Work of Love

A Theological Reconstruction of the Communion of Saints

Leonard J. DeLorenzo

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780268100964
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Theology

The saints are good company. They are the heroes of the faith who blazed new and creative paths to holiness; they are the witnesses whose testimonies echo throughout the ages in the memory of the Church. Most Christians, and particularly Catholics, are likely to have their own favorite saints, those who inspire and "speak" to believers as they pray and struggle through the challenges of their own lives. Leonard DeLorenzo's book addresses the idea of the communion of saints, rather than individual saints, with the conviction that what makes the saints holy and what forms them into a communion is one and the same. Work of Love investigates the issue of communication within the communio sanctorum and the fullness of Christian hope in the face of the meaning—or meaninglessness—of death. In an effort to revitalize a theological topic that for much of Catholic history has been an indelible part of the Catholic imaginary, DeLorenzo invokes the ideas of not only many theological figures (Rahner, Ratzinger, Balthasar, and de Lubac, among others) but also historians, philosophers (notably Heidegger and Nietzsche), and literary figures (Rilke and Dante) to create a rich tableau. By working across several disciplines, DeLorenzo argues for a vigorous renewal in the Christian imagination of the theological concept of the communion of saints. He concludes that the embodied witness of the saints themselves, as well as the liturgical and devotional movements of the Church at prayer, testifies to the central importance of the communion of saints as the eschatological hope and fulfillment of the promises of Christ.

CHAPTER 1

INDEFINITE ARTICLE

Looking Backward

The “communion of saints” is a definitive mark of the Christian imagination conformed to the mystery of salvation: the communion of holy persons invites and demands an act of faith for Christian belief to build toward completion. In fact, it is the exercise of fidelity to the promises of Christ in the face of death that gave this expression its primary meaning for Western Christianity. This meaning was carried into and is now borne by the Apostles’ Creed, “the most universally accepted creed in Western Christendom.”¹ Every saint has a history and so does the article of faith that attests to the communion in which they share. The lives of saints arise from the work of God in the world while the article symbolizing their communion arises from the Church’s reflection on the life of faith in the Spirit.

Why this article of the “communion of saints” does not appear either in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed or the Old Roman Creed is a question whose answer at once signifies the hope that springs from the merits of Christ and the deficiency of this hope, by and large, in the modern world. Put another way: as certain communities in the Early Church confronted death through the practice of faith, the belief in the communion of saints was espoused, and as death is avoided, ignored, or parodied in more contemporary times, the essential meaning of the communion of saints slips away. The sober confrontation with the meaning (or meaninglessness) of death forces the issue of the validity of the communion of saints. Death provides the occasion for asking the question of the saints’ communion in the proper terms; therefore, the primary issue in the communion of saints is not actually death, but rather divine freedom. In the silence of death, the Word of God speaks anew. Accordingly, the axial conviction around which this present work turns is that the communion of saints is intrinsically and inextricably connected to the love of Christ: the Incarnate Word.

While the two following chapters deal with death more directly in preparation for hearing this Word aright, this chapter begins by tracing the development of the doctrine concerning the communion of saints from the experience of the faithful into the baptismal creed. From there, I attend to the ecclesial pronouncements from the Second Vatican Council that confirm the perennial validity of the belief in sharing of communion among members of the Church who abide on both sides of death, so to speak. In the final sections of the chapter I diagnose the current state of notional and real assent to belief in this unbroken communion of saints in the modern milieu in order to ultimately identify the precise problematic with which the remainder of this work is concerned. Through the turns of this chapter, I seek to elucidate how the communion of saints—both as a reality and as a stated article of faith—grows from and shapes a Catholic ethos, as well as how the flagging vitality of belief in this communion in the practice of the faithful signals the diminishment of the faith itself.

The Development of a Doctrine

The term “communion of saints” most likely came from the East, where the meaning of the expression was clear. In Greek, koinonia ton agion—the equivalent to Latin’s communio sanctorum—unmistakably indicates “participation in the Eucharistic elements.”² To this day priests in the Byzantine liturgy lift up the consecrated gifts and exclaim, “Holy things for the holy people,”³ further locating the central meaning of the communion for the Eastern Church in the sharing of the Sacraments.

In the West, however, there was much greater fluctuation in the meaning of communio sanctorum. Upon close inspection of the historical evidence as to what primary meaning the phrase carried as it was incorporated into the Apostles’ Creed, “the inescapable conclusion,” as one prominent scholar puts it, is that, “so far as the creed is concerned, the dominant conception, at any rate between the fifth and eighth centuries, was ‘fellowship with holy persons.’”⁴ It is during these very centuries that certain Christian communities first enacted the meaning of the communio sanctorum as they practiced their faith and reflected on the death of the martyrs.

The Apostles’ Creed is itself an elaborate form of the Old Roman Creed, from which all variant baptismal creeds derive. Evidence of the final form of the Apostles’ Creed dates to the first half of the eighth century, while its adoption into the Roman baptismal rite likely did not occur until at least the middle of the ninth century.⁵ Prior to these dates, the first surviving creed to attest to the presence of communio sanctorum is the formulary on which Nicetas of Remesiana commented in the fourth century.⁶ Extant documents from this period point to the Gallic regions of Western Europe as the place of origin for the meaning of communio sanctorum as it was eventually carried into the Apostles’ Creed. As distinct from most of the other statements of faith that were incorporated into the creeds in the Early Church—and particularly those creedal statements that developed in ecumenical councils—the development and the incorporation of communio sanctorum seem to have taken place without a polemical situation or crisis of heterodoxy to spur its definition. Instead, this article developed through devotional faith practices of Christian communities in Gaul.

As J. N. D. Kelly argues, the intensity of faith of particular Christians, in a particular era, in this particular region, helped the article of communio sanctorum to gain recognition as intrinsic to the faith:

The fourth century witnessed an enormous expansion of the devotion which the Church had paid to its saints and illustrious dead from the earliest times. Even at the beginning of the third century the author of the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas assured his readers that his purpose in writing out what had happened was to enable them to enjoy communion with the holy martyrs and through them with Jesus Christ.… It is evident that in the fourth century the consciousness of communion with the redeemed in heaven, who had already tasted of the fullness of the glory of Christ, was as real and as rich in hope to the theologians as to circles of ordinary Christians. Thus, although it involved no polemical arrière pensée, “communion of saints” gave expression to conceptions which were very vividly present to the minds of fourth and fifth century churchmen, particularly in those regions of Western Europe where … the Apostles’ Creed was molded into its final shape.⁷

What we hear from Kelly is that the occasion for the articulation of this article as part of the creed arose from the devotions to the blessed dead that were abundant and thriving in the regions where the Apostles’ Creed developed. In other words, as the faithful exercised the faith into which they were immersed at Baptism, they applied this faith to the veneration of first the martyrs and then other holy witnesses. Only after this application of the faith was exercised did it come to be recognized as normative for the faith. Devotion drew out orthodoxy.

If Kelly’s argument is indeed well founded, then we may readily conclude that “the fellowship with holy persons” that these Gallic Christians practiced was a fellowship with martyrs they had known in their time, or the memory and testimony of whom were offered to them on behalf of their own or other Christian communities (as in the case of Perpetua and Felicitas). In these martyrs they saw the power of the Christian faith spoken unto death, and their reverence for these martyrs was their own affirmation of the validity of the promises of Christ, a promise that redounds throughout the Gospels, that whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die (John 11:25–26, NAB). They saw the martyrs as living testaments to belief in Christ: these were the ones who allowed their deaths to become the capstone of their witness. So when the Gallic Christians began to venerate other holy witnesses—those whom presumably they had known or whose stories of faith were, again, handed on through the Christian communities—they exercised their imaginations to recognize that a life lived in faith was itself a witness to the validity of the promises of Christ, even when that life of faith did not end in martyrdom per se.

In either case, these Christians practiced the Christian faith in life and especially in the confrontation with death, and they allowed the dimensions of the faith they practiced to expand into a veneration of the blessed dead in virtue of those promises of Christ to which they remained steadfast. In doing so, they did not invent a new aspect of the one faith; rather, they allowed the meaning of the one faith to unfold in their lives. As one commentator suggests, “Perhaps the communion of saints could not be properly and fully understood from the beginning, because the impact of Christian martyrdom in the church was yet to be experienced fully.”⁸

The Orthodoxy of the Body of the Faithful

While it is likely common for one to interpret a creed as that which sets and maintains the normative elements of faith so that adherents may assume these elements into their practice of the faith, the history of the development of communio sanctorum shows a different side. What this history helps to reveal is how the practice of faith contributes to the development of the doctrines themselves. Attending to this double-sided nature of doctrine, Jaroslav Pelikan observes that “It is the purpose of ‘doctrine’ in all the creeds and confessions of faith, and in all the periods of church history, to promote, strengthen, and regulate, but also and first of all to articulate … ‘the orthodoxy of the body of the faithful’ in the church.”⁹ Pelikan borrows the phrase “the orthodoxy of the body of the faithful” from John Henry Newman, who argued for the relationship between, on the one hand, the legitimate authority of the Church to codify what it believes, teaches, and confesses, and, on the other hand, the authority of the body of the faithful who are active subjects and, in the words of Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, members of one another (4:25, RSV).¹⁰

Pelikan follows Newman’s lead to contend that when a teaching is set down in a creed or confession,

[it] is not replacing or even correcting or revising or amplifying what the laity have in fact been believing and teaching all along, though perhaps without really knowing it. It is simply articulating and defending this against recent heretical adversaries, or it is making it more precise by the adoption of a more technical theological vocabulary, or it is transposing it from the implicit to the explicit and from the unconscious to the conscious. Therefore the laity are still confessing their own faith in this text.¹¹

In light of what was noted above regarding the absence of heterodox opposition or polemical arrière pensée pertaining to the incorporation of communio sanctorum into the Apostles’ Creed, the teaching on the communion of saints corresponds to the last instance Pelikan mentions. By including communio sanctorum as an article of faith in this creed, the Church took what was implicit in the application of the faith and made it an explicit element of the faith itself. This articulation came through recognizing the importance of what was first a practice of the faith, and not through the clarification of the orthodoxy of the faith against a heterodox misinterpretation.

The placement of communio sanctorum as one of the last articles recited in the Apostles’ Creed further indicates what kind of article it is, for the creed itself internally operates according to what we might dub a narrative logic. What is proclaimed in the creed is already, and quite significantly, a development of belief from what is professed to what is lived. Though Pelikan does not directly consider how the creed testifies to the relationship between the profession of faith and the embodiment of faith on the part of believers, he does speak to the development of Christian creeds from an even more primitive creed. Observing this development can serve as preparation for exploring the narrative logic of the Apostles’ Creed itself.

In his treatment of the rules of faith in the Early Church, Pelikan claims that the primal creed “behind and beneath all the primitive creeds of the apostolic and sub-apostolic era” is in fact Israel’s great prayer, the Shema.¹² Christian faith stands in continuity with this foundational Jewish belief that The Lord our God is one Lord (Deut. 6:4, 5–9; 11:13–21; Num. 15:37–41, RSV). Upon the testimony of Jesus himself, this foundation remains intact. As Pelikan notes, when Jesus was asked to identify the most important commandment, he responds with the Shema: Hear, O Israel: the Lord, our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength (Mark 12:29–30, RSV). Pelikan thus sees the Shema as a primitive, even foundational creed upon which the creeds of the Christian faith build and develop. The doctrine of the Trinity, which is itself both the deepest content and the structural framework of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed and the Apostles’ Creed alike, remains in continuity with what the Shema professes even as it develops beyond the Shema’s eloquent terseness. The belief in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, which the Christian creeds present, “keep[s] the monotheism of The Shema intact and inviolate [as its] root assumption.”¹³

The Christian doctrine of God as Trinity develops from Israel’s monotheism: the Jewish doctrine of God’s oneness. Not only is Israel’s entire story predicated on this basic truth that it claims, but the Christian story also stands upon the claim to the absolute sovereignty of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Acts 3:13; cf. Matt. 22:32; Exod. 3:6, RSV). Of course, the Christian story moves beyond the Jewish story in claiming Jesus Christ as the Son of God and thus God’s definitive self-revelation in history. For this reason, the second part of the Apostles’ Creed—like the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed—rehearses what the apostles witnessed as the mystery of the life, death, and Resurrection of the One who was called the Father’s beloved Son at both his Baptism (Mark 1:11; Matt. 3:17; Luke 3:22) and his Transfiguration (Mark 9:7; Matt. 17:5; Luke 9:35). Whereas the first part of the creed names the first person of the Blessed Trinity the sovereign Lord who is the origin of all things—in direct continuity with the Shema—this second part of the creed names the second person of the Blessed Trinity as an object of Christian belief and in so doing takes his personal history as the culmination of the salvation history of God’s people. The mystery of the life and person of Jesus Christ is thus professed as the power and the mercy of the one God (cf. 1 Cor. 1:24). The story of Israel’s faith is carried forward and culminates in the Incarnate Word.

In naming the third person of the Blessed Trinity as an object of Christian belief in the third part of the creed, the Church acknowledges the gift it has received. The gift comes in the person of the Holy Spirit, who falls upon the disciples at Pentecost (see Acts 2:1–13). It is the Holy Spirit who makes the disciples partakers in the mystery of the Father and the Son. As F. J. Badcock notes, “The work of salvation is stated to be accomplished in our Lord by the end of the second paragraph,” and for those who see an inner logic to the structure of the creed, the third part concerns the bestowal of “the benefits won by Christ.”¹⁴ The creed’s third part carries forward the belief expressed in the first part as to the unoriginate Father who is the origin of all things, as well as the belief in the second part as to the sonship and lordship of Jesus Christ, who accomplishes salvation. The third part concerns the life of the Holy Spirit, who brings creation to fulfillment and communicates salvation.

Under the belief in the Holy Spirit, we find doctrinal statements regarding the things that the Spirit brings about in the communication of divine life. At the mention of the Holy Spirit, the creed itself opens up to include the effects of God’s self-giving. In articulating these things as dimensions of its one faith, the Church professes what participation in the life of the Triune God means—that is to say, the Church acknowledges what the sanctification of life in union with God begins to look like. With the creed, the faithful claim that because the Holy Spirit is given, the holy catholic Church comes into being, the communion of saints is summoned, the forgiveness of sins is offered, the resurrection of the body safeguards the validity of history and of all creation, and this share in God’s life is radically open-ended as life everlasting. In the third part of the creed, the Church reads forward the narrative it has received regarding the sovereignty of God the Father and the salvific mysteries of Jesus Christ the Son. The belief in the Holy Spirit brings about the renewal of the imagination of “the body of the faithfu...