NO GREATER LOVE: CHRIST, THE SPIRIT, AND THE FLESH

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As we contemplate the tension in our lives between flesh and spirit, we encounter the problem that our human flesh is not totally under the domination of our human spirit. St. Paul describes this problem in his letter to the Romans. “So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind. And making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom 7:21-24). Here St. Paul is writing about what we now call original sin, our natural attraction to evil. What is the answer? In the next sentence, St. Paul gives us the answer. “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I of myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.” (Rom 7:25) Thus, we absolutely need the Grace of Jesus Christ to set our spirit and flesh in a right relationship.

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In his book Prayer, theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar tells us more about our need for Christ in our contemplation. If we wish to find a theological and practical path through these many and varied interrelated aspects, christology will show us the best way. While it is true to say that Christ became flesh on account of our sins, that does not exhaust the meaning of his incarnation. Nor, having accomplished our redemption, did he again strip himself of human nature and return to "naked divinity". In the first place, therefore, all Christian contemplation must focus on that historical event in which the Father's Word appears on our side and speaks to us---sinners that we are, certainly---in a language we can understand. This is the language of flesh in its humble condition, and it can do no harm if the contemplative who desires to soar to God's pure spiritual realm is also humbled by being obliged to contemplate the Word-become-flesh; thus he will learn to understand what, in its plainest language, God's love has to say to him. In his contemplation he is to confess that he is the sinner who stands in need of such language since, in Adam, he too has fallen and has lost the ability for direct communication with the Creator which was proper to Paradise prior to the Fall. It is no accident that all four Gospel accounts of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ begin with the empty tomb. He appeared in His Body, certainly His glorified Body, and ascended into heaven with His Glorified Body. Christians, therefore, cannot despise their bodies. They cannot assume that “sins of the flesh” are of no consequence since our bodies just decay in the tomb and our spirits redeemed by Christ go to heaven.

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How did Jesus Christ resolve the dilemma mentioned by St. Paul in his letter to the Romans? Von Balthasar tells us that the cross of Jesus Christ is the solution to this dilemma. What we have in the cross is the expiation of human nature's displaced center of gravity which had shifted from the "spirit" to the "flesh"; we have an atonement in which the spirit undergoes its freewill yet constrained imprisonment in the flesh right to the bitter end, to the prison of hell, and thus, in this darkness, liberates the sinful senses and faculties so that, redeemed, they can fix upon God. As believers privileged to share in the Lord's resurrection, our senses acquire something of the pneumatic quality of the Lord's glorified senses even prior to our own resurrection, so that, in him and together with him, we can grasp the Father and the Spirit and the entire world beyond. On the cross, the flesh of Jesus Christ died, however that was not the only thing that died. Jesus did not die in ecstatic contemplation of the Father for the Father withdrew from Him. “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice ‘Eli, Eli, laˊma sabach-thaˊni?’ that is, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’” (Mt 27:46, Mk 15:34) Christ died both in the flesh and the spirit so that the Father could raise both in the right relationship to each other. Does this not mean that we must do the same? Hans Urs Von Balthasar tells us more about this. And if contemplation were prepared to die to all forms presented by sense and intellect in order to draw close, through nonseeing, nonhearing and nontouching, to God's sovereign form, precisely this would be a most radical discipleship of the Son. The Son would perhaps be withdrawn as contemplation's object, but only in order to incorporate the contemplative more profoundly into the Son's subjectivity, into his consummation of life in death and resurrection. We must follow the Son completely, both in His dying to the flesh and His dying in the spirit.

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This brings us to the issue of the “dark night of the soul”. In the “dark night” the contemplative shares in Christ’s abandonment by the Father on the cross. Von Balthasar says that every contemplative must undergo this. Every contemplative (and not only the gifted mystic), if his contemplation is an expression of a living discipleship, must be prepared to experience the dark night to some degree. It is a sign that he is on the path of Christ, i.e., it is a sign of consolation, even though it is bound to take the form of a withdrawal of consolation. The beginner is usually granted "sensible", tangible consolations by way of encouragement; his senses and intellectual powers rejoice in the discovery of divine meaning and divine presence in the words and events of scripture. As he advances, these consolations are necessarily withdrawn from time to time and for indefinite periods, for God does not wish to be found on any other path than that of his Son's dying and rising. The spirit must die in the flesh so that the flesh may rise in the spirit. This death has taken place sacramentally and in principle in baptism (Rom 6:2 f); we must be thankful that it also takes effect in our relationship with God. We need to recognize here that it is God who controls the process. We are not to withdraw from God on purpose or out of laziness or weariness. We must always seek Him. It is His Gift that He withdraws from us in order to prepare us for something better just as his Father withdrew from His Son so that the Son could rise on Easter Sunday.

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All this means that we cannot put our contemplative states into some sort of program or technique. God has His own “program” for us. Theologian Von Balthasar explains this in more detail. We would be wise, therefore, to avoid setting up rigid laws regulating the sequence, the succession of contemplative states---laws which would in any case have only a very general application. God is in control of the person who prays; he is also in control of the states in which he regards it necessary and right to place him. No sequence is irreversible; we may have undergone a severe time of aridity, of the dark night: we cannot assume that we will not have to face an even more testing time in the future. Therefore, as we have already mentioned, the three-stage structure of the via purgativa-il1uminativa[JM1] -unitiva must only be used with great care. There is no intrinsic contradiction in a Christian being led along paths of sublime union and blissful, nuptial experience of God, and finally dying in what to him feels like God-forsakenness: this could in fact be one of the highest forms of union with the Lord, who ended his earthly existence in a night of the senses and of the spirit.

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We see in Jesus Christ the most extreme tension between Spirit and Flesh. Christian theology teaches that Jesus Christ was true God and true Man. As God He was pure Spirit. However, as Man He possessed a human spirit which operated through the flesh. On the Cross, through His absolute obedience to the Father, He resolved this tension and put Spirit and Flesh in their proper relationship. We could never do this ourselves. As Christians we realize that through Christ we can share in His Victory. We can and must do penance to break our attachment to earthly joys. However, that is not enough. We need to break our attachment to the gifts which God has given us so that we are attached to Him alone and nothing else. However, only God can do this for us. We have to let him do it for us by being open to everything He gives to us whether attractive to us or not attractive. Perhaps this is the most difficult aspect of our life with God.

– Jim Nugent, CFP