Studia Gilsoniana (Mar 2018)
Silence and the Audibility of the Word: Contemplative Listening as a Fundamental Act of the New Evangelization. Part 2: Jesus Christ, the Eternal Listener
Abstract
In the second part of her arguing for contemplative listening as a fundamental act of the new evangelization, the author turns to the theological perspective of Jesus Christ as the eternal Listener and, thus, focuses upon his act of listening, which is the unique per-sonal form of his eternal divinity. The author addresses the following issues. Granted that listening has to do with obedi-ent readiness, how can one say it is in the eternal Son, who, being God, would seem to be naturally exempt from obedience? In order to answer this question, the author looks at the Balthasarian “enfleshment” of Thomas’ notion of the divine persons as subsistent relations. In brief, to say that the Son is the subsistent relation of sonship means that the Son receives himself from the Father. But this self-reception implies, the author argues, an obedient readiness. And, since the Son is Word, this obedient readiness translates into a “listening.” The Son is not only the eternal Word. He is also the eternal listener of the Word he is. Within the Godhead, each person is his relation (of “opposition”) to the others and there is no difference between the person and his action. For example, the Son is his relation of sonship to the Father. But, one might ask, how could one speak of the Son’s obedi-ence? How does one avoid subordinationism? The key is to see how the Son’s posses-sion of divinity is compatible with a reception of it. If the Father is the “source and origin of all divinity,” the Son does, in fact, receive his divinity from the Father while, at the same time, he is co-equal and co-eternal with the Father. That the Father gener-ates the Son does not mean, as Arius asserted, that there was a time when the Son was not. Rather, the Son always possesses his divine sonship as being given from the Fa-ther, while the Father possesses divinity as being given away. Divinity is compatible with relationality in the mode of reception. In the Godhead, reception is perfection. There are a number of texts from Thomas that the author presents in favor of this argu-ment. Having established that reception is perfection in the Godhead, the author devel-ops how this receptivity encompasses obedience and listening. For, in his receiving, the Son performs an act that, by an intrinsic analogy, one may describe as the taking of the gift of the Father into himself. In this sense, the Son is obedient to the “sense” of the Father’s self-gift. But, in the case of the Son, he is the gift. Not only that, he is the gift as Word. This suggests, as the author argues, that the obedience that characterizes him as a divine person is something intrinsically analogous to listening. Here, then, we find the ultimate theological reason that we are listeners: we are listeners because we are created on the model of Christ, the eternal Listener.
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