35. UTILITARIANISM

    Echoes of the "common good" can be heard in the principle which functioned as the god-term in Bentham's utilitarianism.  Bentham addressed issues raised by a transition from the  medieval belief that God demanded conformity to a divinely ordained social order to an enthusiastic embrace of the promise that the industrial system enabled human beings to harness nature to their purposes.  To deal with the massive disruptions produced by an inexorably advancing industrialization and the dehumanizing slums produced by an unrestrained exploitation of individuals, Bentham posited the formula, "the greatest good of the greatest number," as the god-term in a moral discourse designed to harness the mastery over nature to social ends.

    In effect, Bentham realized that the competition which propelled the Industrial Revolution could result in a Hobbesian war of all against all.  In his response, he wedded the metaphor of individuality forged by Locke to the assumption that the industrial revolution was irreversible.  Echoing the assumption that individuals act out of enlightened self-interest, he re-centered moral discourse in a disinterested calculus designed to distribute the goods produced by an emerging capitalism as fairly as possible.  And he was willing to ground moral discourse in an economic system in which some would inevitably be losers.

        (NB:  Even a cursory analysis of the political discourse in the United States reveals its debt to an amorphous utilitarianism.  For the most part, Democrats act pragmatically.  On their part, Republicans claim to work from principle, but the principles they advocate are little more than rationalizations of policies designed to protect the privileges of the wealthy and powerful.  They win advocates only as long as they are useful for the purpose that rules the party.)

    To escape from a moral discourse which required some individuals to submit to exploitation, John Stuart Mill presented utilitarianism as a vision, not a calculus.  As a young man, he had suffered a breakdown which evoked in him an intense awareness of the personal dimensions of experience.  Later, as a literary heir of the biblical tradition, he placed the notion of "use" at the center of the prophetic vision which located God's moral will in the cries of the oppressed, dispossessed, marginalized and silenced.  In effect, he espoused a traditional moral discourse designed to promote the quest for a fully human and uniquely personal existence for all.  And from that cultural heritage, he envisioned a society which trusted that free individuals would gladly use their abilities to the fullest.  As a supplement to this inherently political discourse, he also suggested that addressing the increasingly complex issues generated by the Industrial Revolution would evoke the fullest use of anyone's abilities.

    Marx, in turn, echoed Mill's vision in his vision of a society governed by the formula:  "From each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs."  During the decades dominated by the Cold War, Marx's use of Mill was the kiss of death for Mill's critique of utilitarianism from within.  I find that very sad.

    Lest I go on endlessly, I merely note that an ethics of intimacy renders moral discourses centered in various versions of the common good irrelevant by centering political discourse in a shared vulnerability, not a struggle for power.  In this context, no one can pretend to offer an authoritative definition of what constitutes the "common good."

34. THE HOLLOW CENTER OF REFERENCES TO "THE COMMON GOOD"

   

   At a recent symposium on Franciscan values, the presenters emphasized Francis's profound respect for the individual and his willingness to form a community committed to sharing a life informed by vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.

     In the ensuing discussion, a member of the audience sought to situate the distinction between respect for individuals and a concern for community in the context of medieval ethical theories which centered moral discourse in references to "the common good".

     Clearly, the efforts by contemporary Thomists to use references to "the common good" as a god-term in moral discourse are designed to re-establish the authority of Aquinas in the Catholic tradition.  That authority is crucial to their argument that a rational and purposive Creator inscribed an objective moral order that can be discerned by the use of reaso—creation by a rational and purposive Creator.  But this argument (and the authority of Aquinas) is undermined, irreparably, by Descartes' geometrization of the universe, which made references to a teleologically structure universe meaningless.  And it was further undermined by the way that modern champions of individuality filled the hollow centers of their metaphors of individuality with a voice of reason.

     These metaphors are profoundly indebted to the metaphor of a solipsistic individual generated by Descartes' methodical doubt.  More recently, they incorporate Kant's abstract conception of the autonomous individual.  Despite the role they played in deconstructing the framework for inquiry forged by medieval Scholasticism, however, the fatal flaws inherent in moral discourses centered in metaphors of individuality are becoming glaringly evident.  As Kundera suggests, they have generated genuinely liberating moral discourses, but discourses celebrating the autonomy of moral agents cannot voice a passionate moral protest against violence or sterility.  In effect, they cannot provide grounds for rejecting the dictum, "Might makes right" or countering Nietzsche's worship of an unrestrained will to power.

    Concern with the harsh fact that, too often, might dictates what is right, inspired the Hellenic search for an ethical theory which validated moral judgments and protests.  Since Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle believed that the city was the cradle and crucible of culture and civilization, they recognized that any privileging of detachment over involvement ultimately fostered eruptions of violence on the part of individuals who feel alienated, isolated, abandoned or betrayed.

    This context might seem to provide a fertile soil for an ethical theory which invokes "the common good" as its god-term.  Clearly, the use of such a notion would re-center a moral discourse previously dominated by metaphors of individuality in a communitarian or participative existence, while welcoming the ways that they empowered individuals whose voices might otherwise be silenced.  But the notion itself has a hollow center which can be filled in incompatible ways by ethical theorists.

    Hobbes' contract theory of society provides a case in point.  To present his version of the social contract as universal and timeless, Hobbes posited a primordial state of nature in which the absence of law implied a right of all to all.  To populate this state of existence, he stated, categorically and reductively, that human beings are rational animals.  As animals, they naturally seek pleasure and avoid pain.  Since the resources at hand were always insufficient to gratify the desires of all fully, this motivation generates a perpetual war of all against all.  In this context, reason reveals that there is only one way to introduce order amidst this chaos and security for all: all reasonable beings always and everywhere agree to a social contract in which they grant absolute power to a dictator irrevocably.  And in this argument, Hobbes believed that he had established his authority over the moral discourse advocated by medieval Scholastics by showing that reasonable beings would see that the common good required the constitution of such a society. 

     In the same vein, the rhetoric which celebrates a laissez faire capitalism also exploits the notion of the common good.  Thus, as the premise for the argument in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith assumed that reasonable beings would seek to maximize the gratification of their desires.  Implicitly, this thesis is centered in a moral discourse indebted to the prophets who defined human existence as a quest for a fully human and uniquely personal existence.  Through its emphasis on the gratification of desires, however, it fused a quest for the good with a quest for goods.  And over the course of centuries, this fusion found its way into the argument that any politically inspired intervention in the operation of the economic system interferes with the operation of the "invisible hand" which rules laissez faire capitalism.  As such, it delays the coming of the kingdom.

       (Addendum:  Today, Republicans appeal to the workings of the "invisible hand," not the prophetic proclamations that God's moral will speaks in and through the cries of the dispossessed, the exploited, the violated, the marginalized and the silenced.  In sum, their rhetoric promises that a capitalistic system allowed to operate without interference will ultimately recover the paradise lost by Adam's sin.  Implicitly, they ask those who are exploited by the system to rejoice that they are contributing to "the common good."  And the more righteous among them proclaim that the benefits they receive are their due and pretend that policies and programs designed to benefit the disadvantaged merely enable the disadvantaged to avoid honest work.  In point of fact, they embrace the dehumanizing and depersonalizing structures of an impersonally operating system which they know how to manipulate.

33. BEING A PRIEST

   I have noted elsewhere that being a priest is like being a parent.  Parents know that they are parents.  I can only hope that they do not suppose that they know how to parent each of their unique offspring through the course of their own journeys into the unknown.  In that vein, I could never doubt that I was a priest, but I had to learn the hard way that I would never know what my next involvement with a flawed individual like me would tap in me or what any interaction would ask of me.

    Now, when my lack of staying power limits my active involvements, I understand more fully why, for the Eucharistic celebration of the 25th anniversary of my ordination, I had to choose the Scriptural passage in which Jeremiah complained that God had duped him.  To dramatize the insight, I note that, when I am asked to witness an exchange of marriage vows, I insist on choosing the Gospel passage to be read.  That passage concludes with the words:  "This is my commandment:  Love one another as I have loved you."  This insistence allows me to point out that this call is addressed to everyone, but we have neither the opportunity nor the energy to be so involved with everyone who enters our lives.  By their vows, the couple say to one another:  "But with you, I vow to be faithful to a shared journey informed by my passionate longing to be involved with you in this way."

    From this perspective, God duped me by calling me to be involved in this way with everyone who entered my life, to the best of my abilities, though our encounters would not call for a commitment to remain passionately, vulnerably, respectfully and faithfully involved, for better or worse, as long as we shall live.

    To be so involved as a priest, therefore, I had to accept the fact that I would be involved with individuals in intensely personal ways, for a time.  To let them go on with lives apart from me and to make room for new encounters, I had to learn how to grieve in a way that allowed me to be fully present, without judgments or agendas, to the next wounded person who came to me in the hope that Jesus, the wounded Healer, might come to them through me, as he had with others who urged them to talk with me.

    I realize now that my hope that Jesus might come to wounded individuals though my involvement with them plunged me into a perpetual interplay between a grieving process and an upsurge of joy and gratitude that God had entrusted individuals whose vulnerability I shared to my care. 

    But my awareness of what was happening came by fits and starts.  To describe the process, I must begin with my gratitude to God for two women in my life who have been passionately, vulnerably, respectfully and faithfully involved with me for many, many years.  My beloved niece, Marie, is one of them.  As one who wants to process experience inwardly before expressing vulnerable self-revelations, I would not have wanted to go through life without such an involvement with a woman whose deep feelings lie close to the surface who loves me, warts and all, and wants her husband and children to share their journey to deepening intimacy with me.  She is still a mystery to me.  Nonetheless, though our conversations may be few and far between, we begin without judgments or agendas.

    On my journey through life, I have not had anyone, man or women, with whom to return again and again to tangled interactions in everyday life.  Once I realized how this absence called me to relive perpetually unfinished interactions with individuals who entered and departed from my life in personal conversations with Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit, however, I realized that I would not have wanted to go through life without an intensely personal involvement with each of them comparable to my involvement with Marie.  And they are always there.

32. ANNULMENT PROCEEDINGS

   In no. 19, above, I noted that I once assumed that a marriage ceremony which satisfied the dictates of Canon Law conferred grace sufficient to carry spouses through any and every crisis.  But the theology which grounded that assumption presented the Sacrament as a timeless event, not a flawed beginning of a process.  Very soon, however, I became convinced that, if the event in question was not a living encounter with Jesus for both persons, the marriage was doomed.

    When I am asked to witness an exchange of vows, I agree if, and only if, the couple seem to understand the call voiced by Jesus in John 15:12:  "This is my commandment:  Love one another as I have loved you."   I then turn to Jesus' assertion, "Without me, you can do nothing."  To dramatize the relationship between the two, I acknowledge that I do many things without Jesus.  Most obviously, I can in no way make him responsible for my breaks with intimacy.  But I also know that I cannot love anyone as Jesus loves that person without reliving tangled interactions between us with Jesus in prayer.  First and foremost, since my woundedness often prevents me from letting Jesus love me, I cannot imagine how he loves you.  Secondly, I am unaware of wounds in you that need the touch of love, but Jesus is.  I must therefore enter a dialogue with the indwelling Spirit if I am to hope to understand my tangled depths and yours.  In this dialogue, I allow the movement of the Spirit to reveal to me what I feel and think, real or imagined, and am willing to express my feelings and thoughts in vulnerable self-revelations when I can do so without judgments or agendas.

 

    As I involved engaged couples in this effort to understand the commitment they were about to make, my understanding of the annulment process underwent a radical revision.  Initially, I had welcomed the annulment proceedings as a call to grieve over a failed marriage in a way that freed wounded spouses to get on with their lives.  As I realized that no one could live a commitment to love another as Jesus loves that person without a deepening involvement with Jesus on the part of both, I became angry at the way that Canon Law reduced this inner journey to a juridical process.

    The anger increased when I had to submit requests for annulments to a canon lawyer who regarded marriage as a natural institution, not a sacramental commitment.  Acting on a canon which allowed him to sit as a single judge, he rejected petitions without hearings.  I wish now that I had seen the issue clearly.  As it was, we simply appealed his judgment to Chicago.

    Today, the issue surfaces in the dishonest argument that same sex marriages would undermine the institution of marriage.  In this regard, I share the wish that ecclesiastical authorities would expend as much energy on divorce as on same-sex unions, since divorce is as prevalent among Catholics as among the general population.  To do so, however, they would have to abandon efforts to ground Christian moral discourse in the natural law framework forged by Aquinas and concentrate instead on ensuring that priests preparing couples for marriage were able to make the marriage ceremony the occasion for a living encounter with Jesus.

    Polemically, I cannot understand how the insistence that marriage is a natural institution ordained by God can be reconciled with the legitimation of a Pauline and a Petrine Privilege in Canon Law.  According to the The Pastoral Companion, [ed. note: a handbook formerly published by canon law professors in our Franciscan seminary system]  the Pauline Privilege assumes that a marriage of two unbaptized people can be dissolved in favor of the faith of the party who received baptism, provided the unbaptized party departs.  The Petrine Privilege may be used in a non-sacramental marriage contracted by one baptized and one unbaptized party, even if the marriage is consummated.  In both sorts of cases, the marriage can be dissolved “in favor of the faith.”  I have two comments.  One, I object to a codified Law which endows a Pope who claims to be the guardian of an inviolable moral law inscribed in a natural order by the Creator with the authority to grant exceptions to it, especially when the authority to grant the exception is reserved to him alone.  I suggest that, if any exception is allowed, the law does not have universal import.  Two, the assertion that marriages can be dissolved in favor of the faith rests on a distinction between a natural order and an order of faith.  Why not a more experiential distinction between a merely contractual marriage and a marriage in which spouses commit themselves to a journey to deepening intimacy with Jesus and with one another?

    Consequently, I regard the animosity directed at same-sex marriages as a rear-guard action designed to maintain the authority of a natural law tradition whose philosophical foundations have been deconstructed.  The rejection of that tradition is evident in the response of most Catholic couples to the prohibition of contraception.  That prohibition rests on the supposition that the natural end of intercourse is the procreation of children and that nothing must be done to interfere with that end.  But the prohibition is meaningful if, and only if, one shares the Thomistic belief that God inscribed natural ends in human nature as the expression of God's moral will.  Quite obviously, that same supposition recurs in tirades against same-sex marriages.  For all but defenders of Aquinas' baptism of Aristotelian naturalism, however, both must be approached through the ethics of intimacy encoded in an incarnational theology.

    From a postmodernist perspective, the very idea of a monogamous marriage awaited the interiorization of the detachment inherent in literacy and the gradual triumph of literacy over orality as the foundation of culture.  Thus, in pre-literate cultures, marital arrangements were determined by a prevailing power structure.  In some cultures, hospitality required a man to invite strangers to have intercourse with his wife.  In others, men were allowed many wives.  In the Deuteronomic tradition, a man could easily divorce a wife, but the wife had no such right.  In sum, there is no historical evidence to support the belief that monogamy is a natural state of affairs.

    When the spread of literacy generated a host of metaphors of individuality, the Hebrew tradition responded with two diverging conceptions of the covenant between God and Israel.  The early stories proclaimed that Israel's God had voiced a categorical promise to be involved with Abraham and his offspring on their perpetual journey into the unknown.  But when the fulfillment of the promises of this covenant were endlessly deferred, the Deuteronomic tradition reduced the covenant to a conditional contract surrounded with promises of rewards for observance of a mediating Law and threats of punishment for transgressions of the Law.

    In the biblical tradition which replaces the promise of an intimate involvement on the part of God with promises defined by a mediated Law, marriage was viewed as a contract, not a covenant.  Quite obviously, a contract can be abrogated if its conditions are not fulfilled.  Tragically, even Catholics who marry are formed by a culture which views person-to-person interactions as transactions.  In sum, if you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.  So when they find themselves at cross-purposes, they do not know how to let the Holy Spirit move in their tangled depths or to encounter Jesus, the wounded Healer.  And the insistence that marriage is a natural institution cannot generate a language which enables them to listen to the Spirit's word of love in feelings they seek to bury and to allow Jesus' love for them to urge them on in their commitment to love one another as he loves each of them.

    In conclusion, I can only voice a cry from a dark valley that seems like the valley of death.  As I pass through this valley in my old age, I am frightened by a seminary system designed to exclude anyone who is not motivated by a desire to be a Pope John Paul II priest.  This system will saddle Catholics with judgmental individuals unable to hear the cries of those who long for a genuinely pastoral involvement.  Even worse, these individuals will be able to absolve themselves of responsibility for the violence they inflict on the faithful by professions of commitment to a juridically structured institution.  I can only trust that this institution is moving toward a bottom which will reveal that its hierarchical structure breeds dysfunctional responses to its dictates in a way that can no longer be denied.  And I am sometimes encouraged by signs that this moment is approaching.

31. LIFE WITHIN THE TRINITY

   Over the course of centuries, Hosea's metaphor, which compared God's loving involvement with Israel to a marriage-union, yielded a language which describes love as a passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful involvement.  The application of the metaphor of intimacy which it encodes to life within the Trinity implies that the three divine Persons are so intimately involved that there is only one divine life.  But it also raises an intriguing question:  How were each of the three divine Persons involved in the decision to create the universe?

    As the previous Reflection indicated, the meta-narrative which has dominated the Christian tradition since the Protestant Revolution traces the Incarnation to a just judgment that a sin of Adam severed, irreparably, a natural relationship between Creator and creatures.  From that starting point, it asserted that divine mercy sought a way to repair the relationship.  In the resulting dance, divine justice had to decree that only a cruel and humiliating death of the Son could make the sort of reparation required to restore the relationship.  But divine mercy countered by urging the eternal Word to embrace that judgment.

    In this meta-narrative, neither justice nor mercy are personified.  In some ways, they rule life within the Trinity impersonally.  In marked contrast, an Incarnational theology traces the act of creation to an out-pouring (over-flow) of the intimate love of three Divine Persons.  Implicitly, it asks the question formulated above:  What was the role of each of the three divine Persons in the decision to create?

    On this feast of the Annunciation, I was struck by a vision of the dialogue within the Trinity that led to the birth of the eternal Word as a baby at Christmas.  In my experience, it is the indwelling Spirit who urges me to spontaneous actions which often involve me in intensely personal ways with persons I would rather have excluded from my life.  From this perspective, the Spirit moved the Father and the Word to share the divine life outside the Trinity in a creation consisting of finite entities.  And this urging required that the Word become incarnate, since words are meaningful only when they draw lines, posit distinctions of generated distinctive forms of life.

    In response to the urgings of the Spirit, the eternal Word embraced the Spirit's longing to share with finite human beings the intimate love shared by the three divine Persons.  In this admittedly whimsically account of the dialogue that led to the Incarnation, the Father had to go along with the project of the indwelling Spirit.

    That project can be succinctly defined:  At birth, human beings are plunged into a journey into the unknown.  Since they must use an everyday language acquired through socialization to process their experience, they cannot escape from the definition of what it is to be fully human and to live with integrity transmitted by the formative power of that language.  But those who commit themselves to a shared journey with Jesus, the way, the truth and the life, soon recognize the flawed existence fostered by any language at hand.  And they become aware that, if they want to enter into a journey to deepening intimacy with Jesus, they must allow the movements of the indwelling Spirit in their tangled depths to inform their involvements with one another, as Jesus, fully human as well as fully God, did.

    In this context, I have been endlessly intrigued by Harold Bloom's suggestion that the stories compiled in the Jewish Scriptures depict not only a God of new beginnings, but also a God whose search for unique individuals willing to embrace life fully was constantly disappointed.  This reading effectively exposes the ways that TV evangelists assure those who support them financially that they are protecting a version of the covenant which includes them among the elect.  But their understanding of the life of the elect makes no contact with the prophetic call to embrace the quest for a fully human and uniquely personal existence.  And as an honest searcher, I could not survive in a small world governed by these evangelists.

30. THE LANGUAGE OF EXPIATION AND REDEMPTION

   Wittgenstein's comparison of words to ropes woven from many strands illuminates the workings of the language of redemption.  Here, I propose to sketch the strands intertwined in that language.  Then, to indicate how the meaning of a word in any instance is determined by its use in a form of life, I will compare these strands to the strands interwoven in a language of love.

    Etymologically, "redemption" invokes a Latin term for "buying back" whose inner logic encodes an economic model.  Here, I propose to analyze the theological discourse which accredited its use as a description of Jesus' saving activity in human history.  (Remember:  theology is a second-level inquiry designed to lay bare the foundations of religious discourse and to validate a religious response to life.)

    In this archeology of knowledge, I begin with the meta-narrative which still functions as the stage for the misplaced debate between Catholic and Protestant theologians.  This meta-narrative takes the harsh doctrine of original sin which an aging Augustine abstracted from the story of Adam and Eve as its starting point.  According to this violent misreading, Adam's sin severed a natural relationship between Creator and creatures.  In so doing, it evoked an interplay between divine justice and divine mercy.  Divine justice had to decree that only a cruel and humiliating death of God's own Son on a cross could make fitting reparation for Adam's sin and the sinfulness of his offspring, while divine mercy urged the eternal Word to become incarnate to make such reparation and repair or restore the severed relationship. 

    Since I daily experience the activity of a God whose love is ever-faithful, I reject, categorically, the supposition (1) that Adam's sin severed a relationship with God, (2) that any notion of justice whatever would demand a decree that the eternal Word must embrace a cruel and humiliating crucifixion, and (3) that the eternal Word would not have entered human history if Adam had not sinned.

    In a genealogy of morals aimed at deconstructing a meta-narrative that attributes the crucifixion to a decree of God, I find that the above suppositions are obscured by the use of many biblical themes, metaphors and models.  Perhaps the most influential theme was drawn from Paul's violent misreading of a sprawling text which included stories with wildly different versions of the Covenant.  The literary framework for the first version can be found in stories which recorded the entry of an incomprehensible deity into human history at an assignable place and time in words spoken to unique individuals endowed with unfathomable depths and a mysterious freedom.  Within this framework, the Yahwist composed a story which told of a face-to-face interaction between Yahweh and Abraham in which God instituted a Covenant with Abraham in categorical terms, "You will be my people, and I will be your God" and promised a fullness of life to Abraham and his descendants.  In effect, this formulation of the Covenant promised that Yahweh would be personally involved with Abraham and his descendants on their journeys into the unknown.  As such, it provided the literary space for the delightful stories in which Abraham and Moses dared to instruct a wrathful God on the morality befitting a being of such awesome power in his dealings with human beings.

    But when the fulfillment of the promises seemed to be constantly deferred, storytellers in the Deuteronomic tradition re-formulated the Covenant in conditional terms:  "If you obey the Law which mediate your relationship with me, you will be my people, and I will be your God."  Thus, to save Israel's belief in her exclusive election as God's Chosen People in times of crisis, they transformed a categorically asserted Covenant into a contractual relationship mediated by a codified Law purportedly given to Moses in and through theophanies.  In this version of the Covenant, God set the terms of the relationship and surrounded them with sanctions to be inflicted for non-observance of the Law's prescriptions and prohibition.  Consequently, if the fulfillment of the promises was deferred, it was Israel's fault, not God's.

    This reduction of the Covenant to a contractual relationship encoded a hierarchically ordered power-structure which easily accommodated the belief that God rewards observance of the Law and punishes transgressions.  In so doing, it bears witness to the influence of an economic model on Israel's determination to take literally the promises to Abraham of a land flowing with milk and honey, constant prosperity, and offspring as numerous as the sands in the sea.  In turn, this economic model provided the literary space for themes drawn from early anthropomorphic conceptions of God in the narrative tradition.  One such theme was the emphasis on sacrifices designed to make reparation for sin and/or to placate a wrathful deity.  Another was an emphasis on appeals for mercy.  Yet another emerged when psalmists, in particular, insisted that Israel's God acted justly, not wrathfully, in the punishments he inflicted on Israel for her infidelities.

    In this context, Paul's violent misreading of the narrative tradition not only obscured the fact that the Jewish Scriptures report countless instances in which Israel's God entered covenants with individuals, but also blinded Christian theologians to the incompatibility between a categorically and a conditionally asserted Covenant.  I suspect that Paul's tortured misreading was motivated by a need to reconcile his conversion with his belief that God's Covenant with Israel was irrevocable.  At any rate, he used it to insist that, with the sacrifice offered by Jesus Christ, God's covenant with Israel was both fulfilled and abrogated.  And this insistence provided the foundation for the polar opposition between faith and works expounded in his Letter to the Romans.

    In its own right, the rhetorical distinction between faith and works was surely designed to erase all traces of the economic model encoded in a Covenant of Law and to replace them with a proclamation that all is gift.  To justify the elevation of a distinction into a polar opposition, Paul had to assume that a language of works implied that God's love could somehow be merited.  As Luther's doctrine of justification by faith alone, however, the emphasis on faith merely moved the economic model from the question of the authentic human response to God to a reading of the gospel stories of Jesus which centers his saving activity in the crucifixion.  And, whether Catholic or Protestant polemicists admit it or not, a meta-narrative which implies that the eternal Word would not have become incarnate if Adam had not sinned centers the saving power of Jesus in the crucifixion.

    In sum, the language of redemption makes sense if and only if a meta-narrative which centers God's activity in human history in two events, an original sin and the crucifixion of Jesus, makes sense.  I can make no sense of the supposition that God decreed the crucifixion of the Incarnate Word as the price of restoring relations severed by Adam's sin.  I suggest, therefore, that, to distract attention from this component of the meta-narrative, theologians invoked a cluster of beliefs, themes, metaphors, models and conceptions, including the assumption that a power-structure governed the relationship between God and humans, Augustine's violent misreading of the story of Adam and Eve, a conditional formulation of God's Covenant with Israel, a doctrine of exclusive election, the economic model supporting the belief that God rewards the good and punishes the wicked, a sin-centered theology which validates the belief that sacrifices can make fitting reparation for sin, Paul's polar opposition between faith and works, a conception of justice indebted to the Deuteronomic tradition's desire to show that Israel's God was not capricious or wrathful in the punishments he inflicted on a stubborn and stiff-necked people, pleas for mercy in response to apparently fierce and implacable judgments, and a belief that sacrifices could make fitting reparation for sins.

    If any of these strands is suspect, the language of redemption (and the theology of transcendence which frames it) is an edifice erected on sand.  And, at the very least, the language of love raises penetrating questions about many, if not all, of them.  The core of these questions can be found in the fact that references to divine justice are meaningful only in a language centered in a detached relationship mediated by a contract.  Since social contracts are designed to govern such relationships, justice can function as a fruitful moral notion in that context.  But its application to person-to-person involvements has pernicious consequences.  There is a world of difference between a relationship and an involvement.

    One further comment:  Though I may seem to be straying far afield, I cannot shake the conviction that Pope Benedict XVI realizes that the Tridentine Mass ritualizes this meta-narrative accurately and that the liturgical reforms introduced by Vatican II will soon undermine the theology of transcendence he espouses.  Here, as elsewhere, he fights a rearguard action.  To illustrate the point at issue, I need only refer to the theology of the Eucharist taught by the Baltimore Catechism and the theological manuals used in courses designed to prepare me for ordination to the priesthood.  This theology referred to the ritual re-enactment of the Last Supper as the "sacrifice of the Mass" and legitimated accepting stipends to offer Masses in reparation for the deceased in the confident belief that this renewal of Jesus' sacrificial death on the cross would make reparation for sins which still confined them to Purgatory.  A communion rail served as a concrete line of demarcation between the ordained priest and the simple laity, and the priest performed the ritual with his back to the people.  By definition, he was a mediator between them and Jesus, the mediator between God and humans.  And since he performed the ritual in Latin, it presumably worked like a magical formula understood only by the celebrant and by God.  And since it worked ex opere operato, it applied the sanctifying grace merited by Jesus' sacrificial death to those who may have been saying the rosary rather than participating actively in the ritual.

    Consequently, I grieve over the number of Catholics who welcome the restoration of the Tridentine Mass here in Quincy.  They clearly prefer a spirituality which bolsters their smug assurance that they are among the elect to one that gives voice to the demanding implications of an incarnational theology.

                  The Language of Love

    The language of love incorporated in everyday English is profoundly indebted to the foundational stories in the Hebrew literary tradition.  These stories portray interactions between an incomprehensible deity and unique individuals endowed with unfathomable depths and a mysterious freedom.  They set the stage for the use of stories to process the experiences through which individuals become more deeply involved with each other on a journey into the unknown.

    The meta-narrative which frames an incarnational theology situates the history of God's involvement in human history on this stage.  Since creation was an out-pouring and overflow of divine love, the eternal Word was central in the act of creation and, therefore, central in the unfolding of human history and in the lives of unique individuals.  Quite obviously, the incarnation was not a response to the sin of Adam.  But a recognition of this fact awaited the gradual displacement of orality by literacy as the foundation of Israel's existence as a distinctive people.

     Concretely, storytellers in ancient Israel were indebted to authors of the Babylonian epics which projected an empty literary space between a realm of deities and a domain of natural forces.  Over the course of four centuries, they filled this space with stories designed to process Israel's historical existence as God's Chosen People.  The earliest stories in this narrative tradition depicted immediate encounters between an incomprehensible God and unique individuals endowed with unfathomable depths and a mysterious freedom.  Later stories introduced a conditional formulation of God's covenant with Abraham as the literary expedient needed to insert a codified Law as a mediator between God and a people ruled by collective responsibility.  Intentionally or not, this Deuteronomic strand fostered a doctrine of exclusive election which did violence to the import of the early stories in the narrative tradition.   At the time of the Exiles, however, prophets projected metaphors of intimacy which enriched the vision in the early stories with formulations giving voice to a longing on the part of God to be intimately involved with human beings.

   These metaphors exploited the glimpses of unfathomable depths encoded in the early stories.  In a radical contrast with a covenant mediated by the Mosaic Law, Hosea and Second and Third Isaiah used the metaphor of a marriage union to define God's intensely personal involvement with individuals as well as with Israel.  In and through this metaphor and other metaphors of intimacy, the prophets called for a sympathetic imagination capable of discerning God's moral will in inarticulate cries from the depths voiced by the oppressed, the dispossessed, the marginalized, the silenced and the outcast.

    Over time, the metaphor defining the covenant in terms of a marriage union generated an understanding that love called for a passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful involvement, and this understanding, in turn, transmitted a vision which described God's love as both all-inclusive and ever-faithful.  In turn, this vision would not allow Jewish commentators to read the story of Adam and Eve as the history of an original sin which evoked a judgment that Adam's transgression irreparably severed a natural relationship between God and human beings.  In the same vein, it undermined the widespread belief in a doctrine of exclusive election.

    Tragically, in the polemical works in which Christian apologists appropriated the Jewish Scriptures as the Old Testament, the doctrine of exclusive election resurfaced in theologies designed to present the authorized version of the special way that God was active in and through Jesus of Nazareth.  And when Augustine's misreading of the story of Adam and Eve prevailed, the starting point for a meta-narrative which traced the Incarnation to an interplay of divine justice and divine mercy entered the tradition with a vengeance.

    But this meta-narrative could not prevent the prophets from using the vision of God's personal involvement with Israel's patriarchs and matriarchs as the literary framework for metaphors of intimacy.  And whenever those metaphors entered the dialogue among those who proclaimed the gospel message, the way was prepared for a competitor which invoked the Prologue in the Gospel of John as biblical warrant for an incarnational theology.

    In sum, as later theologians read the Prologue though a reading code derived from the metaphor of intimacy and a developed doctrine of the Trinity, they traced the Incarnation to an outpouring of divine love.  From this perspective, in becoming fully human, the eternal Word revealed a longing to be intimately involved in the lives of every human being.  And as this insight was developed, this longing of the eternal Word revealed a willingness to be passionately, vulnerably, respectfully and faithfully involved with us, even when the agony in the Garden revealed to him the pain he would share in if he was willing to share the pain that human beings inflict on one another.

    At this point, an incarnational theology takes seriously an assertion attributed to Jesus:  "He who sees me sees the Father."  In this vein, his involvement with us reveals also the love of the Father and Spirit for us.  And as a result, theologians in the Franciscan tradition sought to formulate a language capable of discerning the distinctive activity of each of the three divine Persons in our lives.

    To belabor the contrast between a theology of transcendence and an incarnational theology:  An incarnational theology rejects a theory of divine motivation which asserts that divine justice had to require fitting reparation for disobedience to the Law of Moses or to a natural law inscribed in the structure of the universe by a rational and purposive Creator.  It also implies that Luther's doctrine of justification by faith alone voices an illusory promise of instant intimacy to those who stand naked before God, confessing an inescapable sinfulness and accepting the justification of a severed relationship with God.  By extension, it traces Paul's distinction between faith and works to Paul's compulsion to justify his conversion from a commitment to a strict observance of the Law to a commitment to Jesus as the Christ.  And it suggests that the metaphor which compares God's involvement with us to a marriage-union generates a language which dismisses this polar opposition as simply irrelevant. 

29. PASSIONATE, VULNERABLE, RESPECTFUL AND FAITHFUL INTERACTIONS

    As an analytic philosopher, I had to explore the sort of interactions which promote the quest for intimacy in depth and detail.  And that compulsion was magnified when I realized (1) that love is simply a process of letting another person into my life, (2) that this process can deepen if, and only if, I learn how to interact passionately, vulnerably, respectfully and faithfully, and (3) that my socialization was dominated by languages generated by a metaphor of power and judgment, not a metaphor of intimacy.  Here, I seek to show that these four characteristics of intimate interactions, though distinguishable, operate inseparably.

    My conviction that passion is a crucial component of intensely personal responses to other individuals was crystallized by my encounter with Heidegger and Sartre.  Prior to that encounter, my indoctrination in Scholastic theology had inclined me to view passion and desire as disruptive forces which must be subjected to the rule of reason, and I simply assumed that reason functioned as a detached, disinterested, dispassionate and god-like perspective on language, experience and reality.  My introduction to Heidegger threw new light on Nietzsche's thesis that the rationalist tradition was propelled by a will to power.  More importantly, Heidegger exposed the sterility of forms of life which fostered detachment,  To bolster his critique of rationalism, he devised a hermeneutical theory designed to center an authentically human existence in two passions, Angst (anxiety, dread) and Sorge (care, trouble, worry), rather than in reason.     

   As the twentieth century heir of Cartesian rationalism, Sartre was determined to wrest authority from Hegel, the quintessential rationalist.  To that end, he linked the fusion of passion and reason in Hegel's god-term, the conception of an unbounded consciousness, with his own fusion of Descartes' solipsistic thinking being and Kant's abstract conception of the autonomous individual.  The result can be found in his use of a metaphor which depicted unique individuals as passions for the infinite and his argument that, since they are therefore futile projects to be God, human existence is absurd and even obscene.  Then, as he worked out the implications of this metaphor, Sartre concluded (1) that indifference therefore requires a callous decision to insulate oneself from the possibility that the cries of another might evoke a personal response, (2) that this decision must be constantly remade, and (3) that the resulting stance is a flight from an authentically human existence.

    Since I was beginning to realize that love involves letting another person into my life, Sartre's analyses of passionate interactions between individuals exposed the ways that my efforts to retain control over my life aborted or distorted my longing for intimacy.  As I learned that lesson, I began to see that love and indifference function as polar opposites in everyday English.  Love involves letting another person into my life with at least a dim awareness that interactions between us will tap every feeling in me, including deeply buried pain, anger, fear and shame, while a stance of indifference requires judgments and strategies which justify my habitual desire for self-sufficiency and control over my life.

    My understanding of the workings of these polar opposites was increased when I asked the students in my course on Christian marriage:  "What is the opposite of love?"  I wanted them to answer:  "Indifference."  Almost without exception, they answered:  "Hatred."  As I probed that answer, I began to see the revelatory power of this polar opposition.  Love is not a feeling.  As the surrender of control over my life, it is a willingness to experience pain, anger, fear, shame, care, compassion, joy and playfulness.  In that same vein, hatred is not a feeling.  Rather, it is a tangled response in which anger chokes off the expression of all other feelings.

    To make this point in class, I would ask, with mock innocence:  "What are children feeling when they tell their mothers that they hate them?"  Invariably, I received the answer:  "Anger and frustration."  Then, to show how buried anger distorts communication, I would recount my experience with engaged couples whose teasing was warm, affectionate and playful.  But when they had been married for a number of years, their teasing had a barb in it, since buried feelings inevitably find hidden expression.  And I would then insist that, if all feelings cannot be vulnerably and respectfully expressed, soon all are distorted.

    In the final analysis, intimate interactions will always be flawed, but even events that bring out the worst in us can be brought back into the process.  On its part, the process calls for the honest recognition that lapses into self-protective or self-aggrandizing exercises of power or judgment do violence to those who have entered into a passionate and vulnerable involvement with me.  In sum, each such lapse is an attempt to be invulnerable which encodes a massive mistrust of my loved ones.

    A growing awareness of the violence that I had done to others as a young priest taught me that vulnerability, respect and fidelity were inseparably intertwined in the process which yielded deepening person-to-person involvements.  I had accepted, uncritically, the theology which asserted that the Sacraments operated ex opere operato (automatically, without human involvement).  As a result, I assumed that the marriage ritual, properly performed, conferred the grace necessary to live the vows faithfully.  In effect, I assumed that, regardless of the crisis, every marriage could be saved.  As a result, I invariably reminded deeply wounded spouses who came to me for guidance that they had made a commitment, and I had urged them to stay the course, even if it meant hanging on a cross, like Jesus did.

    Today, I no longer assume that God calls a person to remain vulnerably, respectfully and faithfully involved with someone who does not and perhaps cannot respond in kind.  In the past, I had called them to hang on a cross, not for three hours, but day in and day out, for the rest of their lives.  Now, I do not tell anyone what to do, but I hope to aid them in discerning whether God is calling them to leave or stay.  And I know that someone can leave a marriage with integrity only if they have grieved over what was and what might have been.

    From experiences like these, I learned that love is not a feeling, but a passionate involvement in which every feeling can be tapped.  From my own experience, I learned the hard way that, to transform my longing for intimacy into a realizable quest, I had to learn how to be honest about what I thought and felt, real or imagined.  From the start, tangled interactions revealed that I was involved with a stranger and that I was also a stranger to myself.  And since trust-issues had plagued me since infancy, I found it difficult to voice vulnerable self-revelations in a way that put them in another's care without burdening the beloved with expectations.  But that difficulty taught me (1) that failures to express what I felt and thought honestly deprived me of self-respect and (2) that expectations (and judgments) are inherently disrespectful.  In sum, without vulnerability, no respect, and without respect, no vulnerability.  And without a hard-won trust that my loved ones will be there even when my flawed reactions wound them or expose their vulnerability, I cannot long remain vulnerably and respectfully involved.