On Intuition and Knowing God
All Christians are called to be theologians.
At first glance, such a statement seems absurd. A theologian, by modern estimation, is someone usually dedicated to an intensely literate life buried in books and Scripture: an academic, perhaps, or a member of the religious clergy, someone smart enough and dedicated enough, and with enough time on their hands, to synthesize the valuable texts of various periods in history and to present it all in a coherent framework. Theology is considered the queen of the sciences, the crown that adorns the pursuit of all knowledge. It is considered rigorous, sometimes abstract, often difficult. But while no Christian could consider it irrelevant without doing great violence to his own faith, all the same most Christians, whether by their own humility or cowardice, tend to shy away from the field and offer, weakly, the aside, “I’m no theologian,” when the hour is late enough and the bourbon rich enough to open conversation.
Yours truly counts himself among these. Others, to be sure, may lack the taste of self-restraint, who dive too deeply into the other direction, brazenly putting forth theologies in public that are at best, severely misguided, and at worst, openly blasphemous. To those types only prayers can be offered up that they may one day renounce what they publicly proclaim or profane and seek a more humble truth.
These aside, theology most broadly defined simply refers to the study of God. All men are called to be philosophers in the same sense as all Christians are called to be theologians. We should, to the best of our ability, systematize our reasoning and do our best to think clearly, as philosophy demands of us, but this does not mean that all men necessarily need extensive study of Hegel or St. Thomas Aquinas, nor even of Plato or Aristotle, in order practice philosophy in a manner befitting our stations in life. Likewise are all men called to be artists, insofar as we should appreciate beauty and seek it out or include it in our works wherever possible. This does not mean all men are called to study the brush like Rembrandt.
All men are also called to be theologians in the same sense. Men seek a reason for being higher than philosophy is capable of delivering, and those who use reasoning in order to seek that higher purpose tumble, by modern standards, often by accident, into the realm of natural theology. Many such men are secular humanists, disillusioned by what they have presumed about organized religion—by which they almost certainly mean Christianity, if not Catholicism specifically—and invested in their own Promethean pursuit of more knowledge. Driving forward, they have to ask, in so many words, “what is God?” But the closest answer they can reach is one that indicates a being greater than they can possibly conceive.
Disoriented, the secular humanist in such a position frequently shirks back, uncertain and out of his own element, and surrenders his own judgment to the dogmas of natural sciences. He can thank his disorderly interior faith for this. Science, worse still than philosophy, then tries to wrestle with natural theology only to return to him results that simply don’t make any sense. Rather than being humbled before his own disorientation and misunderstanding, he is horrified that he knows so little and that his own ego prohibits him from learning more.
The honest modern man soon collapses this entire belief system as he recognizes that it cannot hold itself together without a coherent presence of infinity at its core—without God, in other words. As soon as he admits this, he at least recognizes the proper ends of natural theology, so that even if done imperfectly, he’s using the right tools for the job.
But there is more to natural theology than merely discerning that God exists. Moreover, in fact, there is more to theology than merely natural theology. Theology may—or in fact, may not—be the queen of the sciences, but it has ultimate ends that are desirable by every living Christian. We are called to seek knowledge of God insofar as that knowledge serves a greater purpose in our relationship with Him.
Theology in General
Within the Christian tradition, theology is typically taught according to three categories: natural, dogmatic, and mystical.
Natural theology consists of arguments and exegesis from the position of reason and the natural world. Consider it an effort to answer the simple question: what are the things we can know about God that are presumably self-evident according to our places in creation? Natural theology is the easiest form of theology to misrepresent as philosophy, particularly metaphysics, by the modern practitioner. Any sophistic digressions into debunking long-standing arguments for God by pop intellectuals bridges into the territory of natural theology by definition, despite the absurd, abhorrent, or ridiculous means by which they do so.
Dogmatic theology is largely separate from its natural counterpart, relying on exegesis of Sacred Scripture and Tradition to come into greater knowledge of God. This is, ultimately, slightly more important form of theology than natural theology if only because it entails the study of what Our Lord, by His Authority, specifically told us about Himself and His relationship with us. As such, dogmatic theology, wedded to the Church, presents a framework by which we can come to know God more personally than the abstractions presented by arguments from nature and pure reason.
Mystical theology, considered its own category, is slightly less systematized as its natural or dogmatic brethren. Christian mysticism is understood more commonly as the study and development of one’s prayer, or the tuning and honing of one’s interior life in order cooperate with the graces bestowed upon us by God and to allow Him to craft us into being the ideal vessels for His love. This is central to Catholic teaching and imperative to salvation. Mystical theology seeks knowledge of God directly through prayer.
It’s important to note here the descending order of abstraction from natural to dogmatic and finally to mystical theology. Each form carries a significance worthy of study, but this descent from abstraction into practicality, better understood as an ascent from abstraction toward intimacy, clarifies the ultimate purpose of theology. True, it is obviously to know God, but theology is sensible only when this knowledge is ordered toward maintaining a relationship with Him. We are called firstly to love God, but to love Him we must have some certainty of knowledge of Him. Theology exists for this purpose: not to seek knowledge of God as some sort of abstraction, as that would render the knowledge irrelevant, but to seek knowledge of God specifically to clarify and deepen the sort of relationship one has with Him as an adopted son, subject, and friend.
The ends of all theology should then be considered practical above all. Mystical theology could be considered, in a very rudimentary sense, a practical implementation of the fruits of both natural and dogmatic theologies. What we know about God in a general sense will inform how we reach out to Him with our interior lives, and this is true of the sort of things we understand about him by natural reason and by the expression of Himself that He provides for us in Sacred Scripture. Lacking what is ultimately its mystical element, theology is not only incomplete, but useless: of what good is Heaven for the man who does not pray?
All theology, then, must be studied with this ordering in mind. It is a living discipline whose object of study is God, and God is three persons. Our study of theology is not then isolationist, either; it is not, as our secular humanist from before supposes, merely a search for some meaning applicable solely to ourselves. It is the definition of a bond we cultivate with God Himself, and this definition, this practice of theology, naturally defines our lives with meaning as a result.
But with any object of study, particularly in this field, we must seek a teacher.
On Teaching and Knowledge
A question may now arise. The realm of mysticism is the real of the interior life. How certain can we be of knowledge arrived at purely by means of introspection?
To begin with, this question starts with false premises. A disordered interior life is one that ruminates purely on introspection, shutting itself off from its higher functions to toil and stew within its own cognitive habits and thought patterns. Knowledge arrived at behind such a closed door is naturally the subject of doubt; we are fallen creatures with darkened intellects, and even when we are thinking rationally, our darkened wills do not always let us agree with what we presume to be true. It is only natural to consider knowledge arrived at purely by some interior functions, divorced from both the divine will and from exterior reality, to be inferior. It’s like trying to hit a dartboard with a blindfold on.
Fr. Fehlner points this out in one of his remarkable studies on St. John Henry Newman and the Franciscan tradition. Knowledge of knowing, or put another way, certainty of knowledge, must begin with something other than the rumination upon interior things:
To the extent that certitude or personal assurance is attempted without Christ, knowing in fact never transcends the level of subjective bias or fiction (we might say today “myth”). And to the extent “objectivity” is attempted without reference to the eternal Word, learning never passes from the stage of hypothesis, inference, proof, to that of unconditional or infallible assent, i.e., it remains skeptical or agnostic. Together, they tend to cancel each other: pure objectivity is impersonal—personal knowing without objectivity is purely arbitrary and irrational, as Bonaventure notes in his frequent discussion of divine illumination.1
Although fully-articulated atheism is something alien to the pagan world, a sense of de facto atheism, which shunts God from the interior life, and as such, closes the door of the mind, is an atheism that the authors of Sacred Scripture go to great pains to emphasize guarding against. Throughout the literature of the Psalms and Proverbs, of St. Paul’s epistles and the Gospels, indeed writ large across the entirety of the Bible, is a crucial, fundamental element of praxis: pray unceasingly. This does not mean, necessarily, to join a cloister or to embrace the prayerful asceticism of a hermit’s life. It means to coordinate one’s thoughts with God, to leave the door of the mind open such that thoughts of God are never far from the immediate topics of consideration.
This is necessary not simply to live virtuously, but indeed, as Fr. Fehlner elaborates, to think rationally at all. Reason itself is subordinated to this connection to God. Without this sort of ongoing prayer, our reasoning capacity is diminished into, eventually, arbitrary best guesses that leave the will very much in the dark. It’s reduced to something of a Kantian autism, riddled with second-guesses and reinforced by a hidden, unrecognized self-assurance called intellectual pride. If Faith is to be understood as requiring any sort of ‘leap’ so often attributed to it by critics, this leap is here, at the moment knowledge and certainty come together in our cognitive experience: a sort of leap into assent. This isn’t even really a matter of religious faith, so much as certainty in presumed data: an acknowledgment of reliable information—and the reliable discernment of it. As Fr. Fehlner continues to explain,
For Bonaventure then, all knowing begins personally, not simply in an arbitrary act of the learner’s will, but with a judgment that in the first instance is, or should be, an act of fidelity and trust, an establishing within the learner the first, immediate, transparent, lucid point of identification with the real as intelligible, i.e., true. Total lack of fidelity is precisely what produces incertitude at the starting point of knowledge and skepticism at its conclusion.2
Faithlessness, or put more precisely, disordered faith, undermines one’s footing at the very beginning of reason. Reason may in fact lead us to the Faith in a very limited way, but our personal sense of faith decides the starting line at which reason begins to function. We must invest this sort of premeditated faith in something before we really begin using our reason to make decisions: customs, teachers, the general cultural and intellectual landscape that we are born into, et cetera. As a result, like with the beginning of any discipline, we must search fervently for a teacher, and this teacher is always some person who guides us in our experience and corrects our errors.
It is true that learning is possible without an instructor in the flesh, as evidenced by so many autodidacts of centuries past. However, in these cases two points can be made: first, that these autodidacts always learned from books, about or by which some author could be understood as a teacher in a removed sense; and second, that there should be little doubt that a man with direct access the same writer as they had read would no doubt have had an easier time of learning.
In the case of theology, the same more or less holds true. Natural and dogmatic theology both hold in reserve towering intellects worthy of instructing even the simplest of minds, and often are these men shared across the disciplines. St. Thomas’ Summa Theologiae is a good example of a work that has a foot each stably entrenched in both forms. Mystical theology, too, has its instructors, although the practice of teaching it is more nuanced; the writings of Sts. Theresa of Avila or John of the Cross, for instance, lack the systematized, rational approaches of dogmatic manuals, yet nonetheless convey precisely convey, as much as mystical thought can, the theology one engages with in meditative prayer.
Above all teachers in theology stands one, however, whose proximity to the subject of study was predestined from the start of all time. Who of all creatures knows God better than His most Holy Mother? Certainly not the highest of the angelic host, who fell from Heaven upon hearing, according to Venerable Sister Mary of Agreda, that the throne immediately before God’s was reserved for the woman to be the mother of God Incarnate. And certainly not even Adam, who also knew God as the first man brought forth into creation, and who rebelled in Eden and, in doing so, hamstrung his own desire to know God even more fully than when he was created. No, it has to be some other creature, revered more highly than these, who knew God in life and grew inextricably closest to him all the way until her death and assumption: none other than the Queen of Heaven.
Before addressing her as our teacher, however, we must address what positions her so uniquely to be that first among all theologians: her Immaculate Conception.
The Immaculate Conception
Understanding this emphasis on the Queen of Heaven necessarily begins with her Immaculate Conception, by which she is even heralded according one of her official titles, as “she is full of grace, the Immaculate”3. She is referred to specifically as the Immaculate Conception at Lourdes, to St. Bernadette, she declared herself so seemingly within moments of the Church having declared, finally, this Marian dogma to be infallible. There is no other Immaculate Conception. She was predestined first among creatures to be the Mother of God upon his Incarnation; the very notion of the Immaculate Conception springs forth as a result of Christ’s Absolute Primacy. Of course she would have been preserved from the sort of death brought into the world by Adam’s transgression; she was the mother of Our Lord and was so intended to be such from before time.
We may ask ourselves, why only her, however, and not more of her line? Why should only she have been protected from the Fall while her own mother, or her mother’s mother, was not? Or, for that matter, why could not have the entire human race have been preserved as she had been? These questions warrant at least some answers, but the real answer is that the very question itself operates under false presumptions.
To determine this, we should consider the answers that can appeal to nature, particularly with regard to the nature of the Fall and God’s relationship with creation. The latter, specifically, is worth our attention, as it is His relationship with all of creation that makes the Immaculate Conception all the clearer. When God designed to Incarnate, he predestined this from the formulation of the world, prior to any possibility of, first, and then any reality of, second, the damaging of creation’s perfection on account of Adam sinning. The world, and also therefore man, began to exist with the Incarnation already in mind. The person of Jesus Christ was and remains and will remain for all time as the ultimate end of all creation: the uniting of the Divine Word with created flesh in the mysterious hypostasis.
But we should remember Genesis, too, when considering the Incarnation. “Male and female He created them,” we can recall from Genesis, and in like manner, Eve fashioned “as a helper” for Adam, with the instructions to go forth and multiply—all before the Fall introduced holes and rifts in the created order that no doubt gave rise doubts, despair, and all manner of vices that preyed on new neuroses.
Personhood pertains to singular creatures, but singular creatures are not complete when the interests of the divine plan are considered. Adam was created with the intention of a family to come about, in other words, and the creation of this family was clear and intentional; the Fall played no part in its conception. When considering Our Lady’s relationship to Our Lord, a general parallel must be kept in mind. She is His Mother, and as Tradition holds it, the Spouse of the Holy Ghost, and of course, the first created daughter of the Father. The relationship between God and creation is best understood by the Incarnation for this reason: the Incarnation is, precisely, that relationship, and Our Lady’s role as the Blessed Mother then serves as a model for how free agents should cooperate with the divine will, but more importantly, this role defines her as the physical, literal link between the fallen world and the perfection of the Godhead.
We see then the reasonableness of presuming—historically speaking, prior to its dogmatization—the Immaculate Conception in the first place. Her Immaculate Conception is the term given to this system of relations between the Holy Trinity and the Blessed Virgin; Our Lady is not merely a special creature, chosen out of a sea of possible women, plucked out and given the graces necessary to make her perfectly attuned to the will of the Divine Word. She is the most special creature who was ever made, singularly designed and crafted into personhood in a unique action of the Divine Will. If the Fall had not had happened, she would still have been His mother, and she would still have been special among all creatures. This relationship must be considered with Our Lord in mind, as every action she undertook and continues to undertake, being full of grace—i.e., perfected by God and without any stain or blemish of sin—is performed with Him in mind.
Bl. Scotus’ articulation of the doctrine of her Immaculate Conception positions Mary inseparably from Christ, and thus at the perfect juncture for mediation between creation, had it remained innocent or not, and the Godhead. Her will is perfectly attuned to His. She lacked in life and, obviously, in death, any impurities or personal deviations from the Divine plan. And additionally, she was designed favorably as the foremost of creatures from the beginning. These things all together present Our Lady as both the perfect matronly advocate for us in Heaven and the perfect instructor or presenter of the Divine for us here on Earth.
Scotus removed the final ambiguities and resolved the principle objections and, in so doing, formulated the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception which simply states how, with a fullness of grace and beauty beyond compare, Mary both precedes and follows Christ at once, i.e., is mother and spouse. Indeed, the very method of arriving at this conclusion, i.e., of attributing to Mary in the highest degree whatever is of perfection and otherwise not inconsistent with revelation as authoritatively confirmed, thus making her in this order beyond compare and the source of perfection for all other created persons, reflects the nature of theological method rooted in the possibility of knowing directly the fullness of divinity in human guise.4
Her title as the Immaculate Conception means Our Lady is unique among all created beings, as it defines her as, again, first among all creatures, privileged with a relationship to Our Lord Incarnate and, likewise, to the Godhead that the rest of creation has in a more limited sense—and this is to be understood has prior to sin ever entering the picture. As such, we cannot speak of Our Lord’s mother without speaking about Him, as anything said about her features Him throughout. This is one of the things meant by her title Mediatrix of Graces: not so much that she is some sort of heavenly administrator, but that her uniqueness, as Fr. Fehlner explains,
places her within the order of the hypostatic union, not as another divine person incarnate, but as that created person whose union with the Father and the Son is so perfect by grace that no more perfect example of this can be found or conceived, unless we recall the eternal relation of the Spirit to Father and Son by nature.5
“Mary possesses a fullness of grace that constitutes a primacy with Christ,” he repeats, “enjoying such a primacy” of it that “she is the source of life for all others, both those who preceded her as well as those who come after, beginning with Adam.”6 Our Lady’s privileged position, again, is not arbitrary. She was not simply chosen among many different women; she is the first woman in the Divine plan, whom Eve was fashioned in the likeness of so that she may have in Eve a first prefigurement. This is how all of creation is disposed to come to know Our Lord through her: in its literal sense, she assented to His Incarnation and carried Him for nine months before caring for, tending to, and staying by his side for the three decades leading up to His public ministry. But in its mystical sense, too, we come to know Him through her, by her privileged, intimate union with the Holy Trinity.
Likewise should this be known as exactly why Our Lady’s importance to the Church at large cannot be understated. Our Lady’s relationship with God enabled her to share in her Lord’s Passion, being at the foot of the Cross “unbroken”. In this the Church, as a divine institution implemented by God for the safekeeping of the Faith, is founded not only on the rock of Peter, but also maintained, through the Church Triumphant, by Our Lady’s presence at its center as the Queen of Heaven. As such, her title Mediatrix of Gracesquite naturally follows: her presence in the institution of the Church is not an abstraction to be understood only in the sense that she’s presiding over the events of God’s providential unfolding of history, but rather directly known. Providence itself is this direct working of God upon all of his creation, every speck of dust and every free agent within it: all are accounted for within the scope of providence. Our Lady’s position in the Church likewise must be recognized in this personal capacity as well.. “Bonaventure urges all to take refuge with their Mother: first Mary, then the Church,” Fr. Fehlner mentions just a passage beforehand; “Only when the sinner has found his Mother will he also find the home of his Father.”7
This is why, as Fr. Fehlner points out just a passage beforehand,
The principle is not an arbitrary “petitio principii,” neither in our lives nor in our intellectual activity, because as Immaculate, Mary is in fact the primary term of the mission of the Spirit, and enjoys a fullness of wisdom and grace that, in the economy of salvation, is the guarantee of certainty and inerrancy by grace, as the Spirit of God is the guarantee of the fidelity of Father and Son by nature within the Trinity.8
The Immaculate Conception is therefore not just one element among many that constitute the identity of the Blessed Virgin. It is in fact the key defining element of her identity, intimately related to her status as the mother of God, and because of what it is, it comes to be something we use to define ourselves. It defines the Church, in the sense that her mediation supernaturally connects the Church to its King, as she is the Mediatrix of graces. It defines creation, as the Church, within creation, is through her subject to its almighty and most merciful Lord. And it defines ourselves, each and individually, as it is by her relationship with the Godhead that we come to Christ, who grants us our identities and leads us into the vision of that Heavenly mystery.
In descending order then we see quite clearly an intended hierarchy: God’s relationship with Our Lady first, then their relationship with the Church, and then the relationship of these to creation and the world, and then to each of us personally, intimately, within the mystical experience of prayer and the practice of theology.
Our Lady, Teacher of the Faith
Mary is the Mother of Faith, and therefore the Magistra theologiae par excellence, the model and guide and final support of all who study or teach about God. Without her love and active involvement in our lives, and a corresponding love and unconditional docility on our part, there can be no theology worthy of the name.9
So begins Fr. Fehlner in the very study drawn from so far. A phrase is common in these circles: de Maria numquam satis—of Mary, never enough! “Ignorance of Mary,” he goes even further, “is ignorance of the nature of theology; a neglect of Mary is in effect the cultivation of theological blindness, doubt and despair.”10 Our Lady is not to be ignored, neither by academic theologians nor by those low theologians such as ourselves, they that all Christians are called to be.
Through Mary we come to recognize the mystery of the Incarnation by her virginal maternity and maternal virginity. And in understanding the Immaculate Conception, we find the light in which we understand how and why this Incarnation has come to pass, i.e., the primacy of Christ. Hers, then, becomes the first or primary witness which provides the assurance found in all other witness. That is why she is teacher as well as mother. And like the work of the Spirit, Mary’s teaching has a certain lucidity, purity, transparency. It is aimed at the clarification of another, her Son. We may indeed recognize Him without adverting to the light, as we breathe without adverting to the air. Yet what we breathe and what we see can better be appreciated to the extent that we advert to air and light.11
The subject of all theology remains God, so there may arise a question with our current line of inquiry: of what importance does Mary have in the study of God? The previous section, hopefully, clarified much of this. Her Immaculate Conception is crucial to understanding both her relationship with God as well as her relationship with ourselves, the Church, and all creation. It naturally follows that we should seek to understand God through the foremost of exmplars who came to understand Him first. This entails emulation, to our abilities, of her in her adoration and perfect union with the uncreated light of the Godhead. The Lord, and perhaps more specifically, the Holy Spirit, both, uniquely prime us to be instructed in the practice of theology, but we need something in addition to this to be fully receptive to their teachings. We need that mediation between God and man, and that mediation is the Immaculate Conception.
Theology is considered, by the Subtle Doctor, to be ‘unscientific’ in the sense that it is not a body of knowledge necessarily arrived at by having compiled or studied other bodies of knowledge. “Its starting point is the credible,” Fr. Felhner explains, “rather than the evident,” and this is specifically due to theology’s position as the study of a pre-rational starting point of knowledge.12 It is the “starting point for understanding all else and is authoritative and dogmatic,”13 in other words; one’s theological positions inform the rest of his intellectual framework and therefore the rest of his general mindset.
This is somewhat unique to theology, as theology, as stated above, is not simply the detached contemplation of certain natural truths. Theology is the study of God specifically, which aids us in the living experience of loving God and growing, to our ability, the relationship He has with us. But because God is invisible to us, at least in any scientific sense, there is required a sense of witness of Him that more common fields of knowledge do not require. This witness is the zeal of religious fervor, predicated upon, if it is demanded, martyrdom. It is God Himself Who comes to us, specifically, individually, uniquely, to present this invisible spiritual reality.
We must go a step further here, however. As we are each called to be witnesses of this, so then there must exist a primary witness, a greatest or foremost witness, whose witness is more intimate and privileged to that lovely Godhead than ours. And, of course, there is. As Fr. Fehlner explains:
The act of one who affirms that what God has revealed is true, is not only an act of learning; it is also an act that enlightens by assuring those who, out of love, accept that witness, that they, too, without fear of error or change, can assent to the truth of what is revealed. In this sense every believer, and the Church as a whole, is a witness to revelation. Mary’s witness, however, in the visible order is such in a preeminent fashion, because prior to her, there is essentially no other witness: only the invisible Holy Spirit of whose grace she is full.14
All of this requires us to believe in Who God claimed Himself to Be in Sacred Scripture, to believe Him in His institutions of the Sacraments, and to believe Him in His words to us as recorded by the Divinely inspired authors. If we do not believe, then there is no light of Faith to be found anywhere in our interior lives. Our prayers, although heard, are prayers sent out on our accord with frivolity, whose intensity is only predicated upon some threat to our own interior stability. This is not how prayer is supposed to work; prayer is offered to God specifically, in the interest of perfecting, or at the very least clarifying, the bond between ourselves, as His creation, and Himself. He is our King, Lord, and Master, but He is also our father and, ultimately, our friend. We should be looking to Him to perfect this relationship, as it is from Him that we gain the graces necessary for that relationship to be perfected. We are supposed to love Him, and we are supposed to know Him inasmuch as this knowledge directs us toward that personal love.
What we find in Our Lady is the perfect image by which to emulate this cooperation of grace, firstly. Secondly, however, and more importantly, we find in her the Mediatrix of Graces who sits as close to the Lord’s side more privileged than any other created being, as Queen of Heaven and as His Blessed Mother. Like a perfect mirror for the light of God, she guides us by casting the light of God upon where we are to focus. Indeed, Our Lady is, in other words, “a light by which we are able to see Christ.”15 She reveals for us the both the beginning of assent and the ends of theology. We learn from her not merely by emulating her as an historical figure, but by emulating her as she intercedes mystically in our prayer lives, bringing us into a greater love for God than we could possibly hope for without.
We must not forget that Heaven, although invisible to us, is not some dead place where those trapped there do not hear or care about us. Heaven hears our prayers, even those that are uttered imperfectly, and God knows our thoughts. Seeking intimacy and union with Heaven means going to God, and who better to approach Him as our advocate, even for simple conversation, than the greatest fulfillment of matronly love than His mother?
Conclusion
We are called to be theologians such that we come to have enough knowledge of God in order to love Him. The Divine so willed that this knowledge be a little different, and even of different character, for everyone; not everyone is called to write a Summa or offer a commentary on Job, in other words. But in a very general sense, the illiterate in the pews who faithfully receives Communion and embodies the words of St. Paul, to pray unceasingly, is more a theologian than some secular academic who happens to be an expert on Gregory of Nyssa. Being the latter should entail the former, but with increasing obviousness, this is not always the case.
But, as Catholics, we know that our job is to get ourselves, and with a certain degree of culpability, everyone we know, to Heaven. That entails living the Faith to the fullness of our ability. That entails prayer, love, and emulation of those who made it there before us. And while it does not entail, per se, taking advantage of every tool given to us—the Rosary, asking for saintly intercession, et cetera—these things certainly help. One would be a fool not to use a tool designed for a particular job when it’s right at his fingertips.
We may mistakenly believe that Our Lady’s intercession is simply another such benefit at our disposal, something we can choose to invoke at our own whims or something we can choose to bypass in favor of directly appealing to God. Fr. Fehlner, following the implications of her Immaculate Conception, says otherwise. All of the various traditional devotions to her may indeed be optional, but her unique position at the center of the Church is not something to be brushed over—both in an historical and mystical sense. Our Lady teaches us most directly about God in this very way. She is Our Lady.
The practice of theology, in an academic, detailed, analytical sense is a discipline that an overwhelming majority of Catholics are not necessarily called to experience. But all Christians are actively called by God to a distinct, practical sense of theological study, by which we should understand our interior lives developed by prayer and bolstered or enlivened by the Sacraments. God calls us to know Him more even than we seek Him out. The Eucharist especially embodies this absolute love for us that we cannot hope, of our own accords, to compare ourselves to. Reconciliation, too, is a Sacrament that embodies such a love. These are avenues toward knowing Him. We must know him in order to love Him, but we must love Him first. Who best to turn to in this than Our Lady, who loved Him before we did, and who was chosen, specifically, to be capable of loving Him as the foremost of creatures?
For St. Bonaventure, understanding is knowledge passing into affection. Nothing could be more personal or more loving insofar as the love of God is bound up in the understanding of God. Whether this understanding is couched in the style commonly associated with ‘metaphysics,’ whether the theologian is consciously and explicitly aware of the nature of that relation, if this judgment is true, the relation is real. Otherwise, it would not be true.16
1Peter Damien Fehlner, “Mary and Theology: Soctus Revisisted”, The Newman-Scotus Reader (Academy of the Immaculate, New Bedford: 2019), 116-117.
2118.
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4135.
5141.
6140.
7134.
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10112.
11142.
12150.
13151.
14153.
15168.
16164.
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