Kolbe… and Palamas? – KBGF 10

 

In the 10th encounter of our seminar with Dr. J. Isaac Goff on the book of Fr. Peter Damian Fehlner, "Kolbe, The Theologian of Auschwitz" we pause a moment to do some questions and answers, particularly looking at the similarities between Palamas and Franciscanism and St. Maximilian Kolbe, then at Mary and secularism, and finally at the Conventual Franciscan and friend of St. Maximilian, Leone Veuthey, who recently recognized by the Vatican as having lived a life of heroic sanctity and now a candidate for sainthood.

There are some similarities, historical and theological, between the Franciscan Order and the Hesychasm defended by Palamas. Both were radically incarnational, practical, and invocatory: calling on the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary. For both, the saints are not just theologians, but lived theologies. Like Bonaventure, Palamas saw the need for a scientific and syllogistic theology that gives a form to intellectual reflection within the greater whole of being in the Church and seeking union with God. St. Maximilian also sees the need for methodical reasoning while calling on the name of Mary in the face of the social evils gripping our century. This is licit because she works in a conjoined and coordinated way with and under her Son and God, Jesus Christ, in the destruction of satanic influence in our hearts and in society.

This is needed because we have a created independence, but if we make that independence absolute, we systematically exclude God and slavishly idolize our feelings and desires. But in Mary we see a person free and obedient, who in choosing the will of God brings forth the Savior in the world, and continues to do so in our hearts as our spiritual mother. If you deny this Marian principle of loving obedience to God as the path to blessedness and perfection, you destabilize man by abandoning him to disordered desires and you seek to perfect him according to some type of ideology. Only in choosing God do we find the final goal of all longing and the true perfection of man.

So we call upon her and seek to imitate her, for while the symbolic structure of the world points towards Her and Her Son, she is not a symbol but a real human woman that I enter into a filial relationship with. By knowing her fullness of genuine love, I know what it means to love God and love others. But to do this, I not only need to will to love, but to know it, to have a holy mind as well as a holy heart, for compassion without clarity of mind is a very dangerous thing. I need to be able to go from what I know to how to act through a middle which guides my actions from origin to end, from identity to love.

We need a Christian Philosophy, and Fr. Peter himself was very influenced by Leone Veuthey, a friar recently proclaimed venerable and so a candidate for becoming canonized a Saint. This all grows within relationships with real persons through invoking the holy names of Jesus and Mary (and not invoking unholy names!) and through meeting Jesus personally in the sacraments. The "profanation of charity" in our day is the domination of sensuality and social ideologies that destroy in the name of love and equity. But how Mary shows us what true love is.

Ave Maria!

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