Feb 16, 2021
Divine Revelation: Toward Simplicity
A few weeks ago, I met up with some friends of mine who I hadn’t seen in sometime. We sat around, talked Theology, and they — being music nerds — got onto the topic of liturgical music. Next thing I knew, we were listening to Masses. I am not particularly well versed in musical theory, but I was able to sit and appreciate the beauty of each piece. I was able to listen for differences between versions of the Kyrie but asking me to note what instruments or patterns were specifically different goes over my head. I told my friends that I thought it was awesome that they could pull these pieces and really dive into them, understanding them on a deeper level than just “wow, that’s really pretty music.” I was surprised when one of them quickly remarked back, “I wish I could just listen to this music without my brain automatically pulling it apart. I wish I could just listen to it and hear ‘pretty music’.”
When thinking about how divine Revelation is beautiful, my first instinct is to simply think “of course.” Divine Revelation is of God. Since when we perceive Beauty, we are experiencing just a fraction of the Good, and God is the supreme Good, of course divine Revelation is beautiful. But this really just answers ‘why.’ So instead, how does divine Revelation become perceptible to us? How is this beauty made manifest? God reveals in ways that we can understand. And the ways in which God communicates to Man are stunningly simple. We are able to perceive and experience the beauty of divine Revelation through its permeation of God’s Creation — through us as His children, our faculties and senses, and the world we inhabit, especially through the little ways in which we are able to experience His love for us.
Balthasar talks about the idea that love must be perceived in his Love Alone is Credible. He discusses that for us, the beloved, to perceive love, we must already understand it to some degree. God’s love, or grace, brings its own “conditions of recognizability” (Balthasar 75). These conditions which it brings are the Church, Mary as the locus and at the heart of the Church, and “the Bible, which as spirit(-witness) can be nothing other than the Word of God-bound together in an indisputable unity with the response of faith… [and] the Bride and Mother, who is the archetype of faith, must proclaim this Word, in a living way, to the individual as the living Word of God” (79). What strikes me about these conditions — especially the final two — is the accessibility of divine Revelation.
God reveals in ways in which we humans can understand — he reveals in both a humbling and glorifying simplicity. It is humbling because why would God, the Almighty One, Creator of Heaven and Earth, speak to us in such a lowly way as though our own language? In the writing of Scripture, God revealed to Man through man’s languages of the time. He even continues to reveal to us through English translations of the Bible, as well as through other common language translations. He reveals through our simple, lowly tongue. However, while we are called to humility before the Lord, there is another side to this coin.
God designed us with the capacity for language. He made the choice to give us each sense that we have. When Balthasar discusses the Bride and Mother proclaiming the Word in a living way, my mind immediately turns to Mary’s bearing of Christ. The World made flesh. God’s proclamation. How must it glorify God to use the gifts He gave us to respond to his Revelation with faith? To use what we have created, such as language or through art or other means, to provide the response, in our own nature (80). In Christ the Son, the Word divine love is made manifest in a profound way. Christ’s life on earth, especially its culmination with His Passion, is crucial to understanding divine love. The Passion is somber, sobering, and is also a beautiful and deep revelation of God to us, His children, just how much He loves us. I would like to expand, however, on the other side of the coin I described when discussing humility — on glorifying God’s Creation.
In Balthasar, we see how grace brings its own conditions for being recognized. God is not cryptic. He will not reveal something to us in a way that He has not prepared us for. Although Goizueta had his own misgivings about Balthasar, we see him follow Balthasar’s theological method in Christ Our Companion — and also see him build on Balthasar’s illustration of how the beauty of divine Revelation is made manifest. However, Goizueta focuses in particular on how it is made manifest in our daily lives.
I would like to draw attention to, in particular, Goizueta’s section on popular Catholicism. I think here he draws a necessary and firm line, highlighting key developments of how the ordinary Catholic understands his relationship to God. He shines a light on some of my own ‘defaults’ that I will make clearer now.
Goizueta draws upon Louis Dupré’s observations concerning the differing understanding of religious symbols among Medieval and Modern Catholics. For Medieval Catholics, since it was the lace where one encountered the living, transcended God, all of Creation reflected and pointed toward God. The Creator is intimately tied to His creation. We see this sensually rich theological environment in religious life. In words of Goizueta, “matter mattered” (Goizueta 65). The person was inseparably related to the rest of Creation and his Creator. However, this view began to break down in the Middle Ages.
Afraid that too intimate a connection with material creation would compromise God’s absolute transcendence, nominalist theologians such as William of Ockham effectively removed God from creation… whereas previously, meaning had been established in the very act of Creation… it now fell upon the human mind to interpret the cosmos; the person became the source of meaning.” (65–66)
Goizueta later draws on Peter Casarella, who in turn draws on Husserl, who critiques that “Immediately with Galileo… begins the surreptitious substitution of idealized nature for pre-scientifically instituted nature…” (86). Non-technical views are superficial. An idea emerges that if we really want to understand the world, we need to find a way to ‘unmask’ ourselves from the illusion of what we perceive with our own eyes.
Earlier, I rephrased the question of “how divine Revelation is beautiful” because my automatic response is ‘of course.’ I can only cite my own experience for this, however, considering colloquial use of the two terms, ‘How’ questions are generally experiential while ‘why’ is investigative. There is nothing wrong with asking why. This movement toward methodology in theology is oriented toward a desire for a very human desire to understand and through this, know God. However, in the name of methodology, theology suffered. We start to see neo-scholastic theologians reading Aquinas through a dualistic lens, leading to the birth of modern Christianity which, in Goizueta’s words, is “characterized by the splitting, or dichotomizing of reality: as God is severed from creation, the human person — now autonomous “individual” — is severed from both God and nature.” And if God is autonomous from us, that implies that we must be autonomous from God as well.
However, Goizueta is coming from and building on liberation theology and a perspective found in modern-day Latino Catholicism. Without devolving into minutia, we see a return — or maintenance — of this sensual, creation-rooted theology we saw in the Medieval period. When I say that divine Revelation, the ways in which God communicates to Man, is ‘stunningly simple’, I do not mean that it is easy to understand. As I explained in my discussion of Balthasar, this simplicity is rooted in part in the fact that the means are simple means which we can easily understand — however, I think the ‘stunning’ aspect of this is really highlighted through Goizueta. We don’t need to go far to find God. You don’t need a degree in Theology to be Catholic or have a relationship with Him. Goizueta describes how the poor do not find meaning or hope in religious practices themselves, but in the person of Jesus — the object of belief which provokes response (91).
Divine Revelation draws its beauty from God, but we can participate in its beauty because God uses simple means to make his Word know, inviting us into a personal, highly sacramental — not abstracted — relationship with Him as Creator. When I expressed my (slight) jealousy at the fact that my friends could automatically dissect music as they heard it, and they responded that they wished they could just listen to music without pulling it apart — to just hear ‘pretty music,’ I was struck by his desire for naivety. While being a musician undoubtedly gave him a perspective and deep understanding of the music we were listening to — one which I cannot even begin to understand — the raw experience, unburdened by context and theory, I am able to participate in draws me into the beauty in a pure, childlike way. I can just listen to the beautiful music they play. Similarly, we are called to love God like a child: to follow without question and to love without restraint. We are called to simply love Him.
