{"id":16846,"date":"2016-08-16T19:23:16","date_gmt":"2016-08-16T23:23:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/?p=16846"},"modified":"2016-11-21T16:48:45","modified_gmt":"2016-11-21T21:48:45","slug":"reflections-god-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/2016\/08\/16\/reflections-god-man\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections on God and Man"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jesus said to them, \u2018Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am\u2019<\/em>. Jesus\u2019 words\u00a0here are a revelation of His transcendence as God. But they are also<\/em> a revelation of His\u00a0transcendence as man<\/em>. They are in fact a revelation of a single<\/em> transcendence: they open\u00a0to us the Son of the Father in Whose Incarnation every man is conceived and sheltered\u00a0and called to share. Jesus is the one God, but He is also -\u00ad or rather, He is therefore<\/em> -\u00ad the\u00a0one Man.<\/p>\n

For if a man can be God, that man will not just be a special<\/em> man, but in fact will be the\u00a0only<\/em> man. For what is<\/em> man? Man is the image and likeness of the Eternal Son. Man is the\u00a0creature who, in the Son, receives himself<\/em> from the Father as the Father\u2019s self-\u00adexpression<\/em>.\u00a0In the man who is<\/em> God, therefore, all that man is, the whole that he receives and\u00a0expresses, will be perfectly realized, for the Father\u2019s self\u00adexpression as man will, in Him,\u00a0be at one with His self\u00adexpression as Son. The man who is God will be the only man,\u00a0because in truth man is man only when he is, or is in, the Son of God.<\/p>\n

To think otherwise is already and inescapably to move in the direction of atheism. It\u00a0commits us to trying to think of man as something other than the one who receives\u00a0himself from the Father<\/em> as an expression of the Father<\/em>; it is therefore to try to think man\u00a0without<\/em> God, man on his own terms<\/em>, free-\u00adstanding, intelligible in himself. Philosophy,\u00a0and human ingenuity in general, have not fared well in trying to think man in this way,\u00a0because no such man in fact exists. And just as no such man exists, so the god\u00a0corresponding to him fails to exist. Hence on this path we tend inevitably towards\u00a0atheism, even if we do so in the form of religion, endeavouring to put God back into the\u00a0picture as the one with whom man, intelligible in himself, has nonetheless to come to\u00a0terms. For the one whom we would then call<\/em> God, the one who confronts an already\u00a0intelligible man, would not be God<\/em> \u00ad- for God cannot be alongside<\/em> or supplementary<\/em> to\u00a0anything, He cannot be a further<\/em> reality or meaning in addition to what is already real and\u00a0meaningful. If we try to think of Him like that, then He has already ceased to be God and\u00a0has become instead an idol -\u00ad a local divinity<\/em>, decorating whatever conception of ourselves\u00a0we are already committed to. This is to disbelieve in God, even in the act of affirming Him.\u00a0Such an affirmation accomplishes a precise inversion of the truth: it means we think of\u00a0God as receiving Himself from us<\/em> and as an expression of ourselves<\/em>. And this amounts to\u00a0saying that God can be God only when He is man.<\/p>\n

It is this idolatry which seems to underlie the words of those who challenge Jesus in St\u00a0John\u2019s Gospel. They already know who they are -\u00ad they are sons of Abraham -\u00ad and their\u00a0whole world is embedded in this un\u00adinterrogated conception of themselves. God, for\u00a0them, appears only as the one who ratifies who they already are. And this means that they\u00a0are not of God<\/em>, as Jesus tells them; rather, God is of them<\/em>\u00a0-\u00ad the transcendental validation\u00a0of their already accomplished identity. This is not God, however, but an idol. Of God,\u00a0Jesus tells them, you say that He is [yours]. But you have not known Him<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Nor have they known even themselves, precisely because they think they do. Jesus tells\u00a0them that [your] father Abraham rejoiced that he was to see my day; he saw it and was\u00a0glad.<\/em> Abraham, of whom they claim themselves to be sons, knew himself only in the\u00a0Incarnate Son to come, knew himself as a man only in the one man, the only man, apart\u00a0from Whom no man is even a man. Abraham, if they were truly his sons, would show\u00a0them the One in Whom alone they could know themselves, the very One Whom they\u00a0reject.<\/p>\n

For man is man only when he is, or is in, God\u2019s Son<\/em>. But there is a way of thinking -\u00ad in\u00a0fact, in the confrontation with modernity, often a Christian<\/em> way of thinking -\u00ad that can be\u00a0scandalized by this truth. We can perhaps hear the same scandal in St John\u2019s Gospel. Now\u00a0we know that you have a demon<\/em>, they tell Jesus. Abraham died, as did the prophets, and\u00a0you say \u2018if anyone keeps my words he will never see death\u2019. Are you greater than our\u00a0father Abraham, who died? And the prophets died! Who do you claim to be?<\/em> In that final\u00a0question, we can hear the vulgarity of a threatened elite: who do you think you are?<\/em> But\u00a0what are they reacting against<\/em>? It is perhaps the disclosure, or the claim, that God and\u00a0man can be newly intimate. Abraham and the prophets mediated<\/em> God to man, but they\u00a0also kept God at a distance<\/em>\u00a0-\u00ad a reassuring<\/em> distance, perhaps, even a necessary<\/em> one, if a\u00a0certain hierarchical pattern of life and the power structures that sustain it are to be\u00a0maintained. Moreover there seems to be something significant in the insistence that\u00a0Abraham and the prophets are all dead<\/em>. The death even of the mediators means that all\u00a0mediation is now remote, in essence irretrievable, and can only be remembered and\u00a0handed on traditionally<\/em>, rather than experienced anew here and now. Being in this way\u00a0mere clients or subjects of an originating past also enforces distance, together with the\u00a0traditionalism, and the management of it by its elite custodians, which dependence upon\u00a0distant origins renders indispensable.<\/p>\n

Can we generalize this perspective? Suppose someone were to insist that man is man and\u00a0God is God<\/em>, and that everything depends upon maintaining a definitive separation\u00a0between them. The decline of the West, he might argue, stems from forgetting this\u00a0separation, indeed in trying to surpass it. The erasure of hierarchy, the decay of authority,\u00a0the dissipation of social and moral order in an escalating anarchy of individual freedom\u00a0and self expression, not to mention the sentimentalization of Christianity, some speak\u00a0even of its feminization<\/em>, as the price of its ability to survive at all \u00ad- in short, the loss of a\u00a0<\/em>sense of the transcendence of God and of how that transcendence is reflected in culture,\u00a0the extinction of worship as the fundamental religious disposition and of deference as its\u00a0social embodiment: all of this<\/em>, someone might claim, stems from the diabolical liberation\u00a0of man\u2019s aspiration to be God. Man has sought to confiscate Divine prerogatives, and until\u00a0we reconcile ourselves to the peaceful and pious inhabitation of the place assigned to us in\u00a0the cosmic hierarchy, the catastrophe all around us will continue to unfold. As the\u00a0culmination of this narrative, we might be told not so much of the idolatry of God but of\u00a0the idolatry of man<\/em>, and that everything depends upon the truth that man cannot become\u00a0God<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Which is true: man cannot confiscate what belongs to the Divine. But the answer to this\u00a0attempted confiscation is not to insist on absolute separation -\u00ad at least, this isn\u2019t the\u00a0Christian answer, not if it insists only<\/em> upon separation. For the separation upon which\u00a0Christianity<\/em> insists is the condition of possibility for an unprecedented, in fact strictly\u00a0inconceivable, intimacy<\/em>. Man cannot confiscate God, but God has always already\u00a0confiscated man<\/em>: for man receives himself from God as God\u2019s self expression, and beyond\u00a0this man has no reality or meaning whatsoever. This is the truth disclosed in the\u00a0Incarnation, in the man who is God, whom we must call the only man<\/em>, not because He\u00a0attests to a proper separation<\/em> of man from God, but on the contrary because of the union\u00a0in Him by which the separation has been, inconceivably, traversed. The man Jesus \u00ad- the\u00a0only man \u00ad is the One in Whom man and God manifest themselves simultaneously and\u00a0indivisibly. Truly, truly, I say to you; before Abraham was, I am<\/em>. In these words, Christ\u00a0speaks to men not only as God, but He speaks to them also as a man \u00ad or rather, as the<\/em>\u00a0man -\u00ad Ecce Homo<\/em> -\u00ad in Whom alone men can become what they are.<\/p>\n

If, on the other hand, separation, not union, is our last word, then we merely end up\u00a0varying the idolatry from which we were in flight. For absolute separation is unliveable,\u00a0and every worldview which insists exclusively on the transcendence of God in practice\u00a0depends upon a dense and intricate apparatus of mediation, deploying cultural and\u00a0political structures which, it is claimed, reflect<\/em> and secure<\/em> the transcendent origin. But no\u00a0cultural and political structure can adequately embody Divine transcendence, and so\u00a0every structure that claims to do so plays out in fact as ideology, and ideology is just\u00a0another idolatry. Only the Incarnate Son, crucified and risen, embodies the mystery of\u00a0God in the mystery of man, in an unlimited and therefore uncontainable way which\u00a0surpasses every attempt we might make to translate it, not excluding even the Church\u00a0which is His Body. Neither medieval docility towards cosmic hierarchy, nor\u00a0Enlightenment repudiation of it, answers to the truth of the Incarnation. Only the imitatio\u00a0Christi<\/em>, discipleship in the way of the Cross, can do that, in which we become men in the\u00a0One Man, sons in the Son.<\/p>\n

By Fr Philip Cleevely, Cong. Orat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jesus said to them, \u2018Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am\u2019. Jesus\u2019 words\u00a0here are a revelation of His transcendence as God. But they are also a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16869,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[66],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/Michelangelo-Cropped.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8brX6-4nI","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16846"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16846"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16846\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16847,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16846\/revisions\/16847"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}