July 20th, 1989, Serial No. 00984

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Also, last of the fathers, but not the least of them, is the famous phrase for him. His life is astonishing. He was born in 1090 of a noble Burgundian family. He lived in a monastery. Well, they're not certain. His mother was a little. He had been drinking. He had quite a good, young education and quite a chap around town. At the age of 22, he entered Citeaux. It was an extremely austere house. It was just 14 years old. It had just been founded by the great Saint Robert. But it had such an austere life that there were no vocations. It was virtually dying. Well, he entered with 31 companions. And so this helped him survive. I think this kind of indicates the incredible power of these people, in one way or another, that we call saints. They're not just bizarre people who sit in corners

[01:04]

and beat themselves or something, talk piously. But there is an energy there that changes history. So he isn't the founder of the Cistercians, but he's the savior of the Cistercians. Then he's sent out at the early, early age, he's only 25, to make another foundation. He founds Clairvaux. It goes on to make many other foundations, including Riveau, that we'll be seeing as we talk about the St. Quince and Diderot, et cetera. And all these are gathered into one order that's governed by one general chapter. Now, this is what our little sketch is about. This is extremely important, because for the first time, we have what we assume has always been around. That is, the religious order. Remember, in the Benedictine model, the rule, you simply have autonomous families, considered as Christian families, basically. This is my family, it has its own space.

[02:05]

It is not that linked up with the Joneses, down the two blocks. So these Benedictines in southern Italy, and these Benedictines in northern Italy, and these other things, they were linked. It's- What about Cluny? Cluny? But they had a lot of success in the past, so I'm wondering if that's included in the structure. I don't know, but all I know is that this is the first tightly emerging order, of course, the Pope then immediately comes in and picks up, certainly Cluny is contemporary, so maybe it's parallel to this. Well, I'm not sure if this is for a reactionary view. Oh, yeah. But I was wondering if it's something that can be made at all liturgical or normative. Yeah. Well, you might want to nuance this. What I read was this is the first. I don't know if it's- It's a new structure. It's a new structure. Well, what this is, is an individual house can make foundations. A Cito founds Clairvaux, which founds Rivoli. And then the Pope can immediately plug in,

[03:06]

and he has a whole order at his disposal. And this is a powerful political force and spiritual force. So when he wants to gather the forces, this is for the Crusades, basically, of Faurot, the Abbot of Cito, who wrote Faurot, Bernard, and so on. So this is quite a different model from at least the early Benedictine or anything else. This is always assertion. Well, this is assertion. Then the Cluny, which is kind of contemporary to this, that'll make a good term paper. Me too. But Cluny predates this. I don't know if it predates it, though, in the immediate foundation, most of all. Well, it was a big, huge group, anyway, before, because this assertion reacted against the over-the-throne utilization. Of Cluny, yeah. But at one point, they were actually doing houses that depended from them in some kind of dependency. In any case, that's a... In the 10th century.

[04:09]

Oh, Cluny, I don't know. Citeaux started just a bit before Saint-Bernard. I have the date of Citeaux. Yeah, it, just, yeah, at the end of... It had been founded 14 years before, so it was founded in, yeah, 10 what? Anyway, it's around that period. And it's a powerful force, whenever Citeaux comes in here. Monasticism centralized for the first time, power efficiency, a powerful thing for the Pope. Now, then, you get your standard order, the Franciscans and the Jesuits and the Dominicans. This is the, and then the Benedictines become an order just in the last century, with great pressure from Leo XIII of the Benedictine Confederation, the order. Though we have the Commandolins come along and do some of the work, there's something similar a bit after this, from Commandoli, there are foundations

[05:13]

that depend upon Commandoli. But this, with Citeaux, will leave that open, is one of the first. Then he discovers his writing gift. In 1124, he writes of the steps of humility and pride. Quite delightful. There's the ladder of humility that leads up to heaven in the Rule of Saint Benedict. So he's asked to write about that. He says, well, I don't know much about humility, but I know a lot about pride. And the same ladder can go up or go down. So he writes about the degrees of increasing pride. But it's a classic medieval tract on the virtues. And then he gets very, he's not your typical monk, as is often the case, once it's in Peter Damianism, because he's out, involved in church politics very much. He is one of the co-founders. He helps get established the Order of Knights Templar. These are knights that wanted to go off and fight the Crusades, and also defend pilgrims, defend the sick, et cetera. This becomes a powerful, powerful political force also.

[06:15]

He defends them. So if you're into nonviolence, he's not exactly your patron saint. Then he enters into the election of popes, all that, and comes out on one side. He wins a big one there, where a disciple of his wins the papacy, Eugene III. And then he intervenes in the election of bishops and all this. He's very involved in condemning some of the emerging theologians in a pretty ferocious way, Abelard and others, that almost approaches character assassination if you read his ferocious letters against them. It's not just, I disagree with this thought or this approach to the Trinity. Let's discuss it, but he really goes after the idea that they're playing around with women and this kind of thing. Of course, with Abelard, that wasn't the case. Still, it's not directly to the point of theology. He preached the Second Crusade with great vigor. He whipped up lots of support for it. Well, it failed miserably.

[07:17]

So, obviously, as he was creating also all these admirers and friends and allies, he was also creating enemies. He wound up critics and very much criticized for, as a monk, preaching a crusade that ended up not as holy as he had thought. And so he anguishes over that. He dies. He lived a fascinating life. And I think the kind of example of someone who's not at all a plaster saint and not just with pieties, but a real force in history with real energy, all kinds of studies on him, since he is one of the first bridge persons between East and West. Again, he knew much of the Greek mystical tradition, origin, Gregory of Messis, who did Dionysus, and also the Western, Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory the Great, and, of course, the rule. So he bridges East and West in articulating a whole monastic theology,

[08:18]

the kind of thing that Aylred is talking about in his class to you. Bernard is a classic example of that, something to look at. Again, I think each one of us is called to be a theologian. That is to reflect, what do I do with Jesus? How do I understand him in the history of salvation? What do I do with the Holy Spirit? What do I do with the Eucharist? What do I do with Trinity? What's my concept of the human person? What happened at the fall? Is there a fall? Try to put all that stuff together in some kind of way that really isn't just a head trip. It nourishes the whole person. That's the challenge. He brings together something of what's sometimes called the optimism of Eastern theology, the whole image and likeness theology, with a kind of concrete realism in history of the West. His main source is scripture. And if you read his writings, they're just a chain of scriptural texts. This is characteristic of the patristic, that's why he's called the last of the fathers,

[09:20]

and of the monastic. Here's a page. 12 references to scripture on this one page. It just flows. They were reading it so continually. Here's about 14 on this little page, that kind of thing. So this is a model for us to get so fully into scripture that it is our basic language. He says, it is the source of my life, and my soul knows no other. A great Bernard scholar, Yeoman, said, the surest way to understand the heart of Bernard is to approach him through the Bible. So that's the way. Now, what do you do with the scripture? You just kind of memorize one text and another, another. What he does is have a whole, what's a fancy language called a hermeneutic. That is a whole way of interpreting it. Clearly, not everything in scripture is in the same level of importance. Some of the texts about how to slaughter calves

[10:21]

to sacrifice them in Deuteronomy, that's not on the same level as Paul saying, I pass on to you what I myself received, that Christ died and rose again, for instance. A text like that is decisive. The other texts are just slow, kind of fumbling, leading up to key moments. And this is the way it is in our life. We have lots of trivia, lots of marginal stuff, and then some key moments that might come quite as a surprise and might not seem to be that prepared by this stuff before, but which somehow gathered all together, et cetera. This is what scripture is all about as word of God, but how do you see it all in gathered? Well, his fundamental key to it is, we can call, spousal matrimonial love. He feels that's what it's all about. He writes that scripture sings the praises of Christ and his church, the grace of sacred love and the mysteries of that eternal marriage.

[11:23]

So that's what the whole of scripture is about, whatever it seems to be about. That's the way he's gonna gather together Genesis and Exodus and the canticle, of course, mostly of all. He wrote 86 sermons just on the first two chapters of canticles. That was culminating moment of scripture as for many of the fathers, the books aren't on the same level of importance. The father suggested that you start out as a young person reading, oh, the Proverbs, and then you go to the Psalms, but you end with the canticle, which is this mystical text of the union of God and the people of God, that is to say the union of Christ and his church. So who is Christ for him? The bridegroom. What is scripture? Scripture is the story of this love tryst between bridegroom and bride. The bride is the church. That is, the bride is each one of us. And so that's the way he'll read it. If there's a text from canticles, it's about Christ.

[12:26]

It's about his church. It's about us. So this is the classical patristic method. We've seen that before. It keeps coming up again and again and again, following the scripture. First of all, it's Christological, even if we were in the Old Testament, Christological. If we're reading about Moses, somehow it's about Christ. It's preparing for Christ. How can that be? Not that Jesus was hanging around there. But this is also salvation history, that God is prepared for all eternity, and God is providentially determined that Christ would be the center, so that David might precede Christ, but he precedes as intentionally leading up to, just as a Shakespeare would craft a place in the figure, the first figure, he's leading up to a number of Christians later on. Because it's Christological, it's ecclesiological. About Christ and his church, says the line I hope you just heard.

[13:27]

There was one body, says Augustine, says the whole church, that is Christ and the rest. And then because it's about the church, it's about each one of us. On a moral plane, how we should live, and on a mystical plane, how we should live one with another, mystical is in order to be God, and God is personal. Finally, it's about payment, about eschatological. So there's always this great dimension to it. So if you read a canticle, biblical scholars now say it's probably a love poem between a man and a woman, but always read by the rabbis as not just that. Well, we might think of it as just, well, somebody might be reading a novel or something. But of course, they existed in a whole synchro society for which something like that was seen in the larger context of Yahweh's covenant with his people. So even if it was implicit and unconscious, scholars are saying that's their, well, Bernard reads it, he pulls out what seemed missing.

[14:30]

So it's the love affair between God and his people. That is, because God's concrete presence in history is Christ, between Christ and the church, that is between Christ and each one of us, and thus how we should live, thus how we should relate to God and one with another. And that's what the kingdom will be, is the fullness of this. So this is a rich typological way of reading scripture that you'll find coming up again and again and again as we hear the father's vigils. And again, it's again flourishing in the latest hermeneutical theory. This is the way a St. Paul thought. This is the way a John thought. This is the way we operate at the unconscious level. This comes out in dreams, et cetera. This typological, for one thing, really stands for something quite bigger than it. Questions, comments? Yes. Holy shit.

[15:31]

Pardon me? Eschatological. That's about the kingdom, the final time. Yeah. So the key way of understanding what scripture is about is spousal love. And then I think this is a challenge to all of us. How do I put it together? What is the key for me? There's a great recent book out by a fine biblical scholar called The Elusive Presence. For him, this is the key of all of scripture from Genesis right to Revelation. God is there, present to his people, but in an elusive way, in a way that I can't just grab and control and manipulate the way I can append. And that's a theme that goes up again through all these texts, is woven in and out. So what you want to do is, again, come up with your own hermeneutic, your own way of interpreting scripture so it isn't just a series of kind of bizarre texts one coming out of one current and another out of quite a different current. There's quite a bit of diversity there,

[16:34]

but somehow it needs to hang together for us as word of God. Other comments? Another favorite image of him for scripture is banquet, is food for us. And that's what Lectio is all about, just as we feed our body, usually three times a day. So there should be this ongoing nourishment. And that's why in a place like this, we give quite a block of time for spiritual reading. And one of the things we might discuss when we get together is, what are you reading? What really is nourishing you, really? What isn't, et cetera? And then we have big chunks of scripture every day. Is that really being nourishment? So he writes, the word of God is the bread of life and the food of the soul. Therefore, let it descend into the very entrails of your soul. Let it nourish your affections and actions. This is the thing. He uses this delightful image that to hear the word of God

[17:36]

is like to indulge in a huge banquet. And then what is prayer afterwards? Prayer is a good, healthy belch as we let the gases and stuff come out. So it's very typically medieval delightful. But we're to chomp the honeycomb of the letter of scripture so that we can draw from it all its nourishment. So, spousal love and nourishment. This is the basic way he understands scripture. And sometimes he puts them together. He's basically a lyrical poet. And here he's working with the canticle imagery, talking about Christ's word, they merge for him. So Christ is the spouse. Christ is the feeder of the flock. These two images come together in mysterious ways. My beloved is mine and I am his who feeds among the lilies. Here he finds this text in the canticle that puts these two models together of feeding and love.

[18:38]

The bride is not unmindful that he who feeds is also he who makes his flock to feed and that he who abides among the lilies is the same as he who reigns above the stars. So the bridegroom that feeds the bride is right there in the lilies, but is also of the Lord of heaven and earth. It was when he began to feed as one of the flock that he first became her beloved. It was indeed the fact of his doing so that made him so dear to her, of the spouse nourishes of the bride. For he is her Lord in his loftiness and her beloved in his lowliness. He reigns above the stars and loves among the lilies. Even above the stars he loves. For he is love and never and nowhere can he do otherwise than love. This is a final kind of, whatever God's doing, it might seem out of anger, it might seem out of wrath, judgment. It's always out of love because God can never not love.

[19:39]

Christ can never not love. This is Christ's compulsion because Christ is this passionate lover and that's what scripture is. So scripture is the love letter of the spouse to us and we've got to read it in that climate. If someone who's not the beloved kind of intercepts the letter and reads it, that's kind of not proper. That's invasion of privacy. So if we read scripture, which is kind of a curiosity or with a kind of a what's God laying on me now, this isn't the proper place to be and to understand it. The place is to be in the mindset and the heart location of the bride. So love is the key. It's amazing. Here we have this celibate monk and this is the case throughout the Middle Ages. Some of the most passionate of mystical literature is written by celibate monks. So that's basically what scripture is. He knows much of scripture. He sometimes gets in trouble because he quotes it from memory

[20:40]

and he doesn't quite get it right and then he has to go back and apologize. But he loves every word of it. So basically, he'll take key texts of the New Testament and for the Old Testament, things like Hosea, et cetera, and say, these are decisive for interpreting the whole. These are the kind of the peak moments that weave all the rest together. So for instance, obviously the Johannine literature is gonna be decisive for him. God is love. Greater love has no one than this than to lay down one's life. So this is how he's gonna understand the cross. Not that we first loved God, but God loved us first. That kind of text. Then St. Paul, 1 Corinthians that we just heard. Love, it sums up all the law, et cetera. Then the Canticle. He just goes crazy over the Canticle. So these are his key books. Again, you might ask yourself, what are my key books of scripture? What really feeds me? A student of mine at Sant'Anselmo,

[21:40]

he did a thesis on Merton, studying Merton's writings in terms of what texts from scripture showed up more frequently, less frequently, fascinating. And it was basically a monastic model. Primarily John, the Psalms, and then the Synoptics and Wisdom literature. But you might ask yourself, what texts of scripture particularly nourish me, why? Because it's not all at the same level. If it's all at the same level, something's wrong. So scripture is his primary source. And because it leads directly to the living figure of Christ who is interpreted primarily as bridegroom, who's prepared from all eternity, and then comes at the decisive moment. He says his coming was not that of someone who is absent, but as the manifestation of someone who is always there but hidden. This is classic patristic. That is, Christ is there in a hidden way,

[22:41]

in a Abraham, in a Moses, in a David, et cetera. So Christ is the bridegroom. Is this just a fanciful way to approach Christ? Christ is often called, I don't know, rabbi in the New Testament. Christ is Christos, the Messiah. Christ is judge, Christ is friend, teacher, all kinds of things. Good shepherd, lamb of God. Is this a New Testament theme? And how central is it, a bridegroom? What do we remember of bridegroom text? The parable. And what are they waiting for? They're waiting for the bridegroom to come. And when he comes, the wise, so that's it. He uses language that Jesus, that immediately. That's right. So this is, he's here explicitly saying,

[23:42]

I am the bridegroom, and the disciples are the bride. Other texts. John the Baptist once talks about himself as the friend of the bridegroom. And then Jesus tells the parable of a king who prepares a great banquet for his, a marriage feast for his son. And you know, people don't wanna come kind of thing. So regularly, the historical Jesus uses himself, this image. Then of course, what does he, Paul, do here? That's right. That's right. That's right. So the church is the spouse. He, the apostle, is presenting the spouse

[24:45]

to the bridegroom, so that's basic. Where is Jesus' very first sign and miracle in the Gospel of John? That's right, the wedding feast of King, with some kind of mysterious archetype of what it's all about, now that the kingdom is breaking into history. So it is, and if you go in the Old Testament, something like Hosea, it's the theme that comes up in Isaiah, et cetera, not to mention the canticle. But so it's a powerful image, so think what you do with it. And it's a lovely way to interpret in every aspect of the mystery of Christ. Again, the cross is this pledge of the bridegroom, even unto death, of this wild love for his bride. There's a lovely passage. What do you do with the resurrection, where he takes all this canticle imagery of the return of spring, that is the return of life, and he applies it where the bridegroom is coming back. Just a lush passage, which I think is great.

[25:48]

The signs of the resurrection are like this year's flowers blossoming in a new summer under the power of grace. Their fruit will come forth in the end at the future general resurrection, but will last forever. As it is written, winter is over, the rain has passed and gone, flowers appear in our land, showing summer has come back with him who changed death's coldness into the spring of a new life, saying, behold, I make all things new. Here he's weaving in and out of the Old Testament, the new. His flesh was sown in death and rose again in the resurrection. By his fragrance, the dry grass turns green again in the field of the valley. What was cold grows warm again and what was dead comes back to life. Incredible a creation spirituality here, but in a lush way, it's also involved with resurrection. By the freshness of these flowers and fruits and the beauty of the field, giving off the sweetest of scents, the father himself is indeed delighted in the son who is renewing all things,

[26:51]

so he might say, behold, the odor of my son is that of a rich field at which the Lord is blessed. Yes, a full field of whose fullness we have all received. So he just weaves this, and then he gets again to the personal. I am spouse, you are spouse. The spouse enjoys greater familiarity by the fact that when she feels inclined, she may gather flowers and fruit in this field and soothe them over the depths of her conscience so that the couch of her heart will give off a sweet odor for the spouse as he enters. So here he's interiorizing it. Now, it's the individual Christian and the heart that becomes the kind of bridal chamber. If we wish to have Christ for our bridegroom, we must keep our hearts fortified by the testimony of our faith and the mercy of him who died for us and the power of him who rose from the dead. So I think just splendid stuff, pure poetry. It's not kind of scholastic syllogisms about the resurrection, but just a song.

[27:52]

I think it's the way to treat the resurrection. So you might think, what do you do with this image? It's a little bizarre because Bernard is a pretty macho guy out there preaching the Crusades, but here he's thinking of himself as a bride. What do you do with that? Well, with the medievals, there isn't this problem of kind of gender model and I've gotta be male, but there's this kind of capacity to be in touch within with this receptive kind of feminine dimension that is very important in the contemplative life. Questions, comments? To get away from that aspect of the bride, which I now feel that I kind of dispensed with the Holy Spirit in a sense and brought her in as a feminine character, which is exactly opposite of what you're saying, that I had a hard time dealing with the Christ figure and I pretty much self-visited the feminine aspect.

[28:54]

Well, different people do different things and that's certainly legitimate. Bruno is very strong on a spousal to wisdom that's a feminine figure in the Old Testament and the New. And we'll see, we've already seen Christ as mother and Christ as kind of a loving presence, wisdom figure and chick that gathers. So you can do lots of things. Not everyone easily gets into this kind of thing. Some do, of course it's ideal for nuns and sisters. And we'll see then with the iterators coming up next a very different model, similar in so many ways, but different, for him Christ is the beloved friend. And so his basic interpretive model for all of scripture isn't spousal love, but friendship love. And there, you don't get messed up with the genders, if you can. So, but that is a real issue. Well, there are comments on it. But this is a real rich theme and see what you personally do with it.

[29:58]

And again, he'll argue that this is what God is doing from all eternity is trying to wed Israel. And this, again, becomes specific. So something like the Eucharist is a marriage banquet and the virtues are living out our faithfulness to Christ, our bridegroom, et cetera. But it fills the whole of Christian life with a passion and a drive. You can see how he could inspire 31 relatives and companions to enter with him, et cetera. It's not just a dry, abstract stuff. And we'll see also in his theory of the human person, each one of us implicitly has an anthropology. That's how do we understand the human person? He starts with the classic Genesis message about who we are. This is a who the hell am I kind of thing. We're created by God in God's image and likeness. This is foundational for the fathers in the medieval writings. If we're in God's image and likeness,

[31:00]

something like yearning after divinization, total union with God, makes sense because we're the image and likeness of God. If we're just called to be respectable Christians who pay our taxes and go to church on Sunday, this is a kind of an implicit anthropology of many Christians. God is way up there and we're way down here, but we can be good, kind of thing, respectable. This is totally different from what he's sketching. So we're image and likeness of God, as all the fathers would agree. But in what consists our being image and likeness? Obviously, there's all kinds of stuff in the human person. And some things are lower and some things are higher. Some things get us away from our being image and likeness. Some things get us higher. Now, Augustine, for instance, said we're image and likeness precisely in our mind. This is the highest faculty. With our mind, we can know the divine word. We can know God. We can contemplate God. Our passions are the lower. They get us messed up. They kind of drag us down. And so we become less and less image and likeness of God

[32:02]

as we get all caught up in, oh, anger, fear, sex, all that. None of that is in God, who's pure, passionless truth. So that's one way to go. And there's a whole important current in Eastern and Western mysticism that's the wisdom-knowing current. Yeah. Yeah. When you say passion, it seems to me that it probably has to be understood and not just as a word, because even in Scripture, God is presented in our Old Testament as having various passions. He is angry. And certainly those aspects in our humanity are very much a part of our wholesomeness, our fullness in the sense that.

[33:03]

So. Well, there you're spelling out an anthropology. For instance, someone like Augustine would very much dispute, but many contemporary theologians would absolutely agree with me. So this is where we come up with different anthropologies, and it's good to reflect. Is our moments of anger, moments of sadness, are these good? There's a whole patristic current that was perhaps excessively influenced by the Stoics that said, no, God, Scripture might say that, but God wasn't really angry, and then he became reconciled. God can't change because he's a perfect changelessness. Well, there you are. Now, the fathers would say that's in his humanity, but as we go deeper into his divinity, there's this changelessness. Passion means precisely change. There can't be change in God. Yeah. I don't change it.

[34:33]

I don't think that anger was driven by his lowest passions. Okay, but the basic question, Christ, again, is man, and, you know, he dies and things. God never died. Jesus dies. God never was born. God is eternal changelessness, according to a certain theology that's very influenced by the Greeks. So this is being hotly debated today. So you're taking a position that many theologians take today. Somehow, we have to be able to say that in God, there is joy, there is, do we say there's anger in God? It's all the way through Scripture, but again, there's a strong current, and it was most of the fathers who would be horrified by this. There is no emotion or passion at whatever level in God, because that inevitably means passio, which means to be moved, and God is an eternal fullness of non-moved, mover. What does Scripture say? Well, whatever, I think there's one text

[35:38]

that simply says Jesus was angry, but it's very rare, even apparently in the synoptics, but I think what Chris is saying, what they describe him doing in the temple, I think you can describe it as seal or whatever, but there is one text somewhere in the New Testament that describes Jesus as angry, and what do we do with that? Was this a kind of a lower, we've got two hands, and we're here. Just two quick comments. He healed our hands the way they had, so he looked up, and then angrily. Ah, well, there you are. The other side of, I thought on the other side of God having passions. There are those who say that when we find passions in God, what we are trying to do is create God in our image. That's just another side of it. Now, this is just anthropomorphism, as they say. The Greek philosopher who said if horses theologized about gods,

[36:40]

they would have the shapes and characteristics of big horses, kind of thing. So we project up there a God who's sometimes angry, sometimes joyful. Who was it? Yeah, Merton, who says, when we say God is angry, what we're saying is we've behaved in a way that if God were human like us, God would be angry. How God is in God's self is just a total mystery. But somehow it's appropriate to talk about God's anger, because it's the only way we can conceive of God really being related to the horrendous things. If I'm there beating a poor little baby, God can't just be indifferent to that. But it's a big issue being debated today, and a fascinating one. And some of those, it depends how much you're into the old New Testament models, and how much you're into more classic theology models that are influenced by Aristotle and Plato. Yeah, I guess I would just say, I agree that it's not medical, but it's imposing our nature into God.

[37:43]

I think it's part of seeing that our nature does reflect something that God has created, and that he did create us in an image that we've not seen. That's right. And in what, again, consists this image and likeness? That's the question we're wrestling with now. And again, Augustine put it at this sublime summit, he thought, to get beyond these kind of problems of men's, the mind that knows the eternal truth. Now we'll see that Bernard, why this is interesting, he takes an entirely different track. And this, again, invites us to come up with, how do I understand the human person? When am I most like God? Yeah? Yeah? Well, I'm just interested in how the interpretation of Jesus, the moment he's dead, he's saying that he's anxious, that he encircles the interpretation. Analysis, I'm curious about it. Yep. How do we connect to the person who's controlling you?

[38:47]

Lowering awareness. But you can see here we're talking about Jesus, we're talking about Christology, how to do a theology of Christ, and we're talking about theology. What about in God? And we're talking about us. What about in us? And it all wants to fit together. And so this is where someone like Berger, I think, really challenges us to kind of wrestle with this stuff and put together our own Christology, theology, ecclesiology, where does the church come in? And anthropology. So we'll come back next time and we'll explore how he spells out where is the image and likeness in us.

[39:48]

Okay. I think we won't have a class next week, because Monday I think we're having, is that the case? Monday we're having two lectures on friendship. Is it Monday? This Tuesday. In any case, it's some time next week that makes me pretty, I'd invite you all to go to that. It's on monastic friendship, a key category by a great scholar of our time on that, and he's just produced this huge book on the topic that Fr. Avery is reviewing, so that will take the place of this. Then the week after, God willing, we'll come back to St. Bernard.

[40:26]

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