St.
Philip Neri: the Virtue of Joy
Fr. Philip Neri
Powell, OP
Notre Dame Seminary,
NOLA
19 April 2015
“Men are generally
the carpenters of their own crosses.” – St Philip Neri
Part
I
It
is early February in the year 1590. Philip Neri – Pippo Buono
– is 75 years old and long a saintly figure in the streets and
courts of Rome. Confessor and confidant to cardinals, statesmen,
thugs, and fishwives, Pippo stands with the entire Oratory community
of the Chiesa Nouva and eleven cardinals, waiting for the
solemn procession to arrive. Relics of the ancient martyrs, Papias
and Maurus, had been discovered in the titular church of Agostino
Cardinal Cusano earlier in the year. Cardinal Cusano, a penitent
under Pippo's spiritual care, wanted to bestow on his confessor and
friend a singular honor. He had ordered the newly discovered relics
to be transferred to Pippo's home, the Chiesa Nuova. When the
procession arrives, the Papal Swiss Guard comes to attention and
forms an aisle for the relics into the church. As the relics pass by
Pippo, a familiar buzzing begins in his heart. An old friend, Joy,
rises in his soul and Pippo does what he always does when the
nearness of holiness threatens him with ecstasy. He does something
foolish. Where most of us would drop to our knees in prayer, or
shout out praise and thanksgiving to God, Pippo does the unexpected.
He walks up to one of the stoically serious Swiss Guards and begins
pulling on his beard!1
For St. Philip Neri, for Pippo Buono, the joy that love
demands of us is best expressed in humble acts of apparent
foolishness.
And
about his apparent foolishness there is much to say. Reading Pippo's
biographies is like reading a catalog of schoolboy pranks. Attending
vespers at a fashionable parish, he would dress like a beggar and
loudly mispronounce the Latin. He would send penitents on public
errands with their clothes turned inside-out. He would demand that
the young dandies who came to him for advice shave half their beards.
He was once seen skipping like a child inside the church of St Peter
in Chains. And another time, during Mass at the Chiesa Nuova,
he had a barber cut his hair!2
Many thought he was simply an addle-minded old man. Others thought he
was a saint entirely lost to ecstasy. Pippo saw himself as a sinner
tempted by pride to embrace the power and glory that his closeness to
God afforded him, a temptation that – on a much larger scale –
had corrupted Rome and exiled godly humility. Pippo's antics were not
attention-seeking, or foolishness for the sake of foolishness. His
ridiculous behavior kept his joy grounded in humility. He feared the
lightness of his heart at the merest thought of God would lift him
away – literally, allow him to fly – and he feared that
his people would come to believe that only those so lifted in flight
could be said to be holy. His life, his work, his death all point us
toward the truth of joy: Joy
is love in action. Human joy, our joy, is divine love,
God's love for us, in action.
With
Pippo's living-admonition to remain firmly grounded in humility
ringing in our ears, we can move – cautiously move –
toward a less animated exploration of the virtue of joy and how joy
must enliven a priest's ministry. I say “cautiously move” because
joy is an effect of love and we do ourselves only a little good by
simply pinning joy to a specimen board, splaying open its belly, and
dissecting its parts. Examination is good and necessary, but it is
also woefully insufficient. Joy is best known in being joyful.
Not by knowing the names and functions of all its parts. That said,
we turn to the Great Dissector himself, Thomas Aquinas, for the
better parts of understanding where we are intellectually with joy.
According
to Thomas, strictly speaking, joy
is not a virtue.3
It is not an operative habit, nor does it incline us to perform any
specified acts. However, the virtues (theological, moral,
intellectual) do tend to produce “several ordinate and homogeneous
acts,” or effects. In the case of the virtue of charity, joy is one
such ordinate and homogeneous act, making joy an effect of charity.
Thomas writes, “Hence [charity] inclines us to love and desire the
beloved good, and to rejoice in it. But in as much as love is the
first of these acts, that virtue takes its name, not from joy, nor
from desire, but from love, and is called charity. Hence joy is not a
virtue distinct from charity, but an act, or effect, of charity. . .”
How
are these scholastic distinctions even remotely pertinent to our
exploration of Pippo's apparent foolishness? Philip Neri studied
philosophy at the Sapienza
in Rome and theology with the Augustinians just short of a decade
after Emperor Charles V paid mercenaries to sack the city in 1527. In
his biography of Pippo, Paul Turk, notes, “. . .it is well
testified that he read St. Thomas Aquinas throughout his life and
that later on he was capable of discussing intricate problems with
learned men of his day.”4
Though Pippo always downplayed his intellectual prowess and
education, the influence of Thomas in Pippo's day was pervasive and
unavoidable. Pippo often sent young men to the Dominicans and
maintained friendships with the friars at San Marco in Florence. The
fiery friar-preacher, Savonarola, was a life-long inspiration for
Pippo. So, it is a safe assumption that the fine scholastic
distinctions found the Angelic Doctor's work made their way into the
saint's humble heart and mind, and were given an exaggerated
expression in his apparent foolishness. Pippo fully understood that
his antics were both a means to humility and a way to be loving. In
other words, he wasn't just acting crazy to be seen acting crazy.
When the fire of joy overflowed, Pippo – always mindful of the
temptation of vanity – let loose in the streets of Rome a circus of
God's love and drew to Him Who Is Love crowds of sinners to be
welcomed and washed clean. For sinners, foolishness was Pippo's hook.
For himself, it was a penance.
If
we take Pippo's life as a dramatic reading of Thomas' notion of joy,
we can better see not only why Pippo lived as he did, but also how we
have so misunderstood joy. Assuming that Thomas is correct concerning
joy – and, of course, he is! – then we must admit that we've been
“doing joy” wrong for quite some time. Like most of our
traditional philosophical and theological vocabulary and grammar, joy
has been stripped of its transcendental referent –
de-transcendentalized, if you will. The modernizing project of the
so-called “Enlightenment” demanded that our language submit
itself to the grubby paws of naturalized reason and bow to the harsh
judgments of empirical science. Any attempt to reach above human
reason and grasp at the transcendent was ruled out of order. Rather
than reinvent an entirely new language for the modern project, our
Betters took the languages they had on hand – traditional
philosophy and theology – and began re-writing the dictionaries to
scour them clean of the natty influences of silly supernatural
superstitions. The virtues were re-paganized into merely human
attributes, laudable behaviors with nothing above them to strive
toward and nothing beneath them for support. If the virtues suffered
such a barbaric treatment, then their “ordinate and homogeneous
acts” and effects suffered as well. Desire and joy as effects of
charity – de-transcendentalized – became little more than human
longing and momentary delight. Nothing above, nothing below. Nothing
to move toward, nothing to stand on.
The current best definition of
joy? “A feeling of great pleasure and happiness.” A feeling. Not
an act of love or an effect of charity. But a feeling. A feeling of
what? Pleasure and happiness. How defined? No idea. With nothing as a
referent, pleasure and happiness are defined by nothing more than the
individual expressing joy. Do the ISIS terrorists who are beheading
Christians in Iraq feel joy? Sure, why not? If it makes them happy –
and they certainly look happy – why not call it joy? Would Thomas
and Pippo call it joy? Is beheading another human being in order to
instill terror in others a loving act? Hardly. Yet we can rightly
describe these terrorists – using our modern dictionaries – as
joyful.
My
purpose in rehearsing the fall of our traditional language is to
bring into focus the depths to which we have fallen in allowing our
words to become bastardized by nominalism. That is, by not
challenging the underlying assumptions of the modern world's use of
language, we immediately surrender the field to nihilism and chaos.
When we use words in the way that our Betters demand we use them, we
sign away our natural freedom to speak as Christians. Pippo may not
have understood the problem of nominalism or even knew that the
problem existed; however, he understood all too well the temptations
inherent in allowing words and concepts to remain merely marks on a
page. Over and over again in his sayings, his letters, his strange
antics in the streets of Rome, Pippo acted out the
fires of joy. Not
simply speaking about joy but acting joyfully; loving sinners; acting
as a flesh and bone avatar of joyful repentance. Turk notes that
Pippo never gave a penance that he himself failed to complete. He was
as demanding of himself as he was of his penitents. And in this way,
Pippo embodied the joy that our Lord came to us to complete.
If
St. Philip Neri embodies genuine Christian joy, then what does the
opposite of Christian joy look like? Thomas tells us that desire and
joy are the “ordinate and homogeneous acts” or effects of the
virtue of charity. Sorrow is opposed to joy, and sorrow is an effect
of the vice sloth. So, what is sloth? Thomas, referring to St John
Damascene, writes, “Sloth. . .is an oppressive sorrow, which. . .so
weighs upon man's mind, that he wants to do nothing. . .Hence sloth
implies a certain weariness of work. . .a 'sluggishness of the mind
which neglects to begin good.'”5
He goes on to argue that sorrow – as an effect of sloth – is
always evil because it is an intentional rejection of joy, or a
refusal to experience the effects of love, especially divine love.
That's the definition. But what does sloth, oppressive sorrow, look
like in a person? We are quick in the 21st
century to point out that sloth sounds an awful lot like clinical
depression. And the two probably share some of the same observable
traits. But we would miss the point of defining sloth if we simply
shoved it into the clinical category of depression and left it there.
Perhaps the difference that makes the difference between the two is
that sloth – as a vice – is a bad habit. Not a condition or an
illness or a psychic wound. But a bad habit. Sloth is the deliberate
rejection of joy, the calculated refusal to allow the effects of
love, esp. divine love, to touch the soul. This means that the
slothful man has been shown divine love, received it as a gift,
benefited from its promises, and yet refuses to exhibit any of its
effects on him. In this way, sloth is the bad habit of ingratitude
and the added sin of failing to bear witness to the generosity of
Christ's gifts. What we normally think of as slothfulness arises out
of this spiritual laziness: I can't be bothered to participate in the
divine life except as it directly benefits me. The slothful man knows
that he is obligated by baptism and his gifted share in the divine
life to go out and proclaim the Good News of the Father's freely
offered mercy to sinners. He himself as experienced this mercy. Yet!
He refuses. That refusal, that bad habit of ingratitude and spiritual
stinginess, produces an oppressive sorrow that only compounds and
amplifies his sloth.
Pippo
Buono stands against sloth by living joyfully. He bears witness to
divine love by acting, speaking, thinking joyfully – all as the
direct result of getting and receiving the Lord's mercy for his sins.
And lest he become prideful of his spiritual gifts and take too
seriously the accolades that cardinals and fishwives are heaping upon
him, he dresses like a clown, dances around the streets of Rome, and
tells corny Latin jokes in choir. And not only does he do all these
silly things out of love, he demands that his penitents and followers
do them as well. Why? Because the joy that love demands of us is
best expressed in humble acts of apparent foolishness.
Part
II
Joe is the sacristan at St
Dominic's parish here in NOLA. He's in his late 60's, a very humble,
hardworking man who loves the Church and cherishes his job in the
sacristy. Joe is also Barber to the Friars. He buzzes Dominican heads
all over the city. And he loves it. Joe also has a gift for making
this particular friar (me!) feel just a little self-conscious, and
that's OK because he does it in a way that perfectly reflects his
charity. Every time I see Joe, he says, “Fr Philip! It's always so
good to see you! You have the best smile and you always brighten my
day! Just being around you makes me feel better about the world!
You're the smartest guy I know and I hope those guys at the seminary
know how lucky they are to have you!” And he goes on and on in this
vein for quite some time, and then he'll pause and say, “But I
don't want you to get a big ego, so I'm gonna stop.” All I can do
during these moments of praise is smile, nod, thank him, and wait for
the inevitable conclusion. Why do these praise-sessions make me
self-conscious? Because I know something about me that Joe doesn't: I
am not easily given to being joyful nor am I always ready with a
smile. In fact, I can be quite cynical and prone to the temptations
of despair. Thanks to Augustine and Calvin I make a natural idealist
living in a world that will never meet my standards. Thankfully,
that's my dark side, and it doesn't win out very often. But this is
the Fr. Philip Show not the Dr. Phil Show, so why I am telling you
all this? For one simple reason: I chose “Philip Neri” as my
religious name not because I am like him, but because I need to be
more like him.
Pippo exuded joy in his
silliness. He wore humility like a crown, never taking it off. He was
unafraid of being embarrassed; nonplussed by his social and ecclesial
Betters. He took formal social events as an opportunity to remind
himself and others that we are all going back to dust someday. Pippo
understood the need for social order and formality and he respected
authority as any good priest would; however, he never allowed any of
that to overwhelm his ultimate goal, his final end: union with God.
And he never allowed bella
figura – good form
– to ruin a chance to show sinners God's freely offered mercy. In
fact, he wholeheartedly believed that his joyful silliness was the
best way to reveal our Lord's mercy to those most in need of it.
Pippo's antics made it easier for sinners to approach the throne and
receive the gift from his consecrated hands. What he did over and
over again is what all priests must be able to do when necessary: he
made the Lord directly accessible when he seems to be at the most
inaccessible.
Joy – real joy, the effect of
divine love and our charity – makes the Lord accessible to others
through us. More specifically, your joy makes the Lord accessible to
those whom you serve. And they need the Lord more than you will ever
need your self-defined dignity.
Our people live in this world,
but they are not of it. This world demands constant sacrifice,
constant praise. It harangues us to pay attention, spend, consume,
waste, hurry up, demand, complain, be outraged, and whine. It demands
that we do and say whatever it takes to Get Mine and hang on to it
into the grave. Our sacrifices to the gods of this world can never be
enough because they – the gods – know that they are finite
creatures just pretending to be gods. If they ever get their fill of
our misery, they will have to confess their finitude and abdicate
their altars. So, to perpetuate their reign, they multiply our
miseries and await our offerings. Unfortunately, our people will
stand in line to make the proper sacrifices and then turn to us and
wonder why their lives are a mess. And when they turn to you, hoping
to see the Lord and some way out of their misery, who or what do you
show them? (Your answer to that question will define your ministry).
What do they see when they turn to you? A way into a life of grace?
Or just another obstacle to overcome? Do they see a means of
achieving freedom in Christ? Or a man too deeply committed to his
clerical role to bend down and help? They could also see you as an
easy source of cheap grace, or as a mark upon whom they can
perpetuate a spiritual fraud. Maybe you're the one who will eagerly
tell them what they want to hear, thus relieving them of a cross they
choose to carry. Or maybe you will be the priest who agrees with
their dissent and gives them permission to sin.
What will they see when they
turn to you? Better yet: what should they see when they turn to you?
To answer this question fully would require me to start and finish a
lecture series in pastoral theology and practice. I'll leave that
burden to Fr. Krafft. Instead, looking over at my patron, Pippo
Buono, I'll offer a short answer that requires some unpacking. A
priest of Christ – lay or ordained – should always and everywhere
appear to those in need as one who embodies and lives out that great
Catholic ideal: veritas
in caritate. That low
groan you just heard came from the seminarians of second theology who
are currently enduring my homiletics practicum. Veritas
in caritate will
populate their nightmares until the Reaper comes for them!
Nonetheless, I would argue that this simple phrase – packed as it
is with portent – should be engraved and gilded on the doors and
walls of every rectory, priory, convent, monastery, and Catholic home
on the globe. It contains all things necessary for carrying out one's
ministry as a bearer of the Good News. It also has the distinction of
being the adage that Pippo
Buono
lived out in all of his humble silliness. If you want to know why
Pippo was so successful as an evangelist in Rome at a time when
ecclesial corruption and licentiousness ruled, think: veritas
in caritate.
Earlier
I noted Pippo's affinity for the Dominicans of his time. He was
especially fond of Savonarola, the friar who ruled Florence and ended
his life on a pyre as a heretic. Pippo admired the friar for his
skillful preaching and zeal for the conversion of sinners. Savonarola
went to deadly extremes in carrying out his program of reform, but
Pippo nonetheless saw in him a soul burning with a desire for the
truth of the faith to prevail., Pippo took to Savonarola's severity
and, along with his knowledge and appreciation for Friar Thomas,
tempered both with a practical wisdom that pushed him out into the
streets to gather in the Lord's sheep. Without wavering from the
truth of the faith, he cared for God's people in whatever way they
needed. Because he loved, he clung to the truth. And because he clung
to the truth, he loved. In Pippo, there wasn't a sliver of difference
between preaching on the damning evils of sin and immediately
absolving sinners in confession. When he needed to confront sinners
on the street, he did so in way that brought them into the
confessional – with genuine love for their souls. He was never
above begging for others – food, clothes, jobs. Nor did he place
himself below any man because of his station. To Pippo, all men and
women were equally sinful and equally forgiven. And all of them
deserved the attention of his Lord's servant.
Embracing
the phrase veritas
in caritate
as your pastoral motto can only lead to one, glorious effect: joy!
Charity, as a virtue, produces both desire and joy. Desire and joy
are effects of charity. If you preach, teach, and minister veritas
in caritate
then you will experience and exude the fires of joy, drawing to
yourself those who most need to hear the Good News. But there's a
significant danger here, one Pippo himself brushed against more than
once. With great joy comes great temptation. After Cardinal Cusano
had the relics of Papias and Maurus transferred to the Chiesa Nuova
in 1590, Pope Gregory XIV tired to sneak a cardinal's biretta onto
Pippo's head. Pippo leaned forward and whispered something in the
pope's ear, persuading His Holiness to hold off making him a
cardinal.6
Pippo endured and resisted many attempts of this kind to elevate him
to the episcopate and even popular movements to declare him a living
saint. A large part of his antics were meant to dissuade others from
seeing him as a man of classical saintliness. The danger here, of
course, is pride. At a time in the Church when hierarchy, station,
money, and power were the daily currency of Rome, Pippo knew too well
how easily it would be for him to be entombed in the layers of silk,
brocade, silver, gold, and jewels. He wanted no part of an imperial
Church. Whatever work he had left to do would be done as a beggar or
a clown. . .not as a Prince of the Church.
The
dangers we face as priests and ministers in the 21st
century are not exactly the same, but they rise from the same
cardinal sin: pride. Success in ministry – successes like the ones
Pippo managed – would draw the attention of the world. And with the
world comes applause, prestige, wealth, and even power. How many
bishops and priests have we seen in the last fifty years fall because
they forgot to embody veritas
in caritate?
Books, speaking tours, websites, CD's, interviews with the press,
requests for comments on current events – all fine in themselves,
but also ways for pride to inflate the ego and the ego to become to a
god.
Even
if you were to become a god only in your own mind, you would still
fall into idolatry. How long would it be before your bishop becomes a
meddling fool? Your brother priests jealous clerics? Your
parishioners whiny know-it-alls? Looking back on your days at NDS,
you would see the deep and cavernous flaws in your professors and
formators. Safe to discard all that nonsense now. Because before you
would be a wide-open road and clear-blue sky just waiting for you to
make your next astonishingly brilliant move. And the only thing
holding you back would be the drudgery of daily parish ministry and
all those whinging sheep who can't seem to wash themselves more than
once a month. You have a career to build! Important people to meet!
Important meetings to attend! A golf game at 3 and drinks with the
mayor at 5. . .OK. OK. You get my point. I hope. Being a successful
spiritual father opens you up to the particular temptations of fame
and fortune. So, the truly successful spiritual father never allows
himself to forget that he is first and foremost a father. And a
father cares for his children by telling them the truth in love. And
by making sure that he himself is told the truth in love. Even when
that truth stings.
Shifting
gears a bit. Jesus says to his disciples, “I
have told you this
so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.” What is
this?
What did Jesus say to his disciples so that his joy may be in them
and their joy may be complete? Right before this statement, Jesus
was giving his disciples a metaphor for how he sees his relationship
with them: the vine and the branches. He is the vine; we are the
branches. As long as we remain with him, we will grow and thrive,
producing much good fruit. Then he says, “By this is my Father
glorified, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.” How
is his joy given to us and our joy made complete? By bearing much
fruit and becoming his disciples. More than that, actually, he adds,
“As the Father loves me, so I also love you. Remain in my love. If
you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have
kept my Father’s commandments and remain in his love.” Then he
promises to complete our joy. But what does “complete our joy”
mean here? We do all these things and then we find our joy complete.
If joy is an effect of divine love, then our completed joy is an
effect of completed divine love; that is, perfect divine love. In
other words, if we remain in Christ, loving as we ought, bearing much
fruit, and following the Father's commands, we will receive the
effect of perfect love called perfect joy. We will find ourselves
gazing upon the Beatific Vision.
Pippo knew this well, so he lived
his life as if he were always, already in sight of the Beatific
Vision. What we might call his silliness was a means to an end:
humility. Others saw his humble silliness and rightly identified its
source: his joy. And Pippo knew the source and summit of his joy: his
love for God and his Christ. In every way that matters, Pippo's
ministry to sinners was an expression of his love for Christ and
Christ's love for him. Without guile or boasting or weariness, he
gave himself – sacrificed himself – to the holy cause of making
known to sinners the Father's freely offered mercy. He died May 25,
1595 firmly attached to the vine of Christ.
1 Turks,
Paul. Philip Neri: The Fire of Joy. Alba House, 1995, 99.
2 Ibid,
99.
3 ST.II-II.28.4
4 Turks,
13.
5 ST.II-II.35.1
6 Turks,
99.
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