Deified Vision: Towards an Anagogical Catholicism

By Philip Krill

DEIFIED VISION: TOWARDS AN ANAGOGICAL CATHOLICISM is an attempt at activating an “anagogical imagination.” It requires of us that we pray for a share in God’s own contemplation of the world; that we allow our imaginations to get “lifted up” into His own; that we desire to receive, through the illumination of His Holy Spirit, a participation in His own love and desire for all He has created. One author has called this process ‘acquiring an “epistemic participation” in the Mind of Christ.’

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Oct 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9781483475318

Philip Krill

PHILIP KRILL is a Catholic priest of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, MO

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KRILL

Copyright © 2017 Philip Krill.

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Scripture quotations marked RSV are taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, 1971 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission.

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ISBN: 978-1-4834-7531-8 (e)

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Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 9/28/2017

OTHER BOOKS BY PHILIP KRILL

Beyond the Foundation of the World: Encountering the Trinity in Ephesians 1

Deified Vision: Towards an Anagogical Catholicism

Gaudete: Mysteries of Joy

The Hope of Glory: A Contemplative Reading of Colossians 1

Life in the Trinity: A Catholic Vision of Communion and Deification

More than Conquerers: The Pauline Mysticism of Romans 8

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This book is dedicated to:

Dr. Jeff and Heather Wincel

&

Helga and Otto Huiber

Your love and support encourage me to write about the anagogical vision that elevates our friendship.

AN·A·GO·GY (ăn′ə-gō′jē)

Late Latin anagōgē, from Late Greek, spiritual uplift, from anagein, to lift up: ana- + agein, to lead; to lead upwards.

A mystical interpretation of a word, passage, or text, especially scriptural exegesis that detects allusions to heaven. Trinity.jpg

"and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself."¹ Trinity.jpg

"The end towards which the whole world is oriented is that unity of divine and human freedom in Jesus Christ, which God alone can effect, for in Christ man finds his own self and is taken up whole and entire into God."²

Hans Urs von Balthasar

INTRODUCTION

Christianity is the marriage of heaven and earth. God became man so man could become God.³ This patristic axiom, known as the ‘doctrine of deification’ or theosis, is the defining Mystery of the Christian Faith. In the Incarnation, Passion, Resurrection and Ascension of God’s Only-Begotten Son, all of humanity and, indeed, all of the created cosmos has been taken up into the Life of God. The unfolding of the Christian Mystery in time is the on-going fulfillment of Jesus’ promise that when I am lifted up, I will draw all things to myself (Jn. 12:32).

To fully appreciate the mystical center of Christ’s Paschal Mystery, it is necessary for us to develop an anagogical imagination.⁴ We must always begin, as one popular author has put it, with the End in mind.⁵ Anagogy is that End. Anagogy refers to heavenly realities, understood contemplatively as our life in the risen Christ. Life "in Christ (en Christo), as St. Paul puts it,⁶ is fundamentally different from - and infinitely greater than - the imitation of Christ" which, sadly, so often passes as the epitome of the Christian life.⁷ Anagogy refers to our incorporation into Christ, not merely our efforts to emulate His teachings. This "participation in Christ" is an anagogical movement. Ours is an existence of Ascension: being lifted up with and in Christ, and already seated with Him at the right hand of the Father (Col. 3:1; cf. Eph. 2:6).

Perhaps no dimension of Jesus’ story is more foreign to modern Christian sensibilities than that of His Ascension. It seems too closely bound up with a mythical vision of the world that we have long since been unable to share.⁸ But, in truth, the Mystery of Christ’s Ascension - His Lifting Up - has nothing to do with travel to outer space. On the contrary, it is the ‘space travel’ of the heart, from the dimension of self-enclosed isolation to the new dimension of world-embracing love.⁹ ‘Ascension’ does not mean departure into a remote region of the cosmos but, rather, the continuing closeness that the disciples experience so strongly that it becomes a source of lasting joy.¹⁰ The Ascension of Christ is the apex of the Christian Faith, from which all other dimensions of earthly Jesus’ life depend. It is also the crowning Mystery to which the other seminal events of His Paschal Mystery point.¹¹ Jesus has come from the Father and He goes back to the Father (Jn. 13:3). His departure from heaven and His return to His Father (Exitus-Reditus) is the narrative framework in which are embedded the most profound mystical truths regarding the Word-made-flesh. The Ascension of Jesus is the culmination of at the Incarnational Mystery, revealing to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear (Lk. 10:23; Mt. 11:15) that the entirety of creation now has a place in God.¹²

This book, to repeat, is an attempt at activating an anagogical imagination. It requires of us that we pray for a share in God’s own contemplation of the world; that we allow our imaginations get lifted up into His own; that we desire to receive, through the illumination of His Holy Spirit, a participation in His own love and desire for all He has created. One author has called this process ‘acquiring an epistemic participation in the Mind of Christ.’¹³ Adrienne von Speyr says, Contemplating as God does, the Christian learns to contemplate…He contemplates God’s contemplation, and he sees God’s vision, a vision that embraces contemplation and action in a unity.¹⁴ St. Paul himself exhorts us to [h]ave this mind among yourselves, which was in Christ Jesus (Phil. 2:5). Our approach, then, must be katalogical: a perspective which proceeds downwards (kata-) from the revealed archetype (Jesus, the Eternal Word, Logos) to the created image (the human person). This is different from our usual, analogical approach to God which proceeds upwards (ana-) from the creature to the Creator. Any similitude that we, as human persons created in the image and likeness of God, enjoy with our Creator always occurs within a greater dissimilitude between the Trinity and ourselves.¹⁵ We must learn to regard Jesus as the Absolutely Singular,¹⁶ defined by no one and nothing other than His own Revelation about Himself. We must always affirm the Priority of Christ.¹⁷ And this of Christ in those most mystical and mystifying dimensions of His Paschal Mystery, namely His Resurrection and Ascension. For it is our contemplation of the risen and ascended Jesus, in his hidden closeness, that both inspires and requires the development of a keen, anagogical imagination.

I believe it is fair to say that the much-hoped-for fruits of Vatican II have, in large measure, failed to materialize. The longed-for springtime of New Evangelization has not yet arrived. Despite the best efforts of our intellectual and clerical elites, the renewal of the Catholic Church, prayed for and prophesied by even very saintly popes, has not materialized. The seeds of renewal have certainly been planted – especially those deposited by the blood of the 20th century martyrs – but so far, no significant growth can be seen. Instead, Catholics continue to flee the Church in droves. Mass attendance declines, belief in the Real Presence is on the wane, moral deterioration continues unabated, and the culture of death – with its seven anti-sacraments of dehumanization¹⁸ - seems to have usurped the Church’s vision of a new heaven and a new earth (Isa. 65:17; 2 Pt. 3:13; Rev. 21:1). Doubtless it is always darkest just before the dawn. Still, amidst our cultural and moral malaise, we must expect, as Pope Benedict XVI has often stated, that the Church will continue to grow smaller before it revives and manifests the powerful growth promised and desired by Jesus.¹⁹

Why is this? Many reasons, psychological, social, and political, could be, and have been, marshaled to explain our current situation. But none of these, even all of them taken together, can account for the lack of faith which the Son of Man feared He would see upon His return (Lk. 18:8). Ours is a spiritual crisis long before it is a psychological, social, or political one. We have lost our spiritual bearings because we have lost our contemplative vision. And as the prophet predicts with trepidation, Without a vision the people perish (Prov. 29:18; cf. Mic. 3:6).

What, exactly, is the kind of vision we have lost? The answer is simple: an anagogical vision; an eschatological imagination in which the Light of the Resurrection and Ascension illumines and inspires every aspect of our Christian beliefs and praxis. Such is the vision that accounts for the theological appeal of the three most recent popes: St. John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis. It is the vision that was at the heart of the Vatican II Council. Most of all it is the vision of the early church fathers: of Irenaeus of Lyon and Ignatius of Antioch; of Cyril of Alexandria and Cyril of Jerusalem; of Origen and Athanasius. Today none of these is a household name in much of the Catholic world. Yet, until we understand and appropriate the vision of the men and women who, throughout the ages, have had in themselves the mind that was in Christ (Phil. 2:5), our attempts at Church renewal will be little more than ecclesiastical window dressing. We will prop up the outward form of religion while lacking the power thereof (2 Tim. 3:5).

This book is a modest attempt to coax us in the direction of authentic spiritual renewal. All things begin and end with the Trinity. Contemplating Life in the Trinity is the indispensable key for acquiring new life in the Church and in our own individual lives. There is no life in Christ apart from ecclesial existence in His Church, and there is no life in the Church until we experience it as a Trinitarian encounter with the Father, through the Son, and in the Holy Spirit. Such a Trinitarian appreciation of the Church is possible only through the development of an anagogical imagination. Flat-line catechetics and one-dimensional apologetics, while serving important functions at certain times among evangelized Christians, prove counter-productive in effecting the sort of spiritual renewal the world and the Church are waiting for. The New Pentecost, so greatly desired by Pope John XXIII, depends, for its permanent manifestation, on a revival of the Catholic Faith that begins and ends with the Mystery of the Trinity. If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, St. Paul exhorts us, and set your minds on things that are [in heaven], not on things that are on earth. (Col. 3:1-2). This anagogical, Trinitarian approach, as well as a vision of our incorporation into the Trinity through the sacramental Mysteries of the Church, is essential for a genuine renewal among the People of God.

If this language about an ‘anagogical imagination’ sounds strange or convoluted it is because our own sacramental and ecclesial vision has atrophied. The Church must learn to breathe again with both lungs, as Pope John Paul II was fond of saying.²⁰ By this he meant with both the Eastern and Western Catholic traditions of mystical and contemplative reflection on the Mysteries of our Faith. For his part, Pope Benedict XVI has described the results of the last 700 years of Catholic speculative theology and ascetical spirituality as a malady catholiique: a special neurosis that is the product of a warped pedagogy so exclusively concentrated on the Fourth and Sixth Commandments that the resultant complex with regard to authority and purity renders the individual incapable of free self-development.²¹ Benedict XVI beckons us to a more profound, personal, and contemplative approach to the Mysteries of our Faith. Christianity is not an intellectual system, a collection of dogmas, or a moralism. Christianity is instead an encounter, a love story; it is an event.²² This little book is one humble attempt to respond to his impassioned pleas for catechesis in a new and different key.

The outline of this book is thoroughly and unapologetically Trinitarian, with an emphasis on Anagogy. It follows, in a general way, the outline of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It treats of Creed (Dogma), Cult (Liturgy), and Code (Ethics). But it does so with an eye to the anagogical mysteries of Jesus’ Resurrection and Ascension. We must learn to see all things from above if we are to grasp the meaning of anything here below. God became man so man could become God.²³ In His Incarnation, Jesus mysteriously assumed all things into Himself. In His Resurrection and Ascension, He lifted up a redeemed and re-created world to His Father. Our Christian faith comes alive only when we are able to experience our lives as incorporated into the Life of the Trinity through our participation in Jesus’ anagogical Presence.

Consider the following twin-paradox: in His Incarnation, Jesus never left heaven, and in His Resurrection and Ascension, Jesus never left the earth.²⁴ Mysteriously, Christ has incorporated both heaven and earth into His ever-living, ever-active, filial relationship of self-surrendering love with His Father. It is our own assimilation into this Trinitarian Mystery, through participation in Jesus’ Prayer to His Father, that constitutes our core identity as members of His Mystical, the Church. Can you begin to see now how a profoundly anagogical imagination is required to fully appreciate this Mystery? To furnish you, the reader, with the beginnings of such an imagination: this is my aim in writing this book.

PART ONE

Trinitarian Revelation in an Anagogical Key

Chapter One

GOD AS A TRINITY OF HYPOSTASES

A ll begins and ends with our ideas of God. If things must be understood through man, and not man through things, then both man and things must be understood through God, not vice versa. True knowledge, beauty, and goodness are altogether Theo-centric. They begin and end with God. Our understanding of God defines our apprehension of the world. Nothing in the created realm can adequately or satisfactorily express Who God is. He-Who-Is precedes all that has come to be.

Many, if not most, nominal Christians and Catholics, seem to operate with a rather generic and impersonal idea of God. God, for them, is an amorphous, homogenous concept, sometimes referring to a Person, sometimes to a Power, sometimes to an Object. Even the philosophical definition of God as a Being suggests God enjoys a kind of pre-existent independence from the things and people He has created. He appears to exist as an eternally singular Object, separated and above and beyond the world He created. He presents Himself to us as a distant, omni-powerful Deity, with whom humans can admittedly have contact but with whom intimacy is largely unimaginable. He can and does intervene in the world, but as an Arbitrary Power, possessed of a mind and a will to which no human being is privy. In a blessed aseity or independence from the world, God as Being remains aloof and detached, untouched by the creatures He has made.

Admittedly caricatures, these generic ideas of God are not without their elements of truth. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches definitively that God is Creator, Ruler, and Judge of the world. He does pre-exist His creation and He is not constrained in any manner by the things and persons He has made.²⁵ The point to be grasped, however, is that for many ordinary Christian the doctrine of the Trinity is essentially irrelevant to their conception of God. Most believers do not, of course, officially deny the existence of the Trinity or the Church’s teaching about it. They simply ignore it. And they do so because, in large measure, they are experientially ignorant of it. God, for them, is a nothing other than an all-powerful, all-knowing Supreme Being. He is a Monistic Entity, One to be feared, worshipped, reverenced, and served, to be sure, but essentially One without definition or distinctions.

Pope Benedict XVI impugns such a view of God as non-trinitarian monotheism.²⁶ Hans Urs von Balthasar has also been critical of a neo-scholastic metaphysics that conceives of God more philosophically than personally.²⁷ For all practical purposes such believers may as well be Deists, Muslims, or Jews.

More pernicious, perhaps, than a monochromatic image of God is God conceived of in terms of ‘substance’ or ‘being.’ From Aristotle to Aquinas and beyond, philosophy, including Catholic philosophy, has persisted in drawing an analogy (the so-called ‘analogia entis’) between the being (existence) of this world with the Being (existence) of God. Bishop Robert Barron, for example, an otherwise prescient advocate of God’s non-competitive coinherent relationship with the world, doggedly promotes a Thomistic concept of God as Pure Being (or ‘Pure Act of Existing), i.e., Ipsum esse subsistens (the sheer act of to-be itself).²⁸ Following his mentor, St. Thomas Aquinas, and appealing to the famous proclamation of the Fourth Lateran Council regarding our speech about God that in tanta similitudine, maior dissimilitude (‘in however great a similitude, there is an even greater dissimilitude’), Bishop Barron believes we can speak accurately, if insufficiently, about God in terms of ‘being.’ This, despite the fact that he also quotes Aquinas as saying, Since we are not able to know what God is, only what God is not, we are not able to consider in regard to God how he is, but rather how he is not.²⁹

The approach adopted in this book is radically different from the neo-scholastic method used by Bishop Barron. I agree with Felix O’Murdoch when he says in [The] Christian claim to universality is the claim to a phenomenality which finds no place in Greek thought…[T]his is not to deny that the Christianity of those integrations of Greek thinking from Origen through Augustine to Aquinas. It is rather to point out - as is acknowledged by each of these great Christian thinkers - that any such integration was incomplete. This incompletion, however, must not…be understood in terms of the difference between faith and reason, but rather points to a phenomenality which radically escapes any category that relies on the coherence of the world (cosmos) [or of ‘being’], as the categories of Greek thought inevitably do."³⁰ Because Personhood in God precedes ‘being’ of any kind - including anything we might call ‘divine Being’ - and because the Triune God is the ineffable Source of the entire creation ex nihilo, not only can ‘God’ not be an object or ingredient in, above, or alongside the world which He made, He must be otherwise in a way that transcends any and all modes of [being and] otherness discoverable within creation.³¹

Martin Heidegger expresses the perspective of this book when he says, One could not be more reserved than I before every attempt to employ Being to think theologically in what God is God. Of Being, there is nothing to expect here. I believe that Being can never be thought as the ground and essence of God, but that nevertheless the experience of God and of his manifestedness, to the extent that the latter can indeed meet man, flashes in the dimension of Being, which in no way signifies that Being might be regarded as a possible predicate for God.³² Heidegger’s critique signals the death of metaphysical concept of God as the ground of being or the causa siu (singular [uncaused] cause) of all that is. Causa sui metaphysics, in Heidegger’s view, leads to a substantialization of all reality and obscures the ability of Being to reveal its own undefinable splendor and unexpected eventfulness. It is not simply a matter of using the concept of ‘being’ either univocally or analogically. Onto-theo-logy, i.e., thinking theologically in terms drawn from metaphysics and philosophy,³³ is both incapable and indeed subversive of disclosing the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus. God is altogether otherwise than all our attempts to imagine Him using the concept of Being.³⁴ God is, properly speaking, ‘without being."³⁵ As experienced by us, God is absolutely asymmetrical with everything He has created. The very word ‘God,’ as Karl Rahner pointed out long ago, is purposely opaque. It is intentionally ‘meaningless’ for the very purpose of dissuading us from conceiving of God in terms philosophically familiar to us.³⁶ All the neo-scholastic mental gymnastics used to vindicate onto-theology remain, I believe, deleterious to the development of the kind of analogical imagination required to contemplate the Ever-Greater Mystery revealed to us as Trinity.

No concept of ‘Being,’ even when employed to describe God as ‘the highest Being,’ the ‘supreme Being,’ the ‘Pure Act of Being,’ the ‘Ground of Being,’ the causa sui (unique, singular cause) of being,’ the ‘uncaused cause of being’ or any other such onto-theological descriptive is appropriate for the One who reveals Himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The concept of God as the God of philosophy - the ‘ground’ or First Cause of reality - is not a god that humans can easily worship or fall in love with. It is certainly not the God of the Scriptures whose passionate love for humankind elicits an equally impassioned response from those touched by His supra-personal love. The biblical experience of God bears no resemblance to any generic concept of ‘God’ or any onto-theological definition of God as ‘the Act of Pure Being.’ Metaphysics provides no access for us to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The God of the philosophers is not the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Judaism – the religion of Jesus - looks with abhorrence upon any idea of God other than the most personal, involved, caring, faithful, and demanding One they respectfully called Lord. God, for the Jews is, to be sure, beyond description and infinitely greater than humans can imagine. At the same time, He is also intensely personal and deliberately involved in the most minute details of the covenanted lives of the special people He has chosen to be His own. He is the Other other³⁷ who addresses Himself with utter non-contingency yet infinite intimacy with the people He has chosen to be His own.

Covenantal faithfulness captures well the depth of personal involvement this inconceivable God gives to and expects from His holy people from the moment of their election.³⁸ Jesus of Nazareth fulfills and perfects the intimate communication and involvement of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob with His chosen people. He refers to Himself as their Lord, and brings down upon His head the wrath of an entire nation by making Himself the equal of God (Jn. 5:18). The identification of Jesus with the Torah, the Temple, the Kingdom of God, and with God Himself was not lost either on the first eyewitnesses who believed in Him or upon His Jewish adversaries.³⁹ Yet, from the very outset of the Church, Jesus was understood as Lord and Savior, God’s only Son, the Promised of Ages, come in the flesh. The history of Christianity is the experience, explication, and worship of God come in the flesh. It is the on-going, living encounter with He-Who-Is. We encounter Him in His risen and ascended Presence among us. This encounter is prepared for, made possible, and brought to perfection through the power and illumination of the Holy Spirit. The Christian Faith is, in other words, "the triumph of Personhood (Hypostasis) in our conception and experience of God.

A person calling himself or herself Christian no longer experiences God as a singular Divine Monad ruling in the world a detached manner from the persons and things He created. The Christian knows God only as a Community of Divine Persons (Communio Personarum) whose very nature is love (1 Jn. 4:8). Put differently, the Christian knows that his or her experiences of love are made possible by, and always reflect, the Love that circulates among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Trinity is the Source, Goal, and Archetype of all created things. All excellences found in creation have their origin and end in the life of the immortal and life-giving Trinity. The future of Christianity will either become more intentionally Trinitarian or what will survive will not be recognizable as Christianity at all.⁴⁰

These are not extravagant claims. They are, however, largely forgotten or ignored by modern believers. Very few among us are intentionally Trinitarian or anagogical in our thinking or in our devotion. This is why the New Pentecost and the New Evangelization so often prayed for have yet to materialize. The religious landscape continues to be under scourge by the great heresies of post-modernism stemming from a vacuous, generic conception of God. These include the belief in a modified universalism in which almost everyone is saved by a loving God; a Pelagianism in which people are saved because they are basically good and do good things; and/or a dictatorship of relativism according to which all religions are essentially the same, absolute truth does not exist, and critical judgments about other cultures, religions, or individual behaviors are considered intolerant at best and acts of violence at worst.⁴¹ Much of the religious indifferentism we see today derives from our loss of a profoundly Trinitarian and anagogical vision of the Christian Faith.

Such however, was not the case with our fathers in the faith in the early church. The suffered neither from the religious indifferentism nor from the Christological minimalism that discolors contemporary Christianity. Not only did the original eyewitnesses of Christ intuitively apprehend and affirm His equality with God, but even as Jerusalem met Athens and the gospel was introduced into the gentile world with its multiplicity of different and often conflicting cultures - first in the preaching of St. Paul and the other Apostles, and later through the theological and doctrinal developments of the early (patristic) Church - the mind-set and ethos of everything Christian was altogether Trinitarian. Occupation with the Person of Jesus as God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, consubstantial with the Father was a central obsession for all Christians before and after it’s creedal formulation at the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon. Such a Chalcedonian revival must begin again today if the faith we profess is to regain its power to transform the world.

What is the faith of our fathers? What is it that the early church and the saints believed about God as Three Divine Hypostases that makes all the difference to the Christian life? What is the conversion of mind and heart that must be undergone to comprehend their hypostatic (personalist) approach to God?

There is no simple or easy way to explain what transpired, and transpires, in the greatest minds and hearts of the saints of the Christian Church. The nuances of the Christological and Trinitarian Mysteries of the Christian Church are infinite and endless. But amidst all the theological finery, a brilliance shines forth, especially in the mystagogical catecheses of the early Church. The writings of the early church fathers reveal the anagogical depths of the Christian Mysteries. Following the patristic tradition, we seek to acquire a refined anagogical sense of what is communicated to us in the liturgical life of the Church. Only so can we properly approach and understand the Trinitarian beauty of our Christian existence.

Originally all theological reflection in the church was driven by participation in what the fathers simply called the Mysteries, i.e., the liturgical celebrations of Baptism and Holy Eucharist. As a Divine Person, Jesus assumed a human nature for our deification. All that was visible in our Savior has passed over into his mysteries, wrote Pope St. Leo the Great.⁴² The Holy Spirit effects our divinization in Christ through our participation in the liturgical life of His Church. As Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI have said repeatedly, The Eucharist makes the Church and the Church celebrates the Eucharist.⁴³ A person is mystically engrafted into the living Person of Jesus in the primordial Mystery of Baptism. This union of Vine to branches (Jn. 15:1-5) is strengthened in Confirmation and consummated in Holy Communion. Everything about the Christian faith is a relationship of communion. The Mystery of Communio is the defining archetype of the Christian existence. Apart from Baptism, Chrismation, and Holy Eucharist, there is no true, substantial communion with Jesus Christ. Faith, yes, comes through hearing (Rom. 10:17; Gal. 3:2), but the encounter with the gospel issues ineluctably into the imperative be baptized! (Acts 2:38; 10:48). Even St. Paul, immediately after His encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, was baptized and thereafter regained his sight (Acts 9:18). Baptism brings illumination, the Eucharist effects divinization.

It was because the early Church experienced a saving union with Christ in its sacramental Mysteries that its greatest saints were impelled and enabled to reflect anagogically on the risen Christ revealed and made present in these self-same Mysteries. Working backwards from their encounter with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the Mysteries of Baptism and Holy Eucharist, the church fathers were able to discern how Christ came to lift them up into participation in His own Trinitarian Life. The Jewish people had known God as intensely personal, even intimate with them. On Mt. Sinai and elsewhere, He even visited His people in their need. He condescended to meet them in sacred and specially consecrated places. But the possibility that the almighty YHWH could ever become man was unthinkable, impossible, unimaginable!⁴⁴ As radical as God’s loving self-limitation may have been at times for His chosen People, it had to stop short of one final logical development…that of the Son, who gives himself and lets himself be given, and that of the Spirit, who lets himself be ‘poured out’ and sent.⁴⁵ Only the early Christian Church, the Corpus Mysticum of Christ, was in a position to discern that the very One who had bequeathed His disciples the Mysteries of the Living Water (Baptism) and the Bread of Eternal Life (Eucharist) was Himself the Way to the Father and the Sender of the Holy Spirit.

Liturgical prayer and worship lie at the heart of our Life in Christ. These are the Theologia Prima of the Christian Church.⁴⁶ Prayer, and the depth of our prayer, is the first and foremost measure of our relationship with God.⁴⁷ Lex orandi, lex credendi: the law of praying [is] the law of believing. In the Christian vision, liturgy always precedes theology, and theology serves primarily to illumine liturgy. Or, as Evagrius Ponticus famously put it: If you are a theologian, you will pray truly. And if you pray truly, you are a theologian.⁴⁸ For Christian prayer is essentially a participation in the Prayer of Jesus. It is the anagogical assumption of the human person into the eternal self-surrender of the Son to the Father.⁴⁹

The evolution and development of Trinitarian theology was a direct result of the Church’s on-going contemplation of the fontal Mysteries at the heart of its liturgical life. As the kerygmatic proclamation of Jesus as Lord spread to the four corners of the earth, the philosophical systems and naturalistic religions of the pagans were at once judged and redeemed by their encounter with the celebration of the Christian Mysteries. Go ye forth therefore making disciples of all nations, Jesus had told his disciples, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (Mt. 28:19). "Do this for the anamnesis (commemoration) of Me," He told them (Lk. 22:19). These foundational liturgical rites, together with the mandate to celebrate and promote them as the Church’s way of making Him present to itself, provided the defining power of the first Christian evangelists. With astonishing, supernatural success, entire cultures and nations were converted to the Trinitarian vision of God through initiation into the Mysteries of Christ.

The revelation of God as Tri-personal hit the pre-Christian culture like a theological earthquake of unparalleled magnitude. The most astute thinkers of the ancient world were stupefied and stimulated by the Mystery of the Incarnation and its implications for their religion and for their lives. Whereas God for them had been an impersonal, immutable, unchangeable, and altogether impassible monistic ground of being, the advent of Jesus Christ revealed something entirely new. Like persons waking from a dream, they discovered a God whose primary Name is Father, and whose Face is Jesus of Nazareth. This was a God whose Name IS His very being: I am who am God had said to Moses (Ex. 3:14). So too with Jesus: she will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins (Matt. 1:21). Being and Personhood were seen to be identical in the Trinitarian Mystery. Personhood precedes being in God, and Being is communion in God. ‘Existence’ is a function of God’s triune Personhood, not vice versa. The fathers of the early church experienced ‘God,’ not as an abstract First Cause or mysterious summation of Being, but as a tri-hypostatic personality in whom all things find their raison d’être. For the early church, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are seen to establish, support, and sustain all manner and form of existence within and outside of the Trinitarian Life.

Initially this Mystery of Divine Personhood was as bewildering to those who heard it in the ancient world as it has become again today in the Christian world. Very few believers see any relevance of the doctrine of the Trinity to their ordinary lives of faith. Personhood within the Trinity is difficult for even the practiced theologian to grasp and express. Yet, a Catholic faith that is not fervently and comprehensively Trinitarian is unworthy of the name Christian. It cannot withstand the harsh winds blowing from the culture of death or the thunderous assaults stemming from the dictatorship of relativism. Despite the elliptical language and paradoxical speech involved, conceiving of God as Trinity – and ONLY as Trinity – is the fundamental key to recapturing the Faith of our Fathers. It is also the catalyst for advancing the evangelization and transformation of cultures that the gospel mandates. Developing an anagogical imagination and Trinitarian spirituality requires deep prayer, profound liturgical devotion, and serious and sustained contemplative reflection. What was described above as "onto-theo-logy"⁵⁰ must be replaced by "theo-onto-logy." An anagogical vision must precede and drive our contemplation of our life in Christ.

If it can be said that in the past Catholics were well catechized but poorly evangelized. Today it can perhaps be said that many, if not most, Catholics, are neither evangelized nor catechized. And this, despite the plethora of diocesan programs, committees, conferences, workshops, and renewal programs, to say nothing of the proliferation of more books, tracts, software programs, and on-line resources readily available everywhere. The solution?: Ressourcement: a return to the sources of the ancient Christian faith. A fresh appreciation of mystagogy and anagogy. A deeply contemplative effort, driven by prayer, liturgy, and the figural reading of Scripture. A vision of deification that begins and ends with a preoccupation with the Trinity. The development of an eschatological imagination that views Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as the sole and defining expression for God. A spirituality that continually seeks the Face of Jesus. A theology that prayerfully reflects upon Him according to the Scriptures, an exercise that the early church called knowing Christ according to the Rule of Faith.⁵¹ Balthasar called this Seeing the Form.⁵² Regardless of the terms we use, only a more contemplative, anagogical, and explicitly trinitarian Catholicism that will renew the church in the difficult days that still lie ahead.

This may sound as daunting as it is bewildering. Indeed, there is nothing about Jesus, nor about the sacramental Mysteries He established, that is not daunting and bewildering to our natural human understanding. Even our theological and spiritual instincts, such as they may be, balk at the sublime difficulty and mystical challenge the Trinitarian vision presents to our usual ways of conceiving of God. Revelation is a scandal (Greek: skandalon; stumbling block) to human logic and reason. Yet, as the Lord says through the prophet Isaiah, My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways…For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isa. 55:8–9). Like the early Greek fathers, we do well to lay aside our monolithic, totalistic, substantialist, and (truth be told) uninspiring ideas of God and so enter contemplatively into the Trinitarian Mystery as the Tradition has revered and preserved it.

Every non-Trinitarian understanding of God is totalitarian. Without a living appreciation of the Trinity, categories such as Fate and Destiny overshadow and ultimately suffocate all particularity, creativity, historicity, and human achievement. Everything and everyone is subsumed into a larger, fully impersonal scheme of substance or order. For the Greek religions and philosophical systems, all individual entities – whether things or persons – emanate from and return to (i.e., are re-absorbed into) some form of pre-existing Whole. The pre-existing One (whether conceived of eternally or temporally, transcendently or immanently) functioned both as the creator and dissolver of particulars produced by it. As one’s eyes glaze over reflecting upon this dynamic, so also does one’s heart when contemplating such a God whose nature or substance or being is described in terms that are essentially non-personal in character.

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is of an entirely different order. Indeed, He cannot be described as another order at all. Not only is He not the Ground of all Being, the Uncaused Cause that causes all other causes, Pure Act, or any other referent of Ultimate Reality, but His Otherness as God can be apprehended, appreciated, and entered into only if we radically and fundamentally alter our theological imagination in a more anagogical and Trinitarian direction. Initially this means turning our back on all non-Christian or pre-Christian philosophical and religious schemas, and then turning our attention to the uniqueness of the Person of Jesus Christ. Only when our personal, prayerful encounter with Him as risen, ascended, and present has sufficiently transformed our minds and hearts - illuminating them with the Wisdom that comes only from Him - can we see how certain philosophical concepts, once purified and corrected by Him, can help highlight the unique Mystery of Christ in His trans-philosophical beauty.

The triumph of Divine Personhood in the revelation, theological reflection, and confessional declarations of the early church represents the elevation of relationality over substance in the Christian worldview.⁵³ Personhood, not nature, essence, or being, is now conceived of as the primordial form of existence within the Mystery known as God. Somehow there obtains an Eros and Dynamis within and among the Persons of the Trinity that renders irrelevant the more blasé descriptives of God as impassible or immutable. Philosophies of idealism and materialism bear little resemblance to a vision of God as a Mystery of Trinitarian relations.⁵⁴ Jesus, the Divine Logos through whom and for whom all things are made (Jn. 1:3), replaces all philosophical systems with His ethic of obedience and His description of Himself as the Way, the Truth and the Life (Jn. 14:6). Jesus enables and empowers us to become loyal sons and daughters of His Heavenly Father (Jn. 1:12; cf. Mt. 5:45). By the power of His Holy Spirit, we are reborn and incorporated into Christ (Rom. 8:15). In Him we become capable of judging all things, while being judged by none (1 Cor. 2:15).

Personhood, then, as the defining vision for all things human and divine, finds its final norm in Christ Jesus. As Balthasar puts it so well: [t]he whole of what God has to say to the world is said in a single man.⁵⁵ And because what it means to be a person is revealed in the Word-made-flesh, we take note of the self-dispossession that characterized Jesus’ every word and action. For though He was in the form of God, He did not deem equality with God something to be grasped at; rather, he emptied Himself, assuming the form of a slave, accepting even death, death on a Cross (Phil. 2:6-11). In other words, it is the self-emptying of Jesus - His self-effacement - that constitutes His ‘being’ as a Divine Person. His fullness is His self-surrender. "Being, from this perspective, consists in always giving one’s being to the Other from whom one receives it or to others for whom the gift is a standing invitation to participate in the self-giving economy of the ‘Kingdom…[Thus] in a Christian context, selfhood is oxymoronic. The key to Christian subjectivity [personhood] is being subject to the Other. The true self is the giving away of the self to the Other and/or to others. It is pouring out one’s life, losing one’s life in order to find it.’"⁵⁶

Several important truths follow from the triumph of Hypostasis (Personhood) as the defining Christian revelation and experience of God. First, and foremost: wherever Trinitarian awareness triumphed most completely, the term God refers primarily, if not exclusively, to the One Jesus designated as His Father. In other words, God = Father in orthodox thinking. Imagining God as a monolithic entity apart from, preceding, or transcending Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is anathema to the personalist perspective of those shaped and transformed by the revelation of Jesus. The only God Jesus ever knew or preached was His Father. Abba was the generative source of life and inspiration for the Incarnate Word. The divine triunity is one of communion only because the origin of the divinity is the Father who possesses himself as always already given away.⁵⁷ The early church, when using the term God, always and everywhere meant the Father of Jesus Christ.

Trinitarian personalism also raises vexing issues about liturgical and theological language. These issues are particularly troubling for those unschooled in the ethos of patristic spirituality or those whose theological agenda is driven by political rather than contemplative concerns. These include the anthropomorphisms found generally in Scripture, and the gender-specific language of the New Testament. Many, for example, find the masculine pronoun predicated of God offensive to their contemporary sensibilities. They object to the presumably sexist and/or misogynist prejudice of Scriptures. The anagogical, trinitarian perspective we are trying to reconstruct here, however, finds such objections as ignorant as they are presumptive. Revelation illumines human reason as the starting point for our understanding of God. And, while not for a moment discounting the importance of reason for faith or the legitimacy of the historical-critical method for exegesis, a trinitarian, anagogical Christianity insists that the pronoun He as applied both to the Father and the Son is indispensable to the orthodox Faith. It is not a question, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church says so clearly, of there being gender in God. Quite the contrary: gender differentiation and identity among human persons derive from the more primordial relations within the Trinity. "By calling God ‘Father,’ the language of faith indicates two main things: that God is the first origin of everything and transcendent authority; and that he is at the same time goodness and loving care for all his children.

God’s parental tenderness can also be expressed by the image of motherhood, which emphasizes God’s immanence, the intimacy between Creator and creature. Thus, the language of faith draws on the human experience of parents, who are in a way the first representatives of God for man. But this experience also tells us that human parents are fallible and can disfigure the face of fatherhood and motherhood. We ought therefore to recall that God transcends the human distinction between the sexes. He is neither man nor woman: he is God. Similarly, He transcends human fatherhood and motherhood, although he is their origin and standard. No one is father as God is Father."⁵⁸ Our experience of masculinity and femininity, in other words, emerges as image from Archetype. The Father is not a projection of human generativity; rather, our ideas of masculinity derive from the Fatherhood of the First Person in the Trinity. We must not allow the fact that human parents are fallible and can disfigure the face of fatherhood and motherhood,⁵⁹ or the historical fact that in some ways women have been oppressed and exploited by men, to cheapen or discredit God’s direct revelation of Himself as Father.

The anthropomorphism of the Scripture and the masculine personalist predicates of both Father and Son form the mystical template for all theological and spiritual contemplation. Not only is the immanent Trinity the economic Trinity⁶⁰ (God is as Jesus does), but the immanent Trinity ever exceeds the economic Trinity in ineluctably personalist ways. There is no gender in God, to be sure, but God is a Community of Persons, and both Father and Son are only properly apprehended when described as He. Attempts to alter the language about God as Father or Jesus as Son is to seek to fundamentally change the Face of Christianity. Further, it renders a great disservice to those who have a right to receive the Tradition in all its apostolic fullness.

From this follows an equally important, uncompromising, and much misunderstood truth about the hierarchy that exists within both the immanent and economic Trinity. That is, if God is Father and Jesus is Son, a distinction of authority and obedience exists eternally between them that has important temporal and ecclesial implications. All church heresies, for example, including those of Subordinationism and Patripassianism, have their origins in some distortion of the truth concerning the hierarchical relationship of Father and Son. So also, do the more contemporary speculations about the suffering of God or His presumed impassability.⁶¹ The ambiguities involved in each of these topics bring us back to the mystery of the Trinitarian hierarchy. The issues of authority and obedience that have so long bedeviled both the secular and sacred worlds have done so for a very good reason: they stem from the truth of God’s nature itself. At the Source of it all is the Monarchia of the Father: the sense in which the Father is the Origin and Generator from whom the Son is begotten and the Spirit proceeds. If the very Life of God reveals a hierarchy within itself, we must expect relations among people, made in His image and likeness, to reflect the same dynamic that obtains in the immanent Trinity. Using an anagogical imagination, we can seek to re-capture a patristic sense of the Monarchia of the Father, as it establishes and secures Trinitarian hierarchialism as the defining mode of all social and ecclesial order and relationships.

Because the form or nature of God is that of Three Persons, not that of an impersonal essence or substance, "persons-in-relation" constitute the true image of God in humanity. This implies that relationality constitutes the key to understanding all dimensions of created reality, including the intricate dynamics of insensate being. The fatal cleavages⁶² that have plagued both theology and secular social and political theory since the Enlightenment – e.g., those between faith and reason, religion and science, authority and obedience, order and freedom, etc. – show themselves to be artificial when illumined by the distinctions and differences within and among the Persons of the Trinity. As St. Thomas Aquinas so eloquently said, all excellences in nature [both human nature and physical nature] are first in the Trinity.⁶³

Following the Theo-dramatic explications of Hans Urs von Balthasar, we can extend Aquinas’ assertion and say that even what look like mistakes or aporias [surds] within the created order reflect, in their misshapen ways, certain aspects of the Truth, Goodness, and Beauty within the Life of the Trinity.⁶⁴ In other words, there is a vision of a recapitulated and redeemed cosmos presented to us by the Fathers and saints of the Church that has the potential to revolutionize our intellectual and spiritual worlds. The mystics of the Church challenge us to experience God only as Trinity. They urge us to let go of a conceptual approach to Christianity and enter into a continuous contemplation of the Face of Jesus. They teach us how to develop an anagogical imagination, enabling us to see all created things in the light of Jesus Paschal Mystery, especially the Light that flows into the world from His Resurrection and Ascension. Our prayer needs always to be that of the psalmist: In Your light, O Lord, we see light! (Ps. 36:9).

Chapter Two

GOD AS THE PRE-EMINENCE OF COMMUNION AND OTHERNESS

"God is love, says St. John, and he who abides in love abides in God (1 Jn. 4:16). Significantly, St. John does not say, Love is God. Notice: there is no equivalence between human experience and its fallen definitions of love and the kind of love that constitutes the nature of God. God defines love, human notions of love do not define God. For the love that is in God is God Himself. God is Pure Act. To ‘be’ is, for God, to act, and to act according to His own nature, which is to love. How He loves defines how God is. Thus, when God acts, He simply loves, according to His own nature. He cannot not love. He cannot not act in love. And, when God loves of acts in/as love," He simply communicates Himself. Grace, His divine Life, is His nothing more and nothing less than apportioning a share in His own trinitarian Life to those whom He so favors.

Note well the Trinitarian Form of God’s Love, of God’s Being, of God’s nature. God is love and God is Trinity. Therefore, Divine Love always exhibits a Trinitarian form. When we contemplate God as a Community of Persons (Trinity), we see displayed before us the incomprehensible Mystery of Communion and Otherness. Of Togetherness and Freedom. Of Belonging and Singularity. Of Unity and Alterity. There is here, in the Trinity, the Source also of the Hypostatic Union. The Hypostatic Union is the union of the divine and human natures in the Person of Jesus without division and without confusion (to quote the Council of Chalcedon). This union is a subset, as it were, of the more fundamental difference-in-unity that obtains among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit constitute Three entirely separate and ineffably irreducible Persons, eternally and indivisibly connected, related, and adoringly bonded to each other. This is the Mystery of Trinitarian Love. This is the Primordial Mystery encompassing, and establishing everything that can be truthfully predicated of any created being, whether in heaven, on earth, or under the earth (cf. Phil. 2:11).

One of the earliest attempts at formulating, in theological terms, the doctrine of the Trinity was that of Tertullian. God, he said, was "una essential tres personae: one essence, three persons. All of theology, in a sense, has been a sustained attempt to unscrew the inscrutable,"⁶⁵ i.e., to understand the relationship of the unity in God with the particularity of the Persons involved. This has led to a reification of God’s essence, nature, or being, on the one hand, and the reduction of the Persons within the Trinity to pure relations, on the other. In general, it is fair to say that western, Latin Christianity has tended to stress the unity of God ("una essentia) at the expense of the distinctiveness of the Persons (tres personae) of the Trinity. Eastern, Byzantine Christianity has tended to go in the opposite direction, emphasizing the separate and different identities of the Trinitarian Persons and their respective missions." What matters today, if the neo-patristic ressourcement we desire is to come to fruition, is that Trinitarian Mystery of "communion and otherness" receive the profoundly personalist explanation and apprehension it deserve.

Today we are presented with an enormous ecumenical opportunity as a "being as communion" theology from the Christian East creatively engages with a persons as relations perspective emerging in in the Christian West. Orthodox Patriarch John Zizioulas and Pope Benedict XVI have been two of the leading spokespersons for the idea of Persons as relations in the Trinity and within and across human relationships. Communio is the term Pope Benedict received one day in prayer as the perfect one-word expression of the mystery the Tradition is trying to convey when it affirms relationship within and outside the Trinity.⁶⁶ Benedict’s predecessor, Pope John Paul II, also used the term Communio Personarum as the most felicitous way of describing the mysterious way in which persons achieve self-fulfillment in and through self-donation.⁶⁷ "Communio among persons conveys something both delicate and elusive. It is the mystery of persons-in-relation, something not readily evident when describing human relationships as a union of minds, hearts, and wills. The many beautiful dimensions of the word communio" will emerge gradually as we enter more deeply into an anagogical understanding of the Trinity.

Still, it is easier to say what communio is not than what it is. It is not an amorphous blending. It is not a homogenization of persons into an indefinable mix. It is not the dissolution of individuals into a pre-existing or resulting Whole. It is the very opposite of totalitarian reductionism. Totalistic, non-Christian religions and philosophies such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Stoicism, Pantheism, Gnosticism, Monism, Socialism, Communism, and all other forms of scientific or social utopianism reduce and resolve the individual entity – whether inanimate object or human person – into a larger, pre-existent substance (physical, spiritual, or social). This resolution or dissolution is primarily a matter of absorption or elimination. The image of a drop of water dissolving into the ocean comes to mind as a typical image used by proponents of these ideologies to describe the self-sacrifice that constitutes salvation in such a totalistic system.

Communio, as understood from a Christian perspective, stands in stark and utter contrast to these naturalistic forms of salvific unity. Father, Son, and Spirit are not parts of a larger, more inclusive Being called God. They neither emerge from nor return to a more fundamental Unity. The communion they enjoy is a Communio Personarum: Persons-in-relation whose union is a function of their differences and whose differences are enhanced by their intra-Trinitarian connection. There is no Divine Excess in the Life of God that exists over and above the relations of Father, Son, and Spirit. Their identity as God is in no way prior to, or in any way above, the Communio Personarum that constitutes their eternal co-existence.

In its creedal and theological affirmations, the early church used similarly paradoxical language to speak about the Trinity. The doctrinal definitions of Nicaea and Chalcedon served primarily as delimiting statements. That is, they attempted to rule out