Lacordaire on God’s Inner Life
The name of Lacordaire has always had some fascination.
It took many years actually coming at this point to have the compulsion to learn more.
To begin the Magnificat Missalette had a Meditation on Lacordaire.
This called for a search in the Library and find the only book to hand, Pere Lacordaire’s Conferences for Lent in Notre Dame de Paris.
Then a Dominican visitor mentioned the biographical essay, Lacordaire, by L. C. Sheppard – the riveting story of his life.
The latest publication is obviously very selective
Batts, Peter M. Henri-Dominique Lacordaire’s re-establishment of the Dominican Order in nineteenth-century
To tackle 1870 English translation, I tried the second Conference, “The Inner Life of God”. Admittedly it proved to make daunting reading.
The illustration of the young 
people crowded to Notre Dame de Paris makes me puzzle. The writing is certainly academic. But have we any impression of the eloquence of the orator influencing thousand. (Never hear the likes in St. Bernard, it is said).
By some very good fortune, with Google search, a Catholic Writers Notebook, has only recently produced a commentary on the Conference, “The Inner Life of God”.
It is most helpful, lucid and illuminating, in the rather challenging style of the epoc.
| NOTES ABOUT CATHOLIC LIFE & SPIRITUALITY IN THE 21st CENTURY Saturday, October 17, 2009 Lacordaire on God’s Inner Life, Part 1 When discussing the Holy Trinity, the Fathers of the Church distinguished between theology and economy. “Theology” refers to the mystery of God’s inmost life within the Trinity and “economy” to all the works by which God reveals himself and communicates his life. Through the “economy” the “theology” is revealed to us; conversely, the “theology” illuminates the whole “economy”. God’s works reveal who he is in himself; the mystery of his inmost being enlightens our understanding of all his works (Catechism of the Catholic Church, §236). With this in mind, I thought it beneficial to review the theology of God’s inner life as a transition into a later series on how we can use this knowledge of God’s inner life to discover how, by imitating Christ, we might participate in the economy of God’s works of salvation in our own time. For the first series, I’ve chosen to paraphrase some thoughts of Père Jean Baptiste Henri Dominique Lacordaire, O.P., delivered in a conference at Notre Dame in Père Lacordaire begins by defining life as a certain state of being, which defines as that mysterious force, called activity, which is the principle of beings’ substance and organization. Since activity is a permanent and common characteristic of all that is, he concludes that being is activity, citing St. Thomas Aquinas’ definition of God as pure act (Summa Theologica, Q. 3, a. 1). From this, Lacordaire concludes that “activity supposes action, and action is life, or, to put it another way, “life is to being what action is to activity” and “to live is to act”. A stone is; a plant grows; an animal lives – gradations of activity, whose presence constitutes a living being (Père Lacordaire, GOD, pp. 30-32). Lacordaire formulated this in his first general law of life: the action of a being is equal to its activity. Applying this law of life to the inner life of God, he draws the conclusion that, as the action of a being is equal to its activity, it follows that in God there is infinite action, which constitutes the very life of God (Ibid., p. 32). But what is action, he asks. Action is movement, he answers; but movement supposes an object, an end toward which it aspires. “I move, I run, I risk my life seeking something wanting to me and which I desire; for if nothing were wanting in me, my movement would have no cause, repose would be my natural state, immobility my happiness. Since I move, it is to act: to act is at the same time the motive and the end of movement, and consequently action is productive movement” (Ibid., p. 33). Since action is the consequence of activity, it follows that production is the final end of activity and being, both of which are one and the same. According to the first general law of life, the action of any being is equal to its activity. To live is to act; to act is to produce; to produce is to draw forth from self something equal to itself. “Every being tends to produce in the plenitude of its faculties, because it tends to life in the plenitude of its life, and it attains that natural term of its ambition only by drawing from itself something equal to itself” (Ibid., p. 34). All of this, of course, is leading up to his second general law of life and how it applies to the inner life of God, which will be the subject of Part 2 of this series. John O'Neill Labels: The Trinity in Christian Life Sunday, October 18, 2009 Lacordaire on God’s Inner Life, Part 2 We continue Père Lacordaire’s conference on the inner life of God. Having laid down and explained the first general law of life, that the action of any being is equal to its activity and how it applies to the inner life of God, he moves on to the second general law of life. Citing Christ’s words, “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required,” he demonstrates the law of production: for life to produce something equal to itself, it must produce life; for a living being to produce something equal to itself, it must produce a being like itself. Fecundity, then, is the extreme and complete end of production, the necessary end of activity. Thus, we arrive at the second general law of life: the activity of a being is begun again in its fecundity. Life is fecundity, and fecundity is equal to life. God, being infinite activity, is also infinite fecundity. For if God were infinitely active without being infinitely fruitful, one of two things would follow: (1) either his action would be unproductive, or (2) he would produce only outside of himself, in finite time and space. Neither of these would be the action of the infinite and purely spiritual being that is God. Therefore, the life of God is exercised totally within himself by an infinite and a sovereign fecundity (GOD, pp. 35-37). The application of this law to God’s inner life, Lacordaire pointed out, is borne out in the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas in which he explains that in God there is an internal procession in the case of an action that remains within the agent itself. From this, Lacordaire concluded that since action is a movement, a movement supposes the acting being and the desired being, and a relation between the acting being and the desired being, without which there would be no more action, no more activity because relation is the very essence of life. A relation consists in the bringing together of two distinct terms, the perfect conjunction of which is unity, the perfect distinction of which is plurality so that their perfect relation is unity in plurality (Ibid., p. 40). This brings us to Lacordaire’s third general law of life: the end of fecundity is to produce relations between beings, giving an object to and a reason for their activity (Ibid., p. 41). The mystery of life is a mystery of relations, i.e., unity in plurality, plurality in unity. God is one: his substance is indivisible because it is infinite. God cannot then be many by the division of his substance. Let the substance of God remain what it is and what it should be – the seat of unity; and let it produce in itself, without being divided, terms of relation, i.e., terms that are the seat of plurality in relation to unity. For those two things, one and many, are alike in order to form relations; and if the substance of God were divisible, there would be no unity, and likewise no relations. God is a unique substance, containing in his indivisible essence terms of relation really distinct in themselves. As we apply these expressions of the visible order to God, however, their proportions at once become changed because they pass from the finite to the infinite; so, it’s no wonder that Catholic doctrine teaches that terms of relation take, in God, the form of personality. Every being, by that alone that it is itself and not another, possesses what we call individuality. As long as it subsists, it belongs to itself; it may increase or decrease, lose or gain; it may communicate to others something of itself, but not itself. It is itself as long as it is; none other is or will ever be so, except itself. Suppose now that the individual being possesses consciousness and knowledge of its individuality, that it sees itself living and distinct from all that is not itself, it would be a person (Ibid.,pp. 45-47). In my next post in this series, we’ll explore with Lacordaire how many persons there are in God, how and in what order they are manifested in him. Posted by John O'Neill at 8:23 AM Labels: The Trinity in Christian Life Monday, October 19, 2009 Lacordaire on God’s Inner Life, Part 3 In this installment of Lacordaire’s conference on the inner life of God, he takes up the theology of processions or origins and relations in God. The mind lives, like God, of an immaterial life, and consequently knows that life in which the senses have no part, and which is that of God. The mind does two things only, it thinks and it loves. It thinks, it sees and combines objects of divested of matter, form, extent and horizon. I speak of the mind as it is of its own nature, as it lives when it wills to live at the height where God has placed it. Thought is not the mind itself; thought comes and goes; the mind always remains. My thought and my mind are two; yet I am one. My thought, although distinct from my mind, is not separated from it. My intellectual life is a life of relation; I find in it what I’ve seen in external nature: unity and plurality – unity resulting from the very substance of my mind, plurality resulting from its action. The mind, like the whole of nature, but in a much higher manner, is fecund, prolific. The mind, created in the likeness of God, remains inaccessible to all division. It engenders its thought without emitting any of its incorruptible substance; multiplies it without losing anything of the perfection of unity. The body keeps us too far from God; the mind has borne us even to the sanctuary of his essence and his life. (GOD, pp. 49-51) God is spirit; his first act is to think. In God, whose activity is infinite, the mind at once engenders a thought equal to itself, which fully represents it, and which needs no second expression, because the first has exhausted the abyss of things to know, the abyss of the infinite. That unique and absolute thought, the first-born and last of the mind of God, remains eternally in his presence as an exact representation of himself, as his image, the brightness of his glory and the figure of his substance (see 2 Corinthians 4:4; Hebrews 1:3). It is his word, his utterance, his inner word, as our thought is also our utterance and our word; but differing from ours inasmuch as it is a perfect word which speaks all to God in a single expression, which speaks it always without repetition, and which St. John heard in heaven when he thus opened his sublime Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1).(Ibid., pp. 51-52) In God, the thought is distinct without being separated from the divine mind which produces it. The Word is consubstantial with the Father, according to the expression of the Council of Nicaea in 325. In God, the thought is distinct from the mind by a perfect distinction because it is infinite; in God, the thought becomes a person. In God plurality is absolute as well as unity, and therefore, his life passes entirely within himself, in the ineffable colloquy between a divine person and a divine person, between a Father without generation and a Son eternally engendered. God thinks, and he sees himself in his thought as in another so akin to him as to be one with him in substance; he is Father since he has produced in his own likeness a term of relation really and personally distinct from him; he is one and two in all the force that the infinite gives to unity and duality; in contemplating his thought, in beholding his image, in hearing his word, he is able to utter in the ecstacy of the highest, the most real paternity: “You are my Son, today I have begotten you” (Psalm 2:7), in this day which is eternity, the indivisible duration of unchanging being, in that ineffable act which has neither beginning nor end. (Ibid., pp. 53-54) My next post will conclude this series on Père Lacordaire’s conference about the inner life of the Holy Trinity. Posted by John O'Neill at 9:27 AM Labels: The Trinity in Christian Life Tuesday, October 20, 2009 Lacordaire on God’s Inner Life, Part 4 Is the generation of his Son God’s sole act, and does it consummate with its fecundity all his beatitude? In God, from the co-eternal regard interchanged between the Father and the Son, springs a third term of relation, proceeding from the one and the other, really distinct from them, raised by the force of the infinite to personality, which is the Holy Spirit, the holy, the unfathomable and stainless movement of divine love. As the Son exhausts knowledge, the Holy Spirit exhausts love in God, and by him the cycle of divine fecundity and life closes. As a perfect spirit God thinks and loves; he produces a thought equal to himself, and with his thought a love equal to both. Everything in nature teaches you that being and activity are one and the same, that activity is expressed by action, and that action is necessarily productive or fruitful; that the end of fecundity is to establish relations between similar beings; that relation is unity in plurality, from which results life, beauty, and goodness. And that God, the infinite being, the pre-eminently good, beautiful and living being is infallibly the most magnificent totality of relations, perfect unity and perfect plurality, the unity of substance in the plurality of persons; a primordial mind [the Father], a thought equal to the mind [the Word/Son] that engenders it, a love [the Holy Spirit] equal to the mind and the thought from which it proceeds; all the three, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, ancient as eternity, great as infinity, one in beatitude as in substance from which they derive their identical divinity. If human society would aspire to perfection, it has no other model to study and to imitate. It will find there the first social constitution in the first community; equality of nature between the persons who compose it; order in their equality, since the Father is the principle of the Son, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son; unity, the cause of plurality; thought, receiving from above its being and its light; love, terminating and crowning all the relations. If human society would aspire to perfection, it has no other model to study and to imitate. It will find there the first social constitution in the first community; equality of nature between the persons who compose it; order in their equality, since the Father is the principle of the Son, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son; unity, the cause of plurality; thought, receiving from above its being and its light; love, terminating and crowning all the relations. This concludes my series about Père Lacordaire’s conference on the inner life of the Holy Trinity. My next two posts will review why the works of mercy are an excellent form of active Trinitarian spirituality. Posted by John O'Neill at 10:56 AM Labels: The Trinity in Christian Life |
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