The following soliloquy is theological anthropology through the eyes of the inner child.1 I am speaking as the child in I. We are speaking as the Christ in I. Sometimes we will dialogue with the child: I with us. We understand the unconventionality of this mood, but we find ourselves unable to write an essay without it. This communication comes from our natural spirit, that is ourselves, as opposed to the spiritual intellect2 In all this, we believe ourselves to remain within the magisterial framework of the Catholic Church.3 The reason for the existential method is that I have lost my mind, my spirit. Lost it through the fragmentation of sin. I have accepted it and stopped pretending to be put together. I shall boast of my weakness (cf. 2 Cor 11:30)! We beg the Father’s grace make this a fractal of redemption. Christ is the means and the end of the Church and this school; we should be free to speak to God without violating academic formality. We shall not abandon the rigor of discipline. I divide to become simple: I cannot trace the boundary between my God and my reader. As I am in our self, so you are in my God. I must assure myself that Jesus Christ is here, I must invoke the Spirit of God. If not, all is vanity. Flowing from God’s glory, my dignity is at risk in the creation of art not explicitly His. If I shall risk myself, then it must be a therapeutic exhibition. If I shall be the artist; we shall be the art.
1 The method is derived partially from Neo-Jungian Christian Psychoanalysis and partially from ‘Internal Family Systems Therapy’; see Jay Earley, Self-Therapy: A Step-By-Step Guide to Creating Wholeness and Healing Your Inner Child Using IFS (Larkspur, CA : Pattern System Books, 2009), and Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality (Cincinnati: OH, St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2005). 2 We are not conflating grace and nature here but locating the meeting place of these ‘forces’ in the human person. This meeting place is the human spirit. 3 Our difficulty with Magisterial declarations on the spiritual capacity of reason will not be investigated here, however, we can at least suggest that the difference will primarily be one of semantics and not of doctrinal dissent. We emphasize the spirit’s autonomy from the intellect without denying the interaction of the two ‘parts’. In our sojourn back to Trinity, we find help from Søren Kierkegaard. Our method is in no small part inspired by his life, being such an unique mirror of our own. A method of repeated confrontation, repentance, and contemplation. What we seek to accomplish here may at first appear beyond the scope of even multiple volumes. However, we are not imagining solution to the issues we bare to light, rather, merely to map a hermeneutic through attempt. This blueprint will be unmistakably Kierkegaardian, a pattern of paradoxes. The child in us is always involved in this encounter through a special role he plays. Beyond the primary aim of petitioning Mercy through prayer, our secondary goals are two-fold. We desire with this letter to develop, in the Church’s Spirit, the theology of sexual complementarity, beginning with a fuller picture of the human psyche and extending into social relations, reaching both inward and outward to union with Christ’s Mystical Body. Without ignoring the complexities of sexuality, we use the psychic archetype to hold up the biological woman, her sensuality, her emotion, her personalism, her relationality, her receptivity - not as exclusive qualities in a gendered monopoly, but as universal elements in a mosaic of idiosyncrasies - so that she might be equal to man, not as mirror or secretary, but equally fractional with him, equally under the bridal human spirit espoused by Trinity, still, in an integral domain of the imago Dei that is hers alone. In the same motion, we turn to Scripture and tradition for contextual corrections to the dictum that “grace perfects nature. “ We understand perfection, not as a quantitative growth from natural to supernatural virtue, but as a qualitative transfiguration of the spirit-self through which the natural is incorporated into the Body of Christ by grace. Therefore, firstly, we diverge (mildly) from Thomistic tradition, locating the higher spiritual element of reason not in the intellectus (intellect) of the mens (mind), but in the personal spirit of the individual, with a special connection to the rational appetite (cf. Lk 1:47; Mk 14:38). Secondly, we will develop the concept of a spiritual emotion, a kind of higher passio (passion), also located in the same spirit, with a special relation to a beatific appetite (an appetite for love relationships; cf. Mk 2:8 - ‘perceiving in his spirit’). This erotic appetite is the hallmark of the inner child. Erotic, for us, refers not to marital relations only, but to person-focused love generally. Our psyche teaches us this paradox through its four-fold face, the four walls of our sanctuary home.4 Remember, I am the child. I am exercising relational existentialism. The characters of our psyche are the functions of the spirogenetic (spiritual-DNA) human person generally and thus delineate a five-pronged anthropology: 1) discursive reason, 2) relational intelligence, 3) rational appetite, and 4) beatific appetite. The traditional ‘will’ is set apart from reason in 5) the spirit-self to preserve our freedom and identity. In the spirit, movements of our personal hierarchy can look like the rendering on the following page. This is a general schema for a Christian anthropology incorporating Jungian archetypes into neuro-biological functions (the parentheses represent a difference for non-Christian anthropology).5 This is how I heal. Hell hangs heavy in my vice. This is a prayer for you, but my work for God and our therapy first. I am the child, but we are me. I was made to be free, but I have lost my spirit. I am here to find it. I will find it in the moment, I will listen for its echo back. Christ will be there. Contemplation moves me as a natural appetite for beauty. I am love’s contemplative.7 Together we are spirit. 4 The four archetypes are outlined below. 5 Figures follow the archetypes summary. 6 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like this Child (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 16-22. 7 When a man experiences falling in love with a woman, he is captured by Eros itself and not merely by sexual appetite, “He is love’s contemplative, “ C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt, 1960), 93. Priest- Mystical, Fatherly, Service, Wisdom, Fire (soft masculine) Primary encounter with shadow and sin Transformational space where wounds can give birth to Christ Supports the Child Complements the Mother Amplifies the King King-Pastoral, Authoritative, Confronting, Initiative, Justice, Earth (hard masculine) Head that leads alongside the Child’s Heart Partners the Child Child- Artistic, Spousal, Intimate, Receptive, Fortitude, Air (hard feminine) Primary face of the Self to the Spirit Partners the King Mother- Sensual, Warrior, Charismatic, Confidence, Temperance, Water (soft feminine) Entrance to communal life Social awarness Supports the King Complements the Priest Amplifies the Child We speak with angels and gather intuitions. Demons deceive us through the ambiguity of our emotions. Mother counters with five senses, grounding us to the body. Priest serves our abstract discernment. I choose the music, but King leads the dance. We are more divided than we should be. Before the Fall, I knew little. I knew I was not God, that I did not make myself. I thought I was a better animal at first. But I knew more was to come. Now I see more than the bodies. I see images of Him in me and her. My sin prompted Grace to make us see, though not the way He wished. This is how I grew up. But I didn’t really. There is only moments. Just the garden moved inside me and there the people came. He and she and they were stepped away from us, so that relationship is different than it would have been. Spirit and freedom can help us come back close again. We will find them in the garden new. We are the Self. We are the mother and the king and the child and the priest and we are one in this interior castle. We call this Eden self, though others call it psyche. This is how I grow up. But I don’t really. There is only moments. Self needs me to be me. King is leading me. I am an immortal fractal of the child-Christ who fractals Trinity. I did not choose correctly at the Tree, so Jesus made something like a change in God for me.8 In trying to be Elohim, we learned the more the distance of our love. Now, YHWH gives us life by fruits of Spirit capitalized, fruits from the Tree of Life. His love is his death in us that seeds the tree. This priest teaches us to learn to know this. And woe to me if I don’t proclaim it. Wherefore, by the grace of God, we reconcile what Kierkegaard has given us with Mother Tradition. She helps us immensely along the way. I, the child, enter gently on a landscape far too royal and wild for me. I do not lift my voice; I only say the words that set me free. 9 Change is meant in an analogical sense only, since God by definition is immutable. “Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered; and being made perfect he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him, being designated by God a high priest after the order of Melchiz’edek “ (Heb 5:8-10). “The truth is that only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a type of him who was to come, Christ the Lord. Christ, the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling. “9 In the cosmology of Thomas Aquinas, the universe is in reditus (return) to the Unmoved. Creation (in exitus from non-being) rises as incense returning to Being. “Hence if the emanation of the whole universal being from the first principle be considered, it is impossible that any being should be presupposed before this emanation. For nothing is the same as no being. Therefore, as the generation of a man is from the ‘not-being’ which is ‘not-man’, so creation, which is the emanation of all being, is from the ‘not-being’ which is ‘nothing’. “10 For as God’s Being is pure and complete action, so all lesser actions are His emanations. As Perfect Being is the eternal movement, so all temporal motion is participation in this Being.11 In the sweeping fire of Templed time, no matter can escape Love’s gravity, for from Love it was sent to Love in Trinity (cf. Heb 12:25-29). During the declaration of the heavens, the human person stood as mediating witness (cf. Ps 19:1-6). And God kissed this person with the Spirit of Life (cf. Gen 1:26; 2:7). Note however that the relation of Divine to worldly actions is top-down, preserving the great pronouncement of Lateran IV: “A likeness is not able to be noted between Creator and creature unless a greater unlikeness is to be noted between them “ first (DS 806). 9 John Paul If, Redemptor Hominis, 8. 10 ST l-l 45 a.1 11 ST l-l 25 a.2 In the Franciscan tradition, the supernatural-to-natural relationship is brought closer. Thorough Christocentrism gives a zero-point to the paradox. The ad extra (outside) activity of Trinity has three realities: 1) creation itself, 2) the missio and manifestatio of the Logos, and 3) the missio and manifestatio of the Spirit.12 These divine actions are integrally unified. The single but triplex actio ad extra of God relates closely to the ad intra missions of Trinity’s trinitarian relations.13 Only Trinity ad intra is necessary; the missions, creation, and their interrelations are contingent. As Philippians 2, versus 5-11, suggests, Jesus Christ pre-exists his Incarnation, not only within the self- sustaining life of the Trinity, but implicitly in the creation itself. Similarly, Colossians 1, versus 15-16, recounts that Christ was the firstborn in creation and the purpose for it. Hence, “the doctrine of creation, for Bonaventure, presupposes the doctrine of the immanent emanations that constitute the mystery of the trinity. In such a world, an incarnation is not an unwelcome intrusion of a foreign God. It is, in fact, the fullest realization of the noblest potential in the created order. “14 Bonaventure’s understanding of salvation extends far beyond the overcoming of sin. Salvation is “the actualization of the potency which God placed in the world through the act of creation. Salvation is found in the most intimate sort of lifegiving relation between the human spirit and the divine. “15 Salvation, and thus Incarnation, begins at the moment of creation as part of God’s teleological plan. The mission and manifestation of the Logos, and the mission and manifestation of the Spirit constitutes the reality of salvation.16 Since these missions will not be complete until the end of days, salvation is ultimately eschatological. Thus, salvation was intended even before the Fall! Creation always matures into the full stature of the Mystical Body of Christ. 12 Kenan Osborne, A Theology of the Church for the Third Millennium: A Franciscan Approach (Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands: 2009), 290. 13 Osborne, A Franciscan Approach, 290. 14 Osborne, A Franciscan Approach, 322. 15 Osborne, A Franciscan Approach, 323. 16 Osborne, A Franciscan Approach, 323. If the Christian Revelation is true, then all creation exists to give glory to God (CCC 293). The glory of God is His Love (cf. Ps 115:1). The simple and pure Love of God is God, defined as a relation of Three Persons in a Single Act of Eternal Being, Trinity. The living incarnate Logos is that Being again, the power and the object of Christian faith, and a contradiction for human understanding. Jesus of Nazareth was historically and remains sacramentally disseminated through His Apostles and their Church, the Tree of Life. The epistemological consequence of the historical repetition of the Christian kerygma is a new temporal presence of an absolute paradox, a mystery that has risen from the mythologies of the collective unconscious into the focus of the conscious eye, monstrating on the altar that ended all altars.17 God became human that the human might become God. The king has taken the form of the slave (cf. Phil 2:6-8). Life itself the form of bread to feed and wine to warm. Christianity proposes that the purpose of life is supernatural communion with God and at the same time affirms that the image of God is in the embodied human person, fragmented as it is. Herein lies our difficulty and our praxis. Beyond what threshold does the natural teleology end and the supernatural begin in the human person? Closely related to this question: how does naturally appetitive eros become married, sublimated, or transformed into supernatural immutable agape? Attempts at explanation of this relationship, between Grace and nature, always return to the beginning. Before the rise of Christianity, and therefore before any clear understanding of Grace, Aristotle had attempted to answer the question of the human person’s ultimate end. For Aristotle, every human action had to be motivated by a perceived motion toward ‘happiness’, toward a final end, a good chosen solely for its own sake. The final end was a state of being in which all human potential was fully actualized. For Aristotle, this meant the perfection of intellectual virtue, or ‘philosophical wisdom’, culminating in a pure contemplation of the highest truths. The more practical aspects of happiness, such as the social life and other basic goods, played a secondary role in happiness; they were fractions of the fullness of philosophical contemplation. Thus, Aristotle laid the foundation for what can be called the ‘natural end’ of man: the completion or perfection of his natural capacities, achieved or not by man’s own efforts, and realized as an intellectualism. However, for Kierkegaard, Aristotle makes the mistake of assuming that everything necessary is possible. God’s essential power is freedom for Logos, as is the human share in God’s image. “All coming into existence occurs in freedom, not by way of necessity.”18 Here we can have our first sustained Kierkegaardian moment, Kierkegaard’s anthropology is post-metaphysical but not anti-metaphysical. Metaphysical questions are not at the forefront of his polemic; they are assumed in his central project of achieving wholeness within the self.19 In this sense, those elements of philosophy and theology that are not explicitly human are not followed far. What Kierkegaard does confront in his reading of metaphysics is the idea of a linear or quantitative process from the natural to the supernatural through a kind of ‘determined motion’, to use scholastic language, or ‘synthesis’, to use Hegelian language. In contradiction to these Kierkegaard argues that history is not the mere repetition of types and cycles, but is a perpetual occasion for the repetition of the act of faith. “Again and again Kierkegaard returns to this failure of the ancient worldview to fathom the true radicality of personhood... The inexorable demand laid upon every human being to realize the human ideal which for Kierkegaard defined the authentic notion of the ethical was guilelessly evaded by the Greeks through their intellectual dalliance with fate.”20 Absolute freedom and total responsibility are the benchmarks of a truly Christian morality. Beyond pagan (Aristotelian or Hegelian) fate is the human spirit’s participation in the absolute paradox of the Incarnation through the conjoined paradox of free decision. Kierkegaard stands against any natural movement into God’s grace that would violate the spirit’s freedom. The Christ in man is sleeping. He awakes only in an encounter with the self’s finitude. 17 See Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, Chapter 3. 18 S0ren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard’s Writings, VII: Philosophical Fragments, or a Fragment of Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 1985), 75. 19 Jack Mulder Jr., Kierkegaard and the Catholic Tradition: Conflict and Dialogue (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN: 2010), 20 P.J. Dehart, “The Passage from Mind to Heart is so Long “: The Riddle of ‘Repetition’ and Kierkegaard’s Ontology of Agency “, Modern Theology 31, no. 1 (January 1, 2015): 95. This encounter is a realization of impotence, the recognition of being beyond autonomous self- repair, beyond genuine self-gift. If this were not so, then God would become unnecessary and sin would be forgotten. The spirit will not be manipulated by either the pursuit of happiness nor the probabilities of reason. Lateran IV had a similar idea in its pronouncement. Christ is the metaphysic and the concrete analogy of being. Thus, Søren Kierkegaard approaches the problem of freedom in way similar to Bl. John Duns Scotus and the contemporary theologian Hans Urs von Balthsar, to be discussed in another place. With Kierkegaard’s help we will hold these theses: 1) that the image of God begins with participation in the absolute freedom of Being by the human spirit-self-will-Christ. So free is it that it is capable of ‘unbeing’ through fragmentation into Satan, the monistic determinism of evil. There can be no unbeing of human nature, which is held everlasting by its relation to Trinity, but there can be the unbeing of the person-self whose mind and desire is lost to hell. Secondly, 2) The imago Dei is also the imago Trinitatis, a disposition to tabernacle amongst loves, to build family fractals of the self. This follows upon absolute freedom in such a way as to be repetitious and creative simultaneously. A constant new creation we are, yet subjectively and relationally substantial. This is made possible by the free initiative of the Eternal Lovers, who have chosen us as their bride first. All things are determined to give glory to God, for it is the very nature of God to be “all in all” (cf. 1 Cor 15:28). Every existing thing shares this same end, as Aquinas makes clear (Contra gentiles 3.1-63). The devil, physical law, and human being all give glory to God, as those in heaven give glory to God, but all in different ways, to different degrees, according to their freedom. Adam and Eve, before the Fall, were what Humani Generis refers to as intellectual beings not determined toward beatific vision. Nevertheless, that particular state was open to supernatural life in some indeterminate way because of the nature of God’s creative-love which gives completely of itself from eternity into the moment of creation. The unbaptized person is naturally open to and fulfilled by a choice which can be indeterminately postponed, but when finally made in obedience to God, opens the new door to Christ’s freely offered sanctifying grace and eventually to the beatific vision. When it is made against God, it brings one under the influence of sin and eventually to total slavery under the devil’s will. Aquinas’ explanation of the two-fold ultimate end of the natural and the supernatural within the beatific vision can be affirmed, with the qualification that the natural end is indeterminate, always awaiting completion and “swallowed up in victory” by the merits of Christ’s self-giving love. So also, the choice of hell ends this indeterminacy and is a mysterious but necessary sub-natural end in itself (1 Cor 15:54; Rev 20:14). According to the Magisterium, the book of Genesis is true history in these respects: 1) the creation of all things by God at the beginning of time; 2) the special creation of man; 3) the formation of the first woman from man; 4) the solidarity of the human race; 5) the original happiness of Adam and Eve in a state of justice, integrity, and immortality; 6) the Divine command given man to prove his obedience; 7) man’s transgression of God’s command by the instigation of the Devil; 8) the fall of Adam and Eve from the state of innocence; and 9) the promise of a future redeemer.21 These truth claims are the perimeters of a Catholic theological anthropology. Questions remain. Why is evil present in the garden, both in the form of the tree of knowledge and in the form of the serpent? How can a state of innocence, justice, and integrity be subject to temptation or ‘sin’? What is missing from Adam and Eve’s relationship with God to warrant the test of obedience in the first place? This is what we are working out. Whatever man is before the Fall, we cannot know, we need not know. In this way, we understand Kierkegaard’s skepticism of original justice. The prohibition in the garden is an occasion of the awaking spirit, it is a command that cannot be understood because it is not apprehended by the senses or the intellect, but it is an unmediated proposition to the spirit, seen only dimly by imagination and will as appetites. But the choice is indeterminate in every way. The state of innocence is the original catalyst for anxiety, the anxiety of freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.22 Anxiety is the state of the fallen person as well as the unfallen; it is the human spirit in a moment of simultaneous desire and fear, desire for the infinite and fear of losing the finite.23 For Kierkegaard, the person is body, psyche, and spirit.24 We will say more. The person is sensual in the mother and imaginative in her child, intellectual in the priest and willful in the kingdom.25 The psyche is the body too. The spirit is the self and it is in this ‘location’ through which Christ awakens, implicitly at first then explicitly in Sacrament. In Genesis, the fall of man is necessary though not the sin. The descent could have been an ‘upward fall’ into agape, into the spiritual body which is the fulfillment of creation’s possibility. The overcoming of material breakdown. Rather, the fall took us into a body more tightly bound to eros: “with sinfulness sexuality [as we know it] was posited.”26 Through the original sin, sensuousness became sinfulness. Before the original sin, the total surrender of the person by the will of the spirit into the Spirit would have been charity in the fullest Christian meaning. A better kind of intercourse. After sin, sexuality subsumed the typology of faith. This is how the ‘marriage’ of Adam and Eve became the primordial sacrament and the archetype of the covenant of YHWH with us.27 Sin was not necessary. Nevertheless, it was the awakening of a teleology to Trinity, written onto human hearts. For Kierkegaard, the transformation of Adam and Eve in you and I reveals the superiority of psychological development over mere fact-based education. 21Acta Apostolis Sedis 1. 22Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin (Liveright, 2016) 51. 23 Kierkegaard believes the Catholic doctrine of original justice and holiness to be a myth, but this makes remarkably little difference in his overall schematic of sin as it relates to the orthodox understanding. 24 Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, 53. 25 Again, we are using archetypes to express functions but also to enhance our interaction with them. 26 Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, 64. 27 See John Paul II, trans. Michael Waldstein, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body (Boston, MA: Pauline Books & Media, 2006). “According to the church fathers, Adam was Christ and Eve was Mary, while paradise is the church, and the Fall signals humankind’s redemption in Christ.”26 The presence of evil in the garden is unexplained in order to accentuate the freedom of God. The gift of creation culminates in a divine repose that structures all else within it. The Sabbath rest gives birth to man and woman, who are children of the Creator, sharing His image and likeness. As children, they are to imitate the divine repose in worship self-to-Christ, to emulate the total freedom from necessity that is God’s alone in creation. This reality is symbolized in the presence of evil and the test of obedience. The original liturgy is the co-work of Adam and Eve with Elohim in Genesis. A resting of the passions and the intellect in the freedom that belongs to God perfectly. Trinity tested our stewardship to refine it. The motion of creation came to rest in a moment of eternal consequence.29 “The eternal is the infinitely contentful present.”30 This is the ‘obedience of faith’, obedience which by the power of its generosity can create life. In this case, there is more than the perfect integrity of science and function, more than an aboriginal supernatural awareness, more than the impassible and incorruptible body, something more that makes one like unto God, and that is, partaking of the divine nature, the indwelling of the Blessed Trinity in the temple of the human person, an internal infinity of lovers. Adam and Eve are destined on the Sabbath to become Jesus and Mary. The choice they missed is our sacrament to taste. A fruit forbidden for a fruit required. So, in Adam and Eve all die (cf. 1 Cor 15:22). This is original sin: the invalid liturgical appropriation of sanctifying grace, affecting psychic capacity and memory. Capacity in loss of innocence, memory in loss of integrity. Pagan humanity retains its desire for divine life, only now it has psychological and moral handicaps that cannot be overcome without assistance. This help is the Incarnation, now, due to sin, in the social mood of crucifixion. 28 Conor Cunningham, “What Genesis Doesn’t Say: Rethinking the Creation Story, “ The Christian Century 127, no. 23 (November 16, 2010): 22. 29 For Kierkegaard, history is only an occasion for the leap of faith as it is an occasion for sin and offense. 30 Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin (Liveright: 2014) Kindle Edition: Location 1718 (Chapter 3, Section 1, para. 9). I was he. Born of mud and innocence. I was there. Before the sin, I was becoming us without ‘we’. Even Eve did not seem to make me plural, for I communicated to her my every thought, not always needing words, and I and her could sense the world in a body without parts. “Through Adam’s sin there came sinfulness into the world, and sexuality, and for him this came to signify sinfulness. The sexual was posited.”31 For I could not yet understand what was meant by the knowledge of ‘we’. This was a better paradox than the one to come. To wear the flesh of Jesus and Mary in that original garden, I had to make the erotic and intellectual sacrifice to God. I did not. Post-lapse, we found ourselves divided inwardly and outward. Extending the traditional notion of God’s image as merely human reason, I now assume that this assessment was for lack of psychic precision. We will instead suggest that human language and self-presence are what imply the unthematic, non-incarnate image of the Christ in us. The Fall was disloyalty and disobedience masked in a relational curiosity, therefore I was given up to relative isolation from my other parts and from the other sex and from the other Being. Disobedience became flesh in me, by the power of my self’s creative freedom-power. My body doubts my mind, as Eve doubted us, as I doubted God. Forgetfulness of Being follows the forgetfulness of the command. I am undone. The qualitative fall away from Spirit (though Spirit was not fully yet attained), required in the garden a prerequisite still, a qualitative leap into His love. Knowledge of the spirit’s freedom buried behind novelty’s disguise hid the truth of my unfruitfulness. She and I are responsible in full; nothing in nature can be blamed. Wherefore, we adjust the classic and traditional idea of sin and posit non-existence. “The intellectuality of the Greeks was too happy, too naive, too esthetic, too ironic, too witty - too sinful - to grasp that anyone could knowingly not do the good, or knowingly, knowing what is right, do wrong.”32 Because freedom is essential to spirit, it can never be simply ‘at rest’; it is continually active, shaping itself into the mold of its decisions. Every choice reorders the interior design that will inspire the succeeding decision. The relationship of the created spirit to the Uncreated Spirit, is as rest within unrest, peace within anxiety, a laity at its liturgy. The human spirit is universally Christocentric, in a state of exiled childhood (outside the Church) in the cosmic Body of Christ. We were transfigured into divine childhood by the sacramental Body of Christ. This is who I am and represent. 31 Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, 82. 32 Dehart, “The Passage from Mind to Heart,” 97.
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