The critical issue being explored in this paper is the following: how canwe understand the past, and especially the Marist charism, in a way which engages us in the present and gives life to our future? Clearly, this is a matter of more than academic interest as a reading of the Superior General’s Report on the Society demonstrates.
My suggestion and approach is that we do not begin with the past which, by definition, is that which is not present. We do not deny history, but we recognize with the German philosopher' that “history is seen and understood only and alwayswe cannot live in the past. A purely historical approach to charism ossifies and worships the past, freezing the founder’s vision into an ideology (idea-“logos” without the “myths”). We end up “imitating” the founder, ‘copying’ his ideas in a I fundamentalist I way which is a subtle form of ‘idolatory’ • The creative response of Father Colin and the early Marists to the needs of their time is a central facet of their lives; nothing less is demanded of us today.
Nor is it enough to confine ourselves to contemporary concerns, however pressing. We live in the present, but reality is a life-flow from past to future. A purely experiential approach to charism, by centering all understanding on contemporary experience, will dismiss the relevance of insight from a by-gone age as simply inadequate, even infantile, for our own. The present becomes the judge of the past (instead of vice-versa). Such a perspective will ‘ use ‘ certain aspects of the founder's thinking only when these are considered helpful to support one ‘ s own ideas; for the rest, the founder will be ‘ forgotten ‘ , ‘ ignored ‘, ‘ replaced ‘• Such a piecemeal approach to Marist charism is evidently unsatisfactory and ultimately false. The problem here is not ‘ idolatry ‘ but ‘ iconoclasm ‘ - and so the whole Colinian vision collapses.
It is therefore necessary to develop an approach that neither naively imitates the first Marists nor conveniently relegates their ideas to the periphery. We may live in the present but our roots are deeply embedded in the past and our task is to carve out for ourselves and the Church a future of promise. We are called to be a community of memory and hope. In responding to this call a hermeneutic approach to charism may shed light.
Hermeneutics is simply the art of interpretation. It seeks, however, to bridge the gap from past to present by keeping alive the truth in-between ( ‘ interpret ‘) which is a dynamic and living reality as distinct from some ‘ dis-incarnated knowledge'. What is the use of interpreting the Word of the founder if it fails to impinge upon our Word and world today? Hermeneutics is, then, the art of ‘ world-linking ‘: in our context, Father Colin ‘ s with our own.
A hermeneutics of memory and hope has us stand where we are - the present - but not as in a cocoon or a dismembered (or an un-remembered) moment of history. Rather, we seek to be alive to this moment ‘ s full potential. Specifically, as Marists, we stand within a movement, a living (and changing) reality, that has a real beginning and a real history; and, inevitably, we are responsible for that movement ‘ s future. Remembering we have a past, we seek to interpret its present meaning. This is not a mere academic pursuit but a life-and-death question of who we are and what we are to become. What does John Claude Colin's Word mean for us today and tomorrow? The accent is on the meaning which links worlds and leads to action. Marist charism is a narrative, unfolding and practical reality. How can we, today, enflesh the Colinian Word?
To state the matter differently and still within this hermeneutic perspective: there is no Marist charism as a distinct entity lodged in its ‘ pure state ‘ in the mind of the founder and which we seek to ‘ extract ‘ (to be naively copied) or to ‘preserve ‘ (as in a museum and then conveniently forgotten). Certainly, Father Colin and the first Marists lived in a - the - privileged moment of the unfolding of Marist history. But charism is that which is alive, active, growing, changing, unfolding throughout history in the lives of those who respond to the call. The early Marists are the ‘ incarnation ‘ of the charism in a privileged time but, nonetheless, within the confines of their time. Charism is not an idea or a set of ideas, but a life lived in response to a Word of which none of us, not even Father Colin, is the origin. Clearly, charism is the gift of the Spirit. This transcendent dimension - or, as we will say, its mythic quality - continuously calls for new and creative reinterpretation according to situation, time and culture.
All this is not to minimize what has been called ‘ Fidelity to the Founder ‘ - rather it is to enlarge our vision as to what this really means. A hermeneutic approach to marist charism equally insists on the need for exegesis of the Colinian texts (what did Father Colin say and mean?) and the application of the historico-critical method (to situate the founder's meaning in its historical ang cultural context). But ‘text ‘, even when inserted into its ‘ context ‘, is not enough. This is not simply because the total meaning of Father Colin ‘ s Word (text) and world (context) is always beyond us; there is the further complication of our own presuppositions and subjectivity (our socio-historical context or ‘ horizon ‘ ) which we bring to the task of interpretation.
Hermeneutics recognizes that we are dealing with two, or many, different worlds of meaning. This does not lead to an impasse but rather to the interpretative challenge to struggle with the Word of the founder withi9 the horizon of our world so that, in a powerful sense, we 'share the same universe ‘• Within this universe there is a dialogue set up between Father Colin and ourselves: he questions us we question him. His meaning and the marist charism are ‘ impressed ‘ into our lives and meaning - our worlds are linked.
This is to say that what Father Colin says to us is both what he meant to say and more than he precisely intended. Certainly the 'more' must be faithful to the ‘ what but it must also be different to it inasmuch as what Father Colin gives to his immediate followers is a specific world-bound interpretation which must be transculturalized into the world of our horizons. This is the place of - as it is certainly the time for - creative hermeneutics.
The hope of this paper is to do no more than provide a hermeneutic key which may help us further unlock the memory of John Claude Colin in creative and faithful reinterpretation of his Word - and without the creativity neither is there the fidelity. Later it will be argued that the interpretative task belongs to the whole Society of Mary, that interpretation is a communal adventure, and that the Marist community can be defined precisely as the place where separate persons are united in a commonly held memory and a commonly shared hope. ‘‘ The dialectical movement from past to present, and from memory to hope, is the task of hermeneutics and, equally, the task for the faithful disciples of John Claude Colin. Marist Root-Metaphor .
To begin this hermeneutic task the suggestion is that we seek to uncover the root-metaphor which first captivated the imagination of the founder and his immediate followers, giving birth to the Society. A root-metaphor is any story, symbol or experience which gives unity and meaning to our lives and which, it is alleged, can be discovered whenever our biographies are deeply probed. For example, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the root-metaphor by which truly believing Christians live and through which their lives carry redemptive meaning.
inspiring a hermeneutics of memory and hope. The Church of the beginnings and the Church of the last times provide meaning for the present Church by pointing to the atemporal reality of the one universe empowered by Mary’s presence.
Mary, as queen Of earth and heaven, is well able to span the world of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Obviously she is in a unique position to succeed in this hermeneutic art of world-linking. The difficulty, of course, is that we stand in a world of much smaller horizons. The point of the story is that we are able to stretch those horizons, and so come to see and act as Mary does. The genius of John Claude Colin is precisely that he enables his followers to see that the Word of God and, in this case, the Word of Mary explode our limited world-views. We are no longer bound by the exigencies of present experience. This vantage point of a higher - and hermeneutic - perspective is what fires the first Marists enabling them to cut through so many of the limitations {personal, social and cultural) which their world imposes. While they remain people of their times they are not just people of their times in the sense that they learn to ‘measure’ their lives with reference to other worlds.
What John Claude Colin and the Marists found was that the meaning of today's existence can only be realized when creative remembrance of the past is linked to a proleptic hope in the future. In fact, this is central to Christian revelation: Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End and the Centre of our lives: the redemptive meaning of the world which we inhabit is only in context of the wider horizon of the whole universe. The ‘new content' of Mary’s presence is specifically related to the life of the Church, and had already been 'woven into ‘ the Christian experience; properly understood it serves only to highlight the dialectical dynamic at the heart of Christian life. Involved here is a ‘ conversion experience ‘ - that through Mary one learns to find Christ and to tend his Body which is the Church.
The Marist hermeneutic involves two dimensions : the on historical and the other transcendental. Marists feel themselves to play a part in the ‘historical role’ in the new-Marian-Church-being born. This is the ‘ interior-reality-experience ‘ which John Claude Courveille manages to pass on to John Claude Colin and the other aspirants at the Lyons seminary and is enshrined in the Fourviere Pledge of July 23rd., ‘8’6. But more than an historical role it takes its place in ‘ the greater mystery of things ‘ which God has ordained and disclosed through words attributed to Mary - this is the 'transcendental reality ‘ linking and uniting the Marist individuals to a way of seeing that is not their own. The marist hermeneutic involves both an epistomological and a faith perspective.
If we live not only for today but in the memory of yesterday and the promise of tomorrow we are already closer to a hermeneutic and truly Marist (as well as Gospel) response to life. However, there is much more to the structure of the Society's rootmetaphor which deserves our further attention - it is both hermeneutic and mythic at this deepest level of meaning.
Mythic Structure Of Marist Root-Metaphor The invitation to view Marist life in mythic terms - the Marist myth - may strike some readers as the last blow in an attempt to retrieve vision and interpret Marist life for today. Surely, if it became necessary, it would be better for us to lie low and die quietly! My own contention is that the reverse is true: only when we learn to appreciate the mythic depths in our own lives and in the life of our Society will we be truly on the path to renewal. Nor am I the first to say so, A recent study on renewal in religious life during a time of significant cultural change emphasises this precise point:
'Central to the project of revitalizating is the need to deepen the mythic roots of one's own life and those of one's community.”
The modern scientific fallacy that says Man has outlived the age of myths is but a demonstration of the rationalistic tendency which worships at the shrine of human reason, where God was dethroned and goddess religion sacrificed long ago, leaving but charred bones and empty churches. The 'scientific myth ‘ still prevails, but it is crumbling in the wake of the demonstrable inability of ‘ mere reason ‘ to answer the needs of the human heart, and possibly even to provide for a world-future at all: many are
The apostles needed her to guide them, and to be in a sense the foundress of the Church. At the end of time her protection will shine forth in an even greater way. The apostles had their reasons for not making it known to the world, but she will make her presence felt even more than in the beginning. (Founder Speaks ‘‘6:7)
Only a symbolic and mythic interpretation does justice to the evidence. Otherwise we are caught, for example, with the inconsistency with which Father Colin oscillates between the ‘nearness’ of the end of time (it is always close in his mind, but he usually employs the future tense) and its ‘presence’ already among us ( “we are at the end of time” (Founder Speaks ‘‘8.’). Symbolic time operating in a cosmic dimension does not follow the laws of historical time, and so we can be equally placed within and outside of history. We may call this ‘eschatological time’ and find its parallel - and paradox - in the Gospels: ‘end time’ is both ‘now’ and ‘yet to come'. We need a mythic perception to appreciate such symbolic truth - with its power for mediated meaning.
From such analysis it is evident to the writer that the root-metaphor of Marist charism operates in symbolic space and time, and adheres to a cosmic dimension of recurrent patterns in a way which is fully consonant with the symbolic features attributed by scholars to mythic structures. This leads us to the conclusion that the marist rootmetaphor is empowered by a mythic structure. The implications of this finding will aid our hermeneutic task.
Hermeneutic Function Of Myth
Myth has been described as a story or formulation which establishes the “world” within which we live and out of which we act; mythic activity is ‘world making’ activity. myth is not 'something' we “believe in” , but that forever elusive horizon of intelligibility ‘out of which we believe', providing the structure of our faith, the reasons of the heart, and the unconscious power behind one's actions. Yet myth is no mere blind, subjective force. Its credibility is precisely that it provides meaning and, especially in the case of religious myth, is capable of linking Man to the transcendent mystery of God. Man does not take hold of myth; it is myth that takes hold of him. There is always a certain surrender or self-sacrifice involved in mythic activity - for it is here that one knows - with the heart if not with the head - that ultimate meaning is to be found quite outside the realm of the ego: this is that paradoxical dimension to mythic activity spoken by Jesus; ‘‘the man who tries to save his life will lose it, but the man who loses his life for the sake of the kingdom will be saved.”
History and myth are both necessary if we are, today, to learn to relate to the real. There is no doubt that Le Puy was an historical event in the life of John Claude Courveille. But did Mary actually ‘appear’ to him, and if so how? Was it a I psychogenetic vision'? Historical research might lead us to call it an ‘inspiration’ rather than a ‘revelation’. Here we will call it a ‘disclosure’ and treat it as a 'mythic experience’. Certainly there was something ‘historical’ , but its truth-value, its reality, does not depend on any particular, verifiable fact. What concerns us is the power of the Le Puy story which captured the imagination, minds and hearts of John Claude Colin and his companions.
Conclusion
We have tried to argue that a hermeneutic approach to Marist charism is imperative if we are, today, to reincarnate the vision of the founder. Such an approach proceeds along the lines of a dialectic of memory and hope, and a dialogue between Father Colin and ourselves. By focussing on the root-metaphor which inspired the Society in its beginnings – “Mary upheld the Church in the early times; and she will do so again at the end of time ... through you” - it has been shown that Marist charism is itself based on a hermeneutics of memory and hope. This hermeneutic structure is complemented and deepened by a mythic structure.
It is our contention that it was this hermeneutic and mythic power which, as symbol of God's grace, gave birth to the Society of Mary; and that without that power the Society loses its real meaning. We have seen that to be truly seized by a myth is to adopt the attitudes that the myth proposes. Mythic activity creates world by structuring consciousness, encouraging attitudes, suggesting behaviours - or, as Father Colin says, “we worked in that direction, so to speak. II But myth is no blueprint for action; it does not answer the concrete demands of everyday life. Like love, myth is all and yet never enough. There is the need for on-going interpretation of the mythic demands in terms of the world which the myth creates. We must follow Father Colin to deepen our mythic roots and move beyond - or “through” - the Society’s root-metaphor.
John Claude Colin’s role can be seen as that of a 'mythic mediator’. It is he who draws out the myth's major implications and demands, fills in part of the 'mythic space ‘ by contextualizing its relevancy, providing symbols, and even extending the myth. He does this in context of his world, as we must do it for our own. However, his mediation now has a prime place in our Marist sacred history of interpretation and life.
It is, therefore, to John Claude Colin's role as mythic mediator that we now turn, but without losing sight of the reality that we ourselves are involved in a mythic (world-making) and hermeneutic (world-linking) activity. In other words we are looking 'through' the Marist myth and not ‘ at ‘ it. Although living in a different world we are trying to share the same universe as John Claude Colin.
NOTES
The word “charism” has a long and involved history of interpretation in the Church. Its meaning, in context of religious life (having being introduced by Paul VI in Evangelica Testificato), is apt to be misunderstood. For our purposes 1 charism 1 means:
“ a, calling received by some Christians for the good of the whole Church, a calling which involves a certain kind of existence” (as in 1 Cor. 7:7) and the exercise of certain ministries (as in 1 Cor.12, Rom.12 and Eph.4). This kind of life and these “diakoniai” are in themselves a gift of the Holy Spirit determining the existential situation of a Christian in the Body of Christ. They are gifts both for the whole Church to which they are destined, and for the individuals who receive them, since these gifts also determine the way these individuals are called to grow in Christ” J.M. Lozano, “ Founder and Community: Inspiration and Charism “, Review For Religious, Vol. 37, 1978/2, p.225.
The founder's charism or heritage is not confined to his written documents. 'Text' here applies to the full body of knowledge that we have of the founder 1 s ideas; it is important that the 'hermeneutic principle' take into account this broad understanding of the word ‘text’ In view of this
“The sense of a text is not behind the text, but in front of it. It is not something hidden, but something disclosed. What has to be understood is not the initial situation of discourse, but what points to a possible world ... Under- standing has less than ever to do with the author and his situation. It seeks to grasp the world-propositions opened up by the reference to the text. To understand the text is to follow its movement from sense to reference: from what it says to what it talks about”. Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and The Surplus of Meaning, Texas Christian Uni. Press, 1976, pp.87f.
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