Jamie Smith’s Incomplete Counter-Reformation

The Calvinist philosopher James K.A. Smith has written a clever blogpost on N.T. Wright’s  How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels. Smith’s main frustration with Wright is the following:

Cardinal Schönborn: ‘Some of You Feel Abandoned by Your Bishop’

 

Sermon of Archbishop Christoph Cardinal Schönborn at the Chrism Mass

St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna, Monday of Holy Week 2012. Translated by Sancrucensis.

[Introductory note: the following sermon is only intelligible in the light of a recent decision of the Cardinal’s to allow a man living in sin with another man to serve on a parish council in Stützenhofen, which has caused great consternation. I admire Cardinal Schönborn greatly. He is a wonderful teacher of the Faith and a pastor filled with zeal for souls, who has done much good for the Church in Austria, and indeed the whole world. But sometimes he does things that simply make no sense at all. In the following sermon, preached at the Chrism Mass on Monday, he tried to address the concerns of many priests about the  Stützenhofen decision. I shall post some reflections on the sermon after Easter. For now I shall only say that I think the sermon makes many good points, but that the part that tries to explain the Stützenhofen decision doesn’t make sense. I have translated from the prepared text, which differs slightly from the sermon as recorded in the video embedded above.]

Dear Brothers in the Priestly Ministry,

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Everywhere That Mary Went

If you consider of whom she is the mother, how great will be your admiration of her exalted dignity! Do you feel as if you can never sufficiently praise it? Do you not judge, and rightly, that she who has the God-man for her Son is exalted in greatness above all the choirs of angels? Did not Mary confidently call the God and Lord of Angels her Son, saying: “Son, why hast thou done so to us” Which of the angels would have presumed thus to speak? It is sufficient for them and something great, that while by nature they are spirits by grace they are made and called angels, as David says: “Who maketh his angels spirits.” In confidently calling God her Son, Mary acknowledges herself mother of that Majesty Whom those angels serve with reverential awe. Neither does God disdain to be called what He vouchsafed to be. For the Evangelist adds shortly after, “And he was subject to them.” Who was subject? God, to man. God to Whom the angels are subject. God, Whom the powers and principalities obey, was subject to Mary. And not only to Mary, but to Joseph also for Mary s sake. Consider, then, and choose which you will most admire, the gracious condescension of the Son, or the surpassing dignity of the mother. Both are amazing; both are miraculous. That a God should obey a woman is humility without example; that a woman should command the Son of God is a dignity without parallel. In the praise of virgins we hear that wonderful verse: “They shall follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth.” But what praise, think you, is worthy of her who leads the way before Him ?

Style, R.L. Stevenson, and the Pauline Epistles

John Bergsma has an excellent post (the comment box of which I can’t seem to get to work) comparing the variations in style in Plato’s works to those in the Pentateuch and the Pauline Epistles. On the later:

Several of Paul’s epistles are dismissed as “deutero-Pauline” because of differences in style. Are these differences more dramatic than the differences between Plato’s compositions? Could Paul’s style have changed with age and circumstance?

I have often thought the same thing with reference to Robert Louis Stevenson; surely there is more variation of style between A Child’s Garden of Verses and the The Master of Ballantrae than between Romans and 2 Timothy.

Sabbath Breaking

The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had healed him.  And this was why the Jews persecuted Jesus, because he did this on the sabbath.  But Jesus answered them, “My Father is working still, and I am working.” (John 5:15-17)

Charity alone is his changeless and eternal rest, his eternal and changeless tranquillity, his eternal and changeless Sabbath [. . .] For his charity is his very will and also his very goodness, and all this is nothing but his being. (St Aelred of Rievaulx, Speculum Caritatis I,19)

It is hard to fathom the enormity of accusing the Eternal Son of breaking the Sabbath. He IS the Sabbath. In Him the Father rests with infinite contentment, and together they breath that eternal sigh of love fulfilled that is the Holy Spirit. All of creation is ordered to entry into that seventh day of the Divine Life. The Son longs to give us a share of His eternal rest, but we have turned against that rest, through our sins we have banished ourselves to a world of toil and trouble. And so He is still at work He comes into the world to create us all over again, to liberate us from the task-masters of Egypt, and bring us into the promised land of the true and eternal Sabbath.

The healing of the cripple in John 5 is a sign of this new creation that God has already begun to make. And for this they accuse Him of breaking the Sabbath! But isn’t the accusation that the Pharisees make one that we make as well? I was thinking of this other day when I was complaining in my heart about some minor bureaucratic frustration; wasn’t I in fact telling Our Lord, ‘stop breaking my Sabbath’? He is at work in our lives; everything that His providence ordains for us is meant to help to create us anew, to destroy the old man and his works and bring the new man to life, so that we may enter ever more into that eternal rest which is the very life of the Triune God.

Bridal Mysticism in Leviticus

When one is doing a lectio continua of the scriptures it starts out being a literary pleasure — Genesis and and the first part of Exodus are as exciting as anything in ancient literature — but then one comes to the tabernacle descriptions in Exodus and then Leviticus. Leviticus! Surely one of the hardest bits of Scripture to plow through. Those long lists of ritual laws. One of the things that makes the laws so boring is that they seem so arbitrary. Why is suet fat never eaten, but always burned entirely? Leviticus doesn’t say. Of all the books of the Bible Leviticus is perhaps the last one that one would least think of reading as belles-lettres, but that is exactly what the anthropologist Mary Douglas does in her book Leviticus as Literature. Leviticus, Douglas argues, is not a random collection of arbitrary rules, but an intricately crafted work of analogical thinking. She shows how the body of the sacrificial animal is a kind of model or map of the tabernacle, each part of the dismembered animal corresponds to a part of the tabernacle, and the tabernacle is itself a model of Mount Sinai, which is a model of the universe. The sacrificial rites thus become an enactment of the cosmic order. So the suet over the entrails is sacred to God not because it corresponds to the curtain before the Holy of Holies. But what corresponds to the Holy of Holies itself. Well, that’s where the bridal symbolism comes in:

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No one has ever seen God

No one has ever seen God; the only begotten God who is into the bosom of the Father,  he has made him known. (Joh 1:18)

Jean Henri Fabre liked to say he did not believe in God, but rather (through long years of observing insects) he saw Him. But to see God in his creatures is not to see Him as He is. To see the reflected and refracted glory of God in creation is not to see the uncreated light of the Divine Essence itself. We can know all kinds of created perfections, but to know the shoreless ocean of perfection itself, the infinite plenitude of all being, we would ourselves have to come to share in the divine nature. St Thomas explains (Ia q12 a4 c) this from the nature of knowledge.

The Dedication of the Lateran as the Feast of the Church Militant

Today is the Feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica by Pope Silvester I in the year 324. Following closely on All Saints and All Souls, which bring to mind the Church Triumphant and the Church Suffering, we can see the Dedication of the ‘Mother of all Churches’ as the day of the Church Militant.

The texts for dedication of a Church are full of references to Jerusalem, the “city of peace”.

Our Lady as the Pearl of Great Price

A virtuous Woman who can find? Her price is far beyond pearls. – Proverbs 31:10

Again, the kingdom of heaven is as if a merchant were looking for rare pearls: and now he has found one pearl of great price, and has sold all that he had and bought it. – Matthew 13:45-46

Cornelius a Lapide mentions that one can take the pearl of great price to mean Our Lady. But in that case who is the merchant? The merchant is God Himself Who searched through all generations till He found the “virtuous woman” who was to be the Mother of His Son. And He was willing to pay all He had for her. In an earlier post I looked at how the Our Lady can be seen as the final cause of the entire universe; she is more than all other purely created things the end and motive that God had in mind when He created the world. And it was above all for Her that the Divine Son paid the ultimate price on the Cross. There is a beautiful meditation on this in Fr. Antonio Maria Sicari’s Way of the Cross for the Jubilee of Priests:

Solomon as the Antichrist

In my very first post on this blog (posted over a year ago) I mentioned a curious interpretation of the Song of Songs, which sees Solomon and the true beloved as two separate persons.  In May I had to do a workshop on the Song of Songs for a conference here, and so I decided to take a closer look at the said interpretation. Marvin Pope brings it up in his overview of interpretations in the Anchor Bible Commentary on the Song. Apparently, there are some hints at a distinction between Solomon and the beloved in certain medieval Jewish commentaries, but the full fledged interpretation didn’t get worked out until the early days of historical criticism in the late 18th century by scholars such as Jacobi and Löwisohn. In the 19th century the  Heinrich Ewald produced an extremely ingenious and detailed commentary in which the Song is read as genuine romantic drama, neatly divided into scenes of mounting tension etc. I used Ewald’s commentary for my workshop. It is remarkably neat, clearing up a great many difficulties, but it is hard not to smile sometimes at how like a 19th century novel the Song of Songs becomes. Here is a summary of the plot from the 1857 commentary of an Anglophone follower of Ewald, David Ginsburg: