"Eucharistic Controversies" by James Hitchcock

[As with my recent post of Fr. Meconi's essay, "A Christian View of History," this short essay by Prof. Hitchcock was not only a large factor in drawing me into Fr. Keefe's work, but has also found itself virtually consigned to the "memory hole." So, in order that his essay is more readily available than by scouring the Wayback Machine, I post it here for posterity.]

EUCHARISTIC CONTROVERSIES

by James Hitchcock

One of the great ironies of Catholic history is the frequency with which the Eucharist, the very act of Christian unity, has been the focus of contention and faction.

In this as in so many other things the Catholic Church, more than any other religion except Eastern Orthodoxy, regards correct belief as crucial to authentic faith. Modern sentimental liberalism urges that everyone be admitted to the Eucharist, almost indiscriminately, since participating in the Eucharistic act will itself overcome differences and forge unity.

But, while the Church does not of course require everyone to be a dogmatic theologian, it has always insisted that, to the degree each person is able, he must understand Catholic practice in orthodox ways. Thus an indiscriminately "inclusive" Eucharistic community would be a kind of lie.

One of the fiercest Eucharistic controversies came during the "Dark Ages," when the level of speculation in the West was generally low but when for the first time the Church had to face directly the claim that, when Jesus said "This is my Body," he was not speaking literally. Those tenth-century disputes ended by firmly enthroning Eucharistic realism in the Church, so that at every point the Church has taken great pains to defend that realism, as well as ancillary doctrines such as the sacramental power of the priesthood transcending the personal worthiness of the priest himself.

The Reformation of course divided Christianity a dozen ways on this matter, of which the Protestant-Catholic split was only one instance. Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli aborted a possible theological alliance by failing to agree on the meaning of "This is my body," and there developed a spectrum of Protestant beliefs ranging all the way to the Quaker refusal to celebrate the Eucharist at all, as a merely "carnal" understanding of God.

One of the saddest features of post-Vatican II Catholicism is the way in which the Eucharist, once the great transcendent act in which the most socially diverse Catholics could submerge their identities, has now itself become a focus of contention and division. There is now the "Tridentine Mass," the "Novus Ordo Latin Mass," the ordinary vernacular Mass, the "folk Mass," and those celebrations with numerous varieties of improvisation by celebrants and worshippers. In this as in other matters, there is no longer one faith, and what various groups understand the Eucharist to be is fundamentally in conflict one with another. Beyond all statistics of numerical decline, beyond all disputes over morality or the role of women, this Eucharistic division is the single most important indicator of the unhealthy state of post-conciliar Catholicism.

Traditional Eucharistic piety, and much of traditional theology as well, has been criticized as narrow, static, and legalistic, all of which was true in some respects. At its worst the old Eucharistic understanding was preoccupied with obedient conformity and rubrical correctness, able to find Christ solely in the act of priestly consecration and its aftermath. It is this narrowness which reformers had been trying to remedy ever since the beginning of the liturgical movement in the nineteenth century.

But, as with so many other post-conciliar developments, "reform" has proceeded not by broadening and deepening authentic understanding but by truncating it through a shallow and restricted rationalism.

Polls show that two thirds of Catholics do not believe that Jesus is bodily present in the Eucharist, a figure which probably represents not so much conscious dissent as mere ignorance. What has replaced orthodox understanding is a rational reductionism into which all but confirmed atheists might enter - Jesus is present in the Eucharistic community through the individuals who comprise it, whose unity is itself his presence. The bread and wine symbolize this unity.

An authentic Catholic understanding, which has always been available to those who sought it, does understand that Jesus is indeed present in the Eucharist in multiple ways, among which is his presence within all baptized believers, a presence which is especially powerful when those believers gather for Eucharistic worship. He is also present in the words of Scripture, which are not to be read merely as lessons to be learned but as living words able to penetrate the soul of the hearer and transform it. He is, above all, uniquely and entirely present in an immensely heightened and intense way in the Eucharistic elements themselves.

The relationship of these various modes of presence to one another is itself part of the inexhaustible mystery of the Eucharist.

The Eucharist is indeed, as reformers insist, an action rather than a static reality. It is the action of God within the worshipping [sic] community, making Christ wholly present in real and profound ways. Thus the kind of Eucharistic piety which saw Jesus as the "prisoner of the tabernacle," or which thought of him as absent from the assembly prior to the consecration at each Mass, was indeed misguided.

The classical liturgical movement, as it existed until the time of the Council, as well as the work of various modern theologians, sought to retrieve the widest and deepest possible understanding of the Eucharist, an understanding far more demanding in terms of informed faith than the old piety required. Instead, however, liberal Catholicism has mainly issued forth in such things as the theory of "transignification," which are shallow, rationalistic, and merely subjective.

But the post-conciliar period has also brought forth a neglected classic of Eucharistic theology — Father Donald J. Keefe's Covenantal Theology: the Eucharistic Ordering of History — which is as rich and profound a work on the subject as the twentieth century has produced. Only a rash individual would claim to understand all of it, but it provides the basis for a genuine reconstruction of Eucharistic understanding.

James Hitchcock is professor of history at Saint Louis University.

"A Christian View of History" by David Meconi, S.J.

[This essay, along with a brief essay by Prof. James Hitchcock, more or less launched my entry into the work of Fr. Keefe, but it has slipped through my clutches a few times over the years, so I want to make sure it's readily available somewhere else than a dusty corner of the Wayback Machine.]

A Christian View of History

by David Meconi, S.J.

“In Christianity time has a fundamental importance.”1 At the dawn of the new millennium, our Philosopher Pope wants to teach the world that time is not inimical to human union with the Divine but is rather the arena in which creation’s encounter with God takes place. The Christian faith is neither a mere remembrance of the past nor is it merely the waiting of things to come. In two recent writings, the Holy Father reemphasizes this distinct Christian understanding of history: that time neither sweeps us further away from God’s revelation in Christ nor does it simply bring us to some future glory, but is the conduit in which the Eternal is fully available and definitively present to us now. John Paul II’s 1994 Apostolic Exhortation, Tertio Millennio Adveniente, is a beautifully constructed meditation on the nature of history and the significance of time while his 1998 encyclical, Fides et Ratio, argues that absolute truth is not some lost or unattainable reality but “is immersed in time and history” (no. 11) and as such, is presently available to those who seek rightly. Both monumental writings draw on the Christian understanding of time as part of the good creation and a means through which God reveals Himself.

Paganism, Protestantism, and Postmodernism all share a mistrust of the Church’s historical optimism. Instead of seeing history as the medium of salvation, these schools of thought maintain that the Divine, the Absolute, is outside of the here and now. To have a distinctly Christian understanding of history, however, is to confess that the Divine is fully present in and accessible to those in space and time. Professing otherwise is to fall into an historical pessimism, taking one of three forms. First, as the pre- or extra-Judeo-Christian pagans believed, time is a pernicious current taking humanity further and further from some Golden Age. In this worldview, divine works were accomplished in a “time before time.” Groping to return to that time unmarked by successive days, religion became the way man could “tie back” (re-ligio) to that eternal present.

The Protestant understanding of history sees time as salvific only in recollecting what God has done and hoping for what He will again do. God is of course active in history but His real presence is something of the past, when Christ walked the earth, as well as something of the future, His Second Coming. Since the “here and now” is void of His tangible and explicit presence, time has no salvific significance in and of itself. The believer is thus forced to “get out” of history through his inner-life of faith. Because God is no longer really objectively present in history, His presence is now determined by human memory and anticipation. Without the Eucharistic mediation of the Church, Protestantism is forced to deny that the fullness of God’s Self is able to be encountered in the present moment and hence denies history’s ability to mediate the Divine.

The third option is of course that there is no Absolute, no Ultimate Reality, and time is able to offer only that which is relative, finite, and passing. This is the Postmodern understanding of history: because we are caught up in endless and inexplicable relationships and webs of networks, the truth always remains something “out there” and is never able to penetrate our own perspectives and positions. In history there can be no immanent truth, beauty, or goodness. In fact, in history we find nothing—no guiding standards, no valid traditions, no objective reality.

By way of explaining the historical pessimism underlying each of these three positions, the following essay will explain what John Paul II means when he holds up time as a fundamental Christian category. The question to be answered here is whether or not God reveals Himself definitively in created time, in history. Is time a medium of redemption or a hindrance to it? Can one encounter the Absolute fully in the here and now? If the answer is yes, how; if no, what then is history’s relationship to the Divine? Jesuit theologian Donald J. Keefe has seen this relationship between Christ and history more clearly than most and has consequently spent most of his academic energy reminding the rest of us that, “There is no other free, intelligible order in history than the one which is grounded in the free unity of the Eucharistic One Flesh, and none has ever been proposed.”2 In the following essay it will therefore be shown that only in the Eucharistic worship of the Church is the Divine essentially and fully present in time while all other creeds share a related distrust toward the historical.

The second section of Tertio Millennio Adveniente begins by contrasting the Christian sense of time with the pre-Christian or pagan understanding. For the Christian, time is created by God and as such—like all of God’s good creation—time is purposeful and a sacramental through which the Divine is seen. John Paul writes, “Time is indeed fulfilled by the very fact that God, in the Incarnation, came down into human history. Eternity entered into time: what ‘fulfillment’ could be greater than this? What other ‘fulfillment’ would be possible? Some have thought in terms of certain mysterious cosmic cycles in which the history of the universe, and of mankind in particular, would constantly repeat itself . . . . Some have considered various forms of reincarnation: depending on one’s previous life, one would receive a new life in either a higher or lower form, until full purification is attained” (no. 9).

The Holy Father knows that apart from God’s covenant fulfilled in the “fullness of time” (cf. Gal 4:4), pre-Christian civilizations could not see how time was good and meaningful. Rather, to find meaning in this world, the pagan myth acted as the safeguard against history’s devouring those caught up in the present day. Because the pagan gods cannot be met in history, the pre- or extra-Judeo-Christian world used myths reenacted in ritual to regain that Golden Age in which the gods walked the earth. These divine events, figures, and sayings which happened in ‘that time before time’ are again made real through the re-telling of the story. The myth offers meaning and protection in a world devoid of significance: since time moves man further and further away from his true home, he clings to the stories and ceremonies which unite him to the heavenly. As Oedipus, the legendary king of Thebes, proclaimed shortly before his death: “Only the gods can never age, the gods can never die. All else in the world almighty Time obliterates, crushes all to nothing . . .” Myth, as in the telling of the Oedipus trilogy, saves the present by injecting the Immutable into an otherwise transient moment.

Greek Orphics depicted their god of time, Chronos, as a vicious monster and the ancient Latins lived by the adage, Tempus edax rerum (Time destroys all things.) Because the non-Christian trembled in the face of the future, he held up the retelling of myth and reenactment of various rites as his only link to the permanent. The eminent scholar in world religions, Mircea Eliade, calls this the pagan’s attempt to escape his “profane duration” by commemorating some pristine past. For those without the proper understanding of God in the world, in history, time must be transcended and even reversed through religious festivals. As Eliade writes, myths reenacted in rituals, “suspend the flow of time, of duration, and project the celebrant into a mythical time, in illo tempore . . . all rituals imitate a divine archetype and that their continual reactualization takes place in one and the same atemporal mythical instant.”3 For example, upon the return of a warrior from battle, stories of the hero—Marduk in the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh Epic or Zeus’ battle against the Titans—would be told to provide meaning and significance, the presence of the gods, to the deeds just wrought. Upon the death of a child, a pious Greek mother would recall Demeter’s perennial loss of Persephone; and every year the citizens of Rome retold the legend of Romulus and Remus so as to recover the sacred origins of their city. For without the individuals’ recalling of these myths, the significance of the present could not convey the Permanent, the Divine, and risks being irretrievably lost to the pernicious current of time.

Pagan texts were read and rites were performed to flee the present and commemorate what the gods had once done. Within this pessimism, however, Christ’s Church was born. “Not by way of cleverly concocted myths” (2 Pet 1:16) did the first Christians teach. Rather, in stark contrast to the pagan attempt to revive a lost time in which Divinity could be found, the Apostles insisted on announcing—literally, to make now (nunc)—the Good News. Whereas the pagan myths and rituals strove to recover an age gone by, the Christian liturgy made available the definitive and real presence of God. As Cambridge University’s Catherine Pickstock writes, “although the Gospel is written down in a book, its proclamation is continuous with the sacrifice it narrates. Its enunciation ‘makes now’ a total sacrifice which is not a prior, closed-off event, but enters the interstices of our present, in contrast to the non-sacrificial silence of the unspoken text.”4

The Scriptures and the Sacrifice of the Mass together are the means Christ gave to His Church in order to give His whole self uninterruptedly to those in history. By continuing His Incarnation through His Body and Blood in the Holy Eucharist and by continuing His teaching through the Scriptures as transmitted and thus interpreted by His living Church, Christ ensured His essential and absolute Presence to those in time.5 The Lord did not condemn us solely to remembering or anticipating Him—sola fide. Nevertheless, the second understanding of time in need of examination is that in which Christ’s actual presence from the here and now has been removed, thus rendering His presence merely spiritual and intangible.

By removing Christ’s Body and Blood from the center of all worship, the Reformers unknowingly and unintentionally removed God from history. The Calvinist maxim finitum capax non infiniti, (the finite cannot mediate the Infinite), annuls the created order’s mediation of the Divine. In rejecting the Eucharist as the historical continuation of Christ’s Incarnation, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and many others took the God-made-flesh out of time and space, out of the world in which we live. Like any other incarnate individual, once Christ’s flesh is removed from the here and now, His presence becomes one of mere spirit: a presence of memory and anticipation but no longer a Presence which we can touch, kneel in front of and adore. Christ’s Real Presence is confined to the Heavens, to the eternal where time cannot reach. But without Christ’s body essentially present in the here and now, how His presence in this world is different than, say, that of the Holy Spirit’s becomes difficult to explain.

Consider, for example, Article XXXVIII of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Anglicanism: “The Body of Christ is given, received, and eaten in the Supper only in a heavenly and spiritual sense. Moreover the medium by which the Body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper is faith.”6 Without the Church’s sacramental mediation, the true object of Protestant worship is removed from history. Christ’s individuality, His ‘scandal of particularity’—which St. Irenaeus knew scandalized the Gnostics who considered Christ’s flesh a phantom or a mere symbol—is no longer an objective presence in this world. It is now the faith of the believer that establishes Christ’s presence in the world. Unlike the time He walked Jerusalem, Christ’s presence no longer elicits faith but is a presence now determined by the individual believer, sola fide. The Eucharistic Lord who summons and causes an individual’s faith is now reduced to a presence determined by the individual believer because history does not mediate God’s true and objective presence.

Cardinal Ratzinger traces this inversion back to Luther’s denial of history’s mediation of Christ’s true presence. Luther, Ratzinger writes, “considered this heavenly-earthly, Christian-secular history no longer as salvation-bringing and Christian but as anti-Christian, and who sought Christianity, not in it [i.e., history], but against it . . .” Rejection of Christ’s objective presence in history, then, forces the individual to “bring” Christ into history via his own act of faith. Ratzinger can maintain that “Luther’s appearance signaled the collapse of the prevailing historical consciousness,” because with the Reformers came an understanding of Jesus Christ unmediated by His Bridal Church, a spiritual “presence” of the Incarnate God, and an inability to encounter God’s final and definitive work in history.7

The most formidable Protestant theologian of this century, Rudolf Bultmann (d. 1976), encouraged each Christian to “demythologize” the Scriptures so as to rid them of any historical particularity. Believers must now understand Christ’s to be an entirely other-worldly presence. Since history is unable to mediate the Kingdom of God, the Christian should see that, “In his faith he is already above time and history. For although the advent of Christ is an historical event that happened ‘once’ in the past, it is at the same time, an eternal event that occurs again and again in the soul of any Christian in whose soul Christ is born, suffers, dies and is raised up to eternal life. In his faith the Christian is a contemporary of Christ, and time and the world of history are overcome. The advent of Christ is an event in the realm of eternity which is incommensurable with historical time.”8 Firmly rejecting Christ’s Incarnation as eucharistically continued throughout history, the Protestant mind no longer understands His Real Presence to be available to those in time but, rather, to be an other-worldly, unhistorical, cure for time.

Postmodernism holds the similar belief that for those in time, there can be no final truth, no definitive meaning. The term Postmodern was popularized at the turn of this century to describe the discontentment with the modern project which promised to quell human dissatisfaction through progress and technology. After these failed promises of the Renaissance and Enlightenment (i.e., Modernity), Postmodernism realized that we have all we want but we are still restless, anxious, and unsatisfied. Postmodern thinkers have accordingly turned away from any allegiance to what has gone before. Theirs is a position marked by a fatigue with history and there can be little doubt that their rejection of tradition has affected all areas of human living: one only needs to think of twelve-tone or atonalism in music (e.g., John Cage), stream of consciousness and free verse in literature and poetry (e.g., Samuel Beckett), and Dadaism and anti-representationalism in art (e.g., Andy Warhol). Abandonment of structure and tradition has likewise influenced architecture, film, television, and flourishes in every imaginable academic discipline.

The Postmodernist quickly points out that history has proven that there are no permanent foundations underlying human existence and any appeal to reality or truth is nothing more than a camouflaged resort to power. In denying the possibility of objective truth, a series of nineteenth and twentieth-century thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Michel Foucault (1926-1984), and Jacques Derrida (b. 1930) maintain the impossibility of encountering the other. The human person is shut up in his own perspective, his own mind; all is relation, there is no real meaning in the world, only dubious viewpoints, perspectives, and personal opinions. One postmodern critic, David Lehman, summed it up this way, “There are no truths, only a radical relativism; there are no longer any standpoints that can a priori be considered privileged, no structure that functions validly as a model for other structures, no postulate of ontological hierarchy that serve as an organizing principle in the manner in which a deity can be said to engender man and the world.”

What began as a reaction against modernity ends in the rejection of the created realm’s ability to encounter the Divine. Why? Like Heraclitus’ river, Postmoderns see time as that which sweeps away all permanence and ability to grasp the other. In this Postmodern world, people can no longer subscribe to a final, definitive Principle which explains the way things are; there is no true self, no external world and no God to whom all is related. Jacques Derrida argues that such Logocentrism, the attempt to relate all meaning to God—the “transcendental signifier”—as the foundation of truth, is “an attempt which can only ever fail, an attempt to trace the sense of being to the logos, to discourse or reason . . .”9 The postmodern understanding of history disallows any stable referents, any fixed natures, and certainly any possibility of Incarnate Truth breaking into created time. Or as D.H. Lawrence once wrote, “individuality, our identity, is nothing more than an accidental cohesion in the flux of time.”10 Time sweeps all away: all selves, all reality, all truth.

Against this pessimism, the Holy Father insists that, “History therefore becomes the arena where we see what God does for humanity . . . In the Incarnation of the Son of God we see forged the enduring and definitive synthesis which the human mind of itself could not even have imagined: the Eternal enters time, the Whole lies hidden in the part, God takes on a human face” (Fides et Ratio, no. 12). Final truth not only exists but is discernible here and now. The human knower is not condemned to grope for unattainable answers, is not doomed to a world of relativism and doubt, but lives in a world where the Absolute Principle of reality can be encountered.

Note how John Paul’s understanding of meaning and truth is rooted in his understanding of history. Because the Church’s authority is grounded in the historical, Eucharistic Lord, she can teach with a final and definitive voice. In today’s postmodern world, however, the Church’s authority is seen, not as a historical extension of the authority Christ gives to His Apostles but, as nothing more than the fulfillment of Nietzsche’s promise that the world’s weak would search for power out of their “vindictive cunning of impotence.” For it is an all too common opinion today that the Pope has a self-appointed monopoly on ecclesial power and that he could change the Church’s teaching against, say, abortion, the male priesthood, artificial contraception, etc. . . . if he only had the will to do so. A world unable to see history as a medium of the Absolute begins to think that every truth is relative and is eventually lulled into understanding every “truth” as nothing more than an expression of individual strength. However, the Catholic understanding of history and its subsequent teaching of the truth of the Ultimate’s Presence in the world stands as a bright beacon to the rejection of history and subsequent nihilism of Postmodernism. As the Holy Father concludes, although many today believe “the time of certainties is irrevocably past, and the human being must now learn to live in a horizon of total absence of meaning, where everything is provisional and ephemeral,” the Church offers the world true hope and meaning (Fides et Ratio, no. 91). Christ’s self-appropriation of all history to Himself is alone what saves us from this postmodern pessimism, this current “crisis of meaning” (ibid., no. 81).

These reflections have helped us see how Paganism, Protestantism, and Postmodernism all share a denial of the historical order’s ability to mediate the Absolute, the Divine. For the pagan the created order was viewed as a destructive river which took him further and further away from a “time before time” in which harmony and unity prevailed. To recapture this Golden Age, the pagan recalled the perfect personages and deeds which injected permanence and meaning into the present. Denying the capacity to meet God-made-flesh today, Protestantism has haphazardly removed Him from history. Apart from the ecclesial event of the Eucharist, God’s Incarnation is absent from time and His presence becomes one of spirit, determined by the individual believer. Postmodernism likewise sees truth and meaning determined not by the individual’s assent to external reality but by personal perspective and determination. The quest for truth and worship is abandoned as illusory and meaningless.

Apart from these three forms of historical pessimism, stands the sacramental mediation of the Church. In contrast to the understanding of time as antagonistic to our encounter with the Divine, the Church teaches that each passing day does not take us further and further away from God but, rather, stands as a perpetual invitation to enter more fully into His closeness. The Church’s message has always stood in hopeful opposition to such despair of the historical. “Within the dimension of time the world was created; within it the history of salvation unfolds…every year, every day and every moment are embraced by his Incarnation and Resurrection, and thus become part of the ‘fullness of time’” (Tertio Millennio Adveniente, no. 10). Time does not diminish Christ’s Presence in the world because as God-made-flesh, Jesus Christ promised to be with us until the end of the age (Mat. 28:20) and it is this same Incarnate God continuously present in the sacramental worship of the Church.

Eucharistic worship is thus not one peripheral liturgy among others but is rather the life-giving event which imparts ultimate meaning into our otherwise transient days. Christ is the Lord of history, the Lord of all places and times equally and fully and it is only in the Church’s life, where the Divine essence is fully available, that the present becomes salvific. Apart from Christ’s Eucharistic presence and His accessibility through the Church’s worship, the only alternative remaining is a fatalistic understanding of time and history. He has however entrusted Himself to His Body on earth (e.g., Acts 9:4-5), and the Church’s historical mediation of Creator to creation offers the only option to those alien creeds insistent on the inaccessibility of the Divine.

End Notes

1 Tertio Millennio Adveniente, no. 10. For all papal writings I will simply include the title and paragraph number in the body of this essay.

2 Donald J. Keefe, “Eucharistic Affirmations,” The Catholic World Report (June, 1999), p. 52. See also Fr. Keefe’s Covenantal Theology: The Eucharistic Order of History (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1996).

3 Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York: Bollingen Foundation and Pantheon Books, 1954), p. 76.

4 Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 218.

5 See the Second Vatican Council’s Dei Verbum, no. 9, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 74-141 for more on the transmission of divine revelation.

6 As cited in James T. O’Connor, The Hidden Manna (Ignatius Press, 1988), p. 150.

7 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology (Ignatius Press, 1987), p. 157.

8 Rudolf Bultmann, History and Eschatology (New York: Harper and Row 1957), p. 153.

9 Raoul Mortley, French Philosophers in Conversation: Levinas, Schneider, Serres, Irigaray, Le Doeuff, Derrida (New York: Routledge Press, 1991), p. 104.

10 As quoted in Martin Henry, “God in Postmodernity,” The Irish Theological Quarterly, vol. 63 (1998), p. 8, n. 17. For more on Catholicism and Postmodernism, see American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly (Spring, 1999) which dedicates five excellent essays to understanding the Church’s response to postmodern claims.

God bless Fr. Donald Keefe, SJ...

"[O]ur objective reality as human is covenantal, and as historical is Eucharistic; this reality is the single interest and single subject matter of Catholic theology, because it is the ground of existence in Christ. The Eucharist is the center of objective existence because it is the constituting Event of the historically free world, of the Good Creation . . . There is no other dignity than this, our participation in the One Flesh of the One Sacrifice by which in Christ we have access to the Father.”

The last I had heard of Fr. Keefe (via John Kelleher?), many years ago, was that he was working on a final supplement to Covenantal Theology. In the interim — I just discovered tonight —, he has left this vale of tears. I can only offer my humble prayers for his departed soul, as well as hope that any unfinished works of his may come to light in due time.

R.I.P.

Fundamentalists have more fun...

"This Schlagwort [viz., 'fundamentalism'], once descriptive of a naive Biblical literalism, has become the favored device and the current glib-speak for exiling from the realm of civilized discourse those Christians, Catholic and Protestant, who prefer the magisterial authority of their traditions to the clerical and academic consensus that would subordinate the Gospel to the higher truth of modernity. ... [For example,] Martin Marty argues [ca. 1987] that insofar as persons of religious conviction do not sell out to an amalgamated 'pluralistic' public religiosity, the end they have in view can only be a theocratic intolerance....  

"The fundamentalist label is now used in quasi-Catholic circles to include whatever theological position refuses to drift before the winds of change emanating from the editorial offices of such journals of conventional opinion as Commonweal, America and the U.S. Catholic Conference 'news service,' the weekly Origins...."

-- Fr. Donald J. Keefe, S.J., Covenantal Theology: The Eucharistic Order of History, rev. ed., with an Appendix (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, [1991] 1996), p. 66. 

The Eastern Orthodox Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, Part 2

"[The first part of this study] deals with the first known use of this title [viz., Mary as "prepurified"] during the patristic era, that of St. Gregory Nazianzen (c. 329 – c. 390), the Theologian. The teaching of St. Gregory on this title, clearly an immaculist one, was kept alive by many representatives of Byzantine theology during the medieval period. On this tradition depends the considerably more detailed exposition of the title in an immaculist sense by St. John Damascene (c. 675 – 749). His teaching on this title has notable links with St. Maximus Confessor and the Third Council of Constantinople (680) where the title appears to be a part of the ordinary Magisterium of the Church.* 

I am extremely eager to explore this last claim, and I think Fr. Kappes elaborates on it in this 2016 lecture, which I shall address in a separate post.

As a disciple of Scotus, the Martyr of Charity [viz., St. Maximilian M. Kolbe] stresses not only the "negative" definition of the Immaculate Conception: preserved from all stain of original sin from the first moment of conception, but more so the "positive" in pointing out how the name of Immaculate Conception is name of both the Mother of God and of the Holy Spirit, respectively the created and uncreated Immaculate Conception. This perfect union of wills: divine and human, in the Mother of God and of the Church through the operation of the Holy Spirit, makes possible that mysterious, maternal mediation by which the disjunctive transcendentals: infinite and finite, uncreated and created, are united in the Person of the Incarnate Word. This union, through the maternal mediation of the Immaculate, makes possible a sharing in the divine life of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, for those incorporated into the mystical Body of Christ by Baptism.* 

This latter synthesis is not only breathtaking in its own right, but resonates strongly with prior research I was conducting based on Fr. Donald J. Keefe's magnum opus, Covenantal Theology [also here, here, etc.]. As part of a large, ongoing "ressourcement" of books and research interests I engaged as far back as my college days, I look forward to seeing how much overlap there is indeed between "maternal mediation" of the "disjunctive tranascendentals" in Fr. Kappes's work and the theme of "One Flesh " (mia sarx) in Fr. Keefe's.

* from Fr. Peter Fehlner's preface to Fr. Kappes's The Immaculate Conception, pp. xviii-xx.

Why I like perdurantism…

Regular readers might be surprised by this post's title, since I've made it no secret how antagonistic I am to perdurantism (i.e., the metaphysical doctrine that object do not exist wholly at any given time, but are in fact comprised of innumerable time slices for each segment of the spacetime manifold). I have ethical, logical, and metaphysical objections to perdurantism, which I have voiced at FCA in a few posts, but tonight I will voice one thing the theory has going for it in my eyes.

The good thing about perdurantism is that it makes some of the hardest doctrines of Christianity quite reasonable. Note: this does not mean that the latter is so wedded to the former that a disproof of the former entails a rejection of the latter, but it does mean that the authority of the latter might give tremendous metaphysical weight to the former by making "more" intelligible some of the latter. 

Here's an example of the perdurantist-Christian alliance (PCA): if perdurantism is true, not only is Adam literally continuant in all of us, but also no one has ever died. In one swoop, PCA has secured both the literal headship of Adam, and thus the transmission of original injustice to all humans, and the immortality of humans. In the first instance, because Adam is just a "compilation" of his spatiotemporal time-slices, which include all the atoms and subatomic "particles" in any slice, then not all of Adam's atoms have disappeared in the cosmos, and are thus still perduranistically interwoven with all other humans. If at time t, Adam had a physical stature of {t,x,y,z}––which object we shall label A({t,x,y,z})––, then at time t* (say, fifty years later), due to natural growth and muscular development, Adam had a stature of {t*,x*,y*,z*}––the Adam we shall label as A({t*,x*,y*,z*}).

On perdurantism, there is a literal continuity between A({t,x,y,z}) and A({t*,x*,y*,z*}). Just because A({t*,x*,y*,z*})'s bicep's muscular tissues was {x,y,z}mm farther from his humerus than the bicep tissue of A({t,x,y,z}), does not mean they are not members of the same meta-Adam A({t_,x_,y_,z_}). By extension (!), therefore, just because the numerous components of A({t_,x_,y_,z_})'s tissue are now––at time t(p)––farther removed from each other than they were at t or t*, does not mean there is no longer A({t_,x_,y_,z_}). Indeed, it is precisely because A({t_,x_,y_,z_})'s components have "gone into" making his numerous progeny that A({t_,x_,y_,z_}) is still literally a member of our causal nexus. Adam is just as fully present in me as he was in any of his other spatiotemporal configurations (A({t:,x:,y:,z:}). 

Now it is time to make space for the matter (!) of human immortality (HI) under the PCA. Fortunately, from the above, HI falls out quite obviously. If Adam persists in "us" (qua variegated pragmatic configurations of A({t_,x_,y_,z_})), then it follows that each of us (P({t_,x_,y_,z_})) persists throughout the span of the cosmos, despite how dispersed, contracted, agglutinated, or reduced we become. 

Brethren, fall not back into thyselves…

Hebrews 3:

[12] Take care, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God.
[13] But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called "today," that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.
[14] For we share in Christ, if only we hold our first confidence firm to the end,

12 videte fratres ne forte sit in aliquo vestrum cor malum incredulitatis discedendi a Deo vivo
13 sed adhortamini vosmet ipsos per singulos dies donec hodie cognominatur ut non obduretur quis ex vobis fallacia peccati
14 participes enim Christi effecti sumus si tamen initium substantiae usque ad finem firmum retineamus

12 Gebt Acht, Brüder, dass keiner von euch ein böses, ungläubiges Herz hat, dass keiner vom lebendigen Gott abfällt,
13 sondern ermahnt einander jeden Tag, solange es noch heißt: Heute, damit niemand von euch durch den Betrug der Sünde verhärtet wird;
14 denn an Christus haben wir nur Anteil, wenn wir bis zum Ende an der Zuversicht festhalten, die wir am Anfang hatten.

12 弟兄們！你們要小心，免得你們中有人起背信的惡心，背離生活的天主；
13 反之，只要還有“今天”在，你們要天天互相勸勉，免得你們有人因罪惡的誘惑而硬了心，
14 因為我們已成了有分於基督的人，只要我們保存着起初懷有的信心，

We are called to faith in the God whose splendour blinds the eye of man as the sun blinds the eye of an owl. With that faith in the unseen reality behind all passing realities that crowd our vision, we enter the family of the Church. Washed in the waters of Baptism, Christ's own Death and Resurrection, we are given a new challenge: seeing our true selves in Christ beneath the frail scaffolding of our fallen nature. We are to treat ourselves as clay vessels in which treasure is hidden and likewise to treat the Sacraments as vessels of various textures in which the same treasure is hidden in a boundless way. Only by holding to the substance of the Eucharist, hidden beneath the accidents, can we rightly partake of the Holy Gifts. Likewise, only by holding to the substantial God-likeness of all humans, beneath the accidents of their birth and idolatrous confusions, can we live right among men. In the same vein, only by holding to the substance of a unified, coherent nature, beneath the accidents of empirical error and statistical uncertainty, can we attain a scientific grasp of the world. Thus, all reality is sacramental, all reality a symphony of dim reflections towards Eucharistic fullness.

No other word but the Word...

In my devotional reading in the writings of St. John of the Cross last week, I "happened" to read the following. It ties in nicely with the points I made in an earlier post about "hearing from God." I wrote what I wrote in that post ignorant of St. John's wisdom, which is not to toot my own horn, but to remark on how Catholic wisdom is unified in its depths.

Notice the strong emphasis on the linearity of history and the importance of singular events in the Christian worldview. This kind of concrete facticty and irrevocability was integral to the historical escape from ancient views of eternal circularity and endless repetitive transformations devoid of an actual beginning. The latter point is not, obviously, foremost in St. John's writing here, but comes from my reading lately of Fr. Jaki's compelling Science and Creation. The grounding of concrete, linear history is, as Fr. Donald Keefe's magnificent Covenantal Theology elucidates, fundamental to the Catholic "sacramental-incarnational" revelation, a grounding which Fr. Jaki's scholarship (along with the work of R. Stark, P. Duhem, A. C. Crombie, E. Grant, M. Clagett, et al.) has shown was integral to the birth of exact physical science in medieval Europe. Again, Catholic wisdom is unified in its depths.

"That which God spake of old in the prophets to our fathers, in sundry ways and divers manners, He has now, at last, in these days, spoken to us once and for all in the Son. Herein the Apostle declares that God has become, as it were, dumb, and has no more to say, since that which He spake aforetime, in part to the prophets, He has now spoken altogether in Him, giving us the All, which is His Son.

"Wherefore he that would now enquire of God, or seek any vision or revelation, would not only be acting foolishly, but would be committing an offence against God, by not setting his eyes altogether upon Christ, and seeking no new thing or aught beside. And God might answer him after this manner, saying:

"If I have spoken all things to thee in My Word, Which is My Son, and I have no other word, what answer can I now make to thee, or what can I reveal to thee which is greater than this? Set thine eyes on Him alone, for in Him I have spoken and revealed to thee all things, and in Him thou shalt find yet more than that which thou askest and desirest. For thou askest locutions and revelations, which are the part; but if thou set thine eyes upon Him, thou shalt find the whole; for He is My complete locution and answer, and He is all My vision and all My revelation; so that I have spoken to thee, answered thee, declared to thee and revealed to thee, in giving Him to thee as thy brother, companion and master, as ransom and prize. For since that day when I descended upon Him with My Spirit on Mount Tabor, saying: Hic est filius meus dilectus, in quo mihi bene complacui, ipsum audite (which is to say: This is My beloved Son, in Whom I am well pleased; hear ye Him), I have left off all these manners of teaching and answering, and I have entrusted this to Him. Hear Him; for I have no more faith to reveal, neither have I any more things to declare. For, if I spake aforetime, it was to promise Christ; and, if they enquired of Me, their enquiries were directed to petitions for Christ and expectancy concerning Him, in Whom they should find every good thing (as is now set forth in all the teaching of the Evangelists and the Apostles); but now, any who would enquire of Me after that manner, and desire Me to speak to him or reveal aught to him, would in a sense be asking Me for Christ again, and asking Me for more faith, and be lacking in faith, which has already been given in Christ; and therefore he would be committing a great offence against My beloved Son, for not only would he be lacking in faith, but he would be obliging Him again first of all to become incarnate and pass through life and death. Thou shalt find naught to ask Me, or to desire of Me, whether revelations or visions; consider this well, for thou shalt find that all has been done for thee and all has been given to thee — yea, and much more also — in Him.

"If thou desirest Me to answer thee with any word of consolation, consider My Son, Who is subject to Me, and bound by love of Me, and afflicted, and thou shalt see how fully He answers thee. If thou desirest Me to expound to thee secret things, or happenings, set thine eyes on Him alone, and thou shalt find the most secret mysteries, and the wisdom and wondrous things of God, which are hidden in Him, even as My Apostle says: In quo sunt omnes thesauri sapientiae et scientiae Dei absconditi. That is: In this Son of God are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge of God."

-- Ascent of Mt. Carmel, II, xxii, iv-vi.

Laws or wills?

Is there any law that dictates what the most basic laws of physics are? Are the laws of the universe self-ratifying, or are they in need of some grounding principle to account for their exact correlations?

If there is no rational ordering principle for the basic laws of physics, they are irrational. If they "just are," independent of some basic principle that correlates them, then they are inexplicable. That is, if there is nothing by which or in terms of which we can explain the most basic laws, we therefore lack a real explanation of those laws.

Is there not of necessity some additional formulation that states––and therefore makes integral sense of––the basic laws? Is not the (supposed) final articulation of the laws of nature itself the completing element that frames the laws as a coherent set? If so, is not our final articulation of natural law itself a natural law?

How do we account for the basic laws' basicality if not by some other, let us say, Law of Basicality which "picks out" these and those laws––or even just This One Law––as the basic principle of the world? It appears that the final statement of the basic laws of the universe must be as basic and incontrovertible as those laws themselves, otherwise their formal interrelations as the basic arrangement of all spacetime are only contingent (and thus revisable under some later theory).

This post, obviously, is more confused that convincing, more perplexing than persuasive, more at a loss than apologetic. All I can say in defense is that the following words from Paul Davies (my emphases added) set me along this ragged path:

What I find lacking in the conventional intelligent-design argument, is … [the] appeal to something outside the universe that has to be accepted as given and cannot be proved. I’d like to try to explain as much of the universe, including its bio-friendly laws of physics, from within the universe – and in a way that doesn’t appeal to something outside of it.

Even standard physics says the laws of physics are friendly for no reason, but have just been imprinted upon the universe at the time of the big bang from without, by some unknown mechanism. Again, the argument makes an appeal to something outside the universe, instead of something intrinsic to it.

For most people, the first interpretation is, “Well, God did it.” What I’m saying is that that gets us nowhere at all. It just shoves the problem off to some other realm. But saying “God did it” is no worse than saying “the laws of physics did it.” They both basically appeal to something outside the universe.

The problem with saying God did it is that God is unexplained, so you’re appealing to an unexplained designer. It doesn’t actually explain anything; it just shoves the problem off. But to say that the laws of physics just happen to permit life is no explanation either.”

This is a common point in debates about cosmic origins, creation, God, naturalism, etc.

On the one hand, theists assert that God best explains the nomological order of the cosmos. On the other hand, atheists assert that the universe can just as coherently fill the role of "most basic cause." The key argument against the alleged sufficiency of God as an ultimate explanation for everything else, is that God Himself seems to require an explanation. If the universe's most basic laws require God, then why doesn't God require something to explain His nature? We've all got to have some most basic premise, so if theists can have God as their metaphysical bedrock, why can't atheists have the cosmos as their bedrock?

I am a theist, so obviously I side with "the God option," but, as I say, the course of this post is pretty much toothless. I have a hunch (if it can even be called that), that theism is right if only because an intentional formulation of even the most basic laws of nature is rationally inescapable. This intentional formulation of the cosmos the Church calls the Divine Logos. Although I am trying to be as irenic as possible in this post, I think it is also worth pointing out that the appeal to an explanation for God is disingenuous, since the whole debate has always been about explaining the universe. Historically, both sides admit that the universe requires a deeper explanation. Why would that be so, if the universe really had the same ontological stature as God? Since the debate centers on how to account for the universe as a material, dynamic reality, it is a stinky red herring to shift the debate to an explanation for God. Protesting that a theist's explanation is "not good enough" still leaves the atheist without an explanation of his own.

Only once I set into writing did I realize how closely connected this pseudo-hunch of mine is with Gödel's incompleteness theorems.

Briefly (and probably wrongly), those theorems entail that any non-trivial arithmetic set is either complete, but not consistent, or consistent, but not complete. In other words, any formal logical-operational system––which is what the universe's basic laws would reduce to––can either possess all its axioms without contradiction but lack proof for all the axioms (viz., without a further axiom outside the set), or be provable but only by recourse to another "dangling" axiom, which renders the new hybrid axiom-set inconsistent. To quote none other than the great Wikipedia (19 Jun 09):

"Gödel's first incompleteness theorem shows that any formal system that includes enough of the theory of the natural numbers is incomplete: there are statements in its language that it can neither prove nor refute. … Gödel's second incompleteness theorem can be stated as follows: For any formal effectively generated theory T including basic arithmetical truths and also certain truths about formal provability, T includes a statement of its own consistency if and only if T is inconsistent."

Let me propose an analogy. One day Mrs. Miller tells all the kindergartners to go outside for play time, adding that they are to remain inside the sandbox for the first fifteen minutes of recess. Once all the kids are in the sandbox, however, certain doubts begin to break out among them, like deformed pearls coalescing around the grains of sand. What does Mrs. Miller mean by "in the sandbox"? How far do the precincts of the sandbox extend?

They can see the white beach sand inside the oak-board pit, but they wonder if crouching outside the pit to dig into the sand is allowed, or if bringing piles of sand out a few feet to the darker dirt (for soil wars, of course) is allowed. And so on. Noticing a disturbance in the force, Mrs. Miller strides to the sandbox, kneels down to grab a handful of sand from the sandbox, and walks around the sandbox as she lets a fine stream of sand drizzle behind her. She explains that staying in the sandbox means not crossing the thin white line of sand on the dirt she added just around the box-pit.

At this point, most children are satisfied. They know the limits of the sandbox; they have proof from Mrs. Miller herself! But other children begin to worry a new bone: if the line itself is made of sand from the sandbox, doesn't the sandbox then reach to the line? How can the sand be inside the line when some of it is at the outermost edge of the no-play zone? Doesn't Mrs. Miller's sandy stricture mean that some of the sand itself falls outside other grains of sand marking the innermost limits of the sandbox? These scrupulous kindergartners see the proof of the limits of the sandbox right before their eyes, but they find it naggingly inconsistent to use the contents of the sandbox to show where it doesn't reach. They face a grave choice. (Fortunately, they also only have five more minutes of sandbox time, so their crisis won't reach Camusian proportions.) They can either stick to the proof outside the system and say the sandbox demonstrably extends no farther than the sand Mrs. Miller sprinkled, or try to be rigorously consistent and waver indecisively as to just where the sandbox sand ends and the do-not-cross sand begins.

So it is, in terms of Gödelian incompleteness, with arithmetical sets: we can either find a proof of their axiomatic limits from some set outside those limits, or remain totally consistent with their proper axioms and lack the proof of those axioms within the axioms themselves.

In any case, and to let you hear from someone who knows what the heaven he's talking about, the late Fr. Stanley Jaki argued for decades that Gödel's theorems had huge consequences for the world of physics, and noted sardonically for nearly as long how little attention had been paid Gödel by the inhabitants of that world. "Herein lies the ultimate bearing of Gödel’s theorem on physics," Jaki explains in “A Late Awakening to Gödel in Physics”. [Alas, I know, the link is broken, since, I believe, Fr. Jaki's webpage has been taken offline until his executor can deal with the data and materials formerly available on it. I have a copy of the "Late Awakening" paper, if some eager beaver really wants it.]

It does not mean at all the end of physics. It means only the death knell on endeavours that aim at a final theory according to which the physical world is what it is and cannot be anything else. Gödel’s theorem does not mean that physicists cannot come up with a theory of everything or TOE in short. They can hit upon a theory which at the moment of its formulation would give an explanation of all known physical phenomena. But in terms of Gödel’s theorem such a theory cannot be taken for something which is necessarily true.*

This relates to my opening questions because, if the basic laws of the universe are one day found to be consistent, they will for that reason be unprovable. If, however, they are proved, they will for that reason be inconsistent. Indeed, the "extra step" of proving the basic laws' coherence is none other than the human articulation of that proof (i.e., nothing less than an axiom "extrinsic" to the set of basic laws). As such, the universe's basic structure lacks the metaphysical self-sufficiency and ontological necessity that characterize God Almighty.

Although I have not yet finished it––since I let a copy of it fly off my scooter on the way to work one day!!!!––I understand that J. R. Lucas's The Freedom of the Will deploys Gödel's findings in remarkable ways to demonstrate the freedom––that is, the consistency yet intrinsic indeterminacy––of the human will. And this is the point I want to sink this post's tiny, nubbin teeth into: theism provides a better explanation of cosmic law and structure than naturalism because, first, it posits a mind which can intelligibly "see" the whole of the cosmos as one coherent set of formal laws, and, second, it is not prone to a regress of "explaining God," insofar as God just is the active principle which both "proves" the universe's order and grounds His own personal structure. Naturalism not only offers no such resources for framing the laws of the universe into a coherent whole, but also succumbs to an explanatory regress that must terminate in the wise agency of the Good One.

It is of the essence of a free personal action to require no extrinsic or deeper reason for the action's coming about than the agent's agency itself. An agent's action is intrinsically explicable just by reference to the agent's agency at the point of acting. Moreover, the agent's agency is intrinsically coherent just by virtue of the fact that it issued in the action willed by his agency. Nothing extrinsic compelled the agent to bring about the action in question, since he himself freely brought it about, and nothing caused the action other than the particular agency of the agent. By analogy, if I eat a sandwich I find in the fridge, neither the sandwich causes me to eat it, nor does the event of my eating cause my eating. In the first case, the sandwich lacked the property of being "the sandwich involved in Elliot's eating-of-a-sandwich" until I gave it that property by eating it. In the second case, the event of "Elliot eating a sandwich from the fridge" did not even exist until I began eating, and therefore it lacked any causal influence on my eating. I was and am the first, final, intrinsic, and complete explanation for my own eating of the sandwich. In an analogous way, God is the first, final, intrinsic, and complete explanation for His own creating of the world.

In contrast, the universe's set of basic laws, like any formally deducible set, possesses nothing within itself to ground its own coherence. Indeed, naturalists' entire point is that the universe is not sentient, is not personal; as a result, by their own admission, there is nothing metaphysically parallel to the intrinsic agency of divine creation in naturalistic cosmic endurance. (Lo, mystery of mysteries, yon sandwich is eaten without there being an eater!) There is nothing intrinsically self-explanatory about the basic laws of the universe, which is why naturalism fails, but there is something intrinsically coherent about the most basic actions of an agent, which is how theism resurrects naturalism.

God does not stand in need of further explanation, since, first, He is a personal event, and therefore presupposes an agency that formal systems lack, and, second, His Triune "structure" need not be proved, since there is nothing logically deducible about free personal actions. The perichoretic structure of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is not a formal set of axioms: it is an eternal utterance and eternal echo of an eternal Word of Living Love. Apart from the divine agency itself, there is no formal, logical reason why the Father begets the Son in the Spirit, and, hence, there is no need for an extrinsic grounding principle for the ordo divinitatis (aka, "the Triune set").

Nor is there any logical necessity in the creation of the world: it is a free effulgence of the Triune goodness. This is why we will never discover logically necessary physical laws (cue Gödel's incompleteness theorems again): the laws of physics are consistent, but not intrinsically, deductively, apodeictically provable. Moreover, they are not even provable as such without reference to their intelligible ratification by the Mind of God. Nothing grounds the laws of nature (as a formally deducible arithmetic set) other than the added axiom "In the beginning God…" And while it is true that nothing grounds the Triune perichoresis other than the Father's eternal Love for the Son in the Spirit of Father-Sonship as the Father-of-the-Son, nothing other than the divine agency need ground a personal event. This is as non-controversial as saying there is no logical grounding for my eating the sandwich from the fridge. Of course there isn't: eating the sandwich was not a logical entailment; it was a personal action.

God did not obey a basic "law" in existing triunely or in creating anything, but He did execute His own will without remainder. Nature, by contrast, lacks a will and can only follow its basic laws––laws, which, once more, insist upon being accounted for. (Strange dream: accounting records without a head accountant!) A coherent, final explanation need not––and most likely cannot––be a logical demonstration, which is why theism's reliance on God as the ultimate explanation is coherent without being logically necessary, and, in turn, why naturalism's search for intrinsic explanatory principles in nature itself is both impossible and metaphysically bankrupt without a Lawmaker to stipulate the laws at work.

* The Gödelian non-necessity of any final theory of the cosmos ties in hugely with Fr. Jaki's work on the cosmological argument. Insofar as everything non-necessary is contingent, and everything contingent requires an explanation outside itself, the non-necessary specificity of the universe as we find it cries out for a causal grounding, namely, God. But that is not exactly germaine to this post, so for now I bracket it, outside the set, as it were.

The expansive logic of love…

…versus the sterile logic of contraception.

Love by its very nature seeks to issue in something greater than either the beloved on his own or the lover in the abstract. Love seeks to issue in a higher synthesis comprised of the lover-with-his-beloved. Love is, therefore, intrinsically generative and expansive. Bene ergo dicitur bonum diffusum sui (Therefore is it well said that the good diffuses itself). So expansive, in fact, that love will not stop at this one step higher into harmony. Love between two lovers expands to encompass the very objects and people in their lives: this is why “inside jokes” are such a powerful signal, and reinforcement, of friendship and love: they conscript something ordinary and innocuous, the coal of everyday life, and transform them into diamonds forged by the power of love. For better or worse (Romeo and Juliet, anyone?), “worlds collide” precisely because lovers instinctively draw their surroundings into their inner circle. Because humans are essentially embodied, historical beings, our efforts to love one another inextricably draw matter, money, artifacts, and other flesh into the dance.

As love proceeds, it seeks higher harmonies and greater fecundity. A shared bank account, a shared apartment, a shared house, and the like, become tangible, virtually living testaments tot he vitality of the relationship. And such objects and places are ‘consecrated’ by the lovers in the very act of sex. This is why “getting it on” in all kinds of places is such a titillating aspect of “wild love”; the world of inert objects becomes animated by the insatiable passion expressed and deepened in the act of sex.

No matter how passionate such erotic love is, however, it too argues for its own inner logic. The seed cast away in “safe sex” (only those who know nothing of ‘the power and the glory’ of sex would call it safe!) retains a mute but incessant power to generate ideas of literally embodying the love in a way that cannot fade as easily as an organism fades as an ember blinks out. The most obvious response to this fecund plea, is children. I have witnessed time and again how couples, initially intent on ‘controlling’ their lives by ‘preventing’ children, gradually find reproductive sex as tedious and artificial to maintain as the Berlin Wall became. It need not issue in a conscious, explicit desire to get pregnant, but, as time passes, the original ‘logic’ of contraception becomes incoherent, distracting, tedious––much like a theoretically pristine melody in one rehearsal room increasingly becomes mere dissonance for the musically fecund power of genius in another. As love grows, the inhumane ‘logic’ of protecting yourself from your own beloved in the most intimate bond becomes truly absurd. One’s ideological guard drops, the eyes droop, a longing for unaffected embrace and complete self-donation weakens the technologically trained will. At some point, the prophylactics simply get lost in the shuffle of love lived as one life and one day a couple finds themselves pregnant. And in every case I’ve known, they look upon the living, breathing embodiment of their love without a hint of regret. If this logic writ by love is opposed, however, one spouse invariably grows to resent the other. Hence, lovers face a dilemma: the logic of contraception eventually, and intrinsically, works to undermine the logic of love, and vice versa.

If we do not allow the fire of love to burn outside the tranquilly sterile furnace of our own finitude and biological entropy, we will end up melting by it. Openness to life in marital love not only keeps the furnace whole and warm, but also warms and illuminates those around it. Any form of love, therefore, which intrinsically stifles the fecund potency of love–-such as masturbation, homosexual fornication, or contraception––dooms the fire of love, and its world-warming power, as surely as fire wood tossed on the floor but not in the furnace, coal dumped in the flue but not in the furnace, or an oxygen-blocking sheath over the vents, respectively, cannot but be rejected as a threat to the life of love.

In any case, once the logic of love is allowed to expand into the very blood of a new life, we have a family. And the family, being a nucleus of love, naturally displays the same desire for higher harmony and fecundity as found at every lower level. Hence, we have neighborhoods, and community soccer teams, and carpools, and sleepovers, and town councils. Soon, though, a problem surfaces: what more is there than the local community? Love answers: the City, the Nation, the People, the World, the Cosmos. Mankind, which is invariably generated in and for families, is driven by love to find higher and greater harmony as far as the collective consciousness (and conscience) can reach.

But then finitude comes crashing down. The obvious goal of love is an infinite embrace of all things in one thing––the cosmos loved and redeemed in the merest touch of the beloved. Love is infinitely ‘cosmophagic’, ‘ontophagic’––transcendentally driven to consume the cosmos and all being by sacramental (i.e., concrete) means. The insatiability of love bears within it the awful risk of consuming and destroying anything finite. The law of diminishing returns sets in. The finitude of any object loved in, and with, the beloved renders it prey to the tireless chomping hunger of love. Nostalgic repetition with enforced variation (“Tell that joke again,” etc.) seeks to extract from finite being all it can, and in the process, shatters finite creatures into increasingly tiny bits of shrapnel.

Only if love is allowed to tap into an infinite Being will its insatiable ‘lust for life’ find a safe way to exhaust itself, and thus, by maximizing its intrinsic nature, perfect itself. Love seeks heaven the same way a water fountain seeks the sky; but love invariably comes tumbling down just as water does into the pond around it. The only means by which such grave love does not become a mockery and refutation of love's upward striving, is a hypostatic condescension by God which sacramentally infuses His own love into the drooping matter of our world. Thus, there is hope for failed and confused love––hope in Christ who overcame the severest rejection of the greatest love by burrowing with love so deeply into the matter of our world, in the very belly of the earth, that He rose again to generate all new and lasting life. If we unite ourselves to the Sacrament of Divine Condescension (i.e., Christ in the Eucharist), we will find that, upon death, we can evaporate into the heavens and find ourselves transfigured and reunited with our past loves like clouds shimmering in the sun.

I close by asking you to ponder Matthew 3:8–11:

Bear fruit that befits repentance, and do not presume to say to yourselves, `We have Abraham as our father'; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry; he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.

Facite ergo fructum dignum pœnitentiæ. Et ne velitis dicere intra vos : Patrem habemus Abraham. Dico enim vobis quoniam potens est Deus de lapidibus istis suscitare filios Abrahæ. Jam enim securis ad radicem arborum posita est. Omnis ergo arbor, quæ non facit fructum bonum, excidetur, et in ignem mittetur. Ego quidem baptizo vos in aqua in pœnitentiam: qui autem post me venturus est, fortior me est, cujus non sum dignus calceamenta portare: ipse vos baptizabit in Spiritu Sancto, et igni.

Sehet zu, tut rechtschaffene Frucht der Buße! Denket nur nicht, daß ihr bei euch wollt sagen: Wir haben Abraham zum Vater. Ich sage euch: Gott vermag dem Abraham aus diesen Steinen Kinder zu erwecken. Es ist schon die Axt den Bäumen an die Wurzel gelegt. Darum, welcher Baum nicht gute Frucht bringt, wird abgehauen und ins Feuer geworfen. Ich taufe euch mit Wasser zur Buße; der aber nach mir kommt, ist stärker denn ich, dem ich nicht genugsam bin, seine Schuhe zu tragen; der wird euch mit dem Heiligen Geist und mit Feuer taufen.

Produzcan frutos que demuestren arrepentimiento. No piensen que podrán alegar: "Tenemos a Abraham por padre." Porque les digo que aun de estas piedras Dios es capaz de darle hijos a Abraham. El hacha ya está puesta a la raíz de los árboles, y todo árbol que no produzca buen fruto será cortado y arrojado al fuego. »Yo los bautizo a ustedes con[b] agua para que se arrepientan. Pero el que viene después de mí es más poderoso que yo, y ni siquiera merezco llevarle las sandalias. Él los bautizará con el Espíritu Santo y con fuego.

你 們 要 結 出 果 子 來 ， 與 悔 改 的 心 相 稱 。 不 要 自 己 心 裡 說 ： 有 亞 伯 拉 罕 為 我 們 的 祖 宗 。 我 告 訴 你 們 ， 神 能 從 這 些 石 頭 中 給 亞 伯 拉 罕 興 起 子 孫 來 。 現 在 斧 子 已 經 放 在 樹 根 上 ， 凡 不 結 好 果 子 的 樹 就 砍 下 來 ， 丟 在 火 裡 。 我 是 用 水 給 你 們 施 洗 ， 叫 你 們 悔 改 。 但 那 在 我 以 後 來 的 ， 能 力 比 我 更 大 ， 我 就 是 給 他 提 鞋 也 不 配 。 他 要 用 聖 靈 與 火 給 你 們 施 洗 。

The Eucharist as the Church's only ordo theologiae…

[Although I already posted this at Philper, and mentioned here the 'response' to it there, I decided to post it here, not only because I figure it's all for the good to increase the number of possible hits "Keefe" and "Covenantal" can get on the Internet, but also because I was graced with an inebriatingly substantive reply by a Mr. O'Sullivan to my review of Covenantal Theology (CT), which inclines me to give these Keefian matters a more central place of their own at FCA.]

The proper and ineluctable ordo of Roman Catholic theology is the Eucharistic covenant as it thrives in the Church. All theological principles and categories must submit to and be subsumed under this one triune matrix of actual, substantial, concrete, and free––because historical––communion in and through the μια σαρχ (One Flesh).

Hence, predestination is a perversion of the Faith if and when it is imagined as belonging to some higher, antecedent ‘cosmic’ order. Predestination is only orthodox when subsumed under the Eucharist. There is no antecedent rational necessity to account for divine predestination, since God’s providence is only truly real in the historically immanent Lordship of the Eucharistic Jesus. There is no higher ‘reason’ for creation and salvation, but this does not mean they are arbitrary and meaningless realities, since the only grounding of them is the free, coherent, historical action of God in the Eucharistic covenant.

People are not predestined according to some cosmic, pre-incarnate decree, but are predestined precisely in the free, actual, historical appropriation or rejection of the New Adam in the Eucharist. There is no supreme natural order that exists prior to creation’s covenantally grounded structure in the triune work of God. The economy of salvation, therefore, does not take place 'in' nature, but rather generates coherence and meaning for nature precisely by virtue of the historically free and objective concreteness of the Eucharist. All existence is grace, although not all existence is equally graced. History, in turn, is not an absolute, prior category of thought or reality, but is a radically and properly theological concept generated in the human consciousness by the concrete immediacy of the Eucharist as the One Sacrifice for all times and all peoples.

As Fr. Donald Keefe says in Covenatntal Theology: the Eucharistic Order of History (pp. 551, 552):

“When, as often, the Platonic resolution of fallenness by its dehistoricization is mistaken for theology, its self-salvific rationalizing thrust finds a pseudo-Christian expression in theories of predestination; these, whether single, as in Origen’s hypothesis of apokatastasis, echoed by Barth’s systematics and, as has been feared, by von Balthasar’s aesthetics, or double, as from Gottschalk to Calvin to the Synod of Dort, are all led by the same conviction that man’s dignity, his moral freedom, must evanesce before the divine omnipotence, and that the truth and reality of the historical human condition is actual only in a union with divinity outside of time, whether in the world of Forms or in an inscrutable divine judgment. … Augustinianism ineluctably relapses into its pre-conversion condition, that of Platonism, when the sacrificial realism of the Catholic Eucharistic tradition is refused or systematically ignored.”

Fr. Keefe notes earlier, on page 535, that the only thing which keeps Augustinianism from relapsing into unreconstructed Platonism, is St. Augustine's radically sacramental consciousness. From page 535:

“…[St. Augustine] sees the fallen consciousness of man to be integrated historically [not ideally or atemporally] in the Eucharist. … [N]othing further is required for the reconstruction of a realistic Augustinian theology of transubstantiation than the systematic exploitation of Augustine’s own equation of the One Sacrifice, the One Flesh of the second Adam and the second Eve, with the Eucharistic Sacrifice, for it is the freedom of this union that constitutes its historicity. Only the historical density of the liturgical experience itself is able to ground Augustine’s sacramental theology, and to found an Augustinian theology upon any less concrete and historical ground than the Eucharistic Sacrifice is to ignore once again the free historical foundation for Augustine’s on-going conversion of his Neoplatonism to the Catholic faith. This foundation is the Eucharistic liturgy which was his central responsibility over thee nearly forty years of his episcopacy. To ignore this liturgical foundation is to misconceive Augustine’s theology.

"In Augustinian as in Thomist metaphysics we therefore have to do with the concrete, historical, free and objective relation between the event of the Church’s offering of the bread and wine of the Offertory and the Event-presence of the Christ to the bridal Church as Priest, as Victim, and as semper interpellans. This is simply the historical ordo, the dynamically integrating relations of circumincession which we have seen [in the preceding hundreds of pages] to exist between the event of the Old Covenant, the Event of the New Covenant, and the Event of the Kingdom. It is identically the free and intra-substantial ordering of the Offertory, the Canon, and the Communion; it is the historical ordo of sarx, mia sarx, and pneuma, the ordo of the literal, the allegorical and the anagogical sense of Scripture, and finally, the ordo of the sacramentum tantum, the res et sacramentum and the res tantum, radically of the Eucharist and derivatively of the other sacramanets. This is the free order of objective reality, which is to say, the intrinsic meaning of historical substance, the subject matter of any historical-covenantal metaphysics.”

Fr. Keefe's allusion to Thomistic metaphysics alerts us to the fact that the Eucharistic covenant, as the only real grounds of Catholic theology, poses both a similar challenge to Augustinianism and Thomism (vis-à-vis the former's risk of relapsing into Platonism and the latter's risk of relapsing into Aristotelianism), and a similar buttress against such relapse. On page 558 he says:

“‘Form’ cannot then mean in Augustinian theology what the term Logos has generally been understood to mean whether by Thomists or by Augustinians: viz., the eternal Son in some cosmic moment prior to his becoming man. ‘Form’ in Augustinian theology must refer to the Son of God who is the Son of Mary, ‘one and the same,’ and this not as static [cosmic] fact but as covenantal Event. … However thorough the methodological conversion of theology from cosmological to historical metaphysics may be, we still are very largely under the sway of a cosmological imagination, which simply takes for granted a nonhistorical status quo ante as the prius or starting point for all theological inquiry … [which] conforms to a cosmological but not a Christian quaerens intellectum: it seeks always for the God behind the revelation, convinced that only there may be found the quintessential divinity…. The time-honored notion that it is the nonhistorical and cosmological God behind the revelation that is the object of theology forgets that theology is a quaerens directed solely at the revelation, and that the revelation is not information provided in the Old and New Testament about the eternity and the freedom of God, but rather is the Lord in whom the act of faith ‘terminates,’ Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the Son of Mary, ‘one and the same,’ in whom the divine freedom and divine transcendence over history is concretely actual in and by his Eucharistic immanence in history.”

So, even when St. Augustine failed, in various writings or claims, to remain consistent to the sacramental ordo theologiae, which he recognized as paramount, nevertheless it is his fundamental commitment to a “liturgical phenomenology” that can and should correct for his Platonic detours in a stringently Form-based, absolutist predestinarianism.

The vision Fr. Keefe’s places at center is that there is no “world out there” outside the actual, historical Event of the One Flesh being offered triunely. Literally nothing––literally, nihil––exists outside the Event-structure of the Mass. Hence, eternal predestination is coterminous with the historical entry into, or flight from, grace in the Eucharist. The eternal truth that “Christ, the Lamb of God, died for all” is historically coterminous with Christ being received or rejected by all in the Eucharist, as it is offered, historically and actually, to all. Historical worship is thus theologically and Christocentrically antecedent to cosmological predestination. Predestination, in other words, happens now, here, in the Eucharist. Further, because Christ is “pan-historical” by virtue of His covenantal kenosis, as opposed to cosmically “immanent” presence, in fallen humanity, He is transhistorical. His pervasive grounding of history as the arena of grace is what simultaneously makes Him the transcendent Lord of “predestination.” (As for those outside the reach of formal Eucharistic worship, Fr. Keefe’s notes how the trahi a Deo in St. Thomas's thought and the Lumen mundi in St. Augustine's, provide the grounds for personal culpability, since, in any case, original sin is already present, metaphysically but not temporally, in fallen human existence.)