For most of my life, I have been involved in either studying or teaching philosophy. I am greatly indebted to thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas and to 20th-century personalist philosophers such as Martin Buber, Emmanuel Mounier and Gabriel Marcel.
Many years ago, Bishop Bryan McEntegart asked me to pursue graduate studies in philosophy so that I might teach in a college-seminary he was planning, which became the Cathedral College of the Immaculate Conception. If I had been given a choice about which subject I should study, I would have chosen theology.
However, perhaps God’s providential hand was involved. I have learned a great deal in philosophy which has helped me to understand theology better, and also other subjects such as literature, poetry and cinema.
Theology vs. Philosophy
In re-reading Cardinal Walter Kasper’s book “Mercy: The Essence of the Gospel and the Key to Christian Life” (Translated by Walter Madges. New York: Paulist Press, 2013, pp. 288), I have come to see that a theology rooted in salvation history, rather than in philosophy, has much to offer.
Cardinal Kasper points out, convincingly, that a theology that works out of a philosophy of being – even the best philosophy of being – can present a God who seems remote to many people.
He writes the following:
“Pastorally, this conception of God was a catastrophe. For a so-abstractly conceived God appears to most people to be very distant from their personal situation. Such a God appears to them to have little or nothing to do with the situation of the world, in which almost daily horrible news reports come, one after the other, and many people are deeply troubled by anxieties about the future. The wide divergence between the experience of reality and the proclamation of faith has catastrophic consequences. For the proclamation of a God who is insensitive to suffering is a reason that God has become alien and finally irrelevant to many human beings. …
“…the issue of mercy in the theological handbooks could finally be handled only in connection with the issue of divine justice, and that is, justice as it was understood in ancient philosophy, namely, as giving each his or her due…”
What Cardinal Kasper stresses, as does Pope Francis, is that God’s justice is His mercy. God’s mercy breaks the notion that people only receive what they deserve and earn. God’s mercy is God’s love in action. God’s mercy is infinite, unbounded, a magnificent gift to us, to all of us.
Holy Spirit Takes Over
Parish priests tell me that they frequently observe people who, as they near death, reveal a special, unexpected courage and peace. This is true even of people who previously might have been very afraid of death. The way one priest commented on this phenomenon was “The Holy Spirit takes over.”
As he was approaching death, Chicago Cardinal Joseph Bernardin said that everything changed once he began to think of death as a friend. I don’t believe that people can honestly reach that view of death on their own. In the face of death, we do not pick ourselves up by our bootstraps and alone confront death courageously. In the face of death, just as in every moment of our lives, we are not alone. We are God’s. We have been bought at a great price: the death and resurrection of the Son of God.
Re-reading the cardinal’s book has helped me to see that God’s mercy in relation to us is not an occasional event. God’s mercy accompanies us constantly, not just in some dramatic moments such as repenting some sin or when we celebrate the sacrament of reconciliation or make an act of contrition, but every moment of our lives.
Terrible to Resent God
Cardinal Kasper’s book has made it increasingly clear to me how terrible it would be to resent God for being merciful to someone else. It would seem to be the worst kind of hypocrisy. When we think that God is unfair in saving someone – for example, a vicious gangster in the last moments of that person’s life – we are implicitly saying that we are better than that person and that we do not need God’s mercy.
Though we probably would never say this, we implicitly think that we don’t need God’s mercy, that we can save ourselves. What we are thinking is that we deserve God’s mercy, and the dying gangster does not. This type of thinking is what Jesus in the Gospel attributed to the Pharisees. It is a terrible sin because it means we misunderstand both God and our relationship with God.
In relation to God, we are the receivers of God’s incomprehensible love and blessings. To think we are holier than anyone would seem to be a sin of pride. Humility is seeing ourselves as we really are. What are we really? Those upon whom God graciously bestows His mercy.
Father Robert Lauder is a philosophy professor at St. John’s University, Jamaica, and author of “Pope Francis’ Spirituality and Our Story” (Resurrection Press).