Sadly, work-related time constraints have forced me to postpone until summer the independent study course for which I was reading de Lubac’s ‘Catholicism: Christ and the Commond Destiny of Man’. I have not stopped reading, but I will not be writing chapter summaries. Instead, I plan to post here on specific aspects of the book that I find particularly interesting. Hopefully this will mean more frequent, short updates.
In de Lubac’s second chapter he turns to the catholicity of the Church. ‘Through a symbolism the origins of which seem to go back to the first Christian generations, this Catholicism found expression in the miracle of Pentecost…’ he writes, ‘[f]or these gifts were in fact scattered on the Apostles simply that they might carry out a mission of unity: the Holy Spirit, manifested through them, is about to reestablish mutual comprehension among men…’ (55) The scattering of ‘these gifts’ answers the scattering of the peoples at the Tower of Babel; by the Spirit, the languages which once divided men do so no longer. But Pentecost does not undo Babel’s mischief by reversing the division of tongues, but by rendering it irrelevant: the miracle is not that all men suddenly speak one language, but that the Apostles speak all.
Each of them speaks all languages; one man, alone, speaks all languages because the Church is one, and she must one day praise God in all the tongues of the earth. “And even now all these tongues belong to each one of us, since we are all members of that one body that speaks in them” (Augustine, Sermons). (56)
A personal digression: the idea that linguistic diversity may be preserved without threatening the unity of the Body strikes me as a wonderful promise. While a student in Germany some ten years ago, I was struck by two things. First, how wonderful it is that there are other languages, each with their own manner of conceptual organization and expression. My understanding of German culture and my German friends grew in tandem with my understanding of the German language; I even found myself thinking thoughts in German which, though recognizably my own, had never been able to find articulation in English. But, second, there was undeniably a linguistic barrier between myself and my German friends. Though fluent enough to convey any sort of information I wanted to, my German never advanced to the point where I could really get my personality across, and I was painfully aware that my friends there didn’t really know who I was. This may have been a somewhat narcissistic thing to worry about, but on the other hand I’m fairly convinced that the desire to be known is fundamental to being human (and appropriately so, being a thing created in us from the beginning – but that’s another, very large, topic).
I recall thinking then that the difference between the division that existed there and the division that exists between myself and my English-speaking friends was one of degree only: no matter how fluent I got in German, there would remain aspects of myself that I would be unable to communicate, even as there are here in the States. Getting rid of linguistic differences doesn’t erase the inability of human language itself to encapsulate even a single human.
de Lubac speaks to this in noting that the unity spoken of at Pentecost is not merely that of a single linguistic community – ‘This unity is so close that the Church is constantly personified. She is the betrothed, the bride… the “chosen people”, the “son of God”, etc.’ (57-58) In the spirit of 1 Peter 2:9, de Lubac notes that ‘the universal destiny of the community is a genuine legacy from the Old Testament, a doctrinal legacy and not merely a literary one.’ (58) This Church, this one creation, one people, is the fufillment of the promise given to Abraham of a seed, a promise ‘put in the singular. This one seed is Christ. Where Christ is, and there alone, can be found the true Israel, and it is only through incorporation in Christ that participation in the blessings of Abraham may be obtained.’ (59) The nation of Israel in the Old Testament, then, anticipates the worldwide people of God to whom the Apostles were sent out – Israel makes the idea of the Church legible:
Thus, just as the Jews put all their trust for so long not in an individual reward beyond the grave but in their common destiny as a race and in the glory of their earthly Jerusalem, so for the Christian all his hopes must be bent on the coming of the Kingdom and the glory of the one Jerusalem; and as Yahweh bestowed adoption on no individual as such, but only insofar as he bestowed universal adoption on the people of the Jews, so the Christian obtains adoption only in proportion as he is a member of that social structure brought to life by the Spirit of Christ. (60)
Pentecost and Jewish nationalism counterbalance one another in de Lubac’s understanding of catholicity. The former speaks to the inability of any national or ethnic distinction, even one so fundamental as language, to exclude any indivdual from the community of the Church. But the latter serves as ‘an antidote to all attempts at interpretation in an individualist sense.’ (61) Here we have much to gain from de Lubac as we consider how we co-labor with Christ to gather – without regard to national, ethnic, or social distinction on the one hand, rejecting our culture’s tendency to accept as normal or even ideal the notion of a merely individual, autonomous salvation on the other.
