Theological mercenaries

Henry Karlson has written an essay entitled, Academic Theology for the website Inside Catholic, in which he criticizes the attitude of treating theology as one modern academic discipline among others. As a student of theology in a contemporary Catholic school, he complains that there is a great deal of pressure to write “something unique” rather than uphold and defend what has always been believed:

Theologians, because they are tied to universities, are required to write according to the dictates and expectations of academia. This can be problematic, as academia loves novelty, while theology should be about preserving the faith and avoiding empty novelty.

The academic exercise of theology must also be tied into a vibrant spiritual life, and he cites such figures as Hans Urs von Balthasar as examples still being able to “engage theology today”.

The myth of “interiority”

I read the other day a post on the Lonely Goth’s blog concerning the Khrist Bhaktas or Indian devotees of Christ who are not baptized into the Church. Apparently, according to an article linked to on this site, a great number of people who make pilgrimages to Christian shrines and fills the pews on Sunday are not technically “Christians” as we would call them. They are devotees of Christ who do not seek baptism, since “receiving baptism is perceived as relinquishing one’s entire social and cultural patrimony and becoming assimilated to an alien culture”. Some Catholic priests even encourage this type of devotion to Christ, saying that they are there not to baptize people, but to “preach the Gospel”.

“Syncretic, cowardly compromise”, you might be thinking. The funny thing is, however, that Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, that bête noire of integrist Catholicism, when he was working in the Lord’s vineyard in French-speaking west Africa, almost did the exact same thing with many of the Muslim and animist populations. Realizing that many people due to tribal or marital circumstances (polygamy was common in many places) could not seek baptism, he created a class of “believer”, a sort of perpetual catechumenate, for those not quite ready to take the plunge of becoming an “official Christian”. His aim of course was to convert everybody, but he was realistic about what that really meant in practice. By creating a “third way”, he and other missionaries felt that some people were at least leaving the door partially open to the Church, and that such a committment should at the least be acknowledged by the hierarchy.

Interesting quote about God

What is it that motivates today’s Christians? It really is not God… It is rather their egos that motivate them, their social diversity, their worship, their relationship to Revelation, and the restoration of the unity of the Church. All of these are indeed important aspects, but they will not become stale only so long as the salt of the passionate relationship with God preserves its freshness.

-Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Why we need Nicholas of Cusa”

I agree with this statement, as I agree with much of von Balthasar when he speaks of the thought of others. I think there is unnatural, enclosed subtext in much of Christian discourse that is really unsure of how much it can encompass the totality of human experience. And this has to do with an understanding of God, fundamentally. For if God is only conceived of as a function of my own ideological and political necessity (either as the ens causa sui upholding a particular social order, or a “fire in the bosom” affirming my own presuppositions regarding my personal experience, or what have you), we are not really thinking about God, but of a particular axiom needed to uphold our own superstructure of choice. That is a problem of both the left and the right, and it crosses confessional lines.

An Evening with Robert Louis Wilken

AG and I went to a talk at Notre Dame Seminary here in New Orleans given by the noted Christian scholar, Robert Louis Wilken. A former Lutheran pastor and a convert to the Catholic Faith in 1994, Dr. Wilken this night gave a talk entitled, “Reading St. Augustine in the 21st Century”. Dr. Wilken, as many will know, is an expert in early Christian thought, having written and edited such books as Remembering the Christian Past and On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ. He is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia as well as having taught at many notable universities around the world. He is also a New Orleans native, having grown up in the lower Ninth Ward, and gave a biographical prelude to his talk on how good it was to be back in his hometown. There was a good turnout for the event on a rainy Friday night, and the talk itself was followed by a lively and equally interesting Q & A session.

Dr. Wilken decided in his limited time to tackle perhaps the most prolific and influential of ancient writers, St. Augustine of Hippo. Wilken had to start out surveying the vast expanse of Augustine’s thought and writings, not to mention his equally impressive legacy on Western thought. He began with some rather broad yet profound themes that Augustine touched upon in his writings: time, memory, the self, and the soul. In these, what is most important is the “inner life” of man; it is the “most important part of being human”. In Augustine, above any other thinker in antiquity, we have a “turn towards the self”. In no other author then or now can we get a deeper sense of the “inner life” as it journeys towards the truth. For Augustine, reflection and the turn towards the self were a “step on the way back to God”. His task was to explore the infinitely vast universe within, of which the outer universe is but a mere shadow, and there find God.

On Romanticist Metanarratives

Found this via the Ochlophobist blog:

Pelikan once called the development of doctrine to be Newman’s “great idea”, and based his entire remarkable history of Christian Doctrine on it. The development of doctrine is a philosophy of history, and Pelikan gave it a practical application. (That Pelikan ultimately rejected the development–implicitly–by embracing Orthodoxy is evidence of its weakness as a grounds for understanding Christian doctrine and faith.) In defense of Newman, the Cardinal often claimed in the essay that the development was simply the fact that no idea is ever first expressed in its fullest form. This seems reasonable enough, but flies in the face of traditional Christian conviction that the Gospel is the fullest form of all doctrine, and that the Church simply defends its deposit through the inspired Creed and councils. It would be truer to say that what develops is the number of occaisions to which doctrine has to be explicitly applied, though no father of the councils would have dared to say he was finding a new doctrine, rather they were always defending that which had always been taught. And from Nicea to iconoclasm, there is plenty of evidence for that fact. New technical language is applied to explain doctrine, but for the orthodox Christian, doctrine itself never develops. Newman’s essay, therefore, attempted to defend orthodoxy against the enlightenment by undermining it; Hegel simply defended incipient-liberal Protestantism against the enlightenment by removing from it all the content of the Gospel. But their methods of engaging it bear a more than cursory similarity.

Church and Cosmos

This is a series of outline drawings in which a fourteenth-century scholar, a native of Pavia in Italy who lived in the court of Avignon, has attempted to translate his conception of the Universe into geometric terms. What we have here are… learned diagrams in which notions of every sort – theological, geographical, minerological, medical- are combined according to the laws of number and the divisions of visible space. One consists of a map of Europe on which are superposed circles and ovals containing medallions inscribed with signs of the zodiac, the names of the planets and months, of minerals, parts of the body, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and the corresponding sins, with the seven Ages of Life dominating all the rest. In another, five points- the five patriarchates, seats of the princes of the Church- determine the surface of the earth. On the site of Jerusalem a crucifix is reared; from the wound is Christ’s side issues a straight line, rivus sanguinis, which crosses the picture diagonally. Another line, intersecting this one, emerges from the lance of Sagittarius. At the center of the zodiac stands an immense figure of the Virgin; circles symbolize the Church universal, “spiritualis et sacramentalis,” with the Pope in their midst. Along the lines thus created, on the circumferences of the circles, are arranged the Patriarchs and the lesser Prophets, the Planets, the symbols of the stars, the Elements, the parts of the body, and the names of the Months. In still another drawing, two crucifixes symetrically opposed are surrounded by a rose-like form made up of Winds, medallions of the Virgin and Child, Sponsus and Sponsa, animals, Evangelists, Dogmas and Virtues, the Sun and the Moon, the Planets and Metals, the Doctors of the Church, and the monastic orders.

-Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods

On the Margins of Theology – I

The phenomenology of the numinous in Catholic devotional practice

(photo found at this site)

During my Internet browsing, I became acquainted with this essay on the work of Orlando Espin, a kindred spirit it seems who has done work in the academia regarding Latino popular Catholicism. The author of the essay is critical of Espin’s work saying that the scholar pits the faith of the clergy against the faith of the popular classes. This excerpt is particularly illuminating in this regard:

I told Shirley that Professor Espin says that popular Latino Catholicism, even in Mexico, has never identified the Virgin of Guadalupe with Mary of Nazareth. He goes further: “Why can’t the Virgen be the Holy Spirit?” Espin wonders. “Is the Mary-Guadalupe identification really the people’s creation and discovery? Or is it possibly a historically understandable, defensive cover, naively (though sincerely) imposed by theological and ecclesiastical elites on themselves and on the people’s symbol system?”

Shirley agrees with Espin about one thing: “None of the people that I know say that it’s the Virgin Mary; they say it’s Our Lady of Guadalupe.” On the other hand, “everybody I know doesn’t separate the two.”

The rest of the essay has a rather snarky and cynical tone, portraying Espin as a scholar profoundly out of touch with the “orthodox” faith of the masses. For the essayist, Espin reads too much Derrida and not enough St. Thomas; he is trying to use religion as a means of subversion when it is really nothing of the sort.

While I can appreciate some of the author’s criticism, I do not think he is being fair to Espin or popular Catholicism in general.

On putting the genie back in the bottle

The Holy Office presides over the entire church and curbs everyone with its interventions: this supreme, inflexible Gestapo whose decisions cannot be questioned.

-Yves Cardinal Congar

This was written in the personal journal of the wayward theologian before the great awakening and “new Pentecost” known as Vatican II. He also said regarding his superiors “not getting” him: “I am not a man of the tragic, but it is painful to be the victim of stupidity.” A professor in seminary, also a Frenchman, once read me a line from Congar’s memoires about how the Dominican saw it fit to express his displeasure at the Holy Office by relieving himself on the side of its building in Rome. A great start for the “New Evangelization”, I must say.

He was far from being the only one who was in trouble with the law in those days. Hans Urs von Balthasar used to get through his classes in seminary by putting wax in his ears, sitting in the back of the class, and reading St. Augustine instead of listening to the lectures. Dom Beauduin had one of his monasteries suppressed for playing too much ecumenical footsy with some questionable people. Chenu was removed from his school of hip theology, Le Salchoir, and so on. And we need not say much about even our present Pontiff and his youthful, theological indiscretions.

The problem with revolutionaries is that they make notoriously bad governors, as students of Third World history can no doubt tell you. For Papa Roncalli, at one time accused of having questionable affinities to some bad books, waltzed into the Holy Office soon after his election and wrote large on his file, “I am not a heretic”. Indeed, la tradizione sono io. But what is to stop all of those “progressive Catholics”, those who believe that artificial contraception is okay, that women should be elevated to the rank of priest, and so on, from aspiring to do the exact same thing as Congar, and get a new, shiny red hat out of it? Indeed, even the “conservatives” of the Church are children of revolution, sticking their finger in the crack that they themselves pounded into the dyke. If Congar, von Balthasar, Chenu, and Co. didn’t give a hoot about ecclesiastical authority prior to the Council, why should “enlightened” Catholic theologians give a hoot about it now? Revolutionary snowballs are very difficult to stop. As I cited on one of the first on-line essays I ever posted:

In articles about Pope Benedict XVI, much has been made of his experience of student unrest at the University of Tübingen in 1968. Many see that experience as the best explanation of the apparent intellectual about-face that turned the young progressive theologian of the Second Vatican Council into the poster-child of conservative reaction in theology and in church politics. There is something to this, and Joseph Ratzinger was not the only European intellectual to have been deeply affected by the excesses of the fascists of the left at the time. (We all know the definition of a neoconservative: a liberal who’s been mugged.)

Scramble as they may, but these intellectuals, having bought into the revolutionary paradigms of development and progress, will not be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. They have let the genie out of the bottle, and I doubt their ability to put it back in.

The hollow victory over Jansenism- part IV

Some notes on historical theology

Conclusion

This is of course a lot to digest and understand. From the metaphysical to the liturgical, the theological and the sociological aspects, Jansenism is a hard nut to crack. From a few reflections on grace in St. Augustine, it inflamed the national sentiment of the Gallican Church, spread into other countries, and threatened to change the very fabric of Catholicism on the European continent. While it reflected in many ways the tendencies of early modern thought, its defeat, I have argued, facilitated the growth of the “secularized” and “politicized” Catholicism that exists today, especially in the developed world. Most of the positive content of the Jansenist message (the fewness of the elect, the need for penance before absolution, the tendency of the Church to degenerate from its pristine origins) is as foreign to modern Catholicism as the doctrine of the transmigration of souls or millenarianism. But the methods of the Jansenists are alive and well, being used to carry out a program that is the mirror opposite of what they advocated.

The hollow victory over Jansenism – part III

Some notes on historical theology

Epistemological pessimism and the menace of the miraculous

In the last two posts on this subject, I have addressed the Jansenists’ losses and victories in the metaphysical, liturgical, and theological realms. In this post, I will explain how the suppression of the miraculous tendencies of late Jansenism served as a watershed moment of the Church in Western world. Plainly situated in the Enlightenment and before the traumatic events of 1789 that opened the secular, revolutionary epoch, the suppression of the miraculous manifestations sealed the modern Church’s attitudes regarding the relationship between the miraculous and authority. Afterwards, being Catholic would be increasingly defined as the political relationship of the citoyen to the Peuple de Dieu. In these latter times, however, the menace of the miraculous is making a comeback, set in some places to overthrow dogma and tradition in the name of an amorphous “religion of the Spirit” sweeping many parts of the “developing world”.