Hour Of Prayer Research Articles

Translation Criticism: Implementation of House’s TQA Model on “Sweet Hour of Prayer” into Indonesian

Translation Criticism: Implementation of House’s TQA Model on “Sweet Hour of Prayer” into Indonesian

The Impact of Lifestyle on the Immune System: Focus on Islamic Lifestyle: A Narrative Review.

"Lifestyle" is the way or style of people living in a special time and place and includes behaviors and functions of individuals which are formed in a specific geographical, economic, political, cultural, and religious context and influenced by them. Lifestyle as an essential and efficient agent, impacts different aspects of human health, including immune functions. In the Islamic lifestyle, many recommendations have beneficial effects on human health. Islamic lifestyle influences human immunity with comprehensive recommendations and rules for different stages of life from the beginning until death. Breastfeeding is strongly emphasized in the Islamic lifestyle with an essential role in passive immunity. The quality of breastfeeding has been noticed; therefore, some spiritual words during breastfeeding have been recommended, such as the name of God, which affect the mother's and baby's immune systems via the neuro-immuno-endocrine network. Islamic lifestyle, especially in nutrition and attention to permission and forbidden foods, can prevent obesity and nutritional disorders and therefore may influence infection spread and prevention of diseases. In addition, there is a good synchronization between the hours of prayer "Salat", circadian rhythm, and immune response. In fasting according to Islamic rules (Sawm), moderate hunger and thirst may result in the enhancement of T cell function, cytokine production, and NK cell activity and diminish the negative effects of cholesterol on the immune system. Emphasis on the necessity of paying attention to maintain spiritual health and piety (Taghva) and encouraging marriage are other examples of Islamic lifestyle-related recommendations with beneficial effects on human immune functions. Hence, it is believed that Islamic teaching presents patterns for a healthy life style that could be beneficial for the immune system.

Atea: Nature and Divinity in Polynesia

Reviewed by: Atea: Nature and Divinity in Polynesia Dan Taulapapa McMullin Atea: Nature and Divinity in Polynesia. Exhibition, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1911 2018–27 10 2019. Exhibition catalogue available at https://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/Atea_Nature_and_Divinity_in_Polynesia. For additional details, see the exhibition website at https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2018/atea-nature-and-divinity-in-polynesia. Atea No time to close the door of light To shutter the sight of each other in dark wood The dark wood of his arms, her legs Standing on the body of our wailing. Spin the tail of light As pigs run up and down the wand As the wand bursts into feathers inside us The long red, long white streams of tropic birds. Unite angels with their demon Sacrifice the iconoclast to the sea Watch his clothes float away to broken sky. Look for tongue of red molten rock In the sweet hole of the temple of our bodies Wear the bio gifts of missiles In our hair like plastic flowers. There is no point that can free us Of this desire to be buried in light To sleep with these deities deep In cliffs hooked up from the sea. I moved to New York in the summer of 2014, around the same time that London-born Māori curator Maia Nuku moved there to begin work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Since that time, I've watched her nurture a cultural center for the community of Pacific Islanders who live and work here, much like her family helped nurture the diaspora in England. Although I live mostly in the country town of Hudson in upstate New York, I feel I'm a part of the steady stream of Moana people who come to New York City to visit or bring work or to live, like previous generations from the early 1800s when Kanaka Maoli sailors arrived on whaling ships, through to my Aunt Tutasi, who worked in television and hosted Malietoa Tanumafili II and Tupua Tamasese Mea'ole when they came to the United Nations in 1962, right up to the exhibition Te Maori, which the Met hosted from 11 September 1984 to 6 January 1985. Lonoka'eho, Lono of the Stones, of the eight stone foreheads, towered overhead at the entrance to the opening of Maia's exhibition Atea. Kanaka Maoli artist and curator Marques Hanalei Marzan and Shinnecock artist Shane Weeks chanted blessings for the space to a mixed crowd of Pacific community members and artists and prominent New York collectors and curators (for videos of the opening, see the exhibition's website). Looking at the curved figure of Lonoka'eho or at the beautifully carved figures of Hikule'o in the exhibition (figure 1), I felt blessed that these few deities survived colonization, and yet I can't help but see my own feelings about Indigenous disembodiment or removal in these figures. The word "atea" throughout Polynesia has connotations of light and [End Page 596]space, of openness, of day; it is the space in which sound travels, the logo/longo/lono (perception by senses other than light) of chanting across time. Contemporary philosophy of Polynesia, following Lilikalā Kame'eleihiwa, Maualaivao Albert Wendt, and Hufanga 'Okusitino Mahina, often asks what space-time means in the Pacific context, in Polynesian terms: vā being the space (of relations) and tā the beat of time. This search for Indigenous time is caught in a kind of language drift toward Western definitions, but its goal is to bring Polynesian meaning into the greater space. The word "time" originally referred to the tides in old English, and the word "clock" originally meant bells sounding the hours of prayer at abbeys and sounding the change of watch on ships. Like Polynesian words for space-time, such as "vatea" in Samoan, which is the space of light over the sea that defines distance, these English sea meanings changed into something to match the Cartesian lines of maps, arbitrary demarcations, the mechanics of clocks, objects elided of stories, naturalized functions. As I look at the rising shield foreheads of Lonoka'eho and the sumptuous forms of Hikule'o in the...

La semantique politique du jeu de couleurs merinide: pureté et clarté, blancheur et verdeur (xiiie–xve siècles)

ABSTRACTThis article highlights the establishment of political legitimacy of Marīnid Sultan authority (1265–1465) using their symbolic colours, white and green. In order to examine the significance of these colours, we use the available historical material so that we are able to interpret colour in the context of this legitimacy. We consider literature as presented in ̛genres such as historiography, poetry and political and religious texts and demonstrated in the symbolic aspects of the new sultan's power within a ceremonial space. Marīnid scholars have studied such symbolic politics and have composed a ‘poetics of royalty’ – a metaphorical arrangement linking colours and emblems of royalty that are purified and regenerated. These are embodied in certain emblems: norias, water-clocks, white flags (or lanterns) indicating the hour of prayer and the sword of the caliphate as a shining light on the summit of the mosque in al-Qarawiyyīn. The arrangement of the colours has a political dimension developed by sultans and their scholars that demonstrates the legitimacy of a dynasty emerging from nowhere, heir to a missing imām, that of Idrissid, the founder of regenerated monarchy. Finally, the white colour of the Marīnids is a symbolic re-appropriation of the Almohad white. Tīnmal, ‘the one who belongs to the Whites, to the Pure’, also known as the White City (al-madīna al-bayḍā') – founded by the Marīnid sultans on what became the city of Fes.

The Republic of Sound: Listening to Florence at the Threshold of the Renaissance

Such a strategy, I believe, was a way of harnessing the power of the ringing of bells, already deeply ingrained in the Christian sacred soundscape, to unite and assemble people, to eradicate differences, and to harmonize the conflicts between institutions and communities. This was in stark contrast to the urban strategies of popular regimes to reorganize the city spatially through new political jurisdictions, the demolition of defensive towers, the creation of public thoroughfares, and the exclusionary laws suffered by magnates that deprived them of access to political office.36 Instead of such antagonistic urban strategies, the soundscape developed by the Florentine government formed part of a plan to create the appearance of a harmonic regime of inclusiveness. It was a subtle, syncopated rhythm that respected the sacred marking of time and prayer, giving a distinct acoustic imprint to various times when, and spaces in which, these tasks were performed. It was also characterized by a shared orchestration of sacred and secular activities (fig. 7). It was the Badia that marked the hours of prayer and the beginning of the workday, but it was a civic bell, the Leone, that rang the triple sequence of the evening prayer of the Ave Maria, sonically binding a political community to a spiritual one. The message of the acoustic regime was one of harmony and unity between bodies in space, whose movements were the building blocks of an urban ideal of social peace.Figure 7. Bell towers of the Bargello (left), Badia (center), and the Palazzo Vecchio (right). (Photo: Sean Nelson).

Faith Tweets: Ambient Religious Communication and Microblogging Rituals

Faith Tweets: Ambient Religious Communication and Microblogging Rituals

Romantic literature and indigenous languages: reading Felicia Hemans in Te Reo Māori

Nineteenth‐century British settlers brought Romantic literary texts with them to the colonies, but little attention has been paid to the ways in which these texts took root in their new homes through the process of translation into indigenous languages. This paper focuses on one example of this process. Felicia Hemans’ poem “The Hour of Prayer” appears in te reo Māori (the Māori language) in nineteenth‐century schoolbooks designed for educating Māori children and in at least one Māori language newspaper. An analysis of the three distinct translations that have survived shows that the translators predictably did not produce literal versions but rather poetic approximations of Hemans’ text. Some of these editorial changes can be attributed to a desire to preserve the meter and rhyme of the poem, but they nevertheless alter the meaning of the words considerably, particularly when read in the context of contemporary Māori values. Other changes suggest a deliberate attempt to tap into these values in order to convey more forcefully the import of the poem’s spiritual message. Moreover, the three translations, separated by thirty years, each suggest an awareness of the particular historical and political stakes for Māori in New Zealand at the moment of translation.

The Responsory-Communions for Paschaltide

One of the more vexing problems facing the student of the medieval office is the origin of the three hours of prayer that precede tierce: those known commonly as matins, lauds and prime. Of particular interest to the music historian is the organization of the readings that comprise the three nocturnes of the night office, and more specifically the responsories that accompany those readings. The earliest document to describe the night office Lectionary in any detail is that numbered by Michel Andrieu as Ordo XIV, which he described as originating at St. Peters during the second half of the seventh century. 1 Vague in liturgical specificity, Ordo XIV preserves an approach to the Lectionary that is largely calendric, as the readings are cyclically arranged with little relevance to seasonal and liturgical themes. A later document, originating during the first half of the eighth century at the Lateran, offers a wealth of changes to the earlier ordo, including the re-organization of the post-Pentecost lections as well as a host of additions appropriate to the liturgical theme at hand for the major feasts of the year. This later witness, dubbed Ordo XIIIa by Msgr. Andrieu, remained the basis for the matins readings until the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican council.2 Some years ago, Pio Alfonzo interpreted this expansion of the office lectionary as the source for much of the medieval repertory of responsory chants, and it is his suggestion that will serve as the impetus for my own speculations today about the Paschaltide responsory and communion cycles.3

The Origins of Evangelical Pianism

use of the in worship service is basically a twentieth-century phenomenon. At the end of the nineteenth century the was viewed as a secular instrument: yet by the final third of the twentieth century two distinct traditions of piano', both of them with several subtraditions, had become firmly established. This essay will deal with the early history of one of these traditions, a largely EuropeanAmerican tradition that originates in the music played at the great turnof-the-century meetings.' I refer to this tradition as evangelistic piano to differentiate it from the Afro-American styles of piano,' whose origins come from the black church rather than from the meeting. Readers should remember that writers on gospel music are likely to refer to either style as piano,' relying on context to clarify which tradition is being referred to. was occasionally used for the accompaniment of religious music in the nineteenth century. At mid-century, the hymn writer William Batchelder Bradbury (composer of such hymntunes as Just as I am, The Solid Rock, and Sweet Hour of Prayer) used accompaniment for his thousand-voice children's choirs at the Broadway Tabernacle in New York City.2 Another gospel songwriter, Charles Edward Prior (1856-?) served as pianist for the Italian Baptist Mission in Hartford, Connecticut, in the late nineteenth century.3 And although Ira Sankey is usually associated with the reed organ, he apparently had no qualms about using the piano. In 1898 he was asked to sing at an American Mission meeting in Cairo, Egypt. He replied that al-

Holiness in Beauty? Roman Catholics, Arminians, and the Aesthetics of Religion in Early Caroline England

This paper is more concerned with posing questions than attempting to provide answers. I am principally interested in trying to establish whether there was a connection between the English Arminians’ emphasis on ritual and the beautification of churches in the 1620S and 1630S and the perception at the time that Roman Catholicism was gaining ground, especially in London and at the court. It has long been known that Charles I’s court was considered by contemporaries to have been rife with Catholic activity. Likewise, the embassy chapels in London provided a focus for Protestant discontent as a result of their attracting considerable congregations of English Catholics. The 1620s also saw the Arminian faction within the Church of England grow in influence, acquiring the patronage of the Duke of Buckingham and of King Charles himself. As has been demonstrated by Nicholas Tyacke, for example, this faction was very much orientated towards the court, and gained power by working within this milieu under the leadership of Laud and Neile. However, I am not concerned here with the politics of the Arminian rise to control of the Church of England hierarchy, but rather with their interest in ceremonial worship, their endeavour to place liturgy rather than the sermon at the centre of services. Was a leading Arminian such as John Cosin, for instance, reacting to what amounted to a Roman initiative? Furthermore, one needs to ask what part aesthetics played in attracting and retaining the allegiance of Catholics to what was, after all, an illegal form of worship. Even if the no longer faced the likelihood of physical martyrdom, financial penalties were severe, and the threat of imprisonment remained for priests and laity alike. Yet some twenty per cent of the titular nobility and many ordinary folk remained loyal to Rome. May not the very nature of Catholic worship provide a clue to explain this phenomenon? Clearly this is an extremely wide subject, which the time and space available does not permit me to explore in depth on this occasion. Therefore, I propose to focus on two specific areas: what attracted crowds of Londoners to the Catholic worship offered by the embassy chapels; and on one aspect of the Arminian response, namely, the field of devotional literature. I shall examine John Cosin’s A Collection of Private Devotions… Called the Hours of Prayer (1627) in the context of its being a reply to popular Catholic devotional books of the period, such as the Officium Beatae Mariae Virginis, commonly known as the Primer. Thus I shall address issues connected with both public and private devotions.

Myth, Microcosm, and Method in George Herbert's "Prayer" (I)

Myth, Microcosm, and Method in George Herbert's uPrayer" (I) by Joan Klingel Ray Barbara Lewalski's observation that George Herbert "all unobtrusively loads every rift with ore"1 applies especially well to "Prayer" (I), in which the poet offers twenty-six highly suggestive — if sometimes puzzling — metaphors to explore the meaning of prayer. The images of which this sonnet is comprised have been well mined.2 Yet delving a bit more deeply into lines six and seven, with their respective descriptions of prayer as "Reversed thunder" and "The six-daies world transposing in an houre," as well as into the overall organization or method of the poem, especially a suggested turn at line four, yields even greater riches in "Prayer" (I) than have been hitherto recognized. Explicating line six's image of "Reversed thunder," critics point to the thunder frequently associated in the Bible with God's presence and to the thunderbolts that pagan lore says were hurled by Jupiter. But how might thunder be "Reversed"? Di Cesare answers that the image "suggests bold, aggressive prayer" and as such is a witty description of how "the thunderbolt of the divine anger against sinful man is absorbed by the lightning rod of the Cross. . . ."3 On the same image, Rickey and Bloch observe that "Reversed thunder" reminds us that God allows his creatures to assume the divine prerogative and use prayer against him — to "storm" in Rickey's words, "the very throne of Grace"; this is implicitly contrasted with the "merely" authoritative and unapproachable throne of Jupiter.4 While cautioning against the "attempt to 'visualise' the metaphor too closely," Greenwood acknowledges Herbert's "allusion to 'profane' literature" and regards the association of Jupiter's thunderbolts with Judeo-Christian prayer as oxymoronic and suggestive of prayer's " 'two-way' direction."5 But even as readers of line six note the biblical and mythological sources for "Reversed thunder," little has been done to specify a relationship between the two traditions beyond Rickey's 38Joan Klingel Ray contrasting God's approachability with Jupiter's inapproachability . Yet Herbert, an Anglican divine and a classicist, would have surely considered a metaphysically witty fusion of the biblical and mythological allusions. That is, the wounded Christian pray-er who would "storm" God's throne with bitter recriminations — with "Reversed thunder" — is reminiscent of the raving, unruly "Child" in Herbert's "The Collar." In mythology, Phaethon was the unruly child who became a victim of Jupiter's thunderbolts. Despite his father's (Phoebus') warnings, Phaethon insisted on driving the huge, fiery chariot of the sun. The chariot so overpowered the boy that he was unable even to heed his father's instructions for directing it. Consequently, it raced chaotically, burning everything in its path until Jupiter, at the behest of Mother Earth, struck and killed the young charioteer with a thunderbolt . This is a "tale of indulgent parenthood," observes Joseph Campbell.6 It is also the tale of the unruly child who proudly assumes the prerogatives of his father, until (in Campbell's words) "chaos supervenes." Similarly, the pray-er who figuratively hurls "thunder" at God — albeit that God, in His loving generosity, gives His creature the freedom to do so — is an unruly child whose spiritually adolescent rebellion will potentially plunge him into chaos. Indeed, this is precisely what happens to the speaker of "The Collar," who "rav'd and grew more fierce and wilde / At every word . . ."(II. 33-34). But whereas Jupiter hurls punitive thunderbolts at a rebellious child, the Christian God lovingly calls the "Child" back to order.7 This occurs not only in "The Collar," but also in "Prayer" (I). To understand this return to order in "Prayer" (I), we turn to the second image of line six, "Christ-side-piercing spear," insofar as it relates to line 7, "The six-daies world transposing in an houre." In the fullest and most cogent interpretation of line 7 that I have encountered, Di Cesare suggests that its final word, "houre," refers not only to the hour of prayer, but also (and more profoundly) to the hour of Christ's death. Thus, he reasons, the "houre" of the Crucifixion, which is also represented by the...

Two Poems

TWO POEMS Pauline B. Cheek OF A MIND TO Granny never learned to play her organ. Oh, she managed to puzzle out "Amazing Grace" And maybe "Sweet Hour of Prayer," But not what you'd call real playing. You could tell that the organ pleasured her, though. It stood in the North room, Along with the victrola and the plush pile settee, Over near the window, where the light Could catch the grain of the rich dark wood And any dust that dared to settle there. A crocheted runner protected the top From framed photos of the boys and the grandbabies. Nothing else rested on it, except a hymnal, of course, And maybe a pitcher of holly at Christmastime. There's no telling what prompted that salesman To wander so far back from the road. ile could not hear the music inside That slender young woman bending over the hoe. He could not look inside her house At embroidered feedsack pillowslips, At dahlias in a crock beside the kerosene lamp. There's no telling either what prompted Granny to sign That paper that stayed fourteen years in her bureau drawer, Daily reminder of payments due. Extravagance for her was usually a sack of orange-slice candy On an occasional trip to town. Independence for her was not usually signing something Without consulting Joe. No, there's no telling what capricious wind caught hold of Granny's dream And kept it sailing like a kite for fourteen years. She never let go of the kitestring. After alt, she had ways of meeting payments. 18 All the money that came from the chickens was hers. The old horseappie tree bore a plenty of fruit for drying. And stained hands from shelling out walnuts never bothered her. Slowly the snuff can grew heavy, To be emptied, and then filled again With coins and a few wadded bills— For fourteen years. No one remembers what Granny did the day the organ arrived. She's not likely to have shown much emotion. The organ just became a part of her. And years later, when asked how she got it, And searched for an explanation: "I reckon 1 was of a mind to have one, And 1 never did get out of heart." THE BOUNDARY LINE They walked the line into Grandpa's past, Past the pen where the pigs no longer root And the honeysuckle tangles now the cattle's all sold; Then, skirting the thicket where the pines have grown In the pasture he cleared of chestnut oak, They found the site of the cabin he built For the bride he took in her ninteenth year, Faced east to the Sunday when the fire got out And swept down the hollow to the backfire's blaze, Then headed north along John Williams' line, Where he taught his boys to apologize For a hide-out built on another man's land. Turning left at the stob in the hardwood stand Still scarred from the swath of the hurricane'? scythe, Crossing copper-veined rocks where the Indians campea. Leaving arrowheads for the boys to find When they'd finished up chores and could frolic there, They went twenty paces on to mid-July, a maple tree, And a mason jar of lemonade drained when they worked the upper four. Due south across the branch from the Dollar spring, Where his wife hunted cresses and purpie trilliurn. 1 Q To Charlie Sharpe's line and the gap in the fence That ran to the barn and those tale-telling nights When the katy-dids sawed and tobacco cured. They circled the beech that provided shade When he lay near death from the hay-rake fall And back along the garden to the sawdust pile Where he fired the boiler as a lad of twelve And served as sawyer in the lumber mill Till he earned the land fair from his pa. From the gravestone dated back to 1804 They followed the sunken old country road To the mailbox posted on the new highway, Angled north along the orchard and the richest field To the birdfeed plank strewn with sunflower seeds And back to the house, where the...

The Background and Origin of the Christian Hours of Prayer

The Background and Origin of the Christian Hours of Prayer

Time and Zeit

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size NotesThe other Germanic words in this field also deserve etymological reconsideration: Go. þeihs, OE þing-gemearc ‘measured time’; Go. mēl, ON mál, OE mǣl, OHC māl ‘fixed time, meal time’; Go. hweila, OE hwil, OHG wīla ‘period of time, hour,’ ON hvila ‘resting place, bed’; ON, OE stunde, OHG stunta ‘period of time,’ NHG Stunde ‘hour’: ON bil ‘time, point in time.’ What is required is a semantic-field study of these words and their interrelationships as well as an investigation of their individual histories. Such an ambitious undertaking is beyond the scope of this short etymological essay.The evolution of NE tide and NHG Gezeiten ‘the periodic rise and fall of the ocean’ is a side-development within the lexical family. Because etymological evidence almost contumaciously resists elegant and simple formulation, this development wants separate treatment. The experience of eternal return of certain temporal phenomena asserted itself in this particular and separate turn of evolution in the lexical family. In OHG gezîti f. pl. ‘ecclesiastical festival,’ MHG gezît ‘hour of prayer,’ NHG Gezeiten, Falk-Torp maintain that the collective prefix ge- corresponds to the Latin prefix re- and that thereby the ever-recurrent nature of these events is expressed. I dispute that. OHG gezîti is a collection of similar events. The prefix ge- in these formations no more refers to temporal sequence than it does in NHG Gebirge, Gestirn. What is expressed is the fact that a number of events resemble each other. The forms to be found in England and the Netherlands simply did not make use of this morphological device: NE tide, early NDu. tijde, NDu. tij. Middle Low German shows both tide and getide. Collectivity and sequence are not related notions. OE tid and ON tioir in the sense of ‘ecclesiastical feasts at the canonical times’ shows that the continental development was contingent and secondary. That these events constantly recur lies in the nature of the world and not in these morphological formations. That the morphological device does not correspond to the exterior reality of events is shown in the contrast of NHG Gezeiten ‘tide’ and Zeiten ‘menstruation.’ That Zeiten is indubitably a loan-translation of the learned Periode does not vitiate this argument one bit. It only demonstrates the point that continuity or repetition is a superfluous and misleading concept in any discussion of this etymological family. The still-surviving ambivalence in NE tide illustrates that the semantic split in the word family came about as a specialization in order to create a practical device for controlling reality.Feist, VEGW, p. 423a adopts Kluge’s etymology of the second element of Go. sinteins with no reservations. My own etymology below permits us to establish a much more lucid explanation of the Gothic compound. Feist’s contribution is the etymological identification of the first element of the compound. The element sin- is also to be found in ON si-, OE, OFries., OS, OHG sin- ‘constant, lasting,’ cf. ON si-fella ‘uninterrupted series,’ OE sin-niht(e) ‘eternal night.’ Feist finds the root in IE *sem- ‘one’ which can refer to something of a unitary, unchanging nature, cf. Lat. semper ‘always.’If this entry is not an oversight, it is certainly misleading. *tīþ in itself could not yield OHG zit. For the operation of Verner’s law, we must assume some sort of suffix with accent.For other authorities who adhere to this etymology see Falk-Torp, II, 1564.The arrangement of events in relative order is an operation of quite another sort and dimension. The intricate problems of the ordering of events within the grammatical structure of a particular language are treated with clarity and finesse in William Bull’s Time, Tense, and the Verb (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1960), in the series, University of California Publications in Linguistics, Vol. XIX.I have resisted my own inclination to subject the root to a laryngeal analysis. The traditional analysis of ablaut relationships is quite adequate for the purposes of this study. A possible analysis as *de X-y-t y- has been omitted because the positing of such a form would, at this point, be unproductive.

Rembrandt and Josephus

Rembrandt has represented the Temple in Jerusalem on several occasions but never in such detail as in the etching of 1659, Peter and John at the Gate of the Temple. The story of Peter healing the lame man in Acts 3:1–10, is said to take place “at the hour of prayer … at the gate of the temple which is called Beautiful.” One sees, therefore, a tall and spacious portal and through it the Temple terrain crowded with worshipers.

Cosin's Hours of Prayer: A Liturgical Review

Cosin's Hours of Prayer: A Liturgical Review

The Basis of the Suarezian Teaching on Human Freedom

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. XI JANUARY, 1948 No.1 THE BASIS OF THE SUAREZIAN TEACHING ON HUMAN FREEDOM WE propose in these pages to undertake a fresh analysis of the teaching of Francisco Suarez on human freedom and God's causality of a free human act. Our purpose is to point out just what the roots of that teaching are. The suspicion arises almost at once that any such study is useless, wasteful, and harmful: useless, because what ·is of primary importance to man is to have God's grace rather than to dispute its nature; wasteful, because far greater men have, over a long period of time, disputed this very matter and failed to reach a solution commonly accepted, so that we should be content to accept the nature of grace as a mystery not to be toyed with by our unskilled minds; harmful, because it might possibly be provocative of further dispute. Yet we are convinced the analysis ought to be undertaken, first, and most important of all, because of the inherent importance of the question in itself. The questions of the nature 1 THOMAS U. MULLANEY of man's freedom, and of God's motion of that free will are vital to every Christian, for upon the answers given them depend the whole character of one's spirituality and, to a large extent, of one's relationship to God Himself. The spirituality of one who accepts the intrinsic efficacy of God's efficacious helps is bound to be altogether God-centered; his attitude to God is one of completely relaxed and limitless trust. The spirituality, on the other hand, of the praCtical Congruist is bound to have its egocentric side: for if, as Congruists-among them Suarez-hold, the determination that grace shall be efficacious comes from the created will, so that, metaphysically speaking, it is possible that there be some men whom the Allpowerful God cannot save, then, very clearly, our spirituality must be in very important part self-centered. If the ultimate and determining element in saving my soul is myself-and Suarez teaches that it is-then in the effecting of my own perfection it is I, and not God, who is of ultimate importance and my whole spirituality must be shaped accordingly. Now in practical Christian life a choice must be made of one or the other outlook, and the choice is of very real importance in our day-to-day living. According as one chooses one or the other one puts ultimate trust either in God or himself. It seems to us that Father Garrigou-Lagrange has expressed this point extremely well when he wrote, " It has been said that the Thomist must abandon his doctrine when he enters his oratory. On the contrary it is during his moments of insubordination and pride that he forgets his doctrine of the subordination of causes. Freed from all illusion he must say that of himself he is nothing. . . . It would be a great illusion to think that what is better in us and of a salutary nature, the good use of our liberty and of grace, our free determination is exclusively our work and does not come from God. . . . In truth when the Molinist prays (and the same can be applied to the Congruist) he thinks like us that it is an old and absurd dream to believe that we are or do something good of ourselves and independently of God . . . of ourselves we are nothing. If we deduct BASIS OF SUAREZIAN TEACHING ON HUMAN FREEDOM 3 from ourselves what we have received from God and what He unceasingly preserves in us, in strictness of terminology, without any metaphor, there is nothing left. . . . How can our free determination be exclusively our act? How can it depend solely upon ourselves that the grace of God is made efficacious or sterile? Of ourselves we are less than nothing." " Were St. Augustine and St. Thomas in their hours of prayer and adoration ' humble Molinists' ? Humility does not consist in diminishing God's...

“Ut Co-operatores simus.”

“Ut Co-operatores simus.”