Why apologetics might be bad for Catholicism (and other notes)

The dialectic of the sacred permits all reversibilities; no “form” is exempt from degradation and decomposition, no “history” is final.  Not only can a community- consciously or unconsciously-  practice many religions. but the same individual can have an infinite variety of religious experiences, from the “highest” to the most undeveloped and aberrant… we frequently find the shamanic experience attempting to express itself through an ideology that is not always favorable to it.

-Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy

What Eliade says about shamanism in particular we can apply to religion in general. As I have written previously, “complex” religions often emerge out of centuries of syncretism when various ancient sources of the sacred have to be reconciled. Throughout this process, however, there always remains shades of “less advanced” beginnings. The Sicilian saint’s procession or the Malay Muslim faith healer attests to the fact that just because doctrine is advanced and complex, to the point of being rationalistic, it does not necessarily follow that the religion will look so “modern” and “rationalistic”. As in Eliade, there are false starts and stops, shades of previous superstitions, and unwillingness to assimilate certain aspects of a received doctrine that make the religion on the ground look dangerously like paganism, shamanism, and witchcraft.

The Reformation in this sense appears to be the beginning of the last phase of syncretism in the Christian religion. For Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, and the rest, Christendom woke up one day to find itself pagan, or at least tainted by ideas that are contrary to the Gospel. The sloppiness of the cult of the saints, indulgences, purgatory, a clerical priesthood and the like did not fit into the heightened sense of the purity of the Gospel as discovered in the findings of early modern scholars. They, like us, sought only what was necessary, the most important things were the only things that could be the object of belief.

What we have now, however, is a syncretism to the point of the dissolution of all belief. We have whittled away the Christian mystery to the point that it can often be merely a stand-in for self-interested agnosticism: “God” on our own terms, for our own benefit, and our own security, absent from history and our daily life. Only the “highest” forms of religious discourse, freed from superstition, are deemed to be relevant. Any form of religious ecstasy or emotional connection, on the other hand, is devoid of any sense of the sacred as connected to historically developed forms: Pentecostalism, charismaticism, evangelical Christian pop music, and the like.

The Catholic Church, from my own reading of it, has never been comfortable with its more “carnal” aspects. This discomfort was one of the characteristics of the Counter-Reformation: the diminishing of certain saintly cults, a stream-lining of the liturgy, and the cleaning up of clerical life, etc. Even in the Catholic mind, there is always a suspicion of its own paganism. In the higher clergy in particular, folk piety has always been suspect: priests even prior to Vatican II found themselves tearing down side altars when they thought people were worshipping them as idols. Equally awkward have been the various apologias by such lights as St. John Damascene to justify these “carnal” aspects of traditional Christianity. Even those of us hostile to critics of Catholicism can admit that these arguments convince no one who is not already firmly seated in a Catholic choir stall.

I speak not here of what we believe. Such arguments are too easy and miss the point. The question on the table is how  we believe. To have an argument on the Latin language with the rules of English grammar in mind would be utterly pointless. To see ancient Christian doctrines through the prism of the modern skeptical mind might be equally futile. That perhaps is why we seem to always be try to fit square pegs into round holes: we try to find evidence of certain things through other things that have nothing to do with them.

That being said, to engage with arguments with Protestants about the “Scriptural” nature of Catholicism is simply playing a game we are unable to win. Not only that, but it is an unhealthy game. The key to a successful syncretic religion is that it is able to balance various aspects of itself, arranging them in hierarchies but not eliminating any important ones. Those who would wish to reduce Catholicism to Papal authority, for example, do it no favors. The movements coming out of Vatican II come dangerously close to eliminating any sense of “myth” in Catholicism: they seek to replace that which is ancient for an archaeological construction based more on modern liberal ideologies than the early Church.

Perhaps what is most necessary, then, is to ask the question: what does it mean to be religious? What is religion?  Is modernity capable of such sentiments? Even if we cannot “officially” balance folk ways with more official ways, how can we study and respect the former while maintaining the purity of the latter? Can we ever be comfortable with the “atavism” at the heart of our own Faith, and can that “atavism” help to re-found a sense of the sacred in the West?

Religion, as well as philosophy, must be conceived as a way of life, with a sacred civilization, and a cosmos populated with angels, ghosts, and demons. Barring this, what we have before us may be a lot of things, but it is not a religion, at least a religion as has been traditionally conceived.