In the Incarnation, God became vulnerable. He took on vulnerability which he didn’t have otherwise. The Humanity of Jesus introduced this feature of divine love, by letting the vulnerability of material creatureliness have a share in the Godhead. This is how we normally speak. But is it actually right? Does it manifest the truth about God? Does it shine a light onto the infinite mystery of the Trinity that is sufficient and appropriate to our times?
I think not. Vulnerability, it seems to me, is not a feature radically introduced into the Trinity by the assumption of a human nature. It seems far truer to me to say that vulnerability is a characteristic of the Mystery in its very essence.
Randy S. Woodley: Indigenous and Baptist
A Baptist pastor, theologian, activist, and scholar of Keetoowah Cherokee ancestry, Randy S. Woodley has recently started putting out a bunch of books—a lot of them at once, so much so that, despite my interest, it has gotten hard to keep up—on Christian theology, mission, and everyday living in a Native American context. This interests me personally for several reasons. First, I am Canadian, and the history of my country is deeply intertwined with issues of Indigenous identity and the horrors that have been done, particularly in the name of God; the tenor of the recent apostolic visit of Pope Francis to Canada (July 2022) testifies to this. Second, the residential school system, which was largely run by ecclesial bodies in Canada with the support of the government (the reverse is truer in the United States), is a particular form of clerical abuse or abuse conducted by and covered up ecclesial bodies—and I imagine regular readers will understand my connection to the topic. Third, every human on this planet should want to understand how indigenous peoples experience the Christian message; for Catholics in particular, Querida Amazonia has provided special direction on this concern.
In Woodley’s understanding as an Indigenous Christian, God is quite literally “the most vulnerable being who exists” and this is something to imitate in Christian living. He says this directly: “I consider Creator to be the most vulnerable being who exists, and it is in my vulnerability that I exhibit my spirituality, my humanity.”[1] This, no doubt, is jarring to many ears. To many ears, it rings false.
But is it false?
Woodley’s reasoning is given later in the same book. It goes like this:
I believe the Creator to be the most vulnerable being who exists. If God is love, and love means being vulnerable, then God must represent the essence of vulnerability. The incarnation of Jesus expressed Great Mystery’s vulnerability. Jesus’s lifestyle of hanging out with the poor and the marginalized, empowering women, healing lepers, and so on expressed Creator’s vulnerability. The crucifixion demonstrated God’s vulnerability. Jesus radically expresses the most vulnerable Creator by coming from a shalom Trinity, sharing Creator’s mission of love with us, and leaving the responsibility in our hands to co-act with God through love. God is in Jesus, and we, along with others who are different from us, are invited to become fellow human beings, to exchange and empower dignity in ourselves and in others, and to join in reciprocal conversations of each other’s understanding of truth and how to live shalom with, for, and among the whole community of creation, including people. The opposite of vulnerability is control, including the illegitimate use of power. The illegitimate use of power via White supremacy and religious cultural hegemony, especially as used against others structurally, is among the primary failures of Western colonizer Christianity.[2]
For Woodley, the Incarnation “expressed Great Mystery’s vulnerability” and the Crucifixion “demonstrated God’s vulnerability”—but neither of them introduced it. It was always there. Even without a human nature taken into the Great Mystery, “love means being vulnerable.”
Moreover, God wasn’t just vulnerable. He was the most vulnerable. Note the superlative. What Jesus does is “radically express[…] the most vulnerable Creator.” There is no disjunction. God was already the most vulnerable.
Why, we might ask, was God vulnerable beforehand? Because, implies Woodley, he constantly leaves us “the responsibility in our hands to co-act with God through love.” And that responsibility, we note, can be refused. We can say no. God leaves it to us, and we refuse it. Now, God of course is infinitely happy without our assent to his good motions, his good ideas, and his good plans. But we have co-responsibility, and we can say no to God. He is vulnerable before us, because he entrusted us with and in his love. Every sin, even every imperfection, exposes God’s vulnerability. Woodley isn’t wrong.
Next, note that way the author, as an Indigenous person, illustrates the point. He indicates creation, nature, what Catholics, following Pope Benedict XVI, call our common home. We can harm the nature around us with our actions. As an example, this is a particularly forceful one. The effects in this sphere we can see. God is manifested through his creation. We contemplate God gratefully as its author. (Catholics even call this the eighth work of mercy.) Yet… we can see with our ears and feel with our bodies the disruption to God’s plans. We can interfere with it. We can alter it. Creation is vulnerable to our interference. Thus, then, a contemplative gaze might conclude—and with Woodley, it does conclude—that this, too, shows us an aspect of the Great Mystery. To arrive at this conclusion isn’t pantheism or panentheism. God is not within his creation. It’s analogical thinking. Creation shows us this vulnerability. It’s not a pure privation. It’s not a simple lack. It manifests something of love to be open to interaction and denial and allowing space to choose. And this vulnerability didn’t come from nowhere.
Finally, we can’t bypass where Woodley implies the deviation in our thinking is rooted when we flinch at the idea of “God the most vulnerable.” He writes, “The opposite of vulnerability is control, including the illegitimate use of power.” A preoccupation with control is, he adds, one of “the primary failures of Western colonizer Christianity.” There is an ideological blockage that prevents us from appreciating the radical, original vulnerability of God. It is because power and control have particular social forces in our lives that we struggle to understand this feature of the Great Mystery. At an intellectual level, the difficulty is not innate to us. We can see vulnerability in creation, as a positive attribute, and we therefore can know it is from God and must be an expression of his own intimate reality. Only social paradigms which run counter to the Gospel—both the good news of Jesus and the good news heard in creation itself—train our minds to think otherwise.
This should sound as a serious challenge to anyone wanting to present the evangelical message today, to anyone who takes reconciliation seriously, to anyone who has heard Pope Francis’ call to rally around our common home, and to anyone who understands the gravity of the abuse crisis. Every single one of these major issues of our day is implicated in the question of the vulnerability of God.
Jacques and Raïssa Maritain: Catholic and Thomist
I’ll admit that I was well prepared for this Indigenous wisdom. None of this shocked me. When I read Woodley, I found a kindred spirit, someone who was saying things that I had already learned and then further intuited in the light of the abuse crisis. Way back in my RCIA days, Jacques and Raïssa Maritain had taught me the same things. They said them in their mid-twentieth-century Thomistic way, of course. But the substance was identical.
Perhaps the best place to start here is a short book that Raïssa wrote on the Our Father.[3] In the meditation on the third petition (“Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”), we come to discussing the question of what exactly it means for God to will something and for us to want it—or not. Here, Raïssa quotes her and Jacques’ theologian friend Charles Journet: “God is wounded by our sin.”[4] This is the first premonition of the vulnerability of God in this work.
God, says Raïssa, is wounded by our sin. The formula is stark. It’s abrupt. It’s startling. That, of course, is the point. In one sense, God cannot be wounded. He is immutable, as the theologians say: he can’t be changed. He possesses infinite beatitude: he cannot have diminished happiness. Yet Raïssa chooses this formula to describe the horror of sin. It wounds God.
Our attention grabbed and our hearts arrested, for they do love the Lord, we are spurred to read on to better ascertain what our author means. A long quotation from an earlier book by Jacques is given for explanation:
In [what theologians have called] his antecedent will, God wants all men to be saved, just as much he wants all my actions to be good. If I sin, something God intended and loved will not be forever. This is my first initiative. I am thus the cause—the nullifying cause of a deprivation with regard to God, a deprivation with regard to the term or the desired effect (in no way with regard to the good of God himself)… Sin does not only deprive the universe of a good thing, it deprives God himself of a thing which was willed conditionally but really by him… The moral fault affects the uncreated, not at all in himself, he is absolutely invulnerable, but in the things, the effects that he wants and loves. There, we can say that God is the most vulnerable of beings. No need for poisoned arrows, cannons, and machine guns, all it takes is an invisible movement in the heart of a free agent to hurt him, to deprive his antecedent will of something here on earth that he wanted and loved, from all eternity, and which will never be.[5]
In the midst of all the philosophical and theological jargon, we can see exactly what the sense of the woundedness of God is.
God is omnipotent; he can do all things. Yet somehow, he is also open to being thwarted, stopped, checked. That’s exactly what sin is. It is an event by which God offers, in that very moment, something good and beautiful to us. The thing offered has been, because it is good and beautiful, wanted by God in some sense from all eternity. There never was a moment in which he didn’t will it. He proposes it to our hearts and minds. But we are still able to refuse. We can annihilate the chance of realizing this good, any moral good, in this moment. We are, as it were, quite powerful in the face of omnipotence, if we choose to be. If something good comes about, it originates with God. But we have the ability to take initiative and create moral evil, nothingness, a vacuum in the heart of creation. God’s options for us are torn apart.
Not only, then, can we wound God. He is present everywhere and behind every good motion that comes to our hearts. His vulnerability to our powerful no is inconceivably great. There is nothing and there is no one more vulnerable, more offering of good things and relationship, and more able to be thwarted, checked, denied. In himself, God is invulnerable, yet somehow, in what he wills in the created order, he is buffeted and smashed more than a created mind could possibly imagine. In that sense, “we can say that God is the most vulnerable of beings.” Note that Jacques uses the same superlative as Randy S. Woodley: the most vulnerable.
As deep as this already is, Jacques does not stop here. He goes on to develop these kinds of thoughts in writings after Raïssa’s death.[6] To this end, he starts with what seems to be an inconsistency. He notes that Thomas Aquinas teaches that God is merciful “in respect to the effect produced, evidently not in respect to the passion experienced,” for God does not have pity in the sense of feeling sadness in his divine nature or being genuinely changed somehow in his Divinity or in any way altering with time.[7] Yet Thomas clearly would describe God as merciful in himself; mercy is the greatest virtue with which he acts towards us.[8] If that virtue is not in some sense in him, what does it even mean to say that he acts with it?
Jacques realizes that most Catholic philosophers and theologians, and especially most Thomists, resolve the difficulty by going back to the first principle of divine unchangeableness and immateriality. God doesn’t feel this passion. He’s neither changed nor moved. That is where most philosophers and theologians make their stand. And the principle in itself might be technically correct. But Jacques says it falls completely dead. It explains nothing. There is no light in saying this in response to the identified problem.
Jaques proposes, then, that there must exist
a state of perfection for which there is no name: a glory or splendor without a name, implying no imperfection whatever, as distinguished from what we call suffering or sadness, and of which we have no idea at all, no distinguished concept, no name which might be properly applied to God. Indeed it is solely by reason of the effect it produces that in our mental baggage there is a concept and a name for mercy properly applicable to God, but this does not mean that we should be satisfied here and push on no further. Beyond the concepts by which we have a proper knowledge of God’s perfections, the infinity of these perfections still remains something unnamed and unnamable, something properly unknowable by any single concept of ours. But in them there must exist that unnamed splendor to which what we call mercy in ourselves corresponds, not only according to its effect but according to its very essence.[9]
In other words, we don’t have words for whatever it is that is like suffering in God. This beauty of the divine nature must accord with what we know about divine unchangeableness, immateriality, and perfect beatitude. Yet this suffering within the heart of God, whatever that may be, must be present. Without it, mercy makes no sense; it becomes only love, without anything other distinguishing trait by which to understand it. No movement to pity or concern, no tugging on the heart strings—no mercy. Jacques asserts, with all the boldness of taking Thomist metaphysics for granted, that there has to be something in God that is like suffering but which surpasses our ability to understand in a single thought. This is not because of some opacity in the Divine Mystery. It is because, as a good Thomist would say, the Divine Mystery is infinitely bright, and our eyes are like those of a bat.
Jacques does not relent. He says that not only is this divine form of suffering compatible with God’s infinite happiness, it forms an inseparable part of it:
If we want to push the logic to the limit… then we must say that this mysterious perfection which in God is the unnamed exemplar of suffering in us, constitutes an integral part of the divine beatitude—perfect peace at the same time infinitely exultant beyond what is humanly conceivable, burning in its flames what is apparently irreconcilable for us.[10]
He further stresses that the solution to this problem must arise, not in the suffering of harm, evil, and limitation, but in the consent of the will to it, which we know from Christianity to be the means of transforming sadness into happiness itself:
Suffering is an evil and an imperfection, but by the fact that the spirit approves of it and consents to it and seizes upon it, it is incomparably noble as well.
Misery and nobility, evil suffered and grandeur of soul, heartbreak and illumination are all there together in one of those lived contradictions and in one of those indissolubly joined conflicts with which our psychology is not very content. And nobility of soul emerges to higher levels, all the while remaining bound to the misery that it drags with it toward the heights of the human spirit. A person who has not been taught by suffering knows nothing and does not amount to much, being as he is neither a true child nor an adult in the fullness of his truth.
From this we can understand that the concept and the word suffering can be used only metaphorically with regard to God and that nevertheless we ought to seek in an unnamed divine perfection the eternal exemplar of what in us is suffering with all its noble dignity. This supposes on the part of the spirit with regard to suffering (by reason of its nobility) a kind of double transfer: on the one hand, to an analogy of proper proportionality which we cannot isolate because we have no concept or word to bear or make clear its meaning and, on the other hand, to the divine Being Himself, in an eternal perfection which no human concept or name can properly signify.[11]
I stress Jacques’ logic again and continue to rephrase it into the terms common to this blog. The reason why there is this “unnamed perfection” in God which is like suffering is because of the grace of changing suffering into joy. This quintessentially Christian of processes is why it is possible, not only to reconcile something like suffering to God’s own perfect happiness. Not just that—this process must exist in some form beyond time and change within the Divinity itself. It is so good, so integral to the Christian message, that things cannot be otherwise. And if that’s the case, then none of the problems that our minds encounter rise to the level of being real inconsistencies. They are merely apparent.
Simply put, the solution is not to banish suffering and make a static picture integral to our human conception of God. It is to retain some difficult-to-describe analogate of suffering and add to it an infinitely, divinely speeded-up version of changing suffering into joy. Somehow. We can’t truly fathom it, but it must be. There is no other adequate way out.
In God, all is condensed: unchangeableness, infinite happiness, suffering, the (temporal) process of changing suffering into happiness. If somehow all these can coexist in one Being, then there is no contradiction. It only seems that we have a contradiction because we cannot conceive of this ourselves in a single idea. Our thoughts are so limited. They are so small and piecemeal. For us, the property of suffering and its transformation into joy imply time and mutability. But we know, we have to know that these eminently good things all coincide in God. And that explains, too, why he is Mercy Itself and God the Most Vulnerable.
It is, of course, not Thomism that holds Jacques back. Still less is it his Catholic faith. Nothing in these holds him back. They unleash him onto the mystery with what is, I think, greater solidity and metaphysical insight than could be found elsewhere. But that is only, as I insist, because he takes the principles deadly seriously, but does not waver at all in the face of experience. Experience comes first. And that experience teaches the vulnerability of God to the ever-present assaults of human wills, as well as the great resource for understanding the Christian faith as changing suffering into joy—and thus the condensation into one fine point of all unchangeableness, infinite happiness, suffering, the (temporal) process of changing suffering into happiness, mercy, and vulnerability.
If you can’t appreciate the utter genius of this, nor its far-reaching implications, then we just aren’t breathing the same spiritual air. For me, this is life.
Conclusion
There are many issues related to the ones I’ve mentioned here. I would like to finish with a few brief words on those.
For example, there is the whole question of how we prioritize Christian virtues. Fortitude gets plenty of attention. I even once heard a homily on how fortitude is a Christian virtue but patience is not. (Thomas Aquinas would surely like a word, for he teaches that patience is a part of fortitude.[12]) From this homily I got two overpowering feelings. As a survivor, I experienced this as a major red flag. But I also felt what I could only describe as “major colonizer energy.” Now, I’m descended from settler folk, too. But gosh, the justificatory colonizer bravado was off the charts in saying fortitude is a virtue and patience is not. There are clear ideological barriers in these kinds of assertions, and they dovetail terribly well with issues of vulnerability, too.
There is also the related question of economics and the environmental and climate crises. It makes a huge difference if we perceive these through a lens of vulnerability. Randy S. Woodley has made that abundantly clear. But we can perhaps appreciate it even more after considering Jacques and Raïssa Maritain. We have vulnerability, not just of our common home, but also of the human, the worker, the labourer. Moreover, the entire question of happiness is implicated, and that affects the entire purpose and justification of our economic theories and thought. If we really accepted Jacques’ view of the metaphysics of vulnerability and suffering, not only would we be compelled to take the environmental and climate crises seriously, but economics as we know it would need to change for the sake of the human.
Finally, there is the abuse crisis. Those who have lived it in its most first-person forms knows vulnerability in a particular, special way. Our leader on the journey, Marcel Văn, has had the clearest vision of the necessity of changing suffering into joy. We know the value of mercy, because we must give and receive much of it. In all these aspects—vulnerability, suffering, changing suffering into happiness, mercy—God exceeds us. Not just Jesus, but God. His whole nature is the pinnacle of each of these qualities, fused together from all eternity into a single whole-cloth truth beyond anything we can imagine. Never let anyone tell you otherwise. Not for a single second. In possessing each of these qualities—vulnerability, suffering, changing suffering into happiness, mercy—we are more like the infinite, unchangeable, perfect God, not less. Ever more, ever closer. Let him draw us.
O God, the Most Vulnerable, how I love you! How I thank you, how I praise your infinitely speeded-up process of changing suffering into happiness. Grant me the grace to return my vulnerability to your own, and to move at the pace you give me to change suffering into happiness. What you are exceeds human tongue and created thought. However we know you, you are greater still. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
[1] Randy S. Woodley, Indigenous Theology and the Western Worldview: A Decolonized Approach to Christian Doctrine (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2022), 52.
[2] Ibid., 103–104.
[3] Notes sur le Pater, in Œuvres complètes de Jacques et Raïssa Maritain, vol. XV (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires, 1995), 47–139. An English version is available online.
[4] Charles Journet, Le Mal. Essai théologique (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1961), 197, quoted by Raïssa Maritain, Notes sur le Pater, 91.
[5] Jacques Maritain, Neuf leçons sur les notions premières de la philosophie morale, in Œuvres complètes de Jacques et Raïssa Maritain, vol. IX (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires, 1995), 737–939 (here, 921–922), quoted by Raïssa Maritain, Notes sur le Pater, 92.
[6] Here the book is Approches sans entraves, in Œuvres complètes de Jacques et Raïssa Maritain, vol. XIII (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires, 1995), 413–1222; the English translation is Untrammeled Approaches, trans. Bernard Doering (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997).
[7] Approches sans entraves, 840–841; Untrammeled Approaches, 253–254.
[8] ST II-II.30.4.
[9] Approches sans entraves, 842; Untrammeled Approaches, 255.
[10] Approches sans entraves, 849; Untrammeled Approaches, 259.
[11] Approches sans entraves, 852–853; Untrammeled Approaches, 261.
[12] ST II-II.136.4.
Contemplative in the Mud 