The Sarabite: Towards an Aesthetic Christianity

There is a continuous attraction, beginning with God, going to the world, and ending at last with God, an attraction which returns to the same place where it began as though in a kind of circle. -Marsilio Ficino

Sunday, December 02, 2007

A Comment


I sometimes hang out at the Reformed Catholicism blog. Tim Enloe recently wrote this piece about the Pope being God in some medieval writings. Read the original post. Then you can read my comment, which I reproduce in its entirety here. (Hey, I gotta post something.)

I found this post very interesting, particularily since I have read many books on Neoplatonism lately. I would like to think that it is clear for most Catholics that Jesus Christ is the One to which all must return, and it is the Pope’s duty to facilitate that return. I don’t think the whole balance between the One and the Many can be adequately obtained in real life; many Orthodox theologians claim that this is the reason they do not accept the modern Papacy as well. But all of the jurisdictional squabbles, moral ambiguity, and ethnocentrism in Orthodoxy often mean that plurality often wins out over unity. The Neoplatonic categories are too neat to apply to everyday life.

As a Roman Catholic, I will say that I DO NOT believe that the Pope is God on earth. The Church as the Body of Christ is God on earth, and the Eucharist is the image and the promise of that presence; the Church as a whole is the light of glory and the pillar and the ground of Truth. I think the equation of God’ presence to the Pope’s authority is limited to a very few individuals during certain polemics with you Protestants. If anything, the Catholics I admire would think that their crucifix or their image of the Virgin of Guadalupe represents more the presence of the Divine in their daily lives, not the Pope. I think that the slow receding of “superstitious popery” (rosary beads, statues, novenas, etc.) facilitates a Newman-like scenario where one tries to justify doctrines and beliefs one is not really comfortable with, such as the intercession of the saints or purgatory. A son of a farmer in the Mexican countryside who becomes a priest and a theologian would have never formulated the development of doctrine because for him, the Church had always been one.

(My mother, when she first came to this country, used to make the Sign of the Cross everytime she passed a church, even if it was Protestant, since she did not know that there was any other church other than the Catholic Church.)

Authority, then, becomes the ultimate arbitor of what is Catholic. Since one is not comfortable with praying a Hail Mary or kissing the hand of an ecclesiastic, one has to justify it to oneself by saying that it’s somehow okay since the authority of the Church says it is. As if it was the Church hierarchy that invented these things. I am beginning to think this is untenable for a variety of reasons. Authority only becomes a refuge when daily life, the ethos of how the Gospels are historically read, comes into crisis.

I have been thinking recently that many of the things that you Protestants find objectionable were not the inventions of Popes or bishops, but rather practices that emerged in the lives of average layfolk that the Church hierarchy only approved of ex post facto. I can’t see how the intercession of the saints, for example, emerged from some sort of scholarly debates about Scriptures, but rather from our Catholic and very human habit of talking to dead loved ones. This happened with certain individuals, mostly martyrs, and the prayers worked. (That is what is often left out of these apologetic conversations: when we pray for the intercession of the saints, they respond. Just last month, I prayed to St. Joseph, and he came through.) The hierarchy saw some precedent in the Scriptures, and deemed it was okay to do this.

Sometimes authority has to step in and say what the layfolk are doing is not okay, like the recent condemnation by the hierarchy in Mexico of the cult to “la Santa Muerte”, the Grim Reaper, which is just unjustified superstition. But as in the approbation of Marian apparitions, the hierarchy only says that it is permissible to believe in them, and they prove no harm to the Faith. Again, I reiterate, the hierarchy does not create our religion; it regulates it. I like our current Pope, for example, since he is trying to give more deference to organically evolved liturgical practices over the practices created in the 1960’s by panels of “experts”.

In the end, I am not an enthusiastic advocate of the development of doctrine since I don’t think history is all that neat. If anything, I understand it more as “punctuated equilibrium”: new understandings and practices emerge all of a sudden, with some gaps in “development” and may (emphasis on “may”) look radically different from what came before. (Though one would have to ask to what extent historical imagination plays in all of this.) I don’t think this is particularily scandalous since this is how life is. In this case, one has to trust the “authority” of the Church, the whole Church, and defer to the way of life it passes down to us, from dipping our hand in the holy water font when we enter a church to listening to the Urbi et Orbi speech on Christmas and Easter (though that is far more recent). For me, that is the way to “read” the Gospel; in the context of the greater historical and spatial reality of the Body of Christ, not in the illusion of my own ideal of what the Church should be like.

My main problem with Protestantism, then, is also one of authority. You feel yourselves free to re-invent the wheel everytime you deem it convenient or desirable. Up to very recently, we Roman Catholics were quite conservative bunch in this regard. (I think it was the “devil incarnate” himself, Blessed Pius IX, who when it was suggested that St. Joseph’s name be inserted into the Canon of the Mass, objected that he could do no such thing, since he was only the Pope.) I don’t object to “private judgement”; I object to private judgement when it is accompanied by absolute authority to negate and destroy. That is why I find Protestantism so unappealing, and dare I say it, irrational.

And that is why, even if I have a thousand difficulties with Church, I would never leave it, since that would mean I would trust myself over and above the cloud of witnesses that has shined throughout history. And in my book, that is making me God over and above them.

34 Comments:

At 8:53 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

"In the end, I am not an enthusiastic advocate of the development of doctrine since I don’t think history is all that neat. If anything, I understand it more as “punctuated equilibrium”: new understandings and practices emerge all of a sudden, with some gaps in “development” and may (emphasis on “may”) look radically different from what came before."

Your comment makes me think I need to re-read Newman's essay, because before I read your comment, I would have said, based on my one and only reading of the essay more than a year ago, that his description of "development" is a seemingly messy, organic process, rather than the neat linear process you describe.

Of course, it may be a matter of perspective. I read the essay as a "Bible-only" protestant and found the idea that the Church is an organism that develops over time a refreshing and far more plausible alternative to my own church's teaching that every aspect of dogma and praxis was more or less established in a crystal clear fashion before the last Apostle died. Compared to that, Newman's "development" is very messy indeed!

I'm now a newly minted Catholic. Perhaps after a few decades of soaking in Catholic culture, my perspective will change and Newman's explanation will seem too tidy.

-D

 
At 10:38 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Tim Enloe is a heretic.

One Pope does not in any way deny the Triune God.

2 of the best Popes were
Alexander VI
and
Julius II

 
At 11:29 AM, Blogger Arturo Vasquez said...

I too have only read this Newman work once, and I think you might have a point about doctrinal development being a messy process. However, I think what I find unconvincing is the rhetoric that many of the Catholic doctrines and practices that Newman had a problem with emerged as consequences of theologically contemplating various mysteries. This may have been the case, but I would posit that it is also likely that they may have emerged from something far more "grass roots" and intuitive than a discursive exercise.

As I said, I don't think that people first figured out if it was a "Biblical" thing to do to invoke the saints, and only then did it. On the contrary, I think what the Church hierarchy may have done was rubber-stamp a practice that the faithful were already doing. In this way, the "documentary evidence" that we argue over was late in catching up with the actual practice, and the raison d'etre of these practices lies not in the theological justifications, but in the practices themselves.

I would ask, for example, if the doctrine of purgatory emerged not just out of reflections on justification and the temporal punishments due to sin, but also out of the experience of the faithful (appartitions by the poor souls, perhaps). While the doctrine is "Scriptural" in the broad sense of the term, its impetus comes from on high, not through an "organic" process of reflecting in a discursive manner.
Also, with the Immaculate Conception in the Spanish speaking world, the "Heavens spoke", in a manner of speaking, through all of the miracles associated with the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, from the Virgin of Guadalupe onward. That is why I use the example of puntuated equilibrium: at some point, things may have changed abruptly, and something apparently different but substantially the same emerged.

I have absolutely no evidence for all of this, but I ponder these possibilities nonetheless.

 
At 8:13 PM, Blogger CrimsonCatholic said...

IMHO, you're on the right track. The whole Neoplatonic explanation is exaggerated, just as every attempt to find the intellectual sources of Catholic dogma is exaggerated. If you treat Catholic development as simply a mundane historical process, you miss the point that it is revealed. Revealed theological truth doesn't work like any other intellectual source. I defer to Zubiri on this point (translation from Christianity Copyright 2001-2005 by Joaquín Redondo, used with permission granted on his website):
Hence, it is essential to underline that the concept of tradition we have used here is not an historical concept; it is a theologic concept. From the point of view of a historical science tradition is understood as the continuity of a documentary proof. Is there a tradition that Pythagoras may have discovered the mathematical theorems attributed to his name? Not an extensive one, some have said no, and others have said yes. However, they are in the Elements of Geometry of Euclid, and clearly we do have an historical continuity of this. However, this is not the concept of tradition we are discussing here. The concept of tradition here is purely theologic; it is the reactualization of the revealed deposit.
...
At any rate, with hindsight anything can be fitted into a syllogism, including reading these pages. But this does not mean it was the way to discover it. The great masters of speculative theology did not admit the Immaculate Conception. On the other hand, a few poor Franciscans felt the devotion to the Blessed Virgin as the Immaculate Conception. And it is there where the truth of the deposit of revelation was. The revealed deposit, and therefore, the progress, is inscribed in a situation of the whole man, and also in a religious situation.


The critics treat papal authority as if it were something other than a theological given, a simple fact of religious life that can be articulated for the circumstances but is taken for granted in the life of the Church. It is what we acknowledge is there and what we have taken as God's gift whether explicitly or implicitly. We might have better explanation or use these various concepts of Neoplatonism and the like, but what is meant is that the thing in question was really given by God and that it is a true effect of revelation on the religious life of man. That is what it means to say that doctrine is theological rather than merely historical. We are simply reactualizing the effect of revelation.

From that perspective, to deny papal infallibility is to deny its effect on the many Saints throughout the ages, and that is what I am unwilling to do. One might say that there were many Saints for whom it had little effect, just as there were many for whom the Immaculate Conception had little effect. But I can hardly deny the real effect that it did have, and that alone suffices to accept its theological reality. It's not about a mechanism to rationalize each and every theological premise; that cannot possibly produce a compelling authority. It's about the fact that real Saints have treated the Pope's dogmatic proclamations as matters of the faith, and that reality authoritatively demands a response.

Given your affinity for authors of the Spanish persuasion, I think you will appreciate Zubiri. You share in common a criticism of Newman, and Zubiri's experience in biology caused him to make the exact same analogy to evolution that you did. You should take it well that you think like such a great mind.

 
At 9:01 PM, Blogger Arturo Vasquez said...

Mr. Prejean,

I will look into Zubiri. It sounds really interesting. Are his works easily available in Spanish in this country?

 
At 11:34 PM, Blogger CrimsonCatholic said...

Please, call me Jonathan. I feel like I know you well enough already even though we've not met in the flesh. We'll have to get together one of these times I'm in Fremont.

Re: Zubiri's Spanish works, I was hoping you'd be able to tell me, because I'm too Spanish-illiterate to benefit from untranslated works. Yes, I know that this is completely perverse given my admiration for Spanish authors, but as an admirer of Scholasticism who doesn't know Latin, I've gotten used to perversity. But you have your pick between Spanish here and the English translations here and here. I think he's probably a bit obscure in any language, but he really makes you think, and I imagine what he says is even more suggestive in its original context.

 
At 6:31 AM, Blogger Arturo Vasquez said...

Jonathan,

If you ever did come around these parts, AG (a fellow Aggie) and I would love to meet you in the flesh. My e-mail address can be found in my Blogger profile. Keep in touch.

 
At 11:00 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hmmm. When I was a ninth grader at Nazareth Academy, back in the days when it was still run by sisters in long habits, Sister Maragret Eulalia (my Latin, English, and Home Room teacher) used to tell us that we must never say things like "I simply adore that dress" or "what an adorable baby." Why? Because only God was adorable and only God must be adored. Period.

Guess she didn't get that memo about worshiping the pope. ;-)

But seriously...did people ever actually teach such stuff? I find that rather hard to believe.

Diane

 
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