Please notice that a deliberate distinction is here made between Capital and small letters.
Mirror Of Justice Mary is the inspiration I+N nuptial theology
37 Definitions And Reflections
My refusal to put G-d to the test does not mean I have no interest in the question of evidence, and it may be as well to say something about this. Cardinal Newman concluded that the mind's own testimony was the ultimate criterion of truth, and that certitude came of assent actively given on rational grounds at the bidding of reason. He wrote:190
“When inference is clearest, assent may be least forcible, and, when assent is more intense, inference may be least distinct; for, though acts of assent require previous acts of inference, they require them, not as adequate causes, but as sine qua non conditions; and, while the apprehension strengthens assent, inference often weakens the apprehension. To say that a thing must be, is to admit that it may not be. Logic makes but a sorry rhetoric with the multitude; first shoot round corners, and you may not despair of converting by a syllogism. Logicians are more set upon concluding rightly, than on right conclusions. They cannot see the end for the process. To most men argument makes the point in hand only more doubtful, and considerably less impressive. Man is not a reasonable animal; he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal. Belief being concerned with things concrete, not abstract, which variously excite the mind from their moral and imaginative properties, has for its objects, not only directly what is true, but inclusively what is beautiful, useful, admirable, heroic; objects which kindle devotion, rouse the passions, and attach the affections; and thus it leads the way to actions of every kind, to the establishment of principles, and the formation of character, and is thus again intimately connected with what is individual and personal. These beliefs, be they true or false in the particular case, form the mind out of which they grow. There is no ultimate test of truth besides the testimony born to truth by the mind itself.
Irritation and impatience of contradiction, vehemence of assertion, determination to silence others - these are the tokens of a mind which has not yet attained the tranquil enjoyment of certitude. Certitude follows on investigation and proof; is accompanied by a specific sense of intellectual satisfaction and repose; is irreversible. Mere assent is not certitude, and must not be confused with it. If the assent is made without rational grounds, it is a rash judgment, a fancy, or a prejudice; if without the sense of finality, it is scarcely more than an inference; if without permanence, it is a mere conviction. Certitude is the perception of a truth with the perception that it is a truth, or the consciousness of knowing. It is at most nothing more than infallibility pro hac vice, and promises nothing as to the truth of any proposition beside its own. Certitude is not a passive impression made upon the mind from without, by argumentative compulsion, but in all concrete questions (nay, even in abstract, for though reasoning is abstract, the mind which judges of it is concrete) it is an active recognition of propositions as true, such as it is the duty of each individual to exercise at the bidding of reason, and, when reason forbids, to withhold. Every one who reasons, is his own centre; and no expedient for attaining a common measure of minds can reverse this truth.”
Franz Brentano, who was acquainted with the Grammar of Assent, arrived at a similar position:191
“Nor are we likely to think, as so many foolishly do, that whenever one is aware of the truth, one must compare a thing with a judgment. When our judgments are concerned with what is real, we could not compare the judgment and the thing unless the thing were already known to us. The proposition that truth is the correspondence of judgment and thing (or however one may wish to put it) must either be completely false, or else it must be given an interpretation quite different from the one offered by those who think there is a relation of identity, or of sameness, or of similarity, between a true thought and a thing.
To the question, what is to be understood by truth, one usually replies: truth is an agreement between the intellect and a thing. Some have even supposed that we have here a criterion of what is true and what is false. But this is to overlook the fact that we cannot possibly know that there is an agreement between things unless we know each of the things between which the agreement holds. The real guarantee of the truth of a judgment lies in the judgment's being evident; if a judgment is evident, then either it is directly evident or it is evident as a result of a proof connecting it with other judgments which are directly evident. It is possible to distinguish certain classes of evident judgments. By referring to the characteristics which are peculiar to these classes, using them as a kind of rule, we may be able to orient ourselves in thoses cases, all too frequent, in which the weakness of the human intellect leads us to confuse apparent evidence with real evidence. Truth pertains to the judgment of the person who judges correctly - to the judgment of the person who judges about a thing in the way in which anyone whose judgments were evident would judge about the thing; hence it pertains to the judgment of one who asserts what the person whose judgments are evident would also assert. A directly evident judgment is not merely one that is seen to be true; it is also one that is seen to be logically justified, and in this respect it is to be distinguished from a blind judgment which happens to be true. Judging with evidence excludes not only the possibility of error, but also the possibility that there be anyone judging to the contrary who is not in error. Any judgment which is seen by one person to be true is universally valid; its contradictory cannot be seen to be evident by any other person; and anyone who accepts its contradictory is ipso facto mistaken. What I am here saying pertains to the nature of truth: anyone who thus sees into something as true is also able to see that he is justified in regarding it as a truth for all.
The evidence of a judgment cannot be identified with any irresistible compulsion forcing us to make the judgment. The peculiar nature of insight - the clarity and evidence of certain judgments - which is also inseparable from their truth - has little or nothing to do with a feeling of compulsion. We can understand what distinguishes it from other judgments only if we look for it in the inner peculiarity of the act of insight itself. Having the insight is itself sufficient to assure one that no one else could have a contrary insight, then he is aware of himself as a person judging with evidence. The great philosophers of antiquity have indeed affirmed that directly evident affirmative knowledge is limited to self-awareness, even in the case of G-d's knowledge, and rightly so.”
Bernard Lonergan's theory of knowledge derives its inspiration from Newman's Grammar of Assent, but owes its technical precision to a patient meditation of the writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas. In Verbum - Word and Idea in Aquinas,192 Lonergan puts forward the Thomist account of human knowing, and he does so in the today unfamiliar language of that mediæval genius.
I propose to follow him in this, before presenting his view in the more contemporary idiom of his later writings, and suggest that readers who find this language a barrier to understanding may pass over these pages on a first reading and return to them later.
Human knowing in its first stage is called objective abstraction. Man's spirit of wonder and inquiry, which with regard to its function at this stage is called agent intellect, acts as an efficient cause rendering the image or phantasm in the imagination the instrument of its own desire to know, and accordingly prescinding from all irrelevant aspects of that image, including always its inevitable here-and-now character.
Objective abstraction is the effect of this illumination of the phantasm by agent intellect, which is man's ever actual participation in the light of divine wisdom. Thanks to this illumination, human sense knowledge is actually, and not merely potentially, intelligible, the experiential aspects of sensible things become the material causes of human knowledge, and particular data furnish man with material evidence for his eventual judgment. Thanks to objective abstraction, sense experience is assumed into an intellectual horizon.
The second stage in human knowing is called apprehensive abstraction, direct understanding, insight. The individual illuminated phantasm is understood by intellect as the exemplar or external formal cause of the intelligibility it is seeking for. Insight stands to sensible qualities as soul to body, as form to prime matter, and is called insight because, like a mirror, the phantasm is what the intellect looks into rather than what it looks at. Insight stands to the image in which it is, somewhat as eyesight to the eye in which it is, or a person to the photograph in which he is represented, or as an exemplar or derivative to some particular function or exemplatum.
In the image the sensible data are material causes of knowing, and the illuminated phantasm is the instrumental cause employed by agent intellect, which is the principle efficient cause. The quiddity, whatness or nature of some material thing is the moving object of direct understanding, and supplies the form of that understanding. This form is called the species qua. The possible intellect, which is man's understanding in its openness to development in understanding, is infinite potentiality, quo omnia facere et fieri, a natural passive potency to the reception of all forms. The possible intellect is related to the species qua as the eye to eyesight, as the tongue to the sense of taste, i.e., as first potency to first act. Insight itself is second act, related to the species qua as seeing to eyesight, as tasting to the sense of tase.
The species qua is the formal but not the efficient cause of this act of understanding, insight or intelligere. A form is never, in fact, the efficient cause of its own actuation, its esse. The agent intellect is here the efficient cause, promoting the species qua to the species quae intelligitur, making the intelligible actually understood.
Hence the procession of the species qua and of intelligere from agent intellect is a processio operati, like that of a student's learning from his teacher's instruction. On the other hand, the procession of intelligere from the species qua, as seeing from eyesight is a processio operationis. Seeing is not action but passion; it is agere or energeia, but not facere nor poesis; its efficient cause is not eyesight but light. In a similar fashion, intelligere is passion, pati, a second act produced by agent intellect and phantasm.
Like seeing, direct understanding as such is infallible.
The third stage in human knowing is formative abstraction. As grasping an intelligibility, insight is intelligere. But intelligere is itself actually and actively intelligible. For man is intellectually conscious of his own understanding. Insight into phantasm supplies the answer to the question Quid sit - what is a man?, where Quid sit? means Cur ita sit? - why are those particular flesh and bones human? It is as thus grounding the self-expressive, intelligible emanation in a processio operati of an inner produced idea, word or concept as its terminal object, that intelligere is dicere or formative abstraction.
The concept proceeds from understanding as act from second act. This concept is an instrument of self-expressive understanding, and since what is known by intellect is a partial constituent of the reality first known by sense,193 it potentially refers to things. To understanding and meaning there corresponds what is understood and meant, so that the content, ratio or object of thought is not subjective but objective.
If this concept, this universal, abstract formulation expresses the essence or nature of a material things, its reference to that thing is still only potential, since essence as understood is compounded of form and common matter, while all existing matter is not common, but individuating and individual. However, if this concept expresses the intrinsic intelligibility of a material thing in complete abstraction from matter, it assigns not the nature but the formal cause. For instance, rationality is the form of man; essentially, he is a rational animal; in the concrete, I am this rational animal.
Since intelligibility is the ground of possibility, whatever is directly understood is, even if its realisation is impossible per accidens, nevertheless, possible per se.
While in apprehensive abstraction possible intellect is passive potency to reception of form, in formative abstraction it is active potency to operation in virtue of that form.
The fourth stage in human knowing is that of reasoning and weighing the evidence. As supplied by sensible data the evidence is only material, as construed by direct understanding and then by reflective understanding it is formal, but only as the integration of experience, imagination, understanding and conceptualisation in function of the agent intellect's intention of being, of the desire to know reality, does it become actual, the dialectical interplay of sense, memory, imagination, insight, definition, critical reflection and judgment, the moving object of reflective understanding, the sufficient ground of assent.
The aim at this stage is to bring all available resources to bear on the issue in hand. Among them are the gradually developing intellectual habits of nous or understanding to penetrate principles and to grasp the point, of episteme or science appreciating the implications, of reflective wisdom or sophia and phronesis estimating the validity of principles, understanding what is and what is to be done, and testing the strength of one's conclusions, of know-how or tekhne grasping how to act. This fourth stage of knowing is dominated by the question An sit? - Is it so? Here reasoning stands to understanding as motion to rest, as travelling to arriving. With the attainment of understanding one effects the rational transition to judgment.
Judgment is the fifth stage in which one affirms truly or falsely that things exist or that events occur. Judgments stand to reflective understanding as concepts and definitions to direct understanding. The procession of judgment is an actually and actively intelligible and critically reflective intelligible emanation according to the naturally known first principles of Identity, Non-Contradiction, Excluded Middle and Sufficient Reason. The principles of intellect itself are the standard of judgment. One knows by what one is. Intellectual habit is the known sufficient ground and cause of what it does, the birth and life in us of the light and evidence by which we operate on our own. It is reason which both gives meaning to and is the criterion of ‘reality.’ The first principles which are in the possible intellect as efficient cause of its own judgments, but from agent intellect which is the principal cause of both direct and reflective understanding, are not laws, but the self-evident essential conditions of there being objects to be related by laws and relations to relate them. Intelligence stands to law as cause to effect. It is constitutive and creative of law, and the ground of its intelligibility. Since first principles are grounded not merely in intelligibility but in intelligence, their valid application is not limited to the realm of possible human experience, but extends to all that is. Intellectual light reflects by intellectual light upon intellectual light to understand itself and pronounce its universal validity. Though self-evidently known, it is known not as object, but as the medium of knowing, somewhat as the eye sees light not as object, but in seeing coloured objects.
Intellectual light constitutes our power of understanding, manifests first principles, makes them evident, motivates rational assent to them, is the actuating element of all intelligible species, the immanent ground of certitude, the notion of being, where being is not abstract but concrete and existentially dynamic esse.
The objective judgment which is the instrument of reflective understanding is merely conditioned by experience, or the givenness of inner or outer actuality. Moreover, this judgment is not what is known, but the medium in which reality is known.
The transcendental object of human understanding is the concretely real. Truth is correspondence not between the objective judgment and reality, but, in that judgment, between mind and thing. Hence, human truth is not truth absolutely, but truth as in a subject. Such relative truth (the relativity of which does not imply relativism) can be expressed absolutely only at the abstract level of the objective judgment; as normative for action it must be taken in the full context of the total man-world situation.
Knowledge is by identity. The understanding in act is intentionally the understood in act. Only by reflection on the identity of act can one arrive at the difference of potency to grasp the intellect's quality of intellectual light, of transcendence-in-immanence. Growth in knowledge is the development in possible intellect of the habitual grasp of principles from an initial merely potential wisdom towards an intentional identity with the universe of being about which one is, effected by agent intellect in accordance with the conditions of human experience, which is understood by mind as a function in the derivative.
Individual matter and contingent existence are intelligible only tangentially. The particular and concrete is known by man only through sense and imagination and feeling.
I regard this Thomist analysis of human knowing as brilliantly precise, and am grateful to Lonergan for freeing it from the distortions to which it has been for too long subjected. Since the terminology, which cannot in this case be divorced from the thinking, is now unfamiliar, some alternative presentation of at least the main elements of Thomist psychology of intellect is required.
This question is one of crucial importance, and I come now to Lonergan's personal attempt to solve it. Insight - A Study of Human Understanding194 stands or falls by Lonergan's account of knowing as a dynamic structure.
He affirms that the human mind by its very nature is able to penetrate beneath the phenomenal level of its perceptual or imaginal objects and to grasp, obscurely but nevertheless genuinely, the underlying intelligible being. Human knowing is based on the givenness of relevant data, informed by the consciously intelligent and rational exigences of the human mind guiding its own process from data to judging, and actualised when reflective understanding achieves a virtually unconditioned synthesis of basic experience and informing intelligence to reach an absolute judgment. The criterion of truth is the actuality of one's own experience, understanding and judgment. Cognitional process moves from reflection upon objects of thought through rationally compelling evidence to judgments about reality, and through truth to being itself.
While Wren-Lewis, to take one instance,195 believes that true objectivity comes through direct emotional encounter with what is other than ourselves, Lonergan finds it obvious that one can have the feeling that someone is present when no one is there. He thinks that especially in a world come of age such feelings should be examined, scrutinized, and investigated. What is decisive is not the felt presence, but the rational judgment that follows upon an investigation of the felt presence.
How does the judgment of concrete existence take place, and how is it critically verified about objects distinct from the knowing self? C. R. Fay argued196 that Lonergan's reasons for accepting the validity of human knowing were that judgments with transcendent pretensions do in fact exist; that the deepest foundation for knowledge is pragmatic; that the correspondence between knowledge and reality is the simplest hypothesis for explaining why knowledge has its peculiar structure; and that if being is defined as the object of intelligence one doesn't have to prove that it is its object. However, for Lonergan himself verification is a cumulative convergence of direct and indirect confirmations any one of which by itself settles just nothing.
In 1950 he wrote:197 “The definition of truth is correspondence between judgment and reality. The criterion of truth is evidence. Now, to postulate intuitions is unquestionably simple and simplifying. At once the definition and the criterion of truth are made to coincide. At a stroke the critical problem is eliminated, for if evidence is evident intuition of reality, there is neither need nor possibility of proceeding rationally from the criterion to the definition of truth. Unfortunately the postulated intuitions do not seem to exist. In its first moment, on each level, knowledge seems to be act, perfection, identity; such identity of itself is not a confrontation; confrontation does arise, but only in a second moment, and by a distinct act, of perception as distinct from sensation, of conception as distinct from insight, of judgment as distinct from reflective understanding. On this showing confrontation is not primitive but derived; and its is derived from what is not confrontation, not intuition, nor formal and explicit duality. Admittedly it is difficult to justify such derivation. Overtly to accept such difficulty is a basic and momentous philosophic option. Still it seems to me to be the way of honesty and truth.”
In defining being as the object of the desire to know, he is not adopting a postulatory method of argument; his definition expresses an insight into the nature of human understanding as infallibly disclosed to rational, and not merely intellectual consciousness in actual performance. I experience a rational urge to grasp the many as one. The deepest foundation of human knowing is, therefore, pragmatic, but not arbitrary. Judgments with a transcendent reference exist not just as a matter of fact, but as being in some instances expressive of authentic personal certitude about being, for example, that it is the object of the pure desire to know. Isomorphism may not be evidently necessary, but can it be denied without falling into a transcendental contradiction?
It took Saint Augustine years to discover that the word “real” did not have the same connotation as the word “body.” Man, as I have already emphasized, stands in need of an intellectual conversion from the shadows and images of his private dream-world to the truth of the universe of being. Very few realise it is through concepts and judgments that authentic, real being is known. Nevertheless, all science presupposes that reality is intelligible, and metaphysics is the discovery that reality is intelligibility. Lonergan stands for intelligence ever seeking to clarify and affirm itself, and to confirm its position by a proper and differentiated interest in particular fields, and that would deny itself alike were it to regard those fields as either irrelevant or normative.
A priori rejections of the a priori based on an incomplete appreciation of the mind's operation violate the very empirical principle they would establish or employ. We should let questions occur and recur, refusing to be satisfied with poetry, or devotion, or the thrill of intersubjective experience, or the satisfaction of a speciality mastered - at least, if we wish to grasp the many as one.
That is why, as a philosophical theologian, I have concluded that dynamic self-involvement in the dialogue between belief and unbelief is intrinsic to religious experience, and that the Last Judgment may be, in a sense, the first. As a Roman Catholic believer my commitment to this dialogue is an expression of my supernatural faith in G-d, a faith which is G-d's free gift to me. The non-believer's participation in the dialogue expresses instead, I presume, his belief in his own humanity, a belief which I share, albeit for a profoundly different motive, and this common ground makes our dialogue possible.
The difficulty is that of understanding the act of insight. It is act because it is agere, energeia, the actuation or second act of the informed intellect. It is not a transitive activity, not facere, poiesis. It is active not as an episode, but as the achievement of the knower's dynamic intention. It is also a self-consciously intelligent and creative capacity, disposition, proneness or inclination to express itself in a whole galaxy of derivative ideas, theories, and patterns of behaviour. Nevertheless, in terms of the Aristotelian categories, insight is not action but passion, so that human living at its most intimate centre is not self-initiated, although it is self-possessed and self-satisfying. Insight and the personal loving sometimes emanating from it is G-d's gift to man, mediated by a two-fold convergent path: that of our growing mind in its developing appreciation of its own desire to know, and that of the evolving process of the universe impinging upon our sensory apparatus and causing our maturing experience. Whenever these two scissor-blades meet, there emerges from their intersection a further flash of insight, a new increment in our achievement of intellectual delight, so that our minds reflect with that extra sparkle the infinite beauty of G-d.
The objection has been made that Lonergan has missed the distinction between intelligibilities immanent in the objects and patterns of experience, and intelligibilities projected by the knower into objects and patterns of experience. Contemporary physicists construct a mathematical theory of the event in order to transform regularity, separateness and sequence into hypothetical necessity, unity and relation, where the necessity comes from the logical structure of the implications of mathematical functions, the unity from the absence of further interaction terms in the defining Hamiltonian, and the relation from a suitable assignment of contours of integration so that the response vanishes for times earlier than the beginning of the excitation. The intelligibilities found by physicists are, therefore, those they themselves project onto experience. Physical quantities are manufactured articles; they are measure-numbers of the world condition, and are defined by the series of operations and calculations of which they are the result.
Lonergan meets this difficulty by his distinction between the primary and the secondary relativities of relations,199 which I shall not explore here. It was not Lonergan but Galileo who made the easy mistake of thinking that physical laws were properties of things apart from the mind, instead of an answer to the mind's question about things, which is also a question about itself.
In the words of D. B. Burrell:200
“Principles or laws which are not susceptible of formulation, whose meaning shifts with each different type of application form the criteria of judgment or appraisal. Anyone who speaks of parsimony, elegance and the rest in the pluralistic fasion we (and later Wittgenstein201) have adopted is ipso facto committed to something like what Lonergan calls judgment. For this simply means the ability to recognize one account as preferable to another - a procedure justified by recourse to terms like simpler, more elegant, and the rest. The meaning of such terms, then, is one's ability to use them in one or more fields of inquiry. Nor is this use an application of a criterion independently formulated. No definition will be forthcoming that is context-invariant. We are left quite simply with an ability to discern or discriminate.202 Consideration must needs be abstract. At the moment of truth, however, it is paramount, for a discerning judgment, to ask how abstract our considerations have been. Such awareness becomes the proximate condition for judging truly, what Lonergan calls the reflective grasp of the virtually unconditioned. The statement is asserted to be true, then, and thereby offered as a contribution to an ongoing inquiry. The extent to which it is a responsible contribution is not yet settled. Only in responding to comment and criticism, in our ability to discern which be relevant, to refute and to incorporate, will we be able to show (and to know) how responsible a statement it was. This capacity to respond to criticism - our own or others' - is the only measure we have of our awareness in making the assertion. And as its only measure, it is the cash value of the term, the reason why Lonergan speaks of the judgment as virtually unconditioned. The performance will never match the intent; and only time and fidelity to the remote conditions of truth - the demands of ongoing inquiry - can tell us how close it came.”
I wish now to try and express things in my own way in ordinary language.203 The meaning of my human living is in my bodily behaviour not like fruit in a dish but more like my reflection in a mirror. Just as I see myself by looking in the mirror rather than at it, so I enjoy insight into my possible development by inspecting my present situation instead of just viewing it superficially. I understand my meaning in the symbolic language that is my own personal bodying, my projection of behaviour patterned in my own image.
My bodily behaviour is my personal self-expression, so that anyone who understands my behaviour is on the way towards understanding me. Man's spontaneous drive towads meaning is manifested first of all in his raising the question, What?, Why? or How? with reference to some individual instance of human, bodily behaviour. In other words, it is the challengingly concrete and individually existing intrinsic intelligibility latent in human bodying that first moves a person to ask a question.
But although the first focussing of human attention and concern occurs within the field of man's global experience of himself as living with others in and about the world, his interest is potentially infinite in its range. Although in a spatio-temporal universe, man is about all that is, and he is about it consciously. By his wonder, his questioning What is it? and Is it? man is open to all reality.
Because man is a questioner, always questioning, always attending, always concerned, he does not so much start to attend, but rather only brings to a focus an attention that is, in some sense, already given. He never really asks a new question; rather he poses a problem, defines an issue, concentrates on a particular area within the pre-existing total field of inquiry that his questioning permanently intends. Other things make sense if they can be understood; man makes sense because he can understand. He is not just a heap of flesh and bones. Men and women cannot be reduced to hot numbers, curves and vital statistics.
The particularized questioning which is the initial stage of human knowing is called objective abstraction. It is not called abstraction because it leaves something out, for man's experience is always the total one of himself as living with others in and about the world, but simply because the focussing of attention that particularizes his questioning into a question about this as distinct from that, necessarily blurs his awareness of the foreground and background to what is inquired into, and temporarily prescinds from it - though, as one finds to one's cost, only falsely will he deny its relevance.
This dynamic questioning that drives towards meaning as the eye towards colours is man's spirit of wonder and inquiry, the self-consciously intelligent and rational desire to know and understand. This questioning uses images or sense impressions or bodily behaviour just as a writer uses a typewriter, or an orator the words of a language. As a writer is commonly not concerned with the colour of his typewriter,204 nor the orator with the absolute pitch of his voice, so man's questing spirit subsumes some aspects of human bodying immediately into the world of its interests and values, but may, perhaps unwisely,205 abstract from other aspects and dismiss them as trivial and irrelevant. It is this focussing of attention that assumes sense experience into an intelligent horizon. In this way sense knowledge becomes actually, and not just potentially intelligible, the experiential aspects of sensible things become the material causes of human knowledge, and particular data furnish man with material evidence for his eventual personal judgment about the meaning of his own reality, indeed, about the meaning of reality in extenso.
Heidegger has called man a clearing in the forest of being. If the universe is a statement,206 man is the questioner in whom its meaning is progressively brought to light and expressed. Active questioning is the relentlessly dynamic performance that constitutes human Dasein, man's being about the world.
I have spoken about the first stage of human knowing, viz., objective abstraction, or the posing of a particular question. The second stage is the particularized answering within the mind of the questioner, and it is this particularized answering considered relatively to the question as heuristic content and in abstraction from the vital context in which alone it occurs. It is from this point of view that such answering is called apprehensive abstraction, direct understanding or insight. At this stage my understanding of, for instance, my own bodily behaviour is my appreciation of at least one possible meaning as interpretative of a particular behaviour pattern independently of the limiting conditions imposed by the context of that behaviour, viz., my total existential situation. Such understanding is, therefore, abstract, and prescinds from truth and falsity, from the distinction between fact and fiction, history and legend, mystery and myth, alchemy and chemistry, astrology and astronomy.207 This understanding is infallible in its own way because whatever I understand is certainly possible. Only the intelligible, viz., the intrinsically possible, can be understood. Notice, too, that while such understanding is, indeed, abstract, I understand a possible meaning in the bodily behaviour of which it is the hypothetical explanation.
Human bodying is the material cause of human living, man's self-consciously active meaning is its formal cause, its intrinsic intelligibility, the person himself expressing meaningfully his own self-identity is its efficient cause, interpersonal communication is the final cause, the body is an instrumental cause, and the human performance of other persons may be an exemplar cause. Thus, in the image the sensible data are material causes of knowing, and, as assumed into an intellectual horizon, the image is an instrumental cause of knowing, man's active questioning being the principal efficient cause. The formal cause of direct understanding is supplied by the intrinsic intelligibility of some sensible reality moving my questioning to particularize itself as a question in order to find itself as the meaningful answer to its own situation. The mind is a self-assembling, self-adjusting, multipurpose medium of understanding. The eye cannot hear, and the nose cannot see, but the mind can come to understand not only flavours, sounds, perfumes and colours, but all that is. Its potentiality is its infinite openness.
When I consider my particularized answering not so much in its relation to my question as heuristic content, but rather as being itself the formulation of a possible answer, theory or hypothesis, I arrive at the third stage of human knowing, which is formative abstraction. As well as grasping an intelligibility in the data, my insight is itself actually and actively intelligible since I am intellectually conscious of my own understanding. Insight into some relevant representative sample or symbolic image of my bodily behaviour suggests to me some answer to my question, What am I? Why are my flesh and bones human? As supplying an answer to some such question insight is formative abstraction. The tentative answer or suggested objective meaning is a concept or idea proceeding from insight as learning from teaching. This concept or projected meaning is an instrument of my self-expressive understanding, and refers potentially to reality, in this case to the reality who I myself am.
Because human knowing is not content with a grasp of possibilities, it has a fourth stage, that of reasoning and weighing the evidence, of critical reflection. What am I? Why are my flesh and bones human? How are my flesh and bones human? My human bodying, the actual behaviour of these flesh and bones here and now, provides the material evidence. My insight into that bodying, and my appreciation of the possibility that they are human precisely because they are the instruments of my rational inquiry into the intrinsic intelligibility of the behaviour expressed in them, constitutes a formal integration of the evidence.
I move then to judgment, the fifth stage of human knowing, to affirm, I claim truly but you may think falsely, that I am a man because I am rational, and that I know I am a man in that sense, because my reflective understanding has grasped in my own experience as bodying, questioning, theorizing and reflecting, the fulfilment of all the relevant conditions for the existence of such knowledge in me. My knowing exists, and it is conditioned. I know I am a knower, because I know these flesh and bones are the locus of my experienced performance of questioning. Flesh and bones reveal no answer to this question, and neither does the rest of the cosmos. In the light of Christ's resurrection from the dead I can entrust myself to G-d's final judgment.
For many, philosophers are academics who ought to confine their attention to speculative questions, and not concern themselves with the practicalities of life. As a second order activity philosophy is concerned with the evaluation of concepts, their analysis, their logical status and force, and their relation both to the facts that give them significance and to the language in which they are expressed. If philosophy as this second-order activity is to resist the charge of ivory-tower retreat from life, it must express existential concern for some first-order enterprise to which it is relevant, and my own feeling as a philosopher who am first of all a theologian has always been that there is no enterprise to which it cannot be made relevant. The philosopher's finger can dip into every pie.
Life has brought me into contact with psychology and education in addition to philosophy and theology, and possibly with more advantages than drawbacks. Certainly the existential projection of philosophical theories into the constitutive matrix of individual motivations and social processes has taken us beyond the old distinctions between philosophy and life.
I have learned from all the various authors whose writings I have referred to in the notes, and so may most fittingly conclude this Chapter by proving my readers with an indication of my own other published writings to that they have available to them at least the material evidence for an eventual judgment on their value.208 Clearly, however, the process of learning ever remains open.
Please notice that a deliberate distinction is here made between Capital and small letters.
“Ac ratio quidem, fide illustrata, cum sedulo, pie et sobrie quaerit, aliquam Deo dante mysteriorum intelligentiam eamque fructuosissimam assequitur tum ex eorum, quae naturaliter cognoscit, analogia, tum e mysteriorum ipsorum nexu inter se et cum fine hominis ultimo; numquam tamen idonea redditur ad ea perspicienda instar veritatum, quae proprium ipsius obiectum constituunt. Divina enim mysteria suapte natura intellectum creatum sic excedunt, ut etiam revelatione tradita et fide suscepta ipsius tamen fidei velamine contecta et quadam quasi caligine obvoluta maneant, quamdiu in hac mortali vita ‘peregrinamur a Domino: per fidem enim ambulamus et non per speciem’ (2 Co 5:6s).” Cc. Vatican. I: sess. III: Cst. de fide cath. Cap. 4. De f et r.
“Idcirco augusta Dei Mater, Iesu Christo, inde ab omni æternitate, uno eodemque decreto prædestinationis, arcano modo coniuncta, immaculata in suo conceptu, in divina maternitate sua integerrima virgo, generosa Divini Redemptoris socia, qui plenum de peccato eiusque consectariis deportavit triumphum, id tandem assecuta est, quasi supremam suorum privilegiorum coronam, ut a sepulcri corruptione servaretur immunis, utque, quemadmodum iam Filius suus, devicta morte, corpore et anima ad supernam Cæli gloriam eveheretur, ubi Regina refulgeret ad eiusdem sui Filii dexteram, immortalis sæculorum Regis.” Ann. 1950: Pius XII: Cst. Ap. (Assumptio B. Mariæ)
Catholic theologians have hitherto regarded Mary as an exception, but the Truth I+N Theology IS that, I+N Virtue of her Sovereign Prerogative as Mother of G-d, Mary is the Only Rule of Life!
‘I’ is each unique person, ‘N’ the primordial Water; their con-fused mingling is the dark mystery
M = I + N
Introït
I+N the Beginning
I+N swaddling clothes I+N a manger I+N the Inn
I+N-sight
I+N Life in death
I+N Love
I+N
The Divine Mystery IS Absolutely I+Nfinite. Thanks Be to G-d!
Lonergan's Of Supernatural Being "Notes to Insight
In 1973 in Ecstasy and Vendetta I had unequivocally acknowledged my very considerable indebtedness to Father Bernard Lonergan, but it was not until 1974 that he delivered a public lecture under the above title. Already in the Epilogue to Insight (1957) he had concluded: "I believe this work to contribute to the programme, vetera novis augere et perficere, initiated by the encyclical, Aeterni Patris, of His Holiness, Pope Leo XIII," and on 3 March 1980 in a letter to Frederick Crowe he clarified that "Method is about surmounting differences in history."
"Lonergan had said in his 1958 lectures: '.... The heuristic structure in itself is a content'.... There was, however, what I consider his most important later addition, making explicit... the two directions in which one might move along the structure. There is the way up from the presentations of experience, through ideas and judgements, to values and responsible action; one might call this the way of achievement, of self-taught learning, of progress for the human race. And there is the way down through values handed on in family and society, judgements imbibed in a community of love rather than formed in personal acquisition, understanding that comes tardily to the support of this set of judgements, and the experience made mature and perceptive as a result; one might call this the way of tradition, of heritage, of learning by osmosis, of handing on what previous generations had achieved.210
This second direction has not been exploited. Lonergan himself came late to its formulation; we do not find it, where it belongs, in the background chapters of Method, but in those post-Method papers which point a way but do not follow it to the end.... As the Middle Ages repeated after Aristotle, 'Qualis unusquisque est, talis et finis videtur ei': 'the end appears to each man in a form answering to his character'211
.... We must become personally involved, laying our own foundations, affirming our own positions, understanding them in our own systems, communicating with others in the intersubjectivity of our own situation.... Operational content is the mediating factor.... From this perspective it becomes clear that one cannot specify categories for research; one goes rather to a master and becomes an apprentice."212
In his Foreword to the German edition of the only posthumously published Meditations on the Tarot - A Journey into Christian Hermeticism Hans Urs von Balthasar acknowledged the anonymous author's "unmistakable purity," and approved of the way in which he "seeks to lead mediatively into the deeper, all-embracing wisdom of the Catholic Mystery."213
Joan D'Arcy Cooper (1927-1982) also preferred the term "mediation" to "meditation." All her beautifully clear writings merit attention. The Anglican church at Culbone is the smallest in England & Wales. Joan Cooper played the harmonium and was a licensed lay-reader there for many years, and it was in Culbone that she wrote her books.214
Another wise Anglican, the nun and Jungian analyst Helen Mary Luke, was 88 when she completed her valuable Kaleidoscope - 'The Way of Woman' and other essays.215
As well as being of inestimable value in their own right, all of the above in my own mind serve as a much needed complementary and balancing corrective to the crucially and cardinally important methodological contributions of Bernard Lonergan, whose life-work is most helpfully focussed in Frederick E. Crowe's Lonergan (Geoffrey Chapman, 1992). Father Crowe looks after the International Lonergan Archive in Toronto which among its many academic treasures includes, perhaps least deserving of mention, most of my unpublished Lonergan-related papers and some of my published work.
Lonergan's Insight - A Study of Human Understanding,216 Grace and Freedom - Operative Grace in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas,217 Verbum - Word & Idea in Aquinas,218 and Method in Theology 219 belong together, but knowledge of Latin is needed in order fully to comprehend either Grace and Freedom or Verbum, each of which is a re-issue in book form of studies originally published in specialist theological journals.
In Method (p.343) Lonergan wrote: "There is a still further consequence of the shift from a faculty psychology to intentionality analysis. It is that the basic terms and relations of systematic theology will be not metaphysical, as in medieval theology, but psychological... General basic terms name conscious and intentional operations. General basic relations name elements in the dynamic structure linking operations and generating states. Special basic terms220 name G-d's gift of his love and Christian witness. Derived terms and relations name the objects known in operations and correlative to states."
Hence, he correctly emphasises the fundamental importance of religious conversion, of moral conversion and of intellectual conversion. He notes that a given individual may be the subject of all three conversions, of any two of them, of any one of them, or may as yet remain unconverted. His self-knowledge grew sufficiently for him to master the essence of Aquinas's contribution to Christian self-understanding, to develop it further, and helpfully to communicate the main body of his findings to us.
Lonergan, however, perhaps because of his paedagogical and pastoral prudence rather than on account of any remaining blind-spots or notable personal ignorance, failed to acknowledge in Method the existence of what I have now chosen to call "enstatic conversion," an invaluable key to discriminating the wheat from the chaff in fundamentally important areas and dimensions of interfaith dialogue, ecumenical dialogue and Thomist-Scotist dialogue - in this connection Father Eric Doyle's St. Francis and the Song of Brotherhood221 is well worth re-reading.
Eric Doyle and I both attended Bolton's Thornleigh Salesian College. Referring to St. Francis of Assisi, he affirmed (p.42) that the Founder's love of G-d "heightened his sensitivity and endowed him with the precious gift of heart-sight." Dom Iltyd Trethowan, too, more than once expressed unease at Lonergan's repeated denial of intuition.
Now is not the time to go over all the other relevant data, but my own conclusion is clear and peremptory enough. Lonergan affirms in Method (pp. 241-2) that "Because intellectual, moral, and religious conversion all have to do with self-transcendence, it is possible, when all three occur within a single consciousness, to conceive their relations in terms of sublation... in Karl Rahner's sense," so that everything is put "on a new basis," which sets the subject "on a new, existential level of consciousness and establishes him as an originating value." The point I am here making is that although Lonergan did not, in the technical sense, know this, such a subject will, therefore, as the lives of St. Francis of Assisi, of the author of Meditations on the Tarot and, I suspect, of Joan Cooper, Helen Luke and many others superabundantly bear witness, experience what I have suggested is best technically referred to as enstatic conversion. The word "Preliminary" in the title "Preliminary LibrArian", for instance, particularly refers to the moment prior to the individual subject's enstatic conversion.
Lonergan has identified William Johnston's The Mysticism of the Cloud of Unknowing222 as representing a position very largely coherent with his own.
The passage from Ch. 7,1.2.4.6 of St. Bonaventure's The Journey of the Mind to G-d223 included in the Office of Readings for his feast (15 July) points, I suggest, beyond that to the distinction (not separation) I make between religious conversion and enstatic conversion, as does, I believe, the reading from Deuteronomy (30:10-14) for the 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year C).224
Lonergan also wrote in Method (pp. 343-4, my italics): "Since knowledge of intentional consciousness can develop, it follows that the whole foregoing structure admits development and thereby escapes rigidity. At the same time, the structure ensures continuity, for the possibility of development is the possibility of revising earlier views, and the possibility of revising earlier views is the continuing existence of the structure already determined. Finally, the approach eliminates any authoritarian basis for method. One can find out for oneself and in oneself just what one's conscious and intentional operations are and how they are related to one another. One can discover for oneself and in oneself why it is that performing such and such operations in such and such manners constitutes human knowing. Once one has achieved that, one is no longer dependent on someone else in selecting one's method and in carrying it out. One is on one's own."
In company with St. Bonaventure (De triplici via, iii, 14), though responsibility for the new technical term 'enstatic conversion' is entirely my own, I significantly depart from Lonergan's italic assertion, and: "Note, lastly, what the Truth must be - (1) In the first Hierarchy: evoked by the utterance of prayer, work of the Angels; heard in study and reading, work of the Archangels; announced through example and preaching, work of the Principalities. (2) In the second Hierarchy: joined with as refuge and place of indulgence, work of the Powers; apprehended through zeal and emulation, work of the Virtues; conjoined with in self-deprecation and mortification, work of the Dominions. (3) In the third Hierarchy: worshipped through sacrifice and praise, work of the Thrones; admired through ecstasy and contemplation, work of the Cherubim; embraced in kiss and delection, work of the Seraphim.... This is a fountain of life."225
A detailed study of Meditations on the Tarot, of Joan D'Arcy Cooper's five books, of Helen Mary Luke's Kaleidoscope, and of as many of Lonergan's numerous publications as one can stomach is an indispensable precondition to the subsequent task of reconciling their dynamic strengths and transmuting into a higher golden wisdom their dialectical almost contradictions. The author of Meditations, for instance, refers to "metaphysics" in a vocabulary influenced by that of post-Kantian anti-metaphysical authors, while Lonergan's 'metaphysics' is essentially that of Thomas Aquinas and, therefore, not that of the many post-Thomas Thomistic authors Lonergan saw as 'crypto-Scotists'! Again, the author of Meditations distinguishes between astrology and Astrology, magic and Magic, alchemy and Alchemy, gnosis and Gnosis, etc., whereas Lonergan seems invariably to have been content to prefer astronomy to astrology, chemistry to alchemy, mystery to myth, history to legend. Lonergan also imagined the Ancient Greeks were in most respects culturally ahead of their predecessors.226
The needed reconciliation and transmutation may take time, but a lot of the ground has been surveyed already. Here I mention just a few available relevant resources, which are also worth reading for their own sake: Frederick Bligh Bond & Thomas Simcox Lea, Gematria - A Preliminary Investigation of The Cabala contained in the Coptic Gnostic Books and of a similar Gematria in the Greek text of the New Testament;227 Thomas Simcox Lea & Frederick Bligh Bond, Materials for the Study of The Apostolic Gnosis - Part II;228 John Boswell, The Marriage of Likeness - Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe;229 Elisabeth Schuessler Fiorenza, The Discipleship of Equals - A Critical Feminist Ekklesialogy of Liberation;230 Sallie Nichols, Jung and Tarot - An Archetypal Journey;231 Arthur Versluis, The Philosophy of Magic.232
Ever since John-Paul II took on the mantle of Peter among us, I have been attempting to have my ministry recognised as no bar to the exercise of the ordained priesthood, but I cannot truthfully say I am surprised that the Vatican has not as yet placed me high on its list of priorities.
Since 25 March 1994 I have been, when appropriate, using "Extra-Reverend" as part of my style of address. Suggesting, as it does, either something like "Extra-Mural", "Extra-Territorial" and "Extra-Terrestrial" or else something "Extra Pure", "Extra Strong" and "Extra Reliable" - or, indeed, the paradoxical combination of all these, might it not help if all laicised priests were listed in the Catholic Directory under that style of address, with their addresses and phone numbers, so that the People of G-d have open access to all those whom G-d thus has called?
On 27 June 1995 a fellow maverick, Lord Pandit Professor Doctor Sir Anton Jayasuriya wrote to me from the Open International University for Complementary Medicines, Colombo, Sri Lanka, informing me that, subject to my consent, I had been nominated to receive the academic degree of Doctor in Sciences, honoris causa, in appreciation of my "dedication and outstanding contributions to scientific knowledge," which he further identified as "significant achievements in the scientific fields related to humanitarian studies." Although I was unable to travel to Colombo to attend the November Convocation ceremonies in connection with that University's 33rd anniversary celebrations, to which the President of Sri Lanka had also been invited, the Senate then graciously authorized the conferring of this honour upon me in absentia, and I was, therefore, very happy to accept it.
In Psalm 19:1-2 we aren't only assured that "The heavens declare the glory of G-d; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork." Nor, indeed, are we simply informed that "Day unto day uttereth speech." The inspired psalmist also reveals to us that "night unto night sheweth knowledge."
It was at night that Nicodemus took counsel of Jesus. It was in dreams of the night that Joseph was counselled as to how best to safeguard the life of Jesus when Herod was seeking to destroy it. Christians of different affiliations drawn together by similarly obscure promptings of the Holy Spirit may learn and gain much from sharing their questions and uncertainties, and not simply their explicit beliefs.
Christ's One True Church is a redemptive process. Christian charity reconciles alienated men, women and children to themselves, to the entire human family, to Nature and to G-d, undoing the mischief the alienation initiated, and which ideology consolidates.
In an article entitled "The Mediation of Christ in Prayer"233 Lonergan wrote: "Destiny is perhaps the working out of individual autonomy within community, and so the summation of destinies in a community is the history of the community." Globally and locally this means we need to get our priorities right, take stock of resources, plan to remedy our deficiencies, study how best and most effectively - starting, of course, from where we are now - to work towards our common goal, which Jesus has already specified for each and every one of us: "I am come that they may have Life, and that they might have it more abundantly."234
My own most basic questions to my fellow humans today, whether they be renowned Nobel prize-winners or not, are those raised in an ecumenical context on several occasions by Father Bernard Lonergan - (1) What am I doing when I am knowing? (2) Why is doing that knowing? (3) What do I know when I do it? Because different individuals and groups are at different stages of personal development and communion in G-d's School-IN-Love, the words, voices, styles, symbols, gestures and other modalities in, with and through which such questions are considered rightly resonate across the entire spectrum of the Rainbow!235
In the words of this Preliminary LibrArian's immediate predecessor in office, the transcendent vastness of what I have been inspired to call the Neith Network comprises "the physical, vital, psychic and spiritual worlds: their structure, forces, beings, their reciprocal relationships, their transformations and the history of these transformations"236 - past, future and present NOW. It is, IN Truth, a vast domain! The Library is that known as Thoth's Hall of Records in the Hermetic Tradition, and to gain access to the Book one needs to steer clear of what is called Babylon.... Indeed, babble-on discussions won't get us very far, authentic dialogue is urgent.
In the Tetragrammaton YOD is spiritual touch (intuition), mysticism, the seed, root and source of all religious life; the first HE is gnosis; VAU is magic (child of mysticism and gnosis); the final HE is the Book of Hermetic philosophy above mentioned, summation of what is revealed. Authority is this completely manifested divine name - the magic of spiritual profundity filled with wisdom, YOD being divine initiative, and initiation the state of consiousness where eternity and the present moment are one - Sanctificetur nomen tuum.
To YOD, HE, VAU, HE correspond: fire, air, water and earth; wands, cups, swords and pentacles; creativity, clarity, fluidity and precision in thought; warmth, magnanimity, sensitivity and faithfulness in feeling; ardour, fullness, flexibility and stability of will; intensity, scope, adaptability and firmness in desire; prudent initiative, serene strength, well-tempered mobility, steadfastness in justice - Plato's wisdom, courage, temperance and justice, or Sankaracharya's discernment (viveka) and serenity (vairagya) together with his "six jewels" of just conduct and the desire for deliverance; human knowing, leonine strength of will, the eagle's daring and the bull's silent concentration.
Again, YOD expresses the original impulse and active principle, spirit, efficient causality; the first HE the passive principle or containing and limiting formal cause; VAU the neutral principle, matter in evolution, the material cause; the second HE their actual manifestation and final cause, individuality - the phenomena themselves. More specifically, the Father and the Great Voice as source - the Supreme Mother and the Torah as law - the Son and the Shekinah as method - the Daughter and the Messiah's Virgin-Birth as aim. The Messiah is the seventh term or principle of the hexagram Father, Son, Holy Spirit; Mother, Daughter, Holy Soul. "Thou shalt not commit adultery."237
In Meditations on the Tarot YOD is also particularly associated with the East and with Fomalhaut in the stellar Fish, the first HE of the Tetragrammaton with the West and with Regulus, VAU with the North and with Altair, and the final HE with the South and with Aldebaran.
The anonymous author helpfully affirms that a harmoniously balanced neutral sattvic yellow colour symbolises the dynamic equilibrium between actively red raja and passively blue tama immanent within the entire world-in-movement emanating from the four spirits of the above-mentioned four elements, which he also identifies as the four rivers flowing out of Eden's original and quintessential and primordially impulsive current of Life. For further relevant details he refers readers to Professor Friedrich Weinreb's De Bijbel als schepping238
It was on Francesco Patrizi's advice that Pope Gregory XIV (1590-1591) favoured an expression of Christian theology in Hermetic terms. Rudolf Hauschka in The Nature of Substance239 usefully relates alchemical fire, air, water and earth to the chemical elements, especially hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and carbon, and also to the vitamins, especially vitamins A-D.
I mention, too, Isidore Kozminsky's Numbers - Their Meaning and Magic240 chiefly on account of a problem its author has noticed: "In Job 38:31 'HATHEQESHER MODENUTH KIMAH AO MOSHECOTH KESIL TIPETECH' is freely rendered into English 'Canst thou bind the sweet influence of the Pleiades or loosen the bands of Orion?', when it should be: 'Canst thou bind the tremblings of heat or loose the seals of coldness?' There is nothing here about either the Pleiades or Orion.... No man of knowledge in the ancient world would have written of the 'sweet influence of the Pleiades,' situated in 27° of Taurus, it is known today amongst students of astrology as a dangerous point which has a distinctly adverse influence on the eyes, especially when the Sun, Moon or planets are afflicted therein.... With the aid of modern scientific knowledge we know just what is meant by the bindings of heat tremblings and the freeing of cold, which ancient scholars knew some ages past. The true occult scholar cannot be included in the ranks of Bible critics; the Book to him is a library of excellence and a treasure of true knowledge. The translators of the Bible have done much harm in attempting too many liberties with the text."
Yet, according to the Sandhinirmochana-sutra ("Scripture unlocking the Mysteries") the Buddha wisely said: "Once practitioners of contemplation have penetrated the selflessness of phenomena in the absolute sense in true thusness in one cluster, they do not further seek the selflessness of phenomena in the absolute sense in true thusness individually in the other clusters, the sense media, conditional origination, nourishment, the truths, the points of mindfulness, the right efforts, the bases of occult powers, the religious faculties and powers, the branches of enlightenment and the branches of the path."241
In Genesis Revisited - Is Modern Science Catching Up With Ancient Knowledge?242 Zecharia Sitchin seeks to show that, notwithstanding today's "confrontation between Evolution and Creationism," "the Book of Genesis and its sources reflect the highest levels of scientific knowledge;" in other words, "the conflict is baseless."243 Genesis Revisited is a companion volume to the same author's masterly The Earth Chronicles series.244 Four glyphs "V O _ O" were inscribed about 12,000 years ago in the small niche just below the point of the entrance gable in the Great Pyramid - the earliest known writing on Earth; although not as yet interpreted - even by Sitchin, who has unravelled several of the Pyramid's hitherto most perplexing puzzles, they, too, may correspond to the four letters of the Divine Name - reflected IN Mary as Charity-Chastity, Faith-Obedience, Hope-Poverty, Humility.
In my RILKO Lecture The '12th' Planet - Origin of Earth & Home of Man's Creator I reviewed Zecharia Sitchin's main conclusions in the books so far published. By the '12th' planet Sitchin understands what NASA calls Planet X, but what the ancient Sumerians called Nibiru. He claims that 445,000 years ago Enki, the first-born son of the then Nibiruan ruler Anu, established Earth Station 1 at Eridu in Mesopotamia at the north-west of the Persian Gulf, and that about 430,000 years ago Enki's half-sister, Ninharsag, joined him as Chief Medical Officer. In 298,000 B.C. in circumstances I only summarised in my lecture, but which Sitchin has described in detail in his books, Ninharsag at Enki's request and with the approval of Earth's then ruling Council of Extra-Terrestrials created first the male Adam and subsequently a succession of cloned male and female non-reproductive versions of Homo sapiens by implanting into selected Nibiruan females ova previously extracted from ape-women and genetically manipulated in vitro by fertilisation with male Nibiruan semen, possibly in combination with blood and, perhaps, copper-irradiated red earth.
About 250,000 years ago the Nibiruans also bestowed on Homo sapiens the potential for sexual self-reproduction. Nevertheless, as Sitchin emphasises in The Stairway to Heaven (p.86), neither the Akkadians nor their predecessors the Sumerians ever addressed these Nibiruan visitors to Earth as "gods. It is through later paganism that the notion of divine beings or gods has filtered into our language and thinking." Nevertheless, this linguistic infiltration has been so successful that by 4 December 1994 Sitchin had persuaded himself that, like their Marduk/Ra-influenced successors the Egyptians and Babylonians, even the Sumerians had looked upon the Nibiruans as 'gods'!
Whether or not she is regarded as a 'goddess', Ninharsag was undoubtedly a great lady. When in about 8,670 B.C. the 'divine' Ninurta vanquished the 'divine' Enki and his sons in the Second Great Pyramid War, for instance, it was thanks to her diplomacy that their lives were spared and a peace settlement was successfully negotiated, and she was then more than 420,000 years old! Again, when in 2,024 B.C., in the sixth year of the reign of the Earthling Ibbi-Sin, last king of Ur, at the 'divine' Enlil's behest, and despite the 'divine' Enki's easily predictable opposition, the 'gods' Ninurta and Nergal destroyed the post-Deluge Nibiruan Space-Port and its underground silo in the Sinai Peninsula and, incidentally, Sodom and Gomorrah by detonating seven atomic bombs, although several 'gods' and 'goddesses' lost their lives, Ninharsag, like Enki and Abraham, managed to survive.
Today Abraham's diplomatic request "Da mihi animas, coetera tolle"245 is the motto of the world-wide Roman Catholic Religious Congregation of St. John Bosco (1815-1888), and all members of the Salesian Family celebrate 24 May each year as the Feast of Mary, Help of Christians, and also pray to her in a special way246 on the 24th day of each month. In 2,048 B.C. Yahweh commanded Abraham and his élite corps of camel-mounted fighting-men to ride from the Hittite capital of Harran to southern Canaan, Marduk/Ra had himself accepted as "supreme god" in Babylon, and for the next 24 years Marduk repeatedly insisted that his time had come. However, as the events of 2,024 B.C. showed only too clearly, for the Babylonians and, indeed, for most of their neighbours, both human and divine, those 24 years were a prelude to disaster - redeemed only by Abraham's faith!
"Eritis Mihi Testes - You will be my balls!" is a philologically defensible247 English translation of St. Jerome's well know Vulgar Latin version of the original Greek text of Acts 1:8248. I don't imagine many contemporary Christian theologians would wish to invoke those words of Jesus Christ in particular either as an argument against the ordination of women or as one in support of the canonical requirement of clerical celibacy, but from the point of view of Freudian psychoanalysis it can hardly be doubted that this is at least a relevant quotation.
I venture to suggest, however, that much more is to be gained by meditating-mediating, in the light of all I have written above, on the unique relationship that is I+N Jesus-&-Mary: She died on His Cross; He Rose I+N Her Womb!
I recognize, of course, that many are not yet ready to acknowledge the direct relevance of any of what I have here written to our present situation, but Truth will prevail, and I feel most strongly that one must resolutely oppose any principle of community which defines itself by being against other aspects of the created world, seeking and gaining power by gathering together numbers of conforming individuals instead of nurturing and nourishing their growth IN Freedom
- Shalom & Welcome! - 190. J. H. NEWMAN, Grammar of Assent, London, Longmans, 1892, pp. 41. 88. 90-91. 197. 201. 227. 258. 344-45. 350. Cfr his Apologia pro Vita Sua, New York, Doubleday, 1956; Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, New York, Doubleday, 1960.
191. F. BRENTANO, The True and the Evident, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966, pp. 20. 24. 54. 55. 102. 110. 120. 122. 125. 128. 132. 137.
192. B. LONERGAN, Verbum - Word and Idea in Aquinas, London, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1968.
193. Note to p. 111, 2nd last §: “what is known by intellect is a partial constituent of the reality first known by sense…” It is important to appreciate how the word “sense” is used. For instance, in Method in Theology (p. 242) Lonergan mentions "Karl Rahner's sense”. Eric Doyle in St. Francis… (p. 42, note 161 above) refers to what he calls “heart-sight”.
194. Cfr note 15 above.
195. In his review of Insight, note 149 above.
196. New Scholasticism, 34 (1960) pp. 461-87.
197. Modern Schoolman, 27 (1950) p. 155.
198. P. B. SHELLEY, from Adonais.
199. Insight, pp. 491-93.
200. Continuum 2 (1964) pp. 440-43.
201. Cfr N. MALCOLM, Ludwig Wittgenstein - A Memoir, Oxford University Press, 1959; W. A. SHIBLES, Wittgenstein, Language and Philosophy, Dubuque, Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co., 1969; P. WINCH, Studies in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969; L. WITTGENSTEIN, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and his Philosophical Investigations, Oxford, Blackwell, 1958.
202. Cfr C. HAMER, Gilbert Ryle's Wisdom, note 208 below; G. RYLE, “Induction and Hypothesis” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 16 (1937); “Predicting and Inferring” in the symposium, Observation and Interpretation, London, Butterworth, 1957.
203. Cfr V. C. CHAPPELL, Ordinary Language, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, 1964.
204. No doubt Unamuno or Wittgenstein might be, or anyone concerned with the colour of saying. Cfr W. PATER, The Renaissance, New York, Mentor Books, 1959.
205. Cfr e.g.: DANE RUDHYAR, The Magic of Tone and the Art of Music, Boulder & London, Shambhala, 1982.
206. Cfr C. HAMER, The Real Meaning of Words and Meaning Things in Words, note 208 below; M. HEIDEGGER, On The Way To Language, note 9 above.
207. Note to p.120, middle of the page: Although here I am following Lonergan's Insight, Lonergan later came to recognise the validity of ‘myth’ as the term “myth” is increasingly understood today. “Myth” does not feature in the Index to the English edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church where, quite probably, the statement, “ancient religions and cultures produced many myths concerning origins," is meant to be both evasively and helpfully ambiguous (Geoffrey Chapman, 1994, p.66, § 285). Additionally, I agree with the anonymous and posthumous author of Meditations on the Tarot that it can frequently be helpful to distinguish between “Alchemy” and “alchemy”, “Astrology” and “astrology”, “Reality” and “reality”. Indeed, in the light of J. D. SOLOMON, The Mind's Ear, Hounslow, Bibliagora, 1979, I sometimes find it necessary to distinguish between: Word, word, WORD, “word”, ‘word’, [word], {word} and (word). Cfr note 208 below, and in particular my unpublished J. D. Solomon Reflects on our Use and Misuse of Language and Logic, which is a separately produced extract from my longer study of his philosophy there mentioned..
208 For the record: a letter I wrote about the Ergot problem in France was published in John Bull towards the end of 1950. During the years 1955-70 I translated from Italian into English a considerable number of internal Salesian spiritual-administrative and catechetical-educational publications, as well as translating part of a new life of Don Bosco from the French original. I also revised the English text of the official guide to the Roman Catacombs of St. Callixtus. In 1968 for the benefit of both trainee- and practising teachers of R.E. in English Salesian schools and other centres I prepared the privately produced and circulated monograph: Christian Education in School, which was followed in 1969 by a few other sets of notes ad usum alumnorum: “Method in Theology”, “Logical Foundations”, “Understanding and Lonergan's Insight” and by my circular of 6 December 1969: “The Possibilities of the Survival of the Salesian Congregation - a Contribution to a Dialogue in Love on some aspects of our Present Task before God." C. HAMER, as collaborator to T. O'BRIEN, editor, The Companion of Youth, Bollington, Saint Dominic Savio House, 1961; review of E. A. BURTT, In Search of Philosophic Understanding in New Blackfriars, vol. 48, no. 566, July 1967, p. 557; review of A. E. LOEN, Secularization and of D. WATSON, Christian Myth and Spiritual Reality in New Blackfriars, vol. 48, no. 587, August 1967, pp. 612-15; “Marxism and Christianity” in New Blackfriars, vol. 49, no. 571, December 1967, pp. 133-39; “God and Professor Flew” in Downside Review, vol. 86, no. 283, April 1968, pp. 121-31; “Serving a Church in Dialogue with Non-Believers” in Clergy Review, vol. 53, no. 5, May 1968, pp. 345-53; “The Real Meaning of Words” in Clergy Review, vol. 53, no. 7, July 1968, pp. 521-35; review of W. J. ONG, The Presence of the Word, in Clergy Review, vol. 53, July 1968, pp. 563-65; review of N. MIDDLETON, The Language of Christian Revolution in Clergy Review, vol. 53, no. 9, September 1968, pp. 731-33; “Why Ryle is not a Behaviourist" in Philosophical Studies (Maynooth), vol. 17, 1968, pp. 7-25; “"Dialogue and Unity in the Teaching of the Second Vatican Council”, two parts, in Clergy Review, vol. 54, nos. 1 and 6, January & June 1969, pp. 13-26. 433-443; review of K. RAHNER, Spirit in the World in Clergy Review, vol. 54, no. 11, November 1969, pp. 920-21; letter “Challenges to Christian Marriage” in The Tablet, 22 November 1969, vol. 223, pp. 1152-53; note “Implications of Girardi Case” in The Tablet, 22 November 1969, vol. 223, p. 1156;“Gilbert Ryle's Wisdom” in Philosophical Studies (Maynooth), vol. 18, 1969, pp. 133-39; “Philosophy and Third-Order Communication”, PPG Lecture no. 18, in private circulation; letter “Voice of Rome” in Catholic Herald, 28 August 1970, no. 4402, p.5; letter “Renewal Group's Pamphlet” in Catholic Herald, 30 October 1970, no. 4411, p.5; review of J. GIRARDI, Dialogue et Révolution and R. GARAUDY, Marxism in the Twentieth Century in New Blackfriars, vol. 51, no. 606, November 1970, p. 540; “Meaning Things in Words” in Philosophical Studies (Maynooth), vol. 19, 1970, pp. 5-10; “Colin Lyas on the Coherence of Christian Atheism” in Philosophy, vol. 46, no. 175, January 1971, p. 62; “What do we mean by Education?” in Ethical Record, vol. 76, no. 6, June 1971, p. 10; “One Man's Quest - Bernard Lonergan's Achievement” in Catholic Education Today, vol. 5, no. 4, JulyAugust 1971, pp. 6-7; “The Nature of Self” in Ethical Record, vol. 77, no. 1, January 1972, pp. 4-7; letter “The Need for Intelligent Thought on the Ministry of Women” in Catholic Herald, 25 February 1972, no. 4480, p.5; “A Letter to the Reader” in F. STRACHAN, Casting Out The Devils, London, Aquarian Press, 1972, pp. 11-13; review of A. FARADAY, Dream-Power, in General Practitioner, 7 April 1972, p. 12; “Encounter Groups” in The Counsellor - Journal of the National Association of Educational Counsellors, no. 11, June 1972, pp. 1-9; letter “Churchmen and Women” in Catholic Herald, 20 October 1972, no. 4514, p. 5; review of K. BLISS, The Future of Religion and H. V. GÜNTHER, Buddhist Philosophy in Theory and Practice in New Paperback Review, introductory number, December 1972, pp. 23 & 29; “Love - Experience or Experiment?”, PPG Lecture, in private circulation; “Council of Youth” in The Tablet, 5 May 1973, vol. 227, p.424; Ecstasy and Vendetta - The Making and Unmaking of a Catholic Priest, London, Peter Davies, 1973; letter “His Real Presence” in The Tablet, 16 November 1974, vol. 228, p.1113; “Ethical Feeling” in Ethical Record, vol. 80, no. 2, February 1975, pp. 7-9; translation from the Italian: C. MOLINARI, Theatre Through the Ages (Teatro, Milano, Mondadori, 1972), London, Cassell, 1975. 1975 also saw the preparation of an unpublished paper: “Opposition or Complementarity - Therapy and Education: A Personal View." Translation from the Italian: S. S. ACQUAVIVA & M. SANTUCCIO, Social Structure in Italy, London, Martin Robertson, 1976; Encounter Groups, London, Creativity House, 1977; Voice In The Darkness - An essay in contemporary Catholic existentialism, Zennor, Cornwall, United Writers, 1978, ISBN 901976 45 8; a first draft, typed and cloth-bound by hand, of the present re-titled and expanded Italian translation of Voice In The Darkness under the title Il Vero Cattolico - La Sapienza Primordiale Nel Millennio Nuovo: the blue-cloth-covered, hard-back, hand-bound original typescript of Voce nel deserto - saggio di esistenzialismo cattolico contemporaneo (Wormwood Scrubs, 1978) is still in my possession; Letter to Joan Morris: “The Status of Women in the Roman Catholic Church", 10 July 1978, cfr note 118 above - and it is interesting to note that while I was composing that Letter at least one Czech lady, Ludmilla Javorovna of Brno, was already exercising her ministry as an ‘ordained’ Catholic priest behind the then Iron Curtain (cfr The Tablet, vol. 249, no. 8101,11 November 1995, pp. 1453-54); a series of 3 articles: “On Being a Writer”, “Writing to the Point” and “Writing between the Lines” in Writers' Review, August-September 1978 & April- May and June-July 1979, pp. 19-23, 13-15 and 45-48; letter “Testing the Waters” in Psychology Today, March 1979; letter “Fr. Hastings and the Right to Pry” in Catholic Herald, 8 June 1979, no. 4857, p. 4; letter “Meaning altered by translation” in Catholic Herald, 21 September 1979, vol. 12, no. 39, p.4; letter “Tenets of Charismatic Renewal” in Catholic Herald, 15 August 1980; letter “Conversion and Infallibility” in Catholic Herald, 19 September 1980; letter “Towards Rebirth and Charismatic Renewal” in Catholic Herald, 1980; in collaboration with M. Todeschini: Success - Rules for the Guidance of Genius, a monograph in private circulation and Succès - règles pour la conduite d'un génie, an incomplete French translation of the same work, 1980; letter “Küng's Faith, Hope and Assurance” in Catholic Herald, 16 January 1981; letter “Hunger Strikers - The Choice is Yours” in Catholic Herald, 14 August 1981; letter “The Papacy Undiminished” in Catholic Herald, 11 September 1981; letter “Adult Study Is Crucial” in Streatham News, 27 November 1981; study-notes for adult students: “Find Out About Philosophy”, London, New Acropolis, 1981 (cfr C. HOLLAND, “Dreaming of Higher Things” in Islington Gazette, 24 April 1981); “Delta Therapy Naturally”, a specially prepared, privately commissioned report, 1981; 3 articles: “The Alphabet tells a fascinating story”, “Some curious facts about the Calendar” and “Symbolism in Egypt” in New Acropolis, the New Acropolis UK official bulletin, 1982; Sunrise Aquarius, a draft novel now for the most part abandoned, but of which one or two copies probably survive, 1982 (The more serious portion of this story was historically based, ranged the centuries from pre-Ancient-Egypt through the late mediæval Cathars and troubadours, to Hitler's S.S. and his fascination for the occult; it also included a meditation of the spiritual implications of the recent changes introduced into the Roman Catholic liturgy); The Tarot Cards Unpacked and Le Tarot Décortiqué, notes prepared for the use of sincere students of the esoteric, 1982; Four Seasons Massage, London, Creativity House, 1983; Robin Hood - The Man behind the Myth, a 1st draft, 1983 (cfr Nottingham Evening Post, 6 February 1984) - the final text dates from 1988-89; Present and Future Needs In and For Adult Education, London, AHEAD, 1983; reviews of Out of Crisis - A Project for European Recovery and The Birth of Solidarity - The Gdansk Negotiations: 1980, 1983; letter “In Truth, we don't Begin at the Begetting" in The Guardian, 29 May 1984; letter “The Evil of Wage Slavery” in Catholic Herald, 12 October 1984; “Divine Actuality, Theological Realities, Catholic Truth and the Ontology of Language”, a lecture delivered during the CPG annual conference, January 1985; letter “The Living Christ” in Catholic Herald, 26 April 1985; “Large Letters in WordStar” in Practical Computing, vol. 8, no. 5, May 1985, pp. 144-45; The Philosophy of J. D. Solomon, in private circulation (note 207 above refers to one of two especially significant available extracts from this more comprehensive, authoritative study), 1986; letter “Faith Hand in Hand with Good Works” in Catholic Herald, 4 April 1986; The Creativity Machine - A Preliminary Report, a professional discussion of the potential of Jon Whale's invention, 24 May 1988; letter “Mixing People's Action” in Catholic Herald, 11 November 1988; editorial oversight of JON WHALE'S Nature's Power is Love & Light - Electronic Medicine, Crystal Healing and Esoteric Knowledge: The Computer Alchemist's Workbook, 133 pages, Hampton, WHALE, 1988; letter “Sun Dump Not New” in Exeter Herald, 20 April 1989; letter “Maxibus Rubbish” in Exeter Herald, 11 May 1989; in collaboration with JON WHALE: Health is a Rainbow - Cosmic Rejuvenation using the Electronic Caduceus, a professional monograph supplied to the Senior Editor of BRES, Amsterdam, 1989; letter “Spaced-Out Theories” in Exeter Herald, 25 May 1989; letter “A Green Planet” in Exeter Herald, 27 July 1989; The Rainbow Cymbal, 2nd draft and the 1st edition (with extensive indices and bibliographies - more than 2,000 entries) to be circulated privately and non-commercially (14 copies only, with some variations between them), 3 leather-bound volumes comprising 1,629 individually printed pages, 25 December 1989 - 21 December 1990; Letter to Pope John-Paul II, “The Rainbow, The Chalice & The Cross IN New Jerusalem”, 2 February 1991; open letter to all friends of Peace on Earth, “Working, Playing & Praying Together to implement the Rainbow Programme”, 1 March 1991; letter to Dr. George Carey on the occasion of his installation as Archbishop of Canterbury, 19 April 1991; The Creativity Chronicle - Incorporating the Neith Network Orbital Report, vol. 1, no. 1 - vol. 2, no. 2, June 1991 - January 1992, Creativity House, Exeter, in private circulation; transcription and edition of my father, LEVI HAMER's posthumous “GOD”, Exeter, September 1991; “An Index to the published writings of Joan D'Arcy Cooper (1927-82), Ascended Mistress of the Rainbow Programme" and "An Index to Meditations on the Tarot - a Journey into Christian Hermeticism”, Exeter, Creativity House, 1992; Mirror of Justice - Abstracts from a Library: A Sequence of Essays in honour of the nuptial theology of the Sovereign Lady Mary Most Holy Help of Christians by Divine Conception Mother of God & Virgin Queen of All That IS, 1st edition in private circulation, 18 April 1992; The Rainbow Cymbal - Supplementary Volume adding 630 pages of text and more than 560 references to the critical apparatus accompanying it, a leather-bound volume available for consultation, 18 April 1992; “Document 6 - Church in its most authentic and uniquely primordial sense: the Tiahuanaco Connection”, Exeter, Creativity House, 13 September 1992; The Neith Network Library, a further complementary collection of unpublished documents and bibliographical information, comprising 736 pages bound as 3 volumes, and The Red File Index, another 215 pages complementing the preceding but arranged in a different format, Creativity House, Exeter, July 1994; a number of other more recent as yet also unpublished documents, including my: “The ‘12th’ Planet: Origin of Earth & Home of Man's Creator - Zecharia Sitchin's Hypothesis, A Preliminary Assessment” - Lecture to RILKO (Research Into Lost Knowledge Organisation), 31 March 1995 and, even more importantly: “Aquinas today - tradition and innovation” - a paper presented to the Library of the Open International University For Complementary Medicines, Colombo, Sri Lanka, on the occasion of my acceptance of the academic degree of Doctor of Science (honoris causa) in the Medicina Alternativa Institute of that University, September 1995.
209. "Graciously hear us, Lord, holy Father, almighty eternal God, and deign to send your holy Angel from heaven, to guard, cherish, protect, visit and defend all residents in this little dwelling-place...."
210. For an early, though not the earliest account of these two contrasting movements, see. B. Lonergan, 'Healing and creating in history' in A Third Collection, ed. F. E. Crowe (New York/London, 1985), p. 106.
211. Nicomachean Ethics, Bk III, ch. 5, 1114a 30f., Ross translation.
212. F. E. Crowe, Lonergan (Geoffrey Chapman, 1992), pp. 109-13.
213. Element Books, ISBN 1-85230-222-4.
214. That is, not only her final and widely available Guided Meditation and the Teaching of Jesus (Element Books, 1982), but also the somewhat hard to come by Culbone - A Spiritual History (Georgan Studio, 1977), The Ancient Teaching of Yoga and the Spiritual Evolution of Man (Research Publishing Co., London, 1979), The Door Within (Wincanton Litho, 1979) & Corner Stones of the Spiritual World (printed by Hammetts of Taunton, 1981), all of which are, however, readily available from Culbone Community Trust, Porlock Weir, Somerset.
215. Parabola, New York, 1992.
216. Revised students' edition, Longmans, London, 1958; posthumous critical edition, University of Toronto Press, 1992.
217. Darton, Longman & Todd, 1970, ISBN 0-232-51146-2.
218. Darton, Longman & Todd, 1968.
219. Darton, Longman & Todd, 1972; ISBN 0-232-51139-X.
220. Cfr note 225 below.
221. Allen & Unwin, 1980.
222. New York, Rome, Tournai, Paris - Desclee, 1967.
223. "Christ is the way: Christ is the door. By Christ we mount, by Christ we are borne, for he is 'the mercy-seat placed upon the ark of God', 'the mystery hidden from all ages'. A man should turn his face to this mercy-seat, should look at Christ hanging on the cross, should look with faith, hope, love, wonder, joy, appreciation, praise and jubilation for thus will he make his Pasch, that is his pass-over, with him. By the rod of the cross he passes over the Red Sea, he enters from the desert of Egypt to taste the hidden manna, he rests with Christ in the tomb as if dead to all that is without. Yet he hears, so far as is possible to one who is still on his journey, the words Christ spoke from the cross to the thief who took his part: 'Today you shall be with me in paradise.' If this pass-over is to be perfect, we must set aside all discursive operations of the intellect and turn the very apex of our soul to God to be entirely transformed in him. This is most mystical and secret. No one knows it but he who has received it. No one receives it but he who has desired it. No one desires it but he who is deeply penetrated by the fire of the Holy Spirit, the fire Christ sent on earth. This is why the apostle says that this mystical wisdom is revealed through the Holy Spirit. If you want to understand how this happens, ask it of grace, not of learning; ask it of desire, not of understanding; ask it of earnest prayer, not of attentive reading; ask it of the betrothed, not of the teacher; ask it of God, not of man; ask it of darkness, not of radiance. Ask it not of light, but of a fire that completely inflames you and transports you to God with extreme sweetness and burning affection. This fire is God himself; the furnace is in Jerusalem; and Christ kindles it with all the burning fervour of his passion. This was grasped only by the man who said: 'My soul rather chooses hanging, and my bones death.' A man who loves death in this way can see God, for it is a sure truth that 'man shall not see me and live'. Let us die, then, and enter into darkness. Let us silence our cares, our desires and our dreams. With Christ on the cross let us pass-over 'out of this world to the Father'. When he shows us the Father let us say with Philip: 'It is enough for us.' With Paul let us hear: 'My grace is sufficient for you.' And with David let us gladly say: 'My flesh and my heart may fail but God is the strength of my Heart and my portion for ever. Blessed be the Lord for ever, and let all the people say Amen, Amen.' "
224. "Moses said to the people: 'Obey the voice of the Lord your God, keeping those commandments and laws of his that are written in the Book of this Law, and you shall return to the Lord your God with all your heart and soul. 'For this Law that I enjoin on you today is not beyond your strength or beyond your reach. It is not in heaven, so that you need to wonder, "Who will go up to heaven for us and bring it down to us, so that we may hear it and keep it?" Nor is it beyond the seas, so that you need to wonder, "Who will cross the seas for us and bring it back to us, so that we may hear it and keep it?" No, the Word is very near to you, it is in your mouth and in your ear for your observance.'"
225.Human words are at best but a poor guide to meaning. In Classical Greek both in prose and verse the noun often corresponds to either “grace” or “witchery” in English, the word for “witchcraft” being in prose either or but in verse sometimes , and that for “witch” in Aristophanes , but elsewhere in verse also The Greek adjective corresponding to witching is either or . In view of the well known historical ‘Christian’ attitudes of opposition to “witchcraft”, of the central importance accorded to the celebration of “the Eucharist” within the Christian Church, and of the New Testament's emphasis on the value of God's “favour” ( ) and the need to grow in ‘charity’ ( ), it is worth noticing, too, that, as in the case of its Greek counterpart, in Christian Latin usage “charitas” or “caritas”, loosely corresponding to , signifies equally the chaste friendship of virginal celibates consecrated to God's service and the sexually passionate love appropriately expressed by husbands and wives.
226. As the author of Meditations on the Tarot distinguishes between 'magic' and 'Magic', and as the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church distinguishes between 'tradition' and 'Tradition', it will, I suggest, also prove helpful, in the light of the linguistic facts recalled in the immediately preceding note, similarly to distinguish between 'grace' and 'Grace', 'favour' and 'Favour', 'craft' and 'Craft', 'charity' and 'Charity', etc., whenever the context so requires. Bearing in mind Aquinas's teaching that we cannot judge properly unless our senses are functioning freely (Summa Theologiae I, q.84, a.8 c.), parallel distinctions between 'celibacy' and 'Celibacy', 'chastity' and 'Chastity' appear even more necessary.
Note, too, that Aquinas's psychological trinitarian theory is not a conclusion that can be demonstrated but an hypothesis in accord with divine revelation as received within the Catholic Church, and that it does not exclude the possibility of alternative imperfectly but fruitfully helpful explanatory hypotheses (S.T. I, q.32, a.1 ad 2m).
If, for instance, the application of Aquinas's dictum "agere est pati quoddam" be extended, albeit only hypothetically, to Infinite Being, Dom Bede Griffith's claim (in Universal Wisdom, HarperCollins Fount, 1994, p.41) that "in Eternity the Son is begotten of the Father and conceived in the womb of the Mother, the Holy Spirit, just as in creation the Father sows the seed of the Word in matter, and the Holy Spirit, the Mother, nourishes the seed and brings forth all the forms of creation," is better appreciated as harmonising Catholicism and several other religious traditions, especially the Tao (cf. Tao Te Ching, a new translation by Man-Ho Kwok, Martin Palmer & Jay Ramsay, Element Books, 1993, ch. 42):
Re-membering Father Bede's life and example, Chapter 19 adds: "If the sage could abandon his wisdom and skill, then everyone would be a hundred times better off. If the sage could let go of holding the scales, then everyone would flow in the web of harmony... And if the sage can give up looking to gain, then there will be no theft or exploitation. Now while these three things are important, they are not enough: the people themselves need to learn simplicity. They shouldn't need to know more than they do, and should have as few things as possible." Amen.
227. RILKO, 1977.
228. RILKO, 1985.
229. HarperCollins, 1994.
230. SCM, 1993.
231. Samuel Weiser, New York, 1980.
232.Arkana,1986.
233. Method - Journal of Lonergan Studies (2/1, March 1984, p.12.
234. Jn 10:10. 235. Cfr. Heb 1:1.
236. Meditations on the Tarot, p. 189.
237. Ex 10:14.
238. The Hague, 1963.
239. Rudolf Steiner Press, 1983.
240. 4th edition reprinted with a new Introduction, Rider, 1974, pp. 3-4.
241. Thomas Cleary's translation as Buddhist Yoga - A Comprehensive Course, ISBN 1-57062-018-0, Shambhala, 1995,p.17.
242. Avon Books, New York, 1990; Bear & Co., Santa Fe, 1991.
243. Foreword, p.1.
244. Also available in paperback from Avon Books, and in hardback from Bear & Co. The series so far comprises six volumes: The 12th Planet (Stein & Day, 1976; Avon Books, 1978; Bear & Co., 1991), The Stairway to Heaven (St. Martin's Press, 1980; Avon Books, 1983; Bear & Co., 1992), The Wars of Gods and Men (Avon Books, 1985; Bear & Co., 1992), The Lost Realms (Avon Books, 1990; Bear & Co., 1990), When Time Began (Avon Books, 1993; Bear & Co., 1994) & The Cosmic Code (Avon Books, 1998).
245. Actually the King of Sodom's request to Abraham: "Give me the people and take the possessions for yourself." (Gn 14:21.)
246. Invocation of Mary, Help of Christians composed by Saint John Bosco:
translated into English by A. Keogh SDB:
"Whene'er Christ's people sore beset has been,
And ringed with menace of a raging foe,
They've glimps'd her gliding from the sky serene,
Mary their Queen with succour for their woe.
'Tis this the annals of our fathers tell,
And this the trophies of Her shrines proclaim;
The wondrous feasts that yearly hymn as well
The glories won invoking Her sweet name.
Let all to praises new in song give tongue,
To win fresh favours from Her royal hands;
No strain, no melody be left unsung
In Peter's See, in all Creation's lands.
O truly blessed day of history,
Relating for all time what then befell,
When exiled Pope returned in jubilee
From banishment and prison's lonely cell.
O souls unstained of Youth, of maid and boy,
Your tender hearts in gratitude o'er-flow;
Share now your people's and your pastor's joy,
Meet honour on those queenly gifts bestow.
O Maid of maids, o Jesu's Mother blest,
Let not these tokens of your love decrease;
So may our shepherd lead his flock to rest
In Heaven's fields, in bliss that knows no cease.
O grant us You to ever venerate,
Our praise of You, O Triune God prolong,
That we may see what now we celebrate,
Our minds in faith, our tongues in vibrant song."
A reading for the Feast of Mary, Help of Christians, taken from the Book of Ecclesiasticus 24, 9-12:
"At the beginning of time, before the world was, I was created, and to all eternity I shall not cease to be; mine to minister before him in his holy dwelling. So, according to his word, I made Sion my stronghold, the holy city my resting-place, Jerusalem my throne. My roots spread out among the people that enjoys his favour; my God has granted me a share in his own domain; where his faithful servants are gathered I love to linger."
In the year 1571, when the Turks were threatening to invade and dechristianise the whole of Europe, the great Pope St. Pius V took steps to have an army of valiant Catholics formed to march against them, in order to restrain their power and cruelty. Don John of Austria, as well as many great warriors, united in a holy alliance under a banner bearing a golden image of Jesus Crucified sent by the Pope, and assembled a fleet of warships to defend the cause of the Church, or rather, that of civilization. After three days spent in fasting and public prayers and processions, these gallant soldiers approached the holy Sacraments, and invoking the name of Mary, Help of Christians, they set sail and attacked the enemy upon the waters of Lepanto on the seventh of October. After three hours of furious fighting, in which the help of God and Mary most holy was manifest, the enemy commander was killed. Seeing this, the whole Moslem fleet, overcome by confusion and terror, fell into the power of the Christians, who, with a cry of gratitude to Mary, hoisted aloft the banner of Christ. The saintly Pontiff, who all this time had been praying in his palace in Rome, saw in vision the miraculous victory. In order to perpetuate the memory of it, he ordered that the invocation Help of Christians should be added to the Litany of the Blessed Virgin, and that a feast in honour of Our Lady of Victories should be celebrated on 7 October.
Later, when Vienna was delivered from a siege by the Turks in 1683, a sodality in honour of Mary, Help of Christians, was instituted in Bavaria in thanksgiving to her for such a signal grace. The sodality soon spread from Germany to Italy and elsewhere. Finally, Pope Pius VII, upon being freed from imprisonment, fixed the feast of Mary, Help of Christians, on 24 May.
Our Lady made known to St. John Bosco that she wished devotion spread to her under this title, and she worked many miracles to help him in his work. St. John Bosco built a great church in Turin dedicated to Mary, Help of Christians, and the Holy Father made it a minor Basilica. Many miracles were worked in this church. The lame walked, the blind saw, the sick in soul and body were restored to health. From this church, the heart of the Salesian work, the sons of St. John Bosco and the Daughters of Mary, Help of Christians, have carried her name to every part of the world.
It is the office of a mother to give help to her children in all their needs. This title expresses in practice Our Lady's position as our Mother. She has all the help we need and she wants to give it to us, if only we will ask for it. Call on Mary in all your difficulties with the little prayer, Mary, Help of Christians, pray for us, and you will never call in vain. And again, Spread devotion to Mary, Help of Christians, and you will see what miracles are.
247. Cfr T. Maccius Plautus (ob. 184 B.C.), Curculio I, I, 31: "quod amas, amato testibus praesentibus." Also Auctor Priapeiorum 2: "magnis testibus ista res agetur."
248. Although usually translated "You will be my witnesses," also corresponds to "You will be my martyrs" - a nuance not ignored by Pope John-Paul II.
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