Contemplating Divine Forgiveness: An Inquiry into Its Nature and Implications
The Dictatorship of Mercy
In a family that is too austere, it can happen that if a child is raised with overly strict abstinence from pleasures, if they are too restrained and repressed, then once they break free from parental supervision, all the potential repressed energies accumulated previously, all the long-unsatisfied desires, suddenly find a torrential outlet. Where previously the individual was oppressed by the terror of a punishing God and crushed under the weight of an unbearable and distressing sense of guilt and despair, once they become aware of their freedom, they become ecstatic, seized by a state of exaltation and euphoria for the God of mercy and understanding, for full liberation, total innocence, and unquestionable salvation. This is the story of Luther repeating itself.
The Church before the Second Vatican Council was in some ways a stern mother of the first type. A certain Church, emerging from the Council and interpreted in a modernistic and Lutheran sense, became a liberal mother of the second type—a mother who gradually fades away. saying: "Do as you please and be at ease, for God is good. He does not desire suffering, does not punish, and always forgives and saves everyone, no matter what." Hence the widespread conviction today that no one says no to God because man, in the Rahnerian mold, is by essence an implicit and unconscious tendency towards God or, as Heidegger says, "openness to being" or, as can be derived from Severino, a manifestation of being or, as Husserl says, "phenomenon of being."
If before the Christian was terrified by divine severity, now they are certain they can sin freely because sin is no longer sin or because it is tenderly the object of mercy anyway. This paradigmatic experience of Luther has today become a personal experience for many. If before there was too much fear of going to hell, now many are ultra-confident of being forgiven. If before true or presumed faults were meticulously counted, now many are convinced there is no need for this because they consider themselves innocent.
They believe there is no need to repent, ask God for forgiveness, offer Him sacrifices, do works of penance, strive, and make sacrifices to correct themselves, because God takes us all as we are, we are already forgiven and saved freely. He asks nothing of us but to have faith that He has saved us. Others then disregard divine forgiveness and everything that conditions and follows it simply because they do not even believe in the existence of God.
Today there is no one who, like young Luther, is anguished by the conviction of being rejected by God. The anguish of today's man is the one Heidegger speaks of, anguish for "thrownness," in the emotional state of the guilty (schuldig), free and concerned (Sorge) man, of man as being-there (Dasein) of being, "being-that-I-am," founded on nothing and tending towards nothing ("being-for-death"), "nothing that nihilates," man as ek-sistence, project, being-in-the-world, unveiling, experience, pre-thematic understanding of being (Vorverständnis des Seins), home and shepherd of being, "thoughtful recollection" (Andenken), being open to being as time and finiteness, being as illumination, as poetic language, will to power, freedom as truth, being as the presence of the present, presence of the hidden and the mysterious, as the unveiling of the open and the sacred, not the God ipsum Esse of Saint Thomas, first cause, supreme being, and creator, but as the sacred in Hölderlin's sense, the Greek sacred: this is the "divine God" and manifestation of truth.
Whoever understands something and manages to find a logical thread in this hodgepodge of contradictory ideas, dark allusions, and suggestive glimpses is certainly commendable and does useful work, since even Heidegger, whatever he thinks of man, is a rational animal not devoid of intellectual gifts.
What to save and recover in this enormous disordered, tangled mass of philosophical, mythological, poetic, and fantastical materials? There are various interpretations of Heidegger's thought. They could essentially be reduced to two: either the call to return to God understood as ipsum Esse, and then one could make a connection with Saint Thomas; or the Nietzschean perspective of being as a will to power and then one connects with Nazism [1].
The difficulty in understanding what Heidegger wants to say and the possibility of drawing the most radically opposed conclusions from his thought is because he brings together the most contrasting thinkers: the Bible and Greek mythology, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Anaximander, Protagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Duns Scotus, Descartes, Saint Thomas, Luther, Hegel, Hölderlin, Schelling, and Nietzsche. Hence the fact that the most contrasting thinkers have appropriated Heidegger, such as Vattimo and Maritain, Severino and Bertuzzi, Derrida and Ruffinengo, Mazzantini and Deleuze, Dugin and Rahner.
Yet Heidegger's hodgepodge reflects precisely the chaos in which modern man finds himself, a chaos excellently described by Heidegger, whereby man appears as a fluid, free existential subject, mercied, nostalgic, and anguished, guilty-innocent, ecstatic, and taken by care, emotionally situated, being-in-the-world and for-death, the openness of being open to nothingness.
In the end, it is not clear whether Heidegger is a theist a pantheist an atheist an agnostic a nihilist a false mystic, an exalted one, or all of these together or simply a very skillful comedian and a diabolical impostor, who, not devoid of biblical, metaphysical, religious, ethical, and theological illuminations, a shabby heir of Luther, playing the part of the seer inspired by incomprehensible mysteries, amuses himself with his Gnostic oracles by mocking us and treating us like fools.
Yet Heidegger's anthropology and ontology are an exact and faithful portrait of the confused and anguishing state in which postmodern, post-Christian, post-theistic man finds himself (Bold Mine, Ed.), transcendent, dejected and projecting, enslaved by technology, forgetful of being and immersed in "they say" and entities. This is why Heidegger's thought, despite being convoluted and full of arbitrary word meanings, has been so successful. This is why so many recognize themselves in the horrible and sinisterly fascinating picture of Dasein.
What is Divine Mercy?
"I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy."
Exodus 33:19
It is impossible to understand how divine mercy operates if one disregards the mystery of predestination and the existence of the "elect," of whom Christ and St. Paul speak, and if one disregard, in general, the concept of divine election, which means that God does not save everyone, but only some among all, those whom He elects or chooses, namely those who allow themselves to be chosen, given the fact that some reject His call and disobey His universal will for salvation.
Many are called, but few are chosen, says Christ. God calls everyone, but not everyone responds to the call. Some prefer to follow their way, which they understand as "being free" or, as Christ puts it, "doing their own will," an act that is not to be understood in the sense of simply exercising free will, because in that sense, even the blessed do their own will, but in the sense of wanting something contrary to what God wants, essentially not wanting God as their Lord, supreme good, and ultimate end, but a created good or themselves, chosen by their own will.
We must remember that in God's plan for humanity, justice, and divine mercy are fundamentally intertwined. There is no mercy without justice. Certainly, if God had wanted to, He could have shown mercy to everyone, forgiven everyone, or even prevented original sin from occurring and placed all of humanity directly in a state of eternal beatitude and not allowed everyone to choose according to their own will, to be free to say yes or no.
Certainly, in that case, there would have been no exercise of punitive justice. Instead, God chose not to prevent the entrance of sin into the world and to leave everyone the possibility of rejecting His love. Why didn't He do it? We do not know.
It is a fact, however, that God preferred that everyone make their own choice rather than send everyone to heaven. Certainly, He is not responsible for the logical and necessary consequences of the rejection. But the overly lenient thesis that even those who reject God go to heaven is simply absurd. For the atheist, the materialist, and the pantheist, there is no interest in going to heaven since for them God either does not exist or God is themselves. For the do-gooder (or naïve idealist, term of my own, Ed.), even those to whom soul, spirit, metaphysics, the supernatural, theology, religion, holiness, the Bible, the Church, God mean nothing, even they go to heaven. But this is simply absurd.
In the actual historical unfolding of the plan of providence, there is no mercy without justice. He who denies justice denies mercy. Justice and mercy oppose each other because the former inflicts punishment and demands expiation, while the latter removes or mitigates suffering.
They are indeed together not simultaneously in the same subject but successively in different subjects or the same subject. Some, unrepentant, are punished and condemned; others, repenting, are shown mercy and saved. Or the same subject, depending on how they behave, is sometimes punished, sometimes shown mercy.
God shows His mercy to one precisely by punishing their offender. Israel sings of divine mercy that saved it from the Egyptians precisely because He punished the Egyptians.
If the oppressor believes they are forgiven while continuing to oppress the oppressed, how would God not endorse injustice or consider the oppressor's injustice as justice? A mercy that tolerates injustice is false and hypocritical. Is it a merciful God who does not punish the sin of the unrepentant, or is it rather an accomplice and unjust God? Is it true mercy that accompanies injustice, that calls evil good?
Certainly, one must pity the weak or those who sin in good faith or out of frailty. But can one pity the wicked hypocrite, the brazen and obstinate one who sins out of pride consciously and willingly? How does Christ treat such people? Is it the good deed that does not deserve punishment, or do we want to treat sin as if it were a good deed? Is this mercy?
If we reject that suffering is the wages of sin, do we deem the suffering of the innocent fair? If sin does not deserve punishment, yet suffering exists, and everyone, even the innocent, is shown mercy despite being sinners, do we want to say that mercy inflicts suffering?
If our engagement in Christ's redemptive mission absolves us from the necessity of expiation and the belief that we must bear the consequences of our sins, does this not contradict the truth that through the Father's mercy, we find atonement in Christ? And if there were no expiation, which is a work of justice, where would mercy be?
Is it just that innocent Christ pays everything while we, deserving of punishment, are exempt from contributing to our expiation, when we are the guilty and debtors to the Father? Is this true mercy, or is it a convenient way to avoid our responsibilities?
P. Giovanni Cavalcoli OP
Fontanellato, June 15, 2024
source:
https://padrecavalcoli.blogspot.com/p/sulla-questione-del-perdono-divino.html
Notes:
[1] Victor Farias, Heidegger e il nazismo, Edizioni Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 1988; Andrea Colombo, I maledetti. Dalla parte sbagliata della storia, Edizioni Lindau, Torino 2017, pp.612-73.