et Vetera Nova Spring 2023 • Volume 21, Number 2 The English Edition of the International Theological Journal Co-Editors Matthew Levering, Mundelein Seminary Thomas Joseph White, O.P., Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas Associate Editors Holly Taylor Coolman, Providence College Gilles Emery, O.P., University of Fribourg Paul Gondreau, Providence College Scott W. Hahn, Franciscan University of Steubenville Thomas S. Hibbs, Baylor University Reinhard Hütter, Catholic University of America Christopher Malloy, University of Dallas Bruce D. Marshall, Southern Methodist University Charles Morerod, O.P., Bishop of Lausanne, Geneva, and Fribourg John O’Callaghan, University of Notre Dame Chad C. Pecknold, Catholic University of America Michael S. Sherwin, O.P., Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas Board of Advisors Anthony Akinwale, O.P., Dominican Institute, Ibadan, Nigeria Khaled Anatolios, University of Notre Dame Robert Barron, Bishop of Winona-Rochester John Betz, University of Notre Dame Bernhard Blankenhorn, O.P., University of Fribourg Christopher O. Blum, Augustine Institute Stephen Brock, Pontifical University of the Holy Cross Peter Casarella, Duke University Divinity School Boyd Taylor Coolman, Boston College Michael Dauphinais, Ave Maria University Archbishop J. Augustine Di Noia, O.P., Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Douglas Farrow, McGill University Anthony Fisher, O.P., Archbishop of Sydney, Australia Simon Francis Gaine, O.P., Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas Timothy Gray, Augustine Institute Nicholas J. Healy, Jr., Pontifical John Paul II Institute (Washington, DC) Russell Hittinger, Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology Paige Hochschild, Mount St. Mary’s University Andrew Hofer, O.P., Dominican House of Studies Dominic Legge, O.P., Dominican House of Studies Joseph Lienhard, S.J., Fordham University Steven A. Long, Ave Maria University Guy Mansini, O.S.B., Ave Maria University Francesca Aran Murphy, University of Notre Dame Thomas Osborne, University of St. Thomas (Houston) Michał Paluch, O.P., Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas Trent Pomplun, University of Notre Dame Christopher J. Ruddy, Catholic University of America Richard Schenk, O.P., University of Freiburg Michele Schumacher, University of Fribourg Janet Smith, Sacred Heart Major Seminary Christopher Thompson, St. Paul Seminary Thomas Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap., Capuchin College William Wright, Duquesne University Instructions for Contributors 1. Address all contributions, books for review, and related correspondence to Matthew Levering, mjlevering@yahoo.com. 2. Contributions should be prepared to accord as closely as possible with the typographical conventions of Nova et Vetera. The University of Chicago Manual of Style (16th edition) is our authority on matters of style. 3. Nova et Vetera practices blind review. Submissions are evaluated anonymously by members of the editorial board and other scholars with appropriate expertise. Name, affiliation, and contact information should be included on a separate page apart from the submission. 4. Galley-proofs of articles are sent to contributors to be read and corrected and should be returned to the Editors within ten days of receipt. Corrections should be confined to typographical and factual errors. 5. Submission of a manuscript entails the author’s agreement (in the event his or her contribution is accepted for publication) to assign the copyright to Nova et Vetera. Nova et Vetera The English Edition of the International Theological Journal ISSN 1542-7315 Spring 2023 Vol. 21, No. 2 Tracts for the Times Tract 9: Why Is Marriage a Sacrament?.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anonymous 405 Tract 10: Revelation, Dogma, and Catholic Spirituality.. . . . . . . . Anonymous 415 Tract 11: At the Hour of Death.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anonymous 421 Commentary Can Creatures Cause Forms? Aquinas on Cosmology and Evolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lucas Prieto 441 Articles Another Look at Silence and Knowledge of God in Ignatius’s Letter to the Ephesians.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ryan Patrick Budd 451 On Scheeben’s Place in Nineteenth-Century Catholic Theology and the Question of His Theological Method.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Evan S. Koop 471 The Synod on Synodality in Light of Pope Francis’s Theology of Mission. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Keith Lemna 509 One Parable, Two Interpretations: Pope Francis and William Langland on the Good Samaritan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sheryl Overmyer 541 What Are Dead Bodies For? An Augustinian Thanatology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Philip Porter 561 Bonaventure’s Reductio of the Nine Choirs of Angels: How Bonaventure Compressed Two Monumental Traditions into Nine Words and Nine Short Phrases.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Randall B. Smith 583 The De Auxiliis Controversy, Molinism, and Physical Premotion: The Christological Implications.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pachomius Walker, O.P. 607 Exchange A Báñezian Grounding for Counterfactuals of Creaturely Freedom: A Response to James Dominic Rooney, O.P.. . . . . . Taylor Patrick O’Neill 651 From Báñez with Love: A Response to a Response by Taylor Patrick O’Neill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . James Dominic Rooney, O.P. 675 Review Essay Original Sin Revisited: A Recent Proposal on Thomas Aquinas, Original Sin, and the Challenge of Evolution. . . . . . . . . . . Reinhard Hütter 693 Book Reviews God, Evil and the Limits of Theology by Karen Kilby. . . . . . . . . Vincent Birch 733 Jesus Becoming Jesus, Volume 2, A Theological Interpretation of the Gospel of John: Prologue and the Book of Signs by Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Daniel A. Keating 738 The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision by Erika Bachiochi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Angela Knobel 742 Does Judaism Condone Violence? Holiness and Ethics in the Jewish Tradition by Alan L. Mittleman. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Matthew Levering 745 The English edition of Nova et Vetera is published quarterly and provides an international forum for theological and philosophical studies from a Thomistic perspective. Founded in 1926 by future Cardinal Charles Journet in association with Jacques Maritain, Nova et Vetera is published in related, distinct French and English editions. The English edition of Nova et Vetera welcomes articles and book reviews in theology, philosophy, and biblical studies that address central contemporary debates and discussions. We seek to be “at the heart of the Church,” faithful to the Magisterium and the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, and devoted to the work of true dialogue. Nova et Vetera (ISSN 1542-7315; ISBN 978-1-64585-316-9) is published quarterly by St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology, 1468 Parkview Circle, Steubenville, OH 43952. 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Nova et Vetera Subscription Rates: • Individuals: one-year $40.00, two-year $75.00 International: one-year $60.00, two-year $115.00 • Students: one-year $30.00, two-year $50.00 International: one-year $40.00, two-year $70.00 • Colleges, Universities, Seminaries, and Institutions: one-year $110.00, one-year print + electronic subscription $150.00 International: one-year $135.00 To subscribe online, please visit http://www.nvjournal.net. For subscription inquiries, email us at novaetvetera@stpaulcenter.com or phone 740-264-9535. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 21, No. 2 (2023): 405–414 405 Tract 9: Why Is Marriage a Sacrament? An immediate response to the question above could be something like, “Marriage is a sacrament because it is one of the seven signs that Jesus instituted and entrusted to the Church in order to dispense grace to us.” However, this answer is not completely satisfying, because upon hearing this rather rote response one might immediately ask, “But what does it really mean to call marriage a sacrament?” The answer to this question is deeper and richer than the questioner might imagine, because it takes us back to the dawn of time, and impinges upon our understanding of the human person, the human person’s relationship to God, and our understanding of salvation. Now, more than ever, it is important to understand why marriage is a sacrament. Now, more than ever, it is important to understand what marriage is a sacramental sign of, because our culture is quickly forgetting what marriage is; and, should we forget what marriage is, and what it is a sign of, we will forget what it means to be human and we will forget our relationship with God. Thus marriage is more important than many people realize! It is, in fact, an irreplaceable sacrament for understanding human existence and our ultimate destiny. Marriage as the Primordial Sacrament of God’s Love First of all, marriage is a sign that is fundamental to understanding the history of salvation. In fact, God’s plan to save us can be read in terms of marriage. The history of salvation, as recorded in the Bible, begins and ends with marriages. In Genesis, the first book of the Bible, we see God creating Adam and Eve and calling them to marriage, where the two become one (Gen 2:24), giving them the command to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it (Gen 1:28). In the last book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation, we are told that all of salvation history culminates with the 406 Anonymous marriage of Christ and the Church—the wedding feast of the Lamb (Rev 19:6–9). In between the first and last books of the Bible, we see the greatest of all love stories unfold—it is the story of God’s plan to wed himself to humanity! The prophets of the Old Testament often presented God as Israel’s Spouse (see Isa 62) and compared Israel’s relationship with God to marriage (Hos 2:18–20, 3:1; Jer 3:20, 30:14; 31:1–3; Ezek 15:8–15, 16:59–60, 62–63). In the New Testament, Jesus compares the Kingdom of God to a wedding feast (Matt 22:1–14) and presents himself as the Bridegroom (Matt 9:14; 22:1–2; 25:1). St. Paul speaks about Christ as the Bridegroom who has come to offer himself for the sanctification of his Bride, the Church (see Eph 5). In fact, God created marriage in order to provide us with a living sign of the love that he offers us in this greatest of love stories. It was Pope St. John Paul II, in a work called Theology of the Body, who called marriage the “primordial sacrament” of God’s love. By this he meant that God created marriage to be a sign of his love from the very beginning of creation. In other words, if we ask, “Why does marriage exist?,” the answer is that God created man and woman and called them together in marriage in order to be a constant sign, the first sacrament, of the type of love that God wants to share with us. From the dawn of time, he wanted spouses to experience married love as a pointer to his love. He wants everyone to be able to look at married couples and be able to say, “That’s how much God loves me—right there!” The special love that God offers to us human persons is called the love of the covenant. God established his covenant first with Adam and Eve, and he renewed it several times throughout salvation history—with Noah, with Abraham, with Moses, with David, and finally with Jesus Christ, who established the definitive covenant between God and humanity. The essence of the covenant that God forged and continually renewed with humanity is, “I will be your God. You will be my people” (see Gen 17:7; Exod 6:7; Lev 26:12; Jer 7:23, 11:4, 30:22, 31:1, 33, 32:38; Ezek 11:20; 14:11; 36:28; 37:23, 27; Zech 8:8; 2 Cor 6:16; Heb 8:10; Rev 21:3, 7). This covenant is literally a mutual exchange of persons. While a covenant might have contractual elements to it, the covenant that God enters into with humanity is not a simple contract. Contracts normally govern the exchange of goods or services, but the biblical understanding of a covenant involves the unrestrained and unrestricted mutual handing over of both parties to each other. God freely gives his very self to his people, and he asks his people to make a free, mutual gift of self to him in return. In the pages of Sacred Scripture, we can see that this covenantal love that God offers to humanity has four distinctive qualities. First of all, God’s Tract 9: Why Is Marriage a Sacrament? 407 covenantal love for humanity is free. God was not compelled to create, because he is utterly sufficient in himself. Nor, once he created, was he obliged to offer any of his creatures a special share in his life. Yet, the God who is Love (1 John 4:8) freely chose to create and freely chose to enter into a covenantal relationship of mutual self-donation with human persons (see Jas 1:5; Rom 8:32). He freely gives himself and he accepts only a free response. Second, God’s offering of covenantal love is faithful. God is the ever-faithful God who always keeps his promises (Deut 7:9). Once he pledges himself to this relationship of mutual self-donation with humanity, he will never revoke his promise. Third, God’s covenantal love is forever. Donating himself totally in this relationship means that this relationship is permanent. He and his people will always be bound together (Ps 136:1–3). Fourth, and finally, God’s covenantal love is fruitful (Isa 55:11). When he gives himself to his people, he wants them to bear fruit in their relationship with him (see Isa 55:11; Luke 13:6–9; John 15:5, 8). Married love is the only love in the created order that possesses these same four qualities. From the beginning, all true marriages have possessed these four qualities, and the uniqueness of married love that is defined by these four qualities can be perceived through human reason. In other words, understanding what marriage is, is a matter of reason, not faith! However, our current society is losing its ability to reason to truth. Thankfully, the Catholic rite of marriage reminds all of us about the truth of marriage and what marriage is. In The Order of Celebrating Matrimony, prior to exchanging their consent, there are three questions that are asked of the couple. The presiding priest or deacon asks the following (I have added italics to emphasize the four qualities of married love): Have you come here to enter into Marriage without coercion, freely and wholeheartedly? The bridegroom and bride each say: I have. Are you prepared, as you follow the path of Marriage, to love and honor each other for as long as you both shall live? The bridegroom and bride each say: I am. Are you prepared to accept children lovingly from God and to bring them up according to the law of Christ and his Church? The bridegroom and bride each say: I am. 408 Anonymous Notice that the first question pertains to the freedom of the couple’s mutual self-gift. There is no such thing a valid “shotgun” wedding. No one can be forced to give a gift of himself/herself to another. The gift must be free! The second question asks about the couple’s intention to live faithfully for each other. This is an exclusive relationship into which no one else can intrude. There is no such thing as “open” marriage. The second question also asks if the couple is willing to be permanently bound to each other as long as you both shall live until death. A total mutual gift of self requires permanence, and as Jesus teaches, there is no such thing as divorce (see Matt 19:3–9; Mark 10:2–12; Luke 16:18). The third question in the marriage rite asks the couple if they are willing to be fruitful by accepting children from God and educating them in his truth. It is not possible to want marriage without being open to children. This is part of God’s original plan for marriage, and married love is unique among all human loves because married couples can express their love through their bodies in a certain way, and nine months later you may have to give that expression of love a name! Notice that the four qualities of married love—free, faithful, forever, fruitful—are the same four qualities of God’s covenantal love for humanity. This is not an accident! God designed marriage to be a living sign, the primordial sacrament, a sign from the beginning, of his covenantal love. This is why we call marriage a covenant. Notice also that only a man and a woman can participate in a love that possesses all four of these qualities. In fact, marriage is a visible sign precisely through the complementarity of the male and female bodies of the spouses! This is why people of the same sex cannot be married. Between two people of the same sex, the complementarity does not exist for them to receive completely each other’s gift, soul and body, and share a love that is free, faithful, forever, and fruitful. Thus the male body of the husband and the female body of the wife together are the physical, visible sign of God’s love! In the Catholic rite of marriage, when a man and a woman answer in the affirmative to all of the above questions, they are saying that they want marriage. They are proclaiming that they want to share in married love as it was designed by God from the beginning with all that marriage entails. If they say “no” to any of the above questions, they make it known that they do not want to participate in married love. They can go ahead and have the party they had planned to have that evening, but they will not be husband Tract 9: Why Is Marriage a Sacrament? 409 and wife. No one can be husband and wife who do not pledge to live a love that is free, faithful, forever, and fruitful. After a couple has made it known that they intend to offer married love to each other, the priest, or deacon, who officiates the wedding asks the couple to exchange their consent by saying (italics added): Since it is your intention to enter the covenant of Holy Matrimony, join your right hands, and declare your consent before God and his Church. The couple then says to each other: I, take you, to be my wife/husband. I promise to be faithful to you, in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, to love you and to honor you all the days of my life. This is the public statement, before God and the community, to hand themselves over to each other in the covenant of marriage. It is a public vow to enter into a mutual exchange of persons—a covenant. God has created humanity male and female with such intense personal complementarity that a man and a woman can give themselves totally and completely to each other in the covenant of marriage—soul and body. This means that marriage will satisfy a person’s deep longing for intimacy only to the extent that it images God’s covenantal love, because that is what marriage is designed to do from the beginning—to be a living sign of God’s love as the primordial sacrament! However, marriage is the primordial sacrament not only because it is a sign of God’s covenantal love for us, but also because God intended marriage to be a sign of his own inner life of love. The Book of Genesis tells us that we are made male and female in God’s image and likeness (Gen 1:27). From all eternity, the God in whose image we are made is an infinitely intimate communion of persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. From all eternity, in the inner life of the One God, this Trinity of persons pour themselves out in love to each other. In the created order, it is the complementarity of male and female sexuality that allows us to image God’s inner life of love and to be gift for each other. Pope St. John Paul II noted that being made in the image of the tri-personal God, human persons are made to be self-giving gifts. In fact, we cannot find happiness without giving ourselves to God and others in love—this is essential to what it means to be a person! 410 Anonymous As embodied persons, our sexuality is meant to be a constant reminder that we are meant to be gift. John Paul II called this the “spousal meaning of the body.” By this he meant that our bodies reveal to us that we have the capacity for love, self-giving, and to enter into a communion of love. The complementarity of the male and female bodies shows us that we are built for communion with others. This is true for everyone, even if a particular individual never gets married. Marriage is the fundamental communion of persons upon which all other forms of human communion are based. The human communion of persons of marriage is supposed to be, in God’s design, a sign pointing to the Communion of Persons who is God! John Paul II also spoke of a “language of the body” that is spoken by spouses in the marital act. He pointed out how the marital act is designed to “speak” a language of mutual self-donation. This “language,” when spoken in truth, is a sign of God’s inner life of self-giving love and a sign of God’s covenantal love for humanity. Through “the language of the body,” spouses pour themselves out to each other, speaking a covenantal language, expressing their wedding vows through their bodies. As the two become one flesh, their bodies “speak” the language that entails making a free gift to each other that is faithful, total, and therefore permanent, and open to bearing fruit. Only a man and a woman joined in marriage can “speak” this language of the body truthfully, and any attempt to engage in sexual activity outside of the marital covenant forces the body to speak a lie. So, from the beginning, the duality of the sexes and the total reciprocal love of husband and wife that can be spoken through their bodies due to the complementarity of gender was designed to be the primordial sign of God’s covenantal love for us, as well as a sign of his own inner life of self-giving love. In the words of St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, marriage is a “great mystery,” and it is in fact a greater mystery than many people realize, a mystery that stands at the center of our understanding of God, the infinite Communion of Persons, and his covenantal relationship with us! Marriage as a Sacrament of Redemption However, St. Paul’s words about marriage being a “great mystery” were not just about marriage as it was created by God in the beginning as the primordial sacrament of his love. With the Incarnation, marriage is not only the primordial sacrament, but it is now also a sacrament of redemption—a sacrament that brings us Christ’s saving love! Christian marriage is a sacrament of redemption first of all because it is a sign of how God’s redeeming love is offered to us. God the Son offers us Tract 9: Why Is Marriage a Sacrament? 411 his redemptive, restorative love as the Bridegroom! It is on the Cross that the Bridegroom pours himself out completely and totally for his Bride, holding nothing back. Thus redemptive love is nuptial love! In offering his very self, body and soul, out of love for his Bride, Jesus sanctifies her in his blood and saves her. The sacraments themselves pour out of Christ’s pierced side as he makes his offering of total self-giving on the Cross. This is why John Paul II said that marriage is the sacrament of redemption, because it is out of Christ’s nuptial love for his Bride that redemption occurs. Thus nuptial love is the source of and the model of the other sacraments! Marriage is also a sacrament of redemption because it is one of the seven particular signs that Christ entrusted to the Church that allow us to unite ourselves to him and receive his grace. It is incredibly important to note that Jesus worked his first public miracle at a wedding (see John 2:1–9, the Wedding Feast at Cana). This makes sense when you realize that God intended marriage to be the primordial sign of his love in the world. The fact that Jesus worked his first public miracle at a wedding, turning approximately 120 to 180 gallons of water into fine wine, is a sign that he has come to restore God’s plan for married love and to elevate it. In the beginning, Adam and Eve possessed the gifts of original holiness and justice (see The Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§3775–79), and they had the ability to pass on these gifts to their progeny, but they lost these gifts when they sinned and fell from grace. At the wedding feast at Cana, Jesus’s miracle is a sign that he has come to restore and reaffirm God’s plan for married love and to offer abundant graces to Christian married couples to live out this plan. Throughout Scripture, wine is one of the symbols of God’s favor and love (see Deut 7:13; 11:14; 33:28; Ps 104:15; Isa 55:1; Jer 31:12; Joel 2:24; Amos 9:14). Christ comes to bless and restore the wine of marriage, marital love, in superabundance. The Catechism itself tells us that, “without Christ’s help man and woman cannot achieve the union of their lives for which God created them ‘in the beginning’” (§1608). In the miracle that he works at Cana, Jesus shows us that he blesses married love and that he will give married couples the love that they need to achieve the union for their lives that God designed. All married couples will, at times, feel like they have run out of wine in their marriages. However, love is not a feeling or an emotion. Love is an act of the will, and the essence of love is willing the good of the other. The truest love is committing oneself to the good of the other to the point that it entails selflessness and self-sacrifice. This is the type of love that Jesus comes to restore. 412 Anonymous I am convinced that the reason for marital break-ups is the fact that, when engaged couples are asked, “Why do you want to get married?,” many respond, “I want to be happy.” Now, don’t get me wrong, it is reasonable for people to expect that getting married will bring some amount of happiness to their lives. If someone gets married because he or she wants to be unhappy, then this is surely a sign of pathology. Yet, the commitment of marriage is not a commitment to an expectation of happiness. Marriage is not about “happily ever after,” which only exists in fairy-tales, but about “committed ever after.” If you look at the wedding vows (above) in the Catholic rite of matrimony, there is no promise for what one spouse hopes to get, other than promising to receive the totality of the other spouse (“I . . . take you . . .”). Instead, each spouse is promising to give all of himself/herself in service to the good of the other. It is in living out this mutual commitment of self-donation and service to the other’s good that married couples have the opportunity to find happiness, even amidst good times and bad, health and sickness. Jesus comes not to renew the “feelings” of married love, but to continually renew a married couple’s commitment to each other. He makes this clear when, in response to the Pharisees’ question about the practice of divorce, he says that marriage is permanent because it was designed to be so from the beginning (see Matt 19: 3–9; Mark 2–12). This is where Jesus definitively affirms that he has come to restore God’s plan for marriage, the primordial sacrament of God’s love. We must remember that Jesus does not ask anything of us that he does not also give us the grace to achieve. In the Incarnation, the Son of God comes to redeem the human race and to give us his love in superabundance. Jesus comes to transform our hearts so we can love God and each other by participating in divine love. This includes giving the grace to spouses to assist them in overcoming selfishness and empowering them to selflessly sacrifice for each other the way Christ selflessly sacrificed himself out of love for his beloved Bride, the Church. Jesus has come to transform marriage from something that was holy from the beginning into something that is holy-making! He has taken the created reality of marriage and supernaturalized it. If the natural purpose of marriage, from the beginning, is procreation and the mutual support of the spouses, the supernatural purpose of marriage is for the spouses to aid in the sanctification of each other, to assist in getting each other to heaven, and to put any children that God may give them on that same path. In order to accomplish this supernatural task, Jesus comes to incorporate Christian spouses into the love that he has for his Bride, not some fake counterfeit of love. He does this in the sacrament of marriage. St. Paul points to marriage as one of the seven sacraments when, quoting Tract 9: Why Is Marriage a Sacrament? 413 Gen 2:24, in his Letter to the Ephesians he says: “‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one.’ This is a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ and the Church” (5:31–32; emphasis added). The Greek word that St. Paul uses for “mystery” is mysterion. In Latin this is translated as sacramentum. Both the Greek and the Latin words mean “sign.” So, St. Paul is saying that the marriage of Christians is a great sign in reference to Christ and the Church. In the verses of Ephesians chapter 5 that precede this statement, St. Paul exhorts couples to participate in the love that Christ shares with his Church when he says: “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. . . . As the Church is subject to Christ, so let wives be subject in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her” (5:21, 24–25). St. Paul goes on to say more so that it is clear that Christian spouses are to pour themselves out in loving care for each other, loving each other as Christ loves, encountering Christ through each other. St. Paul knows that Christian spouses cannot do this without Christ gifting them with his love. It is the sacrament of marriage that empowers a couple to love with Jesus’s love and to image God’s selfless love in a communion of persons. Thus Jesus elevates the primordial sacrament of marriage to a sacrament of his redeeming love. By binding a man and a woman together in the sacrament of marriage through their mutual consent and incorporating them into his covenant with the Church, Jesus seeks to live his life again through the married couple. This means that every Christian married couple is called by Jesus to go through the Passion together and to die to sin together in order to experience the resurrection of their love. The passion of marriage is experienced in suffering the conversion of each other, and the death in marriage is each spouse dying to his or her own ego in order to be able to live for the other. The grace of the sacrament of marriage, which is to love with Jesus’s spousal love, is constantly available throughout married life. Christian spouses need only lean in to Jesus. As the heavenly Bridegroom, he continuously offers Christian spouses the grace to stoke the fire of his love in their hearts. Additionally, the grace that he offers spouses in the sacrament of marriage is particularized to each couple. This is true for every sacrament. Although Jesus offers a particular type of grace in each of the sacraments, each sacrament is an intensely personal encounter with the Risen Christ. For instance, in the sacrament of reconciliation, the type of grace offered is the grace of forgiveness of sins. Yet, encountering Jesus personally in this sacrament, he offers the grace to each of us to help us struggle with and overcome our own 414 Anonymous particular sins. In the sacrament of marriage, Jesus empowers a couple to love each other with his love, and he assists a couple to deal with their particular marital struggles so as to be living signs of his redemptive love in the world! Conclusion So, why is marriage a sacrament? Marriage is a sacrament, a great sign, because it is a sign of God’s covenantal love for humanity, a sign of God’s own inner life of love, and between baptized Christians it is an effective sign of Christ’s redemptive love for his Church. Whether our culture wants to recognize it or not, marriage will always bear the imprint of God’s love, and it will always have the potential to remind us of the Love that God is and the love that he offers to us—a love that will find its fulfillment in the next life when we are all wed to the One Spouse—Jesus Christ! Marriage is worth living well not only for those who are called to the married life, but in order to lead the world back to God’s love—because marriage, made possible by the duality of the sexes, was created by God and stands at the heart of our relationship with him. If we forget about marriage, we will forget about the type of love that God offers to each of us and the type of loving communion into which he beckons us. We will also forget about the redemptive love that the heavenly Bridegroom offers to his Church and the ultimate goal of our existence. In a real sense, if we forget about God’s plan for marriage, everything is at stake! That is why marriage is a sacrament. May all married couples rely upon God’s grace to live out the vocation to which they have been called and which they have freely embraced—and may all Christian spouses recognize that in Jesus they have the greatest ally in living out their marriage vows. For those who have conferred the sacrament of marriage on each other, Jesus dwells in their marital commitment and ensures them that nothing they experience in this life can extinguish their love, because absolutely nothing can extinguish his love. This is a sacrament, a sign, that the world desperately needs! Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 21, No. 2 (2023): 415–420 415 Tract 10: Revelation, Dogma, and Catholic Spirituality The last two hundred years and more have witnessed many calls for a revision or re-expression or some kind of bringing up to date of Catholic dogma. The promised end of this revision or aggiornamento is to be an easier access on the part of the faithful to the experience of God and Christ. What is the point of dogma except to orient us to and enable a religious experience that is properly Christian? Dogma is to put us on the same path with the same prospects made by those who first formulated Christian teaching. It is they who have some preeminent experience of God in Christ who paradigmatically formulate doctrine for us, as did St. Paul in the first, St. Athanasius in the fourth, and Maximus the Confessor in the seventh centuries. But the twentieth and now the twenty-first century is not that of Paul or Athanasius or even the century that most aspired to timelessness but of course failed, the thirteenth. The biblical theology of St. Paul is not the Platonism of Athanasius or the Aristotelianism of Aquinas. A revised dogma, a reformulated dogma, is to put us on the path laid out by Paul, Augustine, the Areopagite, but not at the same mile-marker. This is not to entertain some bogus notion of “doctrinal progress,” however. The project is not so much a matter of doing a better job than what previous centuries did, but simply of doing what they did for our own century. It’s more like changing oil and rotating the tires in the car we already have than getting a new model. In any and every case and in every time, however, the point of dogma is therefore, as it were, beyond it. Dogma is to get us into that space where we can know the consolation of the Holy Spirit in the difficult spots of our lives, the space where we know the peace of Christ that passes understanding (Phil 4:6). Even more, dogma is to get us into that space where we connect with the experiences of other people both spiritually and morally. At this point, the space in question is communally inhabitable, and lets us acknowledge our common dignity because we all experience the founding 416 Anonymous and framing and freeing dignity of the divine. The space in question, in other words, is what ecclesial space aspires to be, but not always successfully, but where failure is sometimes nothing more than a function of time passing, and occurs automatically because the once nourishing ways of pointing us to the transcendent have passed their “sell” date. And just because some of the once serviceable but now old boundaries will be left behind in the re-articulation of dogma, the new ecclesial space will be more ecumenically and inter-religiously friendly. The foregoing description of the project of doctrinal renovation that challenges us has been so often repeated, from the time and toils of modernism (and liberal Protestantism before it) to the hopeful buds of the “new theology” to the projected post-conciliar aggiornamento, that it seems to be the default position of Catholic mindfulness, something evident and obvious once some modicum of historical awareness has entered the sacred precincts. For it is precisely such awareness that seems both to require and give permission for dogmatic reformulation. Once we see how the sausage is made—how the beasts are slaughtered and the meat cut and ground up—which is to say, once we see the chances and contingencies of the actual history that surround the production of dogma, not all of them savory, then dogma appears to be more a creature of history, and so of our freedom, than we realized. The chances and contingencies that mark doctrinal history, moreover, also mark the history of revelation itself. The necessity and possibility of doctrinal reformulation are deliverances of both the history of revelation and the history of the Church. If we get any deeper in history than the last two hundred years, however, the apparent malleability of dogma relative to historical contingency and its ordination unto fostering religious experience do not turn out to describe a default position that would be recognized always, everywhere, and by everyone in Christendom. Describing revelation and the word of God and ecclesial dogma in fieri is not to take them in facto esse, as presented to us in finished form. So, there is another way to think of the task relative to dogma that we face in our own time. When the Bible speaks of dogma—and of course it does—we get a quite different picture of things. The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him, no creature is hidden, but all are open and laid bare to the eyes of him with whom we have to do. (Heb 4:12–13) Tract 10: Revelation, Dogma, and Catholic Spirituality 417 This rather reverses the direction from which we are to assess the point and utility of dogma. Hebrews here thinks of it from God’s point of view, not our own. The word of God—and also when it is shaped up ecclesially in dogmatic definitions—is here too conceived of as an instrument. But it is not first of all our instrument; it is first of all God’s instrument, the instrument of his choice for discerning our hearts. We thought dogma was ordered to experiencing God. But it’s not. It’s ordered to God’s experiencing us. What does he want to experience? To test? Our God is a “consuming fire” (12:29), and in the first place he wants to test what we have built on the foundation of Christ, whether with gold or silver, straw or hay (1 Cor 3:11–12). The living word of God pierces to the division of soul and spirit, marrow and joints, intentions and thought; that is, it divides thought from action, faith from the works of charity—spirit and pith on the one hand from desiring soul and operative joints on the other. Whatever we build on the Foundation will be saved as long as it really is built on the Foundation. Which is Christ. The Foundation, known by faith, supports the moral action of our lives, and if the moral action of our lives is not supported by the Foundation, it will be burnt up. Here, dogma is oriented not up, not up to the experience of God, but out, out to the experience of the neighbor in charity. These dogmatic truths that direct our action concern our common human dignity, indeed, and especially today they command respect for life, respect for a marriage bed that unites male and female, and an explicit concern for a common polity that publicly acknowledges the debt of justice to God. These things are securely anchored to the Foundation. But same-sex unions, recognition of a right to kill the babe in the womb, and connivance in the naked public square are not. We know this not just because that is the way our ancestors lived, but because these practical directives of Christian life are directly founded in Christ himself. He is the Life who loves life ( John 10:10; 14:6). He is the Bridegroom who makes his Bride fruitful (Eph 5:25). And he teaches that things are due to God in the same public order in which things are due to Caesar (Mark 12:17). In the ways just mentioned, dogma directs us to the world. But it does so only because God has come into the world—in the Foundation, in Christ. But here again, we look not so much up, to an experience of God, and not even out, to the neighbor, but down, to the Foundation under the edifice of Christian life. At this point, the word of God is the Word of God become flesh. It is a Foundation that is laid down only by apostolic preaching (1 Cor 3:10). To be sure, faith comes from hearing (Romans 10:17). The act of faith, however, terminates in the message heard, not in any wordless experience of God on the other side of it. The Foundation is delivered to us exactly and 418 Anonymous only in the very terms of what is preached. For we confess with our lips and so are saved, only so (Rom 10:10). Now, there is a building on the Foundation in addition to that of moral action. Beyond the “elementary doctrines” concerning repentance and faith and baptism and resurrection and eternal judgment (Heb 6:1–2), there are doctrines concerning the sacrifice and priesthood of Christ that Hebrews concerns itself with at length. Why are these doctrines for the mature (6:1)? First, they explicate the intelligibility of the action of Christ, the action of God in Christ; they articulate its truth. Second, they declare the availability to us of the fruit of Christ’s action in the sacraments of the Church (13:10), as Tridentine dogma teaches us, with its complements in the Second Vatican Council’s Lumen Gentium and Sacrosanctum Concilium. Third, they are for the mature because they tell us that being on the Foundation means making up in our bodies what is lacking to the saving suffering of Christ (Col 1:24; Heb 10:32–34; 12:4–8; 13:13). If the Foundation of all dogma is Christ, then the idea of bringing dogma up to date is indistinguishable from bringing the Foundation up to date. But the Letter to the Hebrews forestalls such a thing when it says that Christ is “the same yesterday and today and for ever” (13:8). According to this dictum, the presupposition of there being any history whatsoever—namely, a continuing self-same reality by reference to which all other things are temporally ordered—is fulfilled for Christian faith in Christ. Historical mindedness for Christians there certainly is, therefore, but it means having the mind of Christ, who, though he was in the form of God, took flesh and humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death in time to his eternal Father. It is because Christ is the form of time that Christians are confident that his words, though spoken in time, will not pass away. And this is so even if their not passing entails that they take successive forms in the words of the New Testament, of the Church’s Tradition, of dogma. But these formulations, even if they spell out some new understanding embedded in the old, maintain “the same sense, the same judgment,” and one can even say, as does the Church, “the same dogma” (First Vatican Council, Dei Filius). If there is progress in understanding, still, we have the same judgment, which is to say the same dogma, at Chalcedon as at Ephesus as at Nicaea. That our faith is the same and embraces the same truth about Christ as that of the fourth or fifth or nineteenth century is just the flip side of the abiding and unchanging reality of Christ, the same yesterday and today and tomorrow. He was given to our collective knowledge once for all, for that is all that is necessary given the time-transcending capacity of human words to maintain the divine word spoken by means of them. That our words are Tract 10: Revelation, Dogma, and Catholic Spirituality 419 so capable is part of the promise that his word will not pass away (Matt 24:35). This capability, moreover, belongs to the social and public character of the addressee of revelation that revelation presupposes. The Church is a community. Last, it is indicated by the very nature of Christian revelation in that it can be reflexively possessed as revelation because of such words as the prophetic “thus saith the Lord” and the dominical “but I say to you.” That we know the Lord says what he says belongs to our grasp of a revelation that comes to us as revelation. Seeing how the sausage is made within the framework of Christ’s time, which is God’s time, for whom all created things, including the created freedom of men and angels, are instruments, removes any scandal from the history of dogmatic formulation. God subverts the devil’s plans by out-planning him. This happens signally at the most central action of the order of salvation, where the Cross itself undoes the devil by using him and the evil he compasses to undo his empire (1 Cor 2:7–8). The mob of monks at Ephesus, imperial pressure at Chalcedon, the politics of empire at Trent, political anxiety in the nineteenth century—none of this escapes the transcendent causality of God. It is only a historical accident, the accident that the modern history of dogma grew up within modern positivism, that makes us forget this. Bringing dogma up to date, insofar as it means abandoning the “pattern of sound words” (2 Tim 1:13) and involves us in contemporary ideologies (cf. Col 2:8; 1 Tim 4:7), returns us to the idea of wanting to experience God, wanting, that is, to test him and control him. We seek to put God to the test (Heb 3:8–9). But “he is found by those who do not put him to the test” (Wis 1:2). If rather he tests us, however, then there is a way to prepare for it. The Letter to the Hebrews compares the word of God to a scalpel by which God performs a sort of open-heart surgery on us. But the Bible also tells us to eat the word of God. Jeremiah does so, and his heart rejoices (15:16). Ezekiel eats the scroll on which the word of God is written (2:8–3:3), and so does John in the Book of Revelation (10:8–9). After all, man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God (Matt 4:4). And Hebrews too speaks of doctrine as food for the mature (5:14). We eat the word by our faith, to be sure, and this installs it in our heart (Rom 10:9). But when the Lamb opens the scroll in Revelation (5:9), he himself is the book he opens, St. Bernard says. So, eating the scroll is eating the word of God is eating Christ. And we eat him also in the Blessed Sacrament ( John 6:53–58). The unity of word and sacrament in the Church gives a hermeneutical key to the understanding and re-articulation of dogma, something like the following: no sermon or explanation of faith that gives 420 Anonymous scandal when spoken publicly at Mass in the presence of the Church and her Head can be valid. This unity thus bespeaks an examination of conscience: I cannot eat the Bread in charity if I do not hold to the Creed in faith. Dogma protects the integrity of the Sacrament, and it follows that we all cannot eat the Bread in charity and in common if we do not recognize the Body and hold to the Creed in faith. But the Sacrament in turn vivifies dogma, as charity makes faith alive. This reminds us of what Catholics bring to the ecumenical table. It is not the Eucharist, and not really even doctrine about the Eucharist and the Sacrifice. It is not particular doctrines that we bring so much as the doctrinal thing itself. With Scripture and Tradition, it makes a threefold cord that is hard to break (cf. Eccl 4:12; Dei Verbum §10). But if we thought it was just us who bring it to the table, we wouldn’t bring it. We are commissioned to bring it to an undivided Church as a constitutive part of that Church, just as the Church is commissioned to bring the word of God to the world. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 21, No. 2 (2023): 421–440 421 Tract 11: At the Hour of Death* One of the founding fathers of the United States was the writer and ingenious inventor Benjamin Franklin; when he retired at the age of forty-two, he gave this advice to a young merchant: “Remember that Time is Money.”1 In the Western world this advice no longer applies just to the economic sphere but governs all dimensions of life. The concept of time that it insinuates does not correspond to an open temporality capable of ushering in the kairos, the moment conducive to the sudden appearance of a surprising event. This concept implies, on the contrary, the idea of quantification and measurability: it corresponds to chronos. This is divisible clock time, within which all instants are equivalent and unrelated to each other, without ties that would tell the story of an individual or of a community. The time of a life therefore is set within a framework; it tends toward death. As though death commanded the movement of life: the time of human existence unravels a little more each day, or rather at every moment, while bringing us ever closer to death. Since we now see time exclusively as measurable time, the objective of life is to make the most of the time that we have left, in other words, to profit from our remaining time to live, either by accumulating money and material goods in a mad race for success—“the one who dies with the most toys, wins”—or by experiencing the most pleasures. To the point of eliminating the “dead” times, because they yield nothing, neither wealth nor pleasures nor new experiences. The motto of contemporary man could be summarized as follows: “Life is short, let’s make the most of it!” This is, in fact, the meaning of the Latin maxim that is pronounced nowadays in an imperative tone: “Carpe diem”—“Seize the day.” Making the maximum * 1 This Tract has been translated by Michael J. Miller. Benjamin Franklin, “Advice to a young Tradesman” (1748), in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 3, 1745–1750, ed. Leonard W. Labaree (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 306–8, at 306. 422 Anonymous profit in a minimum of time is the unavoidable law today, not only of the economy but also of life in general. What if we changed our concept of time? What if we allowed ourselves to experience time in its kairos version, so as to allow transcendence to break into our immanent temporal framework? Certainly, we cannot escape death, or the time of dying, but we can perhaps “live” in a different way this particular time that is called “agony.” It could teach and enlighten us also about ordinary time. This time of dying should not necessarily be considered as a “dead” time that we ought to get rid of as rapidly as possible. It can be, on the contrary, a very important time for the dying person, as well as for the well person who accompanies him. The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, in his posthumous work, remarks that in the time of agony what is “Essential” emerges.2 In saying so he agrees with the experience of a man from Grenoble who for two years accompanied his wife at the end of her life: “People think that the living are the ones who close the eyes of the dying, but the dying are the ones who open the eyes of the living.”3 To what, then, does the dying person witness? What essential thing does this time of dying teach us about human existence? Does the experience of finiteness—the temporal framework in which we are set, with our own death as its only horizon—explain by itself the contemporary desire for total autonomy, which results in the need to control our own finiteness, including the time of dying and our own death? What if this principle of autonomy was only an illusion? What if true freedom was found in confident consent to that finiteness, devoid of all intention to control, so that we could live fully this essential time without allowing it to escape from us? Managing the Time of Dying Contemporary man sees very well his inability to prevent time from passing. His life is governed by time. Because he refuses to be dependent in this way, he decides to control the entirety of his existence so as to depend on nothing and no one, thus making his autonomy an absolute value, deprived of any substrate besides his own will. Because he reduces reason to the technological-scientific dimension alone, from birth to the time of dying, all ages of life are subject to this control. “Today dying is thought 2 3 Paul Ricoeur, Living up to Death, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 14 [originally Vivant jusqu’à la mort: suivi de Fragments (Paris: Seuil, 2007), 43]. Didier Sicard, “Penser solidairement la fin de vie [Thinking in Solidarity about the End of Life],” French commission report to François Hollande, December 18, 2012, p. 9. Tract 11: At the Hour of Death 423 of as something to be controlled and is always understood as a commission to organize something. Dying is addressed more and more often with the attitude of management,” the German ethicist and physician Giovanni Maio emphasizes.4 Therefore the time of the end of life is increasingly approached from the perspective of management: it is set within a managerial logic that in recent years could be summed up in the formula “death control,” by analogy with “birth control.” The objective, the French sociologist Patrick Baudry notes, is to make death and dying “an end that is foreseeable, programmable and manageable.”5 Moreover death and the dying person must be “pleasant for the living,”6 and must not move them or even disturb them. Channeled into an antiseptic, allegedly “humanizing” process of control, into the framework of a managerial logic, dying and death are no longer considered tragic events that might unsettle the daily routine of those who are well. This is demonstrated by the protagonist of the novel by the Senegalese author Cheikh Hamidou Kane entitled L’Aventure ambiguë: the young African man Samba Diallo observes that the people in his homeland lead their lives in a familiarity, an intimacy with death, whereas in the West it has “become a stranger [to him] again. Everything fights it and drives it far away from our bodies and minds. I forget about it. When I look for it in my thoughts, I see only a withered sentiment, an abstract eventuality, scarcely any more unpleasant for me than for my insurance company.”7 Just like the time of dying, death is, in effect, banished from the closed temporal framework in which man moves about. He lives as though these realities did not exist. And since he must experience them after all, they have to be subjected to the logic of managerial control. Not only must this time of dying be “comfortable,” controlled, for the dying person and also for the “healthy” person; it must also be set apart from the time of the living, which is characterized by the race for experiences, preferably pleasurably rich. Indeed, the dying person, like the elderly person, is confined to a separate world, a sort of ghetto or Apartheid. The 4 5 6 7 Giovanni Maio, “Gefangen im Übermaß an Ansprüchen und Verheißungen: Zur Bedeutung des Schicksals für das Denken der modernen Medizin,” in Abschaffung des Schicksals? Menschsein zwischen Gegebenheit des Lebens und medizin-technischer Gestaltbarkeit, ed. Giovanni Maio (Freiburg: Herder, 2011), 10–48, at 31. Unless indicated by an English edition being cited first, translations are original to this tract (although English-translation editions are provided for some works after the original-language citation). Patrick Baudry, “De la mort à la disparition,” in Savoir mourir, ed. Christine and Alain Montandon (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993), 211–17, at 211. Baudry, “De la mort à la disparition,” 214. Cheikh Hamidou Kane, L’Aventure ambiguë (1961) (Paris: Éditions 1978), 161. 424 Anonymous French writer Michel Houellebecq nicely sums up this dictate of omnipresent, high-performing youth: “In the modern world, you could be a partner-swapper, bisexual, transsexual, a zoophile, or sado-masochistic, but it was forbidden to be old,”8 and, we might add, to be dying. Old age and the time of dying are considered disgraceful; they are problems to be solved by means of technological-scientific thought. The French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard remarks that they are like “a considerable dead weight in the management of society. A large part of social wealth (money and moral values) is swallowed up by it without being able to give it any meaning. This puts one third of society into a state of economic parasitism and segregation.” Just like old age, the time of dying “is now only a marginal, utterly asocial slice of life—a ghetto, a reprieve, a slope in front of the fortress of death.”9 It is as if the dying person were there, facing the “healthy” person, without being present in the sense of a true presence, as though he were already absent and yet burdensome. In short: a living person who is already dead, even to the point where “the physician no longer came into the room of the patient, for whom ‘nothing more could be done,’” the French psychoanalyst Robert William Higgins notes.10 This is the sign of the failure of contemporary medicine, which increasingly considers the patient from the perspective of a problem to solve and to control. And the French sociologist Claudine Herzlich explains: “The patient is now no more than the occupant of a bed, regarded as though he were already nothing but a corpse.”11 Baudry sums up: “For us today, the ‘dying person’ is considered already dead, already dehumanized.”12 The same observation about the elderly person was already made by the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir in 1970: “Shielded behind the myths of expansion and abundance,” Western society, overcome by the race for profit, “treats the elderly as pariahs,” as “refuse,” “waste,” or “walking 8 9 10 11 12 Michel Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island, trans. Gavin Bowd (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), 152 [originally La Possibilité d’une île (Paris: Fayard, 2005), 213]. Jean Baudrillard, L’Échange symbolique et la Mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 249 (also in English as Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Ian Hamilton Grant [London: Sage, 1993], 163). Robert William Higgins, “Le statut du mourant: Une place ‘impossible,’” in Le mourant (Vallet: M-Editer, 2006), 3–41, at 5. Claudine Herzlich, “Les nouveaux discours sur la mort et le silence face aux mourants: Principes éthiques et pratiques quotidiennes,” in La fin de la vie qui en décide? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996), 53–78, at 60. Patrick Baudry, “La place du mourant,” in Le mourant (Vallet: M-Editer, 2006), 83–112, at 105. Tract 11: At the Hour of Death 425 corpses.”13 The logic of time perceived as chronos demands the multiplication of experiences and pleasures. The time of dying is therefore perceived as a “dead” time, a time during which there is nothing left to experience and nothing can be experienced. This time is considered as devoid of meaning, absurd. It is a time of waiting without expectations, without depth, without hope; in short, a sheer waste of time which has nothing to say about the human being or about the community of mortal men. What is more, it is burdensome to the “healthy” person, because it prevents him from attending to “useful” occupations. In his speech in Stockholm given in December 1990 when the Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to him, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz emphasized: “A society possessed by the frantic need to produce more in order to consume more tends to reduce ideas, feelings, art, love, friendship and people themselves to consumer products.” We can add to this list both aging and the time of dying. The poet went on to say: “Everything becomes a thing to be bought, used and then thrown in the rubbish dump. No other society has produced so much waste as ours has. Material and moral waste.”14 The time of dying, from this perspective, could be compared to an excess piece of useless trash that we ought to get rid of as quickly as possible, as we disconnect the plug of a broken-down electrical appliance. It is no longer a consumer item for the dying person, nor is it one for the “healthy” person, whose time he uses up for no purpose. As a prisoner of a constantly accelerating pace in which everything is urgent, he no longer has the time to waste time on the unprofitable moments of life during which it would no longer be possible to experience pleasures. In a culture bearing the stamp of urgency and activism, of efficiency and hedonism, the time of dying is thus perceived as a form of extreme violence which therefore ought to be cut short as rapidly as possible. Indeed, so as not to have to experience such “dead time”—thus it is viewed both by the dying person and by the “healthy” person—which is devoid of meaning and as cruel as can be, Western culture boasts of the notion of a “good” death understood as a final “short-circuit”: the body lets go all at once, the time of dying is adjourned. From this perspective, the sudden occurrence of an aneurism or a heart attack, as the French psychoanalyst Marie-Frédérique Bacqué observes, is “an ‘ideal death,’ allowing the person to be snuffed out suddenly, or in his sleep, avoiding suffering and 13 14 Simone de Beauvoir, La Vieillesse (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 8, 12, 568, 13 (also in English as Old Age, trans. Patrick O’Brian [London: André Deutsch and Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972], 2, 7, 542, 6). Octavio Paz, “Nobel Lecture: In Search of the Present,” December 8, 1990, trans. Anthony Stanton, nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1990/paz/lecture/, par. 23. 426 Anonymous disappointment, agony and anxiety-producing questions; a momentary death which right away would put the final punctuation mark after a life, neatly, without procrastination, as though in full swing.”15 A “sudden” death, if possible in the absence of consciousness, is viewed as ideal, because then one does not realize that one is dying, one does not see oneself dying, one does not agonize, one does not have to struggle or to experience any anguish. Furthermore, this type of sudden death spares the “healthy” person from the senseless waiting that the time of dying demands. The French philosopher Damien Le Guay remarks that ultimately it is about “more effectively reducing to what is strictly necessary the periods of waiting (and of sharing) that are now deemed too long.”16 People therefore want to reduce as much as possible the time of dying because of their refusal to confront death, along with suffering, but also because they have a problematic notion of the autonomy of the human subject, which would involve only the individual in his choices and actions and would not concern the whole community. This death, so sudden that the subject would not be aware of what is happening to him, was nevertheless interpreted by the ancient philosophers as a “bad” death, of which one must beware. A “good death,” indeed, was preceded by dying which took its time, a time dedicated to entering into a relation with those near and dear, a time of farewell (a-dieu, commending a person “to God”), a time of preparation and of spiritual work on oneself, a time in which “the work of demise”17 is done. In his “Discourse at a Graveside,” given in 1845, Kierkegaard nicely summarizes this tension in attitudes toward death: “If someone meets sudden death, something a more earnest age regarded as the greatest misfortune (which is why it is mentioned in the ancient prayer [‘From sudden death, Good Lord, deliver us’]) but which a later age regards as the greatest good fortune, then one is indeed helped.”18 What if Kierkegaard was correct on the subject of traditional prayers? What if the “good death” desired by our contemporaries turned out to be a great misfortune, because it would prevent people from experiencing a time that is of capital importance, for the dying person as well as for the “healthy” person? For ultimately, to quote the Danish philosopher, “To die is indeed the lot of every human being and thus is a very mediocre art, but 15 16 17 18 Marie-Frédérique Bacqué, Apprivoiser la mort (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2002), 33–34. Damien Le Guay, “La mort intime,” Conférence 43 (2016–2017): 49–91, at 52. See Michel de M’Uzan, “Le travail du trépas” (1976), in De l’art à la mort: Itinéraire psychanalytique (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 182–99. Søren Kierkegaard, “Discourse at a Graveside” (1845), in Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, trans. Sren Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 69–102, at 74. See for example Etienne Binet, Remèdes souverains contre la peste et la mort soudaine (1628) (Grenoble: Jérôme Million, 1998). Tract 11: At the Hour of Death 427 to be able to die well is indeed the highest wisdom of life.”19 And what if the dying person who took the time to die—or rather who let himself live in the presence of death, consented to mingle with it, and allowed the time of kairos to enter into his life—were to teach us again a dimension of life that we have forgotten or wanted to forget? The Time of Dying In order to try to answer this question, let us dwell for a moment on the way in which people used to call the time of dying “agony.” This term, borrowed from the ecclesiastical Latin gonia, “anguish,” is derived from the Greek agōnia, which comes from the verb ageín, which means “to drive” or “to lead.” Another derivative of this verb is the word agōn, which signifies a sports competition, a wrestling match. One might wonder: wherein lies the struggle? Would it not be, rather, in this refusal to confront anguish by advocating a “good death” that is under control? One reason for this refusal lies in the experience of the agony of the dying person who is forced to have to continue living with the help of technological equipment that surrounds him on every side and tries to control and prolong his life at all costs. This “domestication” of death by medical technology—a domestication that amounts to the unreasonable therapeutic obstinacy—in reality results in a depersonalization of death; the dying person is prevented from experiencing his own death as an eminently personal act. In reaction to this encroachment of biomedical power on the time of dying, which depersonalizes it, we have seen the appearance of a movement concerned about having the option not to undergo disproportionate medical treatments and to die naturally instead. This “right” to die, as defended by the German philosopher Hans Jonas,20 however, does not eliminate the time of agony. Nevertheless it assumes a radical form when it becomes the demand to make one’s own decision to inflict death on oneself by resorting to euthanasia or assisted suicide. Those who take this position refuse to experience this struggle, this agony, and arrogantly claim the freedom to determine the exact moment of their death according to subjective criteria based on a quantitative and qualitative utilitarian calculus of future goods and evils.21 Such an attitude 19 20 21 Kierkegaard, “Discourse at a Graveside,” 76. The German title of his short work is explicit: Techniken des Todesaufschubs und das Recht zu sterben [Techniques for Postponing Death and the Right to Die] (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1985). See Le suicide: Regards croisés, ed. François-Xavier Putallaz and Bernard N. Schumacher (Paris: Cerf, 2019). 428 Anonymous toward the time of dying reveals in the final analysis a more fundamental attitude toward life and time. Dying, a Struggle The time of dying implies a different view of temporality: a person no longer projects himself into the future, or possibly into the past; he is in a way forced to live in the here and now, in the present as it is given to us. If there is a struggle within this time, it consists of making oneself available to inhabit the present moment; it is about being present—in the twofold sense of the temporal present (the now) and of presence—to what is, to what presents itself. To be present is to put oneself in the presence of reality, of another person, as what I am living, what is being experienced within me, here and now. Although we can oblige someone to be there—for example a caregiver, a relative or close friend—we cannot oblige anyone to be present in the sense of a gratuitous presence that is open to the presence of the other person. Indeed there are two ways of being present. The first consists of an indifferent physical and spiritual presence, without the form of relation, without in any way being present to or genuinely addressing another. The second is neither a technique to master nor an attitude of controlling reality and the other person; it is above all a way of being in relation to the world and to others that is characterized by openness and a willingness to listen, to enter into relation. To take care of oneself and of the other is to care for and to experience presence in the present moment. Contemporary man tends to refuse to be present to what happens, to the reality of things. Indeed, he has developed the habit, on the one hand, of living in the future, moved as he is by activism, and, on the other hand, of thinking about reality as necessarily being subject to his calculations so that he can control and transform it as he wishes. Moreover, he dodges the situations that would elude his control, so as not to let them unsettle him. He has developed the habit of not being where he ought to be. Wilfrid Stinissen emphasizes: “We live in the reality that was or in the one that is coming (though it often does not come in the way we thought it would). . . . We lose most of our time by not being present or being occupied when the present moment appeals to us.”22 Now we can respond to the present moment only if we allow ourselves to be seized by the time of kairos, by letting go of the supremacy assigned to the time of chronos, of control. The time of dying, insofar as one allows it to be experienced, teaches a human being once again 22 Wilfrid Stinissen, Eternity in the Midst of Time, trans. Clare Marie (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2018), 146. Tract 11: At the Hour of Death 429 to be really present, in deliberate presence to what happens during this particular time which escapes his categorical concepts and also his own will to control. Or, as Ricoeur puts it, when he reflects on the notion of neighbor, relying on the parable of the Good Samaritan: “Being a neighbor lies in the habit of making oneself available,”23 present. He explains that the Samaritan “is neither occupied nor preoccupied by dint of being occupied,” but rather he is “available for encounter and the presence of others.”24 The dying person, in his final moments, provides us with a key to existence: “The only thing required is that you are completely present in reality now,”25 as Stinissen reports. Paz uses an even more radical expression in this regard: “The search for the present is neither the pursuit of an earthly paradise nor that of a timeless eternity: it is the search for a real reality.”26 The present is the living “source of presences,” among which we can classify not only death but also “dying well.”27 When we stop running and ceaselessly struggling, “we are left empty-handed. Then the doors of perception open slightly and the other time appears, the real one we were searching for without knowing it: the present, the presence.”28 Here too, the poet expresses in a few words the whole density of a fundamental existential experience. Our contemporaries are immersed in cacophony—the noise of machines, the churning of thoughts or desires—and in activism, to which is added their desire to control everything in the name of an autonomy that they supposedly owe to themselves alone; consequently they go right past what is essential: “existence which is present” to reality; silence can remind us of this, the Swiss writer and philosopher Max Picard notes.29 Ricoeur sums this up nicely: “Within the very framework of the time of agony” emerges what 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 Paul Ricoeur, “The Socius and the Neighbor,” in History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 98–109, at 99 [originally “Le socius et le prochain” (1954), in Histoire et vérité (1955) (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 213–29, at 214]. Ricoeur, “The Socius and the Neighbor,” 99 (French, 215). Stinissen, Eternity, 157. Paz, “In Search of the Present,” par. 11. Paz, “In Search of the Present,” par. 24. Paz, “In Search of the Present,” final par. See Max Picard, Die Welt des Schweigens (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1959), 158: “In today’s world, which appraises everything according to its immediate yield, there is no room left for silence. Silence was driven out because it was not lucrative, because it was only there; it seemed to have no purpose, nothing resulted from it, it was unproductive. Silence still exists today almost exclusively in this form: as inability, the fact that someone can no longer speak, as something reduced, negative—this is the only form in which it still appears. It persists only as a design fault in the constant flow of noise.” 430 Anonymous is “Essential.”30 When he comes to die, a human being is “made . . . available for the essential.”31 The French philosopher Éric Fiat, for his part, describes this time allotted to dying as the time “when what is essential is sometimes said more pristinely than in the moments of busy life.”32 In order for this essential thing to be able to express and reveal itself, the dying person and the “healthy” person must inhabit the present, being present to the reality of this particular time in a silent attitude. This is no longer the time of chronos and of control, but rather the time of kairos that is conducive to the opportune moment, to a just act, or to the sudden appearance of an event, such as forgiving, giving and receiving, being silent and speaking. The latter sort of time invites us to openness and receptivity, in short to availability, because it contains the unforeseeable which presents itself all of a sudden: the surprise. In order to be capable of allowing oneself to be seized and taught by what happens in the present, the dying person and the “healthy” person strive to get rid of all temptations to control, so as to consent to an abandonment, in the sense that there is no longer any way of latching on or of holding on. This abandonment allows the person to be open to the emergence of a surprising new reality. We are the ones who are taken by sur-prise (something beyond our grasp). The struggle that unfolds in the time of dying thus consists, first of all, in relinquishing the time of chronos and of control so as to allow oneself to be seized by the time of kairos, so as to consent to the reality that is unfolding here and now and to inhabit this present moment fully without any will to control it. To refuse to enter into this struggle of detachment from chronos time is to refuse to be open to this essential thing that is revealed radically during this same time. The time of dying, when lived fully, thus brings the dying person and the “healthy” person back to the present, to the presence of the moments of life that the agonizing person is living in his radical destitution. The French author François Mauriac expresses this very well, even though he is speaking about aging: “I do not feel detached from anything or anyone. But living would now be enough to keep me busy. This blood that still flows to my hand placed on my knee, this sea that I sense beating inside me, this reflux and flow that are not eternal, this world that is so close to ending, demands an attention to every moment, to all these final moments before the last: that is what old age is,”33 and also, we might add, the time of dying. 30 31 32 33 Ricoeur, Living up to Death, 14 (French, 43). Ricoeur, Living up to Death, 42 (French, 76). Éric Fiat, Corps et âme (Nantes: Defaut, 2015), 198. François Mauriac, Nouveaux Mémoires intérieurs (1964), in Mémoires intérieurs: Tract 11: At the Hour of Death 431 This inhabiting the present moment, however, is not fixed in the present. Indeed, the act of being present to the presence of what happens does not spring from nowhere; it is inscribed in the past of a twofold narrative: that of the person and that of the community, which contemporary man habitually forgets in the name of individualistic autonomy and because of the temporality that he reduces to a succession of moments without ties between them. I do not die alone; my dying is inscribed in my story and that of the community in which I live. My dying always has implications for the community. It therefore reveals the social dimension of human existence. The individualization of the time of dying that is promoted by our culture is a symptom of the de-socialization of individuals, who live as though they were alone in the world. Baudry justifiably remarks: “In doing without any socialization of death, of dying, and of the space of the deceased, what we diminish is the socialization of life itself.”34 In other words, by socializing the time of dying, we contribute to the socialization of life. This is revealed by the experience of dying, as a communal narrative. We must insist on the fact that this inhabiting of the present moment is not confined to the present. On the contrary, it has its source in the past, as we just saw, while being open to the future, to the sudden appearance of an existential reality that is not yet present, a reality that eludes prospective reasoning and also the will to control. This openness of the present toward the past and toward the future implies another dimension contained in the word “present.” This word means not just a “presence to” and a “presence for,” but also a given or revealed present. In other words, the openness that the present moment brings is characterized by a relinquishing of the will to control, so as to allow oneself to be seized by reality, understood as the first gift. Living in the present thus means experiencing a presence and perceiving reality (the other and oneself ) as gratuitous gifts: gifts that can be neither merited nor controlled, but only received. One then has the more fundamental experience that life is a gift that eludes all control of the will or of technology and science, and one participates in it gratefully, as the Swiss poet Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz admirably summarizes it. You just see that, in the unknown areas of life, there is one thing that was given to you, which is precisely life. It matters little what it has brought you and what it still holds in store for you—I mean its quality 34 Nouveaux Mémoires intérieurs (Paris: Flammarion, 1985), 419. Patrick Baudry, La place des morts: Enjeux et rites (1999), 2nd ed. (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006), 19. 432 Anonymous of whether it has been good or bad, as they say: because there is the fact that you are alive, which is a great thing. And in the silence, and the solitude, and the rest, when all the noises have become silent, when every detail is suppressed and every anecdote has been removed from you, this is what you participate in with thanksgiving.35 The dying person finds himself in a radical poverty and destitution which contain, ultimately, an incommensurable wealth, a wealth that lies in the acceptance of existence as it presents itself, in an availability to the present moment, in a presence to the present-gift: the gift of reality, of others, and of oneself. Or, as Ramuz put it in his book Présence de la mort: “I love only existence. Just the fact that a thing exists, it doesn’t matter what, it doesn’t matter how. All that is good is being.”36 The time of dying reveals to the dying person and also to the “healthy” person that his life is not at his disposal but that it was given and entrusted to him. Indeed, we cannot initiate our own beginning; we do not decide when and how we come to earth. The start of my life is always a “missed act,” in the sense that I am not at the origin of it, capable of disposing of it. My life is given to me and does not stop being given to me at every moment. This is why it is fundamentally nondisposable. The great vulnerability that belongs to this time of dying reveals this ontological nondisposability of life, because life is what comes about: what comes to me without my requesting it, what incessantly surprises me. Ricoeur nicely summarizes this experience: “For from the suffering other there comes a giving that is no longer drawn from the power of acting and existing but precisely from weakness itself.”37 Herein lies one of the fruits of this struggle that corresponds to the time of dying, both for the dying person and for the “healthy” person: consenting to be no longer in charge of one’s life, but rather allowing oneself to be seized by life at every moment, in the experiences that it permits us to have until our last breath. In the trial of dying, the subject feels like a dying person; he abandons himself to the respiration of the life that is still present, renouncing any sort of control. This experience of passivity—understood as abandonment with regard to what happens and what one becomes—occurs by way of acquiescing and receptive availability to what it is given. 35 36 37 Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, Besoin de grandeur (Lausanne: Éditions Aujourd’hui, 1937; Lausanne: Rencontre, 1951), 92–93. Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, Présence de la mort (1922) (Vevey: L’Aire Bleue, 2009), 68. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 191 [originally Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 223]. Tract 11: At the Hour of Death 433 This is what the dying person teaches the “healthy” person, as the man quoted at the beginning of this article reminds us: “People think that the living are the ones who close the eyes of the dying, but the dying are the ones who open the eyes of the living.” This is also the lesson of the story about the end of a life that the French psychologist Marie de Hennezel records. It was the case of a young woman afflicted with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease), who went from great autonomy to almost total paralysis. “Her paralysis, her immobility obliged her to take an interior risk in order to live: the risk of abandoning herself, letting go, accepting her dependency, and accepting the fact that others took care of her. This was a total reversal of her values. She therefore let herself be cared for and loved, patiently and so graciously that she taught everyone who came close to her about a human being’s strength to go beyond herself.”38 This young woman experienced this presence in the present moment as a gift; her person was unified by it, as a person, as Stinissen emphasizes: “Total presence means that you are completely engaged in the task of the moment. All your forces are gathered together. By the fact that all your attention is directed to one single task, you yourself become whole. Division is conquered. Being present in the now has a mysterious ability to restore inner harmony.”39 Such presence to the present moment, which is perceived as a present (a gift), presupposes that time is viewed and lived through differently from the time of chronos or of kairos, so as to experience the time of schōlè. This time is not only the time of contemplation but also the time of maturation: that which is hidden by nature is then revealed. It is the time of truth (recall that alētheía means “what is drawn out of its hiding place”). It is also the time of availability to the unexpected and, we might add, to what is unhoped-for. The struggle that corresponds to this time of dying consists precisely in consenting to this total destitution, this poverty that allows a person to make himself available to the time of pure presence, the time that no longer depends on the power of the will, in short: no longer being in charge of one’s own life. It is not a matter of undergoing this time of dying passively as though it were an external constraint, but rather of acquiescing in it and confidently abandoning oneself to it. This time is the time of an apprenticeship, or of an increasing depth, through the experience of the trial. It consists of being put to the test, being deprived of all will to control, so as to consent, in an attitude of receptivity and confident availability, to 38 39 Marie de Hennezel, “Sens et valeur du temps qui précède la mort,” in La Fin de la vie, qui en décide? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996), 19–28, at 26. Stinissen, Eternity in the Midst of Time, 162. 434 Anonymous what suddenly appears, to what comes, to the unforeseeable, to the present moment. These are the stakes in the struggle that the time of dying entails, which is so arduous in the view of contemporary man. The Anguish of Dying The time of dying is characterized not only by a struggle (recall the etymology) but also by anguish. This is not the place to elaborate the reasons for this anguish or its connection with death, but rather to reflect on what this anguish reveals about the human being, and more particularly about the response to it by the dying person and also by the “healthy” person. Confronted with the anguish of dying, we can choose to give in to the temptation to turn in on ourselves, relying on our freedom to control everything that thus gives us the impression of being the absolute master of our existence and of life in general—which ultimately proves to be an unrealistic idea. This temptation sees the time of dying as a time that is somehow fixed; since there is supposedly nothing more to expect, the time is thought to be devoid of all meaning and of all openness toward any potentiality. Anguish thus claims to make us declare in advance the uselessness of the time of dying, for nothing new can then come about in the future. Time is perceived as confining. This attitude—close to despair—is nicely described by the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel: “Closing myself in on myself, and in doing so closing time in on myself: . . . a future, . . . since it is no longer a future for me or for anyone else, would instead be a future nothingness.”40 The experience of anguish highlights the fundamental uncertainty of existence. Now for contemporary man, the German Philosopher Peter Wust notes, “the positive meaning precisely of being uncertain is so difficult to recognize.”41 He explains that “in the lack of security one comes to know the profound wisdom of life.”42 Indeed, the experience of the anguish of the time of dying invites the dying person to a response that does not consist of seeking to control what is to come—which can lead only to despair—but rather, on the contrary, to be open, in an attitude of confident availability which sets no condition for the sudden appearance of novelty or of surprise. Fiat emphasizes: “As long as there is life, there is potential. . . . But everybody nonetheless keeps some potential, however tenuous it has become, and even a man in a coma or so-called ‘vegetative state’ still has potential.”43 As though 40 41 42 43 Gabriel Marcel, Homo Viator: Prolégomènes à une métaphysique de l’espérance (Paris: Montaigne, 1944), 80 (also in English as Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope, trans. Emma Craufurd [New York: Harper Torchbook, 1962], 60). Peter Wust, Ungewissheit und Wagnis (1937), 2nd ed. (Munich: Kösel, 1986), 27. Wust, Ungewissheit und Wagnis, 30. Fiat, Corps et âme, 194–95. Tract 11: At the Hour of Death 435 echoing the philosopher, Claude Couturier, who has Alzheimer’s disease, writes: “We still have possibilities.” Even though “I am less high-performing . . . so what? I find that being alive is already an accomplishment . . . and living each moment is even my principal occupation from now on.”44 Although his situation is different from that of the dying person in general, they share the same relation to time: that of openness to the break-in of a new possibility at the heart of existence. The time of dying, like no other time whatsoever, is set within a constant actualization of novelty, of unhoped-for possibilities. The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas neatly emphasizes this dimension of time: “Time adds something new to being, something absolutely new.” And he explains a few lines further on: “Time is the non-definitiveness of the definitive, an ever recommencing alterity [otherness] of the accomplished—the ‘ever’ of this recommencement.”45 We find this dynamic of human life again in the writings of the French writer Robert Linhart, who compares the life of the factory worker to a war of attrition, death versus life and life versus death. Death: being caught up in the line, the imperturbable gliding of the cars, the repetition of identical gestures, the work that’s never finished. Is a car done? . . . Has the soldering been done? Not, it’s waiting. Has it been done once and for all this time? No, it’s got to be done again, it’s always waiting to be done, it’s never done—as though there were no more movement, no result from the movements, no change. . . . And suppose you said to yourself that nothing matters, that you need only get used to making the same movements in the same way in the same period of time, aspiring to no more than the placid perfection of a machine? A temptation to death. But life kicks against it and resists. The organism resists. The muscles resist. The nerves resist. Something, in the body and the head, braces itself against repetition and nothingness. Life shows itself in more rapid movement, an arm lowered at the wrong time, a slower step, a second’s irregularity, an awkward gesture, getting ahead, slipping back, tactics at the station; everything, in the wretched square of resistance against the empty eternity of the work station, indicates that there are still human incidents, even if they’re minute; there’s still time, even if it’s dragged out to abnormal lengths. 44 45 Claude Couturier, Puzzle: Journal d’une Alzheimer (1999) (Paris: Josette Lyon, 2004), 144–45. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969, 2011), 283 [originally Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité (1961) (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1992), 316]. 436 Anonymous This clumsiness, this unnecessary movement away from routine, this sudden acceleration, this soldering that’s gone wrong, this hand that has to do it all over again, the man who makes a face, the man who’s out of step, this shows that life is hanging on. It is seen in everything that yells silently within every man on the line. “I’m not a machine!”46 The obligatory choice in the struggle or the agony that belongs to the time of dying consists of affirming that that time cannot be compared to the time of a machine that has stopped running, is no longer efficient, and therefore should be unplugged. We are not in the presence of a time that is under the control of an individual who thinks that he is the sole trustee of its meaning, but rather of a time within which a subject allows himself to be seized by a new dimension of being. The time of dying is a time of trial and struggle during which one may experience the original confidence in the goodness of existence and, more particularly, the gratuitous dimension of this existence, the first gift that was granted to us. The dying person is invited to rely, with complete confidence, by a free act, on the first movement of life which is characterized by hope. This is also the insight of the Czech essayist Vaclav Havel in the speech that he gave when being inducted into the (French) Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1992. Wrongly thinking that “time belonged [to him],” in the name of a rationality founded on “the perverse certainty of being the absolute master of reality,” contemporary man observes that waiting “must express a kind of respect for the intrinsic movement and the unfolding of Being, for the nature of things, their autonomous existence and dynamic that resist all violent manipulation; this waiting must count on the willingness to give to every phenomenon the freedom to reveal its own foundation, its true substance.” He explains: “Thus distinguishing itself from a machine, the world refuses to submit to absolute control,” even during the time of dying. He concludes his speech as follows: “Waiting which has a meaning, because it is generated by hope and not by despair, by faith and not by hopelessness, . . . is not accompanied by boredom but by tension. Such waiting is more than simply waiting. It is life, life as joyous participation in the miracle of Being.”47 The struggle at the heart of agony reveals the difficulty that the dying 46 47 Robert Linhart, The Assembly Line, trans. Margaret Crosland (London: John Calder, 1981), 16–17 [originally L’établi (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1978), 13–14]. Vaclav Havel, “Associé étranger,” Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, Institut de France, academiesciencesmoralesetpolitiques.fr/1992/10/27/installationde-m-vaclav-havel-comme-membre-associe-etranger-au-fauteuil-laisse-vacant-par-le -deces-de-ugo-papi/. Tract 11: At the Hour of Death 437 person has in relinquishing all control so as to agree to enter into hope. In order for hope to blossom, Marcel emphasizes, he must be “entirely free from the obstructions of possession in all its forms,”48 including the obstructions of controlling reality and the self. The German philosopher Josef Pieper explains that he must “abandon rational self-control and autarchy.”49 The anguish of dying reflects how difficult it is to stop choosing to decide everything by oneself or to conform reality to one’s own plans; it is a matter of deliberately renouncing self-centeredness and control. In short, a matter of relinquishing oneself so as confidently to allow oneself to be seized by the movement of life. The temptation to despair, in the time of dying, can be overcome only by hope, as the French writer Georges Bernanos nicely summarizes: “Hope is despair that has been overcome.”50 He thus follows the lead of Marcel, who says that hope can arise “only where the temptation to despair intervenes,” in other words that “hope is the act by which this temptation [to despair] is actively or victoriously overcome.”51 He specifies : “The hope is for something which, according to the order of nature, does not depend upon us (it is absolutely outside the zone where stoicism can be practised). At the root of the hope is the consciousness of a state of things which invites us to despair (illness, damnation, etc.). To hope is to put one’s trust in the reality [and, we might add, ‘in the other’], and to assert that it contains the means of triumphing over this danger.”52 We find again this fundamental attitude of hope in view of life in the writings of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus: “If he does not hope for what cannot be hoped, he will not discover it, since it cannot be explored and is inaccessible.”53 Or, as the French philosopher Jean-Louis Chrétien puts it, “Knowing how to hope is knowing that you cannot attain by yourself what you hope for, and therefore is also learning to receive incessantly.”54 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 Gabriel Marcel, Homo Viator, 82 (English, 61). Josef Pieper, Enthusiasm and Divine Madness: On the Platonic Dialogue Phaedrus, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine Press, 2000), 70 [originally “Begeisterung und göttlicher Wahnsinn,” in Werke in acht Bänden, ed. Berthold Wald, vol. 1 (Hamburg: Meiner, 2002), 248–331, at 305]. Georges Bernanos, La liberté pour quoi faire ? (1953), in Essais et écrits de combats, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1995), 1259–383, 1263. Marcel, Homo Viator, 49 (English, 36). Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having, trans. Katharine Farrer (London: Dacre, 1949), 74 [originally Être et Avoir (Paris: Aubier, Montaigne, 1935), 108]. Heraclitus, Fragments, trans. Marcel Conche, 2nd ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987), 245. Jean-Louis Chrétien, L’Inoubliable et l’Inespéré, new enlarged ed. (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2000), 162. 438 Anonymous Contemporary man’s refusal to live through the time of dying, because it is supposedly a lost time or a time devoid of meaning, ultimately comes down to an act of despair. It is likewise the consequence of the “modern rejection of the idea that there is anything beyond the control of the subject,” the sociologist and philosopher Hartmut Rosa explains—“that there is any limit to our control beyond what is technically possible.”55 In contrast, the dying person who chooses to be open to hope agrees to stop being master of his life and is willing to throw himself, without a safety net, into the uncertainty that characterizes what is yet to come. Conclusion The time of dying can thus be one of the outstanding places for consent to life: a consent that involves confidently and hopefully relinquishing all will to control. In a way, this relinquishing affirms that, despite everything, a path of life remains possible in the time remaining in which to live, even if the meaning or the foundation of this confidence eludes all calculating rationality. This experience of the dying person’s radical vulnerability, in his existential uncertainty, is what enables him to abandon himself to life. To choose to abandon oneself in this way is to have an experience of freedom in the fundamental sense—something that contemporary man’s absolute will to autonomy refuses to do. Indeed, thanks to the abandonment of all control—as is the case in the time of dying—we experience a true freedom, when we allow ourselves to be seized. This concept of freedom therefore does not consist of choices to spend our time as we wish according to subjective criteria of maximizing profits and pleasures (if we think, for example, about the notion of quality of life). More positively, a person can experience his freedom as a gift: it is granted to me to be—to live—and to be free to welcome my life as a gift. My freedom thus consists of consenting to my existence and to my being, as defined by a particular nature with inherent finalities, a nature that exists independently of my freedom. The human being is neither his own proprietor nor his own origin, nor his own lawgiver; he is the trustee of a life that is received, in which he participates with gratitude. In fact, true confrontation with the time of dying, while avoiding all attempts at control, confirms that existence is not a problem to be solved, but rather a mystery to be lived. A human being can live fully only if he learns again to make himself available to 55 Hartmut Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World, trans. James C. Wagner (Cambridge: Polity, 2020), 84 [Originally Unverfügbarkeit, 2nd ed. (Vienna: Residenz, 2019), 96]. Tract 11: At the Hour of Death 439 reality, of which he is a part, in an attitude of receptivity and abandonment of the will to control everything solely according to his own ends, so as to be open to a dimension of being that is given to him gratuitously, just as one experiences it particularly in an authentic love.56 The time of dying reveals that at a given moment a human being can no longer exercise power: he is called to consent to the movement of life which unceasingly gives itself and is given. He is called to be open voluntarily to a dimension of being that he can receive only as a gift. Paradoxically, this attitude enables a person to adopt an attitude of welcoming, confident availability and, ultimately, to acquiesce in the hope that involves an unconditional openness to otherness. The time of dying thus unveils to us the very heart of human life, which is hope. Indeed, only when I have relinquished all will to control, in other words, stated more positively, when I adopt an attitude of availability with regard to life itself, can I be seized by hope. The latter appears suddenly when I am deprived, when I experience my radical poverty. It is by consenting to lose one’s life that one receives it fully, in hope. Seen this way, the time of dying is not lost time but, quite the contrary, an abundant, nourishing time, as the French poet Christian Bobin summarizes it: “Love for lost time. Lost time is like the bread forgotten on the table, stale bread. You can give it to the sparrows. You can also toss it out. You can even eat it, as in childhood you ate ‘lost bread’ (French toast): dipped in milk to soften it, covered with egg yolk and sugar and cooked in a pan. ‘Lost bread’ is not lost, since you eat it. Lost time is not lost, because in it you touch the end of times and in it you eat your death, at each second, in each mouthful. Lost time is abundant, nourishing time.”57 Thus we can say that the time of dying opens the eyes of the “healthy” person by reminding him that the essential thing is not to be found in Franklin’s injunction, “Time is money,” but in “losing” one’s time in order to gain it, if one considers all the life that is still contained in it. This “loss” of time is the condition for receiving what is essential, which can be revealed at the end of all ends only by relinquishing control, which then opens onto hope. It is by losing one’s time (chronos) that one discovers the time (kairos) that is open to hope. 56 57 See Josef Pieper, On Love (1972), trans. Richard and Clara Winston, in Faith, Hope, Love (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), 139–281 [originally Über die Liebe, in Werke in acht Bänden, ed. Berthold Wald, vol. 4 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1996), 296–414]. Christian Bobin, La Part manquante (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 90–91. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 21, No. 2 (2023): 441–450 441 Can Creatures Cause Forms? Aquinas on Cosmology and Evolution Lucas Prieto Instituto Santo Tomás de Balmesiana Barcelona, Spain Thus formulated, the question may seem odd. It is enough to look at nature to see that many of the relations that are established between substances are causal relations that results in the production of a form. So, for example, the fire from a match in contact with a piece of paper produces fire, in such a way that the agent causes a new form because it communicates its own actuality. In this sense, at the natural level, we can even say that all production involves the causation of a form. The question becomes meaningful, however, when we distinguish between being the cause of this form inasmuch as it actualizes a matter and being the cause of the form as such—that is, between causing a particular order in a matter and being the cause of the reason for this order.1 Continuing with the example: the fire of the match is specifically the same as the fire found in the paper, so that the former cannot be the cause per se of the fire of the latter—that is, the fire of the match is not that which gives reason for the formality of the fire—because in that case it would be the cause of its own formality. The argument leads us to postulate another agent that is the cause of fire as such. So, we can now ask: can creatures be ultimately responsible (at the created level) for this particular ontological configuration? That is, can creatures cause a natural form as such? Aquinas answers yes, and his answer is of particular importance in explaining the causal order among creatures 1 Aquinas formulates this distinction in several places: Summa theologiae [ST] I, q. 104, a. 2; In I sent., d. 42, q. 1, a. 1, ad 3; De veritate, q. 5, a. 8, ad 8. 442 Lucas Prieto and the possibility of true specific novelty in the universe. In this article I will advance how Aquinas justifies ontological novelty by resorting to intra-mundane causes and then show how this causal model allows us to understand the transformism of species (evolution) in a Thomistic framework. To do so, we will formulate our argument in three steps: (1) first we will analyze the notion of form that Aquinas handles in order to understand also how it can be caused in an individual, (2) then we will study the various ways in which the causation of a form can occur, and (3) finally, we will apply these conclusions to the problem of evolution. Form and Individual For Aquinas, form is a fundamental ontological principle of the corporeal entity because it structures matter according to a determined order of perfection. By the form we can distinguish between different entities because a formal perfection supposes a certain term or limit of the act that implies the deprivation of the perfection of another form. A dog indicates a certain degree of perfection, but by the fact of being a dog it lacks the perfection of being a cat. Now, in the physical world, we find an innumerable diversity of entities that differ from each other not only in their form or essence, but also as individuals, which shows that, ultimately, the fundamental distinction is not between being a cat and being a dog, but between being this cat and being this dog, or more clearly, between this dog and that dog. Aquinas holds that this diversity and inequality, both specific and numerical, is something positively willed and caused by God as first agent.2 But does this mean that the diverse structuring of matter is produced by a special divine action? That is, is the formal difference the effect of a creative act of God? In the Summa theologiae, Thomas directly addresses this problem by asking whether creation is mixed in the works of nature and of the arts, which is equivalent, in the last analysis, to the question of the origin of novelty in the physical world.3 Indeed, when an entity is generated, a substance appears that is not absolutely contained in the preceding causes. The agent certainly communicates his actuality by resembling the effect to himself, but in the effect, there is always something else that escapes the essential principles. Therefore, how can this novelty of the effect be founded? Before answering this question, two errors should be ruled out. On the one hand, there is the error proper to materialistic monism (atomism), attributed to Democritus 2 3 ST I, q. 47, a. 2, resp. ST I, q. 45, a. 8, resp. Can Creatures Cause Forms? Aquinas on Cosmolog y and Evolution 443 and Anaxagoras, which, through ignorance of matter—that is, of the power that underlies the entity as a disposition to form—ends up affirming that specific and numerical diversity is nothing more than an epiphenomenon of matter and can be reduced to it. According to this position, the forms are already contained in the elementary parts, so that the production of an entity does not really imply the constitution of an irreducible novelty, but a simple reconfiguration of a previous substance. Nowadays it is also possible to find defenders of atomism or reductive essentialism, but as Crawford Elder has noted, this is done at the price of denying common experience: “In the absence of familiar objects there will be nothing to constitute these groups as groups, nothing to set their membership conditions, nothing to make the difference between an individual microparticle’s lying within such a group and its lying without it.”4 On the other hand, there is the error attributed to Avicenna according to which diversity in no way proceeds from the second causes, but that these are limited only to arrange a matter so that a superior agent (dator formarum) would then create the new form. In this case the error lies in the ignorance of the form, for he forgets “that the natural form of the body is not something subsistent, but that by which something is.”5 In this second position, there is novelty, but at the price of a special divine action that justifies it. This position also has its defenders today. Thus, for example, Revol postulates a continuous creation where each ontological novelty is a beginning and supposes an increase of information that is not reducible to the previous state, which ultimately implies a causality in time that is creative in the strong sense, that is to say, the reference to a divine action of a creative type is required.6 Both errors, basically, have the same origin: not understanding that the causality of the agent is completed in the material subsistent by the eductio of the form from the potentiality of matter. To put it briefly, what changes is not the form of the entity, but an entity of form. Although this explanation is rooted in Aristotle’s natural philosophy, it is with Aquinas’s doctrine of 4 5 6 Crawford Elder, Real Natures and Familiar Objects (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 110. See also David S. Oderberg, Real Essentialism (New York: Routledge, 2007), 92–105. For the virtual presence of the elements in substance, see Joseph Bobik, Aquinas on Matter and Form and the Elements (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 129–239; Christopher Decaen, “Elemental Virtual Presence in St. Thomas,” The Thomist 64 (2000): 271–300; Edward Feser, Aristotle's Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science (Neunkirchen: Editiones Scholasticae, 2019), 310–40. ST I, q. 45, a. 8. See Fabien Revol, Le temps de la création (Paris: Cerf, 2015), 29–59; Revol, “Théologie de la création continuée,” Revue des sciences religieuses 91, no. 2 (2017): 251–67. 444 Lucas Prieto participation that it is consistently grounded. Indeed, the irreducible novelty of the individual does not derive from its formal principle, nor even from its singularization by the matter signified, but by its esse which constitutes it as something one. This does not mean that the actus essendi is the principle of individuation of the corporeal entity (something that could not be accepted within Thomism), but that it is by this participated act that we can overcome an essentialist vision of movement by thinking of its term as something substantial that becomes an individual by the introduction of the created cause in divine causality: a cause or a set of causes can deduce a form from matter because the term of its action is not the form, but being (ens), even if its proportionate effect is the formal actuality.7 Causal Models Now, the modes of eductio are more complex than might be supposed at first glance, for within the Thomistic system we can find three distinct situations referring to the causation of the subsistent, where each situation is defined by the relation established between the effect and the cause, that is, between the proportion of what is produced and its proximate cause. First, we have the case where the educed form of the compound is proportioned to the proximate agent [C≈E, where C is cause and E, effect]. Thus, for example, an orange tree gives oranges. This is probably the most common causal model for thinking about the link between an agent and what is produced (so this model could be referred to as univocal or proportionate causation). This proportion between cause and effect does not mean, however, that this proximate cause is the exclusive cause. Although we cannot develop it, the Thomistic view of causality should be thought of in systemic terms: certainly, it is this particular cause that communicates its actuality, but it always does so within a set of causal factors that also condition the production of the effect. The orange tree, for example, causes an orange tree with the concurrence of multiple causal factors that make possible the realization of the effect. Thus, the climate or soil conditions also influence the process of generation. In this sense, Thomas Aquinas repeatedly affirms that the sun and man beget a man.8 7 8 See Gianfranco Basti, Filosofía del hombre (Toledo: Instituto Teológico San Ildefonso, 2011), 149–88; Edward Feser, Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (Neunkirchen: Editiones Scholasticae, 2014), 177–210. See also Lucas Prieto, “Causalidad creadora y participación instrumental,” in Naturaleza y creación en Tomás de Aquino, ed. Enrique Martínez (Valencia: Tirant Humanidades, 2021), 75–91. See Aquinas, ST I, q. 4, a. 2, corp.; De iudiciis astrorum (Leonine ed., 43:201); Summa Can Creatures Cause Forms? Aquinas on Cosmolog y and Evolution 445 Secondly, the educed form of the composite or mixed body is proportionate to the higher corporeal agent but exceeds the actuality of the proximate agent [Cu> E, where Cu is the universal cause].9 This would be the case for some phenomena that have their origin in celestial bodies. The medieval cosmological image is obviously erroneous, but it is worth not overlooking the ideas it contains. This type of causality occupies an important place in the Thomistic theory because it serves (in part) to justify the principle of proportionate causality. Indeed, according to this principle “whatever perfection is found in the effect is necessary to be in the efficient cause, either according to the same reason (if it is univocal agent, as a man begets man), or in a more eminent way (if it is equivocal agent, as in the sun is the likeness of what is generated by its virtue).”10 A clear example of this causality can be found in the obsolete cosmology of Aquinas. In it, the recourse to the causality of the celestial bodies explains in part how the production of effects that do not respond adequately to their proximate causes is possible. Thus, for example, the attraction of the magnet on iron or the tides by the action of the moon. That is why Thomas says that an effect of the sub-lunar world is precontained in its equivocal cause in a virtual or eminent way. There is obviously not a formal precontinence, since the effect does not depend on this cause according to the same ratio, but an equivocal precontinence, because this cause influences the effect in a certain and radical way, but without being properly the cause of the individual, who keeps for the same reason a resemblance with its proximate agent. Moreover, in this cosmological framework, the heavenly bodies can be causes of the species because they are the ultimate reason for this formal configuration. Aquinas, as we saw at the beginning, distinguishes on several occasions between the cause of the individual and the cause of the species. Cause of the individual is the proximate cause that communicates the form it possesses to another; but this agent is not the cause of the species as such, because if it were, it would be the cause of itself. This would be the case of a fire that communicates its form to paper; that is, it burns it. What a specific agent does is to apply its form to a matter, and this application is the production of a similar effect (univocal causality). But what has caused that mode of being? That is, what agent is responsible for that mode of configuration? Aquinas thinks that the causality of the heavenly bodies can 9 10 contra gentiles [SCG] III, ch. 99; IV, ch. 7; ST I, q. 45, a. 8 ad 3; I-II, q. 85, a. 6, resp.; De potentia, q. 6, a. 1, ad 1; In liber de causis, prop. 9; De spiritualibus creaturis, a. 3, ad 20. See Christopher A. Decaen, “An Inductive Study of the Notion of Equivocal Causality in St. Thomas,” The Thomist 79 (2015): 213–63. ST I, q. 4, a. 2, resp. 446 Lucas Prieto explain this order of matter; specifically, he seems to maintain, for example, that the stability and permanence of things in the sub-lunar world was due to the causality of Saturn.11 Although it may seem strange to us, it is an idea that makes sense: obviously we would have to substitute another type of entity for heavenly body to make it understandable in the contemporary physical scheme, but what seems to be deduced is that the current configuration of a given matter does not depend on the agent that has educed it out of matter, but on a whole set of causes that allow this configuration to remain in time. One could postulate, along these lines, that the stability and permanence of a substance depends on gravity, atmospheric pressure, or other natural forces that maintain this matter as organized. To understand this, it is useful to remember that we say that an agent educes a substantial form of a matter when it is capable of inducing a determined and stable order to the elements (i.e., finalizing a matter). But the proximate cause is not the principle of such an ordering, but produces it by communicating an actuality which it possesses, but which it has also received. Whether there is such a mode of ordering of matter depends on a cause more universal than the particular agent or on a conjunction of causal factors that do not have as their determined effect such an individual (without forgetting that causation is always of an individual). That is why Aquinas, when he distinguishes between the cause of the species and the cause of the individual, maintains that the cause of the species is also its conservative cause. From this it also follows that the particular agents are like instruments of the causality of the heavenly bodies. This does not mean that the causality of the individual is eliminated, but that it is as it were subsumed in a higher order. This causality presupposes two things: on the one hand, the possibility of an irreducible novelty whose formal actuality is superior to the preceding cause because it is an actuality that does not exceed the order of nature;12 that is, the principle of proportionate causality can be integrated into a broader causal framework where the actuality of the agent does not depend exclusively on the proximate agent, but on the causal whole that is ordered to the production of an effect. On the other hand, it presupposes, at least within Aquinas’s explicit system, the existence of causes that are universal and heterogeneous (the heavenly bodies) with respect to the sub-lunary causes. Although this idea, thus formulated, cannot be sustained in the 11 12 ST I, q. 104, a. 2, resp. See Mariusz Tabaczek, Divine Action and Emergence: An Alternative to Panentheism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), 74–78. Can Creatures Cause Forms? Aquinas on Cosmolog y and Evolution 447 present physical framework, nothing prevents it from retaining its value as a principle according to which there are fundamental causes capable of explaining at a deeper level a behavior of a higher order. According to this second causal model, one could explain the various inorganic configurations of the universe, because a conjunction of causes can produce an effect that exceeds the actuality of the proximate agent. But we can go a step further and consider, thirdly, a last case. Although linked to the previous one, it differs in one important point: the educed form of the compound exceeds even the actuality of the universal corporeal agent [Cu< E]. Thomas Aquinas explicitly considers this possibility when dealing with the generation of a living being in a non-seminal way.13 How can a heavenly body cause a living entity? “Since the heavenly body is a mover moved, it is of the nature of an instrument, which acts in virtue of the agent: and therefore since this agent is a living substance the heavenly body can impart life in virtue of that agent.”14 Although Thomas considers that all sub-lunar causality operates instrumentally with respect to the heavenly bodies (at least in a certain sense), the second case differs from the third, because in the previously mentioned equivocal causality (Cu>E), there is a proportion between the effect and the corporeal universal cause, while in the latter case (Cu