As Bishop Sartain said last night, quoting Paul, "For me, Christ is life." This echoes the theme of Sunday's readings, immortality (readings for RCIA). For immortality is im-mortal, that is, life forever.
How do mortals think about "life forever"? We tend to think of the soul as "automatically" immortal. In other words, immortality is part of the soul's "substance" (what it means to be a soul). Earlier in the 20th Century, a theologian named Paul Althaus disagreed with this, writing: "Whether believers or not, it is God who makes us endure. He it is who enables us to persist, through all the reality of death in which we are lost to ourselves. He makes us endure and, in resurrection, gives us back to ourselves once more so that we may stand before his judgment-seat and live." In other words, we really go out of existence upon our death, and only God, who gives life initially, can bring about our resurrection.
I read some interesting comments by then-Cardinal Ratzinger on this topic in his book Eschatology (pp.150-153), comments that go to the question of how "immortal life" is made available to mortals. According to Ratzinger, Gregory of Nyssa, in a homily, gives a magnificent witness to Christian continuity with the thought of antiquity, and to its transmutation:
"Gregory's homily comments on a saying of the Lord preserved in St. Matthew's gospel (Mt.5:8): "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." Behind this beatitude, we can discern another saying of Jesus, from his high-priestly prayer: "This is eternal life, that they may know you." (Jn.17:3)
"The Greek longing for vision, the Greek awareness that vision is life -- that knowledge, being wedded to the truth, is life -- this mighty outreach of the Greek spirit towards the truth here finds its confirmation and final resting-place.
"Yet this word filled with hope and promise at first strikes man as we know him with a sense of despair, of the absurdity of his existence. Seeing God: that is life! But the ancient wisdom of the peoples, echoed by the Bible from the Pentateuch to Paul and John, tells us that no one can see God. He who would see God dies. Man wants to see God, for only then can he live. But his strength cannot bear such a sight.
"Gregory of Nyssa: "If God be Life, then anyone who does not see God does not see life. However, the prophets and the apostle testify: no one can see God . . ."
"And so the human situation may be compared with that of Peter trying to walk upon the waters of Gennesareth. He wants to get across to the Lord, but he cannot. The philosopher, we might say, is Peter on the lake, wishing to step beyond mortality and glimpse life but not succeeding, indeed sinking beneath the waves. For all his capacity to speculate about immortality, in the end he cannot stand. The waters of mortality bear down his will to see. Only the Lord's outstretched hand can save sinking Peter, that is, humankind.
"That hand reaches out for us in the saying, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." Philosophical understanding remains a walking on the waters: it yields no solid ground. Only God incarnate can draw us out of the waters by his power and hold us firm. His promise is that we will attain the vision of God, which is life, not through speculative thinking, but by the purity of an undivided heart, in the faith and love which take the Lord's hand are are led by it.
"Here, then, owing to a christological transformation, the Platonist notion of the life which flows from truth is rendered more profound, and made the vehicle of a "dialogical" concept of humanity: man is defined by his intercourse with God. At the same time, this new concept makes absolutely concrete claims about the things which will set us right on the path of immortality, and so changes a seemingly speculative theme into something eminently practical. The "purification" of the heart which comes about in our daily lives, through the patience which faith and its offspring, love, engender, that purification finds its mainstay in the Lord who makes the paradoxical walking on the waters a possibility and so gives meaning to an otherwise absurd existence. Phil.1:21; John 3:16-21."
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