Divine Life Research Articles

Whitehead’s Transformation of Pure Act

WHITEHEAD'S TRANSFORMATION OF PURE ACT IN AN EFFORT to avoid any final bifurcation into two realms of being and becoming, as in Plato, Aristotle argued that only concrete particulars were fully actual, with forms only derivatively existent as the forms of these actualities. Yet under pressure from his understanding of the basic contrast between matter and form in terms of potentiality and actuality, Aristotle was driven more and more to identify form and actuality .1 Thus the immaterial reality of God becomes a pure, unchanging actuality not readily distinguishable from Plato's form of the Good, although Aristotle seeks to endow it with an interior life of ceaseless activity of "thinking." As pure actuality God is thus conceived as pure form, without matter. How pure form can engage in ceaseless activity of any sort is not clearly explained. Thomas Aquinas was able to explain the activity of immaterial being primarily by freeing the basic polarity of potentiality and actuality from its exclusive identification with matter and form. It was also possible to apply this contrast to form and esse or the act of being. Purely immaterial forms, such as angelic intelligences, could not create themselves by their own power, but were dependent upon the creative act of God whereby they received their own act of being. Thus pure form was in potency to this act of being. As infinite esse, God was pure actuality without any admixture of potentiality, and by the same token he was pure activity in no wise limited by any element of form.2 1 Here see Ivor Leclerc, " Form and Actuality," pp. 169-89 in the book he edited, The Rdevance of Whitehead (London: George Allen &Unwin, 1961). Pages 169-71 summarize this problem for Aristotle; the rest of the essay shows how Whitehead successfully maintains the distinction between form and actuality. • The nature of the act of being is ably explained by Etienne Gilson in his Being and Some Phuosophm-s (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 381 382 LEWIS S. FORD This solution was not without its difficulties. God's relation to form is not clarified thereby. We have the formula, that his essence is his existence, i.e. his infinite esse, but this seems to have the force of making him sheer existence devoid of any essence whatever, since any element of form would in him represent a potentiality not fully enacted. Then God becomes radically unknowable, except insofar as it is possible to know him without the mediation of form. The most acute difficulty, however, emerges from religious concerns. The perfection of God is expressed as pure act, but pure act appears to be devoid of all receptivity. Receptivity is understood in terms of passive potentiality, which pure act emphatically excludes. Besides, divine perfection must be unchanging, for that which is already perfect can only change for the worse. Yet receptivity to the world and to our sorrows and achievements is undeniably part of divine perfection, as Charles Hartshorne has eloquently shown us years ago.8 He speaks for a widespread contemporary sensitivity, a sensitivity implicitly acknowledged hy ingenious attempts to affirm such personal receptivity while at the same time preserving the classical immutability of God.4 In addition, if none of our achievements are received into the divine life and have an effect upon his, they seem lacking in any ultimate significance . Though in itself pure self-giving activity, the Thomistic God of pure act, because utterly devoid of all receptivity, strikes many of our contemporaries just as static and unyielding as the unity of pure form. Thomas succeeded in transforming pure act from pure form to pure activity. We must now complete the transformation by reconceiving this activity in a way so as to include receptivity. 195~), chapter five, and The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Random House, 1956), chapter one. •The Divine Relativity (New Haven: Yale Univerity Press, 1948). •See particularly W. Norris Clarke, S. J. "A New Look at the Immutability of God," in God Knowable and Unknowable, ed. Robert J. Roth, S. J. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1978) , and my response, " The Immutable God and Father Clarke " in The New Scholasticism, 49...

Troens grund

The Basis of Faithby Henning SørensenIn the period 1811-23 Grundtvig is forced into a continuous process of differentiation in the Bible in an attempt to find the Word of God that is the basis of faith. But in the course of the Church year 1822-23 this process is interrupted by Grundtvig’s discovery of the power of the audible word, a discovery that the audible word is better suited to being the word by which faith is born, fed, strengthened, and therefore, grows. The word of man is not just a sound, but can be “tuned” to have a spiritual content. In other words, faith is born and strengthened by the word being heard, and faith in this audible word implies that it seeks to be professed. The unparalleled discovery in 1825 is therefore already being prepared for in 1823, even though right up to the 9th Sunday in Trinity 1825 Grundtvig may be retaining the written word as the basis of faith, in an attempt to defend himself against unbelievers.In 1832 Grundtvig reaches a new understanding of mankind that goes against his Lutheran origins. Recreation must now start from what is created by the Creation and what has fallen of Man at the Fall. This Man is capable of believing and verbalising this faith. The life of Jesus was a divine life lived under the laws of human nature. This life can be linked to Man’s by Man being baptized with Jesus’ baptism and thereby sharing in the blessing that was heard at His baptism. With regard to this starting-point, that is, baptism, Jesus is born and grows as a child together with Mankind to consummation.Since Man was created by a Creative Word, he should remain true to the purpose of creation through faith. But Man doubted, the Fall occurred, and faith became blind. It shrank until it was no more than a vague memory of the original life in God’s image. Through re-creation the heart hears a Word that corresponds to the original Word of Creation, and the faith created at the Creation is re-created into a Christian faith through the Word of faith that illuminates the truth. This does not mean, however, that the faith given to all people at the Creation has no further purpose. For that is precisely the faith which is the source of the Christian faith, and this faith will still be a prerequisite if men are to believe one another and human life is to be lived at all.The blind and the seeing faith, like the fallen and the raised man, are therefore of the same nature. But the seeing faith knows where truth is to be found and will be able to believe this truth if it can be helped towards it.

Tillich and Plato

Although Tillich frequently denies that "being-itself "~ is a being, 1 there is, nevertheless, a residual sense in which Tillich allows that being-itself is also a singular existing individual, z I t can be seen, for example, when TiUich identifies being-itself as "the divine life", a or when he proclaims that "there is of course that being which is beyond essence and existence, which . . . we call God or, if you prefer, 'being-itself'. ''~ Moreover, TiUich informs us that being-itself has "qualities ''~ and "manifestations". ~ Most important, however, is the fact that Tillich is never hesitant in using "being-itself" as an irreducible abstract proper name viz., as the singular subject of subject-predicate assertions. 7

VERRUIMDE HUWELIJKSMORAAL EN AUGUSTINIAANS VERZET IN DE 17e EEUW

SUMMARY The expanded horizons of the 17th century were evinced in moral theology by the positive evaluation given to the subjective motivations for the marriage act, specifically regarding sexual pleasure. One name associated with this problem is the Spanish Augustine Basilius Ponce de Leòn (1569(70)–1628). He taught that the marriage act can morally justified “propter solam voluptatem”. Juan Sanchez († 1624) also follows this argumentation, though he speaks only of “concubitus habitus gratia captandae voluptatis”. Various authors of the 17th century have followed in their footsteps, giving this teaching a certain probability. The study shows that several important questions of fundamental moral theology applying to a so called expanded conjugal morality have their kernel in Gabriel Vazquez's work (1549–1604). B. Ponce de Leòn had already applied Vazquez's principle: that the actual intention of the good purpose is no longer necessary for the moral justification of an act, rather the habitual intention is sufficient. Other important results of Vazquez's work are: the possibility for a person to perform morally indifferent acts and the evaluation of pleasure in natural and moral order. While these questions of fundamental moral theology were important presuppositions, the deeper reasons why the wider standpoints regarding conjugal morality could be justified and propagated are found in another area of theological thinking namely: that which was clearly naturalistic. The opposition to this expanded conjugal morality expressed by the Theology Faculty of Louvain finds its chief support in Augustine's view on man and his moral activity. Man is not a “pure natural being” but has as his fundamental base an orientation toward divine life. This deepest orientation must find its expression in the order of activity. Therefore, recourse to God through love is, for ever activity, including sexuality, the ultimate criterium for morality. Given this background, 3 professors at the Louvain Theological Faculty applied to Rome between 1677 and 1679 (the so called Louvain Deputation) to have condemned that doctrine which accepts, without moral fault, the consummation of marriage “propter solam voluptatem”. This proposition is one of the 65 so called “lax moral propositions” which were censored as “scandalous and dangerous in practice” by Innocent XI on March 2, 1679.

Grace as Participation in the Divine Life in the Theology of Augustine of Hippo

Grace as Participation in the Divine Life in the Theology of Augustine of Hippo

CONTIGUITIES AND MOVING LIMBS: STYLE AS ARGUMENT IN “AREOPAGITICA"

ABSTRACT Milton presents his forceful argument against censorship in a form that dramatizes the nature of the truth humans must not attempt to suppress. Sentences in the introduction have “broken” syntactical patterns; the explicit order of arguments becomes confused and the divisions are blurred as reasons overlap from section to section; flights of “inspired” rhetoric seem to appear randomly; finally, the imagery toward the end of the tract represents truth as fragmented and incomplete. Although critics have seen a disparity between the intuitive, imaginative persuasiveness of the tract and a logical, discursive weakness, both kinds of argumentation are actually integrated and suggest that truth, which has a divine life of its own, must be allowed to appear freely, unconstrained by the necessarily limited forms and perceptions of human beings.

The Appropriation of Dynamics and Form for Tillich's God

In the official formulation of Tillich's theology, the ontological polarity of dynamics and form, together with the other polarities, provides the basic symbolic material for the description of the divine life. In that life dynamics and form are balanced, with the tensions and disruptions characteristic of finite life wholly overcome. “Being comprises becoming and rest, becoming as an implication of dynamics and rest as an implication of form. If we say that God is being-itself, this includes both rest and becoming, both the static and the dynamic elements” (ST I 247). At the same time, however, we find that Tillich identifies God or being-itself with the power of being (ST I 110, 180, 2O5f., 230, 236f., 272; ST II 10f.). Although he does not and perhaps would not identify dynamics with the power of being, we find that they have extremely similar characteristics. In fact we are driven to ask why the element of dynamics within the divine life is not identified with the power of being, and to speculate on the consequences of such an identification. It is our contention that the internal logic of Tillich's analysis of this polarity is such that he cannot finally avoid identifying divine dynamics with the creative power of being. This, in turn, entails that God is a being rather than beyond being, himself an instance of the power of being pervasively inherent in all beings. In the first section we shall consider the polarity of dynamics and form as it functions in finite beings. Then we shall examine its role in the divine life and its relationship to the power of being.

St. Irenaeus as Mystical Theologian

THE THOMIST A SPECULATIVE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY EDITORS: THE DoMINICAN FATHERS OF THE PROVINCE OF ST. JosEPH Publishers: The Thomist Press, Washington, D. C. 20017 VoL. XXXIX APRIL, 1975 No.2 ST. IRENAEUS AS MYSTICAL THEOLOGIAN THE AIM of this article is to suggest that Irenaeus of Lyons is the first really apophatic theologian to write in the West. His work is perhaps the greatest monument in the Patristic Period of Greek theology developed in a Latin setting. Few now would doubt the importance of negative theology for the development of Christian spirituality. Significantly, it was during the 4th century, the first great age of monasticism, when St. Basil was composing the fundamental legislation for Eastern monks, that his brother, St. Gregory of Nyssa, was drawing on his profound initiation into the Greek philosophical tradition to provide the intellectual undergirding for the growing ascetical movement. This Cappadocian theologian was essentially apophatic. Since the God of faith transcends every concept or image we may form of him, we can only know him by a supra-rational mode of cognition, a way of unknowing. 185 186 NICHOLAS GENDLE This is true theoria (Oewpia) or contemplation, and such is the inexhaustible goal of the spiritual life. The importance of Irenaeus's doctrine of transcendence is that this is the work of a Biblical theologian, not at all given to Platonic speculations, with no time for any kind of Christian intellectual elitism. For him, God's progressive self-manifestation is realized in the spiritual advance of man, called to grow in the deifying vision of God by participation in the divine life. But we intend to show that this hope of glory is grounded in a truly Biblical grasp of the transcendence of God and in a profoundly religious sense of man's dependence on him. This is why piety demands a proper agnosticism beyond the sphere of revelation; and why our knowledge of God can never be a mere rationalism presupposed by the innate powers of the human mind. That the Invisible should become visible and the Unknowable known is always a miracle of grace, and if this is so, then we must be dealing here with a genuine connaissance mystique. Studies in the past, e. g., the work of Lawson and of Wingren, have rightly elaborated the Biblicism of Irenaeus and the robust Paulinism of his soteriology. I£ then we can establish the centrality of the doctrine of transcendence for the spirituality of a great teacher, little moved to look to philosophy for the content of his theology, then it may well be that a grasp of the unknowability of God might be basic to any truly Christian account of man's religious quest. Apophaticism, with its implication that all religious knowledge is limited and given is not just a basic position of Christian Platonism. It may be claimed-and here lies Irenaeus's importance-that the Via Negativa is implied as much by Isaiah's sense of the sovereign otherness of Yahweh as by the Platonic axiom of the simplicity of the One. Philosophy merely provided the Fathers with a set of concepts with which to defend and expound a sense of Transcendence inherent in the Tradition from the beginning, and reinforced by the data of contemplative experience. ST. IRENAEUS AS MYSTICAL THEOLOGIAN 187 1) The setting of Irenaeus's Mystical Theology. Our contention is reinforced in the case of Irenaeus, if we consider the nature of his detachment from Greek Paideia. The polemical pressures have changed from the need to challenge fairly straightforward polytheism to an attack on a worldnegating religious outlook often highly sophisticated-sometimes absurdly so-in its philosophical complexities. The gnosticism of men like Valentinus was a danger-sign as to where unbridled Hellenistic speculation might lead the Church. The Gnostics too preached an Unknowable God, but this implied for them not a democracy of grace but an intellectual elite, alone fitted by nature to attain to knowledge of God. Hence, we should not be surprised to detect a change of key in comparing Irenaeus to the Apologists: he is more cautious in his attitude to Hellenism, less inclined to laud the natural capacities...

A new look at christian marriage

The discussion of marriage can become rather forbidding and gloomy when, as often happens, it bogs down on an analysis of various marital difficulties. Too often we are taken up with what is wrong with marriage rather than with what is right with it. I think that there have been many of us who have been influenced by theologians like John Calvin, a very important and creative thinker, but one who had a rather one-sided view of marriage. Consider his commentary on First Corinthians, Chapter 7, in which he says: "Marriage is a remedy ordained by God to help our weakness and is to be used by anyone who does not possess the gift of continence."1 With this kind of "enthusiasm" about marriage, it is easy to see why many Christians have come to think of it as little more than an institution for cripples. Such negativism is not present in much of today's theology, which stresses the positive values of marriage. Marriage is conceived of as a sacrament, which means an encounter with God. Thus it is a way in which human beings can meet God and share in divine life. This em phasis on its joy and goodness casts upon marriage a light very different from that in which it is seen in terms of interpersonal problems or as a remedy for concupiscence. With such diverse attitudes within Christianity, there are many who

Thomas Kelly: A Biography (review)

120Quaker History colored glasses. In his preface he writes that he feels the unique contribution of the book was found in his examining "Quaker ideas as a whole, rather than from the point of view of one geographical area or of one theological section of the total Quaker community." It is the most satisfactory book written about Friends in many years. It will not satisfy all Friends, but it would not be wrong to say that no good book could please all Quakers today. For the larger audience, the readers Elton Trueblood has gathered outside the Society, this volume will provide a most stimulating and, hopefully, inviting portrayal of the Religious Society of Friends. Haverford CollegeEdwin B. Bronner Thomas Kelly: A Biography. By Richard M. Kelly. New York: Harper & Row. 1966. 125 pages. $3.75. I have been acquainted with this book since it was only a concern in the mind of Dick Kelly in 1957, while he was still a Haverford undergraduate. I am delighted with the finished product. Having experienced a conversion experience himself while a student at Westtown, Richard Kelly's main purpose in writing a biography of his father was to document the cataclysmic religious experience Thomas Kelly went through in the late months of 1937 and the early months of 1938. Evidence for this change is given in Douglas Steere's introduction to A Testament of Devotion, but all too briefly. Since it was my privilege to know Thomas Kelly intimately as a student and as a member of a cell-worship group in his home, I have been very much helped by this biography, precisely because I knew only the "new" Tom Kelly. I first met him on religious retreat in April 1938, as the crucial months drew to a close. Tom's scholarly image of himself had been shattered by a great failure, thus opening the way for him to become the authentic prophet of holy obedience, to which these pages bear witness. Long selections of his letters home from Nazi Germany in the summer of 1938 are the high point of this book. One short selection will give you a taste: I spent the evening at Karlsruhe talking of the life, which ... is a translation of love into deed. And afterward they said, 'How amazing to hear such talk!' . . . But I am convinced that it stül speaks, when it is genuine. . . . This world . . . strips off all but the genuine. It has to be genuine to stand up in this world of flame. And Quakers have no business here, or anywhere, unless they are genuine. But if the reality of the Divine Life is in any person, there is a living message and everybody . . . can read it . .1 see it as an aspect of the Incarnation. The Life of God must be actualized in men, in life, in lives. And in such lives there is born the way of Redemption (p. 101). It is amazing to reflect that Thomas R. Kelly, the apostle of total commitment, actually said on the morning of the day on which he was to die of a heart attack, "This will be the greatest day of my life!" Those eager to learn more of Thomas Kelly won't want to miss this book. Wilmington CollegeT. Canbt Jones ...

The Province of East New Jersey, 1609-1702: The Rebellious Proprietary (review)

108Quaker History The limitations of this review permit only a brief discussion of one of these areas—mysticism. This reviewer is impressed, in reading the Introductions again, by the careful, balanced presentation of mysticism in these Introductions. Indeed, Rufus Jones can conclude a vivid rollcall of the "First Publishers of Truth" with this sentence, "It is a matter of little importance what name is given to this type of religion___ The important fact is obvious enough . . . [they had passed] from knowledge about God ... to an inward, first-hand experience. . . . They had found Godin the present tense" (p. 130). This surelyis the quintessence of the author's contribution by word and deed to his generation. This will continue to be the important contribution of Rufus Jones to succeeding generations. On almost every page expressions such as "the inrush of new energies," "the presence of an invading life," appear, witnessing to what Martin Buber has made familiar in his "I-Thou" relationship. One must admit that occasionally phrases such as "all men partake of one central Divine life," "a divine, unlost, inalienable, soul-centre which is unsundered from God," (p. 98) might be interpreted in a Stoic rather than a Christian sense. But such expressions are not characteristic and one is convinced that Rufus Jones would have approved of Howard Brinton's word, "If a man enters the holy of holies only to find himself there, he will not come again" (Preface to Barclay in Brief, ed., Eleanore Price Mather, Pendle Hill Historical Studies, Number 3). Earlham CollegeAlexander C. Purdy The Province of East New Jersey, 1609-1702: The Rebellious Proprietary. By John E. Pomfret. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 1962. sdii, 407 pages. $10.00. Seven years ago, our distinguished member, John E. Pomfret, Director of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, published a splendid history of the Province of West New Jersey from 1609 to 1702. Now he has produced a companion volume, covering the history of East New Jersey during the same period. Since this review must be brief, this reviewer feels like saying simply that this book is quite as good as its predecessor. And that would be high praise. But something more must be said, if only to make it clear what a difficult task John Pomfret set himself. East Jersey was a tiny colony—almost as small as Rhode Island—but it was full of people who liked to squabble. It was separated from West Jersey until 1702, not by a natural boundary but by a surveyor's line run from Little Egg Harbor to an arbitrary point on the upper Delaware. It had no religious uniformity, for it included New England Puritans, Dutch Calviniste , Scotch Presbyterians, Maine Baptists, Anglicans, and Quakers. No more than West Jersey did it have its own center of economic life. East Jersey looked towards New York and West Jersey towards Philadelphia; people rightly said that the Jerseys were like "a cask tapped at both ends." And politically, East Jersey's history was a steady series of bickerings among individuals and between individuals and their rulers over land titles, quitrents, taxes, and what not. As Mr. Pomfret puts it, "West New Jersey was a peaceful community where Quakers strove to settle all matters by patient and considered deliberation. East New Jersey was a rebellious colony" (p. vii). "The volume," says its author, "sets forth the history of this complex proprietary in order to establish its identity among the early American colonies" Book Reviews109 (p. ix). It does that. One feels like taking off one's hat in admiration of John Pomfret's courage and patience in telling so clearly the story of this rebellious province. F. B. T. Quaker Pioneers. By Stephen Allott. With an Introduction by Joyce Blake. London: Bannisdale Press. 1963. 127 pages. Illustrations. 18s 6d. This little book contains biographies of twelve pioneer Friends, together with authentic background and connecting material. Half of these Quaker pioneers will be familiar to most American young Friends: George Fox, Margaret Fell, William Penn, John Woolman, Elizabeth Fry, and Levi Coffin. Their biographies here recorded are a valuable addition to our literature, because of the straightforward , ungarnished, authoritative way they...

The Foundation of The Church

The Church is grounded in the Being and Life of God, and rooted in the eternal purpose of the Father to send His Son, Jesus Christ, to be the Head and Saviour of all things. The Church does not exist by and for itself, and therefore cannot be known or interpreted out of itself. Both the source and the goal of the Church are in the eternal love of God which has overflowed in the creation and redemption of the world. God has not willed to live alone, but to create and seek others distinct from Himself upon whom to pour out His Spirit, that He might share with them His divine life and glory, and as Father, Son and Holy Spirit dwell in their midst for ever. God will not be without His Church; the Church is nothing without God. But in God the Church exists as the supreme object of divine grace, and in the Church God is pleased to live His divine life and manifest His divine glory. That is the mystery and destiny of the Church, hidden from the foundation of the world, but revealed and fulfilled in the Incarnation of the Son of God and in His glorious work of redemption, for in Jesus Christ the Church as the redeemed people of God is the crown of creation living in praise and gratitude to the Creator and reflecting with all things, visible and invisible, the glory of the eternal God.

Georges Bernanos

With the death of Bernanos, France lost more than a novelist. His was the authentic voice of a tradition that is older than a nation and which will surely outlast it. It is true that he wrote novels, and they were supreme in their perception of human destiny, incomparable in eloquence and passion. But the form of them was an instrument, not an end, and the professional critic may readily discover an indifference, even a contempt, for the nicely-ordered ingenuities of fiction. Bernanos was a prophet for whom the novel, or indeed prose as such, happened to be a trumpet to which his own generation might be enticed to listen. He believed in God and he believed in God’s hand at work in the affairs of men. For him the only ultimate truth was the plenitude of divine life, and he looked with an unfaltering vision on a world in which that life was usually ignored, sometimes acknowledged, but which in every case was the arena of a conflict that can end only with the Last Judgment of all. The popular success of the Journal d ‘un Curd de Campagne made a central idea of Bernanos’s familiar to readers to whom Sous le Soleil de Satan or Monsieur Ouine might seem intolerable, unreadable, remote. The huge weight that hangs on moral choice became increasingly for Bernanos a truth to be revealed not merely in the high moments of human tragedy but constantly, at every turn of the head, at every neutral gesture.

The Word Manifest

He that loveth me shall be loved of my Father; and I will love him and will manifest myself to him.—John 14, 21. The feast of the Nativity is the feast of the birth of the Word; his eternal generation in the bosom of the Father, his temporal birth; and his mystical birth in the souls of men, in which is involved their birth to divine life. The Christmas liturgy is at different times concerned with each of these aspects of the Mystery. Dominus dixit ad me. Filius meus es tu, ego hodie genui te, is the triumphal Introit to Midnight Mass.

Sacramental Incorporation into the Mystical Body

THE THOMIST A SPECULATIVE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY EDITORs: THE DoMINICAN FATHERS OF THE PRoviNCE oF ST. JosEPH Publishers: The Thomist Press, Washington 17, D. C. VoL. lX OCTOBER, 1946 No.4 SACRAMENTAL INCORPORATION INTO THE MYSTICAL BODY WITNESSED by the recent Encyclical Letter of Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis/ and by the numerous treatises of theological and devotional writers, the widespread and intensive interest among Catholics in the truth of the Mystical Body of Christ evidences a doctrinal survival against naturalism and a spiritual revival in the face of indifferentism . Throughout the ages of the Church the faithful have stood in awe of this sublime doctrine of the transcendent union of the members of Christ with their Head. Ever since St. Paul employed the metaphor " the Body of Christ " 2 to express the ineffable mystery of divine grace, which it is not given to man to speak, ever since that unique age when God spoke to 1 Pius XII, Encyc. "Mystici Corporis," AAS, XXXV (1948), pp. 198-!l48. • E. g., I Corinthians, vi, 15; xii, !t7; Ephesians, i, 22. 469 470 JOHN T. DITTOE and through men, Catholics have conceived of themselves as members of a divine organism. For St. Paul this daring conception uniting the grossness of sense perception with the unspeakable reality of divine life became the characteristic mode of describing the great fundamental truth of the Christian life. To him was given the privilege of uttering this word of wisdom which has made for all the followers of Christ an almost tactile experience of the divine union among the members of Christ. From St. Paul the Fathers and Doctors of the Church received this sublime teaching and doubled the talents of its richness by their contemplation, preaching, and writing. St. Cyprian, St. John Chrysostom, St. Cyril of Alexandria, and especially St. Augustine were the great expounders of this profound and yet universally appealing doctrine of Catholic truth. St. Thomas, enamoured of this truth so well attes:t;ed by Scripture and so beautifully delineated in Tradition, looked upon it as a treasure hidden in a field and worthy of all the powers of his theological exposition. So thoroughly has St. Thomas treated this matter that many modern writers find in the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ the master-idea of the Summa Theologica.3 If the Mystical Body can be conceived of as the master-idea to an understanding of the most profound work of St. Thomas, certainly the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist may be considered as the master-key to the doctrine of the Mystical Body. The Mystical Body flowed from the side of Christ hanging on the Cross, for by the power of His Passion His Mystical Body was constituted, moulded, founded, and blessed. To apply the power of His Passion, Christ instituted the Seven Sacraments. For men they are the means of becoming a member of Christ, of being joined to the Head. Their common effect is the con3 Cf. Anger, The Doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ (New York: 1931), (translated from the French by J. J. Burke), pp. xvi ff. SACRAMENTAL INCORPORATION INTO THE MYSTICAL BODY 471 struction of the Mystical Body. To the two principal Sacraments as their proper effect belongs the forming of the union of the members with Christ. Baptism and the Holy Eucharist are the Sacraments of incorporation into the Mystical Body of Christ. The precise purpose of this study is to clarify the relationship of the Sacraments of Baptism and the Holy Eucharist with the Mystical Body and to show that the unity of the Mystical Body is the direct, proper effect of the Sacrament of the true Body and Blood of Christ. First, the doctrine of the Mystical Body summarized as " incorporation through grace in the Incarnate Word " 4 will be treated. Men are members of that Body of which Christ is the Head. All supernatural life descends to men through Christ after the manner in which natural life and movement flow from the head of the human body to its members. How this notion is borne out in the Mystical Body of Christ will be the matter of...

God is our Mother

“As verily as God is our Bather, so verily God is our Mother; and that shewed he in all, and especially in the sweet words where he said: I it am”. (Mother Julian, Revelations of Divine Love, c.59).St. Thomas states (1,47,1; 111,23, 2 ad 3) that the things which are in time are meant to be but manifestations of those which are from eternity; i.e. of God himself, of the eternal self- subsistent life of the Blessed Trinity, the nature ofwhich was revealed to Moses when the Lord spoke to him out of the burning bush: “I AM WHO AM . . . Thus shalt thou say to the children of Israel: HE WHO IS hath sent me to you” (Exodus, 3, 14). The Fulness of Being, the Plentitude of Life—such is God’s own description of himself; and when S. John, who had learnt the secrets of the divine life as he lay on the bosom of the Incarnate Word, declared that ‘God is Love’, he was only expressing the same truth from a different point of view. For love is only the ‘affluence’, the diffusion, the self-donation of being. So that Being at its source must also be love at its source (cf. Maritain, Introduction to Metaphysics, 4, 7-8).

Victorinus and the Imago Dei

The doctrine of man as the Imago Dei has been brought out into the forefront of theological speculation in recent years, especially by Emil Brunner and Karl Barth; and Catholic theologians fully admit that Christian tradition needs to be re-explored before an adequate theological statement can be made in the face of the existentialist writers. The great problem, of course, is how can the two apparently irreconcilable trends in Christian tradition be synthesised without prejudice to the truth which each enunciates. How, in short, can the classic theory of St. Augustine be reconciled with the far too little known Imago Christi stress of Tertullian and St. Irenaeus? The latter school taught that man was made to the image of God in the sense that he was made after the pattern of the Christ coming in the flesh to redeem mankind : this school therefore strongly stresses the corporal likeness as a basic element in the Image doctrine. St. Augustine on the other hand, basing himself on a subtle analysis of the nature of the ‘mens,’ contends that man is made to the image of the Trinity itself, and carries in his soul a reflection of the divine life. This theory is then concerned to emphasise man’s spiritual nature as the most important element in the Imago doctrine.

Contemplation and Community

The importance of human life is seen from the end towards which it tends. That which gives a human being his unique value and place in the symphony of creation is his possession of an immortal soul made by God, for God, and whose duty it is to become “worthy of the vocation wherewith we are called,” which is the “lot of the saints in light.” This is the dominant theme interwoven throughout the fiery melody of God’s love for the human soul, and the integrating principle for all human activity. The fecundity of the divine self-contemplation is made manifest in His creative love which has ordained all things so that they form a far away reflection, a passing shadow of those riches of beauty and order whose plenitude is in Him. “For the invisible things of Him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; His eternal power also and divinity.” The social structure, therefore, composed of a community of persons mystically united through charity, one in grace yet diverse in operation, whispers of the Trinity of Persons in God. The very fact that we all partake of the same divine life obliges each, through charity, to serve and participate in the necessary Mass of his brothers sanctification, in order that we may become “a chosen race, royal priesthood, holy nation.” And the fundamental unit of this greater unity is the family, natural and supernatural, both motivated by the same principle of love, though differently directed as to the immediate end, and each affording to its members an ideal and natural context for the plenary development of those powers within the person whose need of fulfilment occasions their unity.

Christian Life

The Christian life is a life of friendship with God, ‘I have called you friends.’ More, we are called to share the divine life itself in fellowship with Christ and as members of God’s family; ‘God is faithful, by whom you are called unto the fellowship of His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.’ He is our elder brother, ‘the firstborn among many brethren,’ and we receive the spirit of adoption of sons, and are joint heirs with Christ.The fullness of the divine life is to be ours hereafter in the blessed, all-satisfying vision and love of God eternally possessed. Then ‘we shall be like to him, because we shall see him as he is-we shall see face to face, and know even as we are known. This life of eternal blessedness is indeed promised as a reward for a life well lived here below, but it will be only the full development of the divine life already begun in this world. ‘He that believeth in the son hath eternal life’; ‘we are now the sons of God.’ At Baptism the soul is born again to the higher life by adoptive sonship, and by this higher life, which we are accustomed to call sanctifying grace, we are ‘partakers of the divine nature.’

The Spirit of Catholic Action

Even in His manhood Christ Our Lord, being endowed with the fulness of grace and truth, enjoys a divine intimacy of love and vision which is incomparable. Since He is at the very apex of perfection made a “little less than the angels” but to Whom all things have been subjected, He “is able to save for ever them that come to God by Him.” Anointed with the glory of the Godhead the grace that is His is not only an endowment of His own sacred humanity but a fount of supernatural life which is meant to pervade all who are redeemed. The first among creatures to receive within herself the author of divine life was Mary the Mother of God, by whom God gives Himself to the world. “The Blessed Virgin,” says St. Thomas, “received such a fulness of grace that she was nearest of all to the Author of grace; so that she received within her Him Who is full of all grace; and by bringing Him forth, she, in a manner, dispensed grace to all.” And again he writes: “Indeed it is a great thing in any saint that he should have such an abundance of grace that it is enough for the salvation of many: but when it is so abundant as to be available for all it is in the highest degree, as is the case with Christ and the Blessed Virgin.” By the man-becoming of God, the God-man is consecrated priest and anointed as king.