The Word was Made Flesh
No one has ever seen love and God is love. “Why sketch an outline, why arrange limbs, why provide him with an acceptable stature, why imagine a beautiful body? ‘God is love.’ What color has love, what outline, what shape? We see none of these things in it, and yet we love” (Augustine, Sermon 34.3). Unseen, the heart sighs. “No one can see glory but he who is in glory; there remains both the desire and the intellect of those who are not in it” (Aquinas, Quodl. 8, q. 7, 1. 16). And yet we love because our heart demands to give itself. Kept to itself, the impossibility of redemption lurks in the background. Loneliness becomes the habitat of the heart, the heart without a presence that it can be naked to. Yet, even a lonely heart beats because it is seen. “Adam, where are you?” Man cannot hide from the One who looks for him. “Where are you?” Such is the proposal of God to humanity. Adam fails to see God because of the lack of certainty he has put himself in; within the bush, Adam cannot see and therefore know the world around him. He has lost his place. Mystery becomes the eclipse of God. Prayer becomes a monologue.
If today there is an eclipse of God (M. Buber), it is because we have lost the experience of being looked at with a sense of love and gratitude for our unique existence. We have lost the awareness of ourselves and therefore exile and slavery crept into our world. This is why Henri de Lubac noted that man can build a world without God but only a world which turns its back on man. It would be superfluous to analyze which came first, the lost of the experience of God that led to the lost of our sense of humanity or the lost of our compassion for humanity that led to the eclipse of God. What must be affirmed is that the human being failed to submit himself to the gaze that defined his humanity and personality, that he preferred autonomy rather than dependency on the Fatherhood of God. This line from Theophilous of Antioch pertains to our discussion: “You will say to me, ‘Show me your God.’ And I tell you, ‘Show me first the man who is in you, and then I will show you my God’” (Ad Autolycum libri tres, I, 3). Any thought of God that does not reveal (and therefore experience) humanity is a failed utopia. There cannot be any dichotomy between the revelation of God and the revelation of humanity, for God is the light that exposes humanity. The experience of the glory of God is an experience of our worth and uniqueness. We cannot achieve deification unless our humanity has been embraced by God, unless we embrace our humanity with God. “How can you be a god when you have not yet become a man? How can you be perfect when you have only just been made? How can you be immortal when, in your mortal nature, you do not obey your Maker? You must hold the rank of men before you partake of the glory of God” (Against the Heresies IV 39, 2-3). It must be noted that for Irenaeus, the glory of God is man fully alive and so to partake in the glory of God is for man to fully embrace what he is made for. This requires that he holds the rank of men, that is, stay as a man and not a god. Only when he has accepted himself as man, that is, one who is dependent on the gaze of God, can he, paradoxically, become a god. Only in obedience to the immeasurable light of his heavenly Father can he achieve an existence that transcends the corruptible world. As Joseph Ratzinger stated, “Man can become God, not by making himself God, but allowing himself to be made ‘Son’” (Dogmatic Theology vol. 9: Eschatology, CUA Press 1988, pgs 64-65).
Responding to Theophilous of Antioch would be very difficult because it is especially manifesting our humanity that is troublesome for us. How can we show the man who is in us if we ourselves have distorted our own image, if we have experienced a lack of gaze that awakened the desires inherent in us? It is not problematic to give examples when that gaze is lacking: A baby who has been abandoned by his mother, a child who lacks the gaze of both a mother and a father, a woman who has experienced infidelity from her husband, and so on. How can we show our humanity when the distance between human persons is far enough that we do not need to look at each other to communicate? What can close the distance between us? What can liberate us from the inhumanity we have experienced? How can we be free to look at the true, the good, and the beautiful? Free enough that “one does not keep one’s eyes in one’s pocket” (Claudel)?
No one has ever seen love and yet we are seen with love. It is that innocent and pure eyes of that babe in the manger that produces the smile of the virgin mother. That non-condemning innocent gaze asks to be held. The question “Where are you?” becomes more dramatic and demands a renewal of decisiveness towards life. “Where are you when there is this babe to be held?” In the smile of the virgin mother is the certainty that there is no love that fails to satisfy life. Virginity is the acknowledgment that Christ alone can satisfy the heart. This is why a mystic is satisfied with life: everything speaks of Christ. It is virginity which keeps married people alive to each other with that tender gaze that Christ arouses in them. It is not simply chastity, that is, moderation, but the understanding of the other as the gift of God, the presence of Christ in life. Without virginity, marriage becomes burdensome and provokes a sigh of resignation rather than a sigh for meaning and love. Virginity is the pure heart which sees God. The one who sees God is one who understands why reality satisfies him. This is why it must be often repeated that virginity is not abstinence from sex but rather positivity. It is the embraced proposal from the Other. It is seeing that the darkness in the world is the overshadowing of the Spirit of the Father and the Son, the radiant glory of the crucified One who reveals that reality is mysterious.
The seen and unseen coincides in the person of Christ, the humanism of God. God Himself, in infusing His Spirit to a human being, manifested the humanity we cannot expose. The Word which speaks the language of love (Spirit) is the sustenance and meaning of life. The Word-made-zygote in the womb of Mary is the lamb that conquers the “spirit of the lion” (Nietzsche) and brings back to man the freedom to erect his head before the glorious One who sees him with an unconditional look of mercy. Every experience of one’s worth comes from the affirmation of another. This is not dissimilar to the original experience of a baby who experiences reality from the smile of his mother. It is not, however, only an experience of worth the child has but an affirmation of his ontological existence. Hans Urs von Balthasar noted,
It is clear that a conscious subject can only awaken to himself and his distinct selfhood if he is addressed by one or more others who regard him as of value or perhaps as indispensable. When a child learns from its mother that it is ‘her treasure’, it becomes aware not only of its ‘worth’ (dignitas individui) but specifically of its uniqueness…The most emphatic affirmation can only tell him who he is for the one who values him or loves him. (Theo-Drama vol. 3, Ignatius Press 1992, pg. 205)
The existence of a child possesses a certain uniqueness that does not simply call out to be loved, but loved in a way that corresponds to his uniqueness. What cannot be separated, however, are his uniqueness and the way he is loved. Our humanity can now be revealed because God, in becoming man, has beckoned us. Pain, suffering, and darkness can never be an excuse for refusing to embrace life because even in the suffering God has from man’s abandonment, He manages to keep His eyes on him. “It seems to me that nothing prevents man from rejoicing in whatever he finds painful. For while he is sad at the troubles caused by virtuous living in the flesh, he rejoices in his soul because of that same virtue, because he sees, as something already present, the beauty and dignity of what is to come” (Maximus the Confessor, Quaest. ad Thal. 58). This is the new humanity, the humanism of God, man with God. There is now a gaze that infuses the spirit of freedom and love into the hearts of man. It is the gracious gaze that brings out the confident cry of a new song to the Lord. Even sin does not blindfold Him. Without this gaze, even love cannot satisfy the lonely heart. “He came to create a need, a thirst that his disappearance will render unquenchable. And at the same time he came to bring the satisfaction of this need, to place the answer in our hands, to offer himself as the sole remedy for this one fundamental craving of our nature that is its own gratification. He came to place himself at our disposal, to join forces with us. Son of God, he came to show us how to be sons of God” (Paul Claudel, I Believe in God, pg. 75). The Sun of glory has broken the eclipse away. Prayer is no longer a monologue but an invitation for the consummation.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Friday, December 05, 2008
Musings on Advent
There is a tendency to think that the Christian's response to the materialistic utopia is activism; the response to the world that is obsessed with "having" is "doing." Especially during Lent, we often hear people not simply giving up such and such an object or activity, but making promises such as “I will be kinder to my co-workers,” “I will try to obey my parents,” “I will be kind to my brothers and sisters,” “I will pray more,” “I will go to Mass more,” etc. Frankly, these promises do not usually last and it is usually rooted in the egotistic mentality that we can achieve salvation; notice on how it is focused on "I will." Activism fails simply because it distances itself from the contemplative character of Christian existence, "It's You!." The story of Mary and Martha is evidence that life is not about doing, but rather being. The Christian of the twenty first century is either a mystic or a moralist.
The mystic is not a person who is in solitude, but rather one who is aware of a Presence that dominates and sustains every aspect of his being. The awareness of a mystic is that which recognizes a presence that arouses the heart and responds with openness and attentiveness that allows the totality of the person to be brought into light. This is why the first mystic is the Virgin. Her virginity is the promise of the Incarnation and therefore salvation. Virginity is not abstinence but rather availability to the triune tenderness of the Father. It is the summit of love, the existence of a person who is fully satisfied with God. Here we can understand Fr. Carron’s remark that the problem of Martha is not about action vs. contemplation, but one about depth: Martha failed to be satisfied in her work. Virginity seen not as abstinence but rather availability, is the character of every Christian, the vocation of every human life. It is the awareness of the satisfaction that the Presence of Christ brings in this world; it is the hundredfold.
Virginity comes with toil, however, and a continuous alertness towards the One who has come eucharistically is necessary. Without this continuous Marian and receptive form of existence, life becomes a burdensome passive form of existence. Rather, the mystic is one who is certain that God's faithfulness has the form of friendship and therefore he is never alone; friendship becomes promise and sign. It is in this way that we understand that the Church is the embodiment of the Spirit of Christ. The Spirit plunges into the depths of man’s sheol and interrupts the loneliness man has created by raising him into the very life of the Father. The Church’s holiness consists in crying out to the Father, “Abba!” within the depth of the hell the world has put her in.
The Church, in her virginity, waits for the consummation of her Groom: “Wait for the Lord. Take courage. Wait for the Lord” (Ps. 27). She is alert and cannot look back (Lk. 9:59-62), even in the past, because she is erected and her head is raised towards Him who will not allow a hair on her head to be destroyed (Lk. 21). That she is by her very nature eschatological does not mean that she disregards the present moment but rather the present moment is the embrace that promises the consummation between herself and her Spouse who has taken her out of harlotry. It is the constant embrace between Christ and the Church that gives certainty to Christians that they are never abandoned, even in death, and their lives are never monotonous, boring, and burdensome because they carry the easy yoke of Christ.
In this way, we understand that the best description of Advent is virginity: the contemplative transparency the Christian has for Christ in all things. In the Christian’s virginity there is sign of the never ending carnality of the Logos, the salvation of man. Virginity gives men hope that the impossible, God-made-flesh, can happen, that it has happened.
There is a tendency to think that the Christian's response to the materialistic utopia is activism; the response to the world that is obsessed with "having" is "doing." Especially during Lent, we often hear people not simply giving up such and such an object or activity, but making promises such as “I will be kinder to my co-workers,” “I will try to obey my parents,” “I will be kind to my brothers and sisters,” “I will pray more,” “I will go to Mass more,” etc. Frankly, these promises do not usually last and it is usually rooted in the egotistic mentality that we can achieve salvation; notice on how it is focused on "I will." Activism fails simply because it distances itself from the contemplative character of Christian existence, "It's You!." The story of Mary and Martha is evidence that life is not about doing, but rather being. The Christian of the twenty first century is either a mystic or a moralist.
The mystic is not a person who is in solitude, but rather one who is aware of a Presence that dominates and sustains every aspect of his being. The awareness of a mystic is that which recognizes a presence that arouses the heart and responds with openness and attentiveness that allows the totality of the person to be brought into light. This is why the first mystic is the Virgin. Her virginity is the promise of the Incarnation and therefore salvation. Virginity is not abstinence but rather availability to the triune tenderness of the Father. It is the summit of love, the existence of a person who is fully satisfied with God. Here we can understand Fr. Carron’s remark that the problem of Martha is not about action vs. contemplation, but one about depth: Martha failed to be satisfied in her work. Virginity seen not as abstinence but rather availability, is the character of every Christian, the vocation of every human life. It is the awareness of the satisfaction that the Presence of Christ brings in this world; it is the hundredfold.
Virginity comes with toil, however, and a continuous alertness towards the One who has come eucharistically is necessary. Without this continuous Marian and receptive form of existence, life becomes a burdensome passive form of existence. Rather, the mystic is one who is certain that God's faithfulness has the form of friendship and therefore he is never alone; friendship becomes promise and sign. It is in this way that we understand that the Church is the embodiment of the Spirit of Christ. The Spirit plunges into the depths of man’s sheol and interrupts the loneliness man has created by raising him into the very life of the Father. The Church’s holiness consists in crying out to the Father, “Abba!” within the depth of the hell the world has put her in.
The Church, in her virginity, waits for the consummation of her Groom: “Wait for the Lord. Take courage. Wait for the Lord” (Ps. 27). She is alert and cannot look back (Lk. 9:59-62), even in the past, because she is erected and her head is raised towards Him who will not allow a hair on her head to be destroyed (Lk. 21). That she is by her very nature eschatological does not mean that she disregards the present moment but rather the present moment is the embrace that promises the consummation between herself and her Spouse who has taken her out of harlotry. It is the constant embrace between Christ and the Church that gives certainty to Christians that they are never abandoned, even in death, and their lives are never monotonous, boring, and burdensome because they carry the easy yoke of Christ.
In this way, we understand that the best description of Advent is virginity: the contemplative transparency the Christian has for Christ in all things. In the Christian’s virginity there is sign of the never ending carnality of the Logos, the salvation of man. Virginity gives men hope that the impossible, God-made-flesh, can happen, that it has happened.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Christ and Inter-religious Dialogue
This speech was given to the Aresty Research Symposium in Rutgers, Spring 2008.
Ever since the beginning of Christianity, one of the main problems was evangelization. How were Christians supposed to propose what they call the “gospel,” the “good news” to all people as Jesus commanded them to (Matt. 28: 19-20)? Most of Jesus’ disciples were practicing Jews, that is, they had the same presuppositions and worldview that Jesus had. Yet, they were called to proclaim the good news not simply to the Jews but to the Gentiles, those who had different worldviews than they. We see examples of this when they had to debate whether Gentiles had to be circumcised and follow the Mosaic law in order to be part of the Church, the people of God (Acts 15; Romans 2-6). The early Church decided not to impose some aspects of Judaism to the Gentiles and yet proclaimed the necessity of Jesus Christ as the only savior. Today, the Catholic Church faces the same problem as the early Church. With so many cultures and religions today, she faces the difficult task of presenting the gospel in a non-imposing way while at the same time proposing an essential element in human life: relationship with Christ. Can the Catholic Church propose the necessity of Jesus Christ while at the same time be tolerant of other religions?
Christ as the Fulfillment of Human Life
The then-Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, in his homily to the College of Cardinals in the Mass for the election of a new pope, said that we are “moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal [in] one’s own ego and one’s own desires.” The Catholic Church, however, proposes that she can know for certain that in Jesus of Nazareth, there is “the full and complete revelation of the salvific mystery of God."[1] She cannot accept a religious relativism which teaches that each religion in their own independent way is a path to God, and that the revelation of God given by Christ is incomplete and that other religions are complementary to his revelation.[2] Accepting such an idea would be destroying her understanding of who Jesus is. According to the Church, Jesus of Nazareth is the Incarnate Word of God (Jn. 1:14) in whom the fullness of Yahweh dwells (Col. 1:19; Rom 9:4-5). He is the definitive and final revelation of God simply because he is God; there is nothing more to add because God himself has shown himself in person. In Christ we find God’s triune tenderness to humanity and all of creation, which is fully expressed in his dying and rising from the dead.[3] As Karl Rahner said,
By the resurrection, then, Jesus is vindicated as the absolute saviour. We can also say more cautiously at first: as the final ‘prophet… We must bear in mind here that his word as God’s final word can be understood to be definitive not because God now ceases to arbitrarily to say anything further, although he could have said more, and not because he ‘concludes’ revelation, although he could have continued it had he just wanted to. It is the final word of God that is present in Jesus because there is nothing to say beyond it, because God has really and in a strict sense offered himself in Jesus…Jesus, then, is the historical presence of this final and unsurpassable word of God’s self-disclosure: this is his claim and he is vindicated in this claim by the resurrection. He is of eternal validity and he is experienced in this eternal validity. In this sense in any case is the ‘absolute saviour.[4]
It is important to note that because Jesus Christ is God himself, although he is the final revelation of God, he is inexhaustible. Precisely because he is inexhaustible, whatever we think of him falls short of who he is. His “I” is ever greater than any human speech or understanding: “no similarity so great that a greater dissimilarity cannot be seen between them [God and creature]”. Our understanding of Christ in Scripture and Tradition, then, develops as time continues. Although it is a Catholic doctrine that objective revelation ceased after the death of the apostles, there is a sense in which revelation is open. Joseph Ratzinger’s study in The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure[5] wanted to free us from the conception of revelation as an abstract concept. He argued that St. Bonaventure’s notion of revelatio is the unveiling of the hidden. Concretely, it can be referred to unveiling of the future, the mystical meaning and understanding of Scripture, and “the divine reality which takes place in the mystical ascent”.[6] There can be no revelation unless there is an unveiling, which presupposes a person with a veil, a person who has the capacity to learn something new.[7] Ratzinger also emphasized that revelation was never equated with Scripture but rather the understanding of Scripture and this understanding increases as time goes on. To put it in another way, there can be such a thing as “new revelation” insofar as our understanding of Christ increases.[8] According to Ratzinger, we can summarize St. Bonaventure’s understanding on the relationship between Scripture and history this way,
a) Scripture has grown in an historical way. Only he who knows its history knows its meaning. History is a structural element of Scripture’s intelligible form…b) Scripture, however, is not simply a product of a past history, but is simultaneously a statement about and a prediction of the future. Since the Scriptures were written, part of this future has already become past, while part of it still remains future. This means that the total meaning of Scripture is not yet clear. Rather, the final “revelation,” i.e. the time of a full understanding of revelation, is yet to come.[9]
The Church’s understanding of Christ through the Scriptures, then, is not simply understanding the historical Jesus, that is, what he had done in the first century Palestine, but experiencing Christ ever anew in the present moment. It requires that the Spirit takes the word and incarnates it to the flesh of the believer. The Spirit does this throughout history and it is in this way that the life of Christ is not limited to a particular time, but universalized. The work of the Spirit is to universalize the saving act of Jesus Christ.[10] The work of the Spirit is not to be understood as some kind of magical trick of God, but rather, it is verified in the witness of the believers. The Spirit works through and in people and only when the totality of the person is taken into account can the word of God be understood. To put it in another way, God works through human realities and does not take away anything that is good in him; “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.” When the Spirit moves a person to turn to Christ, a veil is removed and he is moved from glory to glory (2 Cor. 3:16-18). In this way the person becomes a letter of Christ, not made from ink but the Spirit in his heart (2 Cor. 3:1-3).
The experience of the person, the receiver of revelation, then, is fundamental in understanding Jesus Christ. Christ cannot be known apart from the one who receives him. The experience of Christ is so fundamental that the Church is obliged not to forget it. She must keep remembering her life with Christ. Commitment to the experiences of Christ is what we can call Tradition. Tradition, like revelation, is not a set of propositions or doctrines. It cannot be limited to a particular time. It is remembering the life of Christ. By “remembering” we do not simply mean a recollection of the past but reliving the life of Christ. It is the Christian immersing himself to the reality of what he has received. And because every encounter with Christ is a “new revelation” the Church does not remain close to the future but rather takes up her experiences and understanding that will lead her to examine and judge the future in a Christ-like manner. As Hans Urs von Balthasar said, “Her tradition is not so much a link with the past as a marathon relay race in which one runner hands on the torch to the next…the Church is prevented from ever resting on any past achievement; she is continually being spurred on to make a better response.”[11]
Another factor to be kept in mind about experiencing Christ is that the receiver of revelation has his own environment and context he is living in. The Spirit does not work in a void or a tabula rasa but rather works through the human person as he is. A person, then, who is trained in Aristotelian philosophy will not have to abandon the truths that he has learned in that discipline. Rather, Tradition purifies his understanding within that context, saving whatever is good in that philosophy and turning away from what leads to error. This is why throughout Christian history, we find that non-Christian cultures had made a big impact on Christianity, up to the point of impacting the way Christian theology is presented. One cannot doubt, for example, that Hellenistic culture was not absent in the development of Christian thought. The fact that the concept of transubstantiation has become a Catholic dogma manifests the Greek influence in Christianity.
By understanding the concept of revelation in Catholic theology, it seems that we can say that there is a type of religious pluralism that can be accepted. As the Second Vatican Council taught,
The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men. Indeed, she proclaims, and ever must proclaim Christ "the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6), in whom men may find the fullness of religious life, in whom God has reconciled all things to Himself. The Church, therefore, exhorts her sons, that through dialogue and collaboration with the followers of other religions, carried out with prudence and love and in witness to the Christian faith and life, they recognize, preserve and promote the good things, spiritual and moral, as well as the socio-cultural values found among these men.[12]
The Church can accept that there are rays of truth in other religions because they all partake in the Logos in some way, that is, they are made in the image of God. In fact, St. Justin Martyr even went further to note that Christ is the “Word of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists.”[13] Such a daring statement leads us to conclude that there are those outside the visible structure of the Church who hold certain truths that we can learn from and that she cannot abolish. God could have worked through the religious traditions of those outside the Church so that when they encounter the Gospel, they understand Christ in their own way. As Hans Urs von Balthasar noted, “[T]he range of Jesus’ eschatological work is such that he can operate directly outside the Church; he may give grace to individual persons, and perhaps to groups, enabling them to act according to his mind; the Church must allow for this possibility…it can happen that, bringing her light into some new area, she finds his light shining there already.”[14] Christ cannot be reduced to a particular experience such as encountering him within the Hellenistic culture. Nor can the Church Hellenize or Latinize those countries that have different worldviews. Catholic theology seems to have a hopeful future in that although her understanding of Christ increased throughout the centuries, especially in synthesizing Hellenistic philosophy and Patrology, the inexhaustible Christ can be understood apart from a Hellenistic worldview. The Catholic Church does not stress on uniformity, but rather unity in diversity. This is the mentality of the Church ever since her beginnings. In the first century, there were many Christians who were still practicing the Torah and there were those who did not because they were former Gentiles. Even today there are many examples of diversity such as the different theologies of Thomism and Molinism, and different Rites of the Mass. There may one day be a different kind of Catholic theology that had its origin in Buddhist thinking or Hindu thinking.
Allowing non-Christian religious traditions play an important role does not take away the Church’s mission to spread the Gospel. Every human person has a desire to know the reason to be alive, to be free from his errors and degrading slavery of becoming a caricature of himself. The good news of Christianity is precisely that it proposes that the answer to the longings of the human heart is Jesus Christ. To encounter the fact of Jesus Christ is to encounter an exceptional reality, a presence that corresponds to the deepest needs of the human heart.[15] His death and resurrection is the visible sign of the triune tenderness of God. Although the Church must not Latinize, we must say that she must Christianize. This is not imposition, but proposing to every human person that the Church had experienced a joy in encountering this man from Nazareth. There is a joy in Christ that cannot be found elsewhere, a joy that is essential in every human person (Jn. 16:22). This commitment to her experiences, that is, Tradition, can purify the religious beliefs in non-Christian religions. It does not destroy other religious traditions but rather uplifts and perfects it. Just as an Aristotelian does not have to cease to be an Aristotelian to be a Christian so too a Buddhist does not necessarily have to give up his Buddhist traditions in order to be a Christian. Christian truth is not uniform but symphonic. What is essential is the Person of Jesus Christ encountered in the Church because Christ alone “fully reveals man to himself.”[16] The essence of Christianity is the Incarnate Word of the Father who infuses into the human person a love that lasts forever, a love that produces a joy that cannot be destroyed.
Notes
[1] Dominus Iesus, 6.
[2] Ibid. cf. K. Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, (Seabury Press, 1978), pg. 344: “If religion were basically nothing but what each individual perceives as the representation and interpretation of his own feeling about existence and his own interpretation of existence, then this religion would lack its essential ground and an essential characteristic.”
[3] Pope John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis no. 9: “This revelation of the Father and outpouring of the Holy Spirit, which stamp an indelible seal on the mystery of the Redemption, explain the meaning of the Cross and death of Christ.”
[4] Foundations, pgs. 279-280; emphasis author.
[5] Franciscan Herald Press, 1971
[6] pgs. 58-59
[7] cf. Abraham Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971) pg. 260: “The two classical terms for the moment at Sinai are mattan torah and kabbalat torah, ‘the giving of the Torah’ and ‘the acceptance of the Torah.’ It was both an event in the life of God and an event in the life of man.”
[8] Cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory vol. 2, (Ignatius Press, 1990), pg. 104: “Christ himself is so much the Incarnate Deed and Word of God that it would be quite inappropriate for him to write anything. When, nonetheless, his history comes to be written down, the writing of it shows, not (as in the Old Testament) progress in revelation itself, but progress in understanding and reflection upon it.”
[9] Pgs. 83-84.
[10] “This revelation of the Father and outpouring of the Holy Spirit, which stamp an indelible seal on the mystery of the Redemption, explain the meaning of the Cross and death of Christ” (Pope John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis no. 9)
[11] pg. 75
[12] Nostra Aetate, no. 2
[13] First Apology, ch. 46
[14] Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory vol. 3, (Ignatius Press, 1993), pg. 282.
[15] Cf. Luigi Giussani, Is it Possible to Live This Way? Vol. 1 Faith, (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), pgs. 25-41.
[16] Gaudium et Spes no. 22
This speech was given to the Aresty Research Symposium in Rutgers, Spring 2008.
Ever since the beginning of Christianity, one of the main problems was evangelization. How were Christians supposed to propose what they call the “gospel,” the “good news” to all people as Jesus commanded them to (Matt. 28: 19-20)? Most of Jesus’ disciples were practicing Jews, that is, they had the same presuppositions and worldview that Jesus had. Yet, they were called to proclaim the good news not simply to the Jews but to the Gentiles, those who had different worldviews than they. We see examples of this when they had to debate whether Gentiles had to be circumcised and follow the Mosaic law in order to be part of the Church, the people of God (Acts 15; Romans 2-6). The early Church decided not to impose some aspects of Judaism to the Gentiles and yet proclaimed the necessity of Jesus Christ as the only savior. Today, the Catholic Church faces the same problem as the early Church. With so many cultures and religions today, she faces the difficult task of presenting the gospel in a non-imposing way while at the same time proposing an essential element in human life: relationship with Christ. Can the Catholic Church propose the necessity of Jesus Christ while at the same time be tolerant of other religions?
Christ as the Fulfillment of Human Life
The then-Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, in his homily to the College of Cardinals in the Mass for the election of a new pope, said that we are “moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal [in] one’s own ego and one’s own desires.” The Catholic Church, however, proposes that she can know for certain that in Jesus of Nazareth, there is “the full and complete revelation of the salvific mystery of God."[1] She cannot accept a religious relativism which teaches that each religion in their own independent way is a path to God, and that the revelation of God given by Christ is incomplete and that other religions are complementary to his revelation.[2] Accepting such an idea would be destroying her understanding of who Jesus is. According to the Church, Jesus of Nazareth is the Incarnate Word of God (Jn. 1:14) in whom the fullness of Yahweh dwells (Col. 1:19; Rom 9:4-5). He is the definitive and final revelation of God simply because he is God; there is nothing more to add because God himself has shown himself in person. In Christ we find God’s triune tenderness to humanity and all of creation, which is fully expressed in his dying and rising from the dead.[3] As Karl Rahner said,
By the resurrection, then, Jesus is vindicated as the absolute saviour. We can also say more cautiously at first: as the final ‘prophet… We must bear in mind here that his word as God’s final word can be understood to be definitive not because God now ceases to arbitrarily to say anything further, although he could have said more, and not because he ‘concludes’ revelation, although he could have continued it had he just wanted to. It is the final word of God that is present in Jesus because there is nothing to say beyond it, because God has really and in a strict sense offered himself in Jesus…Jesus, then, is the historical presence of this final and unsurpassable word of God’s self-disclosure: this is his claim and he is vindicated in this claim by the resurrection. He is of eternal validity and he is experienced in this eternal validity. In this sense in any case is the ‘absolute saviour.[4]
It is important to note that because Jesus Christ is God himself, although he is the final revelation of God, he is inexhaustible. Precisely because he is inexhaustible, whatever we think of him falls short of who he is. His “I” is ever greater than any human speech or understanding: “no similarity so great that a greater dissimilarity cannot be seen between them [God and creature]”. Our understanding of Christ in Scripture and Tradition, then, develops as time continues. Although it is a Catholic doctrine that objective revelation ceased after the death of the apostles, there is a sense in which revelation is open. Joseph Ratzinger’s study in The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure[5] wanted to free us from the conception of revelation as an abstract concept. He argued that St. Bonaventure’s notion of revelatio is the unveiling of the hidden. Concretely, it can be referred to unveiling of the future, the mystical meaning and understanding of Scripture, and “the divine reality which takes place in the mystical ascent”.[6] There can be no revelation unless there is an unveiling, which presupposes a person with a veil, a person who has the capacity to learn something new.[7] Ratzinger also emphasized that revelation was never equated with Scripture but rather the understanding of Scripture and this understanding increases as time goes on. To put it in another way, there can be such a thing as “new revelation” insofar as our understanding of Christ increases.[8] According to Ratzinger, we can summarize St. Bonaventure’s understanding on the relationship between Scripture and history this way,
a) Scripture has grown in an historical way. Only he who knows its history knows its meaning. History is a structural element of Scripture’s intelligible form…b) Scripture, however, is not simply a product of a past history, but is simultaneously a statement about and a prediction of the future. Since the Scriptures were written, part of this future has already become past, while part of it still remains future. This means that the total meaning of Scripture is not yet clear. Rather, the final “revelation,” i.e. the time of a full understanding of revelation, is yet to come.[9]
The Church’s understanding of Christ through the Scriptures, then, is not simply understanding the historical Jesus, that is, what he had done in the first century Palestine, but experiencing Christ ever anew in the present moment. It requires that the Spirit takes the word and incarnates it to the flesh of the believer. The Spirit does this throughout history and it is in this way that the life of Christ is not limited to a particular time, but universalized. The work of the Spirit is to universalize the saving act of Jesus Christ.[10] The work of the Spirit is not to be understood as some kind of magical trick of God, but rather, it is verified in the witness of the believers. The Spirit works through and in people and only when the totality of the person is taken into account can the word of God be understood. To put it in another way, God works through human realities and does not take away anything that is good in him; “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.” When the Spirit moves a person to turn to Christ, a veil is removed and he is moved from glory to glory (2 Cor. 3:16-18). In this way the person becomes a letter of Christ, not made from ink but the Spirit in his heart (2 Cor. 3:1-3).
The experience of the person, the receiver of revelation, then, is fundamental in understanding Jesus Christ. Christ cannot be known apart from the one who receives him. The experience of Christ is so fundamental that the Church is obliged not to forget it. She must keep remembering her life with Christ. Commitment to the experiences of Christ is what we can call Tradition. Tradition, like revelation, is not a set of propositions or doctrines. It cannot be limited to a particular time. It is remembering the life of Christ. By “remembering” we do not simply mean a recollection of the past but reliving the life of Christ. It is the Christian immersing himself to the reality of what he has received. And because every encounter with Christ is a “new revelation” the Church does not remain close to the future but rather takes up her experiences and understanding that will lead her to examine and judge the future in a Christ-like manner. As Hans Urs von Balthasar said, “Her tradition is not so much a link with the past as a marathon relay race in which one runner hands on the torch to the next…the Church is prevented from ever resting on any past achievement; she is continually being spurred on to make a better response.”[11]
Another factor to be kept in mind about experiencing Christ is that the receiver of revelation has his own environment and context he is living in. The Spirit does not work in a void or a tabula rasa but rather works through the human person as he is. A person, then, who is trained in Aristotelian philosophy will not have to abandon the truths that he has learned in that discipline. Rather, Tradition purifies his understanding within that context, saving whatever is good in that philosophy and turning away from what leads to error. This is why throughout Christian history, we find that non-Christian cultures had made a big impact on Christianity, up to the point of impacting the way Christian theology is presented. One cannot doubt, for example, that Hellenistic culture was not absent in the development of Christian thought. The fact that the concept of transubstantiation has become a Catholic dogma manifests the Greek influence in Christianity.
By understanding the concept of revelation in Catholic theology, it seems that we can say that there is a type of religious pluralism that can be accepted. As the Second Vatican Council taught,
The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men. Indeed, she proclaims, and ever must proclaim Christ "the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6), in whom men may find the fullness of religious life, in whom God has reconciled all things to Himself. The Church, therefore, exhorts her sons, that through dialogue and collaboration with the followers of other religions, carried out with prudence and love and in witness to the Christian faith and life, they recognize, preserve and promote the good things, spiritual and moral, as well as the socio-cultural values found among these men.[12]
The Church can accept that there are rays of truth in other religions because they all partake in the Logos in some way, that is, they are made in the image of God. In fact, St. Justin Martyr even went further to note that Christ is the “Word of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists.”[13] Such a daring statement leads us to conclude that there are those outside the visible structure of the Church who hold certain truths that we can learn from and that she cannot abolish. God could have worked through the religious traditions of those outside the Church so that when they encounter the Gospel, they understand Christ in their own way. As Hans Urs von Balthasar noted, “[T]he range of Jesus’ eschatological work is such that he can operate directly outside the Church; he may give grace to individual persons, and perhaps to groups, enabling them to act according to his mind; the Church must allow for this possibility…it can happen that, bringing her light into some new area, she finds his light shining there already.”[14] Christ cannot be reduced to a particular experience such as encountering him within the Hellenistic culture. Nor can the Church Hellenize or Latinize those countries that have different worldviews. Catholic theology seems to have a hopeful future in that although her understanding of Christ increased throughout the centuries, especially in synthesizing Hellenistic philosophy and Patrology, the inexhaustible Christ can be understood apart from a Hellenistic worldview. The Catholic Church does not stress on uniformity, but rather unity in diversity. This is the mentality of the Church ever since her beginnings. In the first century, there were many Christians who were still practicing the Torah and there were those who did not because they were former Gentiles. Even today there are many examples of diversity such as the different theologies of Thomism and Molinism, and different Rites of the Mass. There may one day be a different kind of Catholic theology that had its origin in Buddhist thinking or Hindu thinking.
Allowing non-Christian religious traditions play an important role does not take away the Church’s mission to spread the Gospel. Every human person has a desire to know the reason to be alive, to be free from his errors and degrading slavery of becoming a caricature of himself. The good news of Christianity is precisely that it proposes that the answer to the longings of the human heart is Jesus Christ. To encounter the fact of Jesus Christ is to encounter an exceptional reality, a presence that corresponds to the deepest needs of the human heart.[15] His death and resurrection is the visible sign of the triune tenderness of God. Although the Church must not Latinize, we must say that she must Christianize. This is not imposition, but proposing to every human person that the Church had experienced a joy in encountering this man from Nazareth. There is a joy in Christ that cannot be found elsewhere, a joy that is essential in every human person (Jn. 16:22). This commitment to her experiences, that is, Tradition, can purify the religious beliefs in non-Christian religions. It does not destroy other religious traditions but rather uplifts and perfects it. Just as an Aristotelian does not have to cease to be an Aristotelian to be a Christian so too a Buddhist does not necessarily have to give up his Buddhist traditions in order to be a Christian. Christian truth is not uniform but symphonic. What is essential is the Person of Jesus Christ encountered in the Church because Christ alone “fully reveals man to himself.”[16] The essence of Christianity is the Incarnate Word of the Father who infuses into the human person a love that lasts forever, a love that produces a joy that cannot be destroyed.
Notes
[1] Dominus Iesus, 6.
[2] Ibid. cf. K. Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, (Seabury Press, 1978), pg. 344: “If religion were basically nothing but what each individual perceives as the representation and interpretation of his own feeling about existence and his own interpretation of existence, then this religion would lack its essential ground and an essential characteristic.”
[3] Pope John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis no. 9: “This revelation of the Father and outpouring of the Holy Spirit, which stamp an indelible seal on the mystery of the Redemption, explain the meaning of the Cross and death of Christ.”
[4] Foundations, pgs. 279-280; emphasis author.
[5] Franciscan Herald Press, 1971
[6] pgs. 58-59
[7] cf. Abraham Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971) pg. 260: “The two classical terms for the moment at Sinai are mattan torah and kabbalat torah, ‘the giving of the Torah’ and ‘the acceptance of the Torah.’ It was both an event in the life of God and an event in the life of man.”
[8] Cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory vol. 2, (Ignatius Press, 1990), pg. 104: “Christ himself is so much the Incarnate Deed and Word of God that it would be quite inappropriate for him to write anything. When, nonetheless, his history comes to be written down, the writing of it shows, not (as in the Old Testament) progress in revelation itself, but progress in understanding and reflection upon it.”
[9] Pgs. 83-84.
[10] “This revelation of the Father and outpouring of the Holy Spirit, which stamp an indelible seal on the mystery of the Redemption, explain the meaning of the Cross and death of Christ” (Pope John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis no. 9)
[11] pg. 75
[12] Nostra Aetate, no. 2
[13] First Apology, ch. 46
[14] Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory vol. 3, (Ignatius Press, 1993), pg. 282.
[15] Cf. Luigi Giussani, Is it Possible to Live This Way? Vol. 1 Faith, (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), pgs. 25-41.
[16] Gaudium et Spes no. 22
Friday, August 29, 2008
New Blog!
There is a new blog on Catholic philosophy, Philosophia Perennis:
http://perennis.wordpress.com/
Now you can read your favorite authors in one blog.
I'm not going to lie to ya...reading the list of rosters in that blog, comparing myself to all of them, I feel stupid!
There is a new blog on Catholic philosophy, Philosophia Perennis:
http://perennis.wordpress.com/
Now you can read your favorite authors in one blog.
I'm not going to lie to ya...reading the list of rosters in that blog, comparing myself to all of them, I feel stupid!
Thursday, August 07, 2008
Notes on Nietzsche
The question, “Is Zarathustra ‘higher man,’ ‘last man,’ or ‘overman’?”, tempts a person to give a definitive answer as a matter of fact and falls into what Nietzsche calls the will to truth, something which he likes to get away from because it does not concern what is life-enhancing but the object in itself. Answering the question with either the higher man, last man, or overman would indeed have the spirit of the last human being since the last human being is concerned with the truth of things, which, according to Nietzsche, is “the most contemptible person” (TSZ I, 5). What is in the mind of the last human being? Nietzsche describes it this way, “What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?—thus asks the last human being, blinking” (ibid.).The last human being is concerned with the essence or nature of things; he is concerned with the absolute. He rejects this because it is an intellectual exercise and a neglect of the will: “let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject.’…to eliminate the will altogether, to suspend and every affect, supposing we were capable of this—what would that mean but to castrate the intellect?” (GM III, 12). The last human beings are those who are “good” and “just” (TSZ III, 26), those who love reason and truth but hate “creators,” those who invent their own virtues (ibid.). This hatred really comes from a bad conscience, a “serious illness that man was bound to contract under…that change which occurred when he found himself finally enclosed within the walls of society and of peace” (GM II, 16). A person with a bad conscience does not see the person as a goal but rather “a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise” (ibid.). The “creator”, on the other hand, is a person who wills, the person who does not analyze whether x is true or not, but rather wills x or gives worth to x. He is not stuck to the culture or does not rely on any authority, but rather, his “creating will wills” his destiny (TSZ II On Blessed Isles).
Answering the question with either “higher man, “last man,” or “overman” would be falling into the trap to the will to truth, that which is not life-enhancing. What must be done is to fight against such a tendency to care for truth: “I do not refute ideals, I merely put on gloves before them” (EH Pref., 3). This is what the higher man does, for the higher man lives his life as a going over and a going under (TSZ IV 3). He puts his “gloves” on, and goes “under” the root of things, the origin of things, including the origin of the will to truth. In other words, the higher man finds no value in seeing the truth of what Zarathustra is because he has done a genealogy, seeing that when he looks at the origin of things, he would not value truth the same way. It is usually a rule for a student to answer a question, a question like what Zarathustra is, asked by the teacher. But the higher man must overcome this rule. Nietzsche says, “Unlearn this ‘for,’ you creators; your virtue itself wants that you do nothing ‘for’ and ‘in order’ and ‘because.’ You should plug your ears against these false little words” (TSZ IV, 11). This presupposes that although the higher man is a “creator,” one who wills, he has some attachments that he must still overcome. Maybe he is attempting to write an answer to a question posed by the teacher “in order” to get a good grade. Maybe he is writing the paper because he has been told he has to. A tendency to do these things shows that the higher man must still overcome himself. He is above the common folk in that he is free from any laws or opinions of people, but he himself “must go away from the market place” (TSZ IV, 1). He must overcome the rulers of today because that is the greatest danger for the overman (TSZ IV, 3). Unlike the last human being who “prevail at the expense of truth and at the expense of the future,” (EH, Why I am a Destiny, 4) the higher man must become a dynamite, one who destroys all values imposed to him (ibid., 1).
Getting back to the question, “Is Zarathustra ‘higher man,’ ‘last man,’ or overman’?”, it seems that it is a tricky question. The first word of the question, “is,” presupposes being. “Is” refers to esse (to be), something which Nietzsche would want to free us from. For him, what is important is to become oneself. To become who you are means to overcome the notions we have such as cause and effect and being. The study of being, of metaphysics, comes from philosophers who wanted to study things in themselves. The medieval philosophers, for example, believe that all beings reflect God who is Being itself. Everything that exists, everything that has being, reflects Being, reflects God. The more a person conforms himself to the laws of God, the more he will reflect God. God is the cause of all being, of all becoming, one who gives the human person his destiny. Nietzsche, however, believes that we must devour this belief-system and anything that would weigh the person down, that would take away his autonomy. He gives three images about the process of self-overcoming. He uses the spirit of the camel, the lion, and the child. The camel represents duties, those that make a person attached to something other than his own will. What is needed to devour the camel is the lion: “To create freedom for oneself and also a sacred No to duty: for that, my brothers, the lion is required” (TSZ I, On the Three Metamorphoses). The person who has the spirit of the lion has distaste for authority, has distaste for anything that would take away his freedom. The lion, however, is not the last metamorphoses possible but the child. The child “is innocence, forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a wheel rolling out of itself, a first movement, a sacred yes-saying” (ibid.). The child is what Nietzsche would call the overman. This “sacred yes-saying,” is the affirmation of life, the creating of new values. It is amor fati, the love of fate, and this must be the inmost nature of the overman (EH, The Case of Wagner, 4). Amor fati is saying “Yes to the point of justifying, of redeeming even all of the past” (EH TSZ, 8). A person, then, must affirm his life if he has to go through it again. He must will to be in a boring class if he has to. He must will his life all over again even if he knows that one of the stages of his life was working on a paper for class the whole night. He does not fight against traditional values out of ressentiment but willing and valuing the rhythm of life which is called the eternal return.
Becoming the overman, becoming who you are, as Nietzsche said, is a “sacred yes-saying,” amor fati. It is overcoming morality, especially Christian morality, which he believes is an “overestimation of goodness and benevolence on a large scale for a consequence of decadence, for a symptom of weakness, irreconcilable with an ascending, Yes-saying life: negating and destroying are conditions of saying Yes” (EH Why I am a Destiny, 4). Morality comes from a bad conscience, from ressentiment, rather than affirming and willing who the person is. What the overman does is destroy this by “going under,” by genealogy, and simply embrace the life he has apart from any opinions or authority. In fact, he must also reject the beliefs and things he has created for they too can become a camel, something he can be attached to. Here we see why the concepts of cause and effect, of being and becoming, is not applicable to the overman. It is true that the overman is a creator of values, but these values can never become his. This is why Nietzsche can say that he wrote such great books. His books do not have an audience and that is why no one can claim authority over them. Even Nietzsche is not an audience for his books. It is not a book for anyone to follow even for him. He is simply the creator. He must have a Dionysian spirit of tearing down every value and belief-system even if they are his creation. The overman must be “a new beginning, a game.” The child does not take his games seriously. Playfulness does not have the intention of attempting to look at the meaning of things. It is not teleological. The child simply plays and “forgets” so that he can play the game again, so that he can will the eternal return.
“Is Zarathustra ‘higher man,’ ‘last man,’ or ‘overman’?” It depends on the perspective one is coming from. The last man would answer by finding the truth of the matter. He might look for the answer by reading the book and seeing whether Zarathustra had truly become the overman in the end. He might even read what Nietzsche has to say about the book in Ecce Homo and analyze it that way. The overman would answer differently. He would not go to Nietzsche because he loses authority to himself when he relies on experts. If he wants to write a paper on the question, he would do so in a way that would contribute to the affirmation of his life. His creativity is his best defense against the ascetic ideal, that which falls into the realm of truth and falsehood, which does not have primacy on the “I” but the “Thou” (a god or authority) or the “it” (object in itself). His creativity in answering the question includes not caring about what grade he gets from the teacher because having a good grade is not his goal. He does not have any goals. He himself is the source and author of his values. He listens to himself alone. Yet, he himself is not attached to his own ideas or creation. He has overcome himself without destroying himself. It is this process of overcoming himself that he becomes himself. So what exactly is my answer to the question? In my perspective, it seems that Zarathustra could be any of the three.
The question, “Is Zarathustra ‘higher man,’ ‘last man,’ or ‘overman’?”, tempts a person to give a definitive answer as a matter of fact and falls into what Nietzsche calls the will to truth, something which he likes to get away from because it does not concern what is life-enhancing but the object in itself. Answering the question with either the higher man, last man, or overman would indeed have the spirit of the last human being since the last human being is concerned with the truth of things, which, according to Nietzsche, is “the most contemptible person” (TSZ I, 5). What is in the mind of the last human being? Nietzsche describes it this way, “What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?—thus asks the last human being, blinking” (ibid.).The last human being is concerned with the essence or nature of things; he is concerned with the absolute. He rejects this because it is an intellectual exercise and a neglect of the will: “let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject.’…to eliminate the will altogether, to suspend and every affect, supposing we were capable of this—what would that mean but to castrate the intellect?” (GM III, 12). The last human beings are those who are “good” and “just” (TSZ III, 26), those who love reason and truth but hate “creators,” those who invent their own virtues (ibid.). This hatred really comes from a bad conscience, a “serious illness that man was bound to contract under…that change which occurred when he found himself finally enclosed within the walls of society and of peace” (GM II, 16). A person with a bad conscience does not see the person as a goal but rather “a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise” (ibid.). The “creator”, on the other hand, is a person who wills, the person who does not analyze whether x is true or not, but rather wills x or gives worth to x. He is not stuck to the culture or does not rely on any authority, but rather, his “creating will wills” his destiny (TSZ II On Blessed Isles).
Answering the question with either “higher man, “last man,” or “overman” would be falling into the trap to the will to truth, that which is not life-enhancing. What must be done is to fight against such a tendency to care for truth: “I do not refute ideals, I merely put on gloves before them” (EH Pref., 3). This is what the higher man does, for the higher man lives his life as a going over and a going under (TSZ IV 3). He puts his “gloves” on, and goes “under” the root of things, the origin of things, including the origin of the will to truth. In other words, the higher man finds no value in seeing the truth of what Zarathustra is because he has done a genealogy, seeing that when he looks at the origin of things, he would not value truth the same way. It is usually a rule for a student to answer a question, a question like what Zarathustra is, asked by the teacher. But the higher man must overcome this rule. Nietzsche says, “Unlearn this ‘for,’ you creators; your virtue itself wants that you do nothing ‘for’ and ‘in order’ and ‘because.’ You should plug your ears against these false little words” (TSZ IV, 11). This presupposes that although the higher man is a “creator,” one who wills, he has some attachments that he must still overcome. Maybe he is attempting to write an answer to a question posed by the teacher “in order” to get a good grade. Maybe he is writing the paper because he has been told he has to. A tendency to do these things shows that the higher man must still overcome himself. He is above the common folk in that he is free from any laws or opinions of people, but he himself “must go away from the market place” (TSZ IV, 1). He must overcome the rulers of today because that is the greatest danger for the overman (TSZ IV, 3). Unlike the last human being who “prevail at the expense of truth and at the expense of the future,” (EH, Why I am a Destiny, 4) the higher man must become a dynamite, one who destroys all values imposed to him (ibid., 1).
Getting back to the question, “Is Zarathustra ‘higher man,’ ‘last man,’ or overman’?”, it seems that it is a tricky question. The first word of the question, “is,” presupposes being. “Is” refers to esse (to be), something which Nietzsche would want to free us from. For him, what is important is to become oneself. To become who you are means to overcome the notions we have such as cause and effect and being. The study of being, of metaphysics, comes from philosophers who wanted to study things in themselves. The medieval philosophers, for example, believe that all beings reflect God who is Being itself. Everything that exists, everything that has being, reflects Being, reflects God. The more a person conforms himself to the laws of God, the more he will reflect God. God is the cause of all being, of all becoming, one who gives the human person his destiny. Nietzsche, however, believes that we must devour this belief-system and anything that would weigh the person down, that would take away his autonomy. He gives three images about the process of self-overcoming. He uses the spirit of the camel, the lion, and the child. The camel represents duties, those that make a person attached to something other than his own will. What is needed to devour the camel is the lion: “To create freedom for oneself and also a sacred No to duty: for that, my brothers, the lion is required” (TSZ I, On the Three Metamorphoses). The person who has the spirit of the lion has distaste for authority, has distaste for anything that would take away his freedom. The lion, however, is not the last metamorphoses possible but the child. The child “is innocence, forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a wheel rolling out of itself, a first movement, a sacred yes-saying” (ibid.). The child is what Nietzsche would call the overman. This “sacred yes-saying,” is the affirmation of life, the creating of new values. It is amor fati, the love of fate, and this must be the inmost nature of the overman (EH, The Case of Wagner, 4). Amor fati is saying “Yes to the point of justifying, of redeeming even all of the past” (EH TSZ, 8). A person, then, must affirm his life if he has to go through it again. He must will to be in a boring class if he has to. He must will his life all over again even if he knows that one of the stages of his life was working on a paper for class the whole night. He does not fight against traditional values out of ressentiment but willing and valuing the rhythm of life which is called the eternal return.
Becoming the overman, becoming who you are, as Nietzsche said, is a “sacred yes-saying,” amor fati. It is overcoming morality, especially Christian morality, which he believes is an “overestimation of goodness and benevolence on a large scale for a consequence of decadence, for a symptom of weakness, irreconcilable with an ascending, Yes-saying life: negating and destroying are conditions of saying Yes” (EH Why I am a Destiny, 4). Morality comes from a bad conscience, from ressentiment, rather than affirming and willing who the person is. What the overman does is destroy this by “going under,” by genealogy, and simply embrace the life he has apart from any opinions or authority. In fact, he must also reject the beliefs and things he has created for they too can become a camel, something he can be attached to. Here we see why the concepts of cause and effect, of being and becoming, is not applicable to the overman. It is true that the overman is a creator of values, but these values can never become his. This is why Nietzsche can say that he wrote such great books. His books do not have an audience and that is why no one can claim authority over them. Even Nietzsche is not an audience for his books. It is not a book for anyone to follow even for him. He is simply the creator. He must have a Dionysian spirit of tearing down every value and belief-system even if they are his creation. The overman must be “a new beginning, a game.” The child does not take his games seriously. Playfulness does not have the intention of attempting to look at the meaning of things. It is not teleological. The child simply plays and “forgets” so that he can play the game again, so that he can will the eternal return.
“Is Zarathustra ‘higher man,’ ‘last man,’ or ‘overman’?” It depends on the perspective one is coming from. The last man would answer by finding the truth of the matter. He might look for the answer by reading the book and seeing whether Zarathustra had truly become the overman in the end. He might even read what Nietzsche has to say about the book in Ecce Homo and analyze it that way. The overman would answer differently. He would not go to Nietzsche because he loses authority to himself when he relies on experts. If he wants to write a paper on the question, he would do so in a way that would contribute to the affirmation of his life. His creativity is his best defense against the ascetic ideal, that which falls into the realm of truth and falsehood, which does not have primacy on the “I” but the “Thou” (a god or authority) or the “it” (object in itself). His creativity in answering the question includes not caring about what grade he gets from the teacher because having a good grade is not his goal. He does not have any goals. He himself is the source and author of his values. He listens to himself alone. Yet, he himself is not attached to his own ideas or creation. He has overcome himself without destroying himself. It is this process of overcoming himself that he becomes himself. So what exactly is my answer to the question? In my perspective, it seems that Zarathustra could be any of the three.
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