On Saturdays I like to go to Confession. Not because I have a plethora of grievous sins to own up to each week, mind you, though I certainly have my share. Even if I had none, I would still go so as to make some reparation, however insignificant in comparison with Christ's, for the little ways in which I have failed to live up to my calling to be an image of God in the order of creation. It is a fine preparation for Communion and, if you live in a parish like mine, there's never any waiting because academics are far and away too pompous to admit that they've done anything wrong, being far more interested in pointing out the faults of others. Sometimes, when I'm finished, the priest will try to chat me up, knowing full well that once I leave he'll be sitting in lonely isolation until time for the vigil Mass.
Saturday has become one of my favorite days of the week. I like it that I can humble myself before the Lord in the Sacrament of Confession, making right my wayard path. I like it that I can pray an Office in honor of Our Lady during Ordinary Time when there is no competing memorial. I like it that I can be with my family in a special way, a way that continues through Sunday and that reminds me that simply to live, to move, and to have any being at all is a blessing beyond reckoning.
Today was a particularly beautiful Saturday, too, and that can help. I was up before dawn, at about 5:45, to pray the Office and read the Martyrology. By 7:00 I was done and ready for my bike-ride. We have a very nice bike-path here in Athens County, running nearly 20 miles from the east side of Athens to the south side of Nelsonville. It travels along an old canal tow-path, which, in turn, tends to follow the Hocking River, of Harvard on the Hocking fame. I like to ride about 20 miles, so I usually head up towards Nelsonville for about 10 miles and then come back. Today the temperature was perfect for going fast, though my top speed, even on the relatively flat bike path, is really only about 25 miles per hour, a snail's pace compared to the resting speed of really serious bikers. The path goes through cool wooded areas as well as open meadows, and with the sun low in the sky and the air still moist from the cool night the ride is just about as pleasant as one could wish. You have to watch for rabbits, deer, box turtles, and other critters, but if you keep your eyes peeled you'll be OK. Other creatures are more dangerous. About a month ago I was headed up my usual route when I say a large figure in the middle of the path. The bike path is only wide enough for three bikes to go abreast, and as I approached I saw that this particular figure was effectively blocking the whole path. It was a man, laid out right across the path and snoring loudly. Beside him in the grass was his own bike, along with his backpack. I had to go off the path to get around him. As I biked back in the other direction, nearly 40 minutes later, he was still there, soundly sleeping.
The day was getting ever more beautiful, so I decided to say my Rosary out in the hammock. It just don't get no better 'n that, folks. On days like this one must simply breathe in life and be grateful.
On Saturdays I like to remember the First Covenant. The Old Sabbath day is a good day for that, I think, and the Office often reflects it, with readings that refer to God's promise to His people and in the frequent commemoration of Our Lady, the last type of the Old People and the first type of the New, a bridge between the Covenants. The Jews were Chosen to be an image of God in the world--to represent what it is to live according to God's precepts. Though they did not always succeed, they are still to be honored for this role that was so graciously given them. We, too, are called to live as Imagines Dei, living a life that is full of praise and thanksgiving to our God and Redeemer. It's difficult to think of a more fitting way to bring a day such as this to an end than by kneeling down before God's minister and offering up those ways in which we have squandered, through our fault, our own fault, our own most grievous fault, the beautiful promise that has been handed on to us.
But the natural beauty of a day like this is not, I don't think, a coal that we ought to heap upon our own head. Rather, let it serve as a promise of what awaits us in the Confessional--let it be a physical sign of the ineffable beauty of Absolution, and of a return to life as it was meant to be lived. Confession can be difficult--especially if, like me, you are sometimes embarrassed to find yourself confessing sins you've confessed many times before. But it should also be beautiful, invigorating, and cleansing, like a fine Saturday filled with the joy and love that comes of being alive in God's presence.
Saturday, August 02, 2008
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Pray for Perry
I'm taking a hiatus from my hiatus from blogging to ask everyone to include Perry Robinson of Energetic Procession in their daily prayers. I do not know Perry apart from the blogosphere, but my impression of him is that he is bright and faithful, and both of those in the best possible senses of those terms. I've just learned from Mike Liccione that Perry is now "facing a couple of pressing personal challenges". I do not know what these challenges are, exactly, other than that Perry has said that he has suffered from "great evil" and faces the loss of his home.
My own favorite prayer in times such as these has always been Psalm 119 (120):
Oremus.
My own favorite prayer in times such as these has always been Psalm 119 (120):
In my distress I cried unto the Lord, and he heard me. Deliver my soul, O Lord, from lying lips, and from a deceitful tongue.When we cry out to him, he hears us: no matter what else happens to us, we more than conquer through him who loved us.
Oremus.
Thursday, July 03, 2008
Have a Hart
There's a rather fascinating discussion going on over at The Continuum, where Robert Hart and others are taking Mike Liccione and Al Kimel to task for their sanctimonious triumphalism. The combox, last time I checked, was getting longer by the minute, and I got into the act myself a couple of times (once using my wife's name as a pseudonym--a fairly clever ruse, even if it did happen by accident [I was using her computer, and somehow logged in using her Google account]).
What's at issue, I suppose--if anything is--is the question of how one decides to submit oneself to this or that teaching authority. The bloggers at The Continuum are all Anglicans (of the proper sort, not those faux Anglicans of PECUSA), in case you didn't know, and the blog is well worth reading. Like the Orthodox, of course, Anglicans don't buy any of this Roman primacy stuff, and I suppose there is some other theological baggage they would like to toss as well; they also behave Eastern Orthodoxically insofar as they think of themselves as fully within what they call "the Tradition", by which what they appear to mean is that the Anglican church is every bit as co-extensive with "The Church" as is the See of Rome. In some ways they are a little more charitable towards Rome than are some Orthodox, some of whom don't really think that Rome is at all co-extensive with the church, so let's count our blessings while we can.
One thing that I've noticed about the debate so far is a certain amount of equivocation on certain key terms, such as "authority", "private judgment", "the Church", etc. I don't think that either side disagrees that it is not up to the individual person to pass judgment on the truth of authoritative Church teaching; where they disagree is over what constitutes an authoritative Church teaching and why. For example, Anglicans as well as Catholics will assert that a Christian must believe in the Trinity, and both will agree that the reason why a Christian must believe in such a thing, in spite of the fact that no such thing is ever mentioned in the Scriptures, is because the doctrine has been taught by the Church. Well, what does that mean? If you had asked me a few years ago, I would have said that it means that it was taught by an Ecumenical Council. Some Catholics perhaps still think that is what it means; but to some Anglicans what it means is that the doctrine of the Trinity meets a certain standard, namely, the Vincentian Canon (a subject of much comment both here and at Mike Liccione's Sacramentum Vitae). That which has been believed by all Christians at all times and places, these Anglican say, is what must still be believed by anyone professing to be a Christian.
As it happens, not everyone agrees that the doctrine of the Trinity actually meets this criterion. It is an empirical question, and as far as I can see most, if not all, of the evidence points towards the doctrine being one that evolved over time. This does not preclude the possibility, of course, that it was at least secretly believed right from Day One, but unfortunately there is no evidence to that effect, and the very fact that it was necessary for an Ecumenical Council to define the doctrine, and to anathematize anyone who rejected it, suggests that there were plenty of folks who did not accept it. These folks, according to the Vincentian Canonist View (VCV), were never really Christians to begin with--by definition. The purpose of the Council, according to VCV, was not to define some new doctrine that nobody had ever believed before, but merely to put into words--to make explicit, as it were--the genuine content of the Faith that had been handed on by the Apostles but that, in the course of time, had come to be misunderstood by certain persons.
Needless to say, the Catholic Church believes exactly the same thing. So what's the problem? Well, consider, for starters, the fact that some Anglicans say that there were only ever seven Ecumenical Councils. Fewer say that there were only ever nine of them. Certainly no Anglicans would ever say that there were ever twenty-one of them, which is what Catholics are prone to say. Even Anglicans who may perhaps have some fondness for Vatican II will nevertheless toss their cookies at any mention of Trent or Vatican I (I think we can all imagine why, too, so no need to get into any internecine strife at this point). So what were those, um, "gatherings" doing, if they weren't Ecumenical Councils but just collections of various bishops from here and there? Well, whatever they were doing, they weren't making explicit things that were already contained in the Deposit of Faith. To hear Robert Hart tell it, they were "magically" summoning up "innovations" in doctrine--especially all that stuff about Papal "infallibility" (by which he appears to mean some view about Popes being inerrant, though he was remarkably unclear on the whole thing). Who's this Robert Hart when he's at home, you may ask? Wellll...he's an Anglican--but keep calm, he's one of the proper sort that we like, not one of those nasty ones tossing our religion into the dustbin of history.
OK, so "real" Ecumenical Councils, however many of them there are, appear to be bound by this VCV. Vatican I fabricated an "innovation" (Papal infallibility), hence it was not really an Ecumenical Council (among other reasons). Mike Liccione and I argued for some time a year or two ago about what it means to say that this or that teaching "developed" over time, but I think we agreed that, whatever else it means, it does not mean that any legitimate teaching can be new in the sense of an "innovation". But Robert Hart asserts that Mike's analysis of the situation is just a bunch of hooey, and that Mike fails to understand his (Robert's) proof that Anglicanism does not fall victim to the heresy that is the set of innovations to be found in such "councils" as Trent and Vatican I. I'm not altogether sure how he knows this, since I don't believe any of the first five, seven, or nine Councils declared when the next one was to be, or how many of them would be enough. What he does say is that the VCV is a necessary (and, I suppose, sufficient) condition on authoritativeness; he then appears to use his own judgment to determine whether a particular doctrine as taught by other institutions (whether local or allegedly "ecumenical" councils, etc.) really meets the VCV.
I'm jiggy with that, as far as it goes, but there are a few worries. If it's really true that a council, if it is genuinely "ecumenical" in nature, only ever makes latent doctrine patent, what are we to do with the doctrine of the Trinity? Or the doctrine that the Holy Spirit is to be accorded the same latreia as the Father and the Son? Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the doctrine of Papal infallibility had been taught by the same Council that taught the Doctrine of the Trinity. According to Robert, that would be sufficient to show that the council was not really a council; but why not assume instead that it was a council, and that Papal infallibility is not actually an innovation? In short, there are two ways to look at the historical fact of such a meeting; one is as a genuine council, the other is as a heretical innovator. Are there specific facts that would enable one to distinguish the right way of viewing the historical meeting from the wrong way? At this great distance in time, probably not. What people point to in the case of Vatican I is the view, held by many not only outside but also inside the Catholic church, that nobody ever believed in Papal infallibility before. Not only was it not semper ubique, it was more like nunc et tunc, hic et illic. But how on earth can one know such a thing with a sufficient degree of certainty to determine whether the doctrine is a deal-breaker for Councilhood? If we were to apply the very same standard that is applied to the Doctrine of the Trinity--that the folks who didn't believe it just weren't really Christians--we would be permitted to say that, well, folks, those who did not believe, at least implicitly, in Papal Infallibility simply weren't really Christians. But, of course, no Anglicans would want to say such a thing, and I doubt that any Catholics would want to say it either; but if we must say it about the Trinity, we must say it about Papal Infallibility as well--if Vatican I was a genuine council. If you don't think that Vatican I was a genuine council, you must say why you think so, but you cannot point to the doctrines that it promulgated or else you will be begging the question.
To reject the authority of a putative council on the grounds of what it taught will always necessarily beg the question, just so long as one endorses VCV. If one rejects VCV, then of course one may reject any Council one wishes, for no other reason than that one does not like what it taught. I suspect few Anglicans would want to go that route--why else distance oneself from the PECUSA madness?--(though these days I am not so sure about how many Catholics would want to avoid that route). But VCV seems like a condign principle, and it has a certain cachet in orthodox-with-a-small-o circles. Mike Liccione has written at some length on how the VCV must be read if it is to make any sense: in particular, there is a difficulty involving the fact that the VCV itself ascribes authority to "the Catholic Church", not the consensus fidelium, as would appear to be the import of semper ubique taken rather literally. Some Anglicans think that Romans want to equate "the Catholic Church" with the See of Rome, but no real Roman Catholics want to do that. The teaching of the See of Rome herself is that "the Catholic Church" subsists in what is called "the Roman Catholic Church", which obviously includes the See of Rome but which also includes every See in Communion with the See of Rome.
What does it mean to be "in Communion with the See of Rome"? One thing it means is being willing to count as "Ecumenical" those councils at which a Pope, or one of his legates, was present and to whose teachings he consented. This is a historical, rather than doctrinal, criterion for counting a council as Ecumenical. On this standard, there are indeed twenty-one Ecumenical Councils. Anglicans and Orthodox Christians reject this standard. What standard do they put in its place? VCV; but this is a doctrinal standard and, as such, necessarily begs the question.
My comments here are not intended as compelling proof of one point of view or another; they are offered principally in explanation for a certain point of view. When I converted to Catholicism twenty-five years ago, it was largely due to my thinking through various issues of this sort, but I recognize, of course, that what I found compelling will not necessarily be found compelling by everyone. That is an unfortunate artifact of our sad divisions, and it is a sign, perhaps, of how far we have fallen from that "one accord" in which the Christian community found itself in the description of the author of Acts. Personally, in the case of Anglicans (of the proper sort) and Orthodox Christians, I'm always ready to look to what we share rather than to our divisions, because the things we share, in this debauched and secular world, are so much more important than the things we disagree about.
What's at issue, I suppose--if anything is--is the question of how one decides to submit oneself to this or that teaching authority. The bloggers at The Continuum are all Anglicans (of the proper sort, not those faux Anglicans of PECUSA), in case you didn't know, and the blog is well worth reading. Like the Orthodox, of course, Anglicans don't buy any of this Roman primacy stuff, and I suppose there is some other theological baggage they would like to toss as well; they also behave Eastern Orthodoxically insofar as they think of themselves as fully within what they call "the Tradition", by which what they appear to mean is that the Anglican church is every bit as co-extensive with "The Church" as is the See of Rome. In some ways they are a little more charitable towards Rome than are some Orthodox, some of whom don't really think that Rome is at all co-extensive with the church, so let's count our blessings while we can.
One thing that I've noticed about the debate so far is a certain amount of equivocation on certain key terms, such as "authority", "private judgment", "the Church", etc. I don't think that either side disagrees that it is not up to the individual person to pass judgment on the truth of authoritative Church teaching; where they disagree is over what constitutes an authoritative Church teaching and why. For example, Anglicans as well as Catholics will assert that a Christian must believe in the Trinity, and both will agree that the reason why a Christian must believe in such a thing, in spite of the fact that no such thing is ever mentioned in the Scriptures, is because the doctrine has been taught by the Church. Well, what does that mean? If you had asked me a few years ago, I would have said that it means that it was taught by an Ecumenical Council. Some Catholics perhaps still think that is what it means; but to some Anglicans what it means is that the doctrine of the Trinity meets a certain standard, namely, the Vincentian Canon (a subject of much comment both here and at Mike Liccione's Sacramentum Vitae). That which has been believed by all Christians at all times and places, these Anglican say, is what must still be believed by anyone professing to be a Christian.
As it happens, not everyone agrees that the doctrine of the Trinity actually meets this criterion. It is an empirical question, and as far as I can see most, if not all, of the evidence points towards the doctrine being one that evolved over time. This does not preclude the possibility, of course, that it was at least secretly believed right from Day One, but unfortunately there is no evidence to that effect, and the very fact that it was necessary for an Ecumenical Council to define the doctrine, and to anathematize anyone who rejected it, suggests that there were plenty of folks who did not accept it. These folks, according to the Vincentian Canonist View (VCV), were never really Christians to begin with--by definition. The purpose of the Council, according to VCV, was not to define some new doctrine that nobody had ever believed before, but merely to put into words--to make explicit, as it were--the genuine content of the Faith that had been handed on by the Apostles but that, in the course of time, had come to be misunderstood by certain persons.
Needless to say, the Catholic Church believes exactly the same thing. So what's the problem? Well, consider, for starters, the fact that some Anglicans say that there were only ever seven Ecumenical Councils. Fewer say that there were only ever nine of them. Certainly no Anglicans would ever say that there were ever twenty-one of them, which is what Catholics are prone to say. Even Anglicans who may perhaps have some fondness for Vatican II will nevertheless toss their cookies at any mention of Trent or Vatican I (I think we can all imagine why, too, so no need to get into any internecine strife at this point). So what were those, um, "gatherings" doing, if they weren't Ecumenical Councils but just collections of various bishops from here and there? Well, whatever they were doing, they weren't making explicit things that were already contained in the Deposit of Faith. To hear Robert Hart tell it, they were "magically" summoning up "innovations" in doctrine--especially all that stuff about Papal "infallibility" (by which he appears to mean some view about Popes being inerrant, though he was remarkably unclear on the whole thing). Who's this Robert Hart when he's at home, you may ask? Wellll...he's an Anglican--but keep calm, he's one of the proper sort that we like, not one of those nasty ones tossing our religion into the dustbin of history.
OK, so "real" Ecumenical Councils, however many of them there are, appear to be bound by this VCV. Vatican I fabricated an "innovation" (Papal infallibility), hence it was not really an Ecumenical Council (among other reasons). Mike Liccione and I argued for some time a year or two ago about what it means to say that this or that teaching "developed" over time, but I think we agreed that, whatever else it means, it does not mean that any legitimate teaching can be new in the sense of an "innovation". But Robert Hart asserts that Mike's analysis of the situation is just a bunch of hooey, and that Mike fails to understand his (Robert's) proof that Anglicanism does not fall victim to the heresy that is the set of innovations to be found in such "councils" as Trent and Vatican I. I'm not altogether sure how he knows this, since I don't believe any of the first five, seven, or nine Councils declared when the next one was to be, or how many of them would be enough. What he does say is that the VCV is a necessary (and, I suppose, sufficient) condition on authoritativeness; he then appears to use his own judgment to determine whether a particular doctrine as taught by other institutions (whether local or allegedly "ecumenical" councils, etc.) really meets the VCV.
I'm jiggy with that, as far as it goes, but there are a few worries. If it's really true that a council, if it is genuinely "ecumenical" in nature, only ever makes latent doctrine patent, what are we to do with the doctrine of the Trinity? Or the doctrine that the Holy Spirit is to be accorded the same latreia as the Father and the Son? Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the doctrine of Papal infallibility had been taught by the same Council that taught the Doctrine of the Trinity. According to Robert, that would be sufficient to show that the council was not really a council; but why not assume instead that it was a council, and that Papal infallibility is not actually an innovation? In short, there are two ways to look at the historical fact of such a meeting; one is as a genuine council, the other is as a heretical innovator. Are there specific facts that would enable one to distinguish the right way of viewing the historical meeting from the wrong way? At this great distance in time, probably not. What people point to in the case of Vatican I is the view, held by many not only outside but also inside the Catholic church, that nobody ever believed in Papal infallibility before. Not only was it not semper ubique, it was more like nunc et tunc, hic et illic. But how on earth can one know such a thing with a sufficient degree of certainty to determine whether the doctrine is a deal-breaker for Councilhood? If we were to apply the very same standard that is applied to the Doctrine of the Trinity--that the folks who didn't believe it just weren't really Christians--we would be permitted to say that, well, folks, those who did not believe, at least implicitly, in Papal Infallibility simply weren't really Christians. But, of course, no Anglicans would want to say such a thing, and I doubt that any Catholics would want to say it either; but if we must say it about the Trinity, we must say it about Papal Infallibility as well--if Vatican I was a genuine council. If you don't think that Vatican I was a genuine council, you must say why you think so, but you cannot point to the doctrines that it promulgated or else you will be begging the question.
To reject the authority of a putative council on the grounds of what it taught will always necessarily beg the question, just so long as one endorses VCV. If one rejects VCV, then of course one may reject any Council one wishes, for no other reason than that one does not like what it taught. I suspect few Anglicans would want to go that route--why else distance oneself from the PECUSA madness?--(though these days I am not so sure about how many Catholics would want to avoid that route). But VCV seems like a condign principle, and it has a certain cachet in orthodox-with-a-small-o circles. Mike Liccione has written at some length on how the VCV must be read if it is to make any sense: in particular, there is a difficulty involving the fact that the VCV itself ascribes authority to "the Catholic Church", not the consensus fidelium, as would appear to be the import of semper ubique taken rather literally. Some Anglicans think that Romans want to equate "the Catholic Church" with the See of Rome, but no real Roman Catholics want to do that. The teaching of the See of Rome herself is that "the Catholic Church" subsists in what is called "the Roman Catholic Church", which obviously includes the See of Rome but which also includes every See in Communion with the See of Rome.
What does it mean to be "in Communion with the See of Rome"? One thing it means is being willing to count as "Ecumenical" those councils at which a Pope, or one of his legates, was present and to whose teachings he consented. This is a historical, rather than doctrinal, criterion for counting a council as Ecumenical. On this standard, there are indeed twenty-one Ecumenical Councils. Anglicans and Orthodox Christians reject this standard. What standard do they put in its place? VCV; but this is a doctrinal standard and, as such, necessarily begs the question.
My comments here are not intended as compelling proof of one point of view or another; they are offered principally in explanation for a certain point of view. When I converted to Catholicism twenty-five years ago, it was largely due to my thinking through various issues of this sort, but I recognize, of course, that what I found compelling will not necessarily be found compelling by everyone. That is an unfortunate artifact of our sad divisions, and it is a sign, perhaps, of how far we have fallen from that "one accord" in which the Christian community found itself in the description of the author of Acts. Personally, in the case of Anglicans (of the proper sort) and Orthodox Christians, I'm always ready to look to what we share rather than to our divisions, because the things we share, in this debauched and secular world, are so much more important than the things we disagree about.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Gandalf and Saruman Recite the Creed!
In Quenyan, no less! You can listen to it here.
Sorry about that, folks, I couldn't resist. Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee were not really impersonating BXVI and Bartholomew, it just sounds like they are. Actually, it's the real thing: the real Pope and the real Patriarch, reciting the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed in Greek, not Quenyan, and it is a marvelous thing to hear. Using the original text avoids that whole Filioque thingy.
Thanks to Fr. Kimel for the link.
Sorry about that, folks, I couldn't resist. Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee were not really impersonating BXVI and Bartholomew, it just sounds like they are. Actually, it's the real thing: the real Pope and the real Patriarch, reciting the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed in Greek, not Quenyan, and it is a marvelous thing to hear. Using the original text avoids that whole Filioque thingy.
Thanks to Fr. Kimel for the link.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
"Real" Catholics
There is an interesting passage in Eamon Duffy's magisterial if popular Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2nd edition, 2001) in which we read of a fascinating appeal, by the Franciscans, to the notion of the irreformability of the ordinary magisterium:
I was reminded of this passage by the recent kerfuffle surrounding Jay Dyer's decision to become a Roman Catholic. I call it a "kerfuffle", but it seems to have provoked controversy primarily among his Orthodox friends: the Romans in the playground have yet to get deeply involved. I was particularly struck by an essay at a..sinner by Sophocles Frangakis. I find Sophocles to be a voice for Christian charity in the blogosphere, and have always respected his opinions and comments, whether I read them here or at other blogs where he contributes, and his essay on Jay's conversion is, in my opinion, a good example of how to write an essay about something you disagree strongly with but are willing to respect as a matter of Christian love. As the essay progresses, we find Sophocles answering a few of Jay's arguments, and this, too, he does with sensitivity and care, and it is only to be expected, I think, that someone committed to a particular reading of history would want to defend his reading against a rival, especially when that rival had, for some time, been perceived as a friend. I do not doubt for a moment that I would do the same thing, were I in his shoes.
In fact, I write this very essay for that reason, because Sophocles makes an interesting sort of argument in his reply to Jay. He notes that
And now there looms on the horizon a possible concordat between Rome and Constantinople, and this would permit another application of the same argument:
I am reminded here of an argument that was put against me over at The Continuum. After suggesting that a central interpretive authority is required to avoid theological relativism, I was treated, in answer, to a quotation from, of all places, the 39 Articles:
This kind of game can be played by both sides, of course, but I have to admit that the Orthodox have something of a leg up on us Romans, because we tend to think that the Orthodox are, apart from that whole Papal Primacy thing, well, orthodox, whereas the Orthodox tend to think that Romans, in addition to that whole Papal Primacy thing, have heaped many other heterodoxies onto their ash heap of theology. In other words, if reunification is what we're after, the Orthodox think that the Romans have a lot farther to go than the Romans think the Orthodox have to go. Having said that, however, I must say that my own opinion is that, however far you happen to think the other side has to go to meet you half way (and don't we all think we're closer to the center than the other guy is, else we would be standing with that other guy already), there are better and worse ways to go about approaching that center. The wrong way is to start quoting from the 39 Articles, or to say that Rome as a See has done the equivalent of what John XXII did. A far better approach is that taken by such excellent Orthodox writers as Peter Gilbert of De unione ecclesiarum or the folks at Eirenikon. The strategy employed at sites such as those (and there are others) is to look for common ground rather than difference, and where there are differences, to look for a common hermeneutic that will allow both sides to approach the center together, rather than forcing one or the other to come the whole distance alone.
I freely confess to my own particular bias here, and I hope and pray that my Orthodox brethren do not take what I have written in the wrong way. I suppose they are used to hearing such things from certain sorts of Catholics and perhaps it is safe to say that everyone, on all sides of any debate about who is "right" and who is "wrong", should be mindful that pride is the deadliest of sins, so I will be the first to apologize if what I say in genuine charity and hope for reunification comes off as proud, condescending, or just generally arrogant. It may be, as some Orthodox writers have lamented, that reunification is basically de facto impossible now, but one may pray otherwise since, of course, with God all things are possible.
A crucial influence in the development of the idea that the Pope himself might be free from error came from the Franciscan debates about poverty. Successive popes had ruled in favour of the Franciscan rejection of property. When Pope John XXII repudiated that teaching, and denied that Christ was a pauper, Franciscan theologians appealed against his judgment to the infallibility of other, earlier popes. They argued that the Church, in the person of those popes, had repeatedly accepted the Franciscan view of poverty as an evangelical form of life. John XXII, therefore, was in error in rejecting this infallible teaching--and since true popes do not err, this proved that he was no longer a true pope. Papal infallibility was here being invoked not to exalt the Pope's authority, but to limit it, by ensuring that a pope did not arbitrarily reverse earlier Christian teaching.What is interesting here is not the idea that a particular Pope had erred (or so the Franciscans were claiming), but the idea that Popes, as such, cannot err and, hence, the erring person in the papal garb is not really a Pope at all, but is only homonymously a Pope--a Pope in name only. This is not an appeal to an early version of the doctrine of Papal Infallibility as promulgated at Vatican I, though it is clearly connected to that idea, but is rather an appeal to the idea that, whenever Popes teach in conformity with the magisterium, they, insofar as they act as spokesmen for the maagisterium, are preserved from error. Not because they, as particular human beings, have some special grace that nobody else has, but because the office they hold has been granted that grace. If they should happen to err, that means that they no longer truly fill that office.
I was reminded of this passage by the recent kerfuffle surrounding Jay Dyer's decision to become a Roman Catholic. I call it a "kerfuffle", but it seems to have provoked controversy primarily among his Orthodox friends: the Romans in the playground have yet to get deeply involved. I was particularly struck by an essay at a..sinner by Sophocles Frangakis. I find Sophocles to be a voice for Christian charity in the blogosphere, and have always respected his opinions and comments, whether I read them here or at other blogs where he contributes, and his essay on Jay's conversion is, in my opinion, a good example of how to write an essay about something you disagree strongly with but are willing to respect as a matter of Christian love. As the essay progresses, we find Sophocles answering a few of Jay's arguments, and this, too, he does with sensitivity and care, and it is only to be expected, I think, that someone committed to a particular reading of history would want to defend his reading against a rival, especially when that rival had, for some time, been perceived as a friend. I do not doubt for a moment that I would do the same thing, were I in his shoes.
In fact, I write this very essay for that reason, because Sophocles makes an interesting sort of argument in his reply to Jay. He notes that
The citations Jay provides were written at a time when Rome herself was indeed Orthodox, and from the high remarks lavished on her in lieu not only of her position as the First See but also because of her exemplary Orthodoxy and the keeping of that one salvific Faith preserved and undiminished when other Sees were beset with heresy.Later (because of the Filioque controversy, among other things), Rome ceased to be "orthodox" in the sense that Sophocles has in mind and, hence, ceased to fill that office of Primacy that the other Sees willingly recognized in her for so long. In short, Sophocles makes here the very same argument that the Franciscans made about Pope John XXII. Just as he ceased to be truly a Pope when he attempted to teach something contrary to the Tradition, so too, Sophocles (and other similarly-minded Orthodox) claims, the Roman See itself, insofar as it has "erred", has ceased to be Primatial.
Rome was Orthodox and this is why the East "tolerated" her position because they were brethren, confessing one and the same Faith together and gladly accorded primacy, as it, primacy, existed then in its proper context.
And now there looms on the horizon a possible concordat between Rome and Constantinople, and this would permit another application of the same argument:
Hold still, everyone, because we may in our lifetime witness another schism in the Church if the Ecumencial Patriarch Bartholomew continues as he is in opposition to Moscow, who is holding the line formulating Orthodox answers to modern problems and challenges but of course is considered as narrow and old fashioned for doing so.In other words, once you determine who is in the wrong, you also get to determine who is in the right, and the "real" church will move around from place to place depending on who happens to toe your particular line. Constantinople has displaced Rome, but is now in danger of being displaced by Moscow. Eventually, I suppose, if Moscow were to reunite with Rome along with Constantinople, it, too, would be displaced (perhaps by Moscow, Idaho, just to keep things from getting too complicated).
If Constantinople should, for argument's sake, unify with the Roman Catholic Church, the Patriarch of Constantinople would cease to be "Orthodox" despite the fact that he takes up residence in the place Constantinople as Patriarch of the New Rome. He would in effect not hold in common that Faith held by the other Patriarchs.
I am reminded here of an argument that was put against me over at The Continuum. After suggesting that a central interpretive authority is required to avoid theological relativism, I was treated, in answer, to a quotation from, of all places, the 39 Articles:
As the Church of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch have erred: so also the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in their living and manner of Ceremonies, but also in matters of Faith.I confess that it was difficult to refrain from laughing out loud at this, but I never got the chance to ask whether the "Church" of England had "erred" in saying that the Church of Rome had "erred", since I was unceremoniously dismissed by the worthies there as a crank. You know you're in trouble when folks who routinely use Christian names with one another decide to refer to you only as "Carson". That's OK--I've been called worse, but I am certainly not insensitive to the necessity for the Church of England to maintain that everybody else is wrong. Indeed, it is the great Protestant Burden, it seems to me, to maintain two incompatible ideas at the same time. On the one hand, it must be maintained that something called "the Tradition" is not to be located in any one time or place, but in all times and places, that is, it is what has been believed by everyone everywhere. That's what "catholic" means, after all: "universal". On the other hand, it must be maintained that, when it comes to deciding what, exactly, fits this description--well, then it's confined to one time and one place: it's me. If you start to do or to teach something that is not all that consonant with what I and my cronies have been doing and teaching, clearly the only explanation is that you have departed from "the Tradition". I can prove this, too, by showing you the documents and other artifacts that constitute the evidence of "the Tradition" and interpreting them for you in the proper way, not in the heterodox way that you interpret them. If you insist, for some perverse reason, that I am interpreting them wrongly, then I will just point out to you that their meaning is plain and that you are the one jumping through hermeneutic hoops to get it to come out your way, while I am simply looking at all the data in the plain light of day, with no interpretive lens other than sheer rationality.
This kind of game can be played by both sides, of course, but I have to admit that the Orthodox have something of a leg up on us Romans, because we tend to think that the Orthodox are, apart from that whole Papal Primacy thing, well, orthodox, whereas the Orthodox tend to think that Romans, in addition to that whole Papal Primacy thing, have heaped many other heterodoxies onto their ash heap of theology. In other words, if reunification is what we're after, the Orthodox think that the Romans have a lot farther to go than the Romans think the Orthodox have to go. Having said that, however, I must say that my own opinion is that, however far you happen to think the other side has to go to meet you half way (and don't we all think we're closer to the center than the other guy is, else we would be standing with that other guy already), there are better and worse ways to go about approaching that center. The wrong way is to start quoting from the 39 Articles, or to say that Rome as a See has done the equivalent of what John XXII did. A far better approach is that taken by such excellent Orthodox writers as Peter Gilbert of De unione ecclesiarum or the folks at Eirenikon. The strategy employed at sites such as those (and there are others) is to look for common ground rather than difference, and where there are differences, to look for a common hermeneutic that will allow both sides to approach the center together, rather than forcing one or the other to come the whole distance alone.
I freely confess to my own particular bias here, and I hope and pray that my Orthodox brethren do not take what I have written in the wrong way. I suppose they are used to hearing such things from certain sorts of Catholics and perhaps it is safe to say that everyone, on all sides of any debate about who is "right" and who is "wrong", should be mindful that pride is the deadliest of sins, so I will be the first to apologize if what I say in genuine charity and hope for reunification comes off as proud, condescending, or just generally arrogant. It may be, as some Orthodox writers have lamented, that reunification is basically de facto impossible now, but one may pray otherwise since, of course, with God all things are possible.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Jay Dyer Comes Home
Jay Dyer of Nicene Truth posted a lengthy Apologia Pro Vita Sua on Wednesday in which he explains his reasons for turning away from Eastern Orthodoxy and towards Rome. There are only a few comments posted there today, mostly supportive (though some taking issue with his analysis of this or that), but it is perhaps worth mentioning in the context of the East-West "scorecard" that ecclesial decisions such as Jay's are always very difficult for the person making the decision and, I believe, when such decisions are made with such evident intellectual effort and faithful reflection, we may trust that that they are made in bona fides, whether or not the decision is the same one that we have, or would have, made under the circumstances.
I remember reading that greatest of questing blogs, Pontifications, over the course of a year or two as Fr. Alvin Kimel publicly pondered what to do about his increasing sense of alienation from his own communion and began the lengthy process of soul-searching that led, in the end, to his conversion to Roman Catholicism. That process involved a great deal of public discourse (the comboxes there were very often a full-day's worth of reading for me), and anyone who followed it will have come away far more knowledgeable about all sides of the question than when they first began. In some ways it seems almost reasonable to say that God, in his providence, is able to bring about great good even from the personal suffering of those individuals who find themselves deeply troubled by these reflections, for if they are willing to share their journey with the rest of us, we can learn from them and from those who are willing to discuss publicly the reasons for this or that doctrine.
My own process of conversion was neither very thoughtful nor very faithful, as I am now ashamed to admit but happy to confess (if that makes any sense). I became a Roman Catholic exactly 25 years ago this past Tuesday, on the Solemnity of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist, and I believe that it is true to say that my real conversion has been ongoing since that time, and I am not fully confident that it is complete even yet. I am as troubled as anyone by certain features of the calling, and I suppose that posts such as this one are, finally, a reflection of my attempts to come to grips with some of these troubles. As a consequence of this I am always particularly moved by anyone who can make available in a public forum their inner dialog of the soul leading to conversion, whether it be Westward or Eastward. It is very sad that such decisions need to be made at all, but given that they do, the participation of charitable and merciful interlocutors in the blogosphere is a welcome bit of light in the otherwise pervasive darkness that is our barren secular culture.
I remember reading that greatest of questing blogs, Pontifications, over the course of a year or two as Fr. Alvin Kimel publicly pondered what to do about his increasing sense of alienation from his own communion and began the lengthy process of soul-searching that led, in the end, to his conversion to Roman Catholicism. That process involved a great deal of public discourse (the comboxes there were very often a full-day's worth of reading for me), and anyone who followed it will have come away far more knowledgeable about all sides of the question than when they first began. In some ways it seems almost reasonable to say that God, in his providence, is able to bring about great good even from the personal suffering of those individuals who find themselves deeply troubled by these reflections, for if they are willing to share their journey with the rest of us, we can learn from them and from those who are willing to discuss publicly the reasons for this or that doctrine.
My own process of conversion was neither very thoughtful nor very faithful, as I am now ashamed to admit but happy to confess (if that makes any sense). I became a Roman Catholic exactly 25 years ago this past Tuesday, on the Solemnity of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist, and I believe that it is true to say that my real conversion has been ongoing since that time, and I am not fully confident that it is complete even yet. I am as troubled as anyone by certain features of the calling, and I suppose that posts such as this one are, finally, a reflection of my attempts to come to grips with some of these troubles. As a consequence of this I am always particularly moved by anyone who can make available in a public forum their inner dialog of the soul leading to conversion, whether it be Westward or Eastward. It is very sad that such decisions need to be made at all, but given that they do, the participation of charitable and merciful interlocutors in the blogosphere is a welcome bit of light in the otherwise pervasive darkness that is our barren secular culture.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
The Long View
I've been following with some interest the discussion at Sacramentum Vitae regarding the Filioque controversy. Much of it is familiar ground, but the dialectic is still fascinating. (I've posted on this controversy myself a few times; just use the blog search to find it all.)
It's tempting, sometimes, to look upon debates of this kind as threatening, somehow, to our Christian identity. The reason for this, I suppose, is that we all tend to prefer concord to discord, harmony to cacophony. The temptation to worry about such things should be resisted, however. When the philosophical writings of Aristotle were rediscovered in the West during the thirteenth century, they became extremely popular subjects for discussion among certain teachers at the universities of Paris and Oxford. In some ways, Aristotelian philosophical perspectives could be viewed as threatening to Christian doctrine, provided that one antecedently adopts certain philosophical starting points that are incompatible with Aristotelianism. In 1210 the provincial synod of Sens attempted to put a stop to whatever pernicious influence Aristotelianism might have upon the nascent clerics at Paris by forbidding the Masters of that institution from reading any texts by Aristotle, either in public or in private, thus forbidding also the teaching of said texts. The ban was repeated in 1215, and in 1231 Pope Gregory IX promulgated a bull that extended the ban, in a modified form, to other universities. (For some reason the university at Toulouse was immune from the ban, until Pope Innocent IV extended it to include all of Christendom in 1245.)
Papal pronouncements in the thirteenth century appear to have been viewed with the same care and respect that they are accorded these days in institutions of higher learning: by the 1250s the ban was being ignored everywhere, especially in Paris and Oxford. Bonaventure, in his capacity as minister general to the Franciscan order, called upon Etienne Tempier, bishop of Paris, to issue a condemnation of certain Aristotelian theses. In 1270 and again in 1277 he issued the famous condemnations that had the effect, in the end, of putting Saint Thomas Aquinas, a thoroughgoing Aristotelian (and a, ahem, Dominican), on the index of forbidden teachers. This situation was not changed until Thomas's canonization in 1325.
For roughly a century, then, some of the most fundamentally important philosophical perspectives in history were banned from institutions of Christian education, in spite of the fact that many of these perspectives were not merely consistent with Christian teaching, but were actually quite effectively deployed, by Aquinas and others, in the defense of Christian belief. Looking back on this situation from a distance of over 700 years, one can simply scratch one's head in wonderment over the thoughtlessness of certain kinds of partisanship, but at the time, to those who found Aristotle's texts brimming with stimulating and fertile ideas, the ban must have seemed not merely frustrating but positively maddening. In the midst of the controversy itself the disparate sides must have experienced varying degrees of fear and loathing for one another, and yet, in the end, the whole thing was settled amicably and has remained relatively irenic for seven centuries, a sevenfold increase over the amount of time spent squabbling about things.
Some may wish to suggest that the controversy over the Filioque is of an entirely different order than disagreements over curricula that are largely internal to institutions of higher learning and, hence, is not about to go away any time soon. On the one hand, there is some truth to this: after a millennium of argument, there are still some folks who regard the controversy as a point of schism between East and West. On the other hand, the relative importance of the issue with respect to division-making power can be seen in the fact that the version of the Creed used in Uniate liturgies omits the Filioque with the Vatican's blessing. One thing that is about as clear as anything from the posts and comments at Sacramentum Vitae is the fact that the issue turns on various philosophical notions, including cause, unity, identity, and other inheritances from the Neoplatonic and Peripatetic philosophical traditions. As the condemnations of 1270 and 1277 illustrated so nicely, philosophical conventions come and go, sometimes with alarming frequency, sometimes only very slowly. The long view seeks to go beyond theological analysis, which is always metaphorical and analogical at best, and hit upon the deposit of faith which is the same for everyone at all times and places. This task, of course, can be extremely difficult, and it goes without saying that it cannot be accomplished in a conceptual vacuum: philosophical machinery will necessarily be deployed, whether intentionally or not. What ought to be of interest is not the machinery deployed, however, but the faith displayed. If the dialog between opposing parties is a cooperative search for the truth, then charity demands that we wait until both sides have had their say. In this there is, perhaps, some small difference between the words being exchanged at Sacramentum Vitae and the condemnations of 1270 and 1277.
C. S. Lewis, famously, tried to do an end-run around problems such as the Filioque controversy by searching what he thought of as "the tradition" for those elements of belief that, in his judgment, stood the test of the so-called "Vincentian Canon". The result was his Mere Christianity, drawn from a series of radio addresses and constituting a kind of curious attempt at a non-denominational Credo. While such palliatives are sometimes attractive to certain sorts of minds, they are rarely as satisfying as the quest for deeper understanding that animates the differences of theological opinion that they mask. (In this respect it is rather surprising that Lewis, one of the most brilliant minds of his generation, adopted such an approach.) Indeed, in the absence of difference and variation it is not clear whether our understanding could advance at all beyond the truths that we are spoon-fed from the Gospels themselves. Everyone, Greek as well as Latin, knows that the Gospel of St John tells us that the Son "sends" the Holy Spirit; the dispute is not over that fact, but over the meaning and interpretation of that fact and how it is to be interpolated among the other facts handed us by the Gospels. To say with the "mere Christian" that all we need know is that the Son "sends" the Spirit and no more, is to sow the seeds of heterodoxy, since it leaves to individual judgment what, precisely, the upshot of "sending the Holy Spirit" is to be taken to be. It will not do to say, "Just don't think about what the 'upshot' of our faith is to be taken to be, just endorse the facts as we have them." That is like telling a teenage boy "Our cable package came with the Playboy channel, but don't you dare turn it on, even when I'm not at home!" The Filioque controversy arose in the first place as a consequence of localized attempts to put a stop to Spanish monarchianism (a heretical version that denied the subsistence of the Son, not the orthodox version that says that the Father is the only arkhê, "principle" or "source"). In localized liturgies where there was a danger of the heterodoxy, the Filioque was inserted into the Creed to make the Son's subsistence clear (lex orandi, after all, is lex credendi). This local change was later endorsed by Rome, even though the threat of heterodoxy was not a universal one, but that Rome permitted the change in the liturgy at all was part of what angered the Greeks. Or at least some of them: Theophylact of Ochrid noted that the Latins did not have the rich theological vocabulary available to the Greeks, and in particular they had only one word for "procession" whereas in Greek there were four different verbs to indicate four different ways in which it was possible for one thing to "be from" another (ekporeuesthai, khorêgeisthai, metadidosthai, and pempesthai).
Theophylact was extremely patient about the inability of the Latin language to do justice to the finial theological nuances of the doctrine of the Trinity, far more so than most Greek theologians of his day, who took advantage of theological excuses to promote their own anti-Latin Church polity. In his view it was important to allow for the particularities of local practices in the various Churches, especially in the East (he appealed to the case of the Bulgarian Church to illustrate how even in the East it is essential to insure the understanding of theological terms by the lay members of the community) but also, of course, in the Latin West, and many of the differences between East and West he ascribed to cultural differences that were due ultimately to differences in language and custom. Such things were quite permissible, in his view. He drew the line, however, when it came to matters that had been settled by the decision of an Ecumenical Council, and the text of the Creed fell under this rubric. With the insertion of the Filioque clause the Latin West had gone too far, in his view.
And there, for the most part, is where things stand to this day. By now, of course, Western theologians have had plenty of time to absorb the nuances of meaning present in the verbs ekporeuesthai, khorêgeisthai, metadidosthai, and pempesthai, yet they continue to maintain the validity of the insertion of the Filioque clause into the Creed, and the Greeks continue to object. The dispute over the Filioque has been called trivial by Kallistos Ware, but others are quick to point out that it is but the tip of the iceberg separating East from West. Even if this is true, however, it must be admitted that even a thousand years is not very long in comparison with eternity, and I suspect that the long view will see even this dispute in much the same way that we now see the condemnations of the thirteenth century.
It's tempting, sometimes, to look upon debates of this kind as threatening, somehow, to our Christian identity. The reason for this, I suppose, is that we all tend to prefer concord to discord, harmony to cacophony. The temptation to worry about such things should be resisted, however. When the philosophical writings of Aristotle were rediscovered in the West during the thirteenth century, they became extremely popular subjects for discussion among certain teachers at the universities of Paris and Oxford. In some ways, Aristotelian philosophical perspectives could be viewed as threatening to Christian doctrine, provided that one antecedently adopts certain philosophical starting points that are incompatible with Aristotelianism. In 1210 the provincial synod of Sens attempted to put a stop to whatever pernicious influence Aristotelianism might have upon the nascent clerics at Paris by forbidding the Masters of that institution from reading any texts by Aristotle, either in public or in private, thus forbidding also the teaching of said texts. The ban was repeated in 1215, and in 1231 Pope Gregory IX promulgated a bull that extended the ban, in a modified form, to other universities. (For some reason the university at Toulouse was immune from the ban, until Pope Innocent IV extended it to include all of Christendom in 1245.)
Papal pronouncements in the thirteenth century appear to have been viewed with the same care and respect that they are accorded these days in institutions of higher learning: by the 1250s the ban was being ignored everywhere, especially in Paris and Oxford. Bonaventure, in his capacity as minister general to the Franciscan order, called upon Etienne Tempier, bishop of Paris, to issue a condemnation of certain Aristotelian theses. In 1270 and again in 1277 he issued the famous condemnations that had the effect, in the end, of putting Saint Thomas Aquinas, a thoroughgoing Aristotelian (and a, ahem, Dominican), on the index of forbidden teachers. This situation was not changed until Thomas's canonization in 1325.
For roughly a century, then, some of the most fundamentally important philosophical perspectives in history were banned from institutions of Christian education, in spite of the fact that many of these perspectives were not merely consistent with Christian teaching, but were actually quite effectively deployed, by Aquinas and others, in the defense of Christian belief. Looking back on this situation from a distance of over 700 years, one can simply scratch one's head in wonderment over the thoughtlessness of certain kinds of partisanship, but at the time, to those who found Aristotle's texts brimming with stimulating and fertile ideas, the ban must have seemed not merely frustrating but positively maddening. In the midst of the controversy itself the disparate sides must have experienced varying degrees of fear and loathing for one another, and yet, in the end, the whole thing was settled amicably and has remained relatively irenic for seven centuries, a sevenfold increase over the amount of time spent squabbling about things.
Some may wish to suggest that the controversy over the Filioque is of an entirely different order than disagreements over curricula that are largely internal to institutions of higher learning and, hence, is not about to go away any time soon. On the one hand, there is some truth to this: after a millennium of argument, there are still some folks who regard the controversy as a point of schism between East and West. On the other hand, the relative importance of the issue with respect to division-making power can be seen in the fact that the version of the Creed used in Uniate liturgies omits the Filioque with the Vatican's blessing. One thing that is about as clear as anything from the posts and comments at Sacramentum Vitae is the fact that the issue turns on various philosophical notions, including cause, unity, identity, and other inheritances from the Neoplatonic and Peripatetic philosophical traditions. As the condemnations of 1270 and 1277 illustrated so nicely, philosophical conventions come and go, sometimes with alarming frequency, sometimes only very slowly. The long view seeks to go beyond theological analysis, which is always metaphorical and analogical at best, and hit upon the deposit of faith which is the same for everyone at all times and places. This task, of course, can be extremely difficult, and it goes without saying that it cannot be accomplished in a conceptual vacuum: philosophical machinery will necessarily be deployed, whether intentionally or not. What ought to be of interest is not the machinery deployed, however, but the faith displayed. If the dialog between opposing parties is a cooperative search for the truth, then charity demands that we wait until both sides have had their say. In this there is, perhaps, some small difference between the words being exchanged at Sacramentum Vitae and the condemnations of 1270 and 1277.
C. S. Lewis, famously, tried to do an end-run around problems such as the Filioque controversy by searching what he thought of as "the tradition" for those elements of belief that, in his judgment, stood the test of the so-called "Vincentian Canon". The result was his Mere Christianity, drawn from a series of radio addresses and constituting a kind of curious attempt at a non-denominational Credo. While such palliatives are sometimes attractive to certain sorts of minds, they are rarely as satisfying as the quest for deeper understanding that animates the differences of theological opinion that they mask. (In this respect it is rather surprising that Lewis, one of the most brilliant minds of his generation, adopted such an approach.) Indeed, in the absence of difference and variation it is not clear whether our understanding could advance at all beyond the truths that we are spoon-fed from the Gospels themselves. Everyone, Greek as well as Latin, knows that the Gospel of St John tells us that the Son "sends" the Holy Spirit; the dispute is not over that fact, but over the meaning and interpretation of that fact and how it is to be interpolated among the other facts handed us by the Gospels. To say with the "mere Christian" that all we need know is that the Son "sends" the Spirit and no more, is to sow the seeds of heterodoxy, since it leaves to individual judgment what, precisely, the upshot of "sending the Holy Spirit" is to be taken to be. It will not do to say, "Just don't think about what the 'upshot' of our faith is to be taken to be, just endorse the facts as we have them." That is like telling a teenage boy "Our cable package came with the Playboy channel, but don't you dare turn it on, even when I'm not at home!" The Filioque controversy arose in the first place as a consequence of localized attempts to put a stop to Spanish monarchianism (a heretical version that denied the subsistence of the Son, not the orthodox version that says that the Father is the only arkhê, "principle" or "source"). In localized liturgies where there was a danger of the heterodoxy, the Filioque was inserted into the Creed to make the Son's subsistence clear (lex orandi, after all, is lex credendi). This local change was later endorsed by Rome, even though the threat of heterodoxy was not a universal one, but that Rome permitted the change in the liturgy at all was part of what angered the Greeks. Or at least some of them: Theophylact of Ochrid noted that the Latins did not have the rich theological vocabulary available to the Greeks, and in particular they had only one word for "procession" whereas in Greek there were four different verbs to indicate four different ways in which it was possible for one thing to "be from" another (ekporeuesthai, khorêgeisthai, metadidosthai, and pempesthai).
Theophylact was extremely patient about the inability of the Latin language to do justice to the finial theological nuances of the doctrine of the Trinity, far more so than most Greek theologians of his day, who took advantage of theological excuses to promote their own anti-Latin Church polity. In his view it was important to allow for the particularities of local practices in the various Churches, especially in the East (he appealed to the case of the Bulgarian Church to illustrate how even in the East it is essential to insure the understanding of theological terms by the lay members of the community) but also, of course, in the Latin West, and many of the differences between East and West he ascribed to cultural differences that were due ultimately to differences in language and custom. Such things were quite permissible, in his view. He drew the line, however, when it came to matters that had been settled by the decision of an Ecumenical Council, and the text of the Creed fell under this rubric. With the insertion of the Filioque clause the Latin West had gone too far, in his view.
And there, for the most part, is where things stand to this day. By now, of course, Western theologians have had plenty of time to absorb the nuances of meaning present in the verbs ekporeuesthai, khorêgeisthai, metadidosthai, and pempesthai, yet they continue to maintain the validity of the insertion of the Filioque clause into the Creed, and the Greeks continue to object. The dispute over the Filioque has been called trivial by Kallistos Ware, but others are quick to point out that it is but the tip of the iceberg separating East from West. Even if this is true, however, it must be admitted that even a thousand years is not very long in comparison with eternity, and I suspect that the long view will see even this dispute in much the same way that we now see the condemnations of the thirteenth century.
Santa Fe
The New Mexico town is named after Holy Faith; Michelle of Quantum Theology has an interesting essay posted about some encounters she had there in which science and faith appeared to be at loggerheads. Highly recommended reading.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Well, "Gooey" is One Word For It
Just the other day I was recommending Dr. Mike Liccione's Sacramentum Vitae for the fascinating essays on offer there regarding the ordinary and universal Magisterium. Since I check in there regularly to see if there's any more of the same on offer, I get to blame him for directing me to the stomach-churning essay by Mark Morford of the San Francisco Gate, in which we are treated to the sort of analysis one ordinarily expects to find in the Onion, not major newspaper outlets. Just to whet your appetite a little, check this out:
I would say that at least part of Morford's problem is that he is just a kid. At the bottom of the essay there's a picture of him, and he looks like he's about 22 years old, if that. Which would explain why he would say things like this with a straight face:
Here's where it gets gooey. Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.And, no: he's not kidding. He's. Completely. Serious. Dude. The whole essay is just like that. Don't try to read it after a heavy meal.
I would say that at least part of Morford's problem is that he is just a kid. At the bottom of the essay there's a picture of him, and he looks like he's about 22 years old, if that. Which would explain why he would say things like this with a straight face:
Are you rolling your eyes and scoffing? Fine by me. But you gotta wonder, why has, say, the JFK legacy lasted so long, is so vital to our national identity? Yes, the assassination canonized his legend. The Kennedy family is our version of royalty. But there's something more. Those attuned to energies beyond the literal meanings of things, these people say JFK wasn't assassinated for any typical reason you can name. It's because he was just this kind of high-vibration being, a peacemaker, at odds with the war machine, the CIA, the dark side. And it killed him.Of course, he's too young to really know anything at all about Kennedy, or Martin Luther King Jr., for that matter: he's just regurgitating what he's been spoon-fed by all the right media outlets and has adopted as his own because, well, it's what he would like to believe. People of his ilk are bound to lionize Obama because they hate George Bush so much. But he gives the rest of us something to smile about.
Sunday, June 08, 2008
On Infallibility
Dr. Mike Liccione of Sacramentum Vitae has a great essay on the infallibility of the ordinary and universal magisterium. I highly recommend it: he argues, first of all, that there really is such a thing as the infallibility of the ordinary and universal magisterium and, second, that the normative criteria for determining which teachings of the ordinary and universal magisterium are "clear enough in magisterial documents themselves to be authoritatively extended to particular teachings." At the end of the essay there is promissory note for another essay that will examine the status of the licitness of ordaining women and the use of artificial contraception vis-a-vis these considerations.
I won't say much more about Mike's essay here because that might tempt some readers to rest content with the Readers' Digest version on offer here, when in fact the essay ought to be read in its entirety, as I suspect will also be the case with its sequel.
I won't say much more about Mike's essay here because that might tempt some readers to rest content with the Readers' Digest version on offer here, when in fact the essay ought to be read in its entirety, as I suspect will also be the case with its sequel.
Friday, June 06, 2008
Skip a Bit, Brother...
The new English translation of the Roman Missal has been slowly wending its way through the vetting process at the Vatican now for several years. One argument in favor of the older, simpler translations (which I have discussed before) has been that English is just plain fundamentally different from Latin in its modes of expression. Where Latin waxes pleonastic, it is more natural for English to simplify. So a sonorous Latin phrase like "Omnipotens sempiterne Deus" gets turned into the mere vocative "God", or on some occasions, "Mighty God". I don't think that the ICEL translations have been uniformly as banal as this example, but they come fairly close to a certain aurea mediocritas that has generated legions of critics, at least in this country.
Is it really true that simpler, plainer style is the norm in English? I'm not so sure. Although it tends to be rather common nowadays, the plain style is not something that motivated many of those who first translated Latin liturgical texts into English. In his magisterial English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (by far his greatest scholarly work, if you want the opinion of someone whose only knowledge of the subject matter comes from reading the work in question), C. S. Lewis explained in loving detail the various ways in which a desire for stylistic English (as opposed to merely colloquial) drove some of the work (p. 218):
I'm not at all sure that the ICEL is entirely to blame for the present unpleasantness, however. It takes two to tango, as they say, and the numbers of people who read and take delight in the same sorts of literature that transported Jacksie Lewis and his friends at the turn of the last century are rapidly dwindling. I won't pretend to be a snob in this regard: when I was 14 years old, I was reading Lewis's stories for children; when Lewis was 14 years old, he was reading Homer. In Greek. By the time I was 17 years old, I had read some more Lewis, all of Tolkien (several times) and, for some reason, Thucydides (in English), but by that same age Lewis had been offered a scholarship at Oxford University after having passed an entrance examination that I could never pass in a million years, even now. So I am in no position to lecture my cohort about their reading habits. Our technological age has favored the capacity for quick adaptation to electronic marvels rather than the slow, meticulous scholarship that made Lewis the genius that he was. It's not that we are no longer capable of such genius, it's that we no longer have the patience for it. As I said, I read Tolkien in my teens, and I loved what I read so much that I had read and re-read The Lord of the Rings nine times before I graduated from college. Arguably I should have been branching out a little, but even so: I cannot get my own son to read through the thing even one time. I have tried everything: I got him a very nice, deluxe edition of the thing, which has been gathering dust in his room. I tried reading it aloud to him on our cold, snowy winter evenings, along with servings of hot chocolate and beautiful, atmospheric music; I got a recorded books version that we both listened to together; I got the deluxe version of the DVD of Peter Jackson's movie interpretation and promised him that he could watch the whole thing if he would only read the book first. All to no avail: he still has not gotten any farther than the first third of The Two Towers. And yet he will sit for hour upon hour trying to "finish" Grand Theft Auto IV.
He is typical of a certain sort of adolescent boy. I have no illusions about that: some kids just don't like that kind of stuff, and no amount of immersion therapy is going to change that. I haven't figured out yet what he does like, but reading books is just not on his list. (A little sad, since in a house containing two classicists and a philosopher, there are literally thousands of really good books in the offing, all for free. It's like a fucking lending library in here, but never mind.) The same is true for most of his friends, as it happens. Much the same, I suppose, is probably true in the culture at large. I'm sure there are plenty of kids who do go in for a little more culture than most, but I fear, based not only on my experience with my son and his friends, but on my experience with the average undergraduate student, that the days when Lewis and his ilk formed the dominant culture are long gone, if they were ever really here in a dominant form. There will always be exceptions to the situation I am lamenting. I have a friend that I went to graduate school with who was, in some ways, remarkably like C. S. Lewis: he had a very good, classical education as a young boy, he grew up learning how to play the harpsichord and I don't know how many other musical instruments; he appears to have been as well educated as Lewis upon entering college, and he remains a remarkably able and productive scholar in classics. But in the 30 years I have been in the business, he's the only person I have met like that from my own cohort. And what one sees of the intelligentsia in the mass media these days is only discouraging. Just have a look at what passes for thoughtful, intelligent discourse among the self-styled "Brights", and you will have cause to weep; but much the same can be said for popular "apologetics"--there are no Lewises out there defending the faith today, only Bakkers.
Lewis was an amazing man, a man whose view of reality was animated by a love of myth and whose capacity to see the truth was galvanized by a herculean imagination. Many intellectuals these days are basically variations on the Mr. Spock theme: they are able to excel in this or that technical discipline, but the lack that spark of creative intelligence and imagination that enabled Lewis to see the whole world as it really is. He was a complete man, and his was a complete intellect, in a way that is rare to find these days. The delight that he took in English literature was a manifestation of his fascination for the word as sacramental representation of the truth. That's why he delighted so in poetry, and why he lamented what he saw as the degradation of poetic achievement in modernism.
Few of us, apparently, delight in the sheer poetry of language in the way Lewis did, or we would be far more vocal than we are about the banalization of our liturgy, where the sacramentality of language is more paramount than anywhere else. We have become like Brother Maynard in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who, when the monk played by Michael Palin is reading from the Book of Armaments, urges him to "Skip a bit, brother", when the reading becomes rather more detailed than time would appear to permit. We seem to like our liturgies streamlined rather than drawn out, simple rather than complex, and, above all, something that does not demand too much of us. When we remember why we attend Mass in the first place, we will perhaps begin to recapture something of our own sense of excitement and pleasure in the participation in a feast of words, and start praying for more Lewises in the ICEL.
And no, C. S. Lewis would never, in a bazillion years, have used the word "fucking" in an essay. The times, they are a-changin', baby!
Is it really true that simpler, plainer style is the norm in English? I'm not so sure. Although it tends to be rather common nowadays, the plain style is not something that motivated many of those who first translated Latin liturgical texts into English. In his magisterial English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (by far his greatest scholarly work, if you want the opinion of someone whose only knowledge of the subject matter comes from reading the work in question), C. S. Lewis explained in loving detail the various ways in which a desire for stylistic English (as opposed to merely colloquial) drove some of the work (p. 218):
Thus in vota humilium (third in Lent) English forces us to have a noun with humilium so that we get 'thy humble servants'. It then seems to the translator's ear that vota also should have a satellite, and, selecting (for he is an Englishman) one that alliterates, he writes down 'the hearty desires of thy humble servants', where the medieval translator would probably have been content with 'vowes of us humble'. In addition to such rhythmical motives I suspect the influence of a feeling, and, I believe, a just feeling, that the resonant Latin words carry more not only to the ear but also to the heart and imagination than their short English equivalents, so that 'faithfully to fill' is not an excessive allowance for ad implenda nor 'in the midst of so many and great dangers' for in tantis periculis.I am particularly struck by the phrase "It then seems to the translator's ear...". I wonder how much banality in the ICEL translations could have been avoided by paying more heed to "the translator's ear"? Did the ICEL translators even have ears? Sometimes it seems not. Lewis was a master of translation, of course, and quite possibly the members of the ICEL committee entrusted with the task of translating the liturgical texts were principally trained in matters of theology, as opposed to Lewis's background of classical philology, philosophy, and English literature. One suspects, rather sadly, that even if Lewis had lived long enough to help out with the ICEL translations (and had been willing to, and had been able to, etc. etc.) he would not have been invited to do so. While that is merely a suspicion, it appears to be supported by the actual outcome of the project, given that Lewis was not the only person on the planet with his qualifications and talents.
I'm not at all sure that the ICEL is entirely to blame for the present unpleasantness, however. It takes two to tango, as they say, and the numbers of people who read and take delight in the same sorts of literature that transported Jacksie Lewis and his friends at the turn of the last century are rapidly dwindling. I won't pretend to be a snob in this regard: when I was 14 years old, I was reading Lewis's stories for children; when Lewis was 14 years old, he was reading Homer. In Greek. By the time I was 17 years old, I had read some more Lewis, all of Tolkien (several times) and, for some reason, Thucydides (in English), but by that same age Lewis had been offered a scholarship at Oxford University after having passed an entrance examination that I could never pass in a million years, even now. So I am in no position to lecture my cohort about their reading habits. Our technological age has favored the capacity for quick adaptation to electronic marvels rather than the slow, meticulous scholarship that made Lewis the genius that he was. It's not that we are no longer capable of such genius, it's that we no longer have the patience for it. As I said, I read Tolkien in my teens, and I loved what I read so much that I had read and re-read The Lord of the Rings nine times before I graduated from college. Arguably I should have been branching out a little, but even so: I cannot get my own son to read through the thing even one time. I have tried everything: I got him a very nice, deluxe edition of the thing, which has been gathering dust in his room. I tried reading it aloud to him on our cold, snowy winter evenings, along with servings of hot chocolate and beautiful, atmospheric music; I got a recorded books version that we both listened to together; I got the deluxe version of the DVD of Peter Jackson's movie interpretation and promised him that he could watch the whole thing if he would only read the book first. All to no avail: he still has not gotten any farther than the first third of The Two Towers. And yet he will sit for hour upon hour trying to "finish" Grand Theft Auto IV.
He is typical of a certain sort of adolescent boy. I have no illusions about that: some kids just don't like that kind of stuff, and no amount of immersion therapy is going to change that. I haven't figured out yet what he does like, but reading books is just not on his list. (A little sad, since in a house containing two classicists and a philosopher, there are literally thousands of really good books in the offing, all for free. It's like a fucking lending library in here, but never mind.) The same is true for most of his friends, as it happens. Much the same, I suppose, is probably true in the culture at large. I'm sure there are plenty of kids who do go in for a little more culture than most, but I fear, based not only on my experience with my son and his friends, but on my experience with the average undergraduate student, that the days when Lewis and his ilk formed the dominant culture are long gone, if they were ever really here in a dominant form. There will always be exceptions to the situation I am lamenting. I have a friend that I went to graduate school with who was, in some ways, remarkably like C. S. Lewis: he had a very good, classical education as a young boy, he grew up learning how to play the harpsichord and I don't know how many other musical instruments; he appears to have been as well educated as Lewis upon entering college, and he remains a remarkably able and productive scholar in classics. But in the 30 years I have been in the business, he's the only person I have met like that from my own cohort. And what one sees of the intelligentsia in the mass media these days is only discouraging. Just have a look at what passes for thoughtful, intelligent discourse among the self-styled "Brights", and you will have cause to weep; but much the same can be said for popular "apologetics"--there are no Lewises out there defending the faith today, only Bakkers.
Lewis was an amazing man, a man whose view of reality was animated by a love of myth and whose capacity to see the truth was galvanized by a herculean imagination. Many intellectuals these days are basically variations on the Mr. Spock theme: they are able to excel in this or that technical discipline, but the lack that spark of creative intelligence and imagination that enabled Lewis to see the whole world as it really is. He was a complete man, and his was a complete intellect, in a way that is rare to find these days. The delight that he took in English literature was a manifestation of his fascination for the word as sacramental representation of the truth. That's why he delighted so in poetry, and why he lamented what he saw as the degradation of poetic achievement in modernism.
Few of us, apparently, delight in the sheer poetry of language in the way Lewis did, or we would be far more vocal than we are about the banalization of our liturgy, where the sacramentality of language is more paramount than anywhere else. We have become like Brother Maynard in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who, when the monk played by Michael Palin is reading from the Book of Armaments, urges him to "Skip a bit, brother", when the reading becomes rather more detailed than time would appear to permit. We seem to like our liturgies streamlined rather than drawn out, simple rather than complex, and, above all, something that does not demand too much of us. When we remember why we attend Mass in the first place, we will perhaps begin to recapture something of our own sense of excitement and pleasure in the participation in a feast of words, and start praying for more Lewises in the ICEL.
And no, C. S. Lewis would never, in a bazillion years, have used the word "fucking" in an essay. The times, they are a-changin', baby!
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