Monastery of the Holy Cross

Articles tagged with conversion

No One Was Greater Than John the Baptist

Think about all of the things you know, not by experience, but by testimony. Virtually everything we know about history, for example, we know because others have written down descriptions of past events. I had an art teacher who liked to say that if we learned everything from experience, most of us would die from poison mushrooms. How do we know that some mushrooms are poisonous? Because someone told us, and we trusted them.

Here’s a more troubling example: what we know about current events is from the reports of anchormen and journalists. This raises an important point. The knowledge that we have from testimony is only as good as the trustworthiness of the source. When assessing someone’s testimony, we check carefully to see whether that person is reliable. In other words, the character of the person testifying is important.

John the Baptist is one of the most important persons in the New Testament precisely because he bears testimony to Christ as the Messiah. And what we discover, when we look more closely at John’s career, is that he was widely known to be trustworthy. His character was unassailable. He spent a lifetime meditating on the Scriptures and living a manifestly holy life. People of all kinds were fascinated by him. Roman soldiers went out to hear him speak and ask his advice. Herod’s career was jeopardized by John’s public criticism. The historian Josephus tells us that John’s arrest happened because Herod feared that John’s popularity could lead to an uprising.

John insisted on personal integrity and drew to himself bands of disciples. And he did this not for personal gain, but for the sake of God’s kingdom—this detachment was part of his integrity. This meant that when the Lamb of God appeared, John was ready to point to Him and to send his own disciples to follow Jesus. These disciples included Saint Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter.

John thus prepared a people ready to receive Christ, and He testifies to Christ so that others can see and follow. In this, John provides an important example for us.

In his years in the wilderness, meditating on God’s prophecies, John learns, under the teaching of the Holy Spirit, how to live an upright life in the truth, and how to recognize the signs of Christ’s coming and His presence.

In our world, many people have forgotten about Jesus Christ and His message of redemption, forgiveness, and the promise of eternal life. When we lament this reality, often our first response is to think about organizing some kind of movement or program, or joining such a movement. But the start of any renewal, as we see in monastic history, time and again, is first to check our own reliability as witnesses. Christ hasn’t gone anywhere—but do we see Him in His daily coming? Do we see Him in our neighbor, in the guest, in the poor, in the superior of the monastery? If we don’t, perhaps we can ask John to point to Him. What John tells us is that we can prepare ourselves for Christ’s daily advent by withdrawing into the desert of our hearts and there meditating on God’s prophecies, purifying our own hearts and clearing away distractions.

When it does come time to point others to Christ, how strong will I be as a witness? Am I truthful, disinterested? In a word, am I a reliable witness, a credible source of information? Or do I risk making the gospel less credible by my sins or imprudence? Perhaps John is exactly the saint we need today to prepare again a way of the Lord. Maybe we can leave behind the unreliable information we get from the media and go out to the wilderness where John will teach us again to see Christ passing by. We can learn to say with John, “Christ must increase, and I must decrease.”

One last important example of John’s witness is that John tells us that he rejoices when he sees Christ as the friend of the bridegroom rejoices to see the groom receive his bride. This narrow path of self-denial and witness to Christ will eventually be a path of joy. It will make us fearless witnesses after the pattern of John the forerunner and herald of salvation. Blessed are we to celebrate the life of this great man today!

The “Crisis” of Candlemas

The month of February, despite its brevity, is full of critical liturgical celebrations. I use the word “critical” in a precise sense: “of, relating to, or being a turning point…” according to Webster’s. These turning points were somewhat more transparent in the old calendar, before the invention of “Ordinary Time.”

Giotto’s rendering of the Presentation

I invite you to consider the feast of the Presentation (or, as it is often traditionally called, “Candlemas”), which we just celebrated this past Tuesday. This celebration falls forty days after Christmas and is rich in symbolic associations. It is the Incarnate Word’s first visit to the temple—his temple. In the hymn at Lauds on February 2, we sang,

“Parentes Christum deferent,
in templo templum offerunt.”

”His parents carry the Christ;
in the temple, they offer the [true] Temple.

Aside from the obvious paradox in this poetic line, there is a quiet allusion to Christ’s Passion. Christ is brought to the temple as an offering, to be redeemed on the same mount where Abraham had nearly sacrificed Isaac to God. Not only that, but in referring to Christ as the Temple, the hymnist surely is reminding us of a different exchange. The new Temple of Christ’s Body is inaugurated and revealed through His death and resurrection [cf. John 2: 19-22].

The Magnificat antiphon at Vespers this evening (taken from the Benedictine lectionary for the office of Vigils) once again uses the word temple, but in yet a different sense. Here is the text in full, from 1 Corinthians 3: 16-17:

Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If any one destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and that temple you are.

According to the traditional four senses of Scripture, Herod’s temple is the “literal” temple, and Christ’s body is the temple in the “allegorical” or Christological sense. In this quotation, Saint Paul shows us the “tropological” or moral sense. “You are the temple of God! And the Holy Spirit dwells in you!” Thus, the procession on Candlemas, accompanying Christ to the temple, is, in a sense, a procession inward, to the temple that we are. We carry lighted candles, the illumination of the Holy Spirit, into our hearts where Christ wishes to abide.

Candlemas at the Monastery, February 2, 2020

Again, the beauty of this theological reality is accompanied by a serious challenge for us: that we strive to be more and more faithful to our baptismal vows. After all, in our baptisms, we died to ourselves, and we were conformed to Christ’s own Passion, that we might also be conformed to His Resurrection. If we are, with Christ, the temple of God, then we are also an offering to God. Let us, then, today, rededicate ourselves, to “present [our] bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God [Romans 12: 1].” In making this effort, we will undoubtedly discover various resistances to this spiritual renewal, and this in turn will help us to craft a realistic and effective ascetical plan for Lent, only eleven days away.

The world needs spiritual pioneers more than ever. Let us accept God’s invitation and join the saints’ procession to the final temple (the “anagogical” temple), the Church Triumphant in heaven.

A Tale of Two Cities, Violence and Mercy

One of the prominent and baffling themes in ancient mythology is the idea that famous cities were founded on fratricide. In the Bible Cain is the founder of the first city [Genesis 4: 17], and in the pagan world, the most famous example is that of Rome. Rome is named after Romulus, its traditional founder, who was also the murderer of his twin brother Remus.

Perhaps this mythology is less puzzling when we recall that the word politics is rooted in the Greek word polis or city. Most of us are aware that at some level politics seems to require violence, or at least the threat of violence. Rome went on to have a storied history, one in which violence was typically front and center. When God became man, He also became a victim of Rome’s savagery, as did today’s martyrs, Peter and Paul.

Relations between brothers in the Bible are frequently violent. Here Amnon is murdered by men sent by his half-brother Absalom. Both were sons of King David.

Peter and Paul form an interesting contrast with Romulus and Remus. But we shouldn’t be too quick to place the pairs on opposite sides of the problem of violence. After all, both Peter and Paul showed themselves capable of righteous brutality. Peter, according to tradition, drew the sword against the high priest’s slave, and Paul was attendant at the murder of Saint Stephen and bore letters of arrest against the Christians of Damascus. Furthermore, Peter acquiesced, as did the other disciples, with Rome’s violence inasmuch as he allowed Jesus to be dragged away without raising his voice in protest against this manifest injustice. Before the resurrection, he acted unthinkingly, but tellingly, as if the capacity for violence gave the city of Rome real authority.

What changed them both was the encounter with the mysterious and fathomless mercy of Jesus Christ the founder of the city of God, the heavenly city. The Apostles discovered that there is no place for a kind of purified violence in the service of God, that what they believed to be their righteousness, their willingness to fight other human beings for the sake of God was, in fact, a unwitting participation in the machinery that leads inexorably to the death of Jesus Christ. This is explicit in the life of Saint Paul, whom Jesus confronted directly with the question, “Why are you persecuting me?”

This encounter with God’s mercy in Jesus Christ convinced them both that there is no sacred calculus that pits the righteous against the unrighteous, and therefore gives permission to the righteous to flatter themselves by focusing on the sins of others. Or, to put it more bluntly, Peter and Paul discovered that we are all a part of the problem, and man’s anger does not work God’s justice [James 1: 20]. Or, as Saint Paul put it to the Romans, “God has consigned all men to disobedience.” Why? “That he may have mercy upon all. [Romans 11: 32]”

It is this mercy that bound Peter and Paul to Jesus and so to each other. And if we wish to have true peace, let us today with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we too may receive His mercy [cf. Hebrews 4: 16].

 

Just as it did for Peter and Paul, this encounter will require us to change, to renounce, in fact, the City of Man, founded as it is on division, exploitation, and violence. What the early monks discovered is that this renunciation of the world requires a renunciation of the passions, those distortions of desire that pit me against others, leading to their exploitation for my pleasure or ease. Again, Saint James: “What causes war and what causes fightings among you? It is not your passions [James 4: 1]?” In other words, we must seek to follow the examples of Peter and Paul, if not by literal martyrdom, then by death to ourselves in the form of ascetical self-denial. May this important work always be accompanied by and draw life from the peace and joy of knowing the surpassing love of Christ Jesus, Who loved us and gave Himself for us [cf. Galatians 2: 20].

[homily for the Solemnity of Ss. Peter and Paul, A.D. 2020]

Living in Isolation

Americans are being asked to spend the next month in relative isolation. I’m not the first to point out that monasteries are a resource for how to deal with this separation from others. I have many thoughts on this, and I hope to share them over the coming days and weeks.

Saint Benedict teaches experienced monks to admonish newcomers that the way to God is “rugged and harsh [via dura et aspera].” We come to the monastery seeking God, and, human nature being what it is, it is tempting to imagine that entry into a monastery will be a crowning moment of arrival rather than the initiation of a trial. But entry into monastic life also requires renunciation of “the world.”

The difficulty in monastic renunciation comes precisely from renunciation. The novice monk or nun is called to go without the usual comforts that smooth over the inevitable rough spots of life. Today, we are all being called, temporarily, to make acts of renunciation of the usual supports that we have in life: meetings with friends, hugs, museums, church, dining out, checking the sports scores, full shelves in the grocery stores …we have all entered a time of deprivation. A monk chooses this; most of you have not sought this out in the same way. I say this up front because we need to be honest with ourselves about the challenges that deprivation and renunciation present.

They are not at all insurmountable challenges! If, however, we imagine that renunciation will be painless, well, this will only make the unavoidable pain confusing and anxiety-provoking. With God’s help, especially as we prepare to enter Holy Week, we can look upon this as a moment to take up our Cross alongside our Lord, confident in divine accompaniment.

Now let me say a bit more about the “rugged and harsh” way upon which we’ve set out together. There are four initial things that warrant attention: the pain of grief, the invasion of thoughts, the importance of agency, and a long-term goal that gives us hope. Let us follow the example of the philosophers and Fathers and start with the goal.

Antony the Great being invaded by his thoughts while living in solitude: notice how he calmly accepts the presence of these temptations without engaging with them. Martin Schongauer, 15th century

The monk gives up worldly comforts for the sake of the Kingdom of God. We leave aside lesser comforts so that we may depend entirely on God and thereby be found worthy of His friendship. So monks and nuns willingly allow for painful experiences in the short term, always with an eye to the good that we want in the long term. We also choose to reduce our dependence on worldly comforts so as to acclimate ourselves with the interior world of thoughts. Now: during this time of involuntary renunciation, be ready to do battle with invading thoughts! I will have more to say about this soon, but here let me remind you that you are not your thoughts, and that there are ways to choose our thoughts. Choose wisely! We should especially make sure not to allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by the news and the itch to become an expert on all angles of the situation.

Back to the goal: what good are we seeking together in this time of pestilence? What is our goal? We are looking to safeguard our own lives and health and those of our families and neighbors. We are hoping to do this without undue damage to the infrastructure of our economic life (which would provoke a second round of sufferings for the most vulnerable). The hope of achieving these critical goals can motivate us to take action–hence the “importance of agency,” with which I will deal in a separate post.

There is a subtler set of goals that deserves our focus. When this trial begins to subside, and I look back on my decisions, how will I have comported myself? Am I now striving to act with courage, justice, compassion, generosity, and holiness? We will look back at this time and celebrate the heroes. Without doubt, we will also be aware of failures of virtue. If I have not prepared myself to be courageous, compassionate, or holy, now might be the best time I’ve ever had to learn. Acquiring these virtues involves acting in ways that might feel inauthentic in the moment. But one small act of courage makes the next, greater act easier. We will learn much about ourselves in the coming weeks. In some cases, what we learn will be uncomfortable. That, too, is part of the pain of deprivation–hence the “pain of grief,”–another future post. In this post, I want to emphasize that we do have a choice about our personal behaviors, and this is an opportunity for us to become quite a lot stronger than we thought we could be. The reason to emphasize this is that isolation can make it feel like we are reduced to passivity, that we lack agency. Many critics of monastic life harshly accuse us of “doing nothing.” This accusation derives from a certain bias that equates action with external activism and technological manipulation. Amusing memes of couch potatoes as heroes aside, we Americans are not being called to do nothing, but to change our arena of action toward self-discipline in a way that could bring about a discovery of inner strength.

A last comparison for today with monastic life. The newcomer, one hopes, is greatly consoled by the presence of others around him or her, especially the older monks. These are persons who have come through the trial and become icons of hope for what monastic life can achieve. In our shared isolation, who are our icons of hope for what we might achieve by God’s grace in our engagement with the present crisis? We certainly can look to the saints, particularly martyrs and confessors, for demonstrations of patience and sanctity amidst trials. We also have with us many survivors of illness and survivors of social dislocation. Interestingly on this last point, the immigrants among us and our immigrant ancestors are examples of living with great uncertainty and dislocation (our dislocation being more metaphorical but nonetheless real). Who are the best examples we’ve known of strength amid these adversities, and how can we learn from their experiences?

Radical Witness and Saint Lawrence

Monks in the modern world are daily confronted with incongruities. We dress in tunics and scapulars that were the workaday clothing of sixth-century peasants. We pray the Psalms, composed some three thousand years ago in a language that does not translate into contemporary idioms very well. Many of our customs date from the early Middle Ages (suddenly a controversial era!), presupposing a worldview that is unfathomable to many of our neighbors in Chicago.

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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.

You might be an emotivist if…

…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.

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

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.

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.

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.”

 

Emotivism: a Prelude

Christians are called to conversion, to become different kinds of persons, a different kind of community. The liturgy is the place where we learn what sort of persons we are to be. I’ve given a number of theological reasons for this in recent weeks. I’d like now to turn to some other considerations.

First of all, what are we being converted from? The typical answer would be, “Sin.” And this is correct. But there is actually something more, something subtler that the gospel reveals. Baptism was frequently referred to in the early church as “Enlightenment.” So not only did baptism bring forgiveness of sins and sanctifying grace, but it brought about a change of thinking, a revelation, light and clarity where there had been darkness and obscurity, sight where there had been blindness.

The typical blind person in the gospels is, revealingly, the Pharisee. The Pharisees, it should be noted, were generally held to be models of virtue by the Jews of the day, and with good reason. They followed the Torah, kept ritually clean, tithed, looked after the poor, and all the rest. And yet, the Lord refers to more than one of them as blind. From this we can see that “sin”–understood as transgressions of specific laws–is not sufficient as an explanation of the worldview that we are meant to turn away from.

Gamaliel, a teacher of the law, held in honor by all the people (Acts 5: 34)

Gamaliel, a teacher of the law, held in honor by all the people (Acts 5: 34)

Saint Paul exemplifies this situation. He says in his own words that by the standards of the law, his younger self–a Pharisee–was blameless. What changed? We are apt to say something like, “He realized that he needed to be saved by faith instead of the law.” Now this gets us closer. But recall the question we are asking: from what sort of life are we being converted? This can’t be a rejection of the law, since those who do not keep it and prevent others from keeping it are least in the kingdom.

In Chapter 7 of Paul’s letter to the Romans, Paul makes some suggestive (though difficult) remarks. He writes about “sinful passions.” This word “passion” comes to play a big part in monastic spirituality and later throughout the Church (though with somewhat less emphasis). Passions are not the same as feelings. Simple movements of emotion are a natural part of our bodily structure. A feeling becomes a passion when we distort it by liking it beyond reasonable measure, seeking it out, treasuring it, allowing it to bend our minds. This is the source of blinding. When we are under the spell of a passion, we no longer think straight. We all know this in some obvious cases. All one has to do is listen to talk radio or read internet comment threads to discover that anger renders people narrow and illogical. We all have known persons (perhaps ourselves) who, enticed by an attractive person, leave all caution and good sense to the wind.

The law itself can have this effect. Paul was so good at the law that he took pride in fulfilling its prescriptions, and this pride became a debilitating passion in him. So much so that he failed to see that he was acting against God when he was persecuting the early Christian sect. A wiser Pharisee, Paul’s own teacher Gamaliel showed better sense when he urged that Sanhedrin to leave the Christians alone, lest they “even be found opposing God [see Acts 5: 33-40].” Young Saul thought he knew better than Gamaliel and even convinced the Sanhedrin to go against Gamaliel’s sound advice [see Acts 22: 3-5].

Now to our peculiar danger: according to Alasdair MacIntyre, our Western culture is an emotivist culture, and has been for some time. What is emotivism? I will use one of the next posts to give a fuller answer to that question, but here’s an attempt at a short answer. An emotivist is not as interested in truth as he or she is in effectiveness. And to oversimplify more, an emotivist wants to put in effect whatever he or she feels to be good. If MacIntyre is correct, we have wandered into an institutionalized blindness, for we have placed the passions in the driver’s seat, unaware that our arguments are not rational (an emotivist only pretends to be rational because an argument that appears to be rational is more effective than one that is naked nonsense).

MacIntyre

MacIntyre

If the above is true, our conversion today needs to be away from emotivism toward genuine Truth and virtue. This is the spiritual analog to the argument put forward by MacIntyre over thirty years ago in After Virtue. It is worth noting that the traditional spiritual triad of the purgative, illuminative and unitive ways begin with the healing of behavior (purgative) and then of the mind (illuminative). For reasons that I hope to show in my coming post on emotivism, the problem with emotivism is precisely that it disposes us to willfulness and blindness, the opponents of virtue and truth. This can be true even when we have the outward appearance of a devout life of prayer and service. Emotivism hampers our ability to present the gospel to others, since it disposes us to hear the gospel in terms of effectiveness (and effectiveness in terms of realizing personal desire, not effectively achieving actual justice or compassion), rather than in terms of truth.

There is a lot to unpack here. Please send any questions you have to me, and I will try to clarify anything that you are having difficulty understanding. I will try to go slowly, as this is an important topic and worth the time it takes to master it.