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.

Some thoughts on "28 Weeks Later"

Brother Thomas and I saw "28 Days Later" when it came out in Belgium a good year earlier than it was released in the United States. At that time it wasn't clear that we were watching a zombie movie until, well, the zombies showed up. I still remember then Gregory's reaction--"it was a freakin' zombie movie!"--since what had attracted us both to the film were the post-apocalyptic images of London, not the blood and guts of the second half of the film.

(Some time later, I got a kick out of making gutteral zombie throat noises in the dark hallway outside of our rooms, right in the ear of an unsuspecting Gregory. Ecgh! Ecchhhcg! Not the only time I played cruel jokes on him.)

I was excited to see 28 Weeks Later, upon seeing that the reviews were favorable. I have some thoughts (CAUTION: SPOILERS):

• The sequel is more predictable and Hollywood-ish than the first film. I knew, as soon as the story focused on a small group of survivors, that everybody was doomed except for the children and, perhaps, the attractive woman. I also knew that the upstanding, handsome American soldier would die in an act of heroic self-sacrifice.
• I focussed on the black chopper pilate to see whether this movie would kill him off. Mainstream movies still don't know what to do with black characters, so they either kill them off, make them into black stereotypes, or turn them into mysterious "gatekeeper" figures that, as such, do not require a personality). In truth, this movie did a little bit of all three.
• SPOILER: Twist ending was neat; a little tacked on, but actually makes me salivate for the third movie. It also dragged this movie out of sheer cliche-ness. Makes it a tragedy in the true Shakespearean sense, if you catch my drift.
• The most ubelievable part of the film was that they would even think about resettling the country less than a year after the disaster.
• SPOILER: Plot hole. The Rage virus is a blood pathogen. The infected wife kissing her husband (with no notable open wounds in either) shouldn't have turned him into a zombie.
• There's some screwy logic going into both movies about the nature of the zombies. The lore seems confused about their motivation. They're not actually hungry, since they don't actually eat their victims--they just bite, and bite somebody else, and bite somebody else. Hence how the infecteds died from starvation after the first film. If they were true cannibals, it would have taken the original infestation longer to die out than it did. It's as if the infected's "purpose" is neither mindless rage nor carnivorous hunger but simply spreading the disease. Some have commented on the strangeness that the infecteds do not attack each other; this may have less to do with intelligence or society (Ala Romero's recent zombie movie) than perhaps a kind of built-in repulsion between infecteds. They run in groups because they have common targets, no other reason. The hole in this theory is that (SPOILER) the infected husband attacked his infected wife. But that was different, perhaps, because his infected wife was just a carrier and thus may not have been emitting whatever repulsion is effective between infecteds.
• On a more relevant note, I do believe in angels and their fallen counterparts, and I have explored a notion that devils are in a sense just like spiritual "infecteds". Perfect Love, and Perfect Freedom, are IMO synonyms for God and they are synonyms for salvation. In the films, to be infected is to have your entire being possessed by a single purpose, destruction. There are important differences between devils and infecteds, but the key similarity is that their wills are entirely collapsed into hatred; they cannot not destroy. The key difference is that devils have freely forfeited their wills; and also that they hunger as much for self-destruction as for the destruction of others. The infecteds fail to be a stronger analogy just because of plot points in place to make the films scarier. But the fact that infecteds are still technically alive make them a curious analogue to the devils we see possess people in other movies and that we read about in books. To be evil is to be reduced to the barest thread of existence, and to hate even that thread. Despair turns to rage, and rage to murder. Murder and suicide are kin.

On a separate sheet, please address the following:

1. Explain what attracted you to the ministry of teaching.
2. Explain why you wish to teach in a Catholic school.
3. What do you think are the challenges for today's students?

For the last six years I have been a seminarian, and I imagined that I could follow my passion: learning and teaching about the Catholic faith. However my years in formation taught me that I did not want to sacrifice the depth of a dedicated teaching profession, for the breadth of ministries demanded of a parish priest. The Catholic Tradition is my first love. It is a bottomless well of wisdom; it is the key to a happiness which transcends all illusions, all weakness, and all failures. My love for teaching is not only the thrill of engaging a classroom. It is simply my confidence in the Holy Spirit's activity in the life of the Church, and I wish to share this Gift.

I hope to teach in a Catholic school to collaborate with others and help a generation become faith-filled, exceptional contributors to society. I know that Catholic schools are no shelters from the 'real world' but among the best preparations for it. Thus I would not teach religion as an obscure system of rules binding only on those who bear the name. Rather I would teach a truth which pierces the depths of each soul and manifests as a life different from the cynical, secular world; a life bound fast (re-ligata) to God.

Challenges facing high school students are legion, but I think that a single strand runs through them: the desire for autonomy. Perhaps teenagers do seek independence through non-conformity, but they also seek autonomy in a literal sense, that is, to "name oneself". This is the first time in people's lives when they begin to own their beliefs, and question beliefs that they are not ready to own. Because it is the first time, the sensation creates excitement and a demand for autonomy that maybe surpasses our own.

To desire that one's identity and beliefs be chosen rather than passively accepted, I believe, is a good thing. There is an implied desire for authenticity and integrity, i.e., that one's life ought not be guided by a jumble of unproven authorities, but rather by deep personal understanding. Even the rebel who declares, "you can't tell me what to believe!" implicitly demands that his or her beliefs have an inner unity and coherence. The guarding of one's ideas against unproven authorities is the hint of a desire for the unity of universal Truth, a deep desire fulfilled only in Jesus Christ. Understood this way, even the rebel can be a prophet.

What this means for me as a teacher is that my curricula have a hybrid foundation: on the one hand, Jesus Christ, God living and walking among us; and on the other, the questions of the students, and my conviction that all of these are bound up in truth and all Truth is bound up in Christ. My philosophy and theology background has enabled me to explain the lines of continuity drawing the most impassioned teenage values together with the wisdom of the ancient Fathers, the saints, philosophers, and the doctrine of faith. Concretely this means demonstrating the lines of connection between popular culture and ancient truth, such as when I discussed atheism in the context of James Frey's bestseller, "A Million Little Pieces," when I used the summer sci-fi movie "I, Robot" to talk about the Gospel of John and the hypostatic union.

There is nothing I enjoy more than eliciting the “aha” moment from students engaged in learning about our faith tradition, and I hope that, working in a Catholic school, I can be accorded many such opportunities.

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.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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.

Things I've been thinking about recently...

Possible future essays... no promises.

• Bigotry, homosexuality, and Church teaching.
• Descartes' mistake.
• ES IV: Oblivion, video games, and human motivation.

Homosexuality and bigotry

Right. General Pace says homosexual acts are immoral. Now everybody and their dog hates him.

It happened overnight, when everybody was asleep. Nobody announced it; there was never a constitutional amendment; it simply happened. There once was a time when one may have been able to believe that homosexual acts are immoral without being a bigot. Now, this is no longer true.

"Bigotry" as a vague and sentimentally super-charged notion, is one of the only things that western society can agree is inherently evil, though it knows not really why. Even the barest intimation of bigotry sets off a an involuntary reaction on a national scale, a bit like how I collapse choking after the smallest sip of spoiled coffee. In fact, in a society long enamored yet still afraid of her captor--modernity--it is not difficult to see how bigotry has come to be not only a sub-category of evil but its very essence. Let me lay it out.

When good and evil are judged only by the scientifically measurable scale of sociology, they are aligned no longer with the analogues of "order" and "chaos" as in antiquity, but rather with "less harm" and "more harm"--a happily quantifiable standard. Science knows nothing of violating a "nature"; it only knows of violating an "other".

Yet in spite of brute quantifiability of this new standard, the modern sense of violation is not primarily any physical violence (for after all, the willingness of Armin Meiwes' victim initially turned "murder" into "manslaughter", nevermind the calculated willingness of Meiwes nor the measurable deadness of the victim). More heinous than contradicting another's vital organs is contradicting their conscious will (while they are conscious, anyway).

How to reconcile the modern need for a scientifically measurable standard of good vs. evil and the quintessential modern value of self-determination, which itself cannot really be seen or measured?

Balthasar's Liturgical Aesthetic: Beauty and Glory in the Liturgy

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.

Great idea.

Just found this great little blog: The Mass of Vatican II. The fellow is arguing (with perhaps more strident language than I would use, and not with all valid arguments) that the reforms of the missal in 1965 and 1967 were authentic, organic developments based on the true spirit and letter of Vatican II, whereas the missal of 1969 was not.