Man and woman

To what extent are the differences between man and woman rooted in the soul, rather than just the body? If the soul is the "form" of the body, one might assume that masculinity and femininity are characteristics of the soul before they are of the body. Yet the tradition of patristic and medieval commentary on Scripture suggests otherwise. The difficulty was partly how to reconcile the teaching of Genesis that man and woman together were made in the image of God (Gen. 1:27) and that of St Paul that man is the "image and glory of God", whereas woman is (only?) "the glory of man" (1 Cor. 11:7), having been made from man. Most agreed that woman, being taken from the side of man rather than his foot or his head, was intended to be his equal and rather than his slave or his master. Furthermore it was accepted that women were at least as capable as men of receiving grace and becoming saints. But some concluded that "woman" and "man" are sometimes used in Scripture as symbolic terms representing the lower and higher intellect respectively – woman being the lower, more engaged with the physical world. Man, however, has a certain superiority in ruling, according to these writers. To a modern person, such arguments are less than persuasive.

It seems to me that not enough attention was given to the fact that in Genesis 3:16 man's ruling over woman is identified as a consequence of the Fall, rather than as part of the original order of things. As for the allegorical identification with the higher and lower intellect, this is interesting in that it suggests a complexity

Faith

"So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love" (1 Cor. 13:13). I had not until recently noticed that faith and hope are both destined to remain for eternity. I had assumed that faith would give way to knowledge of God – we would not need to have faith, once we had direct vision, just as we would not need the sacraments, once we had God himself. But St Paul suggests otherwise, and this implies that faith is more than a substitute for knowledge. It is actually a kind of knowledge, the perfect form of which is distinct from love and hope, and inferior to love in some sense, but equally eternal.

This makes sense if we think of faith as equivalent to trust. We place our trust in someone, or in their word. Similarly, the infused virtue of faith is an act of trust we perform – we place our trust in God and in his Word and in the Church who brings him to us. In heaven we will still trust God, and we will still hope eternally in him, but we shall also know fully the One we trust, because perfect love unites us with him, and love "believes all things" and "hopes all things" (13:7).

The encyclical on faith, Lumen Fidei, is full of important insights. One of them takes the above argument a lot further. "This fullness which Jesus brings to faith has another decisive aspect. In faith, Christ is not simply the one in whom we believe, the supreme manifestation of God's love; he is also the one with whom we are united precisely in order to believe. Faith does not merely gaze at Jesus, but sees things as Jesus himself sees them, with his own eyes: it is a participation in his way of seeing" (n. 18; cf. 21).

Other interesting themes include faith as light, remembrance of the future (9), deep memory and relativism (11, 25, 40), the spiritual senses of sight, hearing and touch (30-31), importance of Greek philosophy (32), relation of truth and love (29-31), theology as a participation in God's knowledge (36), the "we" of the Church (39), the sacramental structure of faith (40), faith as the common good (51), why marriage must be between man and woman (52), the rediscovery of brotherhood (54), the grammar of creation and ecology (55), union in suffering and death as a call to faith (56-57), and much else.

Read James Schall SJ on the encyclical.
And Carl E. Olson.

Finding Wisdom

This is a book I wish I'd found some time ago. Wisdom Songs is a remarkable outpouring of Orthodox Christian wisdom, published in 2011 by Father Silouan, an English priest-monk from the Monastery of St Antony and St Cuthbert, a hermitage within the Romanian jurisdiction of the Orthodox Church, high up in the South-west Shropshire hills. Situated at 1,273 ft, under the Shepherd’s Rock, on the eastern slopes of the Stiperstones. Two sequels, Wisdom and Wonder, and Wisdom, Prophecy and Prayer, are also available – equally wonderful. Father Silouan lives alone, in what was once a miner’s cottage and small holding of twenty acres of pasture and woodland. His life of prayer, silence, liturgy and work is in the tradition of Orthodox monasticism. Priest-monk Silouan began his monastic life in the summer of 1990, in the monastery of St John the Baptist at Tolleshunt Knights in Essex, established in 1959 by the late Archimandrite Sophrony, disciple of St Silouan the Athonite. Like St Silouan, Fr Sophrony was a monk of the Monastery of St Panteleiomon on Mt Athos in Greece.

The book is wonderful – metaphysically precise, spiritually pellucid, intellectually rich, poetic (if a bit idiosyncratic in style at times) and uplifting. I thought the style a bit too idiosyncratic at first, but then I got used to it.

It is arranged in five "centuries", or series of 100 meditations, on the themes of the Song of Songs, the Holy Name, Holy Wisdom, Mysteries of Glory, and the Wisdom of Stillness. 526 pages. Here is a little taste:

"He is the axis in the midst of of subtle whirling wheels within. His are the sparkling rainbow rings that surround us within. His is the single eye at centre in the inmost heart of all hearts. It is his wisdom that surrounds us like a boundless expanse, for his glory is our firmament. Clear like crystal, translucent and bright, his glory shines through us as light from his throne in the midst. Wheels whirl like winds, all light and winged, resounding through all subtle centres and circles of our being."

Power of Four

In The Seven Sacraments, All Things Made New, and even Beauty for Truth's Sake, I have written about the importance of the number FOUR in Christian cosmology. Patterns of four are found everywhere, including the four cardinal virtues, the four rivers of paradise, and so on. Over on the Beauty in Education site I have been writing about the four senses of scripture. Now Angelico Press has published a brilliant study by Eduardo P. Olaguer, Jr called The Power of Four: Keys to the Hidden Treasures of the Gospels.

Though brief, the book goes much deeper and more brilliantly into the question of "why four gospels?" than I have ever been able to do. In his Introduction to the book, biblical scholar Gregory Glazov explains that Olaguer "takes as his principal goal the unlocking of the Four Gospels to explain Jesus' identity and mission... by identifying four types of symbolic patterns or keys... that unblock the spiritual treasures contained in the Gospels."

It is much more than the usual association of the Gospels with the four faces of the Cherubim (Lion, Ox, Eagle, Man or Angel). That is only the first key. Another is the correspondence of the Gospels with the four parts of the Old Testament (as understood by Christian writers). A third is a set of four "maps" or rhetorical structures used by the Evangelists to organize their writing (chiasmus, diptych, inclusio, and parataxis). The fourth involves four sets of seven, one for each Gospel: seven mountains (Matthew), seven remembrances (Mark), seven Temple visits (Luke), and seven Signs (John).

This book, and Olaguer's other scripture commentaries, show how much richer the field of exegesis could be if scholarship took the text and the authors of the Bible more seriously. Highly recommended.

Trinity in man

In church yesterday for Trinity Sunday, we saw a bright beam of light from a high window shining over the congregation, a bit like the image on my previous post. A metaphor for the Trinity, of course – if the church represents the world, then the Sun is the Father, the Window is the Son (who shows us the Father), and the Light is the Holy Spirit – the light of grace that comes into the world from the Father through the Son.

In my book Radiance of Being I write about "tripartite anthropology" or the idea of Trinitarian Man in the chapter on Nature and Grace. David Clayton summarizes some of this in his own exposition here. There are several ways of seeing the divine Trinity as it were reflected in the constitution of man, beginning with St Paul and St Augustine. Thomists sometimes object, preferring the dualism of body plus soul to the dualism of soul plus spirit, but it is easy to reconcile the two traditions by regarding the spirit as simply the inner face of the soul – the face it turns towards God.

In his fine book On Liturgical Asceticism, David Fagerberg explains that Christianity inherited the concept of soul as the animating force of a body (animals have souls) from the Greek tradition, and the concept of spirit as the immortal intellectual principle that knows God from the Hebrew. In man, unlike the angels, the spirit functions as the form of the material organism – so we can say either that the soul is the spirit functioning as animating form, or that the spirit is the soul functioning as intellectual principle.

When the body dies, the presence of the soul is withdrawn, and so the soul withdraws into the spirit. This is the same as the confrontation with God – the removal of the veil between creature and Creator. This is also the Judgment, because time is one of those veils now removed, and all our actions in life are seen at once, and their meaning revealed. All that is not compatible with the love of God will be burned away. And when the new body, the new earth, and the new heavens are created (Rev. 21:1), the body will express the spirit (1 Cor. 15:35-57) – instead of somewhat obscuring it, as it does in this life. The Holy Spirit will then shine through it like sunlight through a clear window.

Photo by Lawrence Lew OP.