After suffering an injury from the glorious MudBowl....actually lets start there
So this is perfectly Catholic and nerdy and masculine and yeah...for the last 40 years or so, the Josephinum plays a MudBowl. The Theologate Papal Bulls versus the College of Cardinals. This year, we actually had a real life bull...costume present!!!
Theology won, dignum et iustum est and it is quite nice to have that trophy in our pub again! Though it is technically flag football, yeah it kinda ends up not being at time...many injuries were suffered but that is just part of the fun.
Also, THE IRISH ARE NOW 10-0, NBD!!!! BEAT THE HERETICS (I MEAN JESUITS), NOW TO BEAT THE DEACONS AND CONTRACEPTION...
So yeah, a week full of tests and papers. I also presented a paper this weekend at the Pop Culture Symposium we host which was on friendship this year, I talked about dancing as it appears in the Trinity, Dante's Paradiso, the Holy Mass, and...Lady Gaga. When I get a chance, I will post that up
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So I wanted to write a minute on misericordia. I had done some recent research on this since I had hoped to present a paper at the recent Center for Ethics and Culture Conference at Notre Dame this year on Justice, the Crowning Virtue and offer a discussion of mercy, for Aquinas, as the crowning virtue which, itself, is rooted in justice but a notion of justice that would have been inconceivable to the Greeks.
I wanted to offer a brief meditation on the priest in the confessional as sitting in the place of the Divine Tribunal of God.
As the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, "The confessor is not the master of God's forgiveness, but its servant. The minister of this sacrament should unite himself to the intention and charity of Christ. He should have a proven knowledge of Christian behavior, experience of human affairs, respect and sensitivity toward the one who has fallen; he must love the truth, be faithful to the Magisterium of the Church, and lead the penitent with patience toward healing and full maturity. He must pray and do penance for his penitent, entrusting him to the Lord's mercy." (1466)
this is a striking passage. Now only must the priest love truth, "HE MUST PRAY AND DO PENANCE FOR HIS PENITENT, ENTRUSTING HIM TO THE LORD'S MERCY."
This priest does not simply sit there, hear the sins, and administer absolution in some romanticized version of Divine Justice...we beg before the throne of the Triune Tribunal and are granted absolution. The priest, as a true mediator dei, is moved to a profound amount of mercy such that he makes penance along with the penitent.
As Aquinas notes in the Summa (IIaIIae, xxx, 1, corpus):
"As Augustine says (De Civ. Dei ix, 5), mercy is heartfelt sympathy for another's distress, impelling us to succor him if we can. For mercy takes its name "misericordia" from denoting a man's compassionate heart [miserum cor] for another's unhappiness. Now unhappiness is opposed to happiness: and it is essential to beatitude or happiness that one should obtain what one wishes; for, according to Augustine (De Trin. xiii, 5), "happy is he who has whatever he desires, and desires nothing amiss." Hence, on the other hand, it belongs to unhappiness that a man should suffer what he wishes not."
One thing to note at the get-go...mercy is not pity. I am of the strong opinion that Aquinas converts Greek pity (a vile thing it was) to the Christian virtue of mercy. True virtues, in the Aristotelian scheme, ought not to clash. Justice to the Greeks governs one’s relationship with others in an ordered way such that there is a sustained or constant willingness to extend to each person what he or she deserves. This is not far from our modern conception of justice.
Lady Justice, as we depict her, carries a sword, exemplifying her coercive power, scales weighing the competing and warring parts in each hand, and a blindfold indicating her impartiality and dedication to a reasoned and objective ruling, not a ruling rooted in passions. The just man, as the Greeks conceived of it, was one who could show no partiality and as Plato illuminates in The Republic, the just man’s reason rightly orders the will to control the passions. Hence, there is little shock that pity plays no role in the action of justice as a virtue; pity is an emotion that clouds the man’s ability to practice his virtue in accord with his reason.
In this post virtue world (to lean on MacIntyre’s After Virtue), one finds the tendency to confuse misericordia with pity and set it in a drastic dichotomy against justice. On the one hand, justice dictates that each is given his due. On the other hand, mercy seems to dictate that each is given what is not his due. In a sense, the contemporary mind views mercy as entailing something less than justice be done. This supposed clash, then, finds a climax in the writings of Aquinas. One has, on the one hand, Aristotle posits in the Rhetoric that pity is felt (as a passion) for those who suffer undeservedly since we do not pity but blame those who suffer as a result of their own wicked actions. On the other hand, in the Gospel of Matthew, one sees God, Incarnate in Christ, moved with pity at the mere sight of the crowds around him, trouble and abandoned as sheep without a shepherd (Matt 9:36). Christ (The Pantokrator) stands as a judge figure quite different from Lady Justice as conceived in antiquity and today.
The Judge both forgives sinners and condemns the wretched as He sits upon His judgment throne; His right hand of justice is slowed by His left hand of mercy. In typical iconography, Christ the Judge holds the book of names in one hand and blesses with the other; not simply with the sword and scales. The view of mercy as pity creates a tension between the movements of the heart (misericordia; literally the movement of ones heart to sorrow - miserium cor) and the demands of reason (justitia); a tension depicted eloquently depicted in Dante’s Inferno when Virgil (a representative of reason and an ancient) rebukes Dante for his pity on the damned: “… There is no place for pity here. / Who is more arrogant within his soul, who is more impious / than one who dares to sorrow at God’s judgment?” (Canto XX, 30-32).
Yet for Aquinas, the two share a most intimate relationship. Aquinas unites the Greek crowning virtue of justice with the Augustine’s greatest virtue, mercy. Mercy “does not destroy justice,” as Aquinas noted, “but is a certain kind of fulfillment of justice.” “Mercy without justice, he added, “is the mother of dissolution.” Aquinas quite subtlety transforms the Greek passion of pity into the Christian virtue of mercy.
[I hope to write a paper on this one day through the lens of Dante’s interaction with Virgil (fitting types of mercy and justice) in the Inferno. It is my belief that Virgil’s lack of understanding is precisely that misunderstanding present today. Through this I would hope to redefine the virtues so that, with a correct understanding of justice and mercy, one can see their intimacy that hearkens to the words of Portia in the Merchant of Venice: “The quality of mercy is not strained / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath… / It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings; / It is an attribute to God himself, / And earthly power doth then show likest God’s / When mercy seasons justice.” (The Merchant of Venice, IV, I, 179–197).]
So anyways, that was a tangent but what is the point. The priest in the confessional must must must be of one heart with his penitent. It is not simply the penitent and the confessor, but the two working together. As Aquinas, quoting Augustine says, mercy is a deep connection of the heart, through heartfelt sympathy, in which the two are united. One can see this time and time again in the Gospels, Jesus moved to sorrow and is this not the very reason of the Incarnation, God becoming man so that he may, in our lowliness, lift us up so that we may become God!!!
Let the priest sitting in that Tribunal of Mercy, then, been so steeped in mercy, formed in that Most Sacred Heart of Jesus that we so often invoke for mercy. For is not the priesthood, above all else, the very love of God?!?!?!
Ok...rambling over...time to go clean my room :(
