Aristotle’s epistemology, and by extension that of his disciples, particularly Aquinas, is a wonderment of detail. It provides us a theoretical landscape that moves from the receptivity for sensation to the actualization of the concept. It might be compared to analytically moving piece by piece along a lengthy row of dominos. An object acts upon one side of the first domino which passively receives that which is imparted. Then, from its reverse side, the first domino becomes the actor transmitting the data to the facing side of the next domino. In the Aristotelean dissection we are made to pass through the front and back of every synapses imaginable. The mediaeval theologians were inspired to do likewise with grace. Grace has always been recognized as fundamentally the divine providential presence. How, however, they asked, does that presence interact, inspire, move, activate man. A great number of incisions were made into the divine ubiquity. The singular presence of the Holy One was viewed from sundry perspectives of human activity and receptivity. Grace was “prevenient” in that prepared man for action, “sufficient” in its potential to cooperate with man, “efficacious” in its cooperation with man, “actual” in its activating, “habitual” in its abidance, “sanctifying” in its making man holy, “irresistible” in its ability to effect good beyond man’s cooperation. Divine aid was stirred not only in the exercise of virtue but in submission to the great acts of God’s church, the sacraments. There were “sacramental” graces specific to each sacrament, be it baptism, confirmation, eucharist, marriage, holy orders, penance, or anointing of the ill.[i] The greatest and richest of these graces accrued to the greatest of the sacraments, the eucharist, for here was the pivot and epitome of all church life, here was the action that made church a holy union of all God’s children, hence, a holy communion.
The eucharist is Christ.[ii] It is symbolized, ritualized, and seminally realized in the church’s act of gathering to remember that each and all are called as the Body of Christ, as the living presence of God in the world, to the service of God in the world for the sake of the world. As the apostle Paul understood, Christ is more than the Jesus of history; Christ is a composite, the union, of all them that take up the mission initiated by Jesus, that make of themselves one body, heart, mind, spirit in the service of God’s creation. The sharing of the bread and wine as symbol of incorporation into the singular body and life of the self-sacrificing God and the concluding breveting (the “missa est”, the “battlefield commission”) is the heart of the eucharist. It is the church being fully church. It is church obeying “Go!” because it knows the Spirit who abides with it and in it. The commission is to the continuance, the sustenance, of the manifestation of the incarnation of God. Eucharist is not about bread and wine. It is not about Jesus. It is about the mission bequeathed to each and all. The climax of the rite rests not in the enunciation of “This is my body”, but “Go”. And the church, the “body”, rightly responds “Thanks be to [the election, the strength, the grace] of God”.
This reality needs be deeply and well considered. It is not about a rite or an institution. It is about the action and the purpose of the resurrection: “concrete” grace, the manifest, particularized, tangible presence of God’s Christ here and now, his continuous, loving, and redemptive care for his creation. The church is not an assembly of “resurrection people”, the church is the resurrection.
Such ideas are not in contradiction to the élan of a recent Vatican publication, an exhortation from Francis, Bishop of Rome: Amoris Laetitia [The (leaping for) Joy of Love] which follows in spirit his earlier Evangelii Gaudium [The Joy of the Gospel]. The choice of Latin terms in the titles is interesting. The two Latin words both translated as “joy” have, at least in ecclesiastical Latin, nuances worth considering. Before the changes effected by Vatican II, the third Sunday of Advent was commonly known as “Gaudete” [Be glad]. In the midst of the preparatory season for Christmas, it spoke to the gladness that in the coming birth of a child salvation’s dawn was at hand. Gladness carries in it a social inclination, a contagious camaraderie. The fourth Sunday of Lent was then commonly called “Laetare” [Rejoice]. As the darkest and most austere days of Lent were approaching, it interjected into the spiritual tracts of the liturgy a summons to elation, acting to fortify the augurous embrace of the cross with the promise of that which emanates from its depths—transformative joy. There is much in Francis’ telling the gospel brings the sociality of gladness, but its activation in love yields creative joy.
Both exhortations call on clergy and laity alike to approach life first with understanding, sympathy and love. Church teachings, which he has not moved to alter, remain, but remain also secondary to the dominical command to meet the other in his or her situation with care and compassion. It is a glorious thing to hear from an institution as inflexible as the columns that uphold the baldacchino above Peter’s tomb. Nevertheless, out of the several hundred pages calling for pastoral mercy to stand above dogmatic and intransigent judgement, I have already heard several priests of the Roman church summarily proclaim with obvious relief that there is no change to teaching on faith or morals! This is both true and false, for while all the rules stay the same, His Holiness patently understands and thus has stressed to his people that there is something vital, human, humanitarian, and divine that defines—limits—both doctrine and morals: love. Love is not a dispensational, sugar-coated adiaphora. Love means taking a stand. Stand, as did God incarnate, in the place, in the shoes of another and there realize embrace does more to heal a heart, move a heart, than all the word-rattling and finger-wagging in the world. Francis’ papacy is a call to change the dynamic of his church from doctrinaire to pastoral. He asks his church to focus not on doctrine and rules but to exhibit God’s Christ, God’s care, concern, and sacrificial love, God’s absolute willingness to leave his high place that he might stand with and in the place of another. His Holiness is, in my reading and assessment, asking of his church first and foremost concrete grace, a presence to the world that is both unabashedly personal and effectively personalizing. It is not a change of teaching on faith or morals, but it is a repentance, an about turn, and a turning toward the essence of gospel. As ever did Jesus, it summons each, not to the declaration of official positions and understandings, but to “Go”, to go humbly to the heart of the individual and circumstance encountered. This turning toward the heart, the essence, the root of modus operandi Christi is, by definition, a “radical” move. It ripens from the root, not so much that which the conservers of the status quo fear—revolution—but repentance, an about face that acknowledges church is not a primacy of institution, bureaucracy, or power over another, that there is only one cosmic force, one Christoferic, one Christogenic power at the base of wonder, change, and redemption: Love.
The essence and epitome of personhood is the ability to give oneself in free and unencumbered love. On so many levels rings the truth that only love makes a person, evolves a person. Love opens spaces and vistas for one to be able to turn around (repent). Love changes everything, and that is scripture speaking. Love takes the void and makes it a cosmos. Love abandons itself to share in the world of another. Love dies on a cross to give life to others. Love guides in ways words cannot, thus even the incarnate Word of God claims neither to speak nor to act of itself, only to copy the Father who is Love.
Francis faces a largely conservative episcopacy and a people long accustomed to being spoon feed answers. Many who must lead in this repentance into the embrace of humanity are ill prepared to do so by virtue of education, socialization and personality, being introvertedly more comfortable with books, bureaucracy, and policy than with people whose reality is ever far from the purity of the theoretical abstract. Many that are of one heart with Francis long ago abandoned the church they found to be as uncompromising as old wooden pews. They left behind the opportunities to be berated with snippets of Bible or to suffer smug sanctimonious clericalism. However, if the world does not find God in the church, the church must ask itself where and how it has concealed God.
Jesus stands out among his society by the way he acts, by the things he says and does. He is disruptive of the religious status quo. In his time, Judaism exhibited a notable obstinacy. The integrity of the worship and ethic of Judaism had long been, to one degree or another, under threat from a world power. Conservatism was an understandable turn of mind. There were those, such as the Essenes of Qumran, that sequestered themselves from the general population to await in austerity of life the end of the defilement they adjudged the reality of the present. There were others, such as the Pharisees, who separated themselves by their strict adherence to the Law (the Torah), and their demand that all others do likewise. This, in some measure, made the Pharisees (literally: the separated) admired as bastions of orthodoxy. In some part, their attempts to find for everyman in the ancient Law the answer to every issue of contemporary life, caused them to be feared. Legalism and its unavoidable casuistry have that effect. But gospel is not about the Law. Even the conservative tone of Matthew’s gospel has Jesus begin his great teaching from the mountain with beatitudes, not commands or laws, but blessings. The beatitudes relativize the Law and they elevate it. The Law must live in the heart of flesh, must know the intimacies of being human, and so must re-late, be relative to the time, the place, and the person. Yes, it is a “relativism”, and so also is the incarnation of God, an intimate relating to humanity and its world. It makes not for a simplistic ethic but for an authentic ethic. There are no prescribed answers. It, thus, summons one be “present”, be awake, and be aware as much of self and one’s historical baggage as of the other and the situation. It requires thought and heart. Concrete grace and concrete graciousness come with a sacrificially high price.
Jesus does not approach people as either martinet or as someone “separated” from them. He is approachable, and he approaches, not with law in hand, but in that which the Law was meant to establish: the relatedness, the living, evolving relationship, with God. He asks first as to what is needed, and how can it be effectively addressed. The Law of God stands to serve the need of man, not confine man. He does not offer the stone of dogma when the bread of life is required. He does not ask “Why have you done this?” he says “Go, because your sin is gone”. He does not set out to fund research into a cure; he tells the sick “Go, you are cured”. He does not establish a food bank or soup kitchen; he feeds the crowds. He does not argue for the creation of a system of social security; he raises from death the poor widow’s sole supporter. The literalness of such “feats of the impossible” is not the thrust of the narrative; that underscoring resides in the exposition of the godly power resident in personal and moral connectivity with others. He amends the awkward situation. He heals the dis-eased. He forgives the sinner. He is direct and immediate, and this is a wonder to his world, something “miraculous”, something extraordinary that speaks not of God’s Law, but of the direct care and concern of the God he calls Father, a father whose providential and creative love he claims merely to emulate. He knows man cannot come to God. He knows God comes to man, that God wills to dwell in the heart of man. He knows God in his heart. Thus, he is light, leaven, salt—illuminative, transformative, preservative. And that which he illumines, transforms and preserves is the human person. That which he illumines, transforms and preserves is the humanity of God his Father made manifest in his words and deeds. And he concludes his mission bidding them that would follow after: “Go” and remember to do this which God does.
The God that donned human frailty and died in disgrace upon a cross is not a God that lords it above another. That is Christian gospel. God goes before; God creates the new; God redeems. To be a Christian is to do likewise. The Church is convened to be both in its words and actions, and in its sacred words and consecratory rites, the place, the society, and the medium of such open acceptance, creativity, and healing embrace. To heal a wound one does not begin by cursing the situation wherein it appeared or berating the person who suffers it. First must come both calm and succor, balm and bandage. To heal a sin one must first say: “your sin is forgiven”. Repentance is not a precondition for forgiveness, it is a response to it, a response to “concrete” grace, to the experience of human graciousness. If one conceives of that as rooted in the individual’s own enlightenment, in the power of God within, in the transformative power resident in the positivity of the presence of another, it matters not. They all replicate in some manner the power expressed in gospel’s claim that in our midst God died for our transformation, that while still we are sinners, God offers the totality of his love.
Church, like every society, well needs its rules for membership. The egregious sins against the humanity of others, with which this poor world is deluged, must be named, exposed, condemned, and confronted. However, the sinner is always more than the sin because the sinner is a process, a person here and now with a past and–more so–a future in which sin is a maculation, an obstacle in the authentic unfolding of that process, whose amendment requires the sustained effort and care not merely of the individual but the whole community, for such is the sociality of sin’s nature. No sin exists in isolation. No sin is simply individual. No sin arises without root in our general and shared sinfulness, out of, as Augustine had it, our original, our primitive anti-social, and thus, disoriented, thrust toward self-centered satisfaction. Unlike other societies, Church must never forget its humbling reality: it is a mercifully convened assembly of sinners. Church is about enfolding people in a curative and accepting embrace toward fortifying them in self-worth, in hope, and from there toward both trust and creative love. It cannot go about harvesting adamantine positions like stones to hurl upon others. The world looks to the church for the bread of, the meaning of, life, and the church cannot repeatedly respond by hitting the world over the head with a stone and then ask: “Were you hungry?”
If anyone would know God, be kind and considerate to the neighbor and the situation before you, stand outside of yourself, leave behind your comfort zone, and then, perhaps, because it is always a grace, in some dusty alcove of yourself you may sense a creative bit of Light, feel some muted echo of the warmth the passing-by of a God might leave. Here can be gleaned the essence of the Spirit of Christ, and everything else, no matter how painful it may be to acknowledge, is but a tool to get you there, keep you there.
[i] Baptism and eucharist, recognized by the reformed churches as the two dominically mandated acts of church, are inseparable. Thus, they were anciently, and in some places still, received concomitantly. Baptism has its meaning, its purpose and fulfillment only in the action of the eucharist. The others, a grouping neither solidified in number or kind, nor generally agreed to for approximately the first millennium of Christianity, carry weight only as partial replications of the regenerative, healing and incorporative powers of baptism and eucharist.
[ii] The Bishop of Rome has recently noted that the eucharist is redemptive, the cure of weakness and sin. The sacrament of the eucharist ought to be, therefore, administered, not as a reward for piety, but with pastoral concern and compassion for the establishment of an individual’s well-being as well as with discretion and care for the well-being of the community. It is a definitive thrust away from the practice of denying the sacrament to some on the basis of such things as being divorced and/or remarried in the civil system. This opens wide the question as to whom it ought be offered and to whom ought it be denied. Despite the rather nineteenth century Leonine rigidity in section 251 on the issue of same-sex unions, I think the work in which this pastoral advice is given, Amoris Laetitia [The Joy of Love], particularly Chapter 8, to be potentially amongst the most radical of the official statements to emerge from the Vatican since the dogmatic constitution Lumen Gentium [The Light of the Peoples] more than half a century ago. I need add the disclaimer that I opine thus as one not a member of the Church of Rome, merely as one disposed ever toward hope for a more benign and inclusive world.