Where Does Fidelity Dwell?

I. Human fidelity

The place where fidelity dwells has remained strangely hidden throughout human history. In early history fidelity stands in the center of those qualities expected of an upright man, threatened, of course, by constantly lurking betrayal, but undisputed in its place. When early history ends and more advanced civilizations arise, other virtues come to the fore; fidelity is no longer found among the four cardinal virtues. It is not that fidelity has ceased to be valued, but in the social realm it is transformed into the sober necessity of upholding agreements—pacta servanda sunt—while in the private realm it becomes an exceptional characteristic which may be admired in isolated individuals. Today fidelity stands in a more profound crisis than ever.

Human fidelity rests upon an interpersonal I-thou relation that has both a natural and an ethical ground. The relation between what is natural (“it has always been this way, and experience shows that this is best”) and what must co-respond to ethical standards (“you must remain faithful even when doing so is to your disadvantage”) remains suspended in an unreflected way. Only when I can “trust” another is dialogical existence between persons possible: conversation, contracts, agreements, trade, every common undertaking between two or more. A prior commitment on the part of all concerned is required to open a path for relations between persons.

But what happens when the natural-ethical fundamental relationship between I and thou is replaced by an iron rule that has no regard for the person, a rule that requires no prior commitment but is itself always already established—i.e., what we call ideology—and whose unconditional claim to be right justifies any means, even deceit and betrayal? The use of such means must be expected whenever the social fabric has become detached from the realm of prior interpersonal commitments. Now a Solzhenitsyn can utter the cry of Cassandra: “Do not trust them, there is not one bit of fidelity in them;” their plans unfold within a sphere in which you are nothing more than chess pieces moved at their command. And the other half of the world? It is divided into two basic attitudes: on one hand, it attempts to move the ideological block toward a more human position of trust (“détente”), but is continually disappointed in these efforts by bitter experience. On the other hand, it is determined, as is the rest of the world, by the harsh laws of technologization, of high finance, and of the defensive stance imposed by the second block. All of these, despite those realms of freedom that still remain, threaten to create a similarly impersonal network of strict rules of conduct.

We should not be surprised that younger generations view such a world with an ever-increasing fundamental distrust. From whom are they supposed to learn fidelity as the attitude that first humanizes every exchange between persons? How could the ground beneath their feet be firm enough for such trust? And if, after securing the requisite assurance, one should dare to take one or two steps, how could one possibly arrive at the determination to risk one’s entire existence and future in advance? Not to do something like this in the contemporary situation—in a world which no longer rests upon even the most precarious natural ethics—appears as an evident dictate of prudence that is followed unreflectively and instinctively. Without doubt, this is the deepest reason for “partial memberships” in the Church, and, above all, for the decline in priestly ordinations and vowed religious life.

Ideology is a “truth” that one can learn and appropriate without personal engagement (however much it later claims one’s existence). The contemporary crisis of fidelity is identical to the crisis of the human form of truth. As long as truth has a human form (man as the “shepherd of being”), it requires truthfulness from man in order to be present in the world. It cannot exist merely under, over, or outside of human truth.

Language provides us with multiple attestations to the fact that truth and truthfulness or fidelity belong together, whether we take as a point of departure the stem “wahr” [true] or the stem “treu” [faithful], and this is not the case only in Hebrew and thus in the biblical realm, where, as is well known, the two words simply coincide in the word emeth (and its derivations such as amen). In terms of wahr, we find be⁠-⁠währt [proven], and also the old Nordic varar as a promise of faithfulness. The goddess Var protects promises of fidelity. The Anglo-Saxon waer means a promise of service, covenant, fidelity, favor; old high German wara and middle high German ware is, again, covenantal fidelity. Starting from “treu,” we immediately encounter the English true, truth, truce (a cease-fire based on reciprocal fidelity and faith, cf. treuga Dei, treve), and trust (a firm faith in the truthfulness of another, credit). Someone is called true if he may be trusted; when two people trust [trauen] one another they can be wed [getraut]. The exclamation “traun!” (which Luther liked) means “in truth.” And so on.

This mutual belonging of truth and fidelity is characteristic of the world of human beings. It cannot be derived from sub⁠-⁠human nature (even when this is conceived as all-encompassing). In the animal world we can find examples for anything, whether it be for staying together or for breaking apart. This is evident in the herding, mating, and brooding instincts. Even in the more narrow sexual realm, human fidelity cannot be derived from the specific behavior of the sexes in nature or from the sublimation of this behavior, as Nietzsche (to take one example among many) proposes. It is true that in one passage in Daybreak he suggests that the sublimation of passions has ennobled man and made him more than human:

The institution of marriage obstinately maintains the belief that love, though a passion, is yet capable of endurance; indeed, that enduring, lifelong love can be established as the rule. Through tenaciously adhering to a noble belief, despite the fact that it is very often and almost as a general rule refuted and thus constitutes a pia fraus, marriage has bestowed upon love a higher nobility. All institutions which accord to a passion belief in its endurance and responsibility for its endurance, contrary to the nature of passion, have raised it to a new rank: and thereafter he who is assailed by such a passion no longer believes himself debased or endangered by it, as he formerly did, but enhanced in his own eyes and those of his equals. Think of institutions and customs which have created out of fiery abandonment of the moment perpetual fidelity, out of enjoyment of anger perpetual vengeance, out of despair perpetual mourning, out of a single and unpremeditated word a perpetual obligation. This transformation has each time introduced a very great deal of hypocrisy and lying into the world: but each time too, and at this cost, it has introduced a new suprahuman concept which elevates mankind.¹

But shortly thereafter, in The Gay Science, he underlines more strongly the deceptive aspect (at least for males) of this sublimation, which had already been emphasized in the previous passage:

Woman wants to be taken and accepted as a possession, wants to be absorbed into the concept of possession, possessed. Consequently, she wants someone who takes, who does not give himself or give himself away; on the contrary, he is supposed to become richer in “himself”—through the accretion of strength, happiness, and faith given him by the woman who gives herself. Woman gives herself away, man acquires more—I do not see how one can get around this natural opposition by means of social contracts or with the best will in the world to be just, desirable as it may be not to remind oneself constantly how harsh, terrible, enigmatic, and immoral this antagonism is. For love, thought of in its entirety as great and full, is nature, and being nature it is in all eternity something “immoral.” Faithfulness is accordingly included in woman’s love; it follows from the definition. In man, it can easily develop in the wake of his love, perhaps as gratitude or as an idiosyncratic taste and so-called elective affinity; but it is not an essential element of his love—so definitely not that one might almost speak with some justification of a natural counterplay of love and faithfulness in man. For his love consists of wanting to have and not of renunciation and giving away; but wanting to have always comes to an end with having. It is actually man’s more refined and suspicious lust for possession that rarely admits his “having,” and then only late, and thus permits his love to persist. It is even possible for his love to increase after the surrender; he will not readily concede that a woman should have nothing more to give him.²

Here fidelity is the distinguishing feature of woman, but as a mask for physiological instinct; infidelity is the distinguishing feature of man, who awkwardly and with great difficulty assumes a mask of fidelity, but thereby only conceals his sexual infidelity or vanity.

If fidelity becomes questionable under these terms and as viewed by psychoanalysis from the perspective of the sub⁠-⁠human (or from the impersonal subconscious), in the previous depiction it was construed as lying beyond the human (and inhuman) and thus equally relativized, if not completely destroyed. It can find its place only in the realm of the human itself.

II. Human frailty

But how fragile human nature appears when it has to provide the foundations of fidelity, which in turn has to be capable of supporting the frailty of human decisions and commitments. And we must take this human nature unconditionally, in its entirety, that is, together with its sexual desires and drive for power, with its longing for change, for socialization, and also for a life of solitude. It is clear from the beginning that this will be a difficult task. If the act of fidelity is a risk in every individual case, should not this total grounding of fidelity in the “essence” of man also entail calling this “essence” to take a risk? Yet we have to show that this is not a blind “leap” into the void, that it possesses its own rationality, which first makes the human intelligible as human, and which first makes his existence worth living. Such a line of argument, too, must take into account more than isolated heroic instances of personal fidelity. Everyone willingly admires these instances, but one could ask whether this admiration is of any more consequence than admiration for a faithful dog that goes to die on the grave of its master. This admiration in no way obliges us to imitate such extreme behavior. In order to make fidelity sustainable, we can begin by sketching three possible paths.

1. Fidelity is the precondition for bearable co⁠-⁠existence between people in families, tribes, cities, and nations. Fidelity is that which we must be able to rely on when we cross from our own sphere into the sphere of another, which is required at every moment. In this, fidelity is similar to language, which is the medium of communication. And yet it also differs from language: I am obliged to submit to the conventions of language if I am to be understood, whereas my contribution of fidelity to the community remains largely a matter of free will. Certainly I must maintain the general appearance of fidelity if I want to keep my social standing. However, since all of human life is highly changeable, individual as well as group situations are constantly shifting; that which seemed definitive quickly appears relative and in need of adjustment. Public rules of behavior, too, show great versatility. Contracts require countless clauses for events both foreseen and unforeseen. At the same time, it is almost impossible to tell whether the situation has changed through no fault of my own and thus exempted me from certain responsibilities, or whether my inner infidelity, prompted, perhaps, by rising passions that have been exaggerated into seeming like “fate,” is the cause of the change in affairs. We must take both into account. In order for there to be such a thing as communal life despite this instability, the so-called “Golden Rule” comes to our aid as a general regulative norm. It is formulated in the Sermon on the Mount as, “So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them” (Mt 7:12), but was already familiar to Herodotus and the Sophist Antiphon and the whole of Greek and Roman antiquity, from where it also spread to Judaism. Seneca takes it as one of the principles “whose truth is immediately evident without explanation, and which therefore should be presented at a stage of moral instruction which precedes philosophical formation.”³ Kant’s categorical imperative says nothing essentially different. Even a hedonistic ethic, which does not view individual acts of infidelity as especially tragic, still has to insist on the Golden Rule for the sake of a greater and more lasting happiness. This alone secures relative certainty and continuity in existence for the individual. This is why the Golden Rule is based essentially on individual self⁠-⁠advantage; its egoistic root is just as strong as the altruistic. Indeed, in the end the altruistic moment is determined by the wishes and aversions of the individual in to himself. If, in a particular case, we require from someone that he give up his private longings and remain faithful to his given word, we expect this in fact for the sake of the bonum commune, which, however, is also for the immediate benefit of the individual concerned. He acts out of a deeper self⁠-⁠interest. Now we have to pose in all seriousness the question of whether egoism and self⁠-⁠interest can serve as the actual foundation for fidelity between persons.

2. What is difficult to establish in a purely human way with respect to interpersonal relationships might perhaps more credibly be grounded in the realm of the individual person. Is it not the case that a morally integrated person should be faithful above all to himself? That he should be faithful to his principles, his resolutions, and the ideal he holds out for himself as something he knows and something he strives to attain? Here a criterion might emerge that could strengthen interpersonal relationships under certain circumstances, but could also relativize them. For example, when in truthfulness to myself I consider a relation of love or friendship no longer bearable, ethics requires the well-known “breaking off of communication.” Here my responsibility toward myself takes precedence over my responsibility toward another. But immediately here we see the problem of such a norm. My principles, resolutions, and personal ideals are subordinated to the changeability of the stages and situations of life just as much as my personal relations are. Indeed, they must be so if I want to remain a living person and not a pharisaical stickler for principles (one of the most persnickety types of people around). If it were possible for me to work out my own ideal exhaustively, that is, also including the element of the future, then I would be the master of every possible situation that I might encounter. Instead of actually having to listen to the call of each situation, I would have a ready answer in advance. Then I could even stand above the process of my own development, the formation of my tastes, and my estimation of human relations and individual persons. In the end, my entire worldview would stand outside of time and would be determined by me. As a moral agent, I should not be subordinated to any constraints (heredity, environmental conditioning, etc.), but I should be able freely to design my own future in such a way that I would also remain free in the future, even though it will certainly look quite different than the present does. But what would constitute the substance of my projected ideal other than my being constantly free? My whole ideal would in this case consist only in my ability to make decisions at every passing moment according to my responsibility in a given situation. This content remains a purely formal one, which from a material perspective is utterly consistent with an absolute infidelity toward all currently legitimate obligations. Fidelity, then, cannot be grounded on fidelity toward oneself.

3. Fidelity to self on the part of every individual would lead necessarily to social chaos. There must, therefore, be something like a common handing over of personal possibilities, and perhaps even rights, to the community in order that something like a communal subject might emerge, to be set decisively above individual subjects. The motivation for this renunciation can take different forms—i.e., à la Hobbes, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel—but it will almost always be a strict and radical one. The self-constituting communal subject (as “Leviathan” or as the concreteness of the “transcendent” or of the “absolute subject”) will relativize all subordinated, personal ties and transform them into universal bonds. In the Hegelian “phenomenology of spirit,” and much more so in the Marxist program, this process of universalization becomes so highly charged that every higher degree calls for a new infidelity (lest the spirit get stuck at a certain level and lose its justification). From the outset, the final fidelity means an integration into the apocalyptic communal subject. If this communal subject is by way of anticipation represented historically by a “party,” every means that can hasten its full realization can be considered expedient and “permitted”: the Gulag Archipelago, brainwashing, etc. Again and again one must refer here to Brecht’s The Measures Taken, the original radical text of which, of course, we no longer possess.

None of these three possibilities permits us to locate the grounds of fidelity as a fundamental human quality (rather than a way of behaving from time to time) in man himself. But what gave rise to the unshakable certainty of older, more integrated cultures, that without the principle of “fidelity,” human existence could not develop its most noble forms? Despite all mistrust of definitive commitments, is it not the case that people today, not excluding the youth, feel a need to find a path through the chaos that they can trust and upon which they may set out with confidence? Are we not aware of occasional luminous examples of lifelong, perseverant fidelity, examples which may appear to us from far away as mere bourgeois rigidity—“They couldn’t even imagine living any other way!”—but upon closer examination reveal something completely different: a strong inner radiance?

III. The transparency of eternity

Man is a paradox: he has no stable center in himself, but rather two weights that pull him in different directions. One would center him below himself in the biological-animal sphere; the second offers him a home above himself in a realm of absolute values and goods, to which he is not entitled by nature and which overstrain his nature. Without such an exceeding of the biological realm— whereby the biological itself is put at the service of a sphere that lies beyond it—without this all⁠-⁠engaging, corporal-spiritual effort (askesis means exercise), there is neither ethics nor religion. And every ethic, in order to be worthy of man, must have a religious background; otherwise the absolute values for which changeable man strives remain abstract and unable to bear the weight of existence. It is more difficult to grasp the transparence of the religious sphere through concepts based on things in the world than simply to experience it. For there is a symbolism of the forms of existence, which were not only easily deciphered by older cultures, but which still can be recognized today by those who have not yet been corrupted.

To illuminate this symbolism, let us take the validity of the fourth commandment: “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God gives you” (Ex 20:12). The biological center in man can raise many plausible objections to this: why should I be grateful my entire life long to two individuals who came together for what was perhaps an entirely chance sexual encounter? I do not know if they even wanted me. Who can prove to me that this man is really my father? etc. If we must speak of fidelity and gratitude, then this refers at best to an impersonal nature which is responsible for the propagation of the species of which I am an entirely insignificant example. In requiring a lifelong love for one’s parents, older cultures wanted to sacralize an animal process in order to give some stability to society; we do this by other means. However, if I look with human eyes as a mother or father upon my child who smiles at me, then I know that an endlessly deep mystery is revealed here. I participated in the creation of a being (and I continue to do so) who far surpasses the biological realm, and this surpassing is much more than I could communicate—it is something that is given in some incomprehensible way, even though it is given through me. The procreation and bearing of children is, in the human sphere, a mystery that extends into eternity because its outcome is a spiritual being and because, at the same time, a spiritual relation between the child and his parents comes into being. This is a question of the child’s gratitude to his parents for himself, which is embedded not only in the parents’ spiritual responsibility for the child, but also in the spiritual gratitude that both the parents and the child bear toward the unveiled source that is beyond nature. The bond which encompasses the child and parents does not break when the process of nourishing and upbringing comes to an end with the arrival of adulthood: since this bond is grounded in something beyond time, it includes the whole of existence. All of the arguments for a “fatherless society” break down in the face of this simplest human experience. We cannot sum up the basic human relationships biologically, though they do have a dimension that can be calculated and made subject to technology. This being-related to a “more,” which is something that is given and which makes the distinctively human value, is not an extrinsic of autonomous man to something transcendent that lies quite beyond him: it is much more to be found in the innermost center of the human being.

This is why the fourth commandment and the lifelong fidelity it establishes are an expression of the religiosity that has itself been deeply inscribed in man. And from here we can understand how other interpersonal relations, above all between spouses and between friends, can share in the same symbolism. It is possible that a man sees in a woman, and a woman sees in a man—above the blinding schemes of eros—the unique personal core of the other, which is an unrepeatable “image and likeness” of divinity, and decides to love this core. Such love—and it is not common—can only prove its worth, precisely as fidelity, at the point when the first superficial enthusiasms have died out. It is, however, also possible for marital fidelity to win a much longer life for naive love than the biological clock would seem to allow. Once again it is the beloved who, as such, refers beyond his or her earthly, passing form to the presence of the eternal moment in him- or herself. Even death is no denial of the vision for one who has really glimpsed this, even though one may have no clear answer to give to the question death poses.

The same is true of friendship in those cases where friendship selflessly recognizes and treasures the value of a friend. The fact that all such relationships always also contain an aspect of self⁠-⁠enrichment through mutual complementarity is not an objection to what we have said. Anyone with a degree of self⁠-⁠knowledge is quite able to distinguish between what one desires from a friend out of self⁠-⁠interest, and what one grants to and bestows upon a friend for his own sake. “Already because you exist, I draw near to you in gratitude.”

We will stop with these examples of interpersonal fidelity and will not extend the discussion to include fidelity to one’s fatherland, party, or ideal of humanity. In the end these more impersonal bonds are also based on personal bonds. It was important here only to clarify how an ethical-religious sphere opens up by virtue of an imminent transparence or transcendence in the human creature itself. For many people who possess genuine fidelity, this sphere is not explicitly articulated in terms of belief in a personal God. However, it is always associated with a reverence before an unknown mystery that appears because of a beloved person. A cynic cannot be faithful. Perhaps it is not even necessary that the mystery of eternity (which is illuminated for me in a beloved fellow man) be in every case explicitly articulated as belief in immortality. But as long as this person lives and as long as I can be present to him, I encounter in him something that is valid beyond time. And this can be enough for me to be devoted to him in selfless fidelity.

In spite of this, everything that has been said in this section is just as threatened by the frailty which characterizes everything human as what we developed above. We must admit that Solovyov is correct, in his essay “The Meaning of Love,” to emphasize the extraordinary rareness of perfect love and fidelity (as a unity of eros and agape). Admittedly, fidelity is “no empty dream,” but it remains as an exotic plant in this “land of estrangement” (regio dissimilitudinis, as Augustine and Bernard say, following Plato and Plotinus). Its roots are ultimately firmly fixed in the earth only when the eternal mystery in man is illuminated by God’s personal fidelity toward humanity.

IV. Man and the fidelity of God

By his own strength, the average person can only with great difficulty stay true to others or to his own personal dream. Still more difficult is the attempt to correspond in advance to this ideal. In ancient cultures, many things were made easier by virtue of a principle of inner⁠-⁠worldly perseverance, which today’s civilization no longer supports. The fragility of relationships, but also their technical manipulability, leads to mistrust. The natural symbolism of basic human relations has been veiled.

In order to establish fidelity on earth, God had to reveal his eternal fidelity. It is not sufficient, of course, that man experience that God possesses in himself and for himself the property of divine fidelity, a form of being “faithful to himself” that man at all events should imitate insofar as he too is “true to himself.” This would only lead back to the second possibility sketched above, which was shown to be unsustainable. There must already be genuine points of contact between the divine and the human manners of perseverance, as, for example, with the Stoic axiom of a “life according to nature.” However, in the end such points of contact also remain inadequate because when attempted, these points do not allow men to live either entirely divinely or entirely humanly; and so they fail in precisely those spheres in which specifically human fidelity is lived out.

What is required is that fidelity of God which personally addresses man, which demands a genuinely human answer, and which is realized in exemplary fashion in the Old Testament. Yahweh’s designating himself “I am who I am” would not have helped Israel if it were not simultaneously a pronouncement of the historically self⁠-⁠disclosing fidelity that was promised to the people, the ever-present accompaniment. Conversely, this promised accompaniment would be of no use were it not from a God who, in himself and according to his own absolute nature, possessed the property of fidelity.

The Old Testament is fully conscious of the uniqueness of the fidelity of God to his people. God is a rock of righteousness and fidelity, of rectitude and justice even “in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation” (Dt 32:4⁠-⁠5). And so he raises his complaint against the inhabitants of the land, for “there is no fidelity or kindness …there is swearing, lying, killing, stealing, and committing adultery” (Hos 4:1⁠-⁠2). Again and again the Psalms praise him as the one who is faithful and reliable; the words from 2 Timothy best sum up the relationship that was already present in the Old Testament: “If we deny him, he also will deny us; if we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself” (2 Tim 2:12⁠-⁠13). The apparent contradiction between the first and the second statement is illusory, for at the ratification of the covenant on Sinai, salvation and damnation are promised according to whether or not the people are true to the covenant with God. God remains true to himself; “disowning” the unfaithful people of the covenant is also a form of standing by his covenant. This covenant is not dissolved, but only shows its negative consequences.

The consequences for humanity are immediately evident. Anyone who gets involved with God who has turned toward man in fidelity, commits himself once and for all. Just as there is no turning back for God, because all of his acts are eternal, so there is no turning back for man, because his answer must correspond to the offer. “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy” (Lev 19:2). Of course, the partner is not the individual but the people. The people, however, is made up of individuals upon whom God has inscribed for life the sign of his covenant and fidelity: “So shall my covenant be in your flesh an everlasting covenant,” God says to Abraham, as he hands down the law of circumcision (Gn 17:13). But the bodily sign can only be an image of the spiritual: the chief commandment of perfect and uninterrupted love for the one God will be inscribed “upon your hearts;” “and you shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” (Dt 6:6f.). The preliminary nature of the old covenant as ordered to a transcendent fulfillment does not suspend the definitiveness of the requirement of fidelity: as “God’s promises are without regret,” so too his desire to receive a correspondingly all⁠-⁠encompassing answer. Jesus Christ will not only confirm this offer of fidelity, he will raise it above everything else.

Certainly the Old Testament has inner limits. These become evident where the fate of Israel within the covenant that they have thrice solemnly ratified (Josh 14:14⁠-⁠27) is dependent on their own behavior: this fate can be a blessing or a curse (Lev 26; Dt 28). However, as noted above, Yahweh’s fidelity to his covenant is revealed in both. Similar, but graver, is the situation where the covenant must be revoked from the majority of the people because they have persistently broken it (Jer 14:11f.; Ex 11:22f.): here God’s fidelity is concentrated on the “remnant of Israel,” the small core of those who have remained faithful. This idea, which is established in Isaiah, is taken over by Paul, for whom it is central for expressing the continuity between the Old and the New Covenant and, thereby, God’s “sworn” fidelity to his covenant. In the same way, the damning rejection in Jeremiah is simultaneous with the promise of a new and eternal covenant (Jer 31:31). The infidelity of man does not break God’s fidelity, as is clear in his moving internal deliberation in Hosea: “My people are bent on turning away from me… My heart recoils within me, my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger, for I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come to destroy” (Hos 11:7⁠-⁠9).

What is important, however, is that with the blazing up of God’s eternal fidelity, human fidelity, too, comes henceforward into the light. Through the fidelity to God that the covenant requires of the people (2 Kings 20:3; Is 38:3), man is educated into the corresponding fidelity: he who fears God will be trustworthy (Neh 7:2). Human fidelity is an image and reflection of the eternal fidelity of God: “I will betroth you to me forever, … I will betroth you in fidelity; and you shall know the Lord” (Hos 2:19⁠-⁠20).

V. “The faithful witness”

The surpassing fulfillment of this betrothal is the new covenant, since here in the Person of Jesus Christ, divine fidelity has become completely identified with human fidelity. He is the absolute “yes” of God to humanity and the absolute “yes” of humanity to God. Therefore he is named the “faithful one” (2 Thes 3:3; 2 Tim 2:13; Heb 2:17, 3:2) or the “faithful witness” (Rev 1:5, 3:14).

As the revelation of the fidelity of God, he fulfills the remaining provisos of the old covenant. If God’s fidelity is revealed there as two-sided, as a blessing and a curse, then Jesus henceforward takes upon himself the side of the “curse” (Gal 3:13). In being forsaken by God, he suffers through all of the anxiety and abasement that had been foretold for the unfaithful people (Lev 26; Dt 28). Because the vicariously suffering servant of God (Is 53) reveals himself as “the only beloved Son of the Father”—that is, because the Father in covenant fidelity gives us his Son “and with him all things” (Rm 8:32)—God’s essential fidelity, his “fidelity to himself,” is only now revealed in its true depth: as a mystery of trinitarian love. It is the infidelity of man that brings this to light, since it puts the fidelity of God to the most extreme test (in the Cross and the Son’s being forsaken by God).

At the same time, however, Jesus is the revelation of man’s fidelity to God: circumcised in the temple and baptized in the Jordan, he is the representative of the people of the covenant, the “Israel of God” (Gal 6:6), before the Father: “Behold, I and the children whom the Lord has given me” (Is 8:18 = Heb 2:13).

But would this be enough if it were nothing more than an identity of word and answer, of call and echo? Must not there still exist “someone” who hears the eternal word of fidelity and who answers in the same spirit in order for God’s word actually to be received and understood on earth? Yes, this must be the case: a readiness for eternal fidelity must be created in advance on earth so that God’s word can truly come over to the side of humanity, can become flesh. Mariology, like ecclesiology, is integral to Christology: the “handmaid of the Lord” must become the image and archetype of the new people of God, whose members henceforth can be called, in the full sense of the word, “fideles,” the faithful. The heart of the Church is faithful love. This is why believers pray before communion: “Lord Jesus Christ, look not on our sins, but on the faith (fidem) of your Church” to which we belong and in whose attitude we would like to be formed.

The Christian mystery of fidelity, then, is not merely the triumph of God’s fidelity over human infidelity, but also the nuptial mystery between the Incarnate Word and the Church that takes his form (and who is herself made “immaculata” by the word of God: Eph 5:27). We are children of this eternal covenant of fidelity: with God as Father and the Church as mother (Cyprian). And when Paul calls the mystery of the natural nuptiality between man and woman “great” because of its to Christ and the Church, then what we attempted to describe above as the transparency to eternity in fidelity among humans becomes fully illuminated. Paul does not base marital fidelity, fidelity between children and parents, or fidelity between friends and acquaintances first on Christ and the Church; these realities are rather presupposed as a fact of the created world, but are also referred beyond themselves to an ultimate creating origin: the mystery of the fidelity between Christ and his Church, the fulfillment of the covenant between God and humanity. According to the same Letter to the Ephesians, creation as a whole (and so all inner⁠-⁠worldly fidelity) is always already ordered to the first and last idea of God: the perfected covenant of fidelity between “heaven” and “earth.”

To conclude, this is not without practical implications, at least for Christians. Our everyday fidelity to others is not grounded (as for those of the Old Testament) solely on the fundamental fidelity of God, who provides a solid foundation for precarious human relations. It is grounded on the always-already given relation of fidelity between Christ and the Church. This means that we owe our capacity to be faithful not simply to God or to Christ, but through Christ also to the Church. The Church is ever the whole that is prior to the part, and we can and should live out our entire fidelity always as a part, a member, a charism in the Church, by way of which we are incorporated into the ecclesial organism in the place that was chosen for us by God. Only thus do we partake in the perfect fidelity of the Ecclesia immaculata. Indeed, we partake fully, for we are included in the original nuptial act: as “children” of Christ-Church we partake in the “birth from God,” which means partaking in the previously unthinkable eternal act whereby the Son comes forth from the bosom of the Father.

In this way, the Christian, too, can be a “faithful witness” with his Lord (Rev 2:13). He also can be described as “faithful” in his service to the Church (Col 4:7; 4:9; Eph 6:21; 1 Pt 5:12). Both forms of fidelity should be inseparable for the Christian, just as the nuptial mystery to which he dedicates his life in service excludes all possible separation. And from this twofold fidelity, which is but a grateful answer to the fidelity that God has shown to him, a Christian can prove every day, to those around him who would doubt it, that fidelity on earth is possible and that it alone makes existence worth living.