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

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.

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.