Pope Francis, the Sacred Heart, and the Most Blessed Subjectivity of the Logos

Love and Secondary Causality

A learned (and acerbic) Dominican professor under whom I studied told this story: An eminent Dominican scholar, easily identifiable by his fiery red hair, was in the habit of taking his daily walk past the Jesuit house. One day, one of the Jesuits, seeing him from the window and recalling a long-standing Medieval legend, called down, “Judas Iscariot had red hair.” The Dominican, not breaking stride, replied: “The Scriptures do not record that. They do, however, record that he went about in the Company of Jesus.”

The rivalrous relationship between Dominicans and Jesuits, reflected in this apocryphal anecdote, actually has a serious theological foundation. The simultaneous reality of grace – a reality defined as substantially supernatural and therefore utterly infallible – and of the freedom of contingent agents raise certain questions that get one into some pretty serious knots in short order. The divine Will and man's capacity for choice stand as irresistible force to immovable object (or rather all too erratically, variously, and inappropriately movable object; just think it through a bit, or consult your own experience, for a cursory verification). The logical reconciliation of the two?—well, you know it don't come easy.

On this issue in particular, Dominican Thomism and Jesuit scholarship, the latter exemplified in the person of Luis de Molina[1], have long been at odds. In the face of Dominican ire, Molina was denounced to the Spanish Inquisition (which, contrary to popular wisdom, he likely expected, given the famously arcane prose of his Concordia). Subsequent to dedicated and assiduous investigation, the most the Church has been able to do is to permit these two antithetical viewpoints to co-exist with equal authority.[2]

The Thomistic emphasis is with the surefire success, vis á vis the attainment of its objective, of efficacious grace (hence the designation); to hold for less is to venture to the ragged borders of semi-Pelagianism. For Molinism, in contrast, the primary concern is the safeguarding of creaturely autonomy; Molina ascribes to God scientia media, or a “middle knowledge.” Between the divine possession of necessary propositions, like that a square circle is precluded by the laws of reason, and God's knowledge of the effects of the freely undertaken activity of the economic Trinity, lies His knowledge of counterfactuals, such that he can weave salvation history from limitless strands of contingencies in real time, as it were.

The Thomistic notion is very comforting; Garrigou-Lagrange's insistence on it forms my prayer. Yet I do not believe it to be ultimately injured, in any sense, by the Jesuit take. Nonetheless, it has been maintained that since there is no actuality to counterfactuals, a divine middle knowledge is neither ontologically grounded nor metaphysically tenable. With all due humility (but pretty decent theological training to go with it), I don't see things quite that way... precisely because God knows the heart. And he knows it, precisely, Heart to heart.

The case could be made that the attractions and repulsions of any heart are virtually contained in the mystery of its own autonomy: For instance, if I were to be taken out for ice cream, it's vanilla with warm, salted peanut butter all the way, with inerrant sureness at peril of regret; if I were permitted a puppy, it is a dachshund to which my affections have been preordained. Tulips over daffodils; medieval art over Baroque; meezers, spring green, high summer, the baritone voice: Welcome to Planet Val. And you, dear reader, inhabit a world similarly anchored by an inner logic of fully personal and non-necessary delightedness. All of which is to say that the subjectivity of the heart may well ground reality as effectively and intelligibly as the factual transcript of actually accomplished events – if not more so, considering creation itself as the free expression of a tri-personal sovereignty. Who does not weigh and discern among various outcomes of happiness when choosing a gift, all in line with the known heart and preferences of a beloved?

In Laudato si', Pope Francis crystallized Jesuit thinking:

Creating a world in need of development, God in some way sought to limit himself in such a way that many of the things we think of as evils, dangers or sources of suffering, are in reality part of the pains of childbirth which he uses to draw us into the act of cooperation with the Creator. God is intimately present to each being, without impinging on the autonomy of his creature, and this gives rise to the rightful autonomy of earthly affairs.

God, in his freedom, left existential space for the working of secondary causes; he created a universe complete with a co-creative role for autonomous creaturely subjects.

It often seems to me that, for all the marquee headlines and hot-button issues that tend to preoccupy us all, points of the gravest theological import are slipping beneath the radar. In Dilexit nos, Francis’s last encyclical, an often meltingly beautiful devotional encomium to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, we find – quietly, uncontroversially, explosively – a definitive elevation of secondary causes:

While nothing need be added to the one redemptive sacrifice of Christ, it remains true that our free refusal can prevent the heart of Christ from spreading the “waves of his infinite tenderness” in this world. Again, this is because the Lord wishes to respect our freedom.

A God who prizes autonomy more than efficacy, a divine mystery of Person willing to risk the indignity of spurned benevolence to win the rare pearl of requited love, has vouchsafed us a creation, not of causal chains spanning the aeons aligned in domino-array, but of an ever-expanding matrix of interconnection and complexity. When God refrains from forcing the hand of someone he intended to be a recipient or conveyance of good, a soul like Thérèse can rise to a heroic generosity and more than compensate for what would have otherwise gone lost. Love's creative ingenuity remains ever vigilant.

All of this follows in continuity on the thought of Francis's immediate predecessor. Of the father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son in the Gospel of Luke, Benedict XVI writes, “He gives freedom. He can imagine what the younger son is going to do, but he lets him go his way...”

Yet this is hardly an equanimity bred of indifference. It typifies a will committed to just that creative intervention that may win back the heart, at the cost of self-emptying sacrifice, amid the irreducible mystery and complexity of autonomous subjects:

Because God is God, the Holy One, he acts as no man could act. God has a heart, and this heart turns, so to speak, against God himself… [I]n Hosea, as in this Gospel, we encounter once again the word compassion, which is expressed by means of the maternal womb. God's heart transforms wrath and turns punishment into forgiveness.

Let us look to the humility of this self-abnegating God, and may we use our freedom, validated divinely, theologically and ecclesially, to His perpetual honor.

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[1] Not to be confused with Miguel de Molinos, a theologian of roughly the same historical period, whose works are condemned unequivocally.

[2] In 1607, Pope Paul V forbade the controversialists from accusing one another of heresy, and for a period of time discouraged discussion of the relevant matters altogether.