Monastery of the Holy Cross

Articles under Jottings

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.