That we, becoming like unto God, may see Him as He is when He appears, according to the Evangelist!

That we, becoming like unto God, may see Him as

He is when He appears, according to the Evangelist!

Renato C. Valdellon

THE 654/EDU 605:

Philosophical Foundations in Theology—Human Person

Instructor: Professor S. A. Cortright

University of Sacramento

26 July, 2011

Synopsis I

Principle (starting-point): “whoever saves his life, loses it; but whoever loses it for my sake,

saves his life.”i

Obverse (Negative) Form: I. No pain = no gain (i.e., no contemplation/no seeing God);

equivalently: failing to replace/lose one’s old life with new life

[failing to die to oneself] entails not attaining the vision of God or

contemplation.

The Principle Converts: II. That one lacks blessedness or happiness (gain) entails that one is

without (appropriate experience of) pain; equivalently: if one lacks

happiness or fulfillment, one is not replacing or losing (letting go)

one’s old life [one is not dying to oneself].

Comparison of I and II yields III: That one lacks happiness or blessedness entails that one is

without contemplative vision of God; equivalently: lacking

happiness or blessedness amounts to lacking the means of

contemplation.

Synopsis II: Restatement in Affirmative Form

I. If losing one’s old life [dying to oneself] means replacing it with new life, then losing one’s old life means

attaining contemplative vision

(knowledge) of God.

II. To experience happiness or blessedness is to replace/lose the old life [die to oneself].

III. To experience happiness or blessedness is to attain the way to see God, to attain contemplation.

Synopsis III: Affirmative Syllogism

I. (Christianized) Pain (i.e. Christian dying to self) is (yields) contemplation, (i.e. supernatural vision beyond pain).

II. But (Christian) happiness (accepts) is pain (Christian dying to self).

III. Therefore, (Christian) happiness (leads into) is contemplation.

Part One

Christian Dying to Self Yields Contemplation.

(If losing one’s old life means replacing it with new life, then losing one’s old life means attaining contemplative

vision

[knowledge] of God.)

Losing one’s life, dying to self, does ‘actualize’ one’s finding God: By dying to self, the atonement action of every Christian sufferer, the people of God, the Body of Christ, expresses the most positive element of the Gospel paradox. The reason is: by suffering sacrificial atonement, we're not really losing something or just breaking our heart, since so far as the act is for God, it is a positive thing. In the words of John the Baptist, as “. . . we decrease” God “. . . increases . . .” in us.ii So positive is it, nothing whatsoever in life could surpass this manner of gain. Because those in whom God has increased so much eventually manifest successful self-denial or emptying of themselves, they are finally rewarded with the most genuine human `fulfillment, blissful unity with God. As Saint Augustine disclosed, our hearts have “remained restless until they rest in Thee (in You, God)!” iii

The discipline of life which embraces Christian suffering is the high point of being filled with grace. This is that level so beautifully summarized in the Beatitudes by the Lord. This is that level when individuals have achieved the virtue of purity by which, as promised, they see God in everything around them, not metaphorically but really kingdom-wise, i.e. as people manifestly depending on God for their real needs. This is that level when individuals who have become truly meek shall have very clear visions of how great a bounty of the new earth they shall receive. At this level, individuals who have really been through incessant, tearful misfortunes shall be overwhelmed by overpowering spiritual consolations. At this level, individuals who have perseveringly sought for knowledge, understanding, and wisdom shall experience mystic visions of God's justice and goodness; those who have lived the martyrdom of life's oppressions and persecutions shall forget all their life’s tortures and torments as they assuredly contemplate, “face-to-face,” God and God’s Kingdom, right here on earth.iv In these instances, pious individuals finally rewarded for their believing and following of God as pilgrims on earth; they are allowed by God heavenly privileges of great spiritual heights.

The religious knowledge and understanding with which God rewards self-denying believers are also gifts to and from the whole Church. For, the Church receives them as consoling anticipations of humanity’s divine consummation; and the Church holds them up as reasons for joy and hope. Thus, our subject is also earthly supernatural events of the Church. We would like to consider them as illustrating a sort of Divine justification or privileging of certain people who, as it were, are recipients of God's holy approval. This is very much like the sainthood procedure invoked by the Church upon individuals in whom the people of God discern saintly virtue during their life on earth. Prior to canonization (i.e., official recognition of the individual as a saint of God), the Church invokes the Almighty to make happen a miracle, like the healing of someone from terminal disease, through the intercession of the saint-to-be.v For, to the Saints such privilege of performing miracles has been given, once they have been really united with God. This is the ultimate criterion by which the Church officially confers the title “Saint of God” upon a pious believer and follower of Christ: proof positive, in that through the saint’s intercession with God, God performed a miraculous healing of someone very ill.

Likewise, many Saints of God are occasionally gifted with most extraordinary, inexplicable marvels: “talking-in-tongues” (hearing them sound out foreign languages as they preach), vi “slaying-by-the-Spirit” (physical collapse by a complete taking over by the Holy Spirit, along with consequent disappearance of some ailments),vii “bi-location” (pious individuals being seen in two or more places at almost the same time),viii “locution” (speaking past or future events or information related to the Saint),ix “apparitions” (like the countless appearances of the Blessed Virgin Mary all over the world throughout these last centuries), and actual physical levitation in space while in deep prayer (Father Pio was seen levitating while in prayers a few times).x The Blessed Mother is assumed to the Heaven, body and soul. Jesus Himself demonstrated some terrestrial but supernatural human feats like “walking on water,” “penetrating through closed doors,” “multiplying loaves of bread and fishes,” and healing of many sick, even dead, people.xi He even promised the ability to move mountains if our faith bears such a degree of approval, i.e., of holiness, by God. After the apostles received the Holy Spirit, they all spoke in tongues and, while preaching, were healed many sick individuals, and performed miracles. On top of all these, the most glorious human experience on earth of the splendor of the Divine was the three Apostles’ witnessing of the “transfigured Jesus,” appearing with Moses, and Elias in a state of glory. They saw the three men in the most unimaginable state of heavenly blessedness.

But all of these instances and more—including the Apostles eating with the glorified Christ, Thomas’ placing of his fingers in the nail holes and of his hand in Jesus’ side, and the disciples’ conversation with Christ on the road to Emmaus—are not to be understood as mere visualizations by the human eyes, senses, or mental faculties, but as human participation in the divine life of God via abundant living in the grace of God! All the above thus directly illustrate for us the reality of contemplation. In addition, as we are going to explain later, human transformation by grace should be considered an equally supernatural gifting by God to souls who have accepted salvation. Taken together, the above external wonders and the reality of grace in men who have believed in Christ, since both are occurrences that are made to happen only as it pleases God, affirm our major premise, namely: events properly transcending the natural and human realms of experience are out there taking place as events of the Church; many are in themselves quite awesome; they are both images and, in the positive sense, surreality, to which man is made a chosen witness, thereby privileged to perceive, or contemplate, because of some heaven furnished capacity to do so. St. Thomas tells us that precisely in God we can attain this perfecting gift of beatific vision:

The beatitude of an intellectual nature consists in an act of the intellect. In this we may consider two things, namely, the object of the act, which is the thing understood; and the act itself which is to understand. If, then, beatitude be considered on the side of the object, God is the only beatitude; for everyone is blessed from this sole fact, that he understands God, in accordance with the saying of Augustine (Confess. v, 4): “Blessed is he who knoweth Thee, though he know nought else.” But as regards the act of understanding, beatitude is a created thing in beatified creatures; but in God, even in this way, it is an uncreated thing.xii

Moreover, in the context of his doctrine about the seeing of God by man, St. Thomas explains that with the intellectual seeing of God exceeding man's natural capacity, man, nevertheless gets to experience this ability to see God by virtue of receiving some supernatural disposition which is added to the intellect—raised up to such great and sublime height—which is called the light of illumination. With the reception of this special illumination, the blessed, like the mystics, in order to be able to contemplate God, are made deiform, i.e. like to God.xiii St. Thomas based his explanation on the words from Revelation 21:23, “The glory of God hath enlightened it,” which he related to another Scripture verse from 1 John 3:2, “When he shall appear, we shall be like to Him, and [Vulg. 4 “because”] we shall see Him as He is.” According to St. Thomas, two things are required for vision: the power of sight and the union of the thing seen with the sight. And if the principle of the visual power and the thing seen were one and the same thing, it would necessarily follow that the seer would receive both the visual power and the form whereby it sees from that one same thing.xiv Thus, in so far as the created intellect cannot see the essence of God, unless God, by His grace, unites Himself to the created intellect, as an object made intelligible to it. Hence, for the blessed seer to be able to see God, he needs both to be united with God and specially empowered by God. Under this context, the above two Scripture verses account for this great promise of the vision of God, why and how the blessed shall have become deiform (in the form of God, or like to God), whereby he shall be enabled to see Him as He is. xv

Therefore, according to St. Thomas, the act of the intellect, which is directed to divine object, “which alone is beatitude,” is divine contemplation: the beatific human vision of God necessarily supernatural or dependent on grace. We get to establish our minds and hearts, gratefully, in divine realities as the effect of grace. This is supernatural faith (our accepting Jesus solely because He is Son of Man and Son of God): accepting the revelation of divine truth which is otherwise hidden from us.

(We shall, later, posit evidence of given supernatural favor/grace enabling of man, for instance, contemplation or seeing of the Divine, as we more profoundly develop the in-depth meanings behind the grace reality of dying to self, i.e., the overcoming of sin by grace or the eliminating of what veils any level of Divine contemplating.)

Part Two

Second Premise: Christian Happiness Implies Christian Dying To Self.

(Why having blessedness or beatitude, or being happy follows dying to self.)

The Lord has laid down the terms of admission to heaven: “Unless you are born again of water and the Spirit, you cannot enter Heaven!” That is, unless we are changed for God and unto God, we are without the ticket to God’s heaven. Scripture reveals this as the key to having a new life, as when Jesus tells the simple Pharisee, Nicodemus, that every man shall have to be born again:

There was a man named Nicodemus who was a Pharisee and a Jewish leader. One night he went to Jesus and

said,

“Sir, we know that God has sent you to teach us. You could not work these miracles unless God were with you.”

Jesus

replied, “I tell you for certain that you must be born from above before you can see God's Kingdom!” Nicodemus

asked,

“How can a grown man ever be born a second time?” Jesus answered: “I tell you for certain that before you can

get into

God's Kingdom you must be born not only by water but by the Spirit. Humans give life to their children. Yet only

God's

Spirit can change you into a child of God. Don't be surprised when I say that you must be born from above. Only

God's

Spirit gives new life. The Spirit is like the wind that blows wherever it wants to. You can hear the wind but you don't know where it comes from or where it is going.”xvi

This story discloses to us Jesus’ confirmation of the abjectness of human life. He expresses this by pointing us to how alone man can again see God, and His Kingdom. The inference here is that human living has become blind, without purpose and direction, and dead, cut off from God and His Kingdom. And the second inference is: if man wants liberation from this condition of shackledness, he must be born again both in water and in the Spirit. But because Jesus said man cannot know from where and when the Spirit comes, who carries out this new birth, man cannot realize this new birth without the gratuitous help of that same Holy Spirit.

John, the Baptist, stressed this transcendent nature of Jesus' divine character, of His Spirit, and thus, of the baptismal character and effect upon baptized believers, who are born into the new life of grace in Christ through the Holy Spirit, by his saying:

God's Son comes from heaven and is above all others. Everyone who comes from the earth belongs to the

earth and

speaks about earthly things. The one who comes from heaven is above all others . . . The Son was sent to

speak

God's message, and He has been given the full power of God's Spirit.xvii

To paraphrase: whereas human capacity will remain human, earthly—i.e., imperfect or inadequate—Jesus and His Spirit are heavenly, superseding all others by the full power of God’s Spirit. To be born again, or to be delivered from the human fate and syndrome, man needs a gift of transformation to something supra-terrestrial, to something heavenly or Divine, namely, Jesus and His Spirit. Hence, to be born again means to be born in baptism into the Father’s Divine life through Jesus and the Holy Spirit. That is why the life of grace is the life of “renewed” participation in the divine life of God. Because of our first parents’ sin man lost the divine life. But by Jesus’ coming down from heaven and going through the paschal mystery of incarnation, death, resurrection, and the ascension to heaven, mankind, or those that believe, are restored to divine life with God. Union with God (after the manner of Jesus) is life: “This is eternal life: to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”xviii When all of the above takes place in any believer, the believer has come to be born again, has come to be living the new life of grace, the new divine life of God. But man would ask: What exactly is this new life? Or, he would want to know where, or how can he attain it!

We will better understand this new life if we first comprehend what the old life meant and how, in the first place, man suffered the misfortune of having such a kind of life.

Let us recall the beginning when God created man. Man lived a meaningful life through God’s gift. God gave to our first parents this earthly abode whereby they were to appreciate their life, accepting stewardship over all other creations of God, for their own good, in glorification of God. From God—Goodness Himself—came Adam, Eve and all other creations, each of them good. And Adam and Eve surely saw they had a very good deal from God for themselves and their would-be offspring. Their life was practically an absolute bounty! As God's chief creatures of earth they were well endowed with everything they would need and want as human beings. But because they owed their creation to God, they were limited by one condition of God, a condition that God emphatically told them must greatly displease Him, if broken. They could absolutely comply with the condition; and it was by no means depriving them of their complete satisfaction and happiness in the life God had given them. Their existence was called a Paradise. They were not to get sick; they were incapable of worrying about any necessary provisions or wants; and they were not to die! These spell out what might be our bottom-line definition of abundant living in any place, at any later time of history!

When the question is what would make people happy or content in life, we tend to hear (and to believe ourselves): “If only I had all the money I need!” “If only I'll never get sick!” “If only I had the most beautiful/most handsome/strongest mate in life!” And the first human beings had all these desires and needs met! Indeed, they had it made!

Unfortunately for them, and their offspring, all of us, they chose not to comply with the one condition of God. And so their Paradise was taken away from them by God; or their paradisiacal human living was reduced to mere human existence. The stability, permanence, genuineness, and orderliness of living—whether with respect to their internal human traits and potentials or with respect to external biological and environmental conditions for human habitation and exploitation of the earth—became limited and were subjected to changeableness. Before the fall of our first parents, all the animals in the paradise were probably at their easy beck and call, as they were made by God, during creation, masters of God's creatures. This changed; while humans still exercise some dominance over the animal species, nevertheless we know very well man has to be extra wary and clever with them—lions, and the sharks, including the snakes. Physically, Adam and Eve were probably perfect specimens. But with their fall from grace, they must have experienced an internal re-structuring, or a genetic reaction, which might have caused latent biological unpredictability leading to their begetting varied types of human offspring. This might explain the diversities of the human race.

In the beginning, the first man—Adam—created by God, was unimpaired and ordered in his whole being enjoying preternatural mental acumen, i.e., (an unclouded and non-confused mind); but owing to the same phenomena of the fall experience, many of their offspring, obviously, would not be.xix Hence, the reality of humans in all history every place: they are born with a greater or lesser intellectual infirmity. Then, that element of good-natures: some are born moderately tempered, some wild; some are naturally trusting some suspicious; some workaholic, some just plain lazy—but none with perfect self-possession. (Of course, habitat or upbringing has also its “relative” influence.) Hence, what is called The Fall of Man.

Mankind had fallen into the tragic fate of being cut off from God’s good graces and from the paradisiacal state, which God had established at the beginning of creation. So man had to put up with the all encompassing degradation and deterioration that have since plagued the entire creation, i.e., mankind's subjection to the pervading corruption which has infected mankind and the universe, inside and out, on account of man’s transgressing God’s single prohibition. Then, because of their fall, Adam and Eve and all their descendants forfeited that perfect life given to man: inclusively, peace with God and peace within and among human beings, as well as within and over the entire universe. Indeed, woe to man!

Consequently and historically, life had dawned on man in a world characterized by pervasive brokenness, both between each man and himself and between men. The phenomenon of brokenness in human relationships unmasked man’s total unreliability and ineptness, specifically: his inadequacy to make true his avowed commitments, much less his good intentions. This is the characterization of universal human foibles and the pervasive human flaws, all effects of the fall: at bottom, man has lost the capability to love. Man does not even have the notion of true love. So unravels to man the negative facticity of his existence: man’s state of hopelessness and extreme need for some kind of order in living, his existential poverty.xx

The reality, now, is that it has been revealed to us by God himself how he has, in all eternity, seen and heard through generations the “cry of the poor”.xxi Thus, God’s promise of salvation is now fulfilled. As Scripture says, “For God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son that man, believing, may have eternal life.”xxii It has pleased God to effect His providential plan of the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Triune God, that man can have permanently a new kind of life, far removed from the “accursed old life”! So, God became Man, died for mankind, and became the salvation of the fallen and sinful mankind. To this loveless world, God sent the paragon and essence par excellence of love. This God-made man sacrificed His very human life so the people of God can have “the new life,” man’s salvation from the state of temporary earthly condemnation. For this reason, as He himself revealed, Christ was sent by the Heavenly Father, down from heaven, to become the God-man who worked the re-converting of humanity’s “sin-infected heart” into a “divinely attuned heart.” This is how the new reality of grace came forth. In place of lost, Edenic, preternatural innocence, a special heavenly or spiritual endowment has been delivered by Christ to each and every welcoming human heart, by which is effected the reversal or re-formation of humanity: renewed friendship with God and the supernatural gift of grace to refuse sin and opt for virtue. Thus, by grace converted (believing) men and women can act and live as human beings pleasing to their Creator.

And, beautifully, because of this divine event of Incarnation and Redemption, a new type of human world has set in. Externally, and even by fundamental laws of nature, the world has not changed; rather, something new has come into play, which has now enables man to elect between two options vis à vis human existence, namely: to live either by the old ways of the fallen world, or by the new powers brought about through the divine event of Incarnation-Redemption by the Son of God. For thus, under the renewed options generated by the Father’s redemptive salvation, no longer is humanity confined or constrained by the negative or the flawed living options in the world. Man, although still in the world and circumscribed by the world, has now become “no longer of the world.” Within the new order of living by grace in the world, whatever takes place—whether appearing negative or positive—comes about as a possible occasion for collaboration with the working of grace.

Listening to the Lord and facing up to Jesus’ mandate imply a leap in human perception and manner of action, namely: the opting for a radically different type of seeing, not confined to our mere human eyes; rather, the precise opting to turn to the eyes of faith! Right off, the Lord seems to focus man’s understanding of the meaning of living upon things beyond the normal and merely human parameters: natural necessities, conditions, habitat. All the above Scripture verses allude to promises of something transcendentally better, more appropriate, and more real: the meaning of human existence that takes up the radical mandate and challenge from the very mouth of God.

The net result in life, once we have become born again, is that henceforth, without having to wear “rose-colored glasses,” we have are endowed with the option to count on the marvel and power of grace to transform events/happenings into what glorifies God and spiritually benefits us! We can submit our acts not to our mere human good sense, but to the working of the grace of God! Previously, any examining or understanding of realities per se, including of man “in himself” as regards the meaning of his existence, could not provide us clear definition or determinate value. Now, however, in the context of man’s restoration, humanity— assumed by Christ into his risen self within the Paschal Mystery—takes on the fullest new meaning and existential significance. Henceforth, men have become no less than “sons” with the Son, i.e., adopted children of God.xxiii Adoption is the common gift and privilege given by God to individuals who have become bearers of the grace of Christ and, hence, receivers of the new human life of Christ. Adoption, thus, is that unseen marvel, the unique supernatural happening wrought by the Holy Spirit upon all born again believers, newly transformed individual human beings, who were once slaves of sin and are now freed men of grace. Unlike men and women, who had permanently turned to the Devil as their father, redeemed men and women have now returned to the paternal embrace of God, humanity’s real Father. Any deed or event ascribed to any man comes to be good because it is seen and willed by man according as it pleases the eyes of God; or according as it comes as an occurrence of grace, as an affirmation of what God has designed, in eternal wisdom, to someone at a particular juncture in life. For this is what pleases God: that man is restored to his union or friendship with Himself, that man is restored into loving relation with Himself, God.xxiv

To mark our concluding argument, we go back to our main Scripture verses: “He who saves his life loses it; he who loses his life saves it!”xxv To grasp this truth requires some reflection on the Gospel Paradox.

The Gospel is written to us in “opposite” language. That’s because the “teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior” are meant to be understood in reverse manner. Thus, the Christian Message, unlike all worldly messages, is a message of PARADOXES.

What is a paradox? A paradox is an apparent contradiction. It sounds “untrue,” and “unreal”; but it is the “truth”, and it is the “reality”. And so, in the Bible, there are plenty of examples of paradoxes. The Beatitudes are all expressed paradoxically: being spiritually and physically poor is to be blessed, spiritually; literally, to be crying is to be fortunate; in fact, being oppressed and persecuted is happiness. There are more statements like these in the Beatitudes. So, let us try to understand the meaning of our starting point Gospel verses: “He who saves his life loses it; he who loses his life saves it!” Of course the exact phrase in the latter part of this verse, states, “he who loses his life for my sake, saves it! Perfect dying to self and the resulting Divine pleasure in the total human surrender to God comprise, respectively, our major and our minor premises.

In the eyes of the world all suffering and abjectness—poverty, ugliness, vulnerability, pain, losses, sicknesses, death, unfair treatment, persecution, oppression—are bad: to undergo them is dishonorable and to bear with them, despicable. But to Christ, these negative realities are not necessarily evil and undesirable. On the contrary, all could become very effective participation in Christ’s redemptive and holy act of love and sacrifice. In other words, all life tribulations or miseries can become actually decisive moments of grace coming from the Lord. They are the stuff that makes saints. On another occasion, in a very similar statement, our Lord Jesus said, “Unless the seed is buried, and dies; it does not bear fruit. But if it dies, it bears many fruits.” It is this fundamental meaning that our proposition analogically demonstrates in our conclusion.

A similar set of verses below, more explicit than the immediate verse above, re-enforces our second premise and strengthens the inference to our concluding proposition. But even much more explicitly, and truly unequivocally, our Lord Jesus taught and commanded his true followers the following equally paradoxical statements: “Unless you deny yourselves, take up your cross daily, and follow me; you can not be my disciples.” He ended with the topical verses, which we quoted at the beginning of this section: “. . . He who saves his life loses it; he who loses his life for my sake saves it!”

The profound, even unfathomable, aspects, of dying to self as a condition for the reality of spiritual contemplation—including its metaphysical meaning (new life for an old life) and its practical significance (martyrdom)—may seem to threaten sheer negativity, an embrace of suffering and abuse for their own sake. But, surely and in contrast, the individual believer’s unqualified trust in the promise of the Great Promiser, God, or in Integrity Himself, induces, by the grace of faith, the loving endurance of suffering for an arduous good (as God himself loved man through the incomparably arduous deeds of salvation). Enduring love, not suffering, is the key to God’s revealing Himself to, and possessing for Himself, His beloved souls. Now, doesn’t this mark heaven’s threshold? Isn’t this Divine experience, to repeat what we previously asserted, just short of the heavenly, face-to-face revealing of Himself by God?

To repeat: It pleases God that we die to ourselves! Thus we connect the aim of being able to see God, with the aim of replacing the old life with God's new life for man, the life that “pleases God.” Hence, our repeated realization of success as confirmation of God’s pleasure over corresponding human and world events, which are accordingly realized by the conditions stipulated in the premises.

And so, it pleases God that we die to ourselves for his sake! Hence one fundamental part of the above verse is that ultimately what we do, or what we even “martyr” ourselves for, should be something that pleases him. Dying like exploding bombs for “martyrdom’s” sake is not for God's sake; and, thus, should not be something that pleases God. So, at this juncture, we may ask, “What pleases God?”

Early on in Genesis, it is written how it pleases God when ordinary things fall into their natural places. Under the original order of creation, before the fall, it pleases God when all His creatures finish or perform doing each of their regular ends. And even now, during this era since the Fall of Man, order is the token of what is good. As regards the macro-cosmos, astronauts and astronomers, including even the hardest of atheists among them, are still invariably struck with great awe at the myriad complexities of the design of the universe. These manifold constellations, so vast in their totality and so perplexing in their unity, are beyond scientists’ imagination to delimit in space or to define in time! Indeed, no matter the disastrous effects of the Fall, what God has made is good, as Genesis stated. Indeed, before the fall of Adam and Eve, they were living a life as God perfectly ordained for them: most beautifully glorifying to God, and most satisfying to themselves; unqualifiedly good. They were originally favored by God, specially as all the world around them was—by God’s ordinance—beautifully operating in perfect harmony: peaceful, absolutely non-destructive, purposely beneficial.

Below, the words of Josef Pieper echo for us the paradoxical contrast between what brings pleasurable unhappiness, like the sins of the flesh, and discomforting joy, like some sacrifice ordeal, or between what seemingly pleases nature, but actually displeases God. At the end of his book, Happiness and Contemplation, Pieper posited that the supernatural and natural/historical reality of life requires human dying, in imitation of the Lord:

Earthly contemplation means to the Christian, . . . above all: that behind all that we directly encounter, the Face of

the

incarnate Logos becomes visible. . . . . The historical element is this: that the Face of the Divine Man bears the

marks of

a shameful execution (dying). Contemplation does not ignore the mystery of evil, guilt and its bloody atonement.

The

happiness of contemplation is a true happiness, indeed the supreme happiness; but it is founded upon

SORROW.xxvi

Unless we have died to ourselves, we are not born into the new life; we can neither enter heaven, nor its grace realm, heaven-on-earth. Hence, we would be deprived of the accompanying privilege wrought by grace, our union with God or our becoming God's Indwelling Temple. Without this union with God, or without the Triune God’s Indwelling in us as His Temple, we are barred from “seeing” God or contemplating God. Father Haggerty, quoting and commenting on St. John of the Cross’ Spiritual Canticle, says: “This gradual and progressive death by love, a source of immense torment to the soul, is precisely the soul’s path of transformation in God. ‘She lives by dying until love, in killing her, makes her live the life of love’ . . .”xxvii

At bottom, the taste, the experiencing, the witnessing or seeing (namely, some element of contemplation whose possibility, even here on earth, we aim to demonstrate) of the Lord God Jesus Christ, is already practiced by the saints of the world within the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church. For when we’re like each one who lives within the bosom of this Body of Christ, we are in His presence; then we are in contemplation of God. For, our not being apart anymore from Jesus and his Holy Spirit, in so far as we are His Temple, makes present and real for us many a sacramental, already-heaven-like experience on earth: moments of peace, moments of deep spiritual enlightenment, moments of peaceful suffering, moments of genuine peace between individuals, moments of temporal retribution for offenses against God and man, moments of pure acts of charity, of forgiveness, etc. They extend to all promised fulfillment, that is, to countless supernatural, divine interventions for God’s beloved people in this present world. These are those favors known only to God and to the worthy souls of the Church. After all, didn’t Jesus say that his Church is the Light of the world? Aren’t the gift and privilege of being enlightened by the Light, and thus, the privilege of beatitude visions for those who are poor in spirit, assured by His saying?

And so what, then, will it take for us to be welcomed into this new life, to which Christ invites whoever wants to enter the Kingdom of God? Scriptures tell us the way is through our belief and acceptance of Christ’s other command that we be poor in spirit: that we embrace the teachings of the Beatitudes or Blessedness (Happiness). Thus, it is afforded us really and truly that we hear and listen to the Spirit’s prompting us up to the Lord’s Beatitude. “Blessed are you who are poor,” the Lord would say, “in your heart, you already posses the Kingdom of God!” This paraphrases the first Beatitude, and, as matter of fact, all eight beatitudes. xxviii

Equipped with the concepts of the process by which to arrive at beatitude, let us attempt to explore the highest abode of the sort of spiritual haven visited by mystics, like St. John of the Cross, or St. Francis, to get a glimpse of in what this “dying to self” consists, so one could be born into that “life” of which St. Francis speaks when he prays, “. . . and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”xxix What do we know of their experiences before, during, and after their mystic encounters with, or visions of, God? Evident physical and psychological deprivations stand out. In St. Francis’ case, Francis literally and publicly divested himself of the expensive attire his father had bought him, and literally fled from the comforts and luxury availed him by his family’s wealth. But St. John of the Cross endured an even crueler, more agonizing fate, imprisoned and starved during a period of eight months within a windowless closet, 6 by 8 feet square, as well as putting up with public lashings before assembled monks.xxx St. Stephen was stoned to death as he was given the sight of Jesus himself standing in the right hand of God the Father in heaven.xxxi

The next thing we encounter in the mystics’ experience is dialogue between the contemplative and God, which consists mainly of different degrees of total self-abnegation, total self-effacement, before God, very much like Moses’ deep consciousness of unworthiness in the presence of God at Mt. Sinai. Literally, their self-denial or self-emptying covers everything and anything which might be a hindrance to their avowal of complete surrender to the command of their ‘lover’ God. We paraphrase from the illustrative account of St. John of the Cross’s Spiritual Canticle by Rev. Donald Haggerty. Prominent are allusions to the mystic’s seeking for the Divine Indwelling in the soul. Fr. Haggerty relates John’s words: “the Trinity is present in, dwells in, or inhabits the souls of the just.” Moreover, “. . . the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit are not simply present in the soul, but hidden in the innermost being of the soul . . .”xxxii Haggerty refers to this encountering of God as John’s vision of Christ, which is to be identified neither with mere intellectual understanding nor with the basic act of faith. “Some element of in-completion, perhaps obscurity or tenuousness, some unabated hunger or gnawing dissatisfaction will mark even the highest states of holiness.”xxxiii I shall get back to this point towards the end of the paper.

What is ‘achieved’ or given in the contemplative encounter is the exchange of love between the mystic and God: “. . . it is precisely by giving her (the soul) His love there that He shows her how to love as He loves her. Besides teaching her to love purely, freely, and disinterestedly, as He loves her, God makes her love Him with the very strength with which He loves her . . .”xxxiv Haggerty continues, “Transforming her into His love ... He gives her His own strength by which she can love Him. . . . Until attaining this equality of love the soul is dissatisfied.”xxxv That the realm of the Divine is so unreachable, but remains the ultimate goal of the soul is, thus, described:

However relentless its pursuit of the divine Lover, what the soul seeks is hopelessly beyond its reach in this life [a

substantial point like I already referred to above, to which I shall come back to further address: incompleteness of

the

soul's delighting for the God]. She seeks the manifestation of His divine essence because the hiding place of the

Word of

God is, as St. John (the Evangelist) asserts, the bosom of the Father, that is, the divine essence, which is alien to

every

mortal eye and hidden from every human intellect.xxxvi

Yet, Haggerty continues, “The soul’s path to union with God will be above all a dynamic movement of the personal relations with a God unseen, yet known in the Son, carried out quietly, unobtrusively, and secretly within the heart of the soul.”xxxvii But one initial step in the mystic’s attempt to contemplate God begins from the soul’s detachments from all things material, earthly, and personal. Haggerty refers to this detachment:

St. John of the Cross ascribes the greatest importance to a radical purification of the soul by a twofold process:

the

soul’s own voluntary self emptying by detachment from all sensual and spiritual self satisfactions and the interior

voiding

of the soul effected progressively by experience of the divine absences.xxxviii

Then, at the height of this universal detachment, Haggerty points more to the suppressing of the personal perceptions of the seeker:

. . . if the soul desires to find the Bridegroom, who dwells in the hiding place of its own soul, it must: ‘Seek Him in

faith

and love, without the desire for the satisfaction, taste, or understanding of any other thing than what you ought to

know.

Faith and love are like the blind man’s guides. They will lead you along a path unknown to you to the place where

God is

hidden.xxxix

He continues, “Contemplation, nevertheless, brings the intellect into experiential contact with God as long as it does not occupy itself with particular knowledge of God and remains empty of everything comprehensible to it. Only then can the loving supernatural knowledge of contemplation be infused by God into the soul.”xl

Now for final consideration of St. John’s testimony on how to be allowed contemplation of God. He put an absolute premium upon the soul’s being in the state of grace as the primal disposition to enter in the path to encounter God. Haggerty writes,

The indwelling presence, thus, presupposes the presence of God’s immensity. But this notion of God’s coming

to the

soul when He is already present there needs some explanation, and we find it in our understanding of grace.

Indeed, any

consideration of the doctrine of the divine indwelling is always connected to the Church’s teaching on grace.

Through

sanctifying grace, received ordinarily at baptism, God comes to dwell in a new manner within the soul, which

becomes,

as it were, the temple or abode of the Blessed Trinity. Such a gracious gift on God’s part is essentially a personal

communication by which He gives Himself to the soul in order that a more intimate bond may exist between the

soul and

Himself. God’s communication through grace . . . never takes place, however in-comprehensively, without God imparting His own divine Self to the soul . . . [without first being given grace]. xli

We recapitulate St. John of the Cross’s insights on contemplation with the following preliminary thoughts from his Spiritual Canticle, as related to us by Rev. Donald Haggerty:

“By freeing the intellect from the natural mode by which it knows through the signs of concept and analogy, the infusion of love overcomes the distance between the soul's intellect and the God it knows in the absolute certitude of faith.” Jacques Maritain, as quoted by Haggerty, echoes this prominent, exalted power of love over the intellect in man’s desire to know of God:

. . . in virtue of this union in which love clings to God immediately, the intellect is, through a certain affective

experience, .

. . ELEVATED as to judge of divine things in a way higher than the darkness of faith would permit. This is so

because

the intellect penetrates, and knows that MORE lies hidden in things of faith than faith itself reveals, ever finding

there

more to love and taste of in love.

Maritain caps this with his final statement, “. . . it judges more highly of things divine (because it is, then,) under a special instinct of the Holy Ghost.” xlii

John of the Cross, thus, tells us that to see God, to have a contemplation of God, man must first overcome the great distance between God and the lower realm to which the human intellect has access by way of perception. The way to vault man’s intellect to that peak realm where the intellect may be permitted reception of, or contemplation of, the Divine is primarily that man should have become one with God by love, whereby the Divine Holy Ghost, the Third Person of the Triune God, Himself aids the intellect in “seeing” God. Haggerty, however, relates John’s statement that, “Clear and essential vision of Christ contrasts with the evident blindness of earthly eyes unable to attain the invisible reality of the divine Person. For to gaze upon God, to see Him face to face, is a privilege reserved to the soul only upon entrance into heaven.”xliii

Thus, those whose degree of faith and discipleship for God has reached the level of the Beatitudes, and who have more than a head-start in the road to sacrificial purification and sanctification, are well along the way of perfection this side of Heaven. They are most likely already experiencing many moments of Heaven-like bliss of peace and unity with the Divine. And this is what is meant by our Second Premise: Christian happiness is Christian dying to self. To be happy is, as it were, to let Christ be the one to live within us as we let our old life die away.

We end our discussion explanation on our second premise with the following quotation from Josef Pieper as regards the soul's genuine reaching out by grace for that highest realm of spiritual experience, and thus contemplation of God. Pieper writes, “Contemplation does not rest until it has found the object which dazzles it.”xliv So we recall our second premise: But (Christian) happiness (accepts) is pain (Christian dying to self) or if one experiences happiness or blessedness, then one is replacing or losing one’s old life—dying to self—for new life (in Christ).

In contrast, those who are attached to their riches suffer their wealth blocking any speedy growth in the Divine life of grace. Thus, unwisely, they are denying themselves their opportunity of experiencing salvation, of nurturing an earthly prelude or “taste of heaven on earth,” the early reward of faith. This human reluctance to irrevocably forgo attachment to the allurements of the world— perhaps because of reluctance, if not outright refusal, to embrace “pain”, i.e. to embrace the dying to oneself— must have been why the Lord described entering Heaven by the rich as equivalent to a camel forcing itself to pass through a needle’s eye. It is on account of the same reluctance or stubborn hardness of heart that their channel to blessedness, to the state of beatitude, or to the path for genuine happiness, is precluded for them. And so, our second premise, in the negative form, speaks to us, thus:

II. That one lacks blessedness or happiness (gain) entails that one is without (appropriate experience of) pain;

equivalently: if one lacks happiness or fulfillment, one is not replacing or losing (letting go) one’s old life [one is

not dying

to oneself].

Woe to us, indeed, if our human living remains stuck in its sinful state. For, indeed, unless we have “died to self” and, thus, have turned away our old life of the flesh, then, we are not to behold all the marvelous gifts of faith.

Now, we proceed to our conclusive proposition, and its explanation.

III. Conclusion: Christian Happiness is Christian Contemplation.

III. To experience happiness or blessedness is to attain the way to see God, to attain contemplation.

While, we also, look again at the conclusion’s negative form:

III. That one lacks happiness or blessedness entails that one is without contemplative vision of God; equivalently:

lacking

happiness or blessedness amounts to lacking the means of contemplation.

Upon getting into that final, metanoiac state, we shall have been supernaturally transformed by the fullest working of grace: truly bonded with the Eucharist and truly conformed to the truth of the Logos, having paschal-ly died and risen with Christ anew. The Godhead, via the Spirit, makes Himself present within us, and the workings of the Spirit supply glimpses of God within us. Thereby, we are enabled to enjoy and contemplate the Divine, short of heaven’s face-to-face vision of God. And so, shall we be able to exclaim: “Eureka, by the grace of God, this is happiness!” For surely, having become the Temple of the Holy Spirit—and, thus, through the Spirit, enjoying the Triune Godhead's in-dwelling within us— affords us, indeed, the shortest distance to the Divine, and opens up for us the closest sight of God. Isn't this, therefore, already, some Divine contemplation; isn't this contemplation of God? And so, at such peak of earthly human existence, we can invoke that God-desired phrase: It pleases God that He could show Himself to us; it pleases God that we are able to converse with Him, it pleases God that we have come to know Him through bond of true friendship.

Appendix:

A Modicum of Reservation and a Continuing Fidelity of Hope

That “face-to-face” seeing of God properly belongs to, or is ultimately attained only in, heaven is actually intimated to us by the mystics themselves. We have indicated how, ultimately, wanting to contemplate God is equivalent to wanting a most personal conversation with God. Conversation with God is never generated, nor actualized, by man; and certainly, it is perfected only by God. God alone, from his transcendent nature, can place man in a position to access him in true prayer, conversation, or personal “audience” with him. Through no man’s ability, but through grace, via faith and the sacraments, God grants this Divine access by man, to Him. The fullest uniting with God, or total contemplating of God, is reserved to the action by God. Properly speaking, in this consists heaven, not so much a place as the state of happiness and perfection that consists in knowing God Himself. But as St. Paul says, “. . . eye hath not seen, nor ear heard . . .” the glory of God.xlv In Scripture is written, “No one has seen God!”

But, without diminishing the abundant glory guaranteed by the Lord right here in this world to those who are faithful to him, it behooves the faithful precisely, as their fundamental act of fidelity, to remain believing, hoping, and loving while as yet pilgrims with eyes permanently gazing toward end of the line: whether it be heaven after death, or Christ's final return in glory. The Christian journey, somehow like the Israelites’ experience, while assuredly secure and spiritually consoling a good deal of the time, will remain a bitter-sweet affair with the Divine. For in this essentially consists this type of seeing of God, this side of heaven: a continual thirsting and longing for God. St. John of the Cross tells us, as Fr. Haggerty writes, how “. . . paradoxically, it would seem the more God is experienced as the source of one’s own life of spirit, the more powerfully transcendent, incomprehensible, and inaccessible His divinity becomes.” For God is, continues St. John, “. . . the quintessentially hidden God.”xlvi Yet our prayer, nevertheless, is appropriately to ever invoke Psalm: “May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us, Selah!”xlvii

Endnotes

i Luke 9:24, The New American Bible, St. Joseph Edition (New York: Catholic Book Publishing Co, 1970).

ii John 3: 28–30.

iii St. Augustine, Confessions, cited in The Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.:

Libreria Editrice Vaticana,

1997), par. 30.

iv The Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997),

par. 163.

v See Glossary, ibid., 869.

vi See Acts 2:5.

vii See Alan Panozza, “Who is ICCRS,” ICCRS Newsletter, Volume XXXII, Number 1 (January–February,

2007): 1, accessed at <

http://iccrs.org/images/uploads/newsletters/NL05-1/nlo5-1_En.pdf>.

viii See “Bilocation and the Odor of Sanctity,” EWTN (November, 1998), accessed 20 July, 2011 at <

http://www.ewtn.com/padrepio/mystic/bilocation.htm>.

ix See Ted and Maureen Flynn, The Thunder of Justice: The Warning, the Miracle, the Chastisement,

accessed 20 July, 2011 at <

http://www.catholicrevelations.org/PR/the thunder of justice.htm>.

x See Glossary, Catechism, 867.

xi See, respectively, Mark 6:48–50, John 20:26, Matthew 15: 32–38, Matthew 14:20, Matthew 17:1-8,

Luke 24:13-35, John 20: 24-29,

John 21: 4-14.

xii St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Ia Q. 26, “The Divine Beatitude,” a. 3 c., accessed 20 July,

2011, at

<http://newadvent.org/summa/1026.htm>.

xiiiSt. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Ia Q. 12, “How God Is Known By Us,” a. 5 c., accessed 25

July, 2011, at

<http://newadvent.org/summa/1026.htm>.

xivSt. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Ia Q. 12, “How God Is Known By Us,” a. 2 c., accessed 25

July, 2011, at

<http://newadvent.org/summa/1026.htm>.

xvIbid, Q. 12, a. 5

xvi John 3: 1–8.

xvii John 3: 31–34, Bilingual Bible, Good News Translation (Brazil: United Bible Societies, 2007).

xviii See, respectively, John 17: 3, Genesis 1: 28–30, Genesis 3:17, Ibid.

xixCatechism, par 377

xx See Stephen Crowell, “Existentialism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta

(Winter, 2010) at

<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/existentialism>, accessed 20 July, 2011.

xxi See Catechism, pars, 2443–2444,

xxii See, respectively, John 3:16, Galatians 3:13.

xxiii Catechism, par. 460.

xxiv St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica IIIa Q.48, a. 3, at

<http://www.ewtn.com/library/CHRIST/10118A.TXT> accessed 5 July,

2011.

xxv See, respectively, Luke 9:24, John 12: 23-28, Luke 9: 23-24, Genesis 1: 1-31.

xxvi Josef Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (South Bend,

Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press,

1998), 108.

xxvii Rev. Donald Haggerty, “St. John of the Cross and the Hidden God,” Faith and Reason (Fall, 1991):

33, accessed 5 April, 2011, at

<http://www.ewtn.com/library/SPIRIT/FR91301.TXT>.

xxviii See Matthew 5: 1–39.

xxix “Prayers of St. Francis” at

<http://www.franciscanfriarstor.com/archive/stfrancis/stf_prayers_of_st_francis.htm>, accessed 20

July, 2011.

xxx Haggerty, “St. John . . . and the Hidden God”: 2.

xxxi Acts 7:56.

xxxii Haggerty, “St. John . . . and the Hidden God”: 5.

xxxiii Ibid.: 11.

xxxiv Ibid.

xxxv Ibid.: 12.

xxxvi Ibid.; see John 1: 18.

xxxvii Ibid.

xxxviii Ibid.: 36.

xxxix Ibid.: 27.

xl Ibid.: 25–26.

xli Ibid.: 7.

xlii Ibid.: 31–32.

xliii Ibid.: 10.

xliv Pieper, Happiness, 109.

xlv See, respectively, I Corinthians 2: 9, John 1: 18.

xlvi Haggerty, “St. John . . . and the Hidden God”: 9.

xlvii Psalm 67: 1.