Do you know God, or do you just know about Him?
Reflecting on Pope Leo XIV's audiences on friendship with God in Dei Verbum.
Readers of The Oracle had a busy month in May, with the promulgation of the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas and plenty of interesting CTS content to enjoy as a result. Starting now in June, I want to begin looking at Pope Leo’s weekly catechesis sessions on the documents of Vatican II.
Now, these sessions are catechetical, which means they are intended for nourishing the strength and quality of faith in their audiences. The word catechesis originates from two Greek words: the first meaning “down” or “downwards,” and the second “echo” or “sound.” Catechesis is meant to cause an echo down the ages, a mirroring of the message in the lives of those who hear it.
These weekly sessions should best be understood, then, as intended to let the ancient Catholic faith resonate newly in us. St Augustine famously described God as a beauty “so ancient and so new”, and here we’re invited to radiate afresh with the Church’s time-honoured wisdom.
We Need to Get to Know the Council Again Closely
I’d understand if anyone sighed at the mention of Vatican II. Some will think that, since so much ink has been spilt on these documents, it’s surely unnecessary to keep revisiting them again and again. I do sympathise, but at the same time I’d point out that these catechesis sessions are not theoretical analyses of the documents but rather discussions intended to cultivate faith and devotion in the audience, with the documents serving as a means rather than an end.
Others will perhaps be even more negative, having imbibed some very online material about the Council being a heretical abomination with apocalyptic consequences for all that is good and holy in this world. Now, I can’t get into this one here – but I’ll say that there are a lot of notions flying around that don’t bear scrutiny, along with some reasonable misgivings that theologians have been arguing over for over half a century.
Interestingly, Pope Leo seems aware of all this, for he mentions in the introductory session that we need to “to get to know [the Council] again closely, and to do so not through ‘hearsay’ or interpretations that have been given”. All we need, then, is a willingness to learn a bit about these documents and to do so with an open mind.
These catechesis sessions are not theoretical analyses of the documents but rather discussions intended to cultivate faith and devotion in the audience, with the documents serving as a means rather than an end.
A Call to Deepen Our Friendship With God
The first document to be discussed is Dei Verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation. The word “revelation” is easily misunderstood. It doesn’t mean some secret vision or message (that would be “private revelation”), nor does it mean what people mean by it in everyday speech – an insight, discovery, or realisation. No, divine revelation is God’s disclosure of himself to humanity, a disclosure that humanity could never have achieved unaided – things like Jesus Christ being the Son of God, and the Doctrine of the Trinity, etc. As put memorably by Pope Benedict XVI, “we cannot speak rightly about God unless God himself tells us who he is”.
How does God tell us who He is? His primary oracles are Scripture and Tradition, and these are therefore the primary subject matter of Dei Verbum. Pope Leo doesn’t spend much time on all that, however. He approaches it individually, taking as his lens this sentence about revelation:
The invisible God, out of the abundance of His love, speaks to men as friends and lives among them, so that He may invite and take them into fellowship with Himself (§2).
The point here is that revelation means God freely chooses to tell us who He is, out of the “abundance of His love,” because He wants to share His life with us. Freely sharing oneself with another, without the obligation of a family bond or the duty of an institutional relationship, such as an employee/employer or a student/teacher, means inviting another person into friendship.
It might seem a touch, well, cringe, to talk about being friends with God. I’m as into emphasising what Romano Guardini described as God’s “exclusive majesty and awful sanctity” as the next person. Yes, it is always necessary to start thinking about God in such a way that our minds are disabused of lazy misappropriations of His awesome transcendence. We cannot hope to understand He who “has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has ever seen or can see” (1 Timothy 6:16).
The problem, however, is that stubbornly insisting on thinking of God only in these terms can itself become just another lazy misappropriation, another obstacle. It wasn’t God’s “awful sanctity” that caused people to reject His Son – it was Jesus’ intimacy with sinful humanity, his familiarity with us, and His irresistible fondness for people. Hence, as the Pope points out, “Jesus Christ radically transforms man’s relationship with God, which is henceforth a relationship of friendship.” Jesus tells His disciples that “I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15).
It is apprehending God’s sharing of Himself, His making Himself known – i.e. revelation - which qualifies His followers as friends. Therefore, this document about divine revelation is presented by the Holy Father as a call to deepen our friendship with God.
Revelation means God freely chooses to tell us who He is, out of the “abundance of His love,” because He wants to share His life with us. Freely sharing oneself with another means inviting another person into friendship.
Beginning to Know God, Not Just Know About God
Dei Verbum reminds us that knowing about someone is very different from knowing who someone is in personal familiarity and friendship. You might know someone’s date of birth, their previous employment, where they were born and where they’ve lived, but you wouldn’t really know them at all.
The implication is that while religious practice may once have been much more widespread than it is today, perhaps people were encouraged to recite true statements about God without necessarily knowing who He is. Scripture and Tradition are means by which we can begin to know God, not just know things about Him.
What does friendship ordinarily require? Firstly, proximity. Pope Leo presents the narrative of the Bible as God’s coming ever-closer to His people. He also reminds us of the necessity for “liturgical and community prayer, in which we do not decide what to hear from the Word of God, but it is He Himself who speaks to us through the Church”. Friends gravitate to each other, and so should we gravitate to church.
Secondly, conversation. This means not just saying the things we think we’re meant to say. We say the things we think we’re meant to say to a God we only know about but don’t really know in friendship. Pope Leo distinguishes between “words and chatter”. Mere chatter “stops at the surface and does not achieve communion”. In genuine and honest conversation, however, “the word serves not only to exchange information and news, but to reveal who we are”.
All this might seem strange for discussing a document of Vatican II. Maybe the Pope gives us a new angle by which to think afresh about rather well-worn and often contentious territory. People today often complain about the Council’s optimism, described by Pope St Paul VI as the Church going out “towards the world of today with its miseries, its sufferings, its sins”. As I said above, we needn’t get into all that here. What we can do, however, is recall that we all have miseries, sufferings, and sins, and each of us always stands in need of coming ever closer to God. People are less optimistic about the modern world today, and with good reason – but it would be catastrophic to let this mean we lose hope in God’s boundless love for each of us.
The strange fact is that the only thing stopping us from drawing closer to God is usually ourselves. When did you last articulate everything on your heart in prayer, holding nothing back? Imagine a friend who would always know the truth of any situation you discussed with them, and who would only ever interpret anything with your best interests at heart, from a place of sheer goodness and love. Well, you don’t have to imagine – it’s the ancient message of our Catholic faith, it’s our job to make it new: “to live and to cultivate friendship with the Lord” (Pope Leo XIV).
When did you last articulate everything on your heart in prayer, holding nothing back?
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Thank you. I suspect this is a point that lies at the center of many Church controversies, from the Reformation through to the present day. For many of us there is is a genuine tension between the God who is awful, transcendent and mighty and whom we need to worship corporately through the Church's cultic worship, and the God-made-Man who we are encouraged to be friends with, have a personal relationship with, open our hearts out to and so on, and it is hard to reconcile those two polarities.
Lurking in all of us who attend more traditional liturgies is the sense that the true God of the Bible is the God who sent down fire upon Elijah's altar and gave the Israelites a strictly formalised system of priestly sacrifices with which to please him from afar. We love the separation of the sanctuary from the nave and have a keen sense that a layman who steps over the altar rail might be struck by lightning. But Moses spoke to God face to face, and Our Lord's rising tore the veil of the temple in two, and New Testament is very clear that in Christ the distance has somehow been overcome and we have direct access to God in a way that we didn't have under the Old Covenant, which must change or somehow transfigure the priestly office and the nature of corporate worship even if it doesn't abolish the need for it entirely in the way that the extreme Protestants claim.
There's something of Ezekiel about it all: the dry bones of ritual worship have to be made to live, and perhaps it is that friendship with God that makes them live. I suspect that is how its best proponents see Vatican II: a renewed emphasis upon personal sanctity and prayer that can make the inherited bones of the Faith more fully alive.