A friend wrote about the Real Presence in the Eucharist and the absence of it in many priestless parishes. He brought back from the caverns of the mind the taunt of a Jesuit at BC in a 1945 freshman class. He was one of the wise guys of that era when Boston Irish street people were the only People of God, and he referred to the churches of the Brahmins as "The chapels of the Real Absence." I thought it was a low blow then -- age 16 -- and still do today -- age 80.
God, in his real presence in his own world, the one he made up out of nothing, is in all churches and chapels with his people. Catholics happen to believe in the Sacrament of the Eucharist and call it The Real Presence. That is so hard to comprehend, it is often easier to speak of it as Symbol, even if we don't really mean what symbol is supposed to mean. Kind of difficult, even after extensive schooling, to imagine I'm eating real flesh and drinking real blood of God.
Symbolically speaking? Not really. Aristotle taught us it is really real in a transubstantial sort of way. But, surely not really, in the words we use. Why not? Poets do it all the time. And that is the insight I get in reading about Rome barring Fr. Roger Haight, SJ, from teaching anywhere, not just in Catholic schools, for writing of Jesus as the Symbol of God. The insight? It's all tied up in words, isn't it? Like symbol Or, to be consistent, like "substance and accidents," Aristotelian terms. Plato used different words, so much so, that all philosophy after his is really just footnotes. As they say.
For example, we Catholics, intellectuals and non-intellectuals alike, allow mystics like Meister Eckhart, Ignatius, the Great Teresa and her buddy, John of the Cross, to think and speak and write like poets, when they come down out of their ecstasies to the real world of salt and pepper, bread and milk, mountains and oceans, and describe where they have been with the same words used by the people who couldn't leave that real world. They speak as poets speak. We do not expect them to speak like theologians, scholars, or other imaginative authors, a/k/a creators, of dogma and doctrine, who use words so precisely defined as to be rigid. Nor do we punish them for their flights of fancy in words of lyric and song.
Harold Bloom, great teacher, in his great article, "The Art of Reading Poetry," wrote:
No poet would censure Roger Haight, SJ, author of Jesus Symbol of God and a 3 volume masterpiece, Christian Community In History. Rome does. Some theologians do. They are literal, ruled by dictionaries and definitions, and prowl libraries, scope-spotting heresies in figurative language. And yet, and yet, those same theologians insist that the topics on which they ponder, of which they write, are beyond real human knowledge of the really real, i.e. that which we can touch and see and taste and hear and smell. Poetry essentially is figurative language, concentrated so that its focus is both expressive and evocative. Figuration is a departure from the literal, and the form of a great poem itself can be a trope ('turning') or figure. A common dictionary equivalent for 'figurative language' is 'metaphorical,' but a metaphor actually is a highly specific figure, or turning from the literal. Kenneth Burke, a profound student of rhetoric, or the language of figures, distinguished four fundamental tropes: irony, synecdoche, metonymy, and metaphor.
Remember. Aristotle taught them that all knowledge enters through the senses and the senses are, in a Grecian - German? - manner of speaking, materially real. And hence, measurable, definable, almost but not quite exact. I wrote almost, because scientists are telling us that they, too, like theologians, are a bit stumped by Black Holes, action at a distance, subatomic particles, and wonder whether there was a before before the Big Bang. Which we had better find out before the universe stops expanding and begins to shrink back to where it came from, like a rubber band of sorts. Unless the other alternative is permissible, and it just snaps. Wouldn't have to ask questions then, I guess.
What if some theologians are poets at heart? What if a poet were also a theologian? Some say St. Thomas Aquinas was. He wrote and probably hummed along: "Pange lingua," "Adoro te devote, latens Deitas." What if words, all words, must by nature be figurative, simply and especially because they are the symbols of ideas? Think of it: a word is a symbol of an idea. Words are real on paper, when spoken. But no idea is really real, you know. Ever see one walking down the street, growing by the side of the road, drifting through the sky? Ideas, Aristotle again taught us, are universal, a/k/a spiritual.
Is not that the insight? Words are symbols. Of ideas, thoughts, the stuff in our minds.
We think as spiritual entities, not as merely physical, material ones, because that is what we are, exactly as God made us. He plunked us down in this earthly garden of Eden, almost really real in materiality, and gave us a physical body with physical senses to carry a spiritual soul around with us, and, thus, let us get in touch with what we have always called reality. The stuff we eat, listen to, sniff at, cuddle up to, walk on, be with.
Why can't Jesus be a real human being, a real God, and a symbol of both? At the same time and in eternity, which is beyond or outside time? Why couldn't I be both a poet and a professional lawyer using words strictly defined? Maybe because my psychiatrist, after a long time listening to my words, told me to get out of the law, find something else to do, "You are a poet in a butcher's shop." Which could also be Roger Haight's predicament?
This may be stretching a symbol, but Gerard Manley Hopkins, Jesuit priest and poet, wrote in "God's Grandeur"Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
Has any poetry critic accused Hopkins of denying the divinity of the third person of the Trinity in the symbol of a warm breasted bird flying around in the sky, brooding over the world? Had he written as a theologian, would he have irked Rome, been denied freedom to teach anywhere in the world?
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Please note I am not writing on ecclesiology, nor theology, not even squabbling with the CDF, nor challenging Rome. Just using words to take the thoughts out of my mind and, through my really real fingers on a materialistic keyboard, and slinging them into the internet, whence they will most likely descend to this piece you are now reading. And that ain't no symbol. Not intellectual either. You know, Fr. Haight's enemies and I are not that far apart, actually and really speaking. We just use words differently. Theirs are literal. Mine are figurative. I have read Fr. Haight's books and do not recall his writing that Jesus was not real, never came, was neither a real God or a real man, and, therefore is just a symbol.
Last remark. Important. I am not attacking Rome, nor defending Fr. Haight. He needs no defense. People like me who had seminary training, were immersed in logic and definitions of terms and the syllogistic method, which Aristotle bequeathed to the Western world. They were well suited for philosophical and theological disputations, the Super Bowls of the Middle Ages. They are very hostile to brotherly sharing of dreams and insights, when someone comes down from the mountain and shares God.
Nobody here needs offend. Nobody here needs defend. We are not tangling with Rome, nor are we reformers changing Christology. We are the People of God. To be Catholics, Christians, we do need to share our mystics and poets as well as our theologians. We do not read and admire Fr. Roger Haight's life's work, because we seek to challenge the Pope, but because we are the People of God. We believe, because God speaks to us in symbols and gave us symbols of our own to communicate with him. He incarnated himself as a symbol, always was and always is and always will be real. God is.
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