Sunday and Weekday Homilies: Longer Talks

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Monday, 27 January 2025

AQUINAS LECTURE 2025

Believing is Seeing: Aquinas on the Mystery of Faith

This article was published in Religious Life Review 52 (2013) 135-142

It is reasonable, and necessary, to believe

In the Observer Review for 31 December 1995, Richard Dawkins wrote:

I’ll tell you what I hope the Nineties may be remembered for. I hope it will be the last decade in which people believe things because of tradition, because of authority, or because of private inner conviction, rather than because of evidence. Fat chance.

Dawkins wants to purify our access to the world, shutting most of the doors through which knowledge is possible for most of us, and restricting the basis of belief to evidentia sola. In his Commentary on the Apostles’ Creed Thomas Aquinas wanted to keep all those doors open: not just evidence, but tradition, authority, and private inner conviction. We will see that Aquinas’s view is more reasonable as an account of how our knowing and believing actually happen.

‘There are those who say we are stupid to believe things we do not see’, Aquinas writes, ‘they say we should only believe what is evident to us’. But there are many good reasons, he thinks, for disagreeing with those who would want to shut down our access to knowledge in this way.

For one thing, such a view forgets the weakness of the human mind. If we were capable of understanding perfectly all there is, visible and invisible, then it would indeed be foolish to believe things: we should go and understand them for ourselves. But even the most intelligent of human scientists cannot completely understand even the nature of a fly. Aquinas tells of a philosopher who locked himself in solitude for thirty years to concentrate on understanding the bee. When we consider how limited is our knowledge, it would be foolish for us not to believe, to trust teachers.

Of course scientists know a lot more now than they did in the 13^th century. But when we accept that scientists are entitled to teach us, we are acknowledging their authority. It is reasonable (and for most of us necessary) to accept as true what scientists say about things of which we have no experience or capacity to evaluate the evidence. This is Thomas’s second argument in favour of the reasonableness of believing. When a scientist speaks about things that fall within her competence, we accept what she says. If another person comes along who has nothing comparable to her expertise in the relevant area, then we prefer her teaching to his, unless we have some good reason to think that his opinion is more likely to be true.

The point for the moment is that such believing is reasonable rather than stupid. Believing is not, as some (dogmatically) put it nowadays, ‘irrational’. Brian Moore’s novels are wonderful but sadly, in one of his works, he speaks of faith as ‘reason’s opposite’. This is a common modern prejudice which, if applied systematically, would drastically shrink human experience. In Moore’s case it seems to be born of anxieties about ‘religion’ and is actually at odds with the rich understanding of human experience we find in his novels. But if we were to follow to its logical conclusion the idea that faith is reason’s opposite we would find ourselves in a mad world precisely because so much of the knowledge anybody has is knowledge that is believed. Chesterton said that the mad person is not one who has lost his reason but one who has lost everything except his reason.

This is also Aquinas’s next argument: if a person decides to believe only what he personally knows positively to be true, then life in this world becomes impossible. How could we live in the world if we do not believe someone? Notice that for Aquinas belief is not just about ‘things we assent to as true’, it is always also about ‘people whose knowledge we are prepared to trust’. In a famous statement Aquinas asks, ‘how could we even know who our father is if we did not believe someone’? Absolutely speaking, perhaps the person I have always believed to be my father was not my father. How can I know? All the doors through which I can know things are in agreement as to who my father is. Would it not be an indication of mental illness to refuse to accept what family tradition, those with authority to know, personal inner conviction, supported by the evidence of physical resemblance, all tell me about my father?

Faith, one of the ‘highest gifts’ (1 Corinthians 13:13)

One of the best teachers I had thought that people tended to read Aquinas’s Summa theologiae too slowly. Moving ponderously from point to point is one way of doing it, but it can fail to pick up the sense of movement within the treatises of the Summa. In the case of his consideration of faith, for example, his assigning it to the intellect can mislead unless we keep in mind that it always involves also an act of the will. In Aquinas’s terms, a purely intellectual faith remains ‘unformed’: it has not yet grown up to be fully itself, to be ‘faith working through love’. Faith is a kind of seeing, a knowledge, but it is always also ‘in a glass darkly’ (1 Corinthians 13:12). Faith is always both ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, putting us in contact with truth but leaving us always more or less perplexed. Faith unites us with God, who completely transcends creation and our experience of it, but who also condescends to reveal Himself to us and to call us into sharing His life. When Aquinas speaks of the certainty of faith, it is crucial to understand that this comes not from within the believer (as if we could wilfully generate its certainty by gritting our teeth) but comes rather from the One who is faith’s object.

For Aquinas, the knowledge faith gives is not as strong as the knowledge we get from science. Nevertheless we do know things by faith. We are obliged to articulate our knowledge in language – this is the way all human knowing works – and so too we are obliged to articulate our faith. This already raises some questions about theological faith. If God is perfectly simple in himself, and yet faith in God (because it is human) must be articulated, does faith touch the reality of God or does it reach only to those human ways of speaking about God? Aquinas believes that faith actually touches God ‘through’ the ways in which the mystery of God has been articulated. Divine revelation, the Word becoming flesh, means God expressing Himself within the events of our history and in what human beings have written about those events. In an often quoted sentence Aquinas says that faith terminates not in the forms in which it has come to be enunciated but in the reality which those forms express. When we say the Creed, for example, we believe that our faith reaches not just the intellectual content of the propositions we are enunciating, but reaches God who has revealed Himself in these ways.

Faith means seeing in the dark: in presenting it like this, Aquinas stands in the long mystical tradition of Christianity. Pseudo-Dionysius is the first authority he quotes in his consideration of faith, a 6^th century Syrian monk who speaks of a knowledge that is beyond knowing (Mystical Theology) and at the same time speaks of ‘divine faith’ as strong, certain, and liberating. The Spanish Carmelite, John of the Cross, a student of both Pseudo-Dionysius and Aquinas, says the mystical night is illuminated only by the light of faith, but this light is more sure than the light of noonday, it is a night ‘more lovely than the dawn’ (On a Dark Night, verses 4-5). Aquinas himself presents a dialectical account of faith in which there is nothing false, because it is a contact with Truth itself, while its object remains for us invisible, obscure, unknown, mysterious, and absent.

Faith as Decision

Faith always involves decision. Something for which there is convincing evidence, and about which the mind is totally satisfied, would leave no room for decision. If a hypothesis in geometry has been understood perfectly, and its conclusion has been demonstrated with certainty, it would be perverse to decide to reject that conclusion. With matters of faith, however, evidence is not sufficient to satisfy the intellect. In faith there is room for the mind to choose, to say what it thinks is the case on the basis of the available evidence, or on the basis of the trustworthiness of the one presenting the evidence.

This decision to believe is not an irrational ‘leap in the dark’ but is supported by reasons from without and from within. The doors to knowledge which Aquinas wants to keep open are all involved: evidence, tradition, authority, inner personal conviction. What is believed is seen to be credible on the evidence of signs or for some other reason. Although we cannot see the object of faith in itself, Aquinas believed that we can see that the object of faith is credible.

Outside ourselves there are miracles, the example of Christian living, the faith and love of Christian communities, the inadequacy of alternative visions of reality, the preaching of reliable witnesses: these all support the decision to believe and make it possible to see the credibility of what is believed. They do not prove the faith in such a way as to render inevitable the decision to believe. But they do prove that it is not irrational to believe in God and in his providence.

The decision to believe is also supported from within. God himself is, in the end, the only motive of the act of faith which believes God's word simply because it is God's word. The help from outside may be referred to as the objective motive, but the subjective response requires the gift of grace. Saint Paul speaks of faith as a ‘gift’ (1 Corinthians 12:9; 13:13). We touch on the mystery of grace and of God working within human freedom, something Aquinas reflects on at greater length when he considers the act of faith in detail (Summa theologiae II.II q.2). Suffice it to say that there is a subjective light involved in faith, a light added to the natural light of our spirit, helping us to discern the mysteries of faith and to see that we ought to believe God when He speaks.

Faith and questioning

Because the mind has not been given evidence that is demonstrative and convincing, it remains uneasy in believing. For this Aquinas uses a phrase he found in Saint Augustine: faith means cum assensione cogitare. Once again faith is two-sided. It involves assent and at the same time pondering, considering, wondering about, meditating on, that to which assent is given. Faith is an intellectual act distinguished from all other intellectual acts (doubt, suspicion, opinion, knowledge, and understanding) by the fact that assent and cogitatio are present in equal measure and simultaneously. Another way of putting this is to say that faith means ‘trusting while pondering’. We have a striking model of this in Mary, the mother of Jesus, who believed what had been said to her while pondering it in her heart (Luke 1:38,45; 2:19,51).

For Aquinas, the act of believing is therefore a mysterious thing. Because it involves cogitatio it is an ongoing restlessness. But because it is an assent it also means coming to rest, in a decision, an option, an assent to one position rather than another. Plato says somewhere that ‘one must go towards the truth with all one’s soul’ and Aquinas explains the act of believing by speaking of the respective roles of intellect and will. The intellect does not come to rest in the natural conclusion of its proper operation. It does not come to see the intelligibility of the object under consideration so that its search is naturally terminated. The will commands the intellect to come to rest in one position rather than another for reasons appropriate to the will: the good that is involved in believing rather than not believing, the reliability of the witness who speaks, the usefulness of what his words promise. Faith in the theological sense is thus a unique cognitive act, the mind being brought to its decision by the will under the moving power of God's grace.

The intellect in believing is captivated, says Aquinas, referring to 2 Corinthians 10:5. In the act of believing, the intellect is determined in its judgment not by itself and its own proper operation but by a power ‘outside’ itself, namely the will (though we need to be careful not to detach these powers from each other). There is in believing an element of submission, of confident abandonment at the level of the heart, of affectivity, of trust in the One who affirms. Hence the restlessness of the intellect which has not attained its natural end in knowledge, understanding, or vision. This restlessness precedes the act of believing as we struggle with the credibility, the non-absurdity, of believing, and it remains along with the act of believing as we continue to try to understand what it is we believe while committing ourselves to it. To be a believer is to live between these two ponderings.

Faith and Love

As in English, so in Latin, one can ‘believe’ something to be true, one can ‘believe’ a person when she tells us something, and one can ‘believe in’ a person. Aquinas says that all three kinds of believing go to make up theological faith. To believe that the proposition ‘God exists’ is true, is an example of what John Henry Newman called notional assent. It is an intellectual acceptance of something as true and I can believe it without it necessarily making any significant difference to my life. Believing God when He speaks might also be understood intellectually or notionally (although it is difficult to imagine somebody believing that God has spoken somewhere and that this would not make a difference to his life).

In these first two ways, ‘even the demons believe’ (James 2:19). But for faith in a deep sense, as for ‘real assent’ in Newman’s sense, the third aspect of faith is necessary. To ‘believe in’ God then means giving one’s trust and confidence to God, relying on God, entrusting our lives to God. For Aquinas this is ‘formed faith’, faith come to its maturity in love. He writes elsewhere that to believe in God means amando in eum tendere, to tend towards God loving Him. Faith in this sense is the principle of all good works, he says, the faith which Jesus calls ‘the work of God’ (John 6:29).

For Aquinas, faith allows us to share in God’s self-knowledge. It gives us the most fragile purchase on that knowledge. But when we remember the mystery of which faith is the door (Acts 14:27), we will not despise its fragility but will struggle, with all our life’s energy, to keep it.

Thursday, 20 January 2022

LOVING SERVANTS OF THE WORD OF GOD

A talk on Dominican Spirituality given on 12 October 2019 during a 'Come & See' weekend held at St Dominic Priory, St Louis, Missouri

Spirituality and Charism

I have been asked to say something about 'Dominican Spirituality'. You are familiar with the term 'spirituality', it is in common use: Benedictine spirituality, Carmelite spirituality, Jesuit spirituality, and so on. It refers, we can say, to the style of a particular religious order or congregation, to the customs, practices and traditions that are specific to that congregation. All religious orders hold the main things in common - the Bible, the sacraments, the life of the Church in its pastoral and apostolic activity. But each of them lives these central realities of the Christian life with a particular style or flavour. Each has certain practices, devotions, ways of doing things, which gives its particular character to the form of life of each congregation. This begins with the founder or foundress, their way of following Christ and of living the Christian life. Sometimes the historical context and the particular need for which a congregation is established serve to shape its spirituality, to give it a particular style. But it begins with the founder: he or she proposes ways of praying, priorities in the apostolate, theological emphases, ways of organizing the life of the community - these then constitute the form of life which he or she establishes as a new gift of the Spirit for the Church.

This brings us to a second term, the term 'charism'. Each founder or foundress receives a particular gift or grace of the Holy Spirit who raises them up in the Church to respond to a new need. We can say then that a particular spirituality expresses and serves a particular charism. So Dominican spirituality refers to our way of doing things together - our way of being together, of praying, of studying, of preaching, and so on, in order to express the charism of Saint Dominic and in order to serve that charism, to make it present in the life of the Church today.

The best short description of the Dominican charism which I have heard is the phrase I have put as the title of this talk: we are to be loving servants of the Word of God. I heard if from William Barden, a very distinguished Irish Dominican of the last century. It has stayed with me ever since I first heard it because I think it is a beautiful short description of what the order is about. If we meditate on that phrase, if we think about each word in it, then the charism of the Order will be revealed to us and so also the Order's spirituality will emerge from that phrase because our spirituality is everything that expresses and serves the charism.

The word 'Word'

Let us begin with the word 'Word'. We are to be the loving servants of the Word of God. God has many attributes, there are many faces of God and many names of God. Different religious orders focus on different attributes or aspects of God - His mercy perhaps, or His Sacred Heart, His missionary character, and so on. Dominicans focus on God as 'Word'. Think about the reasons for which we use words. It is in order to communicate, to share our thoughts and feelings, to share ourselves with others. Words are about articulation and communication. They are about sharing knowledge and truth. Words are about intelligibility, making things understandable and accessible. So these are the preoccupations of the preacher: the Word of God, the ways by which God Himself has articulated and expressed who He is and what His plan is for humanity. It is about God sharing with us His knowledge of Himself, His own truth. And it is about the intelligibility of that communication - words are not just random or arbitrary sounds, they belong in a language and language is about intelligibility. It is always from within a particular language that we see the sense of things, understand connections, grow in knowledge, see what is true.

We can use the word 'dialogue' for this. Pope Paul VI in his first encyclical Ecclesiam suam (1964) gives a rich biblical and theological reflection on the meaning of the word 'dialogue'. It refers in the first place, he says, to the dialogue of revelation, the conversation which God established with His people in order to share with them the truth about Himself and to bring them into sharing His life. In the dialogue of revelation God offers eternal life to His people. Eternal life is to know God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent: we read this in the Gospel of Saint John (17:3). So the preacher is a person who is called to position himself within this dialogue between God and humanity. The preacher's task is to tell people about the life of friendship and love God wishes to share with them. And his further task is to call people to respond in faith to this invitation, to help people to share through faith in the gift that is offered to all.

The Word of God of which we are to be the loving servants is then the Scriptures which record this dialogue of revelation. In another sense the Word of God is Jesus, the Word become flesh. For at a certain moment this communication by God of His own intelligibility, of His plan for His people, was translated into the form of a human being, Jesus of Nazareth. So we are to be followers of Jesus, His loving servants, wanting to serve him under this particular aspect of communication, dialogue and conversation, of sharing knowledge about God and bringing people to realise the truth.

Serving the Word

So how are we to serve the Word? Well in the first place we must receive it. You have heard, I am sure, that God gave us two ears and one mouth to indicate that we should do twice as much listening as we do talking. So the first thing we must do is listen to the Word. It is the same as when we are in conversation with other human beings: we have to listen to what they are saying and seek to understand it, we have to receive it before we think of saying anything ourselves.

So in the Dominican's service of the Word of God there is this first moment: we listen to the Word. It means, obviously, study and prayer, a study of the Scriptures in the first place, always returning to them no matter what else we might study along the way. But we must pray the Scriptures as well. These are texts that surrender their spiritual and theological meaning only when they are received in faith. So our vocation is a contemplative one, we must ponder the words of Scripture prayerfully as well as studiously. We also celebrate the Word in the liturgies that we have together and our spirituality is a liturgical spirituality also. It is another way in which we receive the Word of God, chanting the psalms and canticles of the Bible over and over again, singing God's praises in the Liturgy of the Hours, and of course celebrating the Mass together, the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist.

Dominican spirituality is not fully seen if we just look at the life of Dominican friars. Along with the friars - and already among them we have friars who are ordained priests and friars who are not ordained - we have nuns and sisters, we have lay members of the Order, associated diocesan priests, people consecrated in secular institutes. The Dominican charism requires an 'order', or a 'family', if it is to be expressed fully and served effectively. So we are blessed in having contemplative nuns, founded by Saint Dominic some years before the friars were officially established. The nuns sacramentalise, they make physically present for us, this contemplative aspect which is part of the vocation of every Dominican.

So we are to serve the Word of God by receiving it, in the different ways mentioned. But we are also to share it, to communicate and to proclaim what we have come to see and understand and appreciate in our prayer and contemplation, in our study and liturgical celebration. We are not 'O.S.', Order of Students, we are 'O.P.', Order of Preachers. From the earliest days we have it, that the purpose of our study is in order to be useful to our neighbours. So the second moment in our loving service of the Word of God is this moment of preaching, communicating, telling about the wonderful things the Lord is doing. We do that in our shared life in the first place. Our hope is that living together as a community of brothers building Christian communion is already a kind of preaching of the Word of God. Of course we do it in explicit speaking as well, by preaching and teaching in the normal sense of those terms (talking, writing, broadcasting). We do it in many works of charity and witness. All across the world Dominicans are engaged in education, in parish ministry, in chaplaincies at universities, hospitals and prisons, working with indigenous people, working with migrants, working with homeless children - the list of activities and projects is long. But whatever Dominicans do is done under this rubric of 'loving service of the Word of God', in order to communicate to people the love and friendship to which God invites us all.

So we must receive and contemplate the Word in the Scriptures. We contemplate the Word of God who is Jesus Christ, staying with Him, learning from Him each day, watching how He does things, how He receives people. We strive to be His faithful disciples. We contemplate the Word also in what is happening in the Church and in the world, studying these, keeping an eye out and an ear open to see what the signs of our times are revealing about God's purposes today. What is it God wants us to communicate to His people at this particular moment in their history? what is their need?

Loving servants

If we go looking in the Scriptures for people whom we might consider as 'proto-Dominicans' we will find ourselves, I believe, considering two groups. (Apart from Jesus himself whom we can regard as the first Dominican!) The two groups with whom we often compare ourselves are the prophets of the Old Testament and the apostles of the New Testament.

We speak about our charism of preaching as a participation in the prophetic work of the Church. The prophets were men and women deputed by God to speak to the people about what was happening in their lives and to re-assure them that God was still present with them no matter what was happening in their lives. We know the prophets are the servants of God's word because they tell us this themselves: 'the word of the Lord came to Isaiah ... to Amos ... to Jeremiah' and so on. Their task was to interpret for the people what was happening at the historical moment in which they found themselves. That interpretation meant bringing the light of God's Word to bear on their present situation. It meant putting God's Word into the mix of what was happening, to challenge or to comfort the people depending on what the particular need was at a particular time.

The apostles then are the prophets of the New Testament. They are the men deputed by Christ to continue his mission in the world and through them the Church continues that mission. It is an apostolic Church and we speak about ourselves as an apostolic order. We believe that Saint Dominic re-imagined the apostolic form of life for a new moment in the Church's history. Like the apostles the Dominicans were to be with Christ, remaining always with Him or returning always to him, learning everything from Him, and preaching His message and bringing forgiveness and healing to all to whom they are sent.

This the apostles did - and Dominicans do - 'in medio ecclesiae', in the heart of the Church. It is a phrase the liturgy applies to Saint Dominic but it applies also to the order as a whole. We are to be at the heart of the Church. I was wondering how to bring into this presentation the fact that for Dominicans our shared, fraternal life is an essential part of our spirituality. And perhaps this is the point at which we can do it. The prophets tend to be very much individual servants of the Word of God, isolated and perhaps lonely, often on the margins of the community, talking back to it from where they are. Think of how strange a figure Ezekiel was, or John the Baptist. The apostles on the other hand tend to move as a 'college'. It comes to our lips very quickly: the college of apostles. They moved around, at least in groups of two or three. So there is always a sense of community and communion among the apostles. They are called to be with Jesus not just then to preach the communion which He has come to establish, but to begin to live that communion with Him. And this is where we can see how a common life is essential to Dominican spirituality, necessary to express and to serve the charism of Saint Dominic. Communion is the goal of our preaching, not just as an ideal but as a lived reality, an experience of reconciliation, mercy and friendship which by our preaching we hope to build up - therefore we must 'put our money where our mouth is' and begin to live that communion with each other. I believe that our preaching carries a particular flavour when it is the preaching of one who is living with others and experiencing from day to day the blessings and challenges of such a shared life.

So there it is. I have offered you a sketch of Dominican spirituality, which expresses and serves the charism of the Order. It is a spirituality which is, I believe neatly but profoundly captured in saying that we are to be loving servants of the Word of God.

PS I do not say anything about us being the loving servants of the Word of God. To do so would add to this presentation by bringing in the Holy Spirit, the Love of the Blessed Trinity, sent in turn by the Father and the Son. It would help to make clear that our preaching is not just intellectual but also spiritual – cf ST I 43 – involving imagination, devotion, beauty, power, inspiration: all that falls under the work of the Spirit, the characteristics of a ‘real’ assent as compared with a ‘notional’ assent.

Sunday, 6 June 2021

ANNOUNCING THE GOSPEL

A TALK TO DOMINICAN STUDENTS AT THE BEGINNING OF THE SUMMER HOLIDAYS

These past few weeks I have been talking about the ‘preaching moment’, offering some reflections on what it involves and how that calls for a way of living and a spirituality that is ours: the Dominican job in the Church requires the Dominican way of life to support it. We have considered three aspects of this preaching moment: the Word, the speaker of the Word, and the hearers of the Word. We have considered the mysteries of light as a way of meditating on the ministry of Jesus as a sustained preaching moment. Last week I spoke about the ridiculous 1970s and about some of the difficulties across the years, as styles and emphases change. It can seem that people – even the brethren – are engaged in something quite different when, in fact, all share the same task: preaching the gospel to people. All Dominicans, I presume, think of what they are doing as an instance of that central activity.

Perhaps the greatest Church document of the 1970s was Evangelii nuntiandi [EN], which appeared in 1975. It is an apostolic exhortation of Pope Paul VI following on the synod of bishops in 1974 and issued to mark the end of the holy year of 1975 as well as ten years since the end of Vatican II. Just as one might legitimately argue that the work of Vatican II is heralded and in many ways anticipated in the great encyclicals of Pope Pius XII on the liturgy, on the bible and on the Church, so the focus on a new evangelisation that came to prominence in the second half of Pope John Paul II’s pontificate is heralded and more than anticipated in this document from Paul VI. It is worth looking at, or looking at again if you have read it before.

For EN Jesus is the great evangeliser who gathers round him a community of evangelisers, the Church, whose task is to evangelise and to send out evangelisers into the world. ‘Evangelisation’ often seems to me to be one of those magic words at the sound of which everybody nods in approval but which is actually difficult to explain when you are asked to do so. What does it mean? What does one seek to do in seeking to evangelise another person? What entitles a person to think they have the right or duty to attempt such a thing? EN speaks of it like this: to bring the good news everywhere so that it might transform humanity from within, to sow the seed of the Word in the hope that it will take root and blossom in the hearts and lives of those who come to believe in it.

Bringing the good news everywhere refers not just to geography but also to every aspect of human culture. Every generation is a new continent to be won for Christ: so Paul VI. The task of the evangeliser, he says, is to ‘upset’ humankind, to question our criteria of judgement, our determining values, our points of interest, our lines of thought, our sources of inspiration, and our models of life, whenever these are in contrast with the Word of God and the plan of salvation.

EN also contains an early response to the theologies of liberation that had emerged, confirming a legitimate use of the term ‘liberation’ as a way of speaking about a goal of evangelisation but warning about identifying human liberation with salvation in Jesus Christ.

The world pays more attention to witnesses than to teachers: this is perhaps the phrase most often quoted from EN. If teaching is to be effective it must be supported by a way of living, confirmed as it were by the way of living of the preacher or teacher. Preaching is still important and necessary, even in a culture of too many words and too many voices. ‘It is the Word that is heard that leads to belief: St Paul said this and it is still true whether it happens in the liturgical homily, in catechesis, or in one to one teaching as Jesus with the Samaritan woman, with Nicodemus, and with others, or St Dominic staying up all night arguing with the innkeeper, bringing the word to bear on individual circumstances and situations.

Evangelisation is another way of talking about the mission of the Church, its responsibility to preach the gospel to every creature, seeking to bring it to new believers, to strengthen those who already believe, and to bring the truth of the gospel into dialogue with unbelief and secularisation.

Who evangelises, EN asks? The Church, in the first place, so wherever the gospel is preached the Church is present. Evangelisation cannot be just the inspiration and initiative of individuals since each individual who preaches the gospel acts in communion with the Church as a whole.

EN 63 says that evangelisation loses much of its force and effectiveness if it does not take into consideration the actual people to whom it is addressed, if it does not use their language, their signs and symbols, if it does not answer the questions they ask, and if it does not have an impact on their concrete life. But on the other hand, evangelisation risks losing its power and disappearing altogether if one empties or adulterates its content under the pretext of translating it in order to make it ‘relevant’. This is the tension I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, in the argument about preaching at the Krakow general chapter.

Certain internal attitudes ought to animate the evangelisers. Above all – and this is simply the teaching and example of St Paul as recorded in 1 Thess 2:1-8 – they must love the people they seek to evangelise. Such love is made up of the following: concern to give the truth, concern to bring people into unity, devotion to the proclamation of Jesus Christ, respect for the religious and spiritual situation of those being evangelised, respect for their tempo and pace, respect for their conscience and convictions, concern not to wound the other person, and the effort always to transmit solid certainties anchored in the Word of God. The preacher of the gospel ought to be living in joy, the joy of his own belonging to it, even when he is sowing in tears, confident of greater joy when the harvest comes.

So off you go on your summer placements when the time comes. You will be out and about, with opportunities to see what it is like, what is possible, what people’s situations and questions are, how the preaching of the gospel might be undertaken, what way of living is required if teaching is to be effective. Holiday time is never completely such for us, of course, because even among family and friends one is the religious, the priest, the Dominican, and inevitably people will be relating to you and thinking of you in those terms. That may seem to mean not very much at times but at other times it may come to mean a lot. If on pastoral placements you get opportunities to speak to groups of people – and I hope you do – in other circumstances you may well encounter a Nicodemus or a Samaritan woman, and a one-to-one conversation will be important for them and for you.

We seek to go about our work as St Paul did, out of love, and not from error or uncleanness, nor out of guile or flattery or greed, nor to seek glory from the world. We do it to please God who tests our hearts, and he will test our hearts as we do it. St Paul’s final comment is startling: his preaching to the Thessalonians was not for any of the reasons mentioned (error, uncleanness, etc.) but because he fell in love with them, full of affection and desire to share not just the gospel of God but his very self with people whom he came to think of as his beloved.

Wednesday, 2 June 2021

THE MYSTERIES OF LIGHT

In Catholic piety the Rosary has a special place as a way of meditating on the mysteries of Christ’s life, death and resurrection. It has been cherished and promoted particularly by the Order of Preachers as a method of contemplating and preaching those mysteries. John Paul II’s decision to add five new mysteries to the Rosary, the so-called mysteries of light, has alerted people to how strange it was before, that in meditating on the important events of the life and work of Jesus one passed from the finding in the temple (recounted in Luke 2) to the agony in the garden. Was there no significant mystery between these two moments, nothing of essential spiritual, theological, revelatory or salvific importance? Thomas Aquinas says in his commentary on the Creed that all the mysteries of Christ are for our instruction. People were encouraged to meditate elsewhere on these other mysteries: healings, miracles, parables, discourses, vocation stories, meals and other encounters, all that Jesus said and did during the time of his conversation among human being

But picking out these five new mysteries of light – the baptism of Jesus, the wedding feast of Cana, his proclamation of the kingdom of God and call to conversion, the transfiguration, and the institution of the Eucharist – gives content to the description of Jesus’ public ministry as a sustained ‘preaching moment’: something is being communicated to people by Someone and the something that is communicated is the Someone who communicates it. It is a matter of deeds and words, as these five mysteries bring out, things said by Jesus the preacher and prophet, things done and undergone by Jesus the sign-maker and artist.

Jesus the preacher is anointed for his ministry at his baptism by John in the river Jordan. This marked the moment when his ministry began. An apostle, Acts 1 tells us, is one who can witness to the events from the baptism of Jesus to his resurrection. This provides the content of the Christian kerygma just as the baptism marks the moment when Jesus himself went public and began to proclaim the Word of God throughout Galilee and the surrounding countryside. The theophany at the baptism is for the Baptist or for those standing by (so Matthew), or it is for Jesus himself (so Mark and Luke), but either way the entry into his ministry involves Jesus in a clearer conviction about his vocation. It may be that one should refer here also to his temptation in the wilderness and to the moment of the Baptist’s arrest. Then Jesus, in his human nature, comes to realise something about himself, that he is to be this representative figure for Israel – the servant of God, a prophet and even the prophet, the anointed one or messiah, the son of man.

The gospels recount in different ways how Jesus appropriated (or revealed) his vocation as a preacher and teacher, as priest, prophet and king. As with many later moments in the public ministry of Jesus, the gospel of John gives a distinctive account of the beginning of that ministry. At the wedding feast of Cana, recounted in John 2, Jesus gave his first sign and the disciples believed in him. His work is underway even though his hour had not yet come. Cana begins the fulfilment of Old Testament promises of the eschatological age, the banquet of fine wine given in abundance, the out-pouring of the Spirit that is bountiful and indiscriminate, the meal offered by wisdom to her devotees (Is 25:6; Joel 3:1-5; Acts 2:13; Prov 9:1-6). But Cana also echoes beforehand the moment of Jesus’s death as John describes it (19:xx-xx): the hour has now come, there is blood and water flowing, there is thirst (now his own rather than that of the people around him), his mother is present and is again addressed as ‘woman’ (the new Eve), and there is glory, the glory first revealed in the sign of Cana, finally and definitively revealed as the glory of the only Son, giving his life on the cross.

The task of preaching is to bring people to see, by faith, this glory. It is a call to conversion, to turn away from sin and believe the good news of Jesus Christ, to have a new mind and be renewed, to turn away from the worship of dead things to a spiritual worship of the living God. The third mystery of light is Christ’s proclamation of the kingdom of God with the call to conversion. It is an invitation to enter into the mystery of Christ’s ministry of preaching. Paul will explain all this at length: those who have been reconciled by Christ become ambassadors of reconciliation (2 Cor 5:20). They receive grace to announce the good news and to invite to the banquet. No particular moment in the gospel accounts of his ministry is picked out in this third mystery of light, which makes it different from the other nineteen mysteries of the Rosary. It could easily have been the Sermon on the Mount, but instead people are invited to meditate on the entire teaching ministry of Jesus, all that he said and did (Acts 1:1; Lk 1:1-4) in announcing the kingdom.

The glory that is being revealed yet remains hidden, and the transfiguration is often understood as a moment in which the veil of Jesus’ humanity slips and a hidden divinity is revealed. But what happens is just as much a breaking in of the future, when the glory that is to be his as the exalted Son of Man, the glory of his resurrection, is glimpsed beforehand by his chosen disciples. Our preaching moments are for the most part mundane, ordinary and routine but they are also moments of insight, illumination and revelation for someone who is listening. At least they are always these things potentially (and perhaps often the one brought to fresh insight through our preaching is the one who is preaching).

If preaching were just a human message, our ideas and experiences, then we would be telling people what they know, or potentially could know, for themselves. But it is the Word that we preach, of course coming through human channels (earthen vessels at that) and so taking flesh in terms of our ideas and experiences as it takes flesh in terms of the language and accent in which we speak but with a character, depth and significance far beyond the channel through which it is communicated. As Paul says, ‘we preach what Scripture calls “the things no eye has seen and no ear has heard, things beyond the mind of man, all that God has prepared for those who love him”’ (1 Cor 2:9). We speak in words not taught by human wisdom (1 Cor 2:13). But where it happens that someone hears, through our preaching, what St John of the Cross calls ‘the silent music of eternal love’, then it is not we who speak (even though it is) but the Spirit of the heavenly Father speaking through us.

So people are taken up into a process of transfiguration, from one degree of glory to the next (2 Cor 3:18), and this is happening particularly as we partake in the daily bread of the Eucharist. The fifth mystery of light is ‘the institution of the Eucharist as the sacramental expression of the paschal mystery’. This too is a strange mystery compared with all the other mysteries of the Rosary. It is not just the last supper, as it might have been, but ‘the institution of a sacramental expression’. People are asked to meditate here on a theological doctrine, the meaning of the last supper in its relation to the death of Jesus, and our remembering of it until He comes.

This final mystery of light now links the joyful mysteries of Christ’s hidden childhood and the luminous mysteries of his public ministry with the sorrowful and glorious mysteries of the paschal event. This is where his public ministry is leading as Luke most clearly teaches in the structure of his gospel. If it is to the paschal mystery, to Jerusalem, that Jesus’ ministry moves it is also to Jerusalem, to the paschal mystery, that Christian preaching points. This is the climax and the heart of the story of Jesus of Nazareth. This is the climax and the heart of Christian preaching: this paschal mystery, sacramentally represented in the Eucharist, which is, as Vatican II describes it, ‘the source and summit of the Christian life’ (Lumen gentium 11).

Thursday, 27 May 2021

Word Breathing Love - A Meditation

Verbum Spirans Amorem

A Meditation in Four Movements

Piwnica Artystyczna Kurylewiczów, Warsaw, 5 July 2010

First Movement

Imagine a father speaking to his infant daughter and saying to her, over and over again, the word ‘love’. The infant cannot understand this word – or can she? The infant babbles something back to the father, giving him great joy and happiness. He cannot understand the sounds she is making, her balbutiendo – or can he? Although she cannot understand what he says, and he cannot understand what she says, the reality of which he speaks – love – is being established between them through this communication that neither understands. Or do they?

Second Movement

Some years ago the literary critic and philosopher George Steiner published a book called Real Presences: Is There Anything In What We Say? He says that there are millions of words processed every day: bureaucratic words, political words, technical words, the words of PhD dissertations, and so on. But is there any properly human depth to any of these words? His argument is that it is only in relation to a transcendent that words gain properly human depth. Works of art, music and literature only have such depth when they belong to the search for a transcendent, or are rejecting a transcendent, or are reacting to a transcendent. In Marco Bruno’s poem about Ireland he speaks of a search for something ‘infinite’ in his journey around something finite. Steiner believes all art, music and literature needs this orientation to the transcendent, the infinite, if it is to be worthy of human beings.

Third Movement

I worked this year with a philosopher for whom it was very important that as well as our words there is what he called ‘the word’ and that it is only when our words are attended by what he called ‘the word’ that they gain meaning. If there is to be meaning we must wait for ‘the word’ that comes to open up the space of meaning. He saw this teaching, for example, in Socrates’ way of conversing. I can only understand this theologically, as a reference to the Divine Word that was in the beginning, the original and originating Word of creation, the original and originating speaking of God, of which all our words are echoes, and to which all our words are responses.

Fourth Movement

The phrase verbum spirans amorem is from a theologian, Thomas Aquinas (Summa theologiae I 43, 5 ad 2). The ‘word that breathes love’ refers in the first place to the Divine Son and the Holy Spirit. The phrase also reminds us that the Divine Word is always a word of poetry because it is a word that breathes love. This means it is a word addressed not only to intellect but also to feeling and imagination and sensation. It is a creative and musical word that is felt and experienced. It is a tasted word, sapiential in the literal sense, sapida scientia, tasted knowledge. The father addressing his infant daughter utters a word that breathes love, establishing love between them as he speaks to her and she babbles back. For early Christian teachers the human being is an infant babbling as he tries to speak about God, not knowing what he is saying and yet saying something essential. Art, poetry and music are conversations like this, ways of seeking to share beauty and truth, establishing those things between us and among us as we engage in such conversations. And we cannot really understand these conversations – or can we?