Monastery of the Holy Cross

Articles under Jottings

Who “Owns” the (English) Augustine?

Fresh takes on towering historical icons like Saint Paul and Saint Augustine are rarer than book publishers would like to claim. This is in part because of the stubborn presence of actual words that any interpreter must confront. Many moons ago, I discovered all of this to my dismay as I labored over a thesis on the Letter to the Romans. I felt decidedly less clever at the end of it all than at the outset. The text of Paul’s epistle had this funny way of funneling my fresh insights back into the common stew of Pauline studies. In other writers, I have sometimes discovered apparently novel interpretations, only to find later on the very same interpretation lodged in a patristic tome of old.

Eventually, one finds this general sense of agreement a comfort, at least if one believes in and is searching for Truth. It would disconcerting, to say the least, to find that the Church has been misreading Saint Paul for nearly twenty centuries, even if one were himself or herself the Vessel of Correction. Most new ideas about the Bible or the Church Fathers have in common a willingness to ignore counter-evidence from those same stubborn texts that rerouted my barque back into harbor.

So it was with no small delight that I read Sarah Ruden’s Paul Among the People some years ago. Amidst teaching assignments at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Cape Town, Ruden has been a prolific author and translator for nearly a decade. What makes her work on Saint Paul so compelling is her awareness of classical culture and her sympathy for the earthy realities of life in antiquity. She is able to depict Paul as a great champion of love and freedom by stripping away the anachronisms accumulated over five centuries of interdenominational debate. She writes with a light touch, an assurance that avoids the preachy or polemic tone.

The reader can imagine how excited I was to see that, after tackling Virgil’s Aeneid and Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, she turned her Latin skills to a Christian classic, Saint Augustine’s Confessions. I’ve begun making my way through it, and so far Ruden’s quirky but compelling take has won me over. I’ve read chunks of Confessions in the original Latin, and I’ve read four or five different translations. Most translations tend to err in the direction of pious seriousness. In my opinion, this is a disservice to Augustine, whose poignant observations on boyhood games and love of puns have slowly charmed me away from the early impression I had of him as a dour, mitered scold. Being not much more of a Latinist than I am an expert in Saint Paul’s Greek, I had been keeping my arriviste opinion to myself. Then I was emboldened by the endorsement of the “unsurpassed biographer of Augustine,” Peter Brown.

Brown’s NYRB review of Ruden’s translation focuses not so much on the changed tone of Augustine himself, but on the effect that this change of tone has on the depiction of God. Since the 1981 publication of previously unknown letters of Augustine by Austrian scholar Johannes Divjak, Brown has made a point of softening the adamantine image of the bishop of Hippo. If you read Brown’s biography (you should!), be sure to read the revised edition that contains Brown’s reappraisal. Browns’ influence is such that scholarly opinion has been following his lead. I want to emphasize here that the interpretation of Augustine as a proto-Puritan with Jansenist scruples is, like the Saint Paul of Luther’s imagination, a modern production. Anyone familiar with Saint Augustine’s “afterlife” in the Western Middle Ages will quickly become aware of the love that both monks and schoolmen shared for Augustine’s prodigious output, and for the man himself. As was the case with Saint Paul, Ruden’s new translation of Confessions is a vindication of the bulk of Catholic testimony regarding Saint Augustine, a genuinely fresh take that succeeds in restoring, in a modern idiom, an older appreciation for his humanity as well as his genius.

Calvin College’s James K. A. Smith will have none of it. I found it a bit disheartening when an intellectual of his status and caliber gave up on Ruden literally after one line. He claims to have been chastised by Brown’s review into questioning himself. This probing self-doubt seems to have lasted about two minutes before he’s back trying to burnish the statuesque, seriously pious Augustine. His big beef? Ruden’s decision to translate dominus as “Master” rather than as the (supposedly) traditional “Lord.” Smith seems to concede that “master” is a legitimate option–for a classicist. But the rest of us, he believes, want not accuracy but a “devotional classic.” It is telling that Smith begins his review openly admitting that when it comes to translations his preferences are nostalgiac and emotional and not rational. And, frankly, it is irrational to insist that Augustine say what Smith thinks he ought to say, based on his queasiness with the (modern, American, contextual) connotations of the word “master.”

Smith does ask two important questions: “which afterlife of words is most germane to the project that Augustine himself is engaged in?  Which history of connotation overlaps with Augustine’s endeavor?” This gets at the heart of my difference from Smith on a number of related issues. Different confessional traditions will answer these questions differently. I would like to think that Benedictines, whose Rule of Life is deeply influenced by Saint Augustine’s own experience as a monk, who read large portions of Augustine’s work–ranging across the different genres of treatise, Biblical commentary, homiletic, and personal letters–at the daily liturgy, and whose institutional history includes at least two centuries of direct engagement with international politics, have as good a claim as anyone to bearing the standard of Augustine’s project/endeavor. From my (Catholic, monastic) perspective, Jean Calvin’s interpretations of Saint Augustine are just those sorts of “new” interpretations that can only exist by suppressing counter-evidence and dissenting voices.

And, in fact, English-speaking Catholics readily use the word “Master” to address God, for example, in the misattributed “Prayer of Saint Francis.” “O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console…” English-speaking Orthodox will be familiar with this translation of the prayer of Saint Ephraim, “O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth…”

But more to the point, we are arguing about a word choice in a modern language. Before the Reformation, and for plenty of Catholics since, God is Dominus. It is understood, at some level, that whether we use Lord or Master, what we mean is Dominus or Kyrios (perhaps even Adonai). Whatever connotations have attached themselves to Lord or Master in the past five hundred years, a span in which the English language has largely developed apart from direct influence by Rome or Constantinople, they may well be part of the shared distortion that has afflicted the memories of Saint Paul and Saint Augustine. More power to Sarah Ruden for inviting us to step back from our allegiances and question ourselves.

Thoughts Determine Our Lives

St. Ignatius of Loyola died on this date 561 years ago. He did not set out at first to be a saint, but a soldier. Then Providence intervened. A cannonball shattered his leg, and as he was recovering from this terrible compound fracture, he underwent this remarkable experience:

He asked for some of these books [of knight-errantry] to pass the time. But no book of that sort could be found in the house; instead they gave him a life of Christ and a collection of the lives of the saints written in Spanish….When Ignatius reflected on worldly thoughts, he felt intense pleasure; but when he gave them up out of weariness, he felt dry and depressed. Yet when he thought of living the rigorous sort of life he knew the saints had lived, he not only experienced pleasure when he actually thought about it, but even after he dismissed these thoughts, he still experienced great joy. Yet he did not pay attention to this, nor did he appreciate it until one day, in a moment of insight, he began to marvel at the difference. Then he he understood his experience: thoughts of one kind left him sad, the others full of joy.

Ignatius’s circumstances didn’t change. His joy and sadness did not depend on the healing of his leg, or on his future prospects as a soldier and a dandy. In other words, our contentment in life, or lack thereof, is not, primarily, a function of the external circumstances of our lives. What determines the emotional shape of our lives (and therefore, that aspect of our lives that really matters!) is our thinking.

This profound insight of Saint Ignatius comports with ancient monastic wisdom, both in Christian and Buddhist forms. The difference between Christianity and Buddhism, in this regard at least, is that traditional Christianity does not aim at avoidance of suffering by the elimination of the ego. Rather, the Gospel allows the newly, intentionally reborn self [in the image of Christ] to embrace joyfully the suffering that comes from standing out to the full, which is to say, the suffering that comes with sainthood. Our suffering is embraced “for the sake of the joy that was set before” us [Hebrews 12: 2]. We do this by changing the way we think, by the “renewal of our minds [Romans 12: 2].” How is this done? By, among other things, faith in God’s promises.

This future-oriented, eschatological thinking finds yet another interesting corroboration in the insights of Jewish psychotherapists Viktor Frankl and Rabbi Edwin Friedman. Both men asked this question: “Why is it that, under experiences of extreme stress, some persons not only continue to function but even thrive?” It’s good to note that Frankl himself was a Holocaust survivor. Both men experienced quasi-Ignatian moments of insight. Frankl’s very language echoes the experience of Ignatius [my emphases in bold]:

Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the [prisoner] marching next to me whispered suddenly: “If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don’t know what is happening to us.”

That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which Man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of Man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when Man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way – an honorable way – in such a position Man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”

Frankl and Friedman both challenge us to change our thoughts, to substitute thoughts of love, hope, purpose, and meaning for thoughts of hatred, anxiety, frustration, and resentment. I will be returning to Friedman, whose overall insights are especially counter-intuitive in our present world (which, from the perspective I’m adopting here makes them actually more persuasive). For today’s feast of Saint Ignatius, let me offer one more example of a change of thinking, this time a literary one. As Sam Gamgee and Frodo Baggins trudge their way through the soul-killing terror of Mordor, Sam experiences this moment of insight. It changes nothing of the external horror to which he and Frodo have been consigned. But it does something quieter, yet more radical. It changes Sam’s heart, and, in Tolkien’s story, this small, hidden change of heart changes the world.

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master’s, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo’s side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep.

Our thoughts determine our lives.

Silence: Scorsese and Endo

“The crosses were set in place….Our brother, Paul Miki, saw himself standing now in the noblest pulpit he had ever filled. To his ‘congregation’ he began by proclaiming himself a Japanese and a Jesuit. He was dying for the Gospel he preached. He gave thanks to God for this wonderful blessings, and he ended his ‘sermon’ with these words…’I tell you plainly: there is no way to be saved except the Christian way. My religion teaches me to pardon my enemies and all who have offended me. I do gladly pardon the Emperor and all who have sought my death. I beg them to seek baptism and be Christians themselves.’

“Then, according to Japanese custom, the four executioners began to unsheathe their spears….[They] killed them one by one. One thrust of the spear, then a second blow. It was over in a very short time.”

–from the Acta Sanctorum, read at the Office of Vigils on the feast of St. Paul Miki and companions, February 6

It is of no small significance that the universal Church celebrates today the Japanese martyrs. We hear little of the brave European missionaries who brought the faith to Japan. Attention gradually focuses in on Saint Paul Miki, who begins his final apologia by proclaiming himself Japanese. For him, Christianity is not a betrayal of his culture, but its goal, its fulfillment. True, it comes with the trappings of faraway Rome, and yet what impresses me is that in the person of Paul Miki, it becomes Japanese. It is easily forgotten just how deep an impact the Catholic faith made upon Japan in their first encounter.

I’ve been asked to comment on Martin Scorsese’s most recent movie, Silence. I haven’t seen the movie, nor am I likely to soon (I wouldn’t mind seeing it at some point), but I am an enthusiast of the book. Two questions jump out as being pastorally weighty. Should Catholics see this movie/read this book? Are the movie and book anti-Catholic?

[SPOILER ALERT: plot developments will appear in what follows]

I separate these two questions, even though it would seem that they are intimately connected. As I attempt to answer them, my reason for considering them separately will hopefully be clear. Now, there are many excellent reviews of the movie and of the book, and the two I’ve found most helpful are those of Bishop Robert Barron and Amy Welborn. It’s also worth noting the effect of playing a Jesuit missionary had on actor Andrew Garfield. I encourage you to read them. In what follows, I will primarily focus on the questions that have been posed to me, with a few final words about the crucial issues of the novel.

In beginning to answer the first question, I should note that I hold the somewhat unpopular point of view that not all literature and not all art is for everyone. We all know this, in fact. This is why we withhold certain types of stories and images from children. Once we reach some arbitrary age, however, it is assumed that we can read or view more or less anything and derive profit from it. A more ancient wisdom respects that different persons are in different places, and not all of us are prepared to grapple with particularly vexing or troubling ideas. When I first read Endo’s Silence, I’m not sure that I was fully ready for it, even though I was thirty-three and a monk in solemn vows. I found the book quite disturbing because of the dilemma faced by the Portuguese missionaries, and the solution of external apostasy (perhaps at the command of Christ Himself?) was gravely disappointing to me. I wanted some clever escape from this version of the Kobayashi Maru test.

But the novel stayed with me. I felt that I was missing something in it, that my own personal maturity and faith needed developing before I could fruitfully engage with Endo. As I understand it, the movie is largely faithful to the book, and so to the first question, I would say that Catholics should feel no particular need to see the movie or read the book. If you do decide to see the film, it’s important to be aware that aspects of it may try your faith, and depending on where you’re at, you might change your mind and go to see something else. On the other hand, it’s also possible to remember that stalwarts like Bishop Barron have watched the film and/or read the book, and do not find it an insoluble challenge to the faith.

Which brings me to question two. Endo’s book is a great work of art, and as such, it “resists a univocal or one-sided interpretation,” in Bishop Barron’s words. Reading the book to determine whether it is pro- or anti-Catholic is a disservice to the book, and probably to the movie as well.

In fact, I do not believe that the book is anti-Catholic at all, and in the end, I doubt such a thing can be said of the film. While it is true that Endo’s own Catholic faith was strained at different times in his life, he did come to love the Church more and more as life went on. We should, as Bishop Barron warns us, be careful not to overlook the heroism of the Japanese martyrs in the novel and in the movie. It is easy to do. Why? I believe that a major difficulty in understanding the book is roughly equivalent to the major difficulty faced by the missionary Fr. Rodrigues: we read as Westerners expecting a European/American novel written for us, and what we are confronted with is a Japanese novel written for a Japanese audience. Fr. Rodrigues struggles with a somewhat patronizing attitude to the simple, vulnerable folk who embraced the faith with tremendous vigor. He struggles to establish any kind of genuine rapport with the natives (significantly, the one native with whom he regularly interacts is the conflicted Kichijiro). His training has not really equipped him for the culture shock he’s navigating. This makes it difficult for him to see Christ alive and glorified in the suffering of his fellow Christians. He is oddly modern in this way. It is a stretch for him to communicate (or even comprehend) the joy of martyrdom for Christ, in the way that Saint Paul Miki did with apparent ease. “When a Christian in the crowd cried out to him that he would soon be in heaven, his hands, [Saint Paul Miki’s] whole body strained upward with such joy…” Saint Paul has entered into and embodied an understanding of the Gospel that ennobles what it means to be Japanese. This nobility extends from the Emperor down to the poorest peasant. The Portuguese missionary in Silence never quite comes around to seeing their fellow Christians as genuine brothers and sisters, members of the Body of Christ. This doesn’t mean that there were not such missionaries. But it does mean that the trials faced by Fr. Rodrigues and his fallen-away fellow Jesuit Fr. Ferreira are met by men who discover themselves unprepared and out of their depth, a situation that neither anticipated or could have properly imagined.

One of Amy Welborn’s most important points is that Endo wanted to name his novel The Scent of a Sunny Place. This title would have placed more emphasis on Fr. Ferreira’s apostasy and its enfeebling consequences. He is a defeated man who puts a good face on his personal failure by…blaming the incurable strangeness of Japanese culture. Endo apparently feared that the title Silence would suggest something about the silence of God in general, which is how many do interpret it.

Here I must say something about the weakness of modern Catholic spirituality. And by modern, I mean roughly post 1350 A.D. Various factors moved the locus of communication between God and man further from the liturgy and world toward the private “cloister of the heart.” There were a few dissenting voices along the way, St. John of the Cross being the most insistent and consistent among them. God’s Logos, His Word, is that through which all things were made. Fr. Rodrigues would know this from the Final Gospel read at the end of every Mass in those days. This means that God speaks through all things, once we learn how to listen. By the early 17th century, the time of the novel’s story, prayer had become routinely interiorized to the point that well-educated priests could plausibly focus on the strained, inward search for the voice of God, especially when tossed into a profoundly alien and dangerously unfriendly culture.  Yet, this notion of prayer is profoundly in tension with the attitude of the Church Fathers, including the great monastic founders of the Early Church. St. Ignatius of Loyola, who addressed a genuine need when he urged his followers to find God in all things, also warned about the real possibilities of self-delusion when we depend entirely on inner locutions and extraordinary signs (in his biography, the Devil deludes him into thinking that he is speaking with and adoring God in a beautiful display of lights, and is nearly led to commit suicide as a result). It is realistic of Endo to posit that not all Jesuits had been fully formed by their founder’s insight when so many cultural drifts were going the opposite direction.

It is for these reasons that I am personally not inclined to believe in the authenticity of the alleged voice of Christ coming from the fumie (the iconic representation of Christ, used by the Japanese persecutors to confirm apostasy). That’s not to say it’s definitely demonic, either. The monastic fathers and mothers taught that these sorts of phenomena have three sources, God, the Devil, and us. The voice of the fumie is what Fr. Rodrigues wants to hear. Perhaps a demon gave him a shove, but he was wandering in that direction already. And in my opinion, one main reason for his failure is his inability to see Christ in the Japanese whom he was sent to serve.

Did he go to serve them? Or did he go to prove a point about Fr. Ferreira? This is another important question that Endo implies.

I might sound a bit hard on these two Jesuits. I don’t see them as weak as much as caught up in a situation for which they are unprepared. The missionaries of the New World enjoyed the consolations (and, to be sure, the complications) of an accompanying imperial power. The Japanese missionaries are utterly isolated, and it is not surprising that they struggle to read the signs of God’s Word in such unfamiliar surroundings.

There is one detail from the movie which has come to my attention. Bishop Barron points it out: that when Fr. Rodrigues’s body is shown in his coffin, he is clasping a crucifix. The implication is that he remained inwardly, privately a Christian. As the bishop goes on to point out, “that’s just the kind of Christianity the regnant culture likes: utterly privatized, hidden away, harmless.” I suggested above that in the crucible of a no-win situation, Fr. Rodrigues gave in to what he wanted to hear. One hopes that Martin Scorsese hasn’t done the same in his own reading of Silence.

 

On the Impermanence of Institutions and the Permanence of Virtue

I wrote several days ago something to the effect that “things are worse in the Church than people think.” This sentiment is worth qualifying and examining.

Mainly, I’d like to distinguish what I mean from what Rod Dreher means when he writes similar things. As I understand him, he sees Christian institutions under imminent attack from secularizing forces. He fears that Christians are oblivious to the seriousness of the threat. In my experience, Christians are plenty aware that demographics trends and political developments do not bode well for the Church in the immediate future. What he perhaps is responding to is the fact that few Christians make this their first concern. I don’t think that this is necessarily complacency in many cases. To explain this, let me say something about institutions.

Alasdair MacIntyre, whose famous St. Benedict quote is the inspiration for Dreher’s “Benedict Option,” is a man whose comprehensive thinking on modernity, morality, and faith deserves as much attention as one can afford. He spends almost an entire chapter on institutions in his seminal book After Virtue. Institutions are important, but should always be secondary to practices. An institution like a chess club brings together persons interested in playing chess and fostering its proper enjoyment. The club itself is not a substitute for the actual practice of playing chess. We all know that institutions tend to have their own internal logic that can often interfere with the practices they are meant to foster and protect. Therefore institutions can only function well and in proper subordination to practices if the members are virtuous. And, as MacIntyre makes clear elsewhere, virtues are learned in practices, not in the bylaws of institutions.

In my opinion, most Christians are aware that longstanding institutions are endangered. And I would agree that many of us Christians are not spending lots of time worrying about it. Ambivalence in this regard has two sources. The first is a recognition that our current institutional arrangements are often unable to surface the right kinds of virtuous leadership, and so tend to be self-defeating. The response of American bishops to the sexual abuse scandal demonstrated (and continues to demonstrate) that the institutional arrangement (meaning the current structure and operating modes) of the bishops’ conference is faulty. This is to be distinguished from the theological necessity of the episcopacy or even the virtue of individual members. Bishops could choose to organize themselves differently, but this would require hard thinking about the precise practices that the bishops’ conference is meant to foster and protect. The Council documents that encouraged the formation of these institutions are somewhat vague on this point and were, perhaps, slightly naive about how institutions can corrupt practices.

The second source of ambivalence stems from the typical Christian concentration on real practices. This is to say that the average Christian is more concerned about the practice of virtue at ground level than the institutional backing that supposedly is undergirding it. Another way to look at this is to say that Christians are already developing their own local, ad hoc institutions (which is what the Benedict Option is supposed to encourage). The collapse of larger structures that provide tax shelter for a religious soup kitchen may or may not impact the soup kitchen itself. But Christians will, in one way or another, find a way to feed the hungry. It’s what we do. And I see so much of this in my everyday life, even from the relative obscurity of the cloister, that it seems ungrateful to fret about difficulties to come, even while I do see the need to prepare for them. I’d rather point to the exercise of faith around me and encourage the Christians I know to continue the work of virtue than worry about something that hasn’t happened yet, and may or may not in fact happen. This work is being done by the laity, a visible fruit of the teaching of Vatican II.

Last of all, the mention of virtue brings me at last to explain what I mean when I say that things are worse than people might think. What I mean by this is that our Western culture, especially in America, has been somewhat less-than-fully-Christian for many generations now, and that reviving a genuine, thoroughgoing practice of Christian virtue is a lot more difficult than the average person might think. This is something I can vouch for firsthand. I am a cradle Catholic who has mostly practiced by faith all my life. And yet, I am continually amazed at how far I have to go to be genuinely holy. Now, putting it that way illustrates that this is not pessimism or frustrating, or even necessarily cause for great fear. If you read the lives of the saints, you will discover that most saints had this same experience (which does not make me a saint, by the way). Love of a transcendent God means, in the words of Fr. Michael Casey, being perpetually out of one’s depth. Where I think there is some naivete is in our American optimism that “most people are basically good.” This is a nice, generous sentiment. But it does not help us to gain a lot of energy in the spiritual battle, in which we must first notice that in every heart there are large swaths of unevangelized heathendom. These are, of course, open to hearing the Good News! Which makes them, in their way, “good,” if broken and in need of healing. This healing is what we must first be about, and only if this happens will institutional reform follow in any meaningful way. In the short term, this may mean the tottering and elimination of many institutions. Some may be sad to see them go. But the long-term needs of the Faith may require this purification.

On Christian Leadership: Jottings

My apologies for the prolonged silence. Lots of traveling and the like…and monastic listening.

Rod Dreher, one of the few bloggers I read from time to time, asks, “Can Christians Afford the Leadership We Have?” In the post, he seems to assume that leadership in Christianity is clear. The only leader he mentions by name is Pope Francis. When he writes about “Christians,” I think he means, “American Christians,” and to some lesser extent “Western European Christians (he makes reference to recent slaying of Fr. Jacques Hamel).” The underlying message is that things are much worse for such Christians than most seem to think, and it’s the job of leadership to sound the alarm and prepare Christians for the coming assault on religious freedom, etc.

A number of thoughts, still disconnected:

  1. How much is a problem of leadership and how much discipleship? Cardinal George could hardly have been clearer about the possible coming struggle. What has the Chicago Church done in response? And who is responsible for responding if someone does sound the alarm? I don’t have clear answers to these questions, but focusing on leadership, and on a very narrow sampling of it, certainly raises them.
  2. Another point the late Cardinal made: when the Holy Spirit wishes to renew the Church, he sends saints. This seems appropriate on the feast day of the one the greats, St. Dominic. Innocent III, one of the most powerful popes ever, didn’t think up St. Dominic nor St. Francis of Assisi when faced with heresies, the fraying of society due to economic changes, and so on. “Where are the saints?” Cardinal George asked me once. I think that they are around, but we are still, in my opinion, at too early a stage of change to know what precisely is called for. All we can do is strive for holiness and be prepared. That preparation may include preparing to give our lives for the faith.
  3. I must confess that it is difficult for me to sympathize with the widespread assumption that we don’t live in an age of martyrs, at least in “civilized” places like the United States. The world is still the world, and will always be a source of hostility to the faith. Preachers may not have stressed this enough in recent decades, that is true. And, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, where we used to celebrate more frequently the very unworldly sorts of saints like martyrs and monks, we’ve more recently populated the liturgical calendar with figures who didn’t have to give their lives for the faith, at least in the obvious way involved in red and white martyrdom. But any familiarity with the early church, Nero, Diocletian, and..ahem..the Cross, really offers us no excuse for imagining that Christian faith will never, ever make hard demands of us. I get why people avoid that, but again, is this a failure in leadership (who wants to hear this?) or a more general failure of imagination?
  4. Another failure of imagination takes the general peace and prosperity that many of us have enjoyed in our country for many decades to be normative for life in general. Having worked in inner cities, and having siblings and close friends who have done social work and ER duty in big cities, I can say that we live in an extraordinarily violent country, and this isn’t about guns. It goes much deeper, and the use of guns is just a symptom. Curbing access to guns will not change the spiritual poverty of our land, which cuts across all groups [it is not politically expedient to care too much about inner cities, since the residents of the areas don’t fund campaigns, for example, so it’s a calculated sacrifice not to look at the ways in which the whole culture contributes to this violence]. The United States military/industrial complex is a force for widespread destruction and bloodshed in numerous places. And, of course, we kill a million babies in the womb each year. So the idea that anybody is safe is, in my opinion, pretty thin.
  5. A long string of excellent popes has been a mixed blessing for Catholics. On the one hand, who can object to the remarkable leadership we’ve enjoyed at that level for a century or more? On the other hand, as Abbot Philip Lawrence once said to me, we can get lazy in our faith and practice if we imagine that we can depend on there being good popes. The current Catholic habit of reading everything the Holy Father writes and says, and interpreting this to maximal effect is a dangerous one, even if you think the pope is completely orthodox. He is the bishop of Rome, the guarantor of Church unity, and has many other important functions. But he is not, and can never be, pastor to every Catholic on the planet.
  6. And what we need are pastors, and masters of the spiritual craft. As I’ve hinted, the problems in our culture are very deep and hidden. In my experience in the monastery, especially for the past twelve years as superior, I’ve come to the conclusion that things are, indeed, a lot worse than people might imagine, but this is not so much because of scheming by human beings who appear to be enemies of the faith. Rather, the practice of genuine virtue and theology has been replaced by an extremely subtle ersatz form of the same. A widespread recovery will take time. But it is certainly possible. God has allowed this for a purpose, and so we might as well get to work repenting and reforming our lives. And any of us can do this; it doesn’t require a leader giving us marching orders, unless we understand that this leader is, of course, Jesus Christ.

This last point should not be heard as making the best of a bad situation or putting on a brave face by another beleaguered hierarch. If God can find a way to get me into a monastery and help me to see the parameters of the challenge that we are facing, there is surely hope for everyone. If you knew me twenty-five years ago, you’d know what I mean. Pray that I finish the memoir I’ve started. It will explain. In any case, God is so much more powerful than we are, and loves us so much more than we love ourselves or others, that we should have all the confidence that we need to place our lives in His hands and go forward, even in this means suffering. Especially, and gloriously so, if this should mean suffering. And it will in one form or another if we care about our souls and the souls of others.

Taciturnity and Silence

The doctrinal heart of the Rule of Saint Benedict is found in chapters 4-7: The tools of good works, obedience, taciturnity (often significantly mistranslated as “silence”), and humility.

Can anyone doubt the average modern Westerner is tempted to view the combination of obedience, silence and humility as a way of robbing the individual of his maturity (exercised by choice and responsibility), of his voice, and of his selfhood?

Saint Benedict cannot possibly mean this, of course. Yet well-meaning Christians can fall into this trap of misinterpretation. I’ve already pointed out our tendency to render “restraint of speech” as “silence.” Saint Benedict actually urges responsible speech, especially where it is most typically going to be denied in an unhealthy community. Thus the younger members are urged to speak up and be heard at community meetings of the greatest importance, and monks who find tasks beyond their abilities are directed to give reasons to the abbot rather than toil miserably without recourse.

This loss of voice is what concerns me especially. I hear so often, when persons are hurting and in need of prayer, expressions like “I know I shouldn’t pray for this, but…” Even in seminary, when I took a course on Wisdom literature, the prof (himself a monk at the time, though he has since left the life) concluded his lectures on Job by claiming that God’s revelation in chapters 38-42 meant that God has more important things to do than to bother about every little human being’s problems. This is a problematic interpretation, by the way, just on exegetical grounds. But it harmonizes with what I discern as a dangerous tendency in the life of faith, to think that being a good Christian means being bullied into silence and conformity by a God who is too busy for us.

God is not too busy for us. God wants to hear from us, especially whatever is hurting us. “Then they cried to the Lord in their need.”

The disciplines of obedience, restraint of speech, and humility are necessary–not because God is threatened by us but because we are forgetful of God. God tends to speak in a still, small voice (which is to say, the opposite of the domineering voice that many lectors take on when reading God’s pronouncements at Mass), easily crowded out by noisiness and idle talkativeness. Talkativeness further cheapens words, and God wishes to give us His Word. Let’s not cheapen that exchange! God gives us an astounding palate of freedom, in order that we might freely offer ourselves as a gift in return. Obedience is not about us being so unreliable and depraved that we need to be treated as slaves. Rather, our desires tend to blind us toward the needs of others, and obedience habituates us to an openness to others, an openness that is, one hopes, less patronizing than what we otherwise might produce by do-gooder-ness [see Deus Caritas Est 34*]. And finally humility is a way to open myself to the grandeur of the cosmos (here is a closer approximation of the message of Job 38-42), of which I form a unique and unrepeatable part…as does everyone else.

Faith does not mean allowing my voice to be co-opted by a dominant power structure. Nor is it about a false propheticism that is license to speak self-righteously about everyone else’s problems. I may require taciturnity to restore my true voice, just as physical therapy necessarily includes rest and inactivity for a damaged limb. But the goal is not silence but true speech, accurate speech, healed of both breezy ignorance and of grating pretension.

* “Practical activity will always be insufficient, unless it visibly expresses a love for man, a love nourished by an encounter with Christ. My deep personal sharing in the needs and sufferings of others becomes a sharing of my very self with them: if my gift is not to prove a source of humiliation, I must give to others not only something that is my own, but my very self; I must be personally present in my gift.” (emphasis added)

Pitch

At what point did hominids begin to recognize musical pitch? Rhythm seems much more obvious, since so many of our bodily functions are rhythmic. We breath, we walk, we chew…Most noises in nature are chaotic, when judged by musical pitch. Even birdsong, while beautiful, is not precisely pitched, nor does it often make use of one pitch held for any identifiable length of time. What was the experience of the first person who heard that a sound could be one note? And who discovered the possibility of adding one pitch to another, that two pitches, with a long enough duration for each, could be heard in relation to one another? I would like to imagine this discovery as a revolution in awareness. A pitch emerges as order out of chaos, hints at fundamentals. This primal recognition is so far from us for whom music is a cheap commodity. It is not so easy for us to engage profitably with ideas like the Music of the Spheres or the myth of Orpheus.

Pythagoras achieved an insight when he heard the relations of pitches in the blacksmith’s shop. For the Pythagoreans and for Plato after him, harmony was represented by an enacted by musical pitch. Today, we have discovered that all of the cosmos can be understood as waves in vibration. But we cannot perceive this fundamental order without an accompanying silence.

[The second movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto is often understood as a duel between Orpheus=the piano and the Underworld=the orchestra. Listen to how the piano tames the orchestra and brings the chaotic rhythms and angular pitches into harmony:]

 

The Hermeneutic of Love

I would like to propose an extension to Pope Emeritus Benedict’s “Hermeneutic of Continuity:” a Hermeneutic of Love.

Here’s my working definition: I will not pretend to understand any text I read until I can be sure that I am striving to love the author and treat the author as a real person, potentially my brother, my eternal friend.

The Hermeneutic of Suspicion was needed, to learn to interpret texts as human things (as distinguished from the Word), to pull the veil back from a Hermeneutic of Credulity. To interpret texts based merely on some posited authority is to engage in power.

The problem with Nietzsche’s insights, and those of Marx, Freud and the rest, is that the interpretation is still based in power. And the power is shifting: away from the Church, away from Western culture, at the “sagging end and chapter’s close [David Jones].” But to some extent, we Churchmen are simply getting what we dished out first.

It will perhaps take a very long time for Western culture to identify all of the evasive half-truths that the habit of empire has planted in us. Love will speed this up.

Today, Progressives take great care not to act imperiously toward other cultures, except toward our own, and especially our own in the past. So Progressivism escapes one type of imperialism but engages instead in a temporal imperialism, empowering its adherents to consider everything that happened yesterday as done by enemies worthy of spite or even silencing.

You can attend Catholic Masses that make use of five different languages from four continents.

But Ecclesiastical Latin is frequently verboten. Isn’t this just a type of exclusion, of silencing those who cannot defend themselves? Isn’t the rejection of the past, of continuity, simply an exercise of brute power over the utterly powerless?

What if the use of Ecclesiastical Latin could be an act of love, akin to the courtesy we show the speakers of Polish, Tagalog and Vietnamese?

Love your enemies. This makes you like God.

Christmas and Peace

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]

Socrates vs. Nietzsche

[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."

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

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.