| Editor: Brother Bruno Bonnet-Eymard | N° 89 – February 2010 |
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OUR LADY OF FATIMA CAMP 2009
TOTAL METAPHYSICS
« We are unwittingly metaphysicians like Monsieur Jourdain, who spoke prose, but, I think, through aesthetics. Both of them are based on and culminate in delightful intuitions, either of truth or the beauty of things; in a perception of their intimate secret, pure and independent of scientific knowledge.
« Both ways – but it is obvious that the aesthetic way is the most accessible and frequented of the two – are extremely profound communions of the soul, of our human soul, with the beings of our universe, in an atmosphere of truth on the one hand, of beauty on the other. » (Georges de Nantes, Total Metaphysics, CRC n° 170, October 1981, p. 3)
Since it is a natural contemplation, a reflection, a meditation of man in the presence of the sole spectacle of nature, metaphysics is independent of religion and the individual sciences. Nevertheless, it aims to encompass everything that exists, all of reality as though it were a single, static, superior and sure being in order to understand its underlying significance: What is being?
According to the jargon of the philosophers, the science of « physics », derived from the Greek word phusis, « nature » is the science of the « nature » of things, while metaphysics is a superior science that consists of going beyond. I remember my perplexity in my final year at Collège Saint-Martin in Pontoise, when our professor, the Abbé de Nantes, told us that metaphysics was the science of being « as being ». What would he be able to tell us about « being as being »?!
Fortunately, the Ancients showed us the way. I can still see written in chalk on the blackboard the names of Aristotle, the initiator of metaphysics, and of St. Thomas from whom it received an immense improvement. I was not aware of our signal privilege, but I now understand that this professor added an intuition to Aristotle and St. Thomas that was capable of renewing all the natural and supernatural sciences, with regard to divine and human things.
ARISTOTLE: SUBSTANTIALISM
Before Aristotle, this same professor taught us, after having written the name of Heraclitus at the top of a column at the left of the blackboard, there were physicists, scientists who were very curious about things in the visible universe, but most of them, who were called empiricists, not to say materialists, were absorbed by the diversity of sensations that were obtained from forms, colours, odours, and their perpetual movement. They were like a child who has his face pressed against a windowpane and who watches snow falling. It is always the same thing, and it is always different. This perpetual flow inspired them a phantasmagorical history of the universe.
Aristotle, on the other hand, sees a dog go by in the street. He perceives as everyone does the « accidents » : colour of fur, size and shape peculiar to the breed; but he also has the intuition of the « substance » that holds them together. The cat, which the dog is chasing, is also a « substance », a basic, fundamental structure that precisely defines this manner of being that is called a “cat”.
Furthermore, Aristotle sees that this structure is dynamic, that is to say that it contains a “computer programme”, as we would say today and a force for carrying it out: in Greek, an entelechy, an organising potency of the matter, which is called the form, the “act” that leads matter to the perfection of the obscure desire of the “substance”, whether it is vegetal or animal, an olive tree or a horse. The Abbé de Nantes named it “dynamorph”.
Aristotle makes out a catalogue of the beings, objects that he has observed, each according to its “species”. The species themselves are classified into “”types”. Since beings are composed of matter and form, they are not “ideas”, he teaches us, making us immune to idealism for life. Aristotelian realism affirms the reality of substances, independent of the idea that he discovered in them through “abstraction”.
Cut a dog into four parts, lengthwise, breadthwise, as you wish, you will not find structure, “form”, but only parts: here a leg, there the lungs… Nevertheless, when all of it is together, the animal lives by virtue of an organising principle that cannot be seen but for which we have an intuition: quiddity, in scholastic Latin, which replies to the question What is it? It is a particular being, whose essence we are able to determine in terms of the other beings of the universe.
“Physics” is based on this Aristotelian realism. It is the science that consists of inventorying and classifying forms, species, “essences” or “natures” of substances, and their laws of development, their relationships of affinity or exclusion. Capping this construction of various forms, words or concepts whereby they are designated and defined, there is Pure Act, the Prime Mover, the perfect being, in its finishedness, complete for all eternity. He is called “God”.
The whole of science and Western civilisation are based on Aristotle’s intuition. If it is lacking, we fall into the anarchy of sensualism, empiricism, materialism. Honour to Aristotle! But also, objection, Your Honour: because when Aristotle considered beings only as “substances”, he neglected their singularity, declaring that it was without interest, unworthy of holding the attention of a sage.
« Thus for twenty-five centuries, philosophers have neglected this ocean, this heterogeneous multitude of familiar beings, either to raise us to the heaven of platonic ideas that are but reveries, or else to distract us from the strangeness of things by collecting the definitions of their universal and necessary essences in the great book of Science. » (G. de Nantes, Theology and Metaphysics, CCR n° 281, December, 1995, p. 21)
ST. THOMAS: EXISTENTIALISM
Let us skip over a few centuries. Christ becomes incarnate; the Church develops. The sovereign Catholic Faith subjugates to itself all the disciplines of knowledge during almost a thousand years, when the introduction of the Aristotelian system in the midst of Christendom triggered a veritable battle of ideas. In the twelfth century, Abelard claimed to place faith under the scrutiny of Greek reason. His proud “Sic et Non”, which excluded all mystery, was fortunately condemned at the Council of Sens (1140) thanks to the faith and vehement preaching of St Bernard. Alas! Less than a hundred years later, reason returned with a vengeance; Aristotle and his bad conveyor, the “cursed Averroës”, were passionately studied in the faculties of Arts, despite Roman condemnations. Pope Gregory IX then imagined a means of defence: the adoption of an Aristotelianism sufficiently amended by very trustworthy theologians to serve as an instrument for comprehensive knowledge.
It was the work of St. Albert the Great and his disciple, St. Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteen century: « In his very difficult essay, De Ente et Essentia (« On being and essence ») written when he was only thirty-two, St. Thomas taught something new, which was in the air and which Avicenna the Arab, inflamed with his Muslim religion, had already found in his Koran: it was the notion of existence, the esse, which distinguishes from nothingness, or from the possible, or from the imaginary, concrete reality, the object of our sensible knowledge that is conceived by our mind as an essence. » (CCR n° 318, p. 21).
EXISTENCE.
Aristotle, who had applied himself to analysing the essential structure of the object of science, neglected this detail… It, however, is of utmost importance! Between a “potential” being, capable of developing, for example, the plan and the estimate for a construction that I am planning, and its completion, there is a gap, a passage from one metaphysical domain to another, from the domain of essence – the architects plans and the quantity surveyor’s estimates – to existence… the sums of money required for taking action, coming into existence!
What is existence? it is a basic fact, object of an intuition that is of another order than the perception of the “substance” of things. When Aristotle saw a dog go by in the street, he had the intuition of a complete viable structure. But he never posed the question of the dog’s existence. I remember that one day we were walking in the magnificent park of the college in Saint-Martin, while speaking of these things, and my professor, the Abbé de Nantes, stopped in front of a beech tree, and he said to me: “It exists.” This was indeed the first time I stood transfixed before this extraordinary, very moving fact of the existence of this being raising its powerful trunk to the sky. That day, I experienced the shock of existence: this exists extrinsic to me. What is it doing there. This is St. Thomas’ existentialism.
Thus it was that for the baccalauréat (school leaving examination) that year our class proudly professed “Aristotelian-Thomist” realism in philosophy … and obtained a 100 % success rate. For the optional subject of the oral examination we refuted Kantian criticism… With that, we had a lifetime to meditate on the existence of the universe that forces itself upon us: that exists, there is no doubt about it, and yet that did not always exist, and I tremble because that could suddenly cease to exist. Such is the contemplation of parents who consider their child in his cradle. They know what the shock of existence is. They prepared this cradle when the child was still nothing but their desire. There he is now who exists! This intuition is distinct from that of his “essence” and of his “accidents”: boy or girl, blond or brown-haired… It is a surprising, moving, formidable, touching, impressive, alarming intuition. Why? Because he is there and he could not be there. As soon as he is there, he exists absolutely, and yet, he could have not existed. This is the problem of existence.
From here on, we abandon Aristotle’s physics and we enter into metaphysics in order to ask ourselves along with St. Thomas: What is existence? As a reaction against German idealism, modern existentialists have experienced this shock of existence and attempted to bring philosophy back to this basic intuition. They, however, were unable to say anything more about it than St. Thomas in his time. How can existence be defined? It is. To exist is to be. When I consider any being, in my mind I distinguish its form, its essence, on the one hand, and then its existence, i.e., the fact that it is there, on the other. What can be derived from this?
How can we progress in the secret of existence? This small child in his cradle exists. What does this tell me? That he is charming? Indeed he is! But that is aesthetics, and if I admire the delicate anatomy of his small hands, I am in Aristotle’s physics. What metaphysics retains is the existence of this child. The Abbé de Nantes’ lesson plunges us into an abyss of contemplation:
« I think along with the parents of the “value” of this child; they had been married for ten years and they did not have a child. Now, they have a child! The passage from the nonexistence of this child to this child in his cradle before me is tremendous!
« I pursue. The being of the little baby adds an infinite value to the “little baby”, because as long as little baby is nonexistence, little baby is nothing; he is zero. Now there is little baby, one over zero equals the infinite (1 / 0 = ∞ ), that is to say that this baby has an infinite value in comparison with the nothingness from which he came. As a being, this baby is absolutely stupefying. »
Let us go further. Forget the baby. This is what is called abstraction. This is known to Aristotle and to all scientists in his wake. It consists in separating an element of the being from all the other elements. I forget that I have before me a baby, this unique baby, etc. I forget everything! I only retain the fact of being. It was something so extraordinary for a baby who did not exist that I isolate this notion of being in order to measure the infinite and prime value. Before knowing whether we are a dog, a cat, a baby, a scientist, or a miserable alcoholic, there is the fact that we exist. Everything partakes in being.
CONTINGENCY.
Let us pursue our meditation: how is it that we exist when before we did not exist? And perhaps tomorrow, we will no longer exist, at least in this manner of being that is ours presently? How is it that being can be limited in time and space? I am here; I am not there, etc. How do all these divisions of being come about? In so far as I cease to consider the being of the baby in order to think only of the fact of being, irrespective of the form of the baby, this fact of being takes shape as the fundamental reality of which all the others are only manifestations. Being is like a kind of immense ocean, perpetually enclosed in small vases of different forms. Why?
The shock of being reveals it as an absolute value, and it is very paradoxical, very scandalous, very inexplicable that in everyday experience this old shoe, this dead tree, this automobile carcass… has a share in existence, this absolute value. What is it doing there? As modern existentialists say, it is « redundant »!
Let us say this at least: if being, the supreme value exists, it must evidently be absolute, perfect, infinite, limitless. From the moment when my mind has had the intuition of being one single time, it has the certainty that the absolute being exists. This is even the definition that God gives of Himself to Moses: « I Am. »
St. Thomas’ existentialism leads us to distinguish essence and existence in the being of our experience, but to indentify them in God: the divine essence is nothing other than God’s existence. In God, there are no limits, frontiers, definitions, concepts: « I Am », and that suffices!
And I? I am, but what is my relationship with I Am? Am I a part of I Am? No, impossible! Parts cannot be distinguished in God. This is when the idea of a relationship of our being with God forces itself upon us. After having affirmed that all our beings consist of essence and existence, St. Thomas himself says that existence is given to substances by God the Creator. The beings of our experience are not emanations of God. Their existence is not a participation in that of God, no! Beware of immanentism, monism, pantheism in which dogs and cats are forms of God! St. Thomas has protected us once and for all from this temptation that leads to idolatry, by establishing between the infinite Being and these finite, limited beings that we are, whose existence must be recognised, a bond of causality: God created the existence of all the beings of our experience.
St. Thomas stopped there, after having made metaphysics make an absolutely decisive, revolutionary advancement. Thus every being is not pure conception, pure idea, but a combination of essence and existence, the constituent principles of its perfect entity. From this simple discovery, St. Thomas can deduce that such a duality of principles supposes a free creation of each singular being. And by whom, if you please, if not by the Unique and Almighty God!
In reality, St. Thomas attributed to the great Aristotle what his genius as a Christian philosopher made him understand perfectly, namely that there exists one God, Father almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth! On the other hand, it was not even sure that the said “Pure Act” of Aristotle’s disciples, Averroës, Avicenna and now, in Paris, Siger de Brabant, is, in their philosophy, a real, living God, governing the world. What is more, it was only too certain that the very idea of this world being created was absolutely foreign to the thought, imagination and desire of the Greeks... and their modern, epigones.
GEORGES DE NANTES:
RELATIONAL EXISTENTIALISM
Let us skip over the centuries and, as our friend Jean Vieux said, « finally de Nantes came ». He came to say something very simple, and simply inspired. According to St. Thomas, « Magister dixit », Aristotle affirms that substance is primary and that all the rest that arises, for example the relations that this substance maintains with other substances, is “accidents”. Georges de Nantes says: no, there is something that is not accidental or secondary for a being, whatever it may be, and that is its relationship to God who created it. Because we are free of all allegiance to this pagan Aristotle, we say: God’s action, called creative causality, constitutes our being, and thus it is previous. Before being dog, cat, man or parrot, the being is first created by God. God’s action, God’s will comes first. It determines these beings as to their matter and their form. God did not take universal forms on the one side, and then muck on the other to make this dog that I call Asor. God thought Asor; He made this dog. It does not disgust God to create dogs, and it is just too bad if it disgusts the Greek! God wanted these concrete individuals. He brings them there, into being, such as they are, matter, form, substance, accidents, in their totality. He did so, it is a relationship that existed before the individual since it brought it into existence.
St. Thomas himself recognises it: « The relationship of creation is prior to substance. But, he adds, according to Aristotle’s categories, according to logical priority, there exists first the substance to which, afterward, the relationship is attributed. » For the convenience of discursive reasoning, they begin by bringing you into being, then, subsequently, they tell you: you are created by God! But ontologically, that is, as a being, it is quite true that you only exist because, in the first place, God created you. Thus relationship is not always an “accident”, pace Aristotle. It is, moreover, an experimental fact, even before speaking about creation. If it is “accidental” for a man to be a father or not, it is “essential” – no! precisely, but constitutive – in order to exist that he be the son of his father. There is no child who is not a son. Even Adam is « son of God » (Lk 3:38)
Thus, the being is first the object of God’s choice, of a decision of God who creates it. We are relative to God. To exist amounts to being brought into being by the Being, by « I Am ». The Abbé de Nantes’ “total metaphysics” adds to Aristotle’s physics and to St. Thomas’s metaphysics a new chapter entitled: « The relationship of origin », or “constituent relationship”, that is constitutive of being.
We exist without inherently possessing anything for it. I cannot make myself exist. At the present minute, I exist; I cannot make my being exist in the minute to come. Thus, minute after minute, God makes me exist. What am I? I am God’s work.
Relational existentialism is the bringing to the forefront of this creative relationship, which is mysterious because it is first, very moving. God does not create me from Himself, even less “from nothing” as is ordinarily said. God sees to it that I am next to Him. Since God is the infinite, I wonder what I am doing “in addition” next to Him! Yet, I exist, body and soul, irreducible to God. Only one explanation is possible, O Aristotle! This gift of being cannot be explained other than by the disinterested, inventive spontaneous love, which is “grace”. God makes us exist for no reason other than a gift of love.
This is where our thinking is very similar to that of Blessed John Duns Scotus, a late XIIIth century Franciscan, master of theology at Oxford and at Paris, who died in 1308.
« What was it that was so rich and so new about his discovery that his predecessors were thereby disqualified? He accuses them, en bloc, of having emptied out the whole mystery of being and of beings, and of God! and of retaining nothing of God’s mystery that goes beyond the old collection of essences, for ever fixed by Aristotle. All these definitions of pragmatic usage, sterile, outside history, inert, outside Providence and the order of eternal salvation, secular and, when all is said and done, godless! ignorant, in any case, of the Bible and of the whole Jewish and then Christian Revelation, justify the anathema of Tertullian († 220): “Omnes philosophi hæretici sunt”. » (G. de Nantes, Theology and Metaphysics, CCR n° 282, January 1996, p. 24)
TO FREE FRANCISCAN TRADITION.
In 1978 already, in his treatise “a mysticism for our time”, the Abbé de Nantes recalled St. Bonaventura’s amazing thesis according to which « Omnis creatura clamat generationem aeternam. » He translated and commented: « All creatures cry out the eternal generation of the Word, the Son of God, God of God, by the Father. But of course, no one can properly hear that cry unless his ears are opened by God’s grace and unless he sees with the eyes of faith. » (CCR n° 105, December 1978, p. 10)
It was up to John Duns Scotus to draw all the conclusions by challenging the Thomist thesis of the distinction between essence and existence.
« No one will contest that there is a real distinction between the stuffed crocodile in the Museum and its living look-alike in the zoological park pool: the one is dead and the other is alive. No good putting them together to make little crocodiles! » (CCR n° 282, p. 25)
Nevertheless, « between the concrete blockhouse of substantialism and the immense desert with its shimmering mirages of an absolutely sterile existentialism, there remains the possibility of directly contemplating the unutterable mystery of the creative act and of its Author, who is God Himself » (ibid.). This relation is willed by God who gives me a basis and places me among my own in order to fulfill an office, a mission, a vocation for the universal common good of the family of His children.
For God is a Father, but it is a secret, object of a divine and ardent revelation.
By separating “Faith” and “reason”, we would risk forgetting it… to the point of losing the Faith! Duns Scotus, « who is wrongly called “subtle”, when he is nothing if not lucid and direct », combines them in a single glance of the intelligence while reminding us that existence comes, to each concrete being, from God, as « the energy to what one is, before all rational manipulations! At the origin of things, there is no real distinction between existence and essence » (CCR n° 282, p. 25)
Here, the explanation of the thinking of Duns Scotus, a theologian of the XIIIth – XIVth century, by the Abbé de Nantes a theologian of the XXth – XXIth century, becomes as it were… autobiographical. It is quite simply marvellous, delightful to see them converge after having both given « the scholastic brigade the slip, at the precise moment of the “white marriage” » between existence and essence, this sterile union, in order to « contemplate this pure, infinite existence that is as virgin as a fountain, as the sky, still undivided before being allotted and shared out, marrying it to each one of the essences that are going to live as a result, without in any way being affected... I dream and I am not listening; I have deserted. They tell me: you are foundering in aestheticism; you are not made of the stuff it takes for metaphysician! »
Our late lamented professor of metaphysics at the Institut catholique de Paris, Father Lallemant, even called the Abbé de Nantes a “modernist” and refused to sponsor his doctoral thesis! « I no longer dared to share with my pupils the ever more enchanting course of my reverie. The sight of the immense, unchanging blue sky we discover through the portholes of our modern Caravels was sufficient to revive.
« Established in the central intuition of this pure existence, and considering it in its minimal extent, that is, any tiny object: it is. I then extend it to the maximum of my most immense sensible or intellectual experiences: it is still equally consistent, immovable and sure, as though heedless of its forced limitations, free of all the imprisonment of essences wherever it is considered. The teeming and luxuriant diversity of the universe holds its being as though encompassed in a single look, enkindled with love... Everything exists absolutely! »
Duns Scotus says: « Universe is univocal. » Everything that is, is in one and the same manner of existence as God, the supreme Being, the infinite Being...
« Then, smoothly effortlessly, I push my intuition forward, testing out the full and absolute truth of the existence of things far and near; can I not strip it of all this complication and push my contemplation of existence ad infinitum, beyond every conceivable limitation; beyond everything: like the “Hidden God, the naked God” of the English Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins?
« If any finite being, any existence wedded to a concept of fixed essence, is a real thing, inexplicable in itself and by its very limitations, my intuition can keep in view this existence detached from this partner, free of all servitude, and thus accede to the contemplation of the only existence conceivable to our mind, that of the naked God, pure existence, having no need of explanation, of origin nor of destination, since to me it is certain and unimpeded infinite being! » (CCR n° 282, p. 23)
We no longer know if Georges de Nantes derives this “metaphysical theology” from himself or from Duns Scotus, when he summarises it in this way: « My predecessors, says Scotus (?), always start from their idea of the thing and end in its concrete being, as though this concrete being could arise from their abstract idea! »
This is the criticism that I have heard my professor of philosophy make for fifty years about the whole line of his predecessors down to Rev. Fr. Paissac, Dominican, his very admired professor in Lyon in 1941.
« On the contrary, if we retain the thing in our pure intuition of its concrete being we are again at that moment, not in a creation of our mind, but in the observation of its existence (and here is the focal, dazzling, point of this light) as of a pure force acting through the power of its Creator. This active existence and this thus nascent being, appear to us to be inextricably united in its singular mystery, whose general forms, species or quiddity will soon be discovered by scholars and philosophers. » (ibid., p. 25)
To this end, « after seven centuries of Aristotelian totalitarianism and shrinking of the faith », we must come back to the wellhead and « draw from the wells of Abraham, Moses and Jesus Christ » (CCR n° 283, p. 11)
It is, in fact, scandalous to see « this pagan Aristotle » supplanting « Abraham, “the Father of believers”, by assuming the role and the glory of Father of scientists and first of the philosophers. » To what result? To arrive at « the God of the philosophers and of the learned, toacertain knowledge of God from our knowledge of the world, firstly in the natural light of universal reason alone, even if it meant occasionally verifying its orthodoxy by taking soundings in Scripture and the Tradition of the Church. When reason would finally be superseded, the Faith would offer to take over to go still further into the Mystery. »
« That is forgetting too hastily that reason in this earthly life is disabled and, what is more, darkened by “the sin of the world” (Jn 1. 29) »
“Total metaphysics” bases its new thinking not on human wisdom but directly and wholly on the Word of God. In doing so, it « recovers the lost path opened by our Blessed John Duns seven centuries ago, to go straight to the only object of our search: God the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ and of Mary of the Immaculate Heart, in His fiery Revelation. » (CCR n° 283, p. 12)
Revelation does not turn us towards man but towards God. In the Old Testament, God reveals Himself as existence, I Am. And man? He is also, but through God and for God, as are all creatures. Now, « omnis creatura clamat generationem æternam », according to St. Bonaventura’s thesis, which our Father declared « amazing ». In fact, all creatures, each according to its species, « are effusions: light gives out light; fire gives out warmth; the source flows into a spring; clouds give rain; the mist produces the morning dew. » (CCR n° 105, p. 10).
GOD IS LOVE
Our contemplation continues in this way if, at least, our ears are opened by God’s grace and we see with the eyes of faith. For example, when we read in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis: « Fiat lux », « Let there be light! And there was light... », the style of this abstract translation incites us to understand that « this light was in the mind of the Creator (and in ours, in the dictionary of common names!) and this light is made to exist from the beginning of the world, all right! Essence plus existence, all is (too) clear.
« In the existential style, Scotist, irrational but real, one would prefer to say: “Be... light! And this light was!” At that instant, the creative Word of God decides on an existence of light, in one single divine command, one single creative choice of a “light being”... Reason does not yet know what a light is, still less the nature of light as whole! »
But the proof that before any scholarly explanation of physicists, and beyond, the light « cries out the eternal generation of the Word », the Son of God, God of God, by the Father, is provided by these words of Jesus in the Gospel:
« I am the light of the world. Whoever follows Me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life. » (Jn 8:12) What a revelation!
In the meditation of the Sages of the Old Testament, God is Infinite, All-Powerful, absolute, unforeseeable. « God could talk with Adam and Eve in Paradise, meet Abraham in the peaceful guise of three men beneath the oak of Mambre, make Himself known to Moses in the burning bush and confide to him His Name: I am (Je suis)… still, human fear, unreasonable may be, would not yield. It was, as the Sages say, “the fear of God, the beginning of wisdom” » [...].
« But nothing of what I was taught by Sacred History could satisfy me. Yahweh existed from all time and forever. Eternally the First. He was the “God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob”, who formed a Covenant with them, gave them a Law and showed Himself to be for them, for centuries, the God of mercy and of faithfulness, no doubt, but He hid Himself and veiled His Face for fear that we might die. Was He therefore so terrifying, or wonderful? for no one could see Him without dying: of ecstasy or of despair? »
« Wise and clever men have sought the gate, the way, the wound of the Heart opening onto the intimacy, the treasure of this Holy, living and true God, appealing more than frightening. But in vain… »
With the New Testament, everything changes. One only has « to open the Gospel of Jesus Christ, in order to have access to this secret of the Heart of God among the humble and the lowly. […] Filled with joy by the Holy Spirit, Jesus said: “I bless, You, Father, Lord of Heaven and of earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them to little children. Yes, Father, for that is what it has pleased You to do. Everything has been entrusted to Me by My Father; and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him.”»(Lk. 10:21-22)
We are far from the metaphysical representations of the divine Being whom the philosophers have imagined to suit their pleasure. They « proudly imagine Him in their own likeness, full of self consciousness, full of the knowledge of all things, enamoured with His own perfection and concerned only for His Glory… I dare to see him quite differently in those times before Time: in the purity and simplicity of a single will, wholly generous, turned outwards rather than on Himself. Turned towards a unique love, towards Someone... »
« Indeed, the only Revelation we have been given about this first instant, a simple, logical presupposition moreover, is in this sense. Of all that men could imagine, it is the most extraordinary; it is unacceptable to philosophers, though deeply moving for the humble. From the Beginning, He is “Sign of contradiction” – contradiction between the good and the bad angels, the just and the reprobate. God, in the absolute and infinite freedom of will, which the philosophers admit, and in full control of the movements of His Heart, in accordance with His good pleasure, the One God, Yahweh - Je suis (I am) desired to be… Father! » (CCR n° 283, February – March 1996 p. 23)
Such is the invention of love at the dawn of the first day: Father, in the infinite freedom of His Will, God is Father. « Before any creature was ever father or mother, before this “ipseity” applied to anyone, God will thus engender from His bosom, from His Heart, the fruit of His love, the object of His desire, a “God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God”, image of His Substance and reflection of His Face, His Only and Beloved Son, the Son of God for ever, from all time, filling all His desire. » (CCR n° 283, p. 23)
Even more than any creature, the Immaculate Conception « cries out the eternal generation of the Word » because the liturgy unceasingly applies to Her what is said about Eternal Wisdom: the Immaculate « came forth from the mouth of the Most High » (Si 24:3), together with the Word to be His Spouse in whom He can become flesh, for Himself and not without His Father from whom He proceeds, in a begetting of which He is the Bridegroom.
One only has to read the Old Bible in all its figures and the Gospel in all clarity to know and love God in all his desires. The orthodromy of our history is its continuation: the Church in all her prayers, and her uncountable sermons, homilies, hymns and liturgical symbols is God the Holy Spirit at work, in His choices, His desires, His wrath, His creative words. Living God. God who acts! In His « Infinite freedom » that Duns Scotus recognised in Him. His Sovereignty has nothing to demand and nothing to justify. It exists! It acts! Out of love!