Fourth Lenten Reflection by Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, ofmcap
(Vatican Radio) The third sermon for Lent by Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, OFMCap. was
preached on Friday morning. In his discourse, the Preacher of the Papal Household
discussed St. Leo the Great. The full text is provided below.
Fr.
Raniero Cantalamessa, ofmcap
Fourth Lenten Sermon
St.
Leo the Great: Faith in Jesus Christ, True God and True Man
1.
Unanimity of East and West about Christ
There are different paths or methods
by which to approach the person of Jesus. One can, for example, start directly with
the Bible and even here one can follow different paths: the typological path followed
in the oldest catechesis of the Church, which explains Jesus in the light of prophecy
and figures from the Old Testament; the historical path that reconstructs the development
of faith in Christ starting from various traditions, authors, and christological titles
or from the different cultural environments in the New Testament. One can also do
this the other way around and start from the needs and problems of people today, or
even with their experience of Christ, and then go back to the Bible from there. These
are all paths that have been well explored. Very early on, the Tradition of the
Church developed another path of accessing the mystery of Christ that involves gathering
and organizing biblical facts about it, namely, christological dogma, the dogmatic
path. What I mean by “christological dogma” is the fundamental truths about Christ
defined in the first ecumenical councils, especially the Council of Chalcedon, whose
substance can be reduced to the following three cornerstones: Jesus Christ is true
man, true God, and one single person. St. Leo the Great is the Father I have chosen
through whom to introduce the profundity of this mystery for a very specific reason.
For two and half centuries, the formula of faith in Christ that will become dogma
at Chalcedon was already available in Latin theology. Tertullian had written, “We
see plainly the twofold state [the two natures], which is not confounded, but conjoined
in One person—Jesus, God and Man.” After lengthy exploration, the Greek authors added
a formula that, in their opinion, was identical in its substance. Their formula, however,
did not at all involve a delay or a waste of time because in the meantime they had
brought to light all its implications and resolved its difficulties, and only now
could that formula have its true meaning. St. Leo the Great found himself to be
the one to oversee the moment in which the two currents of the river—Latin and Greek—were
flowing together, and by his authority as bishop of Rome he supported the universal
acceptance of the formula. He is not content simply to transmit the formula inherited
from Tertullian and taken up by Augustine during the intervening period; he adapts
it to address the problems that had emerged during the time between the Council of
Ephesus in 431 and the Council of Chalcedon in 451. In broad strokes, here is the
core of his christological thinking as it is laid out in his famous Tomus ad Flavianum.
First point. The person of the God-man is identical to the person of the eternal
Word: He who became man in the form of a servant is the same as the one who, in the
form of God, created man. Second point. The divine and human natures coexist in one
single person, Christ, without mixture or confusion, with each nature preserving its
natural properties (salva proprietate utriusque naturae). He begins to be that which
he was not, without ceasing to be that which he was. The work of redemption required
that “the one and the same ‘mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ’ [1
Tim 2:5] could die in one nature and not die in the other.” Third point. The unity
of his person justifies the use of the communication of idioms through which we can
assert both that the Son of God was crucified and buried and that the Son of Man came
from heaven. This was an attempt, successful for the most part, to reach a final
agreement between the two great “schools” of Greek theology, the Alexandrian and Antiochan
schools, and to avoid the errors in Monophytism and Nestorianism, respectively. The
Antiochenians found in Leo’s formula the acknowledgement, which was essential for
them, of the two natures of Christ and thus of the full humanity of Christ. The Alexandrians,
despite some reservations and resistance, found in Leo’s formula the acknowledgement
of the identification of the Person of the Incarnate Word with the eternal Word, which
was their primary concern. We only need to remember the main core of the definition
of Chalcedon to be aware of how much Pope Leo’s thinking is present in it: Following
therefore the holy Fathers, we unanimously teach to confess one and the same Son,
our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same
truly God and truly man. . . . The same was begotten from the Father before the ages
as to the divinity and in the latter days for us and our salvation was born as to
his humanity from Mary the Virgin Mother of God. . . . [He] must be acknowledged in
two natures, without confusion or change, without division or separation. The distinction
between the natures was never abolished by their union but rather the character proper
to each of the two natures was preserved as they came together in one Person and one
hypostasis. It could seem to be merely a technically perfect formula, although
it is dry and abstract, and yet the whole of the Christian doctrine of salvation is
based on it. Only if Christ is a human being like us can he represent us as one of
us, and only if he is also God can his actions have an infinite and universal value.
Only then, as we sing in “Adoro te devote,” is it possible that “One drop of his blood
can free the whole world of all its sins.” (“Cuius una stilla salvum facere totum
mundum quit ab omni scelere.”) East and West are united on this point. St. Anselm
(among the Latins) and Cabasilas (among the Orthodox) agree—with few differences between
them—in their understanding about the situation of humanity before Christ came. On
one side were human beings who had contracted a debt by sinning and had to battle
Satan to free themselves; however, they could not succeed in doing it, since the debt
was infinite and they were slaves of the one they had to overcome. On the other side
was God who could expiate sins and conquer the devil, but he did not need to do it
since he was not the debtor. Someone needed to be found who united in himself a person
who had to take up the battle and a person who could overcome, and that is what occurred
in Jesus, “true God and true man in one person.”
2. The Historical Jesus and
the Christ of Dogma United Again
Those long-settled certitudes about Christ
underwent a whirlwind of criticism in the last two centuries that tended to remove
any substance from them and to characterize them as mere inventions of theologians.
Starting with David Friedrich Strauss, there was a kind of battle cry among scholars
of the New Testament: Let us liberate the figure of Christ from the shackles of dogma
so that we can discover the historical Jesus, the only real Jesus. “The illusion .
. . that Jesus could have been a man in the full sense and still as a single person
stand above the whole of humanity is the chain which still blocks the harbor of Christian
theology against the open sea of rational science.” Here is the conclusion this scholar
reaches: “The ideal of the dogmatic Christ on the one hand and the historical Jesus
of Nazareth on the other are separated forever.” The rationalistic presupposition
of this thesis is boldly asserted: The Christ of dogma does not satisfy the requirements
of rational science. This attack has gone forward with alternating resolutions, almost
right up to our day. In its own way it became a dogma itself: To know the true Jesus
of history, we need to prescind from a post-Easter faith in him. Imaginative reconstructions
of the figure of Jesus proliferated in this atmosphere, adding to this spectacle.
Some reconstructions made claims of historicity, but in reality they were constructed
of hypotheses that were built on hypotheses, all responding to the tastes or demands
of the moment. I believe that we have come to the end of this trajectory. It is
now time to take note of the change that has happened in this area so that we can
put behind us a certain defensive and embarrassed attitude that has characterized
faith-filled scholars over the years. Even more, we need to send a message to all
those who have popularized multiple images of Jesus dictated by this anti-dogma. And
the message is that no one can any longer do “research on Jesus” in good faith that
claims to be “historical” but that prescinds from, and even excludes, faith in him
from the outset. Someone who embodies this shift in a very clear way is one of
the greatest living scholars of the New Testament, the Englishman James D. G. Dunn.
He has summarized the results of his monumental research on the origins of Christianity
in a small volume called A New Perspective on Jesus: What the Quest for the Historical
Jesus Missed. He has exposed the roots of the two fundamental presuppositions on which
the contrast between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith is based. The first
is that to know the historical Jesus one needs to prescind from post-Easter faith;
the second is that to know what the historical Jesus really said and did, one must
remove the layers of tradition and later additions and go back to the original layer
or first “redaction” of any given Gospel pericope. Countering the first presupposition,
Dunn demonstrates that faith began before Easter. If some people followed Jesus and
became his disciples, it was because they believed in him. It was a faith that was
still imperfect, but it was faith. The paschal event will certainly call for a qualitative
leap of faith on their part, but there were other qualitative leaps before Easter,
even if they were less decisive, concerning particular events like the Transfiguration,
certain sensational miracles, and the dialogue between Jesus and his disciples at
Caesarea Philippi. Easter does not constitute the absolute beginning of faith. Countering
the second assumption, while admitting that the gospel tradition circulated for a
certain period in oral form, Dunn shows how scholars always applied a literary model
to oral tradition just as people do today when they go back from edition to edition
to the original text of a work. But if we take into account the rules that regulate
the oral transmission of the tradition of a community—even in some cultures today—we
see that there is no need to strip all the flesh off of a Gospel saying in search
of a hypothetical original nucleus—a procedure that has opened the door to every kind
of manipulation of the Gospel texts. The process ends up being similar to what happens
when someone removes the layers of an onion to search for a solid nucleus that does
not exist. The conclusions Dunn reached have long been held by some Catholic scholars,
but he can be credited with having defended these conclusions with arguments that
are difficult to refute because they come from within historical-critical research
itself and use its very own weapons. The American Rabbi Jacob Neusner, with whom
Benedict XVI establishes a dialogue in his first volume on Jesus of Nazareth, takes
this result for granted. Starting from an autonomous, or we could say neutral, point
of view, he shows how futile the attempt is to separate the historical Jesus from
the Christ of post-Easter faith. The historical Jesus of the Gospels, for example
in his Sermon on the Mount, is already a Jesus who asks for faith in himself as someone
who can correct Moses, who is Lord of the Sabbath, and who can make an exception to
the fourth commandment. In brief he is someone who places himself on the same level
as God. For this very reason, though fascinated by the person of Jesus, the Jewish
rabbi says he cannot become one of his disciples. The research on this topic has
concluded at this point. It has succeeded in proving the continuity between the historical
Jesus and the Christ of the kerygma, but it goes no further. Research still remains
to be done to prove the continuity between the Christ of the kerygma and the Christ
of the Church’s dogma. Does the formula of St. Leo the Great and of Chalcedon mark
a consistent development of New Testament faith, or does it instead represent a breaking
away from it? That was my main interest in the years during which I was studying the
history of Christian origins, and the conclusion I arrived at does not differ from
that of Cardinal John Henry Newman in his famous work An Essay in the Development
of Christian Doctrine. There has certainly been a movement from a practical christology
(what Christ does) to an ontological christology (what Christ is), but this does not
constitute a break. In fact, we see the same process already taking place within the
kerygma, for example, in the developing move from Paul’s christology to John’s and,
with regard to Paul himself, in the developing move from his earliest letters to his
letters written in captivity, Philippians and Colossians.
3. Beyond the Formula
The
topic itself required me this time to pause a bit longer on the doctrinal part of
our meditation. The person of Christ is the foundation of everything in Christianity.
“If the bugle gives an indistinct sound, who will get ready for battle?”, asks St.
Paul (1 Cor 14:8): if we have no clear idea about who Jesus is, in whose name shall
we go out to evangelize? But now it is time to move on to a practical application
of the doctrine to our personal lives and the faith of the Church today, since that
remains the aim of our revisitation of the Fathers. Four and half centuries of
extraordinary theological work gave the Church the formula that “Jesus Christ is true
God and true man; Jesus Christ is one single person.” Even more concisely, he is “one
person with two natures.” One of Søren Kierkegaard’s sayings applies perfectly to
this formula: “The old Christian dogmatic terminology is like an enchanted castle
where the loveliest princes and princesses rest in a deep sleep; it only needs to
be awakened, brought to life, in order to stand in its full glory.” Our task then
is to reawaken dogmas and always give them new life. Research on the Gospels—even
the work by Dunn mentioned above—demonstrates that history cannot lead us to “Jesus
himself,” to Christ as he really is. What we find in the Gospels at every stage is
always a “remembering” about Jesus, mediated through a memory that the disciples preserved
of him, although it is a faith-filled memory. What is going on here is what happened
at his resurrection: “Some of those who were with us went to the tomb, and found it
just as the women had said; but him they did not see” (Lk 24:24). History can declare
that things about Jesus of Nazareth happened just as the disciples said in the Gospels,
but it does not see him. The same is true of dogma. It can lead us to a “defined”
and “formulated” Jesus, but Thomas Aquinas teaches us that faith does not terminate
in propositions (enuntiabile) but in the reality (res) itself. There is the same difference
between the formula of Chalcedon and the real Jesus as there is between the chemical
formula H2O and the water that we drink and in which we swim. No one can
say that the formula H2O is useless or that it does not perfectly describe
a reality. But it is not the reality! Who can lead us to the “real” Jesus who is beyond
history and behind the definition? And here we come to wonderful, comforting news.
There is the possibility of “immediate” knowledge of Christ. It is the knowledge we
are given by the Holy Spirit whom Jesus himself sent. He is the only “unmediated mediation”
between us and Christ in the sense that he does not act as a veil or constitute a
barrier. He is not an intermediary since he is the Spirit of Jesus himself, his “alter
ego,” who is of the same nature. St. Irenaeus reaches the point of saying that “communion
with Christ . . . is the Holy Spirit.” For this reason the Holy Spirit is different
from every other mediation between us and the Risen One, whether that mediation is
ecclesial or sacramental. Scripture itself speaks of this role of the Holy Spirit
whose aim is the knowledge of the true Jesus. The descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost
results in a sudden illumination of all the work and person of Jesus. Peter concludes
his sermon with a kind of definition of the Lordship of Christ that is urbi et orbi:
“Let all the house of Israel therefore know assuredly that God has made him both Lord
and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36). St. Paul affirms that Jesus
Christ is “designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness” (Rom
1:4), that is, by the work of the Holy Spirit. No one can say that Jesus is Lord except
by an interior illumination of the Holy Spirit (see 1 Cor 12:3). The apostle attributes
to the Holy Spirit “the insight into the mystery of Christ” that was given to him
and to the holy apostles and prophets (Eph 3:4-5). Only if believers are “strengthened
with might through his Spirit,” says the apostle, will they be able to know “the breadth
and height and depth, and . . . the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge” (Eph
3:16-19). In John’s Gospel Jesus himself announces this work of the Paraclete on
behalf of believers. The Holy Spirit will take what is his and announce it to the
disciples; he will make them recall all that Jesus has said; he will lead them into
all the truth about his relationship to the Father; he will testify of Jesus. From
now on, the criterion to recognize if something is from the Spirit of God or from
another spirit is if it prompts people to confess that “Jesus has come in the flesh”
(1 Jn 4:2-3).
4. Jesus of Nazareth, “One Person”
With the help of the
Holy Spirit, let us make a small attempt to “reawaken” this dogma. With regard to
the dogmatic triangle that came from St. Leo the Great and Chalcedon—“true God,” “true
man,” “one person”—we will limit ourselves to consider only the last part: Christ
as “one person.” Dogmatic definitions are “open structures” that are able to take
on new significations made possible by the progress in human thinking. In its earliest
stage, the word “person” (from the Latin personare, “to resonate”) meant the mask
that an actor would use to make his voice resonate in the theater. From this meaning
it evolved to indicate a person’s face and thus meant an individual, one single person,
until it acquired its most profound meaning of “an individual substance of a rational
nature” (Boethuis). In modern usage the concept of “person” has been enriched
with a more suggestive and relational meaning, which no doubt benefitted from the
trinitarian use of the word “person” as “a subsistent relationship.” It thus indicates
the human being insofar as he or she is capable of relationship, of being an “I” in
the presence of a “You.” The Latin terminology “one person” proved be more fruitful
than the respective Greek word “hypostasis.” “Hypostasis” can be said of every single
existing object, but “person” can only be said about a human being and, by analogy,
about a divine being. We speak today (as the Greeks do now) of the “dignity of the
human person” and not of “the dignity of the hypostasis.” Let us apply all this
to our relationship with Christ. To say that Jesus is “one person” also means that
he is risen, that he lives, that he stands before me, that I can talk to him on a
first-name basis as he does with me. We continually need to cross over, in our minds
and hearts, from the personage of Jesus to the person of Jesus. The personage is the
one about whom we can speak and write what we wish but to whom and with whom we generally
cannot speak. For the majority of believers, unfortunately, Jesus is still a personage,
someone we can debate about and write about endlessly, a memory from the past, someone
who is linked to a set of doctrines, dogmas, or heresies. He is an objective entity
rather than someone who exists. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre describes in a
famous passage the metaphysical thrill produced by the unexpected discovery of the
existence of things, and for this at least we can give him credit: So I was in
the park just now. The roots of the chestnut tree were sunk in the ground just under
my bench. I couldn’t remember it was a root any more. The words had vanished and with
them the significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference
which men have traced on their surface. . . . Then I had this vision. It left me
breathless. . . . Usually existence hides itself. It is there, around us, in us, it
is us, you can’t say two words without mentioning it, but you can never touch it.
. . . And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly
unveiled itself. In order to go beyond the words and ideas about Jesus and enter
into contact with him as a living person, we need to have an experience of this kind.
Some exegetes interpret the divine name “I AM” to mean “I am here,” I am with you,
present, available, here and now. It is possible to have Jesus as a friend, because
since he is risen, he is alive, he is next to me. I can relate to him as one living
person to another, as someone present to someone present—not physically or even through
the imagination alone, but “through the Spirit” who is infinitely more intimate and
real than the body or the imagination. St. Paul assures us that it is possible to
do everything “with Jesus” whether it be eating or drinking or whatever else we do
(see 1 Cor 10:31; Col 3:17). Unfortunately, Jesus is rarely thought of as a friend
and confidant. In our subconscious the image of him as risen, ascended into heaven,
remote in his divine transcendence, and returning one day at the end of the world
is the image that dominates. We forget that being “true man,” as the dogma says—and
even being the very perfection of humanity itself—he possesses the capacity for friendship
to the highest degree, which is one of the noblest characteristics of a human being.
It is Jesus who wants that relationship with us. In his farewell discourse, giving
full expression to his feelings, he says, “No longer do I call you servants, for the
servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for
all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (Jn 15:15). I have
seen this kind of relationship happen not as much with saints—for whom the prevailing
relationship is with a Master, Shepherd, Savior, Spouse—but with Jews who, often in
a way not unlike that of Saul, come to accept the Messiah. The name of Jesus is suddenly
transformed from being a vague threat to being the sweetest and most beloved of names.
A friend. It is as though the absence of 2,000 years of debates about Christ has played
out in their favor. Their Jesus is never an “ideological” Jesus but a person of flesh
and blood. Of their blood! One is deeply moved in reading some of their testimonies.
All the contradictions are resolved in an instant, all the obscurities are made clear.
It is like seeing the spiritual reading of the Old Testament come to life as a whole,
all at once, before their very eyes. Saint Paul says it is like having a veil removed
from one’s eyes (see 2 Cor 3:16). During his earthly life, although Jesus loved
everyone without exception, it is only with some—Lazarus, his sisters, and especially
John, “the disciple that he loved”—that Jesus has a relationship of true friendship.
Now that he is risen and is no longer subject to the limitations of the body, however,
he offers every man and woman the possibility of having him as a friend in the fullest
sense of that word. May the Holy Spirit, the friend of the bridegroom, help us welcome
with amazement and joy this possibility that can fill our lives.
Translated
from Italian by Marsha Daigle Williamson