virtus fidei – actus fidei

I recently came to a more nuanced way of thinking of faith. In Forming Intentional Disciples, Sherry Weddell points to a way of expressing the relationship between faith and works, that controversial duo that has been a bone of contention among Christians for centuries. She speaks of this in relation to the graces received through the sacraments, but it clarifies thinking when it is used in the relationship between faith and works.

Virtus fedei, the virtue of faith, is what is freely given to us at baptism through the grace of God. It is the “capacity to believe”.  Actus fedei, a personal act of faith, is what transforms that capacity to believe into true belief, a personal explicit faith.

Quoting Ms. Weddell, “The Church’s understanding of saving faith is that it is not merely the passive capacity for grace …. Neither can true faith exist without charity. Intellectual assent alone, without charity and good works is what the Church calls fides informis”, and it is a dead faith that does not save.  

The Glue that Binds

In today's Gospel Jesus counsels forgiving not seven times but seventy. Forgiveness has been called the core of the Christian faith (C.S.Lewis). The Christian answer to conflict and violence is forgiveness, not tit for tat. To defeat your enemy, Lincoln said, make him your friend.

Forgiveness is not an easy yoke to shoulder, but often the hardest thing we can undertake. Forgiving may take years of effort. But it is what Christ demands and offers by way of invitation to liberation and new life. My commentary on today's reading (Living In Christ) notes that persons meeting who hold a grudge against one another stiffen, like corpses. Life flows again when we can forgive.

It is Christ's spirit of love that enables us to forgive. That was brought home to me today when I read that Plato in the Timaeus (31b-c) pointed out that "Two things cannot properly be put together without a third; there has to be some bond between the two to draw them together. The most beautiful bond is the one that produces the greatest union of itself and of the things it brings together . . ." (quoted in D.C. Schindler, "Ever Ancient, Ever New" in Communio, Spring-Summer 2012, at p. 47).

The point the author makes is that Christ is the glue, the bonding agent that draws two together in friendship. (Of course, that is the basic principle of the theology of Christian marriage. It applies, it seems, to all true friendships.)

Schindler goes on to say, "Compare to the opening line of Aelred of Rivaulx's work on friendship: 'You and I are here, and I hope that Christ is between us as a third"; On Spiritual Friendship, trans. Laurence C. Braceland (Trappist, K.Y.: Cistercian Publications, 2010),55."

I think of forgiveness as a core part of the Christian "glue" (love) that holds friends together. It is a crucial grace among the many graces of love, emanating from Christ, who is Love personified, drawing two into His loving embrace, and making friends of them.

Progress or Paganism

Anne Applebaum in her Pulitzer Prize winning book Gulag: A History contrasts the horror and revulsion most intellectuals felt for Naziism as compared with the comparative indifference they exhibited to Stalin's tyranny, which arguably resulted in more victims than Hitler's evil. Ms. Applebaum doesn't speculate as to why this is the case (Introduction, xix), but I have my ideas.

Communism was attractive to western intellectuals because it seemed to represent the culmination of the secular progress of the Enlightenment, and was viewed as a fulfillment of Christian eschatology, shorn of its other-worldly emphasis. Naziism, to the contrary, was a throwback to paganism pure and simple. Morris Berman, in Coming to our Senses, at p. 258, cites the work of the Austrian writer Guido von List (1848 - 1919), who argued that Germany needed to return to a pure paganism emphasizing the volkisch life and a true religion of pagan sun worship. Hitler was exposed to these ideas in his youth and the Nazii movement embodied many of them. Martin Bormann, Hitler's deputy after Rudolph Hess "flew the coop" wrote, "The National Socialist and the Christian outlooks are incompatible. Our National Socialist philosophy stands far higher than the conception of Christianity . . . If in the future our youth hears nothing about Christianity, whose teaching is much lower than ours, Christianity will disappear of itself." (Quoted from Joe J. Heydecker and Johannes Leeb, The Nuremberg Trial, p. 243 (World Publishing Co. 1958)).

Each of these ideologies, really false religions, caused millions of deaths. So shouldn't we be leery of new "liberation" movements that claim to see reality more clearly than Judeo-Christianity?

Shadows and Sunshine

The shooting in Aurora CO prompts reflection. What motivated the shooter? My theory: The killer's cold anger at the meaninglessness of existence. Why didn't he kill just himself? Because all living beings participate in this huge charade, which is more exposed when death overtakes more.

On my way home from work a day or so after the shootings I heard the host of a secular talk show speaking with a theologian. The mere fact of such a talk reveals what is missing in our world for so many: a sense of a positive meaning of life and of each person's place in it. Meaning is found, ultimately, only in religion, which makes an absolute claim, beyond opinion.

The Christian religion's claim to meaning is striking: that the dying universe is also a rising one, revealed by Christ's own salvific act of dying and rising. And the meaning of our lives is to participate in Christ's continuing mission of salvation, through our own relationship to God, how we live, and how we interact with others. The world we live in is NOT ultimately meaningless to a Christian worldview. We respond to the world not in angst and anger, but with thanks.

So this day I thank God for this world, for my life and the lives of those I know and care for. Life is a cause for joy, not sorrow, in the face of life's tragedies and shadows.

Why is Jesus' Yoke "Easy"?

In the gospel for today Jesus says, "For my yoke is easy, and my burden light." Mt. 11:30. Our pastor asked, why is this so? He answered, "what you do out of love, is easier to do." My commentary (Living With Christ, July 2012, at 142) reads: Jesus seeks to satisfy the law in accordance with its original purpose, i.e. "when it is serving the end for which it was made."

Is there a link between acting out of love and acting to serve the end for what something is made? Yes, for love serves the other's good, which is the "end" for which the other was made. To serve that end and to love, are the same thing. When I sacrifice for another's good, I love her and work for her proper good, her proper end.

So, Jesus counsels, to carry an easy yoke, a light burden, act out of love, which is to act for the good or "end" of each person.

Nature and Human Nature

Spending a week in the mountains of Colorado brings front and center the beauty and power of nature.  Craggy mountains, wheeling hummingbirds, shockingly bright yellow stars, burbling mountain streams.  During the week I also had the good fortune to read some of Robert Spaemann's Essays in Anthropology, his effort to locate man in nature, and to understand nature and man together.

Spaemann's basic point is that nature must be understood in terms of man, its pinnacle, rather than from below.  This "anthropomorphic" understanding of man, anathema to scientism, shows nature in a starkly different light than the "passive material open to manipulation" that scientism sees.

Nature has a telos, says Spaemann, an anticipation toward an end it has not yet reached, a goal toward which it strives and yearns.  What is that end?  Spaemann quotes Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle:

The ultimate end of the motion of all being . . . is 'the attainment of a divine likeness' (quoting Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, Book III, 22).  That thought, too, can already be found in Aristotle.  Methexis, 'participation in the eternal and divine,' is the end towards which all things strive, that for the sake of which they do what their nature enables them to do." (quoting Aristotle, De Anima 415b).

Yet because humans alone are able to construe this end as particularly their own, the following applies:  'man is the end of all generation'. (Aquinas, Ibid.)  Only insofar as he transcends nature does the human being recover it.  Only in human beings does what nature really is intrinsically manifest itself.  Why?  Because only in him does nature's purposive structure become free of ambiguity and appear as both free will and the free recognition of a foundation and end he did not posit himself.

Spaemann, Essays in Anthropology, 16.

At the stunning Maroon Bells, to which one travels on a bus in order to reduce human impact, a sign on one of the fourteener's warns potential climbers, "You take care, for the mountain does not care."   Ellen and I went on a hike with a young naturalist, Kyle, who knew the answers to all of our questions and was passionate in his concern for the ecosystem.  I thought and said, "Nature may not care about man, but Kyle, you certainly care about nature!"  In terms of the passage above quoted, and the sign that I read, I thought that the sign more accurately might read, "I care, but I have no hands or arms to act.  I rely on your your arms and legs, your care, climber!"

If nature finds its end in the human being, nature's "highest peak," can't it also be said that man finds his end in caring for nature as his trust, and yearns for his own proper caretaker, the Divinity?  Our telos, our destiny is a divine one: To care, and to yearn for divine caring, to love and to yearn for divine love.

God of My Brothers

More from Karl Rahner.

You have sent me to work among men. O God … ordered me out among men. These men to whom I have been sent are of your choosing Lord … and I must not be their friend, but their servant.

O God, what strange creatures these men are. … They usually want everything but what I’m trying to bring. They want to tell me their little cares and worries … . What a disheartening mixture of the comical and the tragic, of small truth and big lies, of little trials that are taken too seriously and big sins that are made light of!

And what do these men want of me? … they look upon me as some kind of celestial insurance agent, to take out an accident policy for eternity, to make sure you that never  break in upon their lives with the Omnipotence of your Holiness and Justice.

How seldom does anyone say, “Lord what do you want me to do?” How seldom anyone wants to receive the gift of your grace the way it really is: austere and plain, for your honor, not just for our consolation, chaste and pure, silent and bold.

These are the men you have sent me … the field in which you … want me to sow the seed of your grace and your truth …. I don’t mean to say that I am any better than they. I know my own heart, and you know it still better. It’s no different from the hearts of the men I must approach in your name.

When I complain to you of the heavy burden of my vocation … I am acting like a small man who wants to be consoled, who is always thinking of his own sorrows, who can't for a minute forget his own troubles in his own comfort to lose himself in silent admiration of what a great thing it is to spend one's life in unselfishly serving you.

When you assigned me the task of going out among men, you were only repeating to me your one and only commandment: to find my way home to you in love. All care of souls is ultimately possible only in union with you only in the love which binds me to you and thus makes me your companion and finding a path to the hearts of men.

You are waiting to be found in love, and that which is the heart and soul of true love of you, prayer. If I had prayed more I would be closer to souls. For prayer… is not merely a useful aid in my work for souls, the very first that last act of my apostolate.

Lord, teach me to pray and to love you. Then I shall forget my own wretchedness on account of you, for I shall be able to do the one thing that lets me forget it: patiently bear the poverty of my brethren into the land of your riches. Then… I shall really be able to be a brother to them.