Hope - Virtue or Rhetorical Technique?

                                                                   

        Jeffrey S. Metcalfe notes that for Augustine the supreme happiness in temporal life is never achieved, so love and hope are also required. Love cannot exist without hope.

For Augustine, without the hope that a future good will result from one’s love and faith, faith sets up a happiness that excludes its beholder: faith becomes terror.

Without hope, love ceases to produce any happiness in the present, for one’s failure to love completely will always remain a source of misery.

Without hope, the believers faith will be miserable, there will be no happiness in the present, and thus, his love will not move him into action. Without love moving him into action, his hope is pointless, and his faith empty.

However, for consolation St Augustine says that “though human life is compelled to be wretched by all the grievous evils of this world…so we do not enjoy a present happiness, but look forward to happiness in the future.”

For the Black Theologian Vincent Lloyd this hope is the textbook definition of classical psychoanalytical melancholia.“In both, an object is lost, it is mourning without end, the bereaved individual feels the loss not in the external world but in herself, thereby securing a present identity in an eternal loss.”

The only difference between Augustinian hope and mourning, he says, is that,

“In hope, that object is projected into the future, in melancholia, it is projected into the past.”

In this light, Lloyd claims that the virtue of hope serves as a tactic to avoid tragedy. “When one object is pushed so far forward that it is no longer part of our time, It is just hope.” This serves as a threat to ordinary life precisely because this hope is not of our time: the eternal future is always in the future.

Lloyd believes that hope obfuscates this process. “Thus, the effect associated with hopefulness, the cheery disposition for which no cause can be found, is in fact the affect produced by a most profound melancholia.”

This leads Lloyd to conclude that “hope is not a virtue, it is a rhetorical technique.” He recommends Joy.

Unlike hope, joy can delight and move the hearer, and since it does not intend any future object, it eludes the problematic of hope by refusing to bypass the tragedies of real situations. “It begins in the ordinary and stays in the ordinary.”

Of course, one may ask - “Whence joy? In what exactly?”

This is in contrast with the philosopher of love Gillian Rose who does believe in hope, only for her, unlike Augustine, hope’s object is not an eternal future, but an eternal present.

Hope allows this speculative identity to be thought by suspending any secured links in the present to the future and the past, which allows for a present identity to be projected into the future without a priori confirming it.

That this identity might be negated in the future, as the future will be negated in the present, does not adversely affect hope.


Thus Rose writes, “If I am to stay alive, I am bound to get love wrong, all the time, but not to cease wooing, for that is my love affair, love’s work.”

Here love’s work is made possible by Rose’s refusal to cease wooing which is faith: a commitment to persevere even in the prospect of certain failure.

This seems like an awfully shaky proposition, hoping some future imagined identity, which may never be, will withstand the bloody vicissitudes of life.

Oddly, all these writers leave out the Christian response, at least in Eastern Orthodoxy. The Early Fathers will say that we have been given a foretaste of heaven, this we experience primarily through Grace or the working of the Holy Spirit. Also, we have, at present, a gift that acts as some kind of assurance - the gift of Faith. In fact, for the apostles, faith and hope were practically interchangeable.

There is a problem though.

Since we can only know God through analogy, the Saints speak of this joy as a great wedding feast, a marriage consummation, the care of a loving father, the wooing of young lovers, or the wonder when witnessing the birth of a child.

Indeed, even the experience of beauty itself, or perhaps a glimpse of paradise breaks through when we are carried away during liturgy or in prayer.

Is this enough? That depends on ones internal disorder, the external stresses one suffers, and what barriers to those stressors one has - friends, community, work, a partner etc Perhaps an experience of divine rescue, from addiction, loneliness, or ill health…

What of the rejected? The ones who know no good father, or security in this life, who’ve never married, whose every earthly hope has been shattered and betrayed? Is a pretty liturgy enough?

For these, where is their hope? 

Hope is often treated as if it were exclusively a private resource that individuals develop from within and sustain apart from others.

Yet this ignores the enormous role of loving friends and family or a caring community.

On their essay Hope, Attachment and LovevAnthony Scioli and Henry Biller note that,

“…. to experience a full measure of hope, an individual must perceive a living presence that can give as well as receive….attachments are crucial for its development. .bonds with others serve as both a basis for generalized hopefulness as well as grounding for specific hopes and dreams.”

Relationship expert John Gottman describes how success in marriage depends on “encouraging one another’s dreams and aspirations”.

Gina O'Connell Higgins’ book, Resilient Adults, deals with survivors of severe  childhood abuse.  Conceptualizing hope as a gift imparted by a special provider, she quotes survivors’ experiences of friends or caring adults in terms suggestive of received “light”, a “safe harbor” or a “safe haven”.

Erikson linked hope to basic trust and receiving adequate care in the earliest years of life. For Erikson, hope was the bedrock on which the other human virtues might be established. It was “a very basic human strength without which we couldn't stay alive.”

The theologian William Lynch stated that hopeful attitude is grounded in affirmation and acceptance. Lynch also noted, “the wholly interior hope is a romantic fiction”. It is derived in large part from external provisions such as"liberating relationships.”

Essentially, such development as an adequate attachment system (level 1) facilitates basic trust (level 2) which spawns greater differentiated trust (Level 3), leading to stronger faith development (level 4), which translates into adaptive daily hope responses (level 5).

For those who have been denied these developmental stages of trust, only the cross of Christ remains, and, as such, it is not humanly possible to wish for one's own crucifixion.

This is why the Dark Night of the Soul requires perfect passivity for God’s action, man can never will their own deconstruction. Man can only wish for God’s peace, or His love, or His Grace, but only God can desire God for Himself.

When man is utterly undone, decentered, beyond human help, and begins the threefold reduction; pinned to existence and helpless, he finally abandons understanding for faith, memory for hope, and willing to love.

Even the former Pope Razinger, in his essay On Hope, admits the needs for a kind of secure base of human love first:

“Being is not good, especially if you have not experienced it as welcome, have not had “Yes” said to you, that is, if you have not been loved. This indicates that the fear which transcends all fears is the fear of losing love altogether, fear of an existence in which the little daily disturbances fill everything, without anything large and reassuring coming along to keep the balance. Then these little fears, if they constitute everything that can be expected of the future, will pass over into the great fear—fear of an unbearable life—because hope no longer dwells in it. In this case, death, which is the end of all hopes, becomes the only hope

If the fear that transcends all fears is in the last resort fear of losing love, then the hope which transcends all hopes is the assurance of being showered with the gift of a great love.

One could then say that simple objects become hopes by taking on the coloration of love, by more or less resembling it, each according to its uniqueness. Inversely, in fears one always finds the feeling of not being loved, a hope of love, but a trampled one."

What kind of love does the hope that transcends all hopes await? This is the genuine hope which Dr. Herbert Plugge of Heidelberg, on the basis of his contacts with the terminally ill and the suicidal, calls the “fundamental hope.” Without any doubt man wants to be loved by others.

We need the answer of a human love, but this response reaches farther out of itself toward the infinite, toward a world redeemed.”

To achieve this is no mean thing. It’s common knowledge where poverty reigns so does belief in God. Suffering is a nessasary feature of Christian spirituality. Pope Benedict XVI continues,

“that for the sake of their faith Christians have lost “ta hyparchonta,” that is, their money, their possessions, and what appears in ordinary life to be the “substance” upon which a life can be constructed.

…it is precisely through the loss of what ordinarily constitutes “substance,” the basis of daily living, thatChristians are shown that in fact they have a better “hyparxis.”

However, modern American Christians surely fool themselves when they speak of any thick faith in God; they who can relay on 401k’s, medical science, the Government, and live in tiny fiefdoms where casual desires are instantly gratified at a whim.

For these Ratzinger says,

“…what develops is a pseudo-hope that can only deceive man in the end. The law of possession constrains him to “hypostole,” to the game of hide and seek, of compromises by which one tries to assure oneself of the sympathy of the powers that be, by hanging on to one’s “substance.”

He recommends a Franciscan spirituality, saying,

“Francis is the witness and guardian of hope because he has helped us “accept with joy” (Heb 10:34) the loss of rank, of position, of possessions, and has made visible, behind the false hopes, the true, the genuine hope—the one that no one can confiscate or destroy.”

In his last years Francis had lost everything—health, possessions, his own foundation “ta hyparch-onta.” And it is precisely from this man that the most delightfully joyous words issue. With all his hopes taken away, all his disappointments, there shines forth the “fundamental hope” in its invincible grandeur. Francis had truly left the “accidental” to enter into “substance.” Free of the multiplicity of hopes, he has become the great witness that man has hope, that he is a being of hope.”

Yes, even for a Saint, it took near complete disposition for him to finally relay exclusively on God, hence the former Pope concludes,

“We can remain people of hope only if our life is not contentedly grounded in the everyday but is solidly rooted in “substance.”

I cannot say the same for most other Christians.

So, is it possible to have a hope without a future in the present?

I’ll end with a catchy phrase by St Silouan the Athonite:

“Keep thy mind in hell, and despair not.”

                                                              

Is it a Sin to be Happy? Maybe a little bit

                                                

Christianity is all about happiness, finding our true home, and has always acknowledge the righteous of enjoyment of the goods of the earth….but it’s pretty unique in how it frames things.

Take the beatitudes, what does it mean to be blessed?

David Bentley Hart translation of the NT its it this way:

“How blissful the destitute, abject in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of the heavens;"

In his foot note Hart says, “μακάριος (makarios): “blessed,” “happy,” “fortunate,” “prosperous,” but originally with a connotation of divine or heavenly bliss.

The great NT scholar R.T. France says,

“'Blessed’ is a misleading translation of makarios, which does not denote one whom God blesses (which would be eulogētos, reflecting Heb. bārûk), but represents the Hebrew ’ašrê, 'fortunate’, and is used, like ’ašrê, almost entirely in the formal setting of a beatitude.

It introduces someone who is to be congratulated, someone whose place in life is an enviable one. ‘Happy’ is better than ‘blessed’, but only if used not of a mental state but of a condition of life. ‘Fortunate’ or ‘well off’ is less ambiguous. It is not a psychological description, but a recommendation.”

So the point was a complete class reversal of fortunes .

This is a word that was often used in the Classical period to describe the life of the gods.  

From the perspective of Greek paganism, one participated in this divine life through sexual and other indulgences, through prosperity and leisure, and through the acquisition and of power and victory. 

In the Beatitudes, Christ reorients, indeed, inverts what it looks like to share in that life in this world and this age while maintaining in its fullness what that means in the age and world to come.

However, as Fr Stephen de Young comments, 

"Christ teaches that those who experience the beginnings of this destiny in the present world are not the prosperous, the wealthy, the powerful, and the victorious.  Rather, they are those who, despite being in the Spirit, are poor.  They are those who mourn losses.  They are those who are humble.  They are those who hunger and thirst for justice which eludes them in this world. 

These are not those who were seen by ancient cultures to be living the best human life, let alone the life of the gods.  These are those whom the ancients saw as unworthy at best or at worst, under a curse.

St. Luke makes the contrast between ancient understanding and Christ’s teaching even more explicit by paralleling a shortened list of the Beatitudes with a series of woes.”

De young continues,

“The poor are happy but the rich are under a curse.  The hungry are blissful but the full are accursed.  Those who weep are blessed but those who laugh are doomed. 

Those who are hated, excluded, mocked, and derided are experiencing the divine life, while those who are of good reputation and spoken of well by all are damned already. 

For St. Luke, those who enjoy success, prosperity, wealth, and power in this life do so through wickedness and are on a trajectory that leads not to eternal life, but to death, curse, and condemnation in the age to come, an age which has no end.”

Of course, despite all of those troubles, the Spirit bears the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. 

Eudaimonia as a concept is more related to success, prosperity, and goodness of a life lived in this world - the goal of an ethical or moral life.

It simply lacks the eschatological element exemplified by the Beatitudes. And eschatology makes all the difference.

Jonathan T. Pennington, assistant professor of New Testament interpretation, actually renders the nine occurrences of μακάριος in the Beatitudes in 5:3–12 as “flourishing,” instead of “blessed,”

In an interview about his new book, The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing, he says,

“Christ doesn’t say, “Flourishing is when you have lots of kids,” “Flourishing are those who have tons of money,” “Flourishing are the prestigious ones in society,” “Flourishing are the virtuous ones in society.”

Instead, it’s flourishing when you have a poverty of spirit, a hungering or thirsting — not positive things.

When you are humble, that means not getting your rights.

When you’re merciful, you are giving up your rights and forgiving someone who has wronged you. All these things he describes as flourishing are totally unexpected.”

 After all the rewards for the six beatitudes in the middle of Lukes Gospel are all in the future tense!

So, the disciples of Jesus flourish because they know that they already are included as citizens of the coming kingdom of heaven. 

As the Christian philosopher David Naugle cleverly observes, biblical happiness is “edenistic,” not “hedonistic”—it is based on God’s creation and re-creation of the world.”

        

                                                               

I’ll point out a few things, in the past, without the constant rustling of alternative lewis that put Christian faith into question, without the scientific materialistic view of the cosmos that unconsciously shapes our perceptions, without the psychological mechanical view of the person as an animal and bundle of psychic drives, and within a tight community of similar believers, it was a lot easier and more plausible to hold this hope. Even among pagans, these still believed in gods and a universe sufficed with mysterious forces and spirits.

One might ask if it is plausible for modern Christians to hold onto such hope in our modern world? Especially with the loud cacophony pop voices promoting and offering easier, less painful alternatives?

Of course, the question arrises if we even ought to want happiness?

If scientific means were found to assure happiness, Darrin McMahon concluded in his recent history of Western thought on happiness, we would "be leaving a piece of [our] humanity behind.”

Mark Litmore comments that “Half century's work on religion suggests it also is a term we should regard with suspicion. It is a modern concept that conflates rather than illuminates,”

We all know the dangers of the prosperity gospel, and famously Christian Smith has pointed out the emergent national religion one might call "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism."

Happiness is at its center:

1. A God exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.

2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions."

3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.

4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.

5. Good people go to heaven when they die

Where religion promises worldly happiness by unworldly means, it seems to betray
both religion and the legitimate pursuit of happiness in this world.

In Christianity, it’s almost as if a life of good fortune is a terrible danger:

“The most dangerous evil in life is not suffering but tranquility.

….holy men, when they see this world’s prosperity to be their lot, are disquieted with fearful misgivings.

For they fear lest they should receive here the fruit of their labours…

And hence it is that holy men are in greater dread of prosperity in this world than of adversity.”

- St Gregory the Great’s commentary on The Book of Job

This is also bound up with Christianity’s confusing relationship with its own stance of self-denial and psychology’s self-improvement.

Those who look to the mystical tradition, the Spirituality of the Desert, claim that self-denial is the path to spiritual enlightenment and discovery of the true self; the ego is a false self. By contrast, the world of psychology endorses the merits of a healthy ego.

However even a muddled mystic as Richard Rohr acknowledges that in the first half of life we need boundaries, a sense of identity and order for our lives:

“You have to first have an ego structure to then let go of it and move beyond it.”

Although it gives credence to one of Nietzsche’s critiques of Christianity, joy is usually thought in the NT as largely a future event, a promise.

The Epistle of James teaches that we should count our trials {πειρασμοί) as joy since they produce steadfastness of character (Jas 1.2).

The first Epistle of Peter states that we should rejoice in our sufferings as sharing in the sufferings of Christ (1 Pet 4.12-14).

Moreover, despite our present sufferings, we look forward to our joy in the eschaton when Christ's glory will be revealed. The Epistle to the Hebrews also posits joy in the hope of future deliverance against the persecutions and trials of the present life (Heb 10.32-39).

When the Fathers speak of things like joy, rarely do they locate it where a modern man might.

Evagrios, identifies joy as the sine qua non of its genuineness:

"If when praying no other joy can attract you, then truly you have found prayer."

The basic reason for the joy found in prayer is given by Saint John of Kronstadt as follows:

"a lively sense of God's presence is a source of peace and joy to the soul.”

In addition to the joy which we receive through prayer and the sacraments, the Fathers also refer to the joy which accompanies the active working of the good and struggling against evil.

A third source of joy is simply enduring suffering while maintaining faith in God.

Saint John Chrysostom in his commentary on 2 Corinthians 1.5 praises the endurance and fortitude of Abraham in his difficulties and then goes on to extol the blessed Paul,

“through seeing trials in very snow-showers assailing him daily, rejoiced and exulted as though in the mid-delights of Paradise. As then he who is gladdened with this joy cannot be a prey to despair; so he who maketh not this [joy] his own is easily overcome of all;... And truly stouter than any armor is joy in God; and whoso hath it, nothing can ever make his head droop or his countenance sad, but he beareth all things nobly.”

James Cook comments HERE:

"Whilst for the classical philosophers the ultimate goal of therapy was the achievement of happiness or wellbeing in the present, for Chrysostom it was to be found in avoiding God’s judgement for sin and receiving the blessings of eternal life.

For him, the sick are those who are facing the judgement of God, and a key part of his therapy of the soul is to awaken in them a fear of hell that they may live more obedient lives and “receive the good things that are to come.” 

The Fathers rarely address these human concerns of finding love or social acceptance or loneliness. Goods that today we say are our "needs", and without which we deteriorate mentally.

St Symeon says,

"Tell me, what is more beautiful than a soul undergoing tribulation, which knows that by enduring it will inherit joy in all things?"

                                                            

What is real flourishing according to psychology?

“Humans connect to other humans at so basic a level that when we disconnect, our souls shatter into a thousand little pieces.”

- Peter Leithart

"If loneliness didn’t exist, we could reasonably assume that psychiatric illnesses would not occur either.”

- Psychiatrist J.H. van den Berg

Before WW II society was more naturally integrated, people needed other people. Perhaps it wasn’t necessary to point out marriage, community, and friendship as goods as these were simply staples of human existence.

Our man made world today is premised upon the opposite of the humane, connections make us human, and we’ve created a society of isolation.

One can't take it for granted one will have friends, or a partner. We’re not embedded in social systems that way anymore.

If one wants friends, one has to work at it! Books describe how to intentionally find people, join groups, and then, since we no longer simply bump into one another, how to intentionally maintain those relationships.

Johann Hari, in his best-selling book Lost Connections writes HERE,

“Everyone knows human beings have natural physical needs,” he adds, “Well, there’s equally good evidence that we have innate psychological needs. We need to feel we belong to a group; we need to feel we have a stable future; we need to feel that we are valued; we need to feel we have meaning and purpose in our lives.”

The best predictor of happiness in America? It's Marriage, read HERE .

Many psychologists and researchers go as far as saying marriage is THE key to happiness, after 50 years of hard data, read HERE, it's hard to argue.

When you break it down, marriage does yield much more fulfillment and happiness - although mainly for the more well off, In this article HERE it reports :

"....the subtler truth seems to be that finances, family, and social fitness are three prongs in a happiness trinity.

They rise together and fall together.”

                                                           

For example, being married with no medicine you have a better chance of surviving cancer than being single and having chemo !

This study HERE shows for “prostate, breast, colorectal, esophageal, and head/neck cancers, the survival benefit associated with marriage was larger than the published survival benefit of chemotherapy.”

Loneliness is worse than smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. Lonely people need more painkillers, they heal much slower, they have more health problems etc etc

Paul Tournier, a brilliant Christian psychologist, argues that untold damage is done in Christian communities by curating “premature renunciation.”

He explains how nonbelievers and Christians alike (while they may not have language to express it) seem to “know” the Two Gospels of both worlds, which seem in opposition to each other. The gospel of psychology, as he calls it, is one of “self-fulfillment” and “self-assertion,” while the Biblical gospel is “self-denial” and “renunciation.”

"To how many generations of miserable exploited people has the Church preached resignation, acceptance of one’s lot, surrender, and submission?”

“We have all seen so many of those men and women who have never grown up because they have been repressed by a religious upbringing, and have been trained since infancy in systemic renunciation.”

“How many mediocre personalities are there in our churches – people who have not the courage to live full lives, to assert themselves and make the most of themselves, and who look upon this stifling of themselves as a Christian virtue, whereas faith ought to create powerful personalities?

He sees the necessity for self-actualization and self-fulfillment to come *before renunciation - first you need a healthy sense of self and self-assertion.

First you need a place. He says,

"It is readily understandable that to be denied a place is to suffer a serious moral trauma. It is a sort of denial of one’s humanity.”

Without this sense of place, the church’s language of renunciation, to “deny oneself,” becomes painful and confusing.

It is to this person that the church says, “Give yourself to the service of others, for in the service of others you will find yourself.”

Tournier responds in a resounding, “No!” for he understands that since the client “has not been loved, or not loved well, he can neither love nor believe in and accept love.”

Tournier notes, the type of person it was who God “called” in Scripture; ones with a well-formed sense of place.

Abraham was well-established in Ur of the Chaldees when God called him. Moses was asked to leave Midian, where he was tending his father-in-law’s flocks. Jesus called Simon and Andrew to leave their well-established fishing profession etc etc all well-situated in society.

So Tournier sees the necessity for self-actualization and self-fulfillment to come before renunciation, and the former movement can only occur when children experience attachment in their family of origin – when they have a sense of place within their family.




                         

Of course, for a few decades Christianity in fundamentalist Churches become conflated with Americanism and middle class values, and these can be dangerous idols, however family, community, stable wealth, and decent work are universal goods, the only good Ecclesiastes even acknowledged.

Thus, despite heroic theological acrobatics, I cannot square traditional Christianity with any sense of human flourishing. An invisible problem , surely, until the industrial revolution and gone wild in our technological society, and still taken for granted by many of the older generation.

I think the Church needs to rethink it.

Short Story on Loneliness: Food that Perishes

    

"Philosophy which does not nourish" - old drawing I did, various philosophers being consumed, Sartre, Russell, Spinoza etc"

Recently I heard a sermon by a Priest, he said many were counting on a relationship to save them, and this was idolatry. Indeed it is. I've seen it many times, expecting a partner to give you happiness. At the same time, I imagine some may hear this differently, especially the young.

Solitude is different,but loneliness can, in fact, kill.

I’d argue what we call loneliness  today is several different clusters of negative emotions, and several different types of loneliness all converging, and that it’s brand new. We all know loneliness is  twice as harmful as obesity, worse than smoking, chronic loneliness alters the brain, decreases cognitive functioning to the point of qualifying as a traumatic brain injury. Also, one can check, the Church has no sermons on loneliness before the 1800’s; in fact “loneliness” simply meant being alone, with no emotional longing. “A Biography of Loneliness” by Fay Bound Alberti goes into this.

Two good articles on this:

https://stephanjoppich.com/can-loneliness-kill-you/

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/BF01278458.pdf


In any case, I awoke with the following short story in mind:

                                             The Food That Perishes

He pushed wide the heavy Church doors and ducked into the darkness. Candle lit faces crowded the pews. He hesitated. It had been years. He crammed himself into a corner, standing in the back. It was packed. Thick pungent incense rolled through the beams of light streaming from high windows. How much did incense cost? Didn’t the Bible say something about incense being food for God? Moses burnt piles of meat so that the smoke rose up to the heavens, didn't he? His stomach rumbled. Days without food. The acid ate through his gut. A sharp pain, like a blaring alarm he couldn't turn off, it threw his entire nervous system into a panic. He clutched his stomach and grimaced.

The priest glided out in shining robe, a baby faced innocent smile, and immediately launched into his sermon. Bit of a belly there, eh father, he thought, guess the Church weren’t too strict with fasting these days.

“Brothers and sisters,” he intoned, a sea of ill, green faces, stretched tight across yearning skulls, they too, he knew, were starving, and had been for going on 27 years now, “there are those of you who have set their hearts on a full belly, the problem with this, my brothers, is that when it doesn’t happen, you become disappointed, disgruntled.”

His stomach rumbled fierce at the mention of food, he scarcely heard the Priest, his attention strained through the pain to hear, oh, but I am desperate for an answer to this terrible god in his belly... this hunger will never end!

“It is idolatry,” the Priest continued, “you set your hearts on the things of this world, yet we are aliens in this land, passing through, rather hunger for righteousness, man does not live by bread alone, but here, right here brothers and sisters, is the food which does not perish, that forever satisfies, that confers not just life, but eternal life!”

The Priest had worked himself up into something like a frenzy and his eyes glowed with some bright vision,

“Christ is that bread! He will satisfy you! Yes, Christ did not promise a nice house with steak for dinner, caviar for desert, he promised a cross! But he’s here, waiting, right here.

You don't need food to survive. You don’t. Did you know that ? St Seraphim survived four months, kneeling in prayer, without food. It is God, not food, that provides true satiation. You make food an idol when you place it above the Lord. It’s a kind of adultery, cheating on God Himself.”

The Priest paused to collect himself.

The practitioners eyes were glazed from malnutrition, stomachs grumbled, a few sighs, someone groaned in pain.

“It wont be easy. Yes, you will still awake with pangs of hunger, your children will go to bed with tears not hear eyes, you may starve until, indeed, your body gives out, and death overtakes you - but Christ is their! He is there in your pain, in your terrible hunger, even as you starve to death, He will not abandon you.”

His intestines seized up, like a wild animal clawing through his lower gut, he stumbled out of the Church into the bright light, squatted down on the stairs. He rubbed his belly to soothe the spasms ripping apart his abdomen.

Just then a crow landed not far from where he sat. It hopped over. It’s head turning to get a better look.

He thought of reaching out and grabbing the bird, a quick meal, but the pain paralyzed him. It hopped closer.

“I’ve nothing for you friend.”

It cawed and did a little dance.

The man let out a groan, “Do you not find it odd, little friend, that no one in the Bible asked the Lord to be cured of their anger, no woman stumbled up to Him to remedy her vanity, no man concerned with their gluttony or pride.”

“Caw!”

“No, they demanded their daughters be saved from death, their paralysis be healed, they demanded baskets of bread and fish….loneliness, they say, is today’s leprosy, but Christ restored them to health…He didn’t simply keep them company! The nervous symptoms cares little for spirit, it cries out for warmth and flesh!"

The man shook his head.

“Well, friend, at least you’ll listen to me.”

The crow hopped around to the mans battered show, packing at its rubber. In its feathers an ant crawled. The man slowly reached out and picked it off. He crushed it between his fingers and sucked the tiny body into his mouth.

His stomach was settling. The illusion of sustenance, sometimes that’s all it took. Perhaps.

A Christian Theurgy? Ritual deification in Orthodox Christianity and Neoplatonism

  

                          

Recently a paper of mine was published, I have uploaded it on academia HERE and reproduced it below with very cool art work. Enjoy.

                                     Liturgical mysticism: a Christian Theurgy?

                       Ritual deification in Orthodox Christianity and Neoplatonism

                                                                 by
                                 

                                                  Jonathan McCormack


"Man is not satisfied with solutions beneath the level of divinization."

- Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, 1



      One usually thinks of ritual as antithetical to mysticism, yet in Neoplatonism we find the ritual practice of theurgy, or “god-work,” enacted to achieve henosis, union with the divine. As Pierre Hadot has pointed out, rather than intellectual analysis, philosophy for the ancients was a way of life, complete with chanting, prayers, and ascetic practice. It’s no secret Christianity has become an anemic, dying wraith in the West; yet in Orthodox Christianity, there still lives the idea of theosis, or divination, as the goal of the Christian life. Indeed Orthodox Christian liturgy today may be described as a Christian theurgy, perfectly in tune with the deepest of  mysticisms.

For some, the theurgical strain within Neoplatonism begins in Plato’s Symposium. There Socrates relates how the Priestess Diotima staved off a plague by means of sacrifice. Already in place we find a hidden mystical tradition in the initiations of Eleusis. In the fifth century CE, Proclus explains that these initiations do not grant knowledge, but a change of mind. He writes:

“Initiations bring about a sympathy (sympatheia) of souls with the ritual actions in such a way that is incomprehensible to us yet divine, so that some of those initiated are stricken with fear, being filled with divine awe; others assimilate themselves to the holy symbols and, having left their own identity, become completely established in the gods and experience divine possession. 2

Theurgy would eventually come into its full power under the Neoplatonist Iamblichus, born around 245 AD. That was not its beginning however, as Gregory Shaw says,

"Within this esoteric tradition, theurgy was neither an innovation nor a degradation; it was Iamblichus’ attempt to protect the integrity of genuine mystagogy.” 3

Iamblicus himself claimed he was merely following Plato. This may come as a surprise since scholarship until recently tended to ignore the more embodied aspects of philosophy, but as Paul Tyson shows, for the ancients philosophy wasn’t about thinking, which can bring no real truth:

“….right action and right feeling in an actual lived life are clearly a more significant measure of philosophical validity to Plato than smart thinking. Merely intellectually “believing” in the transcendent existence of the form of “The Table” does not make you either a philosopher or a Platonist.

Plato refuses to put his philosophy in clear propositions before us for the very specific reason that he mistrusts written statements as being “dead” propositional substitutes for the communal and individual spiritual practices of the truly philosophical life.

Other than as an active, affective, aesthetic, and embodied existential stance… such spiritual formation cannot be imposed by mere argumentative force and cannot be 'obtained' with a mere proof.

Thus receptive prayer, quiet attention, and right worship are keys to truth and success in the active pursuit of meaningful knowledge.” 4

For Iamblicus the Greek intellectuals had translated traditional mystagogy into sophisticated philosophical concepts, but no longer had the power to transform. For Iamblicus, the gods had to be approached through a specific place in the material world. Sacrifices were not simply ‘sent heavenwards’ but also drew the divinities downwards, specifically by actions and symbols that might invoke those resonances and sympathies which hold the cosmos together. Mysticism for Iamblicus was entirely liturgical.

                                                       

People have criticized such Pagan practices as low magic, however Iamblichus is insistent that theurgic rites are never intended to change the minds of the gods, rather they bring the practitioner into the divine presence. Why ritual? Because it allows us to resonate with the divine. Iamblicus says,

"…by the practice of supplication we are gradually raised to the level of the object of our supplication and we gain likeness to it by virtue of our constant consorting with it.” 5

Prayer and invocation enacted such bodily and spiritual dispositions to receive more fully the divine flow of grace by way of attunement. The gods need nothing from us, Iamblicus says, therefore it is not about service, as many prior Greek and Roman rituals were. He tells us that,

“…earthly things, possessing their being in virtue of the pleroma of the gods, whenever they come to be ready for participation in the divine, straightway find the gods pre-existing in it prior to their own proper essence.”6

Thus it is not to influence God, but rather to attune ourselves to a greater receptivity of the divine. This involved purification. Although not a terribly sexy subject, ascetic renunciations of the passions, as for Christians, were utterly essential for the Neoplatonists. They followed a triad path of purgation, illumination, and finally union, similar to Christian asceticism. Although it’s true that Iamblicaus with his embracing of matter as a means to the divine is often opposed to Plotinus and his more “disembodied” platonism that attempted to escape the world, David Litwa reminds us,

"For Plotinus, godhood is attained by moral and physical purification, which he conceives of as the removal of everything alien to us. He uses the image of a sculptor who continually chisels off pieces of marble in order to reveal the lovely face of a cult statue within. ” 7

Let’s not forget, also, Porphyry’s attestation to a number of occasions when Plotinus engaged with ritual practices during his daily life, including the famous ‘Séance at the Isium’, when his guardian daimôn was called into visible appearance, only for Plotinus to discover it to be a god.

Prayer too is vital for the ascent of the soul. Proclus tells us,

"It is through prayer that the ascent is brought to completion and it is with prayer that the crown of virtue is attained, namely piety towards the gods…" 8

We become what we worship, and for Christians it is found in Christ Himself, the coinciding resonance of God, binding the temporal to the eternal, man to God, earth to heaven, and the material to the spiritual. 

                                                              

To Western ears, the idea of Christian deification may sound blasphemous, yet it was the common language used in early Christianity. In Eastern Orthodox Christianity it survives still. In St. Dionysius’ own words, he defines theosis as, “Now the assimilation to, and union with, God, as far as attainable, is deification.”

We read the Word became flesh to make us “partakers of the divine nature”(2 Pet 1:4), “He became human that we might become divine” says Athanasius.9 The ancient pagans and Egyptians are ripe with stories of mortals and kings becoming divine. Plato himself was referred to as a god by many Neoplatonists.

The Christian seeks to become one with God, not by discarding his humanity, but by grafting himself onto Christ. Second Temple Jewish literature has many prophets, from Moses to Enoch, becoming winged divine beings, and there are even icons of St John the Baptist with wings. Man is to take over the place of the angels, ruling alongside God in His Divine Council. It is our end and telos to become gods in the very image and form of the dying and risen God Jesus Christ.

Like the Neoplatonists, it is the chanting of scripture and songs of praise that pattern our the Christian soul harmonizing man's being to that of Christ. This is the purpose of fasting, prostrations, and asceticism. St Dionysius tells us that persons have union with God and participate in His likeness “in proportion to their aptitude for deification.” 10

For the Christian, it is from Scripture and historical memory that symbols are taken. For the Neoplatonist, it is objects from nature, the Cosmos as a whole being a divine theophany. Which symbols are more life-giving? Which preserve form most fully? A Christian might point out that St Dionysius, as kind of "Christian Iamblichus" succeeded where Iamblichus himself had failed--in building a theurgic society.

Augustine in The City of God X 9-10 did indeed criticize theurgic practices as mere black magic, however he did so simplistically, and many have pointed out the theurgic strains in his own theology. Gregory Shaw is surely correct when he says,

"Unless we choose to dismiss the role of experience in the rites of the Church, we must follow Dionysius in seeing the liturgy as theurgy, a rite that affects a cognitive, perceptual, and ontological shift so profound in receptive participants that it culminates in theosis , the deification of the soul. For both Iamblichus and Dionysius this deification was effected in rites that united the "fallen" soul with divine activities (ta theia energeia).”

St. Thomas Aquinas describes sacrifice as the act of returning the creature back to its first principle, God, celebrated in the Sacrifice of Praise and the Eucharist. Likewise for Iamblicus the creatures of the material universe are referred back to their divine archetypes during ritual. Iamblicus says,

"The deeds themselves make plain what we hold to be the salvation of the soul: in beholding blessed spectacles the soul acquires another life and operates by another energeia, regarding itself as no longer even human, and rightly so; often indeed, when it has put aside its own life it receives in exchange the most blessed energeia of the gods.” 12

This is not biological life, Bios, but Zoe, a greek term that means the “God-kind of life.” For Christians Christ came to give Zoe spiritual life. "I am come that they might have life (Zoe), and that they might have it more abundantly" (John 10:10). The Christian is not called to change his morality but his being. Literally, like a force, like electricity, we must be remade to exist in a way that continuously receives love (Zoe, spiritual life) that then flows out to others. The Trinity exists this way, an economy of self-giving and receiving, and in Christ's resurrection our human nature that he took on will be grafted onto that circular movement of love we call God.

For the Neoplatonists the philosopher’s task was not to demonstrate that the gods exist, but to recover this knowledge as an active principle, entering into the union with the gods. Iamblicus says,

“That which is divine and intellectual and one in us . . . is then actively aroused in prayers, and when it is aroused it seeks vehemently that which is like itself . . . The gods do not receive prayers through powers or organs, but embrace in themselves the energeiai of pious utterances, especially such utterances as have been established and unified with the gods through sacred rites.” 13

For many Neoplatonists the person in theurgic union with the divine might be considered as a mere receptacle of the god, and so lose their humanity in a sense, at least temporarily. For Christians deification is actually the assumption of our true humanity, as exemplified in Christ. Still, Neoplatonic theory does have some comparisons to the Christian notion of the Incarnation. Gregory Shaw may be exaggerating the similarities, but there are some correspondences, he says,

“The theurgist remains human yet takes the shape of the gods. The language of Chalcedon is remarkably similar. Christ is described as possessing two natures, divine and human, that remain unmixed despite their “union” in the person of Christ. The theurgist also possesses two natures, divine and human, that remain distinct while being embodied by the theurgist.” 14

                                                        

Both Christianity and Neoplatonism also share a concern with desire. The Christian liturgy, for example, is meant to shape our desire. Our hearts must be educated, both toward what to love and then how best to love it. A person must learn to want a relationship with God. The Christian story is one great love affair. Just so, Gregory Shaw reminds us,

"….for the ancient mystagogues, it is eros—the soul’s primal desire—that deifies us.” 15

Plato writes about the erotic madness that affects the soul’s assent and deification, and Plotinus tells us that all living things, even plants and animals, are carried by their desire for the One.

“Contact with divinity is an erotic, not an intellectual, experience”, Shaw says. 16 As Iamblichus put it, “the Intelligible appears to the mind not as knowable but as desirable.” 17 This erotic presence, Iamblichus said, is “more ancient than our nature” and is awakened in theurgic ritual and prayer. 18 Iamblichus refers to this more ancient principle of the soul in principle of the soul.

A close study will reveal even more similarities. Christians are often criticized for emphasizing their own weakness. In 2 Corinthians 12:9 we read Paul saying:

But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.

However, many forget it is only in comparison to God, not other men, that Christians affirm their nothingness. Something like this Christian humility, this emptying of self so that Christ may make His home in the Christian heart, can also be found even in Plato, for whom, in erotic terms, the soul is always poor, ugly, indelicate, homeless, lying on the dirt without a bed. In Plato’s Symposium 203d we find Diotima’s description of Eros, from his mother’s side, portraying the poverty of the human soul. Scholars have noted that it is also a description of the historical Socrates:

“In the first place, he is always poor, and he’s far from being delicate and beautiful (as ordinary people think he is); instead, he is tough and shriveled and shoeless and homeless, always sleeping on the dirt without a bed, sleeping at people’s doorsteps and in roadsides under the sky, having his mother’s nature, always living with Need.” 19

"In plain terms,” says Shaw, “for the gods to become human, the theurgist must remain human, and this means recognizing our weaknesses, our insignificance, our utter nothingness.” 20 Indeed for Iamblicus it is precisely the recognition of our impurity and weakness that allows the gods to become present. He says:

“The awareness of our own nothingness when we compare ourselves to the gods, makes us turn spontaneously to prayer. And from our supplication, in a short time we are led up to that one to whom we pray, and from our continual intercourse we obtain a likeness to it, and from imperfection we are gradually embraced by divine perfection.” 21

                                                         

Still, one of the most puzzling things for modern people is the very act of ritual itself. The rest of this essay will address the justification of ritual in the soul's spiritual assent to God.

“We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into it.”

-William Butler Yeats 22

The average Orthodox Christian is most likely ignorant of their own theology. We might ask though, is that a problem? And if so, why? Protestantism has so engulfed the modern imagination that people today cannot imagine a Christianity before the reformation, nor the life practiced in a modern Orthodox Church. Whereas traditional Catholicism found salvation in participating in the sacraments, Protestants would invent a new category of religion based on beliefs, not transformative participatory knowledge, but simple information and assenting to propositions about God.

By the 1700s “Creedal orthodoxy” in the West replaced a living community of social practices. Christianity became a system of beliefs and moral behaviors. This was also compounded by the change from transformative knowledge (being formed into a certain way of being by liturgical attunement) to informative knowledge with the coming of the Gutenberg Press and mass literacy.

Instead of faith being a mode of perception, it became about concepts not resonance, information over initiation. Early Christianity was not primarily about doctrines or dogma, but ritual. You shared a meal with your God, there was a communion, a give and take, perhaps even an exchange of life - your life exchanged for the living Spirit of Christ.

However, Christ did not come to give doctrines, but His body, the Church, and the Orthodox live a faith wherein they are enfolded into His divine body, practicing asceticism in order to receive and share in His Divine life (Zoe).

Modern anthropologists, such as Cathrine Bell, have characterized ritual activities as aiming at generating a socialized agent within a “ritualized body,” which is to say that participation in ritual tends to structure one’s senses, including one’s very “sense of reality.” 23 She says,

"On this understanding, ritual metaphysics is a matter not (or not just) of giving participants a mental image of a larger world, but of giving them the experience of participating in the very patterns and forces of the cosmos. 24 For example, she writes,

“Hence, required kneeling does not merely communicate subordination to the kneeler. For all intents and purposes, kneeling produces a subordinated kneeler in and through the act itself.” 25

                                                

Liturgical living is, in fact, not optional. Secular ritual shapes us as surely as any religious ritual. As the anthropologist Talal Asad reminds us, intentional “unbelief” may be just as much the result of “untaught bodies” as it is of untaught (rational) intentionality.

For the Anthropologist Roy Rappaport ritual does not merely identify that which is sacred—it creates the sacred. 26 The sanctifying ritual of holy water, he says, collectively alters the participants’ cognitive schema of water itself, rendering them with a template for differentiating holy water from profane water.

Modern Christianity has been fractured and practice, theology, and poetry broken into separate pieces. Such wholeness can still be found though. The Catholic theologian David W Fagerberg writes of this living wholeness,

“Faith is not mere assent to a doctrine, it is a living relationship to certain events, events that can only be understood (theology) by participating in those mysteries (liturgy). Asceticism is the capacitation for this liturgical state; theology is union with God.” 27

This conception is not absent from the Ancients, David Bradshaw notes that in Platonic theology,

"Faith is in fact the highest member of the so-called Chaldaean triad of love truth, and faith. Just as love joins us to the divine qua beautiful, and truth to the divine qua wisdom, so faith joins us to the divine qua good….

One – and thereby sharing in the divine energeia – is in Proclus no longer conceived as a magical or theurgical rite, save in a very broad sense, but as reaching out to God in love and silent trust. The resemblance on this point between Proclus and Christianity can hardly fail to be noticed.” 28

The Christian liturgical scholar Paul Holmer writes,

“What we know depends upon the kind of person we have made ourselves to be.” 29

Fagerberg adds, “Conversion consists of becoming a new person, learning new passions and training our wants, being re-capacitated, being re-capitulated as we are en-thralled to a new head. There are things that can only be known by becoming a new kind of person.” 30

Thus to be taught how to love is not a matter of being taught certain theories or theological positions, rather Christ through the Church teaches by making His followers into a loving people.There are differences of course. For the Christian liturgy is usually done in a community, whereas Pagan theurgy can be practiced by the individual. It is the community of individuals in relation that properly make Christian persons, and provide the arena to practice the virtues of love.

Many modern people tend to see mere empty ceremonies in the liturgy. It is the individual, they think, who experiences the mystic. This is a false dichotomy. Church liturgy is indeed corporate and symbolic, but it is the individual who experiences the effects, hence liturgical mysticism is personal and spiritualized.

Liturgical mysticism is personal as the mystery of Trinitarian love is produced in an individual person’s soul, but the soul of a liturgical person receives personhood from the corporate, sacramental body which acts upon him or her. The outer liturgy becomes one with the inner liturgy of the heart.

Just as in Platonism, one must ascetically prepare to rightly receive the experience offered by the liturgy. Without asceticism, the world tends to captivate the passions, arousing gluttony and anger, and vainglory. With asceticism, we learn to receive the world as sacrament. Our perceptions always require a prior aesthetic education to receive truth in beauty. Love is necessary first, for love is that essential "mood" capable of receiving Truth once beauty awakens the desire to know it. Only then will the world arouse praise, gratitude, and worship.

Beliefs in fact arise from ritual practices. To become certain of the resurrection, for example, requires more than a movement of the mind. It requires a movement of the heart. Pascal points out that path to belief: “Endeavour, then, to convince yourself, not by increase of proofs of God, but by the abatement of your passions.”31

Fagerberg puts it this way,

“Ascetical mysticism plays liturgical theology in an erotic key by stirring a thirst for truth, beauty, and goodness in a transformed mind that can only be slaked when man’s eros has been purified and straightened in its trajectory.” 32

Divo Barsotti makes a similar point when he writes, “In theology Christianity finds its doctrine, but in liturgical cult Christianity finds its very self. The Church could never be equated with her theology, but she may be equated with her liturgy, because in cult she finds her doctrine and her life, all her doctrine and all her life.” 33

The proper discourse of God is praise, poetry, and song; otherwise we try to cram God into dead concepts. It is by participating in the rhythms of ritual that we order our hearts to receive God. This is the old Christian formula: Right praise = right knowing. Liturgy trains us to see the Truth of God, it forms us into the type of people who can perceive the signs of transcendence all around us.

Hence Iamblichus will say,

“…the invocation makes the intelligence of men fit to  participate in the Gods, elevates it to the Gods, and harmonizes it with them through orderly persuasion.” 34

Later he explains,

“…it is the perfect accomplishment of ineffable acts, religiously performed and beyond all understanding, and it is the power of ineffable symbols comprehended by the Gods alone, that establishes theurgical union. . . . In fact, these very symbols, by themselves, perform their own work, without our thinking. . . .” 35

                                                       

Conclusion

For both Christians and Neoplatonists, human beings are first and foremost lovers. You become what you love, not what you think. Practice, not belief, is primary - our doings precede our thinking.

Thus, God must be sung to be known. It is our practices that liturgically shape disciples into a certain type of people. There are things that only certain types of people can know. For Orthodox Christians and Neoplatonic theurgists, “religion” is about initiation, not information. Religion is a habitus, a disposition of the soul to be in the world a certain way. For both Christians and Pagans, the grammar of God is spoken in communal performance of song, praise, and thanksgiving.

Our present cultural liturgies shape our perception to occlude the presence of wonder and the Divine. This type of knowing requires the preparation of our hearts. Rituals do not express belief, they shape how we know and the liturgy is to form us into the types of people who desire to know God, and then are capable of receiving His spirit. In this sense, I think we can say Orthodox liturgy is indeed a kind of Christian theurgy.

The major difference between Pagan henosis and Orthodox Christian theosis, however, is the person of Jesus Christ. It is in the shape of this God, union with the Triune God, who sacrificed Himself, who became poor and wretched, who became man that we may become god, whose being we are to assume. The difference Christ makes is the very difference of a new Cosmos.


                                            

Footnotes




1) Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Address to Catechists and Religion Teachers (December 12, 2000), II.3,




2) LIVING LIGHT: DIVINE EMBODIMENT IN WESTERN PHILOSOPHY by GREGORY SHAW




3) ibid




4) Paul Tyson. “Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for Our Times” pg 130




5) Iamblicus, On the Mysteries, (I. 15 pp. 58-61).Emma C. Clarke, Society of Biblical Literature (November 1, 2003)




6) ibid, (I.8. pp. 36-7)




7) M. David Litwa. Becoming Divine: An Introduction to Deification in Western Culture, pg 108

Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2013.




8) Proclus, '𝘖𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘗𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘭𝘺 𝘈𝘳𝘵' [𝘋𝘦 𝘚𝘢𝘤𝘳𝘪𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘰 𝘦𝘵 𝘮𝘢𝘨𝘪𝘢] 148.1-18, trans. Copenhaver, 1988, p.103.




9)Athanasius On the Incarnation 54.




10) Dionysius the Areopagite, Works (1899) vol. 2. p.67-162. The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy




11) Neoplatonic Theurgy and Dionysius the Areopagite (Journal of Early Christian Studies, Winter, 1999)Gregory Shaw




12) ibid (i.12.41).




13) (i.15.46–47) DeMysteriis




14) Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, 57, cf. 53-57.




15) LIVING LIGHT: DIVINE EMBODIMENT IN WESTERN PHILOSOPHYGregory Shaw




16) ibid




17 ) Cited by Damascius, Traité des Premiers Principes II, text and translation by L.G.




18), Dm 270.9, and “the one in us”, Dm 46.13.




19 Plato, Symposium, translated with introduction and notes by A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1989).




20) DIVINE EMBODIMENT IN WESTERN PHILOSOPHy by Gregory Shaw




21) Myst. 47.13-48.4


22) Yeats, Memoirs, 1972, p.195-96


23) Bell, C. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. (1992:80, 221)


24) ibid (1992:160 n.206)

25) ibid 100-101.


26) Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. By Roy A. Rappaport. Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology


27) Liturgical mysticism by  David W. Fagerberg, pg 108 Emmaus Academic (December 27, 2019)

28) pg 152 Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom Cambridge University Press; 1st edition (March 26, 2007)

29 Paul Holmer, C. S. Lewis: His Life and His Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 90.

30, Liturgical mysticism by David W. Fagerberg, pg 208 Emmaus Academic (December 27, 2019)

31) Blaise Pascal, Pensees tr. by WE. Trotter (Mineola, NY: Dove Philosophical Classics, 2003), #233, pp. 65-69.

32) David Fagerberg Provisions for the Journey February 4, 2020, St Paul Center for Biblical Theology


33) Divo Barsotti, Il mistero Cristiano nell’anno liturgico (1951; Cinisello Balsamo, Italy: San Paolo Edizioni, 2006); in English as The Christian Mystery in the Liturgical Year


34) (DM 42.9-15)


35) (DM 96.17-97.6)