Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Hierothee suggested I do a post on my research about the connection of sacrifice to consumption.  This is very difficult to do in the space of a standard post so this will necessarily be a broad sketch of what one day may be a much more compelling (I hope) manuscript.

I suppose the place to start is with John Paul’s Trinitarian anthropology.  Man is made in the image of a Communion of Persons.  He explains this Communion, starting from traditional Processional theology, in terms of total self-gift.  Communion is total self-gift.  This total self-gift  is thereby the archetype for the human person in his relationships.

The human person is a hylomorphic entity; that is, a unity comprised of a spiritual soul and a material body.  Man exists at once,  in the realm of the spiritual and the animal.  As a spiritual being man shares in the capacity for communion by use of his rational faculties, intellect and will.  These faculties give him he capacity for total self-gift, for communion.

Animals also, in some way, must reflect God’s perfection.  As fundamental as communion is to God’s being, one might expect that there should be some way in which sub-personal animals participate in communion.  Certainly sub-personal beings do not have the rational faculties necessary for the communion of gift.  They do however, experience a sort of communion in which they join themselves to something of a lower nature (hopefully).  However, this union is through annihilating the lower nature and raising it into a higher nature.  They become one with it, though this is a defective communion because the “other” has lost its being.

Man lives in both of these dimensions.  He experiences both this spiritual communion of persons–most perfectly when the giving accords with the archetype, that is total, disinterested self-gift.  He also experiences the communion of consumption when he eats…though I would argue he can consume in other ways…when he treats another person as a means rather than an end…but this requires more discussion than we have space for.

Man now exists in a deficient condition; he is fallen.  It is very interesting to look at the third book of Genesis and the story of the fall in light of the above discussion.  The mythic (this does not mean untrue of course) imagery shows our first parents with the task of total self-gift–that is, to give themselves in trust and thanksgiving to God, very much the way that John Paul describes the second Procession of the Son.  There is a detailed discussion of the theology of creation in relation to the Son and the second Procession which should be inserted here but neither is there space for that so this might seem less compelling than it should be, but the support will have to wait a longer work.

The Genesis imagery of the fall indicates that the instead of achieving communion through this act of total-self gift, they instead chose consumption.  I would argue that whatever the act of rebellion might have actually been, the choice of the consumption imagery is significant.  It suggests that consumption–communion on man’s terms rather than God’s terms–is to be a perennial problem.  In fact, consumption now often masquerades as communion.  I believe that this is the anthropology behind what we know as “comfort foods” which are standard recourse for many of us, particularly when we have trouble with relationships of communion.

Man’s fallen state means that his capacity for love takes upon itself, potentially a bitter aspect.  It is now the case that one has to die in different ways, when one loves.  In the very least, he must die to himself and his selfish inclinations if he is to love the other for the other’s sake.  This is a type of sacrifice.  In fact, the challenge to love disinterestedly requires varying degrees of sacrifice.  Sacrifice is to give of yourself for the sake of the other to the point that you experience loss in some manner or another.  This is ultimately what the divine Processions are…though it may not be appropriate to use the term sacrifice for the divine Procession because of the attendant connotation of loss in sacrifice and there is no loss in the divine Communion.

However, the remedy to the fall, in which man’s failure to emulate the second Procession, will take on the proper meaning of the term sacrifice.  The Son Incarnate will freely choose to manifest temporally what He does eternally.  He will, in love, trust and thanksgiving, return to the Father all that the Father has given Him…including His human life.  This Sacrifice on the cross will restore the conditions of possibility for communion, but interestingly enough, it does so in a way the redeems the consumption by which man’s initial communion was lost.

Of course we know well the fact that the Cross draws together the eternal with the temporal.  It draws into itself the last Passover seder in the upper room before Christ’s Passion, as He transforms this  seder into the New Testament Passover–the Sacrifice of the Mass.  The Cross also brings forth the economic manifestation of the second Procession, that is Pentecost–in an analogous way in the first Procession brings about the second.

This one Paschal act, beginning with the Incarnation and ending with the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, is liturgically made present in the Sacrifice of the Mass.  The Mass re-presents the Sacrifice of the Cross through the memorial enactment of the New Testament Passover proleptically celebrated in the Upper Room.   It culminates in an efficacious symbol of communion which looks very much like animal consumption–we call it Holy Communion.

The consumption in the Garden of Eden which destroyed man’s communion with God  is now redeemed by the Son.  The Son, who in an act of total self-gift reflective of His eternal gift, continually gives up His Body and Blood in every Mass celebrated throughout the ages, that through an animal act of consumption the faithful are restored by this life-giving communion with the Son and thereby, inserted into Trinitarian Communion.

In a hylomorphic act of love which eclipses Aristotle’s greatest thoughts, both aspects of the human person, animal and spiritual, are incorporated during this divinizing rite we call Holy Communion.  The human person is inserted into the hypostatic order giving him entrance into Trinitarian life when he consumes the Flesh of the Son of Man and drinks His Blood…he now truly has life in him.

Consumption has been redeemed and is immutably implicated in spiritual communion.  This doesn’t mean that consumption no longer masquerades as communion; it does.

It does mean though, that when this masquerading does lead to sin, it is now the source of its own ultimate undoing…because where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more.  The love revealed and effected on the Cross, is poured out in time via the mediation of the Sacrifice of the Mass, restoring communion where souls choose to turn again to God.  Sacrifice has redeemed consumption and made it the material cause of communion.

I have been teaching a Christology class this semester using Fr. Roch Kereszty’s Jesus Christ: Fundamentals of Christology as one of my primary texts.   I like Kereszty because I think that his synthesis of Christology around the concept of communio is effective and comprehensive.  I agree with his approach on a host of issues.  However, as we reach the end of the semester, I am brought again to the issue that confronts a number of Communio theologians. This is the question of God’s suffering.

Like Balthasar and others, Kereszty begins by embracing the Catholic position that God cannot suffer in His immutable divine nature.  But like Balthasar, he argues that this does not rule out Father’s being “personally” affected, for example, by His Son’s death.  Kereszty uses the term vulnerable for God in the sense that the Father leaves Himself vulnerable to His creation and to being personally affected by the sinfulness of His creation.  He argues that this is the only way to do justice to the explicitness of the Gospel parables.

I suppose that I would question justifying the Father’s personal affect based upon parables which are by their nature, implicit any way.  A genre like a parable that applies to God one must be cautious not to apply anthropomorphisms and anthropopathisms to God.  Nevertheless, the issue of divine Personhood and its analogy to human personhood is one that is under treated theologically and so I would not want to rule out of hand some sort of distinction between what can be predicated of the Persons in contradistinction to the nature. The caveat of course, is that this distinction but be logically consistent with an immutable divine nature and it must not demand temporal qualities in God, nature or Person. However, I suspect that what we have here is simply a lack of precsion between the good that humans experience as changing emotion and their perfect, immutable archetype in God.

I do not believe that Kereszty, as I think is also the case with Balthasar, does an adequate job of analyzing the phenomenology of personal affect or its relationship to known metaphysical categories so as to ensure he is being consistent in his thinking.  It seems to me that his making the distinction between affect of diving nature and affect of divine personhood does not immunize him from the charge of logical inconsistency.

Let us take the term vulnerable.  Etymologically this term means the capacity to be wounded.  Woundedness is nothing other than a deprivation of being.  Kereszty accepts that this woundedness could never touch the divine nature but I do not see simply making the distinction between personhood and nature does any good here.  One still must assert that there is some sort of possible deprivation in the divine Person if he is capable of being wounded.  I do not see how this can be asserted.  The Person is not separate from His nature.  In fact, the Person is a relation of opposition in the divine nature.

Furthermore, to assert that a divine Person may be affected by limited creation, that He may “experience” temporal, limited creation which arises from the love of the divine Persons and so has nothing that they already do not have seems to violate the law of non-contradiction.  To experience means to draw out of, to be affected by experience means to draw something new out of something else but there is nothing new that creatures can give even to the divine Persons.  Thus, the claims of divine personal affect and experience of creatures seems to assert that creation both comes from God and does not come from God at the same time and in the same way.

When we discuss the divine Persons as Relations we have metaphysical categories for assessing how affect can be considered consistent or not with immutability.  There are two ways of relating: ontologically in what the scholastics called real relations and accidentally in what are called logical relations.  In God there can be no accidents.  What does this mean for His relation to His creation?  Well, the relation between God and His creation has to be a logical relation but it is so in a way does not predicate an accident in divine nature.  God is not affected by His creation though His creation is affected by God.  The mutability in this relation is then, one way–only the creature changes.  Notice that this is not with respect to divine nature.  Divine Persons are Relations and the Personal relations to creatures are all logical.  These are not, as Kereszty implies, simply arbitrary philosophical a priori but they are self-consistent, tools of thought that authentically describe the real world and God as He has revealed Himself.

However, God does relate in a way that is volitional.  We will call these relationships.  God chooses these from all eternity. God wills eternally and immutably.  His will does not change.  Vulnerability is a relational term.  Kereszty allows this vulnerability because God wills it but what can God’s willing vulnerability really mean?  How can His creation affect Him, even if He chooses to allow it, in a way that does not end up in a logical inconsitency or just as badly, as an eternal negative or positive affect?  That is, since God acts eternally, if He were to be affected in a negative way that would be an eternal act which would affect Him eternally.  In either positive or negative cases, He would still be drawing something from His creation He did not have and so He would have to be drawing from some higher principle–meaning He would not be God.

I do not see in attributing affect or vulnerability to the divine person while not to the divine nature, any way to remain logically consistent.  I suspect the problem is two fold.  One is the attempt to viscerally jolt their readers into not underestimating the intensity of love and compassion that God has for man.  The other is to fail to adequately assess the differences between finite experience of infinite archetpyes and the affect of the fall on these experiences.  Suffering is a privation of being.  It may be inevitable in fallen human love but it is not inextricably attached to it.  God even in His Person cannot suffer other than the Son, and only the Son, and then under the rubric of the communication of idioms.  The fact that the Father is not affected by His creation does not imply indifference.  This is a faulty attempt at analogy between human experience and the divine reality.  God created out of intense love and compassion and He never changes.  He is not affected in the sense of there is nothing we can do that can reduce this passionate, intense love for His creation.  That is the key and the real drama that I think these Communio scholars are intending.

I was over at Pertinacious Papist earlier looking for the article that Hierothee mentioned but I could not find it. Any way, while rooting around I saw his post about New Oxford Review’s (NOR) accusing Scott Hahn of Gnosticism for his views about the Holy Spirit. Hahn takes a lot of abuse not only from all quarters for various reasons. I have not read the book to which NOR refers and neither do they provide much of an analysis either in their first accusation or in their response to Hahn’s subsequent letter to the editor. However, if one looks at what NOR does present one finds that it does not do much to support their case.

The issue here seems to be that NOR believes that Hahn is saying that the Holy Spirit is a feminine God. Hahn denies that he says this in his book but NOR responds that while he may not say it explicitly they think that it is a necessary conclusion from what Hahn does say.

Here are some of the NOR claims along with my thoughts (you didn’t think that you could avoid those did you):

You do say the Holy Spirit is feminine. You say: “In Syriac as in Hebrew, the word for Spirit, ruah, is feminine, and so it ordinarily called for a feminine pronoun” (p. 160). You say: “Christians often interpreted the Bible’s wisdom passages as referring to the Holy Spirit…. In the Book of Wisdom, chapters 7-9, God’s Wisdom is referred to as ‘holy spirit’…. The Hebrew word for Wisdom, hokmak, is also feminine…” (p. 161).

I assume that OAR simply wants to be complete but here Hahn simply points out factual information. I don’t see how Hahn’s making reference to these facts can be considered problematic as NOR seems to imply. NOR continues:

You say: “Dominican theologian Father Benedict Ashley…. concludes ‘it is to the Third Person of the Trinity…that the Old Testament descriptions of the feminine Wisdom are applied.’ And his conclusion seems very reasonable” (p. 162). You say: “Etymology doesn’t usually make for good biblical theology; but these cases might be an exception. The great Dominican Thomist Father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange said: ‘Since “Spirit” — in Hebrew, Ruah — is of the feminine gender…’” (p. 163). You say: “St. Edith Stein [said]…’Such love is properly the attribute of the Holy Spirit. Thus we can see the prototype of the feminine being in the Spirit of God…’” (p. 165). You wrote it. How can you deny it?

NOR finds problematic, apparently, that there would be anything of femininity to be found in God. This view in itself is problematic because it would seem to make femininity a natural evil unintended by God. It also seems to betray a serious misunderstanding of the ontology of gender/sex difference. I will explain what I mean by these assertions below. There is more:

(2) As we said in our New Oxford Note (Feb.), Hahn says: “We know Who the Spirit is by what He does, and what the Spirit does is bridal and maternal…” (italics added). No “He” (the Holy Spirit) can be bridal or maternal. You might just as well have said the Holy Spirit is a “She.”

This NOR claim again fails to understand the ontology of gender, confusing it for something substantial rather than its being relational. This confusion is further manifested in the following:

(4) We would be startled if you would support lesbian “marriage,” but that’s where your argument leads. If Mary was female or maternal, and if the Holy Spirit is female or feminine and maternal, then Jesus had two mommies, which validates lesbian “marriage.” No, Dale Vree does not support “gay marriage” between men: The Holy Spirit is paternal and Mary is maternal. That’s the proper order.

Why do I say that NOR’s claim would seem to make femininity a natural evil unintended by God? It is because NOR seems to reject the idea that one can see anything of the feminine in God. If that is true then femininity has nothing for its source. God creates out of nothing because God is existence itself and so He is the only Archetype for everything that can and does come into existence in the created order. Thus, if femininity is a created perfection, and Genesis 1 reveals that it is, then it must have its origin in God’s perfection. Thus, femininity must somehow derive its origin in God Himself. But then one might ask what is femininity that it can be in God without God being considered to be female (or worse, androgynous)? This leads to the second issue I mentioned above.

Femininity, like masculinity, do not belong to the substance of nature. Rather, in the metaphysical order they are accidents. But this does not mean that they have no essence. In fact, gender might be said to be quasi-substantial in that it is relational. In being relational, masculinity and femininity only make sense in relation to each other. In other words, one only apprehends masculinity in the knowledge of femininity and vice versa.

Furthermore, understood correctly one can validly say that there is something like gender in God. By correctly understood I mean that masculinity and femininity must be viewed as complementary relations which provide the structure for life giving love. Here one can rightly say that what is reflected in human sex difference (gender) indeed has its origin in the Trinitarian Relations. This does not mean Gnosticism. It does not mean that God has a body, that God is male or female. It means that God Himself and the manner in which He loves infinitely and eternally, is the archetype by which we can understand human masculinity and its relation to human femininity (see this post for more detail on this). NOR is not wrong in what they reject but they are wrong in assuming that Hahn’s statements necessarily result in what they reject.

NOR is also correct in rejecting the idea that God can be feminine in His relation to humanity. Masculinity is at root, a love of initiative. God is masculine in His relation to humanity, which is why God presents Himself as Bridegroom in relation to His Church, the Bride. But this does not mean that what is manifested as human femininity, a relationality, does not have its origin in Trinitarian Relations. In fact, the dogma of creatio ex nihilo demands that it does.

If there is anything else in Hahn’s book that is problematic I don’t know (but it would surprise me if there were). However, in what I do see NOR pointing out as what they find to be problematic in Hahn’s book it does not appear that they have a legitimate claim to make in this regard. Rather, it reflects what has happened often in history. NOR simply lacks the philosophical constructs to understand how Hahn’s claims do not result in what they see as the necessary consequences of his assertions. Perhaps more private discussion might have resolved this issue and avoided an unnecessary, unjust accusation against a theologian who I believe is doing a fantastic amount of good for the Church.

UPDATE: Here are some interesting comments that Hierothee offers from sophiology:

I think the sophiological theme as expressed by the Russians does have some value in regard to this discussion. Wisdom is associated in the tradition with Christ, the Spirit, Mary and the Church. Thus, the sophiologists saw in Wisdom the archetype for creation (essentially feminine in relation to God) expressed eternally in the Son and glorified by the Spirit but eternally ordered to created embodiment in the eschatological Church. So, Wisdom is not associated only with one of the divine Persons, but is seen always in connection to the created reality for which she is the unified, eternal idea. God’s essence is not thereby feminized; but there is recognized in God a reality that is always oriented toward created hypostatization. Thus, Louis Bouyer, for instance, can see in the sophiological theme an extension of the Palamatist distinction of essence and energies in God, the former imparticipable, the latter always oriented toward our deification.