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A Thank You

MEMO

To: Your Holiness, Pope Benedict XIV

From: Laura Jones - http://www.mamaleh-larisa.com

Date: October 21, 2008

Subject: Perhaps you haven’t wondered why we are suffering an epidemic of autism, but should you do so, and become alarmed, please read on …..

As I was just waking up one morning a little over a week ago I had a curious visitor. At first I did not know who it was who came to me, said “thank you”, and then withdrew. But maybe the next day or the day after that, as I was taking my supper in my motor home, where I have a picture by Herbert Schwartz in the ikon corner, I was astonished at myself for having been so bdefuddled, I hadn’t realized that what I had seen was just exactly that picture!

This is the story of the picture:

Herbert liked to do sketches with chalk. One afternoon when I was sitting beside him, he began such a sketch. After he made some swirls, I said: “It’s the wind!” Then he defined a face, and I said, “It’s the Father!” (And it was; when you see it, you will see that it could only be the Father.) Then Herbert made the mouth more defined, and I said, “It’s the kiss of the Father!” Then Herbert said, “Since you knew what it is, it’s your picture.” He had been using a rust-colored chalk, but he took a black chalk instead, and wrote on it the first words of the Song of Song: “Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth for thy breasts are better than wine.”

As I have come to realize more and more of late – and share with you - Herbert inculcated in us the teaching of St. Paul which otherwise has been almost lost in the west; I won’t labor the point because I have addressed it in some depth in my recent postings. But perhaps the principal book Herbert explored as a mystic, and dwelt on at length in his poetry, even in song – and as I relate here, in art - was the Song of Songs. He would tell of how Theresa of Avila was writing a commentary on the book, and became very frustrated because her mind was just a blank, but when she accepted that darkness with docility and gratitude, that’s when her mind was flooded with grace and insights. Although, truth to tell, Herbert never went on to tell us what she then wrote down! Instead, he would dwell on his own similar experience. In working through the murk that filled his mind, he came to a deeper understanding of Jesus’ saying: “What Father, when his son asks for bread, would give him a stone?” Therefore, Herbert concluded, when we are given what seems to us to be but a hard stone, we must meditate so as to understand in what way it is actually the most nourishing bread from the Father.

I will pause to note that this is how Herbert taught us to “meditate” – not to get some profound “spiritual truth” out of a passage, but to discern what God is communicating to us personally, and at this particular moment. You meditate, he would tell us, so that you are prepared when temptations come – otherwise we are caught off guard and easily fall prey to the temptation. He would quote the Dominican mystical theologian, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange: “Those who meditate are saved; those who do not meditate are lost.” It’s as straightforward as that.

So I will try to relate to you what he would tell us about the Song of Songs. It is actually like a geometrical theorem, in that it’s obvious - once you have it pointed out to you! In the opening words, two people are mentioned, and joined by a kiss – which can only be the Holy Trinity, and the maternal breasts are those of Mary, who conceives God the Word in us, and also nourishes us in the divine life.

And this is expressed in the refrain: “I to my beloved and he to me – who feeds among the lilies.” (2:16) Just as the Persons of the Holy Trinity are distinguished from one another ONLY by that relationship which most intimately unites them (for a fuller exposition, cf. my “Manifesto” on my web-site, http://www.mamaleh-larisa.com, click on the ikon of Our Lady of Guadalupe) – so also we are “to” God, and “to” one another in God, together by reason of the relationship itself, nothing more intervenes to “join” us. Jesus “feeds among the lilies” who are His children, a frequently used scriptural image.

And then we come to the passage where the beloved says:

“I will get up now and go about the city, through its streets and squares; I will search for the one my heart loves. So I looked for him but did not find him. The watchmen found me as they made their rounds in the city. ‘Have you seen the one my heart loves?’ Scarcely had I passed them when I found the one my heart loves.” (3:2-4)

It is as she passes the “watchmen”, the “keepers in the city” in the translation Herbert would quote, these being our senses, and rational intellect - it is only as she goes “a little beyond the keepers of the city” that she finds the One her heart loves.

And so as I surfed Zenit this morning, while the progress being made within and in connection with the Synod is totally mind boggling, there was one disturbing item which indicated what – as best I am able to discern it – God wishes me to convey to you by the experience I described.

It was an “event was organized for the 10th anniversary of the publication of Pope John Paul II's encyclical ‘Fides et Ratio.’ In that document, Benedict XVI explained, there is an emphasis on ‘the importance of joining faith and reason in their reciprocal relation while respecting the autonomous sphere of each.’” (ZE08102006 - 2008-10-20
Permalink: http://www.zenit.org/article-23996?l=english PONTIFF REPROACHES SCIENTIFIC ARROGANCE)

The question I must ask, your Holiness, is: What would be THE AUTONOMOUS SPHERE OF EACH?

Please be so kind as to read the section in my Manifesto on these Trinitarian relations, and the manner in which the French philosopher/psychiatrist, Jacques Lacan, clinically verified in his psychiatric practice precisely that theology of the 3 Divine Hypostases in one Divine Nature which is the teaching of the Church, and specifically as worked out in the 7 genuinely Ecumenical Councils. Lacan maintains that except thusly in relation to another, no one can be fully constituted as a person (contrasting, not so incidentally, with the absurd fiction that the person is fully constituted at the very instant conception now being pushed by those 16 American Catholic bishops I mentioned in a previous post.) The same point is the burden of a book I just bought concerned with the ever more serious problem of autism in our society: “There is no Me without You” by Melis Greene.

If we are to live our lives in a true and realistic fashion, conformed, not to our own or someone else’s whimsical intellectual fancy (such as we have seen in the catastrophe visited upon the entire world through machinations deriving from such a mentality on the part of our lending institutions) – we need to take truth where we find it, not stamping it as the property of whoever (like Bill Gates with his software, which it took a slew of law suits by the US government and various class-action groups, plus the European Union – and no doubt others, it’s not my job to keep a precise account on Gates’ efforts, which while successful made him the richest felon in the whole world, efforts to patent human logic, rendering it by law proprietary to himself) would, Prometheus-like, steal the gifts of the very gods, even fire.

In fact, the history of Pope John Paul II’s two doctoral theses superbly illustrates the pitfalls involved – which mean death to both faith and reason!

The first thesis he wrote at the Angelicum, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange being his mentor, and his examining board being composed of future cardinals, if they had not already attained that rank. The thesis is on “The Object of Faith in St. John of the Cross”. John of the Cross holds most emphatically that God Himself is the object of faith, and he expounds at some length on how the darkness of faith – “the conviction of things not seen” Heb 11:1; Moses “endured as seeing him who is invisible” v. 27 – this “darkness” is not on the part of the OBJECT of faith (i.e., that which is known), but due rather to the inadequacy of our knowing powers before the overwhelming superabundance of intelligibility of God Who is infinite.

The future Pope John Paul II was perceptibly somewhat baffled by the failure of John of the Cross to even entertain the notion of the Church’s dogmatic formulations being that which is known in faith, i.e., the object of faith. In the thesis he never came to grips with the dichotomy. The first time I read through his book, I was absolutely non-plussed - at the time I even screamed out loud!!! - when, after over 100 pages of quotations from John of the Cross maintaining the above teaching, namely that faith is faith because it has God Who is beyond our unaided intellectual powers for its object, the young Fr. Wojtyla throws out the total non sequitur that faith is faith because it is delivered to us through men – i.e., within the Church, ergo, via Church dogma.

The illogic could not possibly be more crystal clear.

St. Thomas Aquinas does consider, and refute, and at sufficient length for John Paul to add an appendix of several pages of quotes from Aquinas on the subject, the notion that dogmatic formulations, “definitions”, might be viewed (Aquinas is charitable enough not to say they in fact are, and by whom) as the object of faith. And he denies this most emphatically and repeatedly, as I said, the appendix devoted to this is pages long, stressing that such formulations are the way our minds, which proceed by complex reasoning, are constrained to express our knowledge of God Who is simple – indeed, God is so One that He is a Tri-Unity!

It is just my own surmise that a lingering confusion on this issue may have been the reason John Paul went on to acquire a second doctorate “based on an evaluation of the possibility of founding a Catholic ethic on the ethical system of phenomenologist Max Scheler (An Evaluation of the Possibility of Constructing a Christian Ethics on the Basis of the System of Max Scheler)” (Wikipedia). While certainly John Paul’s strong emphasis upon there being no contradiction between faith and reason is in itself sound – the point to be made is that phenomenology is not a truly reasoned philosophical system, so it is inherently futile to attempt to construct a Christian ethics upon a radically flawed pretense to “philosophy”=love of [genuine and true] knowledge. The mere fact that Max Scheler spent a few years in the Catholic Church – uh, well, the very fact that none other than Martin Heidegger professes his own debt to Scheler as also that of all modern philosophy is not the best recommendation! One of the students of “philosophy” in our Mt. Hope community asked Herbert at one point why it is that the ancient philosophers are so crystal clear – Aristotle’s philosophy is called “common sense synthesized” and it is, in fact, every bit as self-evident as common sense, when I first read him I was like, hey, why didn’t I think of that myself? So this young man asked Herbert why the ancients are so easy to understand whereas modern philosophy – well, when you get to Heidegger, they can’t even translate him out of the German because the people would see how utterly vapid he is. How boring, for instance, if we wrote “anxiety” instead of “Angst”! The meaning of the words themselves, however, is exactly the same.

To his young disciple’s question, Herbert responded succinctly, “It is difficult to express error.”

So when God the Father appeared to me from my bedroom ikon corner, and said, “Thank you,” He could have phrased it: “Thanking you in advance …” for this current disquisition on the disastrous propensity of many within the Catholic Church to ignore, not merely great huge chunks of Holy Writ, but even reality itself, which, as we see from the history of western philosophy at least since Descartes, they just make up out of their heads as they go along: I think, therefore I am.

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