Camino (part 5)

The way of Jesus: filial consciousness

… an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, and said, Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take thy wife Mary to thyself, for it is by the power of the Holy Spirit that she has conceived this child; and she will bear a son, whom thou shalt call Jesus,
for he is to save his people from their sins. (Mt. 1:20-21)

These words of the angel can help us review the path we have traversed so far. Joseph has an essential role to play in Jesus’ human origin, by accepting the Child as his own, bestowing the name, and raising him in the traditions of the royal house of Israel. But he has no part in the physical generation of the Child, and Mary’s role is still more immediate. Jesus’ material existence depends on Mary’s free decision to put her body entirely at the disposition of the divine plan. But even her action is not a sufficient cause, because only a specific divine intervention can produce a human being who lives entirely from the Holy Spirit, the divine Breath, with no “residue” of his own. And it only this unique divine-human composite can change the world in a positive way, i.e., can save. The whole New Testament teaches that the working-out of this change in history flows through chosen men and women who participate in this same divine life, living “in” Christ. In Camino, Saint Josemaría Escrivá shows how the transmission of this life recapitulates its first origin, involving the figures of both Joseph and Mary. In this third and final section of the book, Escrivá describes the conclusion of this process in the generation of “other Christs,” and highlights some key aspects of the way in which these almas de criterio inaugurate the Kingdom of God in their own place and time.

This section can be roughly divided into three smaller parts, each contributing an essential piece to a complete understanding of the overall vision. First, Escrivá shows what it means to live the life of Christ (ch. 36-37, 41-42). This was the main topic of theological dispute in the first centuries of Christianity, at the heart of both the Trinitarian and Christological controversies, which continued unabated until the 7^th-century Persian and Arab conquests put the damper on Christian academic activity. Escrivá provides a precise exposition of the conclusions reached at the end of that period, while maintaining the vibrant contemporary style vivified by personal experience. In the next sub-part, he explores the effects of these divinized humans on the world around them (ch. 38-40). It is here that the comparisons and contrasts with other proposals for world change come to the fore, with the specific theological basis of Escrivá’s version giving rise to qualitatively distinct features. Finally, he approaches the question of how all this is to be concretely realized. The whole book is written in a performative key, and has an impact on any attentive reader on its own. But Escrivá, like the ancient philosophers and theologians, is writing this book primarily as a complement to a specific way of life. This last part reviews some of the specific features of that way and exhorts the reader to fully commit and persevere in this path (ch. 43-46). 

[In today’s installment, I will only comment on the first of these three sub-parts, which is the most theologically rich. I hope to have the second part ready by the end of next week. Commenting adequately on the third part, however, means applying everything we have seen here to the task of understanding the nature and goals of Opus Dei, the concrete way of life that Escrivá founded. This is a particularly important and delicate point right now, as much confusion is swirling around Catholic blogs concerning some recent changes in canon law. I would like to provide a clear and accurate sketch the truly nuclear elements, which have survived all the vicissitudes of the institution’s legal status over the past century. We’ll see if there is time to pull that off.]

---

The centuries-long duration of the ancient Christian theological controversies must not be taken to imply that crucial elements of Christ’s identity were unknown to the first generation of disciples and had to be discovered (or invented) by later authors. The central characteristic of Jesus’ way of being was overwhelmingly evident to that first community is already set forth with crystal clarity in the Gospel of John, as Pope Benedict XVI observes in Jesus of Nazareth:

In St John’s gospel Christ says of himself: “The Son can do nothing of his own accord” (Jn. 5:19,30). This seems to rob the Son of all power; he has nothing of his own; […] On the face of it, a contradiction arises when the same Christ says of himself in St John: “I and the Father are one” (10:30). But anyone who looks more closely will see at once that in reality the two statements are complementary. […] Precisely because he does not stand in himself he stands in him, constantly one with him.¹

Contemporary theologians refer to such statements as expressions of Jesus’ “filial consciousness,” his constant awareness of being totally Son that provides the foundation for all his thought and action. For Escrivá, the alma de criterio is someone who has come to share in this filial consciousness, and can therefore be legitimately called “another Christ” — or even “Christ himself”:

Give all the glory to God. — “Squeeze out” every one of your actions with your will, helped by grace, so that nothing may remain in them that smells of human pride, of indulgence of your “I.”²

The long and complex debates among early Christian intellectuals arise from the challenge that Jesus’ identity poses to classical metaphysics and anthropology. The first efforts to explain in more detail what is entailed by Jesus’ divine sonship immediately run up against the limits of the basic concepts taken for granted in ancient discourse about God, man and the cosmos. In the new synthesis that eventually emerged from this conflict, the category of “will” played a central role in articulating Jesus’ divine status. In another passage from Jesus of Nazareth, Benedict XVI summarizes the decisive contribution of Maximus the Confessor on this point:

Maximus is first and foremost a determined opponent of monotheletism: Jesus' human nature is not amputated through union with the Logos; it remains complete. And the will is part of human nature. This irreducible duality of human and divine willing in Jesus must not, however, be understood to imply the schizophrenia of a dual personality. Nature and person must be seen in the mode of existence proper to each. In other words: in Jesus the “natural will” of the human nature is present, but there is only one “personal will,” which draws the “natural will” into itself. And this is possible without annihilating the specifically human element, because the human will, as created by God, is ordered to the divine will. In becoming attuned to the divine will, it experiences its fulfillment, not its annihilation. Maximus says in this regard that the human will, by virtue of creation, tends toward synergy (working together) with the divine will, but that through sin, opposition takes the place of synergy: man, whose will attains fulfillment through becoming attuned to God's will, now has the sense that his freedom is compromised by God's will. He regards consenting to God's will, not as his opportunity to become fully himself, but as a threat to his freedom against which he rebels.

The drama of the Mount of Olives [see Luke 22:39-46] lies in the fact that Jesus draws man's natural will away from opposition and back toward synergy, and in so doing he restores man's true greatness. In Jesus' natural human will, the sum total of human nature's resistance to God is, as it were, present within Jesus himself. The obstinacy of us all, the whole of our opposition to God is present, and in his struggle, Jesus elevates our recalcitrant nature to become its real self.

Christoph Schönborn says in this regard that “the transition between the two wills from opposition to union is accomplished through the sacrifice of obedience. In the agony of Gethsemane, this transition occurs” (God's Human Face, pp. 126-27). Thus the prayer “not my will, but yours” (Lk 22:42) is truly the Son's prayer to the Father, through which the natural human will is completely subsumed into the “I” of the Son. Indeed, the Son's whole being is expressed in the “not I, but you” — in the total self-abandonment of the “I” to the “you” of God the Father. This same “I” has subsumed and transformed humanity's resistance, so that we are all now present within the Son's obedience; we are all drawn into sonship.³

This dense passage is worth quoting in full, because “The Will of God” is the title and theme of the first chapter of this third section of Camino, and is central to how Escrivá understands the divinization of the alma de criterio. In this chapter, he refers to the same Biblical passage analyzed here — which he assumes is familiar enough to his readers to be called to mind with its principal verb alone (which happens to be the same one Mary used in reply to the angel):

Don’t hesitate: let the “Fiat” — let it be done! — flow from your heart to your lips, as the coronation of your sacrifice.⁴

The connection to the sacrifice of Jesus is made even more explicit a few points on:

Lord, if it is your Will, make a crucifix of my poor flesh.⁵

The reader, as “another Christ,” is placed in the same existential position as Jesus on the eve of his death, and invited to respond with the same words. Importantly, the text presumes that this response has already spontaneously arisen in the reader’s heart, because he has been “drawn into sonship,” as Benedict puts it. This is no mere exhortation to external imitation, but an articulation of an interior experience that can only have a divine origin.

The “filial” aspect of this identification with the divine will comes into focus in the chapters on “spiritual childhood.” In these two chapters, Escrivá elaborates on the experience of filial consciousness for a finite human person — one who is not the Son of God by nature, as Jesus was, but is gratuitously elevated to this status:

Your work wears down your body, and you find yourself unable to pray. You are always in the presence of your Father. — If you don’t talk to him, look at him from time to time like a tiny child…. and He will smile at you.⁶

This gives rise to a fusion of godlike authority and self-assurance with the radical humility of a helpless infant:

860: Before God, who is Eternal, you are tinier than a two-year-old is compared to you.
And besides being a child, you are a son of God. — Don’t forget it.⁷

875: Don’t forget, silly child, that Love has made you omnipotent.⁸

The “omnipotent littleness” of the Christified Christian was magisterially described by Doctor of the Church Thérèse of Lisieux, who recorded her own intense experience of this reality in her spiritual autobiography published at the close of the 19th century. Escrivá deeply appreciated this work, which resonated with his own interior life, while faithfully reflecting the core teaching of the New Testament described by Pope Benedict XVI above. Because he understands the teaching of Thérèse “from the inside,” he is able to apply it to a realm that she never specifically described: showing how this way of being gives a totally new shape to one’s way of working and of relating to other people, and thus breathes new life into the structures that constitute the human world. That is the theme of the second sub-part of this section, to which we will turn next week.

1. Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: from the baptism in the Jordan to the transfiguration, Doubleday, New York 2007, 349.

2. Camino 784: Da “toda” la gloria a Dios. — “Exprime” con tu voluntad, ayudado por la gracia, cada una de tus acciones, para que en ellas no quede nada que huela a humana soberbia, a complacencia de tu “yo”.

3. Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: from the entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection. Part two: Holy week, Ignatius Press, San Francisco 2011, 160-1.

4. Camino 763: No dudes: deja que salga del corazón a los labios un “Fiat” —¡hágase!... —que sea la coronación del sacrificio.

5. Camino 775: Señor, si es tu Voluntad, haz de mi pobre carne un Crucifijo.

6. Camino 893: El trabajo rinde tu cuerpo, y no puedes hacer oración. Estás siempre en la presencia de tu Padre. —Si no le hablas, mírale de cuando en cuando como un niño chiquitín... y El te sonreirá.

7. Camino 860: Delante de Dios, que es Eterno, tú eres un niño más chico que, delante de ti, un pequeño de dos años.
Y, además de niño, eres hijo de Dios. —No lo olvides.

8. Camino 875: No olvides, niño bobo, que el Amor te ha hecho omnipotente. [This point also calls to mind a key point from the introductory quote of this essay: that the divine Child can only be incarnated through the action of the Holy Spirit — whom Escrivá often refers to as Love with a capital “L.” See also point 852, where this point is made still more clearly.]