Already posted in this series: Part One; Part Two

I am troubled now.

John, mystic among Evangelists, treats of the Agony’s psychological inner content only as a pericope within the context of Palm Sunday and the entry in Jerusalem, Jesus having been anointed at Bethany beforehand with costly perfume after the raising of Lazarus. In this, Jesus’s understanding of his own kingship, of its literally cosmic demands and dimensions, becomes clear. Amidst the ringing hosannas and the symbols of enthronement in the Davidic tradition, Jesus is troubled – psyche mou tetáraktai – as before betrayal, as before death itself. The idolization of power and its cult is the satanic mechanism which must be undone from within. However much ancient Jewish thought treats of the whole person, drawing no distinction between body and soul, the literal words handed on to us indicate that it is Christ’s very soul which is distressed.

A brilliant and very valued reader of ours sent me an email this past summer, writing that the suffering of Gethsemane was best encapsulated by this image:

The death of large stars leads to black holes, because a star’s gravity will overwhelm the star’s natural pressure that it maintains to keep its shape. When the pressure from the nuclear reactions collapses, gravity overwhelms and collapses the star’s core, and the star’s other layers are thrown off into space, and this process is also known as a supernova. The remainder of the core collapses, a spot overcome by density and without volume – a black hole.

The totality of density with no extension: in Christ, an existential Big Bang, the Alpha point of a redeemed creation. We can relate this to the teaching of John of the Cross:

Until the Lord said fiat lux, darkness was over the face of the abyss of the caverns of the soul’s feeling. The more unfathomable and deep-caverned is the feeling, the more profound are its chasms and its darknesses regarding the supernatural, when God who is light does not illumine it.

For Balthasar, the torment of the descent into hell is experienced by Christ as eternal – because a hope-bearing hell is no hell at all, ultimately – thus embracing all of history within itself. We see the merit of the black hole analogy, the decay unto implosion of a rebellious creation, the full receiving of its implosive crush revealed most poignantly in the sweating of blood, the inner and vital dynamism of the God-man released so as to cry out more eloquently than the blood of Abel.

Yet, in the sanjuanist writings, this existential compression is ordered to glory:

Who can fittingly speak of this intimate point of the wound, which seems to make its mark in the heart of the spirit…? The soul feels that the point is like a tiny mustard seed, very much alive and enkindled, sending into its surroundings a living and enkindled fire of love… The soul feels its ardor strengthen and increase and its love become so refined in this ardor that seemingly there flow seas of loving fire within it, reaching to the heights and depths of the earthly and heavenly spheres, imbuing all with love… for conscious of the living point or center of love within itself, it is unable to catch sight of the boundaries of this love.

For that which compresses, also focuses and sharpens.

Take this cup away from me, but not what I will but what you will. This fervent supplication of Jesus brings us to the heart of a mystery: who exactly is speaking to whom? What does my will, as opposed to your will, even mean?

That God is consubstantially three Persons – Father, Son, and Spirit – was established early on, in 325 at Nicaea. With this foundation firmly in place, by the mid-fifth century it was Christological questions which were at issue during the third and fourth ecumenical councils, at Ephesus and Chalcedon respectively. One party, following ideas associated with Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople, held that Christ had two natures, one human and one divine, separated from one another such that his bodily nature was only human. This would explain easily – too easily – how Christ’s will could be differentiated from God’s will, but could also call into question the sense in which the whole Christ could be said to be divine.

Another party, led at first by St. Cyril of Alexandria, objected to this strenuously at Ephesus, carrying the day. After Cyril’s death, his successor pressed his point to extremes such that Christ was said ultimately to have one divine nature fully subsuming his humanity – rendering the will of Christ tautologically the will of God, and leading to confusion not only about Christ’s will vis á vis the Father’s, but about his very humanity.

Rome intervened. Present in Christ are two natures – human and divine – each preserved fully according to its own integrity. The Tome of Leo promulgates the (diaphysite/monoprosopic) formula, “two natures, one Person,” una persona – duae naturae; by the hypostatic union, the one Person of the Son of God bears his own humanity and his own divinity “without confusion and without separation.”

Despite its seeming straightforwardness, the meaning of the formula was to remain elusive. Neither the concepts of “person” nor of “nature” were, at that time, defined to utter clarity (which, by the way, remains the case, even today). The Christological dispute precipitated two schisms; the Nestorian party fled to Persia, while the church in Alexandria and most of Syria maintained its own formula – “one divinized nature.”

The burning questions, however, of post-Chalcedonian Christianity centered on the attempt to articulate what independent reality Christ’s human nature – integrated into the one Person of the Word – could possibly maintain; how could a human will possibly hold its own, thus united to the omnipotent Godhead? Would not a person with anything but a single will be divided against himself?

Christian intellectual history has been marred by two foundational Christological errors. The first lies in taking the unitary personhood of the Logos as a detriment to Christ’s humanity; in Jesus, clearly something must be missing. But if God is truly to have become man, then that man of the Incarnation – as is the case for any other man – must have a will… and for that matter, the full actualization of that will, a nature, a soul, and everything else common among rational beings of flesh, blood and psyche, against the heresies of Monergism, Monophysitism, and Arianism/Apollinarianism respectively. (We will be turning to the second error shortly.)

After Chalcedon, Byzantium attempted a political compromise: Monothelitism, the doctrine that Christ’s one Person had exactly one will, correspondingly. The theological answer to that maneuver was to come from the East as well. Maximus the Confessor – Maximus of Constantinople – found an answer through meditating on Jesus’s prayer in the Garden. While Jesus has his divine will as God within the life of the Trinity, and as man, most certainly has a natural human will, a will unrestricted in its own proper mode of being, he has but one personal will. (Again, it is well beyond our scope here, but even greater progress was to come in the Middle Ages, with Richard of St. Victor’s incisive definition of person: spiritualis incommunicabilis existentia, the incommunicably proper existence of spiritual nature).

The one personal will of the Word draws the natural will of Jesus into itself. It does so without violation or contradiction because the human will – any human will – is originally ordered to the divine will. Just as any human nature is neither annihilated nor absorbed in the divinization of eternal beatitude, neither is any part of Jesus’s humanity truncated or cancelled in the hypostatic union. Total fulfillment of the natural will of Jesus is accomplished only in its vigorous adherence to the Logos.

Only now can we appreciate why, and how, Jesus’s prayer to the Father on the Mount of Olives truly is the singularly critical and decisive moment in human history. “Humanly, Christ did not will the Incarnation, but only divinely with the Father and the Holy Spirit,” as summarized by Marie-Joseph Le Guillou and recounted by Cantalamessa. “As regards human consent, the only consent to the Incarnation was given by the Virgin Mary. But in Gethsemane, when Jesus says, Father… your will be done, he utters the fiat of the redemption; now we have the free consent of the human will of a divine person.” Or, as Cantalamessa tells us much more succinctly, “God obeyed humanly!”

At this point, we look to the writings of Benedict – finally – to reveal the secret of all sanctity:

The drama of the Mount of Olives lies in the fact that Jesus draws man’s natural will away from opposition and back toward synergy, and in so doing he restores man’s true greatness. In Jesus’ natural human will, the sum total of human nature’s resistance to God is, as it were, present within Jesus himself. The obstinacy of us all, the whole of our opposition to God is present, and in his struggle, Jesus elevates our recalcitrant nature to become its real self.

Now we can examine the second foundational Christological error to be encountered perennially: namely, that Jesus is so ontologically exceptional as to be more or less irrelevant to human living. No; he is, rather, the exemplar of human nature fulfilled and perfected, whom Ratzinger names “the directional arrow… that indicates what being human tends toward.” The merit of the intuition of the Antiochene school, of Christ as the New Adam – situated in this new garden – comes to the fore.

A further point: Just as John Paul II taught that humanity unaided cannot fathom the tragedy of its own death sentence, so John of the Cross, the spiritual teacher of the lay Carmelite pontiff, taught first that man is so ill-equipped to know of divine radiance, that we would never know to seek it. Of the soul he writes, that “it is impossible for it to lift its eyes to the divine light, or even think of doing so, for in never having seen it, it knows not what it is. Accordingly, it will be unable to desire this light; it will rather desire darkness because it knows what darkness is, and will go from darkness to darkness, guided by that darkness.” Perhaps we witness such a state of feeble and confounded vision followed by great perplexity in the apostles at Tabor, and verified in their own going about from darkness to darkness at Gethsemane. Jesus’s human nature cannot comprehend – in the full philosophical sense of that term – the Godhead (as per Thomas). In the depths of agony, we see his human nature – into which we are to be incorporated – itself stretched and expanded. In other words, it is not merely that man’s sins are atoned for, but man is refined and made to be as silver tried by fire – or rather more still: See, I refined you, but not like silver; I tested you in the furnace of affliction. Or again, as John of the Cross tells us: “…God will raise up in the soul profound blessings and change the shadow of death into light; and God will do this in such a way that, as David says, the light will become what the darkness was.” To rise from the dead, we can now see, is ever more than the regaining of a life once had and taken away; it is the overcoming of death qua death, death in its totality, taken on in totality.

One can glimpse a tiny shard of the Gethsemane experience, but it is costly; here, one can but enter in. We read in Ratzinger’s Eschatology:

He himself entered into the distinctive freedom of sinners, but he went beyond it in that freedom of his own love which descended willingly into the Abyss. Here the real quality of evil and its consequences become quite palpable, provoking the question . . . whether in this event we are not in touch with a divine response able to draw freedom, precisely as freedom, to itself. The answer lies hidden in Jesus’ descent into Sheol, in the night of the soul which he suffered, a night no one can observe except by entering this darkness in suffering faith…. It is a challenge to suffer in the dark night of faith, to experience communion with Christ in solidarity with his descent into the Night. One draws near to the Lord’s radiance by sharing his darkness.

Achieving synergy between our own willing and God’s will is, I believe, the secret of sanctity. And yet how “natural” it is to believe that the slightest movement in the direction of a fiat will cause all the sufferings of Job to alight on our heads, no less what would come of giving the divine carte blanche in our regard. But God is not cruel; he is supremely gentle.

Many of us have been trained to think of God’s justice as functioning on a penal substitution model, looking to victimize someone, anyone, like a quota to be filled interchangeably. And so we fear the “will of God”—who wouldn’t? Yet despite this, and despite the distorted spirituality that warns of chastisements descending from an outraged deity seeking to appease his wrath, Divine justice is neither vengeful nor retributive, but itself truly, perfectly just; just is the Lord; in justice he delights. He is leading us to justice, to guide our feet into the way of peace. The words of the prophet Jeremiah lend assurance: For I know well the plans I have in mind for you – oracle of the Lord – plans for your welfare and not for woe, so as to give you a future of hope.

As for Christ, the Father’s will is as much his longing as his mission: My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to finish his work. As John of the Cross writes, the thirsting soul “would consider all the difficulties of the world, the fury of demons, and infernal afflictions nothing if by passing through them [the soul] could plunge into the unfathomable spring of love.” In his divinity, Christ dwells eternally in the infinite wellsprings of love, in the life of the Trinity; in his humanity, he opens them out for us; the words of Pius XII are apt here: “Assuredly, when He who is the only begotten of the Father and the Word made flesh full of grace and truth had come to men weighed down with many sins and miseries it was He alone, from that human nature united hypostatically to the divine Person, Who could open to the human race the fountain of living water which would irrigate the parched land and transform it into a fruitful and flourishing garden.”

Returning to the passage in John 12, where we began, we find these words: “Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it and will glorify it again.” As Jesus said in the same Gospel, If I glorify myself, my glory is worth nothing – yet even the Father does not “glorify himself,” after the fashion of the kings of the earth. His name is a glory open to all – for we who are baptized, are baptized eis to onoma: not in his name, as if we were his plenipotentiaries on earth (we are not), but into his name, and thus into the Godhead, into the life of the Trinity in which we are immersed as in springs of living water.

Abba, Father, all things are possible to you. An intimacy between God and man unthinkable before this prayer of the Son has been established. For: In the days when he was in the flesh, he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence.

 

In Jesus’s prayer to the Father on that terrible and marvelous night in Gethsemane, the ‘earth’ became ‘heaven’; the ‘earth’ of his human will, shaken by fear and anguish, was taken up by his divine will in such a way that God’s will was done on earth. –Benedict XVI

 

Image: black hole, Pixabay, AI-generated.