Gaudete

... even if it's a day or two late (sorry, life has been busy lately).  The coming-around of the Third Sunday of Advent this year coincided with a passage I ran across recently.  This is from Joseph Ratzinger, wearing here neither papal white nor his cardinalatial red, but rather scholarly black, or perhaps even the robes of the Socratic sage.  Here he is on joy (I have taken the liberty of breaking up a lengthy paragraph into several shorter ones to make this passage more readable):

Let us inquire once more, then, about the proclamation of joy that is the rubric over Christendom.  What is it like?  What is its true form?  Let us begin again, very cautiously at first, with a linguistic statement.  The word evangelium means "glad tidings", we said.  But it did not have, originally, the neat and somewhat ineffectual ring that it has today even when it is translated more comprehensively - and, admittedly, with a concomitant poverty of meaning - as "good news".  In Jesus' time, the word had found its way into the language of contemporary political theology: the decrees of the emperor, all his proclamations, were called evangelium, even when, for the recipients, they were far from being good news.  Evangelium meant "a message from the emperor".  There was nothing trivial or sentimental about it but rather something majestic.  Even though such messages were not always manifestly joyful, they were called joyful because they came from him who held the world together.   

Granted, it would be presumptuous for just any individual - even an emperor - to claim to be God and, for that reason, to call his messages "glad tidings", for it would be an expression of man's glorification of self.  But when the carpenter's son of Nazareth uses this manner of speech, then all that has gone before is absorbed and surpassed: Jesus' message is evangelium, not because it is immediately pleasing to us or comfortable or attractive, but because it comes from him who has the key to true joy.  Truth is not always comfortable for man, but it is only truth that makes him free and only freedom that brings him joy.   

Now, however, we must ask more precisely: what makes a man joyful?  What robs him of joy?  What puts him at odds with himself?  What opens him to himself and others?  When we want to describe the most extreme form of being at odds with existence, we often say of an individual that he does not like himself.  But whom or what is he to like who does not like himself?  Something very important makes its appearance here: egoism, certainly, is natural to man and needs no encouragement; but that is not true of self-acceptance.  The former must be overcome; the latter must be discovered, and it is assuredly one of the most dangerous errors of Christian teachers and moralists that they have all too often confused the two and, by exorcizing the affirmation of self, have enabled egoism to avenge such a betrayal by becoming all the more rampant - this, ultimately, is the root of what the French have labeled the maladie catholique: one who wants to live only on the supernatural level and to the exclusion of self will be, in the end, without a self but not, for that reason, selfless.  The last entry Bernanos has his country priest enter into his diary reads: "It is easier than one thinks to hate oneself.  Grace consists in forgetting oneself.  But if pride were completely dead in us, then the grace of graces would be to love oneself humbly as just one, however unessential, part of the suffering members of Christ."  This word sheds a deep peace over the diary that is otherwise so pensive.  At the end, a breath of the evangelium, of the joy that comes from glad tidings, is felt.  For that man is truly redeemed who can love himself as a part of the suffering members of Christ, who can be simultaneously forgetful of self, free and so in harmony with himself. 

Let us express the same thought more simply and practically: the root of man's joy is the harmony he enjoys with himself.  He lives in this affirmation.  And only one who can accept himself can also accept the thou, can accept the world.  The reason why an individual cannot accept the thou, cannot come to terms with him, is that he does not like his own I and, for that reason, cannot accept a thou. 

Something strange happens here.  We have seen that the inability to accept one's I leads to the inability to accept a thou.  But does one go about affirming, assenting to, one's I?  The answer may perhaps be unexpected: We cannot do so by our own efforts alone.  Of ourselves, we cannot come to terms with ourselves.  Our I becomes acceptable to us only it if has first become acceptable to another I.  We can love ourselves only if we have first been loved by someone else.  The life a mother gives to her child is not just physical life: she gives total life when she takes the child's tears and turns them into smiles.  It is only when life has been accepted and is perceived as accepted that it becomes also acceptable ... 

The content of the Christian evangelium reads: God finds man so important that he himself has suffered for man.  The Cross, which was for Nietzsche the most detestable expression of the negative character of the Christian religion, is in truth the center of the evangelium, the glad tidings: "It is good that you exist" - no, "It is necessary that you exist."  The Cross is the approbation of our existence, not in words, but in an act so completely radical that it caused God to become flesh and pierced this flesh to the quick; that, to God, it was worth the death of his incarnate Son.  Once who is so loved by the other identifies his life with this love and no longer desires to live as if he is deprived of it; one who is loved even unto death - such a one knows that he is truly loved.  But if God so loves us, then we are loved in truth.  Then love is truth, and truth is love.  Then life is worth living.  This is the evangelium ...

-- Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology / Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology.  Translated by Sister Mary Frances McCarthy, S.N.D.  San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987.  pp. 78-81