Pope Leo the Great - from a letter

The mystery of man's reconciliation with God

Lowliness is assured by majesty, weakness by power, mortality by eternity. To pay the debt of our sinful state, a nature that was incapable of suffering was joined to one that could suffer. Thus, in keeping with the healing that we needed, one and the same mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ, was able to die in one nature, and unable to die in the other. He who is true God was therefore born in the complete and perfect nature of a true man, whole in his own nature, whole in ours. By our nature we mean what the Creator had fashioned in us from the beginning, and took to himself in order to restore it. For in the Saviour there was no trace of what the deceiver introduced and man, being misled, allowed to enter. It does not follow that because he submitted to sharing in our human weakness he therefore shared in our sins. He took the nature of a servant without stain of sin, enlarging our humanity without diminishing his divinity. He emptied himself; though invisible he made himself visible, though Creator and Lord of all things he chose to be one of us mortal men. Yet this was the condescension of compassion, not the loss of omnipotence. So he who in the nature of God had created man, became in the nature of a servant, man himself. Thus the Son of God enters this lowly world. He comes down from the throne of heaven, yet does not separate himself from the Father’s glory. He is born in a new condition, by a new birth. He was born in a new condition, for, invisible in his own nature, he became visible in ours. Beyond our grasp, he chose to come within our grasp. Existing before time began, he began to exist at a moment in time. Lord of the universe, he hid his infinite glory and took the nature of a servant. Incapable of suffering as God, he did not refuse to be a man, capable of suffering. Immortal, he chose to be subject to the laws of death. He who is true God is also true man. There is no falsehood in this unity as long as the lowliness of man and the pre-eminence of God coexist in mutual relationship. As God does not change by his condescension, so man is not swallowed up by being exalted. Each nature exercises its own activity, in communion with the other. The Word does what is proper to the Word, the flesh fulfils what is proper to the flesh. One nature is resplendent with miracles, the other falls victim to injuries. As the Word does not lose equality with the Father’s glory, so the flesh does not leave behind the nature of our race. One and the same person – this must be said over and over again – is truly the Son of God and truly the son of man. He is God in virtue of the fact that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He is man in virtue of the fact that the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us. from Universalis.com

Pope Leo the Great - sermon on love

In John’s gospel the Lord says: By this love you have for one another, everyone will know you are my disciples. In a letter by John we read: My dear people, let us love one another since love comes from God and everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God. Anyone who fails to love can never have known God, because God is love. So the faithful should look into themselves and carefully examine their minds and the impulses of their hearts. If they find some of the fruits of love stored in their hearts then they must not doubt God’s presence within them, but to make themselves more and more able to receive so great a guest they should do more and more works of durable mercy and kindness. After all, if God is love, charity should know no limit, for God himself cannot be confined within limits. What is the appropriate time for performing works of charity? My beloved children, any time is the right time, but these days of Lent provide a special encouragement. Those who want to be present at the Lord’s Passover in holiness of mind and body should seek above all to win this grace. Charity contains all other virtues and covers a multitude of sins. As we prepare to celebrate that greatest of all mysteries, by which the blood of Jesus Christ destroyed our sins, let us first of all make ready the sacrificial offerings — that is, our works of mercy. What God in his goodness has already given to us, let us give it to those who have sinned against us. And to the poor also, and to those who are afflicted in various ways, let us show a more open-handed generosity so that God may be thanked through many voices and the needy may be fed as a result of our fasting. No act of devotion on the part of the faithful gives God more pleasure than the support that is lavished on his poor. Where God finds charity with its loving concern, there he recognises the reflection of his own fatherly care. Do not be put off giving by a lack of resources. A generous spirit is itself great wealth, and there can be no shortage of material for generosity where it is Christ who feeds and Christ who is fed. His hand is present in all this activity: his hand, which multiplies the bread by breaking it and increases it by giving it away. When you give alms, do not be anxious but full of happiness. The greatest treasure will go to the one who has kept the least for himself. The holy apostle Paul tells us: He who provides seed for the sower will give bread for food, provide you with more seed, and increase the harvest of your goodness, in Christ Jesus our Lord, who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit for ever and ever. Amen.

Ambrose on John 9.1-41

The blind man went off and washed himself and came away with his sight restored.

You have heard that story in the gospel where we are told that the Lord Jesus, as he was passing by, caught sight of a man who had been blind from birth.

Since the Lord did not overlook him, neither ought we to overlook this story of a man whom the Lord considered worthy of his attention. In particular we should notice the fact that he had been blind from birth. This is an important point.

There is, indeed, a kind of blindness, usually brought on by serious illness, which obscures one’s vision, but which can be cured, given time; and there is another sort of blindness, caused by cataract, that can be remedied by a surgeon: he can remove the cause and so the blindness is dispelled. Draw your own conclusion: this man, who was actually born blind, was not cured by surgical skill, but by the power of God.

When nature is defective the Creator, who is the author of nature, has the power to restore it. This is why Jesus also said. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world, meaning: all who are blind are able to see, so long as I am the light they are looking for. Come, then, and receive the light, so that you may be able to see.

What is he trying to tell us, he who brought human beings back to life, who restored them to health by a word of command, who said to a corpse. Come out! and Lazarus came out from the tomb; who said to a paralytic. Arise and pick up your stretcher, and the sick man rose and picked up the very bed on which he used to be carried as a helpless cripple?

Again, I ask you, what is he trying to convey to us by spitting on the ground, mixing his spittle with clay and putting it on the eyes of a blind man, saying: Go and wash yourself in the pool of Siloam (a name that means “sent”)? What is the meaning of the Lord’s action in this? Surely one of great significance, since the person whom Jesus touches receives more than just his sight.

In one instant we see both the power of his divinity and the strength of his holiness. As the divine light, he touched this man and enlightened him; as priest, by an action symbolizing baptism he wrought in him his work of redemption.

The only reason for his mixing clay with the spittle and smearing it on the eyes of the blind man was to remind you that he who restored the man to health by anointing his eyes with clay is the very one who fashioned the first man out of clay, and that this clay that is our flesh can receive the light of eternal life through the sacrament of baptism.

You, too, should come to Siloam, that is, to him who was sent by the Father (as he says in the gospel. My teaching is not my own, it comes from him who sent me). Let Christ wash you and you will then see.

Come and be baptized, it is time; come quickly, and you too will be able to say, I went and washed; you will be able to say, I was blind, and now I can see, and as the blind man said when his eyes began to receive the light. The night is almost over and the day is at hand.

(Letter 80, 1-5: PL 16, 1326-1327)

Ambrose (339-397) was born in Trier, the son of a praetorian prefect of Gaul. On the death of Auxentius, the Arian bishop of Milan, Ambrose, while still a catechumen, was elected to the see by acclamation.

We know from Saint Augustine that as bishop he was accessible to everyone. Although Ambrose was influenced by the Greek Fathers, especially Origen, his preaching had the practical bent characteristic of Western theological writers.

Excerpts from 'Bernanos: An Ecclesiastical Existence,' by Hans Urs von Balthasar, Ignatius Press, 1996

'For, to tell the truth, man is indeed the being who walks between two abysses, and he is delivered from hell through Christ's abandonment by God, and God's grace has assumed this frightful, hard-as-steel, graceless form, and God has really given his Church and her sacraments and his chosen saints a participation in his battle with hell. None of these things should be forgotten or made to lose its bite. (p. 50)'

'"We must either get to the point where we feel we are right or we must resign ourselves to having eternal discussions with ourselves, as the poor damned souls in hell must have with the greatest logician of them all, whose name is the devil. Every comprehensive judgment is a risk, a wager. But the superstition, or rather the idolatry called Technology, closes our eyes to the divinatory character of Reason, which must either make a choice at the right moment or resign itself to a perpetual condition of doing without.' (quote from Bernanos, p. 93)."'

'"By what right...would you so insist on knowing what you are? This has no importance whatever. Do I, for one, know what I am? There are no duties to be fulfilled, sorrows to be suffered, injustices to embrace. Above all, there are illusions to be lost....A desire for self-knowledge, I swear to you, is the itch of imbeciles. Your sweet genius consists in being what you are without knowing it and without thinking about it, with that exquisite naturalness I so love and which is a grace of God. Yes, God's sweet mercy is within you. Don't ask her to explain herself , to justify herself. Don't bore her with endless chatter and discussions. Close the window, close the door, don't let anyone in. Allow his mercy to smile and pray within you. And when she weeps, say nothing." (quote from Bernanos, pp. 159, 160).'

'What remained unheard of, unimaginable, until the coming of Jesus is that God should have wanted to be poor along with his creatures, that in his heaven he should have wanted to suffer because of his world and did in fact make that suffering a reality, that through his Incarnation he put himself in a position of demonstrating to his creatures this his suffering out of love. And, if the suffering of man points only to that of the Son of Man behind him, then the Son through his suffering points to the wounded Heart of the Father. This is the final goal aimed at through all of Bernanos' work. (p. 191)'

'"If only he could become a saint, what bishop would not give up his ring, miter, and crozier? What cardinal would not give up his purple? What pope would not give up his white robe, his chamberlains, his Swiss guards, and all his temporal power? Who would not desire to have the strength to dare this admirable adventure? For sanctity is an adventure, we might even say the only adventure. Once you have understood this, you have reached the very heart of Catholic faith, you have felt the thrill in your mortal flesh of a terror different from that of death--the terror of a superhuman hope. Our Church is the Church of the saints.But who worries about the saints? We would like them to be venerable old men full of experience and politics, but in fact most of them are children. And children stand alone against all others. The clever shrug their shoulders and smile, saying: "What saint owed much to the churchmen?" Ha! Why bring in the churchmen? Why should this or that person, who is sure that the Kingdom of Heaven can be acquired like a seat in the French Academy or by cultivating connections with everybody--have access to the most heroic of men? God did not create the Church so that the saints would prosper but for the Church to transmit their memory, lest a whole torrent of honor and poetry should be lost along with the divine miracle....Into whose care would you put this flock of angels? History would, all by itself, have shattered them with its summary method and its narrow and harsh realism. But our Catholic tradition bears them along, without wounding them , in its universal rhythm....Do we really wish that all of these would have been placed, during their lifetime, in golden shrines and decked out with bombastic epithets, then to be lauded with genuflections and incense? Such niceties are only good for cathedrals canons! The saints lived and suffered like us. They were tempted like us. They carried their full load, and more than one of them, without letting go of this burden, lay down under it to die there....All of the Church's tremendous superstructure--her wisdom, force, supple discipline, magnificence, majesty--is nothing of itself unless charity animates it....We have great respect for administrative officers, the military police, surgeon-majors and cartographers, but our heart is with the men of the vanguard, our heart is with those who get themselves killed" (quote from Bernanos, pp. 261, 261).'

'"The Lord always did live and still continues to live among us like a poor man, and the moment always arrives when he decides to make us poor like himself. He does this that he might be welcomed and honored by the poor, in the manner of the poor, and that he might thus again enjoy what he had experienced so frequently back then, on the roads of Galilee: the hospitality of the destitute, their simple welcome" (quote from Bernanos, p. 263).'

'Holy is the person to whom a mysterious grace gives the force to pass beyond the boundaries of mediocrity (and, hence, beyond every mean and average) to enter a unique destiny that becomes the norm by which to measure mediocrity. This crossing of boundaries occurs by virtue of a call from God and thus is an act of obedience. At this level, the way leads into a wholly untrodden and pathless territory, all the more so as this way is, to the end, a following of the suffering Christ, whose abandonment by God and descent into the hour and place of darkness was a sheer treading in the pathless, or better, a being trodden and being dragged through the pathless. the more this way adheres to Christ, the more sightless it becomes.

'Such transcending, however, cannot lead outside the Church but only deeper into her. Thus, obedience to God can only be ever-deeper ecclesial obedience. It may indeed be that, when the average Christian obeys the Church, he does so in an average manner: that is, he adheres to her when she explicitly demands something of him, and for all the rest he lives his life and makes his decisions according to his own feelings and with a free responsibility all his own. Things stand very differently with the saint. His act of crossing over into "the sightless and pathless" largely robs him of this supposed average freedom in order to give him a different and higher freedom in God. The saint, then, by contrast to the average Christian, will cling to the injunctions and instructions of ecclesial authority, which for him becomes most concrete in his father confessor and his spiritual director. It belongs to the essence of this obedience that the one giving injunctions cannot himself accompany the one obeying on his way. It remains an absolutely solitary way shrouded in unseeing night.' [p. 267]

The mystic is the Christian who is given to experience subjectively something of the mystery of that sphere by whose life and truth every believer objectively lives his Christian life. This means, therefore, that every believer has fundamentally and objectively died both to the world and to his self and that he is given to live by virtue of a superworldly grace into whose sphere he has been transferred: henceforth, he lives on the basis of a "mystery" whose essence transcends all his natural capabilities and limitations, a "mystery" into which he must lose himself in total trust. The mystic has only one privilege: somehow to "see" what the ordinary Christian can "only" believe. This "seeing" of the reality of God-become-man, and for Bernanos it became (mysterium, sacramentum)the central criterion insofar as he, as a writer, had to be intent on rendering truth--even supernatural truth--perceivable by the senses. It was neither curiosity nor a kind of churchly aristocratism that urged him to explore the mystical domain but rather the strictest requirements of a "Catholic aesthetics". [p. 283]

'For modern man, who suffers from such nervous exhaustion, evil is not a revolt but an escape, a way for man to to rest by "distracting" himself (from distrahere: "to disperse" or 'squander"), a way for him to get out of himself and into the open, a method, alss, for man to strip himself of his person, just as a snake sheds its skin.' [quote from Bernanos, p. 407]

It is equally clear that this same Christ is also the Master of all who revolt against him and that no one has the competence or the possibility to know in advance what the final verdict of the Crucified over his executioners will be, that is, to affirm how far the grace of redemption will extend. [p. 454]

The retreat of the spiritual into self-sufficiency and self-satisfaction is a phenomenon that necessarily corresponds to the secularization of society. One consequence of such a retreat is that the spiritual itself becomes more and more worldly within its own realm: it is as if the spirit itself were becoming materialized out of the inability to perform its task of being the form of the matter of the world. The end result is that the alleged domain of the "spiritual" itself becomes politicized, and a whole 'casuistry' must be elaborated to justify this transformation. [p. 552]

Christendom can be produced only from the fullness of the Gospel and not from the clever mixture of equal parts God's Word and the demands of the times. [p. 587]

'The meek shall inherit the earth simply because only they will not have lost the habit of hoping in a world full of people in despair.' [quote from Bernanos, p. 605]

From 'Flight from the World' by Saint Ambrose

Hold fast to God, the one true good
Where a man’s heart is, there is his treasure also. God is not accustomed to refusing a good gift to those who ask for one. Since he is good, and especially to those who are faithful to him, let us hold fast to him with all our soul, our heart, our strength, and so enjoy his light and see his glory and possess the grace of supernatural joy. Let us reach out with our hearts to possess that good, let us exist in it and live in it, let us hold fast to it, that good which is beyond all we can know or see and is marked by perpetual peace and tranquillity, a peace which is beyond all we can know or understand. This is the good that permeates creation. In it we all live, on it we all depend. It has nothing above it; it is divine. No one is good but God alone. What is good is therefore divine, what is divine is therefore good. Scripture says: When you open your hand all things will be filled with goodness. It is through God’s goodness that all that is truly good is given us, and in it there is no admixture of evil. These good things are promised by Scripture to those who are faithful: The good things of the land will be your food. We have died with Christ. We carry about in our bodies the sign of his death, so that the living Christ may also be revealed in us. The life we live is not now our ordinary life but the life of Christ: a life of sinlessness, of chastity, of simplicity and every other virtue. We have risen with Christ. Let us live in Christ, let us ascend in Christ, so that the serpent may not have the power here below to wound us in the heel. Let us take refuge from this world. You can do this in spirit, even if you are kept here in the body. You can at the same time be here and present to the Lord. Your soul must hold fast to him, you must follow after him in your thoughts, you must tread his ways by faith, not in outward show. You must take refuge in him. He is your refuge and your strength. David addresses him in these words: I fled to you for refuge, and I was not disappointed. Since God is our refuge, God who is in heaven and above the heavens, we must take refuge from this world in that place where there is peace, where there is rest from toil, where we can celebrate the great sabbath, as Moses said: The sabbaths of the land will provide you with food. To rest in the Lord and to see his joy is like a banquet, and full of gladness and tranquillity. Let us take refuge like deer beside the fountain of waters. Let our soul thirst, as David thirsted, for the fountain. What is that fountain? Listen to David: With you is the fountain of life. Let my soul say to this fountain: When shall I come and see you face to face? For the fountain is God himself.