preface 7 unshakeable faith of Orthodoxy, which in turn forms a bridge to the most distant Oriental Churches. (106)

Size: px

Start display at page:

Download "preface 7 unshakeable faith of Orthodoxy, which in turn forms a bridge to the most distant Oriental Churches. (106)"

Laurence Hunter
5 years ago
Views:

1 Preface In Nietzsche s Joyful Wisdom, a madman carrying a lantern runs into the marketplace and encounters a crowd of people who mock his search for God: Where has God gone? he cried out. I will tell you! We have killed him, you and I! We are all his murderers! (125).The madman insists that those who have murdered God should confront the full consequences of their terrible deed, and a number of twentieth-century philosophers pursued the inquiry into such consequences avidly so that the corollary to the death of God became fully evident: the human person then must have died as well. Michel Foucault in 1969 acknowledged such a corollary as a kind of twentieth-century commonplace: it is not enough to keep repeating that God and man have died a common death, and he seeks to illuminate the dynamics of power that shape us (often oppressively) within the gaps and breaches that open following the disappearance of God and the human person formed in God s image. 1 Could it be, however, that such inquiries ironically could guide us toward a renewed understanding of the human person in the light of our relationship to God? Orthodox theologian Olivier Clément proposes that nothing less than a spiritual anthropology can restore our understanding of the human person.a dialectical view of the great radical thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries enables us to see that the human powers brought to light by such thinkers derive after all from the Holy Spirit and that we are lost until we recognize this truth: But today people who are cut off logos 6:4 fall 2003

2 6 logos from the Holy Spirit are in danger of death. Modern humanism needs to be openly acknowledged as belonging within divine humanism, thus revealing Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud to be also forerunners of this movement. 2 Once we have recognized the inner longing of cultures that have turned away from the divine and have become lost in the depths of the malleable human being that is shaped only by desires and cultural forces, we are more fully prepared to address such an inner longing: We must hope to attract the post-industrial society of today by a rich, complex, open anthropology, which by its very openness respects the fathomlessness of the person and is capable of growing into a theo-anthropology. Everyone now realizes that human beings need not only bread but friendship and beauty, not only abundance but restraint, not only the power of machines but a renewed respect for God s creation, not only education of the mind but a greater capacity for celebration. (106) We can note that Clément s powerful observation complements the reflections of Gaudium et spes from the Second Vatican Council, each approach opening a path toward a fresh encounter with modern cultures that makes possible the articulation of the truth of the human person in relation to God in a manner that addresses the deepest needs of the contemporary person. As is well known, Gaudium et spes incorporates a Christ-centered spiritual anthropology : The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light (22). It is appropriate, then, that from his Orthodox perspective Clément envisions a developing unity within Christianity in response to the deepest needs of the contemporary human person: And at the heart of the human race as it grows into unity, there is the vision of a Church undivided once more, combining the ethical and cultural energy of the Western Church with the

3 preface 7 unshakeable faith of Orthodoxy, which in turn forms a bridge to the most distant Oriental Churches. (106) A providential understanding of the dynamics of globalization seems to be at work in this view, such that a spiritual drive toward greater Christian unity encompasses the economic drive toward cultural interdependence and provides a proper grounding for economic activity and exchange within the emerging world economy. Olivier Clément s spiritual anthropology shows us that it will not be sufficient within a globalized context to view one another in purely economic terms. Once we attend properly to the depths of the human person seen as an image of God, the dignity and uniqueness of the other springs fully into view: Spiritual attentiveness, when directed towards some one else, becomes actual astonishment, awakened consciousness, revelation.we experience an intense amazement that other people exist in the warmth of God s light (54). As opportunities for such recognition extend more and more broadly through globalized economic activity, new opportunities to practice what Clément calls the disciplines of communion present themselves, and thus a greatly expanded understanding of the human community will begin to emerge, a burgeoning understanding that brings to increasing degrees of fulfillment a concept of humanity long promised by biblical texts. Within the world of the intellect, the concept of the integration of knowledge harmonizes well with an understanding of the unity of the human community when viewed through the light of a spiritual anthropology, as Clément shows: So there has grown within the rich Christian tradition the idea of integrated knowledge, which assumes the necessity of reason, but in conjunction with the other faculties and senses, such as will-power, love, and the awareness of beauty. Integrated knowledge is knowledge in faith; it combines human nature in a personal movement of encounter and communion. (62)

4 8 logos Our response to beauty, our search for ethical understanding and for sound ethical practices, our rational inquiries, our scientific explorations of nature, our sense of being called to divine worship, all emerge from what Clément says the Christian tradition has long understood as the heart-spirit, and we must remain attentive to the complementarity of all such modes of human activity and desire if each mode is to be seen in its proper light. These themes derived from Clément s spiritual anthropology enable us to hear a kind of harmony among the variety of articles offered in this issue of Logos. An article by Thomas G. Weinandy titled St. Irenaeus and the Imago Dei: The Importance of Being Human explores the emergence of a Christian spiritual anthropology in the writings of Irenaeus, an early father of the Church, and enables us to contemplate the deep significance of the biblical concept of the human person as created in the image of God, surely the foundational concept for any biblically grounded anthropology.weinandy shows that Irenaeus wrestled with Gnostic teachings, drawing on the revelation inherent in the incarnate Word to reach a theological understanding of what it means to be made in God s image: Irenaeus perceived the biblical truth that it is first and foremost God the Son who is the perfect image and likeness of God the Father, and thus for us to be created in the image and likeness of God is to be created in the image and likeness of the Son. This understanding of the human person brings us to appreciate and even rejoice in our bodily existence. A trinitarian understanding of the human person enables us to capture the dynamic complexity and beauty of the human person as a creature of high dignity: we are created in the image of the Son, we find our hearts filled with love of the Father, and we discover that we are capable of participating in the life of the Father and the Son through the Holy Spirit dwelling within us. A variety of reflections on contemporary controversies concerning human identity show the importance of retrieving the biblical concept of the human person if we are to retain a proper

5 preface 9 understanding of human nature. In the contemporary questions concerning equality between men and women, an understanding of the ontological dignity and simultaneity of creation of women and men in God s image is fundamental to our proper understanding of the issues involved, in the words of Jean Bethke Elshtain in Women and the Dilemma of Equality. Elshtain honors and celebrates the quest for equality and freedom in Western feminism and then demonstrates the contributions to such goals made by arguments based on the concept of sexual complementarity, especially as developed by Pope John Paul II. This concept overcomes the damaging reduction of human existence to utilitarian calculations or relations of force and lust and leads to what Elshtain calls an ethical feminism. Specific attention in the contemporary world to the dignity of women helps to overcome the distortions in the understanding of the human person that have been introduced through the historical oppression of women. Another difficult set of contemporary controversies concerns the place of sexuality within our understanding of the human person. A proper Judeo-Christian understanding of sexuality provides illumination concerning human dignity, sexuality, and marriage, according to Alexander R. Pruss in Not Out of Lust but in Accordance with Truth: Theological and Philosophical Reflections on Sexuality and Reality. Pruss shows that the Judeo- Christian understanding of sexuality is rooted in the physical reality of man and woman forming a new kind of organic union in marriage so that it becomes important for a loving couple engaging in sexual activity to be able to seriously consider themselves as becoming truly and physically united. Dominant contemporary views of physical reality as meaningless for the human person lead inevitably to a damaging subjectivism and deprive human sexuality of its true dignity within the divine order. Olivier Clément quotes the words of Bazil Rozanov on this point: It is the atheist... who has no understanding of the flesh (61). Turning to a key term through which modernity understands the

6 10 logos human person, the concept of rights, Paolo G. Carozza guides us through an examination of the Christian origin of this concept as developed within the Latin American tradition in They are our brothers, and Christ gave His life for them : The Catholic Tradition and the Idea of Human Rights in Latin America. Drawing on the comparative study of legal traditions, Carozza shows that the modern concept of rights took shape in some important ways within the historical experience of Latin America and through the Catholic cultural influences that are pervasive in Latin America. The concept of human rights poses certain paradoxes because there is the danger that the concept will be distorted through a relativistic perspective that undermines its capacity to express a cross-cultural language of justice and dignity. Carozza addresses this problem with directness: It follows, then, that the task of cultivating a legitimate pluralism within the universal idea of human rights is a critical part of making the promise of human rights possible. Embracing legitimate pluralism is a recognition that, in the words of John Paul II, every culture is an effort to ponder the mystery of the world and in particular of the human person. The article explores the historical stages through which the concept of human rights developed in Latin American historical experience, and, in his conclusion, Carozza explicitly identifies the link between this concept and the concept of a Catholic anthropology: Throughout, sometimes directly and at other times more passively but no less certainly, the constant characteristic of the Latin American human rights tradition was its dynamic relationship with a fundamentally Catholic philosophical anthropology. Philosophical anthropology provides deep insight into the faculties of the human person and thus contributes in significant ways to a fuller understanding of human nature.through a phenomenological analysis of the moral imagination, Terrence C. Wright in Phenomenology and the Moral Imagination shows the imagination can contribute to our moral judgments without making such judgments susceptible to the claims of moral relativism or skepti-

7 preface 11 cism. Considerations of the work of Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, and Martin Heidegger enable Wright to show that the imagination is capable of reaching truth, that human empathy enables us to direct the imagination specifically to moral truths, and that literature can be seen as cultivating such empathetic uses of the moral imagination. Wright concludes his article with a discussion of how his students demonstrated the operation of the empathetic moral imagination in their reading of Waugh s Brideshead Revisited. We then turn to an account by Sally Cunneen of the work of Sara Maitland, a contemporary fiction writer and practitioner of amateur theology (in Maitland s own words), in Big Enough for God: The Fiction of Sara Maitland. The world of Maitland s fiction emerges from her distinctive vision, a vision grounded in her triple conversion from Presbyterian to Existentialist, and then to Anglican, and finally to Roman Catholic. Cunneen tells us that Maitland, however, is not didactic in the vision emerging from her fiction: Like Flannery O Connor, Maitland does not write about religion but attempts to illuminate the potential mystery and sacredness within the lives of individuals most often women in transformation. Maitland s characters move to what Cunneen describes as incarnational fullness in their development, thus bringing alive within her fictional worlds a Christian understanding of the human person with all of the complexity such an understanding entails. Cunneen provides us with an informative overview of the range of Maitland s short stories and novels, and demonstrates that in Maitland s writing, the reader becomes aware of the sacred potential within and outside of her characters consciousness. Turning to a historical account of the Christian understanding of the human person, Alfredo Romagosa in The Carolingian Renaissance and Christian Humanism examines the development of Christian humanism in the early centuries of the church and focuses on the cultural rebirth that occurred in the age of Charlemagne. This rebirth emerged from the successful integration of knowledge and faith, as seen in the life of the great teacher and

8 12 logos scholar,alcuin, as Romagosa demonstrates while quoting from a letter by Alcuin: His own love of learning was fully integrated with his religious vocation: How pleasant life was when we sat among the writings of the wise, surrounded by a wealth of books and the worthy thoughts of the fathers, lacking nothing we needed for the religious life and the pursuit of knowledge! The article points to the enduring value of the Christian humanism developed in this period: their actions firmly planted the seeds of culture in Western Christianity, which in spite of periods of stagnation, have endured to our time. While humanism found ample nourishment within the church in the age of Charlemagne, humanism in the twentieth century in the work of George Orwell seemed to be, in Orwell s mind, irreconcilable with the Catholic faith, according to George Orwell s Anti- Catholicism by Leroy Spiller. Orwell s writings display the extent to which a secularized worldview dominated the perspective of many intellectuals in the twentieth century: He maintained a nostalgic attitude to the language and liturgy of the Church of England, but he considered all religions as remnants of a pre-scientific epoch, according to Spiller. Nonetheless, Spiller maintains that in important ways Orwell s views did not conflict with a Christian understanding of the world: By using the divine gift of reason and the natural virtue of honesty, Orwell reached conclusions that are compatible with church teaching regarding the rights of man and the dignity of labor, even though Orwell himself did not see this compatibility.the article demonstrates that Orwell recognized the cultural loss that has resulted from a secularized worldview, even though he could not bring himself to embrace Christianity. Spiller quotes from an essay written by Orwell in 1944: One cannot have any worth-while picture of the future unless one realises how much we have lost by the decay of Christianity. Finally, in our Reconsiderations feature, we reprint John Henry Cardinal Newman s Biglietto Speech, ably introduced by Ian

9 Ker, a speech in which Newman confronts the situation of secularization emerging prominently in the modern world and threatening to cause forgetfulness of a truly Christian understanding of the human person. Newman s speech is from 1879, just two years before Nietzsche began writing Joyful Wisdom, the work quoted in the opening paragraph of this preface, and we can see that Newman and Nietzsche are addressing a similar cultural situation, both recognizing the gravity of European cultural developments in their time. Newman recognizes the prominent cultural view that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another and sees this view as a distinctive mark of the cultural situation of his time: The general character of this great apostasia is one and the same everywhere; but in detail, and in character, it varies in different countries. The speech concludes with an expression of confidence that Providence will guide us through such a cultural crisis, and we can recognize one final time in this context that such confidence emerges from a deeply Christian anthropology through which we know that we are not abandoned in the world but turned toward the God in whose image we have been created. Editor s Note: In the Preface to Logos volume 6:2, Spring 2003, I mistakenly applied the title Cardinal to Archbishop Joseph M.Zycinski.I regret the error;the information about Archbishop Zycinski in the Contributor Notes in that issue is correct. Michael C. Jordan Co-editor preface 13 Notes 1. Michel Foucault, What is an Author, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault , vol. 2, ed. by James D. Faubion, trans. by Robert Hurley et al (New York: New York Press, 1998), Olivier Clément, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology, trans. by Jeremy Hummerstone (New York: New City Press, 2000), 106.

CHARITY AND JUSTICE IN THE RELATIONS AMONG PEOPLE AND NATIONS: THE ENCYCLICAL DEUS CARITAS EST OF POPE BENEDICT XVI

Charity and Justice in the Relations among Peoples and Nations Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Acta 13, Vatican City 2007 www.pass.va/content/dam/scienzesociali/pdf/acta13/acta13-dinoia.pdf CHARITY