Kevin Tortorelli OFM’s reflection marks Pope Francis’ giving of Laudato si’ on 24 May, the Solemnity of Pentecost, in 2015.
Introduction
Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theodrama understands Revelation as a drama that sets everything in motion. At its radiating centre is the life and mission of Jesus Christ. Jesus’ mission of searching and healing us invites us to find our own Theodramatic mission in life. Francis’ mission lies in praise of Jesus throughout creation that comes to be through Him, a dramatic action that is both free and given out of love. For St Francis this mission of praise takes treasured form in his Canticle of the Creatures. It may surprise us to see that the Canticle takes the form of an ethic of praise. This is given exceptional expression in the Holy Father’s encyclical Laudato Si’ in which Pope Francis develops an ethic of praise rooted in the Canticle of the Creatures.
Some Brief Notes on Theodrama
Revelation is dramatic. It contains the history of God’s initiative with regard to the world. It is the history of a struggle between God and the creature over the creature’s meaning and salvation. Revelation sets in motion all the elements of dramatic action – moral conflict, suffering, pain, death, guilt, evil. The way forward is located in the Incarnation and mission of Jesus Christ that lies at the centre of all Scripture and that is interpreted in the Spirit of God. On its basis God affirms our existence with a free and resounding ‘yes’. Dramatic action, however, heads not for definitions but for a process of discovery based on an imaginative grasp of the dramatic action that is Revelation.[1]
All Revelation is anchored in the person and mission of the concrete Jesus of Nazareth. The mission of Jesus identifies Him as the One Sent to us by the Father. He is the One Sent who comes to seek and serve us. His mission unites the Father and ourselves. As the One Sent, Jesus is therefore also Son, beloved Son, God’s own son (Rm 8:3). There is a strict identity between the unique person that is Jesus and His mission. Every one of us is created for the sake of a mission and it is that mission that makes one a person. In mission we become a brother and sister of the ‘first-born’ (Rm 8:29). Christ’s mission embraces what Theodrama calls ‘totality, the whole of Revelation and the whole of creation, interconnected in struggle and in final transformation’.
Francis’ response to this Theodramatic totality is simple praise. He accepted the mission of Jesus as the One Sent, who for our sake was poor and humble. In this Francis found his own, unique mission. His attractive personality reminds us of the importance of concrete persons in Theodrama, with its strong individual portraits, bursting with haecceitasas in the Poverello poet from Assisi. Without bag, purse, money or staff, Francis expressed his mission as the jongleur praising God and making no demands for recompense. In this space of his bare existence Francis knew that everything is God’s gift. This poverty lets appear the shining truth of God’s love for us.
The Franciscan life is therefore pure, glorifying praise
for the glory of the grace and love of God
which streams forth from every being.[2]
This praise of God, this glorification of His great goodness should characterise the friars, the Church, and the whole human race. This praise reflects God’s goodness in creation, redemption and return. Praise holds all together in heaven and on earth. Poverty basks in the flow of love that generates the praise of all creatures as we find in the Canticle of the Creatures. Franciscan praise is a distinct expression of the Theodramatic sense that the dramatic action of Revelation does not head for definitions. It heads rather for a process of discovery based on an imaginative grasp of the dramatic action that is Revelation. Chesterton calls this Francis’ great fixed idea, viz., of praise and thanks springing to their most towering height out of nothing and nakedness.[3]
The Canticle of the Creatures
Francis composed the Canticle at San Damiano sometime in the Spring of 1225, the year before his death. He was sick and blind and in great pain. The goal of all life was the praise of God in word and deed[4] and in that spirit the Canticle was to be sung. Brother Pacifico did the honours. It reads like Ps 148 that repeatedly praises God – ‘praise him sun and moon, all you bright stars, all you beasts and sea monsters, snow and wind, mountains, and depths. Let them praise the Name of the Lord for his Name alone is exalted and his splendour covers heaven and earth’.[5] Perhaps one may think of the Canticle and the theme of praise as gushy and sentimental. There may be a measure of disappointment as well if all Theodrama can do is highlight Francis’ penchant for praise.
Balthasar introduces us to the Canticle:
[One] passes ‘from noble lord and brother Sun, ‘sister Moon and star’, gentle or harsh weather, from the spring, from friendly or fearful fire and from the material earth immediately on to those who ‘for the sake of your love forgive and overcome torment and trouble in peace’, and to [Sister] Death, like the elements gentle or fearsome according as she meets a lover or a sinner.[6]
We recall how the sturdy Canticle made peace between Bishop Guido II of Assisi and Oportulo di Bernardo, podesta’ of Assisi.[7] Francis’ consciousness is on full view. All creatures are his brothers and sisters. They are not objects but find a wholesome role in a wide-ranging network of relationships, marked by gender equality and a shared, mutual source of vitality and life. The Theodramatic note can be seen in the community in which the sun is a brother as are wind and fire while the moon, stars, water and even death are sisters to us. God delights in His creatures because they are useful, desirable, beautiful, and strong. By their humble service, the creatures remind us of our own responsibilities.[8]
In particular Francis praises water and mother earth. Together they are our planetary home. Together they give birth to all life and sustain it. One senses the scale of this life commitment in the great number and variety of life forms. This bewildering variety may be our first invitation to contemplation. What do we see in all these life forms and in the earth as the womb of life? Is all this mere chance? But chance explains nothing while life is intelligible as existing, as sustained, as the domain of selection and development, of world order, freedom, and love. Water and mother earth stand at the beginning of creation:
And God said, let the earth bring forth vegetation, plant, and trees. And God said, let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures and let the birds fly above the earth. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them (cf. Gn 1:11–22).
Theodrama highlights and emphasises Francis’ mission as an ethic of praise because his mission responds to the Good with insight that changes behaviour. It is an ethic of praise because it expresses transformation in Christ who had seized him in the drama of his own life. Francis’ ethic of praise has been taken up by Pope Francis in his encyclical reflection that bears the title of the Canticle – Laudato Si’.
Pope Francis’ ethic of praise – Laudato Si’
Laudato Si’[9] appreciates the Canticle’s aesthetic and sacramental focus – that this creation is our world, a great womb of life in which the glory of God the Creator is manifest. But there is another view of the creation on offer. It defines our relationship toward creation in terms of a contract – it gives, and we get. Now creation is no longer a mother but a thing to be used and things do not have an ethical framework. The results of this mentality have now reached a crisis regarding the health of the planet, our common home. The encyclical invites everyone to identify and commit to sustainable and integral development.
Our common malaise is deftly treated – the connection between the poor and planetary degradation; the emphasis on everything as interconnected; the effects of technology and the search for new paradigms in response to the crisis. The Pope throws emphasis on the loss of biodiversity and on the fact that consumerism fails to imitate nature, the great ‘recycler’ that wastes nothing. He observes that the burning of fossil fuels leads to a crisis in the supply of fresh water and to the adverse effects of climate change. We can hear the Canticle in the affirmation that everything in the world is interconnected. An ethic of praise confirms a shared sense of responsibility for the common good and its basic principle of human dignity, its awareness of our propensity to head toward bias and decline that stands in the way of integral human development. Such bias and decline stem in part from the paradigm of technology that controls and maximizes profit in the service of unlimited growth.
An ethic of praise celebrates the simple fact that there is no economic development without human development. On this basis the encyclical invites a return to a renewed covenant with the earth. It will take the form of a widespread conversation on the look of secure development and human progress, the building of human community, the final meaning and goal of human activity.[10] The hope is that the fruit of this dialogue will be genuine, measurable economic progress and innovation. As in the (rainbow) covenant with Noah (Gn 9:12ff), we agree never to destroy the earth and all life on the earth.
I have taken a liberty in adding a final stanza to the Canticle based on Laudato Si’:
Be praised O Most High and Glorious God
Through Sister Rainbow who leads us away from
destruction, bias and decline toward our full,
sustainable human development as your image in
in your creation. Amen.
[1] Balthasar has here undertaken a monumental project (exegi monumentum aere perennius, Horace, Odes III, XXX) in five formidable volumes averaging 500 pp each. See Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theodrama. Theological Dramatic Theory, I, II, III, IV, V, various trans. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988–1998).
[2] Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, IV, The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity, various trans. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), p.379.
[3] G.K. Chesterton, St Francis of Assisi (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1923), p.168.
[4] Michael Cusato, OFM, ‘Francis and the Franciscan Movement (1181/2–1226)’ in The Cambridge Companion to Francis of Assisi ed. by Michael J. P. Robson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p.31.
[5] The Book of Psalms is strongly a collection of songs of praise (Tehilim). See Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, III (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 2019), pp.9–10.
[6] Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord. A Theological Aesthetics, IV, p.380.
[7] Robson, ‘The Writings of Francis’ in The Cambridge Companion to Francis of Assisi, p.46.
[8] Timothy J. Johnson, ‘Francis and Creation’ in The Cambridge Companion to Francis of Assisi, pp.144–46.
[9] The encyclical is available on the Vatican website: http://we.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco 20150524 enciclica-laudato-si.html. A remarkable anticipation of the encyclical can be found in the late Eric Doyle OFM, St Francis and the Song ofBrotherhood (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980).
[10] These points reflect the teaching of the Second Vatican Council. See ‘The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World’ (Gaudium et Spes) in The Documents of Vatican II, ed by Walter Abbott SJ (New York: Herder and Herder, 1966), pp.210–38.