Fr. Leonardo Castellani: an introduction, Page 3

  *

  Not by eloquence, nor by dialectics

  As a young man I was an enthusiastic debater. But while I used to revel in such things, it’s now been over 30 years since I’ve debated my works - even with the “censors” (If there were literal “censors” this word is ok. If it’s figurative, then another word is needed). Approaching religion in this manner is something I simply no longer enjoy.

  It’s a useless endeavor, in fact. Those with religious objections, for the most part know nothing about the subject and one must recommend them a good Catechism. If they really want to know, they’ll read it; if not, they’re just debating for the fun of it, making the discussion futile — even dangerous.

  To those that on a ship or a train come up to you with “But Father, what about this?”, one must not give the answer. Instead, one should intensify the objection, stoking it to a point where the inquisitor is persuaded that one knows all about his queries, that one “feels” them as much, if not more, than himself. That is to say, one must increase his hunger, his love of knowledge - or perhaps, even create it. For if such hunger does not exist, giving one the solution will only be a waste of time.

  Having said that, one must answer that God in his divine nature cannot suffer due to the damnation of the condemned, nor with the sins that preceded their punishment and caused this eternal affliction, because His nature is immutable and in no way subject to men’s passions. To want Him to suffer is to want to change His nature, to want to change God into a creature, which is quite impossible. It is a very grave mental vice and a widely scattered one at that, and it is called “anthropomorphism”: that is to say, conceiving God as someone like or identical to man, a very common error among the ignorant such as Jorge Luis Borges, for example.

  These days one frequently meets people who ask “What do you believe God is like?” with the explicit intention of accepting his existence or not based on his accordance with their tastes. But his existence comes first; so if his existence is a fact, whether I accept him or not is quite irrelevant. By denying him I do not destroy the fact that he exists (instead, I destroy myself.)

  If God exists, one must swallow him just as he is. Jacques Rivière wrote very sensibly to Claudel: “If he consoles or not is something I’m not now interested in. Before that I want to know if he exists or not”.

  To take the position that, “If I happen to like God and find him consoling, well, then I might believe in him” is an absurdity one should never bother to argue against. If God exists and does not suffer, I have no alternative but to say: “I don’t like it and I can’t quite understand it, but it’s a fact and I have no choice but to accept it and make the best I can of it.” After all, this is what we regularly do when faced with the laws of Nature or the reality of the human condition. Let one try, for example, to deny the existence of a polio case or a hurricane; see if that will get them anywhere.

  Yet preachers are continually telling us that we “offend” God with our sins - and to “offend” means to “wound”. All the mystics assert that God suffers with and for those condemned to Hell. Even Kierkegaard wrote that when God “abandoned” his Son (“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”) God the Father suffered terribly for it. So how can one reconcile these with the image of an imperturbable God?

  As we shall see, in a certain manner God does suffer because of all men’s sins and their consequences. What manner? Two, actually: in his Son made Man and in the Order of the Universe, which is Himself.

  I.-

  God took Human Nature, condemned and fallen with all its consequences, and paid for its sins: He suffered for those sins a nearly infinite sum of humiliations and pains. (In a certain sense, we could even drop the “nearly”). This is what we call Redemption.

  A well known ungodly Frenchman (Stendhal) wrote “Luckily God doesn’t exist because otherwise we would have to execute him” - on account of the existence of pain.

  And yet, God does exist, was made flesh, and in fact, was executed.

  The Roman Church Fathers, beginning with St. Ambrose, explained Redemption with a judicial metaphor: God took all men’s “debts” and transferred them to His Son made man and afterwards punished Him; that is to say, He settled the account. The Son willfully accepted this universal debt and paid it with his Passion, Death, and all the rest of his acts while He dwelt among us: a life that is, in a sense, an infinite humiliation, to descend from God to man - as St. Paul puts it “exinanivit semetipsus”, He stripped Himself, becoming nothing (Philippians II:7).

  The Romans were of a juridical turn of mind and easily understood the legal metaphor - all the more so because St. Paul’s took it further saying that Christ was nailed to the cross “chirógraphum decretum” as if a “written decree” of our debt. (Colossians II:14).

  This “judicialism” passed on to Western Theology (not to its Eastern counterpart) and so Redemption was explained more and more in terms of a “contract”, “debt”, “transfer”, “bill”, “payment”, “compensation“, “sentence”, etc. The formula that Borges stumbled across that “Infinite punishment corresponds with an offence that is, in a certain sense, infinite itself” belongs to this tradition. Yet over the centuries this vocabulary became formulaic, withered, petrified, conventional, and, in the mouth of some effete preachers and theologians, became quite unacceptable.

  On the one hand, God appeared implacable (one who must levy recompense, cannot pardon, and cannot abandon retribution) and, on the other, totally unjust: that one should suffer for the sins of others, while those who benefit remain quite content with being cleaned and freed from any payment – quite an injustice. That was what a tyrant like Dionisius of Syracuse used to do.

  “All comparisons come up short”. This legal comparison, if one forgets that it is only a comparison, encourages this misconception: that Christ has already suffered for our sins, we haven’t any need to suffer, we have been forgiven, all that is required is that Christ’s merits be “applied” to us, like a garment that covers our wounds we are “justified”, and that through Faith we are attributed these merits of Christ. This is the doctrine (if it can be called a doctrine) of Luther, who of all theologians is the greatest simpleton, the most coarse and vulgar.

  How, then, did Christ suffer for the sins of all? Christ had to suffer and die this way literally through the action of Sin. Sin, iniquity, and evil are to a degree in solidarity: sin coalesces, piles up, propagates, pushes, moves... and ends up crucifying an innocent Christ, its victim; by accepting and bearing this, he destroys all its consequences. That’s Redemption, materially speaking.

  Explain this.

  Evil is not static, but dynamic; as is Love that attracts all goodness. They have a “social dynamic”, because they have an ontological dynamic. Plato, in a prophetic inspiration, wrote that if a completely just man happened to appear in the world (a man he describes in detail) that all men would unite together to torment and murder him: the iniquities of all would gather for such a purpose. Plato thought that such a thing had happened to Socrates: that he had died through the sins of Athens. What he described in the future had already passed. Yet he was thinking of, at the same time, of one greater than Socrates, who would take on himself all the world’s sin. He spoke of Christ without knowing it; and he spoke well.

  Evil, just like good, is, as the Classics called it, “diffusivum sui”: it communicates, it sticks, it propagates and bounces until it ends up with one who accepts it and returns good in place of bad: there Evil dies. All the iniquity in the connected universe (because the whole of humanity is knitted, so to speak, in relationships of good and evil) concentrates itself in one place in the world, Palestine, where it forms a sharp point, the Pharisees; and that point went toward Christ. It’s as if we imagine a bullet going first through three men then losing momentum in a woolen mattress where it is finally still; as is Evil, when it finds no more resistance.

  If a man receives evil and then returns i
t to the world, evil increases; if he keeps it, the evil remains with him and is passed to others, even the innocent; but if he instead returns goodness in place of that evil, then the evil dies there. If a man cuts off his enemy’s arm and the enemy returns the deed in kind, you have two maimed people. Or, If the second can’t manage revenge and he is left only maimed and destitute, then the pain might be shared with his wife and children, reducing even more to misery; and perhaps the misery will yet be passed on still to neighbors, irritated and inconvenienced at their pitiful state. This is easy to understand. This is the infinite migration of injustice — motus perpetuus — that cannot be stopped; not even by Justice, only by Love. I’m not saying here that justice should not be applied to the wicked, only that Justice by itself is not enough.

  Christ was in actuality the victim of all this sin: all the sins of the past that bred the sins of his era, and all the sins of the future, which He foresaw. He cured them through suffering, baptizing his Gospel through his passion, rendering it efficacious for all future times.

  So God suffered for all the world’s sins and, because of eternal damnation, he suffered really and truly in the Garden and on the Cross a pain equivalent to that in Hell. There isn’t a sin in the world, be it however small, that isn’t stained with a drop of Christ’s blood, Christ who is God. There is not a single person in Hell for whom Christ didn’t suffer really, truly and physically.

  Those sins that occurred after Christ were not the material cause of His death, but they are the material cause of the suffering of Christ’s Mystical Body — in which we all partake. The consequences of these sins — the pain — pass from man to man till they find a true Christian to suffocate them in his heart, accepting them in union with Christ, “in our flesh completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church,” as St. Paul has said (Colossians I:24). And as the patience of Job, Abraham and Anna did truly help and console Christ fortifying Him in his Passion, so too, Christ suffered then every material consequence of future sin (in pain) that would eventually fall on every one of His living members.

  If one would say here, “I do not accept this, it is too metaphysical” the only possible answer is “This is a fact; if you go to Hell by your own fault, little will it matter whether you accepted it or not”.

  II.-

  Now to something yet more esoteric: God suffers from men’s sins against the natural Order, which is not different than He. That’s why to sin is to “offend” God.

  Sin destroys the natural order of the Universe. Such natural order is not an external thing, an invention whereby God would have said something like “I want things to work this way or that. And if not, lo!” in the manner of tyrants. The order of the world is nothing but God’s action as Regulator, his activity of Creation, Conservation, and Providence — that is to say, one single, continuous action, not external but internal to the natural order. He who sins acts against this order and (as God allows) destroys it. So if God could conceivably suffer, He’d suffer. If He could conceivably be destroyed, He would be — by sin.

  In other words, the Order of the Universe belongs to the very nature of things which are united one to another by a tight net of causes and effects, means and ends, conditions, occasions, and consequences, that make up one “single”, solid thing. This is what the word means in Latin: “versus-Unum” (towards the One). Have you ever meditated on the significance of a “natural community” between all men? It is of the utmost importance. Here you will find the roots of our duty to Justice and Compassion.

  So anyone who wounds the Order in any way (and only man, who is free, can do such a thing) acts against it; so much so that if it were possible, the whole Order would be destroyed – like the “chain reaction” of atoms disintegrating that physicists describe. Sin acts against the very nature of things, which is grounded and cemented in the very nature of God. It acts against Love, because God’s nature is Love.

  But God does not suffer, and is not destroyed. God suffers through his creatures, even irrational animals, whose lot it is to bear the material consequences of this disorder (pain), out of balance and seeking desperately to re-establish equilibrium. So this time it is not only Christians who suffer “with Christ” but all men and the whole of Creation, subject since the first sin to terrible throbbing of this pain, in search again of natural equilibrium, Christians and heathen, sinners and saints, adults, children, and even beasts.

  Those who use this pain to restore in themselves the equilibrium of justice, are saved, and consequently are freed from this pain for ever. But those who do not are not freed and because of this are “miseri miseria non utentes” (miserable people who don’t even profit from their misery): they remain eternally out of balance, this is to say, subject by their own will to the law of expiatory pain, not by a “Decree” from God who would want revenge, but by of the very nature of things.

  Moral nature is this: that disorder breeds pain and pain delivers from disorder those who will it; and to those who do not it establishes itself in them in a permanent and incurable way. Even in this life we see it happen, that an unremedied sin begets new ones. The old ones become habits, habits make vices, vices breed perversity, which revels in doing evil things for their own sake, and perversity becomes obstinacy, for which there is no remedy: a horrible image of Hell, that is not in the center of this planet as they say, but in the very center of the obstinate man’s soul.

  Truly Christianity has not been invented to console, it has been invented to frighten in an awesome way. Only later does it console. Tell this to your friend.

  III.-

  Sin is a God-killing act; and I freely admit that is a very difficult mystery; let us not ask for too much. But however inscrutable, this mystery finds justification in the reestablishment order in the moral universe, rejoining in harmonious unity different and till then irreducible elements, while giving at the same time an acceptable solution to the problem of pain. As long as one considers sin as only the breaking of a “Law”, such an awesome punishment remains incomprehensible; because it is above all a crime against Love. The sacrifice on the Cross is not simply “reparation of a debt” because in addition to Justice, Love is involved also. To a crime against Love, Love answers in its own way and according to its essence through an infinite gift... Where then will Creator and Creature be joined, where will the debtor meet his creditor? Their pain is a common one. On the Cross.

  We are in the midst of this immense tragedy, in the heart of the Sacred Trinity. How? In God Himself, a kind of incommensurate storm? That seems incredible to us because we imagine God as nothing more than a good, reasonable, intelligent order. But that is not the first definition of God; before anything else is said, God is charity. He is Absolute Love. With our miserable hearts, let’s try to understand this unheard movement. (We live comfortably, unconsciously, in the middle of this awesome whirlwind, so much so that the smallest deviation of this inflexible sphere would, if possible, disrupt and smash the world to smithereens.)

  For Love nothing is insignificant, everything matters. For Love the tiniest parts are precious, urgent, necessary. Hence the smallest infidelity infuriates. Reason recedes when confronted with this prodigious calling that has fertilized the chaos, a calling that would blow away the most powerful of all angels as if it were a tiny piece of driftwood, a calling coming to die pleading, insatiable, unquenchable, in the ears of a poor little man.

  I don’t know — looks like I’ve ended in a rather Bossuet-like manner, so much eloquence isn’t mine. But to acquiesce to these truths, that exceed all reason and are only known through Revelation is not something one can acquire through eloquence or dialectics. They ask for an open heart; and then even a child with common sense will understand them. Da mihi amantem et quod dico intelliget. Give me a lover, and he’ll understand what I say.