Douthat vs certain theologians

As with the papal visit to the U.S., I deliberately posted nothing during this year's Synod on Marriage and the Family. I contented myself with praying fervently during the proceedings and reading a few articles here and there. I was especially impressed with Dr Chad Pecknold's "Leaving Hegel Out of the Synod." In my opinion, the best intervention at the Synod was not made by a bishop or theologian, but by a female Romanian lay Catholic, Dr. Anca-Maria Cernea, who stated, "What the world needs nowadays is not limitation of freedom, but real freedom, liberation from sin. Salvation." The Synod is now over, leaving us with a very ambiguous final document, known as a relatio, which is quite good in parts.

What prompts me to write now is a post-synodal dust-up precipitated by several critical articles written by Ross Douthat in the New York Times on the Synod and the Holy Father's recent motu proprio making it easier to obtain an annulment. Douthat's writing prompted a fair number of theologians, several of them quite prominent, to publish a letter-to-the-editor of the New York Times. The letter basically asserted that because Douthat, a lay Catholic and a convert to boot, was not a member of the professional guild of theologians, he had no business opining in public on these matters.

Today Douthat responded to their letter in a column published in the New York Times. I have to say I am impressed with Douthat's response. For those interested, in his column he provides links to the articles with which the theologians took issue as well as a link to their letter.

To his great credit, Douthat took something he could've easily and understandably dismissed as not very serious and, moreover, that was intended, if not to stop him from publishing opinions with which the signatories to the letter disagreed in a very popular public forum, then certainly to damage his credibility. However, I think they only succeeded in in damaging their own. It seems to me that Douthat opted to take the high and courageous road by laying down the gauntlet with clear and cogent explanations for his positions. By doing this he makes it very easy for any and all of these theologians to respond to him with their concerns.

Let's face it, the concerns laid out by Douthat are shared by many Catholics throughout the world, cleric and lay, theologians and non-theologians alike. I have no qualms about saying that I share these concerns.

Given the readily discernible ambiguity of the Synod's final relatio, no amount of post-synodal lipstick is going to pretty up the pig (to take poetic license with the sausage-making metaphor everyone seems to love so much in this context). Of course, the proof will be in the post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation, which the Holy Father has promised to deliver sooner rather than later. As Douthat noted, "In politics and religion alike, a doctrine emptied in practice is actually emptied, whatever official rhetoric suggests."

It seems to me that the stakes are very high, not only for the Church, but for the world. Hence, it strikes me as wholly appropriate that there should be a rigorous and vigorous disputatio, which, because of the wide-ranging effects of the outcome, should not be limited to the to the Synod hall.

Is late-modern Western society the realm of the undead?

In his short book The Burnout Society, Korean-born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han makes his case that late-modern, or "post-modern," Western society suffers from a surfeit of both sameness (homongenization) and positivity. "The violence of positivity," Han observes, "does not deprive, it saturates; it does not exclude, it exhausts, which is why it proves inaccessible to unmediated perception" (7).

In his chapter on the "Vita Activa," in which he seeks to show that, like Foucault's disciplinary society and the immunological paradigm, late modern Western society has gone beyond Arendt's attempt, made in her book The Human Condition, to rehabilitate and expand the vita activa (the active life). Before even beginning his own critique, he notes that to prioritize the vita activa over the vita contemplativa (the contemplative life) is to start off down a dead end path, just as dead an end as if one tried it the other way around.

In an endnote to this chapter the Han notes: "Counter to what Arendt claims, the Christian tradition does not attach importance exclusively to vita contemplativa." He then cites Pope St Gregory the Great:

One must know, if a good course of life requires that one pass from the active to the contemplative life, then it is often useful when the soul returns from the contemplative to the active life in such a way that the flame of contemplation lighted in the heart confers its entire perfection on activity. Thus, the active life must lead to contemplation, but contemplation must proceed from what we have observed within and calls us back to activity

I do not have the citation from the works of Pope St Gregory for this passage because Han cites Alois M. Haas' chapter "Die Beurteilung der Vita contemplativa und activa in der Dominikanermystik des 14. Jaharhundrets," from the 1985 book Arbeit Muße Meditations as his source.

According to Han, Arendt insisted that modern work, which, when she wrote, was still largely industrial, turns people into animal laborans. On Arendt's terms, becoming such meant a loss of individuality. But Han doesn't buy this: "If one abandoned one's individuality and dissolved into the life process of the species entirely one would at least have the serenity of an animal" (18). But far from having "the serenity of an animal," the late-modern person, Han notes, "is hyperactive and hyperneurotic" (18). He asks, Why does such "hectic nervousness" prevail?

Image credit: ISTOCK

It seems to me that the direct answer to the question as to why hectic nervousness characterizes people in Western societies today, an answer that Han circles around but never arrives at directly, at least not in this chapter, is a loss of a sense of transcendence: "The modern loss of faith does not concern just God or the hereafter. It involves reality itself and makes human life radically fleeting. Life has never been [I think a better word- it is a translation from German- would be "seemed"] as fleeting as it is today... Nothing promises duration or substance" (18).

While there are certainly historical dynamics in play in the Christian Tradition that prevent us from drawing exclusively with straight lines, the handing on through time of what is substantial (made substantial, that is, embodied/incarnated, by the Church through time, thus making the Church a single subject, recognizable in every age), which Catholics identify as the deposit of the faith, which, I think, can be said to be at one and the same time the Church's memory, will, and understanding, seeks to orient us to what is ultimate, or, in the words of Don Giussani, "to free us from the fascination with appearances, with the ephemeral." It seems to many (myself included) that the ecclesial crisis of our day is making Christian doctrine as fleeting as everything else. In my view, the effect of this, should it succeed, will be to make religion in general and Christianity in particular even less relevant than it is now.

"Given this lack of Being," Han observes, "nervousness and unease arise" (18). For human beings, he continues, it is not enough to belong to a species and work "for the sake of its kind" to achieve temporal aims and perpetuate itself. As a result, "the late-modern I [Ich is translated as "ego] stands utterly alone" (18).

"Even religions, as thanatotechnics [great word] that would remove the fear of death and produce a feeling of duration," Han opines, "have run their course" (18). Reading this made me consider more carefully Roger Rediger's proselytizing of Houellebecq's François in Submission. What appealed to François were the this-worldly aspects of Islam. Reflecting on René Guénon's conversion to Islam, François reasons-

why had Guénon, for example, converted to Islam? he was above all a man of science, and he had chosen Islam on scientific grounds, both for its conceptual economy and to avoid certain marginal, irrational doctrines such as the real presence of Christ in the eucharist (225)

To suggest either than Christ's real presence in the Eucharist is either marginal or irrational is just plain wrong. It is central and, while, being authentically a theological mystery, it cannot be known by the unaided light of natural reason, but is not at odds with reason.

It seems that Western societies today at least remain, to borrow from Flannery O'Connor, "God-haunted." But I think Han is quite right to note, "The denarrativization," what the late Fr Richard John Neuhaus, borrowing from certain post-modern theorists, might call the loss of our meta-narrative, "of the world is reinforcing the feeling of fleetingness. It makes life bare" (18). The net effect of this, according to Han, is that it renders every person expendable, but not entirely expendable, that is, people who can be killed absolutely, but renders us "undead, so to speak" (19).

While Han never writes in this chapter about the need for a transcendent turn, he does end it by pointing out our very human need for contemplation. I don't think that regaining an ability to contemplate can have any effect except to restore our sense of transcendence, the religious sense. Our religious sense is not simply "part" of being human, but precisely what constitutes us human beings made in the imago Dei.

Pope St John Paul II and Michel Houellebecq

I just finished Michel Houellebecq's Submission, a novel I read carefully this week, interspersed with reading Huysmans' Marthe: The Story of a Whore. After reading Houellebecq's book, I am even more convinced of that the mystery central to reality is the Incarnation, which is, indeed, the manifestation of the mysterium tremendum. I also have no problem admitting that Islam in its finest form, which is the form with which Houellebecq deals, is perhaps in some ways better suited to worldly dominance than is Christianity. While it can be and has been used as a form social control, such a use is fundamentally at odds with the nature of Christianity.

Houellebecq grasps something very fundamental, something we see playing out in the Church right now in a big way in the wake of the Synod on the Family. It is a diagnosis that the author of Submission gives in a parenthetical note towards the end of the book, as his main character, François, summarizes an article written by one Robert Rediger:

liberal individualism triumphed as long as it undermined intermediate structures such as nations, corporations, castes [the Church, as Houellebecq describes a few pages later], but when it attacked that ultimate social structure, the family, and thus the birthrate, it signed its own death warrant...

Michel Houellebecq

Here is what Houellebecq writes concerning the Church a few pages later, as François contemplates the reasons for René Guénon's conversion to Islam:

Thanks to the simpering seductions and the lewd enticements of the progressives, the Church had lost its ability to oppose moral decadence, to renounce homosexual marriage, abortion rights, and women in the work place

In this Houellebecq can be read as echoing, certainly not exactly, Pope St John Paul II. Unlike Houellebecq's take on gender relations according to Islam, John Paul II, while firmly insisting on the difference and complementarity of men and women, asserted a fundamental equality of persons.

In his 1994 Letter to Families, Papa Wojtyla observed:

No human society can run the risk of permissiveness in fundamental issues regarding the nature of marriage and the family! Such moral permissiveness cannot fail to damage the authentic requirements of peace and communion among people. It is thus quite understandable why the Church vigorously defends the identity of the family and encourages responsible individuals and institutions, especially political leaders and international organizations, not to yield to the temptation of a superficial and false modernity...

Pope St John Paul II

This kind of critical reflection should lead our society, which certainly contains many positive aspects on the material and cultural level, to realize that, from various points of view, it is a society which is sick and is creating profound distortions in man. Why is this happening? The reason is that our society has broken away from the full truth about man, from the truth about what man and woman really are as persons. Thus it cannot adequately comprehend the real meaning of the gift of persons in marriage, responsible love at the service of fatherhood and motherhood, and the true grandeur of procreation and education

Stated pointedly, there's more at stake than many people realize.

In light of this, our Friday traditio is a repeat- Paul Young singing "Love of the Common People":

Prayer is hope

Since I wrote about hope at the end of last week, I thought it would be nice to write about it again in the early part of this new week. This was made easy by my reading of the following this evening from Michel Houellebecq's novel Submission:

The idea behind the offices of Terce, Sext, and None was "to return us to the presence of God over the course of the day." Every day there were seven offices, plus Mass. None of that had changed since Huysmans's time. The one concession to comfort was that Vigils, which had been observed at two in the morning, was now at ten p.m. During my first visit [twenty years before], I had loved Vigils, with the long meditative psalms chanted in the middle of the night-as distant from Compline, and its farewell to the day, as it was from Lauds, which greeted the new dawn. Vigils was an office of pure waiting, of ultimate hope without any reason for hope (176)

The voice is that of the main character, François, who is beginning a short visit the French Benedictine monastery, the Abbey of Ligugé.

François has just been given a very early retirement from the Sorbonne, where he was a professor of literature (the writing of Joris-Karl Huysmans being his area of interest), for political reasons. He's re-visiting the monastery where Huysmans became a Benedictine oblate and where Huysmans himself had hoped to retire, even going so far as building a house. He did not remain at Ligugé, but returned to Paris. Houellebecq's anti-hero has no plans to remain and, in fact, can only manage a very short stay.

Ligugé Abbey cloisters

It seems to me that François would surely be numbered among those who, according to Václav Havel's taxonomy of hope (see "Some restless thoughts on hope"), wait for Godot, which waiting is not really waiting, but resignation brought about by hopelessness. Do not fear, François remains mostly unmoved by all of this, despite finding Liturgy of the Hours and Mass lovely.

The voices of the monks rose up in the freezing air, pure, humble, well meaning. They were full of sweetness, hope, and expectation. The Lord Jesus would return, was about to return, and already the warmth of his presence filled their souls with joy. This was the one real theme of their chants, chants of sweet and organic expectation. The old queer Nietzsche had it right: Christianity was, at the end of the day, a feminine religion (179)

When one thinks of the Church as Christ's Bride, mystically referring to the soul as feminine, etc., Nietzsche was not totally out-to-lunch. However, much more needs to be said both about ecclesiology and theological anthropology in response to Nietzsche's conclusion, or Houellebecq's conclusion that, in the end, Islam will "win" because of the feminine inheritance that bled from Christianity into late-modern European secularism. So much for all the patriarchy, which is a not-so leitmotif running through Houellebeq's novel.

I like defining hope as "sweet and organic expectation." There is waiting for Godot and then there is waiting joyfully with expectation.

My verse for today

This morning, as I was ending my prayer and reflection time, I picked up off the floor my copy of Pope St John Paul II's book Memory and Identity. I read the chapter "Europe As 'Native Land.'" I removed the book from the shelf the last time I was preparing to preach, but I did wind up using the quote I looked up. Reading this chapter, however, was a nice complement to finishing Havel: A Life.

Digressing from his analysis "of the European spirit," the Pope referred to Jesus' allegory of the vine and the branches, found in St John's Gospel, the fifteenth chapter. He quoted these words of Jesus: "I am the vine and you are the branches" (v. 5). With this, the saintly pope insisted, the Lord "develops this great metaphor, sketching as it were a theology of Incarnation and Redemption. He is the vine, the Father is the vine grower, and individual Christians are the branches"(98). He went on to say that Christ was incarnate so that the Father, by the power of the Spirit, could graft humanity "onto the stock of the divinity of his only-begotten Son" (98). From the beginning, Papa Wojtyla observed, our humanity, originally created in both God's image and likeness, was made for this. Further, "it is only by agreeing to be grafted onto Christ's divine Vine that man can become fully himself" (99).

After briefly laying out the allegory of the vine and the branches, John Paul II asked, "Why, at this point in our reflections on Europe, do I speak of the vine and the branches?" He did so because he thought it offered "the best explanation of the drama of the European Enlightenment" (99). By rejecting the Lord, or marginalizing "his place in human history and culture," a "revolution" occurred in European thought (99). This revolution severed man from the vine, which vine "guarantees him the possibility of attaining the fullness of his humanity" (99). Further, this severing opened up a path "that would lead toward the devastating experiences of evil" that followed (99). While not in such an explicitly Christian way, Havel too, insisted on the necessity of attending to humanity's transcendent dimension, even going so far as to recognize the Christian foundation of Europe.

Later in the morning, praying with my wife and using Sarah Young's devotional Jesus Calling, I encountered the same passage, even the same verse (John 15:5). This second encounter with the same passage in the same morning grounded it some, said something to me about my life, especially about my need to surrender daily to Christ the Lord: "True confidence comes from knowing you are complete in My presence" (313).

Maybe it's because we're in the midst of fall that I was so attentive to this Scripture today, attuned to the image of vines, branches, and leafs.

A leaf drops from a branch dead, there to decay on the ground, or be raked up, sucked up, or mowed up. Chaplain Mike passed along the poem Autumn Song, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti:

Know’st thou not at the fall of the leaf
How the heart feels a languid grief
Laid on it for a covering,
And how sleep seems a goodly thing
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?

And how the swift beat of the brain
Falters because it is in vain,
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf
Knowest thou not? and how the chief
Of joys seems—not to suffer pain?

Know’st thou not at the fall of the leaf
How the soul feels like a dried sheaf
Bound up at length for harvesting,
And how death seems a comely thing
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?

It is the blindman who sees all along

Readings: Jer 31:7-9; Ps 126:1-6; Heb 5:1-6; Mark 10:46-52

I think it is important to note that in the pericopé that is our Gospel reading for this Sunday, it is "Bartimaeus, a blind man, the son of Timaeus" who sees from the get-go, even before Christ heals him. Attend to how Bartimaeus calls out to the Lord: "Jesus, son of David, have pity on me." With these words the blind man gives evidence that he sees who Jesus is- the Messiah. Notice that, while the Lord grants Bartimaeus his request (to see), He tells the son of Timaeus that his faith has saved him.

"Faith" and "saved" are two very important words in this passage. What these words mean are crucial for Christianity. The word "saved" in this passage in a translation of the Greek verb that transliterates as sesoken (literally "has saved"), which is derived from the verb sōzō, which has a range of meaning from being made well to being delivered from peril. There is no need to reduce what our Lord says to only one meaning.

As for "faith," the Greek noun employed in this passage is pistis. Pistis is (too) often viewed as the opposite of  gnosis, or "knowledge." Such a false opposition gives rise to the persistent temptation to divorce faith from reason, which separation is the sad legacy of the Protestant revolt. As Von Balthasar explained in the first volume of his theological aesthetics, The Glory of the Lord:

The contrast between 'pistics' and 'gnostics' is basically that between, on the one hand, the Christian who, by 'bare faith'..., relates in a purely external manner to the content of faith (who, therefore, does not progress beyond a faith based solely on authority, which primarily means obedience to the ecclesial kerygma), and, on the other hand, the Christian who energetically strives to appropriate interiorly what he believes and, in so doing, sees the essential content of faith unfold before his vision..." (137)

Jesus Heals Bartimaeus, by Nicolas Poussin, 1650

We know from Christ Himself that a person can only know Him as Messiah and/or Lord by faith, which comes by way of revelation, an unveiling (Matt 16:17), or, in the words of Luigi Giussani: an event (i.e., something that happens to you) that becomes an encounter. Faith, by its true nature, as St Anselm of Canterbury noted long ago, seeks understanding. In other words, faith strives to know. Hence, faith and reason work together to bring us to the knowledge of the Truth.

Now, I readily grant that the above is an oversimplified explanation of the dynamic at work in faith, but I hope I give what amounts to a useful sketch. However, in Jesus' healing of Bartimaeus we have a perfect, and very dramatic, example of how pistis (i.e., true faith) leads to, or tends towards, gnosis (true knowledge).

Our first reading, taken from the book of the prophet Jeremiah, is about God doing for His people what Christ did for Bartimaeus. In our reading from the Letter to the Hebrews, the inspired author seeks to explain something of just how God does this in and through Jesus Christ, the great and true High Priest. So, with the psalmist and with Bartimaeus, let us rejoice, singing: "The Lord has done great things for us; we are filled with joy."

Some restless thoughts on hope

One helpful way I have found to understand the most elusive of the theological virtues, hope, is by saying it is the flower of faith and its fruit is charity. I think there is an interesting correlation between the theological virtue of hope and the spiritual discipline of fasting, just as I think there is a correlation between prayer and faith as well as between alms-giving and charity. At least for me, hope remains elusive and so I am always looking for better and deeper ways of understanding it.

I am about to finish Michael Zantovsky's biography of Václav Havel: Havel: A Life. It is a book I highly recommend. After resigning from the presidency of Czechoslovakia, which he did shortly after the decision to dissolve the Czech and Slovak federation was reached in 1992 (the formal dissolution of the federation happened 1 January 1993), Havel was made a member of the French Academy of Humanities and Political Science.

Václav Havel greets crowds in Prague's Wenceslas, November, 1989

In his speech accepting membership in the French Academy, delivered 27 October 1992, Havel reflected on the meaning of hope, a reflection that arose very much from his experience of serving for three years as president. According to Zantovsky, "In the speech he drew a line between two different kinds of the phenomenon of waiting. One, waiting for Godot, is provoked by hopelessness. People who feel powerless to change the conditions of their life pin their hope on some indeterminate 'salvation from outside... It is the hope of people without hope'" (421).

"The other type of waiting 'was based on the knowledge that it made sense on principle to resist by speaking the truth, simply because it was the right thing to do, without speculating whether it would lead somewhere tomorrow, or the day after, or ever... waiting as a state of hope, not an expression of hopelessness" (421-422)

According to Zantovsky, this short discourse on hope led him to talk about impatience, which Havel identified as the "vain belief in the primacy of reason" and the false belief that "the world is nothing but a cross-world [not a misspelling of "word"] puzzle to be solved" (422). "Without even being aware of it," Havel confessed, "I, too, submitted to the perverted belief that I was a master of reality, that the only task was to improve reality according to some existing recipe" (422). He admitted that he gave into the illusion of thinking time belonged to him. "It was, of course, a big mistake. The world, Being and history have their own time. We can, of course, enter that time in a creative way, but none of us has it entirely in his hands" (422)

Properly understood, Christian hope must take the form of the latter because it has nothing to do with the former. In the book The Surprising Pope: Understanding the Thought of Pope John Paul II, which is a series of eleven interviews with Fr Maciej Zieba O.P., a close associate of then-Cardinal Wojtyla in Poland, and, prior to ordination, a Solidarity activist, conducted by Adam Pawlowicz, responding to a question that Christianity is somehow opposed to success in the world, Zieba responded:

success is not a Christian category, but nor is failure. The real categories are 'for Christ' and 'against Christ' - and the first will lead to success, the second to defeat. These categories, however, do not translate as success and failure in the world. Besides, we know that in time there are no ultimate successes or ultimate failures. That is clear from the Gospels. Faith in Christ makes it possible for us to perceive within the temporal dimension the weightiness of spiritual reality and opens up the horizon of time to a dimension larger than human life (77)

Both of these expositions on hope show us that it has little to do with optimism.

Pope St John Paul II in Poland, 1983

It always helps to use examples. Therefore, the intervention at the now-concluding Ordinary Synod on the Family, made a week ago yesterday, by Dr. Anca-Maria Cernea, President of the Association of Catholic Doctors of Bucharest (Romania) serves very well: "Material poverty and consumerism are not the primary cause of the family crisis. The primary cause of the sexual and cultural revolution is ideological" (read the whole thing here).

Hope that is truly hope bids us to engage time "in a creative way." Christian hope is not hopeless. Because of the Incarnation, a Christian does not look for "salvation from outside," but rather sees it arising from within.

Speaking of waiting as an act of hope, the season of Advent begins in little more than a month. Enjoy "Donchás" (i.e., "Hope") by The Crossing.