On Being Catholic

Peter Laurie wrote a little piece that I appreciated in something called "The Nation Newspaper" (I don't know what its pedigree is, but it's the news media, so who really cares when it comes to religion writing).

I liked Laurie's piece because it forms a nice example of apologetics of liberal Catholicism. I liked it in particular because such apologetics usually have two main features: a heartfelt, honest expression of self, and a bitter screed against the evils of the 'premodern' elements of Catholic tradition. And Laurie's piece is content to focus on the former.

The wonderful paradox of Catholicism is the eternal tension between orthodoxy and dissent. I live that paradox, filled as I am with certainty constantly beset by doubt.

Laurie is not really an innovator when it comes to seeking a public answer to the question: "If you dissent from the Catholic Church, why not just join a church that agrees with you?" I admit there is a certain temptation to wish that liberal Catholics would all do just that, clergy and laity alike; but that temptation really doesn't stem from charity and is probably at least a venial sin.

But there are, in fact, two questions that conservative Catholics have for liberals: the more common "why not join another another church?" and the rarer, "why not embrace the Spirit-inspired teachings of the Catholic Church?" The implicit modernity that lurks inside the souls of even us conservatives makes the first question is easier to ask than the second. We don't really believe that a liberal Catholic would--or even could--change his beliefs any more than we would change ours. If there is a cognitive dissonance that bothers us about liberal Catholics, we take the more prudential path toward resolution: inviting them to part company with us.

Perhaps that sometimes happens; liberals get fed up and leave, perhaps more often than they stay anonymously, or worse, become agents to "change the Church from the inside." But I really doubt that the invitation to leave is necessarily more effective than the invitation to convert would be if more Pope-believing Catholics had the cojones to ask it. And the reason I say that because the option to convert has an entirely different foundation than the option to stay, or leave the Church. The latter can be justified or argued based on comparing a series of pros and cons; authors like Peter Laurie and Gary Willis (Why I am a Catholic) and Fr. Andrew Greeley (The Catholic Imagination) can explain their continued loyalty by giving you a list of things they like. But the former, the option to convert, has one and only one foundation.

My son, the great scholars of the Torah with whom you have argued wasted their words on you; as you departed you laughed at them. They were unable to lay God and his Kingdom on the table before you, and neither can I. But think, my son, perhaps it is true. -M. Buber, quoted by Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, p. 46.

Perhaps I am taking this quote out of context; after all, Buber and Ratzinger are both addressing atheism, and I am only addressing the matter of Catholics who disagree on points they themselves consider small, even niggling. But I don't believe so. Liberalism is a kind of atheism; it is an atheism of the Church, it is the belief that God is absent from doctrine and that the Magisterium is not really the sacramental Head of the Body of Christ. And so to move from being a dissenting Catholic to an orthodox one I believe truly is a conversion; one more ultimate and radical, even, than Laurie's own conversion from atheism to liberal Catholicism. To be orthodox; to give up, finally, one's cherished right to disagree, and to see the formation of opinions to be itself within the realm moral culpability, is something that hangs on Faith, more than argument.

The only argument that some people would need, but perhaps are not receiving is: "Maybe it is true." Time, perhaps, to stop asking liberal Catholics to leave the Church.

Now I've already revealed a little bit of an extreme opinion. Yes I do believe that dissenting Catholics and orthodox Catholics are doing two essentially different things, different in kind and not just in degree.

Catholicmatch.com - a Catholic online dating service I confess to making use of since leaving the seminary - asks its new members to answer whether they believe seven 'controversial' doctrines. This allows members to find people of like values, if indeed this is important for them. A search criterion allows members to find matches that agree with "all", "most", or "some" doctrines.

What goes under the radar of most people is that there is potentially a world of difference between someone who follows "all" the teachings vs. someone who disagrees with even one. And that difference likely lies in the answer to the $64,000 inquiry, "why are you a Catholic?"

It is perfectly understandable that, given the cultural atmosphere, certain dissenting Catholics would feel the need to defend their association with the Catholic faith; a sort of apologia pro vita mea, albeit one whose most basic principles are different than Newman's classic. One shouldn't expect the answer to speak of salvation, for example. But we might expect a lovely litany of the natural goods of the Church.

Many things attracted me to Catholicism: its long history of intellectual and spiritual achievement; its spirited defence of the dignity and sanctity of life; its preferential option for the poor and vulnerable; and its rich liturgical culture.

I also liked that it's a church of sinners for sinners. It's not a church of the "elect" or of the "saved". Every day your relationship to God through Jesus begins anew.

It's also a church in the world and for the world, especially since the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). Catholics tend to be "worldly" in the best sense.

This Catholic outlook was beautifully summed up by Pope John XXIII in his opening address to Vatican II when, dismissing the Curial voices of gloom and doom who saw nothing but evil in the world, he urged the church to engage with the modern world, not in a spirit of condemnation, but in a spirit of compassion and joy.

Hope is an exemplary Catholic virtue; hope that human beings can rise above all intrinsic weakness and external shackles to build a society conducive to human flourishing.

I've also experienced in my travels the marvellous diversity within unity of Catholicism: the wonder of a Creole Mass in Haiti; the beauty of indigenous Masses and unique devotions to Mary in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

I'm choosing to live in the apartment I've selected because of its lush, forested scenery, the kindness of its managers, the reasonable rent, and the ideal location. But given these criteria, and the ones listed by Laurie (and Willis, and Greeley), I could as scarcely expect everybody to live in the same apartment as they could expect everybody to become Catholic. A mountain of natural goods does not a reason to convert make. This is what von Balthasar would call "Aestheticism" - the attempt to, or belief that one has succeeded in "reaching" God by means of an accumulation of natural beauties. At best a naive romanticism; at worst a presumptuous idolatry.

And thus my radical thesis: one who belongs to a religion because of a series of reasons has not, in the main, converted. (Incidentally, I include here those who incidentally agree with the magisterium on all things, and yet see these agreements as the substance of their Catholic identity).

I sound like I'm channeling Kierkegaard here. I'm really not, but I would like to move on to the main reason I started writing.

For me, as for most Catholics, the church is not a club you join. Catholicism is as much a way of life as a religion, even for someone, like me, not born into it.

Hence, despite the numerous scandals and crises that have beset the church, most Catholics steadfastly remain.

Hence, going to church for most of us is rarely an expression of piety. It's just something that Catholics do. The casual dress of churchgoers shows that it's not something apart from our everyday life. The Eucharist is the core of our faith.

People who know me know I love to dissect, and this here is one juicy slab of beef. As always, the first question one must ask is, "What, precisely, do you mean when you utter these words, 'way of life', 'club', 'expression of piety', 'not something apart from our everyday life', and 'core of our faith'.'?

Perhaps Laurie is making the Reform Jewish distinction between "orthodoxy" and "orthopraxy"; Catholicism is the business of going to church in your shorts and sandals, not an indicator of your opinions. Or maybe he is distinguishing between a pietistic, compartmentalized, hypocritical, aloof, "churchy" atmosphere, and a Catholicism which is, I'm sure he would agree, "integrated" into daily life.

Far be it from me to disparage the exalting of the ordinary. Daily life is the rich soil of sanctification - just ask any Opus Dei member. Moreover, I've witnessed my share of self-righteous "churchiness" to know that this is, in fact, a legitimate concern and one that should be shared by orthodox Catholics as much as liberals.

But somewhere in all the above "I-like-being-Catholicness" is an off-key note. What exactly does Laurie mean when he says that Catholicism is not a club?

Of course, those are words I can get behind. Catholicism isn't a club; it is not a "free association of like-minded individuals" gathered for a common purpose, nor is it exclusive in any a priori sense. As Francis Cardinal George once told an ecumenical meeting of Christian leaders, "To be perfectly honest, I want you all to be Catholic;" the same words could be legitimately said by any Catholic to the whole world. The only thing the Catholic faith excludes is sin, while embracing sinners. (there is a very catchy T-shirt slogan floating about, "Fear Only God; Hate Only Sin"; gotta get me one of those).

Yet somehow I gather that Laurie means something other than all of this. The "club" that he is repudiating is not the club of the "free association of like-minded individuals"; indeed, what he describes as his reasons for being Catholic sounds keen on precisely such a religiosity. No, the aspect of "club" that Laurie here rejects is the fact that clubs logically imply a distinction between members and non-members.

And here we see what "being Catholic" for Laurie really means. It means doing Catholic things. Just as building things makes one a carpenter, and stealing things makes one a thief, being a Catholics means going to church; "just something people do." Here Laurie follows the canon of liberal Catholicism par excellence: what makes one a Catholic is experience.

Blagh. This thing has devolved into a mess as the night winds down. Sorry.

Beckwith and Dawkins

Francis J. Beckwith wrote a First Things blog post, "On the Irrationality of Richard Dawkins," in which he argues that Dawkin's call for "reprimand and correction" against 'irrational' theists is itself irrational in the face of his own thoroughgoing atheism, since it contradicts Dawkins' readily-admitted denial of the ultimate existence of things like "duty" or "purpose".

As I read, I confess to being a little disappointed and bored with the argument. Let me play the honorary atheist here and pine that the entire post was a lengthy exercise in missing the point.

Dawkins, and I am sure most thoughtful atheists, are by now weary of the chorus of theists: "without God there cannot be anything like real meaning in life." For myself as a theist I would hope we would at least do our opponents the service of avoiding unnuanced choruses that, anyway, don't tell the atheists anything they don't already know. "The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference" (Dawkins in Scientific American, 1995). Of course he knows, and unless we're willing to get to the bottom of why Dawkins has no problem assigning moral duties to his intellectual peers, we haven't begun to speak to him.

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Atheists, as class, are not generally nihilists, and for most of them the Christian dichotomy between "ultimate life meaning" and "absolute meaninglessness" is a false option. There's a book on that very subject, as well as a collection of infidels.org essays. Bear in mind that by linking these things I am not endorsing them; I am only pointing out that we are past the point when the charge of nihilism can be made without elaboration or nuance. Atheists, for their part, believe they have already answered that charge.

For atheists, the key argument is that the Christian false dichotomy ignores the fact of non-ultimate meaning, and it is this non-ultimate meaning which atheists argue should be enough for anyone to live for. We are nothing but mammals after all; why should we bother about eternal things at all?

More later!

God the Heretic, Part Deux

Well, this thing is long, repetitive, boring, and still unfinished. Enjoy!

It seems as though the "choice" complicit in determining our beliefs is not so much a positive as a negative choice.

We do not actually choose what we believe; our beliefs are only the most consistent available terminations to the foreground of our thinking at a given time. We do not have direct, volitional access to change the content of our beliefs (they are, to use a computer-term, "read-only"). Of course, by "beliefs" I mean earnest beliefs, not statements (which can be lies) or self-deceit.

On self-deceit: Self-deceit seems to be the closest that one comes to changing one's belief by sheer act of the will. However it is still not direct. Recall that I defined beliefs as the most consistent available terminations to the *foreground* of our thinking. What people know and what they believe are not always consistent. Often, knowledges are present, but have either never been made explicit (perhaps they are very subtle, like the truths that Socrates would bring to birth in his interlocutors), or have been "forgotten" - which is not to say that they have disappeared, but they have receded from the foreground of thought. It is possible for us to wilfully forget things, whether they are subtle points or unpleasant facts. These can be pushed into the background of thought where they have no appreciable effect on conscious beliefs. This is done either by neglect of mental attention to those points, or exaggerated mental attention on a peripheral point that, isolated from its ugly cousin, yields a pleasant outcome. But note that self-deception appears always to be a filter. We do not add an untrue thought to our thinking; we let the knowledge of its falshood slide into obscurity.

But back to beliefs. Beliefs are the most consistent available terminations to the foreground of our thinking. They do not rest high above, aloof from throught, but rather make up a substantial portion *of* that thought (though thought is not simply a sequence of beliefs). Beliefs make up the soft boundaries of the thinkable; thus thought itself is not entirely accessible to the will. What part of it is?

To the extent that we have any control over our daily experiences and inputs, it seems that choice enters here. Like the food we eat, the influences that we imbibe can arrive on our doorstep according to circumstance, impulse or strict planning. Of course the extent to which individuals can do this is wildly variable, and socio-economic class is a strong factor--whether one has cable, Internet access, transportation, a public library, liesure, and the education to know what kinds of influences are where, is strictly beyond anyone's control; those who have these things didn't normally earn them or earn the tools necessary to earn them. Don't tell a destitute Guatemalan villager he can be anything he wants to be. Yet even among the wealthy the breadth of this choice is tightly constricted: there is a grave disparity between the conveniently available, little province of viewpoints that satisfies most in a given 1st world country, and an authentic breaking open of the intellect. Of course I don't mean to draw a line and put myself comfortably on the favorable side of it (though that may be a necessary consequence of merely writing about it). But there is a spectrum, and unfortunately it is precisely a part of the "lower end" of the spectrum that those who belong to it imagine themselves to be at the "upper end". The market couldn't function if it couldn't persuade the masses that they are Inspired Independent Intellectual Individuals (and persuade each that he or she is moreso than most).

Yet perhaps this is looking at it the wrong way. Certainly people have unequal access to the breadth of data generated by the human species in its recorded lifetime. But individually each life can be said to be confronted with every possible choice, irrespective of complex or simple circumstances. No civilization is without its quarrels, its traditions, its wisdoms and its foolishnesses. In one shape or another the entire range of meaningful associations is accessible to every person. Acadamia is elitist; but human meaning is absolutely egalitarian. So we must personalize the question: not what are one's influences, but who.

Our chosen associations affect our thought and thus our beliefs. But how, exactly? It is not necessarily true that one's friends are also one's teachers; as mentioned, Pascal may have played dice with the godless, but not with his belief in God. Shared beliefs are but one of the possible bonds of friendship. Yet still nobody is impermeable to undesired influences; we are "porous", and Scripture frequently warns of associating with non-believers.

I mentioned before that self-deception occurs through the neglect of true thoughts (and these not need be religious thoughts; we deceive ourselves about the simplest and most mundane things). The mind is a bit like quicksand; left alone, objects will sink beneath the surface and disappear. Of course they are still there, but you wouldn't know it simply by looking.

How long can a person sustain the presence of true thoughts in the foreground of the mind? Alone, it would depend on his or her discipline and fervor for truth; yet even religious hermits depend on periodic gatherings and reminders of the brilliant yet subtle nature of their call. How much more necessary, then, would good associations be for those who also maintained associations indifferent to truth?

Again, I make a clear distinction: the danger is not that truth-indifferent associations would put dangerous or untrue thoughts in one's mind (it is scarcely possible today to avoid exposure to untrue thoughts; intellectual provincialism I do not believe is the friend of Christian communities anymore, if it in fact ever was). It is rather that, analagous to the self-deceiver who exaggerates a peripheral thought to forget the deeper thought, truth-indifferent associations exaggerate the presence of peripheral and ephemeral ideas, of zeitgeists, and true thoughts can recede into the background of the mind if they are not brought forward again by good associations.

In short (too late!), it is not the associations that one has, but the associations that one lacks, that have the most profound effect on one's ability to have a breadth of views and truths always in the foreground of thought. The "choice" which is most relevant is not the choice for this or that association but the choice against.

OK, the next installation of this thing should finish it off. I know this essay is kind of weak; but I hope profound insights are forthcoming!

God the Heretic

Whenever I have come across the word "heresy" in my studies, whether in lectures or books, authors of all theological strains are usually at pains to remind us that the word comes from the Greek αἵρεσις, hairesis, meaning "to choose" (yes, I did CTRL+C those words, italics and all, from Wikipedia). The word "choice" has an almost magical effect on some wistful moderns, inspiring them to become serious and far-gazing, receiving in to their trembling hands the golden tongs of the salad bar of eternity, as they solemnly utter, "Gone is the sweet fable of the past, when Truth was given; now there are many truths, and I must choose." A single tear rolls down the modern face. Cue Oleander's "I Walk Alone".

Indeed, Peter Berger's "The Heretical Imperative" argued precisely this, that whatever one's religion--from traditional Christianity to Mahayana Buddhism, it is a chosen religion and cannot be otherwise. He then proceeds to go on about plausibility structures as if this could be cheerful news for Christianity. Viva la heresy.

A point of analytic philosophy, a mere whisper among the enthusiasm for choice, is: can anyone be said to choose their beliefs at all? That was one of the first criticisms I read when studying William James' famous essay, "The Will to Believe". The very notion of a "chosen belief" seems self-contradictory. Presumably if someone believes something, it is believed for some reason--whether good or bad, or whether well-articulated or not. If I were conscious of having a belief because I have chosen to have it; i.e., that it is born out of sheer will, then I cannot actually be said to believe it, can I? I cannot choose to believe something which I know, or think, is false. And if I don't know, I might have a hypothesis--but the very word implies that it is less (hypo) than a real belief (thesis). One can have entertain contradicting hypotheses; one cannot hold opposite beliefs. Choice alone does not a belief make.

In fact, I recall reading that William James himself acknowledged that this was the case, and suggested that his essay would have been better titled, "The Right to Believe". But that does not change James' point that, even if we do not directly choose our beliefs in the manner I described above, still, desires and beliefs are mixed up somehow. A hint as to how is the bit of text from the Pensees that follows the so-called "Pascal's Wager":

Go, then, and take holy water, and have masses said; belief will come and stupefy your scruples – Cela vous fera croire et vous abêtira.

Whereas some have accused Pascal of committing the error of "doxastic voluntarism", this single line actually vindicates him. Pascal never suggested that we choose our beliefs; we do not come to believe, rather, "belief will come." What we do choose is not our beliefs, but our surroundings, our influences--what we listen to, and what we do not listen to. In addition, it is notable, Pascal does not tell the reader what not to listen to, but suggests rather that one add to one's tributaries of influence one thing which might be lacking--exposure to worship. Pascal himself did not shy away from the company of his secularist peers; indeed, it was they, not he, who had constricted their scope of vision.

Blah, I've hit a block. I don't want to let this essaylet die; I do have a point. Need to take a break.

Indeterminate, overdeterminate?

In my Louvain philosophy days, I had the pleasure of taking a class, "Philosophy of God", by William Desmond, an unabashedly Catholic philosopher finely attuned to postmodern sensibilities and whose books bespeak an Irish poet's heart as much as they do a mind full of breadth and depth rivaling the Greeks. That might sound like a lot of blustering, but Desmond is something else. I'm not always certain that even he is always aware of the landscape of his own thoughts; he is not what one would call an analytic philosopher. But by golly, if an analytic philosopher had a problem with Desmond, it would be more like that he simply didn't understand, rather than that he would ever catch William in an actual contradiction. Sometimes I wonder whether Desmond has this in common with John Paul II--whether his writings contain the purest of truth like ore in a mine, too coarse and heavy for practical consumption, but if processed into convenient coins (such as Christopher West has done with "Theology of the Body", God bless him) would lose its more subtle value.

One of the distinctions Desmond made in the class, and that he makes in his books, is between speaking of God as "indeterminate" and as "overdeterminate". The error of speaking of God as "indeterminate" is the implication that the question of God languishes because of a hung jury and a certain poverty of evidence. One may easily--and positivists often do--speak of God as "indeterminate" in exactly the same voice with which they speak of aliens, the loch ness monster, big foot, and the living Elvis Presley. In fact, such indeterminacy is exactly the core of Richard Dawkins' atheism.

A friend, an intelligent lapsed Jew who observes the Sabbath for reasons of cultural solidarity, describes himself as a Tooth Fairy Agnostic. He will not call himself an atheist because it is in principle impossible to prove a negative. But "agnostic" on its own might suggest that he though God's existence or non-existence equally likely. In fact, though strictly agnostic about god, he considers God's existence no more probable than the Tooth Fairy's.

Bertrand Russell used a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars for the same didactic purpose. You have to be agnostic about the teapot, but that doesn't mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as being on all fours with its non-existence.

The list of things about which we strictly have to be agnostic doesn't stop at tooth fairies and celestial teapots. It is infinite. If you want to believe in a particular one of them -- teapots, unicorns, or tooth fairies, Thor or Yahweh -- the onus is on you to say why you believe in it. The onus is not on the rest of us to say why we do not. We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don't' have to bother saying so. *

Desmond grants, as any Christian grants, there is no determining of the question of God. Indeed, the very thought is a contradiction; de-termining, to have reached the end, the limit, the boundary; and having done so, speaking from that position. No doubt the word is very authoritative sounding. But to call something incidentally indeterminate is no great scandal. Science can't even determine whether redheads feel more pain or less pain than other people; it shouldn't arrogate to write a textbook on the Almighty.

Yet secularists of an evangelical strain see that the question of God is, as AJ Ayer would put it, nonsense in the most literal, and thus also the fuller meaning of that word. Theists, incidentally, agree. They just don't see why such niggling facts should stop them.

Anyway, the term "overdeterminate", as best as I understand, grants that God is nonsense, but takes a thoughtful stab as to why. It is not the "not-enoughness" of God, but the "too-muchness" of God. The intellect, like a man stranded on an island, dies equally from thirst as from a Tsunami. And it is precisely that God explodes so over-completely above and beyond and over, not only what we know, but what and why we are, that determinations are impossible, de jure.

To translate this analytically, the notion is really quite simple. Every science (in the broad sense of the word) is grounded by principles that lie outside of its purvue. Each science cannot question its own principle; it can only presuppose it. The historian cannot use the tools of history, no matter how vast they be, to examine whether history is true.

Well, extending this notion by analogy, the principle of everything is of its very nature outside of anything's ability to speak of it. Once we have gotten this far, there is nothing left in speakable nature to appeal to; nothing left available to pry the unspeakable loose from its awful necessity.

One might accuse me of saying too much about the thing I'm calling unspeakable, and to a certain extent they're right--I know as well as any theologian who takes the Thomistic oath that our words are offensive nonsense compared to God. But the thing about the unspeakable is that, for small systems as well as the System, the Universe as a whole, that the unspeakable is, is beyond question.

By conceiving God, who always exceeds our reach, as the horizon presupposed in the movement of knowing, freedom and love, Rahner provided a way for talking and thinking about God as "mysterious," that is to say, as a reality who is known, but only reflexively and indirectly—and perhaps not even consciously—as the ever receding horizon of the human spirit. *

So, Desmond's point is that God is as much the "ever advancing" horizon of the human spirit, as the "ever receding"; a horizon not so much as a line in the distance as the ground underneath our feet or the whatever beyond being and non-being. That is the over-determinacy of God.

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Yet what a friend of mine is mentally wrestling with right now is not so much the language of indeterminacy vs. overdeterminacy, as the business of the "hyper-real" of John Caputo.

For by allowing this name [of God] to fluctuate in all its undecidability and provocativeness, by releasing it from its servitude to being in order to free it as a promise, we free it from its service as the name of a res, even the most real of all real beings, but we do not deny thereby that it has any reference to reality at all. Rather, we enlist it in the service of a certain 'hyper-reality,' reality of the beyond, the reality of the hyper- or ueber. Accordingly, weak theology takes the form neither of theological realism nor of anti-realism, but of a magnifying hyper-realism of the event, one whose passion and existential intensity are correspondingly magnified by this very undecidability. By this hyper-realism I mean the excess of the promise, of the call, of the endless provocation of an event that calls us beyond ourselves, down unplotted paths and into unexplored lands, calling us to go where we cannot go, extending us beyond our reach. Hyper-reality reaches beyond the real to the not-yet-real, what eye has not yet seen nor ear yet heard, in the open-endedness of an uncontainable, unconstrictable, undeconstructible event. - "The Weakness of God, 11-12" Emphases mine.

My stomach needs to settle a little bit before I continue...

There.

If Caputo were making the relatively banal point that God is, in a certain sense, nothing; i.e., no-thing, (and is thereby released from "servitude to being"), this would be a nice intro to a 10th grade theology textbook. But for Caputo it is a crass superstition to suggest that God might ever reach beneath the beyond; even all of his works must be "freed" from the messy and mucky business of historically conditioned "being" (yuck!) He has a Buddhist reverence for the sheer Otherness of the Other, the "uncontainable, unconstrictable, undeconstructible event". And so, I suggest, Caputo makes himself even more pious than God; for it was always God, and never Caputo, who thought that being was worthwhile enough for divinity to inhabit.

What is not assumed is not redeemed; if God and God's works are quarantined by the "hyper-real", then the merely real has none of the hope that Caputo promises.

Thus today we stand somewhat baffled before this Christian "revelation" and wonder, especially when we compare it with the religiosity of Asia, whether it would not have been much simpler to believe in the Mysterious Eternal, entrusting ourself to it in longing [Caputoian?] thought; whether God would not have done better, so to speak, to leave us at an infinite distance; whether it would not really be easier to ascend out of the world and hear the eternally unfathomable secret in quiet contemplation than to give oneself up to the positivism of belief in one single figure and to set the salvation of man and of the world on the pinpoint, so to speak, of this one chance moment in history. - Ratzinger, "Introduction to Christianity" 55

Whether overdeterminate or indeterminate, the question Caputo refuses to ask or answer is whether the determinate - that is, us, our history, our particularity, our ordinariness - has a value of its own that God, the overdeterminate, has himself glorified in Jesus Christ. So far as this goes I believe it is not helpful to draw a sharp distinction between the Resurrection and the other miracles of Christ, as between the "important thing" and the "not so important things". All, together, are bound up in a singular mystery that the Infinite being not only permitted finite being to exist; Infinite being breaks into finite being. It does so in ways that certainly do not rob infinite being of its infinity (its hyper-reality), yet which do not leave finite beings unchanged or unsaved.

Believing in miracles is of one piece with believing in salvation. God bless the determinate.

Descartes' mistake...

It seems to me that there is a pretty obvious mistake in Descartes' method; it is not so much that he followed a process of radical doubt but that he didn't follow it consistently enough. Descartes made indubitability the starting point of thought. He made the perfectly valid observation that in every "Ego" there is a necessary "Ego sum;" this is not so much a logical deduction as a tautology (thus Descartes supposedly does not need to appeal to logic, which he has already doubted--but more on this later). But by elevating this "necessity" to a foundation of knowledge, Descartes commits an equivocation. Because while it necessarily follows from the "Ego" that "Ego sum", the "Ego" itself has no necessity. There is, in Descartes, a forgetfulness of the contingency of the self. An incidental "Ego" is confounded with a necessary "Ego," simply because from the "Ego" itself, certain necessary deductions are possible.

There may also be a wrench on the Cartesian gears buried in the fact that Descartes' "radical doubt" has structure; an odd feature for a method striving for univocity. He doesn't simply doubt everything at once; there is an order to doubt, and for some reason unexplained, the self is the last, i.e., the ultimate step in that order. Hierarchy is not exactly modernity's favorite heuristic scheme... yet one of the most profound foundations of modern thought seems built on a basically hierarchical conception of being and thought, with the intellectual soul standing on top as it ever was.

At the root of the inflation of "Ego Sum" is something common enough. Sometimes a method or an instrument of investigation obscures something but is mistakenly believed to reveal something. For example, a photo of the alleged Loch Ness Monster, with a dark something-or-other popping out of the water, is in all likelihood a smudge; an obscurity mistaken for a revelation. The tautology of "Ego" and "Ego sum" has pretensions of eternity and thus indubitable necessity, because allegedly, time itself has been "doubted". If only Kant's discovery, that time and space are not so easily discarded from thought, was retroactively applied to Descartes' discovery, the essentially time-rootedness of the "Sum" would have been discovered, and the "Ego" once again found to be contingent and hardly worthy as a foundation of knowledge.

The truth beneath the "Ego sum" is that even its status as a tautology has not liberated it from the structures of reason and logic as Descartes as hoped. If he had been consistent in his method, Descartes would have stopped writing after establishing the "Cartesian demon" and would have gone outside and started hitting people and screaming bloody murder. That is because it is impossible to isolate even something as simple as "Ego Sum" from the machinations of a deceiving demon or the vast perceptible, time-rooted world in which we find ourselves.

In short, it might be true that there is a tautology of "Ego" and "Ego Sum". But there is equally as much a tautology between "Ego Sum" and "Ego Sum Nunc." This wrenches the pretentious statement away from eternity and necessity and directs the radically doubting method away from the self and toward that upon which the self is contingent.

Some liturgy thoughts...

Things have been pretty slow in real life. My recent interviews didn't pan out; I have one more this week, this time for a job in a pet store, but I don't know if they'll be able to pay me what I'm looking for. But in the middle of the week, I'm driving out to my old seminary to clear out my room and sign the exit papers.

Some interesting news. The supposed motu propio granting universal permission for priests to celebrate Mass according to the 1962 missal may be coming very soon, at least according to this article. I can only celebrate if that happens. In the current atmosphere, I would be tempted to make a Tridentine rite parish my primary source of the sacraments, if one were offered in union with Rome. It might disappoint some of my friends to learn that I've become a little more of a "traditionalist" since coming back to Tucson. In fact, on an important level, I haven't. But this bears explaining.

Ideally, there should be no need whatever to bring back the Tridentine rite. Unlike many people who prefer to go to Tridentine Masses, I do not believe that the external reforms to the 1969 missal played the most important role in the decay of Catholic worship over the last forty years. Nothing Rome could have done in the 60's would have ultimately saved Catholic worship from the floodgates of modernism effectively erasing the category of "ritual worship" from western culture. The 1969 rite might have accelerated the decay; but ultimately I think we would be in the same place we are today even if Paul VI's Novus Ordo had never been promulgated.

Granted, I do believe that it's Sacrosanctum Concilium, and not the rite of 1969, that inadvertently opened the floodgates. This is not an indictment of S.C.; even those traditionalists who read the document rarely find fault with it. But it was S.C. which was surgically removed from the tradition and teaching of the Church and reconstituted by liberalism into a kind of magna carta of the desacralization of the Mass. It is my opinion that Catholic worship was doomed to decay by the secular history of the late 60's through today; but S.C. was pivotal for changing the nature of the decay. If S.C. had never been written, the decay which had already been occurring in the celebration of the Tridentine rite would have continued, and today we would have far fewer people going to Mass than we do, fewer people calling themselves Catholics, and a liturgy which was as perfunctory, functionalistic, and incomprehensible as it is now superficial, silly, and bland.

For the Catholic interested in worship of the Father that is real and not just pretend, religious and not just social, sacred and not just nice, the mainstream today is, I can say now unabashedly, a wasteland. But apart from the mainstream there are two parallel movements. I used to believe that these parallels were in competition with each other, but now I do not.

The first, and I think most important movement is what is commonly called the reform of the reform, and I think is most represented by the then-Cardinal Ratzinger's book Spirit of the Liturgy. This is the movement which affirms, and I believe rightly so, that Vatican II hasn't been implemented yet, with the exceptions of those liturgical bright-spots on the western landscape. The Brompton Oratory in London is one example (though even there one might accuse them of falling to a theatricalism whose only advantage is that it isn't folk music), as well as the chanted English liturgy of St. Meinrad Archabbey; or more on the 'old fashioned' side, the San Benedetto Monastery in Norcia, Italy.

The second movement is institutionalized implementation of John Paul II's motu propio Ecclesia Dei, embodied by noble organizations in communion with Rome like the Fraternity of St. Peter and the Institute of Christ the King, Sovereign Priest. In other words, a movement to restore, or to return as far as possible, to the rite of 1962.

There are a few important facts to note. For one, a return to the missal of 1962 is emphatically not a return to the state of the Church in 1962. Although Catholic communities that center on the Tridentine rite also reclaim a very traditional morality--a morality that might look over-scrupulous to even conservative Catholics--yet still their manner of celebrating the Mass is probably much different than it was forty years ago. It is tighter, slower, more reverent and knowledgeable of the meaning and origin of each element; in a word, more self-aware both on the part of the priest and the people, which is precisely what Sacrosanctum Concilium was aiming for in its call to "active participation." Those "traditionalists" whose "spirituality" consists largely of criticizing Vatican II would probably be surprised by how much their favored form of worship has benefited, indirectly, from Vatican II.

Two historical points might help explain why this is so; first, that the official suppression of the Tridentine rite has had the effect of embalming it. Some might consider this all the more reason for keeping the Tridentine rite down--its overt anachronism is all the more keen now that it been suppressed and revived within the lifetimes and memories of one generation. But, as one monk priest of mine has once said, "liturgy is supposed to be anachronistic." To desire a form of worship that is timeless is not to deny that that the Tridentine rite is as time-conditioned as its younger sister. But it certainly feels less time-conditioned than the 1969 reformed rite, particularly as the "Novus Ordo" is celebrated by priests still beholden to the historicist bias of their 70s/80s seminary educations.

Second, it is precisely the self-conscious and idiosyncratic character of communities focussed on the Tridentine rite which contributes to the deliberateness and the energy with which they worship. I have seen a forum post comment that this energy is "parasitic on the mainstream church", and there might be a grain of truth in that, especially of the case of schismatic groups that fuel their devotional furnace with the brittle plywood of self-righteous anger. But in the case of the others, there is a natural zeal that attends minority religiosity which is not a vice, but a natural aid to the salvation of many. This minority zeal is the same whether it accompanies a new, radical monastic order freshly approved by Rome or a lay ecclesial community--and it carries the same pitfalls of spiritual elitism and obscuritanism.

In this respect, I would rather hope that the Tridentine rite never becomes mainstream, not for any dislike of it but precisely because it would thereby be in danger of losing its peculiarly sacral character. I do not share the confidence of other traditionalists that the 1962 missal has an objective invincibility to corruption amid the world which is passing away.

As a seminarian I was opposed to reviving the Tridentine rite because I believed that the Church in America and the new generation of priests really ought to focus their attention on the reform of the reform; on the restoring of the Mass to its timeless dignity within the current, ordinary, universal Roman rite. I felt that the Tridentine rite was a distraction from the real task at hand, and that its advocacy implied the illegitimacy, or at least the irrelevance of Sacrosanctum Concilium, which I believe to be the work of the Holy Spirit. But at this stage I no longer believe these things. A few points.

• The "reform of the reform" is going to be more difficult if it has to take place in a void of liturgical excellence. Benedict XVI's ideal of liturgy, I believe, needs an ally against its powerful opponent--mainstream liturgical desacralization. The revival of the practice of the Tridentine rite could serve as a foil to the mainstream decadence, and spark the desire already latent in the laity for more worthy worship-forms. The "reform of the reform" would benefit from a parallel movement, not compete with it.
• The restoration of the 1962 missal via a universal indult would provide an immediate mercy to Catholics who are unable otherwise to enjoy Mass. Of course, such an indult would not result in Tridentine Masses popping up all over the landscape; there are dioceses so devoid of liturgical sense that it would take much time still for a handful of priests to train themselves in the Latin and ritual necessary to celebrate it correctly.
• As mentioned before, the way that the Tridentine Mass is celebrated nowadays has at least indirectly benefited from Sacrosanctum Concilium, and in many ways reflects the goals of Vatican II; this fact has deeply catechetical significance and should be made known to those who currently attend such Masses.

So anyway, I now favor a universal indult, and I have a new affection for the rite of 1962 itself. Hm. Some people reading this might think that I've fallen victim to a certain externalism--focussing too much on the external form of the liturgy. I assure my readers that this isn't so; although I do believe that external forms and internal dispositions are not such divergent matters as some presume. Maybe I'll post my little "liturgical manifesto" in full in the next post.