The House We Live in; 6; Gustave Weigel

Man, man's God, the world between, in this post-atomic game. In Macargh of the University of Pennsylvania, probes these areas with his guests today, outstanding Catholic theologian, the Reverend Dr. Gustav Weigel, S.J. Father Weigel, it's a great pleasure and great time to have you here today. The program is the House we live in. The concern is the environment and man. The motive this inquiry has been to ask our natural scientists to tell us about the environment, about life and the evolution of man. Beyond that, we have asked theologians and spokesman for religions to discuss concepts of God, nature, man.

The purpose of the inquiry is to direct attention to man's power over nature and his destructive power in particular, the need to come to terms again, come to terms perhaps for the first time in this time mentioned with this relation to nature, man's power, man's destructive power, and man's possibility of a creative role. It sorts with enormous pleasure of that I anticipate listening to you, Father Weigel, the spokesman for Christianity, for Catholicism. So the word that struck me at once in the title of your program was environment. Environment indicates for me a ring of restriction. And man is surrounded of course by many such rings. We can easily indicate the more obvious ones. We can speak of the astronomic ring, our place in the total universe. We can speak of the physical ring.

Man must work with the energies that is disposal. He's a living creature. We can therefore speak of his biological ring of restriction. He's also a social animal, as Aristotle said. And sociology will propose necessarily a ring. He is himself a mystery unto himself and into this mystery the psychologists have tried to penetrate. There is a psychological ring to him. One thing we notice about these rings though, they expand. We have heard so much about the expanding universe. You cannot really give the final definition of these rings. Yet they are all there and are surrounded by a ring which we do not see. If we now change the metaphor and speak of all these rings as dimensions of man, then we will find that the last dimension

is the dimension of the divine. We can't experiment with it as we can with the other dimensions. We will perceive it in seeing the different rings of environment. Yet the ultimate restrictive ring on man, the divine, is that which will concern him ultimately to use the words of Professor Paul Tillif. That which concerns him ultimately, this is divinity. How does this divinity come to us? Even though we can have perceive it merely by living in the rings in which we are in closer contact. According to the Catholic doctrine, this divinity, the ultimate dimension of the real, has revealed itself in conversation with some men

whom we call prophets, in whom the perception of the divine, by divine graciousness, became more acute and became therefore more vital, producing the tremendous, fascinating mystery of which autospeaks. These men speak in the name of divinity. The Lord hath said that is the way the prophet begins his prophecy. We believe that this form of self revelation from the part of God to men went on from the beginning and finally reached a high point and a divinity point in Christ Jesus. Christ Jesus, therefore, will make known to man the ultimate dimension of reality. And to that ultimate dimension,

whether you be a Christian or whether you will be a Buddhist or an atheist, you must say that I will be done. The great element in the Lord's prayer. The Christian believes, however, that because of the revelation given by Christ, this will is a loving will. It is not despotic. It is not arbitrary. This will favors man and is friendly to man, if man accepts divinity by total commitment. This total commitment is faith. This is the way we look at it. We realize, though, that faith requires that man be born again. Man, as he has now constituted, is under two forces. One force is the force of the demonic.

And this force manifests itself in what Christians have always called original sin. Another force is the force of grace, God's free giving to man, a power whereby he can overcome to a degree, the force of the demonic, the force of original sin. Man to love God, even as man himself is loved by God, requires a complete disinterested mess, which will not be perfect in man as he is. We find selfishness in him always. But in terms of this disinterested mess, he will continue the loving creation of God. Man is not the end and beginning of all things. He is a creature, and as a creature must submit lovingly to the will of God who alone is transcendent.

Sir, your concept, conception of rings, has man in the middle of this ring. And that raises for me an important subject. That is the role of man, a relative to all of nature. This position is sometimes been described as transcendence. It is, I think, developed in the first book of Genesis. Would you like to speak about this? Yes. It is not that man is transcendent, but man has a window open to reality, which is transcendent, God. Man is here as a loving act of God to enjoy that which God is in his creation, to participate in God's own creative action. This is man's privilege. He is a high point in creation because we find intelligence and love operating

in a finite creature, in a finite instrument. It works in God, and God is love, as St. John tells us. There without finitude, without limit. The problem, therefore, man of man is to accept God with total commitment, to accept his will, and to be creative, according to that will, which never comes to him with paleusic clarity. There is an obscurity. He sees now darkly as in a glass. There will come in Christian hope, a time when he will see even as he is seen. This gives us hope, whereby we can work and live and at the same time makes us aware that we shall not have the situation of the end time in the present moment.

I know that you feel that this first book of Genesis should be read in terms of symbolism, not literally, but the literal wording has an authority and an injunction which I have always found really repugnant. Now, the reading which I make, I suspect you will not agree with, but it is this that man is exclusively made in the image of God. The man is given dominion over bird species, fish fall, every creeping thing that creepeth, and the man is license to subdue the earth. Now, I have used more emphatic terms, and those of which are used in the Bible I read. But this, I suspect, is the assumption which is central to the Western tradition. Would you like to talk of this internal symbolism? Perhaps here we find the strong difference between Catholicism and certainly the Protestant forms of Christianity. We interpret not in the light of the obvious sense of the words.

We interpret in terms of a lived experience of the total church in his 2000 years of existence. From the beginning we have found that the fathers, the early theologians of the church, saw in Genesis depths which certainly do not show up at all in the obvious sense of the words. We see in this book the telling of the tale of God telling the tale of man's own infirmity and told in the Oriental way in the way of the Hebrew and the Easterner. It is told by analogy. It is not told in terms of a scientific that is logical statement.

In an analogy we must be very careful to distinguish two kinds. The first is the analogy of a sheer metaphor. If I call John a fox, I am comparing him to a conventional picture of a fox. There is no true analogy between the real fox and the real man. On the other hand if I speak of God as the father, as the king, I now have an intrinsic analogy. That which makes a human father a father is borrowed and derived from something in God, which we do not experiment directly, but is true of him. We believe therefore that the literary forms used by the writer of Genesis are true to the civilization in which they were born.

The people for whom he wrote had a better understanding of analogy than we have in our day. We are literal minded. They were not. You'll notice that in the New Testament when Christ gives his doctrine. He does so by the form of a story which he usually does not explain at all. It requires insight on the part of the hearer. With the insight he sees beyond what the story tells, words have become transparent to the hearer. There are Christians who find this transparency not only in the words of scripture or in the dogmatic statements of the church, but in all of nature. The outstanding example for us, of course,

is St. Francis of Assisi. Yes. It is not true to say that his Francis was a nature lover. Rather, he found in nature even in his crueler aspects a transparency which showed him God. I like best the story of the moment in which he was to be operated on by the doctors. He has some problem with his eyes and the doctor is going to cauterize him, cauterize the icon. And they put the iron into the fire. Now, this is the moment of dread. Nevertheless, he looked at the fire and said, sister, fire, be kind. Now, fire was a sister only because both Francis and the fire were of the father God. Nature was transparent to him. He did not idolize it.

He found God manifest in nature and could speak of sister fire, of the sister son, of this brother wolf. Yes. Bone and stars. Son and bone rather, brother, sister. The fact that the San Francis is so such a distinguished figure, can this be taken as an example of his uniqueness? I would suggest that the views represented by San Francis are quite different from the views of the medieval church, the sense that, you know, what is on a net, a net, a net, the filed in which we live. Can one see elsewhere the sense that all nature was a manifestation of God? Yes. Can one see in subsequent periods in church history the same view? Let us take the contemporary of San Francis somewhat later contemporary, Thomas Aquinas. Yes. Who did not have this nature or mantrasism at all? No.

He was a pure thinker. In him likewise, he finds that in the world in which we are that man is subject to two laws, to use the similar same Paul, one unto evil, demonic, one unto good, which was the divine. Yes. The law written in the heart by God. Now I'm using metaphors all the time. I cannot speak of God except in analogies because God we have not seen. There is a great optimism in Thomas without for a minute, denying the pessimistic element, the element of original sin. Thomas following Augustine, following Saint Paul, believes that man, under original sin, is helpless unto being right with self in the world and with God. But by grace,

which requires faith, man can indeed become right with God. Sir, can you equate Saint Thomas and Saint Francis? It seems to me that Saint Thomas establishes a hierarchy and there is no hierarchy in Saint Francis, that all nature is generally an equal manifestation of God. The God is vivid, it's plants. God indeed is manifested by all things, but for as small as Thomas, there is a hierarchy. Some things are important. There is things that are less and less important. This of course he takes from his humanistic approach to reality. Certainly you wouldn't want to say there is a complete equivalence and equality between the reality of man and the reality of a rock. No, but perhaps the microorganisms and the chloroplasts and the leaves

are indispensable, probably the most indispensable things of all. They are very indispensable. And if we knew the hierarchy of Saint Thomas would not, of course, attribute them very much importance, he would attribute them the importance that you attribute to them. Without them you do not have spirit in the world. Well you simply don't even have life, but Saint Francis attribute to no values at all. The all was all and all of this was like I just believe that would be quite true. His own love of man was quite intense. And he certainly would not have considered his love of man to be of precisely the same kind as his love for the wolf and for the moon and for the stuff. No, I would accept this but nonetheless, it seems to me that this man is the happiest aberration that he uniquely had this view, which I think is an glorious one, that all nature is a very manifestation of God.

And I seek to find this view of recur in Christianity and I turn to you to ask in what persons and what movements, what attitudes does the view of Saint Francis persist. In a less impressive way, I would point to an entomologist of France in the last century. Hi. Horribon. Yes. Perhaps one other. A Teilier. Teilier. He is far more cosmic. Yes. Their probably is a great deal more of Thomas in Teilier. Then Francis. He takes what I call the intellectual vision of totality. Yes. Francis was not worried about this. No. He took each individual thing, which, for him, was a transparency wherein he saw God. He did not believe in the need of disciplined thought and did not want his brothers, the Franciscans, to learn or teach theology. He was finally persuaded

to permit this. But in the beginning, he didn't want it at all. He hoped that he would show man the transparency of creation and see behind it God. We need all kinds of man. Oh, I think this is a man we need so much more than any other I can think of. This view contains at first of all an extraordinary perception which modern science can only reinforce beyond that it contains an extraordinary humility. And these are two things which I think in the 20th century Western man lacks. These are the perception of the importance of all nature in his own right. There's importance to him at the laws to which they differ, which are in fact his laws too. And of course, beyond all of this, that in it all, I feel sure God is manifest. It is the transparency of the St. Francis saw. But I see this not as a prevailing view in the West at all,

but really is an apparent view. Pure Franciscanism is possible in our time because strangely enough what France is a firm is the reality of the individual. It's a little bit difficult in our time in our crowded cities in our highly organized way of living individuals where the pole will be God and the self. Those poles for us are not so clear. Too many things come in between. The medieval town was by no means a 20th century metropolis. There was much that was land and open road. He could therefore be what I call a Christian romantic. It's harder today.

It's strange that those today who are affirming this with a kind of perverse Franciscanism are our friends of the beat mix. Over here. They refuse to work for money. They live as best they can. They consider the ordinary interest concerns and commerce of man as below their dignity. It's a perverseness. They're disavowed on a franchise. They are undisciplined because they have no principle of discipline. Unprincipled, they will reject the notion of divinity. And this cuts them loose so that they are completely free floating. If you're completely free floating, you're going nowhere and coming from nowhere. This is where the tense piety, the deep recognition of the divine, save Franciscanism. There was a principle of discipline but the things that he stood for, the rejection of the commercial spirit,

the rejection of a completely organized life. This they have in perversion. I also felt this in Franciscanism really escaped chastisement because he was such a perfect aesthetic. No, nothing could have been set against this man. Although I suspect, how can I say this? My own private feeling that he had been had been less ascetic and may well have been chastised for something which might well have been called pantheism but which I think you agree was not pantheism. Of course this thing evidently was an extraordinarily lovable man. Take for instance experience in Egypt where the Egyptian prince recognized the utter simplicity and innocence of this man who wanted the Mohammedan prince to become a Catholic. Instead of chastising him, putting him into slavery,

he sent him back lovingly to Italy. He was a man who could quite literally charm people off their feet, not by having studied psychology or having read a book like how to make friends and influence people. He too was utterly transparent to something bigger behind him. So there's one, I think this, Saint Francis leads us into another concept which is for me an obstruction. The concept of other worldliness that this is caricatured, I think, by the phrase life and earth is a probation for the life here after. Now from this I think, it can also be in fact a view that the relations of man as an aspect of the salvation of man are important but the actions of man to the rest of nature are not consequential. Now this was certainly not true for Saint Francis that he lived his whole life. Could you discuss on this subject then of other worldliness? Remember that every verbal expression that we use is limited.

There is much that it will not say let us analyze other worldliness. Are they quarrelling with this world? Yes, because they consider other worldliness better, better, and worldliness. Now what are they quarrelling with? The prince of this world, the demonic influence working in this world which makes it this world. They are quarrelling with this principle. They're urging us to resist it. In terms of other worldliness they will exercise asceticism. Now asceticism in the Christian sense does not mean the condemnation of the things of this world. It does mean to use all things with control. The ultimate norm of control will be love of God

and love of God will be simultaneously if it be real love of man. And all things which are part of man's life, part of his total environment, all the rings that make us what we are. They are at one thing therefore and rightly so, but more must be said. One thing that has always struck me was the use of gardens in all monasteries or even in communities like the Kamal Dales. The Kamal Dales have a monastery indeed but each one has his own little house. It's walled in and behind this house which has three rooms the monk plants his garden and this is taken for granted.

It's too small to plant wheat. He plants flowers. Even in so ascetic community there is no disdain or contempt or enmity for what God has produced. They use flowers and they are creative and rejoice in what they have created. It is for me the up and spiety to see God manifest in nature and I can certainly say for myself such spiritual experiences as I have, occur with far greater power, in import and the Western Highlands and Islands of Scotland are uttermost Canada. For me there isn't any doubt God has manifest in nature. Although my blood is Germanic I have been greasestised and Latinised by my education. However, I can appreciate what I call the strong romantic strain in the gale

which makes him somewhat hard to live with precisely because reason is not so important for him. I want intuition in the vast views of nature but I like to answer you with one Scottish phrase. When the Highlander was brought down to see the first time he said, is this the mighty ocean and is this all? Father Wigo, this is all. I'm very grateful to you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. We in Macargh's guest today has been the Reverend Dr. Gustaf Wigo last year. Professor of theology of Woodstock College. Ian Macargh is chairman of the Department of Landscape Architecture of the University of Pennsylvania. Landscape architect and a city planet. Next week's guest, Swami Nicola Namba.

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