I begin with the conviction shared by all of us and often repeated by Pope Francis that the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR) is “a current of grace for the whole Church.” If the CCR is a current of grace for the whole Church, we have a duty to ourselves and to the Church to explain what this current of grace consists of and why it is intended for and necessary for the whole Church. In brief, we need to explain who we are and what we offer—or better, what God offers—to the Church through this current of grace.
Until now we have not been—not could we have been—able to say clearly what the Charismatic Renewal is. It is necessary in fact to experience a way of life before being able to define it. This has always happened in the past whenever new forms of Christian life appeared. It unfortunate when movements and religious orders begin with many rules and a detailed constitution established up front as a protocol to follow. Life, as it progresses, acquires features and makes its own rule, like a river that carves out its own bed as it moves forward.
We have to admit that until now we have given the Church ideas and portrayals of the Charismatic Renewal that have been different and at times contradictory. We only need to make brief enquiries of the people who live outside of it for us to become aware of the current confusion with regard to the identity of the Charismatic Renewal.
For some people it is movement of “enthusiasts,” no different than the “enthusiastic and enlightened” movements in the past, the Alleluia people with their hands raised who pray or sing in an incomprehensible language: in brief, an emotional and superficial phenomenon. I can say this with full knowledge of these facts because for quite a while I was among those who thought this way. For some people, the movement is identified with people who do healing prayer or exorcisms; for still others, it is a Protestant and Pentecostal “infiltration” into the Catholic Church. At best, the Charismatic Renewal is seen as a movement whose members can be relied on do many things in the parish but with which it is best not to get too deeply involved. As someone once said, people like the fruit of the renewal but not the tree.
After fifty years of existence and experience, and on the occasion of the inauguration of the new service organization CHARIS, perhaps the moment has come to attempt a reinterpretation of this movement and to define it, even if any definition cannot be definitive since its path is far from over.
I believe that the essence of this current of grace is providentially enclosed in its name, “Charismatic Renewal,” provided one understands the true significance of both these words. What I propose to do is to dedicate the first part of my speech to the noun “Renewal” and the second part to the adjective “Charismatic.”

PART ONE: “RENEWAL”
It is necessary to make some preliminary remarks for us to understand the relationship between the noun “Renewal” and the adjective “Charismatic” and what each represents.
In the Bible we clearly see two modes in which the Spirit of God operates. There is the first mode that is called charismatic. This occurs when the Spirit of God comes upon some people in particular circumstances and confers on them gifts and an ability beyond a human capacity to accomplish the task God is expecting of them. The characteristic of this mode of operation by the Spirit of God is that it is given to a person but not for that person’s sake—to make him or her more pleasing to God—but rather for the good of the community, for service. Some of the people who received these gifts in the Old Testament ended up leading lives that were anything but conformed to God’s will.
Only later, essentially after the exile, does the Bible begin to speak about a different mode of operation by the Spirit of God, a mode that will later be called the sanctifying action of the Spirit (see 2 Thess 2:13). The Spirit is defined as “holy” for the first time in Psalm 51: “Take not your holy Spirit from me” (v. 11). The clearest testimony of this is the prophecy in Ezekiel 36:26-27:
A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances.
The innovation of this mode of acting by the Spirit is that it comes upon people and remains there, transforming them from within, giving them a new heart and a new ability to observe the law. Later, theology will call the first mode of the Spirit’s action “gratia gratis data,” a free gift, and call the second, “gratia gratum faciens,” grace that makes one pleasing to God.
As we move from the Old to the New Testament, this dual kind of action of the Spirit becomes even clearer. We only need to read chapter 12 of the First Letter to the Corinthians that speaks of all types of charisms and then go on to the next chapter, chapter 13, that speaks of a unique gift, equal and necessary for all, which is love. This love is “God’s love . . . poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (Rom 5:5), the love, as defined by St. Thomas Aquinas, “with which God loves us and which makes us capable of loving him and the brethren.”
The relationship between the sanctifying action of the Sprit and his charismatic action is seen by Paul as similar to the relationship between being and acting and to the relationship between unity and diversity in the Church. Sanctifying action concerns the Christian’s being, the charisms concern acting because they are for service (see 1 Cor 12:7; 1 Pet 4:10); the first establishes the unity of the Church while the second establishes the variety of its functions. We can read Ephesians 4:4-13 on this point. There the apostle explains first what constitutes the being of a Christian and the unity of all believers: one body, one Spirit, one Lord, one faith; he goes on to say, “grace was given to each of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift” (v. 7): apostles, evangelists, teachers, etc.
The apostle does not stop at highlighting the two modes of operation by the Spirit but affirms the absolute priority of the sanctifying action over the charismatic action. Acting depends on being (agere sequitur esse), not the reverse. Paul reviews the majority of charisms—speaking in tongues, having the gift of prophecy, understanding all mysteries, distributing everything to the poor—and concludes that without love a charism is worthless for the one who exercises it, even if it benefits the people who receive it.
It is true that a charism is not given because of, or in view of, a person’s holiness, but it is also true that a charism does not stay healthy and can actually become corrupt and end up causing harm if it is not grounded in personal holiness. To recall the priority of the Spirit’s sanctifying action over his charismatic action is the specific contribution the Catholic Charismatic Renewal can bring to the Evangelical and Pentecostal movements, which had themselves among their roots the so-called “Holiness Movement.”
All that I have said about the renewing and sanctifying action of the Spirit is enclosed in the noun “Renewal.” Why precisely this word? The idea of newness goes along with the revelation of the Spirit’s sanctifying action from beginning to end. Ezekiel had previously spoken about a “new spirit.” John speaks about being “born of water and the Spirit” (Jn 3:5). But above all St. Paul is the one who sees in this “newness” what it is that characterizes the whole “new covenant” (2 Cor 3:6). He defines the believer as “a new man” (Eph 2:15; 4:24) and the baptism as “the washing of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit” (Titus 3:5).
The thing to make clear right away is that this new life is the life brought by Christ. He is the one, in rising from the dead, who has given us the possibility, thanks to our baptism, of “walking in newness of life” (see Rom 6:4). It is thus a gift before being a duty, “something done” before being “something to do.” On this point we need a Copernican revolution in the common mindset of believing Catholics (not a revolution in the official doctrine of the Church!), and this is one of the most important contributions the Charismatic Renewal can make—and has made in part—to the life of the Church. For centuries the emphasis was so much on morality, on duty, on what to do to gain eternal life, that it inverted the relationship and put duty before gift, making grace the effect instead of the cause of our good works.
The Charismatic Renewal, concretely the baptism in the Spirit, brought about in me this Copernican revolution that I was speaking about, and because of that I am deeply convinced that it can bring about that revolution in the whole Church. And it is the revolution on which the possibility of re-evangelizing the post-Christian world depends. Faith blossoms in the context of the kerygma not in the context of the didaché, that is, not in the context of theology, apologetics, and morality. These things are necessary for the “formation” of faith and bring it to the perfection of charity, but they are not able to generate faith. Christianity, unlike every other religion, does not begin by telling people what they need to do to save themselves; it begins by telling them what God has done in Christ to save them. It is the religion of grace.
There is no danger that one can fall into “quietism” this way and forget the duty of acquiring virtue. Scripture and experience leave no way out on this point: the surest sign of the presence of the Spirit of Christ is not charisms but the “fruit of the Spirit.” The Charismatic Renewal needs instead to be on guard against another danger, the one for which St. Paul reproached the Galatians: “Having begun with the Spirit, are you now ending with the flesh?” (Gal 3:3)—the return to the old legalism and moralism that would be the exact antithesis of what “renewal” refers to. There exists, of course, also the opposite danger of using “your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh” (Gal 5:15), but that is more easily recognizable.
What the New Life in the Spirit Consists in
But it is time to get more concrete and see what the new life in the Spirit consists in, how it is manifested, and thus what genuine “renewal” is. We rely on St. Paul, and more precisely on his Letter to the Romans, because it is there that he sets forth its constitutive elements almost systematically.
A Life Lived according to the Law of the Spirit
The new life is first of all a life lived “by the law of the Spirit.”
There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death. (Rom 8:1-2)
We cannot understand what the phrase “law of the Spirit” means if we do not begin with the event of Pentecost. In the Old Testament, there were two basic interpretations for the feast of Pentecost. At the beginning, Pentecost was the feast of harvest (the feast of weeks) (see Num 28:26ff) when people offered God their first fruits (see Ex 23:16; Deut 16:9ff). But later, and certainly by Jesus’ time, the feast had been enriched with a new meaning. It was the feast that recalled the giving of the law on Mount Sinai and the covenant established by God with his people—the feast, in a word, that commemorated the events described in Exodus 19-20. A text from the current Hebrew liturgy for Pentecost (Shavuot) says, “This day of the feast of weeks is the time of the giving of our Torah.”
It seems that St. Luke deliberately described the descent of the Holy Spirit with the signs that characterized the theophany at Sinai; he uses images, in fact, that recall the earthquake and the fire. The liturgy of the Church confirms this interpretation since it includes Exodus 19 in the readings for the Vigil of Pentecost.
What does this parallel approach tell us about our Pentecost? In other words, what does it mean that the Holy Spirit descended upon the Church on the very day in which Israel recalls the giving of the law and the covenant? St. Augustine already asked this question and gave the following answer. Fifty days after the sacrifice of the lamb in Egypt, the finger of God inscribed the laws of God on Mount Sinai on stone tablets, and here fifty days after the sacrifice of Christ, the true Lamb of God, again the finger of God, the Holy Spirit, wrote his law. But this time it was not on stone tablets but on the tablets of flesh of people’s hearts.
This interpretation is itself based on Paul’s affirmation that defines the community of the new covenant as “a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts” (2 Cor 3:3). The prophecies of Jeremiah and Ezekiel about the new covenant are suddenly illuminated. “This is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts” (Jer 31:33). It is no longer on tablets of stone but on hearts; it is no longer an external law but an interior law.
How does this new law that is the Spirit function concretely, and in what sense can it be called a “law”? It functions through love! The new law is what Jesus calls “the new commandment” (Jn 13:34). The Spirit has written the new law on our hearts, infusing love into them: “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Rom 5:5). This love, as St. Thomas explained to us, is the love with which God loves us and, at the same time, makes us able to love him in return and to love our neighbor. It is a new ability to love.
There are two ways a person can be induced to do, or not to do, a certain thing: by compulsion or by attraction. The external law induces a person the first way, by compulsion and with the threat of punishment. Love induces him in the second way, by attraction. People are in fact attracted by what they love without having to be subjected to any external constraint. Christian life is lived by attraction, not by compulsion, by love, not by fear.
A Life of the Sons and Daughters of God
Secondly, the new life in the Spirit is the life of the sons and daughters of God. The apostle goes on to say,
All who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of sonship. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God. (Rom 8:14-16)
This is a central idea in the message of Jesus and the whole New Testament. Thanks to baptism that has grafted us onto Christ, we have become children in the Son. What new thing, then, can the Charismatic Renewal bring to this? Something very important, and that is the discovery and existential awareness of the fatherhood of God that has made more than one person melt into tears at the moment of the baptism of the Spirit. Legally, we are his children through baptism, but experientially we become his children thanks to the action of the Holy Spirit that is ongoing in our lives.
A filial sentiment is born. From being a master, God becomes a father. That is the moment in which a person wholeheartedly exclaims for the first time, “Abba, my Father!” This is one of the most frequent effects of the baptism of the Spirit. I remember an elderly lady from Milan, in receiving the baptism of the Sprit, who went around saying to everyone in her group, “I feel like a baby, I feel like a baby! I have discovered that God is my papa!” Experiencing God’s fatherhood means experiencing his infinite love and mercy.
A Life under the Lordship of Christ
Finally, the new life is a life under the Lordship of Christ. In Romans the apostle writes,
If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. (Rom 10:9)
And again soon after in the same letter he says,
None of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living. (Rom 14:7-9)
This special awareness of Jesus is the work of the Holy Spirit: “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit!” (1 Cor 12:3). The most evident gift I received on the occasion of my baptism in the Spirit was the discovery of the Lordship of Christ. Up to that point, I was a scholar of Christology; I taught courses and wrote books on ancient christological doctrines. The Spirit converted me from Christology to Christ. What emotion I had when I heard, in the stadium at Kansas City in July 1977, 40,000 believers from various denominations singing, “He is Lord, He is Lord. He is risen from the dead and He is Lord. Every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” For me, who was still an outside observer of the Charismatic Renewal, this song had cosmic resonances since it brought into play what is in heaven, on earth, and under the earth. Why not repeat this experience, on an occasion like this, and proclaim the Lordship of Christ together in song. Let those who know it sing it in English. . . .
What is special in the proclamation of Jesus as Lord that makes it so distinctive and decisive? It is that by proclaiming it one not only makes a profession of faith but also makes a personal decision. Whoever proclaims it is deciding the meaning of his or her life. It is like saying, “You are my Lord; I submit to you, and I freely recognize you as my savior, my head, my master, the one who has complete rights over me. I joyfully yield the reins of my life to you.”
This luminous rediscovery of Jesus as Lord is perhaps the most wonderful grace in our time that God has granted to his Church through the Renewal. In the beginning, the proclamation of Jesus as Lord (Kyrios) was, for evangelization, what the ploughshare is to the plow, the blade that first breaks up the ground and allows the plow to make a furrow in the soil. Unfortunately, a change occurred concerning this word when we move from the Jewish sphere to the Hellenistic sphere. In the Jewish world the title Adonai, Lord, was enough in itself to proclaim Jesus’ divinity. And in fact it is with that title that Peter proclaims Jesus Christ to the world on the day of Pentecost: “Let all the house of Israel therefore know assuredly that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36).
When it came to preaching to the pagans, however, this title was no longer adequate. Starting with the Roman emperor, so many called themselves “Lord.” The apostle notes it somberly: “Although there are many “gods” and many “lords,” yet for us there is one Lord, Jesus Christ” (see 1 Cor 8:5-6). Already by the third century the title “Lord” was no longer understood in its kerygmatic sense: it was considered the proper title used by anyone still at the stage of being a “servant” and of fear, and it was inferior to the title of Master that was appropriate to be used by a “disciple” and friend. People continued to speak of Jesus as “Lord,” of course, but it became just like any other title, and even more often it was one of the parts of the full name of Christ: “Our Lord Jesus Christ.” But it is one thing to say, “Our Lord Jesus Christ” and another to say, “Jesus Christ is our Lord!” (with an exclamation point).
What in all of this is the qualitative leap that the Holy Spirit makes us take in our understanding of Christ? It is in the fact that the proclamation of Jesus as Lord is the door that leads to knowing the risen and living Christ! Not the personage of Christ, but the person of Christ. He is no longer just a set of theses and dogmas (with their corresponding heresies), no longer just an object of worship and of remembrance but a living reality in the Spirit. The difference between this living Jesus and the Jesus of books and scholarly discussions about him is the difference between the real sky and a sky sketched out on paper. If we want the new evangelization not to remain wishful thinking, we need to put the ploughshare before the plow again, the kerygma before the parenesis.
The shared experience of the Lordship of Christ is also what most prompts the unity among Christians, just as we see happening among us here. One of the top priorities of CHARIS, according to the directives of the Holy Father, is precisely that of promoting this unity among all the believers in Christ through every means possible, in reciprocal respect for each one’s identity.
A Current of Grace for the Whole Church
I believe at this point it is clear why we say that the Charismatic Renewal is a current of grace for the whole Church. All that the word of God has revealed to us about the new life in Christ—a life lived according to the law of the Spirit, a life as sons and daughters of God, and a life under the Lordship of Christ—is nothing but the substance of Christian life and holiness. It is our baptismal life actualized in fullness, that is, not only thought and believed but lived and presented, and not only to a few privileged souls but to all the holy people of God. For millions of believers of different Christian Churches the baptism in the Spirit has been the door to such splendors of the Christian life.
One of the sayings dear to the Pope Francis is that “realities are greater than ideas,” and thus that living the Christian life is greater than thinking about it. I believe the Charismatic Renewal can be (and in part has been) a great help in making the great truths of faith go from being thought to being lived, in making the Holy Spirit move from books of theology to the experience of believers.
St. John XXIII conceived of the Second Vatican Council as a “new Pentecost” for the Church. The Lord answered this pope’s prayer beyond all expectations. But what does “a new Pentecost” mean? It cannot consist only in a new flowering of charisms, ministries, and signs and wonders as a breath of fresh air on the face of the Church. These things are just the reflection and the sign of something more profound. A new Pentecost, to be truly such, must take place in the very depth that the apostle revealed to us: it must renew the heart of the Bride, not just her dress.
For the Charismatic Renewal to be the current of grace we have described, it needs to be renewed itself, and the institution of CHARIS is meant to contribute to this. Origen wrote in the third century, “You must not imagine that the renewing of the life, which is said to have been done once, suffices. On the contrary, . . . this newness . . . must be renewed”: “Ipsa novita innovanda est.” We should not be amazed at this. This is what happens in every project of God from the moment it is put into the hands of human beings.
Immediately after I joined the Renewal, I was struck one day in prayer by certain thoughts. I seemed to be sensing the new thing the Lord was doing in the Church; I took a piece of paper and a pen and wrote down some thoughts that even surprised me because they were hardly the fruit of my reflection. They are in my book The Sober Intoxication of the Spirit Part Two, but let me share them again with you because it seems to me that it is the point from which we must start again.
The Father wants to glorify the Son, Jesus Christ, on the earth in a new way, through a new intervention. The Holy Spirit is appointed to carry out this glorification because it is written, “He will glorify me and take that which is mine.” A Christian life entirely consecrated to God, without a founder, without a rule, and without new congregations. The Founder: Jesus! The Rule: the gospel interpreted by the Holy Spirit! The Congregation: the Church! Do not worry about tomorrow, do not try to make something that will remain, and do not set in motion recognized organizations that can be perpetuated by successors. . . . Jesus is a Founder who never dies, so there is no need for successors. We always need to let him do new things, even tomorrow. The Holy Spirit will remain in the Church, even tomorrow.

PART TWO
“CHARISMATIC”
Now we move to the second part of my talk, which will be much briefer, about what the adjective “Charismatic” adds to the name “Renewal.” First and foremost it is important to say that “Charismatic” needs to remain an adjective and never be a noun. In other words, we must absolutely avoid the use of the term “charismatics” to describe people who have experienced the Renewal. If anything, we should use the words “renewed Christians,” not “charismatics.” The use of this term rightly arouses resentment because it creates discrimination among the members of the body of Christ, as if some people are gifted with charisms and some are not.
I do not want to give a teaching here on charisms about which there are so many opportunities to speak. My intent is to demonstrate how the Renewal, insofar as it is also charismatic, is a current of grace meant for the whole Church. To illustrate this affirmation we need to glance quickly at the history of charisms in the Church.
The Rediscovery of Charisms by Vatican II
What really happened to the charisms after their tumultuous appearance at the beginning of the Church? The charisms did not disappear so much from the life of the Church as they did from its theology. If we retrace the history of the Church, keeping in mind the various lists of charisms in the New Testament, we have to conclude that—perhaps with the exception of “speaking in tongues” and “the interpretation of tongues”—none of the charisms was ever completely lost.
The history of the Church is full of charismatic evangelizers, gifts of wisdom and knowledge (we only need to think of the Doctors of the Church), miraculous healings, people gifted with the spirit of prophecy or discernment of spirits, not to mention gifts such as visions, raptures, ecstasies, and illuminations that are also listed among the charisms.
So then, what is new that allows us to speak of a reawakening of charisms in our time? What was absent before? From their proper role of serving the common good and the “organization of the Church,” the charisms were progressively confined to the private and personal sphere. They no longer had a role in the constitution of the Church.
In the life of the early Christian community, the charisms were not exercised privately; together with apostolic authority, they delineated the features of the community. Apostles and prophets were the two forces that together guided the community. Very soon the balance between the two aspects—that of the office and that of the charism—broke down in favor of the office. A decisive element was the rise of false doctrines, especially those of the Gnostics. This fact increasingly tipped the balance toward the office holders, the pastors. Another fact was the crisis of the prophetic movement spread by Montanus in Asia Minor in the second century that further served to discredit a certain kind of collective charismatic enthusiasm.
All the negative consequences for charisms derive from these historical circumstances. Charisms became relegated to the margins of the Church’s life. There were still reports for a while of some charisms persisting here and there. St. Irenaeus, for example, says that in his time there were “many brethren in the Church who possess prophetic gifts, who speak all kinds of languages, who disclose the secrets of men for their benefit and explain the mysteries of God.” But it was a phenomenon that was in decline. In particular the charisms that had worship and the life of the community as the arena of their exercise disappeared: inspired speech and glossolalia, the so-called Pentecostal charisms. Prophecy was reduced to the magisterium’s charism to interpret revelation authentically and infallibly. (That was the definition of prophecy in the treatises of ecclesiology that were studied in my day.)
People tried to justify this situation theologically as well. According to one theory by St. John Chrysostom, which was often repeated right up until the eve of Vatican II, certain charisms would have been reserved for the Church in its “nascent state” but would have later “ceased” since they were no longer necessary to the general economy of the Church.
Another inevitable consequence was the clericalization of the charisms. Linked to personal holiness, they ended up being almost always associated with the usual representatives of this holiness: pastors, monks, and religious. The charisms passed from the sphere of ecclesiology to that of hagiography, that is, to the study of the lives of the saints. The place of the charisms was taken over by the “Seven Gifts of the Spirit” (in Isaiah 11) that, at the beginning and up to Scholasticism, were considered a particular category of charisms promised to the messianic king and later to those who had the task of pastoral governance.
This was the situation Vatican II wished to remedy. In one of the most important documents of the Council we read this well-known text:
It is not only through the sacraments and the ministries of the Church that the Holy Spirit sanctifies and leads the people of God and enriches it with virtues, but, “allotting his gifts to everyone according as He wills” [see 1 Cor 12:11], He distributes special graces among the faithful of every rank. By these gifts He makes them fit and ready to undertake the various tasks and offices which contribute toward the renewal and building up of the Church, according to the words of the Apostle: “The manifestation of the Spirit is given to everyone for profit” [1 Cor 12:7]. These charisms, whether they be the more outstanding or the more simple and widely diffused, are to be received with thanksgiving and consolation for they are perfectly suited to and useful for the needs of the Church.
This text is not a marginal note within Vatican II’s ecclesiology but rather its crowning achievement. It is the clearest and most explicit way of affirming that, alongside the hierarchical and institutional dimension, the Church has a pneumatic dimension, and the hierarchical dimension is in function of and in service to the other. It is not the Spirit who is in service to the institution, but the institution that is in service to the Spirit. It is not true, as the great ecclesiologist of the nineteenth century Johannes Adam Mohler polemically noted, that “God has created the hierarchy and has thereby provided more than enough for the needs of the Church until the end of the world.” Jesus entrusted his Church to Peter and the other apostles, but even before that he entrusted it to the Holy Spirit: “He will teach you, he will guide you into all truth, he will take what is mine and declare it to you. . .” (see Jn 16:4-15).
At this point, with the conclusion of the Council and its decrees collected in a book, the danger of marginalizing the charisms reappeared under a different form. But one that was no less dangerous: that of the text remaining a nice document scholars would never tire of studying and preachers would never tire of citing. The Lord himself overcame this risk by having a man see them with his own eyes—the man who had intensely desired this text on the charisms so that they could be restored not only to theology but to the life of God’s people. When Cardinal Suenens, for the first time in 1973, heard talk about the Catholic Charismatic Renewal that was appearing in the United States, he was writing a book called The Holy Spirit: The Source of All Our Hopes. He recounts the following in his memoirs:
I gave up writing the book; I thought it was a matter of the most basic courtesy to pay attention to the possible action of the Holy Spirit, however surprising it might be. I was especially interested in the talk of the awakening of charisms; at the Council, I had pleaded the cause of such an awakening.
And this is what he wrote after seeing with his own eyes what was happening in the Church:
Suddenly, St. Paul and the Acts of the Apostles seemed to come alive and become part of the present; what was authentically true in the past seems to be happening once again before our very eyes. It is a discovery of the true action of the Holy Spirit, who is always at work, as Jesus himself promised. He kept and keeps his “word.” It is once more an explosion of the Spirit of Pentecost, a jubilation that had become foreign to the Church.
Now it is clear, I believe, why I say that the Renewal, also as a charismatic reality, is a current of grace intended and necessary for the whole Church. The Church itself is the one that determined this in the Council. The only thing that remains is to move from that determination to implementation, from documents to life. And this is the service that CHARIS, in total continuity with the Charismatic Renewal in the past, is called to render to the Church.
This is not just a question of faithfulness to the Council but also of faithfulness to the very mission of the Church. The charisms we read about in the Council text are “perfectly suited to and useful for the needs of the Church.” (Perhaps it would be more accurate to say “necessary” instead of “useful.”) Faith today, as in the time of Paul and the apostles, is transmitted “not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power” (1 Cor 2:4; see 1 Thess 1:5). If at one time in a world that had become “Christian”—at least officially—one could think there was no longer any need for the charisms and signs and wonders that existed at the Church’s beginning, that is not the case today. We are back to being closer now to the time of the apostles than to the time of St. John Chrysostom. They had to proclaim the gospel to a pre-Christian world; we, at least in the West, have to proclaim it to a post-Christian world.
I have said up to this point that the Charismatic Renewal is a current of grace that is necessary for the whole Catholic Church. I have to add that this is doubly the case for some national churches that for some time have been witnessing a painful hemorrhage of the faithful to other chairsmatic entities. It is well known that one of the most common reasons for such an exodus is the need for an expression of faith more in keeping with people’s own culture and has more room given to spontaneity, to joy, and to the body—a life of faith in which popular piety is an added value and not a substitute for the Lordship of Christ.
Pastoral and sociological analyses of this phenomenon are being done, and solutions are being suggested, but it is difficult for people to realize that the Holy Spirit himself has already provided for this need in a magnificent way. We can no longer continue to see the Charismatic Renewal as part of the problem in the exodus of Catholics instead of as the solution to the problem. For this remedy to be truly effective, however, it is not enough that pastors approve and encourage the Renewal, remaining carefully outside of it. This current of grace needs to be received into their own lives. This is what the example of the Pastor of the universal Church, and the institution of CHARIS as well, is calling us to do.
I will mention some attitudes or virtues that most directly contribute to keeping a charism healthy and making it function “for the common good.” The first virtue is obedience. We are speaking in this case of obedience to the institution above all, to those who exercise the service of authority. True prophets and charismatics in the history of the Catholic Church, and even recently, are those who have accepted dying to what they consider certainties, obeying and keeping silent before seeing their proposals and criticisms received by the institution. Charisms without the institution are headed for chaos; the institution without the charisms is headed for stagnation.
The institution does not suppress charisms but assures them a future . . . and also a past. That is, it keeps them from ceasing to be a flash in the pan and puts at their disposal all the Church’s experience of the Spirit from preceding generations. It is a blessing from God that the charismatic awakening in the Catholic Church was born with a strong impulse toward communion with the hierarchy and that the pontifical magisterium recognized in it “a chance for the Church” and “the first signs of a great springtime for Christianity.” This obedience should be so much easier and appropriate for us today now that the supreme authority of the Church does not just praise and encourage this current of grace in the Charismatic Renewal but has clearly embraced its cause and proposes it persistently to the whole Church.
Another vital virtue for the constructive use of charisms is humility. The charisms are operations of the Holy Spirit, sparks of God’s own fire entrusted to human beings. How do we avoid burning our hands with that fire? This is the task of humility. It allows this grace of God to go forth and circulate within the Church and humanity without being dispersed or contaminated.
The image of “a current of grace” that is dispersed into a mass is clearly inspired by the world of electricity. But the technology of insulation parallels the technology of electricity. The higher the tension and the power of an electric current that passes through a wire, the more resistant the insulation must be to prevent short circuits. Humility, for the Charismatic Renewal and for spiritual life in general, is the great insulator that allows the divine current of grace to go through a person without dissipating or, worse, causing sparks of pride or of rivalry. Jesus introduced the Spirit to the world, humbling himself and making himself obedient unto death; we can contribute to promoting the spread of the Holy Spirit in the Church in the same way by remaining humble and obedient unto death, the death of our “I” and of the “old man” that is in us.
As an ecclesiastical advisor, I have tried to offer my contribution in this teaching to an accurate vision of the Charismatic Renewal within the history and current situation of the Church. However, it will be the moderator and the members of the international committee who will need to bear the major weight of this new beginning. I express to all of them my fraternal friendship and my unconditional collaboration as long as the Lord gives me the strength to do it. The Letter to the Hebrews recommended to the early Christians, “Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God” (Heb 13:7). We should do the same, recalling with affection and gratitude those who first experienced and promoted the new Pentecost: Patti Mansfield, Ralph Martin, Steve Clark, Kevin and Dorothy Ranaghan, and all the others who later served the Charismatic Renewal in the ICCRS, the Catholic Fraternity, and in other service organizations.
I conclude with a prophetic world that I proclaimed the first time I preached in the presence of St. John Paul II. It is the word that the prophet Haggi addressed to the leaders and the people of Israel at the time when they were about to rebuild the temple:
Yet now take courage, O Zerubbabel, says the Lord; take courage, O Joshua, son of Jehozadak, the high priest; take courage, all you people of the land, says the Lord; work, for I am with you, says the Lord of hosts. (Hag 2:4)
Take courage Jean-Luc and members of the committee, take courage all you people in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal: take courage you brothers and sisters of other Christian denominations: work, for I am with you, says the Lord!
________________________
Translated from Italian by Marsha Daigle Williamson

Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa O.F.M Cap.
CHARIS Ecclesiastical Assistant

How were the apostles preparing for the coming of the Holy Spirit? By praying! “With one heart all these joined constantly in prayer, together with some women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers .” The prayer of the apostles, gathered together with Mary in the Upper Room, is the first great epiclesis. It is the inauguration of the epicletic dimension of the Church: that “Come, Holy Spirit” that will continue to echo in the Church forever and ever and that the liturgy will use to introduce all its most important actions.

While the Church was praying, “there came from heaven a sound as of a violent wind . . . and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit ” .
What happened at the baptism of Christ takes place once again: “After all the people had been baptized, Jesus also was baptized. While he was praying heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit came down upon him .”
One might say, that for St. Luke it was the prayer of Jesus that pierced the heavens and had the Spirit come down on him. The same happened at Pentecost.

It is surprising how in the Acts of the Apostles the coming of the Holy Spirit is in constant relation with the praying. The decisive role of baptism is not kept silent , but there is even more insistence on prayer. Saul “was praying” when the Lord sent Ananias to give him back his sight and fill him with the Holy Spirit . When the apostles heard that Samaria had received the Word, they sent Peter and John; “when they arrived, they prayed for the believers that they might receive the Holy Spirit ”.

When, on the same occasion, Simon the Magician tried to obtain the Holy Spirit with money, the apostles reacted indignantly . The Holy Spirit cannot be bought; one can only implore it through prayer. Jesus himself bound the gift of the Holy Spirit to prayer, saying, “As bad as you are, you know how to give good things to your children. How much more, then, will the Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him !”
He bound it not only to our prayer, but also, and above all, to His prayer, saying, “I will ask the Father and he will give you another Helper .”
Between prayer and the gift of the Spirit, there is the same circularity and permeation that exists between grace and freedom. We need to receive the Holy Spirit to be able to pray, and we need to pray in order to receive the Holy Spirit. The gift of grace comes first, but then we need to pray for this gift to be preserved and increased.

However, this should not remain some kind of abstract and unspecific teaching. It must say something to me personally. Do you wish to receive the Holy Spirit? Do you feel weak and want to be clothed “with the power from on high ?” Do you feel lukewarm and want to be heated up? Dry and want to be watered? Rigid and want to be bent? Discontented with your past life and want to be renewed? Pray, pray, pray! May the quiet cry never fade: Veni Sancte Spiritus, come Holy Spirit!
If a person or a group of faithful, gather in prayer and retreat, determined not to rise before they are clothed with the power from on high and baptized in the Spirit, that person or that group will not rise without first receiving what they have asked for and indeed much more. This is what happened at that first retreat in Duquesne where the beginning of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal took place.

Our prayer must be like that of Mary and the apostles ‘unanimous and persevering.’ Unanimous or with one accord (con-corde) (homothymadon) literally means, done with one mind and ‘one soul’ alone. Jesus said, “In truth I tell you once again, if two of you on earth agree to ask anything at all, it will be granted to you by my Father in heaven .”

The second distinctive feature of the prayer of Mary and of the Apostles is ‘perseverance.’ The original Greek word expressing this quality of Christian prayer (proskarterountes) indicates a tenacious, insistent action, the act of being constantly diligent. It is translated with persevering, or assiduous, in prayer, but one could also translate it with “holding on with tenacity” to prayer.

Proskarterountes is a very important word because in the New Testament it is the most common term used to translate this special attitude of prayer. Shortly after, in the Acts we meet it again, when we read about the first believers “who were added to their number”, and “remained faithful to the teaching of the apostles, to the brotherhood, to the breaking of the bread and to the prayers ”. St. Paul, too, pleaded with them “be persevering in your prayers and be faithful as you stay awake to pray ”. In a passage from the Letter to the Ephesians, we read, “In all your prayer and entreaty keep praying in the Spirit on every possible occasion .”

The essence of this teaching derives from Jesus, who told the Apostles the Parable of the Persistent Widow, to teach them they “should always pray and never become discouraged ”. The Canaanite woman is the living illustration of an insistent prayer that does not accept getting discouraged and eventually grants her what she wanted. At first, she asks for the healing of her daughter and Jesus – Scripture says – “said not a word in answer to her”. She insists, and Jesus replies, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel”. She then throws herself at His feet, and Jesus rebuts, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to little dogs”.
What an answer! Enough to be discouraged! But the Canaanite woman does not give up and retorts, “Ah yes, Lord; but even little dogs…” and Jesus gladly exclaims: “Woman, you have great faith. Let your desire be granted ”.

Praying for a long time, with perseverance, does not mean using many words, indulging in vain “babble like the Gentiles ”. Persevering in prayer means to ask often, never cease asking, never cease hoping, never surrendering. It means not giving oneself rest and nor giving it to the Lord either, “No rest for you, as you keep Lord’s remembrance! And give him no rest either until he restores Jerusalem “.

But why should prayer be persevering and why should God not listen to it immediately? Is it not He himself who, in the Bible, promises to listen immediately, as soon as he is called, or rather even before one has stopped praying?
“Thus, before they call, I shall answer, before they stop speaking, I shall have heard .” Jesus rebuts, “Now will God not see justice done to his elect if they keep calling to him day and night even though he still delays helping them? I promise he will see justice done to them ”.

Does experience not blatantly contradict these words? No, God promised to always listen and to listen to our prayers without delay, and so He does. We are the ones who have to open our eyes. It is absolutely true that He keeps His word. In delaying the rescue, he already recues; actually, this deferral is itself already a form of rescue.

It is so because He wishes not to grant the petitioner’s will too quickly, but rather wants to assure him a perfect recovery. Here we need to distinguish between fulfilling the request according to the petitioner’s will or according to his or her needs, where the latter eventually amounts to their salvation.

Jesus said: “Seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you ”. On reading these words, we immediately think of Jesus promising to give us all the things we ask for, and we are perplexed when we see it rarely happens. However, he actually meant one thing: ”Look for me and you will find me, knock and I will open to you”. He promises to offer himself, going beyond the petty things we ask of him, and this promise is always unfailingly kept. He who seeks Him finds Him; he who knocks has His door opened and once this happens all the rest becomes secondary.
When the object of our prayer is the good gift par excellence, that which God himself wants to give us above all things – the Holy Spirit, then we must watch out for all possible deceit. We tend to conceive the Holy Spirit, more or less consciously, as a powerful help from above, a breath of life that comes to pleasantly revive our prayer and fervor, to make our ministry efficient and carrying the cross easier. You have prayed like this for years to have your Pentecost, and it seems to you that there has not been a breath of wind. None of what you expected to happen has happened.
The Holy Spirit is not outpoured to empower our selfishness. Just have a better look around yourself. Perhaps all that Holy Spirit you asked for yourself, God granted it to you, but for others. Perhaps the prayer of others around you, thanks to your words, has been renewed and yours has continued hard earned as before. Others before you, have had their hearts pierced, have felt compunction and crying have repented, but you, you are still there asking for that grace.

Let God enjoy His freedom; make it a point of honor to grant God his freedom. This is the way he has chosen to give you his Holy Spirit and it is the most beautiful way. Who knows if some Apostle, on the day of Pentecost, watching the penitent crowd pierced by the Word of God, I wonder, felt some envy and confusion thinking they had not yet cried for crucifying Jesus of Nazareth? Saint Paul, who was accompanied in his preaching by the manifestation of the Holy Spirit and its power, pleaded three times to be freed from the thorn in his flesh, but was never heard and had to accept to live with it “for the power of God to better rest in him ”.

In the Charismatic Renewal, prayer manifests itself in a new form compared to the past: that of a prayer in-group or a group prayer. By taking part in them one understands what the Apostle meant when he wrote to the Ephesians: “Be filled with the Spirit. Sing psalms and hymns and inspired songs among yourselves, singing and chanting to the Lord in your hearts, always and everywhere giving thanks to God who is our Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ ”. And again: “In all your prayer and entreaty keep praying in the Spirit on every possible occasion ”.

We only know two basic types of prayer: liturgical prayer and private prayer. Liturgical prayer is a communal one, but it is not spontaneous; private prayer is spontaneous but is not communal. We need moments in which we can pray spontaneously, as the Spirit dictates, but sharing our own prayer with others, putting together the various gifts and charisms and enriching each other with our fervor; putting together the different ‘tongues of fire’ to form a single flame. In short, we need a prayer that is both spontaneous and communal.

We have a great example of this ‘charismatic’ prayer, both spontaneous and communal, in Acts 4. Peter and John, freed from prison with the order to no longer speak in the name of Jesus, return to their community and begin to pray. One proclaims a word of Scripture (“Princes plot together against the Lord and against his Anointed”), another has the prophetic gift of applying the word to the situation of the moment; there is like an “uprising” of faith that gives the courage to ask for “healings, signs and wonders”. In the end what happened at the first Pentecost takes place again and “all were filled with the Holy Spirit” and continue to preach Christ “with honesty”.

A special gift to ask the Holy Spirit to grant us on the occasion of the renewal and unification of the serving organizations is that the wonder of those first charismatic prayer groups should be revived, where the presence of the Holy Spirit could almost be breathed in and the Lordship of Christ was not a truth only proclaimed but almost tangibly experienced. Let us not forget that the group of prayer or the prayer in-group is the basic element common to both prayer groups and charismatic fraternities.

With both the above-mentioned praying styles, one can participate in the prayer chain in preparation to Pentecost. To those who like liturgical prayer, I suggest repeating several times a day, at your choice, one of the following invocations to the Holy Spirit used in the liturgy, knowing that you are joining the countless groups of believers who have prayed them before us:

“Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love”. (For those who still love to pray with the original Latin formulas: “Veni, Sancte Spiritus, reple tuorum corda fidelium et tui amoris in eis ignem accende”.) Or: “Send your Spirit, Lord, and renew the face of the earth”. Or: “Come, Creator Spirit, visit our minds, fill the hearts you have created with heavenly grace”.

To the English-speaking brothers and sisters, I suggest repeating, either alone or in the group, the words of that song we received from the Pentecostal brothers and that accompanied millions of believers when receiving the baptism in the Spirit (alternating the singular “me” with the plural “us”):

“Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on US: melt US, mold US, fill US, use US. Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on US.

In my book commenting the Veni Creator, I have also drafted an invocation to the Holy Spirit of my own. In this circumstance, I gladly share it with those who might feel inspired by it:

Come, Holy Spirit!
Come, strength and sweetness of God!
Come, You, movement and peace!
Renew our courage,
Fill our solitude in the world,
Create in us intimacy with God!
We no longer say, like the prophet: “Come from the four winds”,
As if we did not yet know from where you came;
We say: Come, Spirit from the pierced side of Christ upon the cross!
Come from the mouth of the Risen One!

Fr Raniero Cantalamessa, OFM Cap.

Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in his own language. And they were amazed and wondered, saying, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language? Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians, we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God.” And all were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” (Acts 2:5-13)

This scene is repeating itself among us today. We too have come “from every nation under heaven,” and we are here to proclaim together “the mighty works of God.”

There is, however, something else to discover in this part of the story of Pentecost. Since ancient times it has been understood that the author of Acts—and this means first of all the Holy Spirit!— through this insistence on the phenomenon of tongues, wanted to make us understand, that at Pentecost something takes place that reverses what happened at Babel. The Spirit transforms the linguistic chaos of Babel into a new harmony of voices. This explains why the account of Babel in Genesis 11 is traditionally inserted among the biblical readings for the Pentecost Vigil.

The builders of Babel were not, as it was once thought, wicked people who intended to defy God, a kind of equivalent of the Titans of Greek mythology. No, they were pious and religious people. The tower they wanted to construct was a temple to the divinity, one of those temples with layered terraces called ziggurat, whose ruins can still be found in Mesopotamia.

What then was their sin? Let us listen to what they said among themselves when they started to work on it: “They said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth’” (Gen 11:4). Martin Luther makes an illuminating observation about these words:

“Let us build ourselves a city and a tower”: let us build it for ourselves, not for God. . . . “Let us make a name for ourselves”: let us do it for ourselves. The people take no concern for the name of God to be glorified; they are concerned with making their own name great.

In other words, God is being exploited; he must serve their desire for power. They perhaps thought, according to the mindset at that time, that by offering sacrifices from a great height they could win victories from the divinity over the neighboring peoples. This is the reason God was forced to confound their languages and derail their project.

This suddenly brings the matter of Babel and its builders very close to us. How many of the divisions among Christians have been due to a secret desire to make a name for ourselves, to elevate ourselves above others, to relate to God from a superior position in comparison to others! How many have been due to the desire to make a name for ourselves or for our own church more than for God! This is where our Babel comes from!

Let us turn now to Pentecost. Here too we see a group of men, the apostles, who are preparing to build a tower that goes from earth to heaven, the Church. At Babel they still spoke one single language, but at a certain point people no longer understood one another; at Pentecost all the people are speaking different languages, but everyone understands the apostles. Why? It is because the Holy Spirit had brought about a Copernican revolution in them.

Before this moment the apostles were also preoccupied with making a name for themselves, and they often discussed “who among them was the greatest.” Now the Holy Spirit has shifted their focus away from themselves and refocused them on Christ. The heart of stone has been shattered, and in its place beats “a heart of flesh” (Ezek 36:26). As Jesus had promised before leaving them, they were “baptized in the Holy Spirit” (see Act 1:5-8), that is, they were completely submerged in the ocean of God’s love that was poured out upon them (see Rom 5:5).

They are dazzled by the glory of God. Their speaking in diverse languages can also be explained by the fact that they were speaking with their eyes, with their faces, with their hands, with the amazement of people who have seen things too lofty to put in words. “We hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God.” The reason they all understood the apostles is that they were no longer speaking about themselves but about God!

God is calling us to bring about that same conversion in our lives: a conversion from ourselves to God, from the smaller unity of our parish, our movement, our own church, to the greater unity that is the unity of the whole body of Christ, indeed of all of humanity. It is the bold step that Pope Francis is urging us Catholics to take and that representatives of other churches assembled here demonstrate they want to share!

St. Augustine had already made it clear that ecclesial communion takes place by degrees and can occur on different levels: from a full degree which consists in sharing both the sacraments and the interior grace of the Holy Spirit, to a partial degree that consists in sharing the same Holy Spirit. St. Paul included in his communion “all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours” (1 Cor 1:2). This is a formula that we perhaps need to rediscover and go back to appreciating. Today that communion also includes our brothers and sisters who are Messianic Jews.

The Pentecostal and charismatic phenomenon has a specific vocation and responsibility in regard to the unity of Christians. Its ecumenical vocation appears even more evident if we think back to what happened at the beginning of the Church. What did the Risen One do to prompt the apostles to welcome the Gentiles into the Church? God sent the Holy Spirit on Cornelius and his household in the same way and with the same manifestations with which he had sent the Spirit on the apostles at the beginning. Peter could therefore only draw the conclusion that “If then God gave the same gift to them as he gave to us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could withstand God?” (Acts 11:17). At the Council of Jerusalem Peter repeated this same argument: God “made no distinction between us and them” (Acts 15:9).

Now we have seen this marvel repeated before our very eyes, this time on a worldwide scale. God has poured out his Holy Spirit on millions of believers who belong to almost all the Christian denominations and, lest there be any doubt about his intentions, he has poured out his Spirit with the identical manifestations, including the most unique one of speaking in tongues. We too are left to draw the same conclusion that Peter did: “If God then has given them the same gift he gave us, who are we to continue to say that other Christian believers do not belong to the body of Christ and are not true disciples of Christ?”

* * *

We need to look at what the charismatic path to unity involves. St. Paul outlined this plan for the Church: “speak the truth in love” (see Ephes 4:15). What we must not do is bypass the issues of faith and of doctrine in order to be united in the sphere of shared action in evangelization and social issues. Ecumenism experimented with this path at its beginning and experienced its failure. Divisions inevitably resurface quite soon, even in the sphere of action. We must not substitute charity for truth but rather aim for truth with charity; we need to begin to love one another in order to understand each other better.

The extraordinary thing about this ecumenical path based on love is that it is possible at once; the way is completely open before us. We cannot “cut corners” concerning doctrine because there are indeed differences that are to be resolved with patience in the appropriate settings. However, we can skip some steps concerning love and be united right now.

It is the only “debt” that we have toward others (cf. Rom 13:8). We can welcome and love one another despite our differences. Christ did not command us to love only those who think the way we do and who fully share our creed. If we love only those people, he warned us, what is special about that since the pagans also do that? (cf. Mt 5:46)

We can love each other because what already unites us is infinitely more important than what divides us. What unites us is the same faith in God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; the Lord Jesus, true God and true man; the shared hope of eternal life; the common commitment to evangelization; the shared love for the body of Christ, the Church.

Another important thing also unites us: the shared suffering and shared martyrdom for Christ. In so many parts of the world, believers from different churches are sharing the same sufferings and enduring the same martyrdom for Christ. They are not being persecuted and killed because they are Catholic, or Anglicans, or Pentecostals or from some other denomination, but because they are “Christians.” In the eyes of the world we are already one single group, and it is a shame if we are not also that in reality.

How do we concretely put into practice this message of unity and love? Let us recall St. Paul’s hymn of charity. Each of his phrases acquires a new significance when applied to love among the members of the various Christian churches in ecumenical relationships:

Love is patient. . . .
Love is not boastful. . . .
Loves is not rude. . . .
Love does not seek its own interest (in our case, the interests of other churches as well). Love keeps no record of wrongs (in our case, the wrongs suffered from the hands of other Christians, but rather the wrongs done to them) (see 1 Cor 13:4ff)

St. Francis in one of his Admonitions says, “Blessed is the servant who rejoices in the good that God does through others as if he had done it through him.” We can say, “Blessed is that Christian who is able to rejoice at the good that God does through other churches just as he is for the good that God does through his own church.”

***

The prophet Haggai has an oracle that seems to be written for us in this moment of history. The people of Israel had just returned from exile, but rather than rebuilding the house of God together, each of them was building and adorning their own houses. God thus sends his prophet with a message of reproof:

Is it a time for you yourselves to dwell in your paneled houses, while this house lies in ruins? Now therefore thus says the LORD of hosts: Consider how you have fared. You have sown much, and harvested little. . . . Consider how you have fared. Go up to the hills and bring wood and build the house, that I may take pleasure in it and that I may appear in my glory, says the Lord. (Hag 1:4-8)

We need to hear how this same reproof from God might be addressed to us and to repent. Those who listened to Peter’s discourse on the day of Pentecost “were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, ‘Brethren, what shall we do?’ And Peter said to them, ‘Repent, . . . and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit’”(Acts 2:37-38). A renewed outpouring of the Holy Spirit will not be possible without a collective movement of repentance on the part of all Christians. It will be one of the main intentions of the prayer that will follow this time of sharing.

After the people of Israel set about rebuilding the temple of God, the prophet Haggai was once again sent to the people, but this time with a message of encouragement and consolation:

Now take courage, O Zerubbabel, says the LORD; take courage, O Joshua, son of Jehozadak, the high priest; take courage, all you people of the land, says the LORD; work, for I am with you. . . . My Spirit abides among you; fear not. (Hag 2:4-5).
That same word of consolation is now addressed to us Christians, and I dare to make it resound again in this place, not just as a biblical citation but as the living and efficacious word of God that is bringing about here and now what it signifies: “Take courage, Pope Francis! Take courage, leaders and representatives of other Christian confessions! Take courage, all you people of God, and work because I am with you, says the Lord! My Spirit will be with you.”

____________________

Translated from Italian by Marsha Daigle-Williamson

1. A pearl between two valves

There is an area in which secularisation acts in a particularly widespread and ominous manner, and that is the area of love. The secularisation of love consists in separating human love, in all its forms, from God, reducing it to something purely “profane”, where God is “in the way”, or is even a nuisance.

The theme of love is crucial, first of all, for the inner life of the Church, for the sanctification of its members. This is the perspective in which Benedict XVI’s encyclical Deus caritas est lies and in which I am placing these reflections, too. To my analysis of love, I will add some considerations about beauty which is inseparable from love, trying to show how Christ has redeemed both eros and beauty.

Love suffers from a tragic separation not just in the mindset of the secularised world, but also, on the opposite side, among believers. In very simplistic terms, we can express the situation thus: in the world we find eros without agape; among believers we often find agape without eros.

Eros without agape is a romantic love, more often passionate, even to the point of violence. A love of conquest which fatally reduces the other person to an object of one’s own pleasure and ignores every dimension of sacrifice, faithfulness and self-giving. There is no need keep on describing this love because it is a reality which is in front of our eyes every day, advertised in a pounding way by novels, films, TV fiction, the internet, and gossip magazines. It is what common language now means by the word “love”.

For us it is more useful to understand what is meant by agape without eros. Agape without eros seems to us to be like “cold love”, loving “with the tips of your hair”, more by the dictation of will than the intimate impulse of the heart; a falling into a pre-constituted mould, rather than creating one’s own unique one, just as every human being is unique before God. The actions of love addressed to God are similar, in this case, to those of innocent people in love who write love letters copied from a special handbook.

If worldly love is a body without a soul, religious love practised in this way is a soul without a body. The human being is not an angel, that is, a pure spirit; it is the soul and body essentially united. Everything it does, including loving, must reflect its structure. If the element linked to affectivity and the heart is systematically denied or repressed, the outcome will be twofold: either one carries on wearily, out of a sense of duty and to defend one’s own image, or one seeks more or less legitimate compensations, to the point of the very sad cases which we know well. At the root of many of the moral deviances of consecrated souls, the fact that there is a distorted and twisted concept of love cannot be ignored.

So we have a dual reason and urgency to rediscover love in its original unity. True and integral love is a pearl closed within two valves which are eros and agape. These two dimensions of love cannot be separated without destroying it, just as hydrogen and oxygen cannot be separated without depriving oneself of water.

2. Incompatibility of the two loves?

The most important reconciliation between the two dimensions of love is that practical one which happens in people’s lives, but precisely for it to be made possible it is necessary to begin by reconciling eros and agape between them even theoretically, in doctrine. Inter alia, this will enable us to know at last what is meant by these two terms which are so often used and misunderstood.

The importance of this question arises from the fact there is a book which made the opposite thesis, the incompatibility between the two forms of love, popular throughout the Christian world. It is the book by the Swedish Lutheran theologian Anders Nygren, entitled Agape and Eros. We can summarise his thought in these terms. Eros and agape describe two opposite movements: the former, the human person’s ascent and climb to God, as to one’s good and origin; the latter, God’s descent to humanity in the incarnation and the cross of Christ: therefore, the salvation offered to humanity without merit and response on its part, which is not faith alone. The New Testament made a precise choice, using, to express love, the term agape and systematically rejecting the term eros.

Saint Paul is the one who with the greatest purity drew together and expressed this doctrine of love. After him, again according to Nygren’s theory, such a radical antithesis was lost almost immediately to give way to attempts at some sort of synthesis. As soon as Christianity came into cultural contact with the Greek world and the Platonic vision, already with Origen, there was a re-assessment of eros, as upward movement of the soul towards the good, as universal attraction exercised by beauty and the divine. It was along these lines that Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite was to write that “God is eros”, replacing the agape in John’s famous phrase (1 Jn. 4:16) with this term.

In the West a similar synthesis was carried out by Augustine with his doctrine of caritas understood as doctrine of the descending and gratuitous love of God for humanity (no one has spoken of “grace” in a more decisive way than him!), but also as the human person’s longing for the good and for God. His is the statement: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you”; his is also the image of love as a weight which attracts the soul, like the force of gravity, towards God, as the place of one’s rest and pleasure. For Nygren, all of this introduces an element of self-love, of one’s own good, therefore of egoism, which destroys the pure gratuitousness of grace; it is a relapse into the pagan illusion of seeing salvation consisting in an ascent to God, rather than the gratuitous and unmotivated descent of God to us.

Prisoners of this impossible synthesis between eros and agape, between love of God and of self, are, for Nygren, Saint Bernard in defining the supreme degree of God’s love as “loving God for himself” and a “loving oneself for God”, Saint Bonaventure with his ascensional The Soul’s Journey into God, and Saint Thomas Aquinas himself who described the love of God poured out into the heart of the baptised (cf. Rom 5:5) as “the love by which he loves us and which makes us love him”. This, in fact, is like saying that the human person, loved by God, can in turn love God, give him something of him/herself, which destroys, still according to Nygren, the absolute gratuitousness of God’s love. The same deviation happens, according to him, with Catholic mysticism. The love of the mystics, with its very strong emphasis on eros, is, for him, none other than sublimated sensual love, an attempt to establish a relationship of presumptuous reciprocity in love with God.

It was Luther who broke the ambiguity and highlighted the clear Pauline antithesis. Basing justification on faith alone, according to the Lutheran theologian he did not exclude charity from the foundational moment of the Christian life, as Catholic theology reproaches him: rather, he liberated charity, agape, from the spurious element of eros. To the formula of “faith alone”, with the exclusion of works, would correspond, in Luther, the formula of “agape alone”, with the exclusion of eros.

It is not my task here to ascertain whether the author correctly interpreted the thought of Luther on this matter. It must be said that Luther never set out the problem in terms of the contrast between eros and agape, as he did instead for faith and works. Significant, however, is the fact that Karl Barth, too, in a chapter of his Church Dogmatics, reaches the same conclusion as Nygren of the incompatibility between eros and agape: “Where Christian love enters, there always begins at once the unceasing controversy between itself and every other love”. We are completely in the realm of dialectical theology, the theology of the aut-aut (either-or), of the antithesis at all costs.

The repercussion of this operation is the radical worldliness and secularisation of eros. While in fact a certain theology excluded eros from agape, secular culture, for its part, was more than happy to do the opposite, excluding agape from eros, that is, every reference to God and to the grace of human love. Freud went to the extreme in this line of thought, reducing love to eros and eros to libido, to pure sexual drive. It is the stage to which love is reduced today in many manifestations of life and culture, especially in the world of entertainment, to sex appeal, the attraction of the sexes.

A few years ago I was in Madrid and the newspapers were making a great fuss about a certain art exhibition being held in the city, entitled “The tears of eros”. It was an exhibition of works of art with an erotic background – pictures, drawings, sculptures – intending to highlight the inseparable link, in the experience of the modern person, between eros and thanatos, between love and death. The same conclusion can be reached reading Baudelaire’s poetry Les fleurs du mal or Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer. The love which by its nature should lead to life, now leads instead to death.

3. Return to the synthesis

If we are unable to suddenly change the world’s idea of love, we can, however, correct the theological vision which – of course without wanting to – encourages and legitimises it. This is what Benedict XVI has done in exemplary fashion in the encyclical Deus caritas est. He reaffirms the traditional Catholic synthesis expressing it in modern terminology:

“Yet eros and agape – ascending love and descending love – can never be completely separated. [...] biblical faith does not set up a parallel universe, or one opposed to that primordial human phenomenon which is love, but rather accepts the whole man; it intervenes in his search for love in order to purify it and to reveal new dimensions of it” (nos. 7-8).

Eros and agape are united to the source itself of love which is God: “God loves”, the Encyclical continues, “and his love may certainly be called eros, yet it is also totally agape” (n. 9).

Thus one understands the unusually favourable reception this papal document received in the more open and responsible secular quarters, too. It gives hope to the world. It corrects the image of a faith which touches the world at a tangent, without penetrating right into it, with the gospel image of the leaven which makes the dough ferment; to replace the idea of a kingdom of God come to “judge” the world, with that of a kingdom of God come to “save” the world, starting from the eros which is its dominating force.

I believe that the Catholic vision, which on this point coincides with the Orthodox vision, can be confirmed from an exegetical point of view, too. Those who support the idea of the incompatibility between eros and agape base their view on the fact that the New Testament carefully avoids – and, it seems, deliberately – the term eros, always and only using in its place agape, apart from some rare use of the term philia, indicating the love of friendship.
This may be true, but the conclusions drawn from it are not. It is supposed that the New Testament authors remember both the meaning that the term eros had in common usage – the so-called “vulgar” eros – and the elevated and philosophical meaning which the so-called “noble” eros had, for example, in Plato. In the popular meaning, eros indicated more or less what it means today, too, when one speaks of eroticism or erotic films, that is, the satisfaction of the sexual instinct, a debasement rather than enhancement. In the noble meaning, it indicated love for beauty, the strength which holds the world together and drives all human beings to unity, that is, that movement of ascent towards the divine which the dialectical theologians believe to be incompatible with the movement of the descent of the divine towards humanity.

It is difficult to believe that the New Testament authors, addressing simple people and of no culture, intended to warn them about the eros of Plato. They avoided the term eros for the same reason why a preacher today avoids the term erotic or, if they use it, does so only in a negative sense. The reason is that, then as now, the word calls to mind love in its most selfish and sensual expression.

The meaning which the first Christians gave to the word eros is deduced clearly from the well-known text of Saint Ignatius of Antioch: “My love (eros) has been crucified, and there is no fire in me desiring to be fed…I have no delight in corruptible food, nor in the pleasures of this life”. Contrary to what was believed, the expression “My love (eros) has been crucified” does not mean the crucified Jesus, but the “love of myself”, the attachment to earthly pleasures. We are along the Pauline line of “I have been crucified with Christ and I live now not with my own life” (Gal 2:19 f.).

The feeling of the first Christians about eros was further compounded by the role it played in the unbridled Dionysiac cults. As soon as Christianity came into contact and dialogue with Greek philosophical culture, then every inhibition about eros fell away, as we have already seen. In Greek authors, the term was often used as synonymous with agape and to indicate God’s love for humanity, humanity’s love for God, as well as love for virtues and all things beautiful. To convince ourselves of this, a quick glance at Lampe’s A Patristic Greek Lexicon is sufficient. That of Nygren and Barth is therefore a system built on a false application of the so-called argument “of silence” (ex silentio).

4. Christ, primary object of the human eros
The liberation of eros helps first of all human beings in love and Christian spouses, showing the beauty and dignity of the love which unites them. It helps young people to experience the allure of the other sex not as something dark, to be lived sheltered from God, but on the contrary as a gift of the Creator for their joy, if lived in the order desired by him. The Pope also alludes in his Encyclical to this positive role of eros on human love when he speaks of the path of purification of eros which leads from momentary attraction to the “forever” of matrimony” (nos. 4-5).

But the liberation of eros must help everyone, even those who are not married, the celibate and consecrated virgins. At the start I hinted at the risk run by religious souls, which is that of a cold love, which never descends from the mind to the heart. A winter sun which gives light but no warmth. If eros means impulse, desire, attraction, we must not be afraid of feelings, much less despise and repress them. When it is love of God – wrote William of Saint-Thierry – the feeling of affection (affectio) is grace, too; it is not in fact nature which can instil in us such a sentiment.

The Psalms are full of this yearning of the heart for God: “To you, Lord, I lift up my soul…”, “My soul is thirsting for God, the living God”. In The Cloud of Unknowing, a classic of Medieval spiritual literature, one reads: “So pay attention to this marvellous work of grace within your soul. It is always a sudden impulse and comes without warning, springing up to God like some spark from the fire…Strike that thick cloud of unknowing with the sharp dart of longing love, and on no account whatever think of giving up”.

To do that a thought, an impulse of the heart, an aspiration is sufficient. But all of that is not enough for us, and God knows that better than us. We are creatures, we live in time and in a body; we need a screen on which to project our love which is not just “the cloud of unknowing”, that is the veil of obscurity behind which is hiding the God whom no one has ever seen and who lives in inaccessible light.

We know full well the response given to this question: precisely for this reason God has given us a neighbour to love! “No one has ever seen God; but as long as we love one another God will live in us and his love will be complete in us…A man who does not love the brother that he can see cannot love God, whom he has never seen” (1 Jn 4:12, 20). But we must be careful to not miss out a decisive link. Before the brother one sees there is another who can be seen and touched: the God made flesh, Jesus Christ! Between God and the neighbour there is now the Word made flesh who has re-united the two extremes in one person. And now in him is to be found the foundation of the same love of neighbour: “You did it to me”.

What does all this mean for the love of God? That the primary object of our eros, of our search, desire, attraction, passion, must be the Christ,

“Human love is pre-ordained to the Saviour from the beginning, as its model and end, almost like a casket so large and wide as to be able to receive God [...]. The desire of the soul goes only to Christ. Here is the place of its rest, since he alone is the good, the truth and everything which inspires love”.

Resounding clearly throughout the whole of Western monastic spirituality is Saint Benedict’s maxim: “Prefer nothing whatsoever to the love of Christ”. This does not mean limiting the horizon of Christian love from God to Christ; it means loving God in the manner in which he wants to be loved. “The Father himself loves you for loving me” (Jn 16:27). This is not a mediated love, almost by proxy, by which whoever loves Jesus “it is as if” they love the Father. No, Jesus is an immediate mediator; loving him then ipso facto one loves the Father, too. “To see me is to see the Father”, who loves me loves the Father.

The beauty and fullness of the Christian life depend on the quality of our love for Christ. Jesus is the perfect man; at an infinitely superior level are found in him all those qualities and concerns which a man seeks in a woman and a woman in a man. His love does not necessarily subtract us from the allure of creatures and in particular the attraction of the other sex (this is part of our nature which God himself has created and does not want to destroy); however, it gives us the strength to overcome these attractions with a stronger attraction. “Chaste”, writes Saint John Climacus, “is the one who drives out eros with Eros”.

5. Christ’s Love redeems Beauty
We can now see how redeeming eros, Christ has also redeemed beauty, the two realities being closely connected. In the Greek Platonic thought eros is inseparable from kalòs, beauty. In this line, Dionysius the Aeropagite writes:
God, who is beautiful beyond being, is said to be Beauty—for it gives Beauty from itself in a manner appropriate to each …[He is] the productive cause which makes and conserves the whole by its love (eros!) of the beauty which is proper for each being; the final cause—for all beings merge for the sake of the beautiful; the paradigmatic cause [for] all are determined according to it.
God is the author of all the beauty of the world. He wanted beauty (together with goodness) to be a ladder on which we ascend to him, the “one who attracts,” the magnet. But if this is the case, why does beauty so often lead to destruction, and why do we read such words in the Scripture as “beauty is vain” (Proverbs 31:30), “beauty has deceived you” (Daniel 13:5), and “Your heart was proud because of your beauty” (Ezekiel 28:17)?
I do not want to deal with the theme of beauty from the essential and metaphysical point of view—what beauty is in itself, what its relationship to truth and goodness is—but from an existential point of view. In other words, I would like to reflect on our experience of beauty. I would also like to highlight a very specific and limited aspect of that experience: not the beauty of seas and sunsets but of the human body, male and female.
This is the beauty that generates eros, one of the great forces, as we have seen, that moves the world—and perhaps the most powerful. The beauty of seas and sunsets and of ideas, is not erotic, but the beauty of the body is, with all that we know it entails. To the extent in which advertising or entertainment reflect the spirit, the tastes, and expectations of an age, this type of beauty that I referred to as erotic seems to be the most sought-after value, the great “object of worship” in affluent societies. Modern man “doubts the truth, resists the good, but is fascinated by beauty.”
This is a new challenge for believers. It is first of all a human problem whose solution will determine the very future of culture and life. For believers, it is also a problem of evangelization. How do we evangelize by means of beauty a world that has such a debased idea of it? The words that the Idiot, one of Dostoevsky’s favorite characters, says are well known and often repeated: “. . . beauty will save the world”; however, that affirmation is followed immediately in Dostoevsky by a question: “What kind of beauty will save the world?” It is clear—for him as well—that not every beauty will save the world. There is a beauty that can save the world, and a beauty that can lead it to perdition.
One sign of the ambiguity about beauty is that we find in modern culture, along with its exaltation, an explicit refusal of beauty, a real “insult to beauty,” so much so that we can speak of the death of beauty as we did in the past about the death of God. Since those in the past who expressed themselves about beauty were almost exclusively men, the disdain for beauty was transferred to a disdain for woman. In the works of the fathers of the so-called modern poetry we find such terrible verses as “O sweet merciful Woman—but a heap of entrails . . . .” In a painting an artist depicts monstrous birds rushing toward a female body as if it were a corpse. Someone has described some of the famous women of abstract art as “corpses of beauty.”
It is beauty itself (and not just that of woman) that becomes “demystified” and violated in this way. The beginning of a collection of poems by Arthur Rimbaud is famous: “One night I settled Beauty on my knee and found her bitter.—And I insulted her.” In art this attitude leads to the controversial depiction of anti-aesthetic objects like urinals and other similar things that have ended up in some museums.
What causes this ambiguity? The traditional answer is “sin.” But there is an anterior cause to sin itself. The ambiguity of beauty finds its roots in the composite nature of human beings who have both a material and an immaterial element, something that draws them to multiplicity and something that inclines them instead to unity. It is the same God who created both together in a profound “substantial” unity because, with the exercise of free will guided by the word of God, people choose the direction in which they will develop, i.e., whether “upward” toward that which is “above” them or “downward” toward that which is “below” them, toward unity or multiplicity.
The dignity of human beings and the privileged exercise of their freedom consist precisely in this capacity for self-determination. This explains the struggle between flesh and the Spirit as well as the dramatic element that characterizes the existence of human beings in the world and their relationship to beauty.
Created beauty can become the tomb instead of the occasion of exercising freedom because, as we know, it enslaves people. To possess and enjoy that beauty some people do exactly what others do to get drugs: steal, kill, or kill themselves. In crimes of passion we take into account the extenuating circumstances precisely because we realize that the person is operating with reduced freedom. Disordered love of beauty leads to “beastly conduct” because it deprives people of the very things that make them “human”—reason and freedom.
Literature offers us famous symbols of these two kinds of feminine beauty; beauty that elevates – like that of Beatrice in Dante’s Divine Comedy – and beauty that destroys —like that of Helen in Homer’s Iliad. The ambiguity of beauty also finds memorable expression in the Bible. On one hand, there is the beauty in the Song of Songs of the two lovers trying to outdo each other in celebrating one another; on the other hand, there is the beauty of a woman that drew David into adultery and crime (see 2 Samuel 11:2). “Beauty has deceived you,” says Daniel to one of the two elders who wanted the chaste Susanna put to death (see Daniel 13:56).
Stopping at created beauty is seen by the Bible as the very essence of idolatry, insofar as it puts the creature in the place of the Creator:
For all men who were ignorant of GOD were foolish by nature; and they were unable from the good things that are seen to know him who exists, nor did they recognize the craftsman while paying heed to his works. . . . If through delight in the beauty of these things men assumed them to be gods, let them know how much better than these is their LORD, for the author of beauty created them. (Wisdom 13:1-3; see Romans 1:20-23)
The downward move from the level of spiritual beauty to purely material beauty also tends to be reflected within the creature and in particular the woman. The representation of female beauty does not usually focus on the face in which the feelings and thoughts—in a word, the soul—of the woman are so clearly manifested, but focuses instead on other parts of the body, always the same parts. There are no more “Mona Lisa’s” in art, and at this point it seems doubtful that there will be any in the future.
Feminine beauty is entirely reduced to a means of seduction (sex appeal), to the grave detriment of women themselves who end up seen only in relationship to men as objects and not as persons.

6. Christ Has Redeemed Beauty
Let us now see how Christ has redeemed beauty from its vanity and ambiguity. St. Paul wrote, “the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; . . . the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Romans 8:20-21). We could substitute the word “beauty” for “creation” in this text without changing the meaning of this affirmation in any way: “Beauty has been subjected to futility and waits to be set free.” To save the world, beauty itself first needs to be redeemed. The redemption of Christ does, in fact, extend to beauty. Let us see how that happened.
A contrast between two statements about Christ is quite striking. On one hand, he is seen as “the fairest of the sons of men” (Psalm 45:2), and “He reflects the glory of God” (Hebrews 1:3). On the other hand, the words of the Fourth Servant Song are applied to him in his passion: “He had no form or comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him . . . . [He was] as one from whom men hide their faces” (Isaiah 53:2-3). The explanation of this contrast is simple: Jesus redeemed beauty by depriving himself of it out of love. “Because he took flesh, he took, as it were, your hideousness, that is, your mortality, that he might adapt himself to you and correspond to you and arouse you to loving the beauty within . . . . ‘He did not have attractiveness or comeliness’ [cf. Isaiah 53:2], in order that he might give you attractiveness and comeliness.”
To understand this paradox we need to go back to the principle that Paul formulated at the beginning of 1 Corinthians: “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe” (1:21). Applied to beauty, this means that since man is not capable of lifting himself up to the beauty of the Creator through the beauty of creatures, God changed his method, so to speak, and decided to reveal his beauty through the ignominy and the deformity of the cross and suffering, thus revealing his beauty through its opposite (sub contraria specie), as Luther might say. The attainment of beauty now comes about through the paschal mystery of death and resurrection.
The model and source of redeemed beauty is “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6). Beauty is no longer the abstract “splendor of truth,” as Plato defined it, but is, concretely, the splendor of Christ (even if the two coincide since he himself is the Truth). Even Beauty was incarnated!
What differentiates this redeemed beauty from every other type of beauty including bodily beauty? It is that this beauty comes from within, that it has its expression—but not its origin—in the body. The human body becomes the “sacrament” of beauty, i.e., its sign, its manifestation, its transparent expression, but not its ultimate source. It is not an opaque screen on which the light shines, but a window that lets light through.

7. Participating in the Redemption of Beauty
How can we actively participate in this redemption of beauty? Christ, as I said, has redeemed beauty in the paschal mystery through its opposite, allowing himself to be stripped of every beauty. He has proclaimed that there is something superior to the very love of beauty, and it is the beauty of love!
What does all this mean for us? Should we renounce seeking and enjoying created beauty in this world, and most of all the beauty of the human body, as we await the transfiguration of our bodies in the final resurrection? No, created beauty is meant to embellish this life and not the future life, which will have its own beauty. A text from Vatican II speaks of the need for all human acts and values to “be purified and perfected by the power of Christ’s cross” and concludes,
For, redeemed by Christ and made a new creature in the Holy Spirit, man is able to love the things themselves created by God, and ought to do so. He can receive them from God, and respect and reverence them as flowing constantly from the hand of God.
Grateful to his Benefactor for these creatures, using and enjoying them in detachment and liberty of spirit, man is led forward into a true possession of the world, as having nothing, yet possessing all things. [See 2 Corinthians 6:10]
Francis of Assisi is the most successful role model of this way of relating to creation. The saint of radical poverty is also the one who sang the beauty of creation in the most rapturous way. In his “Canticle” Brother Sun is “beautiful,” the stars are “precious and beautiful,” Brother Fire is “beautiful.” The most extraordinary thing is that Francis sang of the beauty of creatures when he could no longer see them, since by then he was almost blind, and the very light of the sun caused unspeakable pain to his eyes. Having renounced everything, he was able to rejoice in everything.
We can, then, enjoy created beauty if we also accept the cross that redeems it. And the cross of beauty does not entail some kind of strange suffering: it is love, and all that love requires in faithfulness, respect for others, submission to God, and the meaning of life, in other words, sacrifice and renunciation.
The redemption of beauty inevitably happens through a choice now. The move from one category of beauty to the next higher one—from external beauty to internal beauty and then to the transcendent beauty of grace—does not occur in a spontaneous and easy way. It requires an ascesis (“discipline”) and, with regard to beauty in particular, an asceticism of the eyes. Ludwig Feuerbach said that people are what they eat; in our current culture wholly dominated by images, perhaps we need to say that people are what they look at.
More important, however, than closing one’s eyes to false beauty is opening them to true beauty: contemplating Christ crucified and risen. St. John Climacus writes, “A chaste man is someone who has driven out bodily love by means of divine love, who has used heavenly fire to quench the fires of the flesh,” that is, the attraction to created things is driven out by attraction to Christ.
A different mode, but a very important one, of participating in the paschal mystery of the redemption of beauty is, lastly, to turn our attention to those who, like Christ in his passion, “have no form or comeliness that we should look at them”—the poor, the crucified, the rejected of our day. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, holding in her arms, with infinite tenderness, a sick child or a dying person who was abandoned, took part—despite all her wrinkles—in this redeemed beauty which also redeems. It will not be, I repeat, the love of beauty that will save the world but the beauty of love.

1.The Swedish original was published in Stockholm 1930; English translation, Agape and Eros, London, SPCK, 1982.
2.Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, The Divine Names, IV, 12 (PG 3, 709ff.).
3.Saint Augustine, Confessions, I, 1.
4. Commentary on St John’s Gospel, 26, 4-5.
5.Cf. Saint Bernard, De diligendo Deo, IX, 26 – X, 27.
6.Saint Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, chap. V, Lecture 1., nn. 392-393; cf. Saint Augustine, Homilies on the First Epistle of John, 9, 9.
7.K Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV, 2, 727-840 [quote from page 736], T & T Clark, Edinburgh, 1958.
8.Saint Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Romans, 7, 2.
9.Cf. G W H Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon, Oxford 1961, pg. 550.
10.William of Saint-Thierry, Meditations, XII, 29 (SCh 324, pg. 210).
11.The Cloud of Unknowing, Penguin Books Ltd., Middlesex, 1967, pgs. 57, 60.
12. N Cabasilas, Vita in Cristo, II, 9 (PG 150, 560-561).
13. Saint John Climacus, Stairway to Paradise, XV, 98 (PG 88, 880).
14.Psuedo-Dionysius Areopagite, The Divine Names, IV, 7, in The Divine Names and Mystical Theology, trans. and intro. by John D. Jones (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1980), pp. 139-40. He considers the word “beauty” (kalos) to be a derivation of “to call” (kaleo) insofar as it is something that beckons, that draws.
15. Cardinal Godfried Danneels, in his intervention to the extraordinary Consistory, May 2001.
16.Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, III, 5, trans. by Henry and Olga Carlisle (New York: The New American Library, 199), p. 402.
17.Arthur Rimbaud, “Sisters of Charity” [“Soeurs de charité”], in Rimbaud Complete, trans. and intro. by Wyatt Mason (New York: Modern Library, 2002), p. 70; cf. also Charles Baudelaire, “The Vampire,” trans. by George Dillon, in The Flowers of Evil [Les fleurs du mal] (Franklin Center, PA: The Franklin Library, 1977), pp. 50-1.
18.Fr. Serge Bulgakov, qtd. in Evdokimov, p. 88.
19.“Un soir, j’ai assis la Beauté sur mes genoux.—Et je l’ai trouvée amère.—Et je l’ai injuriée.” Arthur Rimbaud, “A Season in Hell” [“Une saison en enfer”], Arthur Rimbaud: Selected Poems and Letters, trans. by Jeremy Harding and John Sturrock (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 139.
20. St. Augustine, Tractates on the First Epistle of John, 9, 9, trans. by John W. Rettig, vol. 92 in The Fathers of the Church (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995), pp. 258-59.
21.Plato, The Republic, trans. by Richard W. Sterling and William C. Scott (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1966), p. 198.
22.Gaudium et spes [Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World], 37, in The Documents of Vatican II, gen. ed. Walter M. Abbott, SJ, intro. by Cardinal Lawrence Shehan, trans. by Joseph Gallagher (New York: Herder and Herder Association Press, 1966), p. 235.
23.Francis of Assisi, “The Canticle of Brother Sun,” in Frances and Clare: The Complete Works, pref. by John Vaughn, OFM, trans and intro. by Regis J. Armstrong, OFM CAP, and Ignatius C. Brady, OFM (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), pp. 38-39.
24. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 15, trans. by Kallistos Ware, trans. by Colm Luibheid and Norman Russel (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), p. 171.