Gil Bailie
Professional Background:
Gil Bailie is the founder and president of The Cornerstone Forum, an apostolate dedicated to calling attention to the unique cultural, spiritual, and anthropological significance of the Judeo-Christian tradition and encouraging a deeper appreciation for the history-altering impact of Christ and his Cross and the growing challenges confronting the Christian vocation in our time. Gil is a long-time friend and student of René Girard, Emeritus Professor at Stanford and member of the French Academy. Gil has lectured and written on the value of Girard’s anthropological insights for assessing the scope and depth of the contemporary cultural crisis and for recognizing how essential a theologically, anthropologically, and sacramentally robust faith is to the world-historical challenges we now face.
Education: J.D. from University of Tennessee, College of Law
His formal education was completed in 1968 with the J.D. degree of the University of Tennessee, but Gil has never practiced law. Gil insists that he is not an academic, yet he has undertaken something that is significantly more difficult: to foster and institutionalize a conversation outside the academy, on a national and international scale. Gil acts upon his conviction that “Even an imperfectly sanctified life … can foster a respect for Christianity by exercising the intelligence which faith awakens and by summoning the theological, cultural, moral, and anthropological arguments that render Christian faith intelligible.”
Romano Guardini
Bailie cites Guardini:
“Unconverted man lives in the visible world judging all that is or may be by tradition’s experience and by the rules of logic. But when he encounters Christ, he must either accept him and his revolutionary approach to truth or lose him. If he attempts to judge also the Lord by the stands of common experience, he will soon notice that he is dealing with something outside experience. He will have to discard the norms of the past, and take Christ as his new point of departure. When he no longer attempts to subject Christ so immediate reason and experience, he will recognize im as the supreme measure of all possible reality. The intellect jealous for its own sovereignty rejects such recognition, which would put an end to its world-anchored self-glorification, and surrender it intohte hands of the God of Revelation. This is the ‘risk’ any would-be Christian must take. If he takes it, a profound revolution begins. It may take a disquieting, even frightening form; may demand passage through stifling darkness and perplexity. All that until now has seemed certain suddenly becomes questionable. The whole conception of reality, the whole idea of existence is turned upside-down. Only the haunting question persists: Is Christ really so great that he can be the norm of all that is Does the world really lose itself in him, or is the whole idea only another (magnificent) example of the human tendency to make that which it reveres the measure of all things; another proof of the blindness inherent in al love? Yet the longer the intellect continues to grope, the clearer it becomes that the love Christ is essentially different from every other love. And to the degree that the searching individual experiences such spiritual revolution, he gains an amplitude, a superiority, a synthesizing power of reason that no natural insight can match.[1]
More Guardini:
Romano Guardini remarked on God’s “is” and the “is” of everything else: “In recollectedness the worshipper says, ‘God is here and here also am I.’ In saying this, he become aware of an important distinction. He realizes that in the two sentences ‘God is here’ and ‘here am I,’ the verb to be has different meanings. Differences of meaning also attach to it in ordinary life. If someone asks, ‘What is in this room?’ and I answer, “in the center stands a table, on the windowsill is a rose, on the carpet lies a dog, before me sits my friend,’ then I have said of all these various things and living beings that they are in the room. But they are not there in the same manner. The plant which lives and grows is more than and is different from the table; the dog who knows me and answers my call also is, but he is more than the plant, and in a different sway. But man also is – differently and more en tensely, being endowed with freedom and dignity, and able to reason and to love. And different men possess to varying degrees, the power and the manner of being. “[2]
This is the meaning that God creates ex nihilo. God “Is” as nothing else “is.”
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To fill out the Christocentrism, consider Pope Francis and Robert Barron
As every pope, Francis is empowered to speak Revelation which is the Person of Jesus Christ. Laudato ‘Si is a sustained meditation on creation, Creator and Creation or the created world that has Jesus Christ, God-Man, as Creating Center and as Part.
Christ as Radical Center:
In #99, he writes that “the destiny of all creation is bound up with the mystery of Christ, present from the beginning: ‘All things have been created through him and for him.” The reference is to Colossians 1, 16, 19 that says: “All things have been created through and unto him… For it has pleased God the Father that in him all his fullness should dwell, and that through him he should reconcile to himself all things, whether on the earth or in the heavens…” He also refers to Jn. 1, 14 where he remarks that “unexpectedly, the prologue of the Gospel of John (1, 1-18) reveals Christ’s creative work as the Divine Word (Logos). One Person of the Trinity entered into the created cosmos, throwing in his lot with it, even to the cross. From the beginning of the world, but particularly through the Incarnation, the mystery of Christ is at work in a hidden manner in the natural world as a whole, without thereby impinging on its autonomy.”[3] Bishop-Elect Robert Barron gives important emphasis to this centrality of Christ in creation. Notice that Christ is not merely a religious figure, but the ontological center of all that is of matter and spirit: Jesus is not only the one in whom things were created but also the one in whom they presently exist and through whom they inhere in one another… Individuals, societies, cultures, animals, plants, planets and the stars – all will be drawn into an eschatological harmony through him. Mind you, Jesus is not merely t he symbol of an intelligibility, coherence and reconciliation that can exist apart from him; rather, he is the active and indispensable means by which these realities come to be. This Jesus, in short, is the all-embracing, all-including, all-reconciling Lord of whatever is to be found in the dimensions of time and space.
Yet, Christ as Part:
There is more. He is not only Creator of all that is, but He has entered into His own creation as part of it. That is, the divine Person of the Son has taken a created humanity from the Virgin, and taken it as His very Self. And that humanity, an egg fertilized by the Holy Spirit, with a soul as substantial form endowed with a human intellect and human will, has been assumed into the Person of the Logos as His very Self Which He lives out in relation to the Father for us. He lives a totally human existence being a divine Person transforming every human act into self-gift to the Father. The Council of Constantinople III explained the metaphysics of Chalcedon’s one Person, two natures, not as a parallelism tied together through the Person, but the Person protagonist of all the actions perfused through both natures. There is only one Person who wills with ontologically distinct wills, divine (uncreated) and human (created), but, as Ratzinger puts it, not in parallel but “compenetrated” as one personal will. Wills don’t will; only persons do (Actiones sunt suppositorum).
Robert Barron presents St. Thomas’s theology of creation within the Christology of Chalcedon and Constantinople III. To be created is to be understood in terms of the humanity of Christ. St. Thomas, in S.Th. III, 17, ad 2, asks how many “esse’s” [“to be’s”] are there are in Christ. As we know from Chalcedon there is only one divine Person, there can be only one Person and therefore one “esse personale” which ontologically dynamizes the humanity of Christ without “overpowering” it. Rather, it brings it to its supreme completion with the autonomy and freedom of the divine Person living His Self-gift by means of it. It is here that we are touching the redemption itself where the divine and the human become one in the one Person.
[1] This is quote from Gil Bailie’s “God’s Gamble.” It sounds findable in Guardini’s “The Lord.”
[2] Romano Guardini, “The Art of Praying,” Sophia (1985) 19-20.
[3] Pope Francis, “Laudato ‘Si” #99.
The Truth Will Make You Free 