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ARCHIVE.
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Blog
entries beginning with #101 are not essays but minimally-edited notes and
reviews from the files I've collected over the last few decades. I no longer
have the time and energy needed to sort out and put together into decent
essay-form the many varied ideas in these files, but I would like to share them
with all who are interested.
If
you have questions and think I might help, you're welcome to send me a
note: sam@macspeno.com
Post
#128 is a review I wrote for a friend of an extremely important book by the
liturgist Cipriano Vagaggini; he is described very positively by the monks in
the recorded conversations reviewed in post #127.
===
Dear D:
This is
another book review. The author is referred to in the earlier review I sent you
[of Belonging to the Universe] where I mention that both of the monks involved in the new
paradigms conversations "have very good things to say about Cipriano
Vagaggini's work in promoting the paradigm shift."
They call
Vagaggini "a key person in our theology, who influenced hundreds, even
thousands, of students" (apparently at the international Benedictine
college in Rome).
The
context in which his name came up was David Steindl-Rast's comments about the
contemporary rebirth of focus on inner experience, where he stresses that
"much that is new is in fact a recovery of the older gnosis-wisdom
perspective: a whole-person centered focus on transformative experience."
This book
is even older than Belonging and is, I think, even more important. Its affirmation of
the central significance of matter to a religious perspective is essential to
Sophiology, the New Cosmology and the whole "immense transition."
-Sam
===
The
Flesh, Instrument of Salvation: A Theology of the Human Body, by Cipriano Vagaginni, OSB (Alba
House, 1969).
Somewhere
in The Good Wine
Bruno Barnhart has very positive things to say about this book (as do Br. David
and Fr. Thomas in Belonging to the Universe), so I thought it was worth
getting a look at, even though it's a half-century old.
I
remember the author's name from way back, in connection with the
"liturgical movement" of the 1950s and 60s, but I don't think I ever
read anything of his.
This book
was published after Vatican II but clearly was written earlier. It is just
about unreadable; the language is that of a stilted English translation of a
Latin document from the Council of Trent! The book even contains a nihil
obstat.
But it's
got some very
good ideas in it. It is, in fact, a great treasure!
Its main
point is something which the Christian world still needs to grasp, and which is
essential to the perspectives of both the New Cosmology and Sophiology: that
matter (the flesh, the human body, the physical universe) counts; that a material body is no less
significant than a spiritual soul.
The
author's key idea is that from a Christian perspective, the dichotomy between
body and soul, which we inherited from Hellenistic matter-spirit dualism,
simply has no validity.
He
repeats over and over, in numerous contexts and in many different ways, the
Latin dictum (which was not previously familiar to me and was the Italian title
of the book: caro salutis est cardo).
Cardo is "hinge." So the
dictum says that caro (flesh/matter) is the hinge, the cardinal or pivotal point, of our
understanding of salvation.
Whatever
"salvation" or "redemption" means, the body (matter, flesh)
is central to it.
In The
Good Wine Bruno
talks about the apparent absence of a sense of reversal, paradox, irony in
Christianity. That absence is strongly evident in Christianity's history: for
almost its entire history, the flesh was considered the instrument of
damnation.
Here it
is seen as nothing less than the key, the cardo/hinge, the very means by which
the cosmo-the-andric unity is achieved, so that the fullness of God may be in everything.
The copyright on the original Italian text isn't
given; the English copyright is 1969. So he was certainly on the forefront of
thinking back then.
And since the computer advances of the 1980s,
allowing for the study of self-organizing systems, we can express his point
even better: Because we can see that the self-organizing principle of the
cosmos results in personal consciousness, we can also see clearly the
non-validity of the body-soul distinction.
The author wants to take it even further, however.
Although he doesn't use Eastern terms like "unitive" or "non-duality,"
his thought is rooted in the Christian idea of divinization.
His point is that flesh is no less divinized than
spirit.
In different words: there is no dichotomy between theos
and our real lives in the real world. As Karl Rahner says, "there is no
dichotomy between grace and everyday life."
Vagaggini supports these views with texts from the
Old and New Testaments and familiar early Church fathers such as Ignatius of
Antioch, Irenaeus of Lyons and Cyril of Alexandria. He works his way up to Thomas
Aquinas (of whom he is quite critical on several important points: "The
learned doctor ought to know better," he says).
A good positive summary of Vagaggini's view might
be: Our non-duality is "whole person."
I.e., we experience our non-duality with God by being a whole, healthy, human
being: a person in right relatedness with all things.
To paraphrase St. Cyril: A physically and
psychologically healthy human being is the fundamental way the divine glory
shows itself.
===
So. If the matter-spirit dichotomy isn't valid, how
can we understand the bible's and church fathers' clear distinction between
flesh and spirit?
Vagaggini says the biblical and patristic
distinction between sarx and pneuma
is in fact the distinction between the developmental nature of
matter/body/person (sarx) in contrast to its having
arrived at the telos of the developmental process (pneuma).
This view is obviously coming from a dynamic rather
than a static perspective; and with his emphasis on person and
dynamis, Vagaggini is clearly in the
post-patriarchal, post-rationalistic world of the New Cosmology and Sophiology.
Calling sarx "movement toward the
fullness of non-duality," and pneuma "the attainment of the goal to which the
process is moving," is new to me. It's very helpful.
That
Vagaggini shows that it's both biblically and patristically based is a
breakthrough.
He
acknowledges that sarx is usually identified with death, decay, corruptibility, but he makes
the point that those are, in fact, aspects of the developmental process (of change and
transformation).
Thus pneuma
is not the opposite of the temporal process (i.e.,
not just in-corruptibility) but precisely the telos of that process: transformation to
glory, new person, new creation.
In this
context, he gives a seemingly simplistic definition of the Christian life which
I especially like: participation in the movement toward the goal (the pleroma of non-duality) in order to reach
it. A fascinating way to put it!
===
Although,
as I've mentioned, the book was written in Italian about five decades ago and
in a style that might have come from five centuries earlier, newly familiar words and ideas
keep popping up: importance of matter, centrality of person, dynamic cosmos,
participatory process. A new, contemporary translation of this book would be a
gift to the world.
Of
special interest is his comments on (what else?) Romans 8: "the cosmos
groans with us in wanting our bodies to be saved." I never really
understood that text so clearly before.
In this
context (i.e., that caro salutis est cardo), it is a tremendously powerful statement of the
centrality of person in cosmic evolution.
If we
keep in mind that "body" here simply means the material aspect of a
person, so that from the beginning matter (living matter, human life) is
oriented toward its persistence beyond all that threatens it, then the
fulfillment of this built-in tendency of the material cosmos to persist depends
on the non-duality of anthropos with theos.
What an
affirmation of all that is represented by both the New Cosmology and
Sophiology!
===
Vagaggini
was primarily a liturgist, so he wants to emphasize the implications of this
insight for liturgy and sacraments.
He says
that "the full cosmic value of the laws of the incarnation and sacramentality
are derived from the human body." (Sounds like Bulgakov again!)
Unfortunately,
it will probably take another generation or two before we can deal well with
the liturgical implications of caro salutis est cardo. But once again the ultimate
identity of eucharist, church and transfigured cosmos comes through clearly.
===
Vagaggini
has another, related idea, to which we can give our immediate attention: "The body
appears as the result of a labor of tension which pervades the whole of
material creation into the very vitals of its being."
This
brings together the anthropos-cosmos link in terms of the labor of childbirth, the public work
of the liturgy, and those aspects of endurance and burden connected with Sophia
that modern Gnosticism seems to be especially concerned with.
This book
is indeed a great treasure. Not only does the theological perspective on the
ultimate identity of eucharist, church and transfigured cosmos come through
clearly. With its biblical and patristic analysis of sarx and pneuma, the matter-spirit dichotomy of
the past is resolved, and affirmed in our scientific understanding that the
human person is at the core of the cosmos.
This book
is a buried
treasure!
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