Decisive choices

Pope Francis        ✔ @Pontifex

Dear young people, do not be afraid of making decisive choices in life. Have faith; the Lord will not abandon you!

Pope Francis on prayer

From the close of the interview: 

“I pray the breviary every morning. I like to pray with the psalms. Then, later, I celebrate Mass. I pray the Rosary. What I really prefer is adoration in the evening, even when I get distracted and think of other things, or even fall asleep praying. In the evening then, between seven and eight o’clock, I stay in front of the Blessed Sacrament for an hour in adoration. But I pray mentally even when I am waiting at the dentist or at other times of the day.

You cannot bring home the frontier

The Pope on frontiers, also from the interview. This is a good gloss on what I've tried to get at earlier in the Pope's thought as it relates to the periphery (which in his earlier thought he seems to refer to as the frontier). [See the tag periphery below for earlier posts on the topic.]

"When I insist on the frontier, I am referring in a particular way to the need for those who work in the world of culture to be inserted into the context in which they operate and on which they reflect. There is always the lurking danger of living in a laboratory. Ours is not a ‘lab faith,’ but a ‘journey faith,’ a historical faith. God has revealed himself as history, not as a compendium of abstract truths. I am afraid of laboratories because in the laboratory you take the problems and then you bring them home to tame them, to paint them artificially, out of their context. You cannot bring home the frontier, but you have to live on the border and be audacious.”

And he links the frontier/periphery, again, with the poor: 

“When it comes to social issues, it is one thing to have a meeting to study the problem of drugs in a slum neighborhood and quite another thing to go there, live there and understand the problem from the inside and study it. There is a brilliant letter by Father Arrupe to the Centers for Social Research and Action on poverty, in which he says clearly that one cannot speak of poverty if one does not experience poverty, with a direct connection to the places in which there is poverty. The word insertion is dangerous because some religious have taken it as a fad, and disasters have occurred because of a lack of discernment. But it is truly important.

Pope Francis's favorite artists

Also from the big interview (see last post for link). This list I found quite impressive.

“I have really loved a diverse array of authors. I love very much Dostoevsky and Hölderlin. I remember Hölderlin for that poem written for the birthday of his grandmother that is very beautiful and was spiritually very enriching for me. The poem ends with the verse, ‘May the man hold fast to what the child has promised.’ I was also impressed because I loved my grandmother Rosa, and in that poem Hölderlin compares his grandmother to the Virgin Mary, who gave birth to Jesus, the friend of the earth who did not consider anybody a foreigner.

“I have read The Betrothed, by Alessandro Manzoni, three times, and I have it now on my table because I want to read it again. Manzoni gave me so much. When I was a child, my grandmother taught me by heart the beginning of The Betrothed: ‘That branch of Lake Como that turns off to the south between two unbroken chains of mountains....’ I also liked Gerard Manley Hopkins very much.

“Among the great painters, I admire Caravaggio; his paintings speak to me. But also Chagall, with his ‘White Crucifixion.’ Among musicians I love Mozart, of course. The ‘Et incarnatus est’ from his Mass in C minor is matchless; it lifts you to God! I love Mozart performed by Clara Haskil. Mozart fulfills me. But I cannot think about his music; I have to listen to it. I like listening to Beethoven, but in a Promethean way, and the most Promethean interpreter for me is Furtwängler. And then Bach’s Passions. The piece by Bach that I love so much is the ‘Erbarme Dich,’ the tears of Peter in the ‘St. Matthew Passion.’ Sublime. Then, at a different level, not intimate in the same way, I love Wagner. I like to listen to him, but not all the time. The performance of Wagner’s ‘Ring’ by Furtwängler at La Scala in Milan in 1950 is for me the best. But also the ‘Parsifal’ by Knappertsbusch in 1962.

“We should also talk about the cinema. ‘La Strada,’ by Fellini, is the movie that perhaps I loved the most. I identify with this movie, in which there is an implicit reference to St. Francis. I also believe that I watched all of the Italian movies with Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi when I was between 10 and 12 years old. Another film that I loved is ‘Rome, Open City.’ I owe my film culture especially to my parents who used to take us to the movies quite often.

“Anyway, in general I love tragic artists, especially classical ones. There is a nice definition that Cervantes puts on the lips of the bachelor Carrasco to praise the story of Don Quixote: ‘Children have it in their hands, young people read it, adults understand it, the elderly praise it.’ For me this can be a good definition of the classics.”

God is a surprise

From the recent big interview with the Pope: 

"God is encountered walking, along the path. At this juncture, someone might say that this is relativism. Is it relativism? Yes, if it is misunderstood as a kind of indistinct pantheism. It is not relativism if it is understood in the biblical sense, that God is always a surprise, so you never know where and how you will find him. You are not setting the time and place of the encounter with him. You must, therefore, discern the encounter. Discernment is essential."

Your life story

Here are two excerpts from Pope Francis's recent homilies at Casa Santa Marta.

Jonah. John August Swanson.

1. On Jonah and the good Samaritan: "I ask myself and I ask you : Do you let God write your life story or do you want to write it yourselves? And this tells us about docility: are we obedient to the Word of God? 'Yes, I want to be docile!' But you, do you have ability to listen, to hear it? Do you have the ability to find the Word of God in your every day life, or are your ideas what keep you going? Or do you allow yourself to be surprised by what the Lord has to say to you?"
2. On Martha and Mary: "And we ourselves, when we don't pray, what we're doing is closing the door to the Lord. And not praying is this: closing the door to the Lord, so that He can do nothing. On the other hand, prayer, in the face of a problem, a difficult situation, a calamity, is opening the door to the Lord so that He will come. So that He builds things, He knows to arrange things, to reorganize things. This is what praying is: opening the door to the Lord, so that he can do something. But if we close the door, God can do nothing!"

Who is writing our life story? Who is building our life? Am I, or is God?

At the feet of Jesus

The Gospel for today is about Martha and Mary. We are all quite familiar with the story. Martha is serving and preparing for Jesus. She must be quite busy. Mary is at the feet of Jesus, listening to his word. Martha becomes a little irritated, understandably, and asks Jesus that Mary help her. And Jesus replies that only one thing is necessary. Mary has the better part--it will not be taken from her.

The story is often interpreted as the elevation of the contemplative life over the active life. Martha is busy trying to prepare the house for Jesus, perhaps a little too busy. She represents the active life. Mary is sitting with Jesus, simply being with him. She represents the contemplative life. Insofar as the contemplative life is objectively superior to the active life--since the contemplative life more closely approximates our life in heaven--this is a legitimate interpretation of the text.

But even as this interpretation answers one question--namely, the relative ranking of the active and the contemplative life--it raises another: how are we to spend our time between the two lives? After all, no one on earth can live a purely contemplative life (even hermits need to eat and sweep out their huts) nor can anyone live a purely active life, try as we will (since nothing can take from man his desire for the happiness that this world can give; he is always restless for more, a sign of his interiority).

So we come to what I think is the deeper point of the Martha and Mary story: the need for discernment. Again, we are faced with a critical question: how do we decide to spend our time? When do we pray and when do we act? It is a question of immense importance, and confusion on the answer can have real consequences. Let's take the parable that immediately precedes the story about Martha and Mary. It is about the Good Samaritan. Here there is a confusion about how we are to spend our time. A priest walks by a wounded man on the way to the Temple, while a Samaritan stops to help. Perhaps the priest thinks to himself, "I'm off to Temple, and I can pray for that poor wounded man on the way. I've chosen the better part--no time to stop." That would be hypocrisy indeed! In this case, even though the contemplative life is superior to the active life, prayer without action would be a great evil. Pray for the wounded man on the road--good, yes!--but also act: attend to him, bandage his wounds, take him to an inn and provide for him.

So the question is this: how do I discern God's will for me, at this moment? How do I balance the obligations between prayer and action, knowing that prayer is the most necessary thing, but that this world also requires and yearns for our works of love? Here is where we get to the heart of today's Gospel. Action and prayer can both be at the service of God. But when we make an idol of our projects, when we cease acting for God and begin to act for ourselves, then we lose sight of the great treasure of our lives. When we begin to act for ourselves rather than God, we become irritable when things do not go our way, when they do not turn out well. We lose our peace. It is then that we have to return to the Master and prayer, reorienting ourselves to him and his designs--the better part.

What is the better part? It is placing ourselves at the feet of Jesus. This is the critical point: we must always place ourselves at the feet of Jesus, listening to his Word. We can place ourselves at his feet when we act, by humbling ourselves and serving others. Christ is in our family members, friends, and colleagues. We can place ourselves at his feet by serving them. We also serve and glorify God by taking time to literally place ourselves at his feet in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament.

The contemplative life is superior to the active life. But human life, no matter one's state, is always a mixture of both contemplation and action. It is our task to discern what God's will is for us at any one moment. We can begin by asking our Lord: "How can I place myself at your feet? Let me hear your word, as Mary does, and respond with action, as Martha does. Give me the heart of these saints." 

Where there is darkness...

We recently celebrated the feast of St. Francis. Below is a prayer attributed to him. The Missionaries of Charity pray it every day after Communion, so it played an important role in Mother Teresa's spirituality. I think that the references to light, peace, love, and joy had a special resonance for Mother Teresa. Jesus told Mother in a locution, "Come, be my light," which is also the title of a book that recounts Mother's dark night of the soul in her own words. In many ways this was her mission, to be Christ's light to the world. The references to peace and love are remembered in Mother's "business card." Of course, these are cursory thoughts; a fuller exposition of the prayer and its role in Mother's spirituality would be a major project in itself! 

Here is a version from the National Shrine of St. Francis in San Francisco: 

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is error, the truth;
Where there is doubt, the faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled, as to console;
To be understood, as to understand;
To be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. 

Amen. 

Processes, spaces, peripheries, horizons

Another fascinating and overlooked quote from the pope's interview: 

"We must not focus on occupying the spaces where power is exercised, but rather on starting long-run historical processes. We must initiate processes rather than occupy spaces. God manifests himself in time and is present in the processes of history. This gives priority to actions that give birth to new historical dynamics. And it requires patience, waiting."

This is a rather cryptic comment. I am intrigued how Pope Francis's rejection of occupying space links up rather well with his concept of peripheries. A periphery is a boundary--it is a line, a limit, a demarcation. A periphery is not a space. It is a vector, a velocity and direction--in other words, a process. A periphery is the edge of space. Occupation of space, control of power, appears to win out in the present moment, but over time, historical processes displace spaces. So God acts in history as a vector, rather than occupying a space.

I think to understand this comment more fully, we need to turn to a comment the pope made earlier in the interview when referring to St. Ignatius:

"I was always struck by a saying that describes the vision of Ignatius: non coerceri a maximo, sed contineri a minimo divinum est (“not to be limited by the greatest and yet to be contained in the tiniest—this is the divine”)....it is important not to be restricted by a larger space, and it is important to be able to stay in restricted spaces. This virtue of the large and small is magnanimity. Thanks to magnanimity, we can always look at the horizon from the position where we are. That means being able to do the little things of every day with a big heart open to God and to others. That means being able to appreciate the small things inside large horizons, those of the kingdom of God."

St. Ignatius

Of course, without saying it, Pope Francis is referring to the logic of the Incarnation here. God is not limited by the greatest things (God is greater than the universe) and yet he is contained in the tiniest (God emptied himself to become a baby in a manger). But it is also the logic of God's essence. It is the interplay of God's transcendence (He is infinitely above and other than all things) and his immanence (He is more intimate to all things than they are to themselves). As Augustine has it: God is more intimate to me than my innermost self and higher than my uppermost self--interior intimo meo et superior summo meo (Confessions, 3.6.11). God is not limited by the greatest spaces, and yet he is in a sense contained in the tiniest. How is this the case? Oddly enough, Thomas Aquinas seems to suggest that God is immanent because he is transcendent. God's transcendence or infinity (his being-esse, his comprehension all perfections) is the ground of all created being that participates in God's esse (i.e., His act of being). And so God is in all because he is above all.

If that confuses you, it should. Check out the Summa (I, 7-8).

In the Incarnation, God reveals in concrete terms what he already shows forth in his essence--that the God who is above all is also in all and present to all. In the Incarnation, this truth takes on a vivid reality. The God who is not subject to time assumes a human nature in time. And he does so in a way that spurns occupation of space, that is, possession of power. God knows that possession of space is static while processes are dynamic. In his utter poverty, Jesus initiates a historical process that changes the world. He changes the vector of history.

Incarnation window from Chartres Cathedral.

The Pope then brings all of this high-flying theology down to earth. The spiritual takeaway from the logic of Incarnation, the dynamics of God's metaphysical relationship with creation, and the rejection of occupying space is this: we can "appreciate the small things inside large horizons". 

Again, the theme of peripheries! A horizon: the boundary between earth and heaven, the mutual limit of each domain, the space in which earth becomes heaven and heaven becomes earth (here again we find the logic of Incarnation and Sacramentality). If the horizon of our life, the eschatological orientation of being, is the Kingdom of God, then all of our actions, even the smallest, can have eternal significance. 

In fact, we could say that the more meaningless our actions seem, the greater significance they have. This is the case because small actions, actions on the periphery (as opposed to space-occupying actions) are God's privileged channels for changing the world. Indeed, precisely because an action seems so small, there are great opportunities in it for love. Why? Because love is humble; it does not seek aggrandizement. To love when no one is looking, when there is no reward on the other end, when choosing not to love would be so easy--it is then that love counts the most, because it is then that love gives freely and purely.

Let's ask St. Therese for light on this point, whose feast day we celebrated recently. Mother Teresa, who took her name from Therese, looked upon her as a guide to the spiritual life. A good summary of Mother's teaching (although I can't verify that she ever said this sentence word for word) is this maxim commonly attributed to here: We can do no great things, only small things with great love. 

The Little Flower

Making a mess

Pope Francis on religious life (from the recent big interview):

“Religious men and women are prophets,” says the pope. “They are those who have chosen a following of Jesus that imitates his life in obedience to the Father, poverty, community life and chastity. In this sense, the vows cannot end up being caricatures; otherwise, for example, community life becomes hell, and chastity becomes a way of life for unfruitful bachelors. The vow of chastity must be a vow of fruitfulness. In the church, the religious are called to be prophets in particular by demonstrating how Jesus lived on this earth, and to proclaim how the kingdom of God will be in its perfection. A religious must never give up prophecy. This does not mean opposing the hierarchical part of the church, although the prophetic function and the hierarchical structure do not coincide. I am talking about a proposal that is always positive, but it should not cause timidity. Let us think about what so many great saints, monks and religious men and women have done, from St. Anthony the Abbot onward. Being prophets may sometimes imply making waves. I do not know how to put it.... Prophecy makes noise, uproar, some say ‘a mess.’ But in reality, the charism of religious people is like yeast: prophecy announces the spirit of the Gospel.”

Word cloud of the most common words in the prophetic books.

Peripheral beauty

The Cross is the fullest revelation of God's love that man has received. So the Cross is the most beautiful creation, insofar as it most fully reveals the hidden depths of God's-being-love. And perhaps we could say that the pinnacle of this revelation was Christ's cry of thirst from the cross, his thirst for our love, to love and be loved by us. And we find this beauty, today, at this moment in history, on the periphery of existence. If we are looking to discover beauty in our life, if we want to find something more meaningful--what are we waiting for? Duc in altum. Launch into the deep! Into the depths of the love of Christ, into uncertainty, into a life lived in radical trust.

Peripheral litrugy

The periphery is the place where the poorest of the poor dwell. The periphery of history is the Cross. If we imagine time as a ray (a line extending in a certain direction), the moment of the Crucifixion is the point on the line tangent to eternity. It is the point at which we become closest to entering into the eternal, into the life of God, for God alone is without beginning or end. For this reason, our liturgies are remembrances of the Paschal mystery. It is in the liturgy that we enter into the Paschal sacrifice and touch eternity, whether we are being baptized or receiving Last Rites. The periphery is our place of departure into the deeper realities of love and sacrifice, the places where time meets eternity.

Let us make our lives peripheral liturgies, sacrifices to God.

Towards a theology of thirst

The divine thirst is the first principle and foundation of the MC charism. All else is contained within the experience of thirsting for and being thirsted for by Christ. Accordingly, any theological work must begin with this principle and keep it ever in mind. It will be the soul of any theology that seeks to explicate the MC charism.

What is the task of the theologian as he studies the charism received and transmitted by Mother Teresa? I think it is to make explicit what was implicitly lived and taught by Mother. She was not a theologian, in the normal sense of the word, but I suspect that she had a deeper theological outlook on reality than almost any theologian that lived in the 20th century (and beyond), insofar as she more deeply penetrated the mysteries of reality and their ordering principle--i.e., the divine thirst.

At the beginning of the Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas makes an interesting distinction between two types of wisdom (I, 1, 6, ad 3). One type of wisdom judges by inclination. The virtuous man knows what is right, for example, though he may not be able to explain why. This wisdom is given as a gift of the Holy Spirit. Another type of wisdom (sacred theology) judges by knowledge. This knowledge of wisdom is acquired by study. The moral theologian knows what is right, not by inclination necessarily, but by a thorough study of the precepts of the natural and divine law, etc. Mother Teresa was wise in the first way. She judged by inclination, illuminated by the divine light. It is the task of the theologian to (1) enter into and (2) give an account of this light.

Mother Teresa came to theologically profound conclusions about the relationship between the poor and the Eucharist, the role of suffering in the Mystical Body of Christ, the meaning of human vocation, the phenomenology of love, the meaning of spiritual and material poverty, the interrelationship of beauty and sanctity, to name a few themes. She rarely gave arguments for her conclusions, having received them in the depths of prayer, but since they come from God, they are surer lights to truth than any worldly philosophy. A theology of thirst can help us to explore her conclusions and their significance, with the aim of making manifest the profound depth of the charism so as to draw others to sanctity.

Although many biographies and memoirs have been written about Mother Teresa--the most recent of which have focused on her dark night of the soul--very little work has been done on the theology underpinning the charism. The most significant step in this direction, I think, would be the book Mother Teresa's Secret Fire written by Father Joseph Langford, co-founder of the MC Fathers (read an excellent biography of Father Joseph and the inspiration for the book here). He writes in Secret Fire that Mother Teresa's vision "takes us into the depths of the Trinity in one direction, and the depths of human nature in the other" (84). I think there is no better time than now to explore this theme.

The application of beauty

What are the end of all these musings on beauty? Why spend the time trying to grasp the relationship between beauty and being, the structure of beauty, and its relationship to love? I think because more fully understanding beauty is a key to unlocking Mother Teresa's vision of the human vocation.

Mother teaches us that we must make our lives something beautiful for God. I think we now have the tools to explicitly describe what Mother Teresa implicitly grasped:

• Christ's crucifixion is the apex of created beauty, insofar as it most fully reveals the depths of divine being whose essence is love (we can understand the processions of the Trinity from Father to Son and Father and Son to the Holy Spirit as perfect gifts of self [=love]. The crucifixion is a creaturely icon of this self-gift). Our entrance into this beauty is a double ecstasis. It is a meeting of thirsts: Christ's thirst to love and our thirst to be loved. Or Christ's thirst to be loved and our thirst to love. Here is the core of the charism of the Missionaries of Charity. 
• Holiness (beauty) is the goal of human life. This could change how we understand even the smallest of our tasks. If we are able to orient all of our work towards the final goal of holiness, and if we understand holiness as beauty (the glimpse of God that breaks out of our life and into the lives of others), we can find intense meaning in even the smallest tasks.
• The Church teaches the path to beauty. To want to live a beautiful life is not some false sentimentality. The objective path to beauty (and the most beautiful life is the holy life, inasmuch as the holy life more fully reveals the being of God who is love) is taught to us by the Church, above all in Scripture and Tradition as interpreted by the Magisterium. The Church calls us to holiness and gives us the means: Tradition and Scripture guide us, the Magisterium instructs us, the Sacraments strengthen us and prepare us to live charitably, and our prayer feeds us. Mother Teresa's holiness was a holiness lived from and for the Church. Let us make her mantra our own: I will give saints to Holy Mother Church [starting, we could add, with myself!].

I hope to return more to the theme of beauty and its relation to Mother's charism in future posts. 

Summa on beauty

In the last several posts, we've done some heavy philosophical lifting to get at a better understanding of beauty. In case I lost you in those abstractions, here is a brief summary of those posts:

1. Beauty is objective. Some beings are more beautiful than others, although every being has some share in beauty, insofar as all beings possess esse, a participation in God's being. Those beings who more fully participate in the being of God, show forth more of they mystery of being, and therefore are more beautiful, from an ontological perspective. A tree and a human can both be beautiful, but the spiritual capabilities of man make him more beautiful (a tree cannot think, will, or commune with God, but a man can do all these and more).
2. Beauty is the self-revelatory property of being. Here is a quick take on the relationship between the transcendental properties of being: A thing is good insofar as it is desirable; what is desirable is also intelligible, insofar as it must be known before it can be desired (True); only that which is visible to the intellect, presenting itself, can be known by the intellect (Beautiful); what can present itself as "this thing" rather than "that thing" must be unified (One). In this schema, beauty is the bridge by which we come to a deeper understanding of the mystery of being itself.
3. Beauty is characterized by a lumen-species structure. There is an appearance (species) of a mystery that breaks forth from what appears (lumen). So a beautiful being simultaneously reveals and hides the mystery it re-presents. Think of Christ's humanity revealing the invisible divinity. 
4. Beauty is closely related to the dynamics of love. Insofar as there is a double movement that results in union between the lover and beloved, so too in our experience of the beautiful, there is a double movement from the beheld and the beholder that unites the two. 

Sainte-Chapelle, Paris.
Stained glass is another good example of how beauty both reveals 
and hides a mystery. It symbolically shows forth some of the mystery of the 
New Heavens and New Earth. It presents us with a radiant darkness!

In our next post, we will apply some of these findings to Mother Teresa's charism. 

The structure of beauty

Below is a short excerpt from an essay I wrote on the subjective evidence of faith, as it is presented in the first volume of Balthasar's 15-volume Triptych. I think that Balthasar's understanding of form gives us some insight into the structure of beauty and the way in which it functions as the transcendental property of being that reveals and shows forth being. Beauty is the visibility of being. From these reflections we can move into understanding how beauty and the sacred combine to form a compelling argument for the validity of the Catholic faith, as lived by Mother Teresa. In the essay, I take the finale to Mozart's Jupiter Symphony as an example of beauty's visibility:

Here is the relevant excerpt: 

What does Balthasar mean when he talks about form? For starters, it is an aesthetic category. Form has two elements: “Both natural and artistic form has an exterior which appears and an interior depth, both of which, however, are not separable in the form itself.” (147). In keeping with the medieval aesthetic tradition that finds its root in Plato, Balthasar calls the exterior aspect the species (that which is seen) and he calls the interior aspect the lumen. The lumen is the radiance, splendor, or glory (divine lumen) breaking out of the species.

Two important aesthetic consequences result from the species-lumen structure. First, as we noted before, “The content (Gehalt) does not lie behind the form (Gestalt), but within it” (147). So if we are to perceive the content we can only perceive it in and through the form. Second, the appearance of the form does not merely point to an “invisible, unfathomable mystery,” but is also the mystery itself (146). It both is and is not what it signifies. This is the dialectic of disclosure and un-disclosure that we alluded to earlier in our comments on Christ’s hypostatic union. In sum, the form is both the “real presence of the depths” and a “real pointing beyond itself to these depths” (116).

An example of the double movement of disclosure and non-disclosure.
We cannot look directly at the sun, but can come to know its radiance through
its appearance in the form of the clouds. The clouds both reveal the sun (we could
not directly look at it otherwise) and conceals it (the illuminated cloud is not the sun).

Take an example—Mozart’s finale to the Jupiter symphony (No. 41), a work that Balthasar finds irresistibly beautiful (cf. Love Alone is Beautiful, 53). I hope we can begin with the shared assumption that the symphony qualifies as beautiful. But what is the source of that beauty? Why is it beautiful? The beauty of the finale of Mozart’s symphony reveals itself in the sounding notes, especially in the way the coda simultaneously weaves together the five independent themes of the symphony, an unprecedented feat of integral complexity in the history of music. We can identify these themes in technical language and observe the subtlety of Mozart’s attention to details. In a certain sense the beauty is the arrangement and order of the sounding notes (what else is there?).

So the sound is the species. Yet we are certain that the beauty is not merely this collection of sounding notes. The notes also point to some irreducible mystery beyond the notes, which the sound reveals—allowing the mystery to break out in a radiant splendor from the notes—even as it hides the mystery (we sense that the mystery, whatever it is, is not subject to time, for instance, but the finale expresses it in time and so hides its non-temporality). What is the mystery, though? Is the symphony “about” something?

Some will say it expresses Mozart’s will to defy gloriously the buffets fate has dealt him: the recent death of his daughter, the loss of his audience’s interest, his brokenness and debt, the outbreak of war. But this is not the mystery, even if it is the context of the mystery that reveals itself. It cannot be reduced to an utterance. Still, we feel that the mystery is beautiful in that it shows something about reality. And the way it shows that je ne sais quoi is truth-full. The symphony corresponds to something in reality: the dynamism, balance, order, and resolution of the symphony mirrors something of cosmic proportion that is beyond rational explication. It defies formulation. Mozart’s re-presentation of the mystery somehow points to and touches the self-showing beauty of being, that point at which all the questions of man find resolution. There is a gratuitousness of the finale’s beauty that carries within itself its own credibility. The necessity of the symphony—the feeling that no note could be added or taken away from it, unless by Mozart himself—demands our surrender, yet we cannot say why. We will return to these reflections later.

Hubble image of stellar dust. NASA.

The Classical notion of Vollendung (“the form which contains the depths”) and the Romantic notion of Unendlichkeit (“the form that transcends itself by pointing beyond to the depths”) together “constitute the fundamental configuration of being” (116). Being becomes a portal to the theological. If we properly behold the form of a thing, we behold both its appearance and its radiance, “as the splendor, as the glory of Being” (116). These depths transport us to the last horizon of being, the point at which all reality becomes intelligible. We also note that in our experience of being, the vertical and horizontal are equally necessary: we “plunge (vertically) into the naked depths” through an encounter with the “horizontal (form)” (117). In other words, in our experience of beauty, we gain access to absolute being through a particular existent. The parallel between the horizontal-vertical unity of the beautiful and the hypostatic union of the God-man is, I hope, apparent.

We must also note that eros is always involved in perception of form. “Already in the realm of nature, eros is the chosen place of beauty:” whatever we love appears as, “radiant with glory,” and whatever is glorious in itself, “does not penetrate into the onlooker except through the specificity of an eros” (Love Alone is Beautiful, 54). There is a meeting between the perception of the subject and the radiance of the object. A double extasis occurs, in which the beholder is drawn out of himself and into the object perceived, into the depths of the mystery. The object, for its part, radiates a splendor that draws the subject towards it. These two movements are the subjective and objective aspects of perception.

A truly beautiful work of art, in its radiant glory, never ceases to fascinate the viewer, drawing him into the depths of the present mystery. The viewer becomes unaware of time, unaware of himself, and joins himself to the mystery. The experience of falling in love captures the movement well. The lover, in his love for the beloved, forgets himself and is transported into the eyes of the beloved that shine in splendor.

Beauty and mimesis

In my last post, I gave a thumbnail sketch that focused on the objective basis of beauty. I ended my post with the conclusion that beauty, as the epiphany of form (Plato), is the self-showing property of being (Balthasar). It is being as it relates to the apprehension (we could say this idea comes from Aquinas, but to be clear, it's still a disputed question whether or not beauty is a transcendental for Thomas--for those interested here is an audio presentation on the issue from St. Thomas Aquinas College).

The point of all this, remember, is to better appreciate the role that beauty plays in the charism of Mother Teresa. A fuller understanding of beauty, I am convinced, can help us more fully  and explicitly grasp what was implicitly intuited by Mother Teresa: that to live beautifully, far from being a sentimental cliche, is in fact the deepest vocation of humanity.

In this post, I want to raise the question of what it means to say that beauty is the revelatory character of being qua being. Now when it comes to representational artwork, we could call this the mimetic character of art, it is rather easy to see how beauty is the epiphany of form, even when form becomes more stylized (in the modern period) or symbolic (in the medieval period). Below, a few examples of representation art in different media:

Turner, Sunrise with Sea Monsters. Oil on canvas. 1845.

Raphael, School of Athens. Fresco. 1511.

Stigmatization of St. Francis. Stained glass. Barfusserkirche. 1235-1245.

Personification of Ktisis (Foundation). Byzantine mosaic. 500-550.

We could say the same about representational sculpture and even music (insofar as some pieces are representative of emotions, for example). But what do we make of art that is non-representational? Think about a painting by Pollock or one of Mozart's symphonies or abstract expressionist sculpture. these seem to be good test cases for trying to understand what we say when we say that beauty is the epiphany of form, the revelation of being. In the next post, I'll give some of my observations.

Beauty, being, and the transcendentals

[This post is a little heavier than usual. A summary of the argument and more interesting implications can be found at the end of the post!]

Most people today understand beauty to be a subjective appraisal of an object. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so goes the saying. This idiom is often resorted to when people disagree about whether or not something is beautiful. Imagine you and I are at an art gallery. You find a particular work beautiful, but I don't. We talk for a bit, and end up agreeing to disagree. And no hard feelings, we tell each other, because beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You're not wrong and I'm not wrong. We just have a different opinion. Beauty, this perspective proposes, is a matter of taste. Or is it? We're asking this question: Is there any on which can we judge something as more beautiful than another thing?

Before we answer that question, let's remember why we're asking it. What's at stake in the question? Why should we care if beauty has an objective basis or whether it's just a matter of taste? it gets back to the teachings of Mother Teresa that we're trying to understand. "Make every action something beautiful for God," she instructs us. Well, if beauty is simply a matter of taste, than what makes an action beautiful or not beautiful is just a matter of taste, a matter of opinion. And once we accept that premise, we very quickly fall into moral relativism (the refutation of which would require another post, at least).

Not so uncommon a view today.

But back to the question: is beauty merely a matter of opinion? I think that the reduction of beauty to subjective judgment without an objective basis degrades beauty to the level of all other things that are a matter of taste. You might like vanilla ice cream and I might like chocolate ice cream, but we can disagree--it's a matter of taste. Vanilla is not objectively better than chocolate. We just have different preferences. Is the same true of art? Is a pop song by Ke$ha really just as beautiful as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (hint: the answer is no)? And if Beethoven's symphony is more beautiful, what is the objective basis for making such a determination?

Before we can answer that question, we need a small crash course in Aristotelian and Scholastic metaphysics in order to familiarize ourselves with two concepts: being and the transcendentals. I'll be drawing mostly from the thought of Thomas Aquinas. We proceed to our first question:

What is being? Ens est id cuius actus est esse [see this wonderful compilation of scholastic axioms]. Being is that whose act is to be. We could say that anything that is has being. But we should note that being is different than existence. Existence is dichotomous. A tree exists and a man exist. But a man exists in a different way than a tree. His act of being is different than the tree's. In scholastic terminology, we say that the particular mode of being of the man--i.e., the form of the man--is different than the form of the tree. A man exists as a creature that thinks, wills, feels, etc. A tree does none of these things, but it does grow and reproduce.

Here's my point: whereas existence is dichotomous (things either exist or they don't), being is intensive (things can exist in many different ways, on account of their different forms). To put it another way, being admits of degrees. We could say it's multichotomous, rather than dichotomous. A man has more being than a tree, because it can think and will and feel and move, whereas a tree can only grow and reproduce. Man more fully expresses the possibilities of being.

Hierarchy of Being.
From Rhetorica Christiana, 1579. 

Why should we care about the difference between being and existence, whether one is dichotomous and the other is intensive, etc? Keep reading. We need one more concept to get there, the transcendentals. What are the transcendentals? Transcendentale est universalis modu entis inquantum entis. A transcendental is a universal mode of being insofar as it is being. To put it another way: a transcendental is a property of being that pertains to all being qua being. All things that are possess these properties. 

In Scholastic philosophy, they are four: all being is one, true, good, and beautiful. Since all being as being has these properties, the transcendentals are convertible. So whatever is one is also true, good, and beautiful; whatever is beautiful is also one, true, and good; etc. Under this schema, what is beauty? Ens relate ad apprehensum. Being in relation to the apprehension. It is the revelatory character of being, the aspect of being that is self-showing, that gives itself to the intellect to be understood (as truth) and acted upon by the will (as good). As Balthasar would have it: "The basic phenomenon in all three of them [the true, good, and beautiful] was their epiphanic character, which permeates everything that exists: self-showing (beauty), self-giving (goodness), self-saying (truth), were all seen to be various aspects of this appearing. This appearing is a king of shining-out that recalls the illuminating action of light" (Chapter 5, section c in the Epilogue to his Triptych).

Of course, none of these are my ideas, nor are they new ideas. I'm relying here first of all on Plato's notion of beauty from Symposium: beauty is the epiphany of form that functions as a bridge to the divine (cf. 210 [acc. to Stephanus pagination]). I am also appropriating Heidegger's notion of aletheia (unconcealedness or disclosure), which he identifies as truth in The Origin of the Work of Art but later admits, correctly I think, that "to raise the question of aletheia, of disclosure as such, is not the same as raising the question of truth. For this reason, it was inadequate and misleading to call aletheia, in the sense of opening, truth" (On Time and Being, p. 70). I think what Heidegger was getting at with the notion of aletheia as the opening and disclosure of a world is what Plato understood as the epiphany of form and what the Scholastics would understand as beauty. So the notion of beauty as the self-showing aspect of being has a long and rather distinguished philosophical genealogy.

Plato's Academy. Mosaic from a villa in Pompeii.

At this point, perhaps you're thinking that not all things are beautiful and true and good. There seems to be much in the world that is not beautiful and good. Things like genocide, starving children, civil wars, and natural disasters that we read about in the news every day. Here it is important to keep in mind the aspect under which being is beautiful, etc. All being is beautiful as being. Some beings as evil agents are perverse and ugly. But even these people who do ugly things are still beautiful insofar as they are beings. They are morally evil, yes, but ontologically good, true, and beautiful. So we need to be careful to recognize the formal aspects under which we judge something as beautiful. 

To summarize: 

1. Being is that which is. Everything that exists has being, but not all being exists in the same way. Different beings exist through different modes (called forms). Being admits of degrees in such a way that one thing (e.g., a man) can have more being than another thing (e.g., a tree). 
2. The transcendentals are properties common to all being as being. That is to say: everything that is has these qualities. They are the one, true, good, and beautiful. Beauty is being qua being as it relates to the apprehension. It is, in other words, the self-showing property of being. 

With this framework, our conclusions about beauty fall into place rather easily:

1. All things that exist are beings. Some things have more being than others (they more fully express the possible ways of being).
2. All being possess transcendental properties. The more being a thing possesses, the more one, true, good, and beautiful it is qua being. Why? If beauty is the self-showing property of being, a thing that has more being will be able to show/reveal more being than that which has less. 

To answer our original question: we can judge something as more or less beautiful on the basis that it possesses and shows forth more being than another. This is primarily a conclusion that applies to the ontological realm. It would take quite a bit more work to move from here to the ethical realm, but I would at least suggest a way forward: the human who lives a more beautiful life is the one who more fully reveals the possibilities of being and the nature of being itself.

If God is the source of all being-- ipsum esse per se subsistens, being itself subsisting through itself (again, material another post!)--then the human who is most beautiful is the one whose life more fully reveals being itself by conforming itself to that Being's mode of being. And if the essence of that supreme being--being itself--is love, then the life that is most beautiful is the life most fully lived in love. And what is it to love? To will the good of the other as other (that is, for its own good and not for your own benefit). So Christ lived the most beautiful human life because through his human nature he most fully revealed (incarnated) being itself is and showed forth the possibilities of being. He most fully showed us what love is and how to love.

I would suggest that the saints and blesseds, including Mother Teresa, did something similar: showing us new ways of living in the world in conformance with the life of freedom that is life lived in and for God. 

Living flames

"I have come to cast fire upon the earth..."

The fire of divine beauty will transform us into living flames of charity.
Scripture is the Word on Fire. Christ is the flame.
Kindle this flame within your heart and cast it upon the world. 

Beauty, evangelization, and MT

Here is another fascinating video from Father Robert Barron. In it he discusses the role of beauty in the New Evangelization. here's his thesis: "The best way to evangelize...is to move from the beautiful, then to the good, then to the true. And to get that backwards is to evangelize very ineffectively." Since our culture tends to be suspicious of truth claims ("all religions are at their core the same"), and relativistic on the question of morality ("what's good for you isn't necessarily good for me"), it is best to start with the beautiful--simply to present beauty to a person. Not to tell them that what they're doing is wrong or that they're living a life of lies. Obviously no one likes that. Simply to show them the beautiful.

It is difficult to argue with something beautiful, perhaps because beauty doesn't make an argument. It shows forth something, it gives of its essence to the beholder. Beauty seizes us and compels us to enter into the world that it has created, the world that it shows forth. The experience of beauty is also something intensely personal (although beauty itself is not subjective), and for this reason it is a good place to begin evangelizing in the modern world, which places so much emphasis on subjectivity and personal experience. It is hard to deny the beauty of the Sistine Chapel, the Divine Comedy, or Palestrina's motets, as Father Barron notes. It is even harder to deny the beauty of a saintly life. 

I think this is one reason why Mother Teresa so fascinated the world. She did make claims about truth and goodness that cut against the modern world, especially on abortion (as she so often said, "abortion is the greatest destroyer of peace in the world"). But most people's first encounter with Mother Teresa was witnessing her work with the poor, the selfless sacrifice she made day after day for those who had nothing and no one. Who could fail to see the beauty of a life so lived? 

From the beautiful, we move to the good: when we encounter beauty we ask ourselves, how can I become like that? how can I become beautiful? And here we have the good. Once we are striving towards goodness, we are likely to ask ourselves about truth: what is the goal of my action in the world? what is the end toward which I am ordering all my activity? The beautiful opens us to the world of the good and true, in a way that seems more inviting than demanding. 

And so, when Mother Teresa gave the 1982 Harvard commencement speech, she could denounce abortion and call students who had cheated to repentance--and still receive a long standing ovation. Can you imagine any other Catholic religious figure giving a speech denouncing abortion at Harvard, that bastion of secular bastions, and receiving a long standing ovation? I think not.

Yet people listened to her, and listened intently. Why? Because she lived a beautiful life. She made great sacrifices that few others were willing to make, and so the world listened. And through that beautiful life she opened up to us more distant horizons and broader vistas, the life of beauty lived entirely from, for, and with Christ. She showed us that beauty is our portal into the divine. 

Something beautiful

Beauty was a key category for Mother Teresa. When I was at Kalighat, the home for the aged and dying in Calcutta, there was a sign that read, "Let every action be something beautiful for God." I think it was one of Mother's favorites. To those who implicitly criticized the work that she did as enabling the poor or somehow not being enough she would say: "I can do what you cannot do. You can do what I cannot do. Together we can do something beautiful for God." Many people have heard both of these quotes, but I suspect that not many people know what they mean.

Mother Teresa became a living presence of the divine beauty in the world. I think it is no small aspiration to want to become beauty. It is our vocation: to become beautiful. We are made in the image and likeness of God, and God is beauty itself. But we have lots of mud and grime caked on this image within us, and it takes hard work to scrape it away and let the divine light break forth.

In the next few posts, I'll be exploring beauty. I think if we can understand this concept better, we can come to a much deeper appreciation of what Mother Teresa meant in the above quotes.

What, after all, is beauty?

Who is Jesus?

Christ asks his disciples in today's Gospel: "Who do you say that I am?" (Lk 9:20). It is a question worth asking ourselves. Who is Christ to me? What is my relationship to Christ? We know the answers of others. He is a great prophet (Lk 9:19). We could translate that this way in the 21st century--he's a good and holy man, a wise teacher...but not God. Sound familiar? It is a scandal to the secularism of our culture that God assumed a human nature, that God became man (cf. Jn 1:14).

When she was in the hospital, Mother Teresa made a meditation on the parallel passage of this Gospel in Matthew (cf. Mt 16:15). I post her meditation below:

"Jesus is the leper..." Lepers in Pune, India.

Who do you say I am?

You are God. 
You are God from God. 
You are Begotten, not made. 
You are One in Substance with the Father. 
You are the Son of the Living God. 
You are the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. 
You are One with the Father.
You are in the Father from the beginning: All things were made by You and the Father.
You are the Beloved Son in Whom the Father is well pleased. 
You are the Son of Mary, conceived in the Holy Spirit in the womb of Mary. 
You were born in Bethlehem.
You were wrapped in swaddling clothes by Mary and put in the manger full of straw. 
You were kept warm by the breath of the donkey who carried your mother with you in her womb. 
You are the Son of Joseph, the carpenter who is known by the people of Nazareth. 
You are an ordinary man without much learning as judged by the learned people of Israel. 

Who is Jesus to me? 

Jesus is the Word Made Flesh. 
Jesus is the Bread of Life. 
Jesus is the Victim offered for our sins on the Cross. 
Jesus is the Sacrifice offered at the Holy Mass for the sins of the world and mine. 
Jesus is the Word--to be spoken. 
Jesus is the Truth--to be told. 
Jesus is the Way--to be walked. 
Jesus is the Light--to be lit. 
Jesus is the Love--to be loved. 
Jesus is the Joy--to be shared. 
Jesus is the Sacrifice--to be offered. 
Jesus is the Peace--to be given. 
Jesus is the Bread of Life--to be eaten. 
Jesus is the hungry--to be fed. 
Jesus is the Thirsty--to be satiated. 
Jesus is the Naked--to be clothed. 
Jesus is the Homeless--to be taken in. 
Jesus is the sick--to be healed. 
Jesus is the Lonely--to be loved. 
Jesus is the Unwanted--to be wanted. 
Jesus is the Leper--to wash his wounds. 
Jesus is the Beggar--to give a smile. 
Jesus is the Drunkard--to listen to him. 
Jesus is the Mental--to protect him. 
Jesus is the Little One--to embrace him.
Jesus is the Blind--to lead him. 
Jesus is the Dumb--to speak for him. 
Jesus is the crippled--to walk with him. 
Jesus is the Drug Addict--to befriend him. 
Jesus is the Prostitute--to remove from danger and befriend her. 
Jesus is the Prisoner--to be visited. 
Jesus is the Old--to be served. 

To me--

Jesus is my God.
Jesus is my Spouse.
Jesus is my Life. 
Jesus is my only Love. 
Jesus is my All in All. 
Jesus is my Everything. 

Jesus, I love with my whole heart, with my whole being.
I have given him all, even my sins and He has espoused me to Himself in tenderness and love. 
Now and for life I am the Spouse of my Crucified Spouse. 

Amen. 

God bless you,
Mother Teresa, MC

Types of poverty

Here is a matrix I put together on the relationship between different types of poverty (if you're reading this on a computer, you can click the image to enlarge it):

A note on terms. I'm presenting wealth and poverty under two aspects, the objective and the subjective. We could say that one's objective poverty/wealth is measured by the size of one's bank account. It refers to a measurable object outside of the subject (viz., material goods). Subjective poverty/wealth is measured by one's relationship with others and with God, who is the ultimate source of our happiness and meaning. It refers to a relationship intrinsic to the subject.

Obviously there's nothing wrong, in itself, with buying purses.
But there is a type of spiritual poverty that seeks to replace God with things.

According to this chart, the poorest of the poor would be those who are spiritually and materially poor. Ranking the other types of poverty is more difficult and depends in part on your hierarchy of values. Is spiritual or material well-being more important to you?

Consider this thought experiment--to be spiritually rich and materially poor or spiritually poor and materially rich--which would you choose? The question quickly reveals our hierarchy of values. To be fair, there are an infinite number of nuances and qualifications that make answering that question difficult, if not impossible. But if we simplify the choice to this--would you rather be rich without God or poor with God?--I think we can agree that the ideal Christian would choose poverty with God over wealth without God. Thus we have Christ on the Cross.

Mother Teresa often spoke about the difference between spiritual and material poverty, and how people in both situations could be called the poorest of the poor. She also observed that spiritual poverty is much deeper and more painful than material poverty (so there's a good case to be made that the person who is spiritually rich and materially poor is better off than the person who is spiritually poor and materially rich, though this requires an eschatological perspective. "Blessed are the poor...").

In her talks, she often associated material poverty with the developing world and spiritual poverty with the developed world. It would, of course, be dangerous to reify this distinction. Mother Teresa knew that the materially poor also exist in the developed world, just as the spiritually poor exist in the developing world. But it is generally true that development and material contentment can threaten us with a spiritual malaise. Development is good (obviously), as is the material world (obviously), but when we inordinately desire our material good over our spiritual good, sin lurks nearby.

The authority of mystery

The Gospel for today (Thursday, Week 25 of OT) recounts the perplexity of Herod the Tetrarch (Lk 9:7-9). Presumably he has heard about the great miracles this man from Nazareth has wrought: raising the dead to life, casting out demons, quelling storms, and healing the sick and lepers. Quite naturally, Herod asks, "who is this about whom I hear such things?" The opinion polls are divided. Some think it is John the Baptist risen from the dead, others Elijah, and still others one of the great prophets.

The consequence of categorization.

What is the response of Herod and the people to Jesus Christ, to this miraculous intervention of the divine in history? First, perplexity (Lk 9:7). How are we to understand this Jesus of Nazareth? How is it that a man from such a humble background could work such great miracles? There is something mysterious about this man, something that can't be explained. He does not fit our expectations. There is some power working in and through him whose source remains hidden. 

What is the response to the perplexity that this great mystery inspires in us? It is to categorize: to demystify the mystery, to desacralize the sacred, to make the mystery fit into human containers and expectations. The people place Jesus in their own categories--perhaps this is a great prophet, they say. Herod probably sees him as a miracle-worker with unusual teachings (cf. Lk 28:8). Of course, neither Herod nor the people are right in their assessment of Jesus's identity, though they are not entirely wrong, either.

Do we fit this pattern of behavior? Are we perplexed by the intervention of the divine in history, choosing to categorize the divine according to our expectations, in such a way that we are not entirely wrong, but still far from being right? Note that the people do see something divine in Jesus. They think he is a prophet, because he has wrought extraordinary miracles. And yet the true identity of Jesus, the God-man, still infinitely exceeds their grasp.

Are we fully alive to the working of God in our lives, or are we too busy categorizing God's actions, certain that we know how he does and does not act? In the present moment, we are usually not capable of discerning what is from God and what is not. Discernment requires times (cf. Mt 7:16). Rather than categorizing, would it not be safer to do as Mary does: pondering these things in our hearts (cf. Lk 2:19)? She, who has encountered the deepest mystery, gives it the deepest reverence. 

"Mary, treasured all of these things..."

Herod is not without redeemable qualities. In his perplexity, he "endeavored to see him," to see Christ, though almost certainly for the wrong reasons (Lk 8:9). But we would do well to follow Herod's lead, endeavoring to see Christ, although we should do so inspired by a genuine faith, a faith that seeks holiness, and not out of trivial curiosity. We can bring this faith to all our activities today: our work, recreation, and relationships, seeking to encounter Christ, remaining always open to the possibility of encountering the divine. And when we do encounter Christ, or think that we may have, we must remember to let God be God, as Mary does--to let time unfold the fruit of the mystery present at every moment of existence. Not to categorize immediately, but to respect the authority and logic of mystery, which draws us inexplicably to holiness.