The Extreme of Extremes
Extremes and Miracles
The existence of a great thing requires its opposite, all that which is not great. In other words, an extreme may only exist in contrast to another extreme.
"My stepfather loved me as his own son, even though I hardly knew him": an outlier.
"My biological father did not love me at all, even though I knew him from birth": an outlier.
Deep love and shallow love are only understood in relation to another.
Like in Plato's cave, human sight is bound to the average, all that is immediately visible.
It requires a miracle to unchain those men, to lead them outside the cave and illuminate reality.
To understand possibility requires a miracle.
A miracle that defies gravity: only capable through grace.
A miracle that amplifies gravity: only capable through affliction.
All extremes are miracles.
Divine Love and Human Love
God, or a divine being uniquely complete. This completeness implies the existence of divine love, a deep and pure love.
Yet even divine love is a pair of extremes.
The God of Affliction
Augustine wrote in his Confessions the confession of a God of affliction:
But, in my heart, he did not gain the better of my mother's piety and prevent me from believing in Christ just because he still disbelieved himself.
For she did all that she could to see that you, my God, should be a Father to me rather than he.
In this you helped turn the scales against her husband, whom she always obeyed because by obeying him she obeyed your law, thereby showing greater virtue than he did.
…
But you, who take every hair of our heads into your reckoning, used for my benefit the mistaken ideas of all those who insisted on making me study; and you used the mistake I made myself, in not wishing to study, as a punishment which I deserved to pay, for I was a great sinner for so small a boy.
In this way you turned their faults to my advantage and justly punished me for my own.
For this is what you have ordained and so it is with us, that every soul that sins brings its own punishment upon itself.
This is the image of divine love Augustine gives: not the embrace that lifts, but the hand that strikes, promising that the bruise is a return to grace.
The child suffers at His hand by the mechanical force of gravity. A required love.
The God of Grace
Weil, in Gravity and Grace, wrote of a God of grace, one which loves through consent:
Affliction is a marvel of divine technique. It is a divine operation, full of intelligence and wisdom. It is infallibly directed to the good of the soul, provided we consent to it.
Affliction belongs to the order of gravity, yet Weil insists that its possibility is itself a mark of grace. Grace does not cause the wound; it is what makes the wound capable of meaning. It is the withdrawal that leaves room for suffering to exist, and therefore, for love to exist.
The sobbing, struggling young Augustine finds himself the victim of force, that which makes a man into a thing. Within him a void opens, and the miracle of that void is consent. If he consents to remain in it, to neither flee nor fill it, grace may descend, not as recompense, but as recognition.
The boy who chooses to love despite his beatings reveals the secret order of things: that even under the empire of force, the will may incline toward what is divine. Not a God of coercion, but a God of choice.
Christ: The Extreme of Extremes
If all extremes are miracles, then Christ is the miracle of miracles: the extremity in which force and love no longer oppose, but cohere.
He is man but divine, willed to be put onto the cross but consents to that ultimate force: the reduction from man into corpse.
And from these extremes he came to know the reality of this world, the miracle of both force and grace.
On the cross he initially spoke as man:
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me,
so far from my cries of anguish?
Yet even in this extreme, the divine executed as man through crucifixion, Christ found grace:
Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord.
They will proclaim his righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn: He has done it!
On the cross, Christ experienced both the God of force, and the God of grace.
The miracle of extremity unshackled Christ and revealed the ultimate truth: the God that remained after affliction was the God of Grace.