No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
Wedged in between interpretations of brief passages from Aquinas' introduction to his commentary on the Psalms and Johann Georg Hamann's Entkleidung und Verklärung, this essay argues that Israel's conception of God (which North American culture is poorly equipped to appreciate) must determine the fundamental form of prayer. This basic form is: the offering up to God, in praise and entreaty, of the whole world as well as of ourselves, along with all of our historic experience.
1 This essay is a slightly revised version of a paper commissioned by the Shalom Hartman Institute, Jerusalem, for delivery and discussion at a Conference held in Jerusalem, May 27-30,1991, in celebration of the 3,000th anniversary of the City of David, and in honor of the eightieth birthday of the Mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek. The original conference plan envisioned a strong emphasis on the Book of Psalms, but in light of the Gulf War its organizers changed the focus—a change conveyed by the Conference's eventual title: “Alternatives to Triumphalist Theology: A Prayer for the Peace of Jerusalem.” I wish to express my gratitude and appreciation to the Institute and its Director, Rabbi Dr. David Hartman. I am also indebted to my friend Thomas H. Tobin, S.J., of Loyola University, Chicago, for encouragement and constructive criticism.
2 See Grabmann, Martin, Die Werke des Hl. Thomas von Aquin: Eine literarhistorische Untersuchung und Einführung, 2nd ed. (Münster i. W.: Aschendorff, 1931), 243–44.Google Scholar
3 The most authoritative instance of the custom in the West is found in chap. 18 of the Rule of St. Benedict.
4 “Desiderium sinus cordis” (Tract. in Joh. 40, 10).
5 Readers familiar with Rousselot's, Pierre classic L'intellectualisme de Saint Thomas, 2nd ed. (Paris: Beauchesne, 1924;Google ScholarET The Intellectualism of Saint Thomas [New York: Sheed & Ward, 1935]Google Scholar) will have recognized Rousselot's principal contention in this paragraph.
6 “Omnes historiae veteris testamenti tanguntur in hoc libro.”
7 “0mnia enim quae ad fidem Incarnationis pertinent, sic dilucide traduntur in hoc opere, ut fere videatur evangelium, et non prophetia.”
8 “Et haec est ratio, quare magis frequentatur Psalterium in ecclesia, quia continet totam Scripturam…. Materia ergo universalis est, quia omne opus. Et quia hoc ad Christum spectat: Coloss. I: in ipso complacuit omnis plenitudo divinitatis inhabitare; ideo materia hujus libri est Christus et membra ejus.”
9 On this delicate subject, see esp. Lohfink, Norbert, Der niemals gekündigte Bund: Exegetische Gedanken zum christlich-jüdischen Dialog (Freiburg, Basel, and Wien: Herder, 1989).Google Scholar See also my Loving the Torah More than God? Towards a Catholic Appreciation of Judaism (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1989), esp. 3–4, 66–82.Google Scholar
10 See below, note 33.
11 In saying this, Aquinas is making, in his own way, the point well made and orchestrated by Guthrie, Harvey H. Jr., in a book with the telling title Theology as Thanksgiving: From Israel's Psalms to the Church's Eucharist (New York: Seabury, 1981).Google Scholar
12 “Deprecativus vel laudativus: et hoc invenitur in isto libro: quia quidquid in aliis libris praedictis modis dicitur, hie ponitur per modum laudis et orationis…. Et hinc sumitur ratio tituli qui est, incipit liber hymnorum, seu soliloquiorum prophetae David de Christo. Humnus est laus Dei cum cantico. Canticum autem exultatio mentis de aeternis habita, prorumpens in vocem. Docet ergo laudare Deum cum exultatione. Soliquium est collocutio hominis cum Deo singulariter, vel secum tantum, quia hoc convenit laudanti et oranti. Hujus Scripturae finis est oratio, quae est elevatio mentis in Deum.” The “title” mentioned by Aquinas is the incipit of the Book of Psalms as he found it in the Vulgate.
13 Aquinas rounds out his introductory treatment by approaching the Psalter by means of two more Aristotelian categories: goal (finis) and “agent” or author (agens). The former is “our being elevated and joined with the Most High and the Holy One [ut elevati conungamur Excelso et Sancto]”; the latter is “the Holy Spirit himself revealing this [ipse Spiritus Sanctus hoc revelans].” He then moves on to other preliminary issues, explaining that there are three different Latin translations, all of them connected with Saint Jerome; that the proper way to interpret them is typological, with reference to Christ; and that the whole collection of Psalms can be, and is, variously divided.
14 See his sonnet “It is a beauteous evening.”
15 See van Beeck, F. J., God Encountered: A Contemporary Catholic Systematic Theology, vol. 1: Understanding the Christian Faith (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), 122Google Scholar, note [d].
16 E.g., Deutero-Isaiah (Is 40-55) must be read no less as a warning against temptations to idolatry in the context of the Babylonian exile than as a profession of faith in YHWH.
17 It is more than likely that ancient Israel shared some of the henotheism so widespread in the ancient Near East (see 2Kgs 327 for an example). And the critical inquiry need not stop there. From an historical point of view, one could wonder if Israel's faith in YHWH as God Alone is not the fairly late result of a gradual journey out of polytheism into monotheism. Such historical questions have in fact been increasingly asked; so far, the answers have remained inconclusive. In recent years the evidence introduced to establish the accuracy of the monotheistic and henotheistic pictures, especially in regard to the period before and immediately following the Davidic and Solomonic kingdom, has been increasingly archeological. Smith's, Mark recent The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990)Google Scholar favors the skeptical position; his book is largely written by way of a rejoinder to Tigay's, J. H.You Shall Have No Other Gods: Israelite Religion in the Light of Hebrew Inscriptions, Harvard Semitic Studies, 31 (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1986)Google Scholar, which offers evidence favoring the antiquity of monotheistic, or at least henotheistic, Yahwism.
18 Israel's faith combines the twin themes of creation and salvation. See Clifford, Richard J., “The Hebrew Scriptures and the Theology of Creation,” Theological Studies 46 (1985): 507–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On Deutero-Isaiah, see Clifford, Richard J., Fair Spoken and Persuading (New York: Paulist, 1984), 59–67.Google Scholar See also Ollenburger, Ben C., Zion, the City of the Great King: A Theological Symbol of the Jerusalem Cult, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series, 41 (Sheffield: The Academic Press, 1987), 145–62.Google Scholar
19 A passage in the Apocalypse (Rv 19:11-16) contains a Christian parallel to this. Jesus Christ, known by the name “Faithful and True” (see Rv 4:1), has a hidden—that is, strictly divine—Name as well, which manifests him as the One who is above all the powers that be: “King of kings and Lord of lords.”
20 The memorializing of particular events in time and place that is the very substance of Christian worship follows the pattern set by Israel's worship.
21 One result of this historic rearrangement will be, eventually, an angelology and demonology compatible with monotheism, and indeed supportive of it. Israel, and, in time, the Christian community as well (see 1 Cor 8:4-6), will wisely refrain from denying the existence of the powers that be. (The scientific rationalism of a later day will take care of that.) However, both Israel and the Christian community will, with the patience of genuine resolve, reject the powers' claim to religious submission. On the one hand, therefore, the Jewish-Christian tradition will firmly assign to the powers that be a place in the world, not over it. On the other hand, however, it will respect them as influences to be reckoned with in the struggle undertaken by a humanity both open and resistant to God, and by a cosmos torn between plasticity and sluggishness, as both of them encounter a wholly transcendent God undeviatingly devoted to their ultimate well-being. However, it must also in all fairness be pointed out that the Christian community's doctrinal tradition (unlike its liturgy) experienced real irresolution with regard to the ancient conception, found with such appealing vigor in both Stoicism and forms of Platonism, of the Great Chain of Being. This implies that all the powers that be somehow mediate between true deity—“the greatest God”—and humanity and the world. Thus, in referring to the Son and the Spirit as the Father's hands, instruments, and powers, and in suggesting that they are somehow secondary or subordinate to the Father, early Christian trinitarianism did suggest that they belong to a middle realm, “created so God could create.” Not until Athansius and the Cappadocians does trinitarian doctrine recover the majesty of Jewish monotheism, by making it fully clear that “there can be no grades of deity, and God needs no intermediary to protect Himself from the world or the world from Himself.” The infinite distance between God and humanity and its world cannot “be bridged by inserting enough intermediate steps,” but only by “the free act of a loving Creator”—that is, by the Covenants, and, at last, the Incarnation of the fully divine Logos (quotations from Lienhard's, Joseph T. review of Hanson's, R. P. C.The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy in Theological Studies 51 [1990]: 334–37Google Scholar).
22 On this subject, see the first chapter of a now largely dated best seller, Cox, Harvey, The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1966).Google Scholar
23 On this subject, see Niebuhr's, H. Richard classic Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).Google Scholar On a less austerely theological note, G. Ronald Murphy has given us an exemplary account of the poetic sensitivity it may take to bring about a productive transcultural encounter between a coherent polytheistic culture governed by divine powers of war and wisdom, and ultimately by Fate, and Christian monotheism. See his delightful monograph The Saxon Savior: The Transformation of the Gospel in the Ninth-Century Heliand (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar, devoted to the ninth-century Saxon epic Heliand (“The Savior”). The epic's author, a scholar-monk, recounts the Gospel in keeping with the ethos of the Germanic warrior-world of the Saxon tribes, recently brought to heel by Charlemagne and forced to accept imperial Christianity. In doing so, he succeeds in both appreciating and substantially rearranging the world picture of ancient German mythology, along with the attitudes it used to cultivate.
24 Paul Tillich's broad philosophic explorations of this theme remain valuable. See esp. his Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 1: 81–94, 147–55, 186–204.Google Scholar
25 See, among an avalanche of literature, Schutz, William C., The Interpersonal Underworld (Palo Alto, CA: Science and Behavior Books, 1966)Google Scholar, and the classic essay by Bennis, W. G. and Shepard, H. A., “A Theory of Group Development,” Human Relations 9 (1956):415–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
26 De fide et symbolo, 7 (CSKL 41, p. 11)Google Scholar: “… nullam naturam deo esse posse contrariam.”
27 See, “in their whole substance … out of nothing” (DS 3025).
28 See Norbert Lohfink's commentary on 1QH 2, 20-30, esp. 22-25 (lines 06-13 in Lohfink's arrangement), in Lobgesänge der Armen: Studien zum Magnifikat, den Hodajot von Qumran und einigen späten Psalmen (Anhang: Ulrich Dahmen, Hodajot-Bibliographie 1948-1989;Google ScholarStuttgarter Bibelstudien, 143 [Stuttgart: Verlag Katholisches Biblewerk, 1990]), 49, 53.Google Scholar
29 Mystics, being closest to God, are most keenly conscious of the inalienable holiness of all creatures, which ultimately places them beyond all discrimination or choice.
30 See: “the one principle of the universe” (DS 800).
31 On this issue, so neuralgic in the West today, the classic Christian tradition, as instanced by the Cappadocian fathers, will “equate divine fatherhood with motherhood because God transcends gender.” While often using the language of “culturally entrenched misogyny,” the Tradition insists that the things that are “important and definitive about the human condition, nature and moral character, are unaffected by the gender distinction,” since (and here the Jewish heritage shines through with particular clarity) human differences, and specifically gender, no matter howreal, are “overwhelmed by the glory of God which they have in common” (see Harrison's, Verna E. F. illuminating essay “Male and Female in Cappadocian Theology,” Journal of Theological Studies N.S. 41 [1990]: 441–71;CrossRefGoogle Scholar quotations 442, 447, 451).
In an unpublished paper, Francis X. Clooney has shown how, in treating the relationship between the transcendent God and the contingencies of sexual differentiation, a South Indian Hindu theologian in the Northern Srivaisnava tradition follows a very different, yet curiously comparable course. In a refined effort to teach true monotheism crticial of Vedic polytheism, Vedanta Desika (1270-1369) maintains the goddess Sri as the Lord Visnu's Consort, but proceeds to make her (to use Christian terminology) entirely consubstantial with him, as well as inseparable from him in the work of salvation. Vedanta Desika's move invites insight-provoking comparisons with Israel's opposite move, since, interestingly, both moves are made to avoid reducing the One God to a faceless monad. For obvious reasons, Vedanta Desika's teaching also invites illuminating comparisons, not only with Christian trinitarianism, but also, and especially, with its antecedents in Jewish Wisdom theology and, conceivably, in the angelology of the Hebrew bible, esp. in its habit of presenting the mal'ākh YHWH (“the Angel of the Lord”) as the Lord's persona. On this subject, see Johnson, Elizabeth, “The Incomprehensibility of God and the Image of God Male and Female,” Theological Studies 45 (1984): 441–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Smith, Mark S., “God Male and Female in the Old Testament: Yahweh and his ‘asherah,’” Theological Studies 48 (1987): 333–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
32 See DS 3024-25.
33 On this subject, see Metz, Johann Baptist, “Theologie gegen Mythologie: Kleine Apologie des biblischen Monotheismus,” Herder-Korrespondenz 42 (1988): 187–93.Google Scholar See also Levinas, Emmanuel, “Simone Weil contre la Bible,” Difficile liberté: Essais sur le judaïsme, 2nd ed. (Paris: Albin Michel, 1976), 178–88Google Scholar: “The oneness of [God's] Name means the oneness of the language and the Scriptures and the institutions. It means the end of naiveté and rootedness. The Church remains faithful to a deep-seated Jewish impulse when it seeks the religious emancipation of humanity by (as Simone Weil complains) ‘imposing the Jewish Scriptures everywhere.’ All speech means being uprooted. Every rational institution means being uprooted. The establishment of a genuine society is a form of being uprooted—it marks the end of an existence where ‘being at home’ is an absolute, where everything comes from inside. Paganism means rootedness, almost in the etymological sense of the term. The arrival of Scripture means, not the spirit being subordinated to a letter, the spirit is free; in the root, it is tied down. It is on the arid soil of the desert, where nothing holds, that the true spirit descended into a text, so as to seek a universal fulfillment” (183).
34 See Levenson, Jon D., Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988).Google Scholar
35 This tendency has been especially prominent in the Christian world since the Reformation. See van Beeck, F. J., God Encountered, 1: 62–68.Google Scholar Also see Loving the Torah More than God?, 43-47.
36 On the subject of these developmental stages, see van Beeck, F. J., Catholic Identity After Vatican II: Three Types of Faith in the One Church (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1985).Google Scholar Also see God Encountered, 1:268–88.Google Scholar
37 On Hamann, I am substantially indebted to Schoonhoven, E. Jansen, Jodendom Christendom VerJichting: Johann Georg Hamann en Moses Mendelssohn, een achttiende eeuws dispuut als bijdrage aan hedendaagse discussie (Nijkerk: Uitgeverij G. F. Callenbach, 1986).Google Scholar
38 The title alludes to Psalm 110:1, one of the classical christological proof-texts (see Mk 12: 36 parr.; Mk 14:62; 16:19; Mt 26:64 par. Lk 22:69; Acts 2:34; see also 1 Cor 15:25; Eph 1:20; Col 3:1; Heb 1:3, 13; 8:1; 10:12-13; 12:2). The text is available in Hamann, Johann Georg, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 3, ed. Nadler, Josef (Wien: Thomas-Morus-Presse, Im Verlag Herder, 1951), 291–320.Google Scholar
39 Text (two versions) in Hamann, , Sämtliche Werke 3: 348–407.Google Scholar
40 “Der flüchtigste Leser kann sich schwerlich der Beobachtung entschlagen und erwehren, daß in den Hebräischen Offenbahrungen über Jerusalem die schrecklichsten Drohungen und herrlichsten Verheißungen durch einander gehen, wie die Elemente in der Sündflut und die Sayten auf dem Psalter. Zu einem objectiven Begriff dieser heiligen Gottesstadt, die des HERRN Thron und des HERRN Herde heißt (Jerem. III:17; XIII:17), gehört ein herculischer Wahrsagermuth” (Hamann, , Sämtliche Werke, 3:385Google Scholar, quoted in Schoonhoven, , Jodendom Christendom Veriichting, 10Google Scholar).