CHRISTOLOGY FROM WITHIN

HeyJ XLVIII (2007), pp. 438–457 CHRISTOLOGY FROM WITHIN ILIA DELIO Washington Theological Union, Washington, DC, USA I. THE PROBLEM OF CHRIST In his landmark essay, ‘Current Problems in Christology’, Karl Rahner noted a ‘mysterious monophysite undercurrent in ordinary Christology and a tendency to let the creaturely be overwhelmed in the face of the Absolute, as though God were to become greater and more real by devaluation and cancellation of the creature’.1 Although, he indicated, the name Jesus Christ is the undivided experience that constitutes the central Christian dogma, there is a tendency to split the reality of God and the human man Jesus, so that on a practical level, we fail to see that Christ is not simply the individual existent Jesus of Nazareth but the permanent openness of our humanity to God and hence God’s life in us. Rahner’s diagnosis of the problem of Christ is an essential one to consider. The dis-unity of Jesus Christ, wrought by abstract doctrinal formulation of the hypostatic union of natures has not been helpful to the essential meaning of Jesus Christ. Roger Haight notes that the confirmation of Jesus’ divinity by the Council of Nicea in 325 led to ‘the portrayal of Jesus as a divine individual who also bore an integral human nature’.2 Recent attempts to correct a reified Christology have led to new methodologies in order to understand the internal relationship of Jesus as the Christ. Haight has constructed a methodology of hermeneutics based on historical consciousness while Walter Kasper describes a Son Christology based on evidence of the New Testament.3 Rahner himself sought to describe the unity of Jesus Christ within an historical context by identifying two basic types of Christology, one from below (the ‘saving history’ type) and other from above (the ‘metaphysical’ type).4 Rather than seeing these types exclusive of each other, he suggested ‘that they might be mixed insofar as the latter type (metaphysical) may be contained in the first type’ (saving history).5 What gives breath to Rahner’s Christology, even the metaphysical type, is its cosmic scope which otherwise seems compromised in many contemporary christologies. In order for Christ to come, he claims, there had to be a human species, and for humanity to exist there had to be a r The author 2007. Journal compilation r Trustees for Roman Catholic Purposes Registered 2007. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. CHRISTOLOGY FROM WITHIN 439 creation. The world therefore ‘is not simply accepted as that which is already given, but comes to be in that God himself utters himself, and in this self-utterance of his in the Word become flesh, imposes the finality and unsurpassibility of this self-utterance’.6 Elsewhere he writes, ‘The Incarnation of the Logos (however much we insist on the fact that it is itself an historical, unique event in an essentially historical world) appears as the ontologically (not merely ‘morally’, an afterthought) unambiguous goal of the movement of creation as a whole . . . . Consequently it is not pure fantasy to conceive of the ‘evolution’ of the world towards Christ, and to show how there is a gradual ascent which reaches a peak in him’.7 Here we might note the influence of Teilhard de Chardin who tried to show that Christ is not an intrusion into an otherwise evolutionary creation, but its reason and goal. The whole evolutionary universe is a ‘coming-to-be’ of Christ.8 Rahner’s Christology, especially conceived within an evolutionary framework, yields to another type which Raimon Panikkar has described as a Christology ‘from within’.9 By ‘within’ Panikkar points to a deep inner center in the human person with the capacity to manifest Christ, what he calls ‘Christophany’.10 Here I use the term ‘Christology from within’ in a broader theological framework. By ‘within’ I mean the centrality of Christ in the Trinity, in creation, in the human person and as the goal of history. Rahner reflected on this idea in his book On the Theology of Death where he wrote: ‘When the vessel of his body was shattered in death, Christ was poured out over the cosmos: he became actually, in his humanity, what he had always been in his dignity, the very center of creation’.11 A Christology from within brings together two main ideas, the centrality of Christ and self-transcendence, both in the human person and in creation. It does not try to understand the union of the divine and human natures per se but the meaning and goal of creation in relation to a Creator God. While it leans toward a Christology of the earthly Jesus as Son of the Father, and hence the integral relation of Trinity and Christ, it expands the meaning of Jesus Christ into the meaning of Christ for humanity and creation. A Christology from within relies neither on an historical construct of Jesus nor on an historical epistemology.12 Rather, it is a phenomenology of Jesus Christ that seeks the essential meaning of Incarnation based on the self-transcendent capacity of nature to express itself outwardly. To explore a Christology ‘from within’ I turn to Bonaventure, whose theology of the Word provides a basis for understanding the centrality of Christ in creation and the nature of the Word to express itself. Bonaventure’s theology of Christ complements the theology of Rahner and Panikkar and provides a theological foundation to explore a Christology from within, while offering its own phenomenological approach to Christ through contemplation. The final section brings these theologians into dialogue and examines Christology from within for Christian life today. 440 ILIA DELIO II. BONAVENTURE’S THEOLOGY OF THE WORD To understand Bonaventure’s theology of the Word is to understand cosmic Christology in the Middle Ages. The problem of Christ, as patristic and medieval writers noted, did not begin on the level of history but on the level of creation itself. Bonaventure’s principal mentor, Alexander of Hales, held that one must consider the doctrine of God prior to the doctrine of the Incarnation, or rather, the Incarnation is a central entryway to faith in a credible God. Alexander’s theological foundations of Christology began not with the person of Jesus Christ but with the question of God and the possibility of a divine nature united to a human nature. In the early Church, the question of Incarnation in view of monotheism posed a problem for early Christians. The formulation of a Trinitarian understanding of God was a response by the early Christian community to the question of whether the divine nature could unite itself to human nature. In the same way, Alexander realized that incarnation was possible only in light of a Trinitarian theology. As Kenan Osborne states: ‘Both in the earliest formulations of Christology and in Alexander’s opening statements on the Incarnation, the question of God is basic, that is, what kind of God is being presented when one speaks of Incarnation, and whether such a doctrine of God is a credible doctrine or not’.13 For Alexander, one must consider the doctrine of God prior to the doctrine of Incarnation; or conversely stated, the Incarnation is a central entryway to faith in a credible God. If the doctrine of God fundamentally relates to the question of Incarnation, such a possibility can be considered only with the context of creation itself. Alexander held that there is no necessity in God for either creation or Incarnation. Rather, the power to create and the power to be incarnate focuses on the divine nature as such, rather than on a person of the Trinity.14 Since nature refers to action, creation and incarnation find their sources in the divine nature understood as a principle of action rather than in the divine essence.15 As Osborne indicates, Alexander’s position not only leads to a clear relationship between creation and Incarnation but the person of Jesus becomes more revelatory of a credible God than of human nature itself.16 The twin poles of Bonaventure’s theology, following Alexander, lie in the Trinity and Christ. They are so integrally related that one cannot be thought of without the other. Bonaventure’s Trinitarian theology relies on two major sources: Pseudo-Dionysius and Richard of St. Victor. According to the Dionysius, the highest good is self-diffusive and gives rise to being.17 Richard states that the highest good is love, and love is personal and communicative.18 Bonaventure, therefore, uses the notion of self-diffusive goodness and personal love to distinguish the persons of the Trinity as a communion of persons in love. The Father, he writes, is without origin and thus the source or fountain fullness of goodness; thus, CHRISTOLOGY FROM WITHIN 441 the Father is primal and self-diffusive.19 The Son is that person eternally generated by the Father’s self-diffusive goodness (per modum naturae). As the total personal expression of the Father, the Son is Word, and as ultimate likeness to the Father, the Son is Image.20 The Son/Word is both generated by the Father and together with Father generates the Spirit who is that eternal bond of love between the Father and Son. The Spirit proceeds from Father and Son in an act of full freedom (per modum voluntatis), the procession of the Spirit being the act of a clear and determinate loving volition on the part of Father and Son.21 Bonaventure followed Richard of St. Victor in arguing that the three persons of the Trinity represent three modalities of love. The first is a love that is totally receptive and communicated (amor gratuitus). At the other extreme is a form of love that is totally receptive and responsive (amor debitus). And between these is a modality of love that is both communicative and receptive (amor ab utroque permixtus).22 Viewing the Trinity in terms of love allows the idea of a center to emerge. The second person is the middle between the first person who is totally selfcommunicative and the third person who is totally communicated; thus the second person is both communicated and communicating.23 This second person is the creative Word of the Father’s self-diffusive goodness who is Son and Image. Bonaventure prefers the title ‘Word’ for the second person because it signifies a ‘complex network of relations which the Son bears to the Father, to creation, to humans and to revelation’.24 God’s being as self-communicative love gives expression to its entire fruitfulness in the generation of the Son, so that in generating the Son, the Father speaks one Word immanent to Himself in which is expressed the possibility of creation.25 Zachary Hayes writes, ‘if it is true that the triune God creates after his own Image, that is, after the Word, then it follows that any created reality will possess, in its inner constitution, a relation to this uncreated Word’.26 This is the basis of Bonaventure’s doctrine of convenientia which connotes the congruent relationship between the divine Word and created reality. According to Bonaventure, the emanation of the eternal Word underscores the creative activity of God. He emphasizes that the exemplary character of the Word does not make the act of creation necessary. The Word is first of all the exemplar expressivum et repraesentativum, representing the Father to himself in his unlimited possibilities. In reference to the act of creation, the Word is the exemplar factivum et dispositivum in and after which creation is brought to be.27 The inner-trinitarian speaking of the eternal Word, therefore, is the ontological basis for the possibility of creation. ‘‘Creation is cospoken in the Word that is the Father’s self-utterance and co-loved in the Spirit of love breathed mutually by the Father and Son.’’28 Although the act of creation is a free act, it is the free overflow of the necessary, innerdivine fruitfulness. 442 ILIA DELIO Bonaventure posits an integral relation between the Trinity and Incarnation. It is God’s nature as the primal, fecund mystery of self-communicative, loving goodness that makes possible all of God’s works ad extra. The Son is conceived from the depths of the divine goodness; as Image he is the perfect likeness of the Father and as Word he is the cause of all expression and manifestation.29 The Son is the one who, from all eternity, receives the Father’s love and is totally responsive to it. Because the relationship between the Father and Son is the ontological basis of all other relations, it appears that created reality will bear the stamp of Sonship in the deepest core of its being. As the Word is the internal self-expression of God’s fecund goodness, so the world is the external objectification of that self-utterance in that which is not God. The humanity of Jesus is the fullest embodiment of that self-utterance within the created world. Although Bonaventure sees no absolute necessity for an Incarnation of the Word, he does discern congruity between the mode of Incarnation [the divine Word] and the mystery of creation.30 By ‘congruity’ Bonaventure means a ‘factual, positive inner relation between the inner divine reality of the Word, the extra divine reality of the Word and the reality of the Incarnation’.31 According to Bonaventure, Incarnation is primarily a mystery of relation.32 God’s creative action places the created human nature of Jesus in a unique relation to the divine. Hayes writes: ‘So intense is this relation that the history of Jesus of Nazareth is what the inner Word of God ‘becomes’ when it is most fully spoken into that which is ontologically other than itself, that is, the human nature of Jesus’.33 The humanity of Jesus is the fullest and most perfect external Word that gives expression to the inner, eternal Word as its perfect content.34 Thus the Word holds a middle place between the Father and the world, and it is through the Son that the Father communicates to the world at all levels. It is precisely as Word and center that the Son is the exemplar of all creation. While at one level, the whole of the Trinity is exemplary with respect to the world, at another level the mystery of exemplarity is concentrated in a unique way in the Son, for the triune structure of God himself is expressed in him.35 Thus as the Word is the inner self-expression of God, the created order is the external expression of the inner Word. The created universe, therefore, possesses in its inner constitution a relation to the uncreated Word. Since the Word, in turn, is the expression of the inner trinitarian structure of God, that which is created as an expression of the Word bears the imprint of the Trinity as well.36 III. COSMIC CHRISTOLOGY The centrality of the Word in the Trinity underscores Bonaventure’s cosmic Christology which he shared with the wider Franciscan school, beginning with Alexander of Hales. Although one could label his a ‘Christology from above’, Bonaventure does not rely on a ‘Word’ theology to affirm the divinity of Christ alone but to highlight the CHRISTOLOGY FROM WITHIN 443 complementarity between Christ and creation. Christ is not accidental to creation or an intrusion but the inner ground of creation and its goal. Zachary Hayes noted that the doctrine of Incarnation from Alexander of Hales to Scotus, including Bonaventure ‘did not limit the discussion of the meaning of Christ to the reality of the cross’ but expanded it to the widest possible horizon. What these theologians did, he said, is to ‘perceive the possible relations between the story of Jesus and the larger picture of the world’.37 They saw that the Incarnation is not an isolated event but is integral to the possibility of creation itself; one is inconceivable without the other. Because of this integral relationship between creation and Incarnation, the Franciscan theologians held that ‘a world without Christ is an incomplete world’, that is, the whole world is structured Christologically.38 Both Bonaventure and Scotus maintained that the Incarnation could not be willed due to sin, a lesser good. Rather, as the most noble work of God, it must be willed by God as a greater good, the noble perfection of God’s love. The idea that Christ is the capstone of creation is one rooted in New Testament literature and known as the primacy of Christ.39 It is based on the Pauline notion that Jesus Christ is the ‘image of the invisible God, the first born of every creature’ [Col 1:15 see also Eph 1:20–23 and Jn 1]. Scotus held that God is absolutely free and chose to create this world precisely as it is to reveal divine love. In his view, God intended the highest glory as the ultimate end, and then the Incarnation as leading to that end.40 The Incarnation takes place in light of God’s glory and not in light of any sin which might be committed prior to the Incarnation. Christ is first in God’s intention to love and thus to create.41 Bonaventure too held that Christ is not ordained to us rather we are ordained to Christ.42 While he viewed the Incarnation within the present historical order, he did not consider the Incarnation to be a sort of afterthought on the part of God. As Hayes indicates, Bonaventure viewed the Incarnation as the crown of creation in such a way that it could not proceed from God merely because of sin.43 Rather, from eternity, God included the possibility of a fall of the human race and therefore structured the human person with a view to redemption. God predestined Christ not only principaliter but principalius. God did not predestine Christ because humankind sinned, for as the most noble of God’s works, the Incarnation is willed for its own sake and not for the sake of any lesser good.44 It is not sin that is the cause of the Incarnation, but simply the excess love and mercy of God.45 The intrinsic connection between the mystery of creation and the mystery of Incarnation, Hayes indicates, means that ‘we discover . . . in Jesus the divine clue as to the structure and meaning not only of humanity but of the entire universe’.46 He notes that ‘Christian theology [today] no longer has an effective cosmology that enables believers to relate to the world in its physical character in a way that is consistent with their religious symbols’.47 This world, he states, is not merely a plurality of 444 ILIA DELIO unrelated things but a true unity, a cosmos, centered in Christ. He writes, ‘God created toward an end. That end as embodied in Christ points to a Christified world’.48 The universe is not meaningless or purposeless;49 rather, it has a divine aim which is realized in the Incarnation of the Word.50 Bonaventure’s integral relationship between Christ and creation allows Hayes to draw several insights with regard to the nature of created reality: 1) the world at its deepest level is marked by the radical potential to receive the self-communication of the mystery of divine love into it;51 thus, it is a world that is fit for the working out of the divine purpose,52 2) as the exemplar of creation, Christ is the model for creation meaning that, ‘what happened between God and the world in Christ points to the future of the cosmos. It is a future that involves the radical transformation of created reality through the unitive power of God’s love’.53 This universe therefore has a destiny; the world will not be destroyed. Rather, ‘it will be brought to the conclusion which God intends for it from the beginning, which is anticipated in the mystery of the Incarnate Word and glorified Christ’.54 ‘God’s creative love freely calls for the within the world a created love that can freely respond to God’s creative call.55 That created love is embodied in Christ in whom all of creation finds its purpose. That is why, Hayes writes, ‘a cosmos without Christ is a cosmos without a head . . . it simply does not hold together’.56 Christ is the purpose of this universe and, as exemplar of creation, the model of what is intended for this universe, that is, union and transformation in God. IV. THE IMAGE OF CHRIST Bonaventure’s theology, by which the Word is the center of the Trinity and center of creation, places him in the tradition of the primacy of Christ which was later articulated more explicitly by Duns Scotus. The person of Jesus is the summit of creation so that what takes place in Jesus is intended for the whole cosmos.57 Rahner, too, viewed Christ as the unifying center of reality, since the entire creation is oriented toward the Incarnation. Because the created world is co-spoken with the eternal Word, it does not exist as a self-contained Order, but bears within it a drive towards the spiritual: matter tends toward spirit. Bonaventure says that ‘matter cries out for perfection’ but is unable to attain it on its own.58 Only one who is a union of matter and spirit, the human person, can help the material world towards its God-intended fulfillment. Jesus Christ is the noble perfection of the universe, he states, because in him is united divine, human and material natures.59 The created world therefore is ordered to the emergence of the human person in whom the appetite of material reality and spirituality reality are united. The human is that being in which the drive of the whole of nature is brought to its innerworldly end. As one who is capax Dei, the human represents the most CHRISTOLOGY FROM WITHIN 445 noble potency of the created order, since he/she is capable of receiving the deepest, personal self-communication of God. Bonaventure’s understanding of the human person is related to his understanding of Christ. The Incarnation of the divine Word in human flesh means that human nature has a potency capable of being actuated by personal union with the divine.60 This convenientia ordinis between God and humanity is most fully realized in the person of Jesus Christ who, as the Word incarnate, is truly the historical exegesis of God in history.61 Bonaventure doctrine of convenientia allows him to draw an explicit connection between the Incarnation and the human person, who is imago Dei. ‘Image’, in Bonaventure’s view, refers to the relation of the soul to the Trinity, that is, the three powers of memory, intellect and will that conform the soul to God. Image, therefore, does not reside in a part of nature; rather, it belongs to the very nature or structure of the human person.62 In the third chapter of the Itinerarium, he indicates that the soul entering within itself sees the divine image shine forth as in a mirror. In the depths of the soul’s faculties, in the memory, intellect and will, one finds a reflection of God. The memory here is taken in the Platonic sense of the depths of the soul where the eternal truths reside; it is the ground of the soul which reflects the presence of God. To say that the soul is image of God, therefore, means that God is actually in the soul as an object naturally known and loved.63 Bonaventure further describes the divine image according to the triune powers of memory, intellect and will by stating: ‘These powers lead us to the most blessed Trinity itself in view of their order, origin and interrelatedness. From memory, intelligence comes forth as an offspring, since we understand when a likeness which is in the memory leaps into the eye of the intellect in the form of a word. From memory and intelligence, love is breathed forth as their mutual bond’.64 For Bonaventure, as for Augustine, the soul as image of the Trinity means that the human person is structured in such a way that s/he is ordered to fulfillment through knowledge and love of God. When the mind knows itself as it truly is, and loves itself, there is a genuine image of God in the soul. As a triune image of God, the soul is capable of enjoying the immediate presence of God and is ordered to union with the divine. While Bonaventure uses the Augustinian notion of image to ground the essential relationship between God and human persons, it is only in the explicit turning to the image through knowledge and love that the image of the eternal God in the human person is illuminated.65 It is in the actualization of the person as image that Bonaventure emphasizes the Word of God as true image. In his commentary on the Sentences he distinguishes between the Son of God as image and the human person as image. The Son, he states, is the image of the Father since it is from the Father that the Son proceeds by nature of the Father’s goodness. Because the Son is from the Father (a quo), the Son is the perfect image and expression of the Father, sharing the same nature and, 446 ILIA DELIO thus, expressing the Father totally and completely. As he claims in the Hexae¨meron: ‘From all eternity the Father begets a Son similar to himself and expresses himself and a likeness to himself, and in so doing he expresses the sum total of his potency’.66 The Word, therefore, gives expression to the Father who is the archetype, and himself becomes an expressive archetype in relation to the whole. The Word is the Father’s total and perfect self-expression as supreme loving Being and source of all that is or can be.67 While the second person is the immanent Image of the Father, there is an image of God in the world of creation and that is the human person. In as much as the human is oriented towards the proper image that is in God, he or she is tending towards the image, whereas the Son, in his whole being, is the image of the Father. Bonaventure sees the congruent relationship between God and humanity specifically in the relationship between the Word and humanity. The human person is an image of God not in the general sense of being ‘like’ God but in the specific sense of being ‘like’ the Son. Thus the human person as a creature is created as an image of the Image.68 The idea that humans are formed ‘to the image’ rather than ‘as image’ underscores the congruent relationship between humanity and the Word. To say that human persons are created ‘to the image’ (ad imaginem) connotes both a structure and a goal, since the Word is the true and perfect image in which humans are created. The Incarnation, therefore, becomes the point of departure for understanding the deepest truth about the human person and his or her relation to the divine. The human person is structured according to the one image, Jesus Christ. Christ is the exemplary Image who fills the potential of the created human image. As the Image that becomes an image, Christ is simply the human person because he is the Word. No more perfect image of the Image is conceivable.69 Bonaventure writes that when ‘our mind contemplates in Christ the Son of God . . . our humanity reaches something perfect’.70 V. CHRIST, THE SYMBOL OF REALITY The integral relationship between Trinity, creation, Incarnation and humanity, in which the human person as image of God is fulfilled in the Incarnation, takes on a deeper meaning in light of Christ as symbol of reality. Raimon Panikkar states that ‘Christ is the symbol of the whole of reality’ so that not only are ‘all the treasures of divinity included in Christ, but that ‘‘all the mysteries of man’’ as well as the thickness of the universe are also hidden in him’.71 Panikkar uses the word ‘symbol’ to ‘express an experience of reality in which subject and object, the interpretation and the interpreted, the phenomenon and its noumenon, are inextricably linked’.72 Christ is symbol of the Trinitarian mystery of God by which God is able to communicate God’s life completely to CHRISTOLOGY FROM WITHIN 447 another and to be union with the other as beloved in a perichoresis of love.73 The word ‘symbol’, from the Greek verb symballein, signifies literally ‘to throw together’. Louis Chauvet describes the meaning of symbol as follows: If one construed it transitively, one would translate it, according to the context, as ‘gather together’, ‘hold in common’, or ‘exchange’. The substantive symbole designates the joint at the elbow or knee and, more generally, the whole idea of conjunction, reunion, contract, or pact. The ancient symbolon is precisely an object cut in two, one part of which is retained by each partner in a contract. Each half evidently has no value in itself and thus could imaginatively signify anything; its symbolic power is due only to its connection with the other half. It [can thus be described] as an agreement between the two partners which establishes the symbol; it is the expression of a social pact based on mutual recognition and, hence, is a mediator of identity.74 The symbol introduces us into a realm to which it itself belongs, that is, an order of meaning in its radical otherness.75 A symbol retains its value only through the place which it occupies within the whole . . . an element becomes a symbol only to the extent that it represents the whole, from which it is inseparable.76 To say Christ is symbol of God is to say that Christ is Word of God expressed or projected outward in space, time and history. This expression/projection of the symbol of the Word discloses and manifests what is present. That is, the symbol makes real and reveals that which is otherwise hidden or concealed, that is, the centrality of divine life. It touches an entire spectrum of consciousness beyond/ beneath the merely rational because of its nature as symbolizer and symbolized. That is, the symbol shares or takes part in the reality of the symbolized because it is the expression or ‘pressing outward’ of that which is symbolized. The symbol of Christ therefore functions as the meaning of God for us and discloses to us the true meaning of our lives in God. The notion of Christ as symbol of God helps us to understand Jesus Christ as the One in whom our humanity finds its permanent openness to God. As the crucified and risen One, Jesus is the ‘anointed One’, the One ‘filled with the Holy Spirit’; he is by nature what we are to become by grace, the eschatological fulfillment of God’s plan of creation. Jesus is not the great exception to humanity but its culmination and fulfillment. In Jesus we experience the fact that the mystery of the human person, which is not for us to control, and ‘which is bound up with the absurdity of guilt and death is, nevertheless, hidden in the love of God’.77 Jesus the man is truly God and the true divinization of our humanity; in him we attain full humanization.78 In this way, as Panikkar notes, Christ’s reality is not exhausted with Jesus’ historicity;79 rather ‘Christ is that central symbol that incorporates the whole of reality’.80 448 ILIA DELIO VI. THE COINCIDENCE OF OPPOSITES While Christ symbolizes the whole of reality, the whole of reality is intended to symbolize Christ. This is the essential meaning of the primacy of Christ. The potential for God in creation is realized in Jesus Christ, but that potential has yet to be completed in the fullness of Christ which lies in the capacity of the human person to image [and thus express] Christ. If, as Rahner indicated, the human life of Jesus is God’s ex-istence so that human reality is God’s reality and vice versa, then what do our lives mean when they are first and last the life of God?81 Rahner’s question seems to be at the heart of Bonaventure’s thought as well. Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis in Deum describes the journey into God in and through the centrality of Christ. In translating Bonaventure’s Itinerarium, Ewert Cousins noted the peculiar structure of Christology in this work, the mystery of Christ is a mystery of opposites: divine and human, eternal and temporal, alpha and omega, first and last.82 What is striking about Bonaventure’s coincidence of opposites, as it marks the mystery of Christ, is that it is described symbolically. The coincidence of opposites is not a doctrine of Christ; rather, it describes the living reality of this mystery. Cousins wrote that ‘in the Middle Ages, symbolism reached one its richest flowerings in the history of western culture’.83 ‘The symbol’, he indicated, ‘was key to understanding the deepest level of reality’.84 Bonaventure’s symbolic theology, according to Cousins, is grounded in his metaphysics of expressionism. His Trinitarian theology is marked by the selfexpressivness of the divine persons. The Father expresses himself in the Son who is Word and Image, and the Father and Son express their love in the person of the Spirit. Because creation emanates through the Word, the whole creation expresses the Trinity.85 Christ, the Word who is center of the Trinity and center of creation, is the total expression of God in history and hence total expression of God in creation. Bonaventure concretizes the meaning of expressionism through the use of the symbol. In the Itinerarium he describes Christ, the coincidence of opposites, through the symbol of the Mercy Seat. He writes: Look at the Mercy Seat and wonder That in him there is joined The first principle with the last, God with man, who was formed on the sixth day; The eternal is joined with temporal man, Born of the Virgin in the fullness of time, The most simple with the most composite, The most actual with the one who suffered supremely and died, The most perfect and immense with the lowly, The supreme and all-inclusive one With a composite individual distinct from others, That is, the man Jesus Christ.86 CHRISTOLOGY FROM WITHIN 449 Bonaventure’s symbol of the Mercy Seat is placed within the larger symbol of the temple.87 In the Jewish temple, the Mercy Seat symbolizes the place of atonement and Bonaventure indicates that Christ in his suffering, death and resurrection is the true coincidence of opposites, since the greatest opposites of death and life, God and human are united in Christ crucified.88 If the symbol mediates one’s identity and thus functions as an expression of the whole, it is interesting that Bonaventure describes the symbol of Christ and the union of opposites in the context of contemplation. The call to ‘look’ at the Mercy Seat evokes the idea of ‘gaze’89 which to the medieval mind involves ‘touch’, ‘taste’, ‘experiment’ as well as ‘see’. Contemplation is an engagement with the other, a movement out of oneself into the other by way of vision, leading to union. Before one contemplates Christ, however, one must enter into oneself and discover oneself as image of God through prayer, the practice of virtues, use of the spiritual senses and divine light, made possible by a sincere love of Christ.90 That is, we cannot apprehend the meaning of Christ for us unless we are prepared to receive that meaning within us. The symbol of Christ is an invitation to union with God through contemplation, a penetrating gaze within ourselves and on Christ crucified; a gaze that accepts the disclosure of God in fragile human flesh. This encounter is self-revelatory since the God who comes to us in the person of Jesus Christ is the ground of our being as well. To accept God in our humanity, symbolized by Christ, is to accept the ground of our identity. In the symbol of Christ, God reveals himself to us and we are revealed to ourselves as we begin to see the truth of who we are – our image. The more we contemplate Christ, the more we discover our identity. Contemplation, therefore, is both a looking at and receptivity to the appearance of God’s self-giving love in the figure of the crucified Christ. In its receptivity, the gaze is self-reflective in that the God who is revealed in the crucified Christ is the image in which we are created and thus the basis of our identity.91 Contemplation is creative since it transforms the one who gazes in the mirror of the cross into a reflection of the image itself. That is, the more we contemplate Christ, the more we discover and come to resemble the image of God in whom we are created. This image of God, brought to light in the one who gazes upon the symbol of the Mercy Seat [Christ crucified], is the basis of transformation or the ‘birth’ of Christ in the believer. As we come to be who we are called to be in relation to God (self-identity), God shows himself to the universe through his constant and continual creation of the self. The self that comes to be through a union with God in love is the self in which God is reflected, that is, the image of God. Christ is the symbol by which we are brought to perfection of this image. Bonaventure writes: For if an image is an expressed likeness, when our mind contemplates in Christ the Son of God, who is the image of the invisible God by nature, our humanity 450 ILIA DELIO so wonderfully exalted, so ineffably united, when at the same time it sees united the first and the last, the highest and the lowest, the circumference and the center, the Alpha and the Omega, the caused and the cause, the Creator and the creature, that is, the book written within and without, it now reaches something perfect.92 Bonaventure indicates that, as the union of all that exists, Christ is the image of what we are created to be – centers of opposites – which can only mature through a life-giving, prayerful relationship with God. Bonaventure does not speak of the two natures of Christ as a doctrine but as the reality of God’s life in us and our lives in God, a union which attains its ‘noble perfection’ in Jesus Christ. One who contemplates the mystery of Christ as a union of opposites enters into the incomprehensible love of God. Union with God through contemplation leads to the expression of Christ in the world. VII. CO-CREATORS IN CHRIST For Bonaventure the symbol of Christ, the coincidence of opposites, finds its meaning in the context of contemplation because the mystery of Christ is a mystery of relationship. Christ is the union of God with our humanity and the meaning of what we and all creation are destined for, union and transformation in the divine life. What is achieved in the person of Jesus Christ is the reconciliation of opposites – God and human, eternal and temporal, alpha and omega – an admirabile commercium – so that the humanization of God corresponds to the divinization of the human person. To contemplate this mystery is not simply to see oneself in it but to allow the mystery to come alive within one’s own life. As Bonaventure points out, the destiny of humanity and the destiny of the cosmos are intertwined in the mystery of Christ who symbolizes the meaning of humanity and creation. In his view, ‘the salvation of the cosmos is mediated through the salvation of humanity’.93 Humanity has a distinct and fundamental role in the salvation of the world because salvation is larger than humanity alone.94 This means that our active participation in the Christ mystery is necessary for the fullness of Christ to be complete. What took place in the life of Jesus must take place in our lives as well, if creation is to move toward completion and transformation in God since, in Christ, ‘all is transformed in the living presence of God’.95 The eschatological fulfillment in Christ must be historically realized; creation cannot be completely transformed without human participation. Zachary Hayes writes, ‘the full personalization of creation is realized in as far as human beings enter personally into the mystery of the divine Word who has become incarnate in Jesus Christ, and by sharing in the personal mystery of the Word, entering into the Word’s relation to the Father and to the Spirit’.96 As the union of matter and spirit, humanity is that point CHRISTOLOGY FROM WITHIN 451 at which the created order finds a personal consciousness and a personal voice with which to give conscious praise to God.97 Hayes claims that the positive outcome of life is related to the way in which human life is lived in history. The life and ministry of Jesus tells us that the decisive value at the heart of human life and human relations is agape. ‘What this agapistic vision meant for Jesus may be seen in the inclusive style of life he lived, including his outreach to those excluded by the social-religious structures of his time’.98 John Haught suggests that the life style of Jesus stands as the sacrament of what God is like, and therefore of what a God-like life would be like among humans with respect to each other and to the world in which they live.99 Thus, we are to give ourselves to Jesus Christ, and to his cause and values. Giving ourselves to Christ is not losing the world, as Hayes indicates, but it is finding the world in its truest reality and in its deepest relation to God.100 This is a type of imitatio Christi insofar as the values of Christ are appropriated in one’s own life. Hence each person reflects the mystery of the Word in a personal way in terms of individual gifts, talents and skills. Hayes writes, ‘we are not to become carbon copies of the historical Jesus nor of Francis nor of anyone else. We are to fill the Christ-form with the elements of our personal life and thus embody something of the Word in ourselves in a distinct and personal way’.101 Panikkar too highlights the mysticism of the human person by using the term ‘Christophany’ to indicate that each person bears the mystery of Christ within. The first task of every creature, in his view, is to complete and perfect his or her icon of reality.102 Christ is the symbol of our human identity and vocation which, in its acceptance and fulfillment, is the union of all created reality in the love of God. Our participation in the mystery of Christ, therefore, lies at the basis of a healing world, a world aimed toward the fullness of the reign of God. As Panikkar indicates, ‘Christ is not only the name of an historical personage but a reality in our own lives’.103 We must therefore discover the Christ within us which, according to Bonaventure, is the fruit of prayer, contemplation and union with God. VIII. THE FUTURE OF THE COSMOS To speak of a Christology from within is not simply to provide an alternative to the prevailing Christologies from ‘above’ or ‘below’. Rather, it is to highlight the fact the Christ is the inner mystery of the Trinity, the inner impulse in creation, the inner center of the human person and the culminating center of cosmic history. What is achieved in Jesus Christ must be realized in our humanity if cosmic history is to attain its fulfillment. Christ is the reason for creation not a Savior from its flux and failings. The essential meaning of Christ does not come ‘from above’ or ‘below’ but from the inherent capacity for relationship, within the 452 ILIA DELIO Trinity, between Trinity and creation, and within creation itself. Christ is not a conundrum of multiple natures to be solved by human logic but a living reality. We may pray to Christ in a formula of prayer but do we live Christ? Panikkar states that the task of Christians [today] – ‘perhaps even our kairos – may be the conversion – yes, conversion – of a tribal Christology into a christophany less bound to a single cultural event’.104 As he writes, ‘The whole of reality could be called, in Christian language, Father, Christ, Holy Spirit – the Font of all reality, reality in its act of being [that is, its becoming the existing reality which is ‘the whole Christ’] not yet fully realized, and the Spirit, the wind, divine energy that maintains the perichoresis in movement’.105 By seeing the whole reality in the Christ mystery, he claims, every being is a christophany, ‘a manifestation of the christic adventure of the whole of reality on its way to the infinite mystery’.106 Although Panikkar views the Christ mystery as the meaning of all reality, including all world religions, my objective here is less ambitious. At a moment in history when the earth totters of the brink of destruction due to environmental crises, war, poverty and the myriad divisions within humanity, we need a rediscovery of Christ. Christians who bear the name ‘Christ’ should be symbols of hope and unity in a world splintering at the seams. Contemplation of the symbol of Christ should transform us in such a way that we are changed into our identity – Christians – so that we act according to what we are or what we claim to be. Without a true understanding of the Christ mystery as ontological identity, we reside in the world with dual citizenship: spiritually comfortable in one world and culturally comfortable in the other. Such division can only result in a divided world intended for wholeness in Christ. Faith in the Incarnation means engagement with God first as the divine life within us as image of Christ, and then as that life moves us to act in the world as expression of Christ. We are, as theologian Philip Hefner reminds us, ‘created cocreators’, called to participate in the beauty and goodness of creation destined for transformation in God.107 We are to be mediators of opposites, bridging together the divisions of the world through unity in love – crucified love.108 Without contemplation of the symbol of Christ, that which creation is intended to be in God will not attain its destiny. We need an awakening to the Christ mystery within us to realize that in Christ all dualisms are destroyed, all separations are overcome. One wonders if the problem of Christ today does not stem from an acute case of historical consciousness, as if creation itself may simply be a backdrop to the matrix of human culture. While a Christology rooted in history may try to correct a reified Christology, it struggles with the divine in the same way that an emphasis on the divinity of Christ struggles with the human. ‘If Christ were God alone’, Panikkar writes, ‘or ‘‘more’’ divine than human, his life and mysteries could not also represent our destiny’.109 Yet, Christ is our destiny and the way to that destiny. Without CHRISTOLOGY FROM WITHIN 453 Christ, creation finds neither purpose nor fulfillment, and without creation, Christ does not exist. Incarnation and creation are inextricably linked in the communion of Trinitarian love. The new cosmology of the third millennium speaks to us of a dynamic, evolutionary universe, one that can no longer adequately embrace a static view of the nature[s] of Christ but one of emergence, of an ‘inwardness’ that expresses itself outwardly in transcendence and union. A Christology from within, rooted in a self-communicative Trinity, is one that is consonant both with a Christian understanding of God and an evolutionary universe. It is a cosmic Christology that relies on the image of God, contemplation and expressionism. Christology from within cannot be intellectually grasped as a doctrine, for its meaning comes essentially from ‘within’. Rahner showed that God is the power of selftranscendence at the heart of the universe because the risen Jesus Christ is consubstantial with the dynamic, absolute being of God. ‘The divine nature of Jesus Christ is precisely the same divine nature which is creatively at work in all cosmic history’, he wrote.110 The creative God is the divine impulse within the heart of an evolving universe which finds its unity in the Word made flesh. But it is precisely in the Incarnation that the forward movement of the cosmos assumes a new future; for the human person, created imago Dei, now has the power to make Christ alive. The risen Christ includes our present humanity [and the cosmos] on its way to completion. Thus, the decision to live Christ is a decision for the future of history and the cosmos itself. The inner impulse of creation must now be expressed outwardly in humanity. That is why the Christian of the future must be a mystic if the Christian is to be at all, for Christ lives where there is the contemplation of truth, the union of opposites and transcendence in love. Notes 1 Karl Rahner, ‘Current Problems in Christology’, vol. 1, Theological Investigations, trans. Cornelius Ernst (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1961), 188. 2 Roger Haight, The Future of Christology (New York: Continuum, 2005), 20. 3 Walter Kasper, The God of Jesus Christ, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (New York: Crossroad, 1999), 171. 4 Karl Rahner, ‘The Two Basic Types of Christology’, vol. XIII, Theological Investigations, trans. David Bourke (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 213 – 214. In describing the first or ascending Christology, Rahner states that Jesus of Nazareth ‘is not merely an utterance of God to man . . . but rather the definite, unsurpassable, and victorious – utterance of God to man’. Jesus is the unsurpassable eschatological event, the definitive Word of God in history. As a metaphysical event, ‘the Incarnation is not so much an event in space and time . . . but is rather the historical supreme point of a transcendental albeit free relationship of God to that which is not divine, in which God himself . . . enters into it in order himself to have his own personal history of love within it’. 5 Rahner, ‘Two Basic Types of Christology’, 214. Rahner states that ‘in distinguishing these two types we are leaving the question open as to whether the second type is not in some sense logically contained in the first all along, and whether it cannot be explicitated from this under 454 ILIA DELIO certain metaphysical and theological conditions, especially those bearing upon the unity between the history of the natural world and the history of human thought’. 6 Rahner, ‘Two Basic Types of Christology’, 219. 7 Rahner, ‘Current Problems in Christology’, 165. 8 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, trans. Bernard Wall (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), 297–98. 9 Raimon Panikkar, Christophany: The Fullness of Man, trans. Alfred DiLascia (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1970), 84. 10 Panikkar, Christophany, 10. Panikkar defines Christophany as follows: ‘Christophany stands for a manifestation of Christ to human consciousness and includes both an experience of Christ and a critical reflection on that experience’. He uses the term ‘Christophany’ in light of three characteristics of the contemporary religious scene: 1) the decline of the traditional religions along with the proliferation of new forms of religiosity, 2) the internal crisis of Christian identity, and 3) the external situation of a world in which cultures and religions meet on a planetary scale (p. 9). Thus, he suggests that ‘every being is a christophany. It is a question not of converting the whole world to Christianity but of recognizing that the very nature of reality shows the nondualist polarity between the transcendent and the immanent in its every manifestation’ (p. 15). 11 Karl Rahner, On the Theology of Death cited in Denis Edwards, Jesus and the Cosmos (New York: Paulist, 1991), 100. 12 Haight, for example, indicates that Christology ‘from above’ which emphasizes the divinity of Christ, has so dominated the tradition that ‘the imaginative structure of Christian selfunderstanding’ has been compromised. Christology, in his view, begins with the man, Jesus of Nazareth. He asks, ‘What does it mean to say that this human being, who came to be worshiped by Christians, is to be called divine?’ Historical consciousness, Haight notes, refers to a conscious awareness of the historicity of human existence, the roots of which are epistemological and ontological. One must begin with Jesus, according to Haight, to understand Jesus Christ. See Haight, Future of Christology, 34–52. The historical method, however, has its own internal problems and one wonders if, indeed, such a method enlightens Christian self-understanding or complicates it. 13 Kenan B. Osborne, ‘Alexander of Hales: Precursor and Promoter of Franciscan Theology’, in The History of Franciscan Theology, ed. Kenan B. Osborne (New York: Franciscan Institute, 1994), 30. 14 Alexander of Hales, Quaestiones disputatae: ‘Antequam esset frater’, (Quarrachi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1960), 197. 15 Osborne, ‘Alexander of Hales’, 31. 16 Osborne, ‘Alexander of Hales’, 32. 17 Pseudo-Dionysius De divinis nominibus 4.1 (PG 3, 694). For an excellent discussion of the tradition see Ewert H. Cousins, ‘The Notion of the Person in the De Trinitate of Richard of St. Victor’, (unpublished Ph. D. dissertation, Fordham University, 1966). 18 Richard of St. Victor De trinitate 3.14–19 (PL 196, 924–27). 19 Bonaventure I Sentence (Sent.). d. 27, p.1, a. un., q. 2, ad 3 (I, 470). The idea that the Father is innascible and fecund underlies the dialectical style of Bonaventure’s thought. It also provides the basis of Bonaventure’s metaphysics as a coincidentia oppositorum. The Father’s innascibility and fecundity are mutually complementary opposites which cannot be formally reduced to one or the other; the Father is generative precisely because he is unbegotten. See Zachary Hayes, introduction to Disputed Questions on the Mystery of the Trinity, vol. 3, Works of Saint Bonaventure, ed. George Marcil (New York: The Franciscan Institute, 1979), 42, n. 51. The critical edition of Bonaventure’s works is the Opera Omnia ed. PP. Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 10 vols. (Quaracchi, 1882–1902). Latin texts are indicated by volume and page number in parentheses. 20 Bonaventure I Sent. d. 5, a. 1, q. 2, resp. (I, 115); I Sent. d. 2, a. u., q. 4, fund 2 (I, 56); Hayes, introduction, 34, n. 10. Bonaventure uses the terms per modum naturae and per modum voluntatis to designate the two trinitarian emanations. The terms are inspired by Aristotle’s principle that there exist only two perfect modes of production; namely, natural and free. 21 Bonaventure I Sent. d. 6, a. ul., q. 2, resp. (I, 128). ‘Processus per modum voluntatis concomitante natura’; Kevin P. Keane, ‘Why Creation? Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas on God as Creative Good’, Downside Review 93 (1975): 15. Keane writes: ‘It is noteworthy that Bonaventure’s reason for attributing creation to the divine will is quite different from Thomas’s. Where Thomas is in the main concerned to protect the divine perfection and radically free will, CHRISTOLOGY FROM WITHIN 455 Bonaventure is at pains to elucidate how only through will can an act be truly personal – both free and expressive of the outward dynamism of goodness, an act spontaneous yet substantial’. 22 Zachary Hayes, ‘Bonaventure: Mystery of the Triune God’, in The History of Franciscan Theology, ed. Kenan B. Osborne (New York: The Franciscan Institute, 1994), 58. 23 Zachary Hayes, ‘Incarnation and Creation in the Theology of St. Bonaventure’, in Studies Honoring Ignatius Brady, Friar Minor, ed. Romano Stephen Almagno and Conrad Harkins (New York: Franciscan Institute, 1976), 313. 24 Bonaventure, Comm. in Joann., 1, 6, q. 1 (VI, 247); Hayes, ‘Incarnation and Creation in St. Bonaventure’, 314; Zachary Hayes, ‘Christology and Metaphysics in the Thought of Bonaventure’, Journal of Religion 58 (Supplement 1978): S90. 25 Hayes, ‘Incarnation and Creation in St. Bonaventure’, 314. 26 Hayes, ‘Incarnation and Creation in St. Bonaventure’, 314. 27 Bonaventure I Sent. d. 27, p. II, a. un., q. 2 (I, 485); Hayes, ‘Incarnation and Creation in St. Bonaventure’, 315. 28 Zachary Hayes, ‘The Meaning of Convenientia in the Metaphysics of St. Bonaventure’, Franciscan Studies 34 (1974): 89. 29 Bonaventure I Sent. d. 27, p. 2, a. u., q. 3, resp. (I, 487–488). 30 Hayes, ‘Incarnation and Creation in St. Bonaventure’, 311. 31 Hayes, ‘Incarnation and Creation in St. Bonaventure’, 311. 32 Bonaventure III Sent. d. 1, a. 1, q. 1, ad 1 (III, 10); ad 3 (III, 10–11); III Sent. d. 1, a. 1, q. 2, ad 2 (III, 13); ad 4 (III, 13); ad 6 (III, 13). 33 Hayes, ‘Meaning of Convenientia’, 78. Hayes notes the conditions for the possibility of Incarnation by stating: 1) the two terms of the relation must be capable of entering into such a unique and intense union, 2) there must be a unity of person; for is this were not the case, then the history of Jesus would not be the history of the Word but a history only extrinsically related to the Word, and 3) granted the possibility from the side of God and from the side of man, it is yet required that there be a power adequate to effect the union. 34 Hayes, ‘Meaning of Convenientia’, 77. 35 Bonaventure Collationes in Hexae¨meron (Hex.) 9, 2 (V, 373); 3, 7 (V, 344). 36 Zachary Hayes, The Hidden Center: Spirituality and Speculative Christology in St. Bonaventure (New York: The Franciscan Institute, 1992), 60. 37 Zachary Hayes, ‘Christ, Word of God and Exemplar of Humanity’, Cord 46.1 (1996): 6. 38 Hayes, ‘Christ, Word of God and Exemplar of Humanity’, 6. 39 Ilia Delio, ‘Revisiting the Franciscan Doctrine of Christ’, Theological Studies 64 (2003): 5. 40 Mary Beth Ingham, ‘John Duns Scotus: An Integrated Vision’, in The History of Franciscan Theology, ed. Kenan B. Osborne (New York: The Franciscan Institute, 1994), 221. 41 Delio, ‘Revisiting the Franciscan Doctrine of Christ’, 7–9. 42 Bonaventure, III Sent. d. 32, q. 5, ad 3 (III, 706). Bonaventure writes: ‘Humanum vero genus respectu incarnationis et nativitatis Christi non fuit ratio finaliter movens, sed quodam modo inducens. Non enim Chrsitus ad nos finaliter ordinatur, sed nos finaliter ordinamur ad ipsum’. Zachary Hayes states that, for Bonaventure, ‘the Incarnation is willed for its own sake out of pure love and not simply because of sin. Yet, the redemptive function is not simply added to the Incarnation; for the actual Incarnation is thoroughly shaped by its redemptive function’. See Hayes, The Hidden Center, 190. 43 Hayes, The Hidden Center, 188–89. 44 Hayes, ‘Incarnation and Creation’, 328; Bonaventure, III Sent. d.1, a. 2, q. 2, ad 2 (III, 26); see Hayes, Hidden Center, 189 who writes that ‘the Incarnation is not to be seen as a sort of after-thought on the part of God. From eternity, God knew the course that history would take, including the fall of the human race. From the beginning, therefore, God has acted in view of his intention of restoring what he knew would in fact become a fallen creation’. Rahner (‘Christology Within an Evolutionary View of the World’, 185–86) offers a similar solution to the question of sin in light of the primacy of Christ. He writes: ‘The world and its history are from the outset based on the absolute will of God to communicate himself radically to the world. In this self-communication and in its climax (i.e., in the Incarnation), the world becomes the history of God himself. And so if and in so far as it is found in the world, sin is from the outset embraced by the will to forgive and the offer of divine self-communication becomes necessary’. 45 Hayes, Meaning of ‘Convenientia’, 94; Bonaventure, III Sent. d. 1, a. 2, q. 2, ad 5 (III, 26–27). 46 Hayes, ‘Christ, Word of God and Exemplar of Humanity’, 7. 456 ILIA DELIO 47 Zachary Hayes, ‘Christology-Cosmology’, in Spirit and Life: a Journal of Contemporary Franciscanism, vol. 7, Franciscan Leadership in Ministry, ed. Anthony Carrozzo, Vincent Cushing and Kenneth Himes (New York: Franciscan Institute, 1997), 42. 48 Zachary Hayes, A Window to the Divine: a study of Christian creation theology (Quincy, IL: Franciscan Press, 1997), 90. 49 In the introduction to his book Science and Religion: From Conflict to Conversation, John Haught describes the confession of a scientific skeptic who maintains there is nothing beyond the physical universe. According to this skeptic, ‘there is not a shred of evidence that the universe is purposeful or that it is influenced by any kind of deity who cares for me. . . . As for why we are here, there is no other explanation than sheer chance’. See John F. Haught, Science and Religion: From Conflict to Conversation (New York: Paulist, 1995), 6–7. 50 Hayes, ‘Christ, Word of God and Exemplar of Humanity’, 8. 51 Hayes, ‘Christ, Word of God and Exemplar of Humanity’, 12. 52 Hayes, Window to the Divine, 91. 53 Hayes, ‘Christ, Word of God and Exemplar of Humanity’, 12. 54 Hayes, ‘Christ, Word of God and Exemplar of Humanity’, 13. 55 Hayes, Window to the Divine, 91. 56 Hayes, ‘Christ, Word of God and Exemplar of Humanity’, 13. 57 Panikkar (Christophany, 140) writes: ‘The mystery of Christ is the mystery of the whole of reality – divine, human, cosmic, without confusion yet without separation’. 58 Bonaventure, II Sent. d. 12, a. 1, q. 3 concl. (II, 98). For a discussion of the spiritual potency of the material world see Kent Emery, ‘Reading the World Rightly and Squarely: Bonaventure’s Doctrine of the Cardinal Virtues’, Traditio 39 (1983): 188–99. 59 Bonaventure, De reductione artium ad theologiam 20 (V, 324b). 60 Hayes, ‘Meaning of Convenientia’, 83. 61 Bonaventure, III Sent. d. 1, a. 2, q. 3, resp. (III, 29). 62 Bonaventure, II Sent. d. 16, a. 2, q. 3, concl. (II, 405). 63 Alvin Black, ‘The Doctrine of the Image and Similitude in Saint Bonaventure’, Cord 12 (1962): 270. 64 Bonaventure, Itinerarium Mentis in Deum (Itin.) 4.5 (V, 307). Engl. trans. Ewert Cousins, Bonaventure: The Soul’s Journey Into God, The Tree of Life, The Life of St. Francis (New York: Paulist, 1978), 84. Hereafter referred to as Bonaventure. 65 Ilia Delio, Simply Bonaventure: an introduction to his life, thought and writings (New York: New City Press, 2001), 70–1. 66 Bonaventure, Hex 1.13 (V, 331). Engl. trans. Engl. trans. Jose de Vinck, ‘Collations on the Six Days’, in Works of St. Bonaventure, vol. V (Paterson, N.J.: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1970), 8. 67 Hayes, ‘Convenientia’ in Bonaventure’, 77. 68 Hayes, ‘Convenientia’ in Bonaventure’, 90. 69 Zachary Hayes, What Manner of Man? Sermons on Christ by St. Bonaventure (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1989), 90 n.42. 70 Bonaventure, Itin. 6.7 (V, 312). 71 Panikkar, Christophany, 144, 147. 72 Panikkar, Christophany, 144, 147. 73 The term ‘perichoresis’ was first used by the eighth-century theologian, John Damascene, who said that the divine persons of the Trinity are not only related to one another but mutually inhere in one another and draw life from one another. Bonaventure was influenced by the idea of perichoresis but used the Latin instead, circumincessio, meaning that the divine persons ‘move around one another’ in a communion of love. See Delio, Simply Bonaventure, 41. 74 Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, trans. Patrick Madigan and Madeleine Beaumont (Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1995), 112. See also Roger Haight [Dynamics of Theology (New York: Paulist, 1990), 132–42] who points out that there is an intrinsic connection between the symbol and that which is symbolized (p. 134). 75 Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 112–13. 76 Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 114–15. 77 Rahner, ‘Two Basic Types of Christology’, 215–16. 78 Panikkar, Christophany, 120. 79 Panikkar, Christophany, 150. Panikkar writes: ‘Jesus Christ as undivided experience constitutes the central Christian dogma. The copula ‘‘is’’ collapses: otherwise, it would introduce CHRISTOLOGY FROM WITHIN 457 an epistemic split of the unity of that experience. . . . Jesus is Christ, but Christ cannot be identified completely with Jesus of Nazareth’. In the forward to this book, Francis d’Sa writes: ‘The Christ of the christophany is, for example, the Christ that was, is, and will be at work in the whole of creation, that is, in every single being and not only in Jesus. Jesus is Christ but Christ cannot be identified completely with Jesus’ (p. xvi). 80 Panikkar, Christophany, 147. 81 Rahner, ‘Current Problems in Christology’, 192. 82 For a discussion of the coincidence of opposites see Ewert Cousins, ‘The Coincidence of Opposites in the Christology of Saint Bonaventure’, Franciscan Studies 28 (1968): 27–4; ibid., Bonaventure and the Coincidence of Opposites (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1978). 83 Cousins, Bonaventure and the Coincidence of Opposites, 162. 84 Cousins, Coincidence of Opposites, 163. 85 Cousins (Coincidence of Opposites, 164) notes that a metaphysics of expressionism and exemplarism was derived by Platonism and Neo-Platonism but was developed by Christian thinkers such as Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius, for whom the divine self-diffusive good overflows into the entire cosmos. Bonaventure, he claims, brought specific Franciscan elements to this tradition, including Francis’s love of nature and a sense of the coincidence of opposites. While the tradition of exemplarism, characteristic of the early Franciscan school, supported Bonaventure’s symbolism, it became obscured by Aristotelian logic and metaphysics in the Middle Ages. 86 Bonaventure, Itin. 6.5 (V, 311). Engl. trans. Cousins, Bonaventure, 107. 87 For a study of the temple and other symbols in the Itinerarium see Sister Lilian Turney, ‘The Symbolism of the Temple in St. Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis in Deum’, unpublished doctoral dissertation (Fordham University, 1968). 88 Ewert Cousins discusses the symbol of the temple and Christ, the coincidence of opposites in his book, Bonaventure and the Coincidence of Opposites, pp. 85–86. 89 For a discussion on the concept of ‘gazing’ see Ilia Delio, Franciscan Prayer (Cincinnati: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2004), 77–90. 90 Bonaventure, Itin. 4.8 (V, 308). 91 See Ilia Delio, ‘Clare of Assisi: Beauty and Transformation’, Studies in Spirituality 12 (2002): 75. 92 Bonaventure, Itin. 6.7 (V, 312). Engl. trans. Cousins, Bonaventure, 108–09. 93 Hayes, ‘Christology-Cosmology’, 51. 94 Hayes, ‘Christology-Cosmology’, 51. 95 Hayes, ‘Christ, Word of God and Exemplar of Humanity’, 13. 96 Hayes, A Window to the Divine, 94. 97 Hayes, ‘Christology-Cosmology’, 52. 98 Hayes, ‘Christology-Cosmology’, 56. 99 Cited in Hayes, ‘Christology-Cosmology’, 56. 100 Hayes, ‘Christ, Word of God and Exemplar of Humanity’, 12. 101 Hayes, ‘Christ, Word of God and Exemplar of Humanity’, 15. 102 Francis D’Sa, preface to Christophany, xx. 103 Panikkar, Christophany, 21. 104 Panikkar, Christophany, 162. 105 Panikkar, Christophany, 146. 106 Panikkar, Christophany, 146. 107 The term ‘co-creator’ is described by Lutheran theologian Philip Hefner. See The Human Factor: Evolution, Culture and Religion (Minn.: Fortress Press, 1993), pp. 23–51, 255–275. Hefner writes: ‘Human beings are God’s created co-creators whose purpose is to be the agency, acting in freedom, to birth the future that is most wholesome for the nature that has birthed us – the nature that is not only our own genetic heritage, but also the entire human community and the evolutionary and ecological reality in which and to which we belong. Exercising this agency is said to be God’s will for humans’ (p. 27). 108 For a discussion on crucified love as self-transcendent love see Ilia Delio, Crucified Love: Bonaventure’s Mysticism of the Crucified Christ (Quincy, IL: Franciscan Press, 1998). 109 Panikkar, Christophany, 120. 110 Cited in Edwards, Jesus and the Cosmos, 105.