Burning Saltwater?

Via Fumare: While Working on a Cure for Cancer . . .

Pope Says Theologians Need Humility

Pope Says Theologians Need Humility

Reflects on Tertullian's Lack of Tolerance

VATICAN CITY, MAY 30, 2007 (ZENIT.org).- Benedict XVI says Tertullian's life offers a reflection on the need for humility, which the Pope says is the "essential characteristic of a great theologian."

The Holy Father spoke about Tertullian, a second-century theologian and apologist, at today's general audience in St. Peter's Square.

With his reflection on Tertullian, Benedict XVI resumed his series of catecheses on the Apostolic Fathers. He had interrupted the series with his trip to Brazil and last week's overview of the apostolic trip's highlights.

"This great moral and intellectual personality, this man who gave such a great contribution to Christian thought, makes me think," the Pope said of Tertullian. "It is evident that at the end he lacks simplicity, the humility to belong to the Church, to accept his weaknesses, to be tolerant of others and with himself.

"When you evaluate your thought in terms of your greatness, in the end it is this greatness that is lost."

Benedict XVI noted that Tertullian gradually left communion with the Church and joined a Montanist sect.

"The essential characteristic of a great theologian is the humility to stay with the Church, to accept her and ones own faults, because only God is all holy," the Pontiff said. "We, on the other hand, are always in need of forgiveness."

Scientists against the theory of anthropogenic climate change

Climate Momentum Shifting: Prominent Scientists Reverse Belief in Man-made Global Warming - Now Skeptics
Growing Number of Scientists Convert to Skeptics After Reviewing New Research

via American Papist

Tentative schedule, ISN Summer Conference

here

Institute of Catholic Thought

Vatican Posts Document on Unbaptized Infants

Vatican Posts Document on Unbaptized Infants


VATICAN CITY, MAY 27, 2007 (Zenit.org).- The Vatican Web site has posted the document "The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptized," published by the International Theological Commission.

See: www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20070419_un-baptised-infants_en.html.

2 essays by William Cavanaugh

Radical Orthodox (Catholic) theologian William Cavanaugh
The Unfreedom of the Free Market
The World in a Wafer: A Geography of the Eucharist as Resistance to Globalization

The Science of God by Gerald Schroeder

Gerald Schroeder - The Hidden Face Of God - How Science Reveals ...

wiki


Atheist Becomes Theist
Exclusive Interview with Former Atheist Antony Flew
pdf

Call for Papers, Center for Ethics and Culture

CALL FOR PAPERS

NOTRE DAME CENTER FOR ETHICS & CULTURE


ANNUAL FALL CONFERENCE

The Dialogue of Cultures

November 29-December 1, 2007

In his address at the University of Regensburg on September 12, 2006, Pope Benedict XVI made an argument whose crucial import was obscured by the unproductive furor that followed his speech. Pope Benedict argued:

While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons….Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today.

Our world is characterized by a dizzying array of cultural conflicts. The news from Iraq that greets us every morning reminds us of the deep cultural conflicts between the West and the various Islamic cultures of the Middle East. Other cultural conflicts manifest themselves in the various efforts to secure basic human rights across the globe. And then there is the cultural crisis in Europe, where the Church, led by Pope Benedict, attempts to keep Europe from forgetting its Christian roots and sliding ever more deeply into secularization. This is not even to mention the deep cultural divides within our own polity, and even, most regrettably, within the Church Herself.

The solution to such widespread division, Pope Benedict urges us to realize, is a reconciliation of Christian faith and natural human reason that conceives of the latter according to the full capacities of its freedom; that is, as open to a reality that transcends the empirically verifiable. Only with such a conception of reason, Pope Benedict concludes, will human beings become capable “of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today.”

The Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture, concerned by the deep cultural divides that characterize so much of our world, has found inspiration in Pope Benedict’s Regensburg Address, and has decided to devote its eighth annual Fall conference to the theme: The Dialogue of Cultures. In interdisciplinary fashion, this conference will take up a variety of questions related to both the difficulties and opportunities involved in addressing cultural conflict. Contemporary political issues will certainly be on the table, as will philosophical and theological inquiries into the broader conception of reason of which Pope Benedict speaks, along with its relation to Christian faith. Legal theorists, also, will bring their
perspective to the discussion, perhaps especially in regard to questions of natural law. And, if pattern holds, historians, literary theorists, artists, and people in business will make their own substantial contributions.

One of the key purposes of The Dialogue of Cultures is to help restore the richness in the notion of dialogue itself, which too often has devolved into a cultural cliché. But above all, the Center wants to follow the lead of Pope Benedict, who closes the Regensburg Address by declaring: “The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur—that is the program with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time….It is to this great logos, to the breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures.”

Distinguished speakers invited to the conference include:

* George Weigel
* Jean Bethke Elshtain
* Leon Kass
* Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev, Russian Orthodox Bishop of Vienna and
Austria
* Russell Hittinger
* H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.
* Ralph Wood
* Paolo Carozza

We welcome the submission of abstracts drawing on a wide range of moral and religious perspectives and academic specialties. Special consideration will be given to submissions of ideas for panel discussions that would bring together several people to discuss a focused theme. Possible issues to be explored are:



* The nature of dialogue itself: going beyond the cultural cliché
* Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Address and his other writings on the dialogue of cultures
* The possibility of peace between Islamic nations and the democracies of the West
* The dialogue of cultures between European, Asian, and African cultures
* Terrorism
* The European crisis of secularization
* Universal human rights
* The natural law and cultural dialogue
* Cultural divisions within the Church
* The challenge of immigration
* Cultural issues affecting the dignity of women
* Models of peacemaking and fruitful cultural dialogue
* The Greek philosophical inheritance of Catholic theology
* The aftermath of the war in Iraq
* The role of technology in fomenting/overcoming cultural conflict
* Globalization
* Obligations to developing nations
* The dialogue of cultures and the specter of incommensurability
* Literature and the arts as vehicles of cultural dialogue

One-page abstracts for individual papers should include name, affiliation, address, and e-mail address (if available). Session presentations will be limited to twenty minutes for individuals, one hour for panels.

Deadline for submissions is Friday, July 27, 2007. Notification of acceptance will be mailed by Friday, August 31, 2007. One-page abstracts, along with your full contact information, should be emailed to ndethics@nd.edu or mailed to:

Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture

8th Annual Fall Conference – The Dialogue of Cultures

1047 Flanner Hall

Notre Dame, IN 46556


Up-to-date conference information can be found on our web site: http://ethicscenter.nd.edu.

May article on TOB

William May, The Scriptures, Human Sexuality and Sexuality Morality, and Pope John Paul II's "Theology of the Body"

Articles by Rev. Dr. Papademetriou

Saint Augustine in the Greek Orthodox Tradition
Rev. Dr. George C. Papademetriou

source

"P. Papademetriou: Saint Augustin d'Hippone, Orthodoxie et Consensus Patrum" Le professeur émérite du Holy Cross Seminary (Boston) donne un aperçu patristique et théologique de la place du grand évêque d'Hippone dans l'Église

Some questions on sexual morality

If sex is purely for the sake of pleasure, on what basis can we argue that it should be exclusive? Why shouldn't I be able to have sex with as many people as I want, so long as I "love" them? And what reason would you have to say that I shouldn't, even if I am in a "relationship" with you? Why should you prevent me from loving others? After all, are we not supposed to love?

As for the permissibility of married couples to use condoms in order to prevent the transmission of AIDS or some other STD (when one is infected), is this really what love requires? If I know that I have an STD that can be spread to a partner, should I get married to someone else? If I had the plague, would I say it's ok for me to get close to someone else, if I had a 99% effective means of preventing that person from getting the plague? Or would I play it safe, out of love, and stay away from that person as much as possible? Really, which makes more sense in the context of love?

Do some STDS inhibit procreation? I suppose even if they did, it would be ok to have sex, as long as that inhibition falls outside our intention. But is it right to jeopardize someone else's health? Or would it be better to abstain?

Magna Carta

British Library treasures in full: Magna Carta
The Avalon Project : Magna Carta
Featured Document: The Magna Carta
The Magna Carta 1215
Medieval Sourcebook: Magna Carta 1215

Right Reason interview with Prof. Budziszewski

Part 1
Part 2

See also:
Objections, Obstacles, Acceptance: Interview with J. Budziszewski
Natural Law in Our Lives, in Our Courts (Part 1); Part 2

Being asleep and unconscious

Why wouldn't being asleep or unconscious or in a coma be considered an attainment of the Buddhist ideal? Would not the response entail some sort of desire, striving? (At the very least consciousness and voluntariness, which would imply desire and striving.)

Papal Homily on Augustine's Conversions

Papal Homily on Augustine's Conversions

"Passion for the Truth Truly Guided Him"

VATICAN CITY, MAY 15, 2007, Zenit.org - Here is a Vatican translation of Benedict XVI's homily on Augustine's three stages of conversion. He delivered it April 22 during his pastoral visit to Pavia, Italy.

* * *

PASTORAL VISIT TO VIGEVANO AND PAVIA (ITALY)
EUCHARISTIC CONCELEBRATION
HOMILY OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI

"Orti Borromaici" Esplanade, Pavia
Third Sunday of Easter, 22 April 2007

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Yesterday afternoon, I met the diocesan Community of Vigevano and the heart of my Pastoral Visit was the Eucharistic concelebration in Piazza Ducale; today, I have the joy of visiting your Diocese and a culminating moment of our encounter is also here at Holy Mass.

I greet with affection my Brothers who are concelebrating with me: Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi, Archbishop of Milan, Bishop Giovanni Giudici, Pastor of your Diocese, Bishop emeritus Giovanni Volta, the retired Pastor, and the other Prelates of Lombardy.

I am grateful to the Government Representatives and local Administrations for their presence. I address my cordial greeting to the priests, deacons, Religious, leaders of lay associations, the young people, the sick and all the faithful, and I extend my thoughts to the entire population of this ancient and noble City, and of the Diocese.

During the Easter Season, the Church presents to us, Sunday after Sunday, some passages from the preaching with which, after Easter, the Apostles, particularly Peter, invited Israel to have faith in Jesus Christ, the Risen One, thereby founding the Church.

In today's reading, the Apostles stand before the Sanhedrin -- before that institution which, having sentenced Jesus to death, could not tolerate that this same Jesus was now beginning to be active again through the Apostles' preaching. They could not tolerate that his saving power was once more making itself felt and that his Name was attracting people who believed in him as the promised Redeemer.

They accused the Apostles. Their accusation is: "You want to make us responsible for that man's blood".

Peter, however, reacted to this accusation with a brief catechesis on the essence of Christian faith: "No, we do not want to make you responsible for his blood. The effect of the death and Resurrection of Jesus is quite different. God has exalted him as "'Head and Saviour' of all, and of you, too, his People of Israel". And where will this "Head" lead us? What does this "Saviour" bring?

He leads us, St Peter tells us, to conversion -- creates for us the leeway and opportunity to mend our ways and repent, begin again. And he offers us forgiveness for our sins: he introduces us into the proper relationship with God, hence, into the proper relationship of each individual with himself or herself and with others.

Peter's brief catechesis did not only apply to the Sanhedrin. It speaks to us all, for Jesus, the Risen One, is also alive today. And for all generations, for all men and women, he is the "Head" who shows us the way and the "Saviour" who straightens out our lives.

The two terms: "conversion" and "forgiveness of sins", which correspond to the titles of Christ "Head", archegòs in Greek, and "Saviour", are the key words of Peter's catechesis, words intended to move our hearts too, here and now. And what do they mean?

The path we must take -- the path that Jesus points out to us -- is called "conversion". But what is it? What must we do? In every life conversion has its own form, because every human being is something new and no one is merely a copy of another.

But in the course of history, the Lord has sent us models of conversion to whom we can look to find guidance. We could thus look at Peter himself to whom the Lord said at the Last Supper: "[W]hen you have turned again, strengthen your brethren" (Luke 22: 32).

We could look at Paul as a great convert. The City of Pavia speaks of one of the greatest converts in the history of the Church: St Aurelius Augustine. He died on 28 August in 430 in the port town of Hippo, in Africa, at that time surrounded and besieged by the Vandals.

After the considerable turmoil of a turbulent history, the King of the Longobards acquired Augustine's remains for the City of Pavia so that today they belong to this City in a special way, and, in it and from it, have something special to say to all of us, to humanity, but to all of us here in particular.

In his book, Confessions, Augustine touchingly described the development of his conversion which achieved its goal with Baptism, administered to him by Bishop Ambrose in the Cathedral of Milan. Readers of his Confessions can share in the journey that Augustine had to make in a long inner struggle to receive at last, at the baptismal font on the night before Easter 387, the Sacrament which marked the great turning point in his life.

A careful examination of the course of St Augustine's life enables one to perceive that his conversion was not an event of a single moment but, precisely, a journey. And one can see that this journey did not end at the baptismal font.

Just as prior to his baptism Augustine's life was a journey of conversion, after it too, although differently, his life continued to be a journey of conversion -- until his last illness, when he had the penitential Psalms hung on the walls so that he might have them always before his eyes, and when he excluded himself from receiving the Eucharist in order to go back once again over the path of his repentance and receive salvation from Christ's hands as a gift of God's mercy.

Thus, we can rightly speak of Augustine's "conversions", which actually consisted of one important conversion in his quest for the Face of Christ and then in the journeying on with him.

I would like to mention briefly three important landmarks in this process of conversion, three "conversions".

The first fundamental conversion was the inner march towards Christianity, towards the "yes" of the faith and of Baptism. What was the essential aspect of this journey?

On the one hand, Augustine was a son of his time, deeply conditioned by the customs and passions prevalent then as well as by all the questions and problems that beset any young man. He lived like all the others, yet with a difference: he continued to be a person constantly seeking. He was never satisfied with life as it presented itself and as so many people lived it.

The question of the truth tormented him ceaselessly. He longed to discover truth. He wanted to succeed in knowing what man is; where we ourselves come from, where we are going and how we can find true life.

He desired to find the life that was right and not merely to live blindly, without meaning or purpose.

Passion for truth is the true key phrase of his life. Passion for the truth truly guided him.

There is a further peculiarity: anything that did not bear Christ's Name did not suffice for him. Love for this Name, he tells us, he had tasted from his mother's milk (cf. Confessions, 3, 4, 8). And he always believed -- sometimes rather vaguely, at other times, more clearly -- that God exists and takes care of us (cf. Confessions, 6, 5, 8).

But to truly know this God and to become really familiar with this Jesus Christ and reach the point of saying "yes" to him with all its consequences -- this was the great interior struggle of his youthful years.

St Augustine tells us that through Platonic philosophy he learned and recognized that "in the beginning was the Word" -- the Logos, creative reason. But philosophy, which showed him that the beginning of all things was creative reason, did not show him any path on which to reach it; this Logos remained remote and intangible.

Only through faith in the Church did he later find the second essential truth: the Word, the Logos, was made flesh.

Thus, he touches us and we touch him. The humility of God's Incarnation -- this is the important step -- must be equalled by the humility of our faith, which lays down its self-important pride and bows upon entering the community of Christ's Body; which lives with the Church and through her alone can enter into concrete and bodily communion with the living God.

I do not have to say how deeply all this concerns us: to remain seekers; to refuse to be satisfied with what everyone else says and does; to keep our gaze fixed on the eternal God and on Jesus Christ; to learn the humility of faith in the corporeal Church of Jesus Christ, of the Logos Incarnate.

Augustine described his second conversion at the end of the 10th book of his Confessions with the words: "Terrified by my sins and the pile of my misery, I had racked my heart and had meditated, taking flight to live in solitude. But you forbade me and comforted me, saying: "That is why Christ died for all, so that those who live should not live for themselves, but for him who died for them' (2 Corinthians 5:15)"; Confessions, 10, 43, 70).

What had happened? After his baptism, Augustine had decided to return to Africa and with some of his friends had founded a small monastery there. His life was then to be totally dedicated to conversation with God and reflection on and contemplation of the beauty and truth of his Word.

Thus, he spent three happy years in which he believed he had achieved the goal of his life; in that period, a series of valuable philosophical and theological works came into being.

In 391, four years after his baptism, he went to the port town of Hippo to meet a friend whom he desired to win over for his monastery. But he was recognized at the Sunday liturgy in the cathedral in which he took part.

It was not by chance that the Bishop of the city, a man of Greek origin who was not fluent in Latin and found preaching rather a struggle, said in his homily that he was hoping to find a priest to whom he could entrust the task of preaching.

People instantly grabbed hold of Augustine and forced him forward to be ordained a priest to serve the city.

Immediately after his forced ordination, Augustine wrote to Bishop Valerius: "I was constrained ... to accept second place at the helm, when as yet I knew not how to handle an oar. ... And from this derived the tears which some of my brethren perceived me shedding in the city at the time of my ordination" (cf. Letter 21, 1ff.).

Augustine's beautiful dream of a contemplative life had vanished. As a result, his life had fundamentally changed. He could now no longer dedicate himself solely to meditation in solitude. He had to live with Christ for everyone. He had to express his sublime knowledge and thoughts in the thoughts and language of the simple people in his city. The great philosophical work of an entire lifetime, of which he had dreamed, was to remain unwritten.

Instead, however, we have been given something far more precious: the Gospel translated into the language of everyday life and of his sufferings.

These were now part of his daily life, which he described as the following: "reprimanding the undisciplined, comforting the faint-hearted, supporting the weak, refuting opponents ... encouraging the negligent, soothing the quarrelsome, helping the needy, liberating the oppressed, expressing approval to the good, tolerating the wicked and loving all" (Sermon 340, 3).

"Continuously preaching, arguing, rebuking, building God's house, having to manage for everyone -- who would not shrink from such a heavy burden?" (Sermon 339, 4).

This was the second conversion which this man, struggling and suffering, was constantly obliged to make: to be available to everyone, time and again, and not for his own perfection; time and again, to lay down his life with Christ so that others might find him, true Life.

Further, there was a third, decisive phase in the journey of conversion of St Augustine. After his Ordination to the priesthood he had requested a vacation period to study the Sacred Scriptures in greater detail.

His first series of homilies, after this pause for reflection, were on the Sermon on the Mount; he explained the way to an upright life, "the perfect life", pointed out by Christ in a new way. He presented it as a pilgrimage to the holy mountain of the Word of God. In these homilies it is possible to further perceive all the enthusiasm of faith newly discovered and lived; his firm conviction that the baptized, in living totally in accordance with Christ's message, can precisely be "perfect" in accordance with the Sermon on the Mount.

Approximately 20 years later, Augustine wrote a book called the Retractations, in which he critically reviewed all the works he had thus far written, adding corrections wherever he had in the meantime learned something new.

With regard to the ideal of perfection in his homilies on the Sermon on the Mount, he noted: "In the meantime, I have understood that one alone is truly perfect and that the words of the Sermon on the Mount are totally fulfilled in one alone: Jesus Christ himself.

"The whole Church, on the other hand -- all of us, including the Apostles -- must pray every day: forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us" (cf. Retract. I 19, 1-3).

Augustine had learned a further degree of humility -- not only the humility of integrating his great thought into the humble faith of the Church, not only the humility of translating his great knowledge into the simplicity of announcement, but also the humility of recognizing that he himself and the entire pilgrim Church needed and continually need the merciful goodness of a God who forgives every day.

And we, he added, liken ourselves to Christ, the only Perfect One, to the greatest possible extent when we become, like him, people of mercy.

Let us now thank God for the great light that shines out from St Augustine's wisdom and humility and pray the Lord to give to us all, day after day, the conversion we need, and thus lead us toward true life. Amen.

© Copyright 2007 -- Libreria Editrice Vaticana

Summary of the 2007 Whitehead lectures

lectures given by Professor Sarah Broadie, summaries by Professor Michael Pakaluk

Nature and Divinity in Plato's Timaeus: Precis
Nature and Divinity in Aristotle's Cosmology: A Precis

Edward Coke

Sir Edward Coke
wiki


(source)

(source)

Writings:
Online Library of Liberty
Constitution.org

Related Links:
The Legal Philosophers, Or The Jurists
Legal History and Philosophy

Sir Edward Coke and the Elizabethan Age By Allen D. Boyer (review)

Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England

The Avalon Project
lonang.com
Tucker's Blackstone: Contents
Blackstone Commentary on Law

Sir William Blackstone in America

About the author:

(source)

(source)

wiki
Berkshire History


Misc:
Constitution Society
Blackstone Institute - Sir William Blackstone

The Roman Constitution

from Polybius
Ancient History Sourcebook: Polybius : Rome at the End of the ...
Polybius, The Histories, Book 6
Polybius on the Roman Constitution

The Roman Republican Constitution
Roman Government: The Republic
The Roman Constitution
Roman Society & Constitution

John Deely

Center for Thomistic Studies; Faculty Publications
wiki

Annotated bibliography of John Deely 1965-1993
Semiotics and ontology: John Deely and John Poinsot
What Distinguishes Human Understanding
the basics of semiotics
Semiotic Bibliography
Deely, John N.: Intentionality and Semiotics

Semiotic Society of America

Brian Goodwin interview

source, alt

An Interview with Professor Brian Goodwin
by Dr. David King
David King is a molecular biologist and editor of GenEthics News.

Professor Brian Goodwin authored How the Leopard Changed Its Spots and is in the Department of Biology at The Open University, Great Britain.

The interview was published in GenEthics News, Issue 11, March/April 1996, pp. 6-8.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

David King:
What are your criticisms of the prevailing paradigms in biology, particularly Darwinism?

Brian Goodwin: My main criticism of Darwinism is that it fails in its initial objective, which is to explain the origin of species. Now, let me explain exactly what I mean by that. I mean it fails to explain the emergence of organisms, the specific forms during evolution like algae and ferns and flowering plants, corals, starfish, crabs, fish, birds. That sort of spectrum of organism, each of which is distinct from the other. They don't blend with each other, they are distinct from each other. Now the problem is that in order to understand that the kind of distinct structure and form we have to understand how organisms are actually generated, and that means understanding how starting with an egg or a bud, the organism goes through a developmental process and ends up as a particular type of species with a particular morphology (shape and features). So the whole problem then is to try to understand the nature of that process. One of the fundamental issues is whether or not you can get more or less any kind of organism, or whether there are constraints. Darwin turned biology into a historical science, and in Darwinism, species are simply accidents of history, they don't have any inherent nature. They are just 'the way things happened to work out' and there aren't any particular constraints that mean it couldn't have all worked out very differently. An example is the structure of the arm and the wings of birds. There is always only bone at the top of the arm, never two, even though two would be very useful to birds, but it's never evolved. So it looks like this is something that simply cannot happen because there is an intrinsic constraint on that process. Now there is plenty of evidence that that kind of constraint exists through the whole of biology. In other words, the reason why species are distinct is because you have only got certain types of forms, that can actually be generated by the developmental process. That really begins to shift the emphasis with respect to how we understand the different species and how they are related to each other.

In order to get a really firm grip on this, we actually need a theory of the whole organism and its transformation. Organisms are organized wholes. That's why they have these constraints. The sort of theory that you need to understand morphogenesis involves understanding the components which organisms are made. You certainly need to know a lot about molecules, but you have to understand how they are put together and what sort of dynamics is involved. Now this is where these new sciences that are called the sciences of complexity come into the picture, where you actually look at the dynamics of complex systems, and see how emergent order arises, in often very unexpected ways. This happens because of what we call the relational order, the relationship between the components. It doesn't matter so much what the components are, what they are made of. The really important thing is the way they interact, and that is what determines the type of order that is going to emerge. Now what I and my colleagues are trying to do is to, in a sense, make a map between the pathways of morphogenesis that are available to species organized in a particular way, like algae or plants or amphibians, and to map that onto taxonomy (classification of species). In other words, it's trying to make sense of what we see in evolution by having a theory of morphogenesis (development of shape and form), and making a map between morphogenesis and taxonomy. So it's turning biology into a rational science rather than a historical science. There is no conflict. Everything that happens has a history, so in a sense all sciences have a historical component, but physics of course also has a very strong rational tradition. The whole point is to try to understand why certain structures are necessary, and this is exactly what we do in physics and the new biology. We are asking why has this particular structure emerged in the biological world and this makes biology much more like physics than the historical science that we got from Darwin.

King:
How does your new model of biology incorporate genetics?

Goodwin: A major problem is that in contemporary Darwinism, organisms are actually reduced to genes and their products. Darwinism has given us a very good theory of inheritance in terms of a theory of the genes, but what it has done is to sacrifice the whole organism, as a real entity, to this reductionism, genetic reductionism. That means that organisms have disappeared as real entities from biology, and that, I think, this is a fundamental scientific error. There's another aspect of this problem which has to do with the way Darwinists explains embryonic development. They say that there is a genetic program that determines the development of an organism. An organism wants to become a newt, say, or a sea urchin. Because it has particular genes, they say, it undergoes a particular embryonic development and that is sufficient, in other words knowing the genes is sufficient to understand the details of the embryonic development, and the emergence of a species with its characteristic form and behavior. That sounds, on the face of it, plausible because we know that mutations actually cause transformation of morphology. Drosophila can have a mutation that transforms a two winged fly to a four winged fly. Now that is a pretty major transformation, and a single gene can do it. So you might say that's the sort of thing that is involved in evolution. Well, you see, the burden of proof then is on the neo-Darwinists to demonstrate exactly how the genes do this. They use the term genetic programming, and it is a metaphor for what happens in a computer, but if you ask them to use a genetic program to generate an organism, they can't do it, and the reasons are very simple. You need to know more than gene products in order to explain the emergence of shape and form in organisms. You actually need a theory, a theory that involves physics, chemistry, forces and spatial organization. You can have complete details about genes and you are not going to be able to explain how development occurs. So I think that is the fundamental test. When Darwinists say to me 'genes are enough', I say 'Show me.'

King:
What are the consequences of Darwinist reductionism?

Goodwin: Let me pick up again this issue of the disappearance of organisms as real entities. Because this really has quite profound consequences. I think that this precipitates a kind of crisis of understanding of living forms. It's an extreme reductionism that makes it impossible for us to understand concepts such as health. Health refers to wholes, the dynamics of whole organisms. We currently experience crises of health, of the environment, of the community. I think they are all related. They are not caused by biology by any means, but biology contributes to these crises by failing to give us adequate conceptual understanding of life and wholes, of ecosystems, of the biosphere, and it's all because of genetic reductionism. That's a pretty heavy charge, but let me just describe some of the consequences of genetic reductionism. Once you've got organisms reduced to genes, then organisms have no inherent natures. Now, in our theory of evolution, species are natural kinds, they are really like the elements, if you like. I don't mean literally, but they have the same conceptual status, gold has a certain nature. We are arguing that, say, a sea urchin of a particular species has a nature. Human beings have a nature. Now, in Darwinism, they don't have a nature, because they're historical individuals, which arise as a result of accidents. All they have done is pass the survival test. The Darwinian theory makes it legitimate to shunt genes around from any one species to any other species: since species don't have 'natures', we can manipulate them in any way and create new organisms that survive in our culture. So this is why you get people saying that there is really no difference between the creation of transgenic organisms, that is moving genes across species boundaries, and creating new combinations of genes by sexual recombination within species. They say that is no different to what is happening in evolution. Well, you know, in my book that's a bit like saying there is no difference between radioactive decay, radioactivity as you find it naturally in Uranium, and using that for nuclear energy. Once you scale something up to a particular level you are into a totally different scene. Now, I think that there are the same problems that arise with respect to creation of transgenics, and the reason is because of the utter unpredictability of the consequences of transferring a gene from one species to another. Genes are defined by context. Genes are not stable bits of information that can be shunted around and express themselves independently of context. Every gene depends upon its context. If you change the context, you change the activity of the gene. There are particular cases where that doesn't appear to happen. You put the human gene into bacteria and you get insulin out, but as you know, there is a recent case in the States where the insulin has actually modified and it's not working properly. And then you have got the problem of genes transferring from one transgenic to a related species, resulting in the problem of ecological meltdown, or ecological change that can be precipitated by the use of transgenic species in agriculture. I'm by no means against biotechnology. I just think that it is something that we have to use with enormous caution in its application. We need stringent safety protocols. Now those are the issues of safety, and they are very serious, because the rhetoric that goes with biotechnology is totally at variance with reality. The biotech companies don't want to face the consequences of this radical unpredictability which comes from the intrinsic complexity of organisms. But there is also this really thorny question of species as natural kinds. And when you transfer genes of one type of organism to another, what are you doing to the nature of the species, the recipient species? Now I think that's a very open question. I don't have a simple answer to this. I just think that it's again, something very serious. It raises ethical issues.

King:
How would those ethical questions look in the light of your alternative model of biology?

Goodwin: There is a particular consequence of the idea that species are 'natural kinds' that, I think, is very important for a new type of science in relation to the living realm. It works like this. If you acknowledge that species are natural kinds, so they have natures, then it becomes possible to consider procedures whereby we can understand those natures, that is we go through a process of qualitative evaluation of the conditions under which those natures are being expressed, and cannot be expressed. Let me just clarify that in relation to some specific examples. We know when our domestic animals are distressed and in pain, when they are happy and so on and so forth. In other words we have spontaneous intuitive ways of evaluating the subjective state of domestic animals. Anybody who has an intimate relationship with an animal knows what its subjective states are. Now I say know, they would claim to know, and it seems perfectly legitimate, that claim. But the whole question now is whether we can turn that into a science of subjective states because that would then compliment the science of objectivity which is the mode of contemporary science. In other words what we would be developing is a science of qualities, of qualitative evaluation of other species, and therefore a method of deciding when organisms are being denied the opportunity to express their natures. And this is clearly extremely relevant to the way we treat not just domestic animals and farm animals, but the rest of living nature. And it's that relationship that we need, in order to heal these various crises of the environment and of health and of community, because we've even lost the concept of human nature. Human nature disappears as a concept from neo-Darwinism, and so life become a set of parts, commodities that can be shifted around. But the moment you recover this notion of nature, you are into a different world and you operate in a different way. Now this I think is a pretty urgent development, developing a science of qualities, and it's something we are engaged in at Schumacher College. It has to be done with groups, because you have to try to develop methods of qualitative assessment that are intersubjective, just in the same way that in conventional science the evaluation of what we call reality is dependent upon intersubjective consensus. We come together and carry out these procedures, like experiments and observations and so on, and come to an agreement,about what constitutes reality and what doesn't. And I think we can have a parallel procedure to that in a science of qualities. I think that that would be a fundamental contribution to this issue of how we treat other organisms and at what point a transgenic would be losing its nature.

King:
How would the new science affect our social theories?

Goodwin: Well, another consequence of this new view of species and evolution is it does shift the metaphors that are used to understand evolutionary processes. In Darwinism, you know, the metaphors are of competition and conflict and survival, and in Dawkins' writing it becomes embodied in the notion of selfish genes. Well, from the perspective of organisms as complex dynamic systems, with natures and trying to understand the ecosystem from the point of view, what you find is that organisms are interacting with each other in all kinds of different ways. They are as co-operative as they are competitive, and a lot of the time they are simply making a living. In other words, it's not this nature red in tooth and claw, with fierce competition and the survivors coming away with the spoils. In fact, species extinction seems to be as much to do with the lottery which comes from the dynamics of complex systems, as from anything else. The whole metaphor of evolution, instead of being one of competition, conflict and survival, becomes one of creativity and transformation. When you take on that perspective and bring that into society then you say, all right, why don't we use those metaphors in our social system as well. The metaphors of just making a living, just getting by. Not getting profits into double figure percentages. Not survival through serious competition, but making a living and sharing. I'm not being Utopian, I'm not saying we are going to share everything, because there has to be a certain conflict and competition. But instead of making that the predominant mode, we say that's only one of the components of a vibrant creative society. And the sciences of complexity are really taking on this character of illuminating what it means to be creative. This concept of life at the edge of chaos. Now that is a pretty dramatic metaphor, but what it means is that you shouldn't have too much order. You shouldn't have too much chaos. Perhaps you should be at the point where you can move backwards and forwards between the two and actually be creatively responsive to circumstance. Now clearly, that model is very attractive, but when you look at the dynamics of those systems, you find that it is not driven by competition.They have a complex dynamic interaction and it's that which produces creativity. So the whole business about intellectual property rights and competition that we have in our society, people justify them saying they happen in nature. That is not what happens in nature at all. Nature as we read it now is a much more complex, coherent and creative type of process than the one we have in our social and economic system. So we can begin to contemplate the use of different metaphors and different instantiations of these biological metaphors. You always have to be careful with metaphors. You can't say this happens in biology, therefore it should happen in society. You have to examine it on its own merits. But I think that there is a lot to be said for a basic reevaluation of the metaphors we use in describing evolution, economics and social change, that is arising out of the new sciences.

For more information on subscribing to GenEthics News, email David King or write:

P. O. Box 6313
London N16 0DY, Great Britain

Email: david.king@hgalert.org

Liturgical changes

Liturgical Changes

Both critics and supporters alike of the 1962 liturgical books tend to equate them with the books published after the Council of Trent by Pius V and his immediate successors. Differences over the next four centuries are generally glossed over and the 'Tridentine' rite described as "identical" apart from minor "rubrical" or "calendar" changes to that found in the books published during the opening session of the Second Vatican Council. These claims ignore the effect the rubrics and Calendar have on the celebration of any given liturgical rite. The Word file for each month, confining itself to the Office and Mass, aims to explore the veracity of the "unchanging rite" hypothesis.

The Fathers of the Church in Installments, Every Wednesday from the Vatican

The Fathers of the Church in Installments, Every Wednesday from the Vatican

It is the new series of weekly catecheses from Benedict XVI, dedicated to the great personalities of the ancient Church. Here are the first seven: on Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Justin, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen

More on chant

From Old Zhou:

Amy asked about this part of the interview:

It was once very moving to hear the assembly sing the Te Deum, the Magnificat, the litanies, music that the people had assimilated and made their own – but today very little is left even of this. And furthermore, Gregorian chant has been distorted by the rhythmic and aesthetic theories of the Benedictines of Solesmes. Gregorian chant was born in violent times, and it should be manly and strong, and not like the sweet and comforting adaptations of our own day.

Based on my own experience with chant in various parish churches and monasteries, as well as some study of the history and artistic performance, I'll make a couple of comments.

1. "Gregorian Chant" (TM) can be a subject of endless debates, just like liturgical translation or any other liturgical music, because it depends on several factors: (a) living tradition; (b) historical evidence; (c) ecclesial authority; (d) the actual folks doing it right here and now.

2. Solesmes got the Vatican seal of approval, but there was a lot of debate about what they put out. And it continues. I recommend the book "Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes", by Katherine Bergeron (U. Califorinia Press, 1998) if anybody wants to read some of the history from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For example, these events from 1905:

It was this problem of legitimacy that ultimately brought the work of the commission to a standstill, the proponents of "living tradition" facing off uncomfortably with the Solesmes archaeologists throughout the months of February and March. To resolve the conflict, Pothier finally resorted to a higher authority. By the beginning of April 1905 he had heard from the pope's secretary of state, Cardinal Merry del Val, who wrote: "His Holiness has charged me with declaring to your Most Reverend Paternity that, when He decided to return to the ancient Gregorian chant, He did not intend to make a work so exclusively favoring the archaeology of this chant that we could not admit today certain Gregorian melodies that have come down over the course of centuries." The letter went on to assert that "it would not be contrary to the intentions of His Holiness that the Pontifical Commission for the Vatican Edition of the liturgical books give preference to certain less ancient compositions, provided that they truly have the character of Gregorian music."

The traditionalists had suddenly gained considerable ground. Still, the judgment was not forceful enough to convince the Solesmes editors themselves, who continued sending polemical missives to Rome in defense of their own work. According to Combe, by the end of June they had drawn up, with the support of de Santi and others, something of a manifesto to place before Pius X, in the hopes of reversing the actions of the Pontifical Commission. The document's central paragraph asserted, once again, the unimpeachability of the Solesmes scholarship, whose scientific methods exceeded even the limits of canonical authority. The authors cheekily pointed out that the pope himself could not have imagined such results:

Because the School of Solesmes offers us such an ensemble of guarantees, and because the difficulties raised by their opponents have no solid foundation, lacking all basis in science, we, the undersigned, declare ourselves ready to support the authors of a work undertaken for the honor of the Church, a work that until now has not only justified but surpassed the Holy Father's highest hopes.
The manifesto did no good. Within days, a second letter addressed to Pothier from Merry del Val brought the dispute to a decisive end. It announced a change of plan—a "simplification," the text stated euphemistically, "in the work of the editors." The new Vatican edition would be based on the Benedictine gradual published at Solesmes in 1895, a book that represented, as everyone knew, the work of Pothier, containing the so-called living tradition that he knew by heart, and that Mocquereau had labored to correct by hand. But the cardinal's letter announced that, from this point on, it would be Pothier alone who took charge of any corrections to the melodies, using, as he saw fit, the "paleographic studies pursued under the wise direction of the most Reverend Abbot of Solesmes." An additional clause put these exalted studies in their proper place, stating that "the Holy Father [would] take under His supreme authority and protection the special edition of the liturgical books that He called Typical, otherwise leaving the field free for the studies of learned Gregorianists." The Vatican did not prohibit scientific research with this ruling. It simply relegated such research to an undesignated "free field," as if condemning the monks to the very site on which Mocquereau, and later his entire school, had first staked their scholarly claims—the world of the staffless Saint-Gall neumes, whose signs floated freely, as they say, in campo aperto .

It was not exactly Siberia, but it was a punishment nonetheless. The Solesmes monks were, with this decision, indirectly censured for their extremist position regarding the Church's musical traditions. In this respect, the conflict surrounding the Vatican edition—and the pope's reaction to it—would seem to anticipate another, more serious conflict that visited Pius X during the same decade, the crisis involving what, in Catholic circles, was tellingly known as modernism. The term referred to the teachings of certain Catholic intellectuals around the turn of the century, scholars who sought to update traditional theology through historical discipline.


In this heated debate in the early 20th century, Mocquereau and the monks of Solesmes were the "modernists" working with manuscripts and historiography and philologies and all manner of modern "scientific" approaches in an attempt to reconstruct the "authentic" Gregorian traditions. On the other side were Pothier and "traditionalists" who supported a living tradition of liturgical singing.

I would put Bartolucdi in the "traditionalist" camp, among those who favor the (simpler) living tradition of chant over the more elaborate, "modernist," "scientific" approach developed in the restoration at Solesmes.

I imagine that some people have trouble thinking of "Solesmes" as the "modernists" opposed to the "traditionalist," but that is the case in this debate. The terms are derived from the aproach and methods used in determining and evaluating chant (actual living chanting and listening, as opposed to more "scientific" methods based on manuscripts and philosophical systems and approaches).

3. The elaborate Gregorian Chant of Solesmes provides a contrast to the Plainchant or Plainsong tradition in much of the Church, Eastern and Western, throughout the centuries.


In conclusion, I think Bartolucci's point is that what we need to restore is the "manly," earthy, simpler chant from the heart, from the soul of regular folks raising their voices to God, rather than the often very elaborate, very challenging, very technical sort of chant scientifically reconstructed at Solesmes.

And that is an idea with which I agree!

Interview with Domenico Bartolucci

I Had a Dream: The Music of Palestrina and Gregory the Great Had Come Back
An exclusive interview with maestro Domenico Bartolucci. Who strangled Gregorian chant and polyphony – and why. And how to bring them back to life. Benedict XVI? “A Napoleon without generals”

by Sandro Magister


ROMA, July 21, 2006 – The concert conducted in the Sistine Chapel at the end of June by maestro Domenico Bartolucci, in Benedict XVI’s honor and with his attendance, has certainly marked a turning point in the dispute over the role that music has, and will have, in the Catholic liturgy.

But for now, it is a merely symbolic turning point.

The new direction has been indicated with authority. “An authentic renewal of sacred music can only come follow in the pathway of the great tradition of the past, of Gregorian chant and sacred polyphony,” Benedict XVI said on that occasion. This is a pope whose “great love for the liturgy, and thus for sacred music, is known to all,” Bartolucci emphasized in his greeting of introduction.

But the goal still seems a long way off. Bartolucci, in his nineties, is a first-rate witness to the misfortunes that have plagued sacred music over the past half century. An outstanding interpreter of Gregorian chant and of the polyphony of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, he is at the same time the victim of their near annihilation.

When the curia of John Paul II planned and carried out the dismissal of Bartolucci as director of the papal choir of the Sistine Chapel, only Joseph Ratzinger, then a cardinal, was on his side.

Now, with the election of Ratzinger as pope, there is a real chance that the course of this drama will be reversed, and that Gregorian chant and polyphony will be returned to their central place in the Church. But neither Benedict XVI nor Bartolucci are so naïve as not to perceive the extreme difficulty of this undertaking.

For the Church to draw once more from the treasury of its great sacred music, there is, in fact, the need for a formidable effort of reeducation, and for liturgical reeducation even before musical.

This is what Bartolucci makes clear in his interview with “L’espresso” no. 29, 2006, reproduced in its entirety below.

In it he says, among other things:

“I am an optimist by nature, but I judge the current situation realistically, and I believe that a Napoleon without generals can do little.”

That Benedict XVI is, in this field, a “Napoleon without generals” was seen, for example in the vigil and Mass he presided over and celebrated in Valencia last July 8-9, organized by the Pontifical Council for the Family and by the Spanish bishops’ conference.

The vigil slavishly followed the canons of the television shows, with presenters, guests, comics, singers, and dancers.

And the songs at the Mass reproduced the “popular” style that invaded during the pontificate of John Paul II: a style unceremoniously described and assessed by Bartolucci in the interview that follows.

Here, then, is the barnburner interview, conducted and transcribed by the expert in classical music for the weekly “L’espresso,” Riccardo Lenzi:


When the cantor was like a priest

An interview with Domenico Bartolucci


Q: Maestro Bartolucci, no fewer than six popes have attended your concerts. In which of them did you see the most musical expertise?

A: In the most recent one, Benedict XVI. He plays the piano, has a profound understanding of Mozart, loves the Church’s liturgy, and in consequence he places great emphasis on music. Pius XII also greatly loved music, and played the violin frequently. The Sistine Chapel owes a great deal to John XXIII. In 1959 he gave me permission to restore the Sistine which, unfortunately, was in bad shape, partly because of the illness of its previous director, Lorenzo Perosi. It no longer had a stable membership, a musical archive, or an office. So an office was obtained, the falsettos were dismissed, and the composition of the choir and the compensation for its members were determined, and finally it was possible to form the children’s choir as well. Then came Paul VI, but he was tone deaf, and I don’t know how much of an appreciation he had for music.

Q: Was Perosi the so-called restorer of the Italian oratorio?

A: Perosi was an authentic musician, a man utterly consumed by music. He had the good fortune of directing the Sistine at the time of the motu proprio on sacred music, which rightly wanted to purify it from the theatrics with which it was imbued. He could have given a new impulse to Church music, but unfortunately he didn’t have an adequate understanding of polyphony in the tradition of Palestrina and of the traditions of the Sistine. He also entrusted the direction of the Gregorian chant to his vice-maestro! His liturgical compositions were frequently noteworthy for their superficial Cecilian style, far from the perfect fusion of text and music.

Q: Perosi imitated Puccini...

A: But Puccini was an intelligent man. And his fugues are greatly superior to those of Perosi.

Q: Was Perosi in some sense the harbinger of the current vulgarization of sacred music?

A: Not exactly. Today the fashion in the churches is for pop-inspired songs and the strumming of guitars, but the fault lies above all with the pseudo-intellectuals who have engineered this degeneration of the liturgy, and thus of music, overthrowing and despising the heritage of the past with the idea of obtaining who knows what advantage for the people. If the art of music does not return to its greatness, rather than representing an accommodation or a byproduct, there is no sense in asking about its function in the Church. I am against guitars, but I am also against the superficiality of the Cecilian movement in music – it’s more or less the same thing. Our motto must be: let us return to Gregorian chant and to polyphony in the tradition of Palestrina, and let us continue down this road!

Q: What are the initiatives that Benedict XVI should take to realize this plan in a world of discotheques and iPods?

A: The great repertoire of sacred music that has been handed down to us from the past is made up of Masses, offertories, responsories: formerly there was no such thing as a liturgy without music. Today there is no place for this repertoire in the new liturgy, which is a discordant commotion – and it’s useless to pretend that it’s not. It is as if Michelangelo had been asked to paint the general judgment on a postage stamp! You tell me, please, how it is possible today to perform a Credo, or even a Gloria. First we would need to return, at least for the solemn or feast day Masses, to a liturgy that gives music its proper place and expresses itself in the universal language of the Church, Latin. In the Sistine, after the liturgical reform, I was able to keep alive the traditional repertoire of the Chapel only in the concerts. Just think – the Missa Papae Marcelli by Palestrina has not been sung in St. Peter’s since the time of Pope John XXIII! We were graciously granted the permission to perform it during a commemoration of Palestrina, and they wanted it without the Credo, but that time I would not budge, and the entire work was performed.

Q: Do you think that the assembly of the faithful should participate in singing the Gregorian chant during liturgical celebrations?

A: We must make distinctions in the performance of Gregorian chant. Part of the repertoire, for example the Introits or the Offertories, requires an extremely refined level of artistry and can be interpreted properly only by real artists. Then there is a part of the repertoire that is sung by the people: I think of the Mass “of the Angels,” the processional music, the hymns. It was once very moving to hear the assembly sing the Te Deum, the Magnificat, the litanies, music that the people had assimilated and made their own – but today very little is left even of this. And furthermore, Gregorian chant has been distorted by the rhythmic and aesthetic theories of the Benedictines of Solesmes. Gregorian chant was born in violent times, and it should be manly and strong, and not like the sweet and comforting adaptations of our own day.

Q: Do you think that the musical traditions of the past are disappearing?

A: It stands to reason: if there is not the continuity that keeps them alive, they are destined to oblivion, and the current liturgy certainly does not favor it... I am an optimist by nature, but I judge the current situation realistically, and I believe that a Napoleon without generals can do little. Today the motto is “go to the people, look them in the eyes,” but it’s all a bunch of empty talk! By doing this we end up celebrating ourselves, and the mystery and beauty of God are hidden from us. In reality, we are witnessing the decline of the West. An African bishop once told me, “We hope that the council doesn’t take Latin out of the liturgy, otherwise in my country a Babel of dialects will assert itself.”

Q: Was John Paul II somewhat accommodating in these matters?

A: In spite of a number of appeals, the liturgical crisis became more deeply entrenched during his pontificate. Sometimes it was the papal celebrations themselves that contributed to this new tendency with dancing and drums. Once I left, saying, “Call me back when the show is over!” You understand well that if these are the examples coming from St. Peter’s, appeals and complaints aren’t of any use. I have always objected to these things. And even though they kicked me out, ostensibly because I had turned 80, I don’t regret what I did.

Q: What did it once mean to sing in the Sistine Chapel?

A: The place and the choir formed a unity, just as music and the liturgy formed a unity. Music was not a mere ornament, but it brought the liturgical text to life, and the cantor was something like a priest.

Q: But is it possible, today, to compose in the Gregorian style?

A: For one thing, we would need to recover that spirit of solidity. But the Church has done the opposite, favoring simplistic, pop-inspired melodies that are easy on the ears. It thought this would make people happy, and this is the road it took. But that’s not art. Great art is density.

Q: Don’t you say any composers today who are capable of reviving such a tradition?

A: It’s not a question of aptitude; the atmosphere just isn’t there. The fault is not that of the musicians, but of what is asked of them.

Q: And yet the monks of Santo Domingo de Silos have sold millions of CD’s of Gregorian chant. There’s also the Third Symphony of Henryk Gorecki, with its medieval references...

A: These are consumer phenomena that hold little interest for me.

Q: But there are authoritative composers who have put the faith at center stage, like Pärt or Penderecki...

A: They don’t have a sense of the liturgy. Mozart was also great, but I doubt that his sacred music is very much at its ease in a cathedral. But Gregorian chant and Palestrina match seamlessly with the liturgy.

Q: In effect, Mozart’s letters don’t convey any great religious sentiment. And yet, in the “et incarnatus est” of his Mass in C minor, that soprano phrase from the wind instruments perfectly explains to us the mystery of the incarnation...

A: Don’t forget that Mozart’s father was a Chapel Master. And so, whether he wanted to or not, he breathed deeply of the air of the Church. There is always something very concrete, especially in a man’s childhood, that explains such spiritual depth. Think of Verdi, who as a child had a priest as his first music instructor, and played the organ at Mass.

Q: Do you feel a bit lonely, with no heirs?

A: There’s no one left. I think I’m the last Chapel Master.

Q: But in Leipzig, at the church of Saint Thomas, there is the sixteenth Kantor since the time of Bach...

A: In Germany, in the Protestant arena, the children of the composer of the Brandenburg concerti jealously safeguard their identity. Verdi rightly said that the Germans are the faithful children of Bach, while we Italians are the degenerate children of Palestrina.

Q: Speaking of Verdi, great sacred music isn’t always compatible with the liturgy....

A: Certainly. Verdi’s Requiem Mass cannot be called a Mass suitable for the liturgy, but think of the power with which the meaning of the text comes through! Beethoven, too: listen to the opening of the Credo. It’s entirely different for the Cecilian movement. These are the masterpieces of sacred music that have a rightful place in concert performances.

Q: Bruckner was also very inspired...

A: He has the defect of being longwinded. His Mass for wind instruments, the one in E minor, is rather tedious.

Q: Was Mahler correct in saying that he was “half god and half simpleton”?

A: That’s right. He had some extraordinary moments, such as his masterful treatments of the arch. But then he began to exaggerate, and then...

Q: And do you like Mahler?

A: He’s like Bruckner – some beautiful moments, but rather repetitive. One would like to shout at him at a certain point: knock it off, we get it!

Q: According to Ratzinger, there is music as a mass phenomenon, pop music, which is measured by the values of the market. And then there is the educated, cerebral music that is destined for a small èlite...

A: This is the music of the moderns, from Schönberg on, but sacred music must follow the spirit of Gregorian chant and respect the liturgy. The cantor in the church is not there as an artist, but as a preacher, or as one who preaches by singing.

Q: Do you envy the Eastern Churches at all?

A: They have not changed anything, and rightly so. The Catholic Church has renounced itself and its particular makeup, like those women who have plastic surgery: they become unrecognizable, and sometimes there are serious consequences.

Q: Was it your father who brought you close to music?

A: He was a workman at a brick factory in Borgo San Lorenzo, in the province of Florence. He loved to sing in church. And he loved the romanze of Verdi and Donizetti. But at that time, everybody sang: the farmers while they were dressing the vines, the shoemakers while they were working a sole. There were bands in the piazza, during the holidays music directors came from Florence, and the area theatre had two opera seasons each year. It’s all gone now.

Q: In Italy, the authorities have cut off financing for the orchestras and theatres...

A: They were right to do so. Those organizations have too many people who are just dead weight. Take, for example, the administrative offices: at first there were four or five persons, now there are twenty or twenty-five.

Q: In what sense can Palestrina, Lasso, or Victoria be considered relevant?

A: For their musical density. Palestrina is the founding father who first understood what it means to make music; he intuited the necessity for contrapuntal composition linked to the text, unlike the complexity and the rules of Flemish composition.

Q: For the philosopher Schopenhauer, music is the summit of all the arts, the immediate objectification of the Will. For Catholics, can it be defined as the direct expression of God, as the Word?

A: Music is Art with a capital “A.” Sculpture has marble, and architecture has the edifice. You see music only with the eyes of the spirit; it enters within you. And the Church has the merit of having cultivated it in its cantories, of having given it its grammar and syntax. Music is the soul of the word that becomes art. It most definitely disposes you to discovering and welcoming the beauty of God. For this reason, now more than ever the Church must learn to recover it.

On "Deus Caritas Est" and International Charity

On "Deus Caritas Est" and International Charity

"Faith Liberates Reason From Its Blind Spots"

VATICAN CITY, MAY 5, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Here is the text of an address from Dominican Father Augustine De Noia, the undersecretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The address was given April 27 as part of the plenary session of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. It focused on "Deus Caritas Est."

* * *

Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences
XIII Plenary Session 27 April 2007,10:30-12:30

CHARITY AND JUSTICE IN THE RELATIONS AMONG PEOPLE AND NATIONS: THE ENCYCLICAL "DEUS CARITAS EST" OF POPE BENEDICT XVI

J. Augustine Di Noia, O.P.
Undersecretary, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

It is an honor and a pleasure for me to address this distinguished pontifical academy at the start of your 13th plenary session, and to bring you the greetings of the Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, William J. Levada, who, with Archbishop Paul Josef Cordes and Cardinal Renato Martino, first presented Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical "Deus Caritas Est" to the world at a press conference on Jan. 25, 2006, but who is unable to join you today.

It is a particular pleasure to share the podium with Archbishop Cordes who, as president of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, plays a crucial and active role in securing the charity and justice in the relations among people and nations that is your topic in this session of the Pontifical Academy of the Social Sciences.

The focus of your discussion is the Holy Father's short but tightly argued first encyclical, ""Deus Caritas Est"." In its two parts, the encyclical makes two hugely important points. I should like first to state what I think these two points affirm, and then to suggest something of their significance within a social scientific perspective informed by the Catholic faith.

Eros and Agape: The Sanctification of Desire

As everyone who has read the encyclical will know, in his discussion of eros and agape, Pope Benedict insists on the unity of these two forms of love, as well as the continuity between them. He is particularly concerned to refute the widespread notion that the Christian faith separates these two loves, and even suppresses the one -- eros -- in favor of the other -- agape. On the contrary, asserts the encyclical, eros is ever reaching out towards its fulfillment in agape. The powerful dynamism of desire is itself a sign that human persons are made for and directed toward a love that never ends.

In order to clarify this immensely significant first point, allow me to turn for help to one of Pope Benedict's favorite authors, St. Augustine.

In his writings, and especially in his "Confessions," St. Augustine frequently invites his readers to consider the things that they have desired and the things that they desire now -- to consider, in effect, the experience of desire. When we have thought about things that we have desired very badly, and have worked very hard to possess, St. Augustine asks us to acknowledge that, in the end, we have often lost interest and become bored with these very things, and that we then move on to seeking other things.

For St. Augustine, this is most definitely not a cause for lament. On the contrary. In pondering the experience of desire, we learn something very important about ourselves: No good thing that we have wanted and even possessed can finally quench desire itself, because we are made for the uncreated Good which is God himself.

This means that the good things of this world -- and all the more so, the good of other persons -- far from being obstacles in our quest for ultimate happiness, point us to the Good itself which is their source and in which they share. If we do not love the good things of this world, how shall we be able to love their Maker?

The triune God, who made us for himself and who wants to share the communion of trinitarian love with us, uses the good things of this world to lead us to him who is, we could say, Goodness itself. The challenge -- and, sometimes, the tragedy -- of human existence is to desire and love the created good as if it were divine, to invest an absolute value in what cannot finally satisfy the human heart. That is what sin is. But rightly ordered desire and love of the good things of this world and the good of other persons is already a participation in the Good which is God himself.

These lessons from St. Augustine help us to grasp the point the Holy Father is making in the first part of "Deus Caritas Est" -- that eros is meant to lead us to agape, to the love of God and to the love of one another in God. Pope Benedict resists absolutely the misreading, sometimes perverse, that claims to see in Christian faith the suppression of the ordinary fulfillments of human earthly life, particularly human intimacy and love, in favor of a good beyond life.

On the contrary, for Christian faith the whole range of human desire -- or, to use more technical language, the inclination to the good embedded in the very structure of human existence -- finds it complete fulfillment in the love of the triune God, and nothing less. Although Pope Benedict does not use this expression in the encyclical, we might call this unity of and continuity between eros and agape "the sanctification of desire."

The Service of Charity: The Integral Human Good

The second principal point argued in "Deus Caritas Est," according to the reading I am suggesting today, is actually implicit in the first and is advanced in the second part of the encyclical.

This second point is captured brilliantly in a passage from paragraph 19 of the encyclical: "The entire activity of the Church is an expression of a love that seeks the integral good of man: it seeks his evangelization through Word and Sacrament …; and it seeks to promote man in the various arenas of life and human activity. Love is therefore the service that the Church carries out in order to attend constantly to man's sufferings and his needs, including material needs. " This "the service of charity" is directed to the integral human good, a description of which is the substance, as we have seen, of the encyclical's first major point.

For, while it is true that no created good can satisfy the desires of the human heart, God nonetheless intends us to enjoy these created goods precisely as his gift to us, affording a participation in his own Goodness. These created goods are not rendered irrelevant or dispensable by the fact that they are not themselves ultimate or absolute. The ultimate good does not cancel out or exclude limited or subordinate goods: They retain their integrity and finality in their very ordering to the ultimate good.

Man does not live on bread alone, indeed, but he needs bread in order to live. Integral human fulfillment encompasses a range of created goods even as it necessarily entails a directedness, an inner tendency, toward the enjoyment of the uncreated Good who is God himself, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit who enjoy a communion of life into which we, created persons who are not God, are invited to share as their friends -- and nothing less.

This integral human good is the object of the Church's service of charity: the ultimate good and the intermediate or subordinate goods, the spiritual well-being and the material well-being, the goods of this earthly life and the good beyond life.

Again, Pope Benedict is concerned to refute the pernicious suggestion that, by affirming the priority and ultimacy of a good beyond earthly life, the Church overlooks the poverty and suffering of this world, or, worse, conspires with the "prinicipalities and powers" to maintain the unjust structures that are responsible for this human suffering.

On the contrary. The service of charity encompasses the whole range of the integral good of human beings. The encyclical explains at length how this service of charity has been exercised in Christian history and how it can be exercised in the present day. In the midst of this service, the Church keeps to the forefront that vision of the human good and human dignity that God himself has revealed and inscribed in the human heart from the very moment of the creation of the universe. "The entire activity of the Church is an expression of a love that seeks the integral good of man" ("Deus Caritas Est," No. 19).

"Deus Caritas Est" in the Perspective of the Faith and the Social Sciences

What I have identified as the two major points of the encyclical "Deus Caritas Est" pose a range of challenges to the reflection of Catholics whose professional life is devoted to one or other of the social sciences. In this brief paper, I can only hint at some of the more significant of these challenges -- not only because of the richness of the encyclical's teaching, but also because of the diversity of the social sciences themselves.

For the most part, the program of this plenary session takes its inspiration from the second part of "Deus Caritas Est" in which the Holy Father has a great deal to say about the Catholic understanding of the service of charity and about the practical implications of this understanding for contemporary politics, society and culture. These issues are the bread and butter of social scientists like those who make up this distinguished academy.

To contribute to a robustly Christian engagement with these issues, social scientific inquiries informed by faith must take into account the truth about human nature which is in part already legible in the creation of men and women in God's image and is fully revealed in the contours of the face of Christ -- what the encyclical terms "the integral human good."

The contribution of the social sciences to Christian reflection on these issues thus needs to be framed within the context of the Church's generous tradition -- expressed with great clarity in Pope John Paul II's encyclical "Fides et Ratio" -- according to which the truth discovered in the sciences is in principle coherent with the truth contained in revelation.

The fundamental reason for this lies not in our ability to manipulate bodies of knowledge, but in the nature of truth itself which is one, and thus more radically, in the nature of God himself who is the author of the created order just as much as of the economy of salvation. The Catholic principle is that what is discovered to be true by human reason cannot contradict what is known to be true by faith. This principle forms the background for the important things that Pope Benedict XVI has to say about faith and reason in his discussion of politics in paragraph 28 of "Deus Caritas Est."

The Holy Father's observations here have a direct bearing on the contribution of the social sciences to Christian reflection on the service of charity, understood as an instance of the interface of faith and reason. As an encounter with the living God, faith opens up "new horizons extending beyond the sphere of reason." "But," continues Pope Benedict, faith "is also a purifying force for reason itself. From God's standpoint, faith liberates reason from its blind spots and therefore helps it to do its work more effectively and to see its proper object more clearly" ("Deus Caritas Est," No. 28).

In accord with the traditional Catholic principle, reason retains its integrity and proper finality, but faith contributes to its work by locating the objects of scientific inquiry on, so to speak, the widest possible conceptual map -- that provided by our awareness of the divine desire to share the communion of trinitarian life with creaturely persons, or, to use the terms of the encyclical, the integral human good.

With these principles firmly in place, it seems to me of the greatest possible importance for social scientists like yourselves to resist reductionist accounts of human nature and society, and relativistic accounts of moral reasoning and norms -- accounts which almost by definition obscure the wider horizons of faith about which Pope Benedict speaks in the encyclical.

Such accounts are by no means entailed by research in the social sciences, but often arise from pre-existing philosophical assumptions that come to influence and shape the conclusions of scholarship. This is not the place to trace the complex history of these connections and dependences.

But there is no reason why research that focuses on specific aspects of human behavior and interaction needs to deny the existence of the wider horizon which faith reveals to us. As Pope Benedict tellingly affirms in "Deus Caritas Est," "faith liberates reason from its blind spots."

What is not susceptible to observation and generalization within the limits of a particular social scientific discipline or model can nonetheless provide the context for a fuller understanding of the objects of social scientific inquiry.

I mention this point because the Church faces a huge challenge in the present day in her interaction with international agencies and national governments whose social policies have been influenced by reductionist social science. It can be demonstrated that an entirely secular anthropology -- in the sense of an alternative account of the meaning of human existence -- has, especially since the '90s, come to shape the programs and policies of many international organizations, including the United Nations.

In place of an earlier paradigm in which universal human rights and a common human nature played a normative role, the alternative anthropology espouses the socially constructed character of truth and reality, the priority of cultural diversity, the deconstruction of all moral norms, and priority of personal choice. Although the roots of this secular anthropology are philosophical, the social sciences have been the principal vehicle for its diffusion in modern western societies.

When the Church, in this environment, advances her vision of the integral human good, her interventions are frequently caricatured as retrogressive and intrusive. The alternative anthropology has so powerful a hold on the media, the international aid agencies, many NGOs, and other influential bodies that it is difficult to advance the Christian vision of the integral human good through dialogue, argument and counter-argument. The new anthropology is viewed, in effect, as self-evident and not in need of argument. This situation has created many practical problems that sometimes make it difficult for Catholic aid agencies even to function at the local, national, and even international levels.

Some years ago, when the then Cardinal Ratzinger was its prefect, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith invited about thirty Catholic university faculties across the world to sponsor consultations and symposia on the natural law and universal human values. It is significant that, now as Holy Father, he should state in "Deus Caritas Est" that "the Church's social teaching argues on the basis on reason and natural law, namely, on the basis of what is in accord with the nature of every human being" (No. 28). But it must be admitted that this newly emergent secular vision denies the applicability -- indeed, the knowability -- of any universal account of human nature and destiny.

It is urgent for social scientists whose practice of their disciplines does not in principle exclude some broad account of the integral human good to counter this secular anthropology and the social engineering programs inspired by it. The straightforward, and well-argued account of the Christian vision of the integral human good presented in "Deus Caritas Est" should facilitate the kind of discussion and argument which needs to take place. I cannot think of a better forum for this much-needed debate than the floor of this distinguished academy.

* * *

The encyclical "Deus Caritas Est" bears the date of Christmas 2005, the first Christmas of the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI. This is significant. The only-begotten Son of God took on human nature in order that human persons might share in the divine life. It is this communion of life with creaturely persons that the triune God desires. "I wish in my first Encyclical to speak of the love which God lavishes upon us and which we in turn must share with others" ("Deus Caritas Est," No. 1).

St. Augustine somewhere remarks that it is very difficult for human beings to believe in this love. But we can see that no account of the human condition can be complete that neglects, excludes or denies that the integral human good is found only in the love of God revealed to us on the first Christmas in the Incarnate Word made flesh.

[Text adapted]

Salvation as Transfiguration

Salvation as Transfiguration: The Liturgical Soteriology of
St. Maximus the Confessor



Adam A.J. DeVille, Ph.D. (cand.)
Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute at St. Paul University
Ottowa, ON



Introduction

Writing in the late 1930s, the great Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar observed a process of destruction of Western culture and Christianity that has only increased in the intervening sixty-five years. In such a context, von Balthasar suggested, the inclination on the part of many is to attempt to recover a lost Eden, a garden of delights unspoiled by the acids of modernity and the exigencies of a frequently troubling history. For many Christians, this paradisiacal age is thought to be found in that of the Fathers, and our task is simple: we must return to the way things were done in their time.[1]

Yet, between the Patristic age and our own, there is a great gulf fixed. The former age was one in which highly sophisticated theological disputes were thrashed out frequently at the cost of exile, excommunication, and even death for those on the wrong side.[2] Our present age, by contrast, is one in which many people doubt the very concept of truth, and are supinely indifferent to the ongoing existence of incommensurate and patently contradictory “truths,” thinking none of them worth dying for.[3] Moreover, even many Christians, especially in North America and Western Europe, doubt many (especially moral) truths of the faith “once delivered to the saints.”[4]

In such a context, can a thoroughgoing Byzantine theologian like Maximus the Confessor be relevant--and if he is relevant, can he be approached across such wide expanses of time and space and such profoundly different cultural contexts?[5] This essay will argue that Maximus is relevant to us today[6] and can be accessed, but not by simply adopting all his ideas or imitating all his solutions to the problems of his age. As Alexander Schmemann cautioned us, any return to the Fathers will prove destructive if we seek only to return to their ideas or their texts, and not to their spirit and mind:

It is my impression that with a few exceptions, the “patristic revival”… is a return much more to patristic texts than to the mind of the Fathers, as if these patristic texts were self-sufficient and self-explanatory. It is indeed the “original sin” of the entire western theological development that it made “texts” the only loci theologici, the extrinsic “authorities” of theology, disconnecting theology from its living source: liturgy and spirituality.[7]

The problem with such a textual approach to the Fathers, including Maximus, is that their life was not lived in books but in churches and monasteries, in prayer and at liturgy. If we in our day seek to understand what Maximus has to teach us about salvation, we will be sorely mistaken if we look only to his written works and do not undertake the practices necessary for such salvation. Reading Maximus, in other words, is not enough: we must also act. Accordingly, after examining his tripartite process for salvation as understood in the light of Christ’s Transfiguration, we will close with a reflection on the liturgical texts for Feast of the Transfiguration since it is in the liturgy above all that the Fathers remain alive with us and are able to teach us from beyond the grave. Thus do we outwit the hermeneutic problem of approaching those long dead: we look beyond their texts to their living communion with us in the liturgy and their on-going intercession on our behalf. As von Balthasar so eloquently put it:

[W]e shall not collect the living and sacred documents of our life (and the history of the Church is our life) as a person would collect stamps or butterflies. That would be to demonstrate that we are already dead. Let us read history, our history, as a living account of what we once were, with the double-edged consciousness that all of this has gone forever and that, in spite of everything, that period of youth and every moment of our lives remains mysteriously present at the wellsprings of our soul in a kind of delectable eternity.[8]

I: Salvation as Transfiguration: Foundational Ascetic Practices

At first glance, the Confessor’s soteriology may seem hopelessly abstruse. Any sign of “delectable eternity” is well hidden by writing that is notoriously dense and rhetorically florid. Maximus would seem to be the last person to whom to look for practical counsel on what is necessary that we might obtain eternal salvation.[9] Yet, for all his over-fondness of speculation and sentences that seem never to end, Maximus instead had as his uppermost consideration that of prayer and the practical life.[10] The antinomy of Maximus’s life is that this most complex of theologians is also but a simple monk and man of prayer whose whole concern centres on “ascetic struggle,”[11] leading, as we shall see, to transfiguration in Christ.

This holy monk’s soteriology—insofar as we may treat it systematically, since Maximus was not a systematician—may be summed up as the process of transfiguration of the soul through prayer and ascetic struggle, leading up an ascent through virtue to spiritual knowledge and culminating in theology.[12] We shall consider each of these in turn.[13]

This monastic concern manifests itself repeatedly throughout Difficulty 10, in which we find
the Confessor returning again and again to the theme of “ascetic struggle.”[14] Difficulty 10 is a wide-ranging reflection—which moves from many topics in a pattern of “lateral thinking,” as Louth has put it—but is nonetheless linked by the common concern for the practical means necessary for the contemplation of God and for obtaining salvation.[15] Thus does Maximus return frequently to the examples of, inter alia, Moses, Abraham, the prophets and patriarchs, and the saints who, in possessing “the inerrant knowledge concerning God and divine things…rightly proceed along the straight path.”[16] That straight path is secured through ascetic struggle against the sins to which our fallen nature is prone in an attempt to deny or avoid death.[17] Without such a struggle, it is impossible to begin the process of knowing God: “ascetic struggle destroys evil and through the demonstration of the virtues cuts off from the world those who are completely led through it in their disposition.”[18] Such a struggle, Maximus writes in another place, “overthrows the flesh, sense and the world, through which the relationship of the mind to the intelligible is dissolved, and by his mind alone through love comes to know God.”[19]

For Maximus, ascetic struggle as the first stage in the process of salvific transfiguration aims most simply at “the complete mortification and cessation of desire in the senses,”[20] or what is commonly known among Byzantine theologians as apatheia.[21] One arrives at such a state through ascetic struggle, which is itself composed of a disciplining of the bodily desires—including, inter alia, “conceit…pride and self-esteem,”[22] “‘ignominy of mouth,’”[23] “gluttony”[24] and “envy”[25]—chiefly through prayer[26] until one becomes “completely oblivious of wealth and health and other transient goods which the virtues transcend.”[27] For Maximus, then, the first step along the path to salvation is to undergo that rigorous training which any mountaineer would undertake before attempting to scale a high mountain.

So, too, in the spiritual life, the ascent to Mount Tabor and the uncreated light of Christ’s saving divine power can only be attempted by those who first undertake the rigorous practice and discipline of the body in order to purify the soul and leave the world behind, ascending to God who is without form and beyond the world. [28] As Lev Gillet notes: “before attaining the light of the Transfiguration, the hard path of asceticism is necessary.”[29] Let us now turn to the fruit of ascetic struggle, viz., those transcendent virtues whose achievement marks the second step in the process of transfiguration leading to the ultimate goal of sanctified deification and thus salvation.


II: Transfiguration Through Virtue

After one has begun the process of ascetic discipline, one begins to move to the next stage in the salvific process of deification. That stage consists in the acquisition of virtue, which Maximus defines simply: “Virtue is a stable and utterly dispassionate state of righteousness.”[30] For Maximus, such a state is intrinsically valuable, sought for its own sake as much as for its role as the “divine chariot” carrying us to God.[31] As he puts it, if a man “has virtues alone and for their sake, he is blessed….If you take away all bodily and external advantages from the condition of general blessedness, and leave nothing whatever but the virtues, it remains a state of blessedness. For virtue, by itself, is sufficient for happiness.”[32]

While Maximus does acknowledge that the acquisition of virtue is a gift from God, he stresses repeatedly that the responsibility is ours to accept or reject: “‘The Lord has given us the tropos of salvation and the eternal power to become sons of God; henceforth, our salvation is in our power.’”[33] It is not, in other words, within God’s power to force us to cooperate with His will:
“created man cannot become a son of God and god by grace through deification unless he is first through his own free choice begotten in the Spirit.”[34] Once a man makes that choice, then the entire panoply of salvation, and the entire pantheon of saintly warriors, open up to him:

For God provides equally to all the power that naturally leads to salvation, so that each one who wishes can be transformed by divine grace. And nothing prevents anyone from willing to become Melchisedec, and Abraham, and Moses, and simply transferring all these Saints to himself, not by changing names and places, but by imitating their forms and way of life.[35]

Of those forms of life crucial for the virtues, none rate so high an encomium as that of
humility, which Maximus regards as the sine qua non of all virtues. Humility is the characteristic virtue of the saints who “hold fast to the form of the virtues par excellence, I mean humility. Now humility is a firm safeguard of all that is good, undermining everything that is opposed to it.”[36] As he puts it elsewhere, “the highest of all blessings [is] humility, that conserves other blessings and destroys their opposites.”[37]

One of the blessings that virtue, founded upon humility, conveys, is the ability to read and understand divine revelation, especially scriptural revelation: “As soon as anyone practices the virtues with true intelligence, he acquires a spiritual understanding of Scripture”[38] and thus avoids the literalism that Maximus denounces in many places.[39] Such a reading of Scripture is part of the acquisition of spiritual knowledge leading to contemplation and ultimately our salvation: “Every lover of salvation is totally committed either to the practice of the virtues or to the contemplative life. For without virtue and spiritual knowledge no one can attain salvation in any way whatsoever.”[40] To the matter of spiritual knowledge, then, let us turn next to understand this further step in the climb up the Mount Tabor of our salvation.


III: Transfiguration Through Spiritual Knowledge

For Maximus, spiritual knowledge is that which enables one to soar beyond the fleshly and the worldly and ascend to great heights of contemplation. Once one has undertaken ascetic struggle, acquired humility, and advanced in virtue, one proceeds concomitantly to develop knowledge of things divine that enables one to contemplate the Providence of God.[41] These is not a strictly linear process and often what we might think of as discrete stages overlap and circle back on one another or occur almost simultaneously. As Louth reminds us, “ascetic struggle is not simply an initial stage to be accomplished as quickly as possible, it is an abiding concern of the spiritual life.”[42] Just as a mountaineer does not always ascend to the top in a direct line, but sometimes has to descend in order to ascend from a better position, or move laterally to find a better vantage point from which to continue climbing, so too with the relationship between virtue and spiritual knowledge: “man’s manifestation through the virtues of the God who is by nature invisible is correlative with the degree to which his intellect is seized by God and imbued with spiritual knowledge.”[43]

Virtue and spiritual knowledge, then, go together—although not always, and in some rare instances one who is “smutted by the passions may possibly deduce knowledge of divine things by means of plausible guesswork; but they cannot grasp or express such knowledge with any accuracy.”[44] Maximus recognizes, in other words, that what he calls spiritual knowledge is not simply the result of “mere learning,”[45] which, as often as not, is simply a human creation.

By contrast, Maximus insists that we may attain correct knowledge of things divine, but such an attainment is not of our own devising: “a man whose intellect has been formed by the knowledge that comes by dint of the virtues through the divine Spirit is said to experience divine things; for he has acquired such knowledge not by nature, thanks simply to his existence, but by grace, thanks to his participation in it.”[46] Spiritual knowledge, then, is a divine gift, but once again we must freely choose to participate in it. Our participation is not in a simple, natural acquisition of facts about God, but in a completely transforming process in God and for God so that, with St. Paul, we may say, “It is no longer I who lives, but Christ who lives in me.”[47] This transposition of the self, this total gift of the self, means that any spiritual knowledge acquired consists not in a tangible facts and figures that can be demonstrably discussed and disseminated but is to be understood more as “erotic” knowledge beyond the empirical.[48] Whilst qualifying his terms so that we do not misunderstand him, Maximus nonetheless presses the point: “spiritual knowledge unites knower and known” in “an erotic union in the Spirit.”[49]

For Maximus, then, “spiritual knowledge,” the second stage in our transfiguration in Christ, is to be understood more in monastic and marital terms--as the union of lovers--than academic and scientific ones. Spiritual knowledge, as that intercourse between human and divine, between our efforts and God’s gracious revelation, is embodied above all in Christ’s nuptial self-giving.[50] As Aidan Nichols comments:
Faced with the mystery of the Incarnate Word, Maximus at last grasped that man is not divinised by a simple prolongation of his natural dynamism, but by a change which fulfils his natural aspiration only through transposing it into a new key, in that realm of being and action proper only to persons. Hencefore, where salvation is concerned, divinisation and Christology will form one single mystery.[51]

For Maximus, divinisation and Christology form one single unity and the spiritual knowledge we acquire does not provide us with any “new data” beyond the Christological. Maximus, ever eschewing the role of innovator and the temptation of Gnosticism, suggests that spiritual knowledge simply takes one into the realm of tried and true dogma: “the saints have received the many divine mysteries…and were immediately initiated into knowledge of reality in accordance with the tradition passed down to them from those before them.”[52]

Moreover, Maximus is at pains in several places to stress what is perhaps the central antinomy of the Christian life: the more one draws closer to the Triune God, the darker one’s knowledge becomes—or, to put it in terms of the metaphor we have been using throughout, the higher up one draws to the transfigured Christ on Mount Tabor, the more one becomes blinded by the light, until, at the peak and thus closest to Christ, one cannot see at all with only eyes of flesh. This antinomy of hidden-revealed is drawn out at length in Difficulty 5:

Having become man he [ie., Christ] himself remains completely incomprehensible, and shows his own Incarnation…to be more incomprehensible than any mystery. The more he becomes comprehensible through it, so much the more through it is he known to be incomprehensible. ‘For he is hidden after his revelation,’ the teacher says, ‘or, to speak more divinely, also in his revelation. And this mystery of Jesus in itself remains hidden, and can be drawn out by no reason, by no intellect, but when spoken of it remains ineffable, and when understood unknown.’[53]

The higher one climbs, the more one perceives Christ to be unknown; the greater spiritual knowledge one has of divine things, the less one is able to see and say. In other words, the more the light of spiritual knowledge brightens one’s mind, the darker one’s perception of God becomes, and so one is thrown back on faith. This theological antinomy occupies a large place in Maximus’s writings, especially on the Transfiguration, and so we turn to it next.


IV: Transfiguration as Theology: Antinomic Method

Accustomed as we moderns are to thinking of theology as an academic discipline with discrete boundaries and definite subject matter, we may come to Maximus’s use of this term and find it puzzling. Yet, in light of the foregoing, we may surmise by now that for Maximus “theology,” like the other stages of the salvific ascent up Mount Tabor, is not an academic discipline (Maximus, after all, was the successor to Evagrius, for whom the theologian is simply the one who prays[54]) but, rather, the result of prayer. Theology is largely a synonym for contemplation in and through Christ of the Trinity, as brought about by Spirit-inspired prayer: “Theology is taught us by the incarnate Logos of God, since He reveals in Himself the Father and the Holy Spirit.”[55]

Such a contemplation of the Triune God is as much a revelation as a veiling, as we saw earlier. In this, Maximus takes us once again to the classical antinomy between a theology of negation and that of affirmation, which he understands again via a reflection on the Transfiguration:
For I think that the divinely-fitting events that took place on the mount at the Transfiguration secretly indicate two universal modes of theology: that is, that which is pre-eminent and simple and uncaused, and through sole and complete denial truly affirms the divine, and fittingly and solemnly exalts its transcendence through speechlessness, and then that which follows this and is composite, and from what has been caused magnificently sketches out…through affirmation.[56]

Maximus is here suggesting that the one path we have been following up Mount Tabor is now about to diverge. All the climbers have undertaken ascetic disciplines and practiced virtues leading to spiritual knowledge, but once they have progressed through these stages, some will ascend still higher via a “hidden apophatic theology” in which “the blessed and holy Godhead is by essence beyond ineffability and unknowability and countlessly raised above all infinity, leaving not the slightest trace of comprehension to those who are after it, nor disclosing any idea to any being.”[57]

Others, however, will engage in a positive contemplation, or what the Confessor calls “the affirmative mode” which has three components to it: “activity,” “providence,” and “judgment.”[58] Whether via such “active” means or by the more negative ones, the goal is still the same: “it is our aim to make the intelligence stand alone, stripped through the virtues of its affection for the body.”[59] Only one so stripped may ascend to the top of Tabor and there see, and be seen by, the uncreated light radiating from Christ, who is the source and summit of the Christian life.

When one thus prepared arrives at the top, Maximus sketches out what awaits them as awaited the Apostles whom Christ took with Him to His Transfiguration:

[T]hey passed over from flesh to spirit, before they had put aside this fleshly life, by the change in their powers of sense that the Spirit worked in them….Then, having both the bodily and the spiritual senses purified, they were taught the spiritual meanings [logoi] of the mysteries that were shown to them….Thus they arrived at a clear and correct understanding concerning God, and were set free from every attachment to the world and the flesh.[60]

Those who scale Tabor, then, find themselves arriving at the top in human form, but yet taken beyond human form to contemplate God in a way that is pure, clear, and free from human frailty and fallibility. As Nichols puts it:

For Maximus, the whole “matter” of existence, whether thought or action, is not just renewed but “innovated”–recreated from the roots up–by entrance into the life of the children of God. As Creator, the Logos furnishes man with these “materials” but as Word Incarnate, he communicates to him the new life which “innovates” nature in his person.[61]

This innovation and re-creation, as we have suggested, is for Maximus akin to climbing Mount Tabor, which is not a one-time affair but an on-going transfiguration for all of us.[62] Salvation is thus a process akin to mountaineering. The base of the mountain of salvation is the ascetic practices of prayer and self-denial; the first step is the acquisition of virtue, of which humility is the most important; the next level is spiritual knowledge; the penultimate peak is “theology” or contemplation of the divine along paths of both negation and affirmation; and then the summit is complete transfiguration whereby the self is transposed and we become deified, hearing, like Christ, the Father’s commendation, “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.”[63] Such a commendation from the Father puts squarely before us now the entire purpose of our ascent: to know the Father’s love and be utterly transfigured in, and ecstatically enraptured by, it.[64] Such, as Hans Urs von Balthasar has reminded us, is the source and summit of man’s life as Maximus understood it: “pour Maxime, l’amour est la synthèse de tout ce que est humain dans l’homme.”[65]


V: Salvation as Transfiguration and Deification: Some Liturgical Conclusions

We began by asking how Maximus might be relevant for us today, and how we could receive wisdom from a figure who lived so long ago and in such profoundly different times. We are now in a position to give an answer. As Maximus himself would not hesitate to counsel, what matters is not reading his own often-difficult treatises but what matters is prayer, and above all the liturgy. We conclude with a brief reflection on how the three stages of salvific ascent to transfiguration come through in the liturgical texts for the Feast of the Transfiguration[66] on August 6th.

Maximus argues that the first stage of the ascent of Tabor is that of ascetic struggle. Without struggling against our fallen nature, we will never advance in the spiritual life. This theme is even today still pointedly put before us in the Ikos of Orthros on August 6th: “Come, stay awake! If we let laziness chain us to the ground, our spirits will never rise to lofty matters. Let us rise and go up the slope of the divine Mount.”[67] Thus there is, in one of the opening hymns of the feast day, a clear call sounded to all of us to take up the necessary work of disciplining our passions and overcoming our laziness so that we might be ready for the ascent.

The second stage, as we saw, is the acquisition of virtue. This, too, comes out in the hymnography, drawn out clearly in the fourth stichera from Great Vespers: “O Lord, when You were transfigured on a high mountain in the presence of Your foremost disciples, You radiated with glory, showing how those who lead an outstanding life of virtue will be made worthy of the glory of heaven.”[68] Once more, a Maximian theme may be detected.

Third and finally, the stage of contemplation takes one into the Triune God and allows one to see clearly the mystery of each Person. This theme comes out in several of the texts of the feast, but is perhaps best summed up by the exapostilarion of Matins: “Today, O Word, You reveal Your light on Tabor, O unaltered light of the eternal Father’s Light! And in Your light, we see the light of the Father and the Holy Spirit, guiding all creation with eternal uncreated light.”[69]

We have been arguing that salvation for Maximus the Confessor is a tripartite process of gradual transfiguration in which we are challenged to ascetic practices, virtue, and spiritual knowledge before ascending to theological contemplation of the uncreated light and thus to deification. In sum, salvation for Maximus is a process of cooperating with, and participating in, the grace of God through several stages of ascent, leading to a freedom from every earthly attachment and the ability to see God as Moses and Elijah did on top of the mountain. This is not a direct progression from one absolute, discrete stage to the next, but much more of a circuitous process: not a straight path upward, but a spiral that circles back on itself and only gradually ascends. Such an ascent will lead us in the final analysis to our salvation by our “deliverance from death, separation from corruption, liberation from slavery, cessation of turbulence, destruction of wars, dispelling of darkness, rest from suffering, calming of turmoil, eclipsing of shame, escape from passions and, to sum up, the termination of all evils.”[70] If such are the treasures that await us atop Mount Tabor, may we all run with eagerness to ascend it, aided by the prayers of that master mountaineer, our holy father among the saints, Maximus the Confessor!



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes:



[1] Hans Urs von Balthasar, “The Fathers, the Scholastics, and Ourselves,” Communio vol. xxiv no. 2 (Summer 1997):347-396. (This essay was originally published in 1939.) Von Balthasar demonstrates how fatuously romantic and therefore undesirable—indeed, impossible—the idea of a return is: “No time is completely like another, and the Church is always standing before a new situation, and therefore before a new decision in which she can let herself receive advice and admonition from her past experiences but in which, however, the decision must be faced directly: The past can never lighten, let alone dispense from, the decision itself” (p. 370).

[2] See, for but one germane example, the famous trial of St. Maximus: G. Berthold, Maximus Confessor. Selected Writings (New York: Paulist Press, 1985).

[3] See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981) for one of the most profound and influential treatments of the philosophical crisis of our age.

[4] Jude 3. For an eloquent and theologically compelling response to these doubts, see the encyclical letter of Pope John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor (Vatican City: Polyglot Press, 1993).

[5] For an initial attempt to situate Maximus in something of an historical context, see Jaroslav Pelikan, “The Place of Maximus the Confessor in the History of Christian Thought,” in Heinzer Felix and Christoph Schonborn, Maximus Confessor. Actes du Symposium sur Maxime le Confessor (Fribourg-en-Suisse: Editions Universitaires, 1982): 387-402.

[6] As Andrew Louth suggests, an increasing number of people are coming to see Maximus’s relevance for our age, as evidenced by renewed scholarly attention being paid to him: Andrew Louth, “Recent Research on St. Maximus the Confessor: A Survey,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly vol. 42 no. 1 (1998): 67-84.

[7] Alexander Schmemann, “Liturgical Theology, Theology of Liturgy, and Liturgical Reform,” in Liturgy and Tradition: Theological Reflections of Alexander Schmemann, ed. Thomas Fisch (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990), 42. This essay was originally published in St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 13 (1969): 217-224.

[8] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Presence and Thought: An Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa, trans. Mark Sebanc (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995 [1988]), 13. For a brief comparison between Maximus and Gregory (and his Cappadocian confreres), see George C. Berthold,. “The Cappadocian Roots of Maximus the Confessor,” in eds. Heinzer Felix and Christoph Schonborn, Maximus Confessor. Actes du Symposium sur Maxime le Confessor (Fribourg-en-Suisse: Editions Universitaires, 1982): 51-9. Cf. also Andrew Louth, “St. Gregory the Theologian and St. Maximus the Confessor: The Shaping of Tradition,” in eds. S. Coakley and D.A. Pailin, The Making and Remaking of Christian Doctrine: Essays in Honour of Maurice Wills (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993): 117-130.

[9] As Louth tells us, no less a figure that the Photius, the ninth century Patriarch of Constantinople, found Maximus very difficult to interpret and understand. And as Louth observes, Maximus seems “positively shy of full-stops!” Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 81.

[10] Ibid., 21.

[11] See note 14, below.

[12] Cf. St. Maximus the Confessor, Difficulty 10 31B, cited in Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 131.

[13] In commenting on the Transfiguration, Maximus writes “‘these tabernacles represent the three stages of salvation, namely that of virtue, that of spiritual knowledge, and that of theology.’” Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 46, quoting CT II.13-16.

[14] This phrase occurs numerous times in his writings. In Difficulty 10, it comes up in sections 1108A (Louth: p. 97), 1109B (Louth: p.98), 1145A (Louth: p.119), 1145C (Louth: p. 120), 1148A (Louth: p.120), 1149C (Louth: p.122), 1161A (Louth: p.129). As Louth writes in his introduction, “for Maximus, into whatever realm of speculation his intellect roams, ascetic theology remains fundamental” (p. 44).

[15] Ibid., 94.

[16] Difficulty 10, 30: Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 128.

[17] Jean-Claude Larchet provides a helpful analysis of the consequences of sin and death according to Maximus in his, “Ancestral Guilt According to St. Maximus the Confessor: A Bridge Between Eastern and Western Conceptions,” Sobornost 20/1 (1998): 26-48. Cf. John Boojamra, “Original Sin According to St. Maximus the Confesssor,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 20 (1976): 19-30.

[18] Ibid., 1161C, p.129.

[19] Difficulty 10, 1148A: Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 120.

[20] Maximus the Confessor, On the Lord’s Prayer, in The Philokalia, trans. G.E.H. Palmer, P. Sherrard, K. Ware (London/Boston, 1984), 291.

[21] Cf. Difficulty 10 1148b-D: Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 121.

[22] Maximus the Confessor, Fifth Century in The Philokalia, 262.

[23] Ibid., 265 (cf. 2 Sam. 4:4).

[24] Ibid., 274.

[25] Ibid.

[26] For more on Maximus’s approach to prayer, see “On the Lord’s Prayer,” in The Philokalia, 285-305.

[27] Difficulty 10, 1172D: Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 136. Elsewhere, Maximus gives another list of the vices or bodily desires against which one must war: “Anger, bloodthirstiness, wrath, guile, hypocrisy, dissembling, resentment, greed, and everything by thich the one human person is divided up.” Letter 2: On Love 397D in Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 88.

[28] “For truly the great and fearful gulf between God and human beings is the desire and inclination to the body and this world.” Difficulty 10 1172A in Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 135.

[29] Lev Gillet (“A Monk of the Eastern Church”), The Year of Grace of the Lord: A Scriptural and Liturgical Commentary on the Calendar of the Orthodox Church, trans. Deborah Cowan (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001 [original English edition: 1980]), 240.

[30] Maximus, Fifth Century in The Philokalia, 261.

[31] Difficulty 10 1124B (12), in Ibid., 107.

[32] Difficulty 10 1173A (34) in Ibid., 136.

[33] Maximus, Liber asceticus, PG 90, 953B : cited in Aidan Nichols, Byzantine Gospel: Maximus the Confessor in Modern Scholarship (Edinburgh, T&T Clark, 1993), 208.

[34] Fifth Century no. 97 in The Philokalia, 284.

[35] Difficulty 10 1144A (20b) in Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 118.

[36] Difficulty 10 1205A (51) in Ibid., 153.

[37] Maximus the Confessor, Fifth Century in The Philokalia, 282.

[38] Maximus, Fifth Century in The Philokalia, 273.

[39] See, e.g., Fifth Century, paragraphs 27, 33-40 in The Philokalia, 266-270.

[40] Fifth Century in The Philokalia, 275.

[41] Providence is a common theme in Maximus: see, e.g., Difficulty 10 1188D (42)-1193A in Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 144-47.

[42] Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 69.

[43] Fifth Century in The Philokalia, 278.

[44] Ibid., 264.

[45] Ibid., 265.

[46] Ibid.

[47] Galatians 2:20.

[48] Fifth Century nos. 84-88 in The Philokalia, 280-282.

[49] Ibid., no. 91, 88 in The Philokalia, 282.

[50] Cf. Ephesians 5:25-32.

[51] Aidan Nichols, Byzantine Gospel, 207.

[52] Difficulty 41 1304D: Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 156.

[53] Difficulty 5 1049A in Ibid., 173.

[54] For more on the relationship between Maximus and Evagrius, see Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 35-38.

[55] On the Lord’s Prayer in The Philokalia, 287.

[56] Difficulty10 1165B (31B) in Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 131.

[57] Difficulty 10 1168A (31D) in Ibid., 132.

[58] Difficulty 10 1168B (31c) in Ibid., 133.

[59] On the Lord’s Prayer in The Philokalia, 293.

[60] Difficulty 10 11128A (17) in Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 109.

[61] Nichols, Byzantine Gospel, 198.

[62] In his commentary on the Transfiguration, Archbishop Joseph Raya notes the “Transfiguration is not simply an event out of the two-thousand-year old past, or a future yet to come. It is rather a reality of the present, a way of life available to those who seek and accept Christ’s nearness.” Joseph Raya, Transfiguration of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (Combermere, ON: Madonna House, 1992), 115.

[63] Matthew 17:5.

[64] “Deification through assumption into the divine is produced by perfect love and an intellect voluntarily blinded, because of its transcendent state, to created things.” Fifth Century no. 93 in The Philokalia, 283. For more on the theme of ecstasy in Maximus, see Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 42-43.

[65] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Liturgie Cosmique: Maxime le Confesseur ( Paris: Editions Montaigne, 1947), 263.

[66] Had we time, it would be equally fruitful to undertake a study of other texts from this feast bearing a Maximian mark of influence, including Ode 3 of the Canon, which celebrates the consubstantiality of Christ in a way reminiscent of the Confessor’s treatment of it.

[67] August Menaion: Service Books of the Byzantine Churches (Newton Centre, Massachusetts: Sophia Press, 1994, 63.

[68] Ibid., 50.

[69] Ibid., 69.

[70] Fifth Century no. 76 in The Philokalia, 278.