Pierre de Bérulle Quoted in "Magnifica Humanitas"

 Pope Leo XIV's recent encyclical Magnifica Humanitas builds on the Social Doctrine of the Church, of which Pope Leo XIII is generally considered the father (though, of course, he built on principles found in the Church Fathers and other theologians).  Due to that, almost all of the quotations and citations in the document are from the pontificates of Leo XIII and later, with the vast majority being from Vatican II and thereafter.  

There are only a handful of quotations from non-papal authors; most-reported in the press is the quotation from Gandalf in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (MH 213); another is from Viktor Frankl (MH 121).   But the one that most caught my eye is from one of my favorites, Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle.

Pope Leo quotes from Bérulle's masterwork, the Discourses on the States and on the Grandeurs of Jesus: “According to the teaching of our faith, we have and adore, in our mysteries, a God who is born in a manger, a God who lives and travels in Judea, a God who dies on the cross, a dead God who lies in the tomb...O wonder... man is God and this God-Man passes through all those stages, endures all those states and ennobles them, sanctifies them, deifies them in himself" (MH 232).   

If we look at the context of this quotation, in Discourses IV.VI, we can see that this glorification of mankind in God is a remedy to the lowliness of man in himself: "O wonder!  O grandeur!  That man, who is naught but dust and ash in his origin, according to the word of the same One Who formed him, and Who said to him, in forming him, Pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris [You are dust, and unto dust you shall return] (Gen 3:19); that man, who is naught but powerlessness and weakness in his state and in his progress, and is naught but a vapor, and even a momentary vapor—Vapor ad modicum parens [Vapor appearing for a moment] (Jas 4:15), says the holy Scripture—that man, who is naught but misery in his birth, in his life, in his death, that is to say, in all his states, and about which an ancient has said, O necessitas abjecta nascendi, vivendi misera, dura moriendi [O abject necessity of being born, wretched necessity of living, hard necessity of dying]: that this man, I say, is living and subsisting in the Divinity; that this man is God, and that this God-man passes through all those stages..."  (The "ancient" quoted is Sidonius Apollinaris (5th c.), in his Letters VIII.XI.)

Pope Leo emphasizes the importance of man's limits as a necessary part of his nature and experience, a part that cannot and must not be "overcome" (see MH 12,  118-122, 236).  This is part of his critique of transhumanism and posthumanism (MH 115ff).  Technology, and man's efforts alone, cannot overcome these limits: the only way to be truly "more than human" is through the divinization we receive from Christ (MH 127-128).  

Jesus' humanity is "an abyss of marvels, a world of grandeurs ... the chief-work of God ... the throne of glory and grandeur, where the fullness of divinity dwells uniquely, divinely, bodily (cf. Col 2:9)" (Bérulle, Discourses II.IV).  "Jesus is in a state of fullness, of infusion, and of communication of graces and effects emanating from the divinity in the humanity, and flowing from the deified humanity upon creatures, like a fullness of life and grace in which men and angels participate ... and this infusion and abundance is due to Jesus, from the moment of the Incarnation ... De plenitude ejus nos omnes accepimus [From His fullness we have all received] (Jn 1:16)" (Discourses II.IX).  "It is the only-begotten Son of God Who is this mediator, Who made Himself man for men, and Who, through a love and an admirable power, elevates us in abasing Himself, glorifies us in suffering, deifies us in humanizing Himself, and eternizes us in dying" (Discourses VII.IX).

God created man glorious, "little less than a god" (Ps 8:5), and, even after the Fall, man retains some of that glory.  But it is not an unlimited glory: man is beset by weaknesses and foibles, by limits and inabilities.  Yet God so loved this mankind He made that He wished to raise it even higher, even above that initial glory from which it fell.  And so the Son "nullified Himself" (in Bérulle's favored term) to accept our weakened state and to raise it up in Himself and to raise us up through it.  And so highly did He esteem humanity that He did not simply borrow a body for a time, to slough it off after He redeemed us.  Instead, He took that humanity with Him to the right hand of the Father, and now, in that marvelous line of Bérulle, "For as long as God will be God, God will be man" (Discourses IX.IV).

It is in this that humanity finds its true magnificence, and I am happy that Pope Leo has pointed the Church, however subtly, towards the great teaching of Pierre de Bérulle.

(For those who want to read more from Bérulle, I have translated his Life of Jesus and his Elevation Regarding St. Mary Magdalene, as well as a collection of his writings on the Passion.)