Jesus Christ, Door to the Sheepfold and Master of Dogma

John 20:19 "On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being shut where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them: Peace be with you." 

Man never has the whole truth at his disposal; a portion of it always remains with God. In all communication of truth, there is a kind of reservatio mentalis. This reserving , however, is not done by us, but by God. When arranging matters as we think best, we must always say: assuming that God does not arrange things otherwise. For man to make use of reservatio mentalis is all right provided he reserves something not for his own advantage, but for God's advantage. In belief, the reservatio of truth occurs on the part of God, who perhaps holds it back for communication to us at a later time. In belief there is a foregoing of complete understanding of truth, an abdicatio of truth, which is based on the recognition that everything we know and love has, in God, the form of the ever-greater. 

But this foregoing does not apply in the case of dogma. Here, nothing is relativized. Dogma is the door that is closed against everything non-Christian outside of it. As directed to the outside, the dogmas are rigid and uncompromising. We must regard the door that the Lord closes behind him as closed for as long a he does not instruct us to do otherwise. And he himself does not open the door anymore , but goers right through the closed door. For him, the rigid closedness does not exist, for him every truth is open. But for  us the closing must be regarded as final, as absolute. If we were able to add something to the Lord's truth by our own thought, the everything would be repeated called into question, including within the confines of the Church. Then, however, the door would not longer be the Lord, but rather, man and his truth.The Lord alone has the freedom to enter, from the outside to the inside, through the closed doors. What is closed for us is open for him. In heaven there will no longer be any unclosed doors because there will no longer be any unbelief. 

Dogmas are securings of belief against outside dangers, not closures for the sake of closure. Dogma has a basis of immovable truth , but it opens itself out from that basis into the unlimitedness of living, inexhaustible truth in God. Objectively, it has an absolute point of departure; but it is also relative in each person who subjectively assimilates it, because here absolute truth is grasped only partially and imperfectly, and exists within an open movement of belief toward the Lord. The framework of the dogmatic truth is unshakable, but within its confines, the infinite truth of the Lord moves in sovereign freedom. God's truth is infinite, and is therefore always just outlined and suggested in dogmatic precepts. The measure of dogmatic truth remains the Lord himself; and the Lord can see everything differently, and infinitely more fully than any particular believer can see it. Neither individual believers nor the Church as a whole have any authority to make changes in dogma; but they are also not allowed to do so, because it is the Lord alone who comprises the truth of dogma. 

From the way that the absolute and relative are intertwined, we can see that whereas man may regard himself personally as the greatest sinner, he nevertheless has no right to regard someone else as more guilty than himself. Another person could, perhaps, by citing different reasons, prove to him that he is wrong; an he too, in a certain respect, could be right. But in the end, both would be wrong, because the Lord alone holds in his hand the measuring stick of sin. All human judgments must, in the end, yield before his exclusive judgments. Similarly, the Lord remains the master of dogma, whose entire depths, which men do not plumb, are his own depths, which he avails himself of in freedom.

Adrienne von Speyr John vol.4, pp. 200, 201

Von Speyr: On Scandal

John 13:11 For he knew who was to betray him. That is why he said: You are not all clean.

The Lord knows his betrayer, but he does not point him out, for outwardly he still belongs to the community, although inwardly he has turned away from the Lord. The Lord does not expel anyone; a person who goes away has excluded himself. Before the community, the Lord does not give a hint as to who will leave it soon, for the scandal is not yet public. So, too, the Church will not bring scandals to light before the instigators themselves give occasion for it. 

The scandal of Judas was one that had to happen, but many another scandal in the Church has no visible cause. Yet the Lord does not spare her such scandal. Is it because the Lord himself took upon himself the scandal of the Cross? Is it because through one person's scandal the other members of the Chruch are horrified and thus strengthened in their loyalty to the Church? In any case, the offense is tolerated, even if it affects the Church's holy of holies. The Lord endures it in the room at the Last Supper. The Church must endure scandal; she may not circumvent or deny it, or act as if it were not there, or distance herself from it. Nor is it said that the Church should immediately and by all means stifle the scandal by eliminating the evil, for perhaps the sinner may still repent. Nor does the Lord cast Judas out - it can be better to let an abscess ripen than to put a knife to it too soon and kill it in its early stages. Not every scandal rousing book needs to be immediately banned, even if it may not keep the Church's doctrine intact. Perhaps it is better to talk first and to clear up misunderstanding by the light of day, and fairly. Many in the Church are sinners. and every sin is a tacit scandal and a heresy. But the Church is held together by love. 

John, Adrienne von Speyr, vol III, p.29

The Mystery of Christ reflected in the Sacrament of Confession

...Divinity and humanity are not separate spheres within the Son. Everywhere we try to penetrate into his humanity, we encounter the mystery of his being more than a man, that is, his divine sonship. He is not beyond all understanding, and yet precisely in our understanding, the incomprehensible overwhelms us; rather than being able to see him in his entirety, it is we who find ourselves seen by him and drawn into his ever greater dimensions. Because we are incorporated in this way, we lose any overview of our own situation. It is he who contains us in his perfect openness both to the Father and to the world.

    Whenever we confess according to his will, we must consider his double attitude so that we, too, may learn the correct attitude. He shows us who he is by opening himself to us: he is the one open to the Father, who in disclosing himself to us, also shows us the Father, also glorifies the Father.

...confession is the fruit of the divine human life. The Lord's turning to us, the form bequeathed to the Church, would be the...legacy that in some way is comprehensible in itself, and the turning to the Father would be the unsurveyable sphere of inspiration. We can understand a great deal about confession, just as we could about miracles. We know, for example, that before, the woman was hemorrhaging, and now, she is healthy. Only the nexus between these two facts remains incomprehensible. Or we understand that our Lord was dead and now lives, but we do not understand how that is possible. We do understand, however, that the things extending into the sphere of understanding are related in the sphere of the incomprehensible and are its manifestation. We understand a great deal about confession in the same way: for example, that there must be penance, that it is advisable for a person to admit his errors, and that there must also be an an authority and  a judgment upon good and evil on earth. We also more or less understand many things about faith: that the God-man did penance for our sins on the cross and for that reason the penance we accept for our guilt acquires somehow a symbolic character. Yet all the comprehensible elements are integrated into a whole which as such remains beyond our vision. In the course of the centuries the Church may acquire an increased understanding both of many individual elements and of the incomprehensibility of the whole, and with both of these an understanding of the mystery of Christ, the way he wished to remain alive for us in the vitality of the Father.

  Confession    Adrienne von Speyr   pp 148, 149

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

The Use of Philosophy

....Philosophy, taken in itself, is above utility. And for this very reason, philosophy is of the utmost necessity for men. It reminds them of the supreme utility of those things which do not deal with means, but with ends. For men do not live only by bread, vitamins, and technological discoveries. They live by values and realities that are above time, and are worth being known for their own sake; they feed in that invisible food which sustains the life of the spirit, and which makes them aware, not of such or such means at the service of their life,  but of their very reasons for living - and suffering, and hoping.

    The philosopher in society witnesses to the supreme dignity of thought; he points to what is eternal in man, and stimulates our thirst for pure knowledge and disinterested knowledge, knowledge of those fundamentals - about the nature of things and the nature of the mind, and man himself, and God - which are superior to, and independent of, anything we can make or produce or create - and to which all our practice is appendent, because we think before acting and nothing can limit the range of thought: our practical decisions depend on the stand we take on the ultimate questions that human thought is able to ask.

Jacques Maritain,  On The Use of Philosophy,  pp. 6, 7

The Risk of Education

Recently a provocative question came up: "What would a classroom like that look like?" I have been wondering about the answer ever since. The that under question is clear and specific, so that is easy to explain, but the question itself is impossible to answer. This is how the question came about: I was with a small group of teachers discussing Giussani's book The Risk of Education, and one of them wondered out loud: "Imagine how marvelous it would be if all teachers actually taught the way Giussani proposes." Then from another person came the question: "Yes indeed, what would a classroom like that look like?"

Those of us who admire Giussani can make the mistake of idealizing him, and regard his book on education as the solution to all the problems we have in our schools today. In a general sense, it is, because the book analyzes our educational situation accurately and gives the correct directions we should go in. However, the book is no quick fix. Our concrete educational problems are infinite in variety and depend on the right use of personal freedom on the part of all involved, especially teacher and student. That is why no book in itself could resolve our educational problems. 

Giussani's slim volume is the distilled wisdom of a lifetime in the classroom and presupposes that teachers accept the living martyrdom they must necessarily endure as they risk themselves trying to communicate truth to their students. While Giussani states the risks of educating accurately and concisely in the book, he also says that the heroic sacrifice of real educators is the only road to success. Such dedication will not guarantee success that is absolute, however, since not all students will be open to the gift the teacher is giving them.

 

Giussani's message could be taught and applied as a technique. His method could be reduced to a formula, an ideology, or a closed system. But teaching is not a matter of learning the Giussani technique,  and then communicating it in bits and pieces to students till they have digested all the information offered. Teaching, or education, from Giussani's perspective aims at opening students up to all of reality. Reality as a whole? How many students have teachers who see reality that way?

Also, teaching and learning are an joint experience. It should be a truism to say that an experience can only be lived. In the teaching, truth come alive, the student's mind and heart come alive, and this lived experience occurs when the teacher communicates not just data or information but something of himself.

 

Himself? (Or herself?) Why? Why does a teacher have to communicate himself? And what of that self exactly? Why not just the material he (or she) is teaching? Why is the person of the teacher so important? Because of the relationship that only persons can have, a relationship with one another and at the same time with Goodness, Truth and Beauty that is greater than they are. No matter how ably the specific material is communicated, if the link to the "greater than" is not present in the teacher, the teacher does the student an injustice. 

Suppose I am a music teacher. I can teach a child what a scale is, and how to play the scale correctly on the piano. I can then move on to teach the student how to form chords, how to read notes on a staff, and also keep time. But scales and notes and chords are boring. These are all "bits and pieces", or rudimentary information a student must have to play music, just as a student must learn how to write the alphabet, print words, and write sentences. As an educator, I can teach the skills involved in writing, or in piano playing, but I have to have a love of music, or a love of language , to inspire passion in my students and wake them up to what miracles language and music are. If I don't communicate the passion I have in me for what is greater than I am, if that passion is not in me to begin with, what right do I have to be a teacher?

The personal relationship between teacher and student is the context in which Truth, Goodness and Beauty are communicated to the student in the present moment. Where the teacher has no relationship to this totality, he has no calling to be a teacher.

The Nobility of Teaching

"I wanted simply to say what I think are the fundamental factors of the whole educative process. First, the value of tradition, which is the first factor targeted and censured where a power dominates in society, in the family, in civil society, and paradoxically, in religious society. At times, it can happen that ecclesiastical society, if it is lived as will for power, censures its own history. Second, the figure of the educator, which is the place where tradition becomes conscious and becomes a proposal, but it is a proposal that must offer companionship in its impact, and therefore in the comparison, and in the comparison show the reasons for the proposal itself. But this, the third factor, that is to say, the proof, the verification, is not mathematical; it is not a matter of logic; it stops short, as I said, on the threshold of the person's freedom. Here lies the drama of the risk of education. But whatever be the immediate outcome of your own loving passion (because as the Pope says, there is no demonstration of love for mankind like the educative commitment), the living proposal, in other words, the "I" of the educator, must be untiring, an "I"that is not halted by any circumstances of space or of time, nor therefore of age, nor by any exterior situation, not any kid of response." 

These remarks constitute the closing paragraph of a conference given by Fr. Luigi Giussani on The Risk of Education in 1985 in Milan Italy, (so the Pope mentioned would be John Paul II.) I think it is a remarkable summation of a conference about an incomparable book. It is a final paragraph that concisely packs in the density and depth of Giussani's wisdom on education with an image of the teacher as sacrificial victim. Educators (teacher, preacher, mother, father, Christian, etc.) are called on day after day to give all they have in them, and give it freely, in the face of rejection, indifference, opposition, and even persecution.  It makes me realize that if our teaching is not a "loving passion" that makes us pour ourselves out in self gift, we are doing our students, ourselves, and the Truth we hope to communicate, a tremendous injustice.