Christ:God and Man

Colossians 2:9 "For in him the whole fulness of the deity dwells bodily."

...Christ is God and man, but in such a way that this meeting of the divine and the human in him does not impose the slightest limitation anywhere. God is not in the least restricted by the Incarnation; it neither hinders nor weakens him; it does not put him in a state of unconsciousness; nothing is lacking to him of his divinity, his eternal life and omniscience. But nothing is lacking to Christ the man, either, as a result of his being God; he does not run up against his divinity as though encountering an obstacle to his genuine, full humanity; it is not as though he skipped right over finite human feelings, knowledge and experience and rushed like a stream into his divinity, finding therein a support for his existence that is unavailable as such to any other man. Rather, he is God and man in a union that leaves both natures intact and binds them together in their perfection, not making them merely run side by side. Only such a union can bring it about that in him the whole fulness of the deity dwells bodily, that deity actually accompanies this human life and has a share in this genuine human experience...Divinity and humanity are so intimately bound together in his being that they interpenetrate, with the exception of only those places where the fulness of one would constrain the fulness of the other and would cause harm to it. Aside from that, the two live in one another in a perfect vitality; God takes on perfectly the man united with him, and he who was made man is permitted to live in God.  

Letter to the Colossians,  commentary by Adrienne von Speyr   pp 77. 78

Giusani: Psalm 8 - The Meaning of Man

     Within this psalm lies the meaning of the definition of man's life - his relationship with the one who creates him. The whole cosmos reaches for a certain point of evolution, at which it becomes self-awareness: that point is called "I". The "I" is self-awareness of the world, of the cosmos, and of oneself. The cosmos is the context in which the relationship with God, with the Mystery, lives. 

     The Psalmist asks, "Lord, what is man that you keep him in mind, that you remember him?" Among all the beasts and little creatures of the cosmos, man is one-hundredth, one thousandth, one then thousandth. But the greatness of man, the honor and glory of man, lies in the fact that man, the individual man, is in relationship with the Infinite. To live what man is, to realize his person, man must grasp everything God has done. Happiness is the final end of this process, the process of penetrating the eternal.  

The Psalms,  Luigi Giussani, pp. 18-19

Maritain: Science and Einstein Witness to God

"The science of phenomena ....bear witness to the existence of God....it is not a question of what science itself tells us, but of the very existence and possibility of science....if nature were not intelligible, there would be no science. Nature is not perfectly and absolutely intelligible; and the sciences do not try to come to grips with nature's intelligibility taken in itself (that is the job of philosophy). They rather reach for it in a rather oblique fashion, dealing with it only insofar as it is steeped in, and masked by, the observable and measurable data of the world of experience, and yet can be translated into mathematical intelligibility. Yet the intelligibility of nature is the very ground of those relational constancies which are the 'laws' - including the category of laws which deal only with probabilities - to which science sees phenomena submitted; and it is the very ground, in particular, of the highest explanatory systems, with all the symbols, ideal entities, and code languages they employ, (and with all that is in them that is still incomplete, arbitrary, and puzzlingly lacking in harmony ) that science constructs on observation and measurement.

    Now how would things be intelligible if they did not proceed from an intelligence? In the last analysis, a Prime Intelligence must exist, which is itself Intellection and Intelligibility in pure act, and which is the first principle of the intelligibility and essences of things, and causes order to exist in them, as well as an infinitely complex network of regular relationships, whose fundamental mysterious unity our reason dreams of rediscovering in its own way.

      Such an approach to God's existence is a a variant of Thomas Aquinas' fifth way. Its impact was secretly present in Einstein's famous saying: 'God does not play dice,' which, no doubt. used the word God in a merely figurative sense, and meant only: 'nature does not result from the throw of the dice', yet the very fact implicitly postulated the existence of the divine Intellect."

On the Uses of Philosophy Jacques Maritain, pp.65, 66

published by Princeton University Press 1962

      

Karl Stern on Jesus Christ

        1.)   "Someone once remarked that you should try experimentally to live for one day as if the Gospel were true, even if you do not believe it. In the same way I invite you to think of the nature of Man if Christ had been God-Man and died for your and my salvation.The whole study of anthropology as conceived by philosophers and psychologists is at once deepened in a very peculiar way. It is as if a great, but albeit two-dimensional, picture received a third dimension and came to life. If, as Auden once remarked, it is the function of the poet to introduce order into chaos, then God is our poet."

        2.)   "Christianity teaches that the climax of human perfection is to love infinitely and to be able to be hated infinitely. This degree of maturity has been reached perhaps only once in human history, in the person of Jesus Christ."

The Pillar of Fire, Karl Stern, pp. 207- 8;  p. 249

Love: Human and Divine, Created and Creating

 Christian Smith: Love is relating to persons and things beyond the self in a way that involves the purposive action of extending and expending of oneself for the genuine good of others whether in friendship, families, communities, among strangers, or otherwise.

Mars Hill Audio Journal, vol 112, disc 1 track 2


David Schindler: Love is the basic act and order of things. Love is that which first brings each thing into existence, and that in, through, and for which, each thing continues in existence.

Mars Hill Audio Journal. vol 112 disc 1 track 3

 1.  Read both statements, not just for the idea or concept expressed, but asking that the truth they both express may grasp your heart. This means you, or I, as reader, is asking God for the grace to let what is being said penetrate us to the center of our being, our core, or heart of hearts. We are asking that our reading take place at the level of a prayer.
       
 2.The first statement sees love as a human act, something I or you do, our choice, an exercise of our free will. We are the source of the activity, the loving. We are in charge, so to speak. Love depends on our decision. To some degree, that's true. But none of us would be able to love if love were not done to us first.

3.  The first quotation would not be possible for us to enact without the second already being in place.
The second quotation sees love as what God is, or who God is, the Source and Origin of all that is. It calls to mind the Paul's words where he says in Acts "In him we live and move and have our being" (17:28). We have our being in him. We are rooted, or grounded in him. Not just that we are in his grasp like a child is in a parent's arms, but more than that, we we live and move in him, which means he lives and moves in us, much as branches live attached to a vine, or as the sap in a tree flows throughout the whole tree through all the branches. This is more than the soul, the breath of life, the soul God breathes into man.  It is grace,  the movement of the Spirit which energizes us. In him we live and move, because we have our being in him. He sustains us with or without our awareness of him, with or without our cooperation. Unlike a child who can squirm out of his parent's arms and run about, we cannot separate from him even when we deny we are in his arms.

4.The God who is the ground of our being, in whom we live and move, is present in us and through us whether we are aware of Him or not. He is closer to us than our pulse, our breath. He is much closer to us than we are to ourselves.

He, being Creative Love, is the stage on which the drama of our lives is acted out by us. We are somewhat like dancers who perform on the stage floor. We are concerned with our movements, appearance, performance and the applause we hope for, but take for granted the floor which make our dance possible.
Better yet,  God is the context, from which, and in which, we are making the choices that determine our destiny.
The second quotation brings the idea of order into love, which is something we usually do not associate with love. In God, I see love as self-giving: the Father generating the Son from all eternity by giving his own divine nature to the Son. The idea of order usually springs into my mind with the Son, the Logos. the intelligent/intelligible Mystery in whom and through whom all things are made. Surely the self gift of the Father includes the Infinite Wisdom that is in him, otherwise order would not be in the Logos. But my little pea-brain can only manage to handle one concept at a time.