SOME REFLECTIONS ON "THEOLOGY"

Raymond Rizk 

A - Introduction

When one thinks of theology it is more and more described as it was in the report of WSCF at Dipoli, as a system of thought relating to man, God and the world, expressed in archaic and abstract language, and main­tained by a caste of initiated people called "theologians". We should first of all note that this conception is deeply rooted in the perspective of a primarily Western Christianity. Beginning with the Renaissance, this Western Christianity conceptualized and rationalized the mystery of life in Christian Revelation to an excessive degree. Theology has thus become an affair of the clergy and of a privileged class who undertake to bring out the precepts which ordinary mortals should then be willing to accept as sacrosanct truths. Little by little theology came to be a science like the others but without coming to grips with reality, and its polemics have been raised around differences in interpretation of the letter of the Bible, outside the true and living context of its reading which is the people of God animated by the Spirit. In the desire to be a science, theology developed its own language which was often inaccessible. Going from reasoning to reasoning it was often incapable of resolving the paradoxes of mystery and, in a way, drifted into dichotomies and dualisms (spirit and body, nature and grace, clergy and laity, individual and community, etc.) which very quickly marked the civilization identified as Christian. In this conception of theological scientism, it became very easy to speak of God or to write about God, when the essence itself of the Christian life is not to talk of God but rather to be purified for Him and by Him.

It is probably natural that such a theology, itself the product of a kind of Christianity which was at first feudalistic and then capitalistic and aggressive, should engender great spiritual distress among Christians and put into question many values of the past when confronted with the modern world of technology and violence. This contestation, which is first of all "a call to go beyond the abstract and archaic theology with which man finds himself out of phase" and often leads to "disintegration of the evangelical content of the faith and the historical meaning of biblical events"

Eager to recapture a past which is believed to be lost, Christians desperately try to put themselves at the listening-post of the world, and in so doing, in following the world, come out at the secularization of the Bible and Tradition.

Certain 11new" theologians no longer know very well what they believe, and make us think of the word of Kirkegaard : "one comes to the point of no longer knowing what Christianity is" (Paul Evdokimov in The Holy Spirit in the Orthodox Tradition, p. 12-13).

B - Theology as personal experience

Faced with this situation it is good to return to the sources and discover what theology was in the primitive Church and how it has always been lived, with certain ups and downs, in the Eastern tradition of Christianity: St.Hilaire of Poitiers, a Father of the Latin Church, wrote in the fourth century: "The wickedness of heretics and blasphemers forces us to do illicit things ••• to speak about ineffable matters and to undertake forbidden expla­ nations. It should suffice to accomplish by faith alone, what is prescribed, that is to say adore the Father, venerate the Son with Him, and fill our­ selves with the Holy Spirit; but here we are constrained to apply our humble words to the most unutterable mysteries. The fault of others obliges us to expose to the hazards of human language the mysteries which should be locked up in the religion of our souls" (De Trinitate II,2).

The primitive Church feared the formulation of dogmas more than anything else, and always tried to avoid making the living faith of the Gospels 11a system of thought1. . Of course the need to defend the purity and integrity of the doctrine obliges the Church to oppose those who try to deform the "consensus" of all the apostolic thrones and witness to the one tradition by which the Church lives. But she does so unwillingly because she feels so in­ capable of reducing to words unknowledgeable mystery of God. She is convinced that the mystery of God is beyond every concept which human reason can elaborate, and that God ceaselessly calls us to reform our ordinary way of thinking. Even in dogmatic formulations, she adopts an apophatic (negative) terminology, which excludes all abstract and purely intellectual theology, in order to arrive at an existential attitude which involves man entirely in a search for and meeting with the God who is incarnate and who reveals Himself. "In thus repudiating any objectification of the Mystery," says Paul Evdokimov, "the East zealously safeguards its objective character : it does not exist apart from fully historical event. The Resurrection is in the Kerygma, but the Kerygma is in the Eucharist which is the living memorial of the Resurrec­ tion and its most immediate experience" (op. cit.,p.13). Thus St.Ireneus said in the second century: "Our doctrine is in the Eucharist and the Eucharist confirms it' (Adv. Raeres IV, 18, 5)•

Dogmas expressed by the ecumenical Councils reflect, to be sure, the parti­ cularities of the epoch and its language. For that reason they have a prag­ matic character. They are, after all, only a more or less adequate form for an invariable content which is itself the property of true theology. It is always very important - and unhappily it is not done often enough - to dis­ tinguish between the object of faith and its presentation in the service of a given cultural milieu. Dogmas and the developments which come out of them are more or less valid formulations of revealed truth. They are not theolo­ gy, and to "do theology11 is not to produce new formulations which are more or less "modern". This altogether natural distinction is, however, something quite different from likening the historic events of salvation and the approa­ ches of mystery to myths which must be gotten rid of in order not to keep a merely symbolic vagueness.

In the perspective of the Eastern Church, theology is essentially an "exper­ ience"; according to St. Maximus, experience is "knowledge itself in action which comes from beyond all concept… participation in the object which is revealed beyond all thought" (P.G.90, 624 A). It is this contemplative know­ ledge by participation -- theology -- which the Fathers call theognosis. Theology is a 11communication" with the life of God, a participation with God and thus with man who is the image of God. To "do theology" means to agree to live this revealed Truth (without necessarily speaking about it); and if one must at all costs speak, to try to relate the content (often inexpressible) of this communion with God. 111£ you truly pray you are a theologian, and if you are a theologian you truly pray"; this definition which Evagrius Ponticus gave to theology best expresses the reality of the Eastern Church's life and of certain great spiritual figures of the West. He is a theologian who knows how to keep silence and let God speak, who enters into His ineffable presence so as to be able to enunciate and translate it through the forms of this world. He also manifests this Presence in active love for men and works in union with others for the realization of the Kingdom.

To do theology is, for the Eastern Church, to go out in search of God, and it is a search which leads inevitably to the discovery of man. It is a search which, while employing reason, leads to an encounter on the other side of reason; for "concepts create idols, and only wonder lays hold upon something " (Gregory of Nyssa). "God is not above said St. Isaac the Syr­ ian, "he is ahead, in the anticipation of the Encounter", the Encounter with those who respond to his call. To do theology is to participate in the living reality of the Christ who by the Spirit offers himself to us every day in the private conversation of prayer, in the offering of the Eucharist, in the word of the Bible, in the assembly of brethren, and in man, in every man whom he calls us to serv and liberate.

To do theology is, in the final analysis, a love affair: love of God thus love of men. It is to be ready to say again with Mary Madgalene at the dawn of the Resurrection: "where have they taken my Savior?". It is to put that question to oneself -- to remember God at every moment -- and to consider, as did the disciples at Emmaus, that the Risen One is always near but that our eyes are closed and our spirit preoccupied with 11serious11 matters which prevent our comprehending this living truth, that "man does not speculate but has to be transformed11 (Paul Evdokimov, op.cit. p.25).

To do theology is also to admit that the true revolution for a Christian, that which comes first and which justifies and gives meaning to all the others, is evangelical metanoia. I dare say that this is the most efficacious of all. We cannot make the world new if we ourselves do not change in complete abandon to Him who, with the clay, opens our eyes. We cannot renew the world unless we become fools in the eyes of the world, but fools only in and for Christ and those He loves. The out-and-out pragmatism and rationalism of Christians, and consequently the spiritual crisis which shakes the world, come about from a loss of zeal in the power of God and participation in his Spirit which are the attributes of Christian faith.

The theologian (and every Christian with or without a diploma in theology) is called to become the witness of Christ, He is the one who knows himself loved by God, who has become the only reality for him, In living this reality, he wants to communicate it and to translate it into service and love, into giving for men and things. Free from all attachment because liberated, available, by the very fact that he has become one body with Christ through the eucharistic communion, he is ready always to commune in the cup of suffering of the men around him. He is thus the divinized man who takes up the universe by assuming it, by integrating himself with it. The Christian is supposed always to remain in the world the man who sanctifies work, humanizes social and economic relationships, transcends hatred, denounces injustice and compromises, and remains a prophetic voice recalling in season and out of season the demands of love and mercy in the midst of his struggle for the establishment of a world which is mere true and more just. The Christian personifies the Church because, as Fr. Georges Khodr says : "the Church is already implanted where we are in mission for Christ. The eternal Church is in us in the today of God".

C -· Theology as an ecclesial experience

Indeed, as M.Allchin says (The Contribution of Orthodoxy to the Discussion about God), 11this experience of God, wlhile being highly personal, is not individual. The experience, the knowledge, is given not to isolated man but to all together. It is only in the Community of shared faith that each can receive the unique vision which is his own. The Church is never conceived in the Eastern tradition as an infallible institution to which the individual submits himself and seeks as a refuge, Such a conception derogates the dignity which God gives to man, to his freedom in the Spirit. The Church matters as a place for the communion of persons, as a shared experience of faith, love and adoration. In the Church man meets man, and in this communion he meets God". The Church thus conceived is the great Sign of the Presence of Christ in the World. It is the place where the unity of humanity is realized at the source, beyond differences of opinion and options; where -- in the sacramental moment at least -- we are given the possibility of realizing the junction of time and eternity, and thus have an eschatological foretaste. According to a very ancient tradition, the Church is the believing people around the Bishop in the Eucharist. It is therefore I and the others in union with Christ who form it. It is evident that the Church is not summed up in ecclesial institutions. These institutions have very often failed in the course of history.

Much has been said about the compromises of the historical Church, of its identification with privileged classes, of the obscurantism in which it has sometimes left the masses, etc… To be fair5 we must also put into the picture the civilizing role it has played9 the prophetic voice of monks and great pastors who have never ceased to denounce injustice and to oppose the powerful, But the problem is not there. We must take into account with spiritual realism that the Church "which reflects the weakness of its members is nonetheless, and in spite of everything, the place where the relationship between God and man is known and accomplished. It is ever renewed by the Spirit who is within it and who waits to be received by us. If the Church has failed because of us, priests, laymen and bishops, it is through us together in the Spirit that it will again become faithful to its mission to be the icon of the world, a world from which love springs forth. Thus it is up to Christians to react5 making a collective act of repentance. To do theology is, properly speaking, to act from inside the Church -- which is our spiritual Homeland -- in order to restore it more and more to itself, that is to say the Bride of Christ 11in all her beauty: pure and faultless without spot or wrinkle, or any other imperfection" (Eph.5:27).This movement of re­ pentance can be initiated by no matter what "little remnant'1 of the people (the essential for me is that I begin with myself). It is always a matter of distinguishing between Tradition and traditions: between essentials and ac­ cessories. Certain traditions, often the reflections of personal or national interests, have hidden the true Tradition at times. One must know how to eliminate these traditions without at the same time repudiating the truth which they hide or disfigure. It is in this sense that one can speak of a movement of continuity and discontinuity in the Church: continuity of that golden thread of holiness embracing the essential of the Mystery, and discontinuity of certain forms which change with time and place. A Christian is one who is called to let the Spirit reside in him, to discern the Truth of God here and there. and to act in such a way that the Church may return to its sources and find itself liberated from the weight and vicissitudes of its history.

In this perspective it is evident that the Church has to forsake its silence toward or even complicity with injustice and with the tyranny of power, and become poor again itself; that it must abandon its paternalistic manner to again become truly a servant and adopt a more prophetic stance concerning the problems which divide men. It should be once and for all clear that the Church as community does not have to adopt definitive socio­economic or political options, but that it should be the place where Christians come together to find meaning in order to take on the human struggle. On the other hand, there is no sphere of activity which is taboo for the Christians. It is to the depths of the world, the place where men weep, suffer and converse, that he must bring his mission of humanizing the earthly order. The Christian should never be afraid to soil his hands. But in order to resolve the problems which the civilization of his time poses for him, he must begin with himself. There is no specifically Christian technique, no form is absolute, there are no Christian recipes for the edification of the world. "God is present in everything" said the Pseudo-Dionysius, "but not everything remains present in Him". The Christian, and hence the theologian, must be attentive to the cries of the World and the tumultuous movements which take place in it. He must learn how to distinguish the forms which clothe his actions, while being aware that all forms are under the judgment of God and that renewal, the true revolution, comes from inside man. This renewal, this new man, has been given to us and so it is not for us to invent but to discover them. The new man is Christ incarnate, dead and risen, whom I am called to incarnate and who, to the extent to which he becomes "more myself than I", engenders the new forms and structures.

It is in this that the Good News, the Newness of the Gospels, consist. "If the salt looses its savor", if the demand for holiness in active and calm love and in the action of presence -- that of Christ in me and by me in the world -- if all of that loses its savor, what is the Christianity we are going to offer the world and what is the valid content of our effort?

D - Theology as total human experience

l)We have already seen that every effort toward personal sanctity is insepa­ rable from its social dimension. If there is any further need to affirm it, let us recall the several affirmations of the great doctors of the Eastern Church by which they express the lived reality: "To seek the salvation of oneself alone is the surest way to lose it. Our life is a very hard combat. Our King orders us to remain standing in the ranks of all without pursuing our own interests11 (St.John Chrysostom). And again, "The rich squander so much money for the decoration of their houses… that they thus force their brothers into privations of really inhuman nature. Man, or better the Christ in him, is at the edge of starvation… thy slippers walk in fortunes and the Christ dies of hunger at thy door…" {St.John Chrysostom). "The rich are thieves of a sort. Do not say 'I play with my own'. You play with the wealth of others. All the wealth of the world belongs to thee and to all, as the sun, the air, the land and all the rest" (St.John Chrysostom). "Money and all property are common to all as the 1and and the air we breathe" (St.Simeon the New Theologian, 11th century). "You are a thief if you transform into your own property what you have received in stewardship … the bread you keep belongs to the hungry…" (St.Basil). This list could be expanded, and may extend to all centuries. The evangelical thought is clear and, as Berdiaev notes, it is infinitely more severe concerning riches, exploitation and social disorder than it is, for example, toward sexual irregularity. The Eastern tradition thus clearly shows, as Olivier Clement notes, that there "can and should be a personal Christian presence in politics, economics and art, an open and transfiguring presence", a presence which, in and by love, always seeks and recalls the face of God in man and works within the meaning of God's design for humanity and the cosmos.

2.)We must recognize, however, that new problems are posed by the technolo­ gical and economic developments which have so rapidly changed the structure and mentality of modern societies. "Your neighbor11, says Nikos Nissiotis, "is no longer just the poor person next door, but a distant people", all oppressed people, near or far. The Church of today, and the great majority of Christians, do not always succeed in putting themselves in tune with the world in turmoil. Very often they fall into temptations at two extremes

a - Confronted by men who question everything, who are imbued with their technological power, who use a new language who do not speak about God, who tend to desacralize everything, and for whom the only reality is the world in quest of its own progress, many Christians feel a sort of horror before the power of the machine. They denounce the mechanization it engen­ ders in civilization as an aspect of the reign of Antichrist. They pull back into a static isolation, which is not lacking in pride and paternalism and which expresses itself by purely and simply excommunicating the modern world. This "aristocracy of prayer" as Fr. Georges Khodr calls it, arms itself with the prophecies of the Apocalypse and thereby readily understand as it pleases the exclusively Johannine dictum : 11Do not love the world, neither what is in the world… for all that is in the world… is not of the Father but of the world" (1 John 2:15-16), forgetting that in Johannine thought "world" is co­ relative with the biblical idea of the flesh.

b - At the other extreme is the activism of a large number who celebrate in the technician, the new liturgy of an achievement of creation, without rais­ ing the further ethical problem of the spiritual and cosmic meaning of the machines. According to these Christians, the Church which is allied with the means and power of oppression and, at times, with obscurantism, should be destroyed so that a new man can be born, a new ethic devised by the sociologist, the psychoanalyst and the other wise men. Beguiled by the humanity of Christ, a man eating and drinking with other mon ,they proclaim that the departure point of the new theology cannot be in God but 11is found in humanity and in the priorities of modern society, in the technological and scientific culture which is imposed by the very facts with which we have direct experience" (N.Nissiotis). "Spiritual problems, if they still exist, are subordinated to the primordial task which… is to satisfy the material needs of today's society and to bring all humanity throughout the world into a more balanced existence from the economic, social and ethical standpoint" (N.Nissiotis).

3) In the Eastern perspective, which I believe has been given in great detail in the first part of this study, the truly Christian position is found some­ where between these extreme positions. As the report of the Geneva Conference on Church and Society notes: "The serious and patient confrontation of Christianity with cultural, economic and political tasks and moral problems is not necessarily a regrettable concession to the spirit of the world… It is not a lack of zeal for God and His Word alone… We must banish the two-fold suspicion of the theologian (abstract and systematic) who fears that the an­ thropologist relativize the message on the level of syncretism, and of. the anthropologist who regards the theological assurance as a devastating lack of culture.

4) First of all, how can we fail to acknowledge the positive in the 11new theology", a product of the technological civilization, or give thanks for the "liberations" in which it has been instrumental.

a - It helps to detach us from images and concepts of a primarily Wes- tern Christian thought, and to transcend the world in the interest of an entirely different encounter. It does away with the concepts of God which a "Christian" world invented in the caprice of history. "The death of God11 , which Nietzsche and so many other after him proclaim, does not bother me at all. It is not the living God of Jesus Christ who is concerned, but the many images which Christians have made of him according to their interests and frailties. It has been shown at last, and how happily, that God is not demonstrated by reason. Reason can merely help to identify and clarify what God is not, and thus avoid false hopes. For Eastern theology, as hns been quite rightly said, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche and so many others are the "ido­loclasts", the de-mythologize.rs. They remind us that the great Eastern theo­ logy's approach to the absolute is still more radical. St. Gregory of Nyssa affirms that God is 11 the one to whom nothing can be compared". It is only by finding one sel£ constrained to acknowledge that he does not know what God is that the crucified spirit again feels what God is, the absolute per­ sonal existence which is even beyond being", says O.Clement in commenting on Gregory of Nyssa.

b - The approach of the "new theology" is also positive insofar as it des­ troys false images of man. After the discoveries of biology, sociology and psychoanalysis, what is left of the spirit-body dualism which has marked the civilization of so-called Christian countries? There again, science calls us back to the realism of the Church Fathers; the human person cannot be defi­ ned by any part of his nature, neither body, nor soul nor even contemplative intelligence. It transcends the intellect which now seems continuous with mat­ ter. It is the altogether other, the incomparable, which cannot be known ex­ cept as it is given in the risk of encounter. This recalls us to the propo­ sition that the man whom Christians have presented to the world, whom they have so often incarnated, is not the man of the Gospels. Today it is a mat­ ter of recovering the luminous options in the anthropology of the Fathers.

c - The "new theology" also helps to relieve us of a kind of religiosity, mixed with the superstition and formalism which is so common among the mas­ ses. It has been the occasion for an honest examination of the historic and contemporary Christian reality from which the religious character has so of­ ten evaporated, in which a pagan element reappears and is affirmed, in which spirituality has given way to the merely picturesque and to religious folk­ lore, and in which symbols and rites emptied of meaning have replaced the mys­ teries.

d - It helps at last to unmask the religious and political alliances and the way in which God has been used, both formerly and today, to justify feudalis­ tic and oppressive systems. It presses us to work for the establishment of more peace and justice -- on a world-wide scale.

e - Finally, the processes of secularization free the Church from its role as moralizer : she is less and less responsible for sacralizing the social pro­ hibitions.

5)On the other hand, if true theology is the life in Christ, the "Christ­ like" life as a whole -- and if theological reflection is only one of its functions and a charisma -- we cannot but point out the dangers in­ herent to it in the "new theology" when it tries to restrict itself to political action and radical involvement for changes in existing structures.

a - Theology -- the life of a transforming and deifying knowledge -- is essentially something other than the structures and values which form the political texture. It is 11new11 of the newness of the world to come.. This is the eschatological reality which we express in professing that "Christ is risen". He is present in the world, in his Humanity itself, in an altogether new way, that is to say, beyond every structure and value and beyond every form of death. In the final analysis; neither structure nor value is man's life; they are continual alienation instead. To change the structures -- whether by revolution or reform -- can be the expression of man's desire for freedom; but, as the facts prove, it cannot liberate the whole Man and all men. To ideologize values is still a superstructure. One can change the decorations, but the tragedy which is played is always the same.

Our lived faith, our theology, is from now on an experience of the Resur­ rection of Christ, the freedom essential to man. Theology is not an a½stract superstructure, it is faith in man and in the Resurrection which is taking place in man and in all his structures. As Berdiaev has so well expressed it : "Bread for (and one could add freedom) is a material concern; for my brother it is a spiritual concern1". The real problems are not those of tech­ nology or structure but the geo-social and spiritua1 ones. "Structures are after all only the house, the work, the clothing, the bread which we owe to the "thou" of the neighbor, today on a planetary scale.., The schism between personal and social must cease, on condition that we specify that for Chris­ tians the social is a dimension of the person and not the reverse" (O.Clement Evangile et Révolution p.115).

b - No social form can be dogmatized, and that is why theology doesn't bear a new political program. The 11world to come" is neither a new structure nor a new ideology. The Gospel is not a social recipe but an historic event of life for man. The Christian -- the theologian -- proposes neither political lines of action, as the only valid ones from the Christian viewpoint, nor even more general "perspectives", if by perspective we mean reducing the evangelical event to certain empowering values. The Christian lives his theology in politics. He seeks to transform the political order, not primarily in its structures as such but in its relationship to man because 11outward reforms have no lasting fruitfulness unless the morals which relate to them are refined and ennobled by the radiance of love" (O.Clement:1 op.cit.,p.115).Theology, then, inspires a certain diversity of choice at the political level. Political pluralism ls possible and perhaps desirable within the same faith, on condition that the method of action here and there be based only on "active, inventive, resolute love, without expecting a total and stable result in history -- that would be to strangely misunderstand the mystery of evil -­ but animated by a vision of the total man in Christ, the man who needs bread but who also needs responsibility, friendship, beauty and eternity" (Olivier Clement, op.cit.,p.114).

c - Theology is prophetic it comes also from the event in which the living God speaks and in which his life-giving Spirit acts. But it challenges the temptation in politic, as in every structure, to reduce the whole man to its one dimension. Christian prophetism, because it is eschatological, challenges all structure as incapable of liberating man as well as every structure which, in the situation, alienates man.

d - The Constantinian era in the life of the Church, which we rightly pro­ test today, was in the final analysis only "a slipping from a mystical and eschatological concept of the Church to a sociological concept". To speak plainly, is it not also true that our concern today for a synthesis bet- ween "Christianity" and Marxism or any other ideology is just the desire for a new "Christianity" which is no longer feudalistic as in the Middle Ages, nor capitalistic as today, but socialistic and revolutionary? Both this "new Christianity" and the others are strangers to the Christian faith. True theology repudiates all forms of "Christianity", and it is to be feared that the "new theology" will become, unconsciously perhaps, only a modern revision of the abstractions and alliances of the past. "In forgetfulness of the Church as mystery, in reacting the apartness necessary to prayer -­ which is still political action par excellence, and the only demythologizer since it proclaims that the Lord alone is Lord -- we risk being no longer at the crossroads of the world but a panting prophet who ends by abandoning himself to the spirits instead of discerning them" (O.Clement,op.cit.,p.117).

e - The involvement of the Christian in a given politics (Whether it is of Marxist inspiration or another) is properly submitted to criteria of discern­ ment in terms of the Christian view of man, the assumption of structures, the prophetic questions, and the need for a paschal transcendence beyond all alie­ nations.

f - In the world of today, faced with the insinuating forms of imperialism, oppressive systems in which human dignity is scoffed at and where a proper­ tied class oppresses the others, faced with the hunger tension between the northern and southern hemispheres, the revolutionary violence of wars of li­ beration; in this world ,where the Christian, faced with aimless violence, feels constrained to use violence for the defense of right and justice, I believe in spite of everything that we should not be quick to formulate a theology of violence, Let us humbly admit that this violence is an evil of our torn condition, but not elevate it to a system. Above all, we must not forget that if Jesus in very clear terms stressed two exclusive matters and expressed two rejections: the Sword and Money, it was to give greater value to the very essence of Christianity which is the revelation of person and love. The history of the world would surely have been different had the Church not so often been quick to justify war and bless armies, and if Christian history was not filled with "just wars". Beyond short-term effectiveness, and perhaps without excluding it, the Christian today is called more and more to incarnate the new commandment: "Love one anotherr ". The world needs to be able to say anew: "Behold how they love one another" or, better, somewhat paraphrasing the old phrase: "Behold how they love". 1'It is important for 'prophetic communities' to be multiplied, in the heart of new parishes if possible, which are 'workshops' of freedom and love" (O.Clcment,op.cit. ,p.119), Christian communities which are involved in the world without exclusiveness or prudishness, and which try to conform to the instruction of Staretz Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov : '1Faced with certain ideas, one remains perplexed at times; especially in contemplating the sin of man, he asks himself whether to resort to force or to humble love. Decide each time: I shall resort to humble love. If you make that resolution once for all, you can conquer the whole world. The humility of love has a terrible strength, the most powerful of all and to which nothing can even compare".

Paul Eluard says elsewhere; "Not everything is necessary to make a world; love and nothing else is necessary". The Christian, the theologian, should know that he is called to be the love bearer in the midst of the torment, ready to witness by his life without exclusivism or false modesty to the living god, in whom he is nourished in the Church by prayer, the Word and the Mysteries. He must know that the forms of his action, and all forms, unless they are transfigured by the Spirit, will not enable him to reflect on the joy of the Resurrection in humble love for men. St.Paul's prayer in the Epistle to the Ephesians (3:14-21) again becomes contemporary and should be our answer: "For this reason, then, I fall on my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and earth receives its true name. I ask God, from the wealth of his glory, to give you power through his Spirit to be strong in your inner selves, and the Christ will make his home in your hearts, through faith. I pray that you may have your roots and foundations in love, and that you together with all God's people, may have the power to understand how broad and long and high and deep is Christ's love. Yes, may you come to know his love -­ although it can never be fully known -- and so be completely filled with the perfect fulness of God. To him who is able to do so much more than we can ever ask for, or even think of, by means of the power working in us: to God be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus, for all time for ever and ever. Amen".