Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Recently, I have had a number of opportunities to consider the current state of theological inquiry and the prevailing approach to Catholic theology that has been called “the current emphasis.” I will argue, that this new approach, the “Nuptial Mystery” reflects a new synthesis of authentic previous theology on the order of that established by St. Thomas. But first some background.

In the 13th century there was a watershed in Catholic theology which would establish the approach to Catholic theological inquiry for the next seven hundred years. If one allows St. Anselm of Canterbury to be identified as the progenitor of the scholastic method, this event occurred about a century and a half into the development of this systematic approach to doing theology. The watershed to which I refer, of course, is arrival on the scene of the intellectual giant, St. Thomas Aquinas, who not only mastered and perfected this method but he employed it in such a way as to synthesize (almost) literally, all available sources of authentic knowledge up to that time. At the outset, I must say that I am not reducing all medieval theology to Thomism. However, even the the most hostile scholars to Thomism must admit that since Augustine, no single theologian has had the wide-ranging influence of St. Thomas.

St. Thomas was not only a brilliant personality, but as Etienne Gilson points out, he possessed in uncommon abundance an attribute that magnifies intellect in a synergistic way–a great humility. St. Thomas was not simply an intellectual giant, he was a humble saint and these together allowed him the ability to synthesize knowledge in such a way that even almost eight centuries later, we have not finished plumbing the depths of what he left us. His great synthesis began with adapting and purifying the intellectual tools of philosophy, and integrating recently rediscovered Aristotelian metaphysics into this, for Christian theology. With these tools, he integrated the best of biblical scholarship with his mastery of theological wisdom and insights from the patristics and scholastics up to his time.

Because his insights and completeness of thought were so formidable, the greatest effort of the vast majority of theologians who came after him was in plumbing its depths rather than in adopting his method. This is not to ignore the Franciscan school’s rejection of Thomism and the attempts to set up an alternative school. However, it seems clear that while the Scotian school certainly influenced thinking, and not all for the good when one considers his student’s, William of Ockham, insidious distortion of Western thought with his Voluntarist Nominalism. Nevertheless, even this theology took Thomas as its point of departure. Years later, when Thomism was eventually embraced by a majority of Catholic theologians, later approaches (so called neo-scholasticism) did not place as high a premium on mastering the sources as Thomas had.

This began to change at the end of the 19th century in Tubingen, and even more so, in the early part of the 20th century leading up to the Second Vatican Council. Among an influential group of Catholic theologians, there grew an emphasis on a return to the sources, the so-called Ressourcement, that so many theologians had set aside. The fruit this bore, was its influence of the conciliar documents and it came of age in the years following the council, primarily in the school now called Communio. Those associated with this school are certainly not monolithic in their approach or their models. However, there is a prevailing theme that, I would argue, one might now identify as the dominant approach to modern Catholic theology at the turn of the millennium that is bearing fruit.

Hence, I must say that I agree with Fergus Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians: From Chenu to Ratzinger, who identifies this approach to be the aforementioned “Nuptial Mystery.” In his book, Kerr attributes this theology primarily to Hans Urs von Balthasar and Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II. So what is the nuptial mystery? You can read the About this Blog page to get a little better sense of it, but in a nut shell it is the recognition that the Trinity is a Communio Personarum, a Community of Persons. One of the most fruitful insights has come from recent insights in personalism. These insights begin with the fact that man is made in the image of this Communio and that the human person can in deed be understood in analogy to the Divine Persons. This has led to stunning implications of this image for anthropology, the Sacraments, ecclesiology, indeed, the whole of theological inquiry. In a word, the nuptial mystery looks at the analogy of the Trinitarian Communio with human nuptial communion as the “model” par excellence to draw together and provide the integrating theme for the various theological traditions describing Trinitarian life, creation, the Incarnation, soteriology and indeed, all of salvation history.

In the end, the beatific vision is described in terms of marriage; it is marriage with God for which man was created. This is because human marriage arises from and is possible only because of the divine Communio Personarum. Thus, marriage with God is understood as an insertion of individual persons into Trinitarian communion, not as individuals, but corporately. This corporate incorporation comes about again through marital communion. This marital communion is the marriage of the Church, the Bride to the Incarnate Son, the Bridegroom. It is this marital communion that integrates the corporate Bride into the Hypostatic order. In other words, humanity is restored to its communion with God in the Person of Jesus Christ. Fallen human beings share in this restored communion, by union with Jesus Christ, and thereby enter into the Trinitarian Communio–which is integration into the eternal marital communion of the Trinity. Everything that the Church teaches, then, can be understood in terms of this marital end for which we were created.

This nuptial mystery has its foundations in the the exitus–reditus schema which permeates many civilizations’ cosmologies and was taken up in Christianity, especially in the East. This idea of creation coming out of God and returning to God can only be maintained in coherence in the Christian distinction (i.e. the infinite difference between Uncreated Being (God’s nature) and created being). Thus, the going forth and returning cannot be maintained in a substantive sense but rather, must recogized to be in the category of real relations (on the part of creation, not of God of course). Not surprisingly, St. Thomas’ magnum opus his Summa Theologiae, is arguably organized according to this schema and his presentation of what is called today, the Immanent Trinity (the Trinity in Itself) and the Divine Processions, reflect this.

St. Thomas presents all of the features necessary for this Nuptial Mystery in his theological work. In fact, he presents a little recognized foundational insight for it in his treatise on the Angels in the prima pars of the Summa. Here he says that while the Angels in their nature more perfectly reflect God in His nature, human beings because of their begetting more perfectly reflect God relationally.

It seems to me that St. Thomas has the metaphysical tools necessary for expounding the depth and breadth of the Nuptial Mystery but primarily in metaphysical terms. He did not yet have the philosophical tools for further developing the theological analogy of human personhood to divine Personhood. Indeed, philosophical personalism would not begin to flourish until the early-mid 20th century and the theological implications of this would not come about until Balthasar and Wojtyla especially. Today we still do not have a vocabulary for describing the quasi-substantiality of real created relations, much less the quasi-substantiality of real, I would argue, volitional relationships.

Baltahasar and Wojtyla are themselves synthesizers of the fruits that have arisen from biblical scholarship and the return to the sources that began in the years prior to their entry onto the scene. Between the two, I would say that Balthasar, in some ways, has been the most creative. However, I would argue that Wojtyla/JPII has been the greater and more complete synthesizer. One of the reasons for this is the latter’s better understanding and complete acceptance of Thomist metaphysics which stands at the foundation of his theology. Fused with this is Wojtyla/JPII’s mastery of a relatively new philosophical tool, phenomenology, which has enhanced developments in philosophical personalism. Wojtyla/JPII uses phenomenology to extract universal insights from subjective experiences by bracketing the subject’s unique conditioning of the way he interprets his experiences.

Balthasar, on the other hand, leaves too many cracks in his theology, it seems to me. Specifically, he has abandoned a consistent metaphysics (read Thomism) in favor of embellishing his theo-dramatic model. For example, he dismisses the metaphysical structure for discourse about God and His immutability because he cannot reconcile this with God’s suffering in His divinity. Suffering in God is important for the symmetry of his Theodrama. However, in doing this Balthasar leaves a contradiction between suffering and immutability because suffering per se means privation of being. Thus, he is left with a contradiction that he has to hide with appeals to mystery.  I cannot see how this avoids abusing the meaning of mystery and thus leaves him open to charges of fideism.

The Nuptial Mystery is an integrating thread that demonstrates the consistency and coherence of myriad traditional theologies such as those found for creation, the Incarnation and salvation, the Church, anthropology, the Sacraments, the liturgy, and eschatology. It also explains the human person and makes sense of interior dynamic experience. However, not everyone is happy with this approach. Not surprisingly, it appears to be those who are not especially attached to Catholic teaching or traditional Catholic theology.

R. R. Reno of Creighton University gives some insight into this disapproval in a follow up to his review of Kerr’s book cited above, both in First Things and both of which are more interesting reads than this post I must admit. Any way, Reno discusses the fact that Kerr is lambasted by the seventies crowd for many things in his book, but especially for not criticizing the Nuptial Mystery. Reno points out that Kerr defends himself in response, obviously hurt by the rejection of his contemporaries, that he was misunderstood, and that his “sardonic style” was missed. Those who reject this new synthetic theology are the usual suspects. They are radical feminists, sexual libertines, and others who wish to promote lifestyles that reject the truth that sexual intercourse can only be expressed legitimately within the marital covenant, and then only in openness to life.

Background in the Nuptial Mystery brings with it new and deeper meaning to reading Wojytla/JPII’s writings, especially his Theology of the Body. It will make deeper sense of Ratzinger/B16’s works such as the Spirit of the Liturgy. A good book on this that I would recommend is by Angelo Cardinal Scola entitled nothing other than, The Nuptial Mystery.  If you needed any other motivation to learn more about it, read Reno’s On the Square post about those who reject it…this should be sufficient evidence that there is something compelling there.

The other day I cited John Paul’s admonition of what happens when we forget God–man become an enigma to himself and ends up turning against himself. As I was preparing for a theology of the body lecture, I reread John Paul’s Jan 20th, 1980 Wednesday Audience in which he teaches that because man is created in the image of God, Who is Self-gift, man becomes a gift to the world.

How different this view of man is from those who have rejected God. We are hearing more and more from even the mainstream media about man as not a gift to the world but rather its bane. This view is being fed to them by misguided atheistic ecologists who, after rejecting the Triune, transcendent God of Christianity, have divinized sub-personal creation. They now consider mankind a virus. For example, last year a Texas ecologist was being investigated by the FBI for statements he made that seemed to advocate bio-terrorism. According to LifeSite he said:

“Good terrorists would be taking [Ebola Reston and Ebola Zaire] so that they had microbes they could let loose on the Earth that would kill 90 percent of people.”

To “save” the world from the “scourge of humanity” he advocates the eradication of 90% of what he terms the “fat, human biomass.” Earlier this year an interview with an author who wrote a book about what would happen if humans suddenly disappeared from the earth, Matt Lauer from the Today Show seems to advocate this same line of thinking. Rather than asking critical questions, he and co-host Meredeth Vieira talk about human developments such as cities, dams, canals, etc. as making a mess of the environment. They both agree that the world would be much better off without us. What the world without humanity would mean is a unanswered question. Does it make a difference to the world if it is a molten mass of lava or a lush green paradise? These confused souls seem to presuppose that “better off” means pristine conditions for the highest forms of life but then they reject the highest forms of life–human beings–as the problem. This dichotomous thinking is also epidemic amongst those fanning global warming hysteria. Global warming, if human caused, will only harm humans…so what would be the beef that these anti-human ecologists have with it?

Let’s look at this confused “thinking” a little more closely. The interesting thing here is that the first premise in their logic is that humanity is just another form of life, with no more value than any other. They reduce humanity to the animal aspect of its hylomorphic nature. However, they then have to distinguish humanity from the rest of the animals in order to be able to declare that human beings are the virus while the rest of the animal kingdom is not.

Therefore, for the next step in logic they are forced to make a distinction and it is a fundamental one. The reason that humans are dangerous for the world are that they alone have the capacity to transcend themselves and their environment. The capacity that makes us distinctly different from the rest of creation is no longer a sign that man has a vastly higher moral worth than sub-personal animals. Rather, not being constrained by instinct and having intellect and will, free will, becomes a danger that reduces us to the level, ironically enough, of a virus. A virus is a non-living entity that has no free will and simply responds to environmental pressures according to its nature. A virus is seen as bad, by the way, because it is dangerous to humans. There is no consistency in thought here, except to throw whatever one can at one overriding idea–the self-hatred of man.

However, it would not be correct to say that this self-hatred arises simply out of nowhere. It is a self-hatred that arises from a hatred of God and the fact that we are made in His image. It is a rebellion against the only creature which God put here on earth for its own sake. When one rejects God, he rejects himself and comes to hate in himself the reminder that he is created in God’s image–his free will. Paradoxically, he must employ and, in fact, make his will into an idol in order to do so. But again, we have shown that it is hate and self-will, not logic, which drives this movement.

We have removed God from public life and our late-modern thinking has eliminated the idea of things having a nature. The result is that there is no foundation for morality. One can no longer speak of divine law in public discourse. Nor can one easily speak of natural law because there is professed to be (by our high priests of modern science) no order to nature but a random arrived at arrangement of matter (that only begrudgingly will these “thinkers” admit is ordered). The “thinking” exhibited by these folks is vague at best. If one recalls the tradition that Satan’s non serviam was a rebellion against serving humanity because its animality was too far below him, one might justly call this latest assault on human dignity, satanic.

Post-Darwinist, a Toronto-based journalist, wrote on an interview by Anthony Flew (who used to be one of the world’s best known and most academically serious atheists journalist) and Lee strobel, both of whom became theists through the evidence for intelligent design of the universe.

It was the evidence from science and history that prompted me to abandon my atheism and become a Christian – and now biological discoveries have caused the world’s most famous philosophical atheist, Dr. Antony Flew, to declare his belief in a Creator. An account of my rare interview with Flew is below, and you can find free video clips at LeeStrobel.com.

Be Here Mondays gives his take on this October’s “First Things” review by Stephen M. Barr on Creation and the book by the Harvard scientist Edward O. Wilson Ed, who is first and foremost an ant man, but also has a profound admiration for scarab beetles.

“Do you want to buy an egg, sperm and surrogate mother?’

“Designer babies? Yeah. Why not?” she replies with a laugh. For years, she adds, sperm banks have required college degrees from donors. She often uses a sperm bank that requires sperm from Ph.D.s. “Does that make it a designer baby because they have a Ph.D.? But why wouldn’t I use someone with a Ph.D. versus a truck driver? It’s all the same cost.”

“You know why I did it? Because I could.” Ryan explains. She started Abigails Silver Spoons Adoptions, Inc., years ago, and while that enterprise continues, Ryan saw a new market in embryos.

The attitude towards eugenics, contraception, abortion, etc.., of each person may be dependent on their view of God. If God is seen as Love, then there is a sense of trust and the desire to receive. If God is not recognized as Love, then there is no trust, and He is a potential threat to happiness, that must be taken or grasped for themselves. Here is a great explanation of In-Vitro Fertilization and the Hermeneutic of the Gift.

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Surprised?

Before completing an application, students looking to enter the Harvard Business School MBA program are asked to fill out an online profile that offers three choices of gender: female, male, or transgender. The form also asks prospective applicants if they would be interested in learning more about the school’s “lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender” community.

If you think about it, Harvard appears to be taking the position that “transgenders” no longer (like all other human beings) have a legitimate sex. Agape Press Source

The Georg-August University in Göttingen, Germany has created artificial sperm in a laboratory experiment and used them to produce offspring in mice. There were abnormalities observed in the 7 baby mice, with 6 surviving to adulthood.

The abstract at Developmental Cell Online says the fact that the experiment succeeded in producing live mice “is a clear indication that male gametes derived in vitro from ES cells by this strategy are able to induce normal fertilization and development.”

While embryonic researchers talk about ending disease, their ultimate goal is to create “better people,” the eugenicists’ Holy Grail. Children produced by in vitro fertilization and other artificial methods, suffer birth defects and sometimes hidden genetic problems throughout their lives.

How about this?

In 2002, two major studies published in the New England Medical Journal showed that the risk of birth defects double with children produced by artificial means.

Source Article: LifeSite

The procedure for artificial insemination of a convicted hitman will be paid for by a local health service.

It appears that Salvino Madonia married a woman while in prison and now wishes to further dehumanize this woman by using her womb to carry on his family name. The situation is the “poster child” of everything that’s morally wrong with in-vitro fertilization, from the violation of the couple’s marriage covenant to the the “domination of technology over the origin and destiny of the human person”.

It’s harder to accept and seems more barbaric than using embroyonic stem cells, but the crime of taking of one life for the potential benefit of another (physical or emtional) is ALWAYS wrong.

China is killing prisoners by harvesting and selling their vital organs. “They take both kidneys, then the heart and the skin and the corneas and the liver, and your body is then thrown in the incinerator,”

The combination of genetics and environmental factors have impact on individual behaviors. New research on aggressive and sexual behaviors presented at International Congress of Neuroendocrinology June 19-22.

Genetics appear to be predictive only if men have hostile attitudes and fathers who never completed high school. Moreover, a genetic predisposition toward aggression could be rebuffed by a mother who nurtures her infant, suggests another study involving primates.

To understand what brings about arousal of the central nervous system leading to sexual behavior, scientists have had to discover specific biochemical reactions within a select group of neurons in the hypothalamus. The process involves a complement of sex steroid hormones, perhaps as many as 120 genes and a host of environmental variables (not least among them, arousing stimuli and a suitable mate).

With the development of this new test, clinics will have the capability of screening human embryos for about 6,000 diseases, compared to 200 for tests that are currently available.

Using the technique, doctors can examine every embryo created for a couple through IVF, and determine whether each is healthy and unaffected, a carrier of the disease, or destined to develop the full-blown medical condition. The new test will allow doctors to see which male embryos are free of the disease-causing mutation, so fewer embryos will be wasted. In some cases, the test will allow doctors the controversial option of asking couples to choose the sex of the embryos that are transplanted.

The eugenic technology will be introduced at the annual meeting in Prague of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology.

“Certainly the use of prophylactics can, in some situations, constitute a lesser evil,”.

Condom use within a marriage for any reason will never be approved. My understanding of sex and marriage in the Catholic church is so sacred an act, that it goes far beyond what many of us can fully understand. It is a beautiful gift that is truly out of this world. The Father and the Son are truly one, no separation or conditional giving is possible.

By analogy we can use this phrase if we understand that human sex differences arise from universal cosmic principles of masculinity and femininity. However, we are not talking about gendered biology here.

I have mentioned before that Peter Kreeft has an excellent article on sexual symbolism that articulates how all of creation is ordered according to the cosmic principles of masculinity and femininity. This is due to the fact that creation is an overflowing of Trinitarian love. Hans Urs von Balthasar provides a very explicit discussion of this in Vol 4 of his Theodrama. John Paul the Great’s theology, though it does not directly address this theme, is quite compatible with Balthasar’s on the point. This discussion will integrate insights from these three thinkers.

God is a Trinitarian Family of Three Persons Who are unified in such a manner that all Three fully possess the one and only divine nature. These Persons are described by the Eternal Processions which John Paul characterizes as the total gift of Self of one divine Person to the Others. The Father’s total gift of Himself to the Son and the Son’s reciprocation of this gift are fruitful. This mutual Love is a Person–the Holy Spirit. Being the Source of everything that exists, this total self-giving establishes the framework for creation and so it is the interpretive key for understanding creation and most especially the human person who is created in the image of this Self-giving God.

Von Balthasar teaches that the eternal Trinitarian Processions have analogical expression in human sexual differences:

. . . the divine unity of action and consent . . . is expressed in the world in the duality of the sexes. In trinitarian terms, of course, the Father, who begets [the Son and] who is without origin, appears primarily as (super-) masculine; the Son, in consenting, appears initially as (super-) feminine, but in the act (together with the Father) of breathing forth the Spirit, he is (super-) masculine. As for the Spirit, he is (super-) feminine. There is even something (super-) feminine about the Father too, since . . . in the action of begetting and breathing forth he allows himself to be determined by the Persons who thus proceed from him; however, this does not affect his primacy in the order of the Trinity. The very fact of the Trinity forbids us to project any secular sexuality into the Godhead (as happens in many religions and in the Gnostic syzygia). It must be enough for us to regard the ever-new reciprocity of acting and consenting, which in turn is a form of activity and fruitfulness, as the transcendent origin of what we see realized in the world of creation: the form and actualization of love and its fruitfulness in sexuality (Theodrama: Theological Dramatic Theory, Vol V. The Last Act, trans. Graham Harrison [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998], 91).

Balthasar anchors masculinity and femininity in different modes of ‘act’. For Balthasar, the primary male mode is an initiating act of love. The woman’s primary mode is a receptive act of love. The woman secondarily then returns this love and the man secondarily receives it. Human souls, which are substantial forms of the body, have all that is necessary to human nature. They simply possess it differently. This reading of Balthasar is quite consonant with John Paul II’s morphology of the communio personarum-gift in his theology of the body catecheses, and which he succinctly summarizes in Mulieris dignitatem (MD): “When the author of the Letter to the Ephesians calls Christ ‘the Bridegroom’ and the Church ‘the Bride’, he indirectly confirms through this analogy the truth about woman as bride. The Bridegroom is the one who loves. The Bride is loved: it is she who receives love, in order to love in return” (MD, 29).

As you can see, this relation of love–an initiating love that we refer to as masculine and a receptive, reciprocating love which we call feminine, overflows into Creation. God relates to His creation according to the masculine principle of love. Creation responds to God according to the feminine principle of love. But within creation, the principle of masculine and feminine relation is also found. Kreeft describes it this way:

…we must distinguish “male” from “masculine.” Male and female are biological genders. Masculine and feminine, or yang and yin, are universal, cosmic principles, extending to all reality, including spirit.

All pre-modern civilizations knew this. English is almost the only language that does not have masculine and feminine nouns. So it is easy for us who speak English to believe that the ancients merely projected their own biological gender out onto nature in calling heaven masculine and earth feminine, day masculine and night feminine, sun masculine and moon feminine, land masculine and sea feminine. In the Hindu marriage ceremony the bridegroom says to the bride, “I am heaven, you are earth.” The bride replies, “I am earth, you are heaven.” Not only is cosmic sexuality universal, its patterns are suspiciously consistent. Most cultures saw the sun, day, land, light, and sky as male; moon, night, sea, darkness, and earth as female. Is it not incredibly provincial and culturally arrogant for us to assume, without a shred of proof, that this universal and fairly consistent human instinct is mere projection, myth, fantasy, and illusion rather than insight into a cosmic principle that is really there?

Once we look, we find abundant analogical evidence for it from the bottom of the cosmic hierarchy to the top, from the electromagnetic attraction between electrons and protons to the circumincession of divine Persons in the Trinity. Male and female are only the biological version of cosmic masculine and feminine. God is masculine to everything, from angels to prime matter.

Thus, we have a cosmic structure of complementary relations with binary terms. The first term, masculinity, is an initiating total-gift of self and the second, femininity, is a receptive and reciprocating total self-gift. This is the cosmic structure of creation because it is the structure of Trinitarian love. The next installment will discuss human sex differences based upon this.

Sex and the Human Person:  Part III - Sex Differences

Gay Asylum Issue Raised In Holland  - Dutch Immigration officials, who had previously upheld a moratorium on sending LGBT asylum seekers back to Iran, now say the moratorium will be lifted, to the dismay of Human Rights Watch. A number of western governments offered support to gay people fleeing the country, after the public execution of two gay Iranian teenagers sparked international protest.

Human Rights Watch cited Iran’s criminal code that states that sexual intercourse between men “is punishable by death” and men convicted of foreplay can be punished with 100 lashes and be executed on the fourth conviction. Punishment for sex between women calls for similarly draconian penalities, including execution for successive convictions.

Poll: Most people reject evolution theory - A Gallup Poll released Wednesday suggests about 53 percent of Americans rejects the theory of evolution as the explanation for the origin of humans. 

American Medical Association commissioned Poll - Alcohol and sex play a prominent and potentially dangerous role in spring break trips of college co-eds according to an American Medical Association (AMA) poll released today. The survey has a margin of error of +/- 4.00 percent at the 95 percent level of confidence. Key findings of the poll include: More than half of women (57 percent) agree being promiscuous is a way to fit in.    

      

“We just feel like God has fought and won this battle for us, and we want to give glory to Him”.  Dawn Finley

A jury deliberated only one hour before reaching its unanimous decision that Brandy Holmes must die for the murder of Rev. Julian Brandon. Brandy’s family, hoping for mercy, argued that their daughter was born with fetal alcohol syndrome which caused her to be mentally ill. The prosecutors said “she knew exactly” what she was doing.

I was struck by the reaction of Rev. Brandon’s daughter, who believed that it was the will of God that Brandy’s natural life be ended to pay for her crime. She went on to say that Brandy’s execution will give her and the family closure. Now, I am not being critical of someone who is obiously experiencing a great amount of grief, but the value she placed on having closure was greater than the life of another human being.  In her distorted and rather egocentric relationship with God, she concluded that in order to bring her comfort, God fought to have Brandy put to death. Does God have “favorites” according to who we are, or what we do? Did God exact his vengance according her will? Is it God’s will that his gift of life be taken away from one child in order to please and comfort another? Who is to serve Who?

(transition to abortion - insert here) 

It seems that a distorted and narcisitic sense of God’s love is prevelent among so many who justify abortion & euthanasia. Through their emotional immaturity, they assume the role of master, and reduce God to their servant of the will. What is especially confusing is how those who claim to be catholics (for choice) can justify their agenda. Do they think God runs an amazon.com type creation business? His goal is keep his customers happy. If your happy, than He’s happy. keep what you want, send back the rest, no questions asked!

Just to clarify, I am not comparing the family’s closure to abortion, I just get tangential from time to time.

Holmes to become second woman on death row

A short news video on the procedure of baby sex selection.

 

Amélie has posted some thoughts on this encyclical and the comments to her thread suggest that there is much interest in it.  However, some of the comments are a bit inane.  For example, one guy sees this Encyclical as an olive branch to “gays” because B16 does not explicitly limit eros to heterosexuality and limit “gays” to agape.  This sad thinking, besides being delusional, completely misunderstands the faith and the Trinitarian foundation of love.  If one reads this Encyclical closely, he will see that same-sex eros can never be purified.  One can never acheive same-sex agape (here I mean in the sense of which we call the disorder of same-sex attraction).

Part of the problem with understanding what unity in difference can mean is a lack of a proper metaphysics.  Orthodox theologian, David Bentley Hart does a masterful job in Beauty of the Infinite of showing that the errors of post-modernism reduces to monistic presuppositions about the Being of God.  This error of monism leads post-moderns to see God as in competition with creation and so in opposition to man, especially in terms of freedom.  What Msgr. Robert Sokolowski calls the Christian difference, solves this problem.  God is ontologically different than creation as His is Uncreated Being, where creatures possess created being.  Hart demonstrates that these are not at two opposite poles of the same dimension of being with the finite on one end and the Infinite at the other.  Rather created being ex-ists by participation in Uncreated Being (which sub-sists).  Infinite Being is not the sum of all beings, it is Being Itself.

This type of false opposition is at the heart of other confusions, including Trinitarian theology and the theology of love.  Eros and agape are not two different types of love in opposition to one another but two aspects of the unity which is love.  Like the distinction in Persons in the Unity of the divine nature, the distinctions of love do not eliminate love’s unity.

As the title of the Encyclical says, God is Love.  God is perfection itself and so Love, and loves distinctions into eros and agape are logical distinctions which allow understanding of the different manners in which created being participates in the simplicity of God’s Being. These distinctions are proper to created intellect, but making these distinctions shouldn’t be confused with complexity in God.

Love is an act of the will in which one selflessly gives himself as a gift to others.  But this gift of self is the result of a developing process (in creatures) which is the culmination of a love of attraction.  The attraction (eros) is not annihilated but it achieves its end in the self-gift (agape).  Eros, in our fallen state, must be purified in agape.  Neither is this self-gift static.  It is an on-going act of the will; it is a decision to give oneself as a gift and to receive the other likewise, in response.

What some folks seem to miss is that eros as we experience it, can and many times is, distorted.  B16 addresses that and makes it clear that eros which is not grounded in self-gift is a distortion which strips love and the lover of dignity and humanity.  So what is and is not authentic self-gift?

Self-gift can only be rooted in Trinitarian love.  The Father’s total gift of Himself to the Son and the Son’s reciprocation are fruitful. This mutual Love is a Person . . . the Holy Spirit. Being the Source of everything that exists, this total self-giving establishes the framework for creation and so it is the interpretive key for understanding creation and most especially the human person who is created in the image of this Self-giving God.

This framework shows that love must be true to the order of creation.  This is where those who mistakenly believe that B16 is somehow now saying that same-sex genital relations are suddenly not a disorder, completely miss the Trinitarian nature of creation.  The Encyclical says that “…man is somehow incomplete, driven by nature to seek in another the part that can make him whole, the idea that only in communion with the opposite sex can he become ‘complete’” (DCE 11).  Here B16 follows JPTG’s theology of the body in which the latter shows that man is made, male and female, in the Trinitarian image.  Husband and wife are a unity in difference, made complementarily for one another.  The structure of heterosexual anatomy demonstrates their complementarity and their having been ordered to the one-flesh union which is the only genital union that has the capacity to be fruitful in a life-giving way.

B16 uses the phrase unity and difference also to describe the hylomorphic union of body and soul. Because the soul is the substantial form of the body, the body expresses something in the soul.  This includes sex differences.  Sex differences are ontological and created for the unity in difference of love, manifested in its dimensions of eros and agape. 

So no Virginia, there is no Santa Claus…there is nothing here but wishful thinking to suggest homo-eroticism can be included in anything but a “warped and destructive form” of eros (DCE 4).

Now while marital love is the most clear place to demonstrate this unity and distinction, B16 does not do this.  I suppose that JPTG’s theology of the body, to which I find unmistakeable allusions, has already done that.  Here, B16 makes these distinctions in the unity of love as the prelude to what I believe may be a new development in Church social teaching and perhaps even in ecclesiology.  I will share those next time.

Not exactly the way the English translation put it, but I believe that understanding unity and difference is the key to seeing what B16 is doing in this Encyclical (well at the part 1 right now).  I just finished reading it through the first time so it is very dangerous to go too far with one’s assessment of the letter as a whole.  Nevertheless, I do think I am safe in saying that those who miss this point, e.g. those who are schooled in Cartesian dualism, will undoubtedly see dualist error in this document.  For example, I clearly expect, if they have not already, the usual suspects of feminist theologians to accuse B16 of dualism in paragraph 11 when he describes the one flesh union as the completion of humanity.  But I believe this is a misappropriation of his meaning.

My next post will try to explain how I believe that B16 understands unity and difference and how it works in his explication of eros and agape.

Perhaps no work in modern theology brings together as well as Louis Bouyer’s Cosmos: The World and the Glory of God the three realities of creation – cosmos, liturgy and sex — whose connection it is our intention to elucidate on this blog.  Bouyer, one of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century, puts on full display in this volume an immense erudition and speculative insight whose effect is to vividly portray the perennial relevance of the Church’s liturgical vision of the cosmos and the nuptial metaphysics that expresses most profoundly, in deep connection with the revealed figures of Scripture, the God-world relationship.

In fact, Bouyer’s work might be seen as an a priori synthesis of the primary intellectual concerns of the last two pontiffs: JP II’s theology of the body, and Benedict’s liturgical vision, which itself takes cosmic proportions (see The Spirit of the Liturgy).  Bouyer establishes, in fact, a nuptial metaphysics of Sophianic dimensions – that may indeed go beyond the related theme as found in JP II – and his incorporation of properly liturgical themes with speculative theology may have been unmatched in the twentieth century.

The volume has many different themes and levels of meaning that cannot be easily summarized in a blog blurb.  Some of the themes: the foundation of human reason in mythopoetic consciousness, the connection of human history to cosmic destiny, the connection of “impersonal” nature to the liturgy of the angels, the completion of humankind’s microcosmic subjectivity in the nuptial relationship between man and woman, the link between magic and technology, the interweaving realities of individual human personhood (summed up in the person of Mary) and social existence (summed up in the Church), and much, much more.

Though, perhaps, the book cannot be understood fully except in connection with the eight other volumes of the nine-volume synthesis of which it forms a part, it nevertheless stands on it own as a great work of theology that should be more widely read…Do not tarry!  Buy this book!

A bizarre religious debate is going on in Egypt. The question is: should you take them off or keep them on (your clothes) when having sex? It started when Dr Rashad Khalil, an expert on Islamic law, warned that being completely naked during intercourse invalidates a marriage. His ruling was promptly dismissed by other scholars, including one who thought that “anything that can bring spouses closer to each other” should be permitted. Another religious scholar suggested it was OK for married couples to see each other naked as long as they don’t look at the genitals. To avoid problems in that area, he recommended having sex under a blanket (in a very dark room with blind folds). O.K., now that they have that mess cleared up, what about oral sex (which came about because of the “westerners’ habit of “stripping naked during sexual intercourse”), anal sex, and contraception? Very strange stuff, but here’s the article (parts may be inappropriate for minors!!).

The Muslim faith, like other “modernized” religions, seem a little confused on how to get a handle on the morality of sex. Most of them have no problems with divorce, contraception, oral sex, and some, even anal sex. Not surprisingly to most of you, the acceptance of contraception has done more to promote the homosexual lifestyle than all of the sex obessed activists of today combined. If sex is primarily for bonding and recreation and can be engineered to be deliberately sterile, how can we deny the legitimacy of the ultimate sterility of same-sex relationships? How ironic that the Catholic church is call hypocritical and inconsistent. Marriage and procreation is biblical and consistent with historical tradition and scriptural teaching. Christ transformed marriage into a sacrament that, validly entered into and consummated, is binding until the death of the husband or wife. Furthermore, the sexual union that ensues must be open to the gift of life. If a man and a woman is unable to consumate the marriage for any reason, the marriage is invalid (don’t let this get out, or we may lose that homophobia tag) , even for physical disorders such as impotence. Does anyone (seriously) know if it is appropriate to take viagra?