On Papalotry

In my small town growing up, Commonweal was one of the only magazines that the local library had that had any significant theological content. So it is no surprise that I am used to what they write at this point, and I quote from a recent article concerning the Pope and his relationship to the Church:

When I find the equivalent of such pictures hanging in the minds of first-rate intellectuals, however, I cannot help but wonder. I confess that a great deal of reading in the very spotted history of the Left in the twentieth century has forced me to ponder the resemblance of papal adulation by some Catholic intellectuals to that of various Great Leaders from Lenin to Fidel to Mao by some left-wing intellectuals… there seemed something disturbingly similar in this impulse, and not just in the case of John Paul “the Great,” to highlight and extol virtually every papal deed and statement while finding a way to deflect or ignore almost all criticism…

But the practical effect of all this does not bother me, though perhaps it should, as much as the questions it raises about the Catholic intellect. Catholic thinkers are well aware that the guidance of the Holy Spirit has not worked straightforwardly in the history of the popes and, furthermore, that there has not even been a clear relationship between personal sanctity or theological acumen and institutional leadership. I pay attention when Benedict issues an encyclical. I welcome it as an occasion to reexamine my own thinking and choices. But knowing how many papal encyclicals are justly forgotten today, I do not feel the need to treat it as inspired or devise complicated excuses for why he should not be held responsible for the parts of it that seem to be wanting.

Why should grown-up, well-educated Catholics indulge in this tendency to treat the pope like the Dalai Lama? (Or, on the other hand, like Torquemada?) It seems childish. It gives a bad witness to the maturity and the integrity of our faith.

A comment on this post is also worth quoting:

The adulation, near-adoration, of the Pope is a fairly recent development–19th and 20th century, it seems. Perhaps it began with the sympathy for Popes Pius VI and Pius VII when each was made a prisoner of Napoleon. In any case, under Pius IX, as several studies have shown, the figure of the pope was exalted to near-divine status. Some talked about Christ’s presence in “the three whites”: the Virgin, the Eucharist, and the Pope. Some changed the words of the ancient hymn, “Rerum Deus tenax vigor” to “Rerum Pius tenax vigor.” When a Cardinal at Vatican I gave a speech on papal authority that Pius IX did not like, he was called in and dressed down. When he protestaed that his position was traditional, the Pope expostulated: “La tradizione, son’io!” “Tradition? I’m tradition!”

Yves Congar spoke of the “incredible inflation” of the papal teaching office that has occurred in the last two centuries. He also spoke of the methodological significance for a healthy, balanced ecclesiology of the millennium-long canonical and theological reflection on the possibility of a pope’s becoming a heretic. He often quoted the remark of an Anglican churchman who commented on the fact that the last series of popes were, individually, good even holy men. “What we need,” he said, “is a really good bad pope!” In Congar’s French: “un tres bon mauvais pape!”

On the kiss

My heart, bring me some sign plucked from the roses of hope’s garden
You cannot bring a flower in bloom? Bring me an autumn leaf
Companion of my begging days, get up and go out quickly
Pawn anything- your life, your clothes- and bring abundant wine
O God, You have brought forth all this from what was non-existent
Bring me a kiss or two, brought from the corner of her mouth

- from The Seeing Eye: Selections from the Urdu and Persian Ghazals of Ghalib, translated by Ralph Russell

The Metaphysics of the Evil Eye

Part I – Things gettin’ worse all the time

My family is Mexican, ergo, I am a fatalist. Americans can’t perceive what that really means. In a way, I am just as American as anyone else living in the U.S. of A., but my family definitely isn’t. It’s hard for someone with so much Latin blood and upbringing to say: “Hey kiddo, keep your chin up. Things will get better.” If I do say that, what I really mean is, “Yeah, life sucks. But don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.” Or as my ex-abbot (a Greek) was prone to saying (perhaps quoting someone else?): “Whatever happens, it’ll be bad”.

Perhaps this was the social ground of the phemonemon of the “evil eye” in such cultures. The evil eye always has to do with envy. In Mexico and other parts of Latin America, the evil eye is cast inadvertenly on small children by people who admire them too much. Growing up, my mother was always taught to touch a child who she had admired, lest she give the child a preternatural illness that could possibly cause death. Having a beautiful, healthy child was seen as being a dangerous thing; people would “desire” the child, and that desire, even from afar, could be fatal.

In my rather unsystematic studies of folk belief, I have found that, not without accident perhaps, southern Italian ideas of the evil eye parellel the Mexican manifestations of the phenomenon. Indeed, the best description given for the basis of the evil eye (malocchio, for the multilingual), can be found in the book, Italian American Folklore by Frances Malpezzani and William M. Clements. They write:

Connected with the deeply rooted fatalism of the southern Italian peasant world view, malocchio reflects a pessimism that perceives potential threats from almost anyone and assumes that good fortune cannot endure. To prosper, according to this world view, is to invite envy. And envy generates ill feelings that may result in harm befalling its target. Malocchio makes concrete the abstract envy that pervades a universe defined by only a limited amount of good.

“A limited amount of good.” Americans would best chew on that phrase. For if there was anything so “unAmerican”, so counterintuitive to how we work, learn, and perceive the world, it is the idea of a “limited amount of good”. We are taught that the good is something we create out of thin air. It is a manner of cutting the pie into an infinite amount of pieces until everyone has a share. Indeed, in the metaphysical sense, modernity is the overcoming of fatalism; it is the overcoming of caste and “station in life” so that we can reach our “full potential”. God is on our side since He has thrown open the floodgates of infinite goodness. We are more informed, more comfortable, and of course, better people than our ancestors. Even in our nostalgia for the past, there is a sense of living in a superior age, and our pining for it is just as rational as a four year old’s pining for Disneyworld.

Of course, I wouldn’t want to go back to the life of a Mexican campesino or an Italian paesano either, but their approach to life should at least give us pause. Especially in the fields of religion and culture, we may want to have our cake and eat it too, but perhaps our ancestors knew better than that. Perhaps our universe is governed by the principle of a “limited good”, and it is just a matter of time before the payback comes, either on the microcosmic or macrocosmic level.

Blog happenings

The first is Rod Dreher’s assertion that Voudou in Haiti is the worship of demons (found in this post). I am all for the whole idea of “omnes dii gentium daemonia”, but why stop there? Indeed, I described once how Tommaso Campanella (no paragon of “orthodoxy” himself) thought that Calvinism was the result of demonic influences. So why is it that we are so disturbed at people being ridden by the loa and eating glass when, in reality, heretics and schismatics should be just as repulsive to us. Is your Presbyterian neighbor who mows his lawn every Saturday and pays his taxes on time every year on par with a Voudou priest? According to your Catholic Faith, he is. And so is Rod Dreher, who abandoned the bark of Peter for the Eastern schismatics. If we are going to speak of demonic influences, let us at least be even handed about it.

For me, there is no bourgeois uber-religion of decency that transcends what’s true and what isn’t true. That is a modern invention based on disordered sensibilities, and to say we “good Christians” all worship the same god is an insult to God. For it would mean that we worship a schizophrenic god with various personalities for various kinds of “decent” people. If that is the case, I would rather worship a god who could manifest himself in the Haitian loa as well. That seems a lot fairer.

Two faces of Maya Plisetskaya

Dancing the Black Swan, a very classical role.

Dancing to Ravel’s Bolero. Choreography by Maurice Bejart.

On the inherent superiority of Western culture

Greek wisdom and Roman law were divine gifts that prepared the fullness of time for the coming of the Savior. Only this cultural treasure, after centuries of theological discussions and conciliar definitions, allowed the great Christian dogmas to be formulated with precision. And since they [the neo-modernists] like to speak of the “incarnation”: Just as only the most pure flesh of the Virgin Mary was capable of receiving the Word of God, thus only the “flesh” of Greco-Roman culture was sufficently healthy enough to be animated by the wisdom of the Gospel, and to build the cathedral of Christian cultural, the highest spire of which is the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas. But for the mentality that has today invaded the Church, we have just blasphemed: in Africa, India, and America we have to begin anew. And since there has been a cultural revolution in the Christian West, we have a new task for the next millenium: “A new mobilization is imposed on the Church, in order to confront the task of inculturation of the Gospel in the modern world. In this matter we should embrace the concern of John Paul II: ‘From the beginning of my pontificate I have considered the dialogue of the Church with the cultures of our time an important field of work in which the fate of the world at the end of the 20th century is at play’.”

-Fr. Álvaro Calderón, La Lámpara bajo el Celemín: Cuestión disputada sobre la autoridad doctrinal del Magisterio eclesiástico desde el Concilio Vaticano II, my translation

In spite of my perennialist tendencies, my impulse to post Hindu kirtans and videos of Vodou rituals, I agree 100% with Fr. Calderon’s assessment. Christianity is fundamentally a historical religion. If there were any way to get around that, I would have found it by now. But the fact that the Gospel was written in Greek using concepts such as “logos” that had been in formation in the Greek mind for centuries is no mere accident of history. God could have been incarnated in the context of another culture, just as He “could have” been incarnated in a pearl or an ass. But He did not do that; He came into this world at a very specific time and a very specific place, as did His Body, the Church. Even the Fathers of the Church saw this, and there will always be a superiority of the Greek and Latin tongues to all others, just as the Muslims consider Koranic Arabic sacred, or the Jews Hebrew.

That being said, I think that it is profitable to study other forms of religiosity and cultures, since I do think (good crypto-perennialist that I am) that in them are embodied foreshadowing echoes of the Word of God. They also teach us concepts that we, in our sanitized, modern mentality, once understood but some time ago forgot. But this always has to be done in the mind frame of historical hierarchy. God chose to express Himself this way, and we are obligated to keep to that way as much as possible.

As for inculturation itself, it is not an easy process, and it takes centuries to happen legitimately, and not without many setbacks. I have long defended on this blog the idea that even the more “exotic” aspects of Mexican “folk Catholicism” are just as “Western” as the Pope and the Summa. Only after centuries, and not a little violence, did Catholicism become not just the religion of the State, but of the hearts and minds of even the simplest people. Indeed, if you mentioned to me the persistence of indigenous religion outside of remote parts of Yucatan and Chiapas, I would laugh in your face, as would most Mexicans, save the random New Age-style shaman trying to perform a limpia on you in the Zocalo in Mexico City. Catholicism, in its Spanish flavor with a few alterations, is the indigenous religion of Mexico, as much as that frustrates intellectual radicals who would return us to the pristine religion of “Aztlan” and the “Mexicas”.

The Birth of Krishna

Makes me wonder how Bollywood would remake the life of Our Lord if given the chance…

Clarification

I recommend this particular post on the Inside Catholic blog, but more especially the comments. I thought this was a good clarification of what an elusive “Neo-Cath” is:

The apologetic attitude towards the annulment culture even in “conservative” circles inspires me to re-write a Catholic classic of last century: Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. In my version, Sebastian Flyte takes theology of the body classes and figures out that he doesn’t know how to love. He cleans up and joins Opus Dei with Cordelia, making six figure incomes for Jesus. Lady Marchmain learns to lighten up, and Lord Marchmain comes back home to finally express his undying faith in human dignity. He dies a Methodist, since that makes him feel closer to Jesus, but everyone accepts him as a “separated brother”. And most importantly, Charles Ryder and Julia Marchmain go to a diocesan tribunal and get annulments for their previous marriages. They stay together and live happily ever after, teaching a bunch of RCIA classes to bright eyed catechumens. Instead of an empty tabernacle evoking a dreary Latin phrase (“Quomodo sedet sola civitas”), we could have a big gaudy Paschal candle with the phrase, “Be not afraid”, etched in the wax.

Catholicism: the new and improved, conservative “JPII” version.

Yeah, no thank you.

Reading Hadot four years later

The genesis of my blogging had little to do with religion. Even now, I intentionally try to avoid all fluffy religious discourse, all affected turns of phrase that seems like “devout-speak” that will get me brownie points in Heaven or at least spring me from Purgatory a few years early. What has really obsessed me is the liberation of thought and action from the modern prison of ideology. From Neoplatonism to folk Catholicism, from art to politics, why I write at this point is really due to an (irreligious?) “spiritual exercise”, an attempt to see the world from another radical perspective. It is, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty said of philosophy, an attempt to see the world again for the first time, as if from the eyes of a child.

The person who passed on to me this perception is none other that the often cited Pierre Hadot. You see, I was once like the normal “devout” Catholic, thinking that the Church “has all of the answers”, and if only we could be “docile” to it, somehow everything would fall into place. But unlike most, I took it all quite seriously, to the point of becoming a monk. Well, you know that didn’t work out. At some level I still have admiration for successful monastics, and I have faith that somewhere there are those who choose to live that life who are the “real deal”. I know that this life, however, isn’t for me, not because I have concluded that it is “not my vocation” (as if God sent me a telegram saying to get out of my monastery post-haste), but rather I am skeptical that anyone can live that life in the context in which we find ourselves. But that is a discussion for another time. My own coming to terms with the fact that I would have to “live normally” brought me to the question of whether or not just living your life could be a profound exercise in wisdom. To this question, the French philosopher Pierre Hadot replies in the affirmative.

Capriccio espagnole

An infectious Rimsky-Korsakov piece that has grown on me through the years.