Archives for 2015

Christmas and Peace

December 26, 2015

I didn’t much like the song “The Little Drummer Boy” when I was young, finding it a bit trite, even contrived. Then I heard this version.

That might be the best track off of the amazing 1966 “Noel” album that Baez recorded with, of all people, Peter Schickele, better known for his PDQ Bach hilarity. It was conceived as a protest against the Vietnam War. The collaboration was such a musical success that Baez and Schickele combined for two more recordings.

Why a Christmas album for peace? I haven’t come across any interviews where Baez explains this choice. She had been, and would continue to be, outspoken against all war. She wrote many songs protesting injustice, and she recorded many songs of other writers on related topics. She could have made virtually any of her albums into statements for peace. But she chose to sing about Jesus Christ. She could have written songs using the teaching of Gandhi, who was a strong influence on her decision to found the Institute for the Study of Non-Violence. But she sang about the Prince of Peace.

So sand the prophet Isaiah, in another time of great turmoil and distress, while Jerusalem was under threat by the powerful Assyrian empire:

For every boot that tramped in battle,
every cloak rolled in blood,
will be burned as fuel for fire.

For a child is born to us, a son is given to us;
upon his shoulder dominion rests.

They name him Wonder-Counselor, God-Hero,
Father-Forever, Prince of Peace.

His dominion is vast
and forever peaceful,

Upon David’s throne, and over his kingdom,
which he confirms and sustains
By judgment and justice,
both now and forever.

The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this!

[Isaiah 9: 4-6]

Happy Thanksgiving

November 26, 2015

“O Lord, refresh our sensibilities. Give us this day our daily taste. Restore to us soups that spoons will not sink in, and sauces which are never the same twice. Raise up among us stews with more gravy than we have bread to blot it with, and casseroles that put starch and substance in our limp modernity. Take away our fear of fat and make us glad of the oil which ran upon Aaron’s beard. Give us pasta with a hundred fillings, and rice in a thousand variations. Above all, give us grace to live as true men – to fast till we come to a refreshed sense of what we have and then to dine gratefully on all that comes to hand. Drive far from us, O Most Bountiful, all creatures of air and darkness; cast out the demons that possess us; deliver us from the fear of calories and the bondage of nutrition; and set us free once more in our own land, where we shall serve Thee as Thou hast blessed us – with the dew of heaven, the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine. Amen.”

–Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection

Belief, Behavior, Structure: More from Natural Symbols

November 3, 2015

“The system of control is validated by a typical bias in the system of belief. These tendencies are the subject of this book, for they make their own typical demands on the media of expression and thus produce natural systems of symbolic behavior.”

So this is as close to a thesis statement as I can find in Mary Douglas’s classic book on cosmology, Natural Symbols. It appears a couple of pages before the end of Chapter 4 “Grid and Group,” on pages 66-67 in my 2001 Routledge edition. Let me spend a moment unpacking this quote, then offer an example from monastic life to show why the ideas in this book are so important.

For any community to function, it must be structured. If structure among human beings is to have any staying power, individual members of communities need to be invested in it. Too much disaffection among too many members leads to a breakdown in cooperation, mutual trust and understanding. In order to be invested in the community structure, individuals must share some kind of belief in what they are doing and how the structure harnesses their individual efforts toward the common goal. This “system of belief” thus “validates” the “system of control,” or what I am here calling by the more benign term structure. This is the gist of the first sentence. Without a common belief, structure will falter.

Let’s apply this to a monastery. A monastery traditionally is envisioned as a kind of family with the abbot as father and the rest of the community as sons and brothers. The brothers themselves have a pecking order. Saint Benedict’s Rule is quite firm about brothers observing clear rank based on date of entrance to the monastery. I will have much more to say about this aspect of the Rule tomorrow. For now, I merely need to point out that the behavior of individual brothers is limited, guided and structured by a system. In this system, the abbot has final say over everything. Junior members show respect to seniors (by giving place, using honorary titles, and so on), and seniors are to love the juniors (by watching over their spiritual growth, using familiar titles of fondness). This is a monastic “system of control.” Brothers do not usually feel free to act outside of these structured relationships. When they do step outside of this system, there is a long disciplinary code awaiting them and a series of penances to be assigned to bring the erring brother back into a just place within the structure.

For this structure to be legitimate, for it to have validity, Bit must be connected to a plausible common system of belief. At root, this system of belief is just the gospel, but in the specific locale of the cloister, Benedict extends Biblical and liturgical teaching to validate a very particular structure he has legislated. “The abbot is believed to hold the place of Christ.” Note that this places the most stringent demands on the abbot himself, who is repeatedly warned to reflect on whether his conduct and decisions are worthy of Christ. Thus the structure also controls the abbot himself, lest anyone imagine that the notion of control is a ruse for securing maximum latitude for those in power. The abbot is understood to be someone who excels in two areas: righteous conduct and correct teaching, which is to say he is someone who has internalized the ideal system of control and system of belief.

Now let’s apply all of this to the second sentence in the quote.

Human communities tend to structure themselves in a limited number of ways, and to validate these structures with typical types of beliefs. In turn, these structures and associated systems of belief give rise to typical “media of expression.” What are these media? Certainly they include ways of speaking. In the Rule, monks are not to speak until spoken to, and in particular they are to listen to the abbot. When they do need to speak, they must learn to do so humbly and reasonably and at the appropriate time. So beyond the actual words used, monks communicate by signs of humility. They also signal their intentions by making use of correct times and places (monks are not to contend with their abbot, even outside of the cloister, for example). In fact, we can take this much further. Monks communicate in all kinds of silent ways: in the order in which we stand at liturgy and sit at table, in the way we dress and cut our hair, in the way we care for the tools of the community, the way in which we comport ourselves in the oratory, and so on. This is properly symbolic behavior, and Mary Douglas convincingly demonstrates that the type of symbolic behavior depends on (and in turn influences) the community structure and belief.

For the sake of simplicity, I like to summarize this whole nexus of ideas with a diagram, which I will attempt to render within the limits of blogging software:

media of expression/symbolic communication

⇑ ⇑

⇓ ⇓

system of control/structure ⇔ system of belief

So we have three mutually influencing ideas, from the most interior and intellectual (belief), through the exterior and bodily (symbolic communication), to the most public and collective (structure). Tinkering with any one area will change the others in subtle ways, though Dame Mary strongly suggests that we can predict relatively well just how these changes will play out.

Let me offer one insight that we have had here in our monastery from reflecting on this schema. Much of our interior monastic work involves battling sinful thoughts. I have discovered that many brothers find this spiritual warfare very difficult and discouraging. From a bit of digging and creative rethinking of various aspects of the broadest tradition, we’ve discovered that the exclusive dwelling on thoughts, without attention to how we comport ourselves bodily (and express ourselves, often unwittingly), and without attention to how we maintain community structure, will often lead to exactly this frustration. This is because our bodily behaviors (my pet peeve in this area is monks rushing about–the quickest way to get a rebuke from the superior in Chicago) are undermining our beliefs.

Another vast area of potential cognitive dissonance arises in the area of community structure. Brothers enter the monastery from a world where we believe in a distinction between the public and the private. But this is very much at odds with Benedict’s structure. If we were completely strict in this area, we would not have individual rooms. We would instead all sleep in a common dormitory. Even more, seniors would regularly inspect the beds for any items that monks have stashed away for private use. Now, to be fair, common dormitories have almost never worked in our tradition. But this is a major problem for modern monks, for whom the cell is not intuitively a place of emptiness and pure prayer. From habit, the cell tends to devolve into a simple bedroom, a place to go to be alone, rather than to go to be with God. But if this is so, is it any wonder that at the time of prayer, we are hounded by self-serving thoughts and the fear that God is distant? We’ve encoded this into a space where we spend perhaps half of our day.

So often enough the answer to obsessive thinking is a change of behavior in the areas of bodily comportment and submission to community structure. This takes a lot of the heat off of the individual brother, who can relax a bit into allowing the practices of the life to change him from the outside in.

How to Keep from Being a Cult

October 31, 2015

My blog isn’t particularly about the Benedict Option, but I have paid attention to the discussion that blogger and journalist Rod Dreher has occasioned by his efforts to unpack the last page of Alasdair MacIntyre’s important book After Virtue. He’s linked to me again (thank you!), and so I need to put out some more product. Years ago, I resisted reading MacIntyre, mostly because I didn’t have a lot of confidence in cultural conservatives to instigate a genuine moral reform of society, much as I felt that we needed it. And I figured that MacIntyre’s book was part of the conservative virtue brigade, a la William Bennett (it’s not). I’ve never been keen to the liberal/conservative divide that is woven into the general fabric of the modern world since the French Revolution. I’ve often felt about conservatism as I do about classical music (much as I like it). Whatever the merits of Mozart–and there are many, many of these–repeating Mozart over and over again will not revive the ancien regime. We may even distort our minds and waste valuable time pining for something totally imaginary, and not all that desirable in the end.

The social world that made Mozart possible is gone, and this is not entirely a bad thing. The social world that made the composition of Gregorian chant possible is almost gone, and this is definitely not a good thing.

How to revive monasteries? This is the question that Benedictines and others have been scrambling to answer since the suppressions of the Reformation and the Revolution. Just as we seemed to have answered it, as vocations were pouring into monasteries in the 1950’s, we discovered that the Western social milieu, that seemed so open to deep religious sentiment and observance, turned out not to have the goods after all. Large proportions of those vocations left the monasteries once the glow wore off and the 70’s got going.

The two options usually held out for religious life parrot the conservative/liberal divide: either return to strong, traditional observances (usually ones from the 1950’s, which were the same ones that failed to win the hearts of the droves who left in the 1970’s), or figure out ways to accommodate to a new cultural situation. Let me examine each option using the tools that Mary Douglas offers us in Natural Symbols.

First, let’s dismiss the accommodation possibility. Accommodate to what? Douglas begins her book with a withering review of the attempts of English bishops after the Second Vatican Council to update Friday abstinence and replace its dense symbolism (participation in the Passion, clear social demarcation from non-Catholics) with something more internal, “moral,”–perhaps we might say “sincere.” I will have a lot more to say about the social conditions that determined the bishops’ preferences for dumbing-down ritual and hyping up “heart religion.” Let me just note here that Dame Mary misses no opportunity gently to chide those who imagine that this heart religion is more advanced and progressive than the magical world of the lower-class “Bog Irish” for whom Friday abstinence was a matter of fidelity to a beleaguered homeland and the grandeur that was Rome. Anthropologists of the 1950’s could provide myriad examples of “primitive” African pygmy societies whose religion played more or less the same tune as the highly educated clerics who imagined themselves on the cutting edge.

What accommodation amounts to, If Prof. Douglas is correct, is the willing, albeit unwitting, suicide of the sacramental cosmic worldview of traditional Catholicism and Orthodoxy. So it’s not a road we can take if we are serious about belonging to a Mystical Body that includes Saint Paul, St. Basil, St. Benedict, St. Gertrude the Great, St. Hildegard of Bingen, Dante, St. Symeon the New Theologian, etc.

But what does non-accommodation look like? Critics of the Benedict Option challenge advocates to demonstrate that communities opting out will not become ingrown and cultish. Dame Mary has advice on this score, too.

In social arrangements that she calls “small group,” we see just these characteristics: strong boundaries separating the group from the external world, and fear of contamination by a world dominated by maleficent forces lurking everywhere outside and threatening to infect the group. She doesn’t spend a lot of time on these groups, but what she has to say contains more than enough information to know how to avoid becoming a cult (or, for that matter, how to become one, if that’s what you’re gunning for).

The small group is one in which the numbers are genuinely low. More importantly, authority is weak, and therefore internal structure is confused. Because authority is weak and structure is confused, the group is in constant danger of disintegrating, and generates for itself a fear of evil influences and a high premium on internal purity (both in terms of the group and the individual). This is a congregation of the saved, and they are saved by their own efforts of purification and prophylactic measures against a corrupted world.

I’ve pointed out to the brothers that the Rule of the Master gives us a perfect description of “small group.” And it is part of Saint Benedict’s great genius and sanctity that he corrects these tendencies of the Master in order to produce a community structure that it clear, articulated by ritual and symbol, discerningly open to the world, flexible and sure of itself (because based in Christ, the Logos, whose ordering principles are seen to inhere in the cosmos daily redeemed in the Holy Eucharist and Divine Office). Here is an example of the counter-intuitive fruits of taking Mary Douglas seriously: when a brother is struggling with thoughts, his first attempts to deal with them often involves an attempt to purify himself inwardly by an effort of will, coupled with a feeling of shame and guilt for having this inward impurity. My advice: definitely work against the thought, but often enough these troubling thoughts are a product of an unwillingness to observe clear roles within community life, to confuse structure and therefore to act inadvertantly as if we were a cult obsessed with internal purity. We desire internal purity, but we achieve it by accepting joyfully the roles that Providence has given us through the medium of the Church. So: keep your place in rank, honor those senior to you, love those junior to you, show up for things on time, follow Benedict’s Rule as literally as you can. This takes the heat off of the spiritual battle and involves the whole structure of the Church in the fight, and it offers the brothers the confidence of having a special place within the Church, a confidence that our spiritual foes really can be overcome by the power of Christ animating His Body.

Mary Douglas offered this advice to millennial movements: learn to organize! She died before she could watch movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street get undermined because of their steadfast refusal to organize. Benedictine Option pioneers should work to avoid the related fate of the irrelevant sectarian movements by learning to organize. There is a direct connection between the kind of social body we live in and the beliefs that we hold and behaviors that we legitimate. The connections between these three levels of 1) mind, 2) body, and 3) society I hope to explore in the next post on Natural Symbols.

Does Chant Style Matter? Part 1

October 21, 2015

Pray Tell Blog recently posted my review of Benedicta, a CD collection of Marian chants sung by the monks of Norcia. It’s really two reviews in one. One part of me admires the lovely singing, the warmth of tone, and the ringing intonation of the brothers’ voices. On this level, the recording stands up with the better chant recordings I’ve heard. The other part of me is uneasy, however, about some choices the monks made. Among these choices was their use of the “Solesmes method” of interpretation (which, as I understand, is no longer used even at Solesmes Abbey itself), which I identified as part and parcel of the larger problem of presenting the chants without context. The lone comment on the blog suggests that it shouldn’t matter whether the Solesmes method or some other approach is used. What matters is that the music is beautiful.

Even before reading the comment, I was puzzling over what I take to be the importance of getting past the Solesmes method. Is my position truly defensible? Or is it a personal preference? I believe that my position is rational, and therefore to be preferred to a ‘pre-rational’ assessment.

But defending my position will take some work. Let me give an example of the uphill battle we’re talking about here.

I was at a reception after Vespers recently, speaking with two members of our own Schola Laudis. I mentioned to them that one of the things driving my interest in chant and Renaissance music at the liturgy is that I was seeking a rational way to go forward with the composition of church music. I meant by this that we should have reasons for choosing one type of music over another. When it comes to church music, it seems that we are usually content with saying that we want music that is beautiful. Fair enough. Would it be too pedantic of me to ask why we consider some music to be beautiful and other music to be maudlin, ugly, or overly sentimental? Some people consider “Send in the Clowns” to be a beautiful song (me…not so much, though I get its appeal). I personally find the Prelude to Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde to be quite beautiful, in its way. These are not, and should not (I think) be models for church music. Many people, on the other hand, find Gregorian chant dull, elitist, hard to understand, difficult to sing with any connection to one’s emotions, etc. Yet church documents make very clear that this style is the basis of our sacred music tradition.

Much of what we take to be beautiful depends on our cultural upbringing and, one hesitates to point it out, on our level of achievement in virtues like moderation, chastity, and humility. Lacking such virtues might lead us to prefer ecstatic music to sober music, manipulative music to ordered music, or simply music that we liked as children to music that adults tell us we’re supposed to like when our tastes develop a bit more.

Therefore, simply saying that music ought to be beautiful is not specific enough. Church music needs to be beautiful to certain types of persons. And those of us who are not yet those sorts of persons need to be able to make an act of faith that the beauty of such music will become more apparent as we grow in virtue and knowledge. Furthermore, I think that it is reasonable, based on experience, to hope that exposure to “virtuous” music will actually assist us in growing in virtue (this argument goes back at least to Plato, though it is much contested). We have more likely been exposed to the opposite phenomenon, someone descending into vice accompanied by depressing, libidinous, or cruel music.

What remains, then, is for me to explain why the approach taken by the Norcia monks is delightful on one level, but, in my opinion, does not quite approximate the beautiful in the fullest sense. Furthermore, I should be able to show that their recording falls somewhat (not entirely, mind you) short of what it could have been because of specific choices that they made: the use of the Solesmes method, and the somewhat random manner in which the chants were selected (random with regard to liturgical rationales). These proofs will have to wait for a later post.

Bonus tracks: Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde…music that is not quite chaste, deliberately eliding tonal boundaries in a manner uncomfortably parallel to the elision of marital boundaries in Wagner’s personal life at the time of its composition. He was falling in love with Mathilde Wesendonck, and perhaps carrying on an affair with her. Wagner’s indiscretions resulted in his separation from his wife Minna.

Here’s my example of ‘ecstatic’ music, “Giant Steps” by John Coltrane, a piece not without its own kind of beauty and order, yet clearly not in any way a model for church music.

And surely you didn’t think I’d leave you without “Send in the Clowns…”

Natural Symbols-Introduction

October 16, 2015

[P]eople at different historic periods are more or less sensitive to signs as such. Some people are deaf or blind to non-verbal signals.–Mary Douglas

I’m back after a long layoff owing to travels and recuperation after our major building project this summer. And I have been promising for some time to write some things about Mary Douglas. I’ve begun here with one of many important quotes from what I consider to be her most important book, Natural Symbols. This book is not as famous as her breakthrough (and perennial classic) Purity and Danger. If you are looking to read her work, I’d start either with Purity and Danger or with one of her excellent Biblical commentaries, probably Leviticus as Literature.

But let’s look at this quote. She is saying that human sensitivity to “signs” depends on one’s historical situation. This quotation appears early in Natural Symbols, a book she wrote in response to the widespread rejection of ritual and symbol in the late 1960’s. She was also writing as a concerned Catholic, for whom ritual was a a life-affirming part of her experience. Finally, she wrote as an anthropologist, who had the opportunity to witness the use of ritual in other cultures, and to reflect on the purpose and effect of ritual in building social ties and shared meaning. Natural Symbols is a book that attempts to demonstrate the connection between three levels of experience (listed here from most to least general and abstract): 1) our system of belief about the world, society, God, and evil; 2) the way in which belief is communicated by and shapes society and the control it exercises (or fails to exercise) over us; 3) our experience of being a body, and the ways in which we use our bodies to communicate our shared (or unique) beliefs about the world and our place in it.

Super-dense symbols at Latin high Mass. Note the strict bodily postures of the participants, their orientation, etc.

Let me unpack that last sentence with a concrete example. This will help to explain why I consider the book so important for understanding the malaise afflicting religious life in particular, and the Church in general. In a Catholic monastery, we say that we believe in the Mystery of the Incarnation. This implies that Christ is incarnate in the men with whom we live, and therefore regulate the ways in which brothers relate to one another. As the Prior, I am understood to hold the place of Christ (properly speaking) in the community. This means that brothers don’t refer to me as “Pete,” or sit in my place at table, in choir, or in chapter. Brothers act out, in their own bodies, symbols of the Incarnation. Thus we all genuflect when we enter the church, recognizing Christ’s Real Presence in the tabernacle. We bow to one another to acknowledge Christ in each brother. We discipline our bodies in accord with the social demands that communicate a system of belief.

But what if we happen to enter the monastery as part of an unlucky group that is “less sensitive” or even “deaf or blind,” to symbolic expressions like places of honor, genuflections, pectoral crosses, bows….even habits, tonsures, icons, candles, holy water, etc? I could go on and on. The point is that monastic life as such is as life that is based upon a belief system that is strongly tied to an intricately detailed set of symbolic observances. What if we enter such a life lacking the faculty to see and interpret the symbols?

A less ritually rigorous approach to worship. Note the varying postures, vesture (wink), and lack of identifiable architectural context.

After many years in monastic life, I have some to the conviction that most young men and women entering religious life today do so without the ability to understand the meaning of the symbols of the traditional life. Furthermore, I think that it is quite possible to engage in these symbolic behaviors without ever really grasping what they mean.

What makes me think this? Before Vatican II, the Church in general was governed by massive amounts of rule-bound behaviors that were intended to communicate a certain theology. Strong social disciplines regulated what bishops, priests, religious, and laity could and could not do. When the reforms of the Council began to take hold, huge percentages of Western Catholics quickly gave up all kinds of symbolic behaviors and social disciplines without any apparent grief (for others, obviously, these changes were devastating; Mary Douglas is very sensitive to their suffering, and in some ways this book is an anthropologist’s effort to help redress the wrongs that were just unfolding in 1970 when Natural Symbols was published). This suggests that there were large portions of the Catholic Church for whom, in 1960, the symbols and disciplines already were more or less meaningless, that their importance had been forgotten, despite the fact that everyone continued to engage in them.

In my experience, young men entering a traditional monastic life such as our is reputed to be are looking for the structure that ritual and discipline provide. But I have also observed that for many of these same men, the real meaning of these rituals can be easily misunderstood. I will attempt to explain what I think is actually going on in a later post. Here, since I must wrap up, let me just point out that an effort to put her ideas into effect in our monastery has had surprising consequences (good ones, so far). And Professor Douglas’s concerns turn out to have a lot in common with the diagnoses of Alasdair MacIntyre, Rene Girard, Fr. Henri de Lubac, George Steiner, Pope Benedict XVI, and others writing from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. Those who are interested in the so-called “Benedict Option” would do well to pay close attention to Mary Douglas, if they really wish to avoid becoming sectarian pariahs. More than that, Douglas helps to explain why MacIntyre and de Lubac seem to be often misunderstood even by their own strongest supporters. Changing my belief requires me to change my social experience and to change the way I use and experience my body. Without social structure and asceticism (the disciplining of the body), philosophical and theological ideas will, in our world, tend to float free and remain largely inconsequential beyond the tempest-in-teapot-blog-combox skirmishes. I hope to show why this is the case in the coming weeks.

Socrates vs. Nietzsche

August 31, 2015

[Note: The following is the first entry in my new category of “jottings.” These are totally random observations based in my reading for larger projects. They will probably be, for the most part, either technical or expansively allusive in character and unapologetically so. Regular readers might choose to skip these, but they are intended to provide background for what I hope will be more popular writing in the main posts of this blog.]

Plato and Aristotle, the central figures in “The School of Athens.”

Studies in classical philosophy often contrast Plato with Aristotle. Raphael’s School of Athens shows Plato pointing up toward transcendent reality, the realm of the forms, more real than what senses can perceive. Aristotle, while not exactly pointing down, does appear to be tethering the conversation to what “common sense” can perceive of the only world that we can be confident of sharing with other rational beings. Students of these two philosophers often take sides, preferring one to the other, as though Plato’s greatest student, Aristotle, either refuted or strongly corrected his teacher, or, on the contrary, sadly eliminated all transcendent reference from the joy of philosophizing.

The truth is more complex. What I would like to note is that champions of Aristotle, who use the great man’s teachings against Plato and Socrates, surely do so unjustly. Let me focus on the figure of Socrates, as he is known to us from Plato’s writings about him. When Socrates came on the scene in Athens, he posed himself as an opponent of “common sense.” Yes. But why? I think there were two related reasons. First of all, he opposed a complacent, unexamined use of what passed as common knowledge. This was highly problematic in the quickly changing political atmosphere of his time. Outdated and worn-out ideas lazily copped from Homer’s two masterpieces, The Iliad and The Odyssey did not fit the reality of a budding urban empire.

Socrates also recognized that such complacency in the world of ideas left the people of Athens open to manipulation by demagogues. Such manipulation was openly practiced by the Sophists, the loose school of rhetoricians who “made the worse appear the better reason.” Now, so as not to be too hard on the Sophists, let us note that among the changes in Athenian culture from the heroic age of Homer to the progressive world of Socrates’s day, was a growth in the use of impersonal law to settle disputes. The problems with the legal culture will be a later target of Plato’s, in one of his non-Socratic dialogues. In Socrates’s immediate context, he saw that this reliance upon customary law was not conducive to any attempt to examine truth itself. Many of Plato’s dialogues rehearse Socrates’s method: pick a fight with a Sophist and demonstrate that the Sophist can’t produce a coherent explanation of the actual meaning of the words he is using. In other words, demonstrate that the Sophist tendency is to use words as tools for the achievement of personal goals by using them to manipulate his hearers.

Now let me note here that the theme of manipulation is of a piece with emotivism. Alasdair MacIntyre says that emotivism entails that there be no distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative relationships. That is to say, in our world, sophistry has returned largely unopposed, though we are not often aware of it.

Back to my narrative: Plato recorded and inherited Socrates’s technique and attempted to further the pursuit of truth in his own way. His painstaking accounts of the drama of Socrates’s life and the drama of Athenian society did much to clear away the fog of fuzzy, self-serving, manipulative reasoning. Perhaps he faltered a bit when trying to pin the idea of truth to the transcendent realm of forms. But his work made possible Aristotle’s astounding success in generating a durable realism, or at least something like a technique for separating specious claims about the world from more verifiable claims.

Thus began the arc of Western philosophy, and it apparently continued until the advent of Friedrich Nietzsche. He set the tone for the dismantling of Western philosophy with his remarkable work The Birth of Tragedy. Historians criticize his handling of materials, but he was astute enough to vilify Socrates and locate a turning point in Socrates’s Athens. In Nietzsche’s understanding, Socrates’s thirst for genuine truth was either pie-in-the-sky naivete or perhaps a cynical manipulation that claimed for itself the mantle of truth–which at least the Sophists generally had the good taste to avoid. For Nietzsche, Socrates inaugurated a long desert in which Western culture imagined itself bound by truth, but in fact deluded by this claim into a hideous blindness.

I believe that Nietzsche was perceptive in this claim, though not in the way that he intended. His “Hermeneutic of Suspicion” and “unmasking” of the hidden motives behind appeals to “truth” accurately described, not Western philosophy as such, but rather the particular situation of late nineteenth-century European academe. In other words, Nietzsche was, quite against his intentions, calling attention to the fact that European philosophy had fallen away from its traditional vocation of furthering the durable realism that the founders–Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle–had initiated. And desiring to call a spade a spade, Nietzsche proposed that we go back to acknowledging that rhetorical manipulations are all that we have.

As I suggested, my belief is that Nietzsche perceived that claims to truth by his contemporaries in philosophy really were infected with the complacency that Socrates opposed. How did this happen? It was a slow process, but my own biases lean toward pinpointing the nominalist revolution of the fourteenth century as the beginning. I would also note that this has its roots in the thinking of William of Ockham, who is generally considered to be one of the originators of nominalism. This was at a time when the connection between the liturgical life and the university life was considerably weakened. I don’t exactly like to blame William, since he inherited a number of tricky problems that resulted from institutionalized in-fighting between Dominicans and Franciscans in the early fourteenth-century university. But it does seem here that the first break between words and durable meaning is introduced.

Leo XIII

It is worth noting that Pope Leo XIII seemed to have a similar intuition as Nietzsche, and perhaps a more accurate awareness of the reality of the breakdown in philosophy. In his encyclical Aeterni Patris, he insisted that seminary education return to Thomas Aquinas, two or more generations before Ockham. This set the stage for the amazing insights of the “New Theology” of the early twentieth century. Alas, just as we were reaping the fruits of this greater theological realism, seminary educators turned their back again on Thomas (who is regarded even by the non-theologically inclined, as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of the interpreters of Aristotle). I am not advocating freezing philosophy in one thinker or time period; ironically what Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas offer, if correctly understood, is not a complacent position of authoritative power, but a humble method for uprooting the false and lazy assumptions that steer us from the truth. And lazy thinking leaves us open yet again to manipulation by potentially unfriendly powers.

Who Is Running the Renewal?

August 28, 2015

I’ve been trying to figure out what it is about George Weigel’s recent post “Catacomb Time?” doesn’t sit right with me. I suspect that it is first of all due to an accumulation of fuzzy complaints with someone-or-other not quite specified. Who inhabit those “Catholic circles” who have “a passion for writing Build-It-Yourself Catacomb manuals”? I honestly have no idea who is meant by this. I suppose that he is referring to the Benedict Option, for which there is no shortage of critics, despite the fact that no one seems to know what it is exactly. The reference to “lukewarm, pick-and-choose” Catholics is always a dangerous one. Who of us doesn’t fall into the “pick-and-choose” category from time to time, even often?

Then there is this larger quote, expressing what seems to me a common enough sentiment, but one I just can’t get behind personally:

This same judgment—Catholicism by osmosis is dead—and this same prescription—the Church must reclaim its missionary nature—are at the root of every living sector of the Catholic Church in the United States: parish, diocese, seminary, religious order, lay renewal movement, new Catholic association.

George Steiner in my dream study. He proposes “cortesia” (courtesy) as a mode of mutuality as a partial antidote to a critical and wordy discourse that empties language of its theological import. In this, he comes remarkably close to Benedictine “hospitality” as a mode of encounter, and perhaps a way to reinterpret “mission” away from the excessive freight of unidirectional conquest toward a humble acknowledgement of the potential contributions of potential converts.

“Every living sector” of the Church in a country of almost 70 million Catholics? That’s a big claim. I think what troubles me most about this sort of language is the absence of any feint in the direction of the work of the Holy Spirit in animating the Church. Then there is the question of whether my own religious community qualifies as a “living sector” and whether we actually share that judgment and prescription. One reason I balk at that way of phrasing the “judgment” that “Catholicism by osmosis is dead,” is that it privileges what Mary Douglas refers to as “elaborated speech code” (the language of academia, personal commitment and conviction, related to what George Steiner calls out at the beginning of Real Presences) at the expense of “restricted speech code,” the more passive communicative modes of ritual and symbol. Much of what we learn in the Church is at least somewhat osmotic. Yes, we should pay attention at the liturgy, but often times it takes all kinds of exposure at various levels of awareness and engagement before connections are made. Perhaps I sense here, fairly or unfairly, a neglect of the fundamentally receptive nature of faith, prior to any genuine engagement in mission. St. Paul, the greatest missionary of all, spent well over a decade anonymously living the life of a Christian before the Holy Spirit set him apart as the Apostle of the Gentiles. During that time, what was he doing? Praying? Re-reading the Scriptures? I don’t know, but it was certainly a life of withdrawal, maybe not to the catacombs, but a withdrawal nonetheless.

And then let us not forget who is the patroness of the Church’s missions.

Behind the Church's missionary activity is St. Therese's little way of complete faith in all things.

St. Therese, patroness of the missions. Behind the Church’s missionary activity is St. Therese’s hidden little way of complete faith in all things.

I will leave it to reader to think about the connections between the contemplative life and missionary effectiveness.

Let me end with a little more explanation from Mary Douglas. In the first chapter of Natural Symbols, she relates asking her progressive clerical friends (in 1970) why they think it’s a good idea to move away from the Friday abstinence to more personally meaningful acts of charity–like working in a soup kitchen on Friday.

I am answered by a Teilhardist evolutionism which assumes that a rational, verbally explicit, personal commitment to God is self-evidently more evolved and better than its alleged contrary, formal, ritualistic conformity.

I will admit to nitpicking here a bit, but I think that it is worth watching our language very carefully on these points, lest we saw off the branch upon which we sit. The overall tone of the article supports an individualistic and activist mode of Church life that has the potential to undermine the communal, receptive, gratuitous, gracious, and humble life of faith and hope. Surely one of the points of the young Josef Ratzinger’s “Future Church” article is precisely that we are being called away from “edifices…built in prosperity,” as part of an invitation to leave behind triumphalism. Weigel comes uncomfortably close to a triumphalism-minus-edifices. It is striking that after the long quote from the future pope, a quote that ends with an emphasis on “faith in the triune God, in Jesus Christ, the son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world,” Weigel never again mentions faith, Jesus Christ, or even God. Again, I will admit that finding such lacunae in a blog post runs the risk of straining justice. But as a monk, I am inclined to be watchful on these counts.

More than anything, this serves as an introduction to Mary Douglas, whose work I have put off writing about for long enough…

UPDATE: Recall that the relationship between mission and contemplative life is the crux at which our community began. Also, that while it is hard not to agree that practicing one’s faith will require great resolve and strength in the coming years, maybe decades, this must be a practice rooted in repentance and joyful humility, grounded in the sacrifice of Calvary, celebrated daily in the liturgy. Finally, while Fr. Ratzinger did say that the future Church will make “bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members,” [emphasis added] this mention of individual members needs to be read in the context of the future pope’s voluminous writings on the liturgy and the Church. The initiative he is calling for surely must be greater fidelity to the reality of the ongoing Incarnation in the local church (including a high mystical “Ignatian” vision of the bishop as Christ and priests as the bishops’ vicars). Otherwise, Weigel might be heard to be inviting individuals to greater creativity, initiative in a maverick kind of sense, rather than in a sense of responsive answerability toward the gospel. And the first step may well be admitting that I’m part of the problem with the contemporary Church.

You might be an emotivist if…

August 24, 2015

…you use intention to trump action.

What do I mean by that? When I began as Prior, I noticed that when some brothers failed to do something I had asked, they would reply with a chuckle or confused look at say something like, “Oh, I didn’t mean to do that…” or “I had intended to do that, but then I thought…” The expectation was that if a monk’s heart is in the right place, then if he sins or fails in his duties, I should be quick to forgive. What was often missing was a genuine apology. I don’t write this to shame my brothers; I think that this is the default mode of many people today. Certainly it’s a temptation for me.

If we believe the great sociologist Mary Douglas, this appeal to an inner state (good intention) and lackadaisical approach to formal, external actions (duties to one’s superiors), is a product of a certain kind of social organization. If my place in society is very clear and determined, when I am connected by ties of blood and marriage, hierarchical chains of binding authority, and so on, then external ritual (including obligatory actions mandated by authority, apologies, formal recognition of persons, etc) becomes more important. If I am free to change jobs, move around, lose touch with cousins, and keep my options open, then internal states become more important.

It is common today for people to claim that a focus on internal states is a more advanced form of religion, but Mary Douglas demonstrates that the Congolese pygmies had a similar approach to religious matters, when ethnographers studied them in the early 20th century. This has more to do with the mobility of a hunting and harvesting group than with any kind of cultural advancement or primitivism.

It is common today for people to claim that the more advanced the form of religion, the more its adherents focus on internal (“emotional”) states. Mary Douglas demonstrated that the Congolese pygmies had a peculiarly “modern” approach to religious matters, when ethnographers studied them in the early 20th century. They used no discernible ritual or magic and were more interested in a feeling of personal well-bring or joy. This preference has more to do with the mobility of a hunting and harvesting group than with any kind of cultural advancement or primitivism.

When brothers enter our monastery, they come from a very loose culture in terms of stability, mutual obligations, and so on. An entry into a monastery from this perspective might seem to be a personal choice, a way to maximize internal joy and freedom. And the monastic life can, at times, serve these purposes if we choose to pursue them. Most monks in a contemplative community have very little contact with the outside world, and what contact they do have tends to be with devout, supportive persons who are often inclined to praise our way of life. Which of course feels good if we’re looking for that kind of thing. When a superior corrects or criticizes, it’s tempting to think, “Who is this guy? Everybody thinks I’m pretty swell. I don’t know why he’s picking on me for failing–in his eyes–in jobs that aren’t that important anyway.” And the rest.

Mary Douglas notes a major problem with the attempt to import this loose structure into the monastery. Loose communities lose the ability to understand the heavy ritual component that makes sense of the monastic life and the Christian life in general. “The perception of symbols in general, as well as their interpretation, is socially determined. [Natural Symbols (1996), p. 9]” She goes on to show that loosely articulated social structures make it impossible to understand the full range of meanings of symbols that were at home in a more clearly articulated structure. Monastic life has always been highly regimented, based in clear lines of authority and obligation, and therefore has generated a wealth of symbols. Men entering today, however, usually can’t read them correctly right away, and part of our conversion of life involves learning how to do this. And this in turn requires us to discover our new identity through the roles that are given to us in the life: novice, junior, priest, cantor, prior, cook.

In an icon, every detail fits into an elaborate cosmology. Touch one point of Catholic or Orthodox doctrine, and you set the whole vibrating. Von Balthasar had something like this in mind when he described truth as "symphonic."

In an icon, every detail is symbolic and fits into an elaborate cosmology. Touch one point of Catholic or Orthodox doctrine, and you set the whole vibrating. Von Balthasar had something like this in mind when he described truth as “symphonic.”

Now the Catholic liturgy is also the product of a highly articulated social body, the Church. The world being what it is today, most of us struggle to make sense of dense symbols like the Eucharist, the priesthood, a church building, an icon, and papal vestments. If Prof. Douglas is correct (and there is good reason to suppose that her general theses in Natural Symbols are correct), then the cure for our liturgical mystification is something like commitment. We must make our own the roles suggested (or even given) to us by the Church and by the locale we happen to inhabit. This means getting involved in a parish, treating one’s pastor like a pastor, as someone who has authority over one’s spiritual life. It might mean recommitting to certain formal structures in one’s family (and explicitly in a climate of faith): common meals with assigned seating, traditional celebrations of holidays. It might mean taking more seriously days of abstinence and fast, holy days of obligation, and so on,–anything that requires us to order our internal experience by the external ritualized and moral demands of Church discipline, and, importantly, not letting ourselves off the hook by appeal to good intentions.

Which one did his father’s will? Talk and intentions are easy to come by; deeds can be hard and may require a change of heart.

The Experience of Emotivism, Virtue, and Rationality

August 22, 2015

What d’ya say? Let’s move the discussion about emotivism out of the abstract and into the concrete. What is it like being an emotivist? How do I know when I’m acting like one?

I decided to take up this topic once again because of three separate instances in the past week or so. The first one directly involves me. I was preparing to go to the sacrament of confession. During my examination of conscience, I came upon an old, all-too-familiar sin. I’m tired of battling against it, occasionally discouraged by my inability to make much apparent progress. But what happened next was interesting. I noticed that there was a very subtle stirring inside that suggested to me that what I needed to do was feel worse about this sin. And feeling really, really sorry, really upset with myself…well, I suppose the idea is that my behavior will magically change if I change my feelings.

Well, it doesn’t actually work for me. Does it work for you?

One of the looks of ritualized contrition.

Once you start thinking about this meme, you find it all over. We try to convince each other of our sincerity (especially when we let each other down) by furrowing our brow, biting our lip, getting bleary-eyed. The template for this in my world will always be President Clinton. This is not a criticism of the ex-President. When he felt our pain and acknowledged “not feeling contrite enough,” he was doing what a leader should do–in an emotivist world. Media figures and fellow politicians wanted to make sure that he felt bad, and he needed to make sure that we knew that he felt bad. And it’s become something of a public ritual ever since. When a celebrity (Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods, Paula Deen) messes up, he or she is expected to go on camera and exhibit signs of sorrow.

What other route might there be? Keep in mind that contrition is a condition of absolution in the sacrament of penance. So there is nothing wrong with the feeling itself. It can be a sign of a healthy conscience. The difficulty is that these feelings may or may not actually have an effect on future behavior. If you’ve ever dealt with (or are an) an alcoholic, you know this. Caught lying, the addict may well feel completely miserable and sorry. But the lure of alcohol and drugs typically overrides the feelings eventually. So generating correct feelings is insufficient for changing behavior.

What I recommend instead is truth and preparation. By truth, I mean what twelve-step programs mean by steps four and five: making a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves and stating the exact nature of our wrongs. By preparation, I mean that we learn what situations trigger our disobedience, and make a decision to act contrary to our inclinations when temptation presents itself.

Let me give another concrete example of emotivism.

A common complaint about liturgy is that those attending “don’t get anything out of it.” This sort of rhetoric tempts pastors to make the liturgy more interesting, to see it as a service that they provide to consumers whose desires need to be accounted for. And what are the consumers hoping “to get out of” the liturgy? I can’t say for certain in every instance, but I can speak from my own youthful experience. I thought that church ought to make me feel better about myself, others and the world, that it should inspire me to be a better person. I should walk away from the liturgy with different feelings. This is how many of us gauge the effectiveness of many, if not most, public and private encounters. Success means feeling good, and feeling crummy means that we are doing something wrong.

But does it? This is a highly questionable idea.

Marsalis with another consummate pro, Renee Fleming. There are many hours of dull, hard work behind their effortless musicality.

When I was studying to be a professional musician, I typically practiced three or four hours at the piano every day by myself. I did not enjoy this for the most part. Wynton Marsalis likes to refer to practice as The Monster. Every day, musicians have to get out of bed and confront the monster and slay it. The payoff comes when, after years of slaying monsters, one plays the trumpet like Wynton Marsalis or sings like Renee Fleming. In the meantime, though, one must act contrary to one’s feelings, rather than taking feelings as any kind of objective measure of one’s moral state.

Similarly, in a marriage, when a spouse becomes debilitatingly ill or a child develops a major behavioral issue, dealing with this situation will often require mastering one’s immediate feelings of disgust at sickness, resentment at having to set aside personal goals, and fear that things may spiral out of control. These feelings must be opposed because to give in to them would be to act wrongly, to fail in one’s duties and responsibilities to others. Nursing an ailing loved one can be exhausting, no fun at all. But it is beautiful. When we witness this kind of sacrifice, we recognize it as true and good as well. But to accomplish this sacrifice, we must be prepared to act contrary to our feelings, rather than having our feelings somehow demand of others some kind of compliance (as is the case when we want to “get something out of the liturgy”).

These kinds of routine decisions to act in accord with the truth, with the demands of beauty and goodness, change us into different persons. Our identities become completely wrapped up in the repeated good action, and we become virtuoso trumpeters or faithful spouses, beloved brothers. We have become virtuous, having the ability (Latin: virtus) to choose the truly good, the truly beautiful even when others can’t see it. Here’s the hitch. As we are changing, we are likely at times, perhaps often, to feel “inauthentic.” That is to say, we will miss our old selves. What it’s actually like to be a virtuoso or a faithful spouse is at first an unfamiliar experience and requires us to act in ways that feel insincere.

In an emotivist world, the great sins are inauthenticity and insincerity, the great virtues sincerity and authenticity. Thus, it is difficult for an emotivist to make any headway in any kind of human excellence. Let me end with a quote from Lionel Trilling on what this might mean [emphasis added]:

“At the behest of the criterion of authenticity, much that was once thought to make up the very fabric of culture has come to seem of little account, mere fantasy or ritual, or downright falsification. Conversely, much that culture traditionally condemned and sought to exclude is accorded a considerable moral authority by reason of the authenticity claimed for it, for example, disorder, violence, unreason.”