St. Teresa of Avila and Holy Folly

How I wish ours [our reason] would make us dissatisfied with this habit of always serving God at a snail's pace! As long as we do that we shall never get to the end of the road. And as we seem to be walking along and getting fatigued all the time—for, believe me, it is an exhausting road—we shall be very lucky if we escape getting lost.... Would it not be better to get the journey over and done with? ...

When we proceed with all this caution, we find stumbling blocks everywhere; for we are afraid of everything, and so dare not go farther.... For the love of the Lord, let us make a real effort: let us leave our reason and our fears in His hands and let us forget the weakness of our nature which is apt to cause us so much worry.... Our task is only to journey with good speed so that we may see the Lord.

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Source: St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, trans. by Allison Peers (Sheed & Ward), III Mansions, ii; Peers, vol. II, 226.

Commentary on the "Veni Creator Spiritus"

Veni Creator Spiritus,
Mentes tuorum visita,
Imple superna gratia,
Quæ tu creasti pectora

Qui diceris Paraclitus,
Altissimi donum Dei,
Fons vivus, ignis, caritas,
Et spiritalis unctio.

Tu septiformis munere,
Digitus Paternæ dexteræ,
Tu rite promissum Patris,
Sermone ditans guttura.

Accende lumen sensibus,
Infunde amorem cordibus
Infirma nostri corporis
Virtute firmans perpeti.

Hostem repellas longius,
Pacemque dones protinus;
Ductore sic te prævio,
Vitemus omne noxium.

Per te sciamus da Patrem,
Noscamus atque Fillium,
Teque utriusque Spiritum
Credamus omni tempore.

Deo Patri sit gloria,
Et Fillo, qui a mortuis
Surrexit, ac Paraclito,
In sæculorum sæcula.

English translation:

Creator-Spirit, all-Divine,
Come, visit every soul of Thine,
And fill with Thy celestial flame
The hearts which Thou Thyself didst frame.

O gift of God, Thine is the sweet
Consoling name of Paraclete—
And spring of life and fire and love
And unction flowing from above.

The mystic sevenfold gifts are Thine,
Finger of God’s right hand divine;
The Father’s promise sent to teach
The tongue a rich and heavenly speech.

Kindle with fire brought from above
Each sense, and fill our hearts with love;
And grant our flesh, so weak and frail,
The strength of Thine which cannot fail.

Drive far away our deadly foe,
And grant us Thy true peace to know;
So we, led by Thy guidance still,
May safely pass through every ill.

To us, through Thee, the grace be shown
To know the Father and the Son:
And Spirit of Them both, may we
Forever rest our faith in Thee.

To Sire and Son be praises meet,
And to the Holy Paraclete;
And may Christ send us from above
That Holy Spirit’s gift of love.

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Translation by Father Aylward, O.P. There are about sixty translations; eight of which are in the Annus Sanctus. 

Liturgical Use: Hymn for Vespers and Terce on Whitsunday and throughout the octave. Terce (the 3rd hour, 9am) was the hour on which the Holy Ghost descended upon the Apostles (Acts 2, 15). The hymn is used on many other solemn occasions in liturgical and extra-liturgical functions as an invocation to the Holy Spirit. With the exception of the Te Deum, there is probably no other hymn so extensively used in the Church as the Veni Creator Spiritus. [...]

1. "Come, Creator Spirit, visit the souls of Thy children, and fill with heavenly grace the hearts which Thou hast made." 

Creator: The three Divine Persons concur equally in their external operation; thus the Father created, the Son created, and the Holy Ghost created.

2. "Thou who art called the Paraclete, the gift of God most high, the living fountain, fire, love, and spiritual unction."

Paraclitus: the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit; a Greek word signifying—the consoler, comforter. In the Scriptures the word occurs only in St. John 14, 16; 14, 26; 15, 26; 16, 7. 

Donum: The Holy Spirit is called the ''gift of God most high." To receive the gift of the Holy Ghost (Acts 2, 38) is equivalent to receiving the Holy Ghost with His gifts. 

Fons vivus: Sed aqua, quam ego dabo ei, fiet in eo fons aquse salientis in vitam seternam [Translation: But the water that I will give him, shall become in him a fountain of water, springing up into life everlasting.] (John 4, 14).

Ignis: Earthly fire illuminates, enkindles, consumes, and purifies from dross; so too, in its nature, is the fire of the Holy Spirit—enlightening, love-enkindling, sin-destroying, and purifying. This fire manifests itself in works of charity, and especially in preaching with zeal and fervor the word of God. 

Caritas: Deus caritas est, et qui manet in caritate, in Deo manet, et Deus in eo [Translation: But the water that I will give him, shall become in him a fountain of water, springing up into life everlasting.] (I John 4, 16). 

Spiritalis [or] Spiritualis: The grace of God is called unction or anointing because the effects produced by it in the spiritual order are analogous to those produced by ointment in the natural order. It cools, refreshes, exhilarates, strengthens, heals, enriches, etc. 

3. "Thou art sevenfold in Thy gifts, the finger of the Father's right hand; Thou art the express promise of the Father, endowing tongues with speech." 

Septiformis: The seven gifts of the Holy Ghost are enumerated by the Prophet Isaias: Et requiescet super eum spiritus Domini; spiritus sapientias et intellectus, spiritus consilii et fortitudinis, spiritus scientias et pietatis, et replebit eum spiritus timoris Domini [Translation: And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him: the spirit of wisdom, and of understanding, the spirit of counsel, and of fortitude, the spirit of knowledge, and of godliness. And he shall be filled with the spirit of the fear of the Lord.] (Is. 11, 2-3).

Digitus Dei: The Holy Spirit is called the "finger of God" as may be seen from the following parallel passages: Si in digito Dei eicio daemonia [Translation: But if I by the finger of God cast out devils...] (Luke 11, 20). Si autem ego in Spiritu Dei eicio daemones [Translation: But if I by the Spirit of God cast out devils...] (Matt. 12, 28). 

Rite: explicit, distinctly stated. 

Promissum, i = promissio. Et ego mitto promissum Patris mei in vos [Translation: And I send the promise of my Father upon you...] (Luke 24, 49). Sed expectarent promissionem Patris [Translation: ...but should wait for the promise of the Father...] (Acts 1, 4). 

Sermone: A reference to the gift of tongues (Acts 2, 4). 

4. "Enkindle Thy light within our minds, infuse Thy love into our hearts ; strengthen the weakness of our flesh by Thy never-failing power." 

5. "Drive far away our enemy, and forthwith grant us peace; so that while Thou leadest the way as our guide, we may avoid everything harmful." 

6. "Grant that through Thee we may know the Father; through Thee, the Son; and may we ever believe in Thee, the Spirit of Them both."

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Source: Fr. Matthew Britt, OSB, The Hymns of the Breviary and Missal (New York, NY: Benzinger Brothers, 1922), 162–164.

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If there are few perfect souls, this is because there are few that follow the direction of the Holy Ghost. His seven gifts often have little effect in many souls because they are, as it were, fettered by contrary habits and affections. More or less deliberate and frequent venial sins exclude the graces necessary to produce the acts of the gifts. But we cannot doubt their existence, because Scripture, tradition, and the liturgy speak of them, and, if the obstacles were removed, we should ordinarily see the gradual realization of what the Church makes us implore in the Veni Creator [....]

This prayer, which should be said by the faithful soul with an ever increasing fervor of will, reminds us that the life of grace is eternal life begun; and it ends by asking for the normal fruit of this "grace of the virtues and of the gifts," the infused contemplation of the Blessed Trinity dwelling in us:

To us, through Thee, the grace be shown
To know the Father and the Son:
And Spirit of Them both, may we
Forever hold firm trust in Thee.`

[...] We must trust in the Holy Ghost who dwells in us and who increases His work in us in proportion to our growing fidelity to the first commandment: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind" in order to become "adorers in spirit and in truth." Our Lord said: "I will not now call you servants... but I have called you friends." We should believe in the wholly divine strength of the grace received in baptism, of the Holy Ghost who was given to us. We do not see this strength any more than we see the life hidden in an acorn from which a vigorous oak grows. If the oak is encircled by a band of iron, the bark will soon grow over it. Who can measure the supernatural energy contained in the grace of the virtues and the gifts, which is none other than eternal life begun? Who can set a limit to the work of sanctification which the Holy Ghost has begun in us, and prevent souls from reaching even the inner sanctuary where the Blessed Trinity dwells? "Wherefore I wished, and understanding was given me: and I called upon God, and the spirit of wisdom came upon me" (Wis. 7:7). "I confess to Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them to little ones" (Mt. 11:25).

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Source: Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, OP, Christian Contemplation and Perfection, trans. by M. Timothea Doyle (Rockford, IL: TAN Books, 2003), 406–408.

The Prudence Required in the Spiritual Life

Prudence will be exercised first of all in seeking to know the will of God, in discerning the signs that authenticate it. It must know how to wait for certain manifestations before engaging itself in actualities that can be perilous. God, who is our Master, could not require the accomplishment of His will before having made it clearly manifest to us. He gives to Moses proofs of the mission He is entrusting to him. He is not angry when Gideon asks for repeated assurances of his new vocation. It would truly be presumptuous, according to Saint John of the Cross, to ask for extraordinary signs [NB: visions, locutions, dreams, miracles, etc.], nevertheless we have the right to ask of God the manifestation of His will by the means of His choice. Where there is uncertainty, prudence has the duty to wait.

It is moreover an art, to know how to wait; not to interpret too hastily a strong attraction, an event that seems to be a providential sign. It is also an art to know how to make a soul wait without discouraging it, without diminishing its ardor. Waiting cools fervor that is too impetuous, and unveils the obstacles to be met with; it thus avoids those failures that would crush the spirit. It tries and strengthens whatever attractions are deep, obliges God to give His light, and prepares the way for fruitful realizations. The great doers, such as Saint Vincent de Paul, were often patient temporizers.

Prudence puts the soul at the pace of God who has His time for every work and does not want to be outrun. When the time is come—and sometimes it comes suddenly—prudence is prompt and energetic as God Himself, and demands that there be neither hesitation nor delay in the accomplishment of a divine will that is henceforth certain, and for which the grace that is received could well be only for a day.

Prudence choses the means for the work to be done—not those suggested by the zeal of beginners nor by the desire for quick execution, but those required by the limited strength of the soul and the long perseverance necessary for success. Saint Teresa tells us how the aims of her director, the master Daza, to elevate her virtue at once to the height of the divine favors that she was receiving, was almost disastrous for her.

The prudence of which we speak, which is discretion, is neither timidity nor laziness. It knows the divine exigencies and never consents, even in the face of difficulties, to diminish the ideal that has been glimpsed. It aims simply at adapting the actual possibilities of the soul to the demands of God, and at not using up prematurely the forces that are necessary for a long journey. It puts forth a constantly sustained effort; and, when confronted by a greater obstacle, it knows how to mobilize all the energies of the soul for the violence that success requires. [...]

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Source: Fr. Marié-Eugene, I Want to See God, trans. by M. Verda Clare (Notre Dame, IN: Christian Classics, 1953), 284–285.

St. Thomas Aquinas: "Everything is as so much straw..."

When towards the end of his life St. Thomas Aquinas was graced with undoubtedly some of the highest experiences of contemplation, a famous episode occurred while the theologian was celebrating a morning Mass on December 6, 1273. We are not entirely sure what the content of that experience was, whether St. Thomas had a vision or locution (extraordinary graces) or an actual moment of contemplative prayer or perhaps some combination, but we know that after this experience, St. Thomas never finished his famous Summa Theologiæ. When pressed by his assistant and companion, Brother Reginald, why the saint had stopped writing, St. Thomas replied, "I can't go on.... Everything seems as so much straw in comparison with what I have seen and what has been revealed to me."

This episode is in fact recorded for us by Br. Reginald himself, passed on to a certain Bartholomew of Capua, and made its way into the canonization process for St. Thomas. I bring attention to it because many people, especially those who in subtle ways dislike St. Thomas, point to this episode as if somehow to lessen the emphasis that Thomists give to their intellectual and spiritual master. They use this episode as if to say, "Look, you can't know everything about God. You can't dissect the work of God into an exact science [like Thomas—they mean to imply; this is, of course, a strawman of Thomas's work as well as Thomists']. God is a mystery, infinitely beyond our capacity to understand [when a person has said something like this, you know that he has never read St. Thomas in any way beyond a cursory glance, if at all]. Thomas never would have wanted to be read in this way. His work wasn't supposed to be followed so closely. It was more like guidelines [when a person says this, they clearly don't know or are deliberately ignoring papal and official Church documents promoting St. Thomas's philosophical and theological work]. Even at the end of his life, he admitted that his work was just straw, useless, etc." You may have encountered not a few people who say something similar to these words.

And they must be responded to very simply with a little fact that most people don't know: when St. Thomas compared his work to straw (remember, he didn't explicitly call it straw, but said, rather, "Everything seems as so much straw..."), he was alluding to what was in the Middle Ages a common term for Scripture's literal sense. 

Recall that the Church has taught that there are four primary senses for Sacred Scripture: the literal (or historical), and the spiritual senses (allegorical, tropological (meaning related to morals), and anagogical (meaning related to eternal things or eschatological). See Br. André Marie, MICM's very good article on the four senses, basing his explanation primarily off of St. Thomas here: http://brotherandre.stblogs.com/2007/12/11/the-four-senses-of-scripture/.

You will see, then, that for St. Thomas, the literal sense—or "straw"—was quite fundamental and nuanced. St. Thomas has a very profound doctrine of the literal sense and how it is foundational for the spiritual senses derived from it. As Fr. Paul Murray, one of the great historical scholars on spirituality of our times, has noted, "So, although Aquinas was compelled, at the end, to acknowledge the radical limitation of his lifetime's work, he was not simply dismissing it all as so much rubbish" (Fr. Paul Murray, "Aquinas at Prayer," Logos 14, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 58, 65 (fn. 80)).

Aquinas was being humble but not dismissive.

Repost: "Tota pulchra es" for Serpent (Palestrina)

The serpent is a Renaissance wind instrument and ancestor of the tuba. It was originally used to accompany chant and eventually was given uses in other musical settings. Below is a video of a piece by Palestrina played with several Renaissance instruments and featuring the serpent:

Here is a video where a chant from the Tridentine Missal is played using the serpent:

Repost: Lonergan and the Desire to Know

According to Lonergan, Aristotle expressed something fundamental in the opening lines of the Metaphysics: “All men by nature desire to know.” When the animal has its physiological needs met, it sleeps, but when the human has met its needs, we do math or theology or go exploring, for our intelligence is essentially dynamic love; so long as we want to know, so long as we care and direct our intelligence towards knowing, our consciousness continues to operate in a cumulative, self-correcting, and indefinite process of accumulating data and acquiring new insights. This dynamism is for some unknown, and we seek this unknown spontaneously, by some innate tendency, although it “is a conscious tendency . . . we do so intelligently.” Children ask incessant questions, without prompting, according to some inner impetus, although the dull child, the one who does not care to know, can rarely be coaxed or coerced into knowing if he lacks the desire, for knowledge does not just happen because the external data is present but because of the interior condition of inquiry and the interior operations by which we arrive at knowing. The interior condition manifests itself in questions, for we would not ask unless there was an unknown, and we could not ask unless we sought something. Something: what we seek exists as an ideal, but not clearly or explicitly or we would already have what we were seeking.

The transcendental condition of our questions is the dynamic desire to know, and to know what is unknown, an x, and this unknown x functions as a heuristic, as an intended ideal that as yet is not appropriated or known. It is whatever is intended by the question. But what is intended by questions is not empty or abstract. The condition of questioning is transcendental—the “pure question”—but “no one just wonders. We wonder about something.” Of course, we can wonder about many things, in many different ways, and there are different heuristics at different times, in different communities, and so on. The pursuit is intelligent and conscious, but it is not conceptually explicit, and it differs and develops as questions differ and develop, so “how do you proceed methodically . . . to the attainment of something that you do not know, something which, if known, would not have to be pursued?” According to Lonergan, the solution is precisely that metatheory by which we try to catch ourselves in the act of knowing which Budziszewski judged distracting:

The solution . . . to this problem is self-appropriation. . . . The ideal we seek in seeking the unknown, in trying to know, is conceptually implicit. There does not exist naturally, spontaneously, through the whole of history, a set of propositions, conceptions, and definitions that define the ideal of knowledge. But to say that conceptually it is implicit . . . that these statements differ in different places and at different times—they are historically conditioned—is not to say that it is nonexistent. While the conception of the ideal is not by nature, still there is something by nature. The ideal of knowledge is myself as intelligent, as asking questions, as requiring intelligible answers . . . and if we can turn in upon these fundamental tendencies, then we are on the way to getting hold. . . .

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Source: R.J. Snell, "The Meaning(s) of Natural Law," Intercollegiate Review, June 16, 2014, accessed July 1, 2014, http://www.intercollegiatereview.com/index.php/2014/06/16/the-meanings-of-natural-law/.

Repost: St. Thomas Aquinas on the Symbols of the Mass

Here are two great videos from Dr. Taylor Marshall covering St. Thomas Aquinas's explanation of the symbolism of different actions during the Mass: http://taylormarshall.com/2014/07/theology-mass-thomas-aquinas.html

St. Thomas's description can be found at the Summa Theologiæ, IIIa, q. 83, a. 5: http://www.newadvent.org/summa/4083.htm#article5