imposes another burder; in personal life, representeation is inclusive, as in the free man who exercises renunciation for others, drawing the represented in to the attitude of the representative, who is alone and can be refused by the represented (Althaus)—Problem of where the unbelieving sinner can find faith to lay hold of justification. III.C.2.c. The Church’s Mediation (p. 351): Question of how we can become sharers in God’s grace/freedom on the basis of this deed that is epitome of our sinfulness—The faithfulness of Abraham cannot be represented in the Passion by the unbelief of the Jews, a faith that was over-fulfilled in Mary’s pure consent, which included all that was to happen to her Son, which is why Mary is free from all guilt; her consent represents Abraham’s faith, is the fruit of God’s covenant/Israel’s positive history—Mary’s consent mediates between the faithless covenant partners and the future faithful covenant partners—Jesus and Mary are not related as act to potency or as divine to human, for this undervalues humanity of Christ—In Jesus, there is a conubium of human and divine natures (Augustine), which occurs in Mary, though she has active role in the union for her consent represented human nature in its entirety (Aquinas); Mary’s act is the highest act a creature can perform in love of God—Mary does not morally determine Jesus’ redemptive acts nor does she have rights over Him: her Yes is a perfect self-surrender to God in faith in the name of the entire human race; her receiving of Him is qualitatively different from and makes possible all subsequent receptions by sinners—Her essential solidarity means she is given the last place behind the last sinner, as seen in Him keeping her at a distance throughout His life: she was objectively wedded to human nature in its entirety, not because of her subjective strength of faith or physical motherhood—Jesus on the Cross has no sense of having achieved anything, for sin in the face of God’s love is meaningless/groundless; objectively, at the end of His sufferings, stands man redeemed, anticipated in Mary: she is objectively closest to Him, though He feels her as farthest from Himself—The Son’s missio is His processio in economic mode, but where in His processio He moves toward the Father in receptivity/gratitude, in His missio He moves away from Him toward the world’s ultimate darkness, though since all is obedience, this is moving toward the Father, but because of all this, He must take leave even of His Mother and be unable to see her as the concrete embodiment of His goal—The Son is not absolutely alone with sinners (contra Luther) but is accompanied by Mary who is a witness to God’s activity, which robs Him of all hope of completing His mission, and shows that the Trinity cannot be explicated on the basis of the Cross alone—Mary’s threefold poverty in Nazareth: having been given away to Joseph, having been given to the Spirit, and her fruitlessness beyond the barrenness beyond that of OT figures; at the Cross, Mary retains the poverty of the dispossessed womb, an open poverty that embraces the closed poverty of sinners, conception translated into suffering, which makes her the bride of the slain Lamb and the womb of the Church, where before she was vessel not bride of the Spirit—The withdrawal of the Father at the Cross, paralleling His withdrawal at creation, and in the silence of death the new man is conceived and born of the Church’s womb—Book of Wisdom’s vision of nocturnal visitation of the Word—Paradox of coredemption: Mary’s virginity goes beyond the sterility of OT women taking the last place beyond the sterility of sin, and the Lamb’s providence include the womb that facilitates all that belongs to the world and the Incarnation itself, but now the womb is banished to futility, the final farewell being the only possible form of relationship—Mary is empowered to bring forth redeemed creation’s answer, representing all humanity, to the Word fallen silent in death—No direct connection between Mary and Jesus’ suffering—In the silence of death, the Word is empowered to make His whole body into God’s seed, in the Eucharist, so He finally definitively becomes flesh in the womb of Mary-Ecclesia, whose physico-spiritual answer is more fruitful than any attempt by world to fructify itself. III.C.3. Resurrection, Spirit, and Life in God III.C.3.a. The Risen and Crucified One (p. 361): At Easter, extreme distance between Father and Son changes into most profound intimacy but only because it always was, though Good Friday is not the same as Easter, since the economic Trinity objectively acts out drama of world’s alienation—Cross is not just quasi-sacramental manifestation of God’s reconciliation with the world, but is a dramatic action by God, and it lifts the world’s fate to the level of the economic Trinity—With Son’s obedience, which is even in immanent Trinity, there is radical change from eternal death to eternal life—Johannine view that both sides are glory, but also Pauline dramatic view—Jesus’ humanity shares the Son’s glory finally through being opened to all in Eucharist and drained in the opening of His heart, so the wounds must be there in Resurrected body; the drama of the Passion which includes the Eucharist is always actual to the economic Trinity, embracing all points of time—Christ’s living for God: through obedience, He now has absolute human and divine freedom to judge the world; His freedom is seen in the end of the Trinitarian inversion after the Resurrection, for now Jesus has control of sending the Spirit, whereas before He obeyed the Spirit Who united Him with the Father—Connection between Spirit of Christ, being born of God, and baptism—Jesus’ obedience on the Cross as a baptism, and baptism as a copying of Jesus’ death—Jesus’ freedom to give others a share in His drama through the Spirit and thereby giving Himself Eucharistically—The grace of sonship is a sharing in His proceeding from the Father and bestowing His Spirit—Our dying with Christ happens retroactively in virtue of the grace of Resurrection. III.C.3.b. Freedom Liberated (p. 367): Themes of man’s liberation from sin, world, death, and demonic, and into/for the Trinitarian life of God i.e. theosis—Liberation from the “powers”--Origen’s idea of Christ ransoming us from Satan draws on the Marcionite idea of Jesus ransoming us from the demiurge—Question of how much cosmos prior to paradise was in the grip of fallen powers, for it is unthinkable apart from death—The key kernel of Origen’s idea is that the power of the devil is broken by the Cross, whether the devil is conceived as de-personalized spiritual power or as world’s sin heightened to quasi-personality—To say that the hostile power i.e. sin, devil, hell, or death, is broken is eschatological affirmation—Eschatological intensification of demonic possession (Mt. 12:43-45) within Christ’s victory is central problem of theology of history. (p. 370): At a deeper level, liberation is grace/divine sonship/being born of God—Finite freedom leaves room for others equally free, and this involves the obligation to acknowledge one’s indebtedness to soure of unconditional freedom, for finite freedom must return to its source to reach its goal—Attempts of finite freedom to live in contradiction, reducing its autexousion to autarkia, refusing to honor God, taking itself to be its own source—Question of whether there is a place for grace on this account of freedom—Nature of this freedom is the union of stasis and kinesis (Nyssa)—Plotinus’ account of Spirit as movement of nous to the hen, but for Plotinus the One is free only in/for itself, so Spirit can only approach it asymptotically and circle around it—Nyssa develops this view so that absolute freedom freely communicates itself to finite freedom, making itself the latter’s source/goal; this is found also in Augustine’s desiderium, for holy yearning is the whole life of a proper Christian—God’s will to give Himself is the motive of creation from all eternity, so our yearning is not a demand but a response to God’s decision—God can freely communicate Himself to the creature He has endowed with freedom by fulfilling the philosophical law that God is completely immanent in complete transcendence—Even in creation, the free creature is in God’s infinite freedom, so the creature’s being-over-against-God is heightened in proportion to being-in-God; our realtion to God is not just to Him as “Thou” or “Other”, much less efficient cause, but as interior intimo meo et superior summon meo, a relation that has no analogy—Only in context of creature’s finitude and sinful resistance can we distinguish internal from external or habitual from actual creatures, for God embraces His creature equally from within and without, in duration and in act—Question of distinguishing nature from grace, if even our Dasein/Sosein is a gift: St. Therese/Bernanos’ claim that everything is grace—Nature and grace distinguished back to Irenaeus, where nature is non-divine and the subject that is able to participate in divine goods, including freedom and intellect; distinction continues in Tertullian, Cyril of Jerusalem, and Augustine. (p. 375): Pelagius-Augustine conflict was full of misunderstandings, and attempts to rehabilitate Pelagius have some justification, for Augustine interpreted Pelagius in the sense of his radical pupils Coelestius and Julian of Eclanum—Pelagius drew on the Stoic conception of nature, but also saw human nature/freedom as enjoying intimate connection with God (Greshake); Stoics emphasized first pole of freedom, but did not deny second in freedom’s inclination to ethical good (Chrysippus, Zeno), and on Pelagius’ view original gift of freedom is a primal grace and involves being surrounded by God’s pronoia/cura, and unlike on Stoicism he distinguishes our freedom from God’s, so he combines Greek view of salvation history with Latin Anthropology of the pathos of the individual’s religious freedom/responsibility—On Pelagius’ view, God’s creative and redemptive acts are one operation; his Christian spirituality is anthropocentric: grace allows man to return to himself, so Christ is primarily exemplum, whose attractive power empowers us to do the good, and in the fall the original grace is just blocked—Pelagius distinguishes in our wills posse, velle, and esse/effect; Augustine distinguishes liberum arbitrium as ability from libertas regained only through grace—For Pelagius, sin just wounds ourselves, while of Augustine, sin is an offense against God Who is not just infinite freedom but infinite love, to Whom we can return only with His help: sharing in inner fullness of God’s love is distinct from creation/gift of natural free power to choose and is beyond natural illuminatio—Pelagius sees the Cross of Christ as exemplum, Augustine sees it as exemplum et sacramentum: Pelagius is satisfied with ethical approximation to Christ, lacking the Greek notion of divinization of human nature and the cosmos by the Incarnation and Pneuma—Against Pelagius, Augustine established that the likeness of God in us is the precondition for inner participation in God’s essence/inner love-life—Infinite freedom summons finite freedom to share in it, though this offer cannot be translated into the terms of its own finitude, and attempting to do so is Gnosticism, which abolishes distinction between non-divine creaturely image and likeness as vocation to participate in divine prototype e.g. Joachim of Flora’s equating of the distance between God and creature with distance in the Trinity, condemned by the Fourth Lateran Council in its basic formulation of the analogia entis, the foundation of theological dramatic theory, concretely centered on Chalcedonian formula, so there is theosis only in the context of Christology: sarkosis implies theopoiesis—Even before we set out to win a share of divine life, God has already plumbed the depths of the region of dissimilarity, liberating finite freedom from its self-enclosed servitude—The image inchoately contains an element of the absolute, and so is committed to becoming like God to realize itself, so opposite of self-alienation in orientation to divine freedom—Maximus the Confessor on loving God through the logoi of the good that are grounded in God and so one becomes part of God—Liberation from self-enclosed freedom for the sake of Trinitarian life through exchange of places on the basis of Father’s loving sacrificial surrender of the Son—Analogia entis excludes fusion/confusion, and every increase in creature’s divinization is an increase in its freedom—Being redeemed includes danger of being able to utter a heightened No e.g. a total and irrevocable refusal of grace, as happened with the fallen angel. III.C.3.c. The Paradox of Christian Discipleship (p. 383): Jesus’ whole life was redemptive but his “hour” eminently so, for here the sinful world is taken into the Father-Son relationship—As Spirit of Father and of Son, Spirit includes movement toward the Cross and movement from Cross to Resurrection, and always embraces totality of journey to Cross, Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension, and when given to us recapitulates entire economy of salvation at once, but with eschatological hope for complete fulfillment, and only sometimes and secondarily through historical stages in the believer’s life—Jesus always had complete Spirit of His mission, as shown e.g. by Transfiguration, and Jesus is the synthesis of His mission, mirroring the paradox of subsequent discipleship e.g. in being simultaneously revered and unknown—Sphere of Christian life en Christōi embraces historical Jesus and risen Christ of faith Who recapitulates in Himself everything earthly: the Christian life may lead to the Cross but the Christian also is someone who in principle has resurrected and ascended, and any dark or light phases of life are secondary, for he is stamped with the existentiales of being crucified and risen with Jesus—In sacrament of penance, pneumatic unity of Cross and Resurrection is evident to the disciple; examples of this unity of crucifying light and liberating summons from the NT—Discipleship includes pro nobis of Christ’s Pascal Mystery, for there is closeness and distance between Christ’s crucifixion and the disciple’s, but when we are in Christ we bear fruit but not for ourselves. III.C.4. The Church and the Paschal Mystery III.C.4.a. The Dramatic Dimensions of the Eucharist (p. 389): Mankind is part of the drama of the Cross whether it wishes or not, and the Church is consciously a part of it, and in her doings/drāma is always related to the Paschal drama—Eucharist as drama (Jungmann, Hugo Ball, Honorius Augustodunensis). (p. 389): 1. Those for whom Christ suffered have undergone ontological shift prior to their act of faith (contra Luther) or their knowing that they are addressed by Jesus—Inclusion of mankind is solely work of Jesus, not an action of His Mystical Body, which is only established on the basis of that inclusion—Gratia capitis is first given to Christ and then it redounds to His members (Aquinas). (p. 390): 2. Abiding actuality of the Passion because what takes place in economic Trinity is embraced by immanent Trinity especially the Holy Spirit, and the presence of this salvific drama is fully brought about by the continual representation of Christ bodily delivered for us—In surrendering His sacrificed flesh/blood for His disciples, Christ was communicating not just the material side of His bodily substance but the saving events wrought by it (Betz, Casel)—The Person of Jesus acts in the priest, and the saving work is the identical in the here and now celebration with what was accomplished on the Cross (Chrysostom); most theories of this making present stress only one aspect, but the essential point is the real presence of the Person and His entire temporal history especially its climax (Schmaus, Masure) and His eternal gesture of self-offering to the Father (de la Taille)—That view puts the historical in the eternal; question of whether there is direct relationship between the historical Last Supper/Cross and celebration of Eucharist here and now: theories of simultaneity (Kierkeggard) with past are unconvincing, as is the view that saving act is present according to substance not as it was in time (Casel)—Ecclesial action is offering a sacrifice, but symbolically the separation of bread and wine are type of dead Jesus, and these concrete express direct historical relationship between Last Supper and our celebration—Question of whether ecclesial action is a sacrificium, not just oblatio, since what is sacrificial is in the offerendum not the offerens; it is not clear how offering or receiving Jesus’ body and blood draws Church’s action into the sacrifice of Christ. (p. 394): 3. The Church cannot be offering an alien sacrifice but must be inwardly involved in it—a. Recognition that Jesus’ sacrifice is for us and for all i.e. that our situation was changed while we were yet sinners; this requires preparation to walk His way i.e. active collaboration, and this opus operantis is not part of the opus operatum, hence all the supplication at Mass—b. The inchoate act of the community is already fully accomplished in Mary’s consent; beneath the Cross, Mary’s Yes is a constituent part of the Son’s sacrifice—Christ is the primary occupant of the last place, but he makes room there for Mary—In allowing the Cross to take place she is the archetype of the Church’s faith as seen particularly in the Eucharist, and in “letting be” which is sacrifice in an existential sense—Institution of the Eucharist belongs to the active side of His life, but on the Mount of Olives He is handed over to the pitiless powers and the designs of the Father Whom He no longer understands, which is the final fruit of his life of action; analogies of this being handed over in the child handed over to his mother and the dying handed over to their caregiver: the Son freely entered this condition of dependence by becoming incarnate, and thus He can allow the Church control over Him and His sacrifice—The masculine/institutional side of the Church can only exercise its office if sustained by the supra-official Woman who cherishes/nurtures the official side—Diastasis between Son’s being-sacrificed and Woman’s consent should not be seen as opposing Man-Woman to Head-Body relationships—In the Eucharist the Church is drawn into Christ’s sacrifice, being fructified by Him—c. “Do this in remembrance of Me” is the command whereby Jesus tells the Church to take action on her own initiative, since He has made Himself available/at the Church’s disposal by His Passion—The Mass is the offering to God of the boundless love of Christ i.e. by humanity adopted by the Word and then crucified (Daniélou) but this can only be done through an explicit command by Jesus, and repetition of His exact words—The Church can never attain the existential perfection of Mary’s Yes, and can never speak on its own account—Sublation of OT priesthood into Christ’s, and all of Israel’s faith is concentrated in Mary—Function of representing Christ with its mediating function within the feminine modality of the Church is reserved to the man. (p. 400): 4. For the Church, the offering of Christ’s self-sacrifice is a way of assimilating the mind of Christ which is eucharistia i.e. praise/thanksgiving for the divine permission to give Himself for sinners and for the privilege of manifesting the Father’s love, different from OT sacrifice of praise—Reading of Hebrews 13:10-16: avoidance of “sarkic” over-evaluation of eating from the altar and preservation of connection between sacrifice of praise and concrete gift-offering—Sacrifice of praise at Qumran—Danger in the Eucharist of Christ’s sacrifice becoming mere object of Christian’s sacrifice of praise. (p. 402): 5. What is sacrificed expresses the attitude of the person sacrificing (Essenes, Hebrews, Council of Trent)—There is both movement from sacrificing Church to Christ to God, but also descending movement from Christ’s sacrifice to the Church drawing her into what is His own—In Christ, all have died; baptism just realizes through the efficacy of the sacrament what has already taken place objectively on the Cross, for it is a consent of faith to what Christ has done, in touch with Mary’s archetypal faith/“letting be”—Primacy of the Marian over the liturgical—Intimate physical/spiritual communion between Mary and her Child is starting point for/implicitly includes all subsequent sacrifices including the Cross—Events at the Last Supper are purely at Jesus’ initiative—Every Eucharistic sacrifice by the Church proceeds on the basis of a communion with Christ that He has initiated and that has the effect of creating a new/ever-deeper communion—In the Canon, the Church is privileged by Christ to act, while Christ suffers the action of others, though the Church also is in this action wholly Marian, letting herself be drawn into Jesus’ availability to the Father’s will; here faith not works is privileged. (p. 405): We must focus on the interplay between the priority of divine action and man’s subsequent active and free “letting be”; different models of this are complementary—In being incorporated into the Eucharist, grace perfects nature; in participating in Christ’s mission our elevated freedom is placed at the service of the communion of saints. III.C.4.b. The Dramatic Dimension of the Communion of Saints (p. 406): When drawn into the Body/work of Christ, believers acquire a share in His pro nobis—The being of the theological person is his role/influence in community, as NT says of priests—Opposition between Jesus’ “for us” and others’ mere “being with” one another is just a preliminary stage, prior to Christ recapitulating man in Himself—Involvement in Christ has dramatic consequences even if they cannot be shown on the earthly stage, an expansion of individual’s sphere of influence as he is incorporated into the organism of the Mystical Body, which includes all possibilities of action that arise in the inner area of freedom of its members, which far transcend mere “being-with”—Influence on another’s inner self is only possible in the realm of the good/salvific, not of evil; no possibility of parallel between Civitas Dei and Civitas diaboli (contra Origen, Ticonius): only the good creates unity, so communion of saints can only be created by on basis of principle of good in Person i.e. Holy Spirit (Augustine)—Differentiation in functions in the Body of Christ stems from principle of unity, for any genuine unity creates and sustains difference, and what is needed here is the concept of Gestalt/form i.e. unity manifested as such in its structure of parts, not mere unity that subsequently multiplies itself, nor atomized plurality that organizes itself into unity, but both are equally fundamental as in the Trinity: world attains its Gestalt in Christ, as He attains full stature (Vollgestalt) in it—In Mystical Body, principle of unity seems to do everything in the members, yet they are distinct from it: there are two aspects, the natural/organic/growth of the vine and the cultural/social/cultivating of the vine, and the primary activity of the grapes is to affirm the process by which they have been fashioned, while the vine has its own fruitfulness, although it has been given to it—Christ’s fruitfulness overflows to His members so that they are enabled to bring forth fruit to eternal life, and we merit eternal life by works quatenus a Christo in nobis et per nos sunt (Cajetan, Nazarius, contra Seripando); Christ has two modes of being, as physical person and as personal bearer of His members—Communication of Christ’s love communicates its effective dynamism and a share in all the goods of Church/world (Aquinas): the good of one overflows to all through merit and the deed of one is applied to another through satisfaction, though the borders here cannot be sharply drawn—One can merit for another and it is fitting in friendship for God to carry out the saving will of one man for another (Aquinas), though the mechanism for this is hidden—No in principle limit to possible influence of one member on another in spiritual community of goods, and our free acts of love project our personality into infinity (Bloy)—Communion of saints presupposes cosmic, reciprocal sympathy of world’s elements (Poseidonios), the link between birth/naître and knowing/connaître, which leads to the miracle of the “We”, for we need all other beings to be in communion with God; each soul’s limitations lead it to a priori require complementation by all fellow creatures, for each is a particular picture of God to the others, and in God everything communicates with everything else (Claudel)—Visions of the unification of cultures and universal brotherhood of man in Claudel and Teilhard de Chardin, but there is a danger of blurring boundaries between cosmic/Adamic and Christological universality/community, especially seen in thinking the civitas diaboli has equal influence to that of the saints (Bernanos, contra Bloy/Claudel/Möhler): there is real difference between our solidarity in Adam/original sin and in Christ—Foundation of communion of saints is Church’s Marian participation in the Eucharist whereby she shares in the pro nobis of the Cross and of Jesus’ entire life—While Claudel starts with the need for all fellow creatures for me to understand myself, Péguy starts with need for all others for eternal bliss, so none can be damned, as seen in his Joan of Arc who surrenders herself to damnation so that all can be saved, and even more in his Mater Dolorosa; real solidarity is only on the basis of Biblical caritas, hence on Cross/Eucharist. (p. 418): First meaning of communio sanctorum was sharing in the sacraments/sancta especially Eucharist, though by the Apostle’s Creed it meant people living in Christ’s grace, but first meaning comes to the fore in the Middle Ages (Ivo of Chartres, Josselin, Abelard, Albert, Bonaventure, Aquinas)—The Roman Catechism interprets unity of the faithful in the Holy Spirit as sacramentorum communio, so that what one receives, e.g. sacrament or charism, is of benefit to all—Assuming mature consciousness, having a charism presupposes habitual act of loving readiness for service in the social arena, with a fruitfulness mediated by the Church—In the person endowed with grace, transitions between one’s being and the merits of one’s actions are fluid ones, and even in the being of e.g. love there is a doing, so the whole being of the communio sanctorum is perpetually performing the good, and distinct acts just are consequences flowing from that, though this, through free decisions, is the ordinary way the good radiates forth; examples from Paul, though for him prayer and suffering for others are most important, closest to Christ’s being-for, acting-for, and suffering-for—Solidarity with those in Purgatory—The “passion” quality of death as one possibility of suffering for others, within Christ’s cross, for “all is grace” (von Le Fort, Bernanos, Ignatius of Antioch)—The Church is one with Christ in becoming the world’s sacrament of salvation—Even in death, in discipleship of Christ, Paul can be both priest and sacrifice; all representation in the Church is founded on that of Christ (Lohmeyer). IV. The Battle of the Logos IV.A. Elements of a Christological Theology of History (p. 427): Jesus is in world history as God’s representative, campaigning against recalcitrant human freedom for the coming kingdom of God, and though He is victorious, His work is done only when He hands over the perfected kingdom to the Father, and the time of the end is the time of bitter struggle for His Yes drives the anti-Christian No out of its hiding place—Despite OT analogies, alternative that Jesus provokes cuts world history/Israel in two, making it impossible to use transcendental theology i.e. Rahner to relativize the event, but in its consequences this event yields a dramatic theology of history: there is no distinction of Spirit on extra-Biblical, but only on Biblical grounds—We cannot divide history of Church and world after Christ into periods; every age does well to see itself close to the end—No way to divide history of Church using Hegel’s dialectical periods—The danger of even necessary analysis of the mystery, its inseparability from rationalization, and the great difficulty of synthesis (Hilary)—No identifiable “progress” in history of doctrine—Basis for need for rational teaching in Christ’s prophecy—Question whether periods of Jesus’ life shed light on Church’s/world’s history e.g. sequence from active life to Passion, movement into possibility of complete No/mystery of godlessness: no substantial objection to this view, except forbidding direct parallel between Jesus’ progress toward His hour and Church’s progress toward eschatological tribulation: Church is equipped by and heads to Cross, Resurrection, and Ascension, with Cross and transfiguration always simultaneous, so no theological progress or regression, but simultaneous growth and persecution—Since Jesus’ words about Himself refer to world history not just history of the saints, world and Church history seem more interrelated than often assumed, and not just in political sense. IV.B. The Provocation Offered by Jesus IV.B.1. Gathering, Separating (p. 433): Jesus’ provocative claim summons whole world: in Him, the transcendental is manifested in the categorical, without any abiding mystery of transcendence behind the categorical accessible to reason, contra all non-Christian religious philosophy/mysticism—No neutrality before Jesus’ gathering-in, and no distance between one’s inner decision and exterior action of joining Him in gathering; one must make an interior decision, and one cannot just find oneself for or against Jesus—Jesus’ gathering is a separating, for He brings a sword, which divides neutral bonds of blood/society through personal decision; Jesus must be preferred absolutely, so one must leave behind one’s own life: He does not bring a religious technique aiming at one’s well-being, for which Christ the Christian is transferred to His kingdom—He relativizes all religions that finds the theion in social order or self-discovery through study of Law, philosophy, or meditation, and He separates out all that responds to His summons from what resists it: His peace-bringing action brings the greatest division, by its inner logic not fanaticism; this is necessary to provoke the creature to the highest degree of responsibility, for we are not to gather ourselves from the world nor gather the world but gather at the same level as/with God, for God’s offer goes beyond all mundane ethics/religion—Tragedy of the Cross is elicited by this provocation, fore-willed from eternity: the Word that summons/gathers collapses in chaos of splintered freedom, undergirded by Eucharistic splintering of God, a splintering for us who are splintered in freeing from Him, and the Trinitarian love here is not supra-tragic but a heightening/creative fashioning of tragedy (Siewerth)—Jesus’ provocation anticipates the destiny of the whole world and His own destiny to follow the Father’s will into the abysses opened by His provocation—The way His mission is received shows Him how He will be ultimately separated and so be able to bring in all that was scattered and divided. IV.B.2. Gathering and Sifting (p. 437): Gospel leitmotif from Isaiah regarding people’s hardness of heart—Parallel between theo-dramatic aspects of first and later destruction of unrepentant Jerusalem—Jesus’ gathering concludes endeavor begun long ago: what seemed to be gathered was actually chaotic amalgam, that, as with the first creation, had to be separated: distinguer pour unir, following human reason, which analyzes to synthesize i.e. intellectus dividens et componens—Point in world history when reason breaks through at universal level has inner relation to when Jesus’ provocation takes place, as we transition from a being secure in nature and at its mercy to a being that fashions for itself an environment, making the numinous world a de-mythologized building-site for our rational plans, and though Christianity is not solely responsible for secularizing/technologizing nature, there is a connection (Hegel, Rahner)—The secularizing role of human reason in world history prevents those who reject Jesus’ provocation from returning to numinous world where divine and worldly are mingled, but allows post-Christian atheism which sees only the utile—Only Jesus mediates salvation; other religions then become anti-Christian and try to appropriate from Christianity features that commend it to mankind, while their symbolic/institutional substance disintegrates into sects; exceptions are those dependent on Biblical revelation i.e. Judaism and Islam which reject the full claim by Jesus are so are susceptible to militant atheism or anti-Christian theism—Apathy of crude atheism fallen back into paganism (Nietzsche)—Effective challenge is from secularized Israel that promotes salvation in/through the technological age, while being anti-theistic against failed Yahweh—Marxist anti-theism organizes pagan, diffuse, anti-Christian atheism through Messianic expectations, dialectically interpreted—Tradition that the Anti-Christ will be a Jew based on theological deduction based on that Israel alone is abiding bearer of absolute hope that is identical with its existence, and so if lived along with rejection of Christ offers counter-vision of world history—Spellbinding power even on Christians of the deluding image, which is built by pagans/former Christians e.g. Stalin implemented by greatest worldly force in flagrant contradiction of alleged aim of free classless society, which leads to weakening of Christian organism and the enemy entering it, such that Christians come to interpret their own eschatological hope in mundane terms e.g. development/liberation theology before missionary activity/corporal works of mercy in the spirit of the Beatitudes—All this is anticipated in Revelation—Hellenistic oikoumene and Roman empire were pale anticipations of today’s possibilities e.g. through modern arms/propaganda—Theodramatic demonic context of post-Christian situation is that secularization that begins at time of Christ creates new period of history that manifests itself in ever more complete domination of/liberation from nature is not neutral progress/development, but encompassed by theodramatic world decision provoked by Jesus: gaudium et spes under shadow of luctus et angor; course of history not determined by banal rationalism, but by interaction of two mysteries—Babylon is not destroyed by the Lamb but by its own adherents, the self-destruction of the civitas diabolic, which is possible today—Jesus never claimed to create an earthly paradise, and man responds to His provocation by attempting to manufacture the kingdom of God on earth through power, which resists the powerlessness of the Cross, and tends to annihilate itself through its No to Christ: man’s self-destruction is the only foreseeable/deserved end to the world left to itself insofar as it hoards what is its own rather than gathering with Christ. IV.B.3. Mysterium Iniquitatis (p. 442): Intensified dramatic confrontation only possible in post-Christian age when religious dimension has become subordinated to the No to Jesus’ claim to be unique way to the Father—Long process of state’s de-sacralization, which robbed man of natural protection of society’s embedding in cosmic order, for now man must make norms for the state and alter them for the good of all; freedom can perhaps find a norm in the family where nature and humanity form a unity, but this power of the family is lost once sex is subordinated to technology—Religious elements that bind man to theion are deepened by being incorporated into Christianity, though the numinous is clarified in being shown to speak of Christ and the world is secularized and shown to be God’s other/partner, and its journey through time has an Alpha/ Omega—Other path is loss of natural bonds, handing on of life, and heart i.e. unity of body and soul or of cosmos and idea in man, all of which is loss of proportion that enables man to shape world responsibly/ humanely: rejecting Jesus’ relationship to His father means rejecting all sense of gratitude for existence and embracing total autonomy (Marx), leading to dialectic of anarchy and absolute state—Jesus’ Yes, from the heart that unifies creation and redemption, resists rush toward utopian Omega without Alpha, opposing flesh that originates in Spirit and can be Spirit’s bearer to materialism that degrades matter into raw material of abstract/dis-incarnating power structures—OT precursors to post-Christian opposition—After Gnosticism, different modes of Jewish and Gentile opposition to Jesus become indistinguishable, for Gnosticism is the arch-enemy of Christian faith/love in the Church, for it stages some aspect of the Gospel message but as if man had produced it, leading to various dualisms of the pneumatics and the psychics/ hylics, which includes racism, all the forms of Joachim’s successors (de Lubac), and enlightenment humanisms that seek to “free” religiosity from darkness of alienating institution—The concentration of power in the Antichrist (Soloviev) and the increase of Christian witness being a witness of blood, the final phase of Church history corresponding to the end of Jesus’ earthly life, an idea from Christology not Jewish apocalyptic—Martyrdom throughout Church history as the Christian’s normal badge, but as preeminent in the eschatological age, when Church is no longer in missionary phase, but disarms mysterium iniquitatis by enduring suffering—Just as conversion of Israel cannot be located in history, so we do not know if Church will die with her Lord, or whether second coming takes place as world time is ending or after it has ended—Antichrist’s total power will be earthly/political, so all witness by blood has civil-legal nature: the Christian must take his stand publicly for there is no escape, as in the Gulag—Trinitarian defenselessness goes to the lowly lengths of the Eucharistic Cross, for truth in its origin is unreserved self-surrender/ opening-up of Father’s depths—Hell’s attempt to produce a counter-trinity in Revelation is a refutation of all structuralism that tries to find analogies of structures, its only link to God being blasphemy, contradicting the divine Trinity at every level; it is a “Sabellian” trinity, same evil under three forms—Accumulation of wealth, joined to love perverted into pleasure, is predominant element in dirge on fall of Babylon—In Revelation, only way to combat trinity of hell is bearing witness in lives/blood, fully incarnating faith against satanic dis-incarnation—Genuine prophecy of eschatological opposition between apparent omnipotence of evil and mortal powerlessness of believers. IV.C. The Church’s Form: Beautiful and Marred IV.C.1. Polarities and Dissensions (p. 453): All the NT testifies to internal dissensions in Church, which we are urged to overcome—Church is community of sinners sanctified through baptism, but sinfulness continuing to adhere to them or reawakening in them leads to conflict—Church especially prone to conflict since she straddles the line between e.g. time/eternity, visibility/invisibility, obedience/freedom, order instituted by Christ/inspiration by the Spirit, tradition/newness, and ultimately keeping the last iota of the Law and overcoming the Law by the new law of freedom—Mystical Body can have true members outside the Catholica and dead members within her—This organism can only be held together by living faith in Christ, justification/sanctification by His death/Resurrection, sacraments, discipleship—Dissensions in communities formed by Paul—One can lead an authentically ecclesial life only by living in/from the fullness of Christ—Church’s history is almost invariably tragic—Schism/heresy is never unfolding of divine plan, but due to sin/guilt of Christians, its chief effect being to obscure the mission/Person of Jesus—Increasing disintegration of ecclesial unity without corresponding tendency to return to unity, and now there is no common set of reference points for such unity, for concretely Christ only exists with community of saints united in the Immaculata, with the communion of the ministerial office united in Peter with the living ongoing tradition united in the councils and Church declarations, and without these any unity achieved is superficial—Splintering of Christianity obscures the persisting trunk of the Roman Catholic Church both for phenomenology and theology—Saints are Church’s power of regeneration, but their influence too is narrowed or obscured. IV.C.2. The Domestication of Faith (p. 457): Even more dangerous tendency is that faith is overtaken/hollowed by knowledge/gnosis as happened in OT with Wisdom literature, but now has happened with serious post-medieval Gnosticism—The influence of Joachim’s vision of the three ages and of Averroism on subsequent thought e.g. voluntaristic Nominalism, irrational Mysticism, rationalism, Marxism—Rational faith was produce of religious wars and combined with collapsing Scholasticism in which questions are multiplied without bounds, while in High Scholasticism the problem was to think one must give an answer to every inquisitive question, and all this leads to Hegel’s God without mystery i.e. atheism—Enlightenment first within Anglican/Protestant theology, then French philosophy, then Catholic theology, which could not be stopped by Romantic and Thomist reactions; Catholic theology split by purely rational historico-critical method into traditional view that sees articles of faith as irreducible object of theology and opposite view that submits them to rationalistic scrutiny, replacing them with anthropologically plausible content; historico-critical method leads to few firm results, just questioning everything, leading to mere clinging to external forms, though the “enlightened” Christian cannot even believe literally the words of the Mass—Rationalism/ Gnosticism manifested as a form of the Church’s aggiornamento, leading to theologians being torn between “new theology” formed by rational exegesis and commitment to Catholic Church—Battles of the Logos in the Church today requires the orthodox to confront historico-critical methods (Schlier)—Limited use of that method, and its self-destructiveness, for one either sees the Gestalt or is blind to it—Origins of today’s struggle in NT—Increasing power of anthropocentric Enlightenment—The pugna spiritualis, the most effective weapon being prayer at all times in the Spirit—Like Eve, the Ecclesia listens to the serpent of Gnosticism, which makes man’s knowledge of God more important than being known by God in the concrete Biblical sense of conjugal love: the virginal Church tends toward the mentality of Babylon, becoming the “poor little harlot” (Luther)—Enlightenment is fatal to the Church since it penetrates her and even unsettles the faith of the “simple”. IV.C.3. Fruitfulness from the Desert (p. 464): There is dramatic tension in the very essence of Christ’s Church—Church is centrifugal in contrast to Synagogue: Church is open to and jointly responsible for world, for it must permeate world like leaven, which is critical inculturation, showing that existing cultural values can only be fulfilled in message of Christ—Difficulty on the part of culture is that its Gestalt has perfection that seems incapable of improvement, but Christian reality breaks open the complacent; difficulty on the part of Church is that the Gospel must be embedded in structures of missionized culture, which threatens missionary movement, and amalgams of Church and secular culture are marvelous yet not clearly pure expression of Gospel—Church’s task requires her to alternate between preaching to world from without and within, penetrating without becoming “establishment” and advancing without leaving unfinished business behind, as with Paul, putting down roots without coming under the spell of a place, as with Christ’s exodos—Church’s paradoxical task is possible Christologically—Need to resist the subtlest, religious secularism—Saints provoke new initiatives/examinations of conscience, with most of their effects posthumous (Paul, Augustine, Kierkegaard, Péguy)—Church is mixed until the end, without being bipartita in Donatist sense (Augustine), it never being possible to assess relationship between genuine members and “passengers” e.g. by sociological laws, for Church, contrary to what those laws predict, will never succumb to desiccation, for wellsprings of Spirit may burst forth at any moment—It is not institution that prevents Pneuma from working, though we cannot rely on pure institution—Ever-intensifying anti-Christianity leads to large-scale fallings away but also purification of the “little flock”—Desert to which the Woman is transported is place of impoverishment/temptation, but also place of rejuvenation/concentrated attention on God, and in its isolation she becomes fruitful: to the world, she remains u-topian and without Gestalt, for her place cannot be found on earth, and her invisible Gestalt remains intact—Christ-event is basis of Church’s paradoxical destiny, providing dramatic context and its resolution. IV.D. Slain and Victorious IV.D.1. The Two Adams (p. 471): No possibility of partial acceptance/rejection—The world as a whole knew Him not but was made by Him—Failure to appreciate objective transcendence at world’s origin/goal indicates subjective inability, as in the teaching on the two Adams (1 Cor. 15:45-50)—No smoothing of paradox through supernatural existentiale i.e. psychic always tending to self-transcendence in pneumatic—Starkness of paradox is OT in its desire to burst bonds of flesh/blood, but certainty that they cannot be burst, and so hope is projected forward into Messianic kingdom, but yet this too is unreachable (Bloch, Tillich): even OT Messianic hope in the future is self-contradictory unless it opens onto victory over/resurrection from death, which is not within the power of the psychic Adam—But the Logos unrecognized by the world made the psychic Adam with a view to the second heavenly Adam so the Logos is coming to “His own”, though they are alien to Him since they lack the “pneumatic” as the first principle, but only have it posterior to the “psychic”—The world owes itself to Him just as it is i.e. with no way out/enclosed in finitude, so that He can show Himself to be the Way out—Relation between two Adams is tragic and anti-tragic, though not comic—Whatever actual meaning is in the world/man is from the Wisdom that plans the world and is in Jesus—Incarnation’s prehistory is in creation via the Logos (Irenaeus), so Logos becomes accustomed to men as logos spermatikos, and men to being bearers of Spirit—By becoming flesh, Word appropriates what is His and what is alien to Him, such that flesh is a prison, and within the realm of first Adam as such, victory is impossible; it is possible to make what is worldly serve the kingdom of the Logos, but only by dying/rising with the Logos—Potential given by Logos to the world in creation is meant to be activated by each man as his own in divinely willed increasing autonomy, and the elements are “secularized” being no longer seen as divine, but this autonomy is ambivalent, and can lead to analogia libertatis or de-sacralized Titanism: the model for perfection of selfhood is Jesus—First Adam is not perfectible in himself, but must die to self to be lifted to level of the Second, which is possible only due to the Second Adam, hence Jesus’ unique freedom in imprinting on the world signs of the kingdom that transcend not perfect it, not in flight from the world or in condescension, but in docile sensitivity to the Father’s will. IV.D.2. Theodramatic Dimensions of Liberation (p. 476): Man reborn in Christ is given share in analogy of Christ’s freedom, perfecting his creaturely freedom given originally to Adam, but Christian is given a freedom that outstrips Adam’s, but he must wait within restrictions of “old creation” although he is a “new creation”, and this paradox governs all that follows—Question of how far it is possible to sow seeds of openness from/to God in this essentially self-enclosed world; it cannot be impossible to implant entirely new God-given freedom in our own—Question of whether there can be strictly internal/worldly fullness of meaning e.g. a politics of powerlessness; Gaudium et spes struggled with this paradox and tried to put things positively but while setting aside the apocalyptic law of the ever-growing No opposing the ever-growing Yes: GS shows that man’s meaning is only made clear in Christ, and man is the meeting point of many conflicts, and his existence is a dramatic battlefield; weakness of the document regarding technology and the convergence between universa cultura and catholicity of the Church’s mission, with is a highly abstract assumption, and fails to note that e.g. psychology/sociology are not neutral but stamped by Christian or anti-Christian principles that inform them, and while there are good aspects of dialogue there are also demonisms at work in technologizing of nature, society, and individual, and even in e.g. mass media, move of all toward comfortable level of existence, and the document does not acknowledge combat at social level, glossing over problems with emphasizing growth of human family, and the need for man’s work to go through the fire of judgment to become acceptable to God—Danger of liberation theology is its linking of first and second Adam, earthly action and kingdom of God in single system. (p. 482): 1. Man was called to shape the earth in Genesis, and Gospels specify this to proclaiming the Logos—Work as such aims at gaining power over nature, so no clear boundary between working for survival and working for domination, but there is a threshold beyond which it is immoral/inhuman, as seen e.g. in exploitation of workers—Best that can be achieved is temporary balance between bearable poverty and comfortable existence concerned about world in its wholeness—Christian attempt to help all live in accord with universal rights/dignity of the person becomes more questionable as it approaches its goal, since cultural goods now available for the poor originate from technology/mass culture that are destructive of the person—Christian liberation relies on inadequate means of the old aeon, and must be resigned to failure: Christians required to stand fast not be victorious, after the Victor Who was vanquished (Claudel). (p. 484): 2. In the Passion, Christ no longer resisted superior power of evil but allowed it to rage in Him—Question of whether non-resistance applies not only to private/interpersonal but to social/political, as in today’s non-violence with its Christian element (Gandhi, Martin Luther King)—Questions of whether states can do without organs of power against criminals, and how organs of power can be prevented from misuse, and whether Cross/agapē can be changed into “tactical” instrument in this-worldly conflicts—There is a boundary, but the Christian can influence the masses, even politically, but cannot impose martyrdom on the multitude for political goals, though he should choose it himself. (p. 485): 3. Strategy of the Cross cannot be applied in its totality in earthly power struggles, but also Jesus never fought with earthly means of power—OT holy wars are typoi, unable to be claimed by Christians as their own or theologized, though we still live in the old order—Christian politician/sociologist must have realism about earthly power relationships, which are not theologically justified, but one may have recourse to them in self-defense, as in the parable of the unjust steward: riches and force belong to existence in the prison of finitude, but it is possible to be faithful with these purely worldly goods, though their boundaries are hard to find, for even non-violence can be a manifestation of power/compulsion. (p. 486): 4. Strict Christian duty to fight for social justice, which is a spiritual/corporal work of mercy, according to which everyone will be judged—Goals and means are not clear cut—Real freedom is given in the Spirit, and even the poor/oppressed e.g. Maximilian Kolbe can share in it—Real difference between Christian and civil freedom, martyrdom and non-violence, even if there is fluid transition between them—In Church history, period of martyrs is followed by period of monks, whose lives are testimony of total dedication equal to martyrdom, and monastic theology saw life as a battle—Liberation movements have theological credentials only if carried on in horizon of ultimate liberation won by Christ. IV.D.3. A Duel between Two Deaths (p. 487): 1. Death is the final annihilator and can only be annihilated by itself, and there only can the final theo-dramatic dénoument take place—Question of whether Jesus’ work has a crippling effect, of whether Camus is right that Christianity is ineffectual and one should resolved to die impersonally for justice in the world—We must turn from the Church’s doings to Jesus’—Many-sidedness of death—Jesus gets beyond all of death’s contradictions, but this required an invisibility/intangibility that affected Him as much as us—Interrelated aspects of death can be reduced to death as destiny, as interpreter of life, as final deed; but if death is a fate it cannot be a deed, and if it threatens life it cannot interpret it, yet it is always within man as existentiale and ahead of him as destiny—In suicide, man embraces death in spite of not because it destroys him (Dostoyevsky)—Death is our destiny whether passively endured or actively embraced—There is something of the “execution” about death as such, with an inner connection to guilt, so always somehow merited, and one cannot know if freely chosen death cancels out one’s guilt—Death is questionable interpreter since rarely is one’s life fully rounded at death; it is questionable whether the fragments of meaning here justify believe in eternal fulfillment of meaning after death—In Plato, all is a puppet play, but in Homer and Israel, things are more serious; for Israel, life in Yahweh’s favor was so significant that afterlife was superfluous, which puts question mark over attempts (Marcel) to eternalize all that begins in this life—Question of whether choosing death (Hölderlin, Kleist, Camus) can rob it of its fate-character. (p. 492): 2. Death must be stripped of its fate-character or that character qualitatively changed so the sting is drawn—Anselm sought a death unmerited but undergone by someone guiltless so not subject to fate, accepted freely by the most precious person imaginable, but he considered only external value of two kinds of death, not their inner quality: to represent us, Jesus must have shared our experience of fate, so as to overcome it from within—There is a duel between life and death (Easter Sequence) but even deeper a duel between two forms of death, the more radical form vanquishing/taking over the less—Jesus must submit to the fate of His death, different from the just seizing death for the sake of world justice (Camus), for Jesus’ death is not result of Titanist pride/heroism, but obediently allows the Father/the hour to load guilt on Him—Obedience is higher unity of free will and docility, and for the difference in being thrown toward death, obedience must be fundamental mode of Jesus’ life, including His becoming incarnate, and every moment of his life; his death brings to light every moment of His life, and His unique death is uniquely immanent in His life as its inner form, and in ultimate obedience He was able to do something with His death i.e. Eucharistically share Himself, but only after God and men, not Himself, decided on it. (p. 495): Jesus by His obedient death takes over the guilty death that is our fate, and this alone undermines death from within/draws its sting—Deeper/more deadly forsakenness between Father and Son—Every sin is borne, including that which brings forth second death, so Cross is erected beyond Hell, for the Cross is the pure obedience that remains intact even when God withdraws—In every death, a man’s world/horizon of being collapses, but for the Son this horizon is the Father: on the Cross, the constant relationship/ beholding between Father and Son assumes modality of forsakenness on part of the Father and lostness on the part of the Son, so the Son experiences loss of horizon of meaning/being, and He dies through being estranged from the Father/made to be sin, a once-for-all act that embraces everything; He endures death in and through each individual sin, and sin is “died” (as transitive verb) in obedience, whose power is love—Once faith grasps this, it grasps why Jesus calls Himself the resurrection and the life. (p. 497): 4. All aspects of death are enfolded in Jesus’ death—Destiny as aspect of His death in several regards, throughout His life, and sin breaks out in Him, rather than Him dying heroically—Jesus’ death completely interprets His whole life, as the Gospels show, within a completely historical/dramatic rather than epic/lyrical milieu, and nothing can be repeated—Death is immanent in His life, saturating His life, his existing resting on kenotic act of obedience, so His existence approaches a climax and is the presence of this climax at all intermediate points—His unique death is unsurpassable, immanent in a new way in His risen life, for even the Last Judgment is not said to end His scars or Eucharistic self-giving, which presuppose His death; rather, His earthly life/death are transcended/transfigured in life of the Kyrios, so He becomes creaturely prototype/sacrament of omnipresence/total self-giving of Triune God and vinculum substantiale of creation recapitulated in Himself (Blondel, Leibniz)—His death is superabundant atonement, including torture consisting in unfathomable depths of forsakenness by the Father, unable to be externally depicted, though some have had experiences tending in this direction; atonement requires both free acceptance and being laid on Him from without, not controlled by Him (contra Camus), though in obedience He is most involved—Jesus dies out of love/essentially for us, presupposing both His and Father’s love, involving the Spirit: Son’s death in obedience to the Father is for love of the Father, and the One Who forsakes is just as affected as the One Who is forsaken—One sided love-death is unintelligible unless it encounters a simultaneous response, which can only be realized through shared forsakenness, here in Mary; in all human parallels e.g. Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, each dies alone yet death is shared, so here with Jesus and Mary the mystery of ultimate fruitfulness between Man and Woman comes to fulfillment—Jesus’ representative death has ancient political precursors (Alcestis), and great models in modern drama that echo it, reflecting on His perfect self-giving for the sinful “other” who is thereby healed (Wilder, Greene, Faulkner, Camus), and on how He is overstretched/exhausted by a guilt not His (Bernanos, Claudel)—On the Cross, man’s fear of God becomes God’s anxiety for man—Martyrs go to death courageous and rejoicing because of the representation/anguish of the Man on the Cross—1 Cor. 15:42. Volume 5: The Last Act Introduction A. The Idea of a Christian Eschatology A.1. Christ the Governing Center (p. 19): ‘Final act’ first seems to indicate events at the conclusion of world history, but after these events described in NT, there are the “last things”, which are the subject of traditional eschatology—More recent notion of eschatology (Weiß) addresses late Jewish apocalyptic expectation of immanent end, or concentrates on Jesus’ expectation of the end, or primitive Church’s expectation of immanent second coming—It is possible to reconcile these dogmatic and exegetical eschatologies—NT has two main accepts, Jesus’ consciousness and consciousness of early Church that believes in Him—To Jesus, His destiny, connected to coming kingdom of God, is immanent, and in His hour He arrives at the “end of the world”, His eschatology embracing/qualitatively determining all chronological time—Atmosphere of Jewish apocalyptic is providential, preparing the Chosen People for final saving event, for Israel’s destiny is woven into Jesus’—Emphasis in NT is not on Jewish apocalyptic, though there are elements of that in NT, but on Christians being defined by the eschatological destiny of Jesus: we are bodily/visibly, not just in spiritualized sense, dead and risen with Him; Christological eschatology is primary law—Interference effect between two modes of thought: 1st, after Christ man/Church are fundamentally defined by Christ-eschatology with primacy of faith/hope over seeing/possessing; 2nd, NT use of Jewish apocalyptic which speaks of unveiling saving realities already present—Christological law regarding increasing Yes and No; Christological eschatology is primary but clothed in Jewish apocalyptic images—Jesus’ positive certainty that His mission is dealing once and for all with the world has negative side of judgment against Israel and Jerusalem, which is the Jews’ judgment on themselves: the Jewish people and their salvation history are now taken under Christological/ecclesiological eschatology; even Abraham’s faith looked to Christ, for Jesus’ time contains that of the OT. A.2. The Johannine Emphasis (p. 24): John’s realized eschatology just develops something in the rest of the NT—The One speaking in John is not just the pre-Easter Jesus but the Redeemer who integrates His entire destiny—Jesus’ assertions e.g. “I Am” utterances as corrective to Jewish expectation including within the Church, and OT past and futurist eschaton are drawn into the same realized presence of the eschaton, so realized eschatology is not opposed to but draws into itself futurist eschatology—Wherever/whenever eternal life/judgment are given, they come from the Son sent into the world; light shining in darkness is already judgment of that darkness, but this leads to concealment/flight, intensifying the darkness: Jesus’ presence in the world faces us with ultimate decision of the last judgment—Natural and Jewish eschatology are shown in their relation to new determining center in Christ—Horizontal theo-drama gives place to/is integrated in the final act to primacy of vertical theo-drama, which gives the horizontal meaning/form—God’s abiding forever is not a non-time constituting each temporal moment, but a supra-time unique to Him, mediated/revealed to world time by Christ’s time which also reveals/recapitulates world time—Two phases of Jesus’ glorification divided by hiatus of the Cross/dwelling in the realm of the dead, which may be seen as including the time of the Church—John’s words on the sending of the Spirit indicate in-breaking into world-time of divine super-time; every new interpretation/understanding brought by the Spirit was already there in Jesus/Word, for what He is always implies an ever-greater future—The Christ-event is the effect of the super-time of the economic Trinity/missions, which is subordinate to the super-time of the immanent Trinity/processions. (p. 32): Horizontal in context of vertical corrects Jewish eschatology, and differs from pagan/mythological epic of ascending/descending divinities—Correspondence between John and the rest of the NT—Question whether John’s emphasis on “already” obscures the “not yet” in the rest of the NT; answer is in the freedom provided by the conditionals saying what we will be if we abide with Him. A.3. The Synoptic Discourses on the “End” and the Johannine Emphasis (p. 34): Common view is that Synoptic “little apocalypses” e.g. Mt. 24, Mk. 13, Lk. 17&21 are burdened with Jewish apocalyptic images and so differ from realized eschatology—But most of these texts are concerned with direct effect of Jesus’ presence in the world, and Jewish imagery is incorporated into Christological context—No difference formally from John, since here too His word encompasses all times. (p. 35): a. In Jesus’ self-understanding, since He is the capstone of God’s self-revelation in the form of history, all subsequent history is just the unfolding of this event, and Jerusalem’s fall is eschatological—Luke de-apocalypticizes the prophecies of the fall of Jerusalem in favor of Christological eschatology. (p. 36): b. The disciples’ question of when the catastrophe will occur—All genuine eschatological assertions are Christological assertions (Rahner)—World history is consequence of Incarnation—Christ’s absolute uniqueness and its eschatological and world-historical consequences. (p. 37): c. Need to distinguish passages from Jewish apocalyptic that can be given a Christological context, and those that must remain at level of general apocalyptic language—Imagery having to do with the “birth pangs of the Messiah”, some of which is not Christologically assimilated, though in total context even these gain something like a Christological function—Question of whether judgment of the world at the end of time by the Son of Man, itself an OT theme, is opposed to John’s realized eschatology—Tension between claims that this generation will not pass away until these things pass away and that no one knows the hour, which are separated and united by the claim “Heaven and earth will pass away but my words will not pass away.” A.4. The Day of the Lord and the Judgment (p. 40): Hebrew vagueness in thinking about time, and tendency to project old events into the future in linear time, without possibility of absolute end or something absolutely new or non-earthly (Talmon), so Jewish eschatology looks to a salvation that is future in linear time—Day of the Lord as border between the aeons—Pre-prophetic understanding of the Day, which looks forward to a historical event, unlike Egyptian/ Babylonian understanding, and it is eschatological only in a qualified sense—Amos’ understanding in which the day is one of severe judgment on the people of Israel—Post-Exile, the Day is again a day of redemption for Israel, a decline from the tension of classical prophecy where judgment is most severe on the elect without involving rejection—The threatening picture of the Day in apocalyptic—Influence of all this on NT, including disaster-laden apocalyptic pictures—Primitive Church, missing the true meaning of Jesus’ expectation of the end, adopted Jewish picture of end to/within earthly history—Contrary indications e.g. that the kingdom of God is among you, Jesus’ return like a lightning flash—Paul’s call for vigilance and his understanding of the Antichrist, who is already at work in the mystery of godlessness—In the end-times, there is no qualitative distinction among periods, but only the krisis/decision/scission that Christ has introduced into the world. (p. 46): Peculiar discrepancy in what NT says about judgment: as in OT, it is at the end of the world, but now it is individual not universal event, so individual death and judgment are brought close together—Notion of individual responsibility, with roots in Ezekiel, Hellenistic thought, and Paul, James, and Gospels—What is new in Matthew’s judgment scene is that works of mercy are interpreted as being done to the Judge, and only persons not whole nations are judged—NT gives almost no speculation about hiatus between individual’s death and final Judgment, unlike apocalyptic writings, since NT writes from within Christ-event where the hiatus, and linear time of Jewish eschatology, is overcome—NT no longer has idea of self-unfolding horizontal theo-drama, but only a vertical theo-drama in which every moment of time, insofar as it has Christological significance, is directly related to Jesus Who has taken entire content of history into supra-temporal realm. A.5. Jewish and Pagan Ideas of the “End” Are Fulfilled and Transcended (p. 49): Nothing more is expected in world history beyond the Christ-event, its interpretation, and effects, which provoke dramatic action in history—The Scriptures in their entirety are fulfilled—Jewish hopes have substance in salvation history only in Christian not Jewish dispensation—Jesus fulfills/transcends the apocalyptic idea of pre-existent Messiah or Son of Man, for He is not only figure of other world, but of this world—Since the end is now present, Jewish eschatological attempts to calculate the time of the Messiah’s advent are obsolete, for Jesus is now visible to Christians in a spiritual manner through sacraments and theological virtues. (p. 50): Pagan eschatology e.g. in mystery cults or gnostic systems with dying/rising gods has prima facie affinity with Christian eschatology due to essentially vertical structure—Late NT distances itself from myths, which means futile inquisitive theories and magic, not mysteries or later gnostic teachings; these myths are fundamentally opposed to Christianity: myths and gnostic systems, even when dramatizations of philosophical speculations, are anti-material, while the central argument of Christianity against them is Christ manifested “in the flesh”, and proceed from the experience of Christ’s resurrection, which is historical not mythical—All vestiges of mythical ideas in NT are purely formal ways/human pictorial language of expressing something new/unique, part of human pre-understanding, though it must be transcended/refashioned—Experience of the Transfiguration (2 Peter 1:16): knowledge of Jesus’ dynamis/ parousia rest on a historical experience of His earthly flesh irradiated with divinity—Eschatology oriented to Christ is qualitatively new, though it is formulated sometimes in Jewish or pagan concepts. B. The Subject Matter of This Volume (p. 55): The dramatic action’s ultimate theme is the world’s ever-greater resistance to God’s ever-greater incarnate love, and is dénoument lies in the Cross, God’s acceptance of this ever-greater resistance to God—Questions of whether divine freedom of love can overpower created freedom, or, given that it operates by persuasion not force (Irenaeus), whether it can be sure of attaining its goals—Question whether a theologia viatorum can proceed to eschatology—Review of volumes II to IV as helping us toward an answer—From theocentric point of view, Trinity not Christology is last horizon of God’s revelation in Himself, the true eschaton—Four last things of anthropocentric eschata can only be discussed in theocentric eschatological framework—Themes of imago trinitatis, primacy of God’s “time” over that of the creature—God’s presence for man is always something coming toward him (avenir) not just the unknown future or what has always been, hence faith has an inner dimension of hope (Kerstiens); the present mysterium is envisaged only according to Christological time, in which anthropological time is assumed into the divine form of duration, and all human time becomes dependent on Christ’s time—‘Realized eschatology’ can only refer to Christological time, with the Trinitarian mode of duration behind it, not to anthropological time—Real “last thing” is triune life of God disclosed in Jesus Christ, present in every “now”, which is Being itself, apart from which is only nothing, within which is mysterious vitality disclosed in Christological revelation, which gives us access to the fount of God’s life. I. The World is from God I.A. The World is from the Trinity I.A.1. The Scholastic Axiom (p. 61): For scholastics, creation is embraced by Trinity—Temporal procession of creatures is from eternal procession of the Son, and this is brought to light in the Incarnation, and the same is true of their return to Him; entire Trinity is active in creation, according to order of Persons, and all births in creation are founded in the birth of the Son, and the Father’s love for creatures founded in His love for the Son, so in God processio and missio are the same (Aquinas). (p. 64): God’s Word is Father’s self-expression, expression of everything God can create ad extra, and expression of all Trinitarian processions, and so Word is image of Trinity in creation, though Spirit retains His own function as gift within the Trinity; creatures more or less reflect God’s inner vitality/expression, and God’s attributes come to light only on the basis of that vitality/expression (Bonaventure)—Being is not closed but utters/manifests itself, where this self-utterance is freely given/giving. I.A.2. Implications I.A.2.a. Being—Event—Becoming (p. 66): Divine Persons’ aequalitas only means identity in divine essentia or esse, which is not some fourth thing—We cannot reflect on divine attributes starting only from divine essence/absolute Being part from processions, though this can have apologetic value; we can speak of God’s almighty power, but must consider how God wishes to be almighty in His Trinitarian processions, where it includes handing over of power, powerlessness, letting oneself be begotten, begetting—Unless OT theology is fulfilled in NT, it can slip into gnostic theosophy—God manifest in Jesus is equally/identically eternal essence and eternal happening; latter is not motionless order, nor becoming in earthly sense, but grounds possibility/reality of becoming—Mysterious distinction between unity of all beings that share in Being and unity/uniqueness/ incommunicability of each being, and we cannot dissolve the distinction by making the first member of ens commune unite all others; each limited essentia participates in but is not identical to actus essendi, nor do any beings exhaust the latter: this real distinction is rooted somehow in distinction between common being and distinguishing features of the Persons. (p. 68): Sketch of a Trinitarian ontology (Kaliba, following Siewerth/Heidegger) on which non-subsistent being, the creative ground from which all self-being proceeds and which is real in the degrees of self-being, is God’s first image, and its degrees of existence, consciousness, and the “I” approximate to absolute Being—Kaliba’s version of Augustinian imago trinitatis, in self-positing will, opening on grasp of self and being, from which proceed feeling of self/self-affirmation open to infinite Good—Difficult to apply this to Trinity since these processions in the self depend on finitude, and God has complete control of His existence—For Kaliba, the three “I’s” in God are the self-positing I, the self-knowing I, and the self-aware I, with circumincession among them; no spontaneous origin can exist apart from other spontaneous origins, each conditioning and conditioned by the others—Question whether excluding anything analogous to development from God causes us to lose an essential aspect of Jesus’ self-disclosure—Question of relation between unity of created nature and God’s uncreated unity (Moock)—No form stands in isolation, but only in a context, and form shows itself as reality/good only when there is reciprocal communication between it and unity that produced it: Being/beauty of the real is giving/taking between unity and form—Review of Glory of the Lord on how Jesus’ form is only glorious in proclaiming unity of the Father and returning there in the Spirit, but this takes place in a theo-drama involving motion/interaction—Moock’s Trinitarian conception of all finite Being and event character of everything including absolute Being to be manifested as true and good, where God is not ossified movement, nor changing, but mother of movement—To be receptive to divine speech, human reason must be open (Hemmerle)—In adopting Greek categories Christianity did not refashion philosophical anticipatory understanding of Being, but if it had started with abiding love, it would have expanded philosophy’s world-bound ontology, making what is primary not substantive noun but transitive verb i.e. love’s self-giving which is essential realization of oneself: ekstasis and entasis are one, and self-giving preserves its identity by giving itself away, without this resulting in functionalism/dialectic—Intelligibility of Gestalt results from the way it points to manifold complex of relationships—Self-giving is beyond power and powerlessness, and substance is there for communion and transubstantiation: thus we can reconcile God’s immutability and involvement in history. (p. 75): Every essentia/idea is transcendent toward its ground, the Father, and its destiny is to surrender itself in the Spirit, as the Son does—Finite reflexio completa as letting be everything that shares in being is imago trinitatis, since each Person can be only by letting the others be, affirms and gives thanks for its own existence—No individual created being is identical to its participation in Being but as essentia has unity in itself not from esse, but Being cannot be attributed to it from outside—The creature’s particularity/essentia cannot give itself esse, nor can its universal participation in esse guarantee its essentia/particularity; this is an unlikeness to God, but must have a basis in God—Divine Hypostases are identical to their Being, which is a giving, receiving, gift given, and cause of thanksgiving—Created essences are themselves only insofar as they go beyond themselves and indicate their primal ground and surrender themselves; finite being owes its particularity first to the Logos, its participation in non-finite being to Father, and its vocation to self-surrender to Spirit—Concept of process/procession can be applied to Trinity to denote constant vitality, and to link creature/Creator and being/becoming—Since divine life lacks our poverty, it is not a becoming, and its fullness of life is perfect peace, though this is eternal movement (Plato, Plotinus, Nyssa, Maximus, Erigena, von Speyr), an eternal fellowship that is ever-greater even to Himself—Man ever seeks God, even/especially when he has found Him, not only due to his weak cognitive powers, but due to the superabundant vitality of infinite life: genuine love cannot tire of looking at the beloved—Because He is absolute freedom, God’s eternal here-and-now can display aspects that are ever new—Son is primal expectation/fulfillment of the Father—Something analogous to surprise in divine love, despite His omniscience, and this is prototype for creaturely love—All creaturely being on the way to the Son—Identity of Son’s processio and missio. I.A.2.b. Positivity of the “Other” (p. 81): The fact that “the Other” exists is absolutely good (Nicaea against Arius)—Agape/caritas is only itself by reaching toward the other; in God, unity and distance are not opposites (Gregory the Great, Richard of St. Victor, Brunner)—Idea of God as mere unity without “the Other” (Plotinus, Judaism, Islam) cannot do justice to affirmation that God is love i.e. perfect self-giving eliciting from the Beloved perfect thanksgiving/service/self-giving, and this cannot be in the creaturely realm where we have no complete control over our “I”—Divine self-giving is only motivated by itself and so is boundless, and in it, freedom and necessity coincide, and identity and otherness are one—God’s begetting is an irrevocable sharing of freedom, and so the Son’s turning to the Father in thanksgiving is equally eternal—The Son’s and all creatures’ proceeding from God and returning to Him are one in the very same moment, not two phases, and not where the second is sacrificing of one’s free otherness—God’s life bestowed on man make creature’s distance from God into nearness to God: being other than God does not imply being abandoned by God—Divine Persons are wholly other to each other in that there is no abstract concept of “person” that applies to all three—In God there is only being not having, so the Father gives all that He is in begetting, but this is not a becoming/developing, but it is a kenosis or “super-death” which is a component of all love, which is the basis for every “good death” e.g. self-forgetfulness, laying down one’s life for one’s friends: death is a breakthrough to an ever-greater life—Absolute love requires surrender of one’s own, and taking separation seriously, going under so the Other can rise up in himself, and only this grounds communio. I.A.2.c. Positivity of Letting Go (p. 85): God is actus purus in contrast to creaturely potentiality, but in Trinitarian processions, one Person is active and one passive, such that there is a passive generative potentiality in the Son predisposing Him to be begotten (Bonaventure), and Son and Spirit have active and passive missions—Divine conception is rooted in ability to “let be” and in ability to allow oneself to be brought to birth—There is both genuine active giving involving the entire giving Person and that Person has eternal Being that remains constant through act of self-giving (Lateran IV)—Son and Spirit have an eternal antecedent consent to be begotten or to proceed, and the Father lets the Son go free; passive actio is involved in active actio—In eternal love, conceiving and letting be are as essential as giving—There is eternal reciprocal closeness, and the Son cooperates in His begetting by letting Himself be begotten: this is the basis of His obedience in becoming man, for even in being begotten He carries out the Father’s will; even if the Father’s active actio, there is a passivity, for the Father is grateful to the Son for letting Himself be begotten (von Speyr)—This is the basis for the created dualisms of act/potency, action/contemplation, male/female—Processions are not free in arbitrary sense but arise from necessary will in God—There is a hierarchy to the absolute freedom of the Person, since for a will to be free it must be part of a hierarchy—The Father has primary intention for creation, but gives this entirely to the Son, Whose only delight is to do the Father’s will; Spirit embodies the reciprocal mode of granting requests that is the invention of the whole Trinity: their unanimous decisions are vital/creative, not a rigid dead identity, for God is considerate of God, with reciprocal subordination—Aspects of Fatherhood and Sonship in both Father and Son—Creaturely potentiality/ development is positive, the highest approximation to the non-developmental ever-greater of love in the Trinity—Receptivity presupposes active potentiality for suffering—Activity and passivity in the Trinity as the foundation/original unity of action and contemplation—God’s act of creation introduces no change into His vision which ever beholds the world in His will, but it was only for creatures that God’s internal processes are translated into time—Divine unity of action and consent is expressed in world in duality of the sexes; super-masculinity and super-femininity in each Person, without secular sexuality in them. I.A.2.d. Positivity of Time and Space (p. 91): Primal ideas of time/space original in coming-to-be of divine processions—Eternal being is eternal event not nunc stans, which lacks all that make transient world-time exciting/delightful—Time makes room for existent being to realize itself as event, and space needs time to be mapped/conquered—Jesus hears from the Father the Word that He is; Son eternally receives from Father His always-having-been and His eternal coming from the Father: this is not a stans but an event-filled presence for/in response to Father, an over-fulfillment of an expectation, an ever-more—Valid insights of process theology could be cautiously brought in to consider “eternal time”—Father is the act of eternal begetting, the prius of its result, the Son, Who is present to Him in the mode of coming/future being, over-fulfilling His expectations, though both are perfectly simultaneous; same things can be said of proceeding of Spirit—Persons make room/space for each other, with areas of freedom necessary for keeping the relationship alive, spatial separation being replaced by hierarchical distance of processions: unique aloneness of the Father, making space for the Son and Spirit—Distance is not in opposition but is unified to closeness/circumincessio, but is necessary for personal distinctness and for basis of Son’s abandonment on the Cross—Remote image found in sexual differentiation and union. I.A.2.e. The Absolute Quality of Prayer (p. 95): Each Person enjoys the one divine will in divine freedom, so decisions require integration of their mutual points of view: boundless love, conversation, obedience—Son has no greater joy than to do the Father’s will, even in suffering when the Father’s will appears alien/unintelligible—The Father leaves it to the Son to offer Himself and obey the Father—Trinitarian conversation as prototype of prayer: God honors, glorifies, reciprocally worships God—Worship requires otherness/relation to a Thou—In God there is no dominance of knowledge over love; things exist in God only to prove love with the room it needs, which cannot be with stale fore-knowledge, but requires self-surrender/movement (von Speyr)—Divine love shows itself in fruitfulness/creativity, but worship includes astonishment/gratitude—Divine virtues of faith and hope: vision fulfills rather than destroys faith; faith in God is consistent with absolute knowledge, but love that grants freedom to the other grants something that exceeds knowledge, and faith is constant readiness/basis of love—Lovers do not cling to one another but give each other time and space to prepare gifts—There is nothing formless/potential about these modalities. I.A.3. The Idea of the World (p. 99): If God makes a world it can only be because He wills to communicate His Trinitarian life of love, and the world must reflect that love not as a completed copy, but as open to the prototype, the essence of which is communication—So the world must include freedom and its misuse—In primary plan, the world is created as purely positive, but in a way that if sin arises it can be countered by positive features of Trinitarian life; from the beginning of creation, the Cross is prefigured and is creation’s dominant form. I.A.3.a. Time Is from Eternity and to Eternity (p. 100): Idea of world is from/in God, and so its reality must be located in/from/to Him—Duration of time is analogy of eternal, and has meaning since its ends connect to eternity—The temporal/material are vital/ generative/fruitful insofar as image of Trinity—The surrender to termination involved in things eating and being eaten is reflection to the positive death in Trinitarian perspective, and only sin makes it a negative death, which is still undergirded by positive death—Everything becoming attains its definite shape in full participation in Trinitarian life; everything is an image of God pointing to primal image, and so we cannot have fixed/final ideas about any particular becoming thing: only in God does thought have its final definitive form: learning to love requires forgetting boundaries in the face of God’s boundlessness—The more we bear God’s eternal life in us, the more concepts of daily life are expanded—Our time will be taken into eternal time through the mediation of Christ’s time. I.A.3.b. The Self-Transcendence of Essence and Nature (p. 102): Trinitarian Persons exist in pure transcendence to the others, so likewise developing world exists in self-transcendence, since it attains its being only through prior divine grace/condescension—Formal imago trinitatis in relations between universal being and particular hypostases/essential beings, and between species and individuality poles—Finite being can only find meaning in eventually arriving at Being-as-such without being annihilated, but it cannot do this of itself but requires grace: nature owes its transcendence to power of Being and so latter is stronger than nature—Through grace we step over boundary into eternity while in the midst of time; grace cannot be changed into nature however much it confers itself—Another imago trinitatis in relation of grace and self-transcending nature, revealing relation of Father to Son, since Father is greater as origin than the Son; interplay best seen in Mary at moment of Assumption, given primacy of grace in the Immaculate Conception. I.A.3.c. Relationship, Reciprocity, Exchange (p. 105): Relationship of personal presences/turning-towards in God speaks of reciprocity/surrender/ exchange perfected in the Spirit, not a mere vis-à-vis—Incorporation of all created beings into the Begotten is the most intimate manner of union with God: the created other-than-God is plunged into the Other-in-God while maintaining the distance that makes love possible, and this exchange is the innermost truth of the creature’s being—That man exists in the Son implies that the world as image/expression of God rests on the Word, and the creature’s answer to God is in the Word, not in the creature’s freedom; we can refuse to speak to God, but the ground of our being is still involved in a dialogue with God, and even our obedience is not from our own choice/judgment, but finds its expression in God before all time, and we must be introduced to it—Our movement from and to God is only possible because enclosed within the curve of the Word made man—Only a Trinitarian God can guarantee that man will not forfeit his independent being when united with God, for God lets His love be reflected in the way each man loves: in the unity God bestows on us we discern both His imprint and our particular imprint—Exchange of earthly man for heavenly, and exchange/reciprocal indwelling between earth/time and heaven/eternity. I.B. Earth Moves Heavenward I.B.1. Dimensions of the World (p. 111): Heaven and earth are the stage of the action, both being created, but heaven being the place whence God acts upon/with man—God is above heaven but dwells there with the heavenly host i.e. the gods of the nations who are now angelic patrons of the nations, but with dramatic exchange with earth ultimately ratified in Christ, Who is this exchange—Christians have a dwelling prepared in heaven but wait in Christ on earth as pilgrims and strangers; death becomes the center of their existence, uniting free decision for God with perfect freedom of creature within perfect freedom of God—It takes God’s grace to show the creature that his existence will not be swallowed by pure being/nothingness but given a home/scope for freedom in Trinitarian relationships, and the world has reality only in a transitional state—Man as imago is meant to develop into similitudo, so something of abiding being is infused into man’s striving at least potentially—On earth we pursue partial aims, but they strive toward our main goal insofar as they are in accord with our mission—Some live here and have a relation to eternity, while others live already beyond and share non-essentially in earthly life—Man always lives in borderline situation, with time as a sign of eternity and limitations as a sign of infinity—Faith, hope, and love are anticipation, foundation, and beginning of eternal life on earth, since they are not from this world but from heaven, and are in present reality, presented to our freedom—Heaven gives earth ability to transcend itself and move toward heaven, and supports it in that journey with an atmosphere that suffuses earth; all sensory things can become transparent to God’s joy—We should not abandon earth: saints focus on the earthly because of their mission, while being aware that earthly things have a mode of existence in heaven—In Christian perspective, life, suffering, and death are joined in transcendence of earthly life going toward God—This joining of pain/joy, dying/living, earth/heaven in a single feast is not wishful thinking but the real world, not self-enclosed anthropological/cosmological worldviews that banish heaven, though this can only be grasped by faith. I.B.2. Fulfillment in Christ and the Church I.B.2.a. Christ the Trinitarian Meaning of the World (p. 118): New heavens/earth come about in the Son, and so take a definite/unsurpassable/eschatological form, where time will no longer be characterized by separation—Unity of Church in earth and heaven, inaugurated by Christ, Whose life on earth is no different than His life in heaven, and so He establishes uninterrupted union between earth and heaven, and so He presents us with eternal life in the midst of earthly life: the Risen Son is earth in heaven, and the Eucharist is heaven on earth—He takes the transitory Old Covenant into His eternal life, and on the Cross allows that which in heaven has turned its back on the sinful world to make peace with it. (p. 120): Union between heaven and earth presupposes God’s triune nature—Son transposes eternal relation with the Father into terms of time/creatureliness; this transposition is possible on the basis of the Trinitarian relations being the prototype of creaturely relations. (p. 121): The Son is revelation of the Trinity, including in the Eucharist; He is revelation of the Father, showing both their eternal unity and distinction—He bridges the distance between God and man through the openness of His mystery—Trinity revealed on the Cross is uttered in silence, but gives a genuine vision of God. (p. 122): Since Son is eternal dialogue of prayer of the Persons, He can clothe Himself in human words—Even though there is the Trinitarian inversion in Jesus’ earthly life, this kenosis of obedience must be based on eternal kenosis of Person to each other; divine obedience requires Him to be obedient to men, and obedience is the unity of His life—On the Cross, Jesus is deprived of vision of the Father; question of how Jesus’ immediate vision of the Father is related to our faith i.e. a trusting self-surrender to God mostly without sight—Even as human, the Son knows the continuity of His processio and missio, but in this vision He seeks only the Father’s will, yet as man He also experiences faith, yet in the midst of vision, though in the Passion His vision is veiled but His obedience/faith remains, the fullness of faith of the Christian believer: hence, a Christology both from above and simultaneously from below—This requires a veiling/ not using of sight of the Father from the moment of Incarnation—Transposing of divine vision into humanity, so as to become origin of the vision of the many who come after Him—Even under our limitations, God’s Word does not lose the limitless quality of the eternal—Simultaneity of expectation and fulfillment in eternity, contemporaneity of eternal time with every moment of temporal time, which gives each moment its content/urgency, and only in turning away from God in sin is there a time of decay; God seeks to dominate and embed temporal time in eternity—Although He lives human time, Christ lives God’s time, each of His times being in the hand of the Father—Serious lack of knowledge necessary for Him to carry out His mission—He refuses to anticipate His hour, and so shows how each time belongs to eternity, and how each moment, especially that of His death, remains timeless: everything coincides in Christ, including life and death—The Son puts His passing-yet-eternal time at the Church’s disposal in her time/ year/life—Christ connects all paths to eternity and so removes whole atmosphere of despair from our time—Christ’s return is our future only because it is a living presence in our present bestowing a genuine future on it: Christ’s return has already begun, in the Eucharist—We have no words to describe mode of creaturely duration in God’s eternity, since our life is then transposed into limitless forms of God; eternity involves an elasticity, an encounter between every here and now, a coinciding of becoming with being in the sole destination of worship/glorification of the triune God. I.B.2.b. The Church as Prolongation of Christ (p. 131): Church is prolongation of Christ’ mediatorial nature/work and possesses a knowledge that comes by faith, living objectively and subjectively in interchange between heaven and earth—God’s idea of the world as an organism that He has given its own freedom becomes concrete in the risen Mediator, an expression that the world’s essence/foundations are rooted in the Word; there is a part of us that does not belong to ourselves but lies in Him, our unprotectedness in this world being grounded in our protectedness in God—Our real “I” is that which is cherished by/in the Lord, the “I” of a perfect organ of the Lord—The Church is a unity/reality situated in time by heaven—Church as unity is situated in time by heaven, and mediates/adapts eternal life to earthly lives of believers; she has visible and invisible vantage points as the prolongation of Christ, but even her visible vantage is invisible insofar as linked with heaven at all points—For the saint, heaven is not in future, but he takes part in its fulfillment, even if he is anxious about judgment—Sacraments communicate heavenly reality to us and transpose parts of life of faith into God, in a way beyond experience—The Mass’ sacrificial action embraces everything: personal sacrifice linked to Chrurch’s and Christs’s, founded on Father’s sacrifice for the world, and to draw our sacrifice into His, Chris offers Himself in sacrifice anew every day; in Eucharist we possess Christ in a way like how the Father possesses Him, and in Eucharist, Christ opens perspectives of heaven and earth—Vertical eschatological unity is visible in the representative of ecclesial office i.e. priest—Confession’s mediation of heavenly life through link with Cross as universal confession of sin and Resurrection as absolution—Feasts of the Church year will be absorbed into God’s infinity without disappearing; our entire temporal life has fruit in heaven, and this is the law of the whole visible Church—All subjective efforts in the Church share in the same life, a transition from earth to heaven; faith is that by which eternal life indwells earthly life, and is already life in eternal now, which cannot be compressed into time, and hope and love flow from faith—Prayer is sharing in eternity i.e. Trinitarian and ecclesial prayer—Beatitudes show that what seems furthest from heaven can be closest to it. (p. 139): Life in the Church is sharing in Christ’s life i.e. Trinitarian life—Christ’s return to the Father takes the form of an ever-new Eucharistic coming to His Church and thence to the world—Those with living faith find in Christ that death has lost its sting and physical dying is transition to eternal life that was already present—Death is a punishment for sin, as seen most graphically in the Cross, but even this is an act of mercy, to end the creature that chose sin lest its guilt always remain, but under the law of redemptive love, death is no limit to love: death is no longer a conclusion, but a beginning/promise, and we no longer die our own death, but it is swallowed up in the Lord’s, and He gives to each the death the Church needs at that time, for the Church has a role in the administration of death. I.B.3. The Shape of Christian Hope I.B.3.a. The Vertical Dimension (p. 141): Question whether this account of faith allows any room for hope, which presupposes that the beatific vision is not yet—For Paul, pagans have no hope or a flawed hope, Jews have a futurist hope, but Christians a better hope because they await a resurrection already fulfilled in Christ. (p. 142): Pagan hope is limited to uncertainty about the future, and tends to be greater in the young than the old—Hope is an emotion that should change to trust in providence (Stoics, Aristotle) or renounced like fear (Seneca)—Hope can be dualist, for the soul not the body (Pindar, Plato, Cicero), with a purely vertical/ spatial eschatology, with no sense that history could have a result. (p. 143): Jewish hope is always projected into the future, Messianic even when there is no concrete Messianic figure, a hope built on God’s promise and with the form of patient waiting—The blessing promised to Abraham—Messianic hope remains earthly/horizontal, not based on personal hope of survival, even for Sirach, though this is opposed by Hellenistic Wisdom and by apocalyptic interpretation of prophecy—Even in universalist tendencies in Isaiah, there is notion of separation of saved from rejected, without hope for all mankind—Secularization of the promises, such that Judaism and its hope become worldwide prophetic movement, ultimately in Marxist socialism (Bloch). (p. 144): Christian hope is better because based on Christ’s resurrection, realized Jewish eschaton, and salvation of body and soul—Resurrection of Christ is both object and efficient cause of hope (1 Pet. 1:3-5)—This hope requires the greatest sacrifices from man, allowing the word of the Resurrection preeminence over everything, which requires a greater renunciation/faith/hope than man can naturally have, to the point that I anticipate even receiving an “I” in a undreamed-of form, and so it is renunciation of determining our entire future—Hope is essential part of faith and can have same certainty/confidence in salvation as the latter, unlike natural hope, for Christian hope is founded on God not one’s own will (Bonaventure)—This hope requires current veiling/“not yet”; this delay in beatific vision has a Trinitarian basis, for in hope the Spirit addresses the Father that the Son’s redemption might be realized—We will everything God wills and everything that happens to us without knowing it, since we do not know ourselves due to sin which causes us to live on the surface of ourselves, until after death (von Speyr)—Christian hope is vertical because rooted in Christ-event which is now above, but not vertical in pagan sense, since rooted in history—OT and NT waiting do not have same structure—Hope is not result of yearning, but a gift that comes from its goal; we have already been seized by Him, and died and risen with Him—Pneumatological and Christological expressions of life of faith in/from Christ—Hope reaches into the heart of eternity because it follows the movement of the risen Christ—In Jewish thought God is most hidden and the Messiah most absent, and in pagan thought suffering cannot be reconciled with divinity, but in Christian hope suffering makes us nearest to God and produces hope—Vertical Christian hope requires both exaltation/glorification and the Cross; disciples’ consecration/self-sacrifice is inserted into Christ’s, for the Passion in its internal dimension is supra-temporal and can be inserted into all moments of historical time (Pascal); at every moment, the qui tollit peccatum mundi is equally operative/active, since the peccatum follows the law of the “ever-greater”, and all this is undergirded by absolute Trinitarian self-surrender—Reciprocity of our hope with God’s hope for the oikonomia (Péguy). I.B.3.b. Horizontal Hope? (p. 152): OT’s contribution to eschatology was horizontal/forward-looking theological hope; Christian hope changes this future-oriented hope to hope for something present/final but still awaiting fulfillment—Secular Jewish eschatology has had influence of modern doctrine of the end and modern self-experience, supported by our discovery of evolution and by increasing spread of technology in which what was once regarded as given by nature is now subject to human manipulation—Forward motion is not intelligible without hope that sustains it—Question of whether this has any relevance in Christian eschatology. I.B.3.b.. Teilhard de Chardin (p. 153): Teilhard is cautious in what he ways about Christian hope; problem of reconciling forward thrust of humanist mysticism with upward thrust of Christian mysticism—Teilhard seeks a Christological synthesis and so given extrinsic neo-humanism a place in theology—His taking of his own consciousness, rooted in world of technology and in Paul/John/Greek Fathers, as measure of modern consciousness. (p. 154): The Path to a Single Goal for the World: His crucial theological discovery, before De Lubac, is that the world has only one, supernatural goal—Unity of love for world and love for God, unity of ascending earth and descending heaven—World must have principle guiding its development up to level of the Spirit, the world-soul, which is fulfilled in man, yet there is a limitation here, since the world has no natural/ultimate center, and points beyond itself: goal is given by grace, in Christ, not by development of the world—To be raised to grace, a natural soul seems necessary; world-soul and cosmic Christ seem mutually interdependent—Christ’s human nature is truth of what first manifests itself as world-soul, but is actually process of bringing cosmos into divine sphere—Incarnation is first event of creation, both in order of nature and of intention; evolution is anticipated in mysterious pre-existence of Incarnation/Resurrection, and it all prepares for Incarnation: Christ is the vinculum substantiale of the cosmos (Blondel, Leibniz)—The fomula milieu divin: all things are grounded in hypostatic union, and latter is coextensive with the world though not all things are hypostatically united to the Logos, so Christ has a third cosmic nature which is simultaneously natural and supernatural, in/through/toward which everything evolves, and all knowledge must be simultaneously from above and below—All immanentisms, pantheist or materialist or idealist or neo-humanist, miss that evolution aims at a Person and has a personalizing effect, so there must a personal mysticism; otherwise, the noosphere i.e. totality of humanity’s consciousness feels trapped/stifled on our planet, especially with current technological growth. (p. 158): The Dimensions of Incarnation: Teilhard’s Christology is based on John/Paul’s affirmation and infallibility of Church’s tradition, with skepticism toward Scripture’s letter e.g. miracle accounts—Incarnate Christ unites the Christian/supernatural and pagan/nature-loving—He places Incarnation at the center, with reservations about traditional doctrine of redemption, for in Incarnation, God enters becoming; in Christ we become biologically united in one organism, and we see the goal of evolution—Christ’s assumed flesh is already universal, and in Resurrection we see His coextensiveness with the world—Not only our merits but our works enter heaven—Transubstantiation has an aureole of real divinization of the cosmos; Eucharist is expression/revelation of divine power of unification, and the true host is the universe—For Teilhard, the Cross expresses the labor of evolution/progress/overcoming resistance to union, more than expiation/purification—Creation/Incarnation/Redemption/evolution are coextensive and conditions of perception and existential dimensions of all created being—World converges on a Person Who increasingly personalizes all created reality; this mysticism should converge on the Trinity, but does not do so enough in Teilhard—Recapitulation of world in God-man allows cosmos to be brought home to God. (p. 163): Twilight Eschatology: Love/amorisation as only solution—Heightened consciousness implies heightened freedom—Each individual/humanity faces a choice for or against Christ/the world’s future; Teilhard is skeptical about original sin, seeing it as a necessary evil, but sees the great sin at the end of the world in the decision between righteousness and power—Heaven is complete personalization of all members of Christ in His Mystical Body; hell is evolutionary refuse, spirit declining to level of matter (Bergson)—In evolution, every higher synthesis e.g. life or spirit contains/dethrones lower level e.g. matter; matter allows spirit to exist by providing it with focus for activity/nourishment, so ultimate heavenly synthesis must embrace all the evolutionary stages of the world—But this is contradicted by claims that matter is preliminary stage of spirit, so strictly speaking only spirit exists and matter is just what is synthesized by spirit—Soul becomes the matter capable of being refashioned in the Resurrection, and earthly corporeality e.g. plants and animals are false paths in vertical evolution and will be left behind—Early on, he saw the eternal feminine as the magic mixed with the world to unite it, attaining highest fruitfulness only in virginity/Mary, the real milieu divin—Agape is higher synthesis of powers of eros—Teilhard sees Mary as true Demeter, natural virtue/grace of evolutionary current, and he hopes for transcending sexuality to Marian fruitfulness—His Christological emphasis obscures the Trinitarian shape of world redemption and the theology of the Cross/sin, and becoming obscures being—He opposes neo-humanist hope for the future to Christian vertical hope, the forward becoming inseparable from the vertical. I.B.3.b.. Jürgen Moltmann (p. 168): Salvaging Bloch: Ernst Bloch reintroduced Jewish themes into Christian eschatology; Liberation Theology substantiated their political program with the prophets, and Moltmann agrees—Jesus’ story still needs to assert itself in world history, so OT linear hope remains in force—His theology of hope is opposed to John’s realized eschatology—Need for convergence of theological hope based in the Resurrection with a practical hope that seeks to change the world—For Bloch, the real is hope, proceeding from alpha of nothingness through self-transcendence of becoming to omega of being, where God is a utopia that becomes real when man makes himself absolute; redemption lies exclusively in the future—Fulfillment is not wholly achieved in Christ’s death/resurrection even for Himself, since His kingdom is not yet established in dominion in world history—We must not turn from the world and take refuge in an already fulfilled “above”, nor should we expect fulfillment to come about just through prolongation of historical time, but we should seek to liberate the world; hope is for a transfiguring Resurrection for this earthly world/history/nature—Jesus and the whole community of saints for me, the worst of sinners, to be perfected (Origen)—For Moltmann, the Cross is the actual present form of the kingdom on earth, so freedom and justice can only come about through acting in solidarity with those who suffer, acting on behalf of those who have no future—In contrast to Liberation Theology, Christian action for a more just world can only produce approximations to the kingdom, the fullness of which can only come down from God—Moltmann sees the Cross as the only locus of God’s Trinitarian revelation, and the place where the Trinity plumbs an ultimate depth, with reciprocity between these immanent and economic sides—Estrangement in God contains the whole turmoil of history (von Speyr)—Contra Multmann, the Son is not just the Father’s “Other” in His humanity—Hope for Multmann includes God’s hope arising from the secular process—We can have certainty of hope as to the future/fulfillment—As in Teilhard, there is a triumphalism that lack the object of hope that the NT stresses, that in virtue of God’s mercy we shall survive His judgment (Bonaventure, Péguy)—Moltmann builds elements of realized eschatology into a futurist eschatology. (p. 175): Integrating the Horizontal Dimension: Question of how Christian hope is related to world’s earthly future requires scholastic distinction between hope as passion of the soul that can rise to the level of virtue and hope as theological virtue that comes as pure gift of grace, the latter having God as its primary object and secondarily acquisition of graces for attaining the final goal (Aquinas, Bonaventure)—Christian hope goes beyond the world but takes the world with it—The Christian must awaken hope among the hopeless, which does require creating humane conditions for the poor/oppressed; hope is always social, and must create conditions for others to attain salvation, though it never aims at worldly goods as such—In the earthly future, we are promise primarily pain/difficulty—In the OT, temptation was a sign of guilt or a baffling evil; for the Christian, it is a confirmation of discipleship, and the Christian unlike the Jew must be thankful for persecution, hope that his suffering in union with Christ’s will promote the world’s salvation—Christian is also in the world to proclaim by words and life the reconciliation with God that has come for all in Christ, a participation in responsibility for the world that comes from the mission of Jesus—Temporal success of mission is ambivalent; Jesus does not use the word ‘hope’ when he sends the disciples out, and the criterion for disciples’ mission is Jesus’—The disciples’ hope is the Psalms’ hope for God’s help, minus the hope for the satisfaction of seeing the fall of the godless—Hope can only be sustained by bringing task to completion; every mission is universal in God’s grace—Political theology is centered on mission that looks toward the One Who sends—Allowance of a human expectation of success—Mission implies responsibility for the whole world/polis theou/civitas Dei informed by agape inseparable from living faith and hope that promotes total offering of world to God’s love (Augustine)—Hope is response to God’s prevenient anticipation, and in this sense hope’s horizontal forward thrust is function of realized action of Trinitarian love in Christ—Christian consciousness of history/eschatology is missionary consciousness (Moltmann)—Most Liberation theologies do not link political transformation of social structures with hope, but with loving solidarity (Bassmann, Scannone, Segundo, Miranda, Comblin, Vidales, Galilea), aside from Boff; their lack of reserve with regard to the effectiveness of liberation movement—Object of Christian hope is not mere otherworldly beatific vision but return of the world to God (Wiederkehr). I.B.3.c. God’s Hope (p. 181): Question of whether the supra-hope immanent in the Trinity has an economic side, a hope by Father and Spirit for success of Son’s mission, and a hope that each man will be saved/not reject Son’s work, given each man’s precarious freedom—Péguy’s attempt at a positive answer in Le Porche du mystère de la deuxième vertu, which is a foil to Bloch, Moltmann, and Teilard; Péguy rejects ossified doctrine of God Who just foreknows/foresees and an OT focus on the future, instead committing our hope to an eternal all-embracing present, and so returns us to the Johannine view that all futurist eschatology has its place in a realized eschatology—Hope is the motive power of natural creation and supernatural faith/ love, a miracle of grace in man’s existence: the image of children in the midst of aging and life’s relentless loss, and the image of the transformative power of the French spirit/the farming landscape of France; there is not just the forward thrust of Christendom, but the intercessory communion of patron saints, especially Mary, in whom le temporel/charnel coincides with le spirituel/purity, and who is the center of creation’s eschatological hope—Hope consists in taking a unique risk of entrusting oneself/one’s own—Heavenly Jerusalem is built of saints that accept grace and saints whom this grace must first convert to itself—Paradoxes of cooperation between immortal soul and mortal body, and of penance: turning away from sin is substance of hope—Mary is hope made perfect because she embodies perfect readiness for God’s will—The sinner whom the Good Shepherd goes after awakened anxiety and hope in His heart, dread of having to reject someone, showing the mysterious preeminence of the one over the many, and God’s insertion of His grace/Word into time/flesh—In the economy of salvation, it is only through the temporal that the eternal is maintained/nourished—Hope’s promises to each Person of the Trinity; God’s feeling for and dependence on us who are nothing—Final scenes of communion of saints, prodigal son, gardeners—The child’s vitality in theological hope—Not foreknowledge or overpowering love, but hope’s gentle self-commendation vindicates God after the interplay between Him and human weakness/freedom—What is at stake in the hope principle is the attainment or loss of eternal life on man’s part—Theological hope transforms the sameness of the horizontal plane into an ever-new now—The self-surrender of sleep as image of hope, and the night that buried the Son in the ultimacy of self-surrender. II. Aspects of the Final Act II.A. The Final Act as Tragedy II.A.1. The Difficulty: Human Refusals versus the Trinitarian Embrace (p. 191): Triumphalist tone of the foregoing—Given the mysterious absoluteness of the created will, the astonishing indifference of the tradition to a part of creation’s eternal perdition, as not contrary to God’s glory, following NT/OT view of the twofold outcome of world’s judgment—Ivan Karamazov’s refusal—Question of how we, who exist in the contradiction between attempt at ultimate meaning and certainty of death, should ever find the absolute Good except by compromises, and of why refusal to find meaning/ Providence in this chaotic world should be called demonic—Need for a thorough critique of traditional judgment eschatology and of current tendency toward doctrine of apokatastasis—Magisterial and Scriptural statements that inspire hope, based on Christ’s superabundant work—The Cross laden with every sinful refusal must stand beyond hell—Texts that clearly show man in his finite freedom can reject—NT shows that things are tragic for both man and God Who must judge/reject, a defeat for God. II.A.2. Judgment in the New Testament II.A.2.a. Judgment in Paul (p. 194): Center of Pauline dogmatics is struggle between power of sin and great power of God’s justifying work in Christ; three battles in history, personal experience, and the judgment—Terrifying picture of God Who is so free that He can fashion vessels of wrath and of mercy, against Whom there is no appeal—Ultimately, Israel’s hardening of heart is not a final rejection—In all three encounters, judgment is the beginning not the end—Death/defeat are swallowed up in victory in battle between sinner and God—In OT, eschatological Day of the Lord is day when nations are judged; in Paul, it is day when every individual gives an account of his works, a present reality—Two lines of thought: from judgment to superabundant salvation in Christ for believers; from salvation in Christ to judgment that tests works—Faith requires active love, grace implies heightened responsibility/mission—Cross is God’s eschaton. II.A.2.b. Judgment in the Synoptics (p. 197): Synoptics use images of judgment from OT as matter, but in terms of form they point to Jesus Who is both present and coming—The Day of Yahweh is the day of His ultimate epiphany as Judge, and also His definitive victory over the world, in a judgment that separates, choosing some and rejecting others; this is taken up by Matthew and Paul: universal judgment is also particular judgment—Specific to the Synoptics is that the judgment is handed over to the Son of Man, Who stands in the center of history—The future is decided by the present, and in Jesus there’s an identification between man’s decision regarding Him and His final destiny in the last judgment—In Jesus, the kingdom of God has come/is in the process of coming, as shown in Synoptics by Jesus’ works of grace—Choice for or denial of Jesus in His brothers concretely at all times is motivation behind election/rejection, making a direct link between historical and eschatological now—Jesus’ words on judgment are pre-Cross, and the realm outside the sphere of salvation to which the rejected are cast is outstripped by the even more baffling outside of the Son confronted by the salvation-judgment of the Father—Comparison of Paul and Synoptics. II.A.2.c. Johannine Judgment (p. 199): Krisis i.e. division/discrimination is heart of Gospel of John—Jesus came paradoxically both to judge and save the world—Word/Light that comes to illumine does not as such intend to judge/separate, but does so due to the darkness failing to receive it—Receiving Light/Word fulfills fundamental purpose of the Light/Word which is not to condemn; rejecting Him means a definitive hardening of heart, incapable of hearing/receiving/believing the Word—Darkness compels the Light to show itself as judgment—Decision for or against Jesus in history is an eschatological decision—But beyond OT theology of judgment, the light can convince the darkness of self-love, driving it from its hiding place and intensifying it, which is the core of drama/tragedy; there is a kind of hearing/seeing that in the act of responding rejects positive response, as seen in story of man born blind—The Son is the disclosure of absolute causeless love, which causes the darkness to appear as causeless abyss—To reject the Son is now to reject the Father, provoking a contest/duel between God’s voice and man’s voice/sin (von Speyr)—The darkness’ compulsion of the Son to die is matched by His freewill surrender; through rejecting the Cross one becomes a more hardened sinner. II.A.3. The Devil (p. 203): The mysterium iniquitatis cannot be illumined in a way that would render its darkness light, even for understanding aided by faith, but it can be described as what does not receive and what hates the light; concept of hatred i.e. open aggressive opposition to love that characterizes God in His economic/Trinitarian self-giving brings us to heart of this mystery—Hatred is primarily self-enclosed, but spills over into world of men, allowing them to be sucked away by power more absolute than them—The devil is essentially a liar/father of lies, and those who allow him entrance see the truth/Jesus as devilish, as seen in those who blaspheme Jesus accusing Him of blasphemy, leading to a struggle between them for casting out, a theme that appears in a variety of contexts e.g. the outer region into which the devil and wicked men are cast out. (p. 205): Barth describes the devil as nothingness, which is not mere nothing (Leibniz), absence of something, something creaturely, something that has its ground in God (Schelling), or a shadow side of the good world, but is real insofar as realm of hostility/collapse, a third fashion of reality beside God and creatures, the product of God’s rejection, the obverse of God’s election; it has being only insofar as God’s non-willing is also potent, so it is the enemy primarily of God not creature—God has overcome evil from the beginning; nothingness exists only in relation to redemption, and only in the Cross do we see what evil is, and in the Cross evil is now past, and we are now free to regard evil as finally destroyed—For Barth, there is no equating of nothingness with fallen angels; on his view, angels’ freedom is identical with their obedience, and angels have no choice/history/aims/autonomy of their own: here Barth contradicts de Lubac for whom freedom necessarily involves a decision in favor of God/itself. (p. 207): Barth is right that there cannot be a transparent doctrine of the demonic; the mysteries of God are more exposed to us than mysteries of evil—There cannot be an ontology on which a reality could be a mere appearance that has a third kind of being on the basis of mere rejection; we can only inquire into the being of evil by considering a sin performed by a free human being yet forgiven by God—Barth is right that vanquishing the devil is God’s concern, and we can only recognize the devil’s work by being near God, requiring constant vigilance, for what initially looks harmless can contain the satanic, present in all temptation; he is also right that the battlefield between God and the devil is in Jesus—The shapes of the devil as serpent, devil, and dragon—His assault on individuals and cosmic powers/principles of creation e.g. death and generation, useful and useless (von Speyr), in all of which evil can incarnate itself, but also Christ has seized all these to make them part of His service of redemption offered to the Father—Perspective of Revelation—Intensification of crime as it rises from animal to spirit level, to the point that evil is done for its own sake and celebrated, such that these crimes cannot be imagined, as in the concentration camps (Jünger, Brinvilliers)—Beyond the redemption we posit a judgment at the end of time more severe than all judgments on Israel, an eschatological tragedy in the midst of God’s victory, a failure of part of God’s plan for the world since some of creation has turned out meaningless—The theology of the pain of God confronts the medieval view that makes God sublimely superior to all world process. II.A.4. The Pain of God (p. 212): Contemporary theologians have no problem talking of the pain of God, since they have abandoned Greek theo-ontology of absolute Being in favor of Johannine definition of God as love, Who as such cannot maintain unmoved apatheia in the face of sin/potential damnation of creatures/Son’s abandonment on the Cross—Martelet argues that if God is love, hell is impossible, except insofar as God’s love does not remove our freedom to make a hell for ourselves, so God’s judgment cannot be involved in this, but rather God’s response to hell must be infinite pain—It is not clear that this suffering could be included among aspects of Trinitarian life, given its great difference from being receptive and letting things happen—Further theme of the truth of the death of God, not in Nietzsche’s sense of man’s loss of experience of God, but in Christological sense from the 5th and 6th centuries; God suffering pain is in OT. II.A.4.a. In the Biblical Realm II.A.4.a.. The Old Covenant and the Rabbis (p. 214): God of OT is susceptible to pain in His relationship with Israel due to latter’s infringements of the Covenant—They provoke Him to anger and weary Him, but there is also love in Him—Passages on God’s pain in Hosea—Rabbinic development of this theme of pain and lament of God based on His being bound to Israel; God’s powerlessness in the face of sinfully hardened hearts. II.A.4.a.. The New Covenant (p. 215): We should not be too quick to relegate Jesus’ expressions of anger/sadness/abandonment to His human nature, since they are revelations of the heart of God—In Christ, the whole man becomes the medium in which God declares Himself, and the Eucharist makes this a reality here and now for us. II.A.4.b. The Fathers II.A.4.b.. God is Both Impassible and (in the Son) Passible (p. 216): Recent attacks on divine immutability/impassibilty in the Fathers, based on claim that it is importing of Greek apatheia/ataraxia into Biblical thought. (p. 216): a. Early Christians had to take stance against mythological suffering gods, and counter mythological interpretation of Christ—Christ is God, and is Deus passibilis in human form, but this requires impassibility of divine nature—He is the “Impassible One Who suffers for us” (Ignatius). (p. 217): b. Some Fathers defended divine impassibility in a way showing influence of Greek philosophy (Clement of Alexandria, Augustine), but generally balanced such statements by expressions of God’s life, freedom to communicate Himself, feelings e.g. pity and mercy for man under control of His reason (Tertullian, Novatian, Lactantius)—On Antiochene position, Christ’s sufferings are only in His human nature, and on the Alexandrian position, the divine nature adopts this suffering: communicatio idiomatum is not mere external attribution of suffering to the Logos, but an adoption of it (Cyril)—We can only understand how these statements are reconcilable by seeing what they thought the opposite of apatheia is. (p. 218): c. By saying that in Christ the Godhead suffered, Monarchians, Apollinarians, and Monophysites did not want to subordinate divine nature to world suffering, but they did not reflect on mythological/ metaphysical implications. II.A.4.b.. The Opposite of “Apatheia” (p. 218): To understanding why the Fathers emphasize apatheia, we must understand pathos. (p. 218): a. Pathos can mean external misfortune contrary to one’s will, but God only suffers resulting from His free action, and so He suffers impassibly and is superior to His suffering (Gregory Thaumaturgus)—Less clear expressions are those of Hilary, that He felt bodily pain without suffering it, and the Monphysite Julian of Halicarnassus, that His body is per se incapable of suffering, but does so by His free will. (p. 219): b. Pathos can have connection to sin (Athanasius)—Being born, growing, receiving nourishment belong to ergon of created nature maintaining it in harmony by change, not to pathē; real pathos is sickness of will (Gregory of Nyssa)—Christ can suffer natural pathē, which can be sinful or serviceable, because of prior active will (Maximus, Damascene)—In God, regret, mercy, patience express His constant attitude which is the opposite of insensitivity (Augustine). II.A.4.b.. “Pathos” in the Impassible God (p. 221): Fathers are far from apatheia in the Greek sense—The eternal Son has the passiones of pity and charity for us, without which He would not have descended, and likewise the Father has these passiones (Origen)—Paradox of God’s apatheia in Himself, and His susceptibility in His economy. II.A.4.b.. Conclusion (p. 221): The Fathers largely converge on a doctrine of God’s pathos—No pathos in God if this means involuntary influence from outside: God can only be passive on the basis of prior active decision; mercy and patience must be understood on analogy to human emotions, with no mutability in God—It is wrong to make immutability the same as covenant faithfulness—Post-Patristic theologians conceive immutability more narrowly, especially doctrine of relatio rationis, though further reflection on this could dispel idea that God is aloof. II.A.4.c. The Modern Period II.A.4.c.. Theological Approaches (p. 223): Patristic solution lasted until post-Hegelian German kenoticists and English theology of the pain of God—German kenoticists regard as pre-condition of Incarnation the Son’s reduction of His divine consciousness—English theologians insist on the Father suffering as a result of sin (Bushnell, White). II.A.4.c.. Hegel’s Approach (p. 224): Hegel seeks to include Christian revelation and Enlightenment’s reasons for rejecting it in his synthesis, an all-embracing philosophical Christology—The feeling that God is dead introduces an infinite pain into the education of the human race; this painful feeling must be integrated into the idea of God, in the speculative Good Friday—Hegel’s avoidance of atheist reading of his philosophy, despite Feuerbach—Hegel is trying to interpret God philosophically as necessary process and theologically as free self-revelation/self-surrender in Christ; absolute religion abides yet is overcome in absolute knowledge, and finitude including pain/death are really in God yet are also transcended: what is unacquainted with death is lifeless—For Hegel, Resurrection is living consciousness of community/Spirit’s self-knowledge—Insurmountable ambivalence of this approach. II.A.4.c.. Theologies that Speak of Pain and Death in God’s Essence (p. 227): For Hegel, death of God is negation of Absolute’s mere being-in-itself; Gerhard Koch takes this up in way relevant to theology, but the phrase is also appropriated by Left Hegelians and Nietzsche, and later in “death of God theology”, who all just understand it as psychological experience. (p. 227): Jürgen Moltmann’s Crucified (Trinitarian) God: Moltmann develops Hegel on Trinity: Cross shows ultimate diastasis between Father and Son, and without Cross there is no Trinity—Panentheistic theories of history as history of God’s passion, which is neither necessary process nor just dependent on God’s good pleasure (contra Barth)—God’s yearning/passion for the Other, who ultimately is the Son bearing world’s sin on the Cross; history is God’s deliverance from His yearnings, and the Son’s processio is identified with His missio—Yet he wants to keep these things distinct, but the Hegelian ambivalence remains—He says God can only be revealed in his opposite i.e. in Cross/being abandoned by God; Balthasar will agree if this is restricted to revelation for the Church. (p. 229): Gerhard Koch’s Dying and Rising God: He resits claim that God is dead, falling into myth, Greek/nominalist God remote from the world, Hegel’s God for whom the particular has no significance, Barth’s transcendent God—With Luther, he says all knowledge of God comes from Christ’s dying and rising—God is hidden as creator and for the Redeemer on the Cross—We cannot have assurance of God’s existence, but He appears in death; God’s death is a mode of His being in the world, and worldly death is overcome—God’s life is submerged here in the cycles of history, and Hegelian ambivalence remains. (p. 231): Kazoh Kitamori’s Theology of the Pain of God: Kitamori begins with world of sorrow due to sin—God’s pain is immanent in world’s pain, yet since God will deal with sin, His pain transcends the world’s—God is bound to meet pain with anger yet cause this anger to be overtaken by love, and to justify this transition He must do the most painful thing imaginable—The Cross is primary, even the Father’s generation of the Son is secondary: God’s being can only be understood on the basis of the word of the Cross—God’s pain is to love the unlovable, and to allow His Son to go to His death—This view of sin from Kyoto School and Luther: sin is love that clings to itself and is/produces pain; we cleanse love of selfishness by putting our pain into the service of God’s so that our pain becomes a symbol of His—Preparation for this theology in Japanese tragedies and Samurai ethic of being willing to sacrifice one’s most beloved possession e.g. one’s child—He locates pain in God’s essence, but then His freedom to create becomes questionable (Moltmann)—For Kitamori, Christianity just ministers to God’s pain, and Resurreciton has no role—To go beyond these views requires guaranteeing God’s free commitment to world/Covenant, and we must identify in the Trinity the basis for attributing pain/death to God. II.A.4.c.. Outlines of Creation and Covenant Theology (p. 234): Bertrand R. Brassnet: “The Suffering of the Impassible God”: Problem of inner relation between God Who creates in freedom and creation which is planned eternally but in man operates freely—God is impassible insofar as His will is unshakably constant in the face of the world’s changes, but rendered passible by sinful creation—Contra von Hügel, suffering without sympathy is not enough—God is dependent on creation on the basis of His free conception of it—God’s suffering is integral part of His blessedness, and so of ours; God finds more joy in maculate creation than immaculate one, but this seems to bind God to the world a priori. (p. 236): Karl Barth: God’s Trinitarian Suffering in Christ: Christ is subjective basis for all knowledge of God, and objective ground/goal of covenant, which is internal basis for creation; in Him, God takes over faithlessness/lostness of Israel—In suffering, God acts because it is His remaining faithful to His decision to enter into Covenant; entering into the reality of sin involves no inner contradiction or conflict (contra Moltmann/Kitamori) and God always anticipates/overcomes sin—Problem of how God’s commitment to suffering can come about without becoming dependent reaction to sin and without making sin a trivial interlude: for Barth, election is inseparable from Christology—Barth’s dismissal of the charge of apokatastasis—Christ’s suffering interprets God’s essence and the Father’s heart, for the Father primarily suffers, on Barth’s view—His rejection of language of death of God and eternal suffering—Centrality of theology of Covenant, of which theology of creation is a part, and His reticence regarding theology of divine processions. (p. 239): Jean Galot: The Question of the Pain of God: Rejection of the apatheia tradition, drawing on Maritain—Only thing useful in Fathers, Scholastics, and modern theology is formulae of two natures and communicatio idiomatum, but these do not do justice to OT or NT according to which whole Trinity accomplishes Incarnation and Passion: the Son reveals Father’s suffering, and so no Anselmian compensation is needed, and He is the world’s offering to the Father—God’s essence is unaffected by sin, but He freely creates a world that can involve the Persons in more than metaphorical (contra Maritain) pain, which is a mode of His highest love/perfection—Question whether the bond between love and pain might have its root in ecstatic love of Trinitarian persons, which implies a self-renunciation/surrender that is the origin of the renunciations for humanity that have a painful side. II.A.4.c.. A Basis in the Immanent Trinity (p 242): We should not, like Galot or Gregory Palamas, distinguish untouched inner divine life and Trinity’s relation to the world that is touched affectively if not effectively (Galot, Salmanticenses)—We have no name for the perfection/nobility imparted by pain that implies no imperfection; divine blessedness is simultaneously eternal glory of triumphant possession and acceptance (Maritain)—The need to find in God becoming as a perfection of being, motion as a perfection of rest, and change as a perfection of immutability, that God is not unscathed by sin, and that Jesus’ saving events are within the Trinity (Varillon, Martelet, Schürmann, Hoffmann). (p. 244): Question whether God in His theologia can be influenced by His oikonomia—Eckhart’s divine death has no place here—Created world is immanent in God—No built-in guarantees/securities in Trinitarian self-giving, which include eternal risk and gratitude, which is not unserious play (contra Hegel), but all finite processes happen within this all-embracing process—Mutual “blood” exchange among the Persons is basis for “pain” and “death” in God/in eternal language of glory/in innermost modes of love (Ulrich)—This supersedes limits of tragedy, for tragedy plays out in all-embracing reality of eternal blessedness. II.B. The Final Act: A Trinitarian Drama II.B.1. The Descent of the Son II.B.1.a. Existence in Time as a Representation of Eternal Life (p. 247): The Father creates not by turning outward but by turning to the Son within divine life, and so when Son becomes Incarnate, He does not leave eternal life behind, for eternal life cannot be passed on in any nature-bound form (von Speyr)—Son’s obedience is means/content of His eternal relation to Father—Son can combine full human life with divine nature if He chooses His path in full freedom, such that freedom and obedience coincide, and there is perfect correspondence between word of man Jesus and the Word of God, with constant translation back and forth, which can only happen in the Spirit, a constant movement between humbling and exalting that can only be lived—Christ can communicate to His followers the art of representing the eternal in time; by accompanying Him, we show we are seeking the kingdom, and so become in Him sharers of eternal life—If in Christ eternal life has penetrated the temporal sphere, then this sphere unfolds within eternity, but this remains a mystery. II.B.1.b. Death/Life; Sorrow/Joy (p. 250): Son’s Trinitarian mission is a mission of reconciling the world to God, a mission unto death in the likeness of sinful flesh—Death is created by God, penetrating whole of finite life, and, as sacrifice of life but not as an ending, an image of God, a living self-giving death that is the opposite of death of sin, the closure to self-surrender/eternal life—Son’s mission was to take sinful death into His death of self-surrender, which meant His death had to include abandonment by God, a fulfillment of the life of love—In no sense did the Father will men to crucify the Son, though the Son was chosen for this atoning death before the foundation of the world: this is a great mystery; everything eternal taking place in time is beyond and before all time, and the temporal is only a shadow/borrowing of the timeless/real—Even His experience of death is an experience of life/translation into time of His eternal devotion to the Father; what is contrary to nature is sustained by His act of freedom: His active self-surrender unto death already contains its infallible answer. (p. 252): His suffering to the utter limit follows from/expresses His eternal triune joy—Access to this paradox in Paul’s words—A share in Christ’s love requires that one be brought through whole spectrum of joy/consolation and suffering/comfortlessness (von Speyr)—Womanly and manly sides of the Passion and of Eucharist—Difficult task of discerning fundamental joy in His greatest suffering; the truer the love, the more joyful it is in suffering, and in this way every love, even the physical, can be true joy if it opens itself to God—Christian/ecclesial grief as share in the Lord’s grief—Joy is the presupposition for His experience of forsakenness, and while the latter is objectively joy, this does not imply the Christ can subjectively feel this joy while He bears sin—God requires both death and life from us—The Son suffers the Cross to complete the Father’s joy, and the Father cannot answer because He wishes to give the Son the perfect joy of having died for Him in the experience of forsakenness—A Divine Person is a pure relation, and so consists in being self-surrender, and so dying in God-forsakenness is an expression of His life, which rediscovers itself in Resurrection to eternal life—Sufferings accepted as expressions of love lead back to God and increase joy, and the seriousness of suffering teaches us to know the Son at a depth that God has fashioned—When we consider the joy in heaven over one sinner who repents, we see why changeable human suffering is necessary for heavenly blessedness—The Eucharist is sing of concrete eternity, for in it, death and life coincide. II.B.1.c. Separation as a Mode of Union (p. 256): If we reflect on uniqueness of relation between Father and Son, we see that Christ had experience of forsakenness beyond Gehenna (Eph. 4:9, Prayer of Manasseh), a distance possible only in economic Trinity—God-forsakenness during Passion is mode of Son’s bond with Father in the Spirit, as His death is a mode of His life and His suffering a mode of His bliss—Son’s divine power and glory is “laid up” with the Father (Phil. 2:6-7, von Speyr)—The Son’s being in the Father in the economic and immanent Trinity—All separation/suffering/obligation/obedience are absorbed into reciprocal self-surrender/love of Father and Son—Son’s divine knowledge is laid up with the Father out of obedience, for everything can be laid up with the Father except obedience; as man, He chooses to not know, because it is a positive thing in man not to know and to entrust oneself to God alone, but this not-knowing is anticipated in God—On the Cross as man He sinks into night to atone for sins, while as God His gaze embraces whole span of redemption—Seriousness of the Passion is ensured by the basis of separation in the Trinity, so the Cross can be the revelation of the innermost being of God, revealing distinction and unity of Persons—The Son’s expiation of each individual sin and world’s pains, especially OT sufferings; this overcomes chaos of sin, but also unveils the world as chaos, the primal confession of sin, on which God’s final judgment is pronounced—Reversal of the victory of sin by the Son taking estrangement into Himself and creating proximity—The Spirit definitively accepts the Son’s sacrifice of His divinity and lays it in the Father’s lap in the Son’s giving back of the Spirit of His mission in His last act of love; during Passion, the Spirit maintains internal diastasis between Father and Son, since unlike Son He is not separated from the Father: cry of dereliction as pure revelation of divine love—Separation must be experienced spiritually not just bodily, but as reciprocal personal forsakenness, though even then the Father does not leave the Son, and the Son is so united to the Father in this that He is nothing but the revelation of the Father’s Will; eternal generation of the Son embraces especially the day of the Cross—If this separation had not happened, the mutual act of giving would not have become so perfect, for love unfolds its depth only in the sacrifice of separation, though not in the sense that there is a process in God—Triune love in perfect form in Eucharist—Darkness in God is just an aspect of His light; even our darkness of sin and His light are not absolute contraries, and it can wrapped in His greater darkness/grace. II.B.1.d. A Darkness Reserved to God Himself (p. 265): God’s light is beyond worldly darkness and light, and His darkness is the aspect of this light that we do not understand, the “You shall not” in Eden—Man’s sin/darkness violates this reserved area, arousing God’s anger i.e. His goodness turned against evil; we see divine attributes we would not have seen had we not sinned, but their ultimate meaning is revealed on the Cross—In the Incarnation it seems for a moment as if the Father only kept anger for Himself, but this is not an eternal attribute; the Father’s wrath is transferred from the nations to the Son: God can only count on God yet here He needs man’s help, and the solution is the Incarnation in which sin is transferred to Christ to spare sinners—On Holy Saturday, the Father shows the Son His own darkness and conquered sin, a journey the Son undertakes in pure wordlessness for the Word is dead and in pure obedience, entering into the opposite of the Father, the pure essence of sin separated from the world, condemned by God, in which God cannot be found; here, the Father allows the Son to experience the most intimate thing He possesses i.e. His darkness i.e. His ultimate personal mystery: the greatest nearness/intimacy is often when people turn away from one another—This disclosed darkness is simultaneously the super-light of the Father’s freedom and man’s sin against this mystery permitted by the Father; Father’s two responses to sin are hell as its necessary consequence and the Son’s free atonement, and these encounter each other in mystery of communion and of darkness, but darkness of sin enclasped by darkness of love—Dereliction is a mode of eternal communion—The only thing foreign to the immanent modes of the divine Persons is sin, which is burned by the divine relations, which are fire, which is always present—Mystery of Good Friday/Holy Saturday is mystery of loneliness of love between Father and Son in the Spirit. II.B.2. The Question of Universal Salvation II.B.2.a. The Problem (p. 269): Prospect of universal salvation seems to empty God’s involvement in world of all tragedy, relativizing the world’s refusal through undercutting by Trinitarian depths of revelation—Theolegoumenon of apokatastasis seem to require reappraisal of Biblical passages on twofold result of Judgment or eternity of hell; passages positing universal salvation require their “equal rights” (Schleiermacher), as do theologians and mystics that discuss this—In OT, God of covenant justice rules nations, but in NT, judgment is primarily the Cross (Jn. 12:31)—But in Christ, eternal bliss and damnation are more starkly opposed; in NT judgment, we must measure up to the norm of Jesus—Question of whether there can be a harmony between two poles that seem mutually exclusive—Jesus is both chosen and rejected one, so that the rejected can become chosen through Him (Barth)—Christ’s suffering of hell in our place cannot be mere exchange of places. II.B.2.b. From the Old Aeon to the New (p. 272): Same judgment imagery in OT and NT—God was judge before Sinai, yet accounts of those judgments are written through lens of Sinai—Faith, reward, and threat of punishment in covenant with Israel—God’s faithfulness as righteousness; both blessing with the covenant and collapse of everything outside it are theophanies—Judgment on the nations outside the covenant, and on Israel insofar as it falls outside the covenant, and the need to turn back to God—God’s pitiless punishments out of His righteousness—Israel’s conclusion that since it had knowledge of God’s righteousness in reward and punishment, it could use that knowledge and principle for its own actions in judging others: a legitimate principle, but it led to the Pharisaic attitude that forgot the foundation of the law, mishpat i.e. mercy/ faithfulness and the chief commandment of unlimited love for God—Jesus is recreation of the covenant for He is the unity between God and man, the covenant personified; God’s righteousness in meting out punishment attains expression/term in Christ’s death, and in breathing the Spirit, He creates conditions necessary for our being incorporated into this new covenant—For those in Christ, there is no condemnation or judgment—Portrayal of Cross eschatologically, and collapse of OT symmetrical retribution: whatever follows is not just effect/consequence of/inherent in Cross—With Barth, we can say that there is now no complete balance between God’s elective mercy and condemnatory righteousness, but we cannot say that Christ was punished, for He does not experience hell deserved by sinners, but something below this i.e. being forsaken by God in pure obedience of love: this is a more radical abandonment of OT symmetrical judgment—Judgement in the Trinity—OT rejoicing at punishment of the wicked must fall silent (Nédoncelle, Martelet, Ratzinger)—No longer two levels of right conduct, toward friend or foe: since through Cross Christ suffered bodily and since in Eucharist He is shared bodily, all men are His blood/ bodily relations—Twofold outcome of judgment even in late Jewish apocalyptic writings. II.B.2.c. A Comprehensive Redemption (p. 279): 1. NT texts must be appreciated in their starkness—All Jesus’ words that refer to the possibility of eternal perdition are pre-Easter words, before the light has penetrated the whole darkness (von Speyr)—Paul’s post-Easter certainty that if God is for us, no earthly power can be against us—Unless God’s acts were unsurpassable, the Cross could be surpassed by man’s negation; first Adam could only be made responsibly with view to second Adam, who came certain of victory (von Speyr)—John on universality of redemption and on Christ’s focus on all; von Speyr on Christ’s words about and redemption of Judas—The Son’s leading all flesh into participation in the Father’s eternal life. (p. 282): 2. Cross is decisive judgment because in it the Son undercuts/undergirds the world’s sin—OT judgment of justice was not a mistake, for law of love requires foundation of justice: in the Father’s looking at the Son with eyes of justice, judgment dissolves into love; Son cannot now pass judgment, which is already dissolved, except as judgment of love He has already received from the Father: judgment of Cross is final, but it is only fully revealed on the last day (von Speyr)—Sins are undercut/undergirded by God’s love because sin/evil/devil’s power are finite and end in the love that envelop them (see Irenaeus, Diognetus, Origen, Athanasius, Nyssa) for created freedom is free is within the greater freedom of God; the Son by His suffering has set limits to evil—Since everyone is created with a view to Christ, God applies to all the measure of Christ, and so does justice to what Christ has done for us. II.B.2.d. The Serious Possibility of Refusal (p. 285): The idea of dissolving sin through pain on the Cross seems too physical/mythological—If God respects created freedom, He cannot overrule it just because His freedom is more powerful—An extrinsecist pardon in which Christ’s merits weight heavier in the scales is inconsistent with His representing us/standing in our place—Contra Barth, we cannot avert our eyes from the mysterium iniquitatis and the fact that God’s heightened love provokes a heightened hatred as bottomless as love itself (Heb. 6:4-6)—God has no more grace to give behind the Cross—Jesus’ statements about unforgiveable sins cannot be dismissed as mere exhortations, and his statements about eternal punishment cannot be reinterpreted as temporally limited punishment, nor his statements be dismissed about it being better for Judas to have never been born—Paul sees redemption applied to whole universe, but even still he cannot anticipate outcome of judgment, but can only hope, and still distinguishes the saved from the perishing—The possibility of Christians coming under judgment for deliberately rejecting grace from the Cross; we cannot be saved against our will, without our participation, and we can always say Yes or No: if God does not find His mercy in us, He must let the judgment of law take its course (von Speyr)—Christ’s work is not a blurred collective redemption; we can turn our back on eternal life, and the greater our intimacy with the Lord, the greater the danger of estrangement—The difficulty in which the Good Shepherd finds himself—We can choose our own judge rather than love—Hell is not already behind us in redemption; we cannot be absolutely certain of being saved, for we have to prove worthy through responsible action—John sees some sins as mortal even after the Cross (1 Jn. 5:16)—Question of whether Péguy was right that in God’s heart is anxiety producing not certainty of salvation but hope. II.B.3. The Judgment of Christ (p. 291): Question of how justice and love/grace constitute unity in Christ’s judgment of man—For anyone to be saved, grace must take precedence over justice (Lehmann)—If guilty man is acquitted, this seems like a humiliation for our freedom, and like a defeat for God Who must turn a blind eye to justice/righteousness. II.B.3.a. Man Judges Himself (p. 291): Whether particular and general judgments are one or two, at some point the individual is confronted after death with God’s truth/demands—The greater the love that God offers, the more expected in man’s response, once released from deceptions of senses (Lehmann)—Judgment as radiance of Christ’s light illumining the depth of hearts/sins/conscience, from which we cannot hide (Origen, Nazianzen, Ambrose, Augustine, Lombard, Aquinas); judgment is a judgment on oneself in light of divine truth i.e. what God has done for man in Christ (Oswald), in light of which all see that they fall short of this model (von Speyr): though I can be certain others will be saved, I doubt for myself, since I cannot posit a forgiving divine verdict superseding this judgment on myself (Kierkegaard), and this is self-knowledge’s descent into hell (Theologia Germanica, Hamann)—Eternal blessedness surpasses/is contrary to ideal of pleasurable satisfaction that is sinner’s goal: sinner is asked to give up self-realization and lose his self; blessedness is a Hypostasis that is Himself by surrendering to another—Image from Hofmannsthal. II.B.3.b. Approaching the Verdict (p. 294): Image of the dead being weighed from Egyptian mythology—In Christian iconography, one’s whole life is judged objectively by verdict of divine Judge; man’s verdict on himself in relation to God cannot be last act of judgment, for human freedom depends on/must transcend itself to/is perfected in absolute freedom. (p. 295): Scales is not just quantitative weighing good/evil in life—Freedom is not exhausted in choosing finite goods, but can make a qualitative choice regarding infinite horizon as its own possession/positing itself as absolute autonomy or as its origin/goal/recognizing superordinate absolute autonomy: this fundamental choice takes place in succession of individual choices/acts all vulnerable to death—Difficulty of relation between fundamental choice irreducible to individual situations that is primary issue in judgment, and incarnation of this choice in individual decisions required by situations—Phenomenon of repentance/conversion, especially by the dying; but what is weighed is not just final state of life but its totality: it is not clear that negative fundamental decision at end of life expressed itself in all life situations—Judge must ascertain whether there is something in the life that can be taken up into His living love—Man’s supra-temporal fundamental decision is in the milieu of the timeless verdict of the eternal Judge; our remaining there is dependent on our decision: hence, the imperatives in John to abide, implying that we can also remove ourselves from there—Mortal sin in John is conscious/complete rejection of divine Word/Spirit; John’s ethical/hortatory dualism—To condemn, the Judge would have to find nothing contrary to rejection on man’s part, for forgiveness must be accepted (C.S. Lewis)—The one who came to judge also came to save, and so will take every available path to save the one who rejects him, and if he still rejects him, will just leave the sinner to his blinded will—Question of hell can only be entertained as personal/existential question: danger of both bipolar outcome of history and of protest against it in that both give spectator-view eschatology, not from point of view of the one intimately involved in it (Kreck, Schütz, Przywara, Lochet)—We must take further hypothetical steps if God desires all to be saved (1 Tim 2:4). II.B.4. Approaching the Reality of Hell II.B.4.a. The Absolute Good: Freedom (p. 300): Finite freedom’s essence is dependent on absolute freedom for its origin, which govern its goal and formal object i.e. good in itself (Aquinas) not self-preservation (contra Spinoza); only on basis of transcendental constitution can it opt for a particular good: it is privileged to be a freedom responsible for itself but can only be itself by being oriented beyond itself—Causa prima can only make free causa secunda by putting on it a mark of its origin, though latter can choose itself as absolute good and so choose a contradiction i.e. hell if persisted in—Fire of hell is the fire of God, which devastates the sinner more than he devastates himself (Scheeben)—Finite person has imago trinitatis, and can only become a person by relating to others, an image of the calling to realize one’s freedom in Trinitarian exchange of love: some of his freedom is “laid up” in God—World’s inmost essence rests on/is only intelligible as the word/speech: creature’s essential relation to God is question/deliberation/answer, and this is ground of creature’s being; we must eventually be confronted with the Word Who is our essential freedom laid up in God (von Speyr)—If one tries to be in one’s private hell, one is still embraced by Christ’s being—Only Christ’s freedom can unify our multiplicity; to be bound to Him is to let freedom rule in us. II.B.4.b. Analogies of Transcendence (p. 305): NT uses ‘aionios’ for both “eternal” life and punishment/fire: both involve something final and irreversible in comparison with the changeability that characterizes time—Early Church’s speculation on immortality influenced by Plato on soul as essentially immortal, though still in a way involving participation and gift, and by theological view that immortality of the blessed is participation in divine immortality (Justin)—Tatian on two pneumata in man; similar views in Ignatius, Clement, Didache, and Theophilus—Given this view of participation through grace in eternity, those who behold God share in eternity which includes all time in it, but in hell there is time not true eternity (Aquinas)—To be deprived of all contact with God and fellow creatures is to be stripped of all dimensions that characterize the living, to be a dead nunc stans (C.S. Lewis)—We can reconcile “ex infernis nulla redemptio” with universal salvation by not importing temporality into hell, since a creature can pass from one mode of beign to another in the eternal realm (von Baader)—God can take everything timelessly from sinners and return it to them timelessly—Besides timelessness of God’s bliss and of hell, there is timelessness of the Son on the Cross which has space for infernal experience of sinners; by taking in to Himself sinners’ God-forsakenness, He alone can know what loss of the Father truly means, though this is echoed in the dark night of the soul (Hilton, Tauler, John of the Cross, Angel of Foligno, Mechthild von Magdeburg, Hadewijch, Harphius, Ruysbroeck, Eckhart, Suso, von Speyr); separation from the Father has weight of eternity for Christ—The Passion has a “super-time” and can be participated in at any time or place; His entrance into utmost forsakenness is a substantial condition of His life, and so redemptive suffering towers over the finitude of sin (von Speyr). II.B.4.c. Kinds of Forsakenness (p. 311): Two forms of timelessness, God-forsakenness of the damned and that of the Son on the Cross, are not unrelated, but latter is because of former; Christ takes on Himself both sins and their fruits—The Son places Himself in man’s way even if man has turned his back on God, a use of divine omnipresence (von Speyr): the one who tries to choose forsakenness to prove his own absoluteness finds another even more forsaken (Claudel)—The scenes at the end of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and Crime and Punishment as metaphors for the process by which man timelessly closed in on himself is opened up by the presence of Another timelessly present, since his shell is just a contradiction, thereby making hell into purgatory, paid for by His own comfortlessness, which is the opposite of being closed in on oneself. II.B.4.d. The Unusable Residue (p. 314): What would be left in hell, finally condemned by God, would be sin, separated from the sinner by the Cross, who can now be incorporated into Christ’s Body/Bride; sins are realities, not nothing, due to the energy invested in them—In spite of forsakenness, His descent is objectively that of a victor—The metaphor of unquenchable fire—The second chaos of sin: quality of evil loses all relation to God. II.B.4.e. Can Hope Deceive? (p. 316): The hope that all men will be saved is based on transition from Judaism to NT—The more God’s love undertakes for the world, the more it is vulnerable, and the more we see what the First Commandment demands—After condemnation of Origenism, the Augustinian/scholastic two-fold outcome to judgment, except in e.g. Hildegard of Bingen, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Mechthild of Hackeborne, Julian of Norwich—For Augustine, one can only hope for oneself; for Aquinas, one can hope for those with whom one is united in charity—History of the question in the East (Theodore of Mopsuestia, Nyssa, Maximus, the Nestorian Solomon of Basra) and in the West, which after the Renaissance, was a series of pendulum swings, including advocacy of universal salvation (Bradford, Denk, Lead, Petersen, Bengel, Oetinger, Hahn, Schleiermacher, Schweizer, Martensen, Troeltsch, Bonhoeffer, Hirscher, Schell, Barth) though this is generally based on humanism, anti-orthodoxy, Englightenment optimism, not by deep Trinitarian theology, except in Blumhardts and Barth—Only possible path for theological speculation is that of Thérèse of Lisieux, of offering oneself to God’s merciful love and of blind hope in His mercy, after which she is permitted to expect everything from Him—Hope remains where all speculative systems fail (Rom. 5:5), but it requires total self-consecration to God’s mercy (Thérèse)—Appropriate attitude toward judgment that waits each of us is hope with a certain fear, for something worthy of damnation is in each of us (Ambrose), and so hope can only cling blindly to the Cross; cheap hope of apokatastasis must become dearly bought one (Dies Irae). II.C. Man in God’s Undergirding II.C.1. Existence in the Life/Death of Christ II.C.1.a. Death Underlies Everything (p. 323): Relation between Heidegger on death as existence’s most specific possibility and Nyssa’s claim that because of death God took it on Himself to be born; Heidegger draws on Scheler on the need for mortality to make definite moral decisions: because of the immanence of death we can escape everyday facticity and attain freedom for self-surrender—For Heidegger, being is veiled, and so death has no discernible meaning for the totality; the only solution seems to be flight from the body into the supra-temporal and universal (Plato, Hegel): this fails to give due weight to positive side of finitude—If we are microcosms, then we are monsters (Pascal); rather, we must fashion an ethical life out of a transitory existence: the individual is more precious if mortality is the site of higher consciousness of the Whole—After the Fall, positive and negative aspects of death cannot be unraveled—In sharing a covenant with God, man was able to endure being eternal within bounds of transitory existence, but this was just anticipation of genuine liberation from tragedy of death, and was unsustainable—Liberation lies in human destiny of death being undergirded by Jesus’ death, which includes all essential characteristics of substantial human death, which is most His own, though He refuses knowledge of the hour, which is reserved to the Father alone—Jesus’ course toward death does not come from being thrown from nothingness to existence, but from laying aside His divine proportions in obedience to the Father, with the end of self-gift—The end of Father and Son’s self-surrender is to undergird the concrete end of those who could not understand this end in terms of love, but rather saw death as imposed finitude or welcome end to life’s burden, both of which contradict the ultimate meaning of dying—His death is an undergoing of every possible instance of God-forsakenness and powerlessness for sinners, changing the value of all their deaths, and this deed is proclamation of absolute love/Father’s infinite power, for the Son does not cease to be generated by the Father in dying—Paradoxes produced by finite death revealing infinite love, especially that inseparability of Father and Son is made clear at the moment when their separation is total; here is the origin of faith—Doctrine of God’s triune life is doctrine of His act of seeing world’s sin in light of Son’s undergirding death—The Father sees every individual through the medium of the Son’s mission and in the Spirit—Son’s death bears Resurrection in it in a hidden manner; the Father dispenses this life in a way contrary to the laws of creation, and the Son’s Resurrection opens the door to resurrection for all death—In Eucharist, the Lord gives away in advance incorruption, which He accomplishes through Cross and Resurrection—Son’s death is redemptive only insofar as it manifests ultimate horizon of meaning i.e. Trinitarian love. (p. 331): Against Shizuteru Ueda’s attempt to find redeeming trinity in Zen Buddhism—Parallels between Buddhist problem of wanting to be “I” and Christian problem of sin—Zen anti-substantial, relational metaphysics—The need in Buddhism to discern interpenetration of being and nothingness, aiming ultimately at ego-less relations between men—Contrast to Christian absolute Trinity of substance and relation, identical with absolute love. II.C.1.b. Living in Christ’s Death, Christ’s Life (p. 332): Ambrose’s three kinds of death: of sin, mystical death i.e. of dying to sin, and of earthly life—Believer’s sacramental death in baptism and Eucharist is secondary to Christ’s death undergirding all human dying, which has representative character, and is objectively applied to the living—According to Paul, those governed by the imperative in the indicative and marked sacramentally/existentially are governed by the unity in duality of Christ’s death and risen life, their life now being an eschatological life: we are not annihilated in a Buddhist sense, but unselved by being drawn into Christ’s death/life, and the vacant space created by our unselving in occupied by Christ and His Spirit, fulfilling the imago trinitatis in us—Christological order is first suffering then glorification; suffering can be both active and passive acceptance of imposed suffering, though suffering is always matched by/simultaneous with joy, which we should manifest: it is “as if” suffering, but genuine joy (Augustine)—According to John, the Trinity dwells in our hearts, and we are marked sacramentally/existentially by this. (p. 337): For Paul, Christ and life are equivalent whether we live or die, and this vindicates his yearning for death so as to be with Christ—Yearning for death, especially martyr’s death, in Ignatius, Tertullian, Nyssa—Problem that this yearning is expressed in terms of Stoicism and Neo-Platonism, which later contaminated medieval mysticism in its yearning for the mors mystica, not sacramental but a physical experience of ecstasy of love (Bernard, Thomas Gallus, Bonaventure, Lull, Gerson, Teresa of Avila); the danger of this approach is seen in Molinos and Madame Guyon, but in the middle ages there is ambivalence between non-Christian quasi-Buddhist language of yearning to be out of the body and a muted theology of the Cross—The focus on mystical stages causes the Pauline emphasis on mission to disappear, but this was restored by Ignatius of Loyola. (p. 338): Christ’s dying in God-forsakenness imprints on a human life not the ecstasy of love but everyday taking up of the Cross, which includes the joy of being privileged to suffer—Once we embrace God’s cause, evil is our foe too in a secondary way—Image of Christian life marked by the Cross from Bernanos. II.C.1.c. Dying into Christ’s Life, Christ’s Death (p. 339): From the beginning, God is life—Whatever Adam’s end was, it had to involve giving his finite life back to the infinite life from which it came, but we have only become acquainted with death as a punishment, though grace is latent in it; Paul extends the penal quality of death to all creation—When he dies, man cannot avoid meeting God, and this is providential—Christ gives new value to dying by undergirding the deaths of all sinners: in death, one is expropriated from oneself and turned towards Christ by the latter’s more radical expropriation; we die for ourselves, but Christ dies for all sinners, and so the death of sinners has an objective dative relation to/reciprocity with His (Rom. 14:8), which no refusal can put into question—Death retains its penal aspect, but Christ shows that this and all the Father’s works are based on the Trinity’s love—We can now renounce our lives and dying for ourselves—Believers’ lives are dead sacramentally/mystically and ethically/ascetically, but others are dead to eternal life—Inner solidarity comes about only through second Adam, not the first, who becomes a mere prelude—Jesus raising the dead by His touch, prefiguring the touch of the risen Christ, made concrete in the sacraments—Connection of Baptism, Eucharist, and anointing with dying—The presence of the Church in the loneliness of a man’s dying, seen especially in Mary’s aid to the dying. II.C.2. The One Judgment II.C.2.a. Judgment Universal and Particular (p. 346): OT and NT know only one Judgment/day of Yahweh/Christ, and the Judgment assess weight of various historical entities in God’s sight—In early prophets, Israel’s enemies are judged, then in Amos, Israel too is judged; both the whole nation and individuals are judged, but individuals organized into groups arranged by various sins—Post-exilic prayer for retribution on enemies, and split between the pious and sinners: here, judgment becomes more individualized, addressing each person and act, and on this basis the NT insists we will be judged by our deeds—The general judgment is also a personal/particular judgment; a Biblical theology cannot hold two different judgments or put all emphasis on particular judgment, but rather there are two stages of a single all-embracing event—Judgment as revelation of Christ’s divinity (Origen)—Judgment is at the end, whether of one’s life or of human history—Early theology held that judgment of individual was in the general judgment, while still holding to an intermediate state between death and final judgment (Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Novatian, Lactantius, Cyprian), sometimes with the dead being kept in anterooms (Jerome, Augustine); Aquinas only speaks of two judgments in passing, and Councils of Lyons and Florence do not mention them—Origen on souls being treated according to their deserts prior to judgment, and Nazianzen/Chrysostom emphasize Last Judgment as personal affair. II.C.2.b. Resurrection and Exaltation (p. 351): Key concepts from late Jewish eschatology for Christian eschatology include expectation of partial or general Resurrection before Judgment, and idea that certain righteous/martyr souls are elevated to God’s presence immediately after death: horizontal notion of Resurrection and vertical notion of elevation. (p. 352): 1. Jesus as living proof of doctrine of Resurrection and initiation of end-time—Varying early interpretations of this event e.g. that no one would die or that the dead would rise first—In Resurrection of Jesus and the saints in Mt. 27:53-53, future is made present reality—First resurrection of martyrs (Rev 20). (p. 353): 2. Raising of Christ as exaltation, an OT concept applied to God, Suffering Servant, the king, martyrs, and the godly in general, meaning preservation from Sheol and transfer to God’s sphere—Influence of Hellenistic ideas of immortality (Philo)—Transfer of righteous to divine presence immediately after death in Jewish Apocrypha; NT use of those categories to express eschatology radically changed through Christ’s Resurrection—Paul on how our configuration to Christ excludes incorporeal state, and will take place at His return in the future; immanent expectation of that return renders intermediate state superfluous—John presents everything essential in 6:54 and 11:25-26; question of intermediate state is not important, since to believe is already to live in the Lord Who is the Resurrection—Emphasis in 1 Cor. 15 not on Resurrection but transformation of psychic body into pneumatic body, with immortality conceived in bodily terms. II.C.2.c. Holding Fast to the One Judgment (p. 356): Systematic elaboration of intermediate state paints theology into a corner where it must posit two judgments, but this is unacceptable Biblically/speculatively—In Paul and Synoptics, there is only individual judgment, albeit with social perspective, after death—After Benedict XII’s Benedictus Deus, there cannot be preliminary rewards/punishments—Purgatory as aspect of personal character of judgment—Final Judgment happens along with the world’s history; notion of final judgment on history could be only to show justice of God’s ways in history and to situate each individual in the whole, though this is contrary to OT/NT portrayals of history (Rahner)—Question of whether there can be a separated soul without a body is insoluble in theologia viatorum, but it is difficult to imagine a communio sanctorum made of embodied and disembodied souls i.e. those who have risen in advance and those who must wait until the end of the world—Spiritual body unfolding out of corruptible body—Jesus does not posit temporal hiatus between being with living God and Resurrection; if the judgment takes place along with earthly history, then the Resurrection can too—Judgment cannot involve sinner standing in shame before others, since sinner’s shame is between sinner and God alone; total sum of judgments can only be presented to those who have passed through particular judgment, lost envy/schadenfreude, and see all with God’s eyes. II.C.2.d. The One Judgment and the Purification (p. 360): Purification must be an aspect of the one Judgment that embraces all individual judgments—Fire of purgatory as metaphor for majesty of God as He reveals Himself and transforms us in the moment of encounter (Gnilka, Ratzinger) which is the baptism of fire (Origen, Ambrose, Augustine)—History of notion of purgatory from Jewish beginnings to twelfth century; characteristic features include temporal prolongation of Last Judgment, two fires purifying individual and devouring the world, increasing emphasis on communion of saints in purgatory, and question of how much those being purged can freely surrender themselves to purification—Fire as essential trait of God Who must devour anything impure; the Son’s self-exposure to this fire on the Cross—Purgatory comes into existence on Holy Saturday when Christ introduces mercy into the fires of hell, divine justice having been tempered by the Cross—Testing of our works is between God and individual, and purgatory is in isolation for the one being purged who is wholly focused on God, though prayers by others can help, and only after can one again encounter fellow men, as God does, allowing a new definitive community—Man stands before God objectified in his life work, which embodies the thoughts and intentions of his heart, and this work can be compared to what should have been; change from focus on how I love the Lord to how He wishes to be loved governs whole process, eliminating anthropocentric view of sin, and we come to see sin in contradiction not just contrariety to God—The “I” is disintegrated so that the “Thou” can be seen and we are accommodated to/by the Word—Duration of purgatory is reserved to the Lord—There is an aspect of punishment, and what happens to one does not involve one’s freedom, except an initial freedom to acquiesce—The aim is to acknowledge His absolute prerogative of love, and it is directed to the Cross—Movement toward point where love and punishment form a single unity, which resides in relation of Father and Son—Son is entirely pure and has nothing in Him to be consumed by God’s fire, so He takes the world into Himself as fuel, suffering on account of each of us—Purgatory ends when one realizes the extent of the world’s sin in looking at the Cross, and one is ready to suffer punishment for all sin; then the self-reflection of man in state of original sin is dissolved in original paradisal relation between God and man—Eschaton here is triune God Who in Christ undergirds all human activity: even the sinner’s fear of self-surrender is undergirded by the Lord’s anguish in face of sin—Purification leads to discipleship. III. The World in God III.A. Embedded in God (p. 373): Theologia viatorum cannot try to give complete theologia comprehensorum or it ends up in unproductive abstractions or empty enthusiasms—But we can glimpse our absolute future in the Resurrection of the Crucified One: world can be enfolded in Trinity and we can have unique freedom in His Spirit—His bodily presence extends beyond His individual corporeity, and can be shared Eucharistically so that He feels Himself touched in the least of His brethren—His Resurrection and ours retain individual difference but without being separated from others, unity and distinction like in the Trinity (Pannenberg, Origen)—Nothing of what is familiar from earth will be excluded from/lost to God, but will be transfigured, with its meaning at last made clear—In Jesus’ forty days the kingdom of God/heaven have started on earth—Resurrection from being sowed in death—Jesus alone is way, resurrection, life, the transition from end to beginning, and He affirms finitude of creation up to death and creation’s longing gaze beyond itself—Resurrection is final goal of creation of man, not final goal of nature. III.A.1. He Ascends to Prepare a Place for Us (p. 375): Heaven and earth were established as distinct so they can approach one another: that the earthly has its autonomy shows there is room for it in God—Perfection expression of leaving and returning to God is in Christ: as the concrete exchange, He fills earthly life with eternal content so that He can find a place in eternity for earthly life—In His death, Resurrection is hiddenly present, and this hold earth and heaven together and apart—Only if eternal life is lived in temporal terms can temporal life/death be ready for enteral life—Jesus’ return to the Father is the creation of heaven i.e. a new dimension of creation capable of receiving old creation as it comes to be in God—OT shadowy intimations of heaven accessible to earthly beings, but Christ opens the new life to us; not clear how resurrection is implemented along world-time—Resurrection leads us to the dwelling places Christ has opened to us, which cannot be localized in old cosmos (Albert, contra Aquinas/Dante): the heaven of the Trinity is not created/physical, but the Trinity itself (Dietrich of Freiberg, Cusa)—In the Ascension, all mankind/creation begins its return to the divine source, and so Christ’s body exceeds/contains all places/dwellings; what He brings to completion in Himself, He will do in all physical creation (Erigena)—The mortal world is transformed through death into a world that does not pass away—Christ-event leads ahead personally and archetypically/cosmologically, in essentially Trinitarian manner—Question of whether Christ’s preparing a place for us is just completion of the old creation through those aspects that seem most remote i.e. pain, futility, death—Son is rewarded by the Father for what seems to remove Him most from Father’s presence—What is offered to those whom the Son brings to their place is a pure gift beyond all expectation, but also something earned through victory and so linked to earthly life that resembled Christ’s—New heaven/earth are not a different world—Conditions in anticipation/love for children and adults receiving generous gifts—Identity of transfigured and earthly body is not based in constantly changing materiality, but in mysterious medium in which one expresses oneself in freedom and which is inhabited in common with others and sustains reciprocal communication; on earth, there is alienation between inner freedom and organism that expresses it, but in the Lord’s Resurrection body, His organism responds fully to His self-expressing freedom, which is that of His unique personality—New world dimension has quality of crucified/risen and Eucharistically shared body: new ensouled corporeity has particular human shape and Eucharistic ubiquity guaranteeing room for man/cosmos and allowing the Lord to address Himself personally to each individual—Christ’s body is definitively Eucharistic, not just in its sacramental mode of presence, and has a share in the Trinitarian process i.e. breathing forth the Spirit, pouring Himself out—Those who enter this new dimension take part analogously in this poured-forth existence, making ourselves a dwelling place for others and, like Him, “pure food” for our neighbors (Origen)—Calling on the saints in any time/place presupposes their Eucharistic openness toward us—Eucharistic permeability of all subjects to one another even in mortal existence is basis of communio sanctorum—Scholastics on that which “de-finitizes” the knowledge the blessed have of God (Albert, Alexander of Hales), though this misses a Christological mediation (Rahner)—Basis for permeability in foregoing discussion of purgatory—Beholding/inwardly participating in the Son in Eucharistic self-giving becomes beholding/participating in life of Trinity—Father manifests Himself in the Son’s eucharistia not as distinct subject, but as primal spring of love generating the Son and giving Him away for us; seeing the Father must participate in uncaused freedom of Son’s generation, beyond intellectual grasp or contemplation of objects—Spirit is evident in Son’s eucharistia poured out on the world, since the Spirit is the executive of the Son’s prodigal self-giving—Images from Revelation for translating the atmosphere of Trinitarian love. III.A.2. Recourse to the Idea (p. 385): Fundamental philosophical question of how to conceive finite/spatiotemporal being located in the embrace of the Absolute, avoiding pantheism and mere juxtaposition—First attempt at answer in Platonism’s dualism of divine Idea and thing that comes from it, taken up by Augustine and Maximus—Scholasticism’s alternation between Platonist preference for Idea, and Christian positivity of created reality e.g. Aquinas says when considering mode of being of the thing, the real existent mode of being is truer than the ideal, but when considering the mode of being as such, the being of the idea is truer than the being of the thing, though also there is the Platonist notion that there are true things about effects that are not true of causes (DV 4.6)—In the case of God, truth expresses itself from within, and the likeness of what God expresses in Himself is greater than what created reality expresses through itself (Bonaventure)—Question of whether it is impossible to bridge discrepancy between divine fullness of Idea of a creature and self-realization of that creature, of whether realized idea of the world corresponds entirely to eternal idea (Staudenmaier), or of whether the “very good” of Genesis applies to the incarnate Son Who unites Creator and creature in His person without abolishing distinction in being—Creature’s nature challenges it to catch up to the idea—German mysticism aims at a ground in which every dissimilitudo is surpassed—Erigena on all creaturely realities coming forth from ideas and then returning to and becoming identical with their ideas and so existing in eternity, with a Trinitarian basis for all this, but it is unclear how much the Ideas here part of God’s essence or part of the created world—It is God’s will that we be conformed to the idea He has of us, on the basis of a definition appropriate to God and creature—The foundation for this is the principle that everything that has potentiality in creatures is found positively in God, and the principle that finite freedom cannot cease to be rooted in divine freedom—If our ultimate freedom is laid up in God, in our Idea, then it has two sides, one of which concerns God’s Idea and his waiting for us to be fully realized in Him, and one of which concerns the structure of created spirit which includes synderesis which infallibly cleaves to the God however much we sin, the scintillia that comes from the Good—Ruysbroeck on encounter with one’s uncreated Idea, which can only take place where Father generates Son and simultaneously the Idea of the world to be implemented in the Son, and where God implants grace into the soul, but the highest degree of divine favor and purity are required to discern this, since it is beyond the soul’s intellectual/spiritual faculties; our created being has essential existence in Him and is one with Him, and He knows it by knowing Himself, though even there is distinction of intellectual perception—Since the world is designed/created in Christ, our Idea is in Christ; He causes our idea to move toward us in a way that is both universal/Platonic and individual/personal—Idea is definitively reached through divine fire, on the pattern of Christ’s self-surrender—We become creatures of redemption, existing in the generated Son—God’s idea of the individual is the idea of His mission participating in Christ’s mission/arising out of the center of His mission—Mission is the core of personality, and open it beyond the dimensions of which one or others are aware—Question of how far the task uncompleted on earth can be regarded as fulfilled in heaven, and question of how mission can be imagined in context of eternity. III.A.3. The Creature in God (p. 394): Question of how it is possible for creatures to be embedded in God such that they attain perfection without losing creaturely nature—Review of ideas that prepared for this question—If God has given creatures freedom, He must allow them to choose the Good that they are not, although that Good is indelibly inscribed in their being; as beings in time, human freedom is only possible through a temporal process, which is manifested in death/judgment/fire—No distance between heaven and earth, only between earth and heaven—Infinite Being/Freedom opens Himself to us, imagined as opening of endless rooms, rather than as visio Dei, since God is not object totally available to sight, so metaphor of vision requires dialectical description of highest presence of something that is beyond all we can grasp (William of Auvergne): God offers Himself to the creature by the lumen gloriae but not comprehensively (Bonaventure, Gregory of Great, Chrysostom, Cyril of Jerusalem)—Scholasticism’s rejection of Erigena’s view that God can only be beheld through theophanies, but Albert’s synthesis of East and West in holding that Greek theophany is the same as Western medium confortans videntem—God’s infinite life is a freedom that cannot be beheld/plumbed, but includes rooms we must run through in a never-ending race; Erigena on theos from theorō/I see or theo/I run: God is motion at rest and rest in motion—Nyssa on flight into God that is also rest, with image of endlessly welling-up spring for ever-newer contemplation of/astonishment at/desire for divine beauty, with ever increasing ability to receive and goods received, such that we become ever more like the Lord, like a welling wound of love—Rest/being/remaining the same and motion/over-flowing life/heightening/temporal fullness coinhere effortlessly—The pure act of the Trinity includes positivities in our potentialities in their fullness and so can re-embed them into itself without harming them—Ruysbroeck on Trinitarian mutual relations/embrace as home/beginning of all life/becoming/ creatures in their proper being, without destroying otherness of God; distinction among Persons both eternally justifies distinction between God and creature and eternally surpasses it in love that is gift of grace from unity of divine essence: we live wholly in God and wholly in ourselves, but by one life: meeting with God is the highest blessedness—Embedding of earthly existence in God is given from above, which causes creaturely modes to transcend themselves—In divine fruitfulness is an eternal ever-more, in super-times and super-space, in which we are taken up into the prototype of prayer in the Trinity (von Speyr). III.A.4. Freedom, Vision and Creation (p. 402): Crowning of creaturely freedom is entire/resolute devotion to the Good, not being able to sin at all (Augustine, Anselm) which requires vision of absolute Good and grace from it (Aquinas), but Augustine and Scholastics say little about what can be done with this freedom—Earthly experience shows that what is most precious is not decision in favor of the Good but creative activity, which includes presenting/ surrendering oneself to another free person—Eternal life implies creativity, not just a spectacle—Goethe’s view that continued existence requires activity, new tasks, new difficulties to surmount, though this lack contemplative element; ancient ideals of visio/frui/Sabbath rest are too epicurean—God provides necessary space for created freedom—Creaturely freedom/free self-disclosure cannot be known in advance and are part of person’s dignity, so they must be preserved in eternal life, which requires astonished joy in giving and receiving gifts with others in the communion of saints, and this requires trust/faith/hope—Paradox in OT and NT that no one can see/hear God and live, yet many testify that they saw God and lived, a paradox reflected in opposing theorems of Palamas and Benedict XII: Palamas’ ousia-energeiai distinction based on history from Cappadocians and Chrysostom rejected Eunomius’ rationalism about knowing God; Benedict XII’s intuitive/face-to-face knowledge immediately after death, rejecting tradition from Origen/Bernard/ John XXII that held no vision until Resurrection—Since intimate knowledge can be reconciled with granting freedom, Palamas and Benedict can be reconciled: Palamas’ view does not divide God in two, but provides vision with room for mystery, and Benedict’s view does not assert God can be comprehended (Aquinas)—We cannot know another’s free will by knowing their essence, but they must put it into speech to make it known, so visio does not obviate audition of the Word, on Whom we will always be dependent—To see God is not to see His infinite possibilities or to understand the why-less generation of the Word (Eckhart)—Contra one reading of Palamas, God’s essence cannot remain hidden behind His revelations; rather, God in the why-less Trinitarian event beyond freedom and necessity is ever manifesting Himself totally yet remaining ever-more mysterious: reconciliation of the two views requires seeing God as event, rather than through abstract consideration of essence—Meyendorff on Palamas’ theology as existential personalism; difficulties with explaining seeing God through uncreated energies or created light of glory/created grace (Rahner)—Theological virtues remain but are transformed in eternal life; even in the kingdom, God has things to teach (Irenaeus), and Paul says the virtues “remain’, while Scholasticism saw hope vanishing in comprehensio, faith in visio, and love in fruitio, which are not Biblical terms as in Paul, where Abraham’s faith is the model of total surrender to God—Paul does admit modalities of faith and hope that are determined by pilgrim existence on earth, and these will disappear—Existence in God will be no less full of tension and drama than earthly existence—Augustinian concepts that epitomize heaven’s bliss, vacare, videre, amare, laudare, must be filled with spontaneous free inventive living—Variety of images from Revelation. III.B. Reciprocity III.B.1. Heaven to Earth (p. 411): Review of what has been said on relation between heaven and earth, especially in Revelation—What produces lamentation on earth produces without hiatus Alleluias in heaven—New Jerusalem descends out of heaven, but something of it is fashioned by the earthly/historical, which are simultaneously in heaven, which is the origin of missions of salvation history—The Lamb embraces heaven and earth and causes them to reciprocally enrich each other—Reciprocity of heaven and earth presented in image of a marriage, which allows, without abolishing distance, a closer interpenetration than distance would seem to permit: the key to this is Chalcedonian Christology’s “unconfused and unseparated”—World has teleology in God/a day when free decisions will have run out—New world remains our world (Pöhlmann) and earthly life will be abiding presence in heaven; what is fragmentary on earth has ultimate ground in heaven, and in heaven we will live full content of earthly moments—Earthly mission comes from heaven, constitutes our core as theological persons, and will remain in heaven but expanded (von Speyr)—Question of whether there is a Last Day for those in heaven, even if only an incident within eternal time; reasons to think Yes, especially since heaven seems incomplete until even the last sinner is there (Irenaeus, Origen), but we should not think that the Lord opens up new missions out of a sense of incompleteness/need for self-fulfillment, but out of fullness of His mission—In heaven, all failings and virtues will be confessed, but one will only be aware of God’s grace redeeming one; Thérèse of Liseux on the insoluble question of whether the pardoned sinner or the one forgiven in advance loves God more—The place of the great figures whose mission openly or hiddenly shaped Church history in heaven: the important case of Marian apparitions—Eucharist reveals most profound truth about heaven’s presence to earth—Full Eucharistic liturgy begins with sending of the Spirit (Corbon)—Synergy between Church and Spirit, a Chalcedonian inseparable yet unconfused relation—Son’s return to the Father gives his human/bodily nature Trinitarian dimensions—Even on earth, missions that begin in heaven have an effect that reaches up to heaven; at the center of this fruitfulness stands the Body, which gathers the world into itself through the Spirit and brings it to the Father, the perfected cosmic sacrifice to God of the whole Christ (Augustine). III.B.2. Earth to Heaven (p. 417): Image of ripening grain and harvest, which is both universal/cosmic and individual—World history with its developmental character, not just its final stage, acquires a place in eternal life, as do all ages of an individual—All stages of Church history are equally close to God (Ranke, von Campenhausen)—Battles of ideas will be sublimated and eliminated, not through a synthesis, but preserved in their justified difference and divergence, based on the positivity of the other—Revelation shows that what we think of as a preliminary stage, e.g. OT cultic objects, is not superseded, but taken into heaven, with full fellowship with the NT—Theological heaven/earth dimension is untouched by scientific consideration of the world—Whole creation yearns for change brought about by Resurrection; because of its violated condition, the whole created world is drawn into destiny of redeemed man, including everything living and non-living, so this longing/birth pangs is unconscious (Vögtle)—Medieval eschatological picture is a chimera: Aquinas on how plants and animals fall into oblivion contradicts OT solidarity between living and human cosmos, images of peace with animals in OT and Revelation (von den Steinen), deep Christian sense (Bernhart), Apochyphal accounts of how animals’ souls will accuse men on Last Day (Slavonic Enoch), stories of animals seeking refuge with saints, notion of irrational creatures stand before God as living persons with dignity and souls to be included in final salvation (Erigena, Mechthild von Hackeborn, Gertrude the Great)—Final form of earth will have Christological stamp (Col. 1:15-20)—Static eternal worldview is inserted into dynamic this-worldly view marked by Cross/Resurrection/Church. III.C. In the Triune Life III.C.1. Participation III.C.1.a. Born of God and Endowed with the Spirit (p. 425): Eternal life cannot just consist in beholding God, since God is not an object but an eternal and ever new Life, and the creature is not meant to live over against God but as a participation in His inner life, being born in/of God, and we even have this share in the Spirit now by faith (Leo XIII, Pius XII)—Absolute mystery of this participation in Paul: Spirit and Son in us show that we are fellow sons, Christ’s body, God’s temple—John describes us as being born/begotten of God, with the divine Persons immanent in us, which is preliminary stage of ineffable union to come; as begotten by God, we are called to give our lives for the brethren—Insufficient to portray life of grace in terms of special presence/indwelling of Son/ Spirit, since purpose of indwelling is to enable us to participation in relations among Persons, which is what the Persons are—Participation as core of eternal blessedness in history of theology. III.C.1.b. Breathing with the Spirit: John of the Cross (p. 429): John of the Cross seeks God alone, not heaven/blessedness—Thin webs that hinder the sweet encounter: all that is creaturely, natural doing/desiring, attachment to body/senses; two are destroyed in dark night—Encounter/union explained with images of touching and wounding, as an ocean of love, and as a Trinitarian experience—As a shadow, soul is other than God, but as shadow cast by divine fire, within which is the soul, and as filled with that light, it is a creature divinized by Him—Transformation of intellect and will through indwelling of Spirit, so that one loves God with God’s will: breathing of Spirit by Father and Son becomes breathing by the soul, which is refashioned into the three Persons—Sources in John, 2 Peter, and his own experience, through which his access to Trinitarian process is spiratio. III.C.1.c. “The Birth of the Son”: Rhenish-Flemish Mysticism (p. 433): Rhenish-Flemish mysticism is based on Scritpural reality of brith of Son from Father: to be endowed with grace is to be accepted as sons in the eternal Son—God and soul in dynamic exchange, portrayed with images of light and water, in Mechthild von Magdeburg, Gertrude, and Mechthild von Hackeborn; image of flowing in Trinitarian life and its overflow into the world, drawing all into Trinitarian life, but little mention here of birth of the Holy Spirit, unlike in Eckhart. (p. 434): Eckhart: He uses extreme Neoplatonic ontology to express Christian idea—Compared to creaturely being, God is super-being and non aliud, and all else is declension from His unity—Emphasis on equality of essence among the Persons, but also difference between God i.e. Creator vis-à-vis creation, and divinity i.e. above all that is relation in God, the Trinitarian process flowing back into the darkness/desert/ stillness of Oneness/Ground/Love in which unity and difference are incomprehensibly one—Creatures are nothing in themselves and only exist insofar as they constantly receive themselves from God—Need for adhaerere Deo: creature’s act is only to accept and return divine gift of being—God alone can say “I” for the creature’s “I” is in the Idea, which is God—Christ took on Himself human nature in general—Creaturely image of God’s being is in God; there is uncreated spark in created man—We know God insofar as we resemble Son as image of the Father—1. In single act, Father generates Son and creation, which has more reality in the Son than in itself; since eternal spark in creature has it reality in God, we can say the Father generates us in the Son or the Son in us: Father consumes Himself in giving birth—2. Eternal proceeding of Son becomes temporal process in which man is fashioned in the Son: God’s works are to make us the only-begotten Son; only the soul can be assimilated to the Son, but the image is only the soul’s spark/ground, in which the soul’s powers must gather in contemplation—3. Father gives birth to Son through the soul, and every righteous soul brings God/Christ to birth—4. The soul that gives birth to the Son out of itself gives birth to itself in the Son, and so the soul and the Son become one Son; the soul gives birth to/from/into God out of itself—5. No genuine analogia entis here, for no creaturely potentia receptionis/causa secunda i.e. no Marian principle, and so the creature’s fashioning of the Son is identified with the Father’s generation of the Son, and thus the creature usurps the Father’s place and becomes causa sui: he jumps over difference between Father and Son, and creaturely fruitfulness is identified with divine—Ideas are moved from Son to Father, and Eckhart seeks an even deeper Ground where multiplicity is transcended; the Father here is considered in almost Arian fashion, Trinitarian process being undermined in favor of Neoplatonic trend toward absolute unicity—Eckhart is indifferent toward anything categorical or concrete, even the Cross/suffering, and God is also indifferent to these things, though there are more Christian sounding passages. (p. 444): Tauler: While Tauler says Eckhart taught from perspective of eternity, Tauler brings him down to earth/Christian soteriology, so that he becomes a witness of the Lord and mediates heaven and earth, in a personal experience of Aquinas’ view that man is set between the two limits of time and eternity—We must pass between knowledge and ignorance in simple faith, between certainty and uncertainty in sacred hope, between peace of the Spirit and natural restlessness in calmness, and stand between image and its absence—Tauler uses Eckhart’s Neoplatonic language, but from a concrete experience of discipleship in Christ’s passion: we should have only Christ’s humility and the openness of His wounds—In His sufferings, His Trinitarian dimensions are made manifest—Paradox of participation in incarnate suffering love is experience and non-experience; crucial experience is that of non-experience/desolatio/approaching Jesus’ abandonment on the Cross: consolation is given only so that we can feel loss more deeply, for feeling the lack of God is what is most fruitful, a new Christological meaning of Dionysius/Eckhart’s pati Deum—In Tauler, Eckhart’s theses are not entirely one with Christ-centered spirituality—Imago Trinitatis is in the ground of the soul not its powers; man consists of sensual man, man of higher powers, and ground, which can only be opened by dying/transcending of the lower men—In Tauler, no divine unity beyond Trinity, though ground/spark will flow back into God’s primal Ground where it will find true fruitfulness, but unlike in Eckhart this spark is only uncreated qua idea in God, not in itself—Threefold birth of the Son in the Fathers and Tauler—We are born in God and He is us, but unlike in Eckhart, this is not based on identification of God’s/soul’s birth, but it arises from Son’s Trinitarian disposition: it requires His dying and rising in us, and we must so cling to the Cross that He is constantly born anew in us: measure of self-emptying is measure of divinization—In sharing Christ’s humiliation, we experience ineffable difference between God and man, but thereby our inward congruity—When we are led by humility into union with God, we are given certain understanding of Trinity and true discernment of spirits. (p. 452): Suso: Suso cautiously corrects Eckhart, but also the idea of birth gives place to theme of discipleship of Christ in Passion—The Godhead/wayless Essence becomes the Father’s divine nature pregnant with fruitfulness of divine processions; compared with created beings, God’s Being is nothing, but form this Ground come everything, pre-existent in it in idea—He does not identify generation of Son and creation, and understands being born of God in Johannine terms—Christology/two wills/God-creature distinction are emphasized—Eckhart’s idea of assumption of universal human nature is understood Patristically as ennobling all who share human nature—Man retains a personally distinct being even in highest union with God—Suso agrees with Eckhart that in divine union all distinction is forgotten and superseded, but this does not last, and in reflection, the soul is more aware of its distinctness from God—God’s super-essence is already characterized by distinction, and from this fruitful distinction comes all distinctions among things—As it Tauler, Eckhart’s flowing back into God is only possible through Cross; calm resignation and desire for suffering are only for the praise of God—Unfathomable yearning/open wound in the soul—The Son is the sole sufferer and all who suffer drink from Him. (p. 457): Ruysbroeck: Foci of his thought include Augustinian imago Trinitatis, spark of the soul, eternal procession of creaturely ideas in the Son, distinction between God/Trinitarian fecundity and Godhead/dinve ground of absolute unity paralleling distinction between psychological/mystical encounter with God and union of love with God above knowledge—Ruysbroeck starts with Trinity, and only that basis considers the Trinity; core of his thought is that the Father utters a single Word in which He expresses Himself and all things, in Whom the Father contemplates both personal and creaturely otherness: all creatures came forth eternally in the Son prior to being created in time—God-Godhead distinction is purely conceptual, and there is no distinction between unity of essence and union of Persons, thus overcoming Eckhart: God is eternal event/reciprocal intercourse of Persons without temporal becoming—We can participated in this event only God’s grace/discipleship of Son, not self-absorption—God begets His Son in the apex/memoria of the soul, and from this flows image of Trinity in mind, reason, and will, but this requires employing lower powers of sense and body: this corresponds to primal structure in God of essence, Trinitarian fecundity, and effectual revelation; there must be comprehensive life uniting active, intellectual, and mystical life, but not synchronously, but the mystic has longing for union to be reached only in heaven—Spirit breathes us into God’s unity, and the soul has effects both bodily and spiritually—Ruysbroeck’s reworking of Eckhart’s sermon on Martha and Mary, in which Eckhart made Martha higher—Pulsating life of systole/diastole, of being breathed into God and sent into the world, while remaining united in the Spirit—Creature images Trinity in unity of having/being, doing/suffering, always being there/arriving anew, striving/fulfillment—Picture of authentically Catholic man. III.C.1.d. The Birth of the Logos and Mary (or the Church) (p. 462): Mystical tradition is in continuity with Patristic tradition from Irenaeus to the Victorines; latter draws its teaching from theme of Church and her model, Mary, which dropped out of medieval/Spanish mysticism—In medieval commentaries on Song of Songs, Bride was interpreted as Church, Mary and soul; in Origen/Methodius, it was interpreted as soul only in the sense that in the Church it became anima ecclesiastica—Mediation through feminine principle guards against Eckhart’s intolerable conclusion that as Idea, human beings have created themselves by their own will—Connection of ultimate dignity/ relevance of feminine principle to theology of sexes in Volume 2—Only one passive/birth-giving principle, though with different, but inseparable, aspects in Mary and Church (Irenaeus)—Visible and invisible aspects of the mediating Virgin Mother—Mary gives birth to the Church’s Head, the Church gives birth to members, the members give birth to Christ (Hippolytus)—Church as fruitful virginal mother of believers, especially in Baptism (Origen, Methodius, Augustine)—Mary as bodily pattern (Augustine), and as believing pattern for every soul (Ambrose)—After giving birth, the schooling/fashioning of Logos and of believer in the Logos’ Spirit, both ethically/pedagogically/ascetically (Clement, Origen, Methodius, Ambrose) and mystically/through divinization (Nyssa, Maximus, Erigena, Honorius, Hugh/Richard of St. Victor, Eckhart)—Cyril of Alexandria’s focus on whole Trinity: Christ is formed in us because the Spirit causes us to share the divine process of formation—Economic birth of the Logos in human nature remains abstract unless we consider Father’s sending of Spirit and man’s consent in Virgin’s womb; the latter disappeared in medieval mysticism except as object of personal devotion (Tauler, Suso) because even in Fathers, Mary was seen too much as physical/ethical model for Church’s activity—More recently was realized that Mary is Mediatrix of Trinitarian graces in/with Church and her Son—Mediatorial character of Mary/Ecclesia in eternal life, extending to whole human race—Vision of Mechthild von Hackeborn. (p. 468): Creature’s participation in Father’s Trinitarian generative power involves Church’s feminine fruitfulness, which includes fruitfulness of Petrine office—Through Son/Spirit Father communicates all that is His except His act of giving, and through Church/Mary/soul, they receive participation in His fruitfulness in a creaturely/receptive/feminine way—Church’s fruitfulness can express itself in masculine way, but it still includes painful birth and care of children—Roles of founders of orders and ecclesial authority. (p. 469): Inchoate state on earth point to ultimate blessed destiny, for all these figures—What is too abruptly called beatific vision is participation in God’s life, and a completion/perfection of what began in the Incarnation. III.C.2. Meal and Marriage III.C.2.a. The Dialectic of Images (p. 470): Images of eternal life in apocalyptic epistles/Revelation from Biblical tradition, where blessedness dissolves in praise/reverence/service—Images that portray over-fulfilling of human intimacy with God are meal and marriage—Meals and marriage in Jesus’ life and parables—Both are situations of self-surrender, reciprocal nurturing, fruitfulness, joy—Jesus is Master of the feast and the food—Eucharistic meal as one flesh/spirit nuptial union—Vertical communication between earth and heaven that is nuptial mystery—Marriage between man and woman must adhere to archetype of relation between Christ and Church: Church becomes Christ’s Body, and the Body of Christ and the body of the believer are united in one pneuma—Analogy made possible by bodily Resurrection: in eternal life there are no longer food or use of sexual functions, since the body will not be subject to natural urges, but in both bodily functions there is an element that transcends their current aim and causes them to participate in imago Trinitatis—In the man leading the woman and the woman accepting his leadership, each is to the other a means of reaching/self-transcendence toward God—Without God, relationship between man and woman is meaningless, but without this community, human relation to Triune God would be impossible (von Speyr)—The lesson taught by God first revealing Himself as One not Three—Father and Son transcend themselves in Spirit, and He allows man/woman to transcend themselves in child/toward God—Man is called to be fruitful not just sexually but in totality and primarily in spiritual-intellectual dimension, always rooted, unlike that of the animals, in knowledge of God (von Speyr)—The meal’s transcendence naturally and spiritually, both ennobling us and showing our dependence—Analogy of meal drawn by Jesus e.g. in His temptations and parables—The Father’s instruction that is the Son’s food is the Son Himself: for Him, being nourished coincides with His being—Jesus is seed/sperma and bread of life. III.C.2.b. The Body and Self-Surrender (p. 475): Körper is informed by soul but subject to powers of external world, but Leib is pure expression of spiritual person and can incarnate itself in the corporal world but does not have to; Körper is instrument of action and suffering, which are expressions of self-surrender—Example of sexual intercourse and birth, and active and contemplative roles of man and woman—Christian connection between corporal self-surrender, sacrifice, and fruitfulness in renunciation of marriage, corporal penance, mortification, and death—Jesus surrenders his Körper on the Cross, but takes the experience/wounds into the Resurrection Leib/Eucharistic body, showing the full profile of meal and marriage—In OT and NT, salvation requires spiritual wounds that have physical expression: Christian wounds can only be healed by deeper wounding (John of the Cross)—Devotion to Blood of Christ (Catherine of Siena) and Five Wounds are at the heart of dogmatics—Eucharist as Trinitarian gift descending on the world—In the Trinity, the decline of each Hypostasis causes the Other to arise, the prototype of sexual self-surrender—Cross and Blood show the depth of the mystery of the Trinity—The Lord’s Body as Eucharistic meal and pledge of eternal marriage is offered not just to but in the transitory sphere—Eucharistic and spousal relationship of Christ and Church is not Idealist process above the world, but takes place in realism of world-time: the world always resists, so crucifixion always goes on—Dying of the world that must surrender to greater force of love: expression in Przywara’s poetry—The world’s horror can expand to its full extent, but there is a deeper love than hell; God’s destiny in the Cross and the world’s destiny in opposing God are a single Eucharistic/nuptial unity (Przywara)—In heavenly Eucharistic marriage/meal, terrifying chasms between time and eternity will not be closed, but illumined by God’s triune life, and the eternal Eucharist will nourish not our Körper but our Leib/bodying-forth, in an eternally deepening reciprocity of love (Przywara, Hengstenberg, Ruysbroeck, Novalis, Baader)—Summary and unity of the foregoing on eternal life. III.C.2.c. Communio Sanctorum (p. 482): Review of earlier material on the power of believers to stand in for one another—Archetype of the final form of communio is circumincessio/being for one another of Hypostases, mediated by surrender of Son’s Body by Father in Spirit—In earthly and heavenly sacramental communio, recipients are drawn into Son’s self-surrender, though the Father’s sacrifice of His Son is prior, and this is the source of the Eucharist, and into this the Son takes us (von Speyr)—The Father’s generation of the Son under Eucharistic form—What is hidden in the Eucharist is only for our time, but its substantial content remains in the Resurrection—Man’s dying/purification causes his self-centered “I” to take on Eucharistic/Trinitarian form and be brought into the Son’s sacrifice—Heavenly shape of the communio as reciprocal openness of the redeemed is a part of the mystery of the Trinity, based on unity of divine Will which is result of integration of Hypostases’ intentions, and created freedom likewise can assimilate itself into God’s decisions (Claudel), but in a way that allows each freedom to exercise its own mode of seeing/deciding/mystery, so that free persons are freely available to each other on the basis of each one’s unfathomable distinctness, allowing an always surprising/creative gift—God’s will is the analytic norm for all freedom, but simultaneously the synthetic will that results from the others—We cannot envisage genuine creativity except as overcoming resistance/contrary state/alienation, for otherwise it sinks to insipid pious edification (Hegel), but this alienation has been overcome in the Cross; had there not been genuine overcoming, we would be marooned in the self-devouring nightmare of Nietzsche—In eternal life, creativity will result from personal freedom, but without the loneliness of the genius, but in the affirming/celebrating communio sanctorum. III.D. “If You Comprehend It, It Is Not God” III.D.1. A Faceless Drama? (p. 489): To describe world’s fulfillment in God requires images/symbols—Question whether the portrayal of the world as drama is too simplistic in the face of world’s complexity and God’s incomprehensibility—Danger of reducing Jesus’ words to an abstract system/Idealism—Apparent triteness/mythological sound to Christian dogma/story of salvation history e.g. God’s taking offense at sin and then being reconciled by single event, apparent contradiction of Christian claims by actual history and behavior of Christians; the feel that this whole theological project is a castle in the air—Christ’s apparent facelessness and the elusiveness of His form. (p. 492): We can say that Jesus is an idiot, never said these words, or that we are in the presence of the impenetrable mystery of the Trinity—There is one “I”, that of the Father, within another, that of Jesus, the Invisible seen in the visible, and in the Spirit the Absent One is beheld as present; the darkness of revelation makes us realize we live and move in the mystery of God (Pascal): we can only grasp Jesus’ figure by not grasping it, but allowing it to take its place in the mystery of the Trinity, in the “letting go” of faith—Though a true human being, Jesus eludes psychology and withdraws into mystery—In us, our “I” is no longer “I” but Christ, in reciprocal indwelling, in an instance of the Church as both Body and Bride of Jesus—Jesus died for both world and Church—We must not soften men’s alienation from God or exaggerate the power of grace—We must not think an OT dialectical God has been replaced with a new Enlightenment image of an unequivocally loving Fatherly God, for God is incomprehensible even in His highest revelation on the Cross (Luther)—In faith, we cannot come to a satisfying conclusion on basis of knowledge; what is revealed in mystery, and the closer one comes to God, the more invisible and incomprehensible the Father becomes in one—In the Son, on the Cross, the Father is concealed in a concealment that reveals more than all previous revelations; every mystery fruitfully gives birth to another one—If one has a mission to illumine aspects of divine revelation, on must possess a deeper knowledge and a deeper awareness of mystery—Meaning of these paradoxes can be found only in Trinitarian character of truth itself—The One Who is incomprehensible because He only wishes to be exegesis of the Father, and to be interpreted only by the Spirit is the adequate expression of essence of truth. III.D.2. “This Slight Momentary Affliction”? (p. 498): Paul on the slightness of the world’s suffering, when weighed against hoped-for glory (Rom. 8:18), though the former prepares for the latter (2 Cor. 4:17)—Eternal life is not after death, but is perpendicular to current time, accessible now only in veiled form—Creation’s groaning, including in Christians—Suffering not as closing the world on itself, but as laid on us by the beyond: suffering trains us for last great act of self-surrender and is fruitful, a feature of transcendence, even when it seems pointless/pitiless/vain/ unfruitful (Mechthild von Hackeborn)—Current and future blessedness in suffering in the Beatitudes, which are for both sufferers and the active—Not a question of glorifying earthly suffering, but of whether we are open to values of the kingdom of God—Legitimacy of defending earthly goods, even with arms—God will wipe away tears, but the blessing hidden in earthly tears will remain bodily present—Christ can transform pain into co-redemptive suffering, and so even the cruelest tortures/concentration camps/prisons can be seen as close to the Cross—John joins Cross and Resurrection in exaltation; highest spiritual faculty can be involved in suffering, contra Scholastic theology, yet this is His highest glory—The Christian disciple tries to join forsakenness/Verlassenheit with resignation/Gelassenheit, for man’s dignity is seen in his endurance of suffering—Letting be in the Trinitarian processions: these are depths that creatures must plumb as forms of alienation, and the Son traverses as man these abysses He has always already traversed as God. (p. 502): Behind mystery of suffering is mystery of evil, which is not an element present as possibility in Son relation with Father: nothing of evil remains in eternal realm except what it has achieved in fruitful suffering, which has an objective correlative of joy in eternal life—The false pseudo-profundity of Satan (Dostoyevksy, Bernanos)—Objection that heaven will be boring without darkness and so a new fall with occur (Origen); reply is that what makes the world interesting is not evil, but the multiplicity of the good, which finds its highest development in heaven, in the depth/inexhaustibility of divine freedom. (p. 504): Glittering intermediate form of eros (Plato’s Symposium), its finitude and fickleness, and the fact that it will not continue after death (Nygren, Sirach): all that will survive of earthly love is the heavenly love incarnate in it, though this can be a lot of earthly love, since eros can be refashioned by agape, as seen in the fact that manhood and womanhood survive, though sexuality does not (Weber)—Interpersonal fruitfulness remains, but not of the sort that gives birth; we have a first installment of these in Eucharist and the life of virginity—Scholastic doctrine of the dotes sponsae given to the individual should be transferred to the communio sanctorum, the perfection of earthly marriage, free of sexual cause and effect—The Second Adam takes the First’s form into Himself and transfigures it through incorporation into His heavenly form: mortal reality is not annihilated, but puts on immortality—The more Trinitarian our picture of God is, the more we can have a positive attitude to the perfection of the world. III.D.3. What Does God Gain from the World? (p. 506): In this work’s Trinitarian/Christological eschatology, the question was not what man loses in losing God, but what God loses by losing man, and what God gains if His will that all be saved is achieved—It seems like we cannot answer the question of what the work of creation/redemption means to God—We cannot say God attains fullness in the world or has to communicate His Goodness, nor that He just seek to promote His own accidental glorification in leading rational creatures to share His blessedness—Final goal of creation must be based in gratuitous/loving character of Trinitarian processions, and in creatures being drawn into those processions so that each Person in work of creation magnifies the glory of the other Persons: creation’s gratuitousness is based on Trinitarian gratuitousness, and divine solipsism is removed since participation of creatures in Trinitarian life becomes gift to Persons to one another—If creation’s goal is Trinitarian, question of rejecting creatures and of tragedy in God cannot go away; the best we can do is hope, but this hope must be bold, though the fate of the demons is insoluble in theologia viatorum—Gratuitousness must get us beyond apparent contradiction that since God is all Being the world cannot add to Him or that world has genuine being so God cannot be fullness of Being: question of whether God plus world is more than God is wrong question, since it leave out God’s why-less freedom, with only its own necessity; all possibilities are within Trinitarian distinctions and thus have always been realized—From point of view of oikonomia, things in God seem like mere possibilities/ideas, though we must remember how this is rooted in the freedom of theologia. (p. 509): 1. Divine conversation eternally envisages involving non-divine world in Trinitarian love, and necessary preliminary stages for this i.e. Incarnation and Church, and secondarily the Cross, which roots the world deeper in God than sin could alienate it, so alienation was always considered a possibility—Renunciation and non-hypothetical pre-sacrifice in Trinity; meaning of Cross is only complete in God, and Eucharist shows us that Cross is not past: Son’s whole life is to make us familiar with heaven in a human way (von Speyr). (p. 511): 2. Eternal life is constant vitality in which everything is always new, not something static—Since He is immutable, God’s becoming in the confirmation of His Being, and we become what God is, though God is ever-more—Living relation of time and eternity—Eternal life excludes change from God, including change from creation or Incarnation—Christ never lost any divine attributes in His kenosis, but simply expresses in oikonomia what He always expressed anew in Triune life i.e. complete readiness to carry out Father’s wishes, having His divinity laid up in the Father—Work of oikonomia enriches God in a particular respect without adding anything lacking in His eternal life: Trinity can be more perfected in love after Incarnation because God is not a rigid unity but a unity that come together ever anew in love, eternal intensification in eternal rest, which takes time into itself—Divine love is so rich it can eternally change without growing less/being altered—Economic events in God’s eternal life e.g. joy at risen Son’s return to the Father—Judgment is absorbed into love, superseded by the Cross, and love emerges from judgment. (p. 516): 3. All apparently negative things in oikonomia can be traced to/explained by positive things in theologia—Paradox that Son separates from Father to show His love, so that there be more love, which was always rooted in God—Son has humanity, which Father and Son do not have, but to have something entirely His own is a poverty, which He accepts so that He has something to give away, which He does without reserve in the Eucharist, the earthly representation of Trinitarian poverty, in which everything is always given away—Allowing things to happen in Trinity and Incarnation—The ultimate creaturely negativity of Christ’s forsakenness on the Cross is revelation of highest positivity of Trinitarian love, the perfect unity of Father and Son’s will, which is entirely immutable: bond between Father and Son is not interrupted at all by the Son’s belonging to all sinners—Purpose of Son’s going is to bring the world into this unbreakable unity, and so returning to the Father is completing world’s incorporation into Trinitarian life—Our co-resurrection with the Son, such that we now live in heaven as on earth—His abiding with the Father is simultaneously and always a coming, not just at Last Judgment: though invisible, His abiding unfolds all the more unrestrictedly, into which we are drawn—Son’s full victory is when nothing any more opposes His will, and all are animated by His breath (von Speyr)—Son’s final subjection to Father, eternal form of the Eucharist, is last condition for world’s eternal subjection to God—From the world, God gains a gift made by Father to Son, Son to Father, and Spirit to both, and the world can take divine things it has received and return them as divine gift. Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory Volume 1: Truth of the World General Introduction (p. 7): Question of the role truth plays in event of God’s self-revelation through Incarnation and outpouring of Spirit—Trilogy is connected to transcendentals and their analogy, between worldly beauty and divine glory, between finite and infinite freedom, and here between creaturely and divine truth—Transcendentals equally determine whole of being, are inseparable, reciprocally interpenetrate, mutually imply one another—Question of how absolute unity can be Trinitarian—Concreteness of reflecting on analogous truth of being—Question of ontological foundations of Incarnation and Church—Being a serious theologian requires circling around the totality from different angles, and first being a philosopher, struck with wonder at transcendentals in creation—Essence and esse-existence, individual and universal, form and light, obedience and freedom pervade all finite being and can be accounted for only in terms of each other, and these elevate finite being beyond mere facticity, to be wondered at—Paradox that unveiling is compatible with veiling/mystery, without irrationality—Question whether love is the hidden ground of the circumincession of the transcendentals—Problem of worldly truth’s dissimilarity and similarity with God—First part of inquiry deals with inner-worldly structures of truth, here a re-presentation of a 1947 volume—Aquinas is cited here as guarantor of not leaving the tradition—Second volume on truth that God has made known through free revelation, which elevates/perfects worldly truth—The concrete world/our cognitive powers are always positively or negatively related to God’s supernatural revelation, but the world’s embedding in supernatural sphere does not alter essential core of natural structures, which can be investigated in abstraction by philosophy, but the closer philosophy comes to concrete object/the more it uses concrete knowing powers, the more it implicitly or explicitly incorporates theological data: no way to reconstruct natura pura—One can unconsciously take over theological data (Plato, Aristotle), reject and secularize them (Rationalism, Existentialism), or accept them (Christianity), only the last of which is now viable, since even second requires theological justification—Question of whether there is a third domain of aspects of nature that do not emerge until supernaturally illumined (Vatican I)—Spirit universalizes Christ’s historical risen reality as universale concretum, so there is no split between categorical and transcendental revelation—Richness of philosophical truth, if we look to reality not competing schools (Aquinas beyond Platonism and Aristotelianism); reality shows abundance that prepares for grace—If theology neglects philosophy, philosophy and theology are entirely separated: philosophy devolves into positivism/linguistic analysis and theology lacks all foundation or becomes political—Integration requires philosophy and theology to be open to one another, based on analogy/imaging between worldly being and God, with geistig beings occupying central place, but considering all beings—Categories can be defined over against each other, but transcendentals are mutually immanent qualities of being as such—Nietzsche’s critique of transcendentals, but just as Kant understands them, and his more passionate No to transcendence than positivism can provide—Hollowing-out of transcendentals by human freedom, such that existence is seen as governed by the will to power, in whose service are the transcendentals; this self-contradiction in human freedom leads to its own destruction—All perversions that human freedom inflicts on Being aim at annihilation of depth of being, as seen in formulas of the form “a transcendental is nothing but…”, but no transcendental is exhausted by any de-finition/reduction. (p. 17): Second part of Theo-Logic deals with question of how divine/infinite truth can be translated into creaturely/finite truth—Analogia entis excludes any third encompassing God and creatures—Question of how God can reveal Himself as God without falling into Hegelian dialectic or idol, especially given the Johannine claim that God has translated Himself into flesh, which can mean vanity—Question of whether this translation could be understood by us; this requires the Spirit of truth, Who initiates us into the logic of the Logos, mediated through Church and her sacraments—Question of why in this Trilogy the beautiful was treated before goodness and truth—The Father reveals Himself only in Hypostases of Son and Spirit, so there is no reason to add a third faculty to will/intellect and goodness/truth (Rahner), but, contrary to this, this Trilogy does not coordinate each transcendental to a different Person—To begin with glory is like beginning with apologetics/fundamental theology, since modern man must be taught to see again, especially to see Christ’s otherness as outshining of God’s glory/sublimity—Against post-conciliar rationalism in theology; the Glory of the Lord did not adequately take into account Buddhism, Marxism, Positivism—After being struck by Christ’s splendor, one is introduced into lived answer that this experience requires i.e. praxis presupposes theoria/recognition of demand implied in God’s self-gift, hence the consideration of bonum in terms of dramatic encounter of freedoms, an ethics with a Trinitarian structure—What is decisive for authentic personal being is participation in/fulfillment of Christ’s mission, and His pro nobis being communicated to us through the communio sanctorum i.e. of those who can stand in each other’s’ place—The tragic dimension of ever-greater love calling forth ever-greater hatred, even if we have hope—Last part of Trilogy is necessary to reflect on what was presupposed by first two parts: that God can make Himself comprehensible to human beings—Since man is not just as perceiver and actor but a thinker, speaker, and formulator too, we must ask about theology i.e. man’s attempt to translate God’s logic into his own; theology is primarily Father’s work, but in it, He remains a mystery. Introduction (p. 23): Ontology and critical epistemology deal with whether truth exists, but having answered Yes, the real work still lies ahead i.e. question of truth’s essence—No definitive settling and leaving behind of philosophical questions—Increasing reverent wonder at existence, essence, and truth, which is far beyond freshman doubt—Comparison of question of whether there is truth to the ever-new question of lovers whether he or she loves me, which is very different from initial posing and answering of the question: the ever-new question is part of love’s vitality/essence, presupposing love’s existence even as it questions it—Inquiry into the truth must start by diving in/self-abandoning confidence, which is the condition for certainty about the existence of the rational—The swimmer must swim in order to not drown, the lover must daily live anew the origin of love, and the knower must daily ask what truth is, and neither involve destructive doubt; the vitality of the starting point of metaphysics that can never be left behind, for all questioning is just an intensification of this starting point—No contradiction between question about truth and development of life in/with truth, as in the unfolding of depth in a marriage—Transcendental truth’s inexhaustibility/indefinability, since definition is determination of genus by specific difference, and being is not a genus, and is only determinable by itself; all definition is within truth—The richness of Aquinas’ De veritate, though it ranges only over a small number of questions within domain of truth; similar conviction of inexhaustible richness of truth in Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Hegel. (p. 27): Question here is of essence of truth, presupposing it exists—Recovery of a tradition about truth found in Clement, Origen, Nyssa, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, but lost in manualists, who only prove existence of truth in general, understood as certitude, scientific clarity, or unassailable certainty, drained of vital/personal/ethical decisions—Goodness, truth, and beauty interpenetrate and are not mutually exclusive, so an ethic and aesthetic of truth are required, though they must also be kept formally distinct—No theological resolution of problem of faith and reason until we recognize philosophical unity of theory/ evidence and ethics/decision (Newman) and unity between aesthetic unveiling of being and movement of expression; rationalism shatters unified picture of being by exiling good/decision and beautiful/taste from realm of rationally verifiable, and Christian philosophy should not support this—Truth in world points to truth in God as origin/end, and truth of revelation is norm for truth in the world—The concrete world is always related positively or negatively to grace/supernatural revelation, though philosophy can abstract from these; possible responses reiterated from General Introduction—If grace builds on nature, natural/ philosophical truth must be much richer than most accounts lead us to suppose, for otherwise theology suffers, or is just juxtaposed to philosophy, as in kerygmatic theology next to Scholastic philosophy—What is needed is phenomenology that gazes on world’s truth in original act of beholding. (p. 32): Formal object here is truth, and so no epistemology/ontology/theodicy are offered, and much must be left open/fragmentary here. I. Truth as Nature I.A. A Preliminary Concept of Truth (p. 35): Every conscious human knows concept of truth and that truth exists, for truth is evident as existence, essence, unity, goodness, beauty—Possibility of objections to intrinsic goodness, yet even those who have such objections encounter the Good e.g. in another performing a selfless act—Objections to existence of truth paradoxically require knowledge of what truth really is, as in Augustine’s certainty that one doubts; even if one sees all claims as opinions, life compels one to express opinions, and one must admit that one can express one’s opinion—Skeptical view that truth is just formal correspondence between appearances and conventional signs for expressing them, but genuine truth requires ability to talk about being—Familiarity with being has already been disclosed to every thinker, and this is the innermost essence of truth—In thinking, consciousness is unveiled/present to itself inseparably as the being that it is, such that the thinker thereby knows what being is, for being itself as such has come into appearance, which implies that all being can be unveiled—Truth as unveiledness/uncoveredness/disclosedness/unconcealment/ a-ltheia of being i.e. being appears and being appears i.e. being is not an unknown thing-in-itself behind the appearance and appearance is not a fata morgana floating over nothing/enigma—Unveiledness is absolute property inherent in being as such, which lead to question “to whom?”—We can imagine individual beings that are knowable but not actually known, but being as such must always be unveiled to someone self-conscious, though not every being need be self-conscious—Being can bear witness to itself, and so there can be a certainty in consciousness reflecting firmness/validity/reliability of being: to know being is to know that in principle nothing eludes one’s knowledge—Truth is fidelity/constancy/reliability/ emeth, to which one can entrust oneself, and which is conclusive closing of uncertainty/endless seeking and opening of truth infinity of fruitful possibilities/situations: truth as conclusion serves truth as beginning, and never constricts the knower—Truth’s unconcealment and trustworthiness have in common being an opening beyond itself: truth is both apprehensible/trustworthy and eludes definition; truth is rational because singular being is place where we penetrate meaning of a sample of world, a fraction of truth as a whole, awakening a yearning for more—True knowledge joins experience of possessing/surveying object with clarity/wrapping oneself around object, to experience of being flooded by/participating in something infinitely greater than what comes to light in disclosure/being introduced into mystery of object: this is structure of human reason; foreground of defining individual object requires background of being as a whole—Inasmuch as disclosure is a property objectively inherent in being, subject must conform itself to it i.e. adequation to/being measured by thing, but the subject is not just a machine for recording objective states of affairs, but includes freedom/self-determination/creativity, and objects are relative to/for the sake of subjects, who judge objects, and truth is fully actualized only in judgment: object is measure of truth, but subject is agent of measuring—Object’s meaning is actualized in subject, which contains measure of object: subject’s freedom can positively bring truth into being as in production of artwork: subject has special participation in divine intelligence in bring truth to being, and analogy requires that subject is not entirely measured by object, but can measure object/shape world—Worldly knowledge is always measured and measuring, receptive and spontaneous, though each can serve the other: intellect produces truth as intellectus agens and registers it as intellectus passibilis, and truth moves in the shifting middle—Subject and object comprehend one another reciprocally, a polarity brought to maximum tension between theoria and poiesis. I.B. The Subject (p. 43): Truth is being as unveiled/grasped and is measure of being i.e. being measures itself in unveiling itself—A being that can measure itself because unveiled to itself is subject, which has form of self-consciousness, being inwardly full of light: in grasping itself, it is given measure of all being, in its own light i.e. the coincidence of being and consciousness, which gives it access to inner dimension of itself and outer dimension of being simultaneously/identically; reasons why neither can precede the other without destroying objective of knowledge of self and world—Through self-consciousness/reflection, being is open to self and other i.e. object with its own law/truth which must disclose itself—Receptivity is a perfection of being which is complement of self-awareness, and it is accessibility to another’s being/ability to welcome/ host another’s being in one’s home—More perfect self-possession makes one freer/less closed/more receptive, as seen in hierarchy from rocks to plants to animals to man—Receptivity includes capacity to let oneself be enriched by gift of other’s distinctive truth: it is not perfection to not need to share with/from another or to already be stuffed with truths or to have all-knowingness that precludes communication, which would be height of boredom—To taste full richness of being and to be spontaneous requires poverty/receptivity (Nietzsche)—Self-knowledge and disclosure of world/being addressed by other are inseparable: one receives measure of being in form of self-consciousness only insofar as other summons it to apply this measure to a truth not its own—Physical/organic sensorium obscures/hinders spirituality of human knowing, but receptivity as such does not so hinder: Geist includes receptivity as innate perfection, and it is only how humans do this that is imperfect, though senses are themselves both receptive and spontaneous, not merely passive—Increased self-determination brings increased ability to let oneself be determined by another, in accord with freedom of love to let itself be determined in love, which does not anticipate truth of Thou but lets itself unfeignedly receive every gift of the Thou as new enriching wonder: readiness is neither pure act nor pure potency, but includes both—Innate ideas would prevent dialogue/ courtesy/love—Another’s truth is received in indifference/pure potency, yet it is an active/free potency for cognition, its indifference a readiness for action/a light, awaiting the master’s command; the subject is a kind of spiritual matter/hule noete—Being is disclosed neither as object nor as sum of objects in truth’s way of opening/promising more truth/inexhaustibility—If truth could be circumscribed, it would cease to be truth, since one could take a nihilistic/self-contradictory standpoint outside truth; rather, knowledge makes progress of certitude, but each step shows new enlargements of truth/its intensity—Limited objects stand against background of ever-greater being, which is disclosed in self-consciousness, but only with qualifications: we do not grasp being in its totality, yet we grasp that being must be lit up in itself: absolute being must be self-measuring/self-present/self-conscious, for the light by which self-consciousness measures being is not confined to itself, but is a participation in an infinite/all-measuring/unmeasured light i.e. identity of thinking and being in God, so every act of consciousness is an implicit knowledge of God (DV 22.2 ad1) but also a knowledge that it is not God—No immediate knowledge/intuition of God/His truth, and the only immediate insight is into the subject’s own contingency; inference from world to God requires implicit recognition of God’s transcendence—Subject experiences godlikeness of self-consciousness only in confessing its dependence on the other; analogy to divine subject is never identity, for its knowledge cannot transgress limit of active-indifference potency to any truth/readiness to receive truth anew: deepest core of truth of created being is potentia obedientalis for God’s truth, which is itself a gift—Cogitor ergo sum is fundamental form of cogito ergo sum; distinction in self-consciousness between truth of ego and encompassing truth of divine subject grounds intentionality/objectifiability of objects i.e. the primary distance allows objects to appear as other, rather than as idealist modes of subject: why people are not idealists in their daily lives—Humble confession that while finite object cannot be unknown, its intimate space does not have to be disclosed—Pantheist idealism is frustrated by intersubjectivity/ irreducible multiplicity of subjects; analogy between God and creatures allows worldly analogy among mutually open self-consciousnesses. I.C. The Object (p. 55): It seems that the object’s being accounts for its knowability, but this knowability has conditions that are not just the conditions for knowing—Only when unveiling is not just a possibility but has occurred is being inwardly illumined/measured—Beings that are not subjects are luminous only for others, not for themselves, and subjects are luminous for themselves only when engaged with an object; even subjects are not subjects insofar as they are objectified—For an object to be knowable, it must be measurable and in fact measured, so the measure must be in the infinite subject/God, without which the being could not be known by finite subjects, though the latter can know objects directly, not via God—God measures beings, not vice versa, and as measured the being participates in truth—Divine idea is immanent in being e.g. plant as essence/inner plan/living center/indwelling entelechy, such that its truth transcends its factual existence at every moment; transcendence of a being’s truth increases when it is considered in context of relations with other beings, such that a being fulfills purposes not entailed by their essences alone, but they are equipped with a higher meaning, in part by finite intelligences, but ultimately by God—Freely self-determining creatures are subject to general norms and individual concrete norms/personal laws/God’s will for this being—Levels of truth: fact of object at any moment, unity of a plan, overarching plan known only to providence—Openness of being of creatures to God: existence alone is not their being, and essences are modifiable by God without effacing its individual/specific being, changing the ultimate meaning/direction of its life e.g. election or reprobation—By existence, things participate essence whose individual unity transcends the moment, and in species transcends individual, morphe opening onto eidos, such that things are always more than themselves—Object’s ontological truth complements subject’s nearness/distance from God, and it has the form of receptivity/gift: object is in its depths/essence/framework of meaning in a state of becoming, though necessary/permanent knowledge of object is possible too—Object has its measure in itself to some extent, but when this is known, the whole truth of the object is not known; penetrating the latter requires perceiving relation between immanent truth of morphe and transcendent truth. which requires participating in truth of things as given/disposed by God, seeing things as they are before/ for/in God i.e. share in God’s creative/contemplative vision, with no definite separation between our vision and His—The light in which the subject knows is innate power to measure things in their immanent essence and intellectus principiorum to see things in perspective of Absolute, finding the meaning of reality and beyond that the ideality that provides the meaning/what should be (DV 10.8)—Spontaneity of subject vis-à-vis object is legitimate to extent that it presupposes receptivity to divine truth, renouncing one’s own judgments and norms, being commissioned/empowered by God to see through His eyes. I.D. Subject and Object (p. 61): Like union of man and woman, union of subject and object is new, unpredictable thing over above subject’s readiness to receive object, and object’s readiness to reveal itself in space subject has placed at its disposal, and matter’s essence; union is fulfillment/wonder/gift for both subject and object: it reveals each to the other and to itself—Revelation of object occurs in space provided by subject, whose creative light can draw from object possibilities it cannot draw from itself—Revelation of subject requires resistance of object to turn its light into actuality: subject is only aware of its essence/purpose through creatively serving the world. I.D.1. The Object in the Subject (p. 62): We should not consider world of objects as self-contained, or as not essentially needing world of subjects, or as unaffected by being known, such that all active performance in knowledge is in subjects; rather, objects require subject’s space to be themselves, and they unfold themselves “in person”, requiring the subject’s sensorium as a space in which to unfurl themselves/be what they are/achieve essential completion: this consummation is not secondary ornament, but more necessary to object than physical nature since it is completion in superior world—Plants give inorganic elements superior organic form, and are elevated above their essence in sensory perception; reduced to their vital principle, plants are not the beautiful/meaningful/useful thing God intended them to be, not expressing full concept that utters its objective truth/what it truly is, which lies partly in itself and partly in subject—This does not make truth of things subjective/arbitrary, for subject’s spontaneous sensory/intellectual space is nature/obeys a natural law, and only through this can God’s idea be revealed—Against naïve realism on which sensory qualities inhere in object in itself without need for subject and objects just send off images of themselves to express themselves: this lacks mysterious way subject and object expand in/help one another, and underestimates appearance i.e. what gives the thing in its completed essence/meaningful glory; appearance of object in subject is expressive field of object essence as body is for the soul, for the face not just reflects or duplicates interior feeling, but incarnates/communicates/forms/liberates it—Against critical philosophy, which risks overlooking appearance entirely/making subject’s contribution inessential to the object and so eliminating “secondary” in favor of “primary” qualities, which can be in turn eliminated—Rather, subjectivity of sensorium does not call into question its contribution to truth of object: from self-existent center, object irradiates into subject’s space, and subject makes itself available in attitude of service to completion of object. I.D.2. The Subject in the Object (p. 67): Subject needs object to unfold itself/attain its own truth/have actual knowledge/awaken like Sleeping Beauty from its slumber to world and self—Self-knowledge is not just occasioned but completed/ given character by object/subject’s construction/completion of world—Ego does not “aristocratically” decide to go out to world, nor do object present themselves to subject as a film to a spectator for latter’s judgment: things enter subject’s space without prior invitation/as fait accompli/having already decided subject’s fate/subjecting subject to compulsory labor, for knowledge begins as “proletarian” service—Reflexive knowledge begins with unannounced invasion of jumble of objects in irrational order and expropriation by world, and freedom is achieved only by toiling at division/composition; this toil shows subject that this chaos is fullness of world, and that this fullness is given to it to hold in its inward space: subject possess something of the things themselves, not merely copies, so subject is always immersed in the truth in itself, and must do interpretive work to transform this to truth for itself—Measure of object is impressed on inward space as species impressa and transformed by intellectus agens into conscious measures of species expressa that it can measure with its self-consciousness, and thereby also measure itself—This involves growing skill in being able to see things as they are in themselves and assessing how they measure up to their own truth, and subject becomes more “cosmoform” because more in-formed by world’s truth: subject sees itself more as part of world and gains greater right to contribute its own judgment/creative shaping—Subject’s task becomes creative only insofar as it is ready to serve truth, not dominate it or primarily strive to satisfy urge to know, but self-abandonment rather than self-interest—World’s onrush can be brutal/violating, and subject is forced to yield to things; as man and woman must submit to natural laws to have child, the fruit of knowledge depends on natural constraint, awakening in act of service, awakening to itself in self-forgetfulness, needing to affirm in spirit what it finds itself to be by nature. I.D.3. The Double Form of Truth (p. 71): Subject lays hold of object through images generated by object in sensory sphere, which it perceives by immediate sensory intuition—Balance of action of object on imagination and subject’s spontaneous response—Sensory intuition or “what it’s like” is not yet truth/disclosure of essence and is so immediate/intimate that it cannot be expressed—Subject can penetrate this expression since sensorium is encompassed by/part of space of intellectual cognition, which allows image to be read as expression of non-appearing object—Subject has power to unify synthetically disjointed image in unity of perception, and can confer on it unity of intellectual meaning in unity of concept, and it experiences in its self-consciousness the unity of existing being in analogy to absolute being and so can judge essence beheld in image an objective/extra-mental existence in unity of objective existence: these syntheses are both receptive and creative—Sensible image is flat, and only has depth through subject’ sense power, through which perspectival power it can draw essential points into foreground, and see image as active expression of power underlying activity but not appearing as such—Bringing out the meaning involve abstraction from and turning to phantasm i.e. immersion of meaning in sensory perception, with further result of creative “divination” in which the subject guesses the intelligible form from the sensory clue, guided/demanded by image, but prone to error: this also happens when intellect in its most audacious creative act posits existence, for image as such does not reveal/contain a trace of existence, yet it shows that self-consciousness is insufficient to account for intelligible coherence of the image—Object’s word is audible through subject’s word—Subject has full measure of object only when it see object has being-for-itself. (p. 75): Spontaneity of knowledge is entirely at service of receptivity, so knowledge of truth/truth of knowledge are synonymous with strictest objectivity—Knowing mind’s function is not invention of new world or prejudice e.g. imposing a priori forms, but requires indifference—Sensorium is mediator that cannot impair truth—Fundamental phenomenological attitude is justice—Rigorous objectivity entails willingness to oblige object; object’s claim over subject’s space is not based on object’s claim on or right to the subject—Personal/free/sovereign subject is not tabula rasa—Every sensory impression can have unforeseeable consequences on personal life—Object’s ephemeral or insignificant image is eternalized in spiritual subject’s knowledge/memory, which ratifies/affirms object’s actual existence, a measure the object as object could not have taken—Object’s unity is only imperfectly expressed in any actual state of its morphe, which is an outline only filled in in relation to world, with its foundation in God’s creative idea—Verbum mentis on object’s meaning/being is not just imitation of object’s facticity, but where the object receives its definitive meaning: subject’s creative act is not just justice but love, in its effort to help object attain its truth, though this is not a full/free/spiritual love, without which objectivity would be impossible—Creative side of human knowledge is analogical participation in God’s act of archetypal/productive/ creative knowledge meting out meaning: by a sort of grace, knowledge draws other into spiritual sphere, for God’s gaze is not just gaze of judgment/justice, but of love/mercy. II. Truth as Freedom (p. 79): Truth reaches sphere of freedom, since spirit is free because being-for-itself—Actualization of truth is spiritual not mere natural event, taking place in encounter/fusion of word of object and word of subject, though there are natural preconditions for truth i.e. natural potencies—Aspect of unfreedom in spiritual act is seen in subject and object’s reliance on one another to express their word, and lack of liberty whether/ how to express themselves or whether subject is to actualize its freedom, for highest spiritual acts are naturally predisposed in spiritual subject—Saying Yes to/freely actualizing natural transcendence is to fulfill mission of human existence. II.A. The Freedom of the Object (p. 80): It is not insignificant to an entity whether it is an object of someone’s knowledge, for it is something essential to it lives outside itself—This is often hidden from objects, but objects can want this or not; things have a self-being which grounds unique/incommutable value of being-for-themselves, a gift entrusted first to them alone—Things are not mere instances of some kind or algebraic “x” that can be exchanged for others without loss or known merely through application of universal, for then objects would consist entirely in being known, and would not have free self-revelation/personal word: such an existence would lack meaning because it would lack that which makes having being desirable i.e. unrepeatability/ interiority, but would rather be stripped of mystery/prostituted, and such an ontological order is not just impossible but shameful; only radical cynicism/atheism can overlook/deny the nobility inherent in all being—God gives all things both being and operation, including spontaneity in self-manifestation, and every being has being-for-itself, with intimate and public spheres: spiritual beings’ exteriorization of interiority is entirely up to free being, but lower beings have some such protection too, and this gives each unveiling/revelation of a thing character of a solemn act, occurring only once—All beings can be grasped/ received by intellect, but only if the beings proffer themselves: not all revelation can be wrested from beings, since object’s spontaneity checks subject’s—No breaking of knowledge into mechanical-practical which sees all matter as subject to human mastery, and sympathetic intuition into historical-temporal existence (Bergson); this cannot restore reverence for object, and it removes mystery from reason and renders intuition irrational: rather, there is one intellect which both reasons and understands. II.A.1. The Degrees of Intimacy (p. 84): All beings have interiority, at least in rudimentary form—Externally displaying energies in inanimate objects: essence is genuinely revealed in phenomenal appearances, and scientific laws of nature apply even to their essences, though always provisionally/as hypotheses confirmed through practice, only applying to limited fields: even exact science is just an attempt to woo the core of material world—There is genuine scientific progress, but by intrinsic necessity truth of even lowest level of reality has a richness that eludes exhaustive research, for they too have coquetry of veiling. (p. 85): Greater tension of interiority and exteriority in plants: science cannot explain vital principle—Miracles of plant unity, ability to restore themselves after injury, adaptation, reproduction, plasticity; all this is contrary to mechanistic account or exhaustive scientific account of life—We do have access to living beings in outward manifestations: life’s intimate-public secret it permanently concealed and to the same degree permanently divulged, for it unveils itself by living its life, which shows its essence, not just its appearance, but does not thereby mean one has penetrated to its mysterious center; one just sees that possibility of life are infinitely more abundant than what is on display, for essence of life shows incomprehensible prodigality, though this does not mean actuality is realm of limitation/poverty, for rather it shows the infinite surplus of the possible as the excess that does not become visible, unveiled as what remains veiled—Truth effects unveiling not as correspondence between inner model and outward replica, but between inexhaustible inside and determinately formed outside, showing that the point of their existence is not limited to being object of knowledge. (p. 88): New phase of intimate character of being in animals, for inner space begins to grow light/ accessibility to itself i.e. object becomes subject, which raises new problems of intersubjectivity/plurality of subjects, and of whether the subjective can become object since the subjective seems incommunicable—We cannot know what an animal senses, though we can draw analogical inferences or have empathy—Subjectivity is intimacy guaranteed by being of things, and it cannot be forcibly invaded/communicated as such; subject can express himself but not eliminate his essential solitude in sense or mind, or put his responsibility on another, so community of truth and reciprocal gift-giving requires resignation of other’s self—One cannot fully communicate one’s mood, yet it influences one’s entire Weltanschauung; we cannot know what it is to perceive as opposite sex—Animal kingdom gives rise to many subjective images of the world, all of which are finite/within particular environment/Umwelt—We lack many animal senses, nor do we know what sensorium without mind is like, so we do not know animal worlds, though they intersect our own, yet all animal life is rooted in common medium—Animals do not just express something, but express themselves: they have freedom of expressing themselves in a language, but not of expressing themselves when/how they wish, for their language is naturally predetermined, though it expresses life coherently—Animal’s truth is more mysterious and more accessible than the plant’s; animal is closer to us inasmuch as it has generic likeness to us, but further inasmuch as impossibility of interpreting its language brings home the mysteriousness of life/existence and makes us feel increased solitude. (p. 93): In man, consciousness becomes self-consciousness, and is not just luminous but light for itself: man possesses himself and so is free, for he is substantially spirit; freedom enters between spirit’s self-possession and self-expression, and is integral component of truth—Man is first being that can freely tell the truth or lie—Lower things have objective truth i.e. relation between essence and appearance, but man has subjective truth i.e. capacity to possess for oneself measure between thing and expression—In self-consciousness, being coincides with self-consciousness, and so it is own object (cogito ergo sum), in both immediate and mediated unity: mediation is in judgment drawing evidence from spirit’s original unmediated unity with itself—Spirit simultaneously receives gift of knowing and expressing truth: intensity of interior light requires capacity for extension—Man is not compelled to the communication that he is predisposed to, and so self-unveiling is a responsible/ethically consequential act—Higher/more valuable interiority of ability to communicate oneself, which begins with decision to share with another what properly belongs to oneself—Freedom would not be preserved if we had to communicate in language of obvious natural symbols, but rather we must be free before, in, and after our communication, which we can reveal without giving up intimate sphere: we can grant a glimpse into ourselves without baring our souls—Relation between content and expression is left to discretion of freedom, and is not due to defects in discursive reasoning; dignity of personal spirit means being-for-itself cannot be disclosed to another without free choice—The one who receives a non-free self-communication remains judge of relationship between content and expression, but in free self-communication the freedom of the one revealing stands in the way of this judgment, since his word is now testimony and he must vouch for it, a deposition requiring ethical truthfulness on his part and faith on the receiver’s part: freedom can reveal/express itself only by personally assuming responsibility for revelation, and acknowledging another’s freedom requires giving up unrestricted judgment by oneself and requires surrendering to what has been shown—Man also has sub-spiritual interiority, especially intimacy of sensorium, and man is not pure being-for-itself and his self-possession is never perfect knowledge of his essence, and full depths of origin/freedom/possibilities remains veiled to oneself—Spirit is veiled from itself so it can seek/find itself in infinite Spirit that created it—That man’s spirit is bound to corporeal sensorium implies spirit’s self-possession is inseparable from self-dispossession in dependence on external objects, allowing laying claim to one’s being only through being given over to service of other; self-utterance is bound in natural symbolic language of senses, which limits intellect, makes spirit share in neediness/security of sub-spiritual being, and enriches spirit’s language by allowing it to clothe itself in language of nature/its natural laws—No way to draw boundaries between sense and spirit in human expression, so man’s intimacy participates in two forms of interiority/ systems of veiling/unveiling—We can only know bodiless created spirits by revelation or a priori deduction from their concept: they lack our knowledge’s material receptivity and lack purely creative intelligence; each level of being shows an entirely new kind of interiority, and so pure spirits’ interiority will be of entirely new kind, but will have highest possible kind of creaturely freedom—Approach to spirit’s form of existence is interior clearing/illumination of being, for spiritual substance is light itself, able to become transparent to itself in reflection—Spiritual things are not essentially more knowable/rational/known than material things—Even pure spirits must have personal interiority/mystery/spontaneous personal mutual self-disclosure—That each spiritual substance is its own species (Aquinas) shows their uniqueness/ unrepeatability, but it is problematic to identify them with subsistent ideas, for angels must be supreme realization of freedom, such that their word is a creative event even more than man’s is, analogous to work of human artist, a creative expression possible only to this particular artist/angel—God too is endowed with absolute freedom/interiority/pure being-for-Himself, such that His infinite light is perfectly His own, not needing to be dispersed ad extra, but can only be revealed by free act of condescension: every creature/ contingency speaks of this freedom—Natural knowledge of God halts before His personal life, which can only be revealed in grace. II.A.2. The Mystery of Being (p. 102): Worthier existing things become like something sacred the more they are surrounded by protective veil, and so not every intellect is competent to know every truth, for there is an essential mystery in every being—There are no naked facts i.e. facts exhaustively defined by their facticity, without significance other than superficial meaning; rather, every being/event is laden with meaning, and is expression/sign pointing to something else: signifier cannot be perfectly united to or separated from signified—No division of values and being into separate spheres; existence is separate from essence, but shares essences’ values, and not all values are realized/embodied, though some are—Problems with technological rationality—Inseparability of mystery, knowledge, and truth of being—One can thoroughly know a state of affairs, but this is only one aspect of a being, not a being itself—Essence has a mode of being that does not wholly coincide with existence as facticity, and essence stretches from changeless ideality into changing reality; we cannot adopt model of metaphysical constitution out of diverse parts, but rather phenomenon of polarity i.e. that poles are in tension and only exist through each other: neither essence nor existence is clearly definable as seat of mystery, though we may think that interior essence is mysterious since we have no intuition of essence and can bracket/take for granted existence (Husserl), or we may note their inseparability with existential philosophy, and that even if we did grasp essence fully, existence would be a blinding majesty, the sheer fact that there is anything at all, which includes essence in its interiority, as seen in existentialism’s failure to consider existence apart from essence—Essence and existence always point to each other/beyond themselves, and being unveils itself in each only to show it is still veiled, and is always more than we have grasped of it, for finite being participates in inexhaustibility of its origin, and sense/significance ceaselessly flow into each being for eternity—Freedom of truth includes essence and existence, and both pertain to a being’s nobility/elusiveness—No exhausting the marvel that things exist for the knower or the lover. II.B. The Freedom of the Subject (p. 108): Object is not inert material of knowledge but is an active partner, and subject is a hospitable dwelling for objects even before it can decide to open/close itself: subject’s freedom in knowledge cannot negate this primary receptivity—Cognition’s content always begins with senses, for concepts without intuitions are empty—Fundamental gift bestowed on subject in knowledge is privilege of apprehending things as they are, which requires first serving things—Knowledge also involves spontaneity as expression of subject’s interiority—Subject as person has freedom to advert/attend to things it intends to register/from things it regards as interfering with/superfluous to its worldview; this ability to close off some of what appears shows our imperfection and freedom—We can freely ignore what does not fit our intellectual constructions, and all apperception includes sifting/selecting, even when serving mission of truth; only in light of this negative freedom can we see positive freedom to welcome/unlock truths: this openness is intellectual but includes will/freedom/ethical attitude, since one’s Weltanschauung is a matter of choice, for will is always involved in knowledge, and there is freedom in intellectual knowledge as a whole, an openness first in voluntas ut natura and then in voluntas elicita: we will to know both for itself and as means to our ends—Behind subject’s factual openness is movement of self-opening, but this volitional disclosure/opening is not irrational, but is supreme meaning of all ratio: being has meaning only as being-for-itself, but this is meaningful only if it possesses movement of communication, which together constitute one indivisible illumination of being, whose meaning, and knowledge’s meaning, consists in love: object’s disclosure and subject’s openness are two forms of single self-gift—Love is inseparable from truth, guaranteeing mystery/something more beyond every unveiling; the non-lover can see some states of affairs, but his vision is nearsighted, for only the lover has the movement in which the truth of being comes into existence, but love does not precede truth—Conscious free ad-version to object has character of radical disponibility, laying aside subjective viewpoint and prejudice for pure openness/listening to object, preferring other’s good to one’s own, in justice and love—This is not cold impartial objectivity, but allowing object to be at home in the subject, so it can attain its truth through the subject seeing something in it that it cannot see itself; analogies to penitent/confessor, patient/doctor, model/artist—Loving gaze of subject is equally objectifying and idealizing, which allows realization of latent possibilities of object; this idealization is subjective insofar as it allows real objective truth only through a subject, and is objective insofar as truly observed in object—Locus of ideal images is not domain of formal values, but personal love of another being—Lover gives the beloved the true image of the beloved, and this image has power of reality and making real, while real imperfect image of beloved sinks into non-being, since it should not be, because beloved acts according to lover’s image—There is knowledge that unveils and knowledge that veils—Psychoanalysis fails to see that we repent and change not when our errors are realistically uncovered, but when we are shown our ideal; the truth of a living thing requires that some of it remain veiled, and truth of persons requires that some of them be consigned to oblivion—Man has responsibility to know what is, what should be, and to secure reality for the latter—God alone has knowledge that is archetype of reality and is generative of truth, because pure spontaneity without receptivity, and so measures their truth, but man is analogous to this, not merely reproductive of truth as effect, but also in creative knowledge—Only in God can we see the ideal image of another, and so show it to another. II.C. The Administration of Truth (p. 120): Object and subject possess truth in themselves/as nature, and for themselves/as freedom for giving truth its gestalt—Testimony is at intersection of freedom and nature; man’s calling as spirit is to bear witness to the truth: on human level, truth is dependent on free/mutual revelation of human beings—Questions about norms determining self-disclosure—Role of virtue of prudence: truth must be told in freedom i.e. selectively—Norm of prudence can only be either egoism or love, and only love can measure every concrete application of truth; genuine love is incapable of untruth—Without love there can be formal or propositional truth, but not truth of the self-disclosure of being, though one outside love can still be a conduit for genuine truths—The connection between love, truth, and justice—Abuse of truth through lack of love—Love sets limits to its own revelations and respects the mystery of the other—It is impossible to enter another’s intimate sphere except when the other opens it from within—Need for trustworthiness and responsibility in love, the model being supernatural cardiognosis, which only occurs in and for love—Love has the measure of truth’s revelation and non-revelation, and nothing is freer than love, its law being the movement of giving away; where the good of love requires it, it reveals the truth in a fragmentary/veiled fashion, but every partial expression of truth is expression of measureless readiness to give oneself away—Abuse of truth makes fragment self-sufficient to the detriment of the totality, absolutizing a finite perspective without regarding it as part/expression of transcendent/infinite truth—Love is the most inclusive a priori because it presupposes only itself—Totality as rule for administering truth: the more truth a partial perspective can integrate into itself, the greater its claim to be true—Love in opposition to heresy and sectarianism—The willingness of love to renounce its partial viewpoint for the sake of totality—Love is given a flood of truth that never fits completely into any human schema; love gives the lover a burden of mysteries which he must give back to God. III. Truth as Mystery (p. 131): Mystery in the hierarchy of essence and the sheer thereness of existence; being cannot be exhaustively unveiled and the truth of being cannot be without an indwelling mystery as an immanent property of truth, not something beyond it—Knowing a truth brings to light its mystery; genuine knowledge is a gaining of a permanent mystery—Subject and object are primarily disclosed to each other in the world of images. III.A. The World of the Images (p. 132): Phenomenal images as point of contact between subject and object, in which object shows itself, and which present themselves uninvited to subject—Their banality discloses their mystery. III.A.1. The Inessentiality of the Image World (p. 133): Images simulate/suggest but are not a world/essence/existence, but are mere appearance without interiority/distance/proximity; even if caused by imagination, they have no direct relation to this—In themselves, they belong to neither subject nor object, being nor nothingness, and they are random, lawless, senseless; to make sense, images must be lent an essence and existence they lack: they are appearance of non-appearing sense, and can be interpreted as the index of existing things—Their senselessness points to the underlying sense e.g. series of images points to single object I walk around: mind always already perceives depth in images that they do not possess themselves—Inessential/inexistent image does not appear in natural consciousness, but is artificial abstraction, and the subject has always given the image essence and existence out of itself, following its own natural law of giving sense to all it encounters, and so encounters interiority of object through image; this sense-giving is legitimate, and so solves the enigma of their anguishing senselessness—Subject first sees only abstract relation between essential world and world of images not the law/necessity connecting them, and so falls into skepticism, rationalism, or idealist mysticism, denying truth to or seeking to transcend the images, making it incomprehensible why there is appearance—All intelligible reality is through the senses—Danger of taking flux/unreality of images as truth of being—Truth is revelation in appearance of the being that does not appear; dangerous views fail to see this, and so arrive only at empty mystery—Hopelessness of Copernican shift to subject as the one bestowing all sense as a priori forms from itself—All failed schematisms as pure expression of unconquered inessentiality of world of images. III.A.2. What It Is that Signifies (p. 138): Truth is not in appearances as such or behind them, but only in floating middle between appearance and thing that appears—Interpretation of object by subject presupposes significance of object for subject, which it acquires as its non-appearing essence interprets itself through appearances; what is significant is whole self-expositing being—Against aestheticism, which sees images themselves as what is significant—Significance as irreducible phenomenon, requiring appearing surface on which non-appearing depth expresses and indicates its presence, an ex-pression, not exactly like an exterior word in relation to interior word, but just like a word—Image is original expression, creation not imitation, but it is not the being/depth, but made possible by being’s power to give an image of itself—Full mystery of truth seen in duality between significant reality that is wholly in image but not limited to it—World of images/field of significations are addressed not to conceptual thought but to intelligence that perceptively reads Gestalt of things or sympathetic understanding, the former arising only after the latter, banal in comparison; more consummate expressions, with more unity between inside and outside, the more they elude analysis, because they are an essential mystery: close connection of this aspect of truth to beauty, the aspect of truth that cannot be fit into definition, but requires direct intercourse, making each encounter with truth a new event and a grace—This eternal “more” of each being saves knowledge from being boring and superior, and instead a matter of daily renewed inexhaustible wonder; it is a permanent residue of incomprehensibility, a mysterious fascination truly inherent in the object—Knowledge never truly masters or conquers its object—Inclination of aesthetes to rest in the image world and its signification, without asking what they signify, since any attempt at clarification/definition of these allusive images would be profanation; this is a failure to consider the depth, since the depth appears on the surface: isolating the experience of beauty leads only to Weltschmerz—Images must be read as the expressive field of reality, with focus on the sense, not the letters/images—Being disperses itself from inside out, understanding moves from outside in by recollection—Images are signs pointing to the sphere of spirit, particular images fading away so that intellectual harmony/totality can emerge (Augustine); images perish and go to ground directing our attention to this depth (Hegel): a movement of illusion and disillusion, but without images becoming superfluous—Being first shows its self-display in the images, and then its self-sufficiency/permanence as images die away—Transition from unmediated sensory experience to reflexive intellectual activity: latter is not pure noetic experience of concept, superseding sense perception; rather, sense still reveals essence, but now by effacing/renouncing itself/confessing its own unreality, so that the essence can appear in its reality—It is not that the appearance moves while the essence is immobile; images are not an extraneous element, but beings’ self-revelation/impartation—Beings need not be known by men to fulfill their raison d’être, but just need to have a place among things displayed, knowable in themselves, but richer than what can be apprehended; ontological truth need not reach its telos of unfolding in a subjective space—The ground really is moving in the images, though not in itself, lest being become pure becoming—Essence’s power is its capacity to be outside itself in its appearances, in an original renunciation in which essence lays down its uncommunicated being-for-itself: truth is being’s self-surrender for the benefit of the knowing subject, an abasement of its sovereignty to the point of becoming matter for another’s knowledge—There is reciprocal surrender/dependence between the two poles of essence and image, despite the priority of essence. (p. 150): In the subject, corresponding renunciation of immediacy of sense perception, enabling the intellectual subject to return into its depths, attaining completion of truth—Concept is not related to perception as essence to image; concept can assume self-sufficiency of abstract isolation, and so resembles the unreal image, and distances itself from vitality of truth—Given the two-fold structure of the object, mental activity requires abandoning variety/abundance of senses for universal concept, but never making use of latter except by conversio ad phantasmata; even transcendent objects are best mirrored by synthesis of sensory intuition and concept—In object, the two poles coincide: all appearance is immediately of the essence; in subject also they coincide: abstraction coincides with conversion to senses, the intellect finding its empty unity filled in the senses’ multiplicity, in a renunciation on the part of intellect—These movements deepen truth’s mysteriousness—The depth does not immediately appear because we have only discursive not intuitive knowledge—Thomistic question of how accidents mediate real knowledge of substance, and Kantian question of how appearance lays groundwork for universal/necessary knowledge—Knowledge of essence is not just product of subject’s a priori categories, or a lucky guess at a non-appearing reality—Knowledge of the truth is based on subject’s ability to mirror in sense and intellect the mirroring of essence in appearance i.e. the subject’s receptivity involves both a sensory and intellectual space: sense intuition resolves into concept to enable insight into a being’s essence. (p. 153): Mystery of universal and particular being underlies mystery of significance in general—Universal and particular contain one another—It is intrinsic to the universal only to be realized as unique individuals, and the universal only exists insofar as personality sacrifices its uniqueness to that universal—However unique and creative an individual might be, he only does what “a man” can do: this is a humiliation for the spiritual person, the singular going back to the anonymous universal—Essence can only appear in unrepeatable singulars, and is dependent on them—Universal is not a naked abstraction based on similarities, but is a reality that occurs identically in each—Individual only displays a fraction of potentialities latent in his essence—A distinction between physical and metaphysical essence would suppress real communication of individuals in common essence and lose the ontic solidarity linking individuals through singularity of essence—Against reifying the universal—Particular is surplus over the universal, not foreseeable in the universal—Individuals can be counted, but persons cannot, for they are a world unto themselves—As individual, essence constitutes a man’s unity, and his individual characteristics look like accidents; as person, personhood constitutes his unity, and he is qualitatively distinct from all other entities, and his essential characteristics look like accidents—Unity is as full of mystery as other transcendentals: we cannot grasp unity in itself beyond the duality of universal and particular unity—Circling movement we must follow from universal to particular, essence to existence, or appearance to essence, and back is not a linear conquest of mystery, which resists any attempt to work it out, but it is not unintelligible, but shows a being’s ever-greater fullness. III.A.3. The Word (p. 158): Images must be understood in terms of expression/significance, but not as static, but as challenging thought to search for the essence through the image, through abstraction/conversion—Image reaches its highest function in the word—Sensible appearance is a revelation/language of the essence, but only as having a decipherable meaning when the depth appears with the surface—Nature-bound expression becomes intellectual word when appearance becomes absolute, free creation of subjective interiority, and this is telos of exteriorization/exhibition of interiority—Arbitrary, free language does not display the speaker’s essence like the natural languages of tone of voice, and so allows deception, but it enables direct display of innermost essence—Immediate expressive value of sounds are subordinated to spiritual sense; intellectual language is poorer in sensory expression than immediate symbolic speech, but richer in content—Other forms of intellectual speech besides spoken word—Art’s free use of nature-bound expressive forms to bring out inner content of the mind—Conceptual material refined by generations of speakers of a language and now ready to hand for communication, though this invites indolence in discourse and listening, and can be anonymous/impersonal modes of speech, a garment that obscures one’s personal word—Entanglement of expressive forms without clear boundaries between personhood, spiritual nature, and pure matter; former seems to fall into clutches of latter and be unable to detach itself, in an alienation of mind in pure chatter—Despite risks, spirit’s externalization reveals continuity of perfect hiddenness of interiority and perfect accessibility of exteriority—Spirit is always already expressed in image and images always already charged with spiritual meaning—Child awakens from sub-spiritual life where there was natural expression and natural relations between inside and outside, and which is already specific to a spiritual being, to intellectual life; this unfolding sustained by subject’s energies/operations flowing from within, and by outside world introducing subject into traditions/accepted forms—Polarity of subject and object emerges from world of images/sensory imagination, which is neither, but is equally productive and receptive; as development of subjectivity intensifies, it assimilates more external forms and invests new ones from within i.e. consciousness of world and self-consciousness increase together. (p. 164): 1. Single act in which I lay hold of myself contains equally immediately my unity with myself and objectivity to myself, unity of thinking and being i.e. unveiled being i.e. truth—This requires dualistic projection of image of self, and then identification of image with self—In original spiritual word of self-recognition, spirit becomes truly free, able to go forth from itself without losing itself; in this first word and its distinction/reunification lies ability to test truth of other claims and possibility of discursive knowledge/ intellectus dividens et componens—Knowing and saying are inseparable unity—Verbum mentis is simultaneously closure of interior mental space in itself and its aperture ad extra—Subject is free externally and not bound to any naturally expressive form, as seen in distinction between internal and external word; mental word gives freedom to be a self and to open to the world—In coincidence of being and consciousness, being itself is grasped as subject of subjects—Original analysis and synthesis is prior to discursive knowledge, in the unrestricted openness of the horizon of being, abiding foundation of every particular intellectual activity—In grasping in itself equation of being and image, verbum mentis and expressed sensible word, spirit can read other sensory expressions as expressions of intellect i.e. it can abstract—In self-consciousness, temporal priority of senses gives way to real priority of spirit which includes in itself smaller sphere of sense perception, which it can use and interpret, seeing its meaningfulness as a whole, even if there are particular incomprehensible/absurd sensible things—As a field of/encompassed by intellectual expression, sensorium is intersubjective medium of expression—Openness of unique spiritual essence to all knowable being outside itself belongs intrinsically to spirit’s constitution; its universality/quodammodo omnia allows it to be this singular spirit: individual consciousness is necessarily social consciousness, and I cannot know I am self-contained spirit without knowing that other spirits exist too—Unity in species/communication in one specific essence gives a primary solidiarity such that awareness of community is as primordial as self-awareness—In transcendence, subject expresses something of ontological unity of human nature—Spiritual space of each subject is immanent in every other (Leibniz), though I do not thereby know the contents of other subjects—Self-awakening is immediately an awakening to the Thou psychologically/gnoseologically/ontologically, and although indirect inference and indirect vital empathy are helpful, neither is primary access to Thou, which is rather disclosed in unity of specific essence, so contact between I and Thou is always already given. (p. 170): 2. Essence and image are not related as act and potency or fullness and emptiness, but rather essence depends on expressive field, and latter discloses former’s potency—Spiritual center develops from sensory center of imagination, and never detaches from latter: its primary activity is ordering, describing, interpreting, understanding sensible objects, and only transcends them as guided by them—Exterior utterance does not just express already determined intellection, but enriches latter, leads to greater self-understanding, and is often a surprise—Organic unity of spiritual speech and natural signification—Spirit stands on and itself has a nature, and so is always involved in movement of expression, for others; self-knowledge occurs only through summons of external world—Being-for-itself and self-transcendence grow simultaneously in the spiritual substance—Sub-spiritual entities are naturally unveiled to one another, but man must also freely self-surrender to attain same degree of truth, expressing himself in and to another—Solitude and communion, responsibility for self and for other, increase together—The word that is an expression of free essence is a dialogical word, and the truth that is unveiling of spiritual being has a dialogical/social character, the logos of being becomes an intersubjective logos, dependent on individual subjects—Part of criterion of truth is in the I, in the cogito ergo sum/coincidence of being and consciousness, yet this evidence only appears when one does objective work in the world, in conversation with the Thou, a second criterion for truth—Truth of this world resists relativism by interior evidence, yet the only purpose of this evidence is as a principle for mission of progressive realization of truth in the world—Spirit has task of allowing its certainty to illumine the darkness, but also realizing it is itself lit up only by moving to the light—Truth of the world is not mere being or becoming, but simultaneously both—Truth must be unveiling for someone; the sense of truth as a whole is love, and without love, dialogical truth would be indiscreet and self-serving, and so senseless, an empty formal norm—Increasing knowing implies increasing faith, the only objective attitude to receive truth from spirit’s free self-expression—This faith/testimony has nothing to do with opinion/conjecture/doxa; greater certainty engenders stronger faith i.e. new readiness to entrust oneself to truth—Faith in accepting truth is correlative of responsibility in pronouncing it, which requires the intensified commitment of a deed, ultimately those in which one commits one’s whole being, such that one’s life proves one’s assertions; works are the gravity of love’s words—Faith responds to existential proof as knowledge, for it has had more proof than was necessary for theoretical certainty; the faith of the beloved in the lover is a necessary component of certainty: between free spirits, trusting abandonment is the a priori of true knowledge—Truth as free deed is an ethical matter; conscience measures the ethical deed, and must take its bearings from objective norms of morality—Just as worldly truth has movement between self-determination and determination by another, worldly goodness has movement between interior and exterior norm and between vital word and surrender; these are determinative of duality of creatureliness, but also reveal something of God. III.B. Truth as Situation (p. 179): Comparing vitality of truth-relation with its freedom/intimacy—Being always mine/thine/his is counterweight to universality of truth; even when similar to millions of others, every individual expression is uninternchangeable/unique event: administration of truth is situational/has irreducible personal horizon/ Jemeinigkeit—Danger of jeopardizing truth’s universal intelligibility. III.B.1. The Mobility of the Idea (p. 180): No freedom as such, but only freedom of beings/things of nature with determinate essence/ existence—Nature is a totality teleologically ordered in accord with underlying idea, which is embodied in nature/always thrown into appearance that expresses its essence: freedom is only within framework fixed by idea, especially where freedom has space to cooperate with God in shaping the idea itself—Universal laws/common natures provide framework for spontaneous/free self-expression, allowing public/universal/ abstracted truth—Fluid transition from natural science to historical science of individuals that have interiority irreducible to any universal: every entity has a history not entirely derivable from universal laws—Truth is no less rational when determined by freedom/personality/situation; to call the individual ineffable is not to say that it cannot be known in its own way, but just that it is not derivable from the universal—Distinct rationes/methods for knowing universal or individual/personality—Even if a being can only be known by one person, it is still rational—Entities share simultaneously in nature and history, ideas are both mobile and immobile: idea is both eidos/idea/norm over existence and morphē entelecheia/form unfolding in existence/idea of a development, so knowledge of idea must be both definitive/normative and historical/adaptive—Less predetermination in man’s idea, since it depends on his freedom and that of his environment, hence the dialogical notion of truth—Intricate and unforeseeable complementarities and intertwinings among persons, though they are all knowable in principle—No need for historical thinking to underlay history with universal law, but it must grasp sense of unique situations, a flexible understanding able to change with its changing object, and read the law of unity in its transformations, requiring entering into changing life, not just watching it—Eternal providence can only be grasped as appearing to creatively accompany each new turn of history. III.B.2. Perspective (p. 185): First mode of individualization based on progressive determination of subject by distinctive essential features, all of which could belong to other subjects as well, but which are a unique constellation in this subject; the subject at the center sees truth perspectivally, hence the many personally colored worldviews, particular visions of the truth—To get a comprehensive vision of the truth would require doing away with standpoints, and so with intimacy of the truth—But the relativity of each perspective can be supplemented with others, leading to more comprehensive viewpoints—Most worldviews contain some truth, and can be incorporated into more comprehensive totality—Method of judgment/synthesis can never prescind wholly from one’s own viewpoint; Hegelian attempt at total viewpoint eliminates intimacy/ personality of the truth—One can only progressively lay hold of the truth either by Christian revelation or by taking seriously both personal situation and inconclusible dialogues with other perspectives (Nietzsche)—Model for this in Aquinas on angelic cognition, which is more personal and more universal than our own—Second mode of individualization is through existence, which completes personality of being. III.B.3. Personality (p. 188): Existence is counter-pole of essence, not just naked presence, but whole fullness/density/vitality/ weight of being, richer than what any essential predicate can express/any apprehension can grasp—Existence transcends essence both in factuality/non-nothingness/unity/uniqueness and in its plenitude/ uncontrollability: this is being’s personal character—What from point of view of essence appeared as perspectivity, now appears as bearer of personal uniqueness—Being-for-itself gives each being its precious value and distinctiveness from all others, resistant to all classification, a cosmos of free monads—The core of being/truth is subjective/mutable (ST I 16.8; DV 1.6)—Just as one human nature only exists in personal entities, so truth only exists in unique/personal form: no cognition/communication of truth can be exchanged for another—Personal truth is acquired by personal decision/responsibility/drama, and is the opposite of ownerless/anonymous truth; to exchange personal truths is to feed another with one’s substance, and it is better to know the few truths intended for me than to lose myself in the knowable—Mysteriousness and unfathomability of the uniqueness of personal being/truth, requiring humility/ thanksgiving, not existential angst—Inner dimension belongs to all being but only discloses itself when being becomes consciousness/person—To grasp depth is to no longer see universality/impersonality of natures as opposed to depth, but as a veil over all-too-precious mystery of being, to prevent one from succumbing to the latter as an aesthetic enchantment, and to allow the averageness required for community—Personal truth must have the quality of being rare. III.B.2.4. Situation (p. 192): Truth is conditioned/shaped by situation—Perspective implies certain truths are nearer or more distant, and that there are certain constellations of truths that bring about a moment of destiny, a profile in which the truth is known—Perspective only gives external description of situation, while existential/ personality side of being shows its qualitative urgency—Because of mysterious duality of existence and essence, being has perspectival depth; existence is never just sum of essential properties, but is presupposed by all essential analysis—As existentia, existence appears as adventitious to beings’ essential properties; an esse, it appears as plenitude that is source of any essence—Essence as both supratemporal eidos and progressively unfolding morphē displaying itself in existence—Distinction between essence and existence is a movement within being: existing essence can appear as tip of ideal essence, or as limitatio of esse—Mysterious non-identity linked to/coextensive with time, and mirrors vitality of eternal being—Time’s affinity to eternity and to nothingness—Movement gives being presence in the sense of announcing itself as here, not mere being-at-hand—Presence comes towards us in its futurity; existence is open-ended, a beginning/promise/hope, with a comparative character: vitality of eternal being is due to its futurity—Urgency of being appears when we see the constant possibility of failing to seize it, and so it being an opportunity forever lost, due to the transitoriness of each moment, which is qualitatively singular and has eternal weight, and which requires serious openness—In present state of the world, the past threatens the present from within, and is a warning to devote ourselves to what is coming; eternal life has future but no past, eternal damnation is entirely oriented to the past—Presence is a supremely eventful/meaningful form of being; truth in the temporal guise is situation—Truth is universally valid and supra-temporally valid as we are, in our individuality; no truth except in concrete form of situation—The situation requires that we set aside other situations, but it makes up for this lack of extension in intensity—Essential core of truth must be unceasingly sought and found, and thereby it becomes deeper—Act of knowing essentially includes experience of being overwhelmed by immensity of real truth, and includes both definitive finding and perpetual seeking—Truth is partly inward and partly intersubjective; we must responsibly serve with our whole personality the supra-temporal truth, and ultimately love—Error can be provisional phase within truth, but this is different from a lie, which expels one from the unity of being—Totality of truth’s concrete situations is history—Responsibilities following from individual being a part of the totality of history—Against historical relativism—Limited frameworks can apply to history, but it can only be grasped by accompanying its process; every epoch relates immediately to God (Ranke)—Place of history of philosophy in history as a whole, and the limits placed thereby on abstraction. III.C. Mystery (p. 206): Mystery of truth first appears as existence and essence transcending our grasp of both of them; it is an interplay of veiling and unveiling. III.C.1. Unveiling and Veiling (p. 206): Truth/a-letheia as unconcealment of being, all being unveiled as such, at least in God’s counsel, as determinate something with particular kind of being/Sosein; all things, even humans, confess their essence just by existing—Nakedness/self-betrayal of things calls for protecting love—Things are also veiled in their intimate space, a limitation on unveiling but not on truth—Things become objects of knowledge as unveiled as veiled—Encounter with being is inexhaustible source of thaumazein, especially in that reality is real and truth is true, in which mystery appears as mystery—Interior of being expresses itself in the being by not appearing; analogy to body and its skin—Even intus legere cannot reconoitre interior space entirely; no way to artificially circumvent veiling, as psychoanalysis tries to do—Only something endowed with mystery is worthy of love and reverence; love requires repeated veiling, darkness, losing privileged view of the whole, rejoicing that the other is beyond their control—Urge to reverent veiling and urge to unveiling are interwoven—Lovre seeks to unveil itself before the beloved more than to tear off veil on the beloved, and seeks to know and be true for beloved, rather than attain self-knowledge—Love’s will to transparency opposed to egoistic concealment/sinful refusal to self-surrender; will to transparency gives to the beloved the measure of its own unveiling/confession—Concealing things in love without consulting the beloved for the sake of surprise, or for keeping back what will trouble the beloved and would would love—Decisive counterpart to will to unveiling is will to trust—Individual relation to God as zone of solitude even within love—Possibility/actuality of love rooted in depth/interiority/precious worth of being, so love is always a mystery to itself, the worshipful core of things that does not worship itself—Love requires shame as what is aroused by incommensurability between offer and reception of love, the receiver’s way of offering himself to ultimate mystery/its unveiling, a surrender in the form of withdrawal—The holy hymen where truth lays hold of itself, bringing forth a shame before the excess of its own glory—Bodily shame as indirect illustration of spiritual shame; bodily/sexual shame is rooted in man’s double nature, but spiritual shame is not—Lovers can offer each other a dwelling place in each’s soul, but also carry the other unconsciously; love seeks to veil itself in night, a dimming of the inner light of love itself—Veiling of the truth in love as creative forgetting/overlooking, measured by credit lover advances to beloved in glimpsing who the beloved truly is e.g. in believing in the face of evidence—Love’s ethical seriousness as opposed to psychoanalytic unmasking—Love’s absolute power only found in divine love. III.C.2. Truth, Goodness, Beauty (p. 216): Account of the mysteriousness of truth through description of mutual interwovenness of transcendentals—Being’s opening in truth is an “opening for” someone—We can distinguish the ontological ground that discloses itself, the appearance that is disclosed which is the ground as it appears, and the disclosure as movement of ground into appearance and as bestowal of participation—Externalization of ground is not self-standing in its own right—Being does not have depth until it has interior space/intimate zone, and so moves from superficial being-in-itself to interiority of being-for-itself, which requires going out of itself, which is also further movement into its ground—This can be seen as ground’s pronouncing itself in act of its illumination, or as grounds’ self-realization: truth is grounded in light and measure; in taking its own measure and becoming measure/light for others, it moves from chaos/ undifferentiated being to determinate/intelligible essence—It is posited as nature, and posits./lays hold of itself—Full disclosure of truth in reflection/light’s returning to itself—Inquiry into goodness follows same path of movement between ground and appearance: here we distinguish that which communicates, that which is communicated, and the communication itself; that the being resolves to enter this communication in virtue of what it is, gives beings their value, including value to themselves: they thereby participate in goodness i.e. diffusivum sui of being—Being renounces its being for itself alone, and acquires through this original sacrifice a unique value—The ground of being is this communication/groundlessly self-giving love itself—In one way, ground and appearance are one, and so the good as perfectum is already actual; in another way, there is gap between ground and appearance, and so the good as bonum honestum is in process of being realized—Good transcends true since mere formal correspondence of ground and image is not itself a value; by itself, the true could be a cold, valueless fact, but this is not the case due to mutual indwelling of truth and goodness, and so every truth is a value—Goods are good for me and my needs, but if they were only good in this way, relativism would result, and being would not be good in itself; foundation of goodness is in the being itself, not in the seeker—Communication is not just a relation or just an act, since it is the source of being itself, a bottomless ground of being, which gives it its character of love—We cannot go on asking why there is correspondence and light, or why anything has the goodness to give itself, for these questions/their mystery lie behind but not alien to truth—Beauty is the immediate salience of the groundlessness of the ground with respect to everything that rests upon it, the transparency through the phenomenon of the mysterious background of being, the immediate manifestation of the never-to-be-mastered excess of manifestation in everything manifest, the eternal ever-more in every being; it is this that engenders aesthetic pleasure, and that grounds the disinterested character/joy of beauty—Beauty’s radiance overspreads all that behold it with unbegrudging self-abandonment—Beauty can appear as form/measure or as rhythm of movement/yearning for what is beyond all forms/images; the classical/linear/ Apollonian and the romantic/painterly/Dionysian are manifestations of same mysterious ground of beauty—Beauty is utterly defenseless and utterly protected—Truth, goodness, and beauty can only be grasped through one another; core of being consists in love and is grounded only in groundless grace. IV. Truth as Participation (p. 227): No phenomenology of worldly truth without treating problem of finite and infinite truth. IV.A. Participation and Revelation (p. 227): Truth produces both definitve certainty and eternal seeking; a failure of truth to deliever on its promise of ever-more would destroy truth—Promise of truth requires measure of absolute truth in which eternal being and eternal self-consciousness coincide, not just empty unlimited horizon of being as a priori condition of possibility of cognition of finite objects—Pantheism, idealism, and process theology fail to grasp most basic laws of truth, that truth requires free/personal/inner space, and so absolute self-consciousness must have measure of all being, and have no need to any unfree relation of expression or receptivity: it must have infinite freedom, interiority, and transcendence—Finite truth and analogy between divine and worldly being ontologically depend on God’s creative free deed/utterance, and this can be deduced from creatures’ contingency/creatureliness; all finite truth is in suspense, not resting in itself—God is already glimpsed in the senses, but He distinguishes Himself from finite consciousness in the knowledge of Him as hidden mystery of infinite personal being—God’s freedom to manifest Himself reveals His concealment in Himself; no natural relation between expression and the one Who express—Because divine truth remains a mystery in all its manifestations, worldly truth shares this mysteriousness—Analogy between groundlessness of worldly grounds and groudlessness of divine ground—Relation is participation from creaturely point of view and manifestation from God’s; this is not just one case of participation and revelation mamong many, but is only analogous to other such analogies, as their measure—Analogy to image, significance, and word—World as one vast image/symbol of divine essence; matter is to spirit as world is to God—Tension in manifestation between immediacy and mediation—Knowledge of God bound to interpretation of wordly signs, though God genuinely steps into view in the world and in each thing; we can even come to see what is signified in a similitude without attending to the similitude at all (DV 8.13 ad18)—Essence of worldly things is to image God, and God shines forth transparently/immediately from them, allowing an intuition like in symbolic cognition, a vision implying a logical inference—When God appears in creation, He must do so in the tension between ground and appearance; an image can appear completely full of the ground, so that it seems like an immediate vision of that ground, a mysterious “more” in the appearance, and when this quality descends on a creature, making e.g. an artwork appear like a divine idea, it gives the creature its greatest fascination, but one must have a perfect ordering to God not to give in to temptation to divinize the creature: even in this uttermost manifestation of God, the creaturely veil remains—Divine truth can demand more space than creaturely image can give, showing sovereignty of God’s free decrees and instrumentality of the creature, and this appears most when God most elevates the creature: the creature is most alive when it submits to God in the most deathlike way, so that the creature is no longer noticed; even when the creature refuses to do this, it is constrained to by God’s truth—Creatures have their essence, in German mystical sense, not in themselves but in God, and no proof of God’s existence is as compelling as the withdrawal of God’s transcendence into itself, though creatues are not merely appearances/accidents/modes of divine substance—Creaturely participation in God and God’s revelation are analogous to expression/matter and what expresses/spirit; latter are mediated by imagination/ sensory intuiton which allows elevation of matter without spiritualizing it, and spirit to be rooted physiologically, while in former, ideas/archetypes play mediation role, though this analogy cannot be extended without misunderstanding God’s revelation, which is conditioned by nothing—Ideas are just the archetypes that God projects in His free decision, and the intelligible forms embodied in the world, both immanent in and transcendent to things, but they are not a self-contained zone between God and world, sine all laws can be reduced to God’s sovereign decree, and ideas are apportionment of unchangeable divine truth to creaturely truth—Origin of God’s revelation and goal of creaturely participation in divine unity, which measures itself and all ad extra communication; God’s truth is identity of necessity and freedom, with no nature prior to freedom—That God’s essence is imitable presupposes at least a hypothetical will to possible free creation—God’s freedom is not related to the ideas as Plato’s Demiurge is related to them, so creatures cannot appeal to the ideas to assess God’s freedom, which would have scope only in existence not essence, making the measure of creaturely and divine truth one and the same, but actually entire tension between the poles of creaturely being depends on divine unity of sovereign decision and necessity—Situation can in some sense be described as detached from anchoring in divine truth, but it only places an urgent demand on us in light of that truth; through temporality, God’s truth reaches us as creative freedom, demanding decisions in God’s name and for Him—Perishable moment is so exciting/precious/demanding because imperishable eternity stands behind it—God’s demand seems to overtax the creature yet God makes this demand only insofar as the creature’s own immanent idea refers to transcendent idea in Him—Divine measure cannot be read off prior earthly measures, but must be listened/received anew in each situation/act of opening to God. IV.B. Finitude and Infinity (p. 244): Creaturely/contingent/created truth is not identical to divine truth, but is creature’s own, and analogously related to divine truth; it is chiefly characterized by qualitative finitude, expressed in the human form of knowing as delimitation/definition/inconclusible move from more general to more exact/ concrete, though no object can be precisely delineated into concepts—Alongside this analysis is a complementary synthesis, setting single objects is larger contexts—In judgment, there is creative subsumption of unknown subject under known predicate—By both analyzing and synthesizing, human thought avoids bad infinities to which each one leads, and thereby shows its finitude; unity sought in these two directions is embodied only in tension between individual and universal unity—Finite thought does not asymptotically approximate God’s infinite thought—Content of cognition is suspended between subject and object, reaching only what appears in sensory intuition, which announces eternal surplus of intelligibility in ontological depths lying behind it—Soul’s intuitive certainty of itself is bound up with impossibility of knowing oneself perfectly quidditatively (DV 10.8 ad8)—Worldly truth consists of complementary, irreducible anonymous/universal and personal forms, unified only in God: if former is emphasized, truth is flattened into commonplace; if latter, it is reduced to whimsy—Coincidence of essential and existential truth is impossible—Tension between facticity and necessity is corroborated by tension in knowledge between intuition and concept—Worldly being is a being in nothingness, a being in movement and becoming, which is constantly turned toward nothing, and is saved only by God’s creativity, not tending of itself to greater actuality, and worldly truth follows worldly being, a truth in nothingness known only by knowing in unknowing—Earthly truth can seem vain/empty, engaged with by an endless busyness, but this is to see only one side of earthly truth correctly, forgetting that it also discloses divine truth, and one cannot engage with it unless seeing this disclosure, witnessed to by the mind’s all-transcendent movement: finite reason can only opearate because indwelt by living orientation to infinity—We have a right/duty to be dissatisfied with delimited ratio, but in opposing rationalism must not fall into irrationalism/vitalism: reason, not life, is self-transcending, and ever richer life coincides with greater truth—Tensions in truth do not justify dividing it into theoretical/rational truth of thought and practical/ vital/irrational truth of life, but also truth that is disadvantageous for life leads to glorifying life without truth. IV.C. In God’s Safekeeping (p. 254): Disclosure of being as a whole gives creature face-to-face with absoluteness/divinity; familiarity with being measured by subjective self-consciousness, though spontaneity of. latter includes deeper receptivity to God’s infinite spontanenity—God’s truth is not available as ordinary a priori, not made known in itself but as inner mystery, not known as usable for enriching finite knowing—On basis of disclosure of being as a whole we attribute being to an individual thing, but only in the awareness that it participates in infinite plenitude of this mystery, which requires attitude of service: service of object rests on deeper service of God—Original spontaneity that enables illumination of cognitive space and prepares knower for possible encounter with beings is service, not striving/appetitus/fulfillment of need: latter would make even God instrument of desire for self-consciousness and knowledge: that reduces to ontologism with original vision of God, or dynamism which presses on to divine vision, which insertion of velleitas inefficax either destroys or requires supernatural revelation inscribed into reason; instead, most primitive attitude of spiritual creature is indifferent readiness to serve not striving, and object first displays itself in subject’s space, rather than subject seeking objects to know—Will/striving for knowledge is just one element in this larger luminous space, measured by service that the subject has been chosen to perform for God and world; ultimate norm is not one’s own happiness but better service of God’s majesty/glory in which we find truth fulfillment/blessedness—Knowing/measuring that grasps is embedded in a knowing that can let go because it is grasped/measured—Worldly knowledge cannot pretend to autonomy; if it could, then knowledge would encounter God as extrinsic object that one can measure by personal evidence and thence accept or reject, involving first a rational step of considering evidence, and then an irrational step of leaping into God’s transcendence—From the beginning, creaturely knowledge grasps its own creatureliness, and submission to God is just obeying God’s command inscribed in one’s nature, removing irrationality of second step—We cannot have a bird’s eye view of God, but always know Him as over us—Attitude of faith is immanent in attitude of knowledge—We only possess the truth inasmuch as we receive it from God, hence the need for receiving truth in worldly dialogue: faith is a priori presupposition that there is truth external to me and offered to me, and truth I apprehend is only a part of total truth in which I am embedded—If natural striving/appetitus naturalis visionis vel beatitudinis were norm of what is worth knowing, there would be no limit to this stirving: this is the attitude of the serpent in Genesis, for the primordial sin is to make oneself the criterion and conclude that where one sees no barrier none can exist—But the yearning to unveil the truth is measured by condition of going only so far as it pleases divine majesty to reveal itself—A priori faith requires obedience of understanding which is intellect’s acknowledgment of its creatureliness and God’s absoluteness, and to refuse this is contrary to nature; intelligence does not naturally strive to know anything, but only what it is interested in, and only what the beloved wants to communicate—I should receive the truth because it pleases God to reveal it and to have me know it—To be lifted into the sphere of divine truth is to find one’s true unfolding/development; archetype expresses plenitude of creature’s perfection, but when creature considers itself as it is “in itself”, the archetype appears entirely unattainable/overtaxing—God only knows creature in divine sphere, not in itself/in abstraction from God—No idea of creature immanent in it can be separated from transcendent idea in God—God can be imitated only out of love, and love is ground of God’s apportionment of archetype to creature, and it includes justice—Creature knows it is kept safe in the archetype, for even the essence and existence it has in itself are something it has in, though not identical to, God—Seeing itself apart from God is seeing itself in/from/to nothingness, but this is to struggle against primary form of evidence—Looking to God is primordial attitude of abandonment. IV.D. Confession (p. 267): All worldly being and consciousness is unveiled before the absolute; we are not objects over against God, but God is interior intimo meo—Question of why this does not destroy freedom, intimacy, mystery if all things are naked before God's gaze—Absolute truth is not anonymous truth, but sphere of God’s absolute personal freedom/mystery, so whatever is unveiled before God is veiled in God, safe in His safekeeping, making mysterious what was without depth—Creature must not veil itself before God or before others except as veiled in God—Unveiling before God guarantees that worldly truth is true—Ontological nakedness before God requires conscious unveiling i.e. confession/acknowledgement; all creatures are in permanent state of confession, but they should know/affirm this—Creature’s destiny is to want to be what God wills it to be, which requires unlimitedness of creature’s will, total decision in total active indifference/spontaneous receptivity not predisposed more to one object than another, but welcoming any—No creature is alone before God, but are unveiled together before God, even if veiled from each other in their ultimate truth; to know each other requires knowing one another with God’s eyes, in prayer/self-denial/handing the other over to God’s governance—Man only judges as representative of God’s judicial power—This was just philosophical inquiry, considering revelation of God in creation as Dominus, Principium et Finis—Love presupposes knowledge, which presupposes being, but love is present in being as its basic impulse; eternity is circulation in which beginning and end join in unity—Love is superluminous night that can only be glorified through adoration. Volume 2: Truth of God Preliminary Note (p. 11): Theo-logic begins with the self-revelation of the triune God in the incarnate Logos, and only the Pneuma can lead us into His truth and so to relationship with the Father—Demarcation between works of Logos and of Pneuma is artificial—Expositing/ex-posing the works of the Son is the work of the Spirit. The Johannine Entryway 1. “I Am the Truth” (p. 13): No continuous transition from first volume on truth to Jesus’ utterance, which no person who rises from below can say—Jesus is the truth and testifies to the truth i.e. Jesus is the truth as the one sent by the Father—Others e.g. John the Baptist have seen, but are not, the truth—Jesus exposits the Father by words and works, inseparably: the Word that was in the beginning is the exposition of the Father as flesh—Jesus accomplishes the Father’s act of giving in His own person—There are not two truths, but one truth that is itself interpretation, which requires an exposition of the expositor i.e. the Spirit of truth, Who becomes a fellow witness, with a total exposition, convicting outwardly and initiating inwardly—The Spirit does not bring a new truth, but brings to rememberance the inexhaustible depth of Jesus’ exposition—The one truth is a Trinitarian truth unveiled to and for the world—We cannot conceive the immanent Trinity except in reference to this truth so unveiled. 2. Truth as “Glory” and “Goodness” (p. 16): As seen in first part of the Trilogy, the truth of Jesus as expositor and exposited is beheld concretely as truth of incarnate Word, as glory, the exhibition of God in the world, which has no worldly analogy—Truth and glory both name the Son’s exposition of the Father—As seen in the second part of the Trilogy, the Son reveals the Father’s goodness/love/grace; grace and truth are both what is revealed and the Son’s act of revelation, in the whole of His existence including the Cross, conclusively revealed once handed over to the Spirit, Who mediates charis-aletheia to the world—Jesus’ kingship and truth as completed on the Cross, which sums up the NT concept of testimony (Strathmann), which requires personal answerability for what one declares true; witnessing to Jesus is bound up with Jesus’ sayings about persecution throughout the NT, especially in the concept of the martyr, including the testimony of both life and death—Intrinsic solidarity linking Jesus’ and Spirit’s testimony: Jesus’ life-testimony is accomplished in the Spirit, Who collaborates in Jesus’ life, and is the gift of Father and Son, able to tell us about the depths of God. 3. Truth as Fullness (p. 21): Truth can be linked with fullness only when conceived in Christological-Trinitarian terms, including not just other transcendentals, but also Son’s constitutive relationship to Father and Son, and having absolute primacy over all worldly truth—Fullness of God in Christ in Col. 2:9; this fullness and indwelling is an eschatological reality, deciding the destiny of all creation, filling the Church and enthroned in cosmic sovereignty—Christ’s indwelling in belivers enables them to be filled to the fullness of God i.e. have knowledge of truth by which one can only be overwhelmed—Inseparability of fullness and truth in John 1: truth was not fullness but law in the OT, and is only fullness when the whole Father is unveiled/ exposited in the Son and received by men through the Spirit—Hegelian logic begins with emptiest concepts and ascends dialectically to ultimate fullness of the concept; Theo-logic begins with absolute fullness because it is God’s self-exposition to the world, which the Holy Spirit, not Hegel’s absolute Spirit, ex-posits and de-posits in created spirits—The fleshly existence of God’s Word is a poverty not of abstraction but of love. I. Divine and Human Logic I.A. Logic and Love I.A.1. The Exigency of Logos (p. 27): Question about truth in theology is question about its object, God, Who in covanent/incarnation has become a God with/for us—Great commandment of Deut. 6:4: heart is seat of all conscious, intellectual, affective, and ethical activity; soul is seat of will/desire—To these and dynamis, Christ add dianoia i.e. power of thought: Jesus, more than OT, adds thought in service of divine love, which corresponds to the subject of His person as Word—Ultimate word between God and man is also decisive word between man and man i.e. agapān (Schnackenburg)—As expression of Father, Christ demands same love for Himself—Whether God or Christ (Aquinas, Bonaventure) is formal object of theology, the object first demands to be loved, which requires all the soul’s powers—Against knowledge as power contra Descartes, Bacon, modern physical and anthropological sciences—Biblical knowledge comprises full range of concrete cognitive possibilities, including sexual experience, all of which must enter the service of love, especially as experiential knowledge—Theological knowledge rests on faith, understood as holding the truth of something surpassing knowledge, but it is still knowledge, and being filled with the fullness of God. I.A.2. The Logic of Love (p. 29): Question of whether a knowledge that sublates itself in love has room for logic; Blondel says yes by postulating logic of moral life—Question of whether good and evil suspend the law of non-contradiction—Principles of logic originate in being disengaged from life in its vital unfolding and our obligation to decide; facts have neither contradiction or identity—Speculative/external reason, artificially separated from practical reason, gives rise to abstract/empty logology, outside of real being, though this has its uses for ethical consciousness—To act is to take possession and to renounce in view of the logos of our existence as a whole—Logic of life: 1. Original alogism/polylogism of vital drives must be ordered bvy instinct for vocation/reflection in face of decision; 2. Opposing forces are tamed not destroyed in decision; 3. We must look to ultimate responsibility not just partial goal; 4. We must calculate how to wrest freedom from spontaneous dialectic of life; 5. Every decision particularizes us—Rational logic lives only in ethical decision, and morality requires law of non-contradiction—For Blondel, this logic of life makes sense only in face of/as answer to absolute divine-human Logos: the total Logos, before Whom we make our decision, is an encompassing sphere of Trinitarian logic, and every ethical choice presupposes some knowledge of totality of the good—John on gradual progression of faith/knowledge/love, such that all men, despite their ignorance of Christ, are enlighened by Him/have implicit knowledge of totality, while those who have arrived at full faith have responsibility to help others—Aquinas on conditions for our judging things to be true or false: soul’s openness to everything and things’ correspondence to divine intellect, such that things mediate the universal openness of the soul and the creation of the universe in the Logos (Pieper). I.B. Ana-Logial Logic in the Worldly Realm (p. 35): Since the truth is the incarnate Logos, we cannot speak of a Christology from above or from below in connection with this logic—The human logic in which Jesus is the expression of the whole God is an image and likeness of the triune God, which requires that God represents in man both the unity of the essence and the triune vitality. I.B.1. The Triadic Structure of Worldly Logic (p. 35): Identity and difference do not express structure of real worldly being; such concepts just help us not miss the absolute demand for decision in the relative/real, in which difference/otherness is always overtaken by a third in which I an apprehend otherness—Claudel equates coming to an inner awareness of (connaître) with coming into being with (co-naître); originally, movement is away from being to finitude, where it expresses itself as primordial pulsation: each being is determined by the influence of others to be what they are not, and it determines itself by it influence on others; in us, this becomes knowledge of universal being as being together of all things separated in singularity, and by this knowledge we can say what each things means to say—In self-consciousness, I first understand my otherness, my relation to God, and I resist being and so receive my delimitation and end—All things other than A are its abstract negation and concrete co-constituents –Worldly being has a triadic structure that is an image of the Trinity. I.B.2. Imagines Trinitatis in Finite Being (p. 37): Augustine and Hegel try to bring to light the Trinitarian mystery of being—Starting point for doing so is transcendentals—Interpersonal model cannot attain God’s substantial unity; intrapersonal model cannot give adequate picture of face-to-face encounter of hypostases—Augustine’s recognition of the impossibility of his project; his seeking of an image of the Trinity in the individual spiritual person, but problems arise with the question of whether love in the image is self-love or the love that is God—Transition from mens/notitia/amor as parts of image to memoria/intellectus/voluntas, yet these are not identical to the substance of the soul; fails to capture that each Person does all the operations, and knowledge and love are ascribed to Son and Spirit only by appropriation—Augustine’s model requires counter-image, bursting the self-enclosed subject, given by Richard of St. Victor, following Gregory the Great, building on God being charity identical with the good, which requires more than one person—I-Thou relation is already a We, but not in a way that suggests a third hypostasis in God (von Hildebrand)—Richard notes that two do not love with each other until the two love a third in harmonious unity, an insight that reaches the full selflessness of Chrsitian caritas—This image does not entertain the notion that God has three persons in the modern sense of centers of consciousness (Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure)—Both images give only a faint glimmer of superabundant Trinitarian life in divine unity; both are only a reverse mirror image of the archetype. I.B.3. Dialectic and Dialogic as Theo-Logic (p. 43): The other in God is pure positivity, without negation/reversal of the One—Dialectic, a method of Geist, aims at making the world an imago Trinitatis from below; dialogic, a method of love, begins with Trinitarian dogma and defines creaturely images in terms of positivity of intra-divine others i.e. Son and Spirit—Hegel on the contradiction involved in love—Yannaras on prosopon as presupposing a second subject towards which one is turned—Two theo-logics: one based on Hegelian dialectic encompassing all of being and constructing God, the other based on the I-Thou relation as primordial phenomenon (Rosenzweig, Buber, Ebner, Marcel, Adorno, Mounier, Benjamin, Heschel); both are theo-logics because of their inclusion of God. I.B.3.a. Hegel (p. 46): In Hegel’s logic, the dialectical movement, described in terms of personal love, is consciousness of my unity with another: the one passes intentionally to the other without starting from a given preceding the one and the other—The other always appears as a negative moment, a contradiction through which the individual must find himself, not an equally legitimate other—For Hegel, the positive has no meaning for itself, but only as related to the negative, since the passage to the other is alienation, not love—Rather, there is only real contradiction in opposition of evil to good (Blondel) and there is a primordial vibration among all beings that takes on concrete shape in intersubjective dialogue (Claudel). I.B.3.b. The Dialogicians (p. 49): Dialogicians aim at theo-logic in which God’s gracious self-exposition is ultimate ground of truth event between I and Thou: God is not the Word in the beginning, but the ground of the word within which a man becomes an I: word as speech is prior condition of persons (Hamann, von Humboldt). (p. 50): Rosenzweig renounces Hegelian Idealism with its forgetfulness of personal death—Questions of whether I can affirm non-nothing and negate nothingness—Three paradoxical totalities of God, world, and man, all of which presupposes interpersonal speech and time—In spoken exchange, the event of dialogue is given to both partners as a gift from above—Dialogue is open-ended and points ahead to time when all will be united in bond of one speech, in which Judaism and Christianity are united—Jews as the people who experience God and live before His countenance—Both as paths have the world as a whole as their goal. (p. 53): Buber, following Dilthey, opposes true understanding, linked to life and experience, to abstraction of scientific reason; hence the two attitudes of I-Thou and I-It—Contra Rosenzweig, this reduces the world to the It—Buber shifts to focus on inter-personal as constitutive matrix of I and Thou, a spirit present in speech between them—This is an imago Trinitatis—Highest event of exchange is prior to speech, a silent prelingual word—Being as self-giving relation is close to revelation of God as eternal self-giving Thou, Who can only be encountered, not talked about—Hence the division between Judaism and Christianity. (p. 55): For Ebner, interpersonal I-Thou is sole truth of man’s being, with which is bound up a concrete logic of the Word, in opposition to an abstract thought of logic in the solitude of the “I”—Expropriation of the Logos encountered in all speech, and is fulfilled in Incarnation; in speech, Being is experienced as gift, which can only be answered with gratitude/faith—In all men we encounter the sole Thou—Ebner’s exclusion of metaphysics and theological discourse about God; he says the Father and Spirit we pray to are not those named in the dogma of the Trinity, which may be true as critique of manuals—All three thinkers bring us to a point they cannot cross, but also give necessary insights—Augustine’s Confessions on speaking to God as an answer given to the praying subject by the Word generated by the Father: no personal relationship to Christ except in context of Trinity. I.B.4. Frutifulness (p. 59): No thought given to parent-child relationship in discussions of Trinitarian logic by Greeks or Christian monk-theologians or modern rationalism, idealism, or empiricism; their shared view of marriage and childbirth as post-lapsarian, linked to death, obverse of ethical/feeling I-Thou relation (Hegel)—Rejection of fecundity/fruitfulness as aspect of imago Trinitatis (Augustine)—Linking of femininity, vitality, and Church to the Spirit (Scheeben)—Modern tendencies of refusal of men to be fathers and women to be mothers, without attending to their organic/personal fruitfulness, and the elevation of love over procreation as end of marriage—Rare attention paid to wonder/delight in the child (Haeberlin)—Religious character even of natural marriage as production of new images of God, with which God is immediately involved, and so a sacrament, not just a contract (Scheeben)—This relationship is the most eloquent imago Trinitatis among creatures—Fecundity is the law of organisms and of the spirit: every I-Thou relationship can only be fulfilled in an objective third, and this is a begetting in the beautiful (Hegel, Plato). II. The Possibility of Christology II.A. The Logos Declares Himself II.A.1. The Failure of the Images (p. 65): Question of whether human logic can bear weight of divine logic—Inadequacy of the various images from the last section, as images that look upward, and cannot construct point where they meet. II.A.2. Christ as the Expositor of the Invisible Father (p. 66): In Johannine terms, the man Jesus presents Himself primarily as visible expositor of the invisible Father—Invisibility of God in the OT, such that one can see His glory but not His face; no neutral ground e.g. interpersonal milieu, but only otherness, between Creator and creature: man needs everything from God and God does not need man to be an “I”—Palamite theology as expression of OT relationship between God and creature in which God in Himself is absolutely incommunicable, and only the energies that radiate from Him are accessible and participable; this theological structure is sublated in Christ, Who in His own visibility simultaneously unveils and leaves this invisibility—God is unknowable according to His majesty, but ever-more knowable according to His love (Irenaeus), a knowledge that brings to light its mysteryiousness as a immanent property of the truth. II.A.3. Jesus as the Wholly Other and the Same (p. 68): Paradox that Jesus has a complete human nature, yet He appears before His fellowmen as wholly other—Jesus as the only person Who has entered existence by His own freedom, sent by the Father, in contrast to those thrown into existence by human generation—Jesus’ distance within our shared nature is visible in His bearing as Lord along with His lowliness and obedience—In the Agony, Jesus’ human will had to give free consent to the Father’s plan (Maximus, Léthel) so that the man Jesus really cooperated in effecting redemption—Total otherness of man Jesus is within perfect equality of human nature, wholly other in His abasement, humility, service of all—Jesus is the one teacher and the servant of all in both natures—We must have either no anthropomorphism at all or unrestricted anthropomorphism, and God wishes to be human (Schelling)—Jesus does not dialogue about the Father; his “dialogues” with the Jews involve them talking past each other: no dialogue with unbelievers who do not recognize His divine form in His human form is possible—Dialogical relationship with the expositor is realized in purest form where Jesus’ word is welcomed in hearing that is a pure Yes-saying—Son adequately represents the Fatehr by His full enflshement, especially His death that brings Him to silence, the wordless word/lingua tertia (Wlliam of St. Thierry, Thomas of Celano)—Applied to Jesus, icon means arche-type/image par excellence; He is the image God sets up, which we were forbidden to erect, and He completes/retrieves the image character that we darkened. II.A.4. Truth in Similitude (p. 73): Jesus’ speaking in parables/sapiential discourse and His speaking in openness/parrhēsia; former challenges the hearer to impress the point more deeply—Jesus’ new use of parables and other figures of speech—Use of present and future tense in John—Post-Easter explanation of the parables—Jesus adopts/fulfills aphoristic OT Wisdom literature, and what is hidden is now spoken—Obduracy theory of parables in Mark—Reasons why Jesus explains coming Kingdom in parables, based on their familiarity, appealing to ethical/religious pre-understanding on the part of His hearers, a developed language He can take for granted—Even Jesus’ clearerst statements before Easter are called parables, and only become parrhēsia with the coming of the Spirit—Jesus does not find human logic/natural humanity unprepared for the expositing of divine logic, though this objective expression can never be grasped in its otherness without the subjective in-shining of the Spirit: nature’s ethical/religious dimension empowers the Spirit to lay hold of its ideas whose content exceeds its capacity—Jesus’ parables call for human situation to be ordered in accord with God’s mode of action—Man does not just look to absolute norm of the Good to measure relative goods, but to the concrete norm of the good God as presented in the Son and through the Spirit—Application of this to the parable of the sower—Christian ethics is not an abdiction or a mere ratification of autonomy, but God’s primordially free action elevates and perfects the free goodness of man’s free action—In practically-oriented parables, we see how divine logic expreses itself in human logic on basis of analogia linguae/entis. II.A.5. Transcending Immanence and Immanencing Transcendence (p. 81): Creaturely logic has capacity to sustain weight of divine logic and it owes this to God’s artistry; this is not just human language, but that of worldly being—Recapitulation of claims from Theo-Drama: difference between One and Other in God is positive; something in God allows Him to posit image of God in creatures; similitude in greater dissimilitude seen in non-identity of being and essence, which images identity and difference in God; receiving is as positive as giving in God, and letting happen as making happen, and so potentialities in creatures are not sheer dissimilitude to divine actuality, and distinctions like action and contemplation, male and female, must have foundation in divine life; God is energeia, ever-actual event; God made worldly image to exist on its way to its archetype, destined to be harbored in divine being—Transcending immanence of worldly reality does not have right from its structure to demand fulfillment through transcendence immanencing into world from God (contra Hegel, Baius)—Creaturely logic is not foreign to God—Jesus does not need imagines Trinitatis, since worldly being as such/everyday life gave Him enough such images, especially shared existence with one’s fellowmen and fruitfulness. II.B. Negative Theology? II.B.1. The Place of Negative Theology (p. 87): The warning of great theologians, from Plato to Hegel, that in the end we can only say what God is not—Question of whether Johannine entry point makes clear the infinite distance between God and creature—Insofar as God speaks on His own initiative, He cannot negate Himself, but only attest to Himself, negating every rival/idol: that is the Bible’s negative theology, along with the attempt to take control of God in pharisaical fashion—John is the exposition of the clash between God’s wisdom and man’s folly—In terms of man’s judgment, the vision of God would be fatal, but this does not bind God’s freedom to reveal Himself, to our astonishment; examples from OT—Negative theology is logically prior to God’s self-revelation—According to Paul, man remains a seeker for God despite his failure to find definitively, and this seeking has objective foundation in primordial relation to what is sought—No worldly thing is what we seek, so each must be negated, yet we seek to push worldly things beyond their limts and designate them ‘gods’; these are unmasked as human projections (Xenophanes, Plato, Brahmanas, Buddhism, Vedanta), and then the Absolute can be reached only by negation of all concepts and personality (Homer’s fate, Plato’s Good), which leads to conflict between speculation and mysticism in Neo-Platonism—Ultimate conclusion is drawn by Mahayana/Zen Buddhism, on which what is beyond every finite existent is Nirvana, the really real, which is nothing in comparison with Being, yet which when found unmasks the finite world as maya; in this absolute nothing, the experience of the antithesis between the beyond and the here-and-now is left behind, leading to identity of Samsara and Nirvana, and of identity and non-identity—Nishitani’s Buddhist interpretation of Christianity, which is in same twilight as Neo-Platonism—Zen’s becoming empty as mystical experience and as absolute this-worldliness, as cure for modern anthropocentrism: a breakthrough out of thinking into absolute nothing—View that sunayata is nothing out of which even God came forth (Abe, with similarities to Gnosticism, Proclus, Eriugena on the nothingness of the One)—Zen is at the further remove from what the Biblical search intends, a technique for finding what is beyond all searching, while pathos of perpetual searching remains in the West—Identification of Platonic super-existent with living God of Israel (Philo), surrendering God’s closeness to man in order to make sense of the search (with similarities to Clement of Alexandria, Dionysius, and especially Przywara)—The man weary of searching takes refuge in a system e.g. Zen, or in resigned agnosticism; this negative theology is strongest bastion against Christianity. II.B.2. The Search for God in the Light of the Bible (p. 95): In Biblical realm, what appeared to non-Biblical negative theology as impersonal or only touched in moments of ecstacy, now appears as the one Who already has found man the seeker and addresses him with grace and demand; meditation/method must be replaced by adoration/obedience—Man does not thereby become a contented God-finder, but a more intensive God-seeker; OT commands us repeatedly to seek the Lord—In addition to nature and supernatural grace, the depths of nature de facto do not emerge into full visibility until the light of grace falls on them (Guardini), as is seen especially in the natural desire for God (de Lubac following Blondel, Maréchal)—Undergirding every conscious intellectual endeavor is the basic fact that man positively affirms God, the idea of God living in us from the beginning, commanding all our negations/critiques (de Lubac)—Biblical texts commanding seeking God, and that finding is never a definitive arrival, though false/sinful seeking e.g. for signs is possible—Having been found by God e.g. in covenant eliminates possibility of a concept of God we can survey from above. II.B.3. On the Church’s Reception of Negative Theology (p. 99): That man is in the image of God and that this image is restored in Christ means that no negation can shake the original positive affirmation/immediate certainty of God in man (Blondel)—There is a transcendence, a step into the infinite, at the root of man’s essence, in the image, a movement toward God that continues eternally without undermining beatitude (Nyssa)—All things implicitly seek God in seeking their own perfection (Aquinas)—No concept, word, comprehension adequately expresses God; distinction between an sit and quid sit in God—We have minimal knowledge of His essence, but do not know how the attributes apply to Him (Aquinas)—Unknowing, after removing all creaturely predicates from him, as best means to being united to God (de Lubac following Dionysius)—All concepts are just reminders to point us to God—God is even above all negations, not to deny the law of non-contradiction, but to show that we aim at an intensified affirmation, the goal of which is liturgy/hymnody/adoration—Negative theology more pronounced in Christianity than outside it, since the latter thinks always in terms of emanation and the former in terms of God’s absolute freedom and that the true idea of every creature is only in God (Pieper)—Just two ways to arrive at God: by excessus of love beyond knowledge (Bonaventure) or by means of God (Aquinas)—Christian use of negative theology as response to Gnostics, Arians, Eunomians—Seeking God as adversion to the God who already converted us, based on a primary passivity in us and a descent on God’s part (de Lubac, Maximus)—Question of how all this negative theology relates to the simplicity of the Gospel—There is primacy of revelation as condition of success of any knowledge of God—Faith’s succumbing to Jesus’ incomprehensible/overly demanding words; the Johannine comparative that calls or promises something ever-greater—Our correspondence to love, the greatest way, is always a “way” not a definitive state of arrival—Paul’s ‘hyper’ formulations as a via eminentiae, an overwhelming Christian experience that renders superfluous/surpassed any negative moment—Earthly logic is no longer our guide—Christian, unlike philosophical, negative theology ends in the silence of adoration, struck dumb by the exceeding measure of the gift given. II.B.4. Un-word and Super-word (p. 107): Despite commonalities, divergence between Christianity and Neoplatonism’s conceptions of God was realized by Nicaea—Derived worldly otherness vis-à-vis God presupposes original Trinitarian otherness in God which is supreme positivity (Bonaventure, Aquinas)—Only way for Neoplatonism to keep nous free of negativity is to not try to account for origin of difference, for the One does not reveal itself in its emanations (Plotinus); ascent requires purification from the material, sensible, and conceptual, a simplificiation moving to the One Who remains an un-word, a hymnody that is by means of pure silence (Gnosticism, Proclus)—It is fine for Christians to philosophize in prayer, compose hymns to the unknown, accentuate silent adoration, or adopt angelic-ecclesial hierarchism as way to God; the problem is Neoplatonic purgation of matter, body, senses, imagination, concepts, a trend that continues up to and is not entirely broken by Ignatius’ Exercises (Climacus, Augustine, Eckhart with his Zen affinities, John of the Cross)—Question of what an authentically incarnational Christian spirituality can offer in answer to claims of extra-Biblical ascent models and to the fascinosum of Buddhism/Gnosis/Neoplatonism; this requires transferring dimension of silence into the Word—Neher on God’s silence after Auschwitz and throughout history, which reduces to Gnosticism—Picard on silence indwelling the word, and an indictment of our noisy age; silence protects being and renders each word mysterious, and in God speech and silence are one: this phenomenology of silence allows grasping unity of word, truth, and glory in Christ—Theology has the task of unveiling the super-word of God—Silence is the basis of the word, and a word that detaches itself from that basis is chatter, for there is reciprocity between word and silence (Picard, Rosenzweig)—In his very being, man stands before a transcendent reality that must be free since it is the basis of man’s being, and so there is the possibility that it will speak and break silence (Rahner)—To enter God’s silence belongs to the zone in which pure nature is illumined by grace, already addressed by God (Guardini)—The mysteries that cry aloud i.e. Mary’s virginity, Jesus’ birth, and his death, do not breach but are accomplished in God’s stillness/hēsychia, and the Word’s deeds were performed silently, the one who possesses Jesus’ word can hear and is known by His silence (Ignatius of Antioch)—To glorify God by silence presupposes the divine super-word/self-communication: in Jesus, all treasures of wisdom are hidden and revealed; silence in His life and death, in His Eucharistic presence, and in His mutely entrusting His words to the Spirit—The intelligibility of Jesus’ words does not contradict their unfathomability (Mitscherlich)—If the absolute is the One, it can be reached only by removing finite being—Christianity has adopted language of the creature as purum nihil and annihilation as conformity to Christ’s kenosis (Eckhart, Tauler, Bérulle, Condren, Olier, Guilloré, Gagliardi, John of the Cross)—In Ignatius of Loyola, it is creation of space for God through surrender of what is one’s own, an affirmation of God’s love in the super-word of His Son, which we attempt to answer with super-word He receives as gift: here negative theology becomes perfect encounter in transformation of creature into ecce ancilla. III. Logos and Logic in God III.A. Approaches and Demarcations III.A.1. Jesus’ Relationship to the Father and the Spirit (p; 125): All claims about immanent Trinity must be rooted in NT, in Jesus’ way of relating to Father and Spirit—Jesus’ relation to Father is self-utterance of His person through and inseparable from His humanity; the one Person performs all His acts, has two nativities, addresses the Father as “Thou” in an expression of eternal relation in God—God can take possession of the openness in us that is the image of God in us so as to make Himself known immediately through a human being—Simultaneity of unity and difference in Jesus’ relation to Spirit; this was not seen in prophets’ relation to Spirit—The many words that show Jesus’ relation to Father in Spirit: Logos, image, charaktēr, imprint, off-shining, ground of creation, expressio, Son, door. III.A.2. Identity and Difference in God III.A.2.a. The Essence of God in the Hypostases (p. 128): Through the door that is Jesus we first enter Father-Son relation, and then into the mystery of the Father—Questions of whether the Father knows Himself through divine essence logically prior to generation of Son or only in the Son, of whether Father’s appropriate fontality is in the divine essence or in Father’s paternity—On psychological image (Augustine, Anselm) Father comes close to coinciding with divine essence, with primacy of essence over persons considered as relations—Question of whether a hypostasis can be a mere relation, or is rather a term of a relation—Aquinas on how notionally-multiple relations one with the divine substance constitute Persons: Father generates Son out of His substance but as Father, avoiding problems with Augustinian-Anselmian model—No fruitfulness of the divine essence as such, but rather of the Father—The generator is prior to the generation logically but not actually—We can discuss the immanent Trinity from the economic Trinity only by using two counterveiling propositions that resist being joined in a unity—Aquinas’ refinement of conceptual apparatus, changing Boethius’ definition to subsistens distinctum in natura rationali—There are only two intramental acts, so only two Persons—Distinction of being and ratio of relations in God, but question of how processio as act and relatio can be really identical in God—Faith requires convergence of claims that the hypostases really exist in relative opposition, and that Father, Son, and Spirit are one God, but we cannot reduce these to one proposition—Appropriation by intrinsic affinity points in a more than accidental way to something truly present in the Person, yet appropriation is very limited—This would be onto-theology (Heidegger) only if the Persons were essences to which divine being is added, but this is ruled out by Christian doctrine; being does not differ from but in the supreme Being, since the Spirit is the difference between Father and Son (Bruaire)—Marion’s excessive concession to Heidegger’s critique, and his disregard for good as self-transcendence of esse; esse cannot be left behind (Siewerth, contra Hengstenberg). III.A.2.b. Love Cannot Be Anticipated in Thought (p. 135): The divine essence cannot be the agent of processions of Persons, though the processions and relations always include their identical divinity—The Father has the Godhead insofar as He begets before thinking about it i.e. as given away—God’s most intimate nature is love, for the processions are not arbitrary choices or necessary constraints—Divine essence is not just coextensive with processions, but is concomitantly termined by unrepeatably unique participation of Father, Son, and Spirit in this event, and so only exists as fatherly, sonly, and spirit-ually; their unity is their circumincesio: what is economically appropriated to one Person can be made over to the others—Thought’s incapacity to exhaust God is one with incapacity to exhaust the mystery of the Father, with His always already giving Himself away—Absolute love is absolutely groundless and communicates groundlessness to every property of God, proceeding from the secret and mystery of the Father. III.A.2.c. The Essential Properties in the Light of the Hypostases (p. 138): Each hypostasis displays in its own way the unique one and properties that God is—Economic Trinity alone reveals immanent Trinity, and a description of essential properties of nuda essentia apart from hypostases is at least semi-nominalism (Barth)—We must start with Christ who reveals divinity by His majesty and humanity by His brotherhood; He reveals God’s mystery as simple multiplicity and multiple simplicity (Augustine), and He reveals both God’s solidarity with sinners and His other properties too e.g. anger, weariness, grief, and forsakenness before sinners—His presence is proof of the Father’s free absolute gratuitous love, which primarily appears for the Son and in the generation of the Son, which is rooted in a gratuity that is the primal ground of mystery of God, only dimly echoed in creation and redemption—The Son’s inconceivable reciprocity of love, which gives rise to the Spirit, the objectivized fruit and most intimate flame, supreme objectivity and subjectivity of triune love—This love is ultimate knowing, reason, and rectitude—God’s love is almighty/omnipotent, able to do wanything within compass of infinite love, beyond worldly antithesis of wealth and poverty; genuine impotence of love on the Cross conquered the world and showed its omnipotence, which cannot be separated from love without falling into the absurdities of nominalism—Justice, rectitudo, sedek-mišpat are intrinsic to God’s love, from which arises mercy: God, out of his rectitude, must bring a sinner out of his unjust state before he can see God’s love (Anselm, Augustine), and there can only be the self-condemnation of the sinner who refuses to acknowledge rectitude of divine love—Mercy is ontological modality of love; God has a heart and can be affected in His own free power, the opposite of Neoplatonism’s untouchable One (de Lubac)—The eternal priority of God’s love to all thought in immanent and economic orders reveals His inward vitality, reliability, constancy, on which all the covenants are built, for He accompanies creation in a perpetual now; His vitality explains the Biblical anthropomorphic descriptions of His repentance, through which He always spares a remnant from each punishment, as shown by OT and NT examples, which also reveal His maior dissimilitudo/exalted freedom/holiness/sovereign glory, for all His properties are intensified beyond any proportion to our virtues—God’s freedom exalts Him above everything conditioned, and above freedom and necessity, for He has the freedom to be the one thing necessary—No speculation about dissociating potentia absoluta from potentia ordinata—Order of processions must be given equal weight to equal rank of the three hypostases: Son and Spirit are not commanded by the Father as His obedient executors—No univocal concept of person in God or quantitative sense of ‘three’ (ST I 30.3&4)—Revelation of triune God in salvation history culminating in Christ holds nothing back—If taken literally, Gregory Palamas’ view that the light of Tabor as quintessence of all energies must be distinguished from the eternally hidden incommunicable essence is unacceptable, as is Gilbert de la Porré and Eckhart’s distinction between God and Godhead—What is true in Eastern and Westrn conceptions differs only on different conceptions of participation: Father does not hold anything back from the Son though He does not give His paternity, and God does not hold something back for Himself when He lets creatures participate in the divine nature (Congar), because of the positivity of the other (Barth). III.B. The Position of the Logos in God III.B.1. The Logos between the Father and the Spirit (p. 151): Circumincession is not an afterthought in discussing the hypostases—No sphere of divine logic is confined within hypostasis of Logos, for His distinctive character is inseparable from Father and Spirit—Father, as ground able to bring forth the Logos, is not a gnostic silence or an idealist/irrationalist will, but is the invisible capable of representing Himself in the Gestalt of the Son; love is the motivation and what is communicated: this is a logic of love—Logos cannot just be expression, but must also be image of groundlessly loving self-expression, so that the Logos is not just a “from” but a “towards” the Spirit—It is an idle debate whether Father produces Spirit with or through Son (filioque or dia hyiou), but this joint action is not defined as single principle of spiration (Congar)—Logos’ toward must move in same direction as Father’s generation, a poured-out totality of absolute love beyond all that can be conceived as form/ image/expression—Eastern emphasis on self-outpouring of Father through Son, and Western emphasis on Son’s recersion to the Father, leading to hypostasis of substantial love, the Spirit that executes dynamism of the Father and expression of whole Trinity—This can be verified in terms of economy if Son’s missio is continuation of His processio, made clear in His word of tetelestai on the Cross, which is both giving up Spirit to the Father and to the Church, Who completes the Son’s work—The age of the Spirit is the age of the active presence of the Son, which consists of the Son’s continual return to the Father, the kingdom of Christ flowing into the kingdom of the Father (Cullmann)—Truth belongs primarily to the Son, but rests on the Father’s generative act of groundless love, and so is never a self-enclosed sphere—Spirit as gift par excellence, which pours into our hearts the gratuity of divine love and universalizes the Word’s figurality—The Son is incarnated and acts not by the spirit of another i.e. the Father, but by His own Spirit—The Spirit principaliter proceeds from the Father and pervades the event of the Son’s origination from the Father, and inasmuch as the Son is the archetype of created reality, the Spirit animates the cosmos—Transcendence of Logos toward Spirit is infinite release into freedom, a transformation of mortal bodily realm into soma pneumatikon which is still explicitly incarnate—Doubly self-transcending Logos, as second hypostasis, is mediator/middle in all things (Bonaventure)—Worldly logic is not middle in same sense, but it is “from” ontology and “towards” a regulative function. III.B.2. Toward a Definition of the Processions III.B.2.a. The Problem (p. 157): Difficulties in distinguishing two processions in Biblical interpretation and Christian theology—Question of meaning of Logos in prologue to John’s Gospel—In OT, third form of divine self-manifestation, wisdom, alongside word and spirit—Spirit, as breath of life, is oldest form of God’s manifestation in Israel—Connections between spirit and word throughout OT; identification of word with law—Growing independence of wisdom, especially understood as reason/bīnā/hokmāh indwelling God’s creation, originally His first creation, later conceived as a woman, and then divinized as God’s spirit or mirror—In OT, wisdom, word, and spirit are aspects of God’s turning to His people—Elements of sapiential perspective in John, Philo, and Stoics; in John alone, Logos is ultimate creative ground of cosmic order and so can enter into His own dramatically, not neutrally/harmoniously—Wisdom as aspect of divine essence, not specifically of Word, in Synoptics and Paul—Son is exēgēsis of Father performed in the flesh, and of God, which requires that He have the Spirit, so this exegesis is not just an economic act—Identification of wisdom with Spirit (Irenaeus, Theophilus of Antioch) or with Logos (Justin)—Increasing hairsplitting distinctions between unity of essence and trinity of hypostases in the scholastics, which disregards that the mystery must be approached through counterveiling proprositions; fascination by scholastics with Augustinian mental/image of God analogue—Inadequacy and methodological circularity of the Augustinian image (Rahner)—Danger of importing into Trinity a creaturely supremacy of knowledge over love, or the necessity-freedom dichotomy (von Speyr)—Claim that procession of Son is natural while that of Spirit is voluntary (Alexander of Hales, Duns Scotus, Durandus) moves in the right direction, but does not bring out contrast correctly, for both involve something natural and something free; better is that Son proceeds per modum exemplaritatis and Spirit per modum liberalitatis; in the Son, the Father has given everything that He can give, but not in every way since not yet together with the Son (Bonaventure)—Knowledge and love are inseparable in God, but love presupposes knowledge (Aquinas), but this has the danger of raising to metaphysical principle what just belongs to the creaturely imago—The movment of love is first of all movements and their root; the Word is the Father’s understanding insofar as bound with love/omnipotence (Bonaventure). III.B.2.b. Word, Son, Image, Expression (p. 165): We must test names of the Logos to see how far they sustain His aptitude to translate God’s logic into ours, never forgetting that they are approximations—For Aquinas, central attribute of second person is verbum mentis; for Bonavneture it is expressio, recapitulating sense of other names—Contrast of Aquinas, ST I 34.2 ad3 on Son as radiance, image, and Word understood as verbum mentis, with Bonaventure, In I Sent 27.2.3 on Son as Image and Word understood as similitudo expressa; contrast on understanding of role of nature in generation—Similarity of man-woman-child relation to Father-Son-Spirit; as expression, Son is at the Father’s disposal, and so is archetype of creation, for He is supreme expressio (Bonaventure)—Pre-Nicene Fathers on how internal/external Logos is link between God and creation; this is recovered in Bonaventure without their subordinationism—Bonaventure’s notion of liberalitas transcends Thomist-Scotist controversy over motive of Incarnation: it is motivated by God’s free/generous love transcending every worldly reality—Cosmification of Logos due to His being not just expression of Trinity but also prototypical image of every creative self-expression of God, hence Bonaventure’s rejection of Augustinian view that any Person could have become incarnate: Logos alone is incarnabilis, while man, as microcosm and image of God being closest in affinity to Logos, is assumptibilis by Logos—Need to explain image-character of creation from perspective of Trinity, a kata-logical path from Trinity to world (Gerken), so as to eventually find in the incarnating Logos an adequate expression in the world. IV. Kata-Logical Aspects IV.A. Trinitarian Difference and Ontological Difference IV.A.1. Trinity and Transcendentals (p. 173): We cannot begin with individual outside social context or as bodiless spiritual subject (contra Augustine) or with body-soul structure or man-woman relationship (contra Barth) or with a special sacred history (Pannenberg contra Rupert of Deutz or Joachim of Fiore), but with how God’s absolute trinitarian being can be reflected in world’s being, the question of imago Trinitatis in ente creato—One cannot be a theologian without being a metaphysician or vice versa—Medievals began instead with question of transcendentals—Bonaventure on appropriation of one, true, and good to the Persons, as ex se et secundum se et propter se, incomparison to the world which is ex alio et secundum aliud et propter aliud, owing itself to origin and archetypal image and perfective end, hence investigatable by metaphysican, natural philosopher, and ethicist—Though creation belongs to the Persons in common, each Person operates according to His own property—Question whether the superabundance of love that is the property of the Spirit is first in intention—Love seems to be more comprehensive than being, the transcendental par excellence that comprehends reality of being, truth, goodness, and so goodness seems more transcendental than being: the self-understanding of the child requires love of parents (Siewerth)—We cannot hold that Father generates Son in order to know Himself i.e. Hegelianism, or that Father generates Son because He already fully knows Himself i.e. Arianism, so self-surrender/expropriation of Father can only be ascribed to groundless love, not knowledge; saying love is transcendental par excellence does not remove God from being, but love is the supreme act of being (Plato contra Marion)—There is an intra-Trinitarian kenosis that is God’s positive self-expropriation (Bulgakov), a unity between poverty and wealth exhibited in the child (Ulrich)—Divine being/transcendentals cannot be abstracted from process of hypostases—Essence of spiritual subject is not remainder of abstraction from indivudality, but each is born not into humanity, but into maternal, paternal, and fraternal love (Nyssa), the essence unfolding in a communion of love, contra Augustine’s individual focus—Maior dissimilitudo between necessary Trinity and contingent individuals. IV.A.2. Divine and Creaturely Difference (p. 179): That one divine essence is in three hypostases has nothing to do with contingency, but with greatest plenitude—Each contingent creature must leave room for many others, and non-subsistent esse overflows finite essences that bring it to subsistence, due to latter’s limitedness—No possible identity of creature with God, though revelation of Trinity throws a bridge across this abyss: otherness in creation is modeled on archetypal Other in God, and sheer existence of creatures is owed to intra-divine liberality; no satisfying explanation of otherness outside Christianity—Creature comes from God according to the three hypostases—In creatures, difference between esse and essence is real i.e. can be gathered from the existent itself, neither conceivable without the other; esse cannot be said to be, and whole including quiddity is created—The non-subsistent outpouring of being reveals it as pure/free expression of divine bonitas et liberalitas, which aim at plurality/manifoldness of creatures (Aquinas)—Non-subsistent esse in its poverty derives from being’s self-renunciation—Polarity of universal and particular intensified in spiritual creatures into polarity of self-being and being-for/thanks to others, revealed in structure of true and good—To be very good, worldly difference must have a root in God compatible with His infinity, an absolute positivity of difference: the greatest differences do not violate unity/simplicity of being, for difference in God is between being and subsistence, making alienation, potency, otherness, non-being, and change pervaded by positivity of infinite movement within being itself (Siewerth). IV.B. Fulfillments from Above IV.B.1. Christ Unifies Cosmic Polarity (p. 187): Polarities in creaturely being can be expression of creature’s fruitfulness or pulled apart by irreducible tension—Historical attempts to reconcile tension kata-logically, rather than in earlier ana-logical mode, e.g. with Logos as medium of dialogue/condition of its success (Buber, Hamann, Ebner, Hegel) of as Christ as only way to reconcile distensio and intentio (Augustine)—Kata-logical approaches all have in common that worldly tensions are resolved only when a comprehensive vision or reconciliation is given by God. (p. 188): Maximus on Logos as unifier of all that is divided—Christ annuls man-woman difference, and saves/reconciles/preserves/redeems other differences: paradise-inhabited earth, earth-heaven, material-spiritual, God-creature—Mysterious equilibrium in worldly being between movement and abidance; unity of creaturely being is the goal of individualization and generalization, and God as imparticipately one indwells both—Mutual dependence of individuals and universals/totalities—Christ as universale concretum—The five syntheses are first laid on man to present unified world to God, and only on the God-man when man fails; Christ simply fulfills God’s decree that providently foresees all, and unifies or overcomes all the tensions—Maximus’ possible influence on Bonaventure via Eriugena, Hugh, and Richard of St. Victor, but in Eriugena, Maximus’ Chalcedonian vision is diverted in Neo-Platonic direction so that the lower is transformed into the higher, making e.g. spiritualized/resurrected Christ has no gender and is a ubiquitous body, and the irrational in us will be changed into the rational, vices into virtues, lower natures into higher. IV.B.2. Christ: The Consummator of the Sciences (p. 194): Bonaventure claims Christ is consummator of all sciences—Difference within God grounds creation and all creaturely differences including Maximus’ polarities—Each science deals with a definite realm of being/thought, and strives from multiplicity to a central principle; six fields of knowledge are fufilled in seventh, science of faith in incarnate God, which is veiled in all the others, and so God is hidden in all sensible and intelligible things—All sciences bear seal of incarnate Logos as first and last ideal of the world, but they cannot discover this seal because of their inner limit in nature, and their forgetfulness of their image character and need to transcend themselves—This reduction of the arts/sciences to theology does not annul the arts/sciences, but inwardly preserves/retries them by ordering them to a more encompassing space—The luxuria of the sciences; there is both natural and sinful impossibility of final completeness for worldly sciences—He seeks the normative center/medium of meaning in each science—Application of Bonaventure on logic, and the other sciences, to theo-logic—Theological wisdom’s task is to reconcile all differences/tensions in Christ, and to promise this reconciliation in light of final consummation, by recapitulating in itself all other sciences. IV.B.3. The Trinitiarian Structure of History (p. 200): Inevitable that Christian thought would seek interpretation of Trinitarian mystery in terms of time and history—Gregory Nazianzen on historical periods corresponding to Trinitarian persons for purposes of paideia—Other numerological schemes for dividing history—Hints of Trinitarian model of history in Hugh of St. Victor and Anselm of Havelsberg—Trinitarian history while stressing indivisibility of persons and their work in Rupert of Deutz; cooperation of two other persons with each one’s work that is His proprium—Rupert on OT as Christological time of the Son, divided into seven periods for seven days, and period of Spirit beginning with overshadowing of Mary, with seven periods for seven gifts—Rupert’s theodramatic account of history as Son’s struggle to wrest man from the devil. (p. 205): Joachim of Fiore’s opposite conclusions from Rupert—Antecedents in Montanus and Tertullian, and influence by his native Judaism—His treatment of OT/Father and NT/Son as mere letter, from which comes the Spirit and His age—Christ’s preaching becomes prelude to be left behind, and after that is Petrine period, to be supplanted by contemplative non-clerical Johannine period—Opens door to those who seek Church of Spirit to supercede that of Christ politically, morally, or speculatively, and makes Cross/ Resurrection play no role in salvation—Thomas and Bonaventure’s self-distancing from Joachim—Origen’s spiritual interpretation of Scripture in contrast to Joachim. IV.B.4. God, Cosmos, God-man (p. 209): Nicholas of Cusa’s attempt to synthesize all that had been thought in and out of Christianity, including contrary approaches—Kata-logical thinking in De doctrina ignorantia—God as beyond measure, as Trinitarian forms of unity unitas-aequalitas-connectio; cosmos as explicatio of what in God is perfect complicatio, where God enclasps and reconciles even the contradictions of the world, as what is actu omne possibile—Platonic expression of Thomistic real distinction, esse as anima mundi/forma universalis, which is identified with human mens: man is microcosm, but knows nothing exactly as it is in itself, yet can create perfect numerical abstractions and so build an analogous world—Cusanus’ conception of God as perfect unity, rejecting alteritas for Trinitarian distinctions—Jesus can contain the world’s maximum because He is fullness of specific and generic being, for in God greatest coincides with smallest, and He is omnia contracte and coincidentia oppositorum; in the world’s in-folding in Christ, we are brought beyond understanding to God’s simplicitas, and then we can be loved like the Son, and this is effected by the Spirit—His use of negative theology jeopardizes Chalcedonian formula and the very wall erected by negative theology; this perspective of the raptus/insanitas/idiota inverts whole perspective of theology, looking down from God’s oneness to its explication in the world, from the point of view of the possest that puts every existent in our grasp, and of the non-aliud that founds every aliud—Yet we do not have that standpoint, but an attitude of searching for God—Cusanus appears in homilies as close to the Gosepl, yet his speculation takes him far from the Gospel, agape outmaneuvered by Platonic eros—His axiom that faith includes everything intelligible in-folded in simplicity and understanding is its unfolding, yet he is not clearly guided by faith, reducing Trinity to triply self-positing one—Augustinian image as shedding light on Trinity and on ternary structure of the world. V. The Word Was Made Flesh V.A. Verbum-Caro V.A.1. The Question Becomes Acute (p. 221): Discussion up until now has taken Incarnation for granted without terror before this folly of God—The indestructability of the body is the end of the works of God (Oetinger), not spiritualization as in other religions. V.A.1.a “Flesh” (p. 221): In OT and NT, flesh is fundamentally man who stands before God in transitoriness and sublimity—Union of flesh and God’s breath—Man is in God’s image but also man and woman i.e. one who is transitory, requiring reproduction—Flesh/basar is originally animal flesh for sacrifice, and thence transferred to all humanity; only later is there antithesis of flesh and spiri—Flesh in Paul is not just body but also reason and thought insofar as not sustained by grace/pneuma—Johannine “Word became flesh” does not carry Pauline accent on war of flesh against spirit, but here flesh is neutrally man as created by God, transitory, sexually differentiated (Schweizer); this is OT sense of flesh, which is of no avail without faith and pneuma—Against spiritualizing Gnosis, irrevocable incarnation is for John basis of all salvation; in God’s cosmic lawsuit with the world, only a testimony involving the whole person on Christ’s part can create faith (Schweizer): the Word becomes flesh to win His suit through death. V.A.1.b. Why “Flesh”? (p. 224): Flesh’s weakenss/transitoriness in OT—Non-Biblical Greek/Roman religious philosophy sees body as tomb or worth casting off, despite ideals of kalokagathia—Only after Christianity can flesh be seen in a new light (Poucel, Ternus, Conrad-Martius, André, Ulrich, Siewerth), and Scholastics, including Aquinas, struggled with body, seeing lower as unable to influence higher, or human beings as made just to fill the ranks of the angels: all this clouds the Word’s aim at the flesh—Ancient, medieval, and Renaissance theme of human being as having central position in cosmos, with correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm (though this is opposed e.g. by Gregory of Nyssa), and as copulatio/mediator of spiritual and physical—Question why the Word wants flesh, not an angel or the whole world—Irenaeus on man as God’s one dialogue partner; God’s power is brought to perfection in weakeness i.e. flesh—OT emphasis on weakeness of man and his distance from God, not image of God—The sacrifice of earlier evolutionary forms for the sake of human beings (Dacqué, André) so only in sacrificial shape is man embodiment of universe and dispositive opening to loving sacrificial death—In creation, act of existence does not subsist but surrenders itself to finite essences/their “chalice” character—For material essences, everything God plans is divested; every being is rooted in common enabling ground, and everything, including matter, comes forth is same creative act of divestiture—Insofar as man is product of sacrificial process of nature, he is dispositively open by potential obedientalis, to descente of divine difference: what we see nature doing unconsciously, we must freely appropriate—Connection between temptation and our centrality in the cosmos; to succumb to temptation is to forget that we are not God, and that at all moments we by our bodies are taken out of ourselves and belong to the world—Natural communion among material things and their finding in man their focal point are foundations of the substitutions of Cross and Eucharist—The essence of flesh has a sort of pre-comprehension of what it is for the Word to divest Himself—Each person can stand representatively in the place of every other, for all are made of the one cosmos/matter (Nyssa, Luther, Rahner)—Spirit awakenes to itself through the call of the senses, where it finds its center in heart, not brain—Johannine flesh lacks notions of solidarity and substitution; flesh is God’s property, but refuses to be that, since it is pharisaically set on earthly things—The Word becomes flesh to restore what has been seduced from its end, and not because of our wickedness but because of His merciful love, and because of the predestination of the Son as center/fulfillment of the universe (Bonaventure). V.A.1.c. The Word as Contradiction (p. 234): The Word is only a contradiction to the flesh that closes itself/is hardened to the Word—God sends His Son in like form/homoiōmati of the flesh of sin; this expresses a proximity approaching identity, though without sin—The Word of God as opponent of sinful flesh (Augustine), emblemized by sharp two-edged sword—Jesus’ provocative speech and presence—Jesus does not speak so as not to be understood, but uses popular/individual language—Jesus’ dialogue with unbelievers fractures into theological, non-philosophical dialectic, but reaches consensus with disciples—Jesus’ use of syllogisms when He has unity of OT and NT in view—The transcendence Jesus calls for is the bi-directionality of the OT, pointing back to Abraham’s faith and forward to the Messiah, which is opposed by His opponents’ fixation on Law—Jesus stands among others of flesh, and so is misunderstood. V.A.1.d. Transcendental Expectation? (p. 241): Rahner on inseparability of destiny of body and of spiritual person, and on transcendental hope for resurrection, which we either affirm or reject freely—Eros as prelude to redeemed freedom, death as making God close, and the current outline of a not yet present free and intact form of bodiliness (Welte)—Such a hope and the sacrificial nature of matter appear only in light of Jesus and the earthly failure of His mission in the flesh—No transcendental pre-comprehension of Cross—Fear of resurrection as returning us to nothingness. V.A.1.e. Expectant Vanity (p. 244): Jesus knew that His efforts would be frustrated—Wisdom literature implies a vanity juxtaposed to and unreconciled with confidence and hope—Jesus’ awareness cannot be awareness of a future Messiah or of hope for the people—Jesus’ movement towards His hour—Jesus knows that in coming to this end, He has obeyed the Father—Ultimate failure and sure knowledge of ultimate fulfillment now contain one another, and are no loner juxtaposed as in the OT—Paradox of movement away from God as movement toaward God reaches Trinitarian fulfillment in Christ where removal into uttermost distance from Father and final step into the Father are immanent—Spirit is expression of this common will and life—Rising on the third day is not just a bodily event, but the proving fruitful of His whole earthly mission and its failure; Jesus has perfect confidence in the Father to be able to do this. V.A.2. The Language of the Flesh (p. 248): Jesus speaks language of the flesh i.e. that of corporeal-spiritual man, which shars in all cosmic spheres, since man is microcosm—Jesus and OT speak in many registers, not all able to be captured in scientific theology, or analyzed except artificially; all divisions in the continuum that is man are artificial. V.A.2.a. Language as Expression (p. 249): All things have power to make their essence appear/express it, presenting a dual unity, a true statement about itself, though these are non-identical and expression can be just a semblance, requiring verification by judgment, though it points at what is, which is what appears, not a hidden thing in itself—All creatures can express themselves because they are created in the Son i.e. the divine expression (Bonaventure)—Fairy tale characters and poets as able to translate expressive language of things into human words (Novalis, Goethe, Eichendorff), with love as the key to understanding (Hoffmann), which requires gathering them in one’s spirit and recreating them by one’s words (Claudel)—Spiritual word expresses itself with perfect precesion in bodily Gestalt/body’s natural language (Ortega y Gassett) even without spoken words—Body is informed by spirit and spirit can raise non-human expressive phenomena into sphere of corporeal word. V.A.2.b. Speech and Image (p. 252): To be open to world, concepts/words rely on sense/images—Perfection of image is grasped not just by senses/imagination/memory but by spirit which is opened in/with senses—Sense is both our faculty and the significance of things (Siewerth)—Guardini on images as manifestations of worldly forms which bear witness to sense-bound nature of being, enter into myth, and give significance to everyday life, but are lost when we engage in a technical doing devoid of images—Sense puts its interiority in the world, and in imagination brings expression to memory which can reproduce it; spirit gathers/legein the image and interprets it as manifestation of something—Verbum mentis is incapable of life without turning back to the image—We cannot/must not capture the divine in images, yet we cannot renounce our sense-bound bodily nature. V.A.2.c. The Birth of the Word (p. 254): Birth of the word grounded in birth of self-consciousness, which awakens to itself in the capacity to interpret an image as a Thou, in the mother’s smile being understood by her child—Seeing this as appearing ground is first foundation of freedom from world of images; requires seeing in judgment that appearance and what appears are simultaneously identical and different—Insight that I, an existent who belongs to being, is given custody of myself by a pronouncement of being, as an ex-pression/gift of being as a whole, a gift identical to my being present; this pronouncement alone explains mystery of man’s acquisition of speech i.e. spirit comes into being through Logos—I and Thou and all being bear trace of Logos; power of expressio pervades all layers of microcosm, which are inseparable. V.A.2.d. Myth (p. 256): In dawning light of being, child cannot distinguish parents from divine without knowing that the Thou has God to thank for his existence—Outside Biblical revelation, all peoples associate holiness of Godhead with images or narrative events—Divinized/titanized forces of myth are cosmic, vital forces that sustain existence that are personified e.g. power, love, marriage, craft, trade, war, peace, enmity, death, underworld, withering, reblooming, artistic creation, generation, birth—Stoics see them just as cosmic energies, Platonists as primary emanations of the divine—Their retention in Christian humanism as ideas clothed in images—Experience of them as direct manifestations of divinity in Hölderlin and Schelling; Schelling on totality as presented intuitively through art: since the real and ideal are identical, particular things to the extent that they are absolute are ideas for the philosopher and gods for the artist, so myth, which inclues pagan and Christian religion is necessary for art, though it must be produced by a race not an individual—Schelling on first man as nature rapt into God who then attempts to appropriate for himself his truth that is in God, giving rise to mythological/cosmogonic process that stands under God’s wrath, and to tragic history which subjectively represents the gods—Whole violent history and images of pagan religion was necessary to prepare for true embodiment of Logos, the truth of subjective images of myth, which also transcends them—Non-Christian aspects of Schelling’s view include idea that Logos comes forth as mediator only with fall and becomes divine only in His sacrificial death, and Christianity fulfills both paganism and Judaism, both of which are seen as having mythological structure, and his modalism—No one after Schelling treated mythology with similar sensitivity to religion and Christianity (Schiller, Otto, Spitteler, Kerényi, Mann, Nebel)—Post-Christian period cannot awaken myth to new life—Images of cathedrals and Baroque churches owe nothing to mythology, nor does Christ’s story: we no longer need to endow bodily things with depths of meaning in myth because of the Incarnation (C.S. Lewis); only faith, not imagination, is needed to grasp Jesus—Myth is general in particular, but God is not general and Jesus is not particular but unique—Looking at and entering into depth of the Word are inseparable; this depth is love not beauty, because Jesus takes into Himself ugliness of sin, which must not be idealized—Focus on man’s total answer to total summons of Gospel—Christian art draws attention to following not to itself—Loss of myth leads to abstraction (Brague) but some forms of abstraction can express a depth of the Logos’ bodiliness. V.A.2.e. Icon (p. 264): Jesus is icon of God, equal with Him—Greek understanding of image is not of diminution but of coming to light of the core/essence of object, with substantial participation in object—Question of imitating this super-abundant image—Prehistory of Iconoclasm in Origen who shadowed fleshliness as darkening of the spirit, and who sees Resurrection as spiritualization of coarse flesh; thus it cannot be pictured (Eusebius), the only icon being the Eucharist—Cyril of Alexandria, following Athanasius, on flesh as proprety of incarnate Lord inseparable from His being an image, in which all the goodness of the Father becomes visible—Maximus, following Nyssa, on composite hypostasis of the Logos; his mode of being man is marked by His eternal freedom (Schönborn) so that He is symbol of Himself—Iconoclast Constantine V’s argument that icon would have to show divine Person, Who is uncircumscribable, but to just show the human nature is Nestorian—John Damascene’s association of Christ’s flesh with relics and icons, and his distinction of worship from veneration—George of Cyprus on legendary, divine origin of certain icons—Nicephorus’ argument that to paint or to write is not to lay claim to exhaustive circumscription, but just to capture a likeness—Theodore the Studite’s argument that the icon is an image of the Person in which the flesh participates not the divine nature; imagination is a power of the soul, so to reject images and imagination would be to render this power, and all the others, futile—NT differs in its evaluation of seeing from OT, already anticipated in Isaiah; in Johannine way of seeing, acts of seeing and faith are inseparable, both directed to doxa/glory of divine love made visible in Crucifixion/Resurrection, and both are witnessing—This conjoint seeing in faith of sense/spirit remains in self-understanding of Christian pictorial art, which aims to bring home intensity of God’s language in the flesh for everyman—Theological image must point and direct, but as human artwork it risks riveting beholder’s gaze on itself, especially in masterpieces, but less so in awkward religious art; greater dissimilarity to God places them as protective shields before God (Dionysius). V.A.2.f. Symbol, Metaphor (p. 270): Every finite being participates in duality of expression and self-expressing ground; expression becomes image in sensible reality and word in free sphere of spirit—Word of God lays claim to being expression, image, and word without hierarchical gradation among them—All three forms of communication contain unbridgeable difference and consonance, even with infinite distance between God and creature: language of flesh is adequate expression of Word, though it does not abolish distance, and so keeps in place idol-icon distinction—That revelation of Father in Son through Spirit displays perfect consonance does not entail that we can now understand the consonance—Originally, symbol is sign of recognition/authentication between guests—Jesus as symbol Who fits perfectly with the Father, but this is not reducible to His subjective symbolizing for us—Jüngel’s rejection of Aristotelian metaphor language as only rhetorical, not exact—Jüngel’s attempt to reconcile Pzywara and Barth on analogia entis, in an evangelical analogy where there is greater similarity no matter how great the dissimilarity—Concepts as residues of metaphors, metaphors as reminders of movement of being in speech; implications of his for God’s address to us—Aristotle on metaphor—No adequation/intrinsic affinity between God and human expression, but between lights of being and reason—In Jesus, light of subsisting being shines through light of non-subsisting being, using creaturely images but also giving believers an inward light; in itself, His parables are normal language/meant to reveal not conceal, but appear incomprehensible to those without inward transcending understanding—Created images become transparent/are drawn to God’s love—Siewerth’s exclusion of metaphor from understanding Christ. V.A.3. The Silent Deed (p. 276): Revelation of Jesus is more a matter of deed, not of language; explanatory discourse is not the most important part of that revelation—For OT, dābār is both word and event; events authenticate words in OT—To call Jesus Word is to say more than that He is discourse; He is total expression of God, with principal accent on sovereign deeds—We must seek bond between truths of language and of life; insufficiency of approach of Hare or Wittgenstein—God’s sovereign doing uncontrollable/unsurveyable by us—Jesus’ deeds are the event of His existence as a whole, including His death and Resurrection, and this verifies His words—OT unity of life, love, and language (Ebeling)—Word becomes flesh not to speak but to dwell among us—Worry that the greater part of divine truth must remain in silence, and question of whether Jesus’ translation of the divine into the human is adequate—A god who could be expressed entirely in words or one who does not wish to give Himself away to this end but hides a piece of himself for himself would be an idol—So Jesus must be the expositor of God, all His content and silence handed over to endless hermeneutic of Spirit in the Church, never exhausting God’s maior dissimilitudo, even in the next world, in which we shall receive limitless instruction (Irenaeus). V.B. Factum Est V.B.1. The Fact V.B.1.a. As the Starting Point of All Theology (p. 281): The Word’s enfleshment is the fact, including silence/mystery—Dogmatic statements and theologies do not include this silence, but safeguard the fact in which there is silence—All theology stands or falls with accepting this one fact—Insufficient criteria include reduction of theological discourse to faith propositions, self-evidence of object of faith, self-verification of religious experience, and promise of eschatological verification—Relevant criteria for verification are ecclesial, requiring communication in the truth through Word, Eucharist, and Spirit, and authority given by Christ. V.B.1.b. In the Eternal Origin (p. 282): Incarnation can only originate in Logos/Trinitarian decision to expropriate humanity of Jesus—Primary reality is movement from above, not our movement from below to the absolute—His humanity comes to be in essence and existence insofar as the Logos expropriates Himself (Rahner)—Against Rahner’s claim that humanity comes to be when God declares Himself into the void—Theology eternally remains anthropology—Kenosis not assumptio is primary, without this being degermation. V.B.1.c. In Transition (p. 284): Question of God becoming anything—What is at stake is the Logos’ own history; the unchangeable can be changeable in the other, and ontology learns this from faith (Rahner)—The Logos must learn (Heb. 5:8) to stand as a man with other men and before the Father, feeling in His flesh the urgency of evil and the range of human attitudes, and He learns from His Mother the fiat which as God He did not need to act to actualize; He must take care to keep His human will centered in the Father’s will, and to bring others’ wills into this axis, anticipating Confession (von Speyr). V.B.1.d. Vision and Faith (p. 286): Hardest mystery for von Speyr to formulate was relation of vision and faith in God-man’s lived experience—Incarnate Son possessed vision of the Father, but He also had obedience/faith of the viator, and vision could veil itself into obedience—View that Jesus retained beatific vision in apex of the soul and had Godforsakenness in lower parts is incredible nowadays—Divine vision must be accommodated to human faith, and He must grow toward seeing faith, renouncing active vision for passive being seen, together with other men, emphasizing His humanity as what God wanted humanity to be (von Speyr)—Faith is not negative of vision—Jesus’ placing of His relation to the Father and the OT prayer into His prayer, which He can communicate to others (von Speyr)—The many relations in the history of the Incarnation—Son’s relationship to Father entirely through mission and His depositing with the Father. V.B.1.e. Freedom and Temptation (p. 290): Question of how the freedom of Christ’s flesh/rational humanity is secured within Father’s command, given, against Monothelitism, that it exists; questions of how this freedom its proper sphere of activity and is not a mere ensouled instrument, and of whether Jesus has any free choice, given Maximus’ distinction between natural and deliberative will—NT and Aquinas on Jesus’ genuine willing/free choice—Total plan God conceives for the world is highest good for world and for the man Jesus, to which He could commit Himself with His entire freedom, knowing that His freedom unfolds only within God’s freedom—God grants to every mature human nature a space of free play/creative imagination, even when one always wills what is most perfect (Sölle), as in Jesus’ case—The place of temptation and the desert in the Incarnation, where Jesus must depend on the mercy of the Spirit—Jesus’ fast in the desert as His placement of Himself in situation where man can expect help only from God—His confrontation with the tempting anti-Spirit, who tempts Him toward the quintessential sin of tempting God/appropriating with one’s own hands what God promises to give—Jesus’ watching and praying as part of the mastery of temptation—Learning obedience for Jesus requiresd the Spirit to lead Him into the intimate experience of fleshly temptation to the greatest sin, which was required for us to be liberated from temptation. V.B.2. Dimensions V.B.2.a. Verbum-Caro: Trinitarian Dimensions (p. 296): Initiative for decision for Incarnation is from the Father, but carried out with initiative by the Son and His blood, and consummated by the Spirit—No distance from Father to Son except distance between Persons, and so Father remain in act of one directly giving up/offering throughout Incarnation, so our thanks primarily go to the Father—The Father’s endurance and consolation (Rom. 15:5)—Resurrection as the Father’s work—The Incarnation as the work of the Spirit—Trinity is not a dogma contrived after the fact but revealed in the fact of the Verbum-Caro, hence the Incarnate Son is the revealer of the whole fullness (Col. 2:9). V.B.2.b. Verbum-Caro as Unity (p. 299): Unity of Incarnate Word best understood in terms of Trinitarian character, with Father as speaker of one Word, uniting all Jesus’ many words—Jesus as recapitulation of OT words—Ethics of giving up one’s life for the brethren—Jesus’ life, Passion, and Resurrection as three syllables of a single word, all of which are required to understand the whole—Instruction of the Spirit needed to make us understand unity of the Word in all its details—All of His words point to the Trinity becoming visible in Him, by which He escapes all comprehensive intellectual control. V.B.2.c. Verbum-Caro: Total Humanity (p. 301): Question of how destiny of single body-person can be relevant for all body-persons—Fathers’ upholding of the factum in dependence on Pauline and Johannine theology, which emphasize that we are one in Christ, not as ideal or metaphor but as reality in crucified body, which can be understood soteriologically, Eucharistically, Christologically, in symphony of reciprocal love (Ignatius)—Defense of the flesh of Christ in Ignatius, 2 Clement, Origen, Athanasius—Despite lacking a rational soul in Christ, Logos-sarx theology has courage in giving emphasis to flesh in face of Neoplatonism, drawing on Alexandrian Stoic idea of cosmos as Logos’ body; from His one body, the Logos can enliven/liberate all others, which could not happen if He were Arian creature, or if he assumed non-human flesh (Athanasius)—Eucharist as jointure of physical and mystical bodies (Hilary)—Concrete unity/single dough of entire human nature, which Christ entered and leavened, though only potentially, so there is just a trend not a definite move to apokatastasis (Nyssa)—Divine life is communicated to assumed flesh, though contact with which we are healed (Cyril of Alexandria)—Inseparability of Logos and flesh in being decisive for redemption—These theories do not justify communication made possible by flesh; that requires rooting forms in common matter (Aquinas, André, Siewerth, Ulrich). V.B.2.d. Verbum-Caro: Church and Cosmos (p. 307): Problem of how Christ can be head of Church and of cosmos—The two are distinct in Colossians hymn—For Paul, Christ is head of creation as incarnate—Christ’s fullness and filling all things—Christ’s ruling over cosmic powers e.g. power, technology, economy, sex, which remain today even if not personified as in ancient times—Church has inward share in His life/death/Resurrection, but also points beyond herself to the cosmos (Schlier)—Fathers tend to see Logos’ headship over cosmos as pre-Incarnational, while His soteriological body contains cosmic universality of human nature—Christ’s body sanctifies the cosmos, and never apart from the Church—Christ’s flesh in our neighbor (Chrysostom)—In the Eucharist, we move beyond individual and collective. V.B.2.e. Verbum-Caro and Analogy (p. 311): Chalcedonian Christology is account of an event that cannot be subjected to universal law but subjects all other laws to its uniqueness—Analogy as human mode of judging truth; question of relation of analogy to the One who says “I am the truth”—No mathematical precision of analogy in Christology—Plato’s loosening of Pythagorian rigor in analogy—Christ is truth as exposition of Father in the Spirit—We can approach the mystery through analogy by recognizing Logos of the Father in caro; beginning from below, we see in Jesus the image of one Who is above—Expressio is irreducible to any further principle—The exactitude of the word with which the Logos exposits the Father—Faith looking upward from fleshly exposition of God in Christ understands that this exposition cannot be grasped except from above downward, for God exposits Himself from above, not the man Jesus from below: whole homo assumptus is expression of divine Logos—Caro can precisely express the Logos’ Trinitarian nature, as in the crucifixion, the Eucharist, and Jesus’ every word—Analogy that is event in Verbum-Caro is measure of all other philosophical and theological analogies, for it is the way the Logso read things together in Himself and inserts them into likeness of His similitude—Things created in opposition/conflict (Heraclitus, Sir. 42:44) are pacified/reconciled in His body—Essential forms of individual beings are designed to have a definitive place in analogy of Verbum-Caro, for which they are predestined, and which they can attain only by Trinitarian operation—Subjection of anti-divine powers of cosmos is distinct from loving obedience of bride-Christ; in eschatological kingdom, there are no cosmic powers—Infinite distance between God and creatures remains in Christological analogy, but is transfigured into infinite distance between divine Persons in identity of divine nature—All things primarily attributed to Logos, who exemplifies proportion between God and creature, and communicates it to creation in the Spirit; proportionalitas between proportional relations of God and creature, and of difference between Father, Son, and Spirit. V.C. Caro Peccati V.C.1. Contradiction V.C.1.a. Dialectic and the Lie (p. 317): In self-exposition in flesh, Logos exposes Himself to uttermost extreme, the darkness that does not want to know Him—To contradict Him, the truth, is the untruth/life pure and simple, the contradiction/ dialectic of irreconcilability/enmity—From Johannine point of view, dialectic only occurs in denial of only truth i.e. in sin, which has no place in philosophically neutral Hegelian dialectic, which is a late form of theological dialectic which says we simultaneously are justus et peccator—Before the Logos, lying hatred is ground-less abyss devoid of sense—Holiness/absolute love is depth dimension of truth—His opponents’ ostensible truth is Antichrist, stemming from concealed anti-Trinitarian ground, the diabolos—Biblical dialectic is contrariety of speaking from God/as God intends and speaking of oneself while claiming to speak according to God; this is alredy in OT theology of covenant, with many examples, which draw sharp lines between the righteous and unbelievers. V.C.1.b. Diabolic and Negativity (p. 320): Human propensity to sin is mystery to OT—Principle of absolute evil is counterfeit of revelation of Trinity—Behind Christ’s truth is unreserved Yes to Father’s saving will, while behind unbelief of His opponents is absolute No to the truth displaying itself in Christ, which contra-dicts His Yes—Hegel’s development of truth through supplementation of contraries, but its flirting with demonic contradictory, which could become a God Who gains Himself only through demonic principle—The devil as father of lies, understood purely as principle not as substance—No way for hatred/lying to be integrated into truth as one of its transitional moments: truth can only adopt unqualified rejection/judgment/the lake of fire toward it. V.C.2. “Caro Peccati” [Flesh of Sin] (p. 323): Diabolical contradiction is not nothing; this gave rise to Manichean speculation, resolved by Augustine by saying that evil is privatio boni, with causa deficiens not efficiens—While this seems to allow subject of privation to be integrated into the beauty of the whole, the question arises as to whether sin, which contradicts beauty/truth, can be incorporated into whole, wihtou being over-taken in some manner: this occurs in Cross—Acts building on flesh are sinful/enslaving, since it moves us to self-fulfillment—God condemns the flesh by means of itself: Christ assumes God-hostile flesh out of obedience to God and so neutralizes its hostility from underneath, so that insofar as we belong to Christ we have crucified the flesh—Real negativity/contradiction of God must be experienced within truth as exposition of God in flesh; what is exposited is not the rebel, but a willingness to endure the contradiction to the end: Christ experiences infinite suffering of sin’s effect on God and infinite suffering that He causes in God by being made sin, an experience of something like a destruction of the Trinity (von Speyr)—Christian negative theology is not sublime experience of God’s majesty, but experience of contradiction of sin being taken into logic of Trinitarian love on the Cross, not to find a place there but to be damned in the Son’s flesh—Hell is the outer realm, outside meaning and logic, hinted at in images not describable in ontological categories, an experience without analogy to other experiences—Trinitarian mystery is the only theological dialectic, and its surpassing. V.C.3. Theo-Logic in a Dialectical Key? V.C.3.a. The Langauge of Scripture (p. 327): Scripture merely appears dialectical/contradictory but is not, though we may have to approach the mystery with formulations that appear but are not contradictory—Two passages in John and Paul that come very close to authentic dialectic. (p. 328): Apparent dialectic in 1 John between man as sinner and Christian sinlessness—Christian appropriation of God’s truth as sinless through confession—Concept of abiding and the transition from command to cease sinner to proclamation of conditions to no longer sin; abdiding in Christ is remaining in love as Christ lived it, and this is irreconcilable with sin—When in Christ, we are begotten of God, and receive a share in Christ the living word, which purifies us of ability to sin as it unfolds in us. (p. 330): Law as preliminary to salvation in John and Paul, and law in Paul as showing measureless sinfulness of man’s will to achieve salvation—One can only cling to the preliminary in bad conscience, and this is true sin of unbelief; scandal is wanting to be right for penultimate reasons (Guardini)—Range of meaning of sarx from creatureliness to sinfulness—OT as training of fleshly people for pneuma, but because of flesh they are unable to understand pneuma—For Paul, there is nowhere that nature is unviolated by sin—Incompatibility of life according to flesh/pre-Christian world and according to spirit—No genuine dialectic/contradiction introduced by John or Paul into Christian experience. (p. 334): Augustine’s pre-conversion experience of inner conflict between two wills—His distinctions between baptism blotting out original sin and concupiscence remaining, and between non-sinful physical movement of concupiscence and our moral solidarity with Adam whereby we are guilty of having to experience this movement at all—Luther is wrong to read in Augustine that the fomes are sin, and that misreading introduces intrinsically dialectical/contradictory theology. V.C.3.b. Theology of Contradiciton (p. 335): Luther’s protest that God has nothing to do with logic/analogy, and his view that we are simultaneously enemy and son of God: a paradox-theology that nullifies itself as metaphsyics and suspends PNC—Attempts to reduce non-identity to a formula in Mahayana Buddhism and Hegel; both fail because they do not know the Spirit Who proceeds from love of Father and Son beyond their opposition—Luther identifies justified man with hopeless sinner, concupiscence with sin—Identification of justus et peccator in view of Christological unity/commercium/connubium, but this is elaborated on model of anthropology, so that Christ is supremely righteous and sinful, blessed and damned: these contradicitons are conceived purely formally—Luther’s view that Christ withstands the most terrible reality of God’s wrath, assuming the definitive situation of the sinner—Gratia is a purely formal/mechanical exchange prior to our awareness, while donum is subsequent to that, allowing works and reward—Christology and anthropology here mutually found each other—No unifying hypostasis in Christ for Luther, nor humanity as image of God—All goodness is hidden sub contrario, so there only remains room for faith in God—Luther’s extreme declaration can remain within Pauline paradox, yet the communicatio idiomatum only takes place between natures, with no mediation by the Person—A way out of the contradiction required inconsistency involving effort in gratia, when he advises us to snatch faith to ourselves, making the simul a temporal-eschatological process—Qustion of whether God is wholly revealed in wrath-love contradiction of the Cross which would open up universal salvation, or if there is another unbearable God of majesty behind this one who can only damn the sinner (Seeberg, Harnack, Prenter, Bandt, Ritschl)—The problem of double predestination and experience of Anfechtung; solution requires absolute faith that everything God does is just and subjective certitude that one is saved—In truth, there is no “naked God” behind revelation of God in Christ, and admirabile commercium rests not on formal exchange of sin and grace, but loving obedience of Person of God-man to the Father. V.C.3.c. Hell and Trinity (p. 345): Von Speyr alone adequately answers Luther’s tearing open of abysses: question of how theological contradiction of sin can be affirmed and overtaken without losing its force or destroying theological logic—She sees claims that someone is in hell or no one is as non-exclusive; the Church needs more Origen and less Augustine: hell’s finality must be interpreted in Trinitarian-Christological oikonomia—Christ does not descend victorious into hell, but dead and no longer speaking, as the silent Word: He does not understand the Father or His forsakenness by the Father until Easter, having gathered all sins into Himself and now experiencing His action as meaninglessness—Objectively this separation and damnation of sin is victory, but He cannot subjectively experience it as such—Cross is atemporal as gathering all past and future sins, but hell is atemporal as definitive and without escape—In hell, the “I” becomes an impersonal “one”, mechanically inspecting what is there—Sin in itself has no being but men lend it their personal being, to endure which is sheer horror—As discarded sin, hell is and is not; in hell, the Son is Who He is i.e. the Son, and Who He is not i.e. the bearer of all sin, going in two directions at once, having both lost His Word-character and being the Father’s loudest message—On Holy Saturday, the Son is initiated into the darkness of the Father, presupposing a mobility without potentiality in the Trinity; hell is a preserve of the Father’s inasmuch as prior to creation He took responsibility for for the possibility of the creature’s freedom and perishing—At the point where the Son feels most abandoned, abandonment becomes means to admit Son and redeemed world into the Father’s heaven—Contra Luther’s horizonatal exchange theory, Son’s passage through hell is expression of His super-obedience to the Father, and this is His identity in all contradiction, and His vanquishing of all contradiction: abandonment in the midst of obedience/love, but estranged from itself—Hell is transformed by the Cross and by grace penetrating to the point where damnation was—Effigies in hell are what men have given of their substance to their sin, and He gives salvation to these people, but only if they repent: no guarantee that sins are extinguished/ depersonalized as effigies; von Speyer’s vision of effigies parallels Luther’s simul justus et peccator—Possibilty of believers sharing the intolerability and loss of communication of the Cross, and of experiencing taking upon oneself the sin of all in co-expiation, which leads to experience of contradiction between what one suffers in and inflicts on Christ: this teaching can only be lived, not taught—As long as the world endures there remains the unresolvable contradiction of atemporalities of Cross, hell, and heaven—Resurrected Christ is victor over sin and hell; He does not integrate them into heaven. (p. 359): God did not plan, but only foresaw, sin and the Cross—All sinners have their place after the Incarnation and only Mary is before it; she knows and shares in but is not drawn into His confrontation with man’s contradiction—With Christ’s descent into hell, Mary stands at a place not included in her Yes, leading to faith without consolation, experiencing Holy Saturday as a night of perseverance, a non-participating participation, a love that suffers, in which we all can share—The communion of saints rests on a love so selfless that all can have a part in it. Conclusion (p. 363): Methodos is pursuit of a way, and when One claims to be the way, method is a following; we must presupposes the seamlessness of this way/truth, which is that of the Father in the Spirit—Human logic cannot understand bearing sins of others or how Christ’s abandonment affects the Trintiy and all times or how the contradiction of holiness by sin can be lived/overcome—Attempt to synthesize system after the shattering of all speculations by the Cross bears a trace of Antichrist—Christ shows the rational is the real and vice versa (Hegel) but in a way beyond all systems—The folly of God reveals itself in the One who unites the absolutely divine and anti-divine in unassuming simplicity of obedience—The Son leaves an immense amount of work to the Spirit and the Church, and all that belongs to her, though all this is the Son working in the Spirit. Volume 3: The Spirit of Truth Preludes 1. What Has the Spirit to do with Logic? (p. 17): Jesus’ promise that when He comes, the Spirit will guide us into all truth, taking what is the Father’s and Son’s and declaring it to us—Jesus’ adequate declaration of the Father was closed to men so long as the Spirit had not been given (Hegel)—Spirit can only declare this truth if He is God—Jesus’ human destiny had to reach its consummation before the Spirit could be breathed forth—Spirit does not just interpret teachings but guides us into vital depths of what takes place between Father and Son by assimilating us to it, making us sons in the Son; this space between Father and Son is the Spirit—The Son’s “mine” is always incarnate, so the Spirit’s witness is inseparable from water and blood, taking place in the Body of Christ—Spirit’s operation can be understood as transmuting us into the realm of the divine i.e. as purification, illumination, union, divinization in insight and virtue, or as incorporation into Body of Christ, but the two understandings are inseparable (Cyril of Alexandria, Basil)—Question of how far the Spirit acts outside the Church in declaring Trinitarian truth e.g. through OT prophets, or through pneuma spermatikon corresponding to logos spermatikos among all peoples, or in all creation—Truth in Christ is infinite, and so there is no end to declaring this truth or to new vistas appearing: there is more truth in Christ than in Church’s faith, and more truth in Church’s faith than in her dogmas—Church’s enrichment by those with great charisms glimpsing center of revelation (Augustine, Francis, Ignatius)—Spirit’s imparting of unity and totality to what He unveils—Since Spirit is at work now, there is only relative not absolute eschatology in Christianity, contra Jewish utopian Messianism and liberation theology—Why Christian truth is Trinitarian—Jesus as “true” in the Johannine corpus. 2. Is a Theology of the Spirit Possible? (p. 25): Question of whether Spirit ever appears “objectivized” or just as someone who mediates someone else—Basil on Spirit as the One by Whom we can see God, the One Who transfigures us into greater splendor, and Who therefore does not wish to be seen in Himself—What is graspable in God, the Incarnate Logos, cannot be separated from transcendence toward Father and Spirit; no Christology without indirect Pneumatology, and no Pneumatology except as way into Christology: Spirit is selfless, a Person always depicted impersonally, the subject rather than object of theology (Lacoste, Bulgakov, Bouyer)—Theology i.e. speaking about God grasped only by those endowed with Spirit (Jn 3:8, 1 Cor 2: 13-15), illustrated by Veni Sancte Spiritus and Veni Creator Spiritus—Conglorification of the Spirit. (p. 28): The Spirit/unknown God illumines the Incarnate One/known God, brining out His significance as Signifier of invisible Father i.e. Spirit illumines distinction and identity of Father and Son—What is interpreted about Jesus by purely human insight e.g. in Christian liberalism (Harnack) as a man who understood God as Father is not part of what Jesus calls truth or Spirit wants to show us, since it fails to see that Jesus’ essence is to interpret the Father; it is the flesh that does not avail or the letter that kills—Illuminating Spirit takes possession of theologizing human subject, giving insight into mystery of Son Who interprets the Father, in a knoweldge that surpasses knowledge—God’s nature to always give more without ever holding anything back (Pieper, von Speyr)—Spirit recognizes voice of God in the Word and imparts correct meaning/tone to answering human voices—No theology of the Spirit paralleling that of Son or Father, and no authentic theology except in the Spirit; every grasp of Spirit is indirect, so no normative mode of access i.e. not through enthusiasm, ecstatic phenomena, courage of martyrdom, for the Spirit never points to Himself. 3. Can There Be a Spirit-Christology? (p. 33): Revelation of God’s Trinitarian essence is not concluding until outpouring of Spirit—Barth on Schleiermacher in context of theology of Spirit—Spirit as involved already in OT—1. God’s whole address to the world was Trinitarian from the beginning; His self-surrender/self-giving as gift is the Spirit—2. By Trinitarian inversion must be understood that Christological center of economy of salvation is preceded and succeeded by Pneumatology; attempts at Spirit-Christology, culminating in Hegel—3. Hypostatic union seems to exclude direct involvement of Spirit, yet it seems to involve sanctification/gifts of Spirit. 3.a. Primitive Christian Spirit-Christology (p. 37): Apostolic Fathers see Spirit as divine totality, as ruah Yahweh and unity of spirit of wisdom in Wisdom, without reflection yet on distinction of Pneuma and Logos in God; their reflections on relation of spirit and flesh—Christologies that begin with presence of Spirit in Christ fall into adoptionism (Pannenberg), requiring change from Pneuma-sarx to Logos-sarx model—Late development of theology of Holy Spirit after Nicaea, because He cannot be objectified. 3.b. A “Speculative Pentecost” (p. 40): Hegel’s most comprehensive Spirit-Christology, a theological philosophy of Spirit as all-embracing yet centered in Christology—Religion/theology, on Hegel’s view, must rise to level of philosophical consideration of its content (compare Barth, Jüngel, Pannenberg, Moltmann, Rahner, Küng, Bruaire, Chapelle, Brito, Léonard, Fessard)—No content to philosophy apart from Christianity. 3.b.. On Hegel’s Spirit-Christology (p. 41): Question whether Hegel acknowledges immanent Trinity, or holds that abstract concept of Absolute becomes filled with reality only when it changes into finitude—Hegel’s immaennt Trinity sublates and erases economic Trinity—His Trinitarian speculation unfolds according to principle of lack not magnanimity—One must take either God’s unifying viewpoint or man’s viewpoint of unfolding concretion of fullness—His conflation of creation with the Son, of all ideas being contained in the Logos with claim that the only ideas are realizable, and of Resurrection with outpouring of Spirit—Death of Christ as origin of Spirit—Cross as divine self-emptying yet remaining itself, the highest love, the monstrous union of identity and otherness, which is the Spirit, the negative of negative—Question of whether for Hegel the Spirit in Jesus and in OT is the Holy Spirit. 3.b.. Spirit and Holy Spirit (p. 44): For Hegel, objective Spirit posits itself in community, and then posits itself subjectively/in self-consciousness in Christ—National spirits are just objective spirit/moments in the history of God/God as mutable in the Other (Rahner), not yet subjective spirit—First is the Last and vice versa for Hegel; dialectical spirit-conversions as part of all religions, which leads to question of whether indwelling of Spirit in Christ is special—Hegel’s is a Spirit-Christology only in a general/philosophical sense—Question of whether Spirit is actually a Person for Hegel; that answer is no (Oeing-Hanhoff) casts doubt on his “speculative Pentecost”—Spirit here is just unity of Father and Son, lacking fruitfulness/gift, and so lacking freedom in creating—Hegel’s intention of making Trinity center of his philosophy threatens to become modalism because of universal dialectics, placing contradiction between divine Persons. 3.c. Biblical Starting Points for a Spirit-Chistology (p. 48): Jesus has a priori obedience, not taking His humanity, but entrusting Himself to the Spirit Who makes Him man, a Trinitarian inversion in which Spirit becomes active mediator (Bérulle), fulfilling His OT activity—Overshadowing of Mary is act of Spirit not of all three Persons and not just appropriated to Spirit (contra Bonaventure)—Christ not taking His human form as a thing to be grasped in Phil. 2—Exegetical obejections to these claims about the Spirit, on the basis of distinguishing an impersonal power/ spirit of God from the personal Holy Spirit; against these, the Holy Spirit can be denoted in Scritpure even without personal terms or the definite article—Holy Spirit as divine executant, powerfully bearing the Father’s seed, the Son, into the Virgin’s womb; Jesus’ existence is from the beginning obedience, not thrownness like ours—Jesus’ whole human existence is marked by the part of the Holy Spirit in the event of the Son’s incarnation—The Spirit as in and over Him at His baptism—Spirit attains greatest manifestation of personalization when He most profoundly manifests ineffable unity/love of Father and Son. 3.d. Themes in Modern Christology (p. 51): Against various trajectories in dealing with pneumatology—Congar on experience of Spirit throughout Church history, especially in charismatic movement, and on problems with filioque, themes furthered by Garrigues and Weimer—Bouyer on operation of “Father’s two hands” in history, in pagan intimations of Logos, OT prophecy in Spirit of wisdom, culminating in Mary, in whom meet the ascending Spirit-Wisdom and descending Word, and who becomes created wisdom/eschatological spouse of the Word/Church/Bride/Body—Marius Victorinus on Holy Spirit as God’s perfect return to Himself, given that esse est moveri, and Augustine on appropriation, and the problems associated with distinguishing love as essence and love as personal (Bouyer)—Durwell (drawing on Damascene) on Spirit as God’s hypostasized attributes, as God in His innermost depths, as personalizing Person, present in the love of the Father generating and of the Son generated: the Son is Son and gives Himself back to the Father only in the Spirit, and so His death is His act most filled with the Spirit and life (antecedents for this view in Augustine, Isidore, Athenagoras, but objected to by Aquinas)—Danger of Durwell’s view not safeguarding Trinitarian taxis/order, but von Speyr’s reminder of non-temporal nature of taxis, Son and Spirit freely cooperating in their begetting: Spirit manifests something of Father’s paramount will and Son’s subordinate will in original and unified way—Schooenberg’s problematic process Spirit-Christology in which Jesus as a human person makes Logos and Spirit into full Trinitarian persons—Kasper on how only a Spirit-Christology can combine Jesus’ uniqueness with His universal claim to Lordship. I. The Interpreter I.1. Approaches (p. 63): Spirit is that by which God discloses Himself as God to what is not God—OT disclosure begins with God choosing a people for Himself—Links and divisions between spirit and word in OT, especially in the prophets—Discrimination of spirits in prophets and Qumran—Anthropomorphic hypostases of the one God as forms of His presence, but not as transitions to the Trinity—The way Jesus reminded people of the prophets—Jesus’ connection between baptism and Spirit—Early Church recapitulations of OT Spirit experiences and new ones e.g. Pentecost, glossolalia; Paul on special gifts of the Spirit as necessary unfolding of unity of the Spirit—Simplification and opening to highest fullness in John. I.2. “He Will Guide You into All the Truth” (p. 69): This saying sums up all the Holy Spirit does and indirectly reveals His essence—The integration among all of John’s sayings about the Spirit. I.2.a. Making God Known (p. 70): Holy Spirit declares/teaches/brings to rememberance/guides us into all truth; He is Spirit of truth as witness to truth, internal to it—Question why the Son is not sufficient to make the Father known, but the Spirit is required too—John on Jesus and the Spirit prior to and after His glorification—Jesus baptizes in the Spirt as the Spirit’s source, even before the Cross, when others lack post-Easter faith—Jesus must disappear for the Spirit to come: the incarnate Word can only be interpreted after this Word has been uttered to its end—John on Jesus’ death and Luke on His Resurrection/Ascension as His highest glorification, when “all the truth” has been realized. I.2.b. “All the Truth” (p. 73): The Spirit is needed to interpret all that Jesus spoke and the “things that are to come” i.e. Cross and Resurrection, the inauguration of the eschatological dimension—“All the truth” means the one truth of the Son’s interpretation of God in inexhaustible fullness of concrete universality—Testimony as disclosure/ surrender of what one is to someone, a movement into someone—Spirit is objective attesting of love between Father and Son, and inner fruit of that subjective love, and so can lead us into inner participation in immanent Trinity, not just in the “energies” but in the essence, which is manifested and communicated to us beyond our grasp: initiation/participation in love of Father and Son is divinization, but this only occurs through self-offering of Christ’s flesh and blood—Spirit must sanctify us, for only the holy can enter the divine realm—Relation between Father and Son is one of prayer/adoration/thanksgiving/intercession/ decision (von Speyr)—Indwelling of Spirit—Since “all the truth” is love made manifest in God and revelation, then it must be lived toward Father and world—Essence of discipleship is union between people in faith/love centered on Christ, culminating in Peter’s commission, with its first living cell in Mary and John—Sacramental work of making the truth present—Knowledge flowing from faith in those initiated by the Spirit, the foundation of Christian ethics and theology—Why John is called “the Theologian” from His speaking from the inner realm between Father and Son, the realm of “all the truth.” I.2.c. The Paraclete (p. 78): That the Holy Spirit is Paraclete/Comforter/Advocate/Witness in John does not conflict with His role as Declarer of God’s revelation—Attempts to find sources for term ‘Paraclete’—Spirit speaks in our defense in an advocacy that embraces whole world—Spirit renders Jesus present in new way, enabling us to see Him, although the world cannot see Him—Affirmations about and role attributed to the Spirit interpenetrate (Brown)—The world is not aware that it is arraigned before the tribunal of the Spirit, for it is a purely objdctive/public/cosmic event, regardless of whether the world is now aware of its defeat; the enemy rages because he knows his time is short—Believers are guided into truth of Father-Son relationship, while for the world the victorious superiority of total truth over hostile untruth is unveiled—Although good and bad angels fight over each individual, Christ is already definitively victorious—The Church’s suffering is in the context of the Victor’s suffering, and the disciples’ martyrein in the context of the Spirit’s—Spirit’s advocacy is at the level of divine revelation in Christ. (p. 82): Books of Signs in Jn. 1-12 in the context of the Farewell Discourses—Jesus is always bearer and giver of Spirit, but this cannot be accepted by men before the Cross—Evangelist looks back at events as sees everything done in the Spirit as entirely clear—Thinking from below/flesh is inadequate for understanding what is from above, which requires the Holy Spirit—Testimony of water and blood is also needed—When we have a share in Spiri, what seemed folly is now disclosed as God’s superior wisdom. I.3. Retrospect (p. 85): Spirit’s rolel in salvation history as set out by John integrates previous Spirit-theology. I.3.a. Paul (p. 85): Paul’s is the richest Spirit-theology—It is intelligibly unified around Trinitarian plan of salvation—Paul lives Fatherly self-surrender and co-suffering with the Son—He does not identify Cross and Resurrection within glorification, but sees them as inseparable—Discipleship is being changed into the Son’s likeness by the Spirit, required for understanding/living divine truth—Spirit not only guides us into truth, but explains it, though understanding is inseparable from baptism—Flesh in opposition to spirit in Paul and John—Spirit guides us into life according to truth, which is required for understanding truth—Spirit introduces us into the divine sphere, involving justification and salvation; Spirit wishes to bear fruit in us, and manifest His gifts/charismata, which differ among persons, but are designed with view to ecclesial Body of Christ—Conditions for legitimate glossolalia—Gifts are nothing without agape, which is not a gift of the Spirit but His very presence—For Paul, what is essential is Spirit’s function of interpreting revelation in Chirst—Everyone should be an example to others for the Spirit works toward perfection of individuals and whole Church by liberating believers from external law with law of interior freedom/ service of obedience unto death. I.3.b. Luke (p. 89): Fewer sources about what Jesus said about the Spirit—By looking at Jesus we can see what it is to be bearer/doer/utterer of Spirit—Luke sees that Church is filled with Spirit because she is animated by Spirit of Christ, Jesus’ entire existence being grounded in the operation of the Holy Spirit—Spirit as ground of apostolic preaching, prophecy, testimony, and baptism throughout Acts—Linking of office of proclamation to pastoral office—Understanding of Spirit in Luke’s Gospel is retrospective, based on Church’s experience of Spirit. I.3.c. Matthew and Mark (p. 92): Common to all four evangelists are baptism of Jesus, warning not to blaspheme the Spirit, and promise that the Spirit will stand by the disciples and inspire them with the right words—Jesus being baptized by the Spirit and being the Spirit-baptizer have no OT analogue—John the Baptist’s saying about One who will baptize with the Holy Spirit—Jesus differs from the prophets in how He is equipped with the Spirit and confirmed by the Father at His Baptism—Jesus’ taking of the old covenant on Himself—OT pararllels for being overshadowed with the Spirit—Warning against blaspheming the Holy Spirit as Spirit of Christ, which Jesus defends even at the risk of being slandered Himself--Promise that the Spirit will stand by the disciples and inspire them with the right words. I.3.d. Matthew (p. 96): Matthew between Mark and Luke—Jesus conceived by the Holy Spirit—Spirit of the Father speaking through the disciples—Casting out demons by the Spirit of God—Baptismal formula. I.3.e. The Old Covenant (p. 97): In OT, Spirit and Word of Yahweh are synonymous, not two distinct interpreters, but referring back to save divine truth/truthfulness, linked to His whole being—How this is fulfilled in distinction of Word and Spirit in NT—In OT, God gives Himself as a whole in Word or Spirit—Examples of indwelling Spirit from throughout OT—OT interrelatedness of Word and Spirit is theologically important. I.4. Preview (p. 101): Interpretation of Spirit’s role here just assembles aspects treated by the Fathers and focuses them in Johannine concept—Difficulty of first theologians in fashioning a doctrine of the Holy Spirit and then sticking to that rich manifold—Question for first Fathers of relationship of prophetic Spirit in OT with Spirit Who spoke/operated in Jesus/early Church (Barnabas, Irenaeus, Novatian, Didymus)—Spirit’s operation began before Incarnation, even though men then did not know about Holy Spirit as distinct Person of God (Theodore of Mopsuestia, Cyril of Jerusalem, Leo)—Fathers wrote as Spirit-filled witnesses—Periods of salvation history based around Spirit, Son, Father (Irenaeus)—Montanist Tertullian shifts to Spirit unfolding things Jesus mentioned only briefly, though this does not overthrow regula fidei—Spirit as teacher of all truth (Hermas, Hippolytus, Novatian, Cyprian, Clement, Origen, Cyril). II. The Holy Spirit as Person (p. 107): We cannot skirt the question of “who” this interpreting Spirit is, beyond OT understanding as particular mode of operation of single almighty divinity—Eastern doctrine of Spirit proceeding from Father to Son, but this leads to danger of adoptionism—But if Jesus has same relation to Spirit as Father, the event of the His baptism is unintelligible—Question of whether Holy Spirit is just expression of undivided fullness/essence of God, or a Third beside Father and Son and also a recapitulation of whole Godhead. II.1. What Scripture Says (p. 109): Spirit is almost treated as a person in OT/late Jewish writings—NT is not interested in defining Holy Spirit’s personhood or the doctrine of the Trinity—Often the Spirit appears as impersonal dunamis of God—Problem of the Son being so endowed with God’s power that He seems identified with it—Connection of Pneuma and dunamis must not be reduced quasi-physically/Stoically/impersonally—Spirit appears as divine reality between Father and Son, but also is elusive, unable to be held fast as a Person—Problem of unity and distinction of Spirit and Spirit-filled Son, a dynamic identification (Wikenhauser), though the distinciton becomes clear in John; NT is primarily proclamation, and has no interest in defining mysterious identity-in-distinciton—Against Schweizer’s identification of being in the Spirit and in Christ, and against Hermann’s rejection of Trinitarian/non-Trinitarian or personal/non-personal categories for the Spirit—Prominent trait of Spirit is freedom; He makes men free and effects personal relationship—Distinction between full presence of Pneuma in earthly Jesus and outpouring of Spirit on Church/all flesh after Resurrection: the latter is both Spirit received from Father and Jesus’ own Spirit—Spirit in NT is Spirit of holiness; impersonal Spirit cannot produce personal holiness—Person in God is not a univocal concept, as seen in that the Spirit has no face, yet shines on the face of Christ. II.2. The Fathers. Person in Mystery II.2.a. Trinitarian Mode of Subsistence (p. 117): Many statements about Spirit, yet He is one, and we cannot speak of Him according to His lofty being, and we cannot define His hypostasis, as He unifies a vast number of gifts (Cyril of Jerusalem)—We can only speak of the Spirit in the Spirit, and His mode of subsistence/tropos tēs hyparxeōs is ineffable (Basil)—The Spirit is not a creature, but how He is God cannot be defined (Gregory Nazianzen)—We cannot precisely distinguish generating and proceeding (Didymus, Maximus, Damascene, Augustine but adding in the filioque, Hilary, Nicetas of Remesiana)—The divine mode of personal existence is different in each Hypostasis and its specificity cannot be defined; it is not a generic concept with three species—Scripture’s childlike mode of speaking of three Persons (Nyssa). II.2.b. Trinity and Number (p. 121): Problem of relation between divine Hypostases and number—Basil, drawing on Plotinus, and against Arius and Eunomius, on how the Hypostaes are above number, counted singly and not by addition—Two paths: to number the processions (Gregory of Nyssa) or to be reticent about doing so (Tertullian, Ambrose, Aquinas)—Nazianzen on Trinity beyond monad or dyad; Maximus on how it is Trinity and monad but not in the sense that we use these terms for numbers—Aquinas’ distinction of quantitative from transcendental unity/multiplicity—Hegel on counting belonging to common sense not reason—Hiddenness of Spirit’s manner of procession: 1. Based on Baptismal profession and liturgy (Basil); 2. Based on effects of Spirit in Scripture e.g. divinizing us, revealing the Son, reciprocal glorification (Athanasius, Didymus, Basil, Nyssa); 3. Divine Hypostases work together in the world, but each according to its personal characteristics—Fathers show consubstantiality of Spirit with Father and Son without to give a view on essence of His procession. II.2.c. Trinity or Energy? (p. 128): Gregory Palamas’ distinction of ousia and energies recalls modern view of person: 1. God is seen as subject reposing in/for Himself/His mystery, but also already turned in relationship to what is other than Himself; 2. Even when we intend to give ourselves away, we cannot be given away, and so free self-giving/ communication of the incommunicable (Proclus) remains a mystery—Question of how God’s communicability in energeis related to economic Trinity, and Palamas’ use of Nazianzen’s Trinitarian theology, with echoes of Eckhart—Reconciliations of Trinitarian and energy theology in Meyendorff, Jüngel, Bouyer—Wendebourg’s claim that Palamite view robs Trinity of soteriological function; Barth’s claim that Palamite view undermines God’s self-communication, similar to Gilbert de la Porre—Questions can be solved in Trinitarian not Palamite way: Spirit is already donum, and God’s self-transcendent relation lies in His freedom, not His essence—Sophistical to say that finite person can only give another self; in divine Persons their relationality means that in their self-giving no remainder is not given, contra Plato and Palamas. II.3. The Middle Ages (p. 131): Struggle in the Middle Ages to reach concept of “person”—There were Trinitarian and Christological approaches to personhood, but they needed to be unified, by asking what the person is (Lonergan)—Middle Ages hardly move away from mysterious tropos tēs hyparxeōs even when anthropology is taken into account—Uniqueness of human persons only appears as long as illumined by Trinitarian and Christolgoical light (Guggenberger). II.3.a. Origins (p. 132): Hypostasis means first reality of individual things, then foundations that bring those things into reality, leading to ranked hierarchy of fundamental realities; Athanasius included the reality aspect without the hierarchy—Subsequent Greek Patristic history of this term, culminating in Damascene restricting meaning of hypostasis to personal “who”—Latin theatrical and juridical uses of persona, associated with dignity, (Rheinfelder), coming to theological usage with Tertullian. II.3.b. Ways of Thinking (p. 134): Question of how Middle Ages applied concept “person” to individual divine hypostases—Boethius’ Christological definition naturae rationalis individua substantia does not seem to apply to Trinitarian persons, except as altered by Richard of St. Victor to divinae naturae incommunicabilis existentia, the last term ek-sistentia designating the relationality of Son and Spirit—1. Substance is replaced by existence, moving personhood out of realm of essence, built on by Scotus for whom haecceitas belongs to essence not person, by nomnimalis, and by personalism’s trend to oppose personalist to substance thinking—2. Richard emphasizes that divine persons can only be designated by their relationship of origin or lack thereof in the case of the Father—3. Personhood is here designated in terms of “where from” rather than modern personalist “where to”/relation to a Thou—Question of how person can include several things if each relation in God is unique; it is not a community of negation, or of second intentions, but rather persons are unique and not more closely definable: the mode of incommunicable existence is common to many, all the divine persons agree in the non-universal divine nature, and even among humans the community of persons is not that of genus/species (Aquinas)—Since defined relationally, their modus existendi is greater in diversity than can be thought (Mühlen), though they have a correlative absolute closeness—Holy Spirit cannot be thought of as person in same sense as Father and Son—Tension between univocal conceptual/second intention unity that transcends all theological difference and always greater real diversity; person is ultima solitudo not just haecceitas (Scotus)—Medieval theology’s extension of Patristic reasoning from oikonomia to theologia, especially from Augustine, though there are problems with his mental image for the Trinity—Spirit guides us to understand what the Father has given us in the Son, which includes sapere, sentire, praegustare (Bernard), and this leads us beyond Augustinian standpoint—Scholasticism did not forget the Spirit but carefully attends to the Spirit’s effects/operations—Father and Son, in an act of their “we”, produce the Spirit as the “thou” to which they related in common: spiratio activa is not a distinct person, but spiratio passiva is; Spirit is natural love between Father and Son, showing His mysterious affinity with divine nature, and the fruit and witness of that love. II.4. Modern Times II.4.a. The Tradition (p. 143): In modern times, endless talk of spirit in general and Holy Spirit in particular. (p. 143): 1. Reformers did not question Personhood of Holy Spirit—Deists and Fichte, who sees person as implying finitude, see Holy Pneuma as impersonal—Spirit and Jesus are perfectly complementary, so both or neither must be persons/divine. (p. 144): 2. The way in which Spirit is Person is beyond our grasp, His essence grasped only apophatically, even if His operations are grasped (Dupuy, Torrance, Widmer, Buber). (p. 144): 3. Personalism is essentially nourished by Christian/Trinitarian deposit, and will collapse once it forgets/denies its origin (Roger Benjamin, Tillich)—Concept of person at natural level is needed for God’s grace to bring us to supernatural personhood/full self-possession: man is person because capable of receiving grace and vice versa (Alfaro). (p. 146): 4. God acts in the elect inwardly through Spirit, outwardly through the Word; Spirit is the true witness, rather than just Scripture or the Church (Calvin)—Spirit interprets what He has heard and makes Christ present, gives place to the Father and the Son, and deflects our gaze from Himself (Preiß)—Luther on Spirit being found only in the letter of Scripture—These views restrict tradtional notion of Spirit as Interpreter, with only the one dimension of Scripture, not the freely unfolding interpretation of Christ. II.4.b. New Departures (p. 148): 1. Medievals saw Trinitarian Persons as understandable as relations, while emphasizing human perons’ internal identity and whence, not whither, except in ordering to God, not to other human persons e.g. Scotus’ ultima solitudo sees human person as either sinfully for itself or allows itself to be incorporated into God through obediential aptitude, but no natural interpersonal relationship—Tha relation first glimpsed by Fichte and Hegel, discussed by Feuerbach, and raised to definintion of person by Personalists: person is unthinkable without a Thou for whom we are responsible—Relation became equally primordial to substance—Protestant reactions against that view (Gloege, Stammler): God cannot be dissolved into relations and human interpersonality presupposes person’s internal identity—Overcoming dichotomy between ontology and person in Nédoncelle: personal being is highest form of being, each I owes its existence to/is essentially related to a human thou, each I knows itself to be open to every being, each I is in relation to infinite Thou Who has called it into existence and entrusted it with a mission identical with its person, so prayer is fundamental act of finite existence. (p. 151): 2. Young Hegel’s preoccupation with reconciling finite/life and infinite/spirit—The Holy Spirit overcomes what Hegel hates about Jewish legalism, but he fails to speak of the Holy Spirit, and sees the Church as falling into legalism—No subject-object abyss between two spirits, as between man and God—Jesus’ manifestation of overcoming fate and the law of spirit—Subjective and objective/posited spirit—Legality and morality as preliminary stages to ethical behavior, the unity of subjective and objective spirit—Hegel on true meaning of the Church as many forms of life harmonized in one life/spirit—Differences between Holy Spirit and Hegelian spiri—Holy Spirit as ecclesial spirit has twofold aspect of subjective unity of Father and Son, and objective fruit of their love, related to them in a we-thou relation (Mühlen)—Hegel raises question of relation between Holy Spirit and nature/world spirit. II.5. Who Is the Spirit? (p. 157): Any approach to Trinitarian mystery requires opposed/counterveiling propositions—Augustinian picture posits three functions in Spirit, but without the personhood of those functions—Doctrine of Trinity based just on economic diastasis risks becoming tritheism, with unity of essence emerging just from circumincessio—Lateran IV on Father giving all His substance to the Son yet retains it; the relation of giving here is not an act of knowing, but of love, and the Son actively receives and returns this love—Reciprocal wonder, worship, gratitude, entreaty, excess between Father and Son, producing as/out of excess a Third (von Speyr)—Spirit is a phenomenon of absolute Being—We must banish all notion of plan, purpose, spiration; no point in puzzling out whether Father and Son are single principle of Spirit or whether love springing from divine essence becomes personal trait—Subjective and objective poles of the Spirit move toward each other—Analogy of child as expression and transcendent result of man and woman’s generative/receptive embrace; excess/fruit/propagation are elements of all love—Father’s self-surrender to Son intends always more of absolute love within communio of paternal and filial love; Spirit proceeds from Father through Son, but Son is not mere medium—Problems with Greek denial of filioque: it retains pyramidal Arian-Plotinian monarchia/divine unity—Relatio and terminus in Trinitarian Persons (Aquinas)—Even within Trinity, Spirit is donum not just giving; He is a divinizing gift containing whole being of Godhead (Athanasius, Basil, Gregory Nazianzen)—Spirit rounds out God’s being as love (Durrwell, Moltmann)—Cautions about these formulations about the Spirit—Even within Trinity, Spirit is interpreter of divine gift—Son does not just proceed per modum intellectus/naturae nor does Spirit just proceed per modum voluntatis/liberalitatis; God is beyond necessity and freedom—We should not say that the procession of the Son was insufficient and so Spirit was needed to fulfill those insufficiencies, as seen in God’s salvific work—Each Person is unique in personal being, and cannot be categorically counted, and shared love is not perfected without inner fruit. III. “The Father’s Two Hands” III.1. Introduction (p. 167): Irenaeus’ use of the two hands image for Son and Spirit, by Whom the Father makes the entire bodily human being in the image of God and eternally vivified the bodies of Enoch and Elijah—Athanasius on Son as image of Father and Spirit as image of Son—Bulgakov on Father revealing Himself in hypostases of Son and Spirit, Who form an inseparable dyad; there is a hierarchy of loving renunciation among the Persons—Question of whether Son and Spirit’s missions begin with creation, and of whether Spirit’s mission is in some way subordinate to the Son. III.2. The Dyad in the Act of Revelation III.2.a. Biblical Aspect (p. 171): In OT, no distinction of hypostases yet, but Word and Spirit are almost interchangeable, and Spirit’s inspiration is most tangible in great prophecy of the word of the Lord—In NT, Spirit descends on Jesus and anoints Him as Messiah, but also overshadowed the Virgin in the Incarnation; the Spirit is forerunner, and a cause of the universality of Incarnation’s effects on all human nature (Basil, Nyssa, Cyril of Alexandria)—Basil and Nazianzen on Spirit’s role throughout Jesus’ life and in building the Church; because of Spirit’s presence, bloody death was eternally living act—Spirit rested over/dwelt in Jesus, but we have no way to inspect His consciousness of this inseparable bond with the Spirit—Spirit is not Jesus’ Thou, but His only Thou is the Father in the Spirit—Von Speyr on Spirit, during Jesus’ life, constantly receiving sacrifice of His divine nature to give it to the Father; Spirit ensures unity of Father and Son in form of mutual utter abandonment, and Son’s mission is concluded in giving Spirit back to the Father, but the Spirit acquired earthly experience in accompanying the Son on earth, and their roles are reversed in the Son’s sending of the Spirit to the Church—Mission of Spirit does not take over from mission of Son, but both enter a new stage in which infinite wealth of their relationships is revealed in a new way—The essential factor of Mary’s Yes (Bellarmine). III.2.b. Speculative Aspect (p. 177): Incarnation is central theme of theological speculation on the Spirit—Tension between Philpipians, in which Son empties Himself and assumes form of slave, and Luke in which the Spirit engages in the active operations; this leads to tension between logological approaches (Melito, Nicetas, Cyril of Alexandria) and pneumatological approaches (Augustine)—Medievel history following Augustine on grace of Christ and the distinction between uncreated grace identified with the Spirit (Alexander of Hales) and created grace disposing human nature for union (Gilbert de la Porrée), while Bonaventure, Albert, and Aquinas identify gratia unionis with unio hypostatica—Scotus holds that unio gives no special distinction to humanity, but all that distinguishes Christ belongs to His habitual grace—Later scholastic views on whether the grace of union is sanctifying (Aquinas, Vazquez, Nazarius, John of St. Thomas) or whether additional habitual grace is needed (Suárez); most hold a two-fold sanctification in Christ, one substantial and by the Son, the other accidental and by the Spirit (Galtier, Pohle, Scheeben)—Question of whether when Son’s assumption of human nature is attributed to whole Trinity, this is an opus ad extra that is just appropriated to one Person—Work of Spirit in the Incarnation is not just the work of accidental grace—Reflecting on the various aspects of the missions shows that their works are not mere appropriations but propria of Persons acting in unity—Apparent dilemma of whether to attribute Incarnation to Spirit or Son is generally based on refusal to make room for inversion in transition from immanent to economic Trinity; hence Mystici Corporis’ view that the Son from first moment of incarnation anoints Himself with the Spirit—Alternative of seeing Spirit not just as sanctifying but as creator Spirit, or of looking to essence of Spirit as He proceeds from Father and Son, and what he bears as each one’s Spirit (Basil). III.3. The Dyad Operates in Concert III.3.a. Divinization and Incorporation (p. 185): The two hands operate in distinct manners with/in one another—Father shows Himself in the Son, Who points to the Father, while Spirit is of both and direct attention to this reciprocal showing that reveals God as love—Reasons to guard against Antiochene/Nestorian Spirit-Christology on which Spirit mediates entire divine work of Jesus—What the Spirit shows and interpretes about Father and Son—Greek concept of divinization and Latin concept of incorporation into Christ, which have few differences—Irenaeus on divinization through grace, incarnate Son, and Eucharist, all through the Spirit, against Gnostic natural divinity in us—Theopoiein through baptism, Word of God, and image of God in us (Clement, Origen, Hippolytus, Athanasius, Basil, Nazianzen, Nyssa): Incarnation of God required for divinization, which occurs through Eucharist and Spirit, so that in Him we are sons of God by nature but in ourselves by grace/ divinization (Cyril), and divinization of man and humanization of God are parts of a single, mutually intensifying process (Maximus)—Same ideas in the West (Augustine, Ambrose, Hilary, Lombard, Albert, Aquinas), with emphasis on Spirits’ role in communio of Body of Christ (Ratzinger), allowing even for being constituted in esse divino in this life through the Spirit (Aquinas). III.3.b. Theoria and Praxis (p. 190): Because of interwoven activity of Son and Spirit, theoria and praxis, orthodoxy and orthopraxis are inseparable in field of revelation—Both beholding and doing have their origin in the Father and return to Him, though He appears beyond both. (p. 191): Spirit opens our eyes to preliminary theoria through faith in which we see Son’s praxis—We need to see the truth to have right praxis—Receiving faith also requires our freedom; theoria of discerning/ contemplating the Son is a unified gift and decision, something unhoped for and fought for, the primal reality of act embedded in theoria—Spirit not only points to Son but is interpreter and guide—Theoria is a challenge/readiness for discipleship, for Spirit leads us into whole phenomenon of Christ, rather than standing outside Christ, for the Spirit is in/above Him. (p. 193): 2. Since the Spirit accompanied Jesus’ incarnation, the latter was perfected in nakedness/the cry on the Cross, which is the perfect pneumatization of the Son, as He breathes out the Spirit—Saints become fully incarnate/persons to the extent that their mission becomes transparent in them—Prayer presupposes a distance between believer and God, and a familiarity, for the Spirit sets us in the ground of creaturehood. (p. 194): 3. Notion of Christian experience—Experience/Erfahrung is getting to know through making a journey—Since the Spirit leads us, we, journeying in experience, always experience more than our own decision/setting out e.g. receiving a gift, being empowered/accompanied/pushed along—Entering into the divine realm—In the Spirit, not the letter, of God’s word we find truth/Chrisitan theoria/contemplation/ hearing—Ignatian Exercises on feeling/tasting/smelling the things of God, attributed to gifts of the Spirit, but a penetration into the triune life. III.3.c. Concrete and Universal (p. 196): Being based in a particular historical person is Chrsitianity’s unique opportunity anad its abiding stumbling block—Dilemma of non-Christian religions is either the essence of the person is purely spiritual or the historical person is just one avatar among others; this can only be solved pneumatologically. (p. 196): 1. Jesus’ claim is universal, including/surpassing others—He can claim this because the Spirit of God rests on Him—Question of why He handed this universality over to the Spirit instead of implementing it Himself—His task was to carry out Trinitarian work of salvation within temporal limits of one human life, including being dead—Since Spirit is present in His words/deeds, what Jesus achieved cannot be handed over to the Spirit without His active presence/operation—The Spirit that raises Him is His Spirit, though this is primarily attributed to the Father –Jesus’ current reigning is allowing the Spirit to do what He is charged to do—Revelation of the Spirit never ends, but always preserves its newness—The Father’s two hands do not cease working in concert: Christ comes to us in the Spirit and bodily. (p. 200): 2. Christ identifies Himself with the truth in a Trinitarian sense, involving the interpretation of the Spirit and God’s faithfulness/goodness—Augustine on Trinitarian structure of truth—Spirit’s universalizing work is done within the faithful, not external to them, not involving coercion—The spermata pneumatika in the world, as seen in Church’s theology of baptismus in voto and spiritual communion—Some form of endowment with the Spirit indwells every concept of mission/person that comes from Christ. (p. 203): 3. Christ is present to faith as indivisible/believable Gestalt, but Spirit gives believers eyes to discern this by being drawn into the Gestalt itself, a form that is meaningless apart from the pro nobis of the Cross—Complementarity of the aesthetic and theo-dramatic views; theo-logic is discerned within the battle between infinite and finite freedom, which is concentrated in the Cross and descent into hell—Trinitarian inversion was needed for the Lord to become Servant—Prototype of creaturely readiness in the eternal Son—Son’s taking on of mutable human form requires mutation in His relation to the Spirit, Who is the Spirit of His loving response to the Father, which bring out in man the readiness to go to the limit in obeying the Father; the Spirit thereby gains an inner experience of creatureliness, plumbing the depths of the world, not remaining a detached observer, and this Spirit is breathed on the apostles. III.4. On the Filioque (p. 207): Question of whether metaphor of the Father’s two hands favors Greek theology of the Father’s monarchia—History of Western doctrine of filioque, from Tertullian through Augustine and Leo to 3rd Council of Toledo—Maximus on its reconcilability with Eastern views—Split in the time of Photius, who said the Spirit proceeded from the Father alone, and subsequent split in 1054—Later attempts at reconciliation and at dropping the filioque from the Creed—Possibility of diverse theological interpretations—History of West’s charges against the East. (p. 210): 1. Both sides can be accused of importing economic considerations into the immanent Trinity—But the economic and immanent Trinity are equal unless the economic form requires a change in the picture, as in the case of Trinitarian inversion—Contrary to Greeks, Spirit’s resting on Jesus at His baptism is economic and cannot be projected into immanent Trinity—Contra Palamas, no higher Godhead in which Spirit proceeds from Father alone and lower Godhead/sphere of energies in which Son mediates Spirit, for this obscures Trinity’s self-revelation. (p. 211): 2. Difficulty of finding a term for Spirit’s procession, though there is a similar difficulty in understanding how the Son proceeds—Starting from “binities” of Son and Spirit, and Father and Son, the attempt to establish Spirit’s mode of unity with the Father (Basil, Nazianzen) e.g. proceeding from Father dia Son—Ante-Nicene orthodox subordinationism (Marcus)—Eastern accusation that filioque gives power over Spirit to the Son, leading to Christomonism, papalist oppression, and legalism (Photius, Chomiakov, Karzavin, Lossky, but not Bulgakov). (p. 215): 3. Western perception of Eastern monarchia as entailing only the One is divine and that which is “caused” by Him i.e. Son and Spirit are subordinate (Nazianzen, Maximus, Cappadocians)—No reason for East to accuse Augustine of “essentialism.” (p. 216): 4. Reductio ad mysterium is clear in both approaches, especially in difficulty in giving credible account of procession of Holy Spirit—Greek model cannot clearly maintain inner Form and Love in the Trinity—Difficulty in Western model of explaining how Spirit can proceed from two persons, without proceeding directly from the nature or also from Himself (Photius)—These formalistic objections can be responded to by remembering that ‘person’ is not univocal for divine hypostases, and the name of love requires transcendental plurality (Augustine), and the Spirit is the epitome and fruit of divine Love—The mystery belonging to each Person, formulated in a way that is apophatic theology and doxology. IV. The Role of the Spirit in the Work of Salvation IV.1. Defining the Question (p. 221): Spirit is involved alongside Logos is work of salvation, but their work is distinguished, hence the question of how—We must move from multiplicity of functions to the unity of the One that gives them, but this requires that we already know that unity, which requires a choice for Eastern or Western model—Only the filioque allows us to call God “love” as Scripture does, including the principaliter a Patre and per Filium—Exemplarity of the Word seems to make the Son more apt to create and save, for He is exemplar of all possible worlds (Augustine, Bonaventure, Aquinas)—First procession in God seems to include entire circumincessio of knowledge and love—Spirit’s role comes beyond Father’s love for the Son and the Son as world’s exemplary cause—Early Patristic emphasis is on establishing Spirit’s divinity; emphasis here is on His specific attributes—Notion of procession is rather pale, being colored only through economic characteristics/notiones—Key words for how the living God manifests Himself in His mode of being as Spirit are gift, freedom, and inward/outward testimony IV.2. The Key Words of the Spirit IV.2.a. Gift (p. 225): 1. Gift must be given gratis and as expressing/giving the giver, or it remains a business transaction—Father gives entire Godhead without losing it—Giver is distinct from and present in gift, and giving requires the otherness of the other (Ulrich)—In receiving, the Son is thanksgiving/eucharistia and gift in return—Father and Son anticipate and complete one another in making and fulfilling requests (von Speyr)—Father and Son interpenetrate in loving self-surrender, neither is an “I” without a “thou”, showing identity of poverty and wealth in divine love; both receive mutuality as a gift, and this is an unfathomable more than their love, a fruit/overflowing in which the pure unmotivated nature of goodness comes to light as ultimate face/prosōpon of divinity, the Spirit that searches the ever-deeper abysses of Father and Son’s love—He is pure positivity of the Good, not itself self-emptying, but the goodness of self-emptying, the abiding origin-less-ness that guarantees Father and Son’s self-emptying, superior to the self-emptying of being (Ulrich)—Since He is gift first for Father and Son, He can be gift/God given to the world, and He can make the Son’s flesh and blood Eucharist to the Father that includes whole world. (p. 229): 2. In OT, Spirit of God penetrates all creation with His power—Hiatus between God and man is bridged by covenant in the climate of grace; distance only seems to be bridged when God equips people with His Spirit, but this external relationship must be transcended by interior relationship, and this requires the kenosis and Eucharist of the Son—Gift in divinization requires God crossing to man’s side in the Word, allowing grace in the full sense, not just OT favor, and this grace is Spirit of Father and of Christ without distinction—Being driven by the Spirt can be walking deliberately in the Spirit, for He is freedom and setting free. (p. 231): 3. Theology should beware of reducing mystery of the Spirit to words—Since Father has handed over to Son His entire divinity/freedom, He can endow man with self-subsistence and freedom—Divinization is rooted in incarnation of the Word—Grace as handing over of divine donum does not destroy dialogical relationship of Father and Son but brings it to supernatural perfection, so it does not destroy creature’s dialogical position over against God—Healing power of Spirit poured out on us, setting us free (Augustine)—Contra Reformers, Spirit’s work of justifying/sanctifying is dynamic, not sudden/dialectical event, so we can distincguish grace that initiates this process from sanctifying grace (Trent)—Divine grace really operates in creature, requiring separatrion of gift from Giver in the identity of Spirit given to the soul—Problems and positive points in Lombard’s view, in distinguishing uncreated from created grace–From below, human habitus are transformed, while from above, divine cqualities express themselves in creature—Since God is essentially spirit/self-giving/receiving/loving, His relation to creature s beyond opposition between physico-ontic and personal concepts—Thomism-Molinism debate fails to grasp God as Non Aliud—Bonum of Spirit contains twofold self-surrender of Father and Son. IV.2.b. Freedom (p. 236): All the Persons are free, but Spirit is free in the sense that there is no claim that He empties Himself of His freedom, unlike Father and Son—Encounter of Father and Son is procession of Spirit, as unity of two interpenetrating consents, resulting not from intellectual agreement but from surprise in which love shows itself to be more/more fruitful than envisaged even if it was most selfless of loves—The Spirit as love’s freedom owes its being to Father/Son and is ready to carry out their plans, but in a way free within the divine imagination, with His own original synthesis, blowing where He will—God as ever more/beyond the beyond (Plato, Nyssa)—Spirit is witness in a way allowing infinitely free interpretation—Spirit is the one Who brings things into effect e.g. Incarnation, bringing to light what is hidden—Spirit in/above Christ creates seamless unity between Father’s will and His divine-human readiness to accept everything—No circumventing encounter between divine Spirit’s and man’s freedom, even through mediation of Church—Spirit gives ability to make free choice for/against God, but He does not compel our freedom (Council of Orange contra Jansenius); His work is of attraction (Augustine) and advocacy (Irenaeus, Origen), freeing man to grasp his genuine freedom only by consenting to freedom of divine love indwelling Him—God’s freedom is not created freedom’s opposite “other” but the context for created freedom’s perfection—Father and Son refuse to be known except in terms of self-emptying/kenosis/exinanitio—Love requires death of going out to a thou for its perfection (Feuerbach), as seen in Christ and Mary. IV.2.c. Testimony (p. 242): Jesus first calls on the testimony of the Father to support the truth of His revelation, but testimony of Sprit is crucial for His work’s completion—Origin of this role of the Spirit in the Trinity: He is absolute knowledge of love from within, and objective testimony to the effect that this love takes place eternally—Similarities and dissimilarities with Hegel’s subjective/objective Spirit, which is based on theory of becoming not corresponding to Trinitarian taxis—Subjective and objective as two aspects of Spirit in His eternally realized being, not moments of unfolding knoweldge—Spirit’s role in Incarnation, Transfiguration, and Resurrection, giving spiritual fluidity to flesh withotu dissolving it into Spirit. (p. 245): Two-in-one quality of Spirit’s work shows itself in Church’s structure in varied ways—Church as Bride and Body has physical/visible and spiritual/invisible aspects, rooted in Jesus’ flesh, with Spirit’s two-fold form imprinted on it—This form is love, so all Church’s objective institutions are work of divine love, just as much as is the subjective holiness that the institutions make possible—Only from our imperfect perspective is there tension between pneuma and institution; from Spirit’s perspective, they are one, just as He is act and fruit—Church’s official/sacramental functions are utmost concrete form of her personal encounter with subject (Kehl)—Spirit’s testimony is incarnational, and all spiritualizing idealism or philosophy, theology, or mysticism against the body are anti-Christian—Before seeing Church as institution, we must see it as organism—Anyone called to discipleship is called to obedience of the Cross—Spirit is both in and above order in the Church, making a tension from the beginning between official ministerial order and community charisms, which the Spirit is also in and above—Spirit’s and Church’s testimony are not simply identical/of equal rank. V. The Spirit and the Church (p. 253): Questions in this next section can only be treated generally/in fragments—Our reason can have intimations of nexus mysteriorum, but cannot apprehend mysteries as it can truths that are its proper object (Vatican I), and the Spirit, for the sake of His own systematics, upsets all our artificial systems—God’s single revelation is seen as in a kaleidoscope. V.1. The Church Becomes World; The World Becomes Church V.1.a. God’s Goal: The Salvation of the World (p. 255): God’s plan in sending the Son is to redeem world, not just Church—Universality of Son’s work corresponds to that of the Spirit—Unity of Christ’s cosmic rule is mediated through Church, who owes her being to Christ’s crucified body, which includes whole cosmos—John 3 on universality of Spirit, equally universal to cosmic Christ; new birth is through faith prior to baptism—Church in innermost being is oriented to world in missionary manner; need to revise positions of Origen, Augustine in light of Spirit’s universality—Church’s mission to the world is evident through existence of many Christian communities whose baptism is not invalid, so there is no direct opposition of Church and world, and also Christian faith/ ideas radiate beyond the Church’s boundaries, an anonymous leavening of all cultures with Biblical substance (Islam, Marx, Gandhi, Zen), attributable to operation of Spirit in the whole world. V.1.b. The Church’s Twofold Movement (p. 259): Church must teach truth in a way cultures can understand i.e. engage in inculturation, but also ensure that truth is not splintered but embraced in her pleromatic unity—Elements of non-Christian cultures can be baptized—Christian elements that have been distorted in an anti-Christian way can be brought home e.g. notions of human rights in American, French, and UN declarations of human rights (Paul VI, John Paul II, Lustiger)—Not everything can be embraced in unity of the Church, and so the missionary will be persecuted—Missionary activity can address both natural law and superadded grace in all men (Aquinas)—Tripartite anthropology on which soul is in perpetual dramatic situation of decision between body and what is supernaturally pneumatic—Proclaiming the Gospel requires starting with a Christology from below (Rahner) and cosmic Christology (de Chardin), but these can never of themselves turn into a Christology from above, and so a dramatic act of repentance/faith is needed, requiring the grace of Christ—Ethics in situation of missionary dialogue is mediation between dogmatics and pneumatology, and a decision between autonomous and theonomous ethics—Question of the nature of true selflessness—Buddhist religion of nirvana/samsara cannot grasp Christian kenosis—Christian revelation cannot be embraced in its fullness apart from its Jewish pre-history, which no inculturation can replace—John Paul II’s social teaching see things simultaneously at the level of philosophical anthropology and theological fulfillment, the latter of which has anthropological fulfillment—The Spirit unveils the godlessness/inhumanity of the crucifying powers (Dantine)—Final criterion for discernment of spirits is whether secular power devotes itself to service of Christian love or whether Christian love uses secular power to allegedly attain its goals, a problem ever since the Constantinian shift; need for constant vigilance in discernment of spirits where there is a tendency toward power—Love can only be poured out by God and received by the poor in spirit. V.1.c. Justification, Sanctification, Freedom (p. 266): God’s work of reconciling world to Himself applies to whole cosmos, though it is particularly fruitful/manifest in the Church—Spirit’s role is inseparable from work of reconciliation/liberation the Father does in the Son—Christ strips cosmic powers of independent power through His work of reconciliation; in His body, we experience the body of creation, but formed by the Church not the cosmic powers—Spirit operates in Son’s work/being, whether we place emphasis on Incarnation, redemption, or satisfaction—Hebrews 9:14 refers to the Holy Spirit—Spirit’s share in acto primo of Jesus reconciling God and world on the Cross; we are there objectively delivered from the burden of sin, even if we cannot see it, effecting a real change in relationship of sinner to God—Review of Theo-Drama on freedom, especially in the context of the covenants—God frees us from our egoistic drives/passions and frees us for a personal mission for the sake of the whole Body—All genuine personal freedom seeks the freedom of all, and this is the basis of the freedom of Church from world and of state ruled by law from depotism—Most interior mode of receiving freedom from Spirit is open readiness, and this allows us to be in-formed by divine freedom, which has a particular form in the covenant and in God’s particular will for each one of us—This dependence on/giftedness from God’s freedom explains why we cannot reconcile ourselves to God by our own power (Luther, Augustine, Plotinus, Procus, Iamblichus)—Sanctification depends on God alone being substantially holy, and so the divine Spirit of holiness alone can anoint the finite spirit with divine holiness (Second Council of Orange)—Justification has a history including preliminary stages (Trent) and a goal, which one can lag behind, and so there is a Catholic sense in which one can be non-contradictorialy simul justus et peccator—As in the OT, we in the NT only are on the way to fulfillment, but we are based on a perfect act of faith, in Mary, in whom the Church is the immaculata—Question of how the unjust man can become the justice of God as his own, not just forensically, without denying all we know of justice. V.2. From the Civitas Dei to the Church (p. 275): The universality of offered salvation results in movement of Church to world and world to Church, since the Spirit blows where He wills, and Christ breathes Him out to all nations. V.2.a. Augustine’s Civitas Dei (p. 275): Universal, world-embracing synthesis of Augustine’s Christian theology of history—Antecedents in Plato’s Republic, in Plutarch on Alexander, in Virgil on Augustus, in the Bible’s Noahic covenant, and in Tertullian’s adaptation of universal vision of Stoics—Epistle to Diognetus on Christians as soul of earthly/ political world, a cosmopolitanism with an acosmic basis (Scholz), with the transcendnet Kingdom of God immanent in the earthly kingdom, but also suffering conflict/persecution—Scriptural symbolism of Jerusalem and Babylon (Tyconius)—Question of whether Augustine changed from conception of civitas based on justice (Cicero) to one based on love—Universality of the civitas Augustine envisions is vitiated by his a priori system of predestination—Difficulty of identifying Augustine’s Civitas Dei with the Catholic Church (Salin); he does not allow the City of God to have the same extension as the objective scope of Christ’s saving act—History begins with Ecclesia ab Abel and is centered on Christ’s sacrifice, understood in terms of love. V.2.b. Paul’s Parable of the Cultivated Olive Tree (p. 280): For Paul, Christ’s universal position/act ground totality of body of Christ—Insistance on Israel’s prerogative in the theology of history, and that of Abrahamic covenant—Question of whether distinguishing old and new covenants obscures unity of election of People of God—Israel’s abiding substance in the Church (Lustiger) but Israel only finds fulfillment in being directed to Christ—Lively fellowship of ecclesia ex gentibus and ecclesia ex circumcision, symbolled in Revelation—Question of when the Church in the full sense comes into being; consideration of various possibilities, and rejection of idea of a progressive giving of the Spirit—Church is perfected on Cross/Holy Saturday, but the precondition of this is Mary’s overshadowing by the Holy Spirit, and her “Yes” remains as a Realsymbol even after the Cross; Mary bears the Church within herself potentially just as Jesus bears the Body within Himself potentially—God’s Word and Spirit were present in the prophets and Synagogue and since Abel, but prospectively/dynamically—There is always a looking forward to the Redeemer of all humanity regardless of covenant: Jesus opens all covenants to the universality of creation, and in the end all of redeemed creation will be taken up into the Church. V.2.c. The Problem of “Corporate Personality” (p. 285): Questions of whether “I-writ-large” and “corporate personality” contributes anything here (Mühlen, Robinson, de Fraine)—Rootedness of these ideas in extended family e.g. of OT period, of clan periods of history: each individual is a person not for himself, but in and for the others—Doubtful whether this conception applies to NT Body of Christ, with Christ as “primal I” extending Himself into Church, as Yahweh did into Istrael—Cullmann on the hourglass shape of salvation history—Mühlen on the corporate union between Christ and the Church mediated by Holy Spirit, Who in his view is a Person in two Persons, and so He can be one Spirit in Christ and the many persons of the faithful, and his rejection of Trinitarian inversion—Question of relationship between exact Christ ruling the cosmos and the missionary Church articulated by the Spirit; danger of reducting Christ and Church to one person (Pelz). V.3. Son and Spirit in the Church V.3.a. “The Lord Is the Spirit” (p. 291): World redemption begins with Son’s work of the Passion in the Spirit, which He then hands over from the Father to the Church—In collaboration of Son and Spirit now, there is no absolute distinction or simple equating—Paul presents both Eucharist and Spirit as grounds for the Body of the Church—We are not taken in the hypostatic union or Christ’s physical body—The mystery of the admirabile commercium in which Christ takes sin from us into His body of the Cross and gives to us the form of His transfigured Body—Jesus’ death as cause and prototype of participation in His body; charisms are forms of His surrendered life and are both passively being sacrificed through Christ and active self-offerings with Him (Ratzinger)—Christ sacrifices Himself in the Spirit for us, and at His death, breathes forth the Spirit to the Father and to the world; the Spirit is both the Father’s mandatum and the Son’s obedience; here, economic distinction of roles/inversion lose their meaning, and the Spirit is the Trinitarian Spirit Who is both subjective epitome of Father/Son’s love and objective donum that (contra Mühlen) is not kenotic—Objective/sacramental/hierarchical expression of Spirit’s formative presence deepens His subjective/personal presence, and so Church’s structure exhibits anagogic movement toward perfected communio of the Resurrection: corporeality as agglomeration of material masses will be discared at Resurrection in favor of embodiment/Leiblichkeit in which the material is transformed by coming under sovereign law of the Spirit/being pneumatized/fluidized, as seen in Christ’s universalized risen body (Schmaus, Hengstenberg)—Son gives Himself in the Spirit, and so the Spirit presses toward perfect embodiment, alien to Idealist spiritualization; Catholic Church is recognizable through embodied form—Spirit’s tendency to embodiment manifests the Son, and Spirit’s love manifests the Father; Spirit is definitive interpreter of divine logic, and communicates gnosis incommunicable in words—Jesus now utters Spirit-words to the Church, as seen in Revelation—Jesus does not override the Spirit’s function; the Spirit is both Pneuma Christi and a distinct free divine Hypostasis, apportioning charisms as He wills. V.3.b. Withdrawal as a Precondition of the Gift of the Spirit (p. 297): While Son and Spirit are inseparably unified, Jesus must withdraw from earth to send the Spirit and be present spiritually—The risen Lord’s wish to withdraw from visibility, as seen in various Resurrection accounts, especially Emmaus, as interpreted by Aquinas—Jesus’ demand that the disciples be glad that He is withdrawing, which requires that they receive the Holy Spirit of perfect selflessness, which is the fruit of His withdrawal; we receive the Spirit only in renouncing our selves and the tangible/visible/ experiential Jesus—Son’s death as revelation of selfless kenosis of the love of Father and Son at the heart of the Trinity, which is the precondition for the procession of the absolute non-kenotic Spirit of love—Gift of Pentecost points to both Church’s missionary openness to the world and to disciples’ imitation of Christ in persecution and death understood as martyrion. V.3.c. The Church’s Head and Soul? (p. 301): Problem of theological metaphors on which Christ is only Head of Church and Spirit is only her Soul—Origins of head and body metaphors in different Pauline letters; origin of soul metaphor in Fathers, Scholastics, and modern encyclicals, and similar Scriptural language about animation of the Church also applied to Eucharist, while Origen says the soul of the Church is Christ and Suárez says it is faith—Christ’s union with His Bride takes place both in Spirit and Eucharist—Interpenetration of the two metaphors—While we dwell in the flesh/pilgrim condition, all that is spiritual/charismatic must be put into visible structures, which are filled with goods by pneumatic Christ i.e. Church now is both pre- and post-Easter, both intersecting in Jesus’ death, and in the Eucharist the whole Church is summoned to enter the sacrifice: no redeemed existence that is not also a sacrificial existence (Auer), which is presupposed by all the Spirit’s charisms—Objective opus operatum must be joined to subjective interior conformity to Christ. V.4. Spirit: Subjective and Objective V.4.a. The Meaning and Limits of the Distinction (p. 307): Distinction between objective/institutional and subjective/existential elements of the Church arise out of Christological tension between pre- and post-Easter existence of Jesus and out of Spirit’s two-fold aspect as love between Father and Son and as objective product/fruit/testimony of that love, not (contra Hegel) in Spirit’s need to objectify itself—In both economic and immanent Trinity, the Spirit is principle both maintaining and unifying the distinctions, having the office of making the Church into a representations of the unio achieved prototypically in Christ (Dorner); in Trinity, union and distinction, love and testimony, are identical (Mühlen)—As God, Jesus obeys the Father in the Spirit in the same Spirit-love the Father offers Him; as man, Jesus receives this love as mandatum and oboedientia—Ecclesial form of existence corresponds to Jesus pre-Easter/mortal existence, and so exhibits distinction between objective and subjective structure, but transcends this structure insofar as it sees mandatum Patris as economic form of the Father’s love/obedience as invitation to enter that love—No clean separation between objective and subjective in Spirit’s structuring/sanctifying of the Church—Greatest difficulty of bearing witness when one’s love is most purified—What is objectivistic about Church is expression of divine subjectivity; objectivity of absolute love incarnate in Scripture, sacraments, tradition, preaching, office, and canon law always transcends subjective awareness of closeness to God: what is in these objective elements is itself a living source—Every NT official cult is personal, leading people into personal communio sanctorum—opus operatum without opus operantis is necessary due to sin, but is something that ought not be, in God’s redemptive plan, bring fruitless for the minister even if fruitful for those who receive it. V.4.b. The Church: Two in One (p. 310): 1. Unity of Spirit and flesh cannot be dissolved, and so the post-Easter Spirit, to be authentic, must point back to Jesus’ coming in the flesh, which goes to the Cross—Spirit is interpreter of economic love of Father and Son for the world in service of Christological distinction between mortal/tangible and exalted/ untouchable Son—Spirit is both unattainable objective holiness and subjective holiness that must strive for the former—Full form of objective holiness is circumincessio of Scirpture, tradition, and office (Dei Verbum)—Objective Holy Psirit in the Church guarantees God’s unmanipulable sovereignty even in personal encounter with Him—Church’s unity can only come from Spirit, not men—Objective, not subjective holiness apply to Scripture, sacraments, councils, etc. (p. 312): 2. Distinction/reciprocity between Church’s subjective and objective holiness seen in representative, omnipresent figures of Mary and Peter, both connected to but distinguished from priesthood of all believers—Mary’s elevation above priesthood, offering her own flesh on behalf of mankind (Bernard, Laurentin, Albert): hierarchical priest must try to acquire subjective attitude of Mary at the Cross—Peter and the disciples must leave everything to be entrusted with objective mission, and they must subjectively strive to live up to this/respond: ministerial office tends to subjective holiness, but Mary’s subjective holiness does not trend to objective office—Mary must just extend her unconditional Yes to surrendering the fruit of her body, allowing her Son to perform the sacrifice—Objective holiness exists for the sake of subjective movement of Church’s members toward Christ’s holiness in the Spirit; Marian perfect subjective holiness is precondition for existence of Christ and is Mother of entire subjective-objective Church. (p. 315): 3. Spirit’s two-fold effect of office and charism; in Paul and Gospels, the two are confusingly almost one, but still distinct: non-hierarchical charisms are distinct from those that confer office, but the latter must exhibit charismatic features—Even highest charisms are useless without love—Prior to office-charism distinction, ordinary Christian life is charismatic—Lists of charisms in Romans and 1 Cor are accidental/situational; later charisms, such as genuine theology, mysticism, and the charisms of great religious founders—Spirit is source of both charismatic elements of Church and non-charismatic ecclesial charisms, and the tension between them must be endured in spirit of ecclesial peace/obedience, even when anguished (e.g. cases of Mary Ward, Ignatius of Loyola)—Hierarchy’s task of discerning spirits, but also cases of charisms criticizing the hierarchy. V.5. Objective Spirit V.5.a. Tradition-Scripture-Church Office (p. 319): OT and NT covenants and Church are more than all the objective testimonies of them, though the testimonies go far beyond any individual relationship to God—Spirit, unseparated from Christ, is sovereign Lord of Scripture, tradition, and office—God’s act of traditio i.e. entrusting Himself, prior to writing of Scripture, which is a testimony of the certainty of His covenant faithfulness in a time of desolation, including Israel’s response to God—Jesus knows Himself as the speaker/actor Father’s final word to the world, and the earth’s fully valid response; he establishes pattern for interpretation of Scirpture as unweiling of meaning of the whole Covenant that is Christ—Interpretation of OT as allegory or typology of Christ, which was greater than anything that could be written down—Aquinas’ reasons why Christ could not give any written document to us—The Gospel is Christ Himself, upon Whom the Spirit draws as the Lord of the work of interpretation—Origen’s doctrine of Christ’s physical, Eucharistic/mystical, and Scriptural bodies, but no embodiment can fully contains God’s inner self-surrender as act: faith and love are required to truly receive Scripture, Eucharist and office in the Spirit—Primacy of tradition as Church’s mission i.e. handing on God’s gift of love, addressed primarily to hearts, not primarily the handing on of written text of NT—NT is an instrument whererby the OT is opened to new mystery of Christ (Ratzinger); it is an aid given by the Spirit as a sure standard for tradition, but only within tradition (Rahner): the Church has reverence for but also freedom from the Scirptures (Irenaeus, Blondel)—Sufficiency of Scripture given its place in the Church, not as sola scriptura norm over against the Church; revelation was complete with the Cross/Resurrection, but this can be interpreted in ever-deeper ways by Spirit—Pastoral office’s task of guaranteeing genuineness of interpretation (Clement, Ignatius, Irenaeus)—The place of councils and juridical functions—Scripturre only has its place within tradition, as guided by the Spirit (Bouyer), contra the Reformers’ religion of the book, and contra those who put kerygma or spiritual experience in the first place—Spirit’s role in Scripture-tradition-office overcomes any one-sided attachment to the past; elements of the past like Fathers and Doctors maintain presence/currency due to supratemporal understanding of Christians in communio sanctorum—Individual believers can be enlightened by the magister interior, apart from magisterium externum, but always with view to vocation, not privately (Möhler, Newman). V.5.b. Proclamation and Liturgy (p. 328): Importance of preaching/homiletics in Catholic theology since Vatican II (responding to Barth’s criticism)—Task of proclaiming the Good News required sending of the Spirit—Paul’s awareness of the need to be sent by the Spirit in order to preach, since Spirit makes Son and Father present—Proclamation makes salvation present as event, both in community’s worship and in mission to unbelievers; the preacher must make what is objectively present also subjectively present—Even without special missio, every Christian is empowered/obligated to proclaim content of faith in what he says/lives—The influence of a preachers’ wordless way of life (1 Pet 3:1, Duployé contra Mauriac)—Scripture points beyond itself to ever-living mystery which must be proclaimed, similar to von Humboldt’s remarks about language in general—All proclamation in the Church always transcends itself, since historical past of Son’s theophany made present by the Spirit is every greater than what proclamation can encompass, and because pneumatic/ eschatological Lord can only be embraced in hope, not sight—Apostle’s task in the Spirit as builder of the community. (p. 333): The Supper as doxology to God but does not contain anything estoteric in itself (Justin) and has benefit for the whole world—Gathering of believers on behalf of the world occurs through the Spirit—Christians who celebrate in the Spirit behold the Lord’s glory and transformed into it—Liturgy is bodily sacrifice not self-interiorization/affirmation, and it must be concretely realized in the world eschatologically/cultically—Pauline priestly sacrifice is public, official, eschatological, universal, all given by the Spirit. V.5.c. Sacraments (p. 335): Objective work of God’s spirit in opus operatum can never dispense with cooperation of human partner (opus operantis), even if that partner is a proxy, as in infant baptism; prototype is Incarnation, which only occurs through cooperation of Mary—Examples from Eucharist, Baptism, Confession—In the basic shape of the sacramental event, Spirit draws the individual into the ecclesial realm with its objective holiness, which fills out any subjective inadequacies—Borderline/emergency cases do not call into question the basic form of the sacraments; sacraments reveal the finite nature of Church’s knowledge of the range of God’s mercy, but they are not arbitrary: borderline cases rely on the vital center—Christ’s intention in the sacraments is for manto participate in objective holiness in His Church, to promote his subjective efforts to follow Christ. (p. 337): Baptism-confirmation: Close linking of these sacraments, both of which endow us with the Spirit at a fundamental level—Diverse forms of these sacraments in Acts and the early Church—Baptism as Christologically dying with/into Christ and pneumatologically being reborn through the Holy Spirit; only through these sacraments do we acquire a share in Christ, by being introduced into the objective mystery of salvation. (p. 338): Penance: Penance as the second plank of salvation—Spirit empowers the Church to grant the ecclesial/subjective Spirit to those separated from the communion of Saints, in a way arising out of the Father’s foregiveness, which is the fruit of the Cross—Contrition, confession, and resolution requires looking into the objective norm held up by the Spirit. (p. 339): Eucharist: Eucharist is central, but what takes place in Eucharistic action is more than a sacrament—Spirit’s role in the Eucharist—Question of the epiclesis—Early litrurgies’ request to the Logos to incarnate/eucharistize Himself in the bread and wine; here, epicleses of the Spirit were epicleses of the Logos, due to the Spirit-Christology in play then (Hippolytus)—Change with Athanasius: the Person of the Spirit is inseparable from the Logos—Jesus’ passivity in giving Himself away as food (Nyssa, Gese) in which the Spirit has charge of all that is His; His self-surrender is His mightiest deed: in pouring Himself out in the Spirit, He gives rise to all the charisms for the Body—The Roman Canon shows how the entire word is Trinitarian—The Latin epiclesis, uttered in obedience, in which the Marian Church is drawn into Christ’s sacrifice—The sacrifice of praise summons one’s whole life in response, the whole community being incorporated into Christ’s sacrifice—In the Spirit, the people are not only drawn into God’s activity, but exist first of all by it. (p. 343): Matrimony: Matrimony is a parable elevated from human nature of the Eucharistic union of Chrsit and the Church; measured by this highest union, Christian marriage is more than it was in the beginning: the required love is sos ultimate it can only be attributed to the indwelling Spirit who transforms eros into agape, subjective love elevated to norm of objective love, which is the subjective love that is the Spirit—Even in natural love, there is total self-expropriation for the spouse/an ultimate achievement of the human spirit, and this is all heightened further in Christian marriage—Agape, which is the Spirit’s proper name, only has concrete being in love between Christ and the Church, in which spouses participate—Full awareness of that participation allows renouncing it, nourished by the pneumatic, but still embodied, love of Christ and the Church, acquiring a share in the Church’s supernatural fruitfulness; in this sense, virginity is superior to marriage (Trent; compare Kierkegaard). (p. 345): Priestly ordination: Invocations of the Spirit in various ordination prayers—Theologians seem more concerned with Christological aspect of priesthood, not its connection to the Spirit—Tension between being with Christ and being sent/expropriated away from Him to preach, and so priest represents both Christ and the Church i.e. His Mystical Body i.e. really two Christological aspects—Ordination is in the form of a gift of the Holy Spirit—Trinitarian connection of the priestly ministry: the Church is marked by the objective figure of Christ and the inner life of the Spiri (Greshake)—Priesthood is a distinctive kind of charism, from the objective Spirit, tha confers authority in Church leadership—Communio is a work of both the Spirit and Christ Who sacrifices Himself in the Spirit—We must grasp objective holiness of the Spirit to grasp the character of priesthood, which is distinct from the priest’s personal holiness, though the office absolutely demands subjective holiness—The bishop objectively is in the state of perfection i.e. of love, since his office expropriates him totally for love of his flock—Dangers in both identifying objective and subjective holiness (Tertullian, Donatists) and totally separating them: the connection is a question of the logic of an indivisible unity between objective and subjective aspects of the Spirit. (p. 349): Anointing in the face of the approach of death: Facing death is fundamental situation of human existence, and so it requires a sacrament—Connection of Christ facing death, healing those facing death, and calling His disciples to follow Him in His unique death and His healing ministry—Early interpretation of this sacrament as meaning physical healing; medieval discernment of deeper significance of caring for man in gravest situations—Early eschatological significance given to Baptism (Lohfink) has been transferred to anointing of the sick—Opposition to using this sacrament for those not immanently in danger of death—This sacrament is a renewal of baptism (Greshake); the imparting of the Spirit in Baptism acquires ultimate urgency here, in a readiness to hand oneself over completely to divine Mercy (Aquinas)—Here, the Spirit most assuredly intercedes for us, hence the forgiveness of sins by this sacrament. V.5.d. Canon Law (p. 352): Complementarity of Spirit, love, and law (Käsemann contra Sohm)—Even in OT, law is not set against charismatic elements—God’s choice to take over Israel makes an exclusive demand on Israel, feels like an imposition to sinners, but is really an ennobling prerogative; creation was made to be filled by this covenant—God has an absolute right to the people’s love because He loves them in this unfathomable way—Fulfillment of OT love structure in Trinitarian love displayed in Christ, which removes all appearance of arbitrariness, for what He does is what He is—To refuse this love is self-condemnation—Fundamental structure of the community Christ founds is unity of God’s love and brotherly love, which is the basis of law; canon law arises from discipleship of Christ, as the guarantee that the Church must not be anything other than the community of love given by Christ in the Spirit—All believers are equally indebeted to Christ’s Cross/Eucharist, which creates a community in Him that is primarily ontological not sociological—Ministry is for service—Penance in the Church is a privilege; excommunication is for the sake of communio—Christ’s humanity is already sacramental, and this is infused into the whole Church—Spirit operates in all ecclesial states—Canon law is liturgical/confessional law (Barth)—Church’s constitutive elements are totally immanent in/inseparable from each other: this makes the Church a reflection of the Trinity and the operation of the Spirit in her a salvific interpretation of unity/distinction between Father and Son. V.5.e. Theology (p. 358): One cannot interpret faith without faith, which requires Spirit’s interior illumination/subjective grace and His objective light that He sheds on faith’s content, which compels worship—Theology does not work without prayer (Markus Barth) and nothing is worthy of theological reflection unless it can be subject of prayer—The theologian is confronted with the fullness of God’s truth, greater than what he understood, though he cannot take a merely apophatic stance—The theologian must make faith plausible to those who do not yet believe—Theology is a linguistic event, on which we must reflect, not just a miracle of grace. (p. 359): 1. Human understanding begins with encountering a thou/freedom that is not my own, which indicates a particular state of affairs—Language/indicative acts can only take place in common horizon of pre-linguistic intellection or in indemonstrable freedom of every speaker whose utterance we must believe—To be addressed is to be indebted to the free utterance, and address can only be understood in a horizon not indifferent to our freedom—Religions can sweep away everything within this open horizon or they can take things otherwise thought contradictory and reconcile them in this horizon—Example of how last song in Mahler’s Das Leid von der Erde unites all paradoxes of existence in overarching ewig, though conceptual philosophical language cannot do this: mutually contradictory existentales like sleep-waking, life-death, possession-loss are chosen to be graspsed in a Whole posited as valid/meaningful beyond our constructions. (p. 361): 2. Only in Christ can language between free I and thou coincide with pre/supra-linguistic horizon encompassing both of them i.e. in a God Who is simultaneously Himself and His Word—Freedom of two speakers encounter one another in single horizon of meaning in the Godhead, with aspects of indebtedness, astonishment, surprise, blessedness smoothed out: the Son can endure the contradictions of human life because He remains united to God the Father in the single horizon of divine love—Creatures can have a certain pre-understanding of this, but only to see it as a boundary case, where God is just one factor in human existence, not as a Trinitarian theology, where the Spirit is the interpreter of the unity of word and linguistic horizon in Christ—The Word-made-flesh is beyond all particular language games, as an utterance of total existence, making as single human existence normative for the entire horizon; all particular modes of speech, such as symbol, myth, metaphor, parable, demand/permit plurality of forms, while Jesus categorical claims to possess uniquely the identity of utterance and horizon. (p. 362): 3. This identity must be discernible from the phenomenon itself, and so faith requires an objective Holy Spirit Who produces/attests the unity of Father and Word, and Who then subjectively discloses this unity to believers’ faith, showing that it is objective true that the contradictions of existence, such as the cry of dereliction and His constant unity with the Father, are not absolute, but are dissolved in absolute love—God’s mercy is beyond kindness and punishment, since it dissolves punishment in love, but this image of God must be unveiled by the Spirit: it is not a mere objective fact, for there is no aesthetics without a dramatics—Need to simplify scattered elements to comprehend apparent contradictions in a unified vision (William of St. Thierry), and this simplicity unfolds to theology through discipleship—God begins with an answer we cannot produce; faith can only understand the Word in its total context, at the heart of which is the pro nobis of the Cross, which renders all His words intelligible and realizes the id quo magis cogitari nequit, which is the work of the Spirit. (p. 365): 4. Theology was prayer/confessing in the great Fathers, medievals up to Bonaventure, and in Pascal, Kierkegaard, Newman; they all only put forward rational theology incidentally, to defend faith against heresy, and because prayerful theology needs it since the God Who finds me must be continually sought, since I am a seeker (Anselm)—The task is to grasp what the Spirit has already presented to the theologian—Theology is intimately bound up with liturgy/adoration, similar to Plato’s use of myth; man’s response to God’s total revelation of ultimate love seeks widest realm of comprehensive glorification, in a total work of art (Suger of St. Denis), requiring us to take art’s power of theological utterance very seriously—Attention to history of theolgy is not backwards-looking, but is conversation in ever-present communion of saints, gathered above time in the Spirit—Faith is the Church’s confession before the world. V.6. Subjective Spirit (p. 369): In theology of the Spirit, subjective and objective are the twofold manifestation of His one indivisible Personhood—Subjective aspects must not be separated from objective preconditions; we must avoid subjectivistic/charismaticist pietism—Task of Spirit is to fashion saints—Guiding criterion for assessing instances is seeing how Spirit is Interpreter of God’s revelation in Christ. V.6.a. Spirit and Prayer (p. 369): Son and Father only encounter each other in the Spirit; Jesus only prays to the Father in the Spirit—God discloses Himself in the Spirit (Schlier)—The Spirit enables, but does not make, the cry of Abba in the hearts of the children born of God; Abba is the sound made by self as gift, by the Son, and it expresses the hearing by which He receives His being as Word from the Father, and our hearing of the Word too—The Spirit enables us to enter into God’s personal dialogue, which is the Spirit—Origin of all Biblical hearing is the hearing by which we receive ourselves as gift and our hearing of the Word proceeding from the Father; though we often call this contemplation, the Biblical. term ‘hearing’ is more personal: all Christian prayer is an answer in the Spirit—In eternity, hearing and reflecting will be progressive, because God’s sources are inexhaustible—The unlimited language, in the Spirit, of the Word made flesh—Christ’s prayer is infallibly heard, as is our asking in the name of Jesus—We do not attain the fully adequate insight/petition of the Son—Spirit witnesses that we are children/heirs of God provided we suffer with Him, though we are part of the futility of creation, and its groaning for the glory of the new world—Subhuman cosmos too looks for something it cannot envisage, as are we, though we can hope for it—If we do not wait with the proper patience, as a share in Christ’s Passion, the Spirit helps us in our weakness—If Spirit is to render our prayer effective, we must declare our solidarity with creation’s suffering/Christ’s suffering for creation, since in the Spirit, everything private is obsolete—We must not be resigned to our weakness; unintelligible glossolalia must be interpreted into intelligible prophecy, and ecstatic depths must be rendered fruitful for practical apostolic life: man by obedience must make his mind a useful tool for the Spirit—Consequences of mysticism for the community and the individual mystic; examples of Thérèse of Liseux and Catherine of Siena. V.6.b. Forgiveness (p. 377): Divine initiative in forgiveness can only be effective in us if we forgive others—Forgiveness transcends cosmic and social justice, exculpation of crimes as psychological illness, restitution, clementia as self-control in punishing; forgiveness relativizes but does not vitiate sphere of cosmic and social justice—Expiation is motivated by love, not penal justice, i.e. love between Father and Son which clears path for outpouring of Spirit of love—Christian forgiveness by God or men is not dependent on the guilty’s repentance—God on the Cross operate as original righteousness, being ready to send His Spirit into the hearts of sinners—Conversion of others is achieved by sharing in the Son’s attitude on the Cross, in the Spirit, not by psychological pressure. V.6.c. Experience of the Spirit (p. 379): In the face of Montanism/Messalinism/Reformers, cautiousness about the question of whether one can know whether the Spirit indwells him—Some faith experience is necessary—Holy Spirit can operate in our spiritual nature only if we have a created ability to love, since God works in every worker according to its kind; we can only know we have the Spirit by probable reasoning (Aquinas)—Internal evidence of the Spirit arises only from our believing/surrendered existence e.g. in obeying the commandments—Three degrees of Christian experience of the Spirit (Mouroux): empirical experience which is always ambiguous, experimental evidence which is based on a consciously performed technique, and expérientiel experience which arises from and must prove itself in the totality of the person’s life—Church and individual can only know all this by the Spirit’s interpretation, revealing unity of objective and subjective Spirit; because of the darkness of faith, we only experience the Spirit through mediation of His signs, which all have in common the unity of life—These levels must be used to judge the tradition’s spiritual feeling/tasting—Even archetypal experiences were experiences in faith; we recognize decisive Christian experiences only by their fruits, not by the criterion of delectation, all of which points us toward the total achievement/stance of a life—Life guided by the Spirit will always point to bearing witness/martyrdom, rather than enthusiasm being its sign, and this life will always involve the experience of historical reality in an attitude of hopeful, eschatological expectation. V.6.d. Discernment of Spirits (p. 385): The Holy Spirit is always in the background of any doctrine of spirits, since we must discern which are genuine—This gives rise to three problem areas. (p. 386): 1. We are faced with choice between Spirit of God and spirit of the serpent, the choice between forms of life with or without God—Because of darkenss of faith/abilty of evil to appear as light, we must practice discernment—Prophets’ criteria of true and false prophecy—No bridge between paths of wise man and fool—Apocalyptic/Qumran doctrine of the opposed good and evil empires/spirits for each person, taken up by Hermas, Origen, the monastic tradition, up to Dionysius the Carthusian; this view should have passed away in light of NT requirement for discernment of spirits as charism of the Spirit: doctrine of discretio spirituum in Bernard, Richard of St. Victor, Aquinas, Ignatius—Criteria for the Spirit in the community e.g. the fruits, the confession or denial of Jesus as Son of God; interior witness is only genuine if it involves faith and brotherly love—Ignatian rules for discerning spirits, which are for the purpose of making a choice of will of God or path in life, and his experiences of consolation and desolation, which are ambiguous; choice of God-appointed life should arise out of unity of divine and human freedom, which is the goal of the Exercises, and since all ways of life are within the Church, subjectivity must be in part controlled by objective Church. (p. 392): 2. Discernment of spirits must be applied to the Charismatic Movement—Frequent criticisms of this movement—Discernment of spirits is a specific charism that can be attributed to the community as a whole—Charismatic prayer groups are genuine if they fit into/bear fruit in surrounding Church—Spirit does not do His own work but fosters the work of Christ as Interpreter: a Pneumatology is sound inasmuch as it points to Christ—Centrality of speaking in tongues in Pentecostalism—Contrast of Pentecost xenoglossia to Corinthian glossolalia—Criticism of the role that speaking in tongues plays in Protestant and Catholic Charismatic movements; hypotheses as to why it is so attractive to so many—Criticism of the view that the charism of healing is a normal part of Christian discipleship; patient acceptance of suffering and death can bear more fruit—Place of prophecy for Paul—Reflection on the question of what authentic living in the Spirit would look like must keep in mind that he Church does not begin with Pentecost experience, and that the Spirit sends Christians into the world with unified subjective and objective sides—1. Spirit always directs attention in new ways to Cross/Resurrection only accessible through the Cross, and all charismatic contemplation must keep this central—2. Christians only have value in virtue of love; gifts of the Spirit are given only to men with faith, hope, and love (Aquinas)—3. Spirit given at Pentecost is given as Spirit of power for worldwide mission of proclaiming Christ, contrary to the inward focus of many Charismatic groups (Congar) who just proclaim the Spirit, on Whom the Biblical Church never focused, though they prayed in the Spirit; no Christian experience is unmediated experience of Jesus or the Spirit, but this always requires perseverance in the Christian life—4. On the basis of Pentecost, the Church goes to the world as single organic unity that is both objective/juridical and subjective/charismatic, contrary to movements that opposed subjective holiness to holiness of office e.g. Montanists, Messalians, Donatists, Joachimites, and those Charismatics who are not led by good priest or religious, and are not integrated into parish life—5. Danger in ecumenical groups of thinking that, because of their experience, Church unity has been attained through the Spirit, but this is not sacramental unity—Only the Church of Jesus Christ possesses the Spirit, and the Spirit gives to each as He wills. (p. 399): 3. Question of the relationship between Spirit and power, and then between Christian/Church and worldly power—Christ always spoke and acted as on with plenary power, but always as given to Him by the Father as a charge to which He must be obedient; this power is so governed by receptivity that it can take the form of the powerlessness of the Cross, where the power to reconcile takes on perfect form—Disciples are given power for particular tasks, which must be used in obedience, without relying on worldly power; powerlessness is experienced as fulfilling part of their mission—In the Spirit, Jesus entrusts His plenary power to the Church, which can only act in the Spirit: Spirit and plenary power are only for building up—Punishment by the Church can only be ratification of individual’s free decision to no longer submit to Church order—Spiritual authority received from the Spirit through the sacraments—There is no authority, even that of anti-Christian world powers, except from God; what is required of the saints in the face of these powers—Church, unlike sects, does not engage in propaganda on her own behalf, but prefers to let her witness exert its influence, and not always the most effective one by worldly standards, contrary to the marketing/advertising engaged in by new movements—Dangers of the Church or movements making use of the secular arm now and throughout history e.g. Inquisition, Conquistadores, new marketing. V.6.e. The Witness of Life (p. 405): Christian witness is not just information but is the taking over of the believer’s entire existence: its testimony is the love of God that bears witness to itself in Christ, and its credibility consists in ecclesial love; because the Spirit is the love between Father and Son, He can bear witness to this love—Synoptics on Chrisitan witness requiring reliance on the Spirit—Paul on witness to Christ’s Resurrection—Paul and John place Christ at the center as the one who gives witness: he attests to Himself by His whole life, and He gives witness in the Spirit to Himself and to what He has seen/heard/known from the Father—John on God as Spirit, being born of God/the Spirit, and worshipping in spirit and truth i.e. in Spirit and Son—Jesus is surrounded by faithful witnesses, though He does not need them, because of His own witness to Himself—The believer’s witness to Christ takes over his whole life; martyrdom is not restricted to blood martyrs, but includes those whose life is a daily mortification—Disciples’ testimony is only meaningful if Jesus’ life testimony is seen as revelation of Father’s/Trinity’s love; life testimony is always realization of brotherly/ ecclesial love—Spread of Christianity is not just work of individuals but of communities—In breakthrough into pagan world, there began a new consciousness embracing the entire world, without former distinctions (von Harnack); Paul’s preaching embraced with equal seriousness concern for individual and community in the commandment of love, which solves the political problem of how to have independent local communities but also a strong/unified system of order—Ultimately, giving one’s life for one’s fellowmen becomes the hallmark of all human ethics, even atheistic ethics. VI. Spirit and World VI.1. The World Dimension (p. 415): Focus on intimate relationship between Spirit and Church should not lead us to lose sight of Spirit’s worldwide operation, both in creation and in redemption—No theologian now holds Patristic thesis that there is no salvation outside the Church, nor with Joachim’s view that the age of the Spirit is still in the future—Church exists only when ready to transcend herself in missionary mode—Church finds spermata pneumatika in the world, but is also often afraid of the Spirit and of the traditionalist or progressivist multitude—Church now knows herself only as interim reality, and grants that other ecclesial bodies can confer grace (Kasper), while many inside her seem to be outside her (Augustine)—Spirit impels both Church and world to perfection, since world down to its smallest particles bears stamp of Trinitarian origins—Greek Fathers on universal significance of Incarnation for whole mankind and cosmos, though this was obscured by Augustine; Church is an inner circle through which hypostatic union/communio in the Spirit reaches outward—Dangers and trends in Joachim, Olivi, Calvin—Connection of Spirit to whole creation and its history is linked to question of evolution—Rejection of Hegelian identification of spirit with Weltgeist—Barth on Holy Spirit as Person Who makes existence of creature as such possible; Son of God eternally willed to become incarnate, and so there is no logos asarkos, and being a creature i.e. that through which God will become flesh, is something excellent—Natural history can be read as single salvation story leading up to Christ, in which nature is always surrounded by grace, which leads to question of Spirit as “soul of the world”. VI.2. Is the Spirit the Soul of the World? (p. 421): Positing of world-soul (Pythagoras, Plato, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Plotnius, Al-Kindi, Averroes) which can be held to be created (Augustine) or identified with Holy Spirit (Thierry of Chartres, Bernard Sylvestris, William of Conches, Abelard, condemened as Sens)—Resurrection of the idea in Pannenberg’s cosmology/pneumatological supplement to Teilhard: attempt to overcome Anglo alienation between science and theology, rooted in Clarke’s idea of field, with idea of God facilitating evolution in Trinitarian context—Pannenberg sees Teilhard’s idea of energy as too Christological: it requires idea of “energy field”, which is needed for living things to experience self-transcendence, and where a pneumatological element of evolution can be found: we might combine doctrine of Logos with modern concept of information, and see operation of Spirit in life’s evolution/self-transcendence, which grounds contingency of evolution, since life’s self-transcendence is simultaneously activity on the part of the living thing and effect of a power lifting it beyond its limitations—This doctrine of creation risks eliminating difference between OT cosmological concept of Spirit and NT soteriological concept, so that former predominates (Tillich) and there is no meaningful separation between human and divine spirit—Similar reservations about other views (Taylor, Raven, Moltmann). VI.3. Reflection (p. 425): Speculations on relation between Spirit and His pancosmic/universal/historical operation go beyond Christian revelation—Fluid transitions between Yahweh’s word and spirit mean that it would be improper to automatically interpret OT passages in Trinitarian way—Question of what OT gifts given by God have to do with Spirit that we know from Jesus, since unlike NT gifts they could be natural gifts, and everything in the OT, even dramatic things like Jewish salvation from the nations and the spirit of the prophets, remains a figure—Given trajectory of Scripture, we cannot conceive of the Spirit on the basis of cosmological texts, which would lend itself to a liberation theology reading of Spirit’s action—In NT, Spirit is Spirit of humility, service, taking the lowest place, and so cannot easily be identified with motor of power/ascent/self-transcendence of forms: we should not identify the field that animates evolution of forms with presence of Holy Spirit, but with the plan of creation of the one God—Evolution strives in prehumen realm toward a position in which Godd wishes to engage with man in free/ethical history, and its principle must be inherent to creation, a natural pneuma/world-soul (Clement, Augustine)—Tendency to consciousness is also a tendency to grace (Teilhard)—God designed nature with view to/precondition for man, and as to be brought together with man in the Kingdom; projecting salvation history back into evolution is not suitable for elucidating divine plan—Despite Christ’s use of natural metaphor of grain of wheat dying, Cross and Resurrection are not just a peak instance of natural religion/fundamental law of history/a speculative principle: rather, they are the overcoming by God alone of contradiction between God’s love and man’s sin. VII. “Upward and Onward to the Father!” VII.1. The Return (p. 433): Our and Jesus’ interior longing for the Father (Ignatius, Novalis) Who is still working, for the sake of a Sabbath in which both God and man will rest, but not in inactivity, for the work of Trinitarian love in God and the saints will never rest, but the groaning of creation, men, and the Spirit will be soothed and silenced—The yearning for the Father, and the return of Son, Spirit, and men to creation, are not a flight from the world, but take creation with them—The naming of the origin and end of all things as “Father” in many ancient cultures—Reflective religions see that the Many cannot be ultimate but owe their existence to an ultimate, unitary source in which along they find rest; different expressions of this reconciliation of the Many in the One (Buddhism, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Plotinus)—To affirm that the highest goal is the unity of the origin is not to hold that the exitus-reditus is meaningless: the One might be supplemented or glorified by the Many—Question of whether what flows out from the One has in it the principle of its own turning back or whether it requires ascesis to do so, but never is it held that what comes forth can convert entirely on its own initiative—This goad of memory in the OT—Calling God ‘Father’ in Hellenized Judaism, where it carries connotation of adoption, not myth/sexuality—The promise of a pilgrimage to God’s rest on the part of the whole human race is accomplished paradoxically by Jesus claiming God’s Fatherhood entirely for Himself, which explodes Israel’s destiny to all mankind: no cosmic return except by Jesus being the very specific way—In Jesus, the forward of Messianic hope and the vertical movement to the Father become the horizontal movement to the whole world; the close unity between proclaiming the Gospel, preparing the eschatological Kindom, and fashioning a more humane world (Gaudium et spes)—Return tendencies in various religions are commendable blueprints, but there can be no dialogue with an atheism/positivism that denies an Omega transcendent in history—Balance between negation of world and peace with the world in Zen and Plato—All the religious models just lack the Trinitarian love that is the essence of all being and is visible in Christ i.e. they lack the Father, the wellspring of love—Most difficult dialogue is with those who posit absolute unity behind the Trinity e.g. Eckhart, Muslims, Jews, where Jesus is just a mediating figure; on such a view, the Father cannot be substantial love in Himself, for that requires a Son and a Beloved begotten in self-surrender i.e. the Third, the Spirit—In Christianity, the origin is only accessible through this unity beyond number. VII.2. “The Spirit Searches the Depths of God” (p. 441): 1 Cor 2:10 is astonishing because the Spirit is God, and so must be searching Himself, knowing that He Who is love owes His existence to love, principaliter to the Father, for Spirit is witness, fruit, and identical to love between Father and Son, and for this reason it can occupy him and us for eternity—If love is genuine, it has no other ground than itself—Father’s love has no prior ground because He just is self-surrender and so just is love; Son’s love is not owed to the Father (contra Richard of St. Victor) since He is not a second god, so this Word shows the same groundlessness of divine love even if it has the mode of infinite gratitude/devoted self-oblation—The Spirit searches the depths of this love without finding there a ground that would allow us to conceptualize it—The groundless mystery of love ground everything else, and in its light all else is manifest/intelligible/rational, so that it becomes wisdom (Gregory the Great): love’s evidence is within it and all reasoning knowledge depends on it—The irreducibility of love which wells up in the Father’s act of being is not irrational, and does not require a stance of resignation/apophatic theology; rather, with the Spirit, we have an ever-deeper penetration in love into the groundless love of the Trinity, which offers itself to be known (Gregory of Nyssa)—Jesus’ whole behavior is a single act of pointing to the Father, interpreting/making the invisible one visible, as John saw—Paul saw that ultimately the groundless Source will be present and recognized both in the Son and in every creature, but as John saw, the Source can never be grasped in isolation from Him Who streams forth; hence, no feast devoted to the Father (Suárez, Raynaud, Styczen)—The Spirit’s searching the Father’s love should be our searching too, which is not in vain—No religious philosophy could claim that God is love: grace perfects nature, but nature could never attain or dream of such perfection. VII.3. The Invisible Father (p. 447): Question of what it can mean to behold the groundless abyss of love that is the Father—Beholding requires an object/Gegenstand, but the groundless abyss cannot be gegen nor can it be something that Stand—OT and NT on how we cannot see God—1 Jn 3:2 seems to suggest we will see the Father—Paul on how seeing divine things requires being endowed with doxa/glory of Christ, not of the Father—John’s distinction between glory of the Son that can be beheld in the world and heavenly glory of the Son with the Father: Jesus wants us to ultimately see the latter, divine glory, a preliminary burst of which was given in the Transfiguration—We must participate in the divine essence to see Him, though we will never do so infinitely or totally, although greater love can penetrate further into Him (Aquinas)—Through the Son’s glory we glimpse the abyss of the invisible Father’s love-glory, in the Spirit; born of the Spirit, we exist in the love between Father and Son, and with the Spirit bear witness and give glory to it. Epilogue Foreward (p. 9): This is overview of whole Trilogy, explaining why the Trilogy tried to present theology from perspective of Platonic transcendentals—Question of how to make smooth transition from true religious philosophy to Biblical revelation—Competition of Christianity in the religious marketplace; seeking the most comprehensive interpretation, which can include all less comprehensive ones—Mysteries of Christianity cannot be derived from religious philosophy—What is not present in this volume—The severe situation of media consumption for passing on culture and Christianity: no clear point of contact with the anima technical vacua. I. Forecourt I.1. Integration as Method? (p. 15): Christianity now seen as one choice of worldview among many—Christ would not thrust Himself into first place; Christianity must establish itself with arguments that are no so compelling as to vitiate free act of faith/self-surrender—Christianity must admit what is relatively true in all other views, as on the doctrine of logoi spermatikoi, though mutually exclusive doctrines do not have an equal share in the Logos, but rather less extensive views are integrated into more comprehensive ones—This is too naïve a conception of apologetics: it leads to Hegel, not Christ, and this misses God’s freedom in self-revelation and ungraspability of His freely self-giving love—We must use the method of increasing integration, while recognizing it does not get us to the goal—The ideal and the historical must be united if Christianity is to avoid both irrationality and rationalism—Attempts to renounce all immanent integration (Barth, Schelling, Rahner)—Possibility that a dynamism placed in the created spirit aspires to the vision of God (Augustine, Aquinas); if we went that route, we must reject natura pura and hold that our nature reaches for a goal unattainable by natural powers, which God fulfills by free self-disclosure already inserted into natural freedom, and which flows into all history from Christological center: on this basis, there can be an apologietic integration of worldviews in history—Particular worldviews contradict each other, but can contribute useful elements to unified vision—Pre-Christian and post-/anti-Christian proposals radically differ, since their intentionality differs—No naively pre-Christian worldviews in globalized world. I.2. The Unasked Question (p. 19): Comte’s positivism forbade attention to philosophical questions unanswerable by sciences, a program still pursued even by purportedly anti-positivistic philosophies—All great philosophical and religious systems asked about the gorund, meaning, essence, and end of being as such and of being human, but positivism rejects this question, yet in doing so it provides an answer to it—Worldviews that presume to proceed from pre-given empirical data “out there”, such as specialized sciences or Marxism—Positivistic interrogation of nature, back to the Big Bang, without asking about its givenness or about evolution as such or why it happened; or description of human being as one who questions, without asking what meaning such a being has who always searches after meaning: that is required for genuine philosophy—Freudian, Jungian, and Adlerian psychoanalysis (but not Frankl’s logo-therapy) avoid this question—Confucianism and Shintoism fail to ask this question, and are just psychological, sociological, or national ethic, compatible with lots of religious views—The question is not just the meaning of being qua being, but of the meaning or value of the being of man; it is in part the search for a light that sheds light on our meaning: one light might forbid the question, or might hint at ultimate meaning, or might direct man just to himself. I.3. The Question as Man Sees It (p. 23): Science, which dominates everything, aims at controlling everything i.e. at technology and productivity, which leads to slavery, though these tragic consequences can lead to the philosophical question, though often answered with despair/resignation—Philosophical question about the meaning of the whole becomes the religious question of the salvation of the whole when attention is turned on man—Meaning-salvation seems to imply dualism i.e. one must negate something e.g. becoming, finitude, seeming, individuality—This is so even in Indian advaita, with its ambiguous conceptions of reality, though this cannot explain why there is semblance; it leads either to the view that being is non-being and the doctrine of literal self-lessness, as seen in Zen, or to the view that the seeming cosmos is a divine manifestation/ epiphany, or even to the Stoic view that the cosmos is the organism of the divine—Many religious philosophies lead to indifference e.g. Stoicism, Taoism, Sufism—All these views destroy the reality of man in his finitude—Another form of monism attempt to distinguish in the divine an absolute sphere from a phenomenal form e.g. fate as distinct from the gods (Homer); on some such views, the gods mediate the meta-divine sphere, though one’s loving participation in the god can lead one to forget or ignore the impersonal ground, but such a god is unable to be believed in in his individuality (Aristophanes)—The tragic vision of The Ring of the Nibelung, which allows us to see the real center in the world of seeming; tragedy’s support for the Buddhist view that existence is suffering, but while standing in the way of the solution of a purely contemplative flight into nirvana: hence the possibility of also living an active life, or a life of compassion in which one postpones nirvana until all beings are freed from the tragedy of existence, a pointer toward Christianity—A Heidegerrian critique of an impersonal absolute and a particular personal god as onto-theology—None of these systems can explain the ontological status/origin of māyā; even Hegel’s view does not do justice to God, man, death, or concrete life—No monistic system gets around the perplexity expressed in religions’ two-fold form as popular ritualism and esoteric mysticism, beyond which impasse no religious philosophy can move, though it shows man’s nobility—No full integration possible on the basis of these logoi spermatikoi; transition to revelation does not solve these problems, which are insoluble by reason, nor does it create a conclusive rational system, because it is God’s free self-disclosure, which can never be transformed into material for reason. I.4. God’s Word (p. 29): The Voice that begins salvation history, unlike the voices in other religions, does not want to be an answer to man’s highest questions, but demands obedience, and that accepts many contradictions, but marks out an entirely concrete relationship, though with universal implications—Covenant with Abraham is absolute, meaning a decision between life and death, and is the work of a perfectly free but jealous graciousness—No concept/image/prior apprehension of this God’s voice, unlike gods of the nations; union across the absolute distance between God and His people only possible through free covenant established from above—The two ways set before the people—Israel is the people forced by God where they would not go—Gradual awareness of pure obedience as love—Difficulties/renunciations found in the prophets, ethical writings, Wisdom books—Motif of vicarious representation in Abraham, Moses, the Suffering Servant—Later Judaism determined by temptation to transgress the distance between God and man in mysticism (Merkaba, Kabbala, Hassidism, Spinoza, Idealism) or to passional messianism (up to Marxism)—Better than conservative Judaism, Islam maintains the revealed primal distance between God and man: the only bridge between God and man can be direct free work of God in inspiration or miracle, and so no Incarnation or sacraments, and also the rejection of the Jewish theological-national dimension and the messianic dynamism—Emphasis in Islam on being a religion of the Book and the rejection of the redemptive significance of the Cross, in favor of earthly success, which can use earthly means—Attempts to overcome barrier between God and man in Sufism, in which one hands oneself over to the will of God with selfless love, even to the point of dissolution of the creature and identity with God (Hallāj), though this ultimately leads to Averroistic rationalism—No purely rational defense of Christianity against challenges from Judaism and Islam—With Judaism and Islam, Christianity affirms ineradicable God-creature distance and God’s free self-revelation out of love; unlike late Judaism, Islam, Eastern religions, no dissolution or pure divinization of the creature, and finite creature can have definitive value because, as love, God wills to be gift/fruitfulness in Himself, according space to an “other”: the “other in God” can be an “other in creatureliness” without abandoning the God-creature difference, and the created spirit can have the dignity of a person/partner of God once we posit the positivity of the Other—Other religions try to free man from suffering and death, but in Christinaity they are the highest epiphany of God’s love—Changeable, perishable, earthly being is now something positive, to which we should have steadfast fidelity or “indifference” as serene courage readiness to plunge into the created, not the world-superior indifference of other religions—Christian eschatology is determined by the affirmations that God is “other”, which makes His essence as love understandable and which becomes visible in Jesus’ coming from God, and that sufferin/death contribute to redeeming the guilt of the world, which allows it to integrate everything meaningful to man/the world’s religions—Only in Christology is the otherness of the world/man from God encompassed in God’s life, due especially to the Resurrection, which is not a de-physicalizing but a transfiguring, not redemption from finitude but assumption of finite/other into the infinite, which has the Other in itself—Worldly forms of love cannot show this view of God to be contradictory—The mystery of God revealed in Christ can only be accepted in free decision, and does not allow of strict proof, as in all personal relations—Problem about philosophizing about Yahweh is that He is not impassible, and so it is not clear if he is dependent on Isreal in order to love: Yahweh points beyond Himself to His own promise, the God of Jesus Christ. II. Threshold II.1. The Hesitation of Being (p. 43): Apologetic based on “whoever sees more, is right” forces one to see the limitations of various religious projects and so transcend them—Counterarguments reduce us to a situation of apparently irreducible pluralism—Against the desire to see more, the tendency to humility, maintaining silence and distance before the absolute (Buddhism, Judaism, Islam)—Worry that syntheses lead to Hegelian gnosis—Questions whether man is ultimate in evolution, whether Western personality disproves reincarnation or communist ideal, whether world is really good, and whether universal mortality refutes all search for meaning after death—Apologetics’ confrontation with cogent, existential objections, up to “Jesus, yes; the Church, no”—Difficulty of reaching the historical Jesus make Christianity seem irrational—We can be helped by turning to sheer existence, the Being that first confronts one’s spirit (Aquinas)—Being is what we must seek to interrogate again and again (Aristotle) although it seems understood; it is richest and poorest of concepts, hence contradictory descriptions of Being—Question of whether a theological/ Christian light can be thrown on this philosophical concept: the Trilogy’s theological aesthetics, dramatics, and logic is build on this light, based on the Transcendentals beautiful, good, true, all of which are permeated by the problematic of the One. II.2. Being and Beings (p. 47): Every real being has “to be” entirely, although essences are divided from one another—The sum of all existing things is not the sum of reality, which cannot be summed—Possible beings are not real and cannot realize themselves, while esse can only be realized in subsistent entities with finite essences—Gradation of beings according to which they become gradually aware of the power of self-realization given to their real essences, and so have perspective on reality in general—In wonderment, esse simplex non subsistens comes to itself/culminates as spirit in perfect reflection in human beings: man is in image and likeness of God because esse in his essence is not just an sich but für sich—No worldly being can attain coinciding of essence and esse because it must receive a reality given to it—God is not identical to the non-subsisting real, because worldly essence and esse are recognized only in their deficiencies; we cannot fashion an image of the prototype on the basis of the image we are—All we can attain here is contentment and gratitude to God, not fullness of meaning and spirit; we cannot absolutize anything finite to construct God, for all similarity points to a greater dissimilarity. II.3. Appearance and Hiddenness (p. 51): Reality gives to every entity to-be-what-it-is and to-be-with (Mit-Sein) and to a spiritual being to-be-for-itself and to-be-for-another, and so every being has the gift of being able to express itself to another, which implies an innerness/ability to communicate/impart itself, such that each being simultaneously gives itself away and preserves itself—In the space afforded by a conscious being, really appearing beings come to perfection/completion in their own reality, especially in a being that knows the appearing being as other, and especially when the appearing being is a person expressing himself—The one expressing is always more than his expression, and so remains veiled in his subsistence even when unveiled in his expression—One can express oneself only by preserving oneself, which is not the same as holding back—To take another’s appearance into me is to be claimed by him, but also requires gathering his manifold ways of appearing into the unity of my apperception i.e. I must apperceive his reality, which surpasses the limitations of my being—The comprehensive unifying medium of reality is required to let every other thing be—The full self-revelation of the other reveals the other as a mystery beyond all concepts—The other is revealed as a subject that never abandons its subjectivity, which is an appeal to love—I am aware of myself and of other in the light of Being/reality, which is outside/safeguards subject and object. II.4. Polarity in Being (p. 55): Problem of unity of Being does not allow univocal common denominator: esse is one only as completum et simplex, subsiting only in many entities on which it bestows ontic unity—Being gives to beings its indivisibility while beings give to Being realization; esse comprehends all finite things but is also ever-unique—A polarity to Being determines everything else in the world—If Being cannot be subsumed under a univocal concept, neither can true, good, or beautiful, which only have their place in the act of Being—Mystery of being does not allow us to see how a being can separate from comprehensive reality to become the determined being it is—The absolute must be free spirit without our being able to conceive what infinite spirit is in itself—Difference resulting from polarity of worldly Being is not a decline from divine identity, but the presupposition for worldly interconnectedness, communication, mutual exchange, love—Love among human beings foreshadows a mystery already operative in their origin, in which loving persons never close themselves off from one another, but are open to original mystery of Being in their fruitfulness, and this must have an analogue in the divine identity. II.5. Self-Showing (p. 59): a. In the difference of the polarity of Being, every worldly being is epiphanic, showing e.g. its invisible life principle in its changing phenomenal forms—An entity’s phenomenal form is how it expresses itself, a kind of speech—Each thing expresses not only itself but the reality in them, and thence the subsisting esse (Ps. 19, Claudel, Goethe)—Paradox of veiling in the act of unveiling, and the phenomenon of referring—The freer a shaping form, the more it expresses itself in a uniquely personal way, as is most clearly seen in human language; but here, the expressing being can hide itself more: freedom can point to itself, but cannot be seen directly—Epiphany of beings is their self-interpretation/signifying—First reaction to a subject’s self-manifestation is astonishment, since the unknown real can show itself in complete and lovely figure, and the subject thereby becomes visible—A light irradiates a form, which points to the reality that appears in and transcends that form—Classicism emphasizes form, while romanticism emphasizes what the form mysteriously signifies—Question of whether to limit the subject to the light in its appearance, as in Kierkegaard’s aesthetic sphere, or to perceive the indications of epiphany, in which the beautiful points to true Being and is indivisible from the true/good, though appearance can be beautiful even when divided from or feigning this depth, but then it is a mere seeming not a radiant appearance with the power in itself to point beyond itself—In the Absolute is thought inexpressible, then the appearance will be read as referring to the mystery of emptiness (negative theology, Tao, Zen). (p. 61): b. Perceivers of the beautiful do not gather/synthesize isolated impressions, but grasp totalities beforehand in their appearance from the depths through an intuitive judgment—Awe/gratitude are already there in the ability to gather impressions due to the real being unable to be expropriated by the ego, and they do not grow stale if one is accustomed to the phenomenon’s essence: the phenomenon of the epiphany as such continually gives itself anew—Even imperfect forms are made real by the light/act of Being—Imaginary/aesthetic-religious myths/images let the contemplator rest in his own light, but they only point to themselves, contra Stoic/cosmological readings of Homer; OT images point to the reality of Jesus, but not in a way apparent to themselves—That the images point to a real essence can only be grasped on the basis of transcendental apperception—Gestalt is not just image but is the unity encountering perceiver that is simultaneously manifest in experience of self, so that object and I communicate in esse—Beyond but still with imagination occurs Bildung, in which subject ascribes to real things their valid essence, and things shape spirit to themselves, allowing an intra-worldly discernment of spirits. (p. 63): c. From transcendental epiphany of world’s Being, we glimpse structures of revelation—We can read Christ as image significant in Himself, or as appearance of the One He images such that He is understood in His reality—Historical-critical method stuck in first approach, but the seeming on which it focuses can be plunged in deeper truth of radiant appearance, as is indicated by variety of viewpoints and of differences that only make sense as self-interpretation of the Trinity—Only the de-formity of Christ’s death/abandonment make the uniqueness of this form visible, in His simultaneous submission to worldly forms and self-presentation as true interpretation of absolute Being—Necessity of Ascension, as disappearance of this appearance; necessity of divine Spirit interpreting this figure as definitive appearance of Absolute now dwelling in Church/world—Reconciling death of the Son refers to the perfect love of Father for the world, and so difference transcending meaning of difference becomes apparent in God’s identity—Recognition/affirmation of Jesus’ uniqueness does not result from Jesus and believer’s shared esse, but from absolute Being in Jesus freely giving Himself to faith i.e. from grace, which takes up human reason/grateful astonishment—In Christian faith, neither form nor light are dissolved or triumphant over the other: we can gain both by contemplating phenomenal forms and by plunging directly into infinite light of love—All beauty has a moment of grace and calls for astonishment, but when we stand before pure grace, which reveals glory not beauty, it calls for worship. II.6. Self-Giving (p. 69): a. Transcendentals can only exist within one another e.g. beauty is what is shown, and it is good i.e. imparts itself, and hence striving and polarity are universal—One can strive for the good for many reasons, but only when it is sought in itself does it come fully into view, and only then is self-giving possible—Stages of spiritual life in subpersonal realm, and consequent rights at those levels—At every stage of existence, man has a right to love i.e. paradoxically, to something that can only be provided in free self-surrender—All dramatics among human freedoms result from attempts to compel love which cannot be compelled, and resulting forms of power and denial—Dramatic cases of conflicts among rights of different degrees of importance—Strangeness of the word ‘convince’—Degrees of objective rights and subjective attitudes about them—Coinciding of rights and love in rectitudo (Anselm). (p. 71): b. Question of how the good acts e.g. after it gives itself, whether it can let itself be assimilated by a freedom, and of whether freedom can be influenced from without, given that the mind/will are self-caused, and free to let themselves be influenced/convinced or not—Empirical arguments for religions e.g. good examples, do not have infallible effect, since Jesus explains how the world will irrationally resist the best reasons—Apostolic life can convince only if it carries Christ’s own form of efficacy e.g. in weakness i.e. the power of the Cross—Human insights into power of tragedy in which perishing in self-surrender becomes grace (Aristotle) or saving others through renouncing entry into blessedness (Buddhism)—Intercessory prayer turnts to a ground in which another’s freedom is grounded, though that ground can be envisioned mythically or a-personally, or according to OT idea of vicarious representation—Finite freedom cannot free itself from its chains, but God does not conquer, compel, or extrinsically allure man, but exposes our freedom to love for God and neighbor, as in Irenaeus’ suasio or Augustine’s voluptas trahens or vocatio, the inscription of the law on our hearts, which can only take place through sinking into depths of death on the Cross. (p. 74): c. Mystery of kenotic power of the Cross, which gives power of internal conviction—Catechesis is recalling of love already poured out by God in Christian freedom—Kenotic power is a dying to self on behalf of another, while Indian non-violence aims to destroy appearance of personality or thirst for Being, or just aims at political ends (Gandhi): it is never Jesus’ non-resistance to evil, which does not aim at self-perfection or knowledge, but takes evil captive, absorbing them in the kenosis of the person as such—This requires that non-subsisting reality/esse be the space for absolute subsisting reality/esse nihilating itself in love, accepting those who follow this love, and hence results the communion of saints—Polarity in worldly good between objective norm and subjective conscience is modified by Incarnation such that Christ becomes the norm, uncontrollable by us, rooted in the Trinity. II.7. Self-Saying (p. 77): Self-expression in speech presupposes tension between perfect interiority in freedom of self-consciousness and perfect externalizing in more than natural language, a free imaging, such that truth forms the conclusion and beginning to beauty and goodness—Evolutionarily prior to human self-consciousness, there are only preliminary steps to beauty, goodness, and truth, though even there self-showing/giving must be inchoate ways of self-saying, which requires things to be words in the Word (Pieper)—Things’ epiphany and self-gift are indispensable moments of their emergence into speech in man—The whole metaphysics of the transcendentals is only unfolded in the theological light of free creation in the Word, though without metaphysics needing to become theology. (p. 78): a. Language requires openness of reality to spiritual self-consciousness, which grasps itself reflexively as Being i.e. as really existing—Senses are always open to appearing/self-giving beings, but to spirit things/persons want to make themselves known in their reality, not just in images—Whatever manifests itself as real does so in a sensible image, and spirit recognizes Being by looking on these images, responding with a word that is spirit and has a sensible correspondence, so that the medium of human thinking is speech (Hamann, Kobusch), which cannot be abstracted from speaker and hearer—Language draws the subhuman structure of self-showing/giving into the spiritual—We can truly encounter each other despite the poverty of matter-bound words (Borchardt), and this can also occur in silence/stillness/memory. (p. 81): b. Language presupposes insight into Being as reality and freedom to express oneself in the pre-givne medium of language, and so freedom to lie or tell the truth—Problem of debasing language by a culture of lies—Subject discovers Being in cogito ergo sum only when discovered by Being through images: reality comes about not by possession but as something given/bestowed—Subjective act of recognizing the truth requires intuition of reality and its light for true judgment—Worldly beings for their truth do not depend on human spirit’s judgment but on free choice of absolute free Spirit—We do not immediately participate in uncreated light, but in light of Being flowing from our spiritual nature. (p. 83): c. Transcendentals all mutually penetrate one another though they remain distinct modalities of being; their basic phenomenon is epiphanic character, like the illumination of light: this presupposes distinction between appearance/representation/form and essence that appears—In evolution, there is hierarchy from appearance/self-showing/beauty which is already in lifeless things, to self-giving/goodness which involves life, to self-saying/truth which requires humanity; in other ways, each one can claim primacy—Primacy of beauty in artwork and in God’s revelation/splendor—Beauty and expressive power of self-surrender—Vulnerability of self-expression—Undiminished admiring astonishment as response to beauty, gratitude that never gets used to the gift as response to the good, faith that does not atrophy with deeper knowledge as response to the true—Phenomena of not-one unity and of one unity identical in itself, and so of analogy of being—Polarity of being/transcendentals is taken up/superseded in absolute One/True/ Good/Beautiful—No remainder of His Being outside His absolute Spirit/self-possessing freedom, but archetypes of self-showing/bestowal/expressiveness are in Him, in the personal differences, whose mysteries cannot be deduced from necessary analogies from worldly being, but are revealed only by God’s sovereignty, though traces are thereby found in worldly being, allowing God to become one with them, III. Cathedral III.1. Christology and Trinity (p. 89): Each transcendental points beyond its philosophical to its theological aspect, but such that in the similitudo the maior dissimilitudo becomes clear, but also such the latter is revealed in the former—With the Cross we enter the sacred public arcana of Christian revelation; its continuity with the foregoing is only apparent to those within. (p. 89): a. Jesus is the Truth because all worldly truth holds together in Him, which presupposes that He personifies the analogia entis, as the adequate sign/surrender/expression of God in finite being; the Son is the total epiphany/surrender/expression of the Father—The Son’s kenosis as allowing Him to personify man in His reality, without replacing the esse non subsistens of humanity—Jesus’ whole existence as God’s self-surrender/expression: the truth of His being can be deduced from His exaltedness/splendor and His perfect servitude—Jesus points to the Father, but without our transcending the sensible appearing, though we have been given the penetrating insight of the Spirit Who allows us to see through to the divine background, requiring faith as act of trust—Coinciding of Jesus’ manifestation of risen bodiliness and disappearance of His sensible bodiness wihtou prejeduce to His lasting invisible presence. (p. 91): b. Analogy does not mean that we ascribe what belongs to worldly being directly to God, just as identical in Him; that would be onto-theology—Real identity of God unfolds vitality of transcendentals in His threefold personality in a way unconceivable to us, and that is beyond what we grasp as the “to be” of beings: all of this points beyond worldly order and law-likeness to God’s freedom, such that He cannot be an idol woven by human thinking—Transcendence over all that we conceive as identical is revealed in Jesus—God’s essence is inseparable from the Persons, being His life/the transcendentals in its processions—The Good now dominates, self-showing/expressing culminating in absolute self-giving i.e. begetting within divine identity—In the love that God is lies every possible form of self-expression/truth/ wisdom, a beauty/splendor transcending all we can conceive, containing all power/divine attributes. (p. 93): c. The Word is a work of love, judging everything that is not love, and burying it in death—God unites in Himself what could not previously be united, without paradox/dialectic, as Gestalt, uniting in Himself the forms of love that seem contrary to the world, a unity that is credible only when God reveals Himself as love—Failure of human attempts to explain the union of opposites from below e.g. by making out the synthesis to be the invention of the early Church; all of this bursts His figural unity, and destroy the claim that God is love—The unity of the figure of Jesus as revelation of absolute love is decipherable only from Jesus’ freely assumed death on the Cross—Importance of simplicity of sight when encountering the form of Jesus or to see the revelation of the mutual knowledge of the Father and the Son—Poverty of spirit points only to God, wishing only for God’s grace/good pleasure to direct it; it requires God’s will and our readiness—If we try to get around God’s Incarnation/epiphany, He becomes the One/abyss/hollow/absolute Being—The one in prayer must not try to get beyond Son’s pointing to Father, and Father to Son, in the Spirit. III.2. The Word Becomes Flesh (p. 99): a. Pagans, Jews, Moslems reject Word becoming flesh, allowing only the prophetic word, not God becoming something—God became not just man, but flesh i.e. something frail, vulnerable, mortal—Truth of Logos-Sarx Christology, prior to Apollinaris’ distortion, is caro cardo salutis—For philosophy and non-Biblical religion, human spirit is midpoint, for they place man apart from all other beings, or they make suffering heroic—Christ is not a suffering tragic hero; His only real urge is to persevere by surrender to God’s will—Jesus lives for His Passion, and it is a mystery of the body: only because of our bodiliness can we suffer in soul, analogous to sexuality, as in Jesus’ abandonment—World-redemptive suffering required Jesus’ species-commonality with all mankind/our material unity. (p. 101): b. The material cosmos is related protologically and eschatologically to the Incarnation, not just to the logos asarkos, and to the fulfillment of the Incarnation in the Mystical Body: it is not a desire to be spiritualized or to live purely in bodies, but to be full conformed to the Son’s risen, spiritual body—Lordship of enfleshed Son is Lordship over the universe—We owe our existence as bodily beings to the cosmos; bodily powers of being present to each other are foreshadowing of Jesus’ vicarious representation—Whole evolutionary climb of organisms constantly offering themselves to others’ sustenance and whole violent human history come in the final all-encompassing Victim before a God Who is not a tyrant but is absolute surrender beyond all imaginable forms of recklessness. (p. 103): c. My body is incomprehensible intermediate zone between self and world: it belongs to me, but is also item in the world detachable from me—Bumping into another reveals his freedom and limits of my freedom, presupposition for life with/turning toward each other—True community requires mystery of the other mediated by the body—In Jesus we find an other so strange we cannot categorize Him: everything discussed in the Threshold section above is happening in Him, in the encounter of bodies—No previous definitive self-showing/saying/giving of God: that requires God to be a thing one can touch with one’s senses, a scandal John sees and that culminates in John 6—Jesus’ Resurrected/Eucharistic Body is one that can be touched, yet does not have bodily limits—In Eucharist, there converges true body/blood in which God shows/gives/speaks Himself with structure of definitive community in which individual bodies become temples of Spirit but in Christ’s Body are but one temple—Fleshly thought is stunned in face of spiritual understanding of the body—The Resurrected body still contains blood, the life element in man belonging to God (Catherine of Siena). (p. 106): d. Faith in the resurrection intensifies our awareness of being headed toward death, which gives our works their enduring value and sadness—All other religions attempt to flee this e.g. with immortality of the soul; hence, OT’s focus on long earthly life—In Christ, death is transvaluated to be definitive expression of love, unlike anything grasped in OT—Jesus alone understand the horror of death as love—Now dying can be understood as perfect surrender to the Father, perfecting the highest work of the body, transvaluating death into the greatest act of life, swallowed up in God’s vitality. III.3. Fruitfulness (p. 109): a. The three transcendentals reveal the mystery of Being only imperfectly; each is open to the other two, and all beings are endowed with the mystery of fruitfulness—Power for procreation/birth is clearly linked to finitude/death—Transcendentals/self-surrender allow beings to strive beyond themselves, but a moment of death always likes in this surrender (Hegel), anticipating Christ, imaging the Trinity—Dying in Christ coincides with highest fruitfulness in which what is generated already belongs to God’s eternal triune-fruitful life, perfectly seen in the self-surrender of those who are celibate for the kingdom—OT anticipations, in which God is primary model of fertility, culminating in Joseph and Mary and the supernatural fruitfulness of their marriage, and in John and Mary as the prelude to the fruitfulness of the Church: this shows also lasting importance of sexual difference in the Church; supra-sexual/virginal fruitfulness has personal aspect seen in John and Mary, and sacramental aspect seen in blood/water/Spirit poured out of Christ on the Cross—Jesus’ universal presence is bodily, but without this Body, the Church, being identical to Him, and the Church’s universality is the sacrament of salvation of the world—Incarnate Word as God’s epiphany, self-bestowal, and self-expression, all of which belongs to the Church too, for Jesus shares our humanity, and so can call others into His mission. (p. 113): b. Church receives a share in Christ as originating sacrament, through Eucharistic universalizing—Church owes her fruitfulness to sacrifice of Christ’s body; bodily emergence of Church cannot be separated from latter. (p. 114): In individual sacraments, the Church presents in bodily form decisive incorporation into Christ’s/Church’s salvific efficacy, in most notable situations in life, which are already graced in their natural sacramentality e.g. birth, puberty, marriage, festive meals, illness; they also incorporate OT anticipatory rites: all is taken up by Verbum-Caro, placing Eucharist at the center—Rootedness of each sacrament in Christ’s bodily self-surrender: the one who brought salvation did so by living a human life, submitting Himself to natural events and to Jewish rites, making them the foundational events of His life, and so of the Church’s/each Christian’s life—Christ dispenses Himself in the sacraments by the authority of the Father through the Spirit. (p. 117): c. At the central point, Jesus is ready to forgive all of man’s infidelity, but God never forces His love on the self-righteous, and the brighter His light, the more they are entrenched in darkness—The Cross is an admirabile commercium not as theatrical exchange of roles, and not as the Father’s proof of His love, and not as Jesus proving His solidarity with sinners—Rejection of Girard’s idea that all talk of God’s wrath is just transposition of human emotions onto God: we do not judge God, but He judges us through the Cross—Ridiculousness of being asked to believe that I am guilty of a crime I do not know and then that someone else has taken my place—Key features of redemption—1. Staus/commission of Son of God, altering all of human nature, by appropriating to Himself its materiality and all of its negativity, and such that the pain of alienation will be experienced both by God and man—2. This change transforms all human nature/freedom, but without replacing our actual being: since no one is abandoned like the Son, the assumption of our nature surpasses that nature; estrangement from God is now a form of absolute love—3. Incarnation/abandonment are participatory achievement of Holy Spirit, revealing and effecting the extreme of Father and Son as epiphany of their unity, where the holy exchange takes place: the Spirit encounters finite freedom not externally, but from where all created freedom has its origin/constitution as oriented to the authentically good—4. The moment of accepting or rejecting grace, where finite spirit recognizes its receiving of its own existence or not—Jesus’ death in the sinner’s estrangement from God means that no sinner can attain purely autonomous loneliness—We do not know if a human freedom can deny the Spirit’s offer of true freedom to the end, and there is only room for hope (Rahner, Ratzinger, Lauter): we have the obligation to hope for all. [7450] 379