Words and Things

The synthetic impulse in Catholic Life

(The Hildegard Lecture, University of Mary, Bismarck, North Dakota: Being a brief journey of the mind engaging St Hildegard, Saint Thomas, the metaphysics of universals and relations, social justice, Charity and why we should listen to children, farmers and poets.)

Saint Hildegard was a woman of intense prayer, immense energy, great practicality and extraordinary imagination. As an abbess, she directed her community, and at the direction of the Pope Eugene III, (the Cistercian pope) she wrote down her mystical visions; her work includes musical compositions, liturgical drama, poetry, moral instruction, and writings on medicine, botany, animal and human anatomy.

The breadth of her writings indicate that she was keenly interested in practical things, like biology. She was interested in keeping people, especially her sisters, healthy, and in keeping the farm animals well cared for. But she ascends, so to speak, to artistic expression, moral counsel and the contemplation of the mysteries announced in Sacred Scripture.

Her mind was like a Jacob’s ladder where her thoughts ascended and descended. She moved from the sublime to the earthiest practicalities, without seeming to have encountered a distasteful endeavor among them. The image of the ladder is purposeful, because it suggests that in her mind these things are all related, that is to say, connected in a real way such that an active mind can discern the path to and from widely diverse realities.

We have come a long way intellectually, socially and culturally since the Twelfth Century when she was living, praying, milking cows, writing poetry, music and letters to princes. Historians still wonder how she derived such a comprehensive approach to reality. They also wonder where she learned to write in Latin, given the fact that she did not have the education of someone like Heloise, Abelard’s friend. Nor did she have much exposure to what was occurring in cultural centers like Rome or Paris.

She was naturally gifted, of that there can be no doubt, but I would like to focus on the simple fact that her gifts found fertile ground to grow and develop within a culture that assumed the relatedness of things. The Catholic synthetic impulse, by which I mean a purposeful concern for the deeper connections that bind all that exists, is prior to formal education, and forms the habits of the soul prior to the disciplines of grammar, rhetoric, music, biology, medicine, morality and mystical contemplation. Saint Hildegard witnesses to this.

For a Catholic the synthetic impulse that I will argue is somewhat natural to human beings becomes robust and fruitful with baptism into the faith; it comes with looking at life and reality from the gut awareness that the source of all that is, is the Good God; this good God loves immensely, and was interested in a garden at creation, not a wild and chaotic forest of beings related only by a competitive need to survive. Hildegard had this fundamental confidence in the relatedness of things. Her faith gave her access to the mind of God. Oh, even the children have this access: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth…” We have it too, and if we do not have it, it is because somewhere along the way we stopped permitting the basic intuitions of nature and of the grace of the faith impact our way of seeing, thinking and acting.

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Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, the towering figure of monastic theology, died during Hildegard’s life-time. We are perhaps somewhat familiar with the controversies involving him and Abelard, arising from Abelard’s early exposition of a kind of nominalism. Controversies of these kinds began in earnest in the intellectual hubs of Europe in Hildegard’s time, and they continued for some time thereafter. At their center, these had to do with just how to account in rigorous fashion for this relatedness of all things. How is Scripture related to Aristotle? Revelation to philosophy? Bernard and Abelard clashed mightily on these questions. But primarily this was not a clash about texts or authors, it was a clash about how things and their relations can be accounted for in different ways.

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Hildegard died in 1179. St Thomas was born in 1225. I remember as an undergraduate taking metaphysics class from Dr. Frederick Wilhelmsen, a brilliant teacher and renowned Thomist. He lectured one day on the thomistic distinction between the synthetic act of the mind and the analytic act of the mind. I have never forgotten how he put it: There are two ways to know a frog: you can watch it jump and swim, or you can kill it, dissect it, and jab at its artificially preserved parts. Dr. Wilhelmsen obviously thought our age was excessively analytical and insufficiently synthetic. His sympathies were evident in the formulation.

Thomas himself was familiar with the Greek terms that underlie our words analytical and synthetic, but he preferred the Latin manner of describing these two different ways of using the mind: modus resolutorius and modus compositivus, or the mode of resolution and the mode of composition. The via resolutionis starts with the thing known and reduces it to its constitutive parts. The via compositivus points toward the substance, or thing, in its actual act of existence. The via compositivus considers how the frog exists in itself and in relation to other existing things. Frogs relate to water, other frogs, snakes, people, Angels and God in different ways. Understanding its relations is an aspect of accounting for what it is.

The human mind resolves existing things to their basic elements: matter, form, essence, existence. But to do so, it starts by inspecting the existing thing in operation. Thomas conceived of the two acts of the mind as suited to moving from physics to metaphysics; from consideration of formed matter in motion to the consideration by abstraction to the realities operative in the particular. These realities are real, though perceived only by a purified act of intellection. These metaphysical terms like matter, form, nature, substance and existence name the commonalities that really bind us together as existing things. Through them we have access to an analogical account of similarity, and to the mystery of being partially disclosed by terms like beauty, goodness and truth.

For Thomas, things are related in a real way because the divine pure act of being (ipsum esse existens), God Himself, gifts all of creation with an act of existence that is in some way reflects the Giver and that serves as the metaphysical basis for the relations among existing things. As Saint Thomas says somewhere in the Summa Contra Gentiles (SCG IV, 42): Sic ingitur omnes creaturae nihil aliud sunt quam realis quaedam expressio et repraesentatio eorum quae in conceptione divini verbi comprehenduntur. (Thus, all creatures are nothing other than a kind of real expression and representation of those things which are comprehended within the conception of the Divine Word).

The key here is “real expression” Existing things in act (the jumping frog) are themselves real expressions, existing reflections and representations of the incomprehensible intelligibility and goodness comprehended in the incomprehensible WORD. We are all related most basically as participants in a gratuitous gift of existence. What we know about other things is spurred by a prior existential connection that in some way assures that the ground the intellect covers is familiar ground even if we have never seen it before. It is the incomprehensible intelligibility of the WORD, source of all that is, that guarantees that our meagre perceptions of the relatedness of things are real and not merely contrived fancies.

The Summa Contra Gentiles, in the sense I am delimiting, is a synthetic work, as is the Summa Theologiae after it. They are both expressions of the via compositionis that is to say, contemplations of the whole as an assemblage of moving parts. But these grand synthetic opera only work because they are also expressions of the via resolutionis, that is to say, the distinguishing of elements operative within the particular realities treated. The interrelatedness of the whole reflects the realities examined in particular, each of which relates to other realities treated elsewhere.

Take for example the Second Part of the Summa Theologae, on the moral life, treated in general and in particular. It is situated between the treatment of Trinity and creation in the First Part, and the Christological treatises of the Third Part. The relation is thus something like this: The created being, man, reflects its origin in the Trinity. The eternal dynamic of the processions of WORD and LOVE from the Father is reflected in existing human beings. Our reflection shows itself as a capacity for self-moving in time toward the summit of expressive participation in the eternal Trinitarian dynamic. This is morality. This human reality of motion at the highest levels of his nature is by way of gratuitous gift offered in the grand suitability manifested in the economy of the Incarnation of the WORD (Third Part).

Like the Scripture commentaries, the Summae are works of synthesis made possible by a prior detailed work of analysis. If you open Saint Thomas’ commentary of the epistles of Saint Paul, you quickly realize that he comments each line with a prior awareness of the teleology of the entire Pauline Corpus, and indeed the whole of Sacred Scripture. In short, Thomas the magister shows us that you cannot teach the parts without first having perceived the intelligibility of the whole. And you cannot perceive something of the intelligibility of the whole if you do not know the elements operative in the parts. In Thomas, this is true of the Summa because it is first true about the Scriptures.

The Summae could have been ordered in other ways, because they are compositional works, manifestations of the working mind engaged in reality, exploring the relatedness of all things. But they are not fictive, because however you order the exposition, the order aims to reflect the relations indicated in reality. The mind seeks an ever more adequate adequatio to things that are.

Thomas is thinking metaphysically from Hildegard’s baptismal perspective; their way of seeing reality is essentially synthetic, that is to say rooted in a sense of the comprehensive relatedness that undergirds creation. Hildegard’s work and Thomas’ work are related by way of the common synthetic impulse that is itself animated by the human and Catholic intuition about the relationality inherent in creation. You don’t have to be a metaphysician to have this confidence that relationality is present and waiting to be discovered; you only have to have a sense of what the Prologue of Saint John’s Gospel tells us about the good God who made all things in the WORD.

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Nominalisms and voluntarisms, with their dominant descendants in the physical sciences and in the psychological and sociological pursuits, have had the cumulative effect of stripping us of our confidence that things are essentially related. From this perspective, more universal concepts like nature and form are constructs of the mind to help us understand existing things, but these constructs are contrived as an aid: we group things according to similarities because it is convenient to the mind, not convenient to reality. We no longer have the sense that “essentially related” is a phrase that means something more than “apparently related” to my mind. We now assume that thoughts about things are related, but not things themselves. From the current dominant perspective things knowable and knowing beings were not really made for each other. This is the expression of the greatest gulf that lies between us and St. Hildegard. She was spurred by her intuitions confirmed by faith in a good and creative God, to investigate the relatedness of things, not thoughts.

Dogs and cats may be related in some way to a prior biological category in the order carnivore, in the class mammalia, in the phylum chordata, in the kingdom Animalia. The relation here implied is about how particular animals are related to other particular animals with similar characteristics. But zoology will not speculate beyond the fact that all particular animals are composed of physical elements that combine to form living things similar enough to breed. Individuation is our starting point and our ending point in what is left of the via resolutionis and the via compositivus. We are materialists by cultural education, and individualists by virtue of the metaphysical option that by default hovers over the culture.

Today we dissect the frog in order to move from physics to biology, and biology to zoology, and then to microbiology and micro-physics until we get to what we moderns consider the basic building blocks of reality, whether they be molecules, or atoms or some other matter-based concept. There is no greater sign of the impoverishment of our access to related modes of knowing than in the realization that since Hildegard’s time we have shifted from analysis for the sake of knowing the structure of being to analysis for the sake of resolving everything to biology and physics.

This actually represents a retreat of the intellect in the face of reality as we encounter it. We can no longer speak of significant similarities beyond the physically observable. Relationality as inscribed in the structure of created being is no longer accessible to us. We cannot know beyond what we can measure. Try to make an argument from analogy on any controversial topic today, and you will see how far we have retreated as a thinking culture. This is so because analogical argument is essentially argument from perceived relations that lie beyond the merely physical.

Well, there are many fine books written that can illuminate how we got from the analytic impulse that resolves to being, and the analytic act that resolves to atoms. The overwhelming fact, though, is that this is where we are. And this fact impacts how we as Catholics approach the relatedness of all things. Ah, beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, the Lord said somewhere. Or put another way, beware of believing one way but seeing with the eyes formed in a different light.

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People, though, still naturally sense a relation among things that is real and significant, though not reducible to the physical. We still sense a common humanity that binds us in some way; from this flows a natural kind of compassion, and a spontaneous desire to help a neighbor in need. We still speak of how music is more than a succession of sounds, but rather an expression of a higher order of harmony and depth. Children still look at puppies and make baby-talk to them as if there is some level of connection beyond the merely linguistic. But these are examples drawn mostly out of what is left of the spontaneity of life, the aesthetic realm, and the exemplarity of children. Beware of accounts of the human reality, though, be they philosophical, psychological, sociological, or any other kind that do not account for the experience of Good Samaritans, musicians, poets and children.

Kinship is another way of saying the relationality inscribed in things. There is a kinship between nature and music, for example. We forget about the great metaphysical tradition from the Ancients to Augustine and Thomas that explored this relationship. We sense an unnamed nostalgia when we see the filming of nature put to music. We do not know how to account for this without a sense that harmony, luminosity and proportion are aspects of being that both transcend and undergird individuation. Without a culture that begins from the notion that things are related, we reduce this unnamed nostalgia to mere sentiment or to the pre-figured pattern present in the perceiver.

Children know better when they dance and smile, often in the company of puppies, at certain tunes and become sad at others. But that brings me back to Saint Hildegard. A child’s intuition about the relatedness of things is something she had and so do children today. Only it seems we get educated out of that sense by the fourth grade. Likewise, a perception that the drama of nature is somehow related to music is something she experienced, and we do too. Think of those excellent BBC Planet Earth shows, where the swimming of penguins and walruses is put to music. Only we no longer let the intuition spur our searching for the source of the relation.

Fairy Tales and modern fantasy are among the final preserves of the mind open to the relatedness of things. Perhaps that is why so much modern child-psychology looks upon these with suspicion if not disdain. The perilous realm is perilous in great part because things are intensely related. Gollum is like Frodo in ways the story only intimates; there is something deeper there. And Frodo is like Gollum in ways that make us uncomfortable in a way that is probably good for us to contemplate. The Elves and the Orcs are sprung from the same stock, one free to hear the whispers of brooks and bushes, the other cruelly bred to destroy the beauty of both. My grand-niece tries to talk to the dog. She is on to something the rest of us have forgotten. The kinship is real, and mysterious.

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In each of these examples taken from ordinary experiences, everyday life has developed a different account of the relatedness of things. We tend to put the source of the relation in the mental constructs present in the ones perceiving and not in the things themselves. Somewhere along the way, the culture learned to start from the assumption of non-relation, and began to think of other ways to account for the lingering sense that relatedness is a mysterious yet central category of existence. So now we imagine that when we see birds fly at the approach of a storm and think of Mozart’s Symphony in G-minor, it is a soothing construct of the imagination, not an intuition about the mystery at the heart of reality. Part of the problem here is the lack of intellectual respect afforded the human imagination. We relate it to unreality, whereas Augustine or Thomas related it to human sensibility and intellection.

The misery of this kind of non-account for relationality is particularly evident in the social and political order. It is true that people retain a spontaneous if tenuous sense that we are connected at deeper levels than mere convenient association. Nevertheless, our wider culture has no basis to talk about mutual concern and compassion apart from the language of purely willed associations. These willed associations all pursue a via resolutionis that resolves to the isolated individual to whom can be attributed rights but within whom links to the world outside themselves are increasingly difficult to account for apart from willing them. We speak of the atoms of society; but we find it difficult to speak of human nature as essentially connected and hence inherently relational. We live in a culture of tenuously expressed human compassion, or at worst, of willed isolation from what affects my neighbor.

Why? Because if metaphysical universals like matter, form, nature and existence are mental constructs that may be useful for grouping things, then we are not in fact related to each other, or to all other existing things. It only took a couple of centuries to move from the abandonment of these metaphysical categories as naming something real, to an inversion of the via resolutionis to the reduction of all things to their radical individuality. Today, this appears primarily as a reduction of all individuality to a material category.

In the Church’s life this breakdown is reflected in the reduction of charity from a robust gift of social cohesion to an individually willed act of selflessness. There is not much urgency to it, not like in the parable of the Good Samaritan. There is only me, wanting to help. In a profound sense the magisterium of the current and last several pontificates has been dedicated to recovering the authentic sense of the word «charity».

Catholic moral teaching, including the Social Justice magisterium, presumes a metaphysics of human nature in relation, and proposes a healing and strengthening of these relations by faith, hope, and charity. The Church stubbornly insists that willing can only affect how we choose to deal with what is a prior existential relatedness. When social relations are conceived as fundamentally voluntary, they are subject to severance for whatever provocation the willed relations might unpleasantly cause. The “I do not want to deal with you” that is an ever present temptation to fallen nature becomes a normative response. When there is no intellectual respect for the human intuition that like it or not we are related, and willing otherwise does not change that reality we end up with what Pope Francis calls the culture of indifference. Indifference perceives no claim of relation, and in this culture kills by neglect.

It is much easier to deny solidarity among peoples when relations are conceived as originating in willed associations between individuals only. The mind cannot alter reality but it can choose not to see it completely. It is as if we are living in an age when the blind spot we have chosen by predilection is exactly the unwillingness to see that all existing things are related in a real and significant way. We experience this chasm in the pro-life debates and in the debates surrounding the just treatment of immigrants. We dehumanize and then dispose of persons that the culture of radical individuation tells us are related to me only to the extent I will the relation. Even the natural created order, the trees and brooks, are foreign to us; they are in some sense adversarial and objects of willed subjugation.

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The first casualty of the long intellectual and cultural boat ride across the gulf that separates us from St Hildegard is the sheer human joy of pursuing the signs of relationality we know are present in things that may at times appear disparate and unrelated. It is the confidence in the relatedness of things that is the birthright of a human being, and is immensely fortified by the baptismal graces that flow from faith. The loss of this kind of spiritual and intellectual joy is the fruit of first the deconstruction and then the denial of metaphysics. It now expresses itself in an intellectual culture of endless disciplines and sub disciplines happily unconcerned with what a colleague across the campus may be doing or thinking.

Even in a Catholic institution, disciplines can become citadels that privilege one account of a thing as if it were the only one. We take human beings apart: Man as biological organism, man as affected by sensual impressions, man as creative, man as a laboring creature, thinking creature, man as mortal, man as immortal. All of these express aspects of the mystery that is man, but perhaps Dr. Wilhelmsen was correct to suggest that we have prioritized analysis and have forgotten to step back to watch the man jump, laugh, cry, sing, work, sweat, create, hope, pray and die. Yet, the analytic act and the synthetic act of the mind are intimately related in ways suggested by Thomas’ Scriptural commentaries and his Summae. Analysis must push to try to account for the whole of the actually existing being in relation to the rest of creation.

Faith is meant to direct the gaze of the mind, not replace the work of the mind. This is as surely true today as it was in Hildegard’s time. The difference, though, lies in the fact that Hildegard knew she had faith, and worked from there. Modern academics do not often appreciate is how much faith it takes to conceive of the world as essentially unrelated. In our current context, I would like to make a few suggestions about how to avoid the leaven of the Pharisees and how to follow the Catholic synthetic impulse.

First, I think this impulse naturally respects the way children see things. Children are naturally realists with a healthy dose of imagination. These are the ingredients of a synthetic mind. They watch things be and live and move and they are amazed. Chesterton talked about this frequently. Talk to children as often as you can.

Closely allied to this is a renewed attentiveness to the poor. Not as a category of persons in similar circumstances, but as persons who are connected to us, like us, and they have something to teach us. (By the poor, I mean teenagers and mothers and fathers that I know who have nothing, and have survived violence in Guatemala and a journey through Mexico, mostly through the kindness of strangers.) The poor that I know are keenly aware of their dependence on the kindness and generosity of others and on God for survival. And, to be perfectly blunt, the poor that I know tend to be more spontaneously kind and generous than is the norm for modern polite society. Dios cuida al que cuida a un pobre, as my Grandmother would say.: God takes care of one who takes care of the poor. The more resources we have the more likely we are to forget that the reciprocity of human relations is basic to us and to the economy of divine providence. Without this awareness we construct the illusion of self-sufficient individuation.

Secondly, pay attention to poets and writers and other expressive artists. Whether they know it or not, poets and painters live in the environs of the WORD made Flesh, in all of his cosmic splendor and human poverty. This is so because they craft words and images together with creative care, and in doing so are reflecting the creative act of the WORD. In him all things are related; in poets, words relate to things, and things relate to other things. In painters and sculptors, images reflect perceptions rooted in what is. They can speak beyond themselves because they live in this mystery of words and reflections and creation. They always have. They did so in pre-Christian times, and they do so in a post-Christian culture.

Thirdly, get to know a farmer. The natural rhythms of nature are increasingly distant from the experience of many. Yet, the environs of nature mark the reality from which arise both human survival and creativity. The analytic act and the synthetic act are operative everyday in the life of a farmer, or any person (like St Hildegard) who works closely with nature. Only, like most things St Thomas talked about, they are operative in ordinary life before they are the object of metaphysical and theological reflection.

Finally, pay close attention to the saints. They are the Good Samaritans of the Church’s calendar, and their response to life is saturated with spontaneity and joy at how all things are, and how they relate. Charity is the proper perfection of the soul formed in faith. And Charity is the gift of knowing how to relate. It is that simple. Saint Lawrence loved the poor, as did Saint Francis, and every saint you can name. They perceived and enacted by grace what Thomas describes in the Second Part of the Summa Theologiae. He could describe it first of all because of the exemplarity of Christ. Yet, all the saints showed him what the mystery of human life at its optimal expressions can look like. The WORD made flesh, and those who keep his company, witness to the truth about relations.

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In St Hildegard we see operative a truly remarkable expression of this vigorous charity. It permeated how she saw life, thought about it, and how she acted. A theologian, philosopher or an artist could talk easily to the Abbess, and the Abbess could converse easily with them. The Abbess could talk to a farmer or a child, and they could converse happily with her. We might overlook how truly amazing this was. All too frequently we see that not every theologian and philosopher can talk to each other, or to an artist; nor can any of them always speak comfortably to a farmer or to a child. The artist may not suspect that his expressive impulse is closely related to the farmer’s craft or the child’s fears of the dark. And the theologian or philosopher may not think the farmer or the child or the poor have much to say about how things are, perhaps because they have not read the latest journal. And this may be because the theologian, the philosopher and the artist no longer see with eyes capable of perceiving the kinship of things. In a simple yet profound sense, a Christian is called by grace to be the mediator of a related world that struggles to live up to its relations. If we listen to the deeper impulses of the faith, we should be able to find joy in the simplest things, and in contemplating the grandly expressive relation between all things that are; and we should be able to converse with anybody. (1)

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Here are a few books that have helped me form this lecture, more by the impressions they have over time left on my mind than by any particular textual reference.

Sabina Flanagan, Hildegard of Bingen, 1098–1179 A Visionary Life, Second Edition, Routledge, 1998.

BrunoForte, The Portal of Beauty, Eerdman’s, 2008.

William Franke, Dante and the Sense of Transgression, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013.

Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity, The University of Chicago, 2008.

Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1952.

John Milbank, Beyond Secular Order, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.

Charles Péguy, Los Tres Misterios, Introducción de Javier del PradoBiezma, Ediciones Encuentro, S. A., Madrid, 2008.

Arturo Pérez-Reverte, El Pintor de Batallas, Alfaguara, 2013.

JosephRatzinger, Dogma and Preaching, Ignatius Press, 2005.

Larry Seidentop, Inventing the Individual The Origins of Western Liberalism, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014.

Javier Sicilia, La Confesión, El diario de Esteban Martorus, Penguin Random House, 2009, 2016.

Frederick D. Wilhelmsem, The Paradoxical Structure of Existence, University of Dallas Press, 1973.

XXXIII Sunday, Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, Brownsville, Texas

-On the message of the US Bishops on immigration in light of the Gospel today: Bearing witness to the Lord; being given what to say.
-Sobre el mensaje de los obispos EEUU sobre la inmigración a la luz del Evangelio de hoy: Dando testimonio del Señor.

https://youtu.be/mFT3LUruWuI?feature=shared

(Or, if you prefer, “What conversion looks like”, or perhaps “a lecture in praise of the Charity of Jerome and Augustine”)

The Translated Word. (Living Tradition Lecture, Center for Ethics and Culture: University of Notre Dame, 14 November, 2025)

Behind this lecture is a desire to share with you my love for words, and my sense of both their efficacy and limitations. And also to sketch my conviction that if we open the door to the issue of translation, we step into the dramatic center of the mystery of salvation itself.

Words and Translation

So what is a word? Words, St Thomas points out, are intentionally directed outward manifestations of what is understood within the mind of the speaker. (1) Words are therefore invisible in their origin, made visible in their manifestation and trajectory, and inherently relational. They have an origin and a destination. Words do not come into existence in isolation from this relation. There may exist sounds through air, or scribbles on paper, but they do not exist as words apart from the sense intended by the speaker (or writer), and the understanding that in some way dawns in the mind of the hearer (or reader). This means also that they are a part of history. They are present signs of human relations existing in the world.

What is in the mind of the speaker, though, is derived from our being physical creatures in a material world. We form of an understanding of what our senses encounter. And from that interior word we make a physical sign, also known as a word, of what we understand. Our speech is constantly trying to make sense of our experience of our human relations and of the wider world around us. And we desire to communicate our understanding to someone else.

It is true that we can understand words in a letter or paragraph without knowing who wrote them or why, and without knowing to whom the writer wished to speak. This is because we have a reservoir of communal memory about what words generally mean. This reservoir is what we call a language. If we catch words in mid-air, so to speak, without knowing where they came from or to whom they were directed, we can still hear and read them, but the burden of interpreting them (translating them for ourselves) is carried solely by our sense of what the language understands through words like these. We know these words came from someone, and someone first heard and understood them in a certain way. And when they are in a different language, we have to understand the sense over there, and move it to a sense understandable over here.

The English word translate literally derives from prior words in the Latin tradition that inhabit the thoughts of people who move things around, or carry them across from some place or other. Latin antiquity took the past participle of transferre, translatus, as an adequate way to describe these movements. The Romans themselves preferred to describe their translators as interpreters (interpres), deriving from people involved in diplomatic missions or the market place.(2) What Roman antiquity mostly interpreted, or translated, were the peoples they conquered or traded with, and Greek texts. Our modern sense of the term translate basically suggests moving the signs of understanding from one language to another. Or, more precisely, trying to understand in one language what is expressed and understood in another language.

From the Greeks we have hermēneuō for interpreting or translating, from which we have our word hermeneutics, deriving its sense (it would seem) from Hermes the messenger / interpreter of the gods to men. I will avoid the word hermeneutics this evening. It is a perfectly good word, but we have made it into an overly professional word. I am more interested in the translating we humans do everyday. (3)

Other languages unknown to me may have radically different ways of deriving the sense of what we call translating. I would enjoy learning from others about what those word histories might suggest. But, part of our poverty is the human limits of our knowledge of languages, and my poverty is mostly Latin derived and applied. Language limits can be a blessing, though, if we understand them right. Borges certainly thought so. He used to say that he was opportunely ignorant of Greek, which allowed him to focus his attention on what English poets, as English poets, had made of Homer. (4)

2. The Translation of the Word

At the center of the revelation is the Only-begotten Son of the Father who became flesh and dwelt among us. In speaking to us about this, St John’s prologue calls the Son also the WORD. The Nicene Creed says a lot about the WORD, but only actually refers to him as the Son. The Word / Son are one and the same, of course, but the two words move our minds to distinct aspects of his identity. This already points to a basic reality in us: what is One in God requires multiple words for us to approach. Son and Word overlap in sense in some ways: they both come from a source distinct from themselves, for example. But they signify from different contexts. The words unite in our minds, but we cannot think them identically.

St Thomas has a nice little summary of our worded limitations somewhere in his treatise on the Trinity in the Summa when, speaking of the Word, he says the following: To show that he is connatural with the Father, he is called “Son”; as co-eternal, he is called “Splendor”; as entirely similar, he is called “Image”; as immaterially begotten, he is called “Word”; and this because it has not been possible to find a suitable name to designate all these things. (5)

Theologically speaking, the first translatus that should occupy us is the movement of the Son / Word from his place to ours. We could say Et Verbum Translatum est, et habitavit it in nobis. The Word translated himself to where we are. The issue of movement is evidently a concern of the Evangelist. Where he came from is not a physical place, for he came from being with or in the Beginning; where he moved to is our house. The Beginning, on the reading of the Fathers, East and West, is not primarily a reference to time or to before time: rather, it is more properly a reference to the Father, origin, principle, and source. He is the principium that the Word/Son is in and with. (6)

The medium of his self-translation to us is his flesh. What we have seen and touched. (7) For the Evangelist, his movement across eternity to our dwelling place is primarily for the sake of signification, that is to say, of being seen, heard, understood and known: and we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth. (8) John will make explicit later the sort of things we should know when we behold Christ. (9)

The translation of the WORD, thus, is not simply a movement of place; it is simultaneously a signifying move, such that it would be true to say that the WORD’s taking flesh is the self-interpretation of God to us. Verbum caro factum est, et interpretavit se nobis. He became flesh, and interpreted himself to us. St Thomas, in his commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews says that the Word expressly manifested himself to us. (10) In other contexts St Thomas uses the word expresse to mean literally, plainly, fully. In his flesh the inexhaustibly intelligible WORD of the Father showed himself to us most expressly, most directly, most clearly. (11) The manifestation occurs in his being present to us, and acting among us in the flesh. The flesh of Christ is the exteriorization of the Father’s inner Word. To use Augustine’s phrase, the Verbum Cordis of the Father became the Verbum vocis; that is to say, the Word that the Father has in his heart from all eternity became the Word spoken into our physical hearing. (12)

The hearing encompasses more to Augustine than just that Jesus preached publicly; the audible Word refers to the whole of his incarnate presence. The clarity of the manifestation is through the radical character of the showing. The life of Christ in its totality is one long self-pronunciation of himself into our seeing and hearing. The pronunciation is as much in what he does and suffers, as it is about his spoken words. (13) This is why the totality of the human life, death and resurrection of Jesus is the self-translation of the Word. The revelation is his self-expressiveness within the limitations of a single human life. This is his self-imposed poverty. He has no other language at his disposal to speak to us so directly, save a poor human life. As Javier Sicilia states in one of his novels: But he remained within the limits of his own flesh, in his own poverty, in his own death, so poor, so miserable, so hard. (14) Such is the form of the revelation.

The clarity of the sign that is Christ’s flesh is at the same time inherently enigmatic. This is so not because he could be more explicicitly present to us, but because humans can only perceive direct presence through the senses. We see who someone is and what they are about through how they present themselves to us. The Incarnation is thus an invitation to see through the expressive manifestation and rightly interpret the truth shown us through his flesh. There is no getting around this need for true interpretation of Christ; nor should we hope their were. This is the human way.

The interior move from sensible perception of other persons to an understanding of some kind of the persons themselves is what is most mysterious about us. It happens, and so we can speak of it. We craft words for it. We say them to ourselves and to each other.

The primordial translation of the Word among us is a move that gives birth to new words in us that have to do with the fact of his presence and the understanding of his person; basically who he is and why he comes. These are words we would not have thought to think and say before. The only reason we are interested in translating words about him, even inspired words, is to perceive what the enfleshed Word among us is saying to us by being who he is, and by acting as he does while he is with us.

It is undoubtedly a matter of providence that save for the words written on the ground in front of the condemned woman’s accusers, we have no indication that the Lord was interested in writing. What we have are the memories of disciples who saw and heard, and urgently spoke of this to anyone who would listen. The New Testament is a written record of what they glimpsed in him and what they understood about him: As Pope Leo the Great so elegantly puts it in his sermon on the Beatitudes: writing in the hearts of the disciples the swift hand of the Word established the ordinances of the New Testament. (15)

The first letter of John would have us remember what we truly know of Christ: John’s epistles provide the most explicit and briefest formulations of what the disciples perceived about the Word made flesh: In this way the love of God was revealed to us: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might have life through him. (16) What the faith perceives about the Word’s self-translation through the fully expresive enigma of his flesh is inextricably bound to the word love. This is the knowing of faith: We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us. (17)

The word love, of course, is word with an intended meaning. St John and St Paul and the other apostolic evangelizers used the word a lot. But as with all words, we need to think about it’s intended sense, the content of the word. That is what I will attempt to do as we move forward.

3. The Conversation of the Son

Son is a most personable word, with a history as old as human culture and molded into an instrument of theology since the earliest Scriptural discourses. It is the primary New Testament name for Jesus. Adam and Eve started with two sons. One killed the other. The primordial act of violence burns in our collective memories. I cannot read the opening lines of the parable of the Prodigal Son (There was a man who had two sons), without thinking of Cain and Abel.

Son and daughter both are inerradicably relational words, and point to an enfleshed connection of the most intimate kind. The son or daughter can have brothers and sisters, cousins and in-laws. The biology of the connections can be traced, though the humanly charged lives of loves and betrayals flowing from the biological are resistent to transparency. Especially when viewed by the mildly interested bystander observing a family dynamic.

If you’ve ever been invited to a celebratory dinner prepared by a family not your own, than you know that the familial conversation often darts about quickly and at different levels, offering glimpses of personal histories of great affection and unresolved resentments. To the outsider, they are only worded and gestured glimpses, though. If you want to know the meaning of some things said or done at a large family gathering, you basically have to hang around these people long enough to get a sense of where the affections and resentments come from, and how the conversation both hides and reveals them.

So if Christ in our midst is the self-enunciation of the Father’s Word, and the Word’s human life speaks Love, then we have need to be in his company to begin to sense what manner of love this might be. Reading about it will not suffice, nor will a brief exposure. Jesus speaks various parables about being invited to the Son’s wedding banquet. (18) The thing about the parables is that they are stories that you can step into at some point. You have to step into it to really understand it, but hearing it gives you a chance to think about whether you want to step into it or not. The call to enter the banquet is like this. Like any invitation that comes to us, it elicits the question: do I really want to go? We accept or reject the invitation depending on what we know about it. Or if we have anything better to do.

The satisfied will be less likely to take up the invitation to the celebration than the poor and the lame will, because for the poor at least it’s something different, and there’s a good chance it will be better than what I have now.And even if we count ourselves among the poor, the blind, and the lame who get an unexpected invitation to a place at the dinner because the first invited had better things to do, we cannot expect to catch on immediately to the bewildering conversation. Even if we all speak the same language, we will struggle to catch how the words signify for the speakers. It is about more than the words; it’s about knowing what the words mean within the context of the kind of life on display there. And, God forbid, we should show up in the wrong attire and get thrown out. For the invited there is a steep learning curve into the language of the ethos, and the ethos of the language, and we don’t have forever to figure it out.

So let us think about Jesus’ banquet conversation for a moment. Conversation is a word we use mostly to describe how humans who are not angry at each other speak together. Jesus did in fact have conversations with people, and they with him. Take Nicodemus, for example. But in an older sense of the term, only the disciples actually entered into the conversation of Christ. Conversatio in the patristic age and after primarily referred to a style or way of life. (19) Walking in his company, watching what he does, listening to what he says and who he says it to, and how he says it, is all part of discipleship. Everything from the first Come and see, to the Eschatological banquet itself, is a deliberate path into the conversatio Christi. The longer we stay with Christ, the more we realize his conversatio involves also the Father and the Spirit, and of course other human beings besides us.

The Lord Jesus spoke the blessing upon the poor in spirit, and his first hearers likely understood the words in their continuity with the language of the Psalms and the prophets. The disciples would later have apprehended their sense in light of Jesus’ particular mission to the little ones, the tax-collectors and sinners; and, if the disciple persevered in his company, they would have understood the Beatitudes even more profoundly in light of the Lord’s own Passion, death and Resurrection. He stands revealed as the preeminent man who lives, dies and rises in poverty of spirit.

Our sense of the words coalesces in our minds to the extent we have taken up the invitation to dwell in the company of Christ.Without this we will understand the words in a host of different ways that may or may not have a connection to what Jesus meant when he opened his mouth and pronounced them. The company we keep may even prevent an efficacious reading of the Gospel, because the way of life transmitted in such company can be at odds with understanding the conversatio Christi. The Son’s translation into our dwelling places becomes a matter of our understanding him by moving towards and into his way of life. This is our first translation. The Church, the communion of the baptized, is meant to be a community where the conversatio Christi is enacted through time. We are supposed to show one another what Christ’s love looks like. Perhaps we do not fully appreciate this. If we did, we might be more deliberate about it.

A human life lived in relation with others is the principal medium for understanding love; and this is nowhere more true than when we are trying to understand the love shown in Christ. But in the pursuit of a better understanding about his love, we begin to perceive that there is a way the love of Christ understands. The Lord Jesus understands the world differently than we do because he understands it through his love.

There are two distinct ways of knowing. To understand love you need to observe how it works; to have love’s understanding you have to have love so as to understand through it. In the broader perspective of the pedagogy of the Word Incarnate we are suitably moved from trying to understand Christ’s love to possessing his love’s understanding.

4. The Spirit as Translator / Interpreter of the Son

Augustine, preaching on John 16,13, when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth, has a remarkable passage wherein he comments about how a Christian comes to the Truth, that is to say, the Word understood, through love. How does the Spirit guide us to the truth? Augustine urges his hearers:

Be renewed in the spirit of your mind, (Eph 4,23) and understand what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect (Rom 12,2) that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the length and breadth and height and depth, and to know the charity of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled to all the fullness of God (Eph 3,17-19). For in this way the Holy Spirit will teach you all truth, as he pours out charity, more and more, into your hearts (Rom 5,5). (20)

Rhetorically, Augustine’s explication is a string of carefully chosen Pauline texts about love and knowledge, culminating in Romans 5,5: and the charity of God has been poured into our hearts. The essential point is Augustine’s insistence that the Spirit guides to all truth through a renewal of mind that enters into the depths of Christ; this love poured into our hearts fills us with the truth of God.

This knowledge of the truth, this love poured out, is not primarily a worded concept; we have terms for it, but this love poured out is something else and something more than the terms. We can build accurate worded descriptions of this love, and its effects, based on what Scripture says about it. These can be conceptually apprehended by the hearer, but Augustine is saying that the Scriptures and the experience of the Church teach that the Christian life lived through the pouring out of love into us is the knowing, and the knowing is in the love poured out.

We cannot know this love without participating in it. This is the more the words approach but do not capture. In the Christian lexicon, participation is not primarily a social category, as in how many people came to the meeting. Participation is first a metaphysical word connoting sharing in the form and likeness of its source. We participate in the charity of Christ through the grace of baptism and beyond. This we can call living with and through love’s understanding. This love given to us is generative: it is a participation that makes us able to love him in return. As Augustine says elsewhere: it is not that we loved him first, for he loved us to this end: that we might love him. (21)

Christ’s example in the flesh summarizes the whole move; it signifies it; and in the Spirit that he breathes upon us he makes it something inside of us, moving us. Moving us into what? The conversatio Christi, the ethos of the banquet hall, the kingdom where giving life is the only way to preserve it. The truth of Christ is the love of the Spirit. Christ’s pouring himself out on the Cross is the Word speaking the word Love, that is to say, the Spirit. And the Spirit poured out is this love taking hold in us such that this love operates in us. If this love is not in us, we do not really know the Word that the Christ has so expressly spoken to us.

5. The Charity of St Jerome

In the year 382, at the request of Pope Damasus, St Jerome began work on the revision of the Latin texts of the Scriptures then in use in the Latin West. (22) St Jerome worked with the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, the Septuagint translation into Greek, and the existing Latin versions of both the Septuagint and the Greek New Testament then circulating in the Latin speaking churches. The scope of his work was unprecedented, and the fruit of his labor was not universally well received. Jerome made some translation decisions of great consequence, and that impact our Christian speaking today.

First, in examining how the Septuagint, and early Latin translations of it, handled the Hebrew terms for love, he noted that the Hebrew word Hesed was at times translated in the Greek version through either noun or verb forms of agape (ἀγάπη). He also noted that the earlier Latin translations of the Old Testament, following the Septuagint, at times translated hesed / agape as caritas.

Jerome understood the hesed–agape sense continuum in the phrases of the Psalm more like eleison, the compassion God offered to rescue Israel from their historical sufferings. Thus he does not use caritas in the Vulgate revision of the Psalms to misericordia. In his Old Testament revisions he usually chose to use Misericordia (mercy) for instances where forms of agape appear in the psalms and prophets, leaving caritas to just a handful of Old Testament texts, mostly in the Song of Songs. In fact the word caritas does not appear at all in Jerome’s revisions of the Latin Psalters then in use.

Jerome also noted that the same Greek word agape is abundantly used throughout the New Testsment. Only here the older Latin translations favored dilectio as the appropriate translation. Jerome then moves rather systematicslly to translate the agape of the New Testsment as caritas.

For Jerome, in historical context the sense of agape of the New Testament should be distinguished from agape used in the Septuagint version of the Psalms and prophets. Jerome’s intuition here is to translate and mostly reserve the Latin caritas for the New Testament term agape as a term more specific and more suitable word to name Christ’s work.

As a Latin word caritas was used occasionally in pre Christian Latin. Cicero and Pliny, for example use it to name a preferential love for the homeland. (23) In this it differed from dilectio, which tends more to name the preferential love of friendship. In the second century caritas was picked up by Tertullian and others to name Christian love and responsibility for the poor. But the pre-vulgate Latin New Testament manuscripts did not generally use caritas consistently to name the work and love of Christ. (24)

Jerome made the case that caritas, understood as a generous self-giving love is better to name the environs of the love of Christ. Obviously, there is great emphasis in the New Testament on the mercy we have received in Christ, but for Jerome the mercy comes by way of the outpouring, the generosity of Christ’s life poured out. This in turn is the same love poured out and into our hearts.

What we have here is an example of a word chosen because it tends toward the sense of love described by agape in the New Testament. Yet, once chosen and incorporated into the New Testament translation, the word caritas itself has its specific sense filled out (so to speak) by the content it names. The content of caritas is Christ and the gift of the Spirit. The sense of caritas is further explicated through Johannine and Pauline usage of agape.

It is theologically and historically decisive for the Latin West that Jerome positioned caritas the way he did. The remedy (the mercy) comes to us through a pouring out action, a self emptying love offered by God on behalf of his people, for whom he has a preferential love. Jerome’s translation decision in favor of caritas over either misericordia or dilectio attemps to name what is New about the New Testament revelation, the expressed manifestation of Christ and the gift of the Spirit. In the New Testament it is the how of the love that most warrants our attention; this is the singular quality that initiates and consummates a relation of union between Heaven and earth. Christ and the human race. The coming and self-donation of the Word and the Spirit unveils the what of God’s mercy by manifesting the completeness of Christ’s self-gift, his charity. (25)

6. The Charity of St Augustine

Augustine, we know, incorporated Jerome’s New Testament translations into his preaching and writing as soon as he could obtain copies. (26) Augustine’s late works, including the Confessions, and his sermons on the Gospel and Epistles of John, for example. already either use the vulgate translations for key passages, or invoke the language of Jerome’s translations as he develops his theological expositions. (27) We can fairly well trace Augustine’s gradual incorporation of Jerome’s use of caritas beginning in the late 390’s.

By the time Augustine is writing Book XV of De Trinitate in the 420s his useage of Jerome’s translation is more uniform. This too is notable because of Augustine’s citation of Jerome’s textual revisions regarding the New Testament’s use of caritas.

It may be impossible to estimate how much Jerome’s specification of the Scriptural terms for love and mercy in Latin spurred or influenced Augustine’s theology of the Holy Spirit and Charity, but the influence cannot have been negligible. I say this because words once received, and seen in relation to other words of similar senses, are very intimate to us. Jerome gave Augustine a set of stable, accurate terms that could be sounded, meditated and contemplated in fruitful yet disciplined ways. The Latin tradition after Augustine, then fruitfully develops both Trinitarian and moral theology, with caritas at the center of it all.

Here, though, I want to focus on Augustine and how he understands the word caritas. In one of Augustine’s sermons on the first letter of John, for example, he explicates charity as both the meaning of the Cross and the way of Christian life.

«In what way, brothers, (should we walk as he walked)? What does the Apostle admonish us? He who says that he remains in him, that is, in Christ, must walk as he walked. Maybe he admonishes us to walk on the sea? Don’t even think it! In fact, he admonishes us to walk on the path of justice. In what path? I have already reminded you. He was nailed immobile to the Cross, and on this path he walked: this is the path of charity.» (28)

Augustine pokes at overly literal interpretations of walking as he walked. Yet his identification of the way of Charity and Justice as the very immobility of Christ on the Cross must have shaken his hearers.

In an earlier sermon on 1st John, he expresses himself forcefully about the primacy of charity in the Church, and this, because it is the defining gift of our Christian identity:

«Thus, even the wicked can possess all the sacraments and still be wicked, but what they cannot do is be wicked and possess charity. This, then, is the proper gift; it is the singular source. The Spirit of God exhorts you to drink from charity, to drink from Him.» (29)

For the mature Augustine caritas is what God is in his unified substance; and caritas is the proper name of the Holy Spirit. And caritas is what is poured into our hearts at the coming of the Holy Spirit (Rom 5,5). And it is the caritas of Christ that urges us to see, judge and act as he did: Caritas Christi urget nos. This means acting through the same love animating Christ and expressely signified through the course of his life. Thus, in De Trinitate XV, Augustine says:

«For this reason Holy Scripture proclaims: God is caritas, and as this love is from God, and acts in us that we might remain in God and he in us, and since we understand this because of his own Spirit that he gave to us, this very Spirit is God caritas.» (30)

In the Confessions Augustine gives us a particularly compelling example of how his conversion has affected his vision. First, let us hear again the words by which he describes God’s action at his conversion, and consider that without using the word, he is describing the outpouring of the caritas Dei at his conversion. Among other things, this is Augustine claiming he has been brought to his senses:

«You called, shouted, broke through my deafness; you flared, blazed, banished my blindness; you lavished your fragrance, I gasped; and now I pant for you; I tasted you, and now I hunger and thirst; you touched me, and I burned for your peace.» (31)

This is the key moment from which he can describe how he now understands the narrative of his own life. He now sees more clearly, in retrospect, what only recently he had utterly failed to understand at all.

The understanding he writes about is the fruit of the charitable seeing as love sees that was granted at his conversion, when charity was poured into his heart. A scribe could have been there to write Monica’s words to Augustine, but only Augustine can tell us how he now understands the truth in the words St Monica spoke. The words are for the sake of things understood. But what is Augustine understanding? He is telling us about how he understands his loves, and about how by love, he understands his own life and that of those around him.

The understanding of Augustine in the Confessions is from his memory acted on by charity. Memory is a privileged place for Augustine. The words we use to express the things we understand derive from there. Memory is the present state of how we have understood something. It is not a data base. It carries the contour of our living. We remember what we understood when something that happened in the past comes back to us. Or, we remember what we didn’t understand. Or we remember that at that time we understood something that we no longer understand that way. Memory, with its mysterious mounts and crevices, is the principle terrain of our maturing self-understanding as human beings. Inasmuch as memory involves retrieval and the drive to put words on it, it is the place of our personal re-translation. Such is the work of the mature Augustine remembering and understanding anew his younger self. It is his charity that sees the past with renewed understanding.

As he tells us in Book XIII:

«And in your gifts, which we confess, we praise you, the giver, whose ‘Spirit was hovering over the waters’, and wherever he came, he brought back praise to you. This is what your gift does, for your gift turns us to you, and your love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us [Rom 5:5], and through this our hope does not disappoint. This gift of yours, the Holy Spirit, is your gift, who teaches our bones to live in you and not die in themselves.» (32)

The drive of memory moves toward a better understanding, not just of ourselves as individuals, but also of those around us, whom we loved, or perhaps loved not so much as we should have. Sometimes we want to behold them again, in the flesh, so as to understand again how that love was. I didn’t say ‘what that love was’, I said how it was, because I don’t think love’s understanding is primarily about the essence of a thing; it’s more about the quality of the relation than its quiddity.

Relation is a heavier word than we likely realize. It is made so by its having been pulled up into the Trinitarian discourses of the Cappodocian Fathers in the wake of the Council of Nicaea. It was singled out as a term more consequential than Aristotle and his later commentators realized. (33) One substance in the Godhead, but the Father is not the Son, nor the Son the Father, nor the Spirit either of the others. They are distinct in view of their mutual relations of self-donation: Father, and Son, and the mutual love of the Spirit, as Augustine teaches. (34) It is exactly by our graced participation in the divine relations that our worded relations of divine and human love find their proper cohesion.

7. The Word Translated into our Flesh

The world has lost confidence in the existence of unselfish love. This is the challenge of our generation. Our age consoles itself by trying to deconstruct everything, especially love. What word are we saying to the world? By what love can this word be shown?

I think that the two most important questions that appear in the Gospels are relational questions. The first is who do you say that I am? And the second great question is And who is my neighbor? The witness of the church requires a faithful testimony of love to answer both questions. But it appears clear that the credibility of our response to the first question depends upon the authenticity of our lived answer to the second. How can we believably profess love for the Christ of God if there is no love shown to the ones he loves?

Love is shown, and the selfless love of Christ in us is credible to the extent we love generously from that love, to the extent we drink from it, as Augustine says. If our lives seek to live from both the mercy we have received and the charity of Christ that suffuses it, we can signify something of Christ. But only persuasively if the charity within is allowed to manifest itself. The Christian testimony is persuasive with the persuasiveness of generous self-giving. There is no profit motive here. Nor does our word offer a syllogistic proof: It tempts the hearer to conversion into the Christ, whose appearing remains both clear and enigmatic, waiting for the hearer to sense the pull of the narrative translation in the Spirit to the sense of Christ. But the narrative translation of Christ to the world depends on the life that announces the narrative, and on the quality of the charity that animates it. The gift poured out to us can make us into a word that speaks him.

«What face does love have?», Augustine asks. «What shape, or what stature, what feet, or what hands does it have? No one can say. And yet, it has feet, for they are what lead to the Church; it has hands, for they are what give to the poor; it has eyes, for by them the destitute are understood. Blessed, it says [in Psalm 40], is the one who understands about the destitute and the poor. It has ears, about which the Lord says: He who has ears to hear, let him hear. These are not spatially diversified members distinct by location; no, he who has charity sees everything and at once with his intellect. Dwell in it and it will dwell in you; abide in it and it will abide in you.» (35)

This seeing everything at once by love is what makes our life a kind of word in the Word; a kind of love in and from his charity. Our love signifies him. Or so he would have us let him do for us.

Just as the significational and curative aims of the Incarnation involve the translation of the Word through the specificity of the flesh, so the Spirit’s work is to translate us over to the state of participation in the charity of Christ, so that the specificity of our flesh can speak him too. The Spirit does this by insinuating himself into our perceptions of Christ. Conversion is the word we would use to speak of this translation being brought to completion. From the Spirit’s perspective it is a translation. It is a making of us into a word understandable to the Word, and for the world.

Christ, indeed, pronounced his blessing upon the poor. His mission and his love cannot be sounded to its depths until we let his love for the little ones take hold of us. For this love understands about the poor, Augustine says, quoting the psalm. These are the vulnerable, the powerless poor who have never been at the center of the world’s narrative about itself. (They are in the center of the Gospels, as R Girard knew.) They were most certainly at the center of Christ’s narrative about himself and about us. He died in the condition of the rejected; the but I am a worm and no man, scorned by everyone, despised by the people, of Psalm 21, the Psalm he spoke from the Cross, announces this.

What does he see, or better, how does he see, as he gazes at us and the world from the Cross? The one who has charity, Augustine says, sees everything and at once with his intellect. Christ sees the Father through the love of the Spirit. And from this gaze he has motive and light to love us in our poverty. We are blessed to be invited to the banquet, to see ourselves and others as he sees us. And by the Spirit poured into our hearts, to respond to who and what we see.

Caritas Christi urget nos.

+Daniel E. Flores, STD, Bishop of Brownsville, Texas

[Translations of Latin authors that appear in the text are my own doing. I have no one else to blame.]

(36)

Notes

1. Super ad Hebreos, cap. 1, lect. 1: Ad cuius evidentiam sciendum est, quod tria requiruntur ad locutionem nostram. Primo, verbi conceptio, qua scilicet praeconcipiatur in mente id quod ore loquendum est; secundo ipsius verbi concepti expressio, qua insinuetur quod conceptum est; tertio ipsius rei expressae manifestatio, qua res expressa evidens fiat.

2. Basically what an interpres does is an act of moving words, verba translata sunt.

3. Spanish, by the way, does not usually say trasladar to translate; in Spanish that term primarily refers to moving things around. To translate, Spanish usually says traducir, rooted in the Latin terms meaning to lead things across. The idea of movement remains, but the verb roots are different. The paths of our modern lexicons are varied and often quirky. Words have a present sensible signification, más o menos, and have past uses not far below the surface.

4. See Efraín Kristal, Invisible Work: Borges and Ttanslation: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002. p. 23 he cites Borges’ “Homeric Versions” in Selected Non-Fictions, note 73: “The Odyssey, thanks to my opportune ignorance of Greek, is an international bookshelf of works in prose and verse.”

5. 1a,34,2,ad 3: Nam ut ostendatur connaturalis patri, dicitur filius; ut ostendatur coaeternus, dicitur splendor; ut ostendatur omnino similis, dicitur imago; ut ostendatur immaterialiter genitus, dicitur verbum. Non autem potuit unum nomen inveniri, per quod omnia ista designarentur.

6. St Thomas summarizes the readings of the Fathers on the words in Principium in his commentary on the Prologue of the Gospel of John.

7. 1 Jn 1,1

8. Jn 14,39

9. For example: The world must know that I love the Father (Jn 14,31). And we must know that as the Father loves me, so I also love you. Remain in my love (Jn 15,9). In fact, for John the sign to the world that the Son loves the Father is his mission to love us to the end.

10. Super ad Hebreos, cap. 1, lect. 1: Secunda vero expressio, quae est editio specierum in mente angelica, vel humana, ordinatur tantum ad cognitionem sapientiae divinae, et ideo potest dici locutio. Tertia vero, quae est per assumptionem carnis, ordinatur ad esse, et ad cognitionem, et ad expressam manifestationem, quia per assumptionem carnis, et verbum factum est homo, et nos in cognitionem Dei perfecit. . (Io. XVIII, 37: ad hoc natus sum, ut testimonium perhibeam veritati). Et se nobis expresse manifestavit. Bar. c. III, 38: post haec in terris visus est, et cum hominibus conversatus est. Sic ergo, licet Deus loquatur in novo et veteri testamento, perfectius tamen in novo nobis loquitur, quia ibi per revelationes in mentibus hominum, hic per incarnationem filii.

11. San Juan de la Cruz, Subida de monte Carmelo, Lib 2, Cap 22, n. 5: Por lo cual, el que ahora quisiese preguntar a Dios, o querer alguna visión o revelación, no sólo haría una necedad, sino haría agravio a Dios, no poniendo los ojos totalmente en Cristo, sin querer otra alguna cosa o novedad. Porque le podría responder Dios de esta manera, diciendo: «Si te tengo ya habladas todas las cosas en mi Palabra, que es mi Hijo, y no tengo otra, ¿qué te puedo yo ahora responder o revelar que sea más que eso? Pon los ojos sólo en él, porque en él te lo tengo todo dicho y revelado, y hallarás en él aún más de lo que pides y deseas.”

12. Tractatus 1,8 in Ioannem: Verbum Dei apud Patrem erat, et verbum in voce nostra sonuit; Verbum aeternum caro factum est, et habitavit in nobis.

De Trinitate 15.11.20: Quomodo ergo verbum nostrum fit vox corporis, et tamen verbum manet in mente nostra, sic Verbum Dei caro factum est, et tamen apud Patrem manet. Sicut verbum meum, quod in corde meo est, fit vox cum id profero, et manet in corde meo; ita Verbum Dei, cum caro factum est, non est mutatum, sed assumpsit naturam humanam, et apud Patrem incommutabile permansit. Non enim factum est Verbum caro, ut desineret esse Verbum, sed ut caro per Verbum viveret, sicut vox mea non desinit esse verbum meum, cum fit vox corporis, sed vox fit, ut verbum meum audiatur.

13. Cf ST, III, prologue.

14. Javier Sicilia, La confesión: Debolsillo, 2016: Sabe qué me maravilla de la encarnación? —continué—, que es todo lo contrario del mundo moderno: la presencia del infinito en los límites de la carne, y la lucha, la lucha sin cuartel, contra las tentaciones de las desmesuras del diablo. No sabe cuánto he meditado en las tentaciones del desierto. ”‘Asume el poder’, le decía el diablo; ese poder que da la ilusión de trastocar y dominar todo. Pero él se mantuvo en los límites de su propia carne, en su propia pobreza, en su propia muerte, tan pobre, tan miserable, tan dura. Nuestra época, sin embargo, bajo el rostro de una enorme bondad, ha sucumbido a esas tentaciones. ‘Serán como dioses, cambiarán las piedras en panes, dominarán el mundo’… A ella le hemos entregado a Cristo y no nos damos cuenta.

15. St Leo the Great: et in córdibus discipulórum velox scribéntis Verbi manus novi testaménti decréta condébat.

16. 1 Jn 4, 9: In hoc apparuit caritas Dei in nobis, quoniam Filium suum unigenitum misit Deus in mundum, ut vivamus per eum.

17. 1 Jn 4,16: Et nos, qui credidimus, novimus caritatem, quam habet Deus in nobis.

18. See Matthew 22:1-14; Luke 14, 7-24.

19. See, for example, ST, III, 40.

20. Tract 96, 5, on John: Renovamini ergo spiritu mentis vestrae (Eph 4,23), et intellegite quae sit voluntas Dei, quod bonum est et beneplacitum et perfectum (Rom 12,2): ut in caritate radicati et fundati, possitis comprehendere cum omnibus sanctis, quae sit longitudo, latitudo, altitudo et profundum; cognoscere etiam supereminentem scientiae caritatem Christi, ut impleamini in omnem plenitudinem Dei (Eph 3,17-19). Isto enim modo vos docebit Spiritus sanctus omnem veritatem, cum magis magisque diffundet in cordibus vestris caritatem.

21. Tractate on 1st John, 7, 9: Non illum dileximus prius: nam ad hoc nos dilexit, ut diligamus eum.
In his commentary on Romans, chapter 5,5, St Thomas distinguishes the two senses of the Pauline phrase the love of God poured into our hearts. The text speaks of God’s love for us, and secondarily of our love for him. The latter is made possible by the former. See Super ad Romanos, Chapter 5, Lecture 2.

22. For studies on Jerome’s work of review and revision of the texts of the Vetus Latina, see H.A.G. Houghton. The Latin New Testament: Oxford University Press, 2016; Andrew Cain, Jerome’s Commentaries on the Pauline Epistles and the Architecture of Exegetical Authority: Oxford University Press, 2021. J.N.D. Kelly, Jerome: His Life, Writings, and Controversies, Hendrickson: 1975. Esp Ch 15 and 25. Michael Graves, Jerome, Epistle 106  (On The Psalms). Introduction, translation, and commentary, SBL Press: 2022

23. See the entry for caritas in Oxford Latin Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 1983.

24. The Old Latin was inconsistent in translating agape in the New Testament. It most often used the word dilectio. So, for example, Deus dilectio est, or dilectio Christi urget nos, or dilectio dei infunditur in cordibus nostris.

25. The issue of discerning between two Latin words that could be used to translate one Greek word is not an issue for the Greek Fathers. It had to become an issue for Latins. The Greek Fathers establish a different trajectory for theological reflection on the distinct content of the word agape.
Likewise, it’s worth noting that agape in Greek has a verb form. The Latin caritas does not. Jerome, for his part, takes the word dilectio (a preferential love) and uses its verb form (diligere) as the usual couple for caritas. This has the effect over time of aligning the sense of diligere more towards caritas.

26. Augustine was not so fond of the Old Testament revisions produced by Jerome. He did consult them, however. For various reasons he thought it unwise to prefer the extant Hebrew text over the Septuagint. For one thing he thought it would be a cause of disruption with the Greek speaking churches.

27. Tractate on 1 John, sermon 7. Augustine cites the Old Latin text useage of dilectio Deus est (he probably had it in front of him), yet explicated it using caritas. Here in 7,6: Quia vero dicit Apostolus: Caritas Dei diffusa est in cordibus nostris per Spiritum sanctum qui datus est nobis; in dilectione Spiritum sanctum esse. Ipse est enim Spiritus sanctus, quem non possunt accipere mali; ipse est ille fons de quo dicit Scriptura: Fons aquae tuae sit tibi proprius, et nemo alienus communicet tibi 

28. Tractate on 1 Jn 1. 9: Quomodo, fratres? Quid nos monet? Qui dicit se in ipso manere, id est in Cristo, debet sicut ille ambulavit et ipse ambulare. Forte hoc nos monet, ut ambulemus in mare? Absit. Hoc ergo, ut ambulemus in via iustitiae. In qua via? Iam commemoravi. Fixus in cruce erat, et in ipsa via ambulabat: ipsa est vía caritatis.

29. Augustine, on 1 John (sermo 7, 6): Ergo habere sacramenta ista omnia et malus potest; habere autem caritatem, et malus esse, non potest. Hoc est ergo proprium donum; ipse est singularis fons. Ad hunc bibendum, vos hortatur Spiritus Dei; ad se bibendum vos hortatur Spiritus Dei.

30. De Trinitate XV, 19, 37: Quapropter si sancta Scriptura proclamat: Deus caritas est; illaque ex Deo est, et in nobis id agit ut in Deo maneamus, et ipse in nobis, et hoc inde cognoscimus, quia de Spiritu suo dedit nobis, ipse Spiritus est Deus caritas.

31. Augustine, Confessions, Bk 10, ch 27: Vocásti et clamásti et rupísti surditátem meam, coruscásti, splenduísti et fugásti cæcitátem meam, fragrásti, et duxi spíritum et anhélo tibi, gustávi et esúrio et sítio, tetigísti me, et exársi in pacem tuam.

32. Confessions XIII, 7,8: Et in donis tuis, quae confitemur, laudamus donantem te, qui ‘Spiritus tuus ferebatur super aquas’ [Gen 1:2], et in quemcumque locum veniebat, ad te referebat laudem. Hoc facit donum tuum, quoniam donum tuum nos ad te convertit, et caritas tua diffusa est in cordibus nostris per Spiritum Sanctum, qui datus est nobis [Rom 5:5], et per hoc spes nostra non confundit. Hoc donum tuum, Spiritus Sanctus, donum tuum est, qui docet ossa nostra, ut vivant in te, et non moriantur in se.

33. See Giulio Maspero, The Cappadocian Reshaping of Metaphysics Relational Being, Pontifical University of the Holy Cross: Cambridge University Press, 2024

34. See Lewis Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge, 2010) p. 255 ff for a textual discussion about Augustine’s teaching and sources on this point.

35. Tract in I Ioannem, Sermo 7,10: Qualem faciem habet dilectio? qualem formam habet? qualem staturam habet? quales pedes habet? quales manus habet? Nemo potest dicere. Habet tamen pedes; nam ipsi ducunt ad Ecclesiam: habet manus; nam ipsae pauperi porrigunt: habet oculos; nam inde intellegitur ille qui eget: Beatus, inquit, qui intellegit super egenum et pauperem (Ps 40,2). Habet aures, de quibus dicit Dominus: Qui habet aures audiendi, audiat (Lc 8,8). Non sunt membra distincta per locos, sed intellectu totum simul videt qui habet caritatem. Habita, et inhabitaberis; mane, et manebitur in te.

36. In the course of preparing this lecture, I sketched a section that attempted to address a relation I see between the principal theme and some important observations made by Juan Gabriel Vásquez in his lectures at Oxford on the viability of the novel as a literary genre. (La traducción del mundo: Las conferencias Weidenfeld 2022: Alfaguara, 2023) Unfortunately, I could not yet articulate the relations sufficiently well; further, what I had written would have made the lecture too long and of a different kind. I do want to acknowledge, though, that in general and indirect ways the book mentioned influenced the kinds of theological issues I ultimately focused upon. In his dedicatory pages of the published lectures he cites Marcel Proust (El tiempo recobrado): Me percataba de que este libro esencial, el único verdadero, no necesita que un gran escritor lo invente, en el sentido corriente del término, sino que, puesto que el libro ya existe en cada uno de nosotros, lo traduzca. El deber y la tarea de un escritor son los de un traductor. The citation gives a sense of JG Vásquez’ concerns as a literary critic, and as a gifted novelist. Si Dios me presta vida, maybe at some point I’ll take up the early sketches I wrote, and develop the theme. Whether I do or not, I do owe the author a debt of gratitude for the fruitfulness of the questions he asks.

(October 25, 2025):

(Below are notes to guide discussion of the seminars on synodality and parish life parented at the Jubilee for Synod Teams held in Rome, October 25, 2025. After the seminars, I hope to add notations from suggestions, contributions, and questions offered by seminar participants.)

How style is always a matter of substance.

Viewing Synodal style as an important aspect of the pastor’s leadership.

Intro: The danger of leading, and then discovering there is no one following or collaborating; not because people don’t want to, but because they don’t understand the why of pastoral decisions. Sharing the pastor’s mind. Admitting there are things the pastor, and the whole parish can’t see without the participation of others. AIM: The pastoral conversion of the local community towards the mission and the spirituality that sustains it.

1. An assessment of synodal seeds already present: consultative groups, ministerial groups, prayer groups. Apostolic Movements. How does the mission and formation of each enrich the parish and wider community. (Growing awareness about what aspect of the mission might be suffering for lack of attention, for future planning). Assessment of cultural diversities present in the community.

2. Parish Council as principal collaborative arm with the pastor to promote cohesiveness and diversity in the mission among the groups and the laity that do not form part of the groups.. How is it structured? How can it model a spiritual attentiveness to the diversity of gifts as well as cohesion of mission and service? Parish assemblies. Can they be regularized? Prayer, listening, speaking, common adoration and thanksgiving.

3. An assessment of collaboration among lay groups; Do they ever pray together? Does the leadership of the various groups have moments of communion and fellowship together? Are gifts appreciated by the wider community?

4. Integrating a spiritual habit for the whole: starting with an evening of meditation and intercession with the members of various together: perhaps integrating seasonal Lectio Divina; guided meditation, to help inculcate an ethos of familiarity with the style and priority of the Lord. Making the connection between attentiveness to the Ethos of the Way of Christ’s life (Conversatio Christi) and the Eucharistic celebration of the whole body on Sunday. Diverse spiritualities, but all nourished by Scripture and sacramental life. This is what gives cohesion to the particular groups and activities of the local community. In this ethos periodic listening in the Spirit integrated into parish life seems less programmatic and more just part of how the parish prays, thinks and plans together. Pastoral Conversion. Who are our poor?

5. The immediate and the long view. Emerging priorities. Consensus. Tough pastoral decisions. What can we add, or might we adjust to see ourselves as having a common purpose and mission? Supporting each other and identifying how to address community concerns and pastoral priorities. The practice of cultivating the conversatio Christi is itself formative of the community. Let the community take responsibility for the conversatio evinced by the community.

6. What kinds of mission initiatives might be more effective by collaboration with neighboring parishes and missions? With the Diocese?

+df

Aquinas Day Lecture, Thomas Aquinas College, Santa Paula California, 28 January 2019

[It is true what Paschal says: The last thing one settles in writing a work is what one should put in first.[i]]

I would like to dedicate this time together to exploring some aspects of Saint Thomas’ work as a commentator on Scripture. This is not a topic often broached in courses on Saint Thomas’s thought. And if it is discussed it is usually in a passing nod to article 10 of the first question of the Summa. Now that is a very interesting article, but I do not think we can grasp its significance within the overall aims of the Summa Theologiae nor within the overall work of Thomas the theologian without looking at how Thomas actually handled Scripture in his Scriptural lectures and commentaries. It is always good to remember that lecturing on Scripture texts was Thomas’ main occupation, his day job if you will.

My modest aim today is to encourage you to look to the commentaries on Scripture in order to better understand the vision of Saint Thomas. Thomas’s vision was profoundly Christological, and his Christology was profoundly Scriptural. One of the things we will see today is Thomas’ intense interest in the literal sense of the Scriptures. This must be understood as more than an academic and interpretive exercise. It is directly related to the wider ecclesial interest, especially noteworthy in the mendicant movements, in the literal following of Christ. This was part of the reform movements of the 12th and 13th Centuries, and a hallmark of the charismatic influence of both Saint Francis and Saint Dominic.

I.               The Literalness of Christ the WORD:

I will start with Thomas’ commentary on the Letter to the Hebrews. His exposition of that letter is a beautiful expression of Thomas’ robust exegetical mind. It is also a text that had been somewhat neglected by both philosophers and theologians. This may have to do with the fact that within the commentaries on the Pauline corpus, Thomas’ commentary on Hebrews presents unique textual difficulties; it is transmitted to us through two interpolated reportationes.[ii] This is vexing to the reader for reasons I need not go into here. The first lecture on chapter one, the received text reports Thomas commenting on the sense of the first verse:

In times past, God spoke in partial and various ways to our fathers through the prophets; in these last days, he spoke to us through a son, whom he made heir of all things and through whom he created the universe […]

Thomas uses the occasion to explain that God’s speaking is first of all the Father’s eternal generation of the Word. This eternal conceptum is, in fact, further expressed in three ways: First in creation, secondly in the revelations to the angels, the saints and the prophets of what lays hidden in the WORD, and thirdly in the Incarnation itself. Within this three-fold movement of expression that issues from the eternal WORD, only the latter two, Thomas says, revelation and Incarnation, have the character of a word, properly speaking.

Thomas says explicitly that this is because the latter two are ordered ad manifestationem.  Both are a kind of opening up of what is inside the mind and heart of God; and both are directed to knowers capable of receiving the manifestation.

The first expression, he says, namely creation, is not ordered to manifestation but rather to being, and thus does not have the character of a word spoken. It is never said in Scripture, Thomas notes, that God speaks by creating creatures, but rather that he is known by creating them: numquam dicitur, quod Deus loquatur creando creaturas, sed quod cognoscatur. Rom. I, 20: invisibilia Dei etc,...[iii]  In short, creation is an act of the Word, but it is a speaking (Let there be light) producing something that is not quite a word.

This way of describing reality puts into play the existence of knowers other than God, namely angels and human beings. Because even if Scripture does not ever say God produced a kind of word by creating creatures, it does say that he is known in this creative act. Creation is capable, and in the divine wisdom was meant to convey something beyond itself, to other knowers. We might say that this expressive power of created being, in the long run, is fairly meager, for although it can express beyond itself, it never quite allows us to know the who behind all the whats of creation.

When moving from expression to word, Thomas describes how God’s speaking ad manifestationem makes known more about the speaker than what his created works convey. What characterizes this “more” made known by words is the manifestation of God’s own interior intentionality. This is equivalent to saying that God’s speaking to angels and prophets is variously ordered ad cognitionem sapientiae divinae.

Thomas thus preserves the word “word” as an intentional revelation of a prior intellectual understanding, by its nature interior to the speaker, to another intellectual being. Thomas, not surprisingly, refers in this context to Augustine’s discussion of the verbum vocis being a manifestation of the prior Verbum cordis. The Incarnation, in this analogy, is the singularly perfect self-expression to us of the Verbum cordis of the Father.[iv]

What is implicit in this account, unspoken we could say, is that we human beings are capable of putting words together to describe expressions, that is to say, realities that are not words. This is the primordial grandeur of the human creation. Our first words are words about what is. And when it comes to other persons, our words are about who the what is.

Apparently, when speaking to human beings, the only way available to God is that of adaptation to our mode of understanding things. And this involves adaptation to the way signaled by our own prior exercise of the speaking power, which in turn derives from our interaction with created things and other speaking human beings.

But to speak of God having to adapt to our way of speaking, while true, is not the most fortuitous way to say this. It is more accurate to describe Thomas’ wisdom here by saying creation was conceived originally in the WORD precisely to serve as the gentle medium of God’s speaking to us about what lies hidden in his heart, the verbum cordis. Creation is the language God conveniently uses to address us because he made us word capable beings who already interact and put words on creation.

Now then, the sensible, intelligible and imaginal species granted to the prophets are communications conveyed by God using images drawn from our experience of creation and specified by Him to say something about Himself, God the speaker. Part of what God speaks has to do with the deeper rationes governing creation of all things ad esse in the first place.

Thus, the interpersonal use of wordy images to say something to each other makes it possible for God to specify created knowables to say something about Himself to us. Think of Hosea 11:4:

Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, who took them in my arms; I  drew them with human cords, with bands of love; I fostered them like one who raises an infant to his cheeks; Yet, though I stooped to feed my child, they did not know that I was their healer.

We have to have had some interaction with cords and bands to understand their relation to love, and we have to have some concept of familial fostering to understand that God is saying something about himself beyond what our human interactions can express. Again, in the divine wisdom, creation is the medium through which God can speak this word to us.

Which brings us at length to how Thomas describes the Incarnation in this context. He reserves a particular phrase for describing the Word Incarnate, viewed precisely as Word. His coming in the flesh is ordered ad expressam manifestationem. With delightful austerity of words, Thomas says of the WORD: Et se nobis expresse manifestavit.[v] The adverb expresse for Thomas implies a kind of literal directness. We will see this word again later. God expressed Himself literally; Jesus is the historically literal expression of the divine wisdom. Thus, it is essential to Catholic Christology to profess that the Second Person of the Trinity literally acts and expresses himself through his sanctified humanity. Thus, for example, when Scripture says Jesus was angry at the hardness of heart of the Pharisees, it is true to say that God’s anger was literally manifested in and through the Son’s humanity. Interpretavit se nobis, we could say: He translated Himself to us, in a language we could understand. That literal language is the humanity of Christ.

Human nature is a created expression of image and likeness, but by the Incarnation the human creation is elevated to become a word. And the concrete human nature of Christ becomes the word addressed by God to us. Indeed, the whole of Christ’s living, dying and rising (the acta et passa mentioned in the Summa) is creation becoming the most expressive, literal word from God to us.

In short, we could say that neither things nor persons could ever tell us how much love sustains the existence of all that is were it not for the WORD made flesh who in the flesh and in time showed us his heart.

II.  A Literal Sense Controversy

At this point I would draw your attention to Thomas’ commentary on the Psalms, probably the last work of his teaching life.[vi] The prologue to this commentary shows us Thomas devoting not a little effort to deal with an errant understanding of the literal sense of Scripture. I hope to show that his interest here is directly related to protecting the literalness of Christ’s teaching and example, and to accounting for the Old Testament as primarily prophetic and intentionally preparatory in nature. The principal antagonist in this dense discussion of erroneous expositional procedure is Theodore of Mopsuestia.  

Concerning the mode of exposition, it must be noted that in the Psalter, as in [the exposition of] the other prophets, we ought to avoid one error condemned in the Fifth Synod.  Theodore of Mopsuestia, indeed, said that in Sacred Scripture and the Prophets, nothing is expressly said about Christ, but rather [these words were said] about certain other things, and, in fact, they [i.e. these words said about certain other things] adapted to Christ.  Like, [that text of] Psalm 21, [19]:they divided among themselves my vestments, etc.[is said] not about Christ, but literally said about David. This mode [of exposition] was condemned in that Council, and whoever asserts such a thing in expounding the Scriptures is a heretic.[vii]

Now this is fascinating. Theodore of Mopsuestia’s teaching on Scriptural interpretation was sparsely and vaguely known in Thomas’ time. In fact, Thomas may be the first theologian of the High Middle Ages to reference it at all, or in such detail. His references to it were likely made possible by his personal quest for reliable texts stemming from the patristic period; that personal quest is well attested to in the abundant citations of the Greek Fathers in such works as the Catena Aurea, the Contra Errorum Graecorum, and the Summa Theologiae itself. Some were probably Greek texts recently translated into Latin, others older Latin translations discovered in monastic, papal or episcopal archives. In addition to the description of Theodore in the commentary on the Psalms, Thomas references Theodore’s error also in his expositions of the Gospel of Matthew and of the Gospel of John, both late commentaries. In other words, Thomas’ awareness of and his concerns about Theodore of Mopsuestia are late elements in his teaching career.

The reference to the determinations of “the fifth synod” clearly identifies the authority for the question at hand with the Second Council of Constantinople. Thomas likely reviewed documents surrounding Constantinople II and documents prepared by Pope Vigilius both before and after the Council’s decrees.  In addition to the Acta of the Council, with the accompanying excerpts from Theodore’s writings, the Latin tradition preserved particular texts of Theodore’s writings about the prophets, together with point by point anathemas by Pope Vigilius in the Constitutum Vigilii.[viii]

In the history leading up to the Council, the Constitutum Vigilii was issued by the Pope in 553 in an effort to condemn certain errors in Theodore’s writings, without condemning him personally in posthumous fashion.  The Council did, in fact, condemn him posthumously, and anathematized his writings; the Pope subsequently recognized the Council’s decrees. The Constitutum of Pope Vigilius contains some sixty Latin excerpts from the writings of Theodore, and includes texts from his notes on particular Psalm verses.[ix]  The Latin texts certainly derive from the same source as those contained in the Council’s acta.  Leontius of Byzantium is recognized as the translator.[x] The Constitutum Vigilii proves singularly important, however, because the Pope offers a point by point explication and condemnation of Theodore’s texts, something not found in the Conciliar decrees themselves. Similarities between the Pope’s characterization of the texts before him, and Thomas’s characterization of Theodore’s teaching on adaptation can be discerned.  To go into this discernible similarity would be different and much longer lecture.

The error attributed to Theodore involves two major aspects: First that he denied the prophets ever intended to say anything literally about Christ. (nihil expresse dicitur). To say this in terms related to what we saw earlier in the commentary on Hebrews chapter 1: Nothing was expressly said in the Old Testament about the One who is the Incarnate and thus expressly manifested WORD of the Father. As you can imagine this undermines any understanding of the Old Testament as words from the Word, preparing for the Word’s expressed manifestation.

Thus, Theodore accounts for New Testament references to the prophets as a work of textual adaptations. “Adaptation” is a bad word for Thomas, if it is used to describe how Old Testament texts can be made to refer to New Testament realities. What is adaptation? The short answer is that it implies that the Old Testament authors did not intend to refer to New Testament things, rather, New Testament authors appropriated the words at will: they made them fit.

Thomas gives an interesting elaboration on this point in his commentary on Matthew. Probably his earliest reference to Theodore the exegete, Thomas says the following about what adaptation implies:

And another was [the error] of Theodore saying that nothing of those things which are brought forth from the Old Testament are literally said about Christ, but they are adapted, as [for example] when they bring forth that [text] of Virgil:  recalling such things, he hung suspended, and affixed he remained.[xi]  Now, this [text of Virgil] is adapted concerning Christ; and next [it is said], that [the text of Matthew] that it might be fulfilled, ought to be thus exposed, as if the Evangelist were saying and this can be adapted.  Against which [can be adduced the text] from the last chapter of Luke:  It was fitting that all those things which were written in the Law of Moses, and the Prophets, and the Psalms about me be fulfilled.[xii]

Now, stick with me here: Thomas is saying that adaptation involves appropriating words away from the author’s intention, like when some people read in the Aeneid that Anchises’ “pendebat and fixusque” (he hung suspended and was affixed) can be applied it to Christ. Martin  Morard has identified the source of Thomas’s example.[xiii]  Thomas seems to be making a passing reference (probably from memory) of a letter from Saint Jerome to Saint Paulinus of Nola. In that letter St Jerome severely rebukes those who manipulate classical pagan texts to make them refer to Christ. The following appears in Jerome’s Epistola LIII to Paulinus of Nola:

[Those] who come boldly to the Sacred Scriptures after secular letters, […] whatever might be said there they think to be the Law of God, nor do they think it worthwhile what the prophets or what the Apostles think, but rather they fit (aptant) the incongruous testimonies to their own sense, as if it were a great thing, and not a most vicious thing to deprive a way of speaking of its sense, and to drag a writing according to their own will to a repugnant sense.  As if we could not read Homeric verses and Virgilian verses and not also call Maronus a Christian without Christ, because he wrote […] the words of the Savior on the Cross:  talia perstabat memorans fixusque manebat. These are childish things, and similar to a game of circles.[xiv]

Interestingly, Jerome’s letter censures the adaptations of Proba, the well known Roman matron and convert who herself received lengthy responses to her letters from Augustine.  Jerome rebukes any attempt to offer as legitimate a reading of a secular text which prescinds completely from the intention of a classical author; the activity is an active one, involving imposing (by will of the reader) something at variance with the original author’s intentional use of words.  Jerome of course knows the context of Anchises’ statement, and is quite sure that there was no intention to speak– even in a vague way– about crucifixion.  Thus, for Jerome, the practice of reading Virgil in this way involves a re-figuration of the words’ contextual sense away from one of Anchises’ resoluteness. The words used by Virgil take on a significantly different meaning through the transfer of context.  

Through this example Thomas understands that adaptation involves a radical manipulation of words based upon verbal ambiguities and the equivocal use of language.  When “they” adjust the text of Virgil to signify something about Christ, they do something at variance with what Virgil himself intended to signify through the words he used.  The text is adjusted with no real reference to what the poet intended.  To say, therefore, that the Apostles and Evangelists adapted prophetic texts to Christ implicates them in a falsification of textual integrity of the kind Jerome attributed to Proba and her circle.

Ok, so clearly a Scripture reader, in this case an Apostle, cannot expose a prior prophetic text by prescinding from the intention of the author. To do so does violence to the text because it separates words from the things the author wanted to talk about. But here is the point: when the New Testament speaks of the prophets, it cannot be doing so in the way Jerome ascribes to childish Roman matrons reading Christ into Virgil. So what are the New Testament authors doing when they quote the Old Testament and use the common NT phrase: “This was to fulfill what was said by the prophet,… etc.” ?

Countering the claim that the New Testament authors intended to say that the prophetic words of Isaiah could conveniently be adapted to signify something about Christ, Thomas (in the commentary on Matthew) offers the text from Luke 24, 44:

[…] Against which [can be adduced the text] from the last chapter of Luke:  It was fitting that all those things which were written in the Law of Moses, and the Prophets, and the Psalms about me be fulfilled. And it should be known that in the Old Testament there are certain things which refer to Christ, and are said about him alone, like that [text which says] Behold a virgin shall conceive in the womb, and bear a son, Isaiah 7, [14]; and also that [text] Psalm 21, [2]:  God, my God, look upon me, why have you forsaken me? etc.  And if anyone should put a different literal sense, he would be a heretic, and the heresy is condemned.[…][xv]

The sense of this citation moves the argument to another level:  Matthew could not have intended to say that “the text can be thus adapted,” because he only conveyed what he learned from Christ, namely that “all these things” written in the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms were written about Him. The argument against Theodore thus is reduced to a Christological error. The Lord Jesus knows what the intentions of the Old Testament authors are, and it is his knowledge, confided to the authors of the New Testament, that sustains the propriety of New Testament citation of the Old. It is the literal historicity of the WORD made flesh (expresse manifestavit se), the One who spoke through the prophets prior to his Incarnation, that gives the Apostles (and the Church) access to Old Testament intentions.

III.         The Rule of Saint Jerome:

After addressing the error attributed to Theodore of Mopsuestia, Thomas turns to a principle of exposition he calls the Rule of Saint Jerome. Bear with me as I read it to you in full:

Blessed Jerome, therefore, [in his commentary] on Ezechiel handed on to us a rule which we will use in the Psalms:  namely that concerning things done, they are to be exposed thus, as figuring something about Christ or the Church.  As, indeed, it is said in 1 Cor. 10, [11]:  all these things happened to them in figure.  Prophecies, moreover, were sometimes said about things which were of the time then, but [the prophecies] were not principally said about those things, but, in fact, [the prophecies were said about those things] inasmuch as they are figures of future things: and thus the Holy Spirit ordered that when such things are said, certain things are inserted which exceed the condition of that thing done, so that the soul might be raised to the thing figured.  Like in [the book of] Daniel many things are said about Antiochus in the figure of the anti-Christ:  hence, there certain things are read which were not completed in him, they will be fulfilled, indeed in the anti-Christ; as also certain things are read about the kingdom of David and Solomon, which were not to be fulfilled in the reign of such men, but were to be fulfilled in the kingdom of Christ, in whose figure they were said:  as [for example] Psalm 71, [2]:  God, your judgment etc. which is according to the title about the reign of David and Solomon; and [the author] places something in it that exceeds its capacity, namely [in verses 7] justice will arise in his days  and abundance of peace, until the moon be taken away:  and again [in verse 8], he will rule from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends [of the earth] etc.  Therefore, this Psalm is expounded about the reign of Solomon, inasmuch as it is a figure of the reign of Christ, in which all the things there said will be completed.[xvi]

This proposed regula has two distinct parts and is designed to counter Theodore’s principal errors by re-casting the issue of signification. Thomas here aims to address the wider issue of authorial intent by discussing how both the words and deeds in the Old Testament intentionally refer to realities in the New Testament.  He explicitly links this account to the tradition of the Fathers, specifically through the authority of Saint Jerome. The mode of exposition appropriate to the sacred text, therefore, has its own kind of authority, rooted in Thomas’s sense of the consuetudo ecclesiae. Thomas works here to integrate the newly discovered determinations of Constantinople II into the distinctly developed tradition of Latin Scriptural exposition.

By way of quick summary of the regula, we should first note that not every signifier in the Old Testament signifies the New through the literal sense. The Pauline teaching in 1 Corinthians 10, (All these things happened to them in figure), opens the issue by noting that the great bulk of the pre-New Testament Canon is a narrative of literal history and is embedded in that history. As it unfolds, the history itself aims to Christ and, and at the same time the history figures his identity and mission. The general figuration is prophetic and applies to the literal history. This is what we could call the classic spiritual sense of the Old Testament: persons and events in the OT bear an anticipatory likeness to NT persons and events.

Thus, for example, the literal accounts of Moses interceding with God for Israel’s sake after the incident of the Golden calf literally and historically prepares for Christ’s coming by divine pedagogical action at that time: God, after all, desires a people free from idolatry, and this in itself prepared for Christ. Yet the history also pre-figures what Christ’s mission will entail. Christ the mediator once revealed is revealed to have been figured in Moses. The text is literally intended of Moses; and Moses Himself figures, shows likeness, to the coming Christ.

This initial principle encompasses the whole of the intentional signification found in things done, that is to say the entirety of those res recounted in the Old Testament.  The articulation accounts for the relation of res ut figura to res figurata established through the Lord God’s expansive and significant accommodation of Israel’s history toward the Incarnation.[xvii]

The “Rule of Jerome”, though, extends also to address prophetic events and discourses that have both an Old Testament historical referent and a literal sense extending to Christ. First, let me point out that I am persuaded that in the received text on the Psalms, the reference to Jerome on Ezekiel is incorrect. There is internal evidence to support this, evidence I cannot go into here.[xviii] Instead, I would argue that what Thomas says here ,..

[…] Prophecies, moreover, were sometimes said about things which were of the time then, but [the prophecies] were not principally said about those things, but, in fact, [the prophecies were said about those things] inasmuch as they are figures of future things: […][xix]

… corresponds more precisely the following text from Jerome’s exposition of Hosea 1, 3:[xx]

The prophets promised about the coming of Christ after many centuries and the calling of the gentiles in this way, in order that they might not overlook the present time, lest they seem not to teach the convoked assembly [of their time] about the things that occur through their fault, on account of the other [future realities], but instead seem to [neglect the present] and rejoice about obscure and future things.[xxi]

This particular text from Jerome focuses specifically upon the prophet’s intention to signify both the present historical res and the future historical res with the same words.  In Osee, 1, 3, in fact, enunciates a principle quite decisive in determining the modus exponendi of prophetic texts that involve reference to OT history and yet are understood by the New Testament as literally referring to Christ. 

To do justice to Old Testament history and to avoid the error of Theodore, Thomas thus articulates a specific principle by which this kind of signification can be discerned. Call it the principle of exceeded conditions. Speaking summarily, if the words attendant to the OT history exceede the condition of the histories, then the exceeded description itself extends to a literal application to later realities. Thomas’s intention here is to permit this aspect of Jerome’s rule to counter Theodore’s nihil expresse dicitur in a way that allows for literal reference to Christ yet does not altogether preclude a genuine OT historical res at play in the prophecy.

The verbal description exceeding the condition of an Old Testament reality corresponds more exactly to that which the history figures; this does not, however, suggest that the figure is itself superfluous to the mode of signification.  For one thing, Solomon or Antiochus do not cease being historical res simply because they are presented to us on occasion through descriptions verbally designed to set in relief how much they– considered as figures– fall historically short of the future reality they signify. The immediate historical res addressed by the prophet requires the expositor’s attention because without knowledge of it, the very fact that the prophetic description exceeds the context would escape significant notice.  

That the prophetic description does in fact exceed the condition of the earlier history indicates to the reader that the littera of the description– at least in those parts exceeding local circumstances– intentionally signify New Testament history expresse through the words. By means of this kind of inspection of the words and the Old Testament res, discernment of expresse and ad litteram signification is possible. In the end, this is Thomas’s most sophisticated analysis of textual signification; it amplifies the traditional categorization according to literal and spiritual significations, for it contains elements of both. The OT history signifies, but the description expressly points beyond the OT history.

Why does Thomas think it necessary to expand the discussion of Theodore’s error beyond the immediate affirmation that some Old Testament texts do in fact signify Christ ad litteram? Partly, I think, because Thomas understands Theodore to have focused his interpretation of the Old Testament texts solely in terms of the immediate historical context surrounding the articulated words.  There appears to be no room for any other kind of signification in Theodore’s teaching: in Psalm 21, either David spoke about his persecution by Absolom, or he spoke about Christ. Since for Theodore it was obvious that David had Absolom on his mind when composing Psalm 21, it could not be that Christ could be understood in that text except through an adaptation. Theodore views Old Testament intentionality to be confined to one historical thing only.  

Theodore thus sounds to Thomas like a strict Aristotelian when it comes to textual signification. Indeed, Theodore sounds a lot like the fifth objector in Quodlibetum VII, q. 6, a. 1, that is to say, an Aristotelian that cannot admit of more than a single referent per signifier. Thomas dealt then (the late 1250’s) with the issue by noting that Jerome on Hosea rightly says that nothing prohibits a single deed or thing from having several related senses, inasmuch as one is a figure of the other.[xxii]

Ironically, Theodore reads Psalm 21 the way Jerome says Virgil should be read: solely in terms of the immediate historical intentionality. The point Thomas makes, though, is that the Christian cannot read Isaiah or David the way Jerome reads Virgil for the simple reason that God can do what Virgil cannot, namely accommodate history to signify his intentions. Related figurative senses are present in the thing described. Thus, Theodore, in addition to having erred in his appreciation for the intentionality of prophetic texts uttered about Christ alone, also lacks an understanding of the unified intentionality governing the whole of the Old Testament aimed toward Christ. Doubtless, Thomas saw Theodore’s reading of Scripture as ultimately rooted in a Christological error. Theodore has no room for a  real relation between the facta of the Old Testament and the facta of the New; he has no room for the intentional governance of history by the WORD.  

IV.         CHRIST in Figure and the Figure in CHRIST

Figuration is an essential element within the Scriptural tradition, and in the Catholic tradition of Scriptural interpretation. Figuration is built into the Scriptural self-understanding itself. It concerns events that are intelligible in light of other events. “Moses, with his arms upheld”; “Israel, with unmoistened foot”; “As at Meribah, when they hardened their hearts”. The Old Testament itself depends on these kinds of historical invocations in order to understand its later historical moments. In the last books of the Old Testament, the invocation of the Exodus event in remarkably nuanced ways both interpret the later moments of Israel’s history, and expand Israel’s perception of the meaning of Israel’s foundational historical events. Later events are figured in the foundational event. The WORD, who authored the first Word-Event, guides the later prophetic tradition to its figurative amplifications. The self-understanding of the New Testament reads the prior figurative tradition as brought to clarity in the Paschal Mystery. At the Easter Vigil this interpretive dynamic is on full display.

Now then, throughout the commentary on the Psalms, Thomas respects and shows remarkable dexterity in locating, or in wanting to locate, the historical references in the Psalms: anything from the Exodus, to troubles with Absalom, thanksgiving for victory in battle, to psalms composed to accompany cultic worship, etc. After locating the history, Thomas then usually goes on to read those events as prefiguring something having to do with Christ. We could call this a discernment of the spiritual sense of the OT. This is not an exercise in seeking out fanciful allegories; rather it is rooted in a pre-critical theological conviction that Israel’s history was governed by a special providence, a grace that orders its signification in a way that is anticipatory of the final revelation of God’s historical intent in Christ. This serves as the basis for a Christian reading of the psalms that respects the history of the psalmists. Figuration, in this tradition, (and here I must insist Thomas is very much in the spirit of the Fathers) is rooted in history, not in words; in events understood a certain way, not in poetic allusions.

So what does it really mean to say that there is a literal historical New Testament sense in OT prophecy which also involves reference to OT historical events? To get a sense of Thomas’ response to such a question, let’s look at his particular commentary on Psalm 21, the celebrated Passion Psalm, the one cited by Christ himself from the Cross. Exposing the text, Thomas will not say that the history of David’s sufferings there expressed are a prefiguration of Christ. Nor will he allow that the literal sense refers to David, and the spiritual sense of the text refers to Christ. Given all we have seen in the treatment of Theodore of Mopsuestia and the Rule of Saint Jerome, this should not surprise us. Here is what Thomas says:

As was said above, as in the other prophets, also this one treats of certain things then present inasmuch as [those certain things] were figures of Christ, and which pertained to the prophecy itself.  And thus, sometimes some things are put forth [in the text] which pertain to Christ, which exceed, so to speak, the condition of the histories. And among others, specifically this psalm treats about the Passion of Christ.  And thus, this is its literal sense.  Hence, specifically He spoke this Psalm in the passion when He cried out Heli Heli Lammasabactani:  which is the same as God, my God, etc. as this Psalm begins.  And thus, granted this Psalm is said figuratively about David, nevertheless specifically it refers to Christ ad litteram.  And in the Synod of Toledo a certain Theodore of Mopsuestia, who exposed this Psalm about David ad litteram was condemned, and [he was condemned] on account of this and many other things.  And, thus, [this Psalm] is to be exposed about Christ. [xxiii]

Thomas explicitly places the issue of Psalm 21 within the same context governing the exposition of Psalm 71, as explained in the Prologue to the Psalter commentary; both involve discerning words which describe realities exceeding the immediate historical condition.  Neither text can be exposed primarily about the Old Testament figure.  The history narrated in the Psalm is not about David, it is about Christ. This is its literal sense. On this reading, David (the psalmist) has a vision of the Passion, and wrote of it. The psalmists own sufferings are secondarily referenced in the psalm, but only to the extent they are figured within Christ’s sufferings. David saw himself in Christ; he did not see Christ in himself.

Now, you may think this is a distinction without a difference. But in fact, it sustains a whole Catholic understanding of spiritual progress. It is more perfect to see oneself figured in Christ than it is to see Christ figured in oneself. This is because Christ is the supreme locus of intelligibility, and I understand myself better if I see myself figured in him. This is the distinction Thomas wishes to preserve: Israel’s history pre-figures New Testament events, yet the prophets had moments of imaginative vision with understanding that saw from afar the Christian history: they read the contemporary events they lived figured within the history of Christ: Prophets and Kings longed to see what you see, but did not see it.

Thomas is a theological witness to a truth of Catholic Faith, namely that after the full revelation of Christ’s historical appearance, the Church has access to the aim of history. Hence, all the faithful now have the capacity by spiritual instinct and knowledge of the Gospel to see themselves figured in Christ. This, together with the gift of the Spirit guiding our reception of the history of Christ, is what is new about the New Testament revelation. And this is why the Fathers of the Church, following Saint Paul, call the definitive revelation in Christ an “unveiling”. What is unveiled? The aim of human living and all of history. This is a datum in the tradition which witnesses to what then Cardinal Ratzinger called the laying bare of the intelligibility of history by the revelation of its end in Christ.[xxiv] For us who live after the foundational events of the Christian revelation, the figurations are clearer, though not yet perfectly so. The enigmas of the Apocalypse, for example, will remain until the end.

Thomas understands this unveiling of the supreme intelligible precisely in the terms we saw at the outset, namely the expresse manifestavit se of the Incarnation. The eternally generated WORD in the flesh literally and historically expresses what every human life and what all history is really about. What Thomas does here in exposing the text of Psalm 21 as literally about Christ and figuratively about David (effectively reversing the ordinary way of explicating figuration) is grant to David a perspective of vision that is equivalent to ours. We know the history of Christ as literal history, and can see ourselves in it.

Only in this context does the full theological weight of the spiritual or figurative senses of Scripture appear. In the literality of Christ the prior governance of Israel’s history is finally understood; this unveiling guides us to the right reading not just of the books of the OT, but of the history itself. Thomas occasionally uses the term ‘allegory” when referring to the spiritual reading of the OT, but he prefers the term “mystice”; the mystical sense is what is figured within the literal history of Christ. Thus, to state the matter briefly, the ecclesiological sense of a text is the figure of the Church present in the person of Christ; the moral sense of a text is the norm of Christian living present in Christ’s actions; the eschatological sense is the destiny of the Christ as anticipatory of the final destiny of the human race.[xxv] All of this flows from the super-intelligibility of the eternally generated Word, who expressly reveals in the flesh that the intelligibility of history is the Word, a person who creates all things, sustains all things and aims all things to the innermost recesses of the Father’s heart.

***

Thus, and with this I will conclude, we see the transparency of the ecclesial tradition of reading Scripture to the Eucharistic sacrifice itself. In the Sacred Liturgy the sacramental re-presentation of the historical founding Word-event of the Passion, death and Resurrection of Christ comes after the reading of the Scriptures. The Paschal Sacrifice is thus positioned to unveil the fundamental ratio through which the Scriptures just read are rightly understood. The literal body of Christ appears after the worded Scriptural explications, just as the Incarnation follows and clarifies the prior Scriptural pedagogy. And yet the Scriptures read prior to the Eucharistic Sacrifice guide our understanding of what is to be enacted, just as the Scriptural record prepared the way for faith in the Incarnation. It is a reciprocal pedagogy of grace. What concerns Saint Thomas throughout his discussions of Scriptural signification is accounting theologically for how this cohesive reciprocating movement towards the literal expressiveness of God in Christ happens textually and historically.

Christian liturgy and theology breathes of figuration or it dies. Figuration flows to Christ and flows from him. And the root of all figurative meaning is the literal Gospel history of Christ, culminating in the Cross and Resurrection. The Cross, literally understood in light of his Rising, is the supreme intelligible of God’s heart made literally manifest. It is both plainly visible and at the same time a kind of brightness that comes to us under cover of darkness. The Christological truth revealed in Scripture and enacted—made plain and made present– in the Eucharistic intervention is the basis for understanding rightly all subsequent figurative readings, be they moral, ecclesial, or eschatological. And the aim is that we see our lives figured within Christ thus plainly manifested. Of the Eucharist as of the Incarnation itself, we can truly say: Se nobis expresse manifestavit.

Thank you for your kind attention.

+Daniel E. Flores

Bishop of Brownsville

(2019)

+++

[i] Pensées, 19: La dernière chose qu’on trouve en faisant un ouvrage, est de savoir celle qu’il faut mettre la première.

[ii] The Marietti printed editions, and the electronic versions of the Corpus Thomisticum (recognovit ac instruxit Enrique Alarcón automato electronico, Pompaelone ad Universitatis Studiorum Navarrensis aedes a MM A.D.) convey this text to us most readily, and make note of this feature of the textual tradition.

[iii] All translations of Thomas’s commentaries on Scripture utilized in this lecture from Latin to English, are my own. Yo soy el culpable. With the exception of the Commentary on the Psalms, the Latin texts used are from the Marietti editions and the Corpus Thomisticum. Super ad Hebraeos, cap. 1, lect. 1: Prima autem expressio, scilicet in creatione, non ordinatur ad manifestationem, sed ad esse, Sap. I creavit Deus ut essent omnia. Cum ergo expressio non habeat rationem locutionis nisi prout ordinatur ad manifestationem, manifestum est, quod illa expressio non potest dici locutio, et ideo numquam dicitur, quod Deus loquatur creando creaturas, sed quod cognoscatur. Rom. I, 20: invisibilia Dei per ea quae facta sunt, intellecta conspiciuntur. 

[iv]Super ad Hebreos, cap. 1, lect. 1: Tertio per carnis assumptionem, de qua dicitur Io. I, 14: verbum caro factum est, et vidimus gloriam eius, et cetera. Et ideo dicit Augustinus, quod hoc modo se habet verbum incarnatum ad verbum increatum, sicut verbum vocis ad verbum cordis.

[v] Super ad Hebreos, cap. 1, lect. 1: Secunda vero expressio, quae est editio specierum in mente angelica, vel humana, ordinatur tantum ad cognitionem sapientiae divinae, et ideo potest dici locutio. Tertia vero, quae est per assumptionem carnis, ordinatur ad esse, et ad cognitionem, et ad expressam manifestationem, quia per assumptionem carnis, et verbum factum est homo, et nos in cognitionem Dei perfecit. . (Io. XVIII, 37: ad hoc natus sum, ut testimonium perhibeam veritati). Et se nobis expresse manifestavit. Bar. c. III, 38: post haec in terris visus est, et cum hominibus conversatus est. Sic ergo, licet Deus loquatur in novo et veteri testamento, perfectius tamen in novo nobis loquitur, quia ibi per revelationes in mentibus hominum, hic per incarnationem filii.

[vi] The Latin text of the Prologue derives from the Parme edition (In Psalmos, ed. Parmensis, t. XIV, 1863). This is the received text also utilized in the Corpus Thomisticum.

[vii] Super Psalmos, Prologus:  circa modum exponendi sciendum est, quod tam in psalterio quam in aliis prophetiis exponendis evitare debemus unum errorem damnatum in quinta synodo. theodorus enim mopsuestenus dixit, quod in sacra scriptura et prophetiis nihil expresse dicitur de christo, sed de quibusdam aliis rebus, sed adaptaverunt christo: sicut illud psalm. 21: diviserunt sibi vestimenta mea etc., non de christo, sed ad literam dicitur de david. hic autem modus damnatus est in illo concilio: et qui asserit sic exponendas scripturas, haereticus est. 

[viii] See See J. D. Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, Florence: 1763. Vol. 9., Collatio IV, cols. 76-79.  These texts were preserved in the Collectio Avellana, Vigilius, Epist. 83, CSEL 35.  See Martin Morard, “Une source de saint Thomas d’Aquin:  le deuxième concile de Constantinople (553).”  Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 81 (1997):  pp. 26 and 33.

[ix] A fair amount of discussion has taken place, and continues, concerning the reliability of the Latin excerpts preserved by the Council and by the Constitutum Vigilii.  Some have argued that the texts do not adequately convey the subtlety of Theodore’s teaching on prophecy, and that reconstructive work on the corpus of Theodore’s writings warrants a reconsideration of his actual teaching, considered distinctly from what Constantinople II ascribed to him.  Robert Devreese did considerable work in this area, as did the J. M. Vosté.  Vosté found confirmation of the Council’s judgement in the Syriac versions of Theodore’s work; Devreese considered the Syriac version not much more reliable, textually speaking, than the Latin excerpts.  De Margerie points out that Devreese seems inexplicably to have overlooked the fact that the Latin excerpts in the Collatio IVand Constitutum Vigilii are taken largely from Theodore’s comments on the Minor Prophets, and not from the Commentary on the Psalter.  He further suggests that the comments on the Minor Prophets are more explicitly errant than those in the Commentary on the Psalter.  For a review of the debate concerning the degree to which the excerpts in the Collatio IVand the Constitutum Vigilii fairly reflect Theodore of Mopsuestia’s teaching on Scriptural exegesis, see the following:  J.M.  Vosté, “L’Oeuvre Exégétique de Théodore de Mopsueste au IIa Concile de Constantinople,” Revue Biblique, 38 (1929), pp. 382-395 et 542-554; Robert Devreesse, “Par Quelles voies Nous sont Parvenus Les Commentaires de Théodore de Mopsueste?”  Revue Biblique 39 (1930) pp. 362-277; Pietro Parente, “Una riabilitazione de Teodoro Mopsuesteno,” Doctor Communis, 1950, pp. 3-15; Bertrand De Margerie, An Introduction to the History of Exegesis. Vol. I: The Greek Fathers, translated by Leonard Maluf, (Petersham, Massachusettes:  St. Bedes Publications, 1993) pp. 165-187.

[x] Vigilius prefaces the excerpts with a letter to the Emperor, from whose court in Constantinople the Latin translations were likely sent to the Pope.  The Latin version of Theodore’s writings in the Constitutum varies only in the most minor degree from that in the Collatio IV.  On Leontius of Byzantium see De Margerie,  The Greek Fathers, p. 177, n. 34.

[xi] Aeneid 2, 650.

[xii] Super Matthaeum, cp. 1, lc. 5,(Marietti no. 148):  alius fuit theodori dicentis, quod nihil eorum quae inducuntur de veteri testamento, sunt ad litteram de christo, sed sunt adaptata, sicut quando inducunt illud virgilii talia pendebat memorans, fixusque manebat hoc enim adaptatum est de christo; et tunc illud ut adimpleretur, debet sic exponi, quasi diceret evangelista: et hoc potest adaptari. contra quod lc. ult., 44: oportet impleri omnia quae scripta sunt in lege moysi, et prophetis, et psalmis de me.

[xiii] Morard locates the reference in Saint Jerome, Epistola LIII, 7, 2-3, to Paulinus of Nola, which, he notes, was variously transmitted through the tradition of the Vulgate manuscripts and the glosses.  See “Une Source,” pp. 32-33.  Morard is aware of Smalley’s reading, though he does not advert to it’s specifics.

[xiv] Jerome, Epistola LIII, 7, 2-3, (CSEL 54, pp. 453-454):  […] Qui si forte ad scripturas sanctas post saeculares litteras venerint […] quicquid dixerint, hoc legem Dei putant nec scire dignantur, quid prophetae, quid apostoli senserint, sed ad sensum suum incongrua aptant testimonia, quasi grande sit et non vitiosissimum dicendi genus depravare sententias et ad voluntatem suam scripturam trahere repugnantem.  Quasi non legerimus Homerocentonas et Vergiliocentonas ac non sic etiam Maronem sine Christo possimus dicere christianum, quia scripserit […] verba Salvatoris in cruce:  talia perstabat memorans fixusque manebat.  Puerilia sunt haec et circulatorum ludo similia. […]  Jerome’s use of the verbs aptant and trahere (almost 200 years before the controversies prompting the Consitutum Vigilii and the Collatio IV) might well have signaled to Thomas the analogy he perceives between the act of adapting Virgil and the way Theodore understood the Evangelists’ act of adapting the Old Testament prophecies.  See Morard, “Une Source,” p. 32.

[xv] Super Matthaeum, cp. 1, lc. 5, (Marietti no. 148): […] contra quod lc. ult., 44: oportet impleri omnia quae scripta sunt in lege moysi, et prophetis, et psalmis de me. […]  et sciendum quod in veteri testamento aliqua sunt quae referuntur ad christum, et de eo solo dicuntur, sicut illud ecce virgo in utero concipiet, et pariet filium, is. vii, 14; et illud ps. xxi, 2: deus, deus meus, respice in me, quare me dereliquisti? etc.. et si quis alium sensum litteralem poneret, esset haereticus, et haeresis damnata est.

[xvi]Super Psalmos,  Prologus:  beatus ergo hieronymus super ezech. tradidit nobis unam regulam quam servabimus in psalmis: scilicet quod sic sunt exponendi de rebus gestis, ut figurantibus aliquid de christo vel ecclesia. ut enim dicitur 1 cor. 10: omnia in figura contingebant illis. prophetiae autem aliquando dicuntur de rebus quae tunc temporis erant, sed non principaliter dicuntur de eis, sed inquantum figura sunt futurorum: et ideo spiritus sanctus ordinavit quod quando talia dicuntur, inserantur quaedam quae excedunt conditionem illius rei gestae, ut animus elevetur ad figuratum.  et ideo spiritus sanctus ordinavit quod quando talia dicuntur, inserantur quaedam quae excedunt conditionem illius rei gestae, ut animus elevetur ad figuratum.  sicut in daniele multa dicuntur de anthioco in figuram antichristi: unde ibi quaedam leguntur quae non sunt in eo completa, implebuntur autem in antichristo; sicut etiam aliqua de regno david et salomonis leguntur, quae non erant implenda in talium hominum regno, sed impleta fuere in regno christi, in cujus figura dicta sunt: sicut psal. 71: deus judicium etc. qui est secundum titulum de regno david et salomonis; et aliquid ponit in eo quod excedit facultatem ipsius, scilicet, orietur in diebus ejus justitia et abundantia pacis, donec auferatur luna: et iterum, dominabitur a mari usque ad mare, et a flumine usque ad terminos etc.. exponitur ergo psalmus iste de regno salomonis, inquantum est figura regni christi, in quo omnia complebuntur ibi dicta.

[xvii] Thomas often supports the general principal with a reference to 1 Corinthians 10, 11: Omnia in fugura contingebant illis.  See, for example, Secunda Secundae, q. 104, a. 2, c. Super ad Hebraeos 1, 5, articulates this general principle with the phrase […] quaedam vero etiam secundum quod sunt homines quidam, et istorum dicta de ipsis possunt exponi et de christo; sicut illud: deus, iudicium tuum regi da: quia illud potest convenire salomoni. 

[xviii] It is worth noting that an inquiry into the presence of the two lemma Hieronymus and Ezechiel in Busa.  Thomae Aquinatis Opera Omnia cum hypertextibus in CD-ROM, secunda editio,  (Milano:  Editoria Elettronica Editel, 1996) does not yield any other reference by Thomas to Jerome on Ezekiel. Yet, numerous references to Jerome on Hosea, in matter closely related to the issue at hand can be found.

[xix] See note 16 above for the Latin.

[xx] See in Quodlibetum VII, q. 6, a. 1, ad 5, a specific text from Jerome on Hosea is referenced. See also the presence of this text from Jerome in Prima Secundae, q. 102, a. 2, c.

[xxi] Jerome, In Osee Prophetam, I, i, 3.4; CCL, 76, p. 10, lines. 148-152:  Prophetae sic multa post saecula de aduentu Christi et uocatione gentium pollicentur, ut praesens tempus non neglegant, ne concionem ob aliud conuocatam non docere de his quae stant, sed de incertis ac futuris ludere uideantur. […].  De Margerie, writing in a broader context about Jerome’s exegetical approach, finds a similarly expressed principle in Jerome’s in Malachi, 1, 10; PL 25, 1551 B.  See The Latin Fathers, pp. 140-141. 

[xxii]The reference to Saint Jerome here, I think, is the one Thomas is thinking of in articulating the Rule of Jerome in the Psalms commentary. Quodlibetum VII, q. 6, a. 1, ad 5:  ad quintum dicendum, quod auctor principalis sacrae scripturae est spiritus sanctus, qui in uno verbo sacrae scripturae intellexit multo plura quam per expositores sacrae scripturae exponantur, vel discernantur. nec est etiam inconveniens quod homo, qui fuit auctor instrumentalis sacrae scripturae, in uno verbo plura intelligeret: quia prophetae, ut hieronymus dicit super osee, ita loquebantur de factis praesentibus, quod etiam intenderunt futura significare. unde non est impossibile simul plura intelligere, in quantum unum est figura alterius

[xxiii]In Psalmum 21, introduction:  sicut supra dictum est, sicut in aliis prophetis, ita hic agitur de aliquibus tunc praesentibus inquantum erant figura christi et quae ad ipsam prophetiam pertinebant. et ideo quandoque ponuntur aliqua quae ad christum pertinent, quae excedunt quasi virtutem historiarum. Et inter alia specialiter iste Psalmus agit de passione Christi. Et ideo hic est ejus sensus litteralis. Unde specialiter hunc Psalmum in passione dixit cum clamavit, Heli Heli lammasabactani: quod idem est quod Deus Deus meus etc. sicut hic Psalmus incipit. Et ideo licet figuraliter hic Psalmus dicatur de David, tamen specialiter ad litteram refertur ad Christum. Et in synodo Toletana quidam Theodorus Mopsuestenus, qui hunc ad litteram de David exponebat, fuit damnatus, et propter hoc et propter alia multa; et ideo de Christo exponendus est. Sciendum est autem quod quinque Psalmi agunt de passione Christi prolixe: quorum iste Psalmus primus est. Alii enim brevius tangunt passionem Christi. Secundus est, judica domine nocentes me, Ps. 34. Tertius est, ibi, exaudi Deus orationem meam, et ne despexeris deprecationem meam. Quartus, Ps. 68: salvum me fac Deus, quoniam intraverunt aquae. Quintus, Ps. 108: Deus laudem meam ne tacueris. Et hoc propter quinque plagas Christi: vel propter quinque effusiones sanguinis. Et unus est modus procedendi in omnibus, quia incipiunt a gemitu, et terminantur in salutem populorum: quia ex passione facta est salus omnibus hominibus. 

[xxiv] Ratzinger “Biblical Interpretation in Conflict: On the Foundations and Itinerary of Exegesis Today”, in Opening up the Scriptures: Joseph Ratzinger and the Foundations of Biblical Interpretation edited by Josë Granados, Carlos Granados, Luis Sánchez-Navarro (Eerdmans, 2008). Electronic format, pos 466: “When things have reached their goal, one can discover cover the true sense that so to say lay hidden in them. This sense appearing at the end of the movement transcends whatever sense might be inferred from any given section of the now completed path. «This new sense thus presupposes the existence of a divine Providence, the existence of a (salvation) history arriving at its destination.»» God’s action thus appears as the principle of the intelligibility of history. The unifying principle of the whole of past and present «history, which alone confers sense on it, is, however, ever, the historical event of Christ.”

[xxv] See Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars, q. 1, a. 10.

A couple of verses I wrote sometime in 2016. Dios me ha dado una devoción al joven mártir. Me da consuelo.

Jamás imaginaste 

cuando a México intentaste 

A un obispo encontrar,

Que el viento se levantase

Y el Pastor te invitase

A Japón sin regresar.

Tempestad no existe 

que la gracia no tranquilice 

con la patria recordar.

Japón recibiste

Y con lágrimas te dirigiste

A la blanca Cruz señal.

Ser sacerdote no alcanzaste

Pero el Santo Nombre dijiste

Y el pueblo sí nutriste

Cuando te dieron tu altar.

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Did by grace you imagine

When for Mexico you set

That a bishop would be lacking

But a bride would find you yet?

That wind and sea advancing

Would by Love’s design enhancing

Make the East your best well met?

No gale has yet existed

That grace has not resisted

By the beloved’s longed for sight.

Japan your new embrace

On which your young groom’s face

Saw signed a great white Cross. 

You did not reach to be a priest,

For no bishop was at that East,

But still you said a consecration

And after made Communion ministration

When at the nuptial altar station

you took your appointed place.

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I gave this talk to students at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, in February, 2024, as part of a seminar series Dr John Cavadini had organized to help celebrate the Eucharistic Year in the United States.

Hunger, Poverty and the Eucharist

(Reflections as from different mirrors)

+Daniel E. Flores, STD

Bishop of Brownsville

The question. What to give to the person who has everything? This is something sometimes asked in jest.

The Queen of Sheba may have wondered that when she was preparing to leave Solomon’s Jerusalem.

Had she visited him again later she might have better gifted him a slap across the face with the question: What are you thinking ?

He had grown weak of mind, dizzied by his success, influenced by the flatteries of his courtiers and wives, and the gods of the nations he permitted to be propagated in his kingdom.

Poverty is a reality of the human condition with as many faces as there are vulnerable conditions. Solomon was more vulnerable than he knew. And, we could say, the not knowing how poor he was was his greatest poverty, his greatest vulnerability.

The precariousness of our vulnerabilities is a given in human life. We don’t like it; we would prefer not to think about it, and we would like to overcome it. Yet, we teeter about like a little boat on the Sea of Galilee, trying not to think about the storm that might appear on the horizon. Until it does.

Perhaps the better question: What to give to the person who thinks he has everything?

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In the mission of Jesus the gift is crafted to suit the need.

It’s gratuity is pristine and childlike,

yet its arrow is deliberately poised to strike what we didn’t even know we were missing.

The Incarnation itself is the gift most suitable.

The Lord’s public ministry is a pedagogy of deeds and words that when combined form signs of things God would have us learn to hunger for.

The pedagogy of desire is the moving dynamic of the Kingdom.

We are taught what to hope for, and how to attain it.

Not everyone who approached Jesus came seeking the forgiveness of their sins.

The paralyzed man lowered from the rooftop didn’t say anything;

his action and that of the friends who lowered him were expressing an unspoken ache for healing (Mk 2, 1-12).

Jesus spoke and acted;

first he forgave the man his sins,

and then told him to get up and walk.

A sign of who he was and what he came to do.

A sign also that engendered opposition.

John’s disciples were sent to ask Jesus: “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?”

Jesus responds: “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind regain their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have the good news proclaimed to them. And blessed is the one who takes no offense at me.” (See Lk 7,18 ff; Is 61, 1 ff)

The crowds hear about these things, and they want to go see him.

“Blessed are your eyes, because they see, and your ears, because they hear” (Mt 13,16).

A kind of hunger, primal almost, to be near where his goodness is.

The crowds sensed the particular character of his goodness;

it was the overflowing of generosity from his person,

And the selflessness of his accessibility.

The cynicism of those days was not so different from our own: “what’s in it for him? What’s the game here?”

In that springtime of his passing by, many perceived: “No game here.”

There was just the gift.

Goodness attracts, even though the attracted are not always so good.

There is both abundance and pedagogy in Jesus’s generosity.

There is a feeding and a progressive teaching of what to hunger for.

Poverty of spirit, purity of heart, meekness, and justice.

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness [justice] for they will be satisfied.

A hunger for a right relation to God and neighbor.

A hunger for communion amongst the children of Adam.

In the face of a famished crowd, and helpless disciples, he tells them: “give them some food yourselves“ (Mk 6,37).

A hunger in Christ to have us hunger to feed the weary.

There are so many hungers.

A hunger for forgiveness of sins, and a hunger for being able to forgive.

A hunger for every word that comes from the mouth of God,

and a hunger for a true enfleshment of the words spoken.

A hunger for a pure act of generous love given,

A hunger for a true act of generous love received,

A hunger for a pure act of generous love given in return.

Catholicism is the religion of the response to the gift; of the graced arrow that hits the mark to generate a grace that returns the gift.

Salvation is in the response. Faith operates through love (Gal 5,6);we move in response to the love given, or we, and our faith, are still dead.

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Nicodemus seems to have been a well situated individual. He asked questions; Jesus gave him time and responses, both generously suited to his need. What he lacked was an initial openness of mind to how the Spirit of God could work in bringing about a new birth in us.

There is a gift of the Spirit to the mind, opening it to what the Spirit can do.

Nicodemus learned, arduously, to hunger for this gift.

There is the vulnerability of not knowing what it is most vital to know.

Jesus would have us know what we do not know we need to know.

Augustine points out (Tractate 69 on John) that it is possible for a Christian not to know what he or she really does know.

As when Jesus tells the disciples in John 14, 4-5: And you know where I am going, and you know the way. To this Thomas says: Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?

Jesus then says: I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

So, as Augustine points out, they did know the way, because they knew him, they just didn’t know they knew. Jesus had to tell them.

So it is with us, we know him in the Eucharistic mystery.

But, it is possible not to know him, in this mystery, precisely as the Way for us to the Truth and the Life.

We have to let him tells us how we move along towards the Father through this Eucharistic Way.

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From the novel by Javier Sicilia, “La Confesión”(DEBOLSILLO 2016). (Translation mine).

A poor priest talks to his Cardinal Archbishop aboutthepoor Christ on how the vulnerable Word addresses power.

«Do you know what amazes me about the incarnation? —I continued—, that it is the complete opposite of the modern world: the presence of the infinite within the limits of the flesh, and the fight, the relentless fight, against the temptations of the devil’s excesses. You don’t know how much I have meditated on the temptations of the desert. «‘Assume the power,’ the devil told him; that power that gives the illusion of disrupting and dominating everything. But he remained within the limits of his own flesh, in his own poverty, in his own death, so poor, so miserable, so hard. Our epoch, however, under the face of an enormous kindness, has succumbed to these temptations. ‘They will be like gods, they will change stones into loaves, they will dominate the world’… to this we have handed over the Christ and we do not even realize it.»

To this we have handed over the Christ; to this we have also handed over the poor:

An unrivaled pursuit to overcome the limits of our flesh;

to overcome our poor, fragile, time limited particularity;

as if this overcoming were the Kingdom on the eschatological horizon.

The illusion of invulnerability, and its twin ambition, self-sufficiency, is proposed as the principal aim of the epoch;

it has its own pedagogy of word and act, designed to instill and stir desire for limitlessness.

This pedagogy says “repeat after me”:

I want what I need so as not to need anything.

I have a right to get what I need…

And you have a right to try.

But, you have no right to expect me to help you.

Woe to you if you get in my way.

We have a hunger for it.

“But he remained within the limits of his own flesh, in his own poverty, in his own death, so poor, so miserable, so hard”, … as Javier Sicilia puts it.

Our flesh is the sign and source of our vulnerability, our limitations, our poverty. We have one, time bound life. What shall we do with it?

Christ Jesus, the WORD made flesh, had one time-bound life among us;

his limited flesh, his poverty.

From the Cross he needed someone to give him a drink.

His insufficiency. What did he do with it?

He embraced the limit; not as a curse, but as the path of his gift to us.

He gave it up for us,

offered it to the Father as a gift of love,

—One of us offering what we could not—

rose from the dead still bearing the marks of his wounds.

And he gives us his flesh to eat.

And in his risen body, he breathes the Spirit into us,

That we might be able to join him in the offering.

It is striking that the Risen Christ reveals himself to the Eleven through the signs of his wounds.

That is to say, through the glorified wounds themselves, or through the act of breaking the Bread. To my mind these are roughly equivalent signs.

The wounds speak of the vulnerable One.

And the bread-breaking is a sign of, well, breakability.

Pius XII talks about this in Mediator Dei; so do the Didache and Justin Martyr in the Apology. This is ubiquitous in the Tradition. He is recognized in the sign and act of the Sacrifice.

The Risen Christ desires to be recognizable and recognized under the sign of his vulnerability handed over for our sakes.

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Words and Signs.

Jerome translated the Gk mysterion into Latinusing either mysterium or sacramentum. (It’s not always clear what his criteria were.)

The Liturgy does this also: where in English we say “the Mystery of Faith”, translating mysterium fidei, the Spanish missal translates: el sacramento de nuestra fe.

Jesus is present in mysterium, that is to say, in the sacramentum.

This is instructive. We tend to think of a mystery as a dark cloud, and hiding things deep inside, which it is;

and we tend to think of a sacramentum as a visible sign, which it is;

but each one is a translation of the same New Testament word.

Each one is the other.

A darkly bright cloud, yes, but one that visibly signifies;

a visible sign, yes, but one that hides more than it shows, like the pillar of cloud that guided the Israelites by day.

The mysterium signifies; it shows us some we can understand.

But it is also a cloud we must enter.

In the form of an action that offers his poverty: Take this, all of you,..

His vulnerable life, as a sacrifice of love to the Father, for the sake of his poor, vulnerable little flock.

One solitary vulnerable life, so poor, so hard, so miserable.

The mysterium / sacramentum of the Eucharist is an act that re-presents to us something the Someone of the Son does: it is presence and action; action of perduring gift.

To make us rich, as St Paul says (2 Cor 8,9).

But rich in what sense? In what way?

How are we to understand this?

How can we enter into it?

Rich by sharing in the wealth of his poverty,

now revealed as the glory of the Kingdom in all its dispossessed fullness.

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At the Savior’s command, and Formed by divine teaching

The traditional placement of the Lord’s Prayer after the Great Amen and before the elevation of the Lamb of God leading to Communion is enormously significant.

It is the formative prayer expressing compactly the desires of the Kingdom, and the desires of the Church at this moment.

The response of the Father to these simple petitions is Communion with Him through the gift of the Son,

the Lamb once slain who dies no more, the food of the new life, in the Holy Spirit.

The food of the journey, the Way.

Thy Kingdom Come would seem, then, to be the primary posture of a Christian poised to receive Communion.

That would be the Kingdom

where the blind and the lame are invited,

where the law is for the sake of man,

and not man for the sake of the law;

where mercy flows generously like the wine at a wedding;

where the widow and the orphan are not exploited,

and Lazarus at the door of the rich man is hungry no more.

You have to want to be at that kind of banquet.

Not wanting to is part of our poverty, that neediness that we do not know we have.

We can be so trapped in our self-made frozen lakes.

Mt 25, 31 ff. “For I was hungry and you gave me food,..”

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If there were no Matthew 25, 31: where would we be?

We would be without a vivid expression of how Jesus understood himself in the figure of the Son of Man:

The Son of Man, head of the human race, present in each member.

He who chose to share in our flesh, makes us common sharers in his.

There is no turning away from another that is not a turning away from him.

“You did it for me; or not”.

We would be without an explicit link between “this is my body” and the bodies of every member of the human race:

The vulnerable bodies, our woundable, limited, poor, miserable flesh bodies. Our common poverty. This is our great connection to Him and to each other.

We would be without the parabolic crescendo to the prophetic tradition defending the unjustly oppressed, the widow and the orphan,

The defenseless who are without resource to hold in check the manipulations of those who have the power to do so.

Head of the human race; he is in us and we in him, even in what by shorthand we call the natural order.

All the more so in the order of grace, where his headship is recognized and acclaimed.

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Behold the Lamb of God

In the Apocalypse, and in the Eucharistic Liturgy, the Christ is envisioned as the the Lamb who was slain, but who dies no more.

The triumphant vulnerable,..

The way of Christ is not the way of putting all our energy into a provisional invulnerability.

The self-preoccupation is slowly killing us.

There is a turn here: we stop focusing on procuring our own invulnerability so as to offer some relief to the vulnerable around us.

In Christ the Communion of the vulnerable makes us a people who strive to supply to the other what they may lack, as they supply what we may lack.

Opening us to the truth that our incompleteness, our congenital lack of self-sufficiency, is not a curse but a blessing,

that invites relation and communion.

And the possibility of love.

In the Eucharist we learn that we cannot feed ourselves with what we most need.

It has to be freely given by another.

What we most need is a love that hungers to feed another.

This is the love he feeds us with.

It breaks tbeough.

“Why, you’re one of my little ones,” she said, as she reached out to touch the Misfit. Right before he shot her. (My translation of Flannery O,Connor.)

By his poverty we were made rich.

Rich with what?

As I have done so you must do,..

A generosity that gives outside of ourselves,

That clothes the naked because we have been clothed with the baptismal garment

That feeds the hungry because we have been fed by his sacrificial Eucharistic act

That welcomes a stranger because we were once strangers and have been made members of the household of God.

That visits the prisoner because we were prisoners once, and have been set free.

By this is the Father glorified.

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A practical consequence

Reality is supposed to look different on the other side of the Sacrifice,

On the other side of the dying and rising of Jesus.

Our vision of what is, informed by the light of what has been done for us, given to us, handed over for us, fed to us, breathed into us.

Love acts, or it is not love.

In Christ there is no love of the Father that prescinds from the flesh and blood condition of the neighbor.

When we walk out of Mass is there something we can do, or make plans to do?

I do not ask the “to do” question out of my American proclivity to always seek measurable results,

but rather from a Gospel insistence that love and justice must touch flesh and blood, or they are just words we have emptied of content.

There is a further opportunity to meet Christ in the flesh and blood encounter with the suffering of another.

The Eucharistic encounter summed up in “This is my body given up for you” envelops the entire dramatic unfolding of the Liturgy;

it is mirrored in the outgoing search for some manifestation of “the least of mine, for they are me”.

There should be a hunger to find him in our midst;

on this campus we inhabit, this city and neighborhood. In a soup kitchen, a refugee center, a juvenile detention facility, a prison cell, in a nursing home or hospice center.

The point is that the searching is something that he initiates in us, so that he can be found by us.

Better not to go alone. He tended to send out in pairs, and the Church better expresses herself when the practical encounters are communal. We are not lone rangers.

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The mysticism of the Christ glimpsed

The hunger and thirst for justice is not different than a hunger to go to Christ in his humiliated and broken condition.

This is like the hard mysticism of Dorothy Day.

Mary Magdalene searched for him, his corpsed body; she was found by a Gardener. The words she uses are meant to remind of us the Song of Songs

«Sir, if you carried him away, tell me where you laid him, and I will take him.» (Jn 20,15)

“The watchmen came upon me as they made their rounds of the city:
Have you seen him whom my heart loves?”(Song of Songs, 3,3)

Recognition is the sweetest grace of the New Testament:

Jesus said to her, «Mary!» She turned and said to him in Hebrew, «Rabbouni,» which means Teacher.

This ardent desire for a glimpse of Christ in the flesh is a Eucharistic consequence, a Eucharistic desire.

But it seems a decision of his inscrutable goodness to us that we look for him marred, bloodied, rejected, hungry, imprisoned Alzheimered, drug addicted, ..

Out of his generosity, he insists we learn to see and serve him there, to embrace the leper as St Francis did,

We have to see him there before our eyes can see the Christ that the baroque masters tried to capture in his risen glory.

The Eucharistic sacramentum is a broken host, and a wounded side filling an overflowing chalice.

The Eucharistic mysterium is a making sturdy the heart to go to the difficult places, the places that offer a glimpse of Christ; so poor, so thirsty, so miserable, so hard.

A consolation not a comfort.

It is a love suited to our circumstance.

For stern as death is love, relentless as the nether world is devotion; its flames are a blazing fire. (Song of Songs 8, 6).

Christ hidden, Christ loved and searched for is the only suitable way to get us out of our pervasive self-preoccupation,

and onto a road like the one to Emmaus that allows him to join our company, and show himself.

If we cannot empty ourselves in some way, we are not really receiving the sacramentum we are consuming.

We are worse than lost in the cosmos.

So pervasive are our webs of self-concern, that to leave them is like slowly waking up from a dream or a deep sleep.

It is a kind of rising from the dead.

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Thank you for your kind attention.

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