Pope Francis’ letter on child sex abuse

1732 words, 9 min read

I wasn’t planning to write anything about the subject of child sex abuse, whether perpetrated by priests or others, since it is such a shocking and incomprehensible atrocity to my mind. Even in this post I will not reflect on the subject itself (out of a sense of self-preservation and an insurmountable repulsion), but only on Pope Francis’ letter from last week that he wrote “to the People of God” after the report of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury was published about over 1000 cases of child sex abuse perpetrated by over 300 predator Catholic priests and covered up by numerous bishops.

Pope Francis’ letter was published three days after the Grand Jury report and I read it immediately and in a hurry. My immediate sense was one of mixed feelings. In isolation it made sense, but given how long this scandal has been publicly known, it left me feeling like it fell short of what was needed today. It also lacked any mention of bishops or any specifics about what will be done to bring about justice and healing.

Over the following days I then read a host of very negative reactions to the letter, which, from memory didn’t match with my impression from a brief reading of the text. In addition to what were issues for me, many commentators also criticised Pope Francis’ call to prayer and repentance for the whole Church, arguing that it does not apply to the victims of child sex abuse. This is obviously a view I share, but it didn’t seem to me like that was what Pope Francis was saying.

So, against the above background, I’d here like to take a careful look at some passages from the letter, addressed to “the People of God” - i.e., first to the Church and then to all of humanity.

Francis starts by again recognising the criminal harm done to the victims of sexual abuse, abuse of power and abuse of conscience and is clear about the enormity of the evil that has happened and the importance of preventing it in the future:

“Looking back to the past, no effort to beg pardon and to seek to repair the harm done will ever be sufficient. Looking ahead to the future, no effort must be spared to create a culture able to prevent such situations from happening, but also to prevent the possibility of their being covered up and perpetuated.”

He then takes full ownership for this failure on behalf of the Church:

“With shame and repentance, we acknowledge as an ecclesial community that we were not where we should have been, that we did not act in a timely manner, realizing the magnitude and the gravity of the damage done to so many lives. We showed no care for the little ones; we abandoned them.”

Next, Francis calls for solidarity, since “to acknowledge the truth of what has happened, in itself this is not enough”:

“If, in the past, the response was one of omission, today we want solidarity, in the deepest and most challenging sense, to become our way of forging present and future history. [...] A solidarity that summons us to fight all forms of corruption, especially spiritual corruption. [...] Saint Paul’s exhortation to suffer with those who suffer is the best antidote against all our attempts to repeat the words of Cain: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Gen 4:9).”

Pope Francis then points to “effort and work being carried out in various parts of the world to come up with the necessary means to ensure the safety and protection of the integrity of children and of vulnerable adults, as well as implementing zero tolerance and ways of making all those who perpetrate or cover up these crimes accountable.” Here, I believe, it would have been good to be more specific both about the fact that “those who perpetrate and cover up these crimes” include bishops and to give at least some examples of what the “work and effort” is that is being carried out. As it stands, this passage sounds very generic and not very convincing.

To complement the specific efforts already in place to address past instances of child sex abuse and prevent future ones, Francis moves on to issuing a call for “every one of the baptized [to] feel involved in the ecclesial and social change that we so greatly need.” He calls for the conversion of the whole Church (a call that Jesus perennially addresses to Her) so that we may “see things as the Lord does”.

“To see things as the Lord does, to be where the Lord wants us to be, to experience a conversion of heart in his presence. To do so, prayer and penance will help. I invite the entire holy faithful People of God to a penitential exercise of prayer and fasting, following the Lord’s command. This can awaken our conscience and arouse our solidarity and commitment to a culture of care that says “never again” to every form of abuse.”

A key passage follows next, where Francis insists on the need for the whole Church to dealing with abuse, instead of leaving it to “specialists” and he argues that it is precisely a model of the Church where she is identified with clerics instead of the whole “People of God” that is the root of the present crisis:

“It is impossible to think of a conversion of our activity as a Church that does not include the active participation of all the members of God’s People. Indeed, whenever we have tried to replace, or silence, or ignore, or reduce the People of God to small elites, we end up creating communities, projects, theological approaches, spiritualities and structures without roots, without memory, without faces, without bodies and ultimately, without lives. This is clearly seen in a peculiar way of understanding the Church’s authority, one common in many communities where sexual abuse and the abuse of power and conscience have occurred. Such is the case with clericalism, an approach that “not only nullifies the character of Christians, but also tends to diminish and undervalue the baptismal grace that the Holy Spirit has placed in the heart of our people”. Clericalism, whether fostered by priests themselves or by lay persons, leads to an excision in the ecclesial body that supports and helps to perpetuate many of the evils that we are condemning today. To say “no” to abuse is to say an emphatic “no” to all forms of clericalism.”

This I buy unreservedly - the Church are all who are baptised and considering the clergy to be in some way above the laity (by either group) distorts both and leads to perversions of teaching and action. Francis sums this up by saying that

“the only way that we have to respond to this evil that has darkened so many lives is to experience it as a task regarding all of us as the People of God. [...] Without the active participation of all the Church’s members, everything being done to uproot the culture of abuse in our communities will not be successful in generating the necessary dynamics for sound and realistic change.”

Next, the question of who is called to repentance is clarified and, I believe, dismisses the interpretation of critics who consider it to be directed also at the victims of abuse [emphasis in the following is mine]:

“The penitential dimension of fasting and prayer will help us as God’s People to come before the Lord and our wounded brothers and sisters as sinners imploring forgiveness and the grace of shame and conversion. In this way, we will come up with actions that can generate resources attuned to the Gospel. For “whenever we make the effort to return to the source and to recover the original freshness of the Gospel, new avenues arise, new paths of creativity open up, with different forms of expression, more eloquent signs and words with new meaning for today’s world” (Evangelii Gaudium, 11).”

This clearly reads in a way where fasting and prayer are asked of those members of the Church who have not been abused and certainly not of those who have. This also doesn’t read to me as an abdication of responsibility by the hierarchy (who certainly have greater responsibility for the failures that have lead to this unthinkable scandal), but as a recognition of the importance of the Church to be actively a body composed of all of its members. Then fasting and prayer - the invitation to which I gladly accept myself - may lead to a discernment of what to do differently so that an end may be put to abuse.

Francis summarises this very clearly towards the end of the letter:

“Let us beg forgiveness for our own sins and the sins of others. An awareness of sin helps us to acknowledge the errors, the crimes and the wounds caused in the past and allows us, in the present, to be more open and committed along a journey of renewed conversion.

Likewise, penance and prayer will help us to open our eyes and our hearts to other people’s sufferings and to overcome the thirst for power and possessions that are so often the root of those evils. May fasting and prayer open our ears to the hushed pain felt by children, young people and the disabled. A fasting that can make us hunger and thirst for justice and impel us to walk in the truth, supporting all the judicial measures that may be necessary. A fasting that shakes us up and leads us to be committed in truth and charity with all men and women of good will, and with society in general, to combatting all forms of the abuse of power, sexual abuse and the abuse of conscience.”

Having several times re-read Pope Francis letter carefully, I do see its call to fasting and prayer as addressed to me, a member of the People of God, to be what I and the whole Church need to hear from him and act upon now. At the same time, I wish he would have spoken more specifically and concretely about what will happen to address the crimes that were perpetrated by priests and bishops, either by pointing to processes in motion or by indicating new ones that would go towards “making all those who perpetrate or cover up these crimes accountable”.

What is a mystic today

862 words, 4 min read

The following is a rough translation of Xavier Melloni's "Qué es un místico hoy", recommended to me by PM and AC. I hope it - a true mystic's manifesto - will bring as much joy to English-speaking readers as it did to its original audience and to me:

---

Today, as in all times, a mystic is someone who is as necessary as they are useless for their own generation. They are useless because they produce nothing and what they offer can be neither bought nor sold. It has no price in the market. It escapes those who want to take it and confuses those who want to understand it. Therefore they have to be set aside, since they place themselves in front of the immediacy of what has to be achieved and produced. The mystic says: what truly is, already exists. One just has to learn to perceive it. They also irritate  institutions, because they relativize them and remind them that the sky they have painted inside their vaults is not the authentic, open sky.

But, at the same time, their presence is indispensable because they indicates a mode of existence that all beings and institutions crave. They were born to foster the sacred flame that burns in everyone and everything. The fire of the mystic is different from that of the prophet. The prophet points to and shouts about what is missing, while the mystic indicates what is already. The prophet speaks of the not yet, while the mystic speaks of the already. Both things are necessary.

Paraphrasing Raimon Panikkar, “the mystic is not the one who has hope for the future but for the Invisible”.

The mystic is not naive, but innocent. Naivety is an immaturity that makes people blind and clumsy, because it prevents them from confronting the dark elements of reality and of themselves, while the innocent sees everything, perceives everything and, without backing away, surrenders.

Another thing that is proper to the mystic is their ability to reconcile paradoxes. On the one hand, they are someone exquisitely close to people and their situations, but they also remain unreachable, withdrawn to a strange distance. Being fully present, they are also absent. They find themselves in another place, and when they are in another place, their presence is perceived. Their speech is quiet and with their silence, they speak. Words are sacred to him - or her; that's why they do not squander them. And because of that, they also know how to listen, and understand what others do not understand. They speak, look, understand from a different place; at times so different, it seems madness. But their madness is nothing more than the shock that their anticipation of Reality produces in us.

They love every object, every plant, every petal, and is fascinated by them, but, at the same time, they can do without it. They are all tenderness, but also vigor, as Leonardo Boff says about Francis of Assisi. They are fragile and strong at the same time. They cannot stand the pain of the little ones. They see from them and for them, and their prayer is always for them.

They are concrete, rooted in their time and place, capable of speaking simply and giving examples that the smallest ones understand, and at the same time, they are universal, because they perceive what concerns the common human condition. They see the part in the all and the all in the part. We could say that they have a fractal instinct, which is just as scientists today understand that the framework of reality is constituted.

Theirs is a sovereign freedom but, at the same time, they are at the service of all, because they perceive the unrepeatability of each person and each thing, and this makes them walk on hallowed ground. They welcome each being as an epiphany and, shaken, submit themselves freely because they know that their self does not belong to them, but is only a receptacle and a witness to other existences.

They love their tradition, the one that has nourished and guided them, but they do not make an absolute of it. They know that “to be original is to return to the origins” (Gaudí), not to repeat them but to recreate them. And the origin of every tradition is beyond itself, before it emerged. They know the way of the Source, “although by night”. Their faith is transconfessional, because they know that Presence runs through existence and that is what all traditions celebrate. Their rejoice with them, for their diversity and their wealth.

Like a compass, with one foot they are rooted in their own center, and with the other one they wander the circles of otherness. This center is not only that of the tradition to which they belong, but a deeper Center that, by de-centering them, re-centers them.

They are all empty. Their existence is a passage through which others transit to discover themselves. Like an icon, their mere presence helps those around them to discover the depth that inhabits themselves. They only stay silent and see. And their joy, like their nostalgia, are immense.

Filioque: division or wonderful variety?

3879 words, 20 min read

Naïvely, I thought that a key point of theological difference between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches concerned the nature of the Holy Spirit, with the Orthodox view being that he proceeds from the Father alone (a la a triangle pointing up, with the Father on top), and the Catholic one consisting in a procession from both Father and Son (a la a triangle point down, with the Holy Spirit at the bottom), where the Latin term "filioque" (meaning "and the Son", as in referring to the Holy Spirit as him "qui ex Patre Filioque procedit", "who proceeds from the Father and the Son.") embodies this Western position. Given such superficial understanding, I wondered what room for dialogue there might be between the two traditions, but I never ventured deeper into this question, until - by sheer coincidence - I came across one of St. John Paul II's General Audiences from 1998, where he mentions the topic in passing in the following terms, in the context of talking about the Holy Spirit as the source of communion also among all Christians:

“[I]t comforts us to recall that precisely on the doctrine of the Holy Spirit significant steps have been made towards unity among the various Churches, especially among the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches. In particular, on the specific problem of the Filioque concerning the relationship between the Holy Spirit and the Word who proceed from the Father, it is possible to maintain that the difference between the Latin and Eastern traditions does not affect the identity of the faith “in the reality of the same mystery confessed” but its expression, constituting a “legitimate complementarity” which does not jeopardize but indeed can enrich communion in the one faith (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 248; Apostolic Letter Orientale lumen, 2 May 1995, n. 5; Note of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, 29 June 1995: The Greek and Latin Traditions Regarding the Procession of the Holy Spirit, L’Osservatore Romano English edition, 20 September 1995, p. 3).”

Looking at the Catechism, the complementarity of such "expressions of faith" can indeed be found there at §248:

"At the outset the Eastern tradition expresses the Father's character as first origin of the Spirit. By confessing the Spirit as he "who proceeds from the Father", it affirms that he comes from the Father through the Son. The Western tradition expresses first the consubstantial communion between Father and Son, by saying that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque). It says this, "legitimately and with good reason", for the eternal order of the divine persons in their consubstantial communion implies that the Father, as "the principle without principle", is the first origin of the Spirit, but also that as Father of the only Son, he is, with the Son, the single principle from which the Holy Spirit proceeds. This legitimate complementarity, provided it does not become rigid, does not affect the identity of faith in the reality of the same mystery confessed."

Essentially, the Catechism argues that the two views: whether the Spirit is thought of as proceeding from the Father through the Son (Eastern) or from the Father and the Son, who are consubstantial, but where the Father is the first principle (Western), are complementary.

Turning to the next reference from John Paul II's 1998 General Audience - his Apostolic Letter Orientale Lumen - yields the following gem in reference to the development of both Eastern and Western traditions, which further underlines the argument for complementarity:

"We can only thank God with deep emotion for the wonderful variety with which he has allowed such a rich and composite mosaic of different tesserae to be formed."

Next, and before arriving at the note from the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity that John Paul II refers to, it is worth listening to the words he addressed to Bartholomew I of Constantinople on the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul June 29, 1995:

“[I]t is necessary to clear up a misunderstanding which still casts its shadow on relations between Catholics and Orthodox. To this end a Joint Commission was established. Its task is to explain, in the light of our common faith, the legitimate meaning and importance of different traditional expressions concerning the eternal origin of the Holy Spirit in the Trinity, expressions that are part of our mutual doctrinal and liturgical heritages. On the Catholic side, there is a firm desire to clarify the traditional doctrine of the Filioque, present in the liturgical version of the Latin Credo, in order to highlight its full harmony with what the Ecumenical Council confesses in its creed: the Father as the source of the whole Trinity, the one origin of both the Son and the Holy Spirit.”

Joh Paul II here sets the scene for the joint Orthodox-Catholic study of this subject by affirming a key point that is central to Orthodox Pneumatology, which is that of the Father as the sole origin of the Holy Spirit. This is in deed a point at which that Joint Commission has arrived already in 1982, in its first report, where it says:

"Without wishing to resolve yet the difficulties which have arisen between the East and the West concerning the relationship between the Son and the Spirit, we can already say together that this Spirit, which proceeds from the Father (Jn 15:26) as the sole source in the Trinity and which has become the Spirit of our sonship (Rom 8:15) since he is also the Spirit of the Son (Gal 4:6), is communicated to us particularly in the eucharist by this Son upon whom he reposes in time and in eternity (Jn 1:32)."

Arriving at the 1995 Note of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity (entitled "Greek and Latin Traditions on Holy Spirit"​), there is a clear desire to show how Catholic teaching respects the key points of the Orthodox one, how inadequate human thought is when facing the nature of God and that the introduction of the contested "filioque" term in the Latin liturgy followed both a delayed arrival of the creed of Nicaea-Constantinople and questionable Greek to Latin translation:

"The doctrine of the Filioque must be understood and presented by the Catholic Church in such a way that it cannot appear to contradict the Monarchy of the Father nor the fact that he is the sole origin (ἄρχω, αἰτία) of the ἐκπορευόσις of the Spirit. The Filioque is, in fact, situated in a theological and linguistic context different from that of the affirmation of the sole monarchy of the Father, the one origin of the Son and of the Spirit. Against Arianism, which was still virulent in the West, its purpose was to stress the fact that the Holy Spirit is of the same divine nature as the Son, without calling in question the one monarchy of the Father. 

We are presenting here the authentic doctrinal meaning of the Filioque on the basis of the Trinitarian faith of the Symbol professed by the second Ecumenical Council at Constantinople. We are giving this authoritative interpretation, while being aware of how inadequate human language is to express the ineffable mystery of the Holy Trinity, one God, a mystery which is beyond our words and our thoughts. 

The Catholic Church interprets the Filioque with reference to the conciliar and ecumenical, normative and irrevocable value of the confession of faith in the eternal origin of the Holy Spirit, as defined in 381 by the Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in its Symbol. This Symbol only became known and received by Rome on the occasion of the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon in 451. In the meantime, on the basis of the earlier Latin theological tradition, Fathers of the Church of the West like St Hilary, St Ambrose, St Augustine and St Leo the Great, had confessed that the Holy Spirit proceeds (procedit) eternally from the Father and the Son. 

Since the Latin Bible (the Vulgate and earlier Latin translations) had translated Jn 15:26 (παρὰ τοῦ πατρὸς ἐκπορεύεται) by "qui a Patre procedit", the Latins translated the ἐκ τοῦ Πατρὸς ἐκπορευόμενον of the Symbol of Nicaea-Constantinople by "ex Patre procedentem" (Mansi VII, 112 B). In this way, a false equivalence was involuntarily created with regard to the eternal origin of the Spirit between the Oriental theology of the ἐκπορευόσις and the Latin theology of the processio. 

The Greek ἐκπορευόσις signifies only the relationship of origin to the Father alone as the principle without principle of the Trinity. The Latin processio, on the contrary, is a more common term, signifying the communication of the consubstantial divinity from the Father to the Son and from the Father, through and with the Son, to the Holy Spirit. In confessing the Holy Spirit "ex Patre procedentem", the Latins, therefore, could only suppose an implicit Filioque which would later be made explicit in their liturgical version of the Symbol."

This effectively sounds to me like the Catholic side saying: we never intended to change the  Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed - we agree with the Father being the origin of the whole Trinity and we are just making it explicit that the Holy Spirit, whose origin is the Father, then proceeds from the Father through the Son. With attempts to clear up the mistranslation already in the 7th century and with a clear desire from both sides to explain how each other's positions were close to each other, one could wonder why this has even been such a prominent cause of division during the history of the Church.

Here, an excellent 2003 study by the North American Orthodox-Catholic Theological Consultation, entitled "The Filioque: a Church-Dividing Issue? An Agreed Statement" sheds some light by tracing the history of the controversy and showing the prominent role of ecclesial, religious and secular power struggles in the process, including Charlemagne, the rise of Islam and power moves by popes, patriarchs and princes ("II. Historical Considerations" of the document is a fascinating read).

The North American statement also provides insight into the background to the renewed dialogue between Catholic and Orthodox Churches, which is in line with the Pontifical Council's note, but which provides a much appreciated personal and practical perspective, both very much in sync with Pope Francis' emphasis now on journeying together:

"When Patriarch Dimitrios I visited Rome on December 7, 1987, and again during the visit of Patriarch Bartholomew I to Rome in June 1995, both patriarchs attended a Eucharist celebrated by Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Basilica. On both occasions the Pope and Patriarch proclaimed the Creed in Greek (i.e., without the Filioque). Pope John Paul II and Romanian Patriarch Teoctist did the same in Romanian at a papal Mass in Rome on October 13, 2002. The document Dominus Iesus: On the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church, issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on August 6, 2000, begins its theological considerations on the Church’s central teaching with the text of the creed of 381, again without the addition of the Filioque. While no interpretation of these uses of the Creed was offered, these developments suggest a new awareness on the Catholic side of the unique character of the original Greek text of the Creed as the most authentic formulation of the faith that unifies Eastern and Western Christianity."

The Statement also revisits the recognition of human limitations when contemplating the Trinity, which has been clear from as far back as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in the 5th Century:

"Concerning the divine Mystery itself, we can say very little, and our speculations always risk claiming a degree of clarity and certainty that is more than their due. As Pseudo-Dionysius reminds us, “No unity or trinity or number or oneness or fruitfulness, or any other thing that either is a creature or can be known to any creature, is able to express the Mystery, beyond all mind and reason, of that transcendent Godhead which in a super-essential way surpasses all things” (On the Divine Names 13.3). That we do, as Christians, profess our God, who is radically and indivisibly one, to be the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit – three “persons” who can never be confused with or reduced to one another, and who are all fully and literally God, singly and in the harmonious whole of their relationships with each other - is simply a summation of what we have learned from God’s self-revelation in human history, a revelation that has reached its climax in our being able, in the power of the Holy Spirit, to confess Jesus as the Eternal Father’s Word and Son."

The Joint Orthodox-Catholic statement then proceeds to spell out the great degree of agreement that they have found to be already the case:

"We are convinced from our own study that the Eastern and Western theological traditions have been in substantial agreement, since the patristic period, on a number of fundamental affirmations about the Holy Trinity that bear on the Filioque debate:
both traditions clearly affirm that the Holy Spirit is a distinct hypostasis or person within the divine Mystery, equal in status to the Father and the Son, and is not simply a creature or a way of talking about God’s action in creatures;

• although the Creed of 381 does not state it explicitly, both traditions confess the Holy Spirit to be God, of the same divine substance (homoousios) as Father and Son;
• both traditions also clearly affirm that the Father is the primordial source (arch‘) and ultimate cause (aitia) of the divine being, and thus of all God’s operations: the “spring” from which both Son and Spirit flow, the “root” of their being and fruitfulness, the “sun” from which their existence and their activity radiates;
• both traditions affirm that the three hypostases or persons in God are constituted in their hypostatic existence and distinguished from one another solely by their relationships of origin, and not by any other characteristics or activities;
• accordingly, both traditions affirm that all the operations of God - the activities by which God summons created reality into being, and forms that reality, for its well-being, into a unified and ordered cosmos centered on the human creature, who is made in God’s image – are the common work of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, even though each of them plays a distinctive role within those operations that is determined by their relationships to one another.

Nevertheless, the Eastern and Western traditions of reflection on the Mystery of God have clearly developed categories and conceptions that differ in substantial ways from one another. These differences cannot simply be explained away, or be made to seem equivalent by facile argument."

Beyond such broad alignment, there are subtle differences though between how the two traditions speak about the Holy Spirit, in particular between the implication or not of an origin in the words used for speaking about procession in Greek versus Latin:

"The Filioque controversy is first of all a controversy over words. As a number of recent authors have pointed out, part of the theological disagreement between our communions seems to be rooted in subtle but significant differences in the way key terms have been used to refer to the Spirit’s divine origin. The original text of the Creed of 381, in speaking of the Holy Spirit, characterizes him in terms of John 15.26, as the one “who proceeds (ekporeuetai) from the Father”: probably influenced by the usage of Gregory the Theologian (Or. 31.8), the Council chose to restrict itself to the Johannine language, slightly altering the Gospel text (changing to pneuma...ho para tou Patros ekporeuetai to: to pneuma to hagion... to ek tou Patros ekporeuomenon) in order to emphasize that the “coming forth” of the Spirit begins “within” the Father’s own eternal hypostatic role as source of the divine Being, and so is best spoken of as a kind of “movement out of (ek)” him. The underlying connotation of ekporeuesthai (“proceed,” “issue forth”) and its related noun, ekporeusis (“procession”), seems to have been that of a “passage outwards” from within some point of origin. Since the time of the Cappadocian Fathers, at least, Greek theology almost always restricts the theological use of this term to the coming-forth of the Spirit from the Father, giving it the status of a technical term for the relationship of those two divine persons. In contrast, other Greek words, such as proienai, “go forward,” are frequently used by the Eastern Fathers to refer to the Spirit’s saving “mission” in history from the Father and the risen Lord.

The Latin word procedere, on the other hand, with its related noun processio, suggests simply “movement forwards,” without the added implication of the starting-point of that movement; thus it is used to translate a number of other Greek theological terms, including proienai, and is explicitly taken by Thomas Aquinas to be a general term denoting “origin of any kind” (Summa Theologiae I, q. 36, a.2), including – in a Trinitarian context - the Son’s generation as well as the breathing-forth of the Spirit and his mission in time. As a result, both the primordial origin of the Spirit in the eternal Father and his “coming forth” from the risen Lord tend to be designated, in Latin, by the same word, procedere, while Greek theology normally uses two different terms. Although the difference between the Greek and the Latin traditions of understanding the eternal origin of the Spirit is more than simply a verbal one, much of the original concern in the Greek Church over the insertion of the word Filioque into the Latin translation of the Creed of 381 may well have been due – as Maximus the Confessor explained (Letter to Marinus: PG 91.133-136) - to a misunderstanding on both sides of the different ranges of meaning implied in the Greek and Latin terms for “procession”."

The Joint Statement then presents an summary of the theology behind the subtly different Greek and Latin concepts, with a focus on the Son's role in the life of the Holy Spirit and again a conclusion of many similarities between Eastern and Western positions:

"[T]he theological issue behind this dispute is whether the Son is to be thought of as playing any role in the origin of the Spirit, as a hypostasis or divine “person,” from the Father, who is the sole ultimate source of the divine Mystery. The Greek tradition, as we have seen, has generally relied on John 15.26 and the formulation of the Creed of 381 to assert that all we know of the Spirit’s hypostatic origin is that he “proceeds from the Father,” in a way distinct from, but parallel to, the Son’s “generation” from the Father (e.g., John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith 1.8). However, this same tradition acknowledges that the “mission” of the Spirit in the world also involves the Son, who receives the Spirit into his own humanity at his baptism, breathes the Spirit forth onto the Twelve on the evening of the resurrection, and sends the Spirit in power into the world, through the charismatic preaching of the Apostles, at Pentecost. On the other hand, the Latin tradition since Tertullian has tended to assume that since the order in which the Church normally names the persons in the Trinity places the Spirit after the Son, he is to be thought of as coming forth “from” the Father “through” the Son. Augustine, who in several passages himself insists that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father,” because as God he is not inferior to the Son (De Fide et Symbolo 9.19; Enchiridion 9.3), develops, in other texts, his classic understanding that the Spirit also “proceeds” from the Son because he is, in the course of sacred history, the Spirit and the “gift” of both Father and Son (e.g., On the Trinity 4.20.29; Tractate on Gospel of John 99.6-7), the gift that begins in their own eternal exchange of love (On the Trinity 15.17.29). In Augustine’s view, this involvement of the Son in the Spirit’s procession is not understood to contradict the Father’s role as the single ultimate source of both Son and Spirit, but is itself given by the Father in generating the Son: “the Holy Spirit, in turn, has this from the Father himself, that he should also proceed from the Son, just as he proceeds from the Father” (Tractate on Gospel of John 99.8)."

Finally the Statement is careful not to present an unrealistically rosy picture, acknowledging differences that remain in spite of similarities - with the West considering procession from Father and Son (with the Father as origin) necessary for distinguishing the Son from the Holy Spirit, while the East focuses on the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father alone and the Son manifesting and sending the Holy Spirit in creation:

"The Greek and Latin theological traditions clearly remain in some tension with each other on the fundamental issue of the Spirit’s eternal origin as a distinct divine person. By the Middle Ages, as a result of the influence of Anselm and Thomas Aquinas, Western theology almost universally conceives of the identity of each divine person as defined by its “relations of opposition” – in other words, its mutually defining relations of origin - to the other two, and concludes that the Holy Spirit would not be hypostatically distinguishable from the Son if the Spirit “proceeded” from the Father alone. In the Latin understanding of processio as a general term for “origin,” after all, it can also be said that the Son “proceeds from the Father” by being generated from him. Eastern theology, drawing on the language of John 15.26 and the Creed of 381, continues to understand the language of “procession” (ekporeusis) as denoting a unique, exclusive, and distinctive causal relationship between the Spirit and the Father, and generally confines the Son’s role to the “manifestation” and “mission” of the Spirit in the divine activities of creation and redemption. These differences, though subtle, are substantial, and the very weight of theological tradition behind both of them makes them all the more difficult to reconcile theologically with each other."

Personally, I am left feeling much more optimistic about the Catholic and Orthodox Churches approaching each the with openness and the desire to look for the good in each other and with St. John Paul II's words on my mind: "We can only thank God with deep emotion for the wonderful variety with which he has allowed such a rich and composite mosaic of different tesserae to be formed."
​

Žižek’s Holy Spirit: equality, love, community, freedom

2002 words, 10 min read

The Post-Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek is perhaps a surprising source of insights about the Holy Spirit, but I believe that his perspective is highly relevant for atheists and Christians alike. My first encounter with his thought on the subject was in a transcript of him addressing Occupy Wall Street protesters at Zuccotti Park in 2011:

“What is Christianity? It’s the Holy Spirit. What is the Holy Spirit? It’s an egalitarian community of believers who are linked by love for each other, and who only have their own freedom and responsibility to do it. In this sense, the Holy Spirit is here now. And down there on Wall Street, there are pagans who are worshipping blasphemous idols.”

Instead of being a throw-away comment of the moment, Žižek’s view of the Holy Spirit is the result of careful reflection from a number of viewpoints.

In a 2007 lecture - entitled “Meditation on Michelangelo’s Christ on the Cross” - he elaborated on how it is that the Holy Spirit is the source of the Christian community and pointed to the radicality of life that such a basis implies:

“The Holy Spirit is the love between believers; it is the spirit of the community of believers, according to the famous words of Christ: “For where two or three have gathered together in my name, I am there in their midst.” (Matthew 18:20) I think this passage should be taken literally. So what does this mean? Even today, the message is very radical. The temptation to be resisted is the temptation of meaning itself. […] I claim that Christ died on the cross precisely to reject [...] attempts at finding a higher purpose or meaning. Rather the message is: “Your standards matter to me. I throw myself into creation, and abandon my place up there.” The conclusions are radical. The ultimate meaning of Christianity for me is a very precise one. It is not: “We should trust God. The big guy’s with me, so nothing really bad can happen.” That is too easy. The message is not: “We trust God.” The message is rather: “God trusts us.” The gesture of Christ says, “I leave it over to you.” Usually we read religion as the way to guarantee meaning: We are concerned with the small details of everyday life and never know what will come of it all, or how things will turn out; we can only make wagers, and we do this maybe to ensure that God will arrange things in our favor. But the meaning of the death of Christ for me is the opposite: God made the wager on us. It is really a crazy wager, where God is saying: “I leave it to you. Holy Ghost, community of believers, you have to do it!””

In the same piece Žižek also demonstrates that his thoughts on the Holy Spirit are not merely an analysis from outwith or a thinking about an other, but that they are pertinent to his own context and community:

“[The] link between Christian community and the progressive movement is crucial. And here I’m not playing a cheap game of identifying radical political movements as a kind of religious community; what I’m referring to is the idea of a radical community of believers. The ideal is neither that of blind liberal individuals collaborating with each other, nor the old organic conservative community. It is a community along the lines of the original Christian community: A community of outcasts. We need this today, this idea of an egalitarian community of believers that is neither the traditional heretical community nor the liberal multiplicity. This is why I and many other leftist philosophers, such as Alain Badiou and others, are so interested in rereading, rehabilitating, and reappropriating the legacy of Paul. It is not just a matter of private religious convictions. I claim that if we lose this key moment—the moment of realizing the Holy Spirit as a community of believers—we will live in a very sad society, where the only choice will be between vulgar egoist liberalism or the fundamentalism that counterattacks it. This is why I—precisely as a radical leftist—think that Christianity is far too precious a thing to leave to conservative fundamentalists. We should fight for it. Our message should not be, “You can have it,” but “No, it’s ours. You are kidnapping it.””

Žižek’s thoughts on the Holy Spirit have deeper roots still, which go to the very heart of the Christian mystery of the Trinity and the incarnation. In a 2004 paper entitled “Death’s Merciless Love”, he reflects on how the transcendent-immanent, divine-human gap is resolved by Jesus’ death on the cross, which finds its fulfilment in and unity with the Holy Spirit:

“[I]n order for humanity to be restored to God, [Christ as the mediator between God and humanity] must sacrifice himself. In other words, as long as Christ is here, there can be no Holy Ghost, which IS the figure of the reunification of God and humanity. Christ as the mediator between God and humanity is, to put it in today’s deconstructionist terms, the condition of possibility AND the condition of impossibility between the two: as mediator, he is at the same time the obstacle which prevents the full mediation of the opposed poles. Or, to put it in the Hegelian terms of the Christian syllogism: there are two “premises” (Christ is God’s Son, fully divine, and Christ is man’s son, fully human), and to unite the opposed poles, to arrive at the “conclusion” (humanity is fully united with God in the Holy Spirit), the mediator must erase himself out of the picture. Christ’s death is not part of the eternal cycle of the divine incarnation and death, in which God repeatedly appears and then withdraws into himself, in his Beyond. As Hegel put it, what dies on the Cross is NOT the human incarnation of the transcendent God, but the God of Beyond Himself. Through Christ’s sacrifice, God Himself is no longer beyond, but passes into the Holy Spirit (of the religious community). In other words, if Christ were to be the mediator between two separated entities (God and humanity), his death would mean that there is no longer a mediation, that the two entities are apart again. So, obviously, God must be the mediator in a stronger sense: it’s not that, in the Holy Spirit, there is no longer the need for Christ, because the two poles are directly united; for this mediation to be possible, the nature of both poles must be radically changed, i.e. in one and the same movement, they both must undergo a transubstantiation. Christ is, on the one hand, the vanishing mediator/medium through whose death God-Father himself “passes into” the Holy Spirit, and, on the other hand, the vanishing mediator/medium through whose death human community itself “passes into” the new spiritual stage.

These two operations are not separated, they are the two aspects of one and the same movement: the very movement through which God loses the character of a transcendent Beyond and passes into the Holy Spirit (the spirit of the community of believers) EQUALS the movement through which the “fallen” human community is elevated into the Holy Spirit. In other words, it is not that, in the Holy Ghost, men and God communicate directly, without Christ’s mediation; it is rather that they directly coincide - God is NOTHING BUT the Holy Spirit of the community of believers. Christ has to die not in order to enable direct communication between God and humanity, but because there is no longer any transcendent God with whom to communicate.”

In a 2009 book entitled “The Monstrosity of Christ. Paradox or Dialectic?” and co-authored with the Anglican theologian John Milbank, Žižek challengingly draws the identification of the community of believers with the Holy Spirit and of the Holy Spirit with the crucified and risen Christ to its ultimate conclusion, which is a life at the end of history, a life of “ethical extravagance” and “permanent revolution”:

“There is, however, a third position between these two extremes, that of the Holy Spirit, of the apocalyptic community of believers, of the self-organization dialectical clarity versus the misty conceit of paradox of believers who drew from Christ’s nonreturn after his death the correct conclusion: they were awaiting the wrong thing, Christ already had returned as the Holy Spirit of their community. The very meaning of Christ’s death is that the work to be done is theirs, that Christ put his trust in them. Once we accept this, Eagleton’s reading of Jesus’ “ethical extravagance” also becomes problematic:

“What one might call Jesus’s ethical extravagance—giving over and above the measure, turning the other cheek, rejoicing in being persecuted, loving one’s enemies, refusing to judge, non-resistance to evil, laying oneself open to the violence of others—is . . . motivated by a sense that history is now at an end. Recklessness, improvidence and an over-the-top lifestyle are signs that God’s sovereignty is at hand.There is no time for political organization or instrumental rationality, and they are unnecessary in any case.”

But is this “extravagance” really constrained to the end-of-time atmosphere in which all we can do is wait and get ready for the Second Coming? Is it not that, in an apocalyptic time—the time of the end of time, as Agamben put it—we have both aspects, “ethical extravagance” as well as political organization? The specificity of the Holy Spirit, the apocalyptic emancipatory collective, is that it is precisely an organization which practices these “ethical extravagances,” i.e., which lives its life in an apocalyptic “state of emergency” in which all ordinary legal (and moral) commitments are suspended, practiced in the mode of “as if not.” The problem with the Church is that it betrayed original Christianity not by its organization, but by the type of this organization: the apocalyptic community of believers which lives in the emergency state of a “permanent revolution” is changed into an ideological apparatus legitimizing the normal run of things. In other words, with the Church, we are not active enough: the pressure of the Second Coming is eased, all we have to do is to lead our daily lives following the prescribed ethico-religious rules, and Salvation will come by itself.“

In summary, Žižek’s Holy Spirit - like all of Žižek’s Trinity - invites to a life of radical commitment in the present, to a life lived with and for others and therefore in God, a life steeped in freedom:

“So what I claim is that something absolutely unheard of happens with Christianity which is that Christ, the death of Christ, means something very radical. It means, in all other religions we trust God, we believe in God. The death of Christ [instead] means, God trusted us. It means, “I give you your freedom, it’s up to you.” The Holy Ghost for me is — and I take it literally when it says in the Bible “Whenever the two of you are there, I will be there, I am there.” — it means the gift of freedom. It means, God doesn’t want to play that “up there a guarantee,” it means God entrusts the fate of creation, his own fate, into us. It means what happens here is part of, as it were, the history of God. And […] à propos iconoclasm […]: the prohibition to make images of God in Judaism does not mean this gnostic way “oh it’s too mysterious, we cannot paint it.” It means the exact opposite! It means God is alive not in your stupid deep meditations of up there, but how you act and react with others. And that’s why you shouldn’t make images because it’s not an image to be made up there. And I think, if anything, even more this holds for Christianity. That’s for me what the Holy Ghost is. God is no longer the substantial master up there, God is — to put it in this way — the spirit of our community, the gift of freedom.”