Summer’s Bold Beauty
Thanks to a recommendation by Austen Ivereigh (on the America site), I have been led to the works of Michael Casey, an Australian Cistercian monk. I’ ve been reading his Fully Human, Fully Divine with much pleasure and profit.
The book is a theological-spiritual meditation upon the Tradition’s teaching that, in Christ, humankind is called to transformation and divinization (theosis).
As a Cistercian, Casey draws upon the rich heritage of the Cistercian fathers: Aelred of Rievaulx, Isaac of Stella, and, especially, Bernard of Clairvaux, whose feast the Church celebrates today.
Casey concludes his book with a chapter, “Eternity,” and writes:
We are divinized to the extent that nothing of our humanity is denied, despised, or ignored, when nothing of what makes us human is lost or left behind. Just as God’s Son lost nothing of his divinity during his sojourn on earth, so we will carry to eternal life everything in our lives that is genuinely human.
May the humanity of Jesus inspire us to accept our own humanity in all its present ambiguity, so that through him and with him and in him we may become, in a manner that is beyond our imagining, full sharers in his divinity.
And Casey quotes an “Ode on Eternal Day” from Bernard’s “Sermons on the Song of Songs:”
O never-ending solstice when daylight lasts forever.
O noon-day light, marked with the mildness of Spring,
stamped with summer’s bold beauty, enriched with autumn’s fruit –
and lest I seem to forget — calm with winter’s rest from toil.
Thank you for making us aware of this book, Father. It looks wonderful. I’ll add it to my list!
This is theological point that does not get the emphasis it should. I knew that that it was important in the Eastern church, but I recently discovered that it is also found Thomas Aquinas–I was reading Matthew Levering’s book on Scripture and Metaphysics. There is even a hint of the idea in Plato. The beautiful little prayer at the mingling of the water and wine says it well, but most priests do not say that prayer aloud, unfortunately, although I know one who does.
I have read and studied this book and it profoundly impacted my life, and my view of theosis. I love all of Casey’s books, but this one was engrossing on a personal level. Too often Christology is only talked about in the most technical language, not so here. The language is easy, and persuasive. Also, one has the feeling that Casey has truly lived everything he writes about.
Recent work seems to have concluded that the theme of divinization was also very important in the West, in figures like Augustine and Aquinas. Hans Kueng famously remariked that he didn’t think “modern man” was much interested in being divinized, but that was in the early 1970s, I think, and he [that is, either "modern man" or Hans Kueng] may have changed his mind, or not.
The spectacular growth of the Cistercians in the 12th century is rightly attributed to the influence of Bernard of Clairvaux, That growth also fits easily into the pattern that John Allen sees in the recent Georgetown CARA study: high tension religious life has important advantages too often overlooked by advocates of more flexible and open communities. Bernard openly ridiculed what he saw as the secularism and laxity of the Cluniac establishment.
The Cistercians established more than 500 houses, from Ireland to Romania and from Norway to Spain, in their first century. And incredibly they managed to do all this without the benefit of consultants, studies or the promulgation of “best practices.”
Ironically their major problem was that their practice proved so successful that the unintended result was the proverbial embarrassment of riches, surpassing even the Cluniacs.
Patrick Molloy,
As you know, part of their successful “practice” was to go off to scarcely-inhabitable places for solitude and to transform them into productive farm land.
Joseph A.,
I think that Casey’s study is a good illustration of your point. Those who the Cistercians drew upon and appropriated (in addition, of course, to the New Testament) were Augustine and Cassian, Benedict and Gregory the Great.