NLM: Catholicism or Post-Catholicisms? Part 1

“Catholicism or Post-Catholicisms?” — Part 1: The Value of an Anthropological Analysis of Liturgical Reform https://t.co/IQHYhQ0q9Y pic.twitter.com/mdVGEQ8atW

— NLM (@NLMblog) January 10, 2023

Garrigou-Lagrange on the Importance of Dogma

In the early 20th century, Garrigou-Lagrange was not buying what William James--Mr. "Religious Experience"--was selling, namely the assertion that theological claims possess no value unless they relate immediately to human life and conduct.

First, James: "Take God's aseity..."

— Fr. Aquinas Guilbeau, OP (@FrAquinasOP) August 25, 2021

Theosis

The spiritual reality is that we become like what we worship. God detests idols and false gods because we were not made to be as lifeless as they are. So the Lord became like us, the Lover like His beloved, so we may become like Him, the lovers like the Beloved.

— fah’Tim (@FrGrumbach) July 22, 2021

Theological Anthropology

"Man is truly man when he participates in God's life. This participation, therefore, is not a supernatural gift, but the very core of man's nature." —Fr John Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought (SVS Press, 1975)

May the memory of Fr John be eternal! pic.twitter.com/Rfq6xJUgz2

— St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary (@stvlads) July 22, 2021

The Importance of Music to the Human Person

"In some mysterious way, human beings have sensed intuitively that music is of the very nature of God.... What is that mysterious way by which music reflects the God that we Orthodox know to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life?" https://t.co/KlyiTSLhRA

— St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary (@stvlads) July 6, 2021

Catherine Pakaluk on Edith Stein

Spotify—https://t.co/DQZ19GfstZ.
SoundCloud—https://t.co/F8brJKrldt.
Apple Podcasts—https://t.co/NuI8nzPK6Z.

— Thomistic Institute (@ThomisticInst) June 9, 2021

Eastern Christian Books: Scripture and Emotion in Maximus the Confessor

Eastern Christian Books: Scripture and Emotion in Maximus the Confessor

Brill: Divine Scripture and Human Emotion in Maximus the Confessor: Exegesis of the Human Heart by Andrew J. Summerson

Why, Indeed?

When the PBC isn't advancing something progressive, it's back to being "unauthoritative."

Why is there no English translation of the Papal Biblical Commission's text on Biblical Anthropology (2019)?
No German translation either - that is telling. Perhaps pressure from groups around Cupich, Tobin and Marx? @cnalive @cworldreport https://t.co/11KvZnav2n

— Ulrich L. Lehner (@ulrichlehner) March 24, 2021

Eastern Christian Books: Handbook of Theological Anthropology

Eastern Christian Books: Handbook of Theological Anthropology

Bloomsbury

A Collection of Writings by St. Basil the Great

This valuable work brings together major themes in Greek Patristic anthropology -- the image of God in the human being, the Fall from Paradise, and the human condition in the present life and in the age to come. Available here: https://t.co/SKBOeVmY4Y pic.twitter.com/5n2gHC8nfM

— SVS Press (@SVSPress) October 29, 2020

Interview with Demetrios Tselengides

On the Lack of Distinction Between the Theanthropic Body and the Body of Humanity: the Root of our Problems

~ Interview with Professor of Dogmatic Theology, Demetrios Tselengides

Link to video: https://t.co/REJv4IpftN

Link to audio: https://t.co/nhbKPU6et1

— Orthodox Ethos (@frpeterheers) September 3, 2020

“Here is my rhetorical question: With what moral support can the faithful man go to church, when he knows that by going himself he is preventing someone else who wants to go, because they have reached the maximum amount [of attendees]?...(1)
Link to video: https://t.co/REJv4IpftN

— Orthodox Ethos (@frpeterheers) September 3, 2020

A Necessary Starting Point

"The Lord Jesus is the prototype and foundation of the new humanity. In him, the true 'likeness of God' (2 Cor 4:4), man – who is created in the image of God – finds his fulfillment."

-Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, 431

— Fr. Thomas Aquinas Pickett, O.P. (@ThomasAquinasOP) June 1, 2020

But it doesn't mean that everything that is written at (R)CST in connection with it is well-reasoned.

More on John Paul II/Karol Wojtyła

They are making a big deal out of the 100th anniversary of his birth because of the agenda to canonize him and to protect the "legacy" of Vatican II after the rather disastrous pontificate of Paul VI and the inconsequential pontificate of John Paul I. John Paul II seems larger than life as his pontificate was concurrent with the fall of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc, and some, like Weigel, were eager to attribute being a cause who brought about the fall of Communist states to John Paul II. The conservative ultramontanists who think that John Paul II was traditional and liked him will defend his reputation, regardless of what evidence a more neutral historian might evaluate differently. Unfortunately for the patriarchate of Rome, he was canonized too quickly, and a fair and impartial assessment of his legacy may never be written at this point, unless the patriachate of Rome and its reputation were to suffer such a reversal in the future that all of its actions are called into question.

John Paul the Forgotten? by Richard A. Spinello

While Francis seems to be ignoring or revising the "theological legacy" of John Paul II (his encyclicals), what long-term effects will Francis's papacy have, besides confirming divisions among Latin Catholics and maybe even bringing about more muddle-headedness for those who have not been catechized well?

There are at least two other things at work here:
1. John Paul II's encyclicals can be difficult to read. This is a clear contrast with the encyclicals of Benedict XVI. While seminarians and young priests of the "John Paul II generation" may admire John Paul II, how many of them have the theological education to properly evaluate his writings, or the desire really to engage with them properly?
2. Top-down, centralized teaching of theology is a disservice to theology, which requires a personal relationship between the teacher and the student. It should be no surprise if the transmission of theology by the patriarch of Rome is incomplete and ineffective.

How many of today's current Roman Catholic seminarians were influenced by Pope Francis, rather than Benedict XVI? There are many priests, especially Jesuits, who are vocal Francis adherents, and progressives who see Francis as embodying their interpretation of Vatican II. Whether they will have any long-lasting influence on the patriarchate of Rome remains to be seen, as most of them are older and have limited influence among those who have different opinions about theology and liturgy.

There will be a lot of commentary about his pontificate this week, but it is unlikely that I will do a greater search of links to post them. Maybe Phil Lawler will have an interesting take on the man and his pontificate.

More:
CWR: Wojtyla’s Athenian catechesis: An antidote to the culture of veriphobia by Eduardo Echeverria
A review of Archbishop Karol Wojtyla’s newly discovered and published 1965 reflections on St. Paul’s discourse at the Areopagus, titled Teachings for an Unbelieving World.

Remembering the lens and the life of Pope St. John Paul II by Joanna Bogle
He was an innovator soaked in the rich traditions of the Church, a man of physical courage who found his strength in spiritual truth, and a mystic with a robust and cheerful style which endeared him to non-believers and even to cynics.


First Things:
A Protestant Appreciation of Pope John Paul II by Bruce Riley Ashford
Pope on the World Stage by Peter J. Leithart
My Pope by Julia Yost

A Long Essay for Holy Saturday

CWR: This Holy Saturday: Social Distancing, Solitude, Healing by Brad Bursa, Ph.D.
Msgr. Luigi Giussani claims that “the only condition for being truly and faithfully religious…is to live always the real intensely.”i This line stays with me in these solitary days, when “the real” has become surreal. [...]

The author uses "death as isolation" as the first explanatory key, basing it on the writings of Joseph Ratzinger.

Following the Judeo-Christian tradition, Ratzinger does not view death in a one-sided manner, as if it were only an experience of bodily corruption that marks the end of one’s physical life. Instead, “death is present as the nothingness of an empty existence which ends up in a mere semblance of living.”^v Ratzinger says, “Death is absolute loneliness…the loneliness into which love can no longer advance is — hell.”

The second explanatory principle is the definition of Person within the Trinity as "relation":

In God, in the Trinity, person is pure relativity, of being turned toward the other. The concept of person does not refer to substance, but to relationality. God’s substance is one, and person, as the “pure relativity of being turned toward the other” does not lie on the level of substance, but on the “level of dialogical reality.” Thus, Ratzinger concludes that relation is recognized as a third fundamental category “between substance and accident.”^xvii Therefore, in and through Christian faith, theology manifests “the Christian newness of the personalistic idea in all its sharpness and clarity,” for “it was faith that gave birth to this idea of pure act, of pure relativity…it was faith that thereby brought the personal phenomenon into view.”^xviii

Ratzinger argues that the early developments in Trinitarian understanding offer profound insight in the area of anthropology as well. For the human being to be made in God’s “image and likeness,” must, in some way mean that the human being is a personal being. In other words, the human being is “not a substance that closes itself in itself, but the phenomenon of complete relativity, which is, of course, realized in its entirety only in the one who is God, but which indicates the direction of all personal being.”^xix The human being exists as a personal being, precisely because the human being is a spiritual being. God takes the basic material of earth and forms the human being, but human being only enters into existence after God breathes into the formed earth the breath of life. Now, “the divine reality enters in,” for “in the human being heaven and earth touch one another….the human being is directly related to God.”^xx Based upon what has been developed in the area of Trinitarian theology, to be in God’s image, according to Ratzinger, “implies relationality,” setting “the human being in motion toward the totally Other”….“it means the capacity for relationship…the human capacity for God.”^xxi To be in God’s image means to be personal, it means the human being has the capacity for a personal relationship with God and to exist as a personal being, as a social being, in relation to others human beings.

Is sociability a participation in the Divine? Can we say that primates participate in the Divine? Yes, but it may be foreign to some of us. All of His creation participates in God in its own way.

Would Byzantine Christians have any difficulty with using the Divine relations to enhance theological anthropology? I don't know.

The Weeping of Christ

One more follow up to this post. I definitely need to become more familiar with the writings of St. Maximos, so I can't write a response to his writings on this topic.

What of the difference between Christ and the mourners for Lazarus? Did the mourners, including Lazarus' sisters Mary and Martha, sin when they experienced grief, wept, and spoke and acted while in that condition, or was their sadness blameworthy?

It may be objected that Christ does not have any reason to weep for Lazarus as such, because of the knowledge that He possesses. He knows that Lazarus is not lost forever (but temporarily in Hades?). He knows that He will raise Lazarus from the dead (as a prefigurement of His own resurrection), and that Lazarus will be redeemed.

Is death an evil, something to be sad about, even if "everything will be ok in the end"? Even if we believe in the Resurrection of the righteous, when we grieve and weep for those who have passed away, is that a sin, a mark of imperfection or some sort? Can and did Christ feel sadness because someone has died, despite everything that He will do to remedy death? Christ knows as God that He saves; would it be objectionable to claim that Christ knows as man what he will do to redeem mankind ?

Does not Christ also know as man that He himself will be raised from the death on the third day? How could he make that prediction to His apostles if He did not know? And yet he nonetheless suffers in the garden before He is betrayed by Judas, and He has fear of death. How can such an emotion be justifiable (or sinless) if He knows that He will be triumphant over death? (And I know that St. Maximos at least does not claim that our Lord sinned in fearing His Passion and  His Death, though St. Maximos has his way of explaining it, something along the lines of His fear not affecting or swaying His will.)

It would seem that even for Christ, knowledge that Death does not have the last word, etc. does not exclude the possibility of associating emotions relating to death as an evil. So could it not be reasonable, then, for someone to be sad that a friend has death? And if it is reasonable, is it therefore sinless? And if sinless, could we not say that Christ did experience sadness that Lazarus had died, and not just out of compassion for the suffering of those who still live, not just sympathy, but a true sympathy, a suffering with others?

As I stated before, I hardly know the writings of St. Maximos, so I don't know if these objections are answered or deal with by him. I don't know if he (or St. Cyril of Alexandria) makes a mistake of applying a priori reasoning about human passion on Christ or the Theotokos. Perhaps the mourning of Martha and Mary was "imperfect," as their sadness lead to them being tempted to have doubts about Christ or to experience other disordered movements in the soul. We have their words at least to claim as evidence of this at least.

Is self-love bad? Disordered self-love that is so because of a rejection of God? Yes. But does that mean that everything that is done through disordered self-love is evil in itself? Is any passion associated with something perceived as evil necessarily blameworthy or sinful? Or only that which is motivated or left unchecked by disordered self-love? And would not passion motivated by a rightly-ordered love that is one with the Divine Agape be not blameworthy but praiseworthy? (If it is indeed possible to be righteous and yet experience the passions associated with evil or loss.) It seems that St. Maximos or St. Cyril of Alexandria might accept these distinctions, but need confirmation.

Speculation on Prelapsarian Human Nature

How far can one take it? And why should one take St. Maximos the Confessor as THE expression of Tradition on these points?

Orthodox Christian Theology: How Does Grief Demonstrate Our Original Sin?

If passions, like sadness (or "grief") is a consequence of the Fall, then it is because death is a consequence of the Fall and so we suffer loss and are sad as a result. But what does it mean that sadness is "blameworthy"? Are there no legitimate reasons for being sad, because we have suffered a loss? Is it only legitimate to feel sad out of compassion for the suffering for others? This seems too strict or rigorist to me. 

Saint Maximus taught that sadness is in fact a blameworthy passion that is the result of the fall—a stain of original sin. In the Questions to Thalassius he writes that after the Fall:

[T[he great and innumerable mob of passions was introduced into human life and corrupted it. Thus our life became filled with much groaning…If, on the other hand, our condition of self-love is distressed by pain, then we give birth to anger, envy, hate, enmity, remembrance of past injuries, reproach, slander, oppression, sorrow, hopelessness, despair, the denial of providence, torpor, negligence, despondency, discouragement, faint-heartedness, grief out of season, weeping and wailing, dejection, lamentation, envy, jealousy, spite, and whatever else is produced by our inner disposition when it is deprived of occasions for pleasure. (1.2.15)

Now, many may contend with Maximus’ teaching by saying Jesus “groaned” (John 11:34) and “wept” (John 11:35). We must be careful to read these passages in a Christologically orthodox way.

We know that Jesus “was tempted in every way,” but we also know that “God cannot be tempted by evil” (James 1:13). So, we must understand He was “tempted in every way, WITHOUT SIN” (the Greek does not necessarily include the word “but.”)

In other words, He was tempted in every blameless, without sin. sort of way—hunger, thirst, pain, privation—but not by sinful temptations such as sex, avarice, and the like. I have covered in detail elsewhere that Jesus Christ voluntarily assumed blameless passions, which were in fact not inherent to His sinless human nature as by nature flesh that is sinless, like Adam’s in paradise, experiences none of these things. However, Jesus did voluntarily experience these things as it was naturally possible for Him to. Adamite (prelapsarian) flesh is not glorified flesh—it can contain fallen aspects naturally because the fall did really occur in the prelapsarian flesh, turning it into postlapsarian flesh. Prelapsarian flesh tends towards immortality, but it is not truly immortal until it is glorified. Glorified flesh cannot experience the fall. So, Enoch, Elijah, Moses, Mary, and others (if they exist) with resurrected bodies cannot fall into sin like Adam and Eve, because they have glorified bodies. This, for them, would be an impossibility.

This being said, we must be careful not to assume Jesus weeps for the same reason we grieve. We often grieve because we feel an intense, sorrow due to personal loss or some sort of self-love. Jesus did not experience this sort of sorrow, which Maximus states is from the passions.

Weeping that arises from the blameless passions is much different. For example, weeping from laughter is not the same as grief. Weeping from hitting one’s thumb with a hammer also is not the same as grief. Weeping out of compassion and empathy is also not the same as grief.

When Jesus wept, this does not mean he was weeping from grief—which clearly the
Theotokos did during her son’s crucifixion.

As a brief aside, while grief and weeping from such are blameworthy passions, only the consent of the will to despondency is sin. So, our Orthodox icons of the Theotokos and Saint John weeping at the crucifixion is not a terrible example of sin—this would be absurd. It is a demonstration of God’s people, with postlapsarian flesh, experiencing grief as we all do. They were not despondent and so did not sin. Saint Basil (Letter 260, Par 9) and Saint Maximus (Life of the Virgin, Par 53) both speak of the Theotokos having instant healing from precisely this predicament.

The preceding being said, how did Jesus weep? First, let’s plainly look at what the Scriptures indicate. In John 11:31 there are “Jews” consoling Mary and Martha. It is not clear whether they were professional mourners (Jer 9:17), but they wept with Mary and Martha (John 11:33) akin to those wailing for a ruler’s dead daughter in Matt 9:23. Clearly, community-mourning was some sort of social custom in Judea. Contextually, we must understand that Jesus was joining in this social custom, which He was obviously accustomed to. What he was not doing was grieving the death of Lazarus, as He was calm four days beforehand being fully cognizant of its occurrence. Clearly, Jesus was showing pity for Mary and those there, joining in the community mourning.

CHE COSA E' L'UOMO? UN ITINERARIO DI ANTROPOLOGIA BIBLICA

Sandro Magister: The Most Beautiful Document of This Pontificate. Which Almost Nobody Has Read

LEV

John Behr: Becoming Human in Light of the Gospel of John

Questionable Biblical Anthropology?

Rorate Caeli: On Pontifical Biblical Commission document and homosexuality, better not to rush to judgment

CWR Interview with Keith Lemna on Louis Bouyer

CWR: Recovering the Cosmos: The theological and spiritual vision of Fr. Louis Bouyer by Carl E. Olson

A conversation with Dr. Keith Lemna, the author of The Apocalypse of Wisdom: Louis Bouyer’s Theological Recovery of the Cosmos, about “one of the most comprehensive theologians of the twentieth century.”