Faith and Freedom

Teresa Forcades

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781509509799
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion, Politics & State

Teresa Forcades, Spanish Benedictine nun, theologian, physician and political activist, is one of Europe's leading radical thinkers. Marrying her Catholic faith with a passion for social justice, she came to prominence for her eloquent condemnation of the abuses of some of the world's biggest pharmaceutical companies. She has gone on to found a leading Catalonian anti-capitalist independence movement and is one of the leading voices in the world today against the injustices of capitalism and the patriarchy of modern society and of her own church.

In Faith and Freedom, her first book written in English, she skilfully weaves together her personal experiences with a reflection on morality, religion and politics to give a trenchant account of how the Christian faith can be a dynamic force for radical change. Placing herself in a powerful tradition of Catholic social doctrine and Liberation Theology, she applies her perspective to the issues most precious to her: freedom and love, social justice and political engagement, public health, feminism, faith and forgiveness.

Structured around the five canonical hours that give its peculiar rhythm to the monastic day, this book is a thoughtful and bold polemic against the exploitation and injustice of the status quo. Its call for liberty, love and justice will resonate with anyone disaffected with a savage and destructive political and economic system that marginalises and murders the poor and undermines the very fabric of social life.

1
Matins: love and freedom

It's pitch black in Montserrat. Quiet. Down below the mountain, the serpentine yellow lights of the village of Monistrol. Above, bright stars. The bell rings at 6 a.m. and at 6:30 the first prayer of the day starts: matins. Half asleep, braced against the winter cold, we gather in the monastery church and face the large window above the altar with its serene Christ on the Cross. It is a simple piece of unpainted clay in the style of the old Romanesque Maiestas. Jesus reflects no pain and hangs effortlessly, as if ready to fly from the cross, as if he had nothing to do with such gruesome torture. His arms are not aligned but stretch forward in an open embrace: the cross hangs in the middle of a large corner window with a panoramic view of the mountains, and the arms have to accommodate themselves to the square angle left by the tall brick walls. At this dark hour, the window glass reflects the hanging Christ and duplicates his embrace, redirecting it towards the wider world outside the church walls.

“And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.” This is how the Gospel of Mark explains the consequences of Jesus' death (Mark 15:38). The reference is to the temple that stood in Jerusalem in the first century CE: its curtain isolated the space where God dwelt, which could only be entered by the high priest at strictly prescribed times. Mark wants to make clear that Jesus had nothing to do with such separation and regulation. Jesus came precisely to free God from such ungodly constraints. Jesus' name Emmanuel means “God with us.” God with us, God among us. The Spanish mystic Teresa of Ávila put it even more plainly: Entre pucheros anda el Señor (God walks amidst the kitchen pots).

No organ is played during the matins prayer, and there is almost no singing except on Sundays or major festivities. Voices are still hoarse from sleep, so reciting rather than singing the psalms helps warm them up for the next prayer, the joyful lauds. Matins is sober. It is also called the “office of readings”: its distinctive feature consists of two relatively long readings (around two pages each) proclaimed from the lectern. The first is from the Bible, the second from classical theological treatises, most of them belonging to the first centuries of Christianity, the so-called “patristic era.” Patristic theology, despite being more than 1,500 years old, has not lost its power to speak to the heart; this is because it was written at a time when Christian believers had no social standing at all and were considered a bunch of ignorant peasants or in some cases a dangerous fanatical sect. Some of those early Christians refused to acknowledge the divine status of the Roman Emperor and were sentenced to death for doing so. Not all were heroes, though. Quite a few, probably the majority, gave up in the face of persecution and tried to dilute the message handed down by Jesus, to make it less sharp and uncomfortable. Clear injunctions to social upheaval such as: “You know that among the nations those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them; but it should not be so among you” (Mark 10:42) coexisted at that time with open endorsements of the status quo: “Slaves, accept the authority of your masters with all deference, not only those who are kind and gentle but also those who are harsh” (1 Peter 2:12). These contradictions coexisted then and continue to coexist today, for both these sentences can be found in the New Testament.

Often, while listening to a biblical or patristic text during matins, I am elated or deeply moved. At other times, I am frustrated or even angered. On a couple of occasions when I have been the reader I have omitted a sentence of the text because I found it too offensive; for example: “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent” (1 Timothy 2:12). On these occasions, I think of Howard Thurman's grandmother. Thurman was one of the greatest African-American philosophers and theologians of the twentieth century, a friend of Mahatma Gandhi and a mentor to Martin Luther King Jr. Thurman's grandmother had been a slave most of her life. She was an illiterate deeply devout Christian who forbade her grandson to ever read to her from the letters of Paul because she knew that they contained the statement: “Slaves, be obedient to your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ” (Ephesians 6:5). She refused to acknowledge this as the word of God.

This is what the matins prayer with its long biblical readings invites me to do: to take personal responsibility for my own faith. I do not have faith in a book. I honor the Bible and cannot imagine my life without it. I read from it every day (or almost every day), but I do not expect the text of the Bible to hinder my thinking, or be a substitute for it. I do believe that the text – the different texts – of the Bible are inspired by God and, precisely because of that, they do not collide with my freedom but count on it. God – such has been my experience – has never collided with my freedom; She has created the space where my freedom can exist and invites me to own it. God has never invited me to give up my freedom in order to obey or to please Her. God takes no pleasure in slaves: “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends” (John 15:15).

God takes no pleasure in slaves but enjoys friendship and freedom. The first book of theology I ever read was Leonardo Boff's Jesus the Liberator. I was fifteen years old at the time, and part of a family that mistrusted the Roman Catholic Church despite having had me and my two sisters baptized into it. The three of us were born during the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, who imposed a fascist regime known as “National Catholicism,” religiously sanctioned by the hierarchy of the Spanish Catholic Church. My parents opposed Franco and resented the support that the Church gave to his regime. I read Jesus the Liberator because I was eager to learn more about Jesus after being shaken to the core by reading the gospels for the first time. I remember being deeply affected, but I don't remember having felt “personally liberated” by God: this first religious experience of mine had more to do with making sense of life than with liberation. As a teenager, I didn't feel oppressed; I was rather content and full of plans. It was only much later, while studying theology in the Unites States in the 1990s, that I came across the text of the Enuma Elish and realized, at least at a theoretical level, how seriously the biblical God takes human freedom and how deeply involved She is in supporting it.

The Enuma Elish is the ancient Babylonian Creation narrative that directly inspired the biblical book of Genesis. Its name means “when above” and reflects the opening words of the text: “when the sky above was not named and the earth beneath did not yet bear a name…” This epic poem of about 1,000 lines was first discovered in 1848 among the archeological remains of Ashurbanipal's library in Nineveh (present-day Mosul, in Iraq). The clay tablets of Nineveh are fragmentary and were written in Akkadian cuneiform script in the seventh century BCE. New tablets of the same text were discovered in Assur (Iraq) in the twentieth century; these had been written in Assyrian in the tenth century BCE. The original Enuma Elish is presumed to have been written in the eighteenth century BCE in Babylon during the Hammurabi dynasty. Its narrative dominated Mesopotamian cosmogonies for more than 1,000 years and greatly influenced those of its Near Eastern neighbors. The Enuma Elish includes what seems to be the most ancient notion of a creator God (Marduk), who shapes the world in seven days with a distinct order that resembles evolution: it starts with the planet (the separation of heaven and earth) and ends with human life.

In the sixth century BCE, the Israelites lost a major war against the Chaldean king Nebuchadnezzar. Jerusalem was destroyed and the Hebrew elites were deported to Babylon where they were greatly impressed by their captors' magnificent capital city and by its cultural and religious achievements. The majority of them abandoned their Hebrew tradition and embraced that of the victorious Babylonians – the majority, but not all. Some Hebrews sensed in their defeated provincial tradition a value superior to the wealth and splendor of the imperial city and took up the task of writing a cosmogony, a narrative of Creation, which dared to contradict the venerable Enuma Elish on some crucial points. The most fundamental of these departures from the original text was their depiction of the existential predicament of the human being vis-à-vis God. According to the Enuma Elish, God, having created the world, rests on the seventh day and commands humans to serve Her. According to the biblical Genesis, God, having created the world, rests on the seventh day and invites humans and all of Creation to rest along with Her. The purpose of human life according to the Babylonians was to serve God, to fulfill God's (or God's representatives') needs; according to the Israelites, on the contrary, the purpose of human life is to enter into a personal friendship with God. The human being of the Babylonian Creation is instrumental: her goal is to fulfill God. The human being of the biblical Creation is free: her goal is to fulfill herself.

As the biblical quotes at the beginning of this chapter illustrate, this most fundamental faith in human radical freedom and its biblical corollary (friendship with God as the goal of human life) has tended to get lost in the historical development of religious institutions and of religious consciousness. Even in the Bible itself, there are many instances where Yahweh (the biblical God) acts as the Babylonian Marduk, using humans for Her own purposes and blatantly ignoring their fundamental freedom. A most notable case is the episode of the drowning of the Egyptians in the Red Sea: in order to liberate the Israelites, God kills the Egyptians (Exodus 14:20–31). It is difficult to see how Yahweh respects the fundamental freedom of the Egyptians here. Paradoxically, this episode – which is so problematic for contemporary consciousness to interpret positively, since God kills some people in order to favor others – seems nevertheless to dramatize the core historical experience of the ancient Israelites: God's liberation of them from slavery. We don't know what really happened in history, but we do know what the Israelites believed and wrote about themselves: we were slaves in Egypt and God took pity on us and made us free – not because we were any better than the Egyptians, but because we were oppressed and we suffered.

The biblical reading of matins is over, now comes the patristic. The second reading today is from Gregory, the fourth-century bishop of Nazianz (in modern Turkey). Gregory defended his Christian understanding of freedom against the dominant view of his time as daringly and as vehemently as the ancient Israelites had done ten centuries earlier. It is clear that neither the exiled Israelites nor Bishop Gregory and the other fathers and mothers of the Church had notions of personal freedom comparable to those of our twenty-first century; the individual subject of modernity with his claims to autonomy had not yet developed. But, arguably, they had that without which the subject of modernity would have never developed at all – a deep personal experience that gave them the courage to defend against all odds, in a sharp and consistent way, the idea of a radically free relationship between the human being and God. Taking this into account, modernity can be described as developing simultaneously both against and from historical Judaism and Christianity: against the social control exerted by ecclesiastical institutions and the submission of the individual consciousness to imposed articles of faith; from the radical freedom and dignity of the human being created in the image of God and called to friendship with Her.

Gregory of Nazianz challenged some of the fundamental ideas of Neoplatonism, the philosophy developed one century earlier by Plotinus which had become the dominant view amongst the cultural elites in Gregory's time. Plotinus held that the world came into existence through “spontaneous emanation” as an extension of God's self. Gregory categorically refused the notion of “emanation” and mockingly compared the Neoplatonic “emanating God” to a “spilling boiling pot.” He contrasted this with the Christian notion of Creation as implying a free act on the part of God: an act that enables the world to be other than God.

There is a tendency today in Christian theology to argue along lines that sometimes mirror the Neoplatonic notion of emanation, in an attempt to overcome the sharp divide between God and the world that seems to be entailed by the patristic notion of “Creation.” Thus, for example, the feminist theologian Sally McFague complements the traditional metaphor of the creator God as an artist (intellectual creation) with that of the creator God as a mother giving birth, highlighting that what is being born is not “a part” of the mother but a different reality that, despite being different from her, is nevertheless organically bound to her in a way that a work of art would never be bound to the artist who creates it. Some contemporary theologians use the word panentheism to distinguish their perspective from traditional pantheism, that is, from the notion of a complete continuity or identity between God and the world (as in Spinoza's dictum: Deus sive natura, God or nature). As opposed to pantheism, panentheism does acknowledge a distinction between God and the world (nature/universe), but considers nevertheless that the world exists within God and cannot be separated from Her.

Gregory's view is more radical: God has been able to create – and uninterruptedly sustains – a reality that can truly confront Her, oppose Her, refuse to identify with Her. Not in absolute terms, but in the here and now of contingent historical reality. God is free and can create from nothing. Human beings are also free and can refuse their link to God. God abhors this refusal but nevertheless sustains it out of respect for love. Love, God's essence and the goal of human life, is impossible to conceive without freedom. The notion of a break, fracture, or...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Introduction
• 1: Matins: love and freedom
• 2: Lauds: social justice
• 3: Sext: public health
• 4: Recreation: feminism
• 5: Vespers: faith
• 6: Compline: forgiveness
• End User License Agreement