Homily
Sunday, August 24, 2008, 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A
Assumption Grotto Parish, Detroit
Via Negativa
Today let us speak of the knowledge of the Person of Christ the Lord. Do you wish to know him? And to love him? Then today’s homily is for you, and St. Paul will be our teacher.
We know that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit; we know he is Creator, Lord, Almighty, All-knowing; we know he is pure spirit and is in all places; and even in prayer, we have had personal experiences of God in our soul, mystical experience of infused meditation or infused contemplation; we have had inspirations and illuminations by God’s actual grace. We know the Son of God became Man, and so forth. In fact, we have a Creed, which by the law of the Church – a law not always observed in certain places, alas – we profess every Sunday, and we do so together.
There are three ways to get to know God: we know God through his effects, that is, the effects reveal some truth about the cause. So we look at the beauty of the world, and we say God is beautiful; and we understand the nature of our souls, and say God is Spirit, and intellectual, and free.
Second, we can know God by “eminence,” that is, by looking at some perfection, and applying it to him in the eminent degree. Good is a perfection; God must be infinitely good. Truth is a perfection; God must be infinitely true.
Third, we can know God by negation or removal. Man is limited; God is unlimited. Man dies; God must be undying. The material world changes and passes; God must remain unchanging in an unending way. This knowledge by negation is called, in Latin, the “negative way,” or “via negativa.” About this, St. Thomas Aquinas says, (S. Th., I, 2):
We cannot know what God is, but only what he is not; we must therefore consider the ways in which God does not exist, rather than the ways in which he does.
I bring this now to today’s reading of St. Paul, the textual basis of today’s homily, chosen especially because we are in the Holy Year of St. Paul. We have been looking at Romans for several weeks, and will continue to study Romans for two more weeks (cf. Rom 11:33-36). Today’s verses bring chapter 11 to a close, and also brings to a close the first part of the Epistle, called the “dogmatic part.” Chapter 12, which we will read next week, begins the “moral part” of the Epistle; it will speak more about what we are to do than what we are to profess.
In this Epistle, St. Paul says many negative things about God, in this sense of the “negative way,” or “via negativa”: God is inscrutable, St. Paul says, and unsearchable, no one knows his mind, and no one gives him counsel in his works and no one repays God justly. No, none, in-, and un-! God exceeds what the intellect can grasp. It is much like a shadow: the object of the eye is light, yet a shadow is the absence of light. That said, we know the shadow; we know something which, in a sense, is not. So too the intellect knows God, who is not a mere object of senses or of thought; but this is so, not because God does not exist, but because the intellect is too small to comprehend Him, and the senses utterly fail to perceive Him. Therefore, we need the via negativa to enter into the interior mystery of God. By itself, the intellect can know things about God, but only with faith can a person really know God.
This is why faith enlightens the intellect. St. Anselm of Canterbury said, “Credo ut intellegam” (“I believe, so that I may understand.”) Pope John Paul II chose this Latin expression as the title of the second chapter of his encyclical, Faith and Reason.
Indeed, it is upon the doorstep of the confrontation of faith and reason where St. Paul leaves us in these verses. Our meditation on the “negative way” of knowing God has brought us to a particular application: the roles of faith and reason in our Catholic lives. In the midst of much doctrine which St. Paul has been promulgating in a very positive way, he now gives us doctrine of a negative sort. And both are to help us know God, and attain our salvation. Both are effective paths to know, and even to love, Christ the Lord.
There are some who reduce their entire Catholic religion to reason. It is not, Credo ut intellegam, I believe so that I may understand, but rather intellego ut credam, I understand so that I might believe. This is the mind of the proud man. Today we find those who claim to be Catholic, but who reject the Pope and the Magisterium because they do not understand. It could be matters of the liturgy, the teaching on contraception, her jurisdiction which excludes pro-abortion politicians from communion, or the delicate matter of those who have remarried without an annulment after a divorce. They don’t understand, so they reject.
Yet on the other hand, there are others who reduce the entire Catholic faith to feelings, or get caught up in New Age doctrines, or Eastern-Religion forms of prayer, and who reject all doctrine and theology in favor of mere experience. When the previous ones embraced reason and rejected faith, these embrace faith but reject reason. Both parties are in error.
The harmony between faith in reason is incredibly simple, yet immensely deep. That is, reason is to serve the faith. Reason has many functions in our lives, and one of them is to enjoy the intelligibility of the faith. Our God, in fact, is a reasonable God, and the sharp mind will never come to the end of truth and beauty in God.
So if St. Paul tells us much about what God is not: unknowable, inscrutable, etc., it is not to bar us from entering into the mystery of God, but precisely to launch us into the inscrutable mystery of his truth, his love, his reality and his mercy. You know what a shadow is; but a shadow is only “not light.” You know what sickness is; but sickness is only “not health.” You know what a blind person is; yet blindness is only “not seeing.” So apply this to the Son of Mary.
See, when the Holy Spirit created his Body in the Womb of the Virgin, and he dwelt among us in human form, he revealed many positive thing, for example, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” Yet many mysteries were given us through signs and parables. We hear of talents, but God is not in heaven passing out money of gold. We hear about “seed,” yet the Word of God is not the tangible seed of a certain plant. We have Jonah in the belly of the whale, yet Christ is not Jonah.
It is our job, in the contemplation of prayer, to go higher than these tangible things to enter into an unspeakable knowledge of the Trinity. It is of this when St. Paul says, “heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell” (2 Cor 12:4). When Job says, “My eyes have seen all this, my ears have heard and understood it,” St. Paul says that in heaven, “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor 2:9).
When you pray, you will usually use words, and this is good. But occasionally you will have ineffable experiences of union with God for which there are no words, nor can their be; any word would be in sufficient. And so it is that you know with your intellect that which is the object of your faith. These experiences of prayer come in deep interior silence, and are usually called “infused contemplation.”
Come to know Christ in this way, and ask Him to reveal himself to you in this way, especially when you come to communion at the Mass. You know that Christ is merciful, loving and powerful, but if you go to him along the “via negativa,” you will enter more deeply into the mysterious truth of God, for which there are no words. Yes, think about your faith, think deeply; but don’t limit your faith in the Trinity to the confines of your tiny intellect.
“And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness” (Eph 3:17-19) of Christ, the Son of Mary. Amen.