For They Will See God

 

The saying in Matthew 5:27-28 (“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” NRSVCE ) addresses both the objective and subjective aspects of adultery.  As part of the Torah, the Ten Commandments are the foundation of the Mosaic law.  In the “Sermon on the Mount”, Jesus refers to this objective standard from Revelation, as quoted in Matthew 5:27.  Pope John Paul II then emphasizes Jesus’ focus on the subjective, interior part of the commandment, rather than on the violation of “property rights” of a woman’s husband: "This statement is one of the passages of the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus brings about a fundamental revision of the way of understanding and carrying out the moral law of the Old Covenant” (John Paul II, “Man and Woman He Created Them”, Section 24:1) . 

 

This is significant because the Sermon on the Mount emphasizes the personal rather than simply the objective.  As we have seen emphasized in “Love and Responsibility”, man’s interiority is what makes him a person:  “It is remarkable that precisely through his interiority and interior life man not only is a person, but at the same time most inheres in the objective world” (Karol Wojtyla, “Love and Responsibility” 2^nd edition, p. 5).  In this saying, Jesus requires his disciples to imitate him in their sexual ethics in the transcendence that is only possible for persons: “The morality in which the very meaning of being human is realized—which is, at the same time, the fulfillment of the law by the ‘super-abounding’ of justice through subjective vitality—is formed in the interior perception of values, from which duty is born as an expression of conscience, as an answer of one’s own personal ‘I.’  Ethos makes us, at one and the same time, enter into the depth of the norm itself and descend into the interior of man, the subject of morality.  Moral value is connected with the dynamic process of man’s innermost [being].  To reach it, it is not enough to stop “on the surface” of human actions, but one must penetrate precisely the interior.” (Ibid., Section 24:3).

 

Thus, Jesus is calling his disciples into the “depth of the norm” through descending into the “interior of man”.  How does this apply to sexual ethics?  Certainly, this requires attention to one’s “heart”:  “The ‘heart” has become a battlefield between love and concupiscence.  The more concupiscence dominates the heart, the less the heart experiences the spousal meaning of the body, and the less sensitive it becomes to the gift of the person that expresses precisely this meaning in the reciprocal relations of man and woman.” (Ibid., Section 32.3).  Through the “concupiscence of the eyes”, a man enters into a non-spousal relationship with a woman as he has “reduced” her to an object, an object of his lust.  This denial of the woman’s interiority leads the man and woman into a sexual relationship that is not marital, thus instantiating a relationship that is “adulterous” compared to the marital relationship that is or could be: “The relationship of the gift changes into a relationship of appropriation” (Ibid., Section 32.6). 

 

Entering into the “new ethos” of the Matthew 5:28 requires that the man take responsibility for his relationship with the woman, to protect her from his “reductive” desires that denies a spousal relationship, and vice versa.  He must guard his heart against the “lust of the eyes”:  “Christ makes the moral evaluation of ‘desire’ depend above all on the personal dignity of the man and the woman; and this is important in the case of unmarried persons and—perhaps even more so—in the case of spouse, husband and wife” (Ibid., Section 42:7).  John Paul II speaks of “purity of heart” as the goal and foundation for relationships, a position not of “using” the other but where “human beings cannot share without firmness in facing everything in its origin in concupiscence of the flesh ‘Purity of heart’ is gained by the one who knows how to be consistently demanding from his heart’ and from his ‘body” (Ibid., Section 43:5).  This then interconnects his actions and his subjectivity in a way that focuses on the spousal relationship and the dignity of woman.

 

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.