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8 Deification and Ordinary Life Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange was well into his thirties when he published his first essay. So was Henri de Lubac. Karl Rahner was only twenty-two. Admittedly, it was just a simple piece of pious reflection, brief and unpretentious, devotional rather than academic. It asks what the heart of the Christian should be like, and how it is possible to gain real Christ-like love and sacrificing power. In answer it proposes prayer, through which the human person draws near to God, becomes capable of “touching our Creator and Lord,” and is subsequently filled with his grace, his Spirit, his love.1 Such thoughts may seem to have little connection with the more sophisticated Rahner of later renown, with his high-minded Heideggerian terminology, complex scholastic categories, and provocative ecclesial stance. Yet when read in hindsight, this brief reflection from Rahner’s youth indicates a conviction and a set of concerns that in point of fact were to mark his lifelong intention as a theologian and priest. Harvey D. Egan, who characterizes Rahner’s entire theological project as more sapiential or mystagogal than intellectual or academic, has drawn attention to the “imbalance” present in many early Rahnerian studies, which focused almost exclusively on his philosophical and speculative theology and neglected the pastoral concerns and spiritual dimensions that pervade it throughout.2 In the words of Rahner’s famous exhortation delivered in the name of St. Ignatius of Loyola, which on his eightieth birthday Rahner looked back upon as his best work and the fitting “resumé” of all his theology and life’s ideals, his greatest desire was to help souls to attain a direct and immediate experience of God.3 He wanted his spiritual 1. Karl Rahner, Sehnsucht nach dem geheimnisvollen Gott: Profil-Bilder-Texte, ed. H. Vorgrimler (Freiburg: Herder, 1990), 78–80. ET in Karl Rahner, Spiritual Writings, ed. P. Endean (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004), 31–33. 2. H. D. Egan, “Theology and Spirituality,” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner, ed. D. Marmion and M. E. Hines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 13–28. 131 writings to be regarded “not as secondary by-products of a theology that is sort of an art for art’s sake, but at least as important as my specifically theological works.”4 “[B]ehind everything I have done there stands an immediate pastoral and spiritual interest.”5 All of Rahner’s theology, and with it, his doctrine of deification under examination here, can only rightly be understood and interpreted in the light of this express pastoral and practical aim, expressed most lucidly and emphatically in his plentiful spiritual writings made up in the main of sermons, retreats, reflections, meditations, and prayers. Accordingly, this chapter will draw from the wide range of Rahner’s spiritual writings from right across his career in order piece by piece to build up a discernible outline of what deification may actually “look like” in the concrete circumstances and actions of temporal human life. Of course, as Rahner himself would point out, deification is never complete this side of the grave. But a divine life has already begun here, and so it is not too much to expect it to take some bodily and historical shape in the form of various personal and communal practices and conscious experiential manifestations. While such elements as prayer, sacramental participation, and ecclesial incorporation obviously feature in Rahner’s description of authentic spiritual life, what is most noticeable in his account is the way in which he locates the momentous transformation wrought by union with God in the ordinary things of life: work, routine, suffering, and finally, death. For on account of the incarnation, an event with decisive and ongoing implications, even the most trivial details in the human situation have been drawn into the drama of God’s self-bestowal, so that God may indeed be found, in typically Ignatian fashion, in all things. Having drawn together this outline of Rahner’s spiritual theology, in which we shall find deification more often featuring as an implicit rather than explicit theme, we shall offer some brief concluding comments. God in the Ordinary As we have seen, it belongs to Rahner’s notion of Vorgriff that every human experience at the level of the categorical somehow penetrates beyond the categorical and touches the limitless and transcendent. The incarnation of the 3. Karl Rahner, “Ignatius of Loyola Speaks to a Modern Jesuit,” in K. Rahner and P. Imhof, Ignatius of...

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