We Will Come To Them And Make Our Home With Them

 

“’By their very nature, the institutions of matrimony and married love are disposed toward the birth and education of offspring, which are as though their crowning achievement.  In this way, a man and a woman, who by the marriage covenant “are no longer two, but one flesh” (Matt. 19:6), through the intimate union of their persons and actions render each other mutual help and service and experience the meaning of their oneness, which increases day by day.  This deep bond arising from the mutual gift of self of two persons, as well as the good of the children, requires the total fidelity of the spouses and calls for the indissoluble oneness of their life together’ (Gaudium et Spes, Section 48).  This conciliar text makes it perfectly clear that parenthood constitutes the central meaning of the marital community.  In the birth and education of offspring, the spouses ‘experience the meaning of their oneness, which increases day by day.’  The meaning of the marital communio personarum and it involves, particularly conjugal intercourse, is the child.  In other words, the meaning of marriage is the family.  One of the reasons children come into the marital community of husband and wife is to confirm, strengthen, and deepen this community.  In this way, the spouses’ own interpersonal life, their communio personarum, is enriched.” (Karol Wojtyla, “Parenthood as a Community of Persons” in Person and Community, page 332).

 

I am fascinated by the concept of communio personarum (or communio) as I think it is the best definition of marriage that I have encountered.  In “The Family as a Community of Persons”, Bishop Wojtyla defines “communio [personarum]”: “Communio in the primary sense refers to community as a mode of being and acting (in common, of course) through which the persons involved mutually confirm and affirm one another, a mode of being and acting that promotes the personal fulfillment of each of them by virtue of their mutual relationship.” (Karol Wojtyla, “The Family as a Community of Persons”, Person and Community: Select Essays, p. 321).  In this description I see the active as well as the metaphysical, providing a base from which to marry in addition to being married.  Just as “love is a task”, marrying (marriage) is a task: learning and choosing the good for the other, giving of oneself to the other, and receiving the other.  And, just as in the Trinity, this marital love is generative, actively generating a third person in the life of their child through their marrying.

 

The child is not simply another person to whom life is “bestowed” by the married couple and God, the child is an expansion and extension of the communio that is the marrying couple, that is begun and continues; in some way the child has always been part of the marriage and becomes known through the conjugal act, a revelation of the communio of marriage.  This activity of the child in his emerging into being and developing physically is part of the same communio that is present before and after conception: “The real introduction to the family community, to the communio personarum, occurs when the parents fully discover in their child the task that together with the child presents itself to their love.  In order for this task to be fully discovered and carried out, it must be discovered gradually and carried out gradually” (Ibid., page 333). 

 

This is a different way of looking at marriage and family rather than the reductive and sequential Western view, where marriage, fecundity, and family are more discrete and separate, where one “produces” a child in some way, and where family does not necessarily mean communio but is reduced to three individuals living together.  It gravely illuminates the inseparability of the procreative and unitive aspects of marriage in that it describes fecundity as not only connected to the fertility of the married couple but also to the expanding of the communio of marriage into the communio of family, extending the task of marital love into the task of family love.  This frames the vigorous love of courtship and matrimony as part of the same whole as the communio of family, comprising therefore these two aspects of marriage by a larger system, a “form” of communio.  Thus, the love of courtship continues, matures, and perfects as part of one semantic process which describes one indivisible whole.

In My Father’s House There Are Many Dwelling Places

 I think the genius of John Paul II with respect to marriage is that he realized that the end of marriage, its final cause, is theosis, the participation in the life of the Trinity.  From that vantage point the three ends of marriage as taught by the Church serve the processes of kenosis and henosis as well as metamorphosis.  Procreation, the first end, instantiates the creativity of Trinitarian love.  This must be the first end of marriage since creativity through procreation grounds the marriage in the full exchange of love present in theosis.  The temptation to avoid procreation  is the temptation to mistake pleasure in the conjugal relation as the ultimate good and to avoid the necessary suffering of kenosis that is part of the gift of self, and thus miss the joy of Godly love.

In a similar way, the second end must itself be secondary since the temptation to stay focused on the vivid pleasure of the conjugal union will block the necessary grieving of kenosis.  The attentiveness that John Paul II focuses on the translation of the Latin describing the second (“mutuum adiutorium”) is characteristic of his understanding on this temptation.  This is the temptation to mistranslate the second end as “mutual love” rather than “mutual help”, to focus on the pleasures of the relationship rather than its final cause.  The mutual help of marriage is to aid each other to risk the seemingly endless steps of kenosis and their resultant suffering, to “love the Hell out of each other”, to encourage each other to empty themselves of their selves to make an opening for the love of God.  This emptying of the spouses allows the filling of new life in the couple and the practicing of theosis, of loving each other as the Trinity love.  Thus, the mutuum adiutorium serves the rigors of procreation and its fruits.

Perhaps Karol Wojtyla does not focus much on the third end of marriage (remedium concupiscentiae) in this section because the first chapter is so focused on the explication of the personalistic norm.  Certainly he does deal with the subject later chapters and in the Theology of the Body.  I sense that he wants to stay focused on the “positive” part of sexual ethics, especially initially on the how love is antithetical to utilitarianism, to avoid perhaps getting distracted by the (contemporarily) recent historical negativity of discussions of concupiscence and its remedy.  Certainly a focus on concupiscence would limit the discussion to the subjectivity of sensuality and affection and miss the mystery of Trinitarian love.

Travelling to the Land of Milk and Honey

 One of the most striking parts of Section 3 of “The Family as a Community of Persons”: “Communio in the primary sense refers to community as a mode of being and acting (in common, of course) through which the persons involved mutually confirm and affirm one another, a mode of being and acting that promotes the personal fulfillment of each of them by virtue of their mutual relationship.” (Karol Wojtyla, “The Family as a Community of Persons”, Person and Community: Select Essays, p. 321).  This description attempts to describe the family “… not merely as from the category of society, or “the smallest social  unit,” as the family is often called.” (Ibid., p. 319) but as “a personal and interpersonal reality” (Ibid., p. 320). 

This description is important because it emphasizes the family members as persons, as persons who exist and act with and for other persons rather than a collection of humans living together: a Communio.  To start, the personalistic norm demands that “the person is a kind of good to which only love constitutes the proper and fully-mature relation” (Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility (2^nd edition), p. 25).  All actions of the community that is the family are judged according to this norm of not using the other as a means to an end but loving them.  And this is not easy:  “Love in reciprocal relations between people is not something readily available” (Ibid., p. 13).  Choosing the good for another requires the kenosis of subordinating one’s own passions, of emptying oneself of self-centeredness.

Wojtyla describes the practice of love in the community of persons more concretely in “Person and Act”.  Here he presents the “theory of participation”, that in forming and maintaining community, that “by acting together with others, man preserves all that results from the community of action and at the same time—precisely by this means—realizes the personalistic value of his own act.” (Karol Wojtyla, “Person and Act”, The English Critical Edition of the Works of Karol Wojtyla/ John Paul II, p. 385). 

Participation in type of community that is Communio requires more than simply being a member of a community and socializing together.  It requires the attitudes of solidarity (“a constant readiness to accept and realize the share that falls to each due to the fact that he is a member of a given community” (Ibid., p. 401) and opposition (“a function of one’s vision of the community, of its good, and of the living need to participate in existing together and especially in acting together” (Ibid., p. 402) that generate the acts of a person truly participating in community.  And it requires the eradication of the non-loving attitudes of conformism (“Man in this case does not form the community but in a sense ‘allows himself to be carried by the collective.’” (Ibid., p. 405)) and avoidance (“a lack of participation; it is an absence in the community” (Ibid., p. 406) from which one acts in a way harmful to the community and not meeting the personalistic norm.

In summary, a community of persons requires acts of love through participation by its members in addition to “being together”.  This is at best difficult and often painful, a participation in the redemptive suffering of the Paschal Mystery that leads the individual members closer to the perfection of their telos as a result of their “mutual relationship” of Communio.

Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things

 

Given that the vast majority of the Church is the laity, it seems appropriate that Vatican II dedicated at least one decree, Apostolicam Actuositatem, to them.  Of note is that the decree is on the apostolate of the laity—the Council fathers clearly setting the frame for the “call to holiness” for them.  I found it helpful to see “apostolate” clearly defined: “The Church was founded for the purpose of spreading the kingdom of Christ throughout the earth for the glory of God the Father, to enable all men to share in His saving redemption, and that through them the whole world might enter into a relationship with Christ. All activity of the Mystical Body directed to the attainment of this goal is called the apostolate …” (Apostolicam Actuositatem, Section 2).  The apostolate of the laity is not passive in the least and requires grounding in the love of Christ as well as an outward focus: “…laymen are called by God to exercise their apostolate in the world like leaven, with the ardor of the spirit of Christ” (Ibid.).  In short, it is not possible for the laity to participate in this apostolate without actively developing one’s relationship with the Holy Spirit.

 

This mission could seem daunting at first.  One great help is to remember that Our Lady is our model for this apostolate; studying and meditating on her life and witness provides a clear path: “The perfect example of this type of spiritual and apostolic life is the most Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of Apostles, who while leading the life common to all here on earth, one filled with family concerns and labors, was always intimately united with her Son and in an entirely unique way cooperated in the work of the Savior.” (Ibid., Section 4).  After all, she lived an ordinary life as a mother and a wife, bearing many ordinary and some extraordinary trials during her lifetime and is an example to us.

 

Indeed, the apostolate of the laity is an ordinary one, if you will, taking place in mundane and quiet ways and accomplished by ordinary people.  The Council points out that “young people” have a much increased “social importance” which allows them to “become the first apostles of the young, in direct contact with them, exercising the apostolate by themselves among themselves, taking account of their social environment” (Ibid., Section 12).  Married couples as well have an apostolate, to themselves, their children, and those in their social sphere.  In the overdeveloped West, the simple fact of having children and involving them in the love of God through Christ is a radical witness.  The family itself gives witness to Christ in its very existence as well as corporal works such as fostering and adopting children, providing welcome and hospitality to children as well as adults who live with brokenness and loneliness. 

 

And the apostolate is active in the “world” as well.  Contrary to current examples of scandal by politicianswho profess the Catholic faith, the apostolate includes Catholics in government making “…the weight of their convictions so influential that as a result civil authority will be justly exercised and laws will accord with the moral precepts and the common good…. they can work for the common good and at the same time prepare the way for the Gospel.” (Ibid., Section 14).  This mission to influence the governing of the common good is part of a larger duty to work in harmony with others to “renew the temporal order and make it increasingly more perfect” (Ibid., Section 7).  Since the “temporal order” is part of the cosmos redeemed by Christ: “the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” (Romans 8:21).  While not necessarily proclaiming Integralism the Council fathers still clearly state: “It is the work of the entire Church to fashion men able to establish the proper scale of values on the temporal order and direct it towards God through Christ” (Apostolicam Actuositatem, Section 7).

There are many rooms in my Father’s House

I am not sure how the “unrepeatability of the human person” fits the theme of Karol turning to phenomenology, at least from this week's readings.  More so, I found these quotes of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka and Roger Duncan’s paper curious: ”Wojtyla came to phenomenology, contrary to a popular assumption, entirely on his own” and “[The Acting Person] manifests an independent and ingenious reflection of the author’s own, expanding the issues of personal and social ethics, grounding them in an analysis evidencing a strong kinship with the methods of the phenomenological school” (Anna-Teresa Tynieniecka and Roger Duncan, Karol Wojtyla, Between Phenomenology and Scholasticism, page 487).  I know that Wojtyla studied Scheler in the early 1950s; is it possible that he was already practicing something akin to the “method” of phenomenology?

I am led down this path as I think about the idea that Wojtyla appeared to experience people in an unusually intense and present way, apparently deriving the “meaning” of the people he met intentionally.  Did he practice “something akin” to the method of phenomenology simply as part of whom he was?  Weigel speaks of “. . . ongoing pastoral concern and his sense of priestly ministry as a matter of ‘meeting someone wisely.’  Wojtyla’s openness in his encounter with others was a way to ‘see’ into his philosophy . . . Other philosophers remembered texts.  Karol Wojtyla always remembered persons”.  (George Weigel, Witness to Hope, page 129).

I think that Wojtyla’s style of relationship--developed in the quarry with other workers, in the Rhapsodic Theater with other actors, in the underground seminary with other seminarians, and at St. Florians with the Srodowisko—was quintessentially phenomenological as his subjectivity richly perceived and described the people he met and knew.  He then used his metaphysical training to provide meaning to their lives through the context of his intellect.  In a strange way I think he contextualized each person he met as “unrepeatable” and unique and, then, gave them the dignity of their personhood by receiving them, each and every one of them, as a gift.  He provided the drama of who-they-could be from his metaphysical perspective of who-they-were, allowing the best of each person to appear in receiving them as a gift.

Deep calls To Deep At The Thunder of Your Cataracts

So, why a triangle [the SanJuanist triangle]?  The three vertices are three major spiritual communities in the life of Karol Wojtyla: the Living Rosary mentored by Jan Tyranowski, Srodowisko where he fell in love with love, and Vatican II where he helped distill a meaning of love for the whole Church.  From these communities he developed three major understandings of love: the Trinity as the exemplar of love (and gift), the spousal love of man and woman, and love as the give of one’s self.  Michael Waldstein ties them together using the form of a triangle in part, I think, to highlight this distinctive connection that Wojtyla made between the three.

While I found Christopher West’s introduction to the Theology of the Body exciting (Christopher West, Naked Without Shame, 1999), it was my encounter with Dr. Waldstein’s analysis many years later that illuminated this foundational understanding that the love between man and woman could somehow reveal something about the love of the Trinity.  Moreso, that the telos of theosis was somehow revealed in conjugal love as well as the poetry of Saint John of the Cross.  For me it was a dramatic connection between my understanding of marital love from working with marriage and family clients and the goal of theosis.  Here was a new faith, a way of communing with God beyond the intellectual concepts that had formed my religious practice.  I still marvel at the concept, not only in its strangeness to my early catechesis but as a way to address a better way than the “peace and love” of the Sixties that was rooted in a sincere desire to love authentically yet provides a sound base from which to practice that love rather than devolving into simple carnal lust and hedonism.

All We Like Sheep Have Gone Astray

In my reading of contemporary articles, I recently came across a clear example of historicism.  This article by Eduardo Eccheveria examined the proclamation from the “Fundamental Text of the German Synodal Way” (Eduardo J. Echeverria, “The Faith Once for All Delivered”, https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2021/03/13/the-faith-once-for-all-delivered/).  Dr. Echeverria reported that the text states that revelation is limited to the encounter between a person and God : “The experience is revelatory, and not the content of faith, doctrines, creeds, confessions of faith, catechisms, and the like.” (Ibid.). Thus, anything beyond the encounter with God is not revelation: “St. Paul affirmed that ‘Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.’ (Rom 10:17). What, then, has been revealed by His word? Nothing at all, according to the Text, because there is no revealed data, that is, no propositional revelation, mediating determinate knowledge of God, man, and the world, in other words, no revealed truth.” (Ibid.).

As John Paul II writes, “The fundamental claim of historicism, however, is that the truth of a philosophy is determined on the basis of its appropriateness to a certain period and a certain historical purpose.” (John Paul II, , Section 87).  Thus, according to Dr. Echeverria, the above “Fundamental Text” shows an underlying  historicism in its isolation of Revelation to the experience of any particular person, denying the capability to communicate Revelation between persons much less across historical periods.  This variant of Modernism highlights the cost of absolutizing subjectivity—that Truth can not be communicated beyond a particular person’s consciousness—and exemplifies John Paul II’s point  that ”the history of thought becomes little more than an archeological resource useful for illustrating positions once held, but for the most part outmoded and meaningless now.”.  This philosophical narrowness limits access to the Truth and any hope for communicating it.

Thus, historicism denies the communication of Wisdom either across the ages or even between persons, since each person’s historical context is not identical.  In the end “this form of modernism shows itself incapable of satisfying the demands of truth to which theology is called to respond.” (Ibid.)

 

Therefore The Child To Be Born Will Be Called Holy, The Son of God

I centered on the quote from Pseudo-Epiphanius when reading this last section of Fides et Ratio: “the literal translation of the text [“He noera tes pisteos trapeza”] describes Mary as ‘the intellectual table of faith which furnished the bread of life to the world’." (Sr. Prudence Allen, R.S.M., Mary and the Vocation of Philosophers, page 54).  Somehow the image of Mary as “table” (or “altar”, from the Latin) brings to mind the icon “Platytera”--“an icon of the Theotokos, facing the viewer directly, usually depicted full length with her hands in the "orans" position, and with the image of Christ as a child in front of her chest, also facing the viewer directly . . . Poetically, by containing the Creator of the Universe in her womb, Mary has become Platytera ton ouranon, which means: "More spacious than the heavens.” (“Panagia Platytera”, Orthodox Wiki, https://orthodoxwiki.org/Panagia_Platytera).  The theme is of Mary as the place, the platform from which Jesus is brought to the world.  This is a very sapiential image, the framework that connects the person to the Creator and the Creation.

This sapiential service of Mary orders our interaction with God by giving us the structure of the table.  As in the Platytera icon, we are called first to receive Jesus from the table: “David Meconi, S.J. observes that: “Mary exemplifies philosophy’s initial task to receive reality and not manipulate it.’” (Sr. Prudence Allen, R.S.M., Mary and the Vocation of Philosophers, page 54).  Mary does not analyze or reduce the reality of Jesus; rather she ponders Him as a mother gazing at her child and leads us to do so as well.  Her vocation was simply to allow herself to present the Divine Mystery: “Just as the Virgin was called to offer herself entirely as human being and as woman that God's Word might take flesh and come among us, so too philosophy is called to offer its rational and critical resources that theology, as the understanding of faith, may be fruitful and creative. (John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, Section 108).  She invites the philosopher to focus on fecundity as well as analysis in his thought.  Also, she gave herself to this simple vocation of being a platform from which God emerges to the world ”in giving her assent to Gabriel's word, Mary lost nothing of her true humanity and freedom, so too when philosophy heeds the summons of the Gospel's truth its autonomy is in no way impaired” (Ibid.), inviting philosophers to the freedom of littleness by which God can be offered to the world.

Oh, Living Flame of Love Tenderly Wound My Soul

Buttiglione speculates that “Perhaps it was from Tyranowski that Wojtyla derived a natural tendency to read in St. John of the Cross a kind of phenomenology of mystical experience” (Rocco Buttiglione, The Thought of the Man Who Became Pope John Paul II, page 45).  What I find intriguing is that Father Garrigou-Lagrange, who directed and influenced Father Wojtyla’s doctoral thesis on St. John of the Cross and the doctrine of faith, was “attempting to apply his knowledge of the Spanish mystic in defining a priestly spirituality which would fit the questions and problems of a world left devasted by the [Second World] War.” (Ibid.).  That devastation was far more than the physical destruction of infrastructure; rather the greater influence was the explosion of trauma in a generation whose parents endured the genocide of the First World War and its aftermath.

Why is this important?  We know that the common response to emotional trauma is some degree of long-term dissociation that leaves the sufferer both stunted in emotional growth as well as isolated relationally.  This dissociation expressed itself in the existentialism and nihilism of post-War culture for which the intellectual explanations of faith were insufficient to provide the emotional healing so desperately needed by that generation and its children.  I think that Karol Wojtyla discovered experientially this remedy of faith in God while enduring the horrors he experienced during the occupation by the German National Socialists, a faith he found through Saint John of the Cross, the faith that was the “only proximate and proportionate means for communion with God” (John Paul II, Master of Faith, Apostolic Letter, 14 December 1990, Section 2).

I think that Saint John of the Cross’s “message of a vigorous, living faith which seeks and finds God in His Son Jesus Christ, in the Church. in the beauty of creation, in quiet prayer, in the darkness of night, and in the purifying flame of the Spirit” provided the base for the fulcrum of Karol Wojtyla’s faith that he then expressed to others in service, especially in his vocation to the priesthood.  Wojtyla distilled the essence of the faith he meditated upon in the works of San John of the Cross that provided the healing for trauma by making available “the horizon of the mystical” (Ibid., Section 12) that allows the human person to commune with God in the prison of his dissocation: “St. John’s phenomenology of mystical experience takes man towards the irreducible core of the person, and shows the necessity of transcending this core toward that truth who is God himself, by responding to the initiative of God toward human beings.  This divine initiative, which traverses natural human structures, illuminates and, in a certain sense, makes the irreducible core of the human person experienceable” (Rocco Buttiglione, The Thought of the Man Who Became Pope John Paul II, page 48).  Thus, Saint John of the Cross is the Master of Faith for the generations suffering from the devastating trauma of the twentienth century as he leads us out of ourselves through our inner caverns of feeling.

Oh, Living Flame of Love
Tenderly wound my soul
To its deepest inner heart
Without oppression!

Come consumate our love
Tear through the veil of our union
If it be your will, come and rend
The veil of the temple!

Oh, lamps of fire
In deep caverns of feeling
Once obscured and blind
Are now leading
In the warmth and the passion
Of your love

(Saint John of the Cross, The Living Flame Of Love)