Papal preacher delivers third Advent Sermon
(Vatican Radio) The Papal preacher, Father Raniero
Cantalamessa, delivered his third Advent Sermon on Friday to Pope Francis and
members of the Roman Curia.
As preacher to the Papal Household, Capucin Father
Cantalamessa gives a meditation to the Pope, Cardinals, and members of the
Roman Curia every Friday morning in Lent and Advent in the Apostolic Palace’s
“Redemptoris Mater” Chapel.
In the third Advent sermon, Fr. Cantalamessa continued his
theme of the Holy Spirit’s action in the Church.
Please find below the full text English translation
of the Sermon:
Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, ofmcap
Third Sermon for Advent 2016
THE SOBER INTOXICATION OF THE SPIRIT
1. Two Kinds of Intoxication
On the Monday after Pentecost in 1975 at the closing of the
First World Congress of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, Blessed Paul VI
delivered an address to the ten thousand participants gathered in the St.
Peter’s Basilica in which he defined the charismatic renewal as “a chance for
the Church.” When he ended reading his official discourse, the pope added these
words extemporaneously:
In the fourth-century hymn by St. Ambrose that we read this
morning in the breviary, there is a simple phrase that is difficult to
translate: Laeti, which means “with joy,” bibamus,
which means, “let us drink,” sobriam, which means “sober” or
“temperate,” profusionem Spiritus, which means “the outpouring of
the Spirit.” Laeti bibamus sobriam profusionem Spiritus. This could
be the motto for your movement: its plan as well as a description of the
movement itself.[1]
The important thing to note immediately is that the words
from Ambrose’s hymn were of course not written for the charismatic renewal.
They have always been part of the Liturgy of the Hours of the universal Church.
This is therefore a joyful exhortation addressed to all Christians. As such I
would like to present it in this meditation, also as my humble greeting to the
Holy Father for his 80th birthday.
To be more accurate, in St. Ambrose’s original text, instead
of “profusionem Spiritus,” “the outpouring of the Spirit,” we find “ebrietatem
Spiritus,” that is, “the intoxication of the Spirit.”[2] Tradition
subsequently considered his original expression to be too audacious and
substituted it with a milder and more acceptable word. In doing so, however,
the meaning of a metaphor as ancient as Christianity itself was lost. In the
Italian translation of the Breviary, the original text of the verse by St.
Ambrose has been restored correctly. A stanza of the hymn at Lauds for the
Fourth Week of the Breviary says,
And may Christ be food to us,
and faith be our drink,
and let us joyfully taste
What led the Fathers to take up the theme of “sober
intoxication,” already developed by Philo of Alexandria,[4] was
the text in which the Apostle exhorts the Christians in Ephesus that says,
Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery; but be
filled with the Spirit, as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among
yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts. (Eph
5:18-19)
Starting with Origen, there are countless texts from the
Fathers that illustrate this theme, alternating between the analogy and the
contrast of physical intoxication and spiritual intoxication. The likeness lies
in the fact that both types of intoxication infuse joy; they make us forget our
troubles and make us escape ourselves. The contrast lies in the fact that while
physical intoxication (from alcohol, drugs, sex, success) makes people shaky
and unsteady, spiritual intoxication makes people steady at doing good. The
first intoxication makes people come out of themselves to live below the level
of reason; the second makes people come out of themselves to live above the
level of their reason. Both use the word “ecstasy” (the name recently given to
a deadly drug!), but one is an ecstasy downward and the other is an ecstasy
upward.
St. Cyril of Jerusalem writes that those who thought the
apostles were drunk at Pentecost were correct; they were mistaken only in
attributing that drunkenness to ordinary wine, whereas it was “new wine”
pressed from the “true vine,” who is Christ. The apostles were intoxicated,
yes, but with that sober intoxication that puts to death sin and brings life to
the soul.[5]
Drawing on the episode of water flowing from the rock in the
desert (see Ex 17:1-7) and on Paul’s comment about it in the First Letter to
the Corinthians (“All drank the same supernatural drink . . . and all were made
to drink of one Spirit” [1 Cor 10:4; 12:13]), Saint Ambrose wrote,
The Lord Jesus poured out water from the rock and all drank
from it. Those who drank it only symbolically were satisfied; those who drank
it in very truth were inebriated. Inebriation of this sort is good and fills
the heart without causing the feet to totter. Yes, it is a good inebriation. It
steadies the footsteps and makes sober the mind. . . . Drink Christ, for
he is the vine; drink Christ, for he is the rock from which the water gushes
forth. . . . Drink Christ, that you may drink His words. . . . Divine scripture
is imbibed, divine scripture is eaten when the juice of the eternal word runs
through the veins of the mind and enters into the vital parts of the soul.[6]
2. From Intoxication to Sobriety
How do we appropriate this ideal of sober intoxication and
incarnate it in our current historical and ecclesial situation? Where, in fact,
is it written that such a strong way of experiencing the Spirit was the exclusive
prerogative of the Fathers and of the early days of the Church, but that it is
no longer for us? The gift of Christ is not limited to a particular era but is
offered to every era. There is enough for everybody in the treasure of his
redemption. It is precisely the role of the Spirit to render the redemption of
Christ universal, available to every person at every point of time and space.
In the past the order in which this dynamic was generally
taught was that which went from sobriety to intoxication. In other words, the
way to attain spiritual intoxication, or fervor, was sobriety, that is,
abstinence from things of the flesh, fasting from the world and from one’s
desires—in a word, mortification. This understanding of the concept of sobriety
was deepened in particular by Orthodox monastic spirituality and linked to the
so-called “Jesus Prayer.” According to this path sobriety means “a spiritual
method” consisting of “vigilant attention” to free oneself from passions and
evil speech, removing and leaving behind all carnal satisfactions, and having
the only activity be repentance for sin and prayer.[7]
Under different names—detachment, purification,
mortification—this is the same ascetic doctrine found in the Latin saints and
Doctors of the Church. Saint John of the Cross speaks about the soul’s need to
“detach and strip itself for God’s sake of all that is not God.”[8] These
stages of spiritual life are called purgative and illuminative. Here the soul
painstakingly frees itself of its natural habits to prepare for union with God
and for His impartations of grace. These things constitute the third stage, the
“unitive path,” which the Greek authors call “divinization.”
We are heirs of a spirituality that conceived of the road to
perfection in this sequence: First we need to remain in the purgative stage for
a long time before entering into the unitive stage; it is necessary for a
person to practice sobriety for an extensive period before being able to
experience intoxication. Every expression of fervor that manifests itself
before that time is regarded as suspect. Spiritual intoxication, with all that
it signifies, thus comes at the end and is reserved for the “perfect.” The
others, called “proficients,” should especially engage in mortification,
without making claim to a strong and direct experience of God and of his Spirit
while they are still struggling with their weaknesses.
There is great wisdom and experience underlying all this,
and it would be wrong to consider these things outdated. It must be said,
however, that such a rigid plan also marks a slow, gradual shift from a focus
on grace to a focus on human effort, a shift from faith to works, sometimes
verging on Pelagianism. According to the New Testament, there is a circularity
and simultaneity between the two things: sobriety is necessary to achieve
intoxication of the Spirit, and intoxication of the Spirit is needed to attain
the practice of sobriety.
An ascetic path, undertaken without a strong initial impulse
of the Spirit, would be a deadly labor and would produce nothing except
“boasting in the flesh.” According to Saint Paul, it is “by the Spirit” that we
must “put to death the deeds of the body” (Rom 8:13). The Holy Spirit is given
to us so that we are able to mortify ourselves rather than being given as a
reward for having mortified ourselves.
According to an early Church Father, a Christian life full
of ascetic efforts and mortification but without the life-giving touch of the
Spirit would be like a Mass in which there were many readings, many rites
performed, and many offerings brought forward, but in which there was no
consecration of the elements by the priest. Everything would remain as it was
before. That Church Father concluded,
One must look on the life of the Christian in a similar way.
He may have fasted, kept vigils, chanted the psalms, carried out every ascetic
practice and acquired every virtue; but if the mystic working of the Spirit has
not been consummated by grace with full consciousness and spiritual peace on
the altar of his heart, all his ascetic practice is ineffectual and virtually
fruitless, for the joy of the Spirit is not mystically active in his heart.[9]
This second path—from intoxication to sobriety—was the path that
Jesus led his apostles to follow. Even though they had Jesus as their teacher
and spiritual master, they were not in a position before Pentecost to put into
practice hardly any of the gospel precepts. But when they were baptized with
the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, then we see them transformed and capable of
enduring all kinds of hardships for Christ, even martyrdom. The Holy Spirit was
the cause of their fervor rather than its effect.
There is another reason that impels us to rediscover this
path from intoxication to sobriety. The Christian life is not only a matter of
growing in personal holiness, it is also ministry, service, and proclamation.
To accomplish these tasks we need “power from on high,” the charisms or, in a
word, a profound Pentecostal experience of the Holy Spirit.
We need the sober intoxication of the Spirit even more than
the Fathers did. The world has become so averse to the gospel, so sure of
itself, that only the “strong wine” of the Spirit can overcome its unbelief and
draw it out of its entirely human and rationalistic sobriety, which passes
itself off as “scientific objectivity.” Only spiritual weapons, says the
Apostle, “have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and
every proud obstacle to the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to
obey Christ” (2 Cor 10:4-5).
3. The Penetrating Rain of the Spirit
Where are the “places” in which the Spirit acts today in
this Pentecostal way? Let us listen once again to the voice of Saint Ambrose
who was the cantor par excellence, among the Latin Fathers, of the sober
intoxication of the Spirit. After discussing the two classic “places” in which
one could receive the Spirit—the Eucharist and Scripture—he hints at a third
possibility, saying,
There is, too, the inebriation that follows on the
penetrating rain of the Holy Spirit. We read in the Acts of the Apostles . . .
of those who spoke in foreign tongues and appeared, to those who heard them, to
be drunk on new wine.[10]
After noting the “ordinary” ways of being intoxicated by the
Spirit, Saint Ambrose adds a different way with these words, an “extraordinary”
way (extraordinary in the sense that it is not predetermined or instituted),
that consists in re-living the experience the apostles had on the Day of
Pentecost. He obviously did not add this third possibility to tell his audience
that it was closed to them and had been reserved only for the apostles and the
first generation of Christians. On the contrary, he intended to inspire the
faithful to desire the experience of this “penetrating rain of the Spirit” that
occurred at Pentecost. Also for St. Ambrose Pentecost was not a close event,
but a possibility always open in the Church.
The possibility is therefore open also for us to draw upon
the Spirit in this new way that depends solely on God’s sovereign and free
initiative. We should not fall into the error of the Pharisees and scribes who
said to Jesus, “There are six days for us to work, so why heal and do miracles
on the Sabbath?” (see Luke 13:14). We could be tempted to say to God or to
think, “There are seven sacraments that sanctify and confer the Spirit, so why
go beyond them into new and unfamiliar ways?”
One of the ways in which the Holy Spiriti is acting today,
outside the institutional channels of grace, is the Charismatic Renewal. The
theologian Yves Congar, in his address to the International Congress of
Pneumatology at the Vatican in 1981 on the sixteenth centenary of the
Ecumenical Council of Constantinople, said,
How can we avoid situating the so-called charismatic stream,
better known as the Renewal in the Spirit, here with us? It has spread like a
brushfire. It is far more than a fad. . . . In one primary aspect, it resembles
revival movements from the past: the public and verifiable character of
spiritual action which changes people’s lives. . . . It brings youth, a
freshness and new possibilities into the bosom of the old Church, our mother.
In fact, except for very rare occasions, the Renewal has remained within the
Church and, far from challenging long-standing institutions, it reanimates
them.[11]
The principal instrument by which the Renewal in the Spirit
“changes people’s lives” is the baptism in the Spirit. I mention it in this
place without of course any intention of proselytism, but because I think it is
important that a reality which touches millions of catholics around the world
be known at the center of the Church.
The expression itself comes directly from Jesus who before
ascending into heaven, referring to the future Pentecost, said to his apostles:
“John baptized with water but you, not many days from now, will be baptized in
the Holy Spirit” (Ac 1:5). This is a rite that has nothing esoteric about it
but rather occurs with gestures of great simplicity, peace, and joy and is
accompanied by attitudes of humility, repentance, and willingness to become
like children so as to enter the kingdom.
It is a renewal and an actualization not only of baptism and
confirmation, but also of the whole of Christian life: for spouses, a renewal
of the sacrament of marriage; for priests, a renewal of their ordination; for
consecrated people, a renewal of their religious profession. People
prepare themselves for this, in addition to making a good confession, by
participating in catechesis meetings by which they are put in vital and joyful
contact with the principal truths and realities of the faith: love of God, sin,
salvation, new life, transformation in Christ, the charisms, and the fruits of
the Spirit. The most common and beautiful fruit is the discovery of what it
really means to have a “personal relationship” with Jesus. In the catholic
understanding Baptism in the Spirit is not an arrival point, but a starting
point toward Christian maturity and service to the Church.
A decade after the charismatic renewal appeared in the
Catholic Church, Karl Rahner wrote,
Even an objective and rational theology does not have to
reject all these enthusiastic experiences [of grace] out of hand. . . . . Here
we are certainly confronted with especially impressive, humanly affective,
liberating experiences of grace which offer wholly novel existential horizons.
These mold the innermost attitude of a Christian for a long time and are quite
fit . . . to be called “baptism in the Spirit.”[12]
But is it right to expect that everyone should go through
this experience? Is this the only possible way to experience the grace of
Pentecost? If by the “baptism in the Spirit” we mean a certain rite in a
certain context, we have to say no; it is not the only way to have a profound
experience of the Spirit. There have been and are countless Christians who have
had a similar experience without knowing anything about the baptism in the Spirit,
receiving a spontaneous outpouring of the Spirit at the occasion of a
retreat, a meeting, a reading, or, according to Saint Thomas Aquinas, when
someone is called to a new and more demanding office in the Church.[13]
Having said that, however, it must also be said that
what is commonly called the “baptism in the Holy Spirit” or the “outpouring of
the Spirit” has shown itself to be a simple and powerful way to renew the lives
of millions of believers in almost all of the Christian churches. Even a normal
course of spiritual exercises can be concluded very well with a special
invocation of the Holy Spirit, if the person leading it has experienced it and
the participants desire it. I had that very experience last year. The bishop of
a diocese south of London took the initiative to convene a charismatic retreat
that was open to the clergy of other dioceses as well. About one hundred
priests and permanent deacons were present, and at the end they all asked for
and received the outpouring of the Spirit, with the support of a group of
laypeople from the Renewal who had come for that occasion. If the fruits of the
Spirit are “love, joy, and peace” (Gal 5:22) by the end they were almost
touchable with hands among those present.
This is not a question of adhering to one movement
rater than to other movements in the Church. Nor is it even a question,
properly speaking, of a “movement” but of a “current of grace” that is open to
all and is destined to lose itself in the Church like an electric discharge
that is dispersed within a mass and then disappears once it has
accomplished its task.
Saint John XXIII spoke of “a new Pentecost”; the Blessed
Paul VI went further, speaking of a “perennial Pentecost”. This is what he said
during a general audience in 1972:
The Church needs her perennial Pentecost; she needs fire in
her heart, words on her lips, prophecy in her outlook. [...] The Church needs
to rediscover the eagerness, the taste and the certainty of the truth that is
hers [...] And then the Church needs to feel flowing through all her human
faculties a wave of love, of that love which is called forth and poured into
our hearts ‘by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us’ (Romans 5.5)”[14].
Let us conclude therefore with the words of the liturgical
hymn recalled at the beginning:
May Christ be food to us,
and faith be our drink,
and let us joyfully taste
the sober intoxication of the Spirit.
________________________________________________
English translation by Marsha Daigle-Williamson
[2] Sancti
Ambrosii, Opera 22: Hymni, Inscriptiones, Fragmenta (Rome:
Città Nuova, 1994), p. 38. The Latin stanza: “Christusque nobis sit
cibus, / potusque noster sit fides; / laeti bibamus sobriam /ebrietatem
Spiritus.”
[3] St. Ambrose’s
hymn “Splendor paternae gloriae” [“O Splendor of the Father’s Glory”], in Brian
P. Dunkle, Enchantment and Creed in the Hymns of Ambrose of Milan (Oxford,
UK: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 222.
[4] See, among many
examples, On the Creation of the World in Philo: Philosophical
Writings, ed. Hans Lewy (Oxford: East and West Library 1946), p. 55.
See Legum allegoriae 1, 84, “methe nefalios.”
[5] See St. Cyril
of Jerusalem, The Catechetical Letters of St. Cyril of
Jerusalem, 17, 18-19, reprint of Nicene and Post-
Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 7 (N.p.: Veritatis Splendor, 2014), p.
592; see PG 33, p. 989.
[6] St. Ambrose, Commentary
on Twelve Psalms, 1, 33, trans. ĺde M. NíRian (Dublin: Halcyon Press,
2000), p. 21; see also PL 14, pp. 939-940.
[7] See Hesychius,
“On Watchfulness and Holiness: Written for Theodolus,” in The
Philokalia, vol. 1 (London: Faber and Faber 1979), pp. 162-198.
[8] Saint John of
the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel II, 5, 7, trans. E. Allison
Peers (New York: Image Books, 1958), p. 96.
[9] Macarius of
Egypt, “Love,” 113, in Philokalia, vol. 3, trans. and ed. G. E.
Palmer et al. (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), pp. 334-335.
[11] See Yves Congar,
“Actualité de la pneumatologie,” in Credo in Spiritum Sanctum, ed. José
Saraiva Martins, vol. 1 (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1983),
p. 18, republished as “Pneumatology Today,” in American Ecclesiastical
Review 167, no. 7 (1973): pp. 435-449.
[12] Karl Rahner, The
Spirit in the Church, trans. John Griffiths (New York: Seabury Press,
1979), pp. 10-11.
[14] Insegnamenti
di Paolo VI, vol X, Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, p. 1210 s. (Discourse
of 29 Nov.1972); translation in E. O’Connor, Pope Paul and the Spirit,
Ave Maria Press, Notre Dame, Indiana 1978, p.183).
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