Grace, Love, and Freedom (John Paul II series)

This is part of a series of passages from the late John Paul II's encyclicals, which I as a Protestant can learn from. The following are reflections from the 1993 encyclical Veritatis splendor. Here, he examines the nature of grace and freedom and their role in Christian morality:

"To imitate and live out the love of Christ is not possible for man by his own strength alone. He becomes capable of this love only by virtue of a gift received. As the Lord Jesus receives the love of his Father, so he in turn freely communicates that love to his disciples: "As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you; abide in my love" (Jn 15:9). Christ's gift is his Spirit, whose first "fruit" (cf. Gal 5:22) is charity: "God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us" (Rom 5:5). . . .

"Love and life according to the Gospel cannot be thought of first and foremost as a kind of precept, because what they demand is beyond man's abilities. They are possible only as the result of a gift of God who heals, restores and transforms the human heart by his grace: "For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ" (Jn 1:17). The promise of eternal life is thus linked to the gift of grace, and the gift of the Spirit which we have received is even now the "guarantee of our inheritance" (Eph 1:14).

"And so we find revealed the authentic and original aspect of the commandment of love and of the perfection to which it is ordered: we are speaking of a possibility opened up to man exclusively by grace, by the gift of God, by his love. On the other hand, precisely the awareness of having received the gift, of possessing in Jesus Christ the love of God, generates and sustains the free response of a full love for God and the brethren, as the Apostle John insistently reminds us in his first Letter: "Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is love... Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another... We love, because he first loved us" (1 Jn 4:7-8, 11, 19).

"This inseparable connection between the Lord's grace and human freedom, between gift and task, has been expressed in simple yet profound words by Saint Augustine in his prayer: "Da quod iubes et iube quod vis" (Grant what you command and command what you will).

"The gift does not lessen but reinforces the moral demands of love: "This is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another just as he has commanded us" (1 Jn 3:32). One can "abide" in love only by keeping the commandments, as Jesus states: "If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love" (Jn 15:10)." [secs. 22-24]

Freedom, as John Paul II reads the New Testament, is not simply a matter of self-expressive choices of the will, but is found first as the gift of the Holy Spirit, whose love and grace enables us to begin keeping the dictates of the law. Following Augustine, John Paul II holds that obedience comes from the love created in our hearts by the grace of God. Rather than a justification by faith or works, though it includes each of these at some level, the key is a justification by love, that is the benevolent action of the Spirit in us.

Simone Weil and Rootedness--Part 2

Weil's The Need for Roots begins with a basic assumption: rights and obligations are essentially two sides of the same thing, but with one key difference. Obligations remain whether human beings recognize them as such or not, while rights must be acknowledged. Our obligations to other human beings are eternal and without condition; they are the bond of love that arise from the needs of others. "The possession of a right implies the possibility of making either a good or bad use of it. While, on the other hand, the performance of an obligation is always, unconditionally, a good from every point of view" (275).

This distinction is important for Weil because obligations take root in physical and social relations. Writing in 1943, she sees the French as having been uprooted in the towns because of an education that prizes technical know-how at the expense of an expansive liberal learning. Workers have become alienated from their true obligations; the life of the factories is mechanical and inhumane. It demands work which is neither interesting nor lively. It is too often exhausting and dangerous. What is needed are "forms of industrial production and culture of the mind in which workmen can be, and be made to feel themselves to be, at home." She goes on to line out sixteen or so proposals that bear a striking resemblance to those of Catholic distributism, including the abolishment of large factories for small guild-run workshops; the ownership of the tools and machines invested in the workers themselves, and a system of vocational adaptation for those with superior or inferior talents in any one profession. Each one is intended to return workers to a life of natural obligation because they are connected to their work and their work to their lives.

Weil also laments the loss of rootedness in the countryside. This takes shape in the way "peasants" are denied the private ownership of the land, have no pensions to survive on when they grow old, and the general way in which rural persons are educated away from a love of the land. Weil argues that rural education should inspire in its workers a love of the beauty of the land and of the beauty of the lifecycle. Likewise, she holds that rural Catholicism should seek to prepare the people to engage a life of farming as a truly holy, noble task: "The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded upon the spirituality of work" (97).

Nonetheless, for Weil, the most fearful trend towards uprootedness is in the nation a whole. Patriotism upon various levels has been replaced by a singular economy of state. The family, village, district, and region have all ceased to matter before the national interest: "Man has placed his most valuable possession in the world of temporal affairs, namely, his continuity in time, beyond the limits set by human existence in either direction, entirely in the hands of the State" (100). Her point is that life is made up of numerous intermediate communities and associations that stand between the individual and the nation-state, and patriotism has historically been made up of numerous types of loyalty to king, village, children, neighbor, region, and so on. These have been weakened by a nation that has money as its only value: "The State is a cold concern which cannot inspire love, but itself kills, suppresses everything that might be loved; so one is forced to love it, because there is nothing else. This is the moral torment to which all of us today are exposed" (114).

Weil overgeneralizes here; still, what she says has a a note of reality to it. Her key point is that the nation-state does not and cannot easily ask for the same kinds of personal obligations that other social formations more naturally call up. The general French disdain for politcs and for public life she sees as emblematic of this problem, one which has historical causes including that of the abuse of royal power, the large landed aristocracy, the military and social abuses of the republican regimes after the Revolution, and the colonial abuse of the country towards other nations. At the heart of these is the break up of the trades, families, and traditional education for morals. Nationalism has displaced obligations to family, fellows, and truth. To this, she replies that the only authentic patriotism at the moment is one of compassion, the same kind of compassion that one feels for those who are suffering and poor. "If their country is presented to them as something beautiful and precious, but which is, in the first place, imperfect, and secondly, very frail and liable to suffer misfortune, and which it is necessary to cherish and preserve, they will rightly feel themselves to be more closely identified with it than will other classes of society" (174-5).

Taken together, Weil's three concerns with uprootedness point to the local, human, and personal shape of our obligations and loyalties. We love what we know and what we are tied to. We respect, honor, and treat as sacred those to whom we are intertwined in the precious nets of family, neighborhood, town, and congregation. Of course, all of these can be abused, as Weil acknowledges. But they are also natural in a way that the power of national force is not. She concludes that the state is "sacred" only in the way an altar is, that is to serve a higher purpose, not to draw attention to itself. The only other options she thought were anarchy or the idolatry of communism.

"Good is the Flesh" by Brian Wren

What an amazing new hymn! Well worth pondering in it's Christ-centered and sacramental understanding of our bodily existence.

Good is the Flesh by Brian Wren

Good is the flesh that the Word has become,
good is the birthing, the milk in the breast,
good is the feeding, caressing and rest,
good is the body for knowing the world,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

Good is the body for knowing the world,
sensing the sunlight, the tug of the ground,
feeling, perceiving, within and around,
good is the body, from cradle to grave,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

Good is the body, from cradle to grave,
growing and aging, arousing, impaired,
happy in clothing, or lovingly bared,
good is the pleasure of God in our flesh,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

Good is the pleasure of God in our flesh,
longing in all, as in Jesus, to dwell,
glad of embracing, and tasting, and smell,
good is the body, for good and for God,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

from Bringing Many Names. Carol Stream: Hope, 1989.

John MacMurray & the Personal Structure of Freedom

"Until we recover our sense of proportion, until we recognize our creaturliness and our dependence, we shall continue to frustrate our freedom by desiring what cannot attain, and by using our resources for our own destruction. Humility is the handmaid of freedom. It is the meek who inherit the earth."--John MacMurray

Moral philosopher John MacMurray was particularly concerned with how the intersubjective nature of personhood shaped the conditions of freedom. For MacMurray, the personal and the community are tied together. The personal does not exist without the life of the community. How can this be the case?

1. MacMurray starts by stressing the action of a person. A person intends to act in a certain way; this requires a motive. Persons have free will which allow them to choose to act for certain reasons before they act.
2. But free will defined this way is only the beginning of freedom. The conditions of true freedom are achievable only by having a moral end which governs our techniques. Thus, we absolutely need self-control, and one is not truly free without it.
3. Action is inevitably interaction. MacMurray insisted that the arena of human action is for the most part that of persons-in-relation not that of individuals as a simple aggregate. Persons are still individuals but they are are truly persons only in their nexus of relations.
4. The highest relationships are that of persons in interaction together exhibiting true love, not that of unequal master-slave relations based on fear and desire for power. Persons cannot be reduced to relations of power.
5. "Community," for MacMurray is closer to friendship than society. True freedom is found in community, not society.
   
6. "Society," as he defines the term, is an impersonal interaction of persons based on mutual cooperation but motivated by fear and a concern with a justice of the distribution of goods, duties, and burdens.
7. "Community," on the other hand, has a common life based around a common purpose. Its end is itself. It pursues the living of its friendship. It is motivated by love, not self-interest and fear, and according to MacMurray is always universal in its potential scope--all are invited.
8. The common purpose and end that creates this community is genuine religion. God as the Wholly Personal Other is the ground of a community's love and friendship. Religion both creates and celebrates community. It is what gives rise to the tradition that offers some continuity of the community over space and time.
   
9. Without true community, society-whatever its democratic claims--can only offer a limited freedom of negotiation and fear. Society's justice is a thin project of mediating competing claims.

"Friendship reveals the positive nature of freedom. It provides the only conditions which release the whole of the self into activity and so enable a man to be himself totally, without constraint. It is in this sense, in particular, that freedom is a constitutive principle of friendship. "

Gabriel Marcel & The Promise of Fidelity to Persons

The Christian "existentialist" philosopher Gabriel Marcel also had an important role in Christian Personalism. In particular, he brought together ethical, emotional, and existential commitments to show their dependence upon each other. (I should say in passing that reading Marcel's existential diary, Being and Having, was an important help to me at a time in which my faith was foundering and I was cut off from trust of God or others.) Here's some of his key ideas:

1. Ours is a broken world characterized by the impersonal relations of technology. The world system is functionalist in its treatment of situations and people. This treatment creates a condition of despair since technology and functionalism can not solve or engage the personal.
2. As persons created in the image of God we are created for ontological wholeness. It is a condition of who we are and of the trajectory of our lives in time and space. To be human is to pursue wholeness.
3. One way we learn to achieve wholeness is to distinguish between what we "have" and what we "are." Both are important ways to relating to reality, but to confuse the two is to distort essential aspects of our selves as things that are disposable.
4. Not all of life is a problem to be solved; much of it is a mystery to be received and lived. Again, to confuse the two is to invite frustration and despair. To treat people as problems is to attempt and reduce them to things that can be manipulated rather than other images of God that we encounter in all their value and difference.
5. Intersubjective experience involves the risk of making oneself disponibilite, that is available, disposable, at hand for another. It involves making oneself a gift to another, offering one's self to another because we are "with" the other; we are part of them.
6. The fullest relationships are ones of mutual reciprocity. They are acts of charity and presence. They require of us fidelity--commitments to be at the disposal of another--and this needs our constant willingness to remain open and accountable to other persons.
7. The power to do this is found in the Christian virtue of hope, which is given actively by God to the human person.

"The possibility of despair is bound up with liberty. It is the essence of liberty that it is able to be exerted in self-betrayal. Nothing which is outside [us] can shut the door to despair. . . . Fidelity [should be] considered as the recognition of something permanent . . . [and] witness considered as the beginning of things--the Church a perpetutated witness, an act of fidelity. It is an essential characteristic of the being to whom I give fidelity to be not only liable to be betrayed, but also in some manner affected by my betrayal.

"Fidelity [then is] regarded as witness perpetuated, but it is the essence of witness that it can be obliterated and wiped out. . . . Fidelity can only be shown towards a person, never at all to a notion or an ideal. An absolute fidelity involves an absolute person. Question: does not an absolute fidelity to a creature presuppose Him in whose sight I bind myself?"

Paul Tournier & the Meaning of Persons

The psychologist Paul Tournier was another important contributor to Christian Personalism. Especially important to his work as a therapist and a medical doctor was the stress on treating patients as persons with full dignity and not as simple cases to be solved. His thinking was clearly influenced by the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber who distinguished between I-Thou relationships and I-It relationships.

Tournier defined persons as those characterized by both a separation from others and a connection to others: "the double movement" of "a separation followed by a relation. By the secret the person is formed, and then by communication of the secret is affirmed." In other words, we each have things that are ours particularly yet they are also communicated in acts of trust to others. In doing so, we open ourselves as more than atoms in relations of defense and negotiation. We risk our inner beings with others.

This leads to another aspect of personhood, that of commitment and responsibility. "The personage," according to Tournier is "an external appearance which touches the personage of others from outside," while "the person communicates inwardly with the second person, the 'thou'." In Tournier's thinking, this inward offering is essential to our growth and development as moral and aesthetic beings. He sees this as important in marriage and in healthcare:

"The true dialogue [in marriage] is not the first easy communion, wonderful though it be--the impression one has of sharing the same feelings, saying the same things and thinking the same thoughts. The true dialogue is inevitably the confrontation of two personalities, differing in their past, their upbringing, their view of life, their prejudices, their idiosyncrasies and failings--and in any case with two distinct psychologies, a man's and a woman's. . . . Marriage thus becomes a great school of the person, through the level of personal commitment it entails and the exacting quality of the dialogue that demands it."

"For me as a doctor to become a person, to attain completeness as a human being, the road is the same as for my patients, and I must commit myself to it before I can hope to lead them along it. It is the road of personal dialogue with God and with my fellows. There is a decisive turning I must take, that leads me into the word of persons . . .It is this aptitude for personal contact, which is created and nourished by being sincerely sought after, which is the proper medicine of the person. . . . There comes into being a 'reciprocity of consciousness,' to use M. Nedoncelle's admirable expression. I allow my person to be discovered and known, and at the same time discover and know the person of my patient. It is in this that the medicine of the person demands a personal commitment which is not called for by technical medicine."

Complaint and Prayer

The Psalter models for us that the way of complaint is part of biblical fidelity and troth--at least a certain kind of complaint joined to an expectation of shalom. The psalmists complain to God, objecting that he could have and on the surface should have intervened in any number of horrific circumstances. The sheer weight of atrocity is often cited by them, speaking from a wounded position, an exhausted position. The believer says to God, "As best I can understand from my limited position you appear to have allowed horrible things to happen. Why? Should you do such a thing?"

Then, rather than walk away in disgust or disbelief, the believer waits on God. Believers protest from the ground of covenant—this is what God has promised us and who he is; therefore, should not God intervene? (i.e. Ps 44, 74, 88, 102, 142) This position at its best seeks to continue to affirm God’s mystery and goodness even amidst confusion and doubt. It has its own kind of eros, its own kind of ascending desire.

Likewise, this response holds it important to identify with the suffering of others, not to make light of their pain by seeking easily to explain it. This kind of sympathetic and confused covenantal response is loving, full of the charity of agape. The isms of the twentieth century remind us well of the failure and dangers of utopian visions. Our eschatological rationality should act in full awareness of the dangers of demagoguery, either in believing that we ourselves can change the world or in the furor of a people disappointed by that world. But this need not mean we do not reach out with the hands of love, offering the gospel of Christ.

With this in mind read (or pray) the following:

You have made us like sheep to be eaten and have scattered us among the nations.
You are selling your people for a trifle and are making no profit on the sale of them.
You have made us the scorn of our neighbors, a mockery and derision to those around us.
You have made us a byword among the nations, a laughing-stock among the peoples.
My humiliation is daily before me, and shame has covered my face;
Because of the taunts of the mockers and blasphemers, because of the enemy and avenger.
All this has come upon us; yet we have not forgotten you, nor have we betrayed your covenant.
Our heart never turned back, nor did our footsteps stray from your path;
Though you thrust us down into a place of misery, and covered us over with deep darkness.
If we have forgotten the Name of our God, or stretched out our hands to some strange god,
Will not God find it out? for he knows the secrets of the heart.
Indeed, for your sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.
Awake, O Lord! why are you sleeping? Arise! do not reject us for ever.
Why have you hidden your face and forgotten our affliction and oppression?
We sink down into the dust; our body cleaves to the ground.
Rise up, and help us, and save us, for the sake of your steadfast love.

Charity and the Politics of Honors

Caritas is the ancient Christian notion of love as concretely expressed in public and private actions. As a Latin term it almost functions as a cognate to the New Testament notion of agape. The two certainly overlap. Love (caritas, agape, call it what you will) can expose the hidden motives behind our attempts at honors, including that of academic programs.

Marilyn McCord Adams has observed that evils in life are not limited to questions of pain and morality. Esteem and disesteem make up a serious component in the way we value our lives: “[T]he category of honor centers, not on the evaluation of deeds, but on the sacred quality of persons," which is not to deny there is any relationship existing between conduct and honor. As a public and social system of regard, honor is something that is garnered because it is both owned by the person and given by the society. That universities regularly trade in systems of honor and shame: grades, awards, regalia, scholarships, and so on, should give us pause. As Adams further notes, honor (or shame) takes both “ascribed” and “acquired” forms: the former is given because of a person’s birth, class, or station; the later results from highly regarded deeds or misdeeds. The emphasis, rather than being on the quality of the actions themselves, however, falls on the person in toto. (The honors student is, well, more honorable, right?) We should not forget that symbolic systems of identity such as these are real matters of import for our students. Honor and shame have painful implications. The experience of even minor evils can disgrace a person, and that loss of honor can result in real anguish and humiliation. Psychic pain is as real as physical pain, and at times even more important for how it deforms and even destroys human self-regard.

Nothing about this understanding need assume the academic "innocence" of the “victims” who are "robbed" of self-respect. A poor performing student is a poor performing student. But our gifted students, the kind I tend to see in honors education, even more often have their reputations and self-conceptions tied to the academic system of rewards. The student in question may not think of himself or herself as a participant in a combative academy of honor, but something like that does continue to exist. A system of honor and shame takes place inevitably in an environment of challenge and riposte. Honor is a symbolic quality that must be maintained by the person in question. One either continues to gather and defend one’s honor, or one loses it. Any challenge--let us say, an average or poor grade-- to a person’s honor calls for some kind of response:

1. “positive rejection,” in which the person (or professor) making the challenge is deemed inferior and therefore unworthy of consideration at all;
2. “negative refusal,” in which case the person is now considered shamed--always a dicey approach in academics; or
3. “acceptance of the challenge” which can result in a war of wit (or arms) in a cycle of counter-challenges (Adams 109-110).

This pattern can take academic forms, even in a Christian environment that prides itself as a supportive atmosphere.

We need to take a long look at how their system of honor feeds into the modern social imaginary. The economic state of the West appears to be built more and more on a new pagan desire for libidio and power and for a stable control of human destiny; it wants to offer a revised salvation of personal prosperity and life needs satisfied. What kind of honor are we preparing our students to receive?

An eschatological structure, as I've discussed in the last two posts, can move in repentant or rebellious directions, moving toward or away from God's intended pattern of development. Offering a new millennium, the current libidinal world economy offers a false eschatology, narratives of sexual and consumerist salvation--an end to repression, an awakening to utter multiplicity of desire; the body as pseudo-sacramental hypersexualization able to endlessly buy and consume products of desire. The modern media and consumerist state functions as a secular soteriology which will not permit the claims of Christ as the only Lord (Caesar). Our modern social spaces are what Graham Ward calls cities of aspiration and desire; unable to offer a true community, they only manage autonomous individuals in their personal choices. "It is not good to eat much honey, or to seek honor on top of honor. Like a city breached, without walls, is one who lacks self-control." (Prov 25:27-28). Such a statement, I realize, sounds faintly puritanical and bizarre, maybe even unpatriotic, to modern ears.

To speak of the "politics" and "economy" of the Christian Church is to risk confusion because to speak of the Church (and the Christian university) as a counter-polis is to expand the definition of Realpolitik to a sacramental vision of virtue-oriented traditions. These traditions have the end of God's kingdom reigning over all. The libertarian society of atomic individuals, by contrast, is a truncated politics. The purpose of power and honor is forgotten; or worse, it is made into insatiable desire itself. To train our students for this, to make them leaders in such a system, is problematic. The church as public polis is really trans-political in the modern sense of that word, and the local and the small may reflect far better the kind of honor and worth we wish to train our students to undergo and to give away. In the same way the oikos of God, God's household, transcends our normal conceptions of economics as certain macro and micro-systems of human monetary exchange.

Admittedly, this seems like an uphill battle when we as Americans, for example, treat our educations as economic counters of the more limited kind, but we as global Christians have the gifts of congregation and scripture to counter them with. The cross of Christ is, after all, an apocalypse, a revelation of God's judgment on the powers that be. His stigmata are signs of compassion. Atonement makes our education both polis and oikos, politics and economy, but of a far wider place. The sacrifice and splendor of a cross-shaped teaching will be wasteful in its love for and on the students. The crowns of heaven we receive can be cast down at the feet of Jesus, and now we multiply honor when we freely pour it out in sacrifice.

We cannot squander what we cannot exhaust. The love of God is a generative principle within our pedagogies.