A path to wisdom
Father Marie Dominique Philippe was undeniably a philosopher and theologian when he founded the Community Saint-John in 1975. Recognized as a congregation of diocesan rite in 1986 by the Church, this same Church paid tribute to him a few months before his death through the Prefect of the Congregation for Religious: “I would like to thank Father Marie-Dominique Philippe for the words he addressed to me, and especially for the prayers he promised. I would like to thank him in front of you for what he did for the Church: with his heart totally given to the Lord and his intelligence open to truth, to the Holy Spirit, a new community has been born in the Church which, in its vigour and freshness, carries the word of the Gospel throughout the world. Father Philippe, the Church is deeply grateful for what it owes you, and it owes you a great deal. See, dear Father Philippe, the affection that surrounds you. In a way, it’s a manifestation of the love the eternal Father has for you. Accompany with the same love, the same affection, this family born from the heart of God and from your heart, so that it may follow the path you have traced for it with a master’s hand. Thank you again.”[1] Thus, the search for the three wisdoms that was his own is placed at the service of the Church by the Community of which he is the founder. To return to it unceasingly and to continue to nurture it is to nourish fidelity to the spirit of founders, as the Second Vatican Council and the Popes constantly recall.[2]
There is a diversity of forms of religious life, a multiplicity of vocations. They are all aspects of the Gospel lived out more explicitly by a particular community, religious order or a particular person. It’s a matter of living something of Christ’s holiness more explicitly, of giving it to the Church and, by the same token, of bearing witness to it for all mankind. Take the example of St. Dominic. St. Catherine of Siena, one of his children, said of him that his vocation in the Church is the office of the Word,[3] that is to say, to continue and make explicit, through holy preaching, the mystery of Jesus in so far as he teaches and preaches the word of God. This means that, for a son of St. Dominic, his holiness is first and foremost to follow Christ in the mystery of holy preaching. For a Carmelite nun, her primary vocation is to be, with her sisters, in the desert following Mary to live the mystery of Christ’s Cross with Mary in her Compassion, in the silence of prayer.
The spirit of a founder, that which in him is the call of Christ and the proclamation of the Gospel, is lived by him and by his brothers. This is a dimension of the Gospel, a particular evangelical beatitude more deeply rooted in the heart of a person, prompted by the Holy Spirit and his gifts, to highlight a particular dimension of the Gospel message. This may involve charisms insofar as this is necessary for the good of the Church, but the evangelical life and spirit of the founders as such are not charismatic; they belong to sanctifying grace and are given to the Church as the presence of Christ and the Gospel at the heart of human history.
Finally, religious life has a prophetic vocation in the Church, and the prophetic dimension of each religious foundation, which projects the whole Church towards the eschatological anticipation of Christ’s coming, is essential to it.
To fully appreciate the meaning and richness of Father M.-D. Philippe’s teaching, we must briefly summarize what seems prophetic in his thought and itinerary. In this way, we can better understand what is innovative for the Church and the times in which we live, and how his approach renews our reading of the Gospel by highlighting aspects that were previously unexplored, forgotten or even relativized. As Paul Claudel wrote: “The Gospel has not exhausted its mission. To each generation that arises, there is something old and something new to teach, something suddenly in our ears that our fathers had not heard, a new explanation, a new perspective, a new instruction, a new injunction, all the while around our line-by-line advancement is arranged the negative landscape[4].”
The question we are asking here, then, is, since Father M.-D. Philippe’s quest for wisdom was one of the founding stones of a spiritual and religious community, what are the main insights of this itinerary called to be placed at the service of the Church and the contemporary world by those who inherit it? These are the aspects that so struck the first brothers of Saint John. It’s what brought them together in the service of God. This is what inspired their common intention to seek the truth and cooperate in proclaiming the Gospel. This was the spirit of the École Saint-Jean, a place of formation in the spirit of the three wisdoms, where Father M.-D. Philippe gradually implemented a filial and fraternal cooperation of the brothers with him in the search for truth. It was this cooperation that brought the mystery of fraternal communion, thus placing the Community of Saint John at the heart of the Church. How else to bring about a true fraternal encounter and respond to Christ’s desire for unity?
1. Prologue: Poverty of intelligence and prophetism
One of Father Philippe’s most striking traits is his insistence, following in the footsteps of St. Dominic, on the spirit of poverty.[5] Not only material poverty, which he never turned into an ideology, for it is embodied differently according to time and place, but he insisted especially upon poverty of the intelligence in front of reality, which alone is capable of inspiring authentic poverty of heart. Nothing better sums this up than this testamentary statement in his last book:
“It is extremely difficult for man to maintain the rectitude of a realistic intelligence, because it implies remaining very poor. The poverty of Saint Dominic must be for us today a very interior poverty—the poverty of an intelligence that seeks the truth in all things and does not let itself be taken in by the desire to possess something, or the security of having created or accomplished some work. Around the age of forty-five, a man usually has a family and a home, a place where he can lay his head. And in the intellectual domain, after a certain age, we often want to have something we can rest on. But Jesus tells us that “The Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.” Jesus says this for our Christian life, but a philosopher has the right to consider Christ as a wise man whose words are particularly profound and true. In fact, if we want to maintain an intelligence that seeks what is first in that which is moved, what is first in that which moves itself, what is first in that which is, then our intelligence must always remain very poor. We must love reality, which exists and which we seek to know, more than our own intellectual wealth. When we stop at our intellectual wealth, our intelligence becomes narrow minded. We may have very interesting intellectual projects, but we are no longer possessed by the search for truth. The truth is no longer what guides us, what we are seeking in all things. This is what explains how, very easily, our intelligence lets itself be seduced by some secondary aspect and strays from a purity in the labor of the search for truth.”[6]
On the religious level, in the sense of the virtue of religion, this poverty is reflected in the importance, of adoration.
For him, this poverty of the intellect is the source of all authentic renewal and, transformed by the gift of fear to become the beatitude of the poor, of every prophetic attitude: it’s not a question of defending or spreading his ideas, his conception of the Church and of Christian life, or even philosophical system, or even to open a “little theological school”, but to let oneself be radically to allow himself to be radically purified by existing reality, by the mystery of God contemplated in wisdom, by the action of the Holy Spirit.[7] The realism of the “this is” judgment of existence, the realism of adoration, realism of the theological life of faith, hope and love.
This is an invitation to a radical renewal of intelligence, love and theological life theological life, similar to the Prophet John the Baptist’s invitation in the desert to Israel to renew waiting for the Messiah, through radical poverty. Father Marie-Dominique, for his part has always defined himself as a John the Baptist for the Communauté Saint-Jean.[8] This is how we should his public testimony on the day he officially celebrated his seventieth anniversary as a priest:
“Today I have only one thing to do: thank God for having led me to the Saulchoir as a Dominican. I have never regretted giving myself to God, and to have given myself to God for this search for truth is to have given myself to God for this search for truth is to have given myself to God for this search for truth. the search for truth, it was great, it was beautiful. It’s philosophy and theology that we have to keep we need to deepen all the time to go ever further and love the Lord more, to love him in a deeper, more divine way. So that the deepest thing in my heart.., is thanksgiving. I thank Jesus for all that he has done for me, I thank Jesus for giving himself to me as bread, as wine, as a gift. I thank Jesus who gives himself to me as bread and wine, so that I can discover him in all his truth. And we must give thanks for the Blessed Virgin, this treasure that God wants to give us. is our Mother, mother of our intelligence, mother of our heart, and the way in which she exercises her maternity on us should fill us with joy. should fill us with joy. Mary loves joyful children who know they are loved by God and who desire to love God above all else.” [9]
2. Metaphysics of the human person
Father Marie-Dominique Philippe’s entire philosophical approach, based on human experience human experience, has been to seek to understand the human person in all his or her dimensions: his activities, his becoming, his life, his being, his spirit. He sums up his thinking as follows interests the philosopher is man existing in all his dimensions, singular and universal,”[10] is to try “to understand the truth at all levels, without excluding any”, so as not to be “a mere observer of the truth”, nor become the man of a party, “which is the opposite of the search for truth.”1 The philosopher’s fundamental question is: “What is man? The philosopher tries to grasp and man’s finality: that for which man exists.”2
It is the link between man and being that enables us to develop what is most profound in the philosophical approach: to be able to speak of the human person and make explicit all the dimensions involved in the statement “I am”, a philosophy of being is necessary. By starting with the judgment “this is”, we can integrate the uniqueness of the judgment “I am”. So, in the hermeneutic age and in the face of positivism, both of which proclaim the death of “metaphysics”, it is possible to integrate what is right in a philosophy of mind, by situating it in the light of the discovery of the principles and causes proper to that-which-is-in-as-much-as-it-is:
“Only the rediscovery of an authentic first philosophy of what is, discovering substance (ousia) and being-in-act (energeia) and, thanks to these two principles, discovering the problem of the person at the level of being and spirit, can help us overcome this positivism and restore the full dimension of human intelligence”3.
Such a quest was a constant feature of his philosophical itinerary, which he followed in successive stages that would be worth studying in detail. He is indeed a “philosopher of the person”, one who explicitly introduces this question into first philosophy, thus completing what had been glimpsed by Aristotle and then by Thomas Aquinas–reconciling the opposition between anthropology and metaphysics, which had steered Western thought towards a dead end, he opens a renewed path for philosophy towards its true vocation: wisdom. For him, the solution lies neither in the Hegelian response4, nor in the misogynistic claims of atheistic humanism, nor in phenomenology or hermeneutics, still less in the human sciences alone, but in the rediscovery of a genuine itinerary towards truth, where the intelligence puts itself at the school of what is, in an attitude of poverty. This itinerary, punctuated, as it were, by three milestones, is summed up by Father M.-D. Philippe at the end of his work:
“Philosophy begins with the “this is” judgment of existence, which leads to the discovery of substance, then of being-in-act, especially through the experience of love of friendship. The personal activities par excellence, then, are the judgment of what is, which drives the search for truth, and the choice of friendship. The search for and discovery of God’s existence will be a person’s deepest activity, his ultimate end. And, in discovering that God leads them as a Father, the human person will discover what he or she is in God’s eyes. These three judgments: “This is”; “You are my friend”; “It is necessary for there to be a first Being” allow us to touch what the person is. But they must be united if we are to understand the depth of the human person“5.
The question of identity of the human person and respect for human dignity has never been so urgent as it is today. Finding a way out of the sterile opposition between a spiritualizing idealism and a positivist existentialism, as Heidegger, Levinas or Karol Wojtyla tried to do, is a major preoccupation of philosophy. How could an authentic metaphysical inquiry into the “I am” of the person be anything but salutary?
3. The end, a major issue in contemporary philosophy
The dimensions of “I am”, of the human person, the most perfect way of being that we experience, are clarified in the light of the principles and proper causes of that which is in as much as being: ousia-substance, principle and cause according to the form of that which is, and being-in-act, principle and final cause of that which is. After the judgment of existence “this is”, the key is therefore the discovery – we might say the rediscovery and deepening after an eclipse of several centuries1 – of the end as the proper cause of that-which-is.
This is one of the major points already apparent in his reading of the Philosopher:
“The reality of the person [beyond the psychological personality] is found in Aristotle, especially when he talks about friendship. There is no word to express the person, but he shows its reality when he speaks of friendship. The philosopher often brings to light something that has not previously been developed, or has been confused with something else. For example, many of Aristotle’s statements can be understood in relation to Plato, whom he criticizes and surpasses. Aristotle’s whole endeavor is to discover finality, to go beyond the exemplary cause, the Idea of the good spoken of by Plato, which remains a useless ideal – as Aristotle points out – for the conduct of human life. Aristotle is not looking at the fruit of the discovery of finality, which is the unity of my person. In a way, my person implies finality, and all my efforts (including their “how”) to effectively reach this end. By highlighting finality, Aristotle thus grasps what is essential in the person”2.
This discovery of finality is made explicit first and foremost in ethical philosophy; the ethics, not of the pursuit of happiness – questioned from Kant to Freud and from Schopenhauer to Levinas – but of the end (discovered from the experience of the relationship with others) as the proper cause of human action, of voluntary action. This is the only way to truly situate the “time of responsibility” and the frantic search for freedom.
As we have already emphasized, however, this clarification of an ethic of finality presupposes that we situate artistic activity and work as the fundamental human experience: “It is this first experience that we must look at today3“. This philosophical reflection on work is therefore fundamental, but it is also crucial, particularly in the contemporary context, where, even in this field, the sense of finality has often been lost, and man remains enslaved to efficiency, money, economic rivalry and domination. In reality, all the ideologies of work and productive activity are still very much alive, and a fundamental philosophical project is still open. Likewise, the rediscovery of art, in the broadest sense of the term, is urgently needed, from the point of view of wisdom.
As for the ethical question, far from being able to be deduced from a religious doctrine – which would inevitably give it the form of an ideal from on high, and therefore inaccessible – it can only be worked out by learning to love what is good, and to be ordered by it. This patient and demanding work, in the midst of the complexity of human experience and in a world where limit situations are becoming the norm, is a necessity for anyone willing to put themselves at the school of reality and become the true companion of their brothers and sisters in humanity. Today, it is no longer possible to present ourselves as a lofty spectator, with the arrogance of the one who knows!
The ethics of the love of friendship is indeed “the ethics of human happiness, that is, of finality. It is the ethics of the person1“. An ethic of the person that, far from suppressing nature, sees it as a foundation2.
Considering that the ethics of friendship, the ethics of the person, is a fundamental human ethic, then we see how the discovery of the end as the proper cause of voluntary action is what makes it possible to distinguish three levels of ethics, three different levels of the discovery of the end, three different levels of responsibility on a strictly human, philosophical level: the ethics of friendship, assuming the moral virtues, fundamental human ethics, which every human being is capable of discovering3 ; religiousethics – which is only fully itself enlightened by the philosophical discovery of God’s existence – commanded by adoration and oriented towards the desire for contemplation4 ; Christian ethics based, not on Christ discovered as the end – which presupposes faith, but on the human experience of Christian action and the “philosophical” understanding of existence that Christ proposes.
Without an ethics of the good and the end, it remains extremely difficult to discover the end as the proper cause of that-which-is-in-as-much-as-it-is. Aristotle pointed out at the beginning of the Metaphysics that no one before him had really discovered the end as the cause of that-which-is. And we know to what extent, for Heidegger, the loss of a sense of finality marks modern Western thought. We can therefore better understand how this major aspect of philosophical research became apparent to Father Marie-Dominique Philippe from the very start of his theological studies, in the face of a reading of Saint Thomas Aquinas emptied of all its human and philosophical density. The key is seeing the loss and rediscovery of the end as the proper cause of that-which-is, which is solely capable of enabling us to rise to God, to the affirmation of his existence.
For Father Marie-Dominique Philippe, this is where we need to be “even more realistic than Thomas Aquinas”, more deeply philosophical at the heart of the contemporary world. The transition from an ethic of love of friendship and of the end to the discovery of the final cause of that-which-is-in-as-much-as-it-is, must be much more direct. This is demonstrated by the work on the ratio boni, essentially developed at the end of his personal philosophical itinerary. If, in Aristotle’s words, first philosophy alone enables us to know what is “separate”, i.e. the spirit, it is thus indeed the search for truth at the heart of the experience of personal love, the response to the attraction of what is good on the will, that enables us to question the end, beyond the discovery of substance as cause according to the form of that-which-is, and to already glimpse the wisdom that alone unites the true and the good. From the point of view of form, love remains a quality and a relation. It is therefore second, relative. But love, at its deepest, interpersonal and perfect, is about completion. It is “the experience of the end” (ἐντελέχεια). What is good, the friend in his own person, in his personal goodness, is the cause of this state of perfection in which the one who loves finds himself; he is that by which the one who loves is in this state of completion, from the viewpoint of his being.
This is also where we find the analogy that will enable us to explain the “Christian proposal” as the proclamation of the Good News of a God who gives himself through love by making himself the “friend of mankind” in Christ, and allows mankind to become sources of this new Love in fraternal charity.
Existentialism, which claims to be permanently creative about the meaning of existence, and analytic philosophy, which dissolves being and action into form (structure) and efficiency (process), lead to an impasse in understanding human action and the meaning of relationships with others. Assuming the complexity of man in the light of the end enables us to respect it and integrate it into the growth of the person. Only the attraction of what is good, and of the One who is good, can free us from the “unhappy conscience” already spoken of by Saint Augustine.
4. A true “first theology”
At the end of his study of the major dimensions of the human person, of the “I am”, Father Marie-Dominique Philippe points out: “We stop to ask ourselves: is there an ultimate dimension of the human person, where one goes beyond oneself towards another?1” The study of the human person is thus both the completion of first philosophy in its scientific dimension, and the starting point for a new question: “Is there, beyond the human person, a first Person that religious traditions call God?” It is through this questioning that philosophy becomes wisdom, and that the “love of wisdom” that runs through and inhabits it takes on its full meaning. Without it, philosophy would remain truncated:
“Is the study of the human person the ultimate quest of first philosophy, or is it a first summit, an end awaiting another that is truly the ultimate end of our philosophical quest? Historically speaking, it’s clear that the search for and discovery of the existence of a primordial Being has always been the ultimate goal of philosophical research. As for the negation of God’s existence, as developed by contemporary ideologies, this too is considered the ultimate negation, the radical negation. From a philosophical point of view, we must recognize that our intelligence cannot remain in doubt about such a serious question, so important for man, from both a practical and a speculative point of view. So, after studying the human person in the light of the proper principles of what is as it is, our philosophical research takes on a new development, that of “natural theology “2.”
Showing the inadequacy of this expression “natural theology”, Father Marie- Dominique Philippe suggests, in his latest work, to return to the simple term “theology”, following the Greeks, or to call it “theology according to first philosophy”, or even “first theology”, in the sense that it is necessary and fundamental for that which will develop from faith3“. This is an orientation and a program, a research project that remains immense and crowns all philosophical labor. But it is also, for “Christian theology”, a major contribution to what is commonly referred to as “fundamental theology”, whose stakes today are those of clarifying the human richness of the Christian faith. What’s at stake here is not only the status of theology in relation to faith, but also that of Revelation, clarifying the relationship between the word of God and the human word, and so on.
“In fact, without this ultimate development of philosophy, theology based on faith cannot stand. Without a theology developed from first philosophy, Christian theology can no longer exist. If we reject first philosophy and affirm that human intelligence is incapable of discovering the existence of God on its own, we can no longer develop a genuine theology based on faith. What is usually referred to as “natural” theology, then, is indeed a first theology, necessary for theology based on faith. It is its first foundation. For using a philosophy that stops at man and whose measure is man, is ultimately to accept only a God relative to man; it is therefore to diminish faith and no longer be able to touch the true God of faith who reveals himself as “I am5“. If Aristotle says of the sophist that he puts on the philosopher’s mantle, because he is not a philosopher but takes on the appearance of one6, then there are also many who put on the theologian’s mantle, because they replace the first philosophy with logic7.”
This first theology thus opens with the questioning and the itinerary by which the philosopher rises to the sapiential affirmation of the existence of God; the last work opened by Father Marie-Dominique Philippe was, as we have already mentioned, his research on the ratio boni, to which the unfinished work published after his death bears witness.
However, the itinerary of first theology does not end with this discovery. For many years, Father Marie-Dominique Philippe taught all the dimensions of this ultimate development of philosophical wisdom, and its ethical consequences for the human person. We can briefly recall here the path of such a theology, which is a path to be pursued, a work in progress to be deepened:
After the philosophical discovery of God’s existence, the philosopher turns to the question of how God exists, or what has classically been called the divine attributes. While Father Marie- Dominique Philippe has long relied on St. Thomas Aquinas’s treatise De Deo Uno1 , by the early 1990s he had developed a completely different approach. On the one hand, while it is for the wise to order, the contemplative order of philosophical wisdom is different from that of the Summa Theologica, which St. Thomas explicitly states is a teaching order concerning the content of Christian revelation. This means that the order of St. Thomas’s treatise is understood in terms of the judgment of faith, as a foundation in which the believing theologian uses the resources of philosophy so as not to diminish the specific judgment of faith on the mystery of God. The primacy of St. Thomas’s assertion that “God is altogether simple “2, which commands the entire order of the treatise and characterizes his thought, is understood with a view to the treatise on the Most Holy Trinity. This simple, perfect, sovereignly good, infinite and unique God is revealed in Christ as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is not a philosophical order.
What, then, is the proper order of philosophical wisdom? Father Marie-Dominique Philippe explored this question at length in his teaching at the École Saint-Jean (School of Saint John) from 1982 to 2006. For the philosopher, it is the human person, this being who is spirit, who rises to the analogical affirmation of the existence of the One who is first and who attracts his intelligence and will. Thus, the first judgment of philosophical wisdom about God is to affirm: “He is light: in him, his intelligence is his being, he is Truth”. This search is in line with Aristotle’s assertion, which so fascinated Hegel: “God is the thought of thought”, and which he made the major issue of the entire history of philosophy. For what is at stake is the relationship between spirit and being, and, more profoundly, the relationship, the kinship of our spirit with the One who is its unique Source. On the other hand, if in the human person intelligence and will, knowledge and love, remain distinct and unite only in wisdom, in God knowledge and love are one. He is spirit, in whom spirit is his being, the first Person, whose eternal life is light and love.
This is the starting point for the philosopher’s inquiry into the relationship between the human person and the First Person, and his philosophical approach to the problem of Creation. Not as a search for origin, but for the actual relationship of dependence in the order of being of the “I am”, through its soul-substance, towards the One who is, the only necessary Being. If, in this creative act, God is “like an artist”, he must also be seen “like a father”, creating creatures capable of knowing what is true, loving what is good, and ultimately capable of knowing Him. This is the key to divine government over the human person, freely able to turn to God in search of wisdom, to worship Him and seek to contemplate Him. Thus, God is Lord in his government over the universe, and Father in his government over the human person:
“The One who, in His Goodness, draws him to Himself as the Source of his being and spirit, through all the good realities He puts in his path to find Him”1.
In the light of Creation and God’s paternal government over the human person, the philosophical gaze can then end in a judgment of wisdom on the human person: what can we say about the human person in the light of God on a strictly philosophical level? What does it mean that the “I am” is that of a creature and a child of the Father of his spirit? It is this judgment of wisdom that makes it possible to affirm the radically religious dimension of the human person, and thus to propose a philosophical religious ethic based on adoration, capable of responding intelligently to the caricatures of the religious attitude that are fanaticism and indifferentism.
From an epistemological point of view, we can better understand the link between intelligence and faith, and the impasse of fideism. In this connection, Father Marie-Dominique Philippe was fond of referring to an audience with Paul VI in 1965, during which the Pope forcefully pointed out the contemporary danger to faith posed by fideism. This attention to fideism, both speculative and practical, which only first theology can radically correct, is one of the very important axes of Father Philippe’s research, which was fully confirmed by the encyclical Fides et Ratio. Father Marie-Dominique Philippe was fond of pointing out that fideism is the laziness of those who, having faith, believe they can dispense with the intelligent search for truth. And he added: “The Holy Spirit never favours laziness”. And this is all the more true as this fideism has repercussions on the practical level, so that we come to confuse the properly human level of analysis of action, which includes this patient search for truth, with the view proper to theological wisdom, which looks at everything in the light of supernatural beatitude. This confusion has far-reaching consequences not only for our understanding of human action, but also for the way we meet people and judge them.
In his Regensburg Address, Benedict XVI stressed the decisive role of the Logos in the practice of authentic religious faith. The search for God is inseparable from the search for truth. Father Marie-Dominique Philippe has tirelessly applied himself to this task. His latest reflection on the goodness of others has led him to show how the path of goodness enriches the path of being to discover the Source of all that is. Far from any “religious” narrow-mindedness, the human person can consider the greatness of his or her vocation and the fullness to which the Christian faith gives him or her access.
5. Christian realism
Only by looking at the intelligence in its capacity to reach out to what is, to existing reality, and to open itself up to the One who is the primary Source of its being and spirit, can we explain how the realism of the Christian faith is rooted in the human person. This is one of the essential aspects of Father M-D Philippe’s approach: his sense of faith, based on the assertions of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas that, through and by the statement of faith, the intelligence adheres to the existing reality of the mystery2, always greater than what man can say about it, because it is the very mystery of God3. In this way, he was able to give countless people a sense of God and his mystery.
This ongoing quest to contemplate the mystery and pass it on through teaching, preaching and service to others has never ceased to take many different paths:
The importance of the Word of God, which nourishes the intelligence’s adherence to the reality of the revealed mystery, and brings us into the presence of Christ welcomed in faith. One of the great aspects of Father Philippe’s preaching and teaching is his sense of the Word of God: a human word whose meaning and truth are the revealed mystery. This allows us to understand that the most adequate tool within the adherence of faith to make explicit the meaning of the Word of God is a philosophy capable of rising to wisdom and analogically enunciating something true and proper about God, and not just historical circumstances or man’s cultural conception of his relationship to God. This aspect was essential in the starting point of the Saint John Community.
As if vis-a-vis the Word and its human realism, Father M-D Philippe constantly reminded us of the contemplative dimension of faith. Faith brings a new judgment of existence to the mystery of God, in order to enter into communion with him; Faith seen as a theological virtue, not an intellectual habitus. Directly ordered to the beatific vision, it only has meaning to anticipate the latter by leading us towards God himself. Immediately contemplative, it brings no new meaning to the human intellect, nor does it replace philosophical truth; it involves no new specifically Christian reasoning. This is why Father Philippe has always maintained that, as such, the Christian faith is not the source of any new philosophy. This rules out any speculative or practical fideism. Fundamentally, theological wisdom in the service of the Word of God requires only faith and a philosophy that achieves wisdom. This does not mean, of course, that a theologian should not include the Tradition of the Church, which is part of the mystery of the Word of God. But faced with the extreme richness, indeed the extreme complexity, of this information, Father M.-D. Philippe’s choice was not to pretend to do without it, nor to oppose it as some theologians have done, nor to drown in it by becoming its archivist, but to take things up by their most refined aspect, to lighten them by the essential: a theological aggiornamento.
In faith, the intention of God, who reveals himself and invites us to receive him, is to lead the human person to his mystery, as to the end in which all his beatitude consists. In this way, faith is inseparable from charity, and is finalized by the growth of the latter to make the human person, transformed by grace, a child of God. An important article at the end of Father Marie-Dominique Philippe’s life underlines this and is in a way programmatic on this theme1. From this point of view, all Christian formation, a fortiori that of religious, is commanded by the primacy of the theological virtues2. This in no way implies a neglect of the moral virtues: they are taken up concretely from charity, faith and hope within the divine friendship that is charity. The vows of religion, as they have often been called, are in reality vows of the evangelical counsels, as Saint John Paul II emphasized in the Apostolic Exhortation Vita Consecrata. This is an essential aspect of renewing the meaning of the “Christian proposal” in the contemporary world, freeing ourselves from overly apologetic discourse, and inviting us to the extraordinary reality of the Gospel: the Gospel of Christ’s encounters with human beings.
Since the Word of God and the mystery of Christ, the Incarnate Word, is the starting point from which all theology can unfold and organize itself as wisdom, they are first and foremost given to the believer: “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God3“. “So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him4 “. As nourishment for faith, the Word of God has a major place in the life of prayer. Father Marie-Dominique Philippe preached numerous retreats in Carmels, contemplative monasteries and Foyers de Charité, over a period of decades; and, of course, for the Brothers and Sisters of Saint-Jean. He constantly insisted on the importance and meaning of prayer as a fundamental part of our Christian formation, insofar as it is the divine exercise of the theological virtues.
Prayer is at the heart of the practical requirements of Christian life: the Brothers’ and Sisters’ Rules of Life, as well as the Formation Charter, bear witness to this. It is the mark of the concrete and radical primacy of God’s love in the Christian life. It is therefore shocking to read that Father Marie- Dominique Philippe exalted human friendship to the detriment of God’s Love and the mystery of fraternal charity that depends on it.
Affirming that it is the divine exercise of the theological virtues means that the gifts of the Holy Spirit are indispensable to the theological life; they are necessary for salvation, affirms Saint Thomas Aquinas1, since only the Holy Spirit can lead us to the fullness of love of God and neighbor. More than just a theology of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, Father Marie-Dominique Philippe contributed to a theology of the Holy Spirit himself. He liked to assert that only the Holy Spirit leads and rectifies our hearts transformed by grace, often quoting Romans 8:14, but he always considered as a profound error any separation or opposition between the Holy Spirit and Christ (like the theological position developed by Joachim de Flore, for example), between the mission of the Word and that of the Holy Spirit. For him, it was a question of Trinitarian theology itself. Finally, his extremely attentive reading of the Gospel according to St. John enabled him to develop a theology that highlights how our participation in the mystery of the Paraclete is what Christ’s government – over us, over and through the Church – is ordered to as its end. This does not mean freeing ourselves from authority and obedience, by which we cooperate in Christ’s government, but it does remind us that the exercise of authority is ordered to an end, and that only Christ and the Holy Spirit Paraclete ultimately lead the human person to the Father and to the eternal beatitude to which he or she is predestined, and thus to holiness.
Father Philippe passed on the great Dominican tradition of the realism of the theological life: to concretely and personally receive Revelation, the Gospels and the mystery of Christ. This evangelical vitality was not only at the heart of his own way of life, but animated the contemplative and apostolic impulse in which he drew those he taught, first and foremost the members of the Saint John Community. His constant reference to the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii nuntiandi, “foundress” of the Community, and to the vir evangelicus that was Saint Dominic, are to be understood in this light.
6. Justice and mercy
The great light brought by the Gospel and proclaimed by Christ is that God’s government – of which the Church is called to be instrument and witness – is commanded by His mercy. So much so, that at the heart of God’s rule over the Church and the world, as revealed in the Book of Revelation, shines the Lamb who opens the seven seals, and by whose blood we are redeemed. This mercy is conceived not as an admission of weakness or a contempt for justice, but as primary, for it is God the Father2 who assumes justice in the order of wisdom3 willed by him. Here we understand how fundamental the contemplation of the mystery of God the Creator is, since we find in it an analogy that we can use to turn towards the very mystery of God that we reach only through faith: the mystery of the Incarnation and Redemption, the response of mercy to the misery of sinful man, the superabundance of the Father’s Goodness that wants to communicate itself without limits. And the response we give in faith to this most primordial of God’s initiatives is adoration in spirit and in truth.
Pope John Paul II, in particular through his familiarity with Saint Faustina, has insisted in season and out of season on reminding us how much the mystery of the superabundance of divine mercy is a indispensable light for our times.
As for Father Marie-Dominique Philippe, he insisted on this “time of mercy” as a sign of the times, referring more and more to Thérèse de l’Enfant-Jésus, Mother Teresa ou Saint Faustina, “saints of mercy”, as great gifts given by God to the Church of our time. This mercy can only fully exist if it is deployed in a number of ways:
- Towards persons, through a radical approach to fraternal charity that accepts to walk the path with people, without placing oneself in the overbearing position of those who know. This search for mercy, drawn from its primary source, the mystery of the Father, makes forgiveness appear as the act par excellence of mercy, both the forgiveness received from God and the forgiveness given and received in fraternal charity. “When we get to Heaven, there will be nothing left but mercy in our souls. And on this earth, insofar as we live by the Father’s grace, we must try to ensure that only the Father’s mercy is upon us1 “.
- From a viewpoint of community life, by understanding like St Thomas Aquinas, how teaching is the second of the works of spiritual mercy after intercessory prayer2. And all the more so since, by discovering how one of man’s greatest miseries is not to have access to true knowledge, we better appreciate the vital importance of teaching and preaching, transmitted as a living search for truth.
- Finally, in the exercise of government, always and ultimately considering the primacy of persons, and therefore of mercy, while accepting that while we can and must always show mercy to people, since Christ came to save them and give them Life, the consequences of such and such an act on the community and the common good involve respect for justice. How can this be embodied and realized? In the implementation of a common intention, expressed above all in the search for truth. Shouldn’t the Church be this if it is of Christ? Mercy towards people, whoever they may be, stemming from the primacy of Love, in an ever-renewed and self-giving trust, and just, fervent cooperation where each one surpasses himself in the search for truth, is invited to contribute the best of himself to the common good and to receive the fruits for his contemplative search for the mystery of God with Christ.
All human institutions are founded on justice rather than mercy. Religions are no exception, and the Church herself never ceases to stumble over the tensions and contradictions that the injunctions of justice and mercy ring in her ears. Christ reconciles justice and mercy only by dying of injustice, animated by infinite mercy. What does this mean in concrete terms – politically and institutionally – for the Church and the churches? Much remains to be done, and yet what a sense of urgency! Here lies a demanding and disturbing theological reflection on mercy as the fulfillment in Christ of all justice.
7. The divine economy and eschatological hope
We have already highlighted Father Marie-Dominique Philippe’s interpretation of the Second Vatican Council as a momentous event in the life of the Church, analogous to John the Baptist’s place in the divine economy. The prophetic announcement of a new Advent, in the words of Pope John Paul
II. Developing a theology of “salvation history” that enables us to read the “signs of the times” has been a constant preoccupation of Father M.-D. Philippe. Christ’s words: “How can you not know the times in which we live?” were of the utmost importance to him.
He drew his insight into the divine economy from an attentive reading of the Apocalypse and the first chapters of Genesis, which he began in 1930 as a novice and continued to the end of his life. However, it was the natural theological view of God’s guidance of all things, the divine government, which permeated every line of St. Thomas’s theology, that provided the foundation for his work. All that remained was for him to look at Mary’s growth in faith, hope and charity, and her cooperation in Christ’s work, to formulate a renewed, sapiential vision of the divine economy.
In his dialogue with Father M.-D. Chenu, he became aware of the limits of a theological position that adopts the path of history in reaction against a fixed vision of dogma and the repetition of a scholastic theology, cut off from all scriptural, patristic and historical references, repeating the same conclusions and becoming ever more alien to the Word of God and Christian life. He measured the risk of a historicist vision – often developed in the Protestant context and negating any metaphysical dimension of theology – leading to the splintering of theology and a separation between “dogmatic” theology, exegetical and biblical studies, patristics, apostolic life and spirituality.
Through a renewal of philosophical thought, drawn first and foremost from a reading of the works of Aristotle, and through metaphysics rather than historical phenomenology, Father M.-D. Philippe has highlighted the way in which biblical and mystical theology provide a genuine insight into the history of mankind, the future of the Church and God’s conduct towards each of his children. He is not, therefore, a “historian”, but he has reminded us – and this was urgent and necessary after the philosophical developments of Hegelian thought and the wanderings of Marxist messianism – how the development of Revelation, first in the becoming of the Old Covenant with Israel, then in the life of the Church, must be seen as a work of wisdom of divine government. In this way, we can see the links between the development of revelation from Abraham to Christ and the vital development of theology in the Church’s journey, between the path of Christ and that of the Church.
It was in this light that he laid great stress on the light shed by the stages of Christ’s last week on those through which the Church is passing today, and on the importance of the mystery of Holy Saturday, as the time when Mary enters into her mystery of divine maternity over the Church; a mystery of maternity in which the Church must choose to follow her.
Father M.-D. Philippe has thus sought to unfold the full richness of theological wisdom by looking at the various dimensions of the Word of God and its fruitfulness. The Word of God prepares the human heart and the chosen people for the coming of Christ: biblical theology. It nourishes contemplative faith: scientific theology (the work of Saint Thomas). It unfolds within the life of the Church: theology of the Church. It configures us to Christ: mystical theology. In this way, it becomes possible to integrate historical development (in its becoming and as life), with Christ at the heart and summit of the divine economy, thanks to a theological wisdom that, assuming an authentic metaphysical gaze, makes explicit the mystery of God that reveals itself received in faith.
Are his disciples really looking forward to the coming of Christ? Once the fervor of the novitiate has passed, do we have to wait until the end of religious life to enter once again into this expectation – more personal than communal? Being honest means recognizing the existential weakness of eschatological hope and the theology that should accompany it. Father M.-D. Philippe’s spiritual intuition has always been that contemplative charity, which nourishes the expectation of Christ’s coming, must, if it is to extend to the world (“God so loved the world…”), be accompanied by a discernment of the divine economy of the times in which we live. But how, without Hegelianism, moralism or illuminism, can we develop a theology of history and of God’s dealings with mankind?
8. The mystery of Mary
Finally, it’s the place of the mystery of Mary that’s crucial to mention here. The importance of this mystery in the life and theology of Father M.-D. Philippe is well known. Indeed, he never sought to add anything specifically to the rich Marian tradition from which he had benefited above all else. However, the acuity that metaphysical research gives to his view of the human person enabled him, as in a way his uncle Father Dehau had prophesied, to clarify who Mary is. “Who is she who rises from the desert, leaning on her Beloved?” In his many commentaries on the Song of Songs, and in seeking to clarify the richness of Mary’s personal cooperation with the work, but even more so with the person of her Son, he developed a theology of personal relationship with Christ – and with one’s brother – whose human realism allows itself to be transfigured by the mystery of fraternal charity. Entering into the mystery of Mary as “Immaculate Conception”, discovering what it means for her personally to be united to Christ on the Cross, to the point of becoming “Mother of the Church”, receiving Mary in glory as the prophetic announcement of the re-creation of which she is the dawn: so many ways of welcoming in faith the person of Mary as Jesus gives her to us in the footsteps of John.
To delve into this realism of the divinization of our persons through the action of the Holy Spirit in the light of Mary, is to discover the path of life that is ours – the material diversity of which from one to the other is extreme – illuminated by hers, and the way in which she comes to place her existence at our disposal. In other words, to move forward in our personal relationship with Mary is to enter into an evangelical transformation of our lives, and particularly of our fraternal charity. How can we understand that the poverty and gratuitousness we learned from her is not a necessity of faith or salvation, but a necessity if the fullness of God’s life is to take hold of our human lives? Father Philippe never ceased to refer to her as the one with whom we are in a permanent school of life, where nothing is of the order of the acquired, but everything is more and more of the order of gift.
Finally, at the end of his earthly life, Father M.-D. Philippe left us a great theological legacy on how Mary works with the Holy Spirit Paraclete to make the Christian life a life of Mercy. In other words, we still need to discover more clearly, as little Thérèse did, that mercy is the only evangelical path that can turn our human lives – however miserable they may be – into epiphanic sites of the Holy Spirit’s presence. More than the guardian of fraternal charity, Mary, living God’s mercy, is given to us as a shortcut to this mercy and the holiness it engenders. To caricature this in order to disqualify it is to condemn mankind, including Christians, to wander along the hopeless highways of justice.
After the golden age of Mariology and the Marian charism of St. John Paul II, the time has come for a personal interiorization of the believer’s relationship with the Virgin Mary, but also for questioning “the sign of the Woman” (Rev 12) in the chaotic world we live in. Father M.-D. Philippe has opened up ways for us to live out this moment of Holy Saturday, when the Church’s faith takes refuge in the unique heart of Mary, which is strikingly similar to our world, marked by disarray and the anxious expectation of a new Advent.
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As we come to the end of this journey through the work begun by Father Marie-Dominique Philippe, we can better appreciate the scope of his work in the search for truth in the ecclesial context of the Council. His passion for understanding the human person and his intense love of Christ were the driving force behind his work. He liked to say non recuso laborem to express his readiness to take up a philosophical or theological question at its starting point, in order to deepen it, to “go further” in the discovery of reality and the mystery of God. He wanted to serve mankind by making the philosopher’s skill and words available to those who wished to discover its singularity and richness. What’s more, he wanted to serve the child of God by giving him a sure, solid nourishment for his faith.
Learning to read the book of Creation and the book of Revelation constantly mobilized his attention and all his energy. His teaching of the three wisdoms enabled the brothers and sisters of Saint John, as well as many priests, religious and lay people, to participate and share in this luminous quest. Whether through preaching or teaching, through dialogue with the world of philosophers, doctors and therapists, marginalized people and artists, business and education, or religions – particularly Islam, Judaism and Buddhism – those who have benefited from his teachings have never ceased to make them their own, to pass them on and add to them. He never saw his teaching as the final word on things, but rather as a formulation of the foundations from which research must constantly deepen and expand. In other words: much remains to be done…
All these prophetic aspects of Father Marie-Dominique Philippe’s itinerary and teaching, from the poverty of intelligence in the face of reality, to the mystery of Mary, masterpiece of God’s wisdom, could be, with no doubt many other aspects, a deployment of this spirit of the beloved disciple, desired by Christ in the ultimate expectation of his return: “If I want him to remain until I come…”. (Jn 21:22).
[1] CARDINAL FRANC RODÉ, Address to Father M.-D. Philippe, Ars, July 1, 2006. This is also what a journalist from Le Figaro who interviewed Father Marie-Dominique Philippe on the occasion of the publication of his book Les trois sagesses very spontaneously noted: “It seems to me that this is the first time in the history of the Church that a religious community has been founded in reference to a philosopher and to a philosophical search for truth!” To which, Father Marie-Dominique Philippe commented: “Hey, that’s pretty good!”
[2] Cf. SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL, Const. dogm. Lumen Gentium, no. 45; Decree Perfectae caritatis, no. 2b; PAUL VI, Apostolic Exhortation Evangelica Testificatio, no. 11; JOHN PAUL II, Vita consecrata, no. 36.
[3] “As the proper and most special object of his religion, he had chosen this light of science to extirpate the errors of his time. His Office was that of the Word, my only Son. Above all, he appeared to the world as an apostle, so powerful were the truth and brilliance with which he sowed my word, dispelled darkness and spread light”. (Le Dialogue, t. II, trans. J. Hurtaud, OP, Paris, Lethielleux, 1940, p. 27).
[4] L’épée et le miroir, Paris, Gallimard, 1939, p. 63-64.
[5] “Dominic did not, however, renounce true voluntary poverty; he too loved it, and the proof that he practiced it, and that he abhorred wealth, is the curse he left as a legacy to his sons in his will, when he declared cursed from himself and from me, those who would introduce, into his Order, possessions, whether private or common. Is this not a sign that he, too, had chosen Queen Poverty as his bride?” (S. CATHERINE DE SIENNE, ibid., II, p. 272-273).
[6] Retour à la source, I, p. 148: “We will never be able to say that we have reached the limit, that our thinking on being is perfect, that it has nothing more to acquire. To claim this is to show that we don’t know what it is to think about being, to grasp it. That-which-is, as being, cannot be defined, nor enclosed in a conclusion; it is what is first for our intelligence. The knowledge of being is therefore first and ultimate for us. We cannot go beyond it to measure it or be judge of it. In this sense, we can say that this knowledge is ‘abyssal’: it places us in front of an abyss” (Une philosophie de l’être est-elle encore possible?, II, p. 286). “How difficult it is, given the human condition, to maintain a true life of the intelligence, an intelligence that accepts to progress slowly and to deepen ever more the contact we have with the realities around us and with ourselves, without ever despairing, without ever stopping, without ever abandoning this search for what is deepest, most essential, this search for what is being, the true and the good!” (Being, I, p. 186).
[7] “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God” (Rom 8:14).
[8] “Some have suspected [Marie-Dominique Philippe] of being a traditionalist or, worse, a fundamentalist, linked to Archbishop Lefebvre. But Marie-Dominique Philippe was on another side. He loved tradition, which for him was synonymous with fidelity to the Church. He was not nostalgic. He joined the Dominicans in 1930, and devoted his entire life to the renewal of the Church, with faith and intelligence. Steeped in Thomistic culture, he was a stranger to ideologies” (M. NEUSCH, in La Croix, August 28, 2006).
[9] M.-D. PHILIPPE, Conference, June 30 2006, Ars.
[10] The Three Wisdoms, p. 21.
Father Marie Dominique Philippe, O.P. 
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