Before his recent death, the Jesuit Paul Quay, longtime teacher at Loyola University of Chicago and St. Louis University, finished a work that is being acclaimed as perhaps the finest book of theology written in over a decade. In The Mystery Hidden for Ages in God (Peter Lang, 1995), Quay attempts to “recast the whole field of theology” by reasserting the vital unity of the Old Testament and the New.
Influenced enormously by the “New Theology” of the 1940s and 1950s, especially the work of Henri de Lubac, Quay re-examines the enormous importance of the Old Testament for our faith: “[T]he cultural decline now noticed and deplored by most reflective people, whatever their religious views, is the direct result … of the loss by Christians of the spiritual understanding of Scripture, most especially of the Old Testament.”
Marcion’s Revenge
One of the earliest controversies in the Church (second century A.D.) had to do with whether the Old Testament was to be regarded as the word of God. Marcion attacked the God of the Old Testament as cruel, maintaining that it was blasphemous to identify the compassionate and merciful God and Father of Jesus Christ with Yahweh.
Marcionism, of course, was firmly rejected by the Church. Today, however, the Old Testament has been lost to such a degree in both our understanding and our practice of the faith that we face what Quay calls “Marcion’s Revenge,” a truncated faith that becomes distorted when isolated from its source in Israel and the Old Testament. The consequences are multiple and deadly.
First, we face those moral relativists who reject Church teachings on a host of moral issues on grounds that Jesus himself never addressed those issues in the Gospels.
Second, we face those doctrinal relativists who place in question virtually everything Jesus had to say on grounds that he was a product of his culture and age and could not be expected to say the same things were he a twentieth-century American.
Third, we face all those well-meaning Catholics for whom the God of the Old Testament is too harsh and too patriarchal to be reconciled with their own falsely contrived notions of a gentle Jesus, meek and mild. If the stern and demanding Father-God of the Old Testament is not outright rejected today, as Marcion argued he should be, he has at least been displaced.
Fourth, we lose that whole process, from Creation through Jesus Christ and the Church, in which man first falls and then has to be brought through a long and difficult process of maturation within Israel, to that point at which he is able to receive Jesus Christ. Instead, we confront hosts of people within the Church who no longer take the accounts of the Creation and the Fall in Genesis seriously, nor the Mosaic Law and Israel’s struggles with it, because Christ did not recapitulated these events; he rendered them null and void.
The Psychic Universe
The most serious loss to our faith is the reality of the Fall. Many have observed that the most denied teaching of the Church today is that of the Fall. Most people believe that evolution, with its failure to find any period in human history that could be characterized as “original justice,” renders the Fall merely symbolic or mythological. Therefore, most people have no context for understanding the history of Israel as a struggle with fallenness. Nor do most people today have any basis for understanding the psychic character of fallenness as it works itself out in a human being from conception onward. Therefore, most people also have no way of identifying fallenness within themselves.
For that reason, Quay examines the structure of fallenness as it might be understood to be present in human beings, however unconsciously it might work itself out in the earliest stages of our lives. Quay points out the fact that every human being (from the moment of conception) is affected by original sin in the fact that God is no longer the center or focus of his psychic universe. The infant himself is the center of his universe. This does not mean that he cannot take God into account, but it does mean that God has been moved to the periphery of things.
This has enormous implications with regard to what love will mean for that infant.
The infant himself, because he perceives himself to be the center of the universe, will love those people and things whom he finds inherently lovable—whomever is attractive, useful, or necessary to him—and will hate those people and things whom he finds inherently hateful. Since he loves and hates in this fashion, he presumes everyone else, including God, loves and hates in this same way. The baby, in Quay’s words, “must discover some value that is rooted in himself as such. For he cannot be satisfied with a love that is not directed to him personally.”
But the baby is now set on a path that puts him in opposition to God. This desire for a value that he can call his own is insatiable. It can never be completely satisfied, and it will never cease in the demands it makes on others. Thus he will begin to see love as something that is coerced from others. He will think that if he discovers within himself a goodness that he believes makes him lovable, then other people will have no choice but to love him. Most seriously, as Quay points out, “To desire that a free person’s love for oneself be necessitated by one’s own excellence is to desire what belongs to God alone.”
An Unmerited Love
This notion that love must be merited makes love for one’s enemies impossible. It also makes it all but impossible to appreciate the goodness in others, because others are now perceived as rivals for the love the fallen child seeks. As for his relationship with God, “The infant is henceforth disposed to love God inasmuch as good for himself, not for God’s own goodness. He is disposed to love God for his own happiness, not to love himself as beloved by and made for Him.” In the end, as Quay puts it, “Thinking wrongly about the very nature of love, all his loves are falsified.”
At work here is exactly the same sort of sin as that committed by Adam and Eve. They, by eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, claimed that things were lovable not by reference to God’s commands but by reference to themselves and to what they found attractive and useful. “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate.”
Death is the ultimate price to be paid for this, because only God and that which comes from God can have ultimate value and therefore eternal life. Every human sin is a variant of that first sin and a product of the distorted notions of love and hate that fallenness produces within us.
Using typology and the spiritual sense of Scripture as that was understood by the Church fathers, Quay shows how the Old Testament is really a psychic history of the human race from its original fallenness through that maturity that is able to receive Christ.
He sees in Cain’s murder of Abel that fallenness of the baby working itself out in childhood. Because Cain’s sacrifice is rejected by God, Cain believes that God does not love him, loving being bound up in Cain’s mind with being lovable and meriting love. God’s act, intended to be disciplinary, is read as a manifestation of God’s judgment of him as unlovable. Cain also sees Abel as his rival, as someone who has coerced God’s love away from Cain and to himself. Abel thus merits his hatred. And so he murders Abel.
Israel and Christ
The people of Israel at the time of Christ’s conception were the closest thing on earth to a holy society. They had been carefully prepared for him to be his home and people. As Quay rightly observes, “It was this religion, this culture, this Scripture that formed Jesus as perfect man before the Father.”
At the same time, the culture offered its members a preparation for Christ unavailable elsewhere. They were not prepared in the sense that everyone in the culture was ready to hear him or had reached a suitable level of maturity. But the people were ready in the sense that their culture did not drag them back from psychic maturity or obstruct their further growth. Rather the culture of Israel, as an instrument of God’s grace, called them forward to grow yet more, even till old age, in contrast with the much lower levels of maturity reached by even the best of the pagan cultures around.
The Church fathers, and Quay, see Israel’s history as a revelation of the stages through which each of us most go as Christians—but with a crucial difference. Christ recapitulated Israel’s history in his own life—as unborn, infant, baby, child, adolescent, adult—but Christ didn’t just repeat those stages of life; he transformed them in his own life into what they should be. As the new Adam, like us in all things but sin, he revealed what a human life lived in perfect love from conception to death is. In other words, he neither simply repeated nor repudiated the Old Testament—he transformed it. This is what recapitulation means. And we are called to do this ourselves in our own lives and by his grace.
What has been lost to us with the loss of the Old Testament and the recapitulation theology of the fathers is the realization of what our faith is all about. Instead of growing to mature faith and love, people today are stuck in notions of love that are both childish and fallen.
What people demand of the Church today, therefore, is consonant with this childish and fallen understanding of love; namely, that the Church find their every desire lovable, their every demand admirable. When the Church attempts to discipline them, as God did Cain, they react like Cain. Believing that they must be lovable in order to be loved, they perceive the rejection of their demands as a judgment of themselves as unlovable.
Hence the extraordinary and emotionally charged attacks so often directed today against the Church by her own children. Like the youngster who throws temper tantrums when he isn’t affirmed in his desire to be regarded as lovable on his own terms, they often respond with vicious personal attacks on anyone who speaks for the Church and against their demands.
As Quay points out toward the end of his book, “the problem of the institutional Church, in large measure lies here: we do not wish so to adapt, but want all else to adapt to us.”
We have lost all sight of the fact that we are fallen and must be transformed in Christ to love as he loves. And the loss of the realization that we are called to be transformed in Christ comes inescapably with the loss of the Old Testament, of Christ’s recapitulation of it and of our need to recapitulate it as well in him.
Quay also points out that those who are trying to become mature in their faith are in for rough times from those who are not. As he puts it, “those who are spiritually more mature through their longer or closer following of Christ will be opposed or rejected or persecuted by those who are less spiritually mature. For, these latter have no adequate way to understand from within themselves what these others are really about.”
Quay is not arguing here for an attitude of arrogance, obviously, but simply pointing out that vilification is to be expected even from within the Church, because so many Christians have lost sight of what their faith is about and have no way “from within themselves” to understand the faith in a different way. And, sadly, many have no desire to understand their faith in a different way; all they want is affirmation of their own understanding.
Reclaiming the Old Testament
The antidote for this, according to Quay, lies in large part in reclaiming and recapitulating the Old Testament in our own lives. Because Israel prefigures the Church, the Church herself is called to recapitulate the history of Israel.
Just as the culture of Israel was designed to prepare people for Christ, so also the important mission of the Church is to continue the work of inculturation through Christ.
Although culture itself cannot automatically save people, we as incarnate beings are in need of “external” graces to aid us on our path to salvation. Thus the Church, in seeking converts to the faith in every culture, must work for “the development, mostly through these converts, of their culture, so that it becomes a more suitable and effective medium for assisting new generations to mature more easily and fully in the Lord.”
At the same time, it must be realized that no two cultures are identical, and therefore we must expect the Church, in her recapitulation of Israel’s history, to find herself recapitulating different stages of that history in different cultures and parts of the world.
Indeed, Quay sees in our age and in our societies of the West a recapitulation of the late monarchy and exile of Israel, in which even the words of their own Scriptures were lost to the people.
What is the Christian desirous of remaining faithful to Jesus Christ and willing to recapitulate with the Church—if necessary, through Israel’s terrible exile in Babylon—supposed to make of the situation in which we find ourselves today?
Four Theological Tasks
Quay sets forth the four most important things we must do in theology today in order to reconnect the intellectual life of the Church to the lives of ordinary Christians.
First, we must develop a new theory of original sin that takes into account the fullness of Church teaching while incorporating the best insights of psychology, genetics, and paleo-anthropology.
Second, we must reexamine the inner life of the Trinity in order to understand more fully the structure of love as well as allow both the Eastern and Western views of the Trinitarian processions to be given full justice.
Third, we must recognize the Trinitarian structure of creation and “understand more deeply the role of Christ’s humanity in His unique mediatorship.”
Fourth, we must recover the spiritual sense of the Scriptures as reflected in the patristic doctrine of recapitulation, and, in so doing, recover the spiritual sense of Scripture.
The one thing we should not do is abandon our fellow Catholics to the heinous aberrations of this age.