The Higher Path

Generally, if I write or find an article about the Scriptures for my other blog, I will copy a link to it here, as well, rather than reproducting the whole thing. This is one of those times.

My post includes commentary & the link to an article at First Things (click here).

Leading Us Home

The entire message of Scripture might be summed up as this: The God who is love created us to bring us to a perfect union of love with him. I would argue that every other aspect of the Faith is somehow supportive of that underlying premise.

Thus, the Anagogical Sense of the Scriptures, that which leads us forward to our eternal homeland, is perhaps the most important point. The Allegorical Sense can lead to a reduction of God's revelation through the Scriptures & the history of the people of Israel to a mere intellectual exercise akin to "Biblical matching", such as, "Oh, Moses is like Jesus, Pharoah is like the devil, Miriam is like Mary, the Israelites are like the Church, the serpents that bit them are like sin, ..." These cranial gymnastics are interesting, but by themselves may become a distraction that isn't that helpful in moving one toward salvation.

Likewise, the Moral Sense alone could lead one to just try to be a good person, a mere human effort to earn God's favor through "being good." Well, my Pelagian friend, the problem is that salvation is a pure, unmerrited gift from God, which we gratefully accept.

So, you see, it's easy to get the whole Catholic system of Scripture study out of whack if first things aren't put first. The absolutely overriding desire of every human life should be this: to get to Heaven. Thus the Anagogical Sense helps us to get our Biblical priorities straight, and - to paraphrase a certain Cardinal Ratzinger - to keep from imprisoning the Word of God in the letters themselves.

Over at First Things, Mark Shea has another installment in his series about Catholic Scripture study called Coming to Our Senses, dealing specifically this time with the Anagogical Sense. God bless him for taking on this noble task.

Transforming Pain into Love

Our Why Catholic? group met to discuss the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick, but it seemed that before we could do that, we had to understand something about sickness & death in themselves first. We discussed our various personal experiences & also more public ones, such as Terri Shaivo & Pope John Paul II. Obviously, man has searched for ways to deal with sickness, injury, suffering, & death since the beginning, yet these days, men's minds & laws are increasingly tending toward the avoidance & elimination of any pain or suffering at all costs, with the predictable consequences making the headlines daily.

While the context of the excerpt is unknown, following is a lovely meditation from the Tueday, March 24 evening entry in the Magnificat magazine:

.....Everything we suffered appeared to us as a countenance of Jesus forsaken to be loved & wanted in order to be with him & like him, so that in union with him, by loving that suffering, we too might give life to ourselves & to many others.

.....Upon entering this path of unity we had chosen him alone. In a burst of love we had decided to suffer with him & like him. Well then, we have experience that God, who is nothin but love, cannot be outdone in generosity, & through a divine alchemy he transforms pain into love. In a word, he was making us into Jesus, whom we experienced in ourselves through the gifts of his Spirit, gifts which are summed up in love.

.....We realized that as soon as we were glad to endure any pain - so as to be abandoned like him who re-abandons himself to the Father - & we continued to love him by doing God's will, the next moment, the pain, if it was spiritual, went away &, if physical, became a yoke that was light.

.....Our pure love, that is, our gladness to suffer, transformed any pain we encountered into love. In a certain sense, suffering was divinized through Jesus' divinization of suffering, if we dare say so, continued in us.

.....After every meeting with Jesus forsaken, & we had loved him, we found God in a new way, more face to face, in a unity that was more complete. The fruits of the Spirit, light & joy, returned, & so did our peace - that special peace Jesus promised, & for which we felt it necessary to turn all torments, anguish, agonies of the soul, disturbances, & temptations into an occasion to love God.

.....Chara Lubich

The Moral Sense

Continuing his series on the Senses of Scripture as outlined in the Vatican II document Dei Verbum & the Catechism (109-119), Mark Shea investigates the Moral Sense. The Church teaches that we be attentive to the Literal & Spiritual senses of Scripture, with the latter subdivided into Allegorical, Moral, & Anagogical senses.

He does a nice job of tying the whole subject to common current day objections that there is no moral authority outside of the individual, & certainly not within that collection of perhaps edifying, but nonetheless fictional stories called the Bible.

There's a lot to consider about this, as in American, the conscience is routinely considered the supreme authority - even in matters of faith - over either Church teaching or decisions. But all that will have to wait for later. For now, just ponder the article (see here).

The Historical-Critical Let Down

Mark Shea is at it again (see here). He is one of the very few Catholic authors I know that is intentionally seeking to advance the state of Catholic scripture scholarship by tackling what the Council actually said about studying the Holy Writ (see here, esp. Art. III), instead of just regurgitating the same old theories, guesses, & attendant errors. Well, him & the Pope, I suppose.

A releated must-hear: Fr. Zuhlsdorf's excellent website has a wonderful podcazt (see here) that includes, among other things, John Cleese reading from the Screwtape Letters regarding the historical-critical method.

Book Review: Lovely Like Jerusalem

by Aidan Nichols, O.P.

A lovely book that shows how the longings of the people of God of the Old Covenant - ancient Israel - find their fulfilment in the person of Christ Jesus in the New Testament. Click on the image for the entire review at my blog.

I sense a true resurgence in Catholic scriptural scholarship & spirituality.

...

What great times are these!

The Literal Meaning

You can't possibly know what something means if you're not even sure what it says.

So, thanks to Mark Shea over at Catholic Exchange for saving me the trouble of writing an article on this particular aspect of studying the Sacred Scriptures according the methodology outlined in the Catechism:

110 In order to discover the sacred authors' intention, the reader must take into account the conditions of their time & culture, the literary genres in use at that time, & the modes of feeling, speaking, & narrating then current. "For the fact is that truth is differently presented & expressed in the various types of historical writing, in prophetical & poetical texts, & in other forms of literary expression."

116 The literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture & discovered by exegesis, following the rules of sound interpretation: "All other senses of Sacred Scripture are based on the literal."

Good stuff. Can't wait to see the rest.