Being in two places at once: Plotinus and Augustine

One of the odd -yet regular- aspects of Catholicism is that one finds oneself in two levels of existence at once. One exists in a Church that has been responsible for some of the highest flights of intellect and art; one finds oneself in a Church surrounded apparently by the work of five years olds. Byrd wrote Mass settings for our Church; the Praise Band warbles on accompanied by a kazoo...

And so, for the Ascension Day Mass yesterday, I find myself in a rather ill-judged 1970s' building, listening to a priest with a tendency to the folksy. But he has obviously said his Office of Readings today because there is a strong reminder of Augustine in the homily:

Today our Lord Jesus Christ ascended into heaven; let our hearts ascend with him. Listen to the words of the Apostle: If you have risen with Christ, set your hearts on the things that are above where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God; seek the things that are above, not the things that are on earth. For just as he remained with us even after his ascension, so we too are already in heaven with him... 

Why do we on earth not strive to find rest with him in heaven even now, through the faith,  hope and love that unites us to him? While in heaven he is also with us; and we while on earth are with him...

[From today's Office of Readings: attributed to a sermon by Saint Augustine]

 

It's odd, sitting there in fairly unprepossessing surroundings, but hearing something which touches on a theme which runs through Plotinus: the soul's dwelling at the same time with the Divine but also on the earth (from the Mckenna translation here):

  

Many times it has happened : Lifted out of the body into myself ; becoming external to all other things and self-encentered ; beholding a marvellous beauty ; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order ; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine ; stationing within It by having attained that activity...yet, there comes the moment of descent from intellection to reasoning, and after that sojourn in the divine, I ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending, and how did the soul ever enter into my body, the soul which, even within the body, is the high thing it has shown itself to be.

[Plotinus Enneads IV.8.1]

The entity, therefore, described as "consisting of the undivided soul and of the soul divided among bodies," contains a soul which is at once above and below, attached to the Supreme and yet reaching down to this sphere, like a radius from a centre. Thus it is that, entering this realm, it possesses still the vision inherent to that superior phase in virtue of which it unchangingly maintains its integral nature. Even here it is not exclusively the partible soul: it is still the impartible as well: what in it knows partition is parted without partibility; undivided as giving itself to the entire body, a whole to a whole, it is divided as being effective in every part.

[Plotinus Enneads IV. 1]

I'm sure the Dawkins brigade will sneer at ancient myth; I'm sure evangelicals will mutter about how the Catholic Church looks to Athens far more than it does Jerusalem. Well, so much the worse for them: this splitness of the human is as clear a fact of human experience as anything else and we should be talking about it. And, indeed: here we are, talking about it. A very ordinary, predominantly working class parish, with its priest talking about the way we live both with God in heaven and yet in time.

Catholics -well, I- don't deserve Catholicism. We squabble; we create ugliness; we're smug. If we can get through this generation without having completely destroyed the Church, it sometimes seems that would be achievement enough. That is indeed one of our main tasks: if we cannot appreciate Catholicism, not to destroy it for future generations who may be a better audience than we are. And yet, perhaps even for us, the occasional glimpse of our true life at  'rest with him in heaven even now'.

A belated happy Ascension Day!

 

 

 

 

Rosary on the Coast: This Sunday!

Rosary on the Coast
for Faith, Life and Peace in the British Isles

Sunday 29 April 2018 at 3pm

Website: https://www.rosaryonthecoast.co.uk/

 

Lots of locations already planned! (Website has a map.)

 

The website carries many endorsements from our bishops including this from Bishop John Keenan:

 

 

Please join in if you possibly can and please publicize this.

Conservative Catholics and Traditionalist Catholics

The excellent Father Hugh has recently blogged about the differences between conservatives and traditionalists in the Church with, roughly, the conclusion that conservative Catholics are rather on the way out and traditionalists on the way in.

Part of the post is, I suspect, a little teasing: by describing the progressives of The Tablet as 'conservative', we can all enjoy imagining scenes of seventy year old secularised priests in Hampstead reaching for their smelling salts. But there is also a serious point that those who wish to conserve a corrupt and failing order are both part of that corruption and doomed to fail, whilst those radical traditionalists who return to the strong roots of our Church have a viable alternative to present failings.

I've touched on this issue before but Father Hugh's post prompts me to have another go at it. Part of the problem here is a necessary ground clearing of definitions. Immediately, we can dismiss the idea that being a Conservative (party supporter) necessarily makes you a conservative: certainly in Scotland, Conservatives are loudly proclaiming they are progressives. Moreover, it is not the case that conservatism in politics is a neat match for conservatism in Catholicism, any more than traditionalism in the Church is, I would hope, a neat match for Traditionalism in the wider world. But since I attend an Ordinary Form Mass, am sceptical about the claims of self-identified traditionalists such as Father Hugh, and would be extremely surprised to learn that I am a progressive, I guess that makes me a conservative. So how do I defend myself?

Let's start with Russell Kirk on conservatism:

Perhaps it would be well, most of the time, to use this word "conservative" as an adjective chiefly. For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.
The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata. It is almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such. The conservative movement or body of opinion can accommodate a considerable diversity of views on a good many subjects, there being no Test Act or Thirty-Nine Articles of the conservative creed.

In essence, the conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night. (Yet conservatives know, with Burke, that healthy "change is the means of our preservation.") A people's historic continuity of experience, says the conservative, offers a guide to policy far better than the abstract designs of coffee-house philosophers. But of course there is more to the conservative persuasion than this general attitude.

Now, I suppose from this that I'd be tempted to describe traditionalists as those who do have an ideology, those (to quote Father Hugh) 'radical Catholics who look to the unchanging essence of the Faith'. But that won't quite do because, in the Church, a conservative, like all Catholics, is committed to 'the essence of the Faith': to the Catechism, the teaching of the Doctors of the Church, the Creeds, the Magisterium etc. The dispute there isn't between conservatives and traditionalists but between Catholics and heretics (or, more charitably, between the fullness of the Catholic Faith and whatever poor sinners can manage to make of it in their short, earthly lives). But the ideology, or vision of the traditionalist Catholic seems centred on restoring pre-Vatican II standards of liturgy (presumably, with pre-Vatican II intellectual and spiritual formation as well:

Of course, it is true that it is more than the liturgical reforms that led to the mass exodus from the pews, the seminaries and the convents. The liturgical reforms are arguably only the most immediately visible element of the wider reform agenda that was implemented. Yet without the liturgy that had been the rock of stability and Catholic identity throughout nearly two millennia of incredible social, political, economic and technological change, there was no safe place left for so many people to stand their ground and dispassionately assess the changes in society. With the liturgy having become less distinct from the world, and indeed often incorporating the worst of secular banalities in music, symbols and gestures, what was the point of the liturgy any more? If it is just another socially-contingent construct, then it could be embraced or forsaken according to taste.
Yet the new conservatives, as any reader of The Tablet will know, cling doggedly and defiantly to their post-conciliar vision of the Church, ever more shrill in shouting down those who dare to say that their emperor has no clothes. (Father Hugh here)

I think this is a profound difference between a conservative and a traditionalist Catholic. Speaking personally, whilst I am very happy to criticise the 'worst of secular banalities in music, symbols and gestures' that I quite regularly experience, I am much less willing to focus entirely on the Spirit of Vatican II let alone Vatican II itself as the cause of problems in the Church. It is perfectly possible, for example, to imagine an English language liturgy, even with the priest facing ad populum, with common-or-garden (often Protestant) hymns such as those by Wesley or Watts, done with dignity. (Indeed, that's not so very far away from many Ordinary Form Masses I've attended.) Since both vernacular liturgies, ad populum and 'folk' traditions in Church music (and can get more of a folk tradition in British music than Wesley?) are examples of the Spirit of Vatican II, I suppose that means I'm possessed by that Spirit. Frankly, I don't think that the banalities which are a feature of modern Church life are the main problem here: whether we had an Extraordinary Form Mass as the norm or simply screened out some of the nuttier abuses of good taste in the Ordinary Form, I doubt whether numbers of practising Catholics would be significantly changed. (It would take too long to argue this fully here -indeed, I doubt whether I could even I had the time- but essentially the process of secularisation in Western Europe is a process that is far bigger than Vatican II and has affected most religious communities regardless of whether or not they have a traditional liturgy. Crudely, when I was an Anglican, there was a similar tension between those who valued the traditional language of the Prayer Book and those who didn't. Neither group was particularly thriving despite their claims to be the future. It's always seem odd to me how much Catholic discussion of secularisation focuses on Vatican II and ignores the academic discussion of the wider process. From that perspective, it seems hard to understand how a greater emphasis on a traditional liturgy or formation would have much effect on the process.)

A characteristically conservative response here is epistemic humility. We don't fully understand the processes of secularisation; we have even less of an idea of what to do about them. I'm perfectly delighted that bodies such as the Latin Mass Society have a mission and a drive: I genuinely wish them all the best -and it is indeed possible that they might be right. (My suspicions -and indeed general thoughts on the importance of letting different approaches make an attempt- are similar to these.) But, being a conservative, I'm suspicious of ideology and certainty. I'm particularly suspicious of words like 'radical' or 'ressourcement' because the root to which we return is always that of our current, warped imaginings: indeed, the Spirit of Vatican II itself is very largely a result of a 1950s/1960s attempt to get back to the essence of Catholicism, a stripping away of medieval accretions to find the essence of tradition ('swing those pants, patres!').

Another conservative response is what I'll style 'Augustinian grumbling': given a conservative emphasis on the imperfectability of the human situation, part of the normal human task is to put up with it. It's salutary to ask yourself when, where would be a better time to be a Catholic? For one in Scotland, it's hard to think of a time, certainly in the last 500 years or so, when life was better for us. That doesn't mean that secularisation isn't a problem to be faced and even fought, but it does mean that our forebears faced worse challenges without (some of them at least) giving up.

Finally, there's the St John Paul the Great problem. For many of us, he was the Pope who brought us into the Church or who sketched out a vision of how the Church should resist secularism. But he was also a Pope closely identified with Vatican II and not so much traditionalism as conservatism. (I'd argue that his phenomenological approach is very much part of Vatican II's central turn to subjectivity in the engagement with modernity -but that for another lifetime perhaps.) For me, his conservative 'style' seems more likely to be a successful strategy than a more obviously traditionalist one: an approach which does not reject the past, nor sees an essence simply to be preserved in it, but rather a Burkean sense of organic growth:

In his speeches and writings, he [Burke] articulated the concept of an organic society: a social order that is sacred, natural, historical and traditional. He believed that social change was best achieved when eschewing abstract thought divorced from experience; instead, he favored renewal of the polity in harmony with a regard for individual liberty, respect for the accumulated wisdom within existing institutions and a concern for the greater good of the community. His political theory can best be summarized by his most famous phrase: "Society is a contract between the past, the present and those yet unborn."  [Here]

Again, this requires a warning against simply reading political conservatism into Catholic conservatism: the Catholic Church preserves a Deposit of Faith which cannot change. But how that deposit is realised in modernity is something that does require change, not just the imagining of a past concrete form and an attempt to restore it. (Although, it is perfectly possible that, sometimes, simple restoration is the right answer: it is perhaps instructive here to think on the restoration of Gothic forms by Pugin and his followers.)

In fine, part of this is mere semantics. It is a conservative thing (just not the only conservative thing) to be fond of the Latin Mass and to find strength in the past. No conservative can live in modernity without some articulation of theory and principles which will smack, just a little, of an ideology. The characteristic passivity of conservatism does need to be supplemented by a little thumos from time to time. And in all these things, the conservative may find himself shading into a traditionalist or even a progressivist. But if there is a difference between conservatism and traditionalism, it is best summarised thus. Conservative will be fond of the familiar, both in terms of what they have experienced, but also in terms of the family and the immediate. He will also be suspicious of plans and programmes, and with all the certainties of this or that day's analysis. He will value highly civic and ecclesiastical peace. Finally, he will regard himself as living in a mystery greater than he: something that can be glimpsed only partially and where he is primarily dependent on God rather than his own actions.

Not enough to stop the decline into secularism, says the traditionalist and the progressive and the personality with a book to sell. Fair enough. Go ahead and try your way. But where is the evidence that it will work any better? (And to pre-empt one point, growth in some congregations is not evidence of a technique that will work to reverse secularisation in general. (We can all attract fanboys.) And it's that more general question that I'm really interested in.)

The Benedict Option: Prolegomena to any future blogpost that will be able to present itself as a review

I've been putting off tackling The Benedict Option . It's been sitting next to my bed since publication and frankly I'm a little scared at having to read and then comment on it. Anyway, procrastination away! After having finished this post, I shall tackle it and report thereon.

This resolution is in part to do with a Twitter discussion that's been going on for a little while in the Catholic UK blogosphere about the new Catholic Education Service's guidance on LGBTQIIAA+ matters. (Countercultural Father here and Joseph Shaw here give a flavour of the report and the debate.) I simply don't have enough detailed expertise in either English education or the legal/regulatory framework on such matters to get too involved in this. The pressure to adopt the Time for Inclusive Education framework will undoubtedly hit us in Scotland with similar issues shortly. But I did leap in with an expression of sympathy for the dilemma faced by the Catholic Education Service: how to deal with a cultural (and legal etc) environment that frames the discussion and sets out questions to be answered in a way that does not sit easily with Catholic understandings of anthropology, and where that discussion seems to be entirely controlled by LGBTQIIAA+ pressure groups such as Stonewall.

This issue seems to me to be very much at the centre of Dreher's concerns: how an authentically Christian life can be lived out in an environment which is becoming hostile to Christianity. (That doesn't necessarily mean persecution, but it does mean (eg) that expressions of the sinfulness of homosexual sex are no longer 'acceptable' and even in some environments legal.) His solution -well, to be considered!- but the essence is clearly some sort of strategic withdrawal into a more thoroughgoingly Christian space than that offered by a secularising society.

Anyhow, I'm a great believer in Collingwood's idea that you should approach an (archaeological) investigation with questions to be answered rather than just digging around at random. Accordingly, I set out below some of the issues I'm going into this investigation with to see if I can sort them out.

1. Modesty of ambition. One of the reasons I've been so reluctant to tackle the book is that I worry there'll be nothing new there. At various times, I've read quite deeply in the literature surrounding secularisation theory and Stanley Hauerwas so I'm familiar with the difficulties that Christians face in modernity and suggestions about how they should form authentically Christian communities. Dreher's work is short (less than 75000 words I believe) and written by a journalist. So I want to find out: what does it offer that's new? (My suspicion is that it's going to provide some interesting insights into some modern ways of concretely living out Christianity. But it has also provided a 'buzz' around this important issue, and that's a good thing I suspect: we need to be thinking about this more.)

2. Specificity of tradition. Dreher is Orthodox, but the book seems to cover 'mere Christianity' without much worry about denominational differences. I want to see whether this helps or hinders his message. (My suspicion here is that we need to dig deeply into our specific traditions. Catholicism isn't Orthodoxy and neither are Evangelical Protestantism. I would expect the problems and solutions facing each tradition to be different.)

3. Outreach to the non-saints. My main worry is the apparent focus on the gathered saints (or at least saints in making). Catholicism has been a religion of saints doing their best to save a lot of sinners despite themselves. I want to find out: how does Dreher suggest that the 'Benedict' communities reach out to people who are not focused on being saints, but who might just get dragged to purgatory with the grace of sacraments?

4. Finally, inter-community structures and practices. Three things that have really had an impact on my religious life are EWTN, the internet and the Catechism. None of these seem easily into the model of a Benedictine community which is at the heart of the analogy. So I want to know: does Dreher's analysis do justice to the ways in which part of the response to the fluidity of modernity is, to borrow from Evola, 'to ride the tiger' rather than run away from it?

As a final point, part of my reluctance is that I want to like the book and I'm afraid I won't. Inasmuch as one can like a public persona, I do like Rod Dreher: he seems like an honest man trying to do honest things. That's difficult to reconcile with the need in the American religious market to become a personal brand; but although I worry that I should probably be spending the time I'm going to spend on the Benedict Option on Duns Scotus and Suarez, he does seem to be trying to deal with an important issue with integrity, and I want to be able to respect and indeed praise him for that.

No doubt other things will emerge. But that's what I'm aiming to get at just now. Wish me luck: I'm going in....

Amoris laetitia and the flight of the alone to the alone

                                                       Sancte Blimp, ora pro nobis


I enjoyed (both as substantive advice and paradoxical non-silence) Artur Rosman's blogpost 'Have you tried shutting up?' It sums up much of what I feel about the current state of affairs in many areas: too much chatter to too little purpose. But still. One cannot always be wise.

There has been a little flow of Catholic commentary along the lines of 'the current crisis over Amoris Laetitia shows how great Catholic traditionalism is and how conservative (non-traditionalist) Catholics now need to stop sitting on various fences and stop trying to square the circle of reconciling the modern Church with traditional, orthodox Catholicism'.

To even set up this question requires a firm distinction between conservative Catholicism and traditionalist Catholicism. The most obvious difference (and possibly in the end the only one) is the acceptance of the Ordinary Form of the Mass: I count as a conservative Catholic because I attend the Ordinary Form; another counts as a Traditionalist because she or he attends the Extraordinary Form, the Latin Mass. 

I'm not quite sure about this. It's hard to imagine a genuine conservative who would be hostile to the Latin Mass. I think I've made clear before that I don't think returning to the pre-Vatican II mass is the answer to Church decline, but I'm not at all hostile to the thought that it might help. And in any case, I'm perfectly happy for anyone who wishes to try this: it may well be part of an answer. My reasons for not regularly attending the Extraordinary Form of the Mass are more about loyalty to my existing parish, familiarity, not wishing to separate myself from the majority of Catholics and just being a little sceptical about anything which claims to be simply better. There is probably also a lingering sense, from my Anglican days and from my days as a literate Atheist, that religion can be done perfectly well in English and has been so far as literary quality is concerned. All these strike me as perfectly sensible and recognisable conservative reactions.

Added to that, there is a conservative horror at unrest and murmuring against hierarchy. Whatever else might be said about current reactions to Amoris Laetitia, I find it difficult to see how engendering an attitude of disloyalty to bishops and the papacy is going to help the Church in the long run. Conservatives ought to be well aware at the unavoidable frailties of human hierarchies whatever divine assistance they might receive. But the difference between the ancients and the moderns is that the ancients knew how to live with the necessary absurdities of hierarchies whilst the moderns do not. Moreover, whatever might be said about popes, bishops and priests is, in the end, mostly about a lack of effective action to save the laity from itself. Whatever wild and wacky ideas may be found in the teaching hierarchy of the Church, they are considerably fewer than the wild and wacky ideas found in the laity.

So when I see ill-tempered attacks on the papacy and hierarchy due to Amoris Laetitia and how various local bishops are interpreting it, my general reaction is that the ill-temper is harmful, that we need all to remember the difference between an attack and well-intentioned criticism, and that whatever the faults of Amoris Laetitia, they are mostly those of lacks which, if, as we travel down the pyramid of authority in the Church, were they not met by greater failings in those receiving the document, would have few if any ill effects.

Let's take the latest interpretation from the Maltese bishops for example:

In a new document, Criteria for the Application of Chapter VIII of Amoris Laetitia, the bishops say that if “a separated or divorced person who is living in a new relationship manages, with an informed and enlightened conscience, to acknowledge and believe that he or she are [sic] at peace with God, he or she cannot be precluded from participating in the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist”.

Now if we were dealing with a traditionally formed laity, that might be interpreted something like this:

If you can twist your own conscience into deluding yourself you can take communion in an adulterous relationship, then there's very little in practice we can do to stop you. But do remember the following:

Wherefore whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink this cup of the Lord, unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup. For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord's body.

1 Corinthians 11:27-29 KJV

Let me make it absolutely clear: I regret the lack of clarity which allows Amoris Laetitia to be interpreted as allowing communion to those who have been civilly 'divorced' and 'remarried'. But that lack of clarity is only really dangerous because existing lay and clerical Catholic life is as lax as it is and has been for a while. The past few popes have been seen as bulwarks against the waves of infidelity which have been crashing on decks for a while. If that particular defence is less effective at the moment than it might have been, the main problem is the waves, not the defences (which, whatever the intentions, have not been very effective in their results in the past anyway).

Here's another aspect of the conservative as opposed to Traditionalist approach. Vatican II might be seen as the acceptance of the subjective turn into mainstream Catholic life. It might also be seen as advocating a greater role for the laity. Both of those might be regarded as part of a conservative mood which values individualism and is sceptical of the effectiveness of centralised power. If 'Traditional' Catholicism suffered from externally imposed rules, 'conservative' Catholicism fully accepts that strand of conservative thinking that endorses Plotinus' view of life as the flight of the Alone to the Alone, the individual soul to God. If marriage is to be saved, and adultery to be avoided, in the end, it is only the well formed conscience of the laity that can do that.

And this leads me, finally, to some well intentioned criticism of my own about Amoris Laetitia and its 'progressive' interpreters. In the end, what matters most is sin, not admission to communion. Teaching on marriage and divorce should not be primarily about creating a pastoral process where a priest leads a parishioner to retake to sacraments, but to a sinner's exploration of conscience sometimes, but not usually with a priest. (Really, how likely is this in depth 'pastoral process' going to be in the realities of modern parish life? Unless the laity are equipped to take it seriously for themselves, sprinkling on a few minutes with a priest every couple of weeks is not going to turn thjs into deep reflection.) And here, clarity of reasoning does matter, because that is an important part of how the sinner is going to reflect.

In that light, the important questions are going to start with: Am I still married? Amoris Laetitia seems to rather fudge this. If I am still married to X, but am now in a (sort of conjugal) relationship with Y, being admitted to communion is the least of my problems. If I am still married, then I have responsibilities to X and am in a less than ideal situation (to put it at its least) with Y. Taking communion will not relieve me of these realities. Say, for example, that after ten years of receiving the 'mercy' of communion, I see a way of breaking up with Y. Should I take it? (Do we need another pastoral process to discern this?) If, having lived apart from X, I meet Y for the first time, should I resist my attraction to him? (Whether or not I might be able to receive communion eventually is surely a secondary question to whether or not pressing forward with that attraction is going to lead to some sort of sinful result.)

Does the matter of my reflection in these circumstances still rest on two principles: that marriage can not be dissolved and that sex outside marriage is wrong? If it doesn't, what should I be reflecting on instead? Proper responsible discernment requires this sort of precise, philosophical self-questioning. Instead of encouraging that and a responsible, reflective and (taken properly) autonomous laity, we seem to have a sort of slot machine clericalism where the primary issue is no longer right or wrong action and a proper understanding of marriage, but rather getting the sacraments and getting the priest to tell you it's fine (although you might be quite hard put to explain precisely why it is fine, except that it 'feels right' and Father Fred agrees).

Pierre Manent Mercredi (7): reconciling human experience with religion

From Le Regard Politique, my translation. (The English version of the work is Seeing Things Politically.)

Those works which successfully combine a faithfulness to human experience with a religious perspective are rare. Or, to be exact, in my opinion. there is only one work, only one text in which the two perspectives are strangely, paradoxically reconciled. Unsurprisingly it's the Bible, especially the Old Testament in which you get, at the same time, directly and immediately, human experience in its ignorance of God, and yet also, mysteriously, a presence of God which does not suppress or cover up the authenticity of that experience. The text of the Psalms especially is shocking because, in a chaotic and popular language, it maintains a balance that only the greatest spiritual masters of religion can maintain so perfectly: it is a text where human beings at the same time complain, scream, protest, want to kill their enemies, are afraid of death, are sick, and yet, also, mysteriously, there is an experience of of something which is radically different from any human experience but which does not prevent this human experience from being lived and described in all its truth, in all its nudity.

(p.88)

My commentary:

Manent emphasises here a characteristic position: a refusal of an easy reconciliation between different perspectives. (He talks elsewhere of living within a tension between religious, political and philosophical perspectives.) There is an echo here of twentieth century theological debates on natura pura: roughly, whether there is a sharp division between a (philosophical) perspective on nature uninformed by revelation and a theological perspective informed by revelation. (My sympathies are with the defenders of a concept of natura pura for what it's worth.)

Gilead and Marilynne Robinson

I'm a bit of a sucker for that sort of high end American intellectual life (think Frasier without the jokes) where everyone appears terribly mature and balanced and to have been brought up surrounded by old oak and nourished on good bourbon.

I'm currently about half way through Gilead, Marilynne Robinson's much praised novel about this wise old small town pastor reminiscing about his life. Everyone seems to like it, I like it, and I haven't finished it (so there is always the possibility of an alien abduction enlivening things a bit later on) but...

Robinson has been much praised for restoring a vision of how religion can survive (indeed, should survive) in modernity. I think it's probably fair to describe that vision as one of providing a space for critical reflection on the everyday. (The narration in Gilead is retrospective, changing nothing in the life, but adding depth and complexity as the everyday is reflected on and retold.) From reading Robinson's interviews and critical reviews of her work, that impression seems not far from her intention:

Psalm 122 is, you could say, the theme song of this vision, and it is a vision that prompts Robinson to a ferocious critique of the abstractions of ideology - including "austerity" as an imperative to save the world for capitalism. She offers a striking diagnosis of the corrupting effect of rationalism: rationalism as she defines it is the attempt to get the world to fit the theory; and because the world is never going to fit the theory, the end-product of rationalist strategies is always panic.
"Rationalism is the omnium-gatherum of resentment and foreboding", whereas reasonableness is interested in "things as they come". The economic crisis is, in this sense, the nemesis of one kind of rationalism, oblivious of the actual complexity of people's motivation.
Where do we find the reasonable rather than the rationalistic? Above all, in the various ways in which we are educated in "imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly"; in a broadly conceived, long-term commitment to building this kind of loving understanding - in fact, in what has often been called a "liberal education". [Rowan Williams here.]

Robinson: I do. That’s what I do. But it rationalizes my lecturing, too. But fear was very much—is on my mind, because I think that the basis of democracy is the willingness to assume well about other people.
You have to assume that basically people want to do the right thing. I think that you can look around society and see that basically people do the right thing. But when people begin to make these conspiracy theories and so on, that make it seem as if what is apparently good is in fact sinister, they never accept the argument that is made for a position that they don’t agree with—you know?

[Robinson in conversation with President Obama here]

Quite apart from my 'Frasier' fetish, I find this all very attractive on one level: reasonable people, thinking the best of each other, and trying to find and promote the good in small communities. Unfortunately, it just strikes me as profoundly unCatholic and only superficially human.

My reaction to this is perhaps not being helped by my currently reading Russell Kirk's Ancestral Shadows. Whilst sharing an affection for small town American life with Robinson, Kirk's vision is rather more likely to end up with an axe wielding revenant than with mature contentment. (And you could add Flannery O'Connor to that as well. Or Walker Percy's physically satisfied moderns who decide to chew their own limbs off rather than suffer the boredom of their secularised lives.) I suppose, unsurprisingly, that Robinson's vision of serious reasonableness is very hard to reconcile with the medieval and Catholic universe of demons and gnashing of teeth. Indeed, it is a reminder of just how much Robinson's Calvinism is essentially an anti-Catholicism, a reasonableness defined as being an escape from medieval superstition and hysteria.

Robinson's Calvinism covers up much of what it is to be human. Although I despise most of what has happened to popular culture since the 1950s, the search for ecstasy through sex n drugs n rock and roll is utterly human and a shadowy tribute to the human desire for a supernatural end. Gilead has little place for the burning ecstasy of the saints or of Jimi Hendrix.

It also has little place for the demonic or the ancestral shadow of original sin. Most serious Catholics I know tend to be very clear about their own unworthiness. They are usually very conscious about their need for the mercy of grace and how little they deserve it. Oddly, in view of Calvinism's debt to Augustine, there is much more of a sense in Catholicism of the essential imperfection of the Earthly City and our final home being with God, rather than with a good bourbon in front of PBS, natural goods though these undoubtedly are.

Perhaps the Robinsonian vision is the correct one. Perhaps we are all reasonable people, striving with good hearts towards a progressive future. I'm afraid I tend to see as well as goodness, the irruption of the lust for domination into all of human life, the dumb certainty that this small creature has it right, and that if only everyone else were as reasonable, everything would be fine. (And with a little, forceful encouragement, it will be.) At the centre of Robinson's Calvinism is the sermon and the self-reflective community:

What do you personally get out of going to church?
I have gone to the same church for more than 20 years. It is my village, so to speak. I see children come into the world and elders pass out of it, and I see lives unfold around me. That is a little part of it. Then I have occasion, rare in the world, to hear a good and learned man say something he takes to be true, to a congregation listening in good faith for whatever truth he has to offer. Finally, I think differently, otherwise, in that place than I do anywhere else. It is as if I can put the world and myself aside for an hour and hear and think more purely. [Here]

These are not bad things. But a Catholic goes to Church essentially to have something burst into a community from outside it  through the Mass. Hopkins' lines

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

whilst certainly celebrating the immanence of the divine also acknowledges its transcendence, its imposing externality (the martial echoes of 'charged'/'foil'; the violence of 'crushed' (emphasised by enjambment)/ 'rod'), its essential surprisingness.

Although much has been made of the way in which Robinson's vision of the importance of religion offers a contrast to secularising narratives, I'm not so sure. Everyone loves her. She wins prizes and Presidents woo her. The idea of religion as adding depth and shade to an already existing (secular) design is one we all already love. And a world tweaked thus would be less overtly hostile to some forms of religion. (We would all be in Church to hear a good and learned man say something.) But we would be deaf to grandeur and squalor, deaf to the way that religion roars of something else terrible.

Could Robinson's Congregationalism produce this?

Losing my religion...?

No, don't worry (or rejoice). Not me, but the Orthodox philosopher Nick Trakakis (his essay here. Catholic response here. Orthodox response here.)

Trakakis' essay raises a lot of specific issues regarding Orthodoxy and traditional Christianity which, although I wouldn't want to dismiss, seem rather less fundamental than his dismissal of institutionalised religion per se as in tension with the philosophical life:

Part of the reason for Heidegger's separation of philosophy and theology lies in his view that philosophy is more radical in nature than theology. Theology, on this picture, does not allow for radical or genuine questioning: if we start from a position of faith, then our questioning or seeking begins by already having found what it searches - namely, God. Dominique Janicaud, in his criticism of the recent theological turn in French phenomenology, made a similar point: "The dice are loaded and choices made; faith rises majestically in the background."

Philosophy, by contrast, must consist in honest questioning, really following inquiry or evidence wherever it leads. The kind of thinking that has traditionally been regarded as integral to philosophy demands deep and searching questioning and a restless and perhaps even endless exploring, but without knowing where such wondering and meandering will lead (so as not to prejudice the outcome). It is what Heidegger envisioned as a type of thinking that is always underway, travelling "off the beaten track" onto bypaths and even dead-ends, but with no predetermined end in sight.

If we wish to grapple with the ultimate questions of life and death in novel, interesting and fruitful ways, a creative and adventurous spirit is required, one that is prepared to occasionally depart from the conventional and familiar in order to freely roam on roads less travelled, imaginatively constructing speculative theories and experimenting with diverse myths, models and metaphors of, for example, God and world.

It's a position that I've often come across. Religion is about accepting answers while philosophy/rationality etc is about an open ended inquiry which leads who knows where. The closedness of religion is essentially in tension with the openness of philosophy.

It's difficult to know where to start with this. And perhaps that's the first thing to say: it's a deceptively simple claim which really isn't very simple at all. What is philosophy? What is religion? (Are these questions demanding a descriptive answer - 'This is what my experience of Orthodoxy is like' or a normative one -'This is what Orthodoxy should be'?) Does philosophy automatically trump religion? Why? And so on. Reading some of the comments both in Trakakis' essay but particularly those in the combox, I was reminded of the chapter in Newman's Loss and Gain where the prospective Catholic convert is beset by visits from various crackpots all claiming to have the answer to life (nowadays of course neatly expressed on a website).

There is a truth here, one which you find roughly sketched both in Plotinus' claim that life is the 'flight of the alone to the alone' or the existentialists' claim that existence precedes essence, that we are all, inevitably, left in the position of trying to make sense of it all. (To borrow from Trump, I have some sympathy with the general desire just to stop everything 'until we've figured out what the hell's going on'. Unfortunately, we can't.) Even if some sort of radical philosophical rootlessness was the correct stance for PhD educated philosophers, where would that leave the rest of us? Wouldn't we have to trust some sort of academic authority while we earn our daily crust? Wouldn't some sense of the limited nature of our reason and the need to rely on something pre-digested by the smarter or more knowledgeable or simply more leisured be part of what figuring out what the hell's going on is like for most of humanity?

But let's consign the lived reality of most people's search for meaning to the dustbin: what about the purported wise? Shouldn't we remain open to truth in a way that religion closes down? Again, I think there's a rough truth here which is that intellectual exploration does have to be free from extraneous pressures: the search for truth should not be restricted by (eg) the State (and that I take it is the reasoning behind Dignitatis humanae). But that is hardly what Trakakis can mean. He is free to leave Orthodoxy. I am free to leave Catholicism. Nothing will happen except that we have something slightly more exciting than usual for an audience to read about. Moreover, every reflective religious believer is aware, particularly a convert such as myself, that there is in principle the possibility of radical (and unexpected) religious change simply because it has happened  before. Atheist teenage me didn't expect to become a Catholic. Middle aged Catholic me doesn't expect to become a Dawkinsian. But it might happen. Indeed, it should happen if I can no longer stay within a particular institution without sacrificing (again in rough terms) my integrity. There is a point at which change is required, even though specifying that point precisely is not a straightforward matter. (Again, even philosophers have to reckon with the restricted nature of their reasoning. At what point does a temporary local difficulty in one's institutional commitments become the necessity for change?)

All of us find ourselves with commitments and the need for decisions which close down or channel our lives. (The slightly waspish me might suggest that Trakakis might be in greater danger to his intellectual integrity from continental philosophy and the iron laws of the Western academy than he is from Orthodoxy.) There is the detailed, Somme like struggle to answer those specific points that might begin to persuade someone that Christianity is untenable. That simply requires spadework and detailed argument and both Trakakis and I know well enough how these arguments go and go on. But there is the meta-argument about where, while we wait for death, we are better off living out our lives of confusion and search.

To become personal, my conversion to Christianity (initially Episcopalianism and then Catholicism) was intellectually at least affected by at least two broad issues. First, I was plunged into a great deal of Greek philosophy. This lead to a great many intellectual obsessions, but three in particular struck home. One was the strong sense in Plato of the transcendent, of something above and better that beckoned to us. (You can see this both in the Ideas and in the daimon of Socrates.) There is an ethical seriousness about the intellectual, philosophical quest that, frankly, is often better modelled in religious communities than in the Western academy. Secondly, there is the horizon of philosophy in myth and figurative language: Plato frequently stops and goes beyond dialectic to say something that is unsayable. Finally, there is the perennial question of Plato and Aristotle (and Strauss): the relationship between the City and Man (or the community and the person if you prefer). Philosophy exists in a city: how does it live there and how does it engage with that city? Trakakis seems from that perspective to have opted not for the life of the unfettered mind, but for life simply in a different sort of city from that of the Orthodox church. Has he applied the same degree of critical reflection to the exercise of power in that City as he has to the exercise of power in the Orthodox Church? To cut that long story short, I found (and find) those obsessions better answered in the Catholic Church than I do elsewhere. It is a better sort of community to live in while waiting to die. It is a better sort of community to live in whilst pursuing truth, goodness and beauty. To the extent that Foucauldian power inevitably surges through its veins, it seems to me to be better used for the flourishing of its members than the same unavoidable power when surging through the institutions outwith it.

The second aspect of my conversion was having children. Now this might not seem a very philosophical reason for change, but I think it was. For the first time in my life, I was presented with the need to articulate and to persuade someone else. (Academic teaching isn't the same:there isn't the same desperate ethical need to get it right rather than just to explore. Moreover, as a father, one is not producing adult philosophers (who arguably themselves  have a personal responsibility to get it right) but people who are, at least for eighteen years, radically dependent on your lead and, thereafter, quite possibly going to be dependent 'ordinary folk' rather than the autonomous wise.) What does one say to the next generation while, before your eyes, time is running out to say it? In many ways, this is just a dramatic intensification of the preceding aspect: given that someone vulnerable and to whom you have a duty of care is dependent on your getting those answers right, you are forced to think and act much much more seriously. But it is also that most characteristically Greek philosophical question of how do you pass on the good life to the next generation. And the answer, even for the philosophical life, is not itself by philosophy. I don't know whether Trakakis is a parent or not. (To the extent that he reaches people outwith the academy, let alone within it, he is certainly in loco parentis.)  But how does one prepare the ground for philosophical flourishing let alone any other kind? What sort of community is the best preparation (and this is the really tough one) how does one achieve it as a matter of fact, now, before your child reaches eighteen and gets sucked into the void of modernity?

[Just rereading the above, the one issue I don't think I've tackled adequately is the phenomenology of the freedom of search in the Church  (ie what it feels like). Here, I think the abandonment of the sharp distinction between natural reason and revelation in much modern Catholic theology is unhelpful. Qua philosopher, all bets are off. Of course, I expect (based on previous reasoning) to approach certain issues in certain ways. But it is perfectly possible (I keep an open mind) that I will find myself outargued or persuaded to a different conclusion. That is the freedom of philosophy: an intellectual suspension of commitments and a willingness to follow the arguments. But at the same time, as a human being and Catholic, I am subject to certain commitments which may or may not be in tension with the free deliberations of philosophy. Moreover, qua philosopher, I am aware of how difficult these issues are and that a momentary inability to see a way forward in an expected direction is not the final conclusion. All I can say is that, up till now, I have never found an issue in philosophy which provides a clear stumbling block for my Catholicism (as opposed to a difficulty of which there are many) and have found many issues where my Catholicism has helped illuminate philosophical issues. As I said above, that might change. But so far as I can see at the moment, given what I know and given a fairly thorough going over the key issues, that is unlikely to happen.

I also think that (judging from purely external observation) there is something here that needs to be said about the intellectual life within Orthodoxy rather than in Catholicism. I have no wish to indulge in Orthodox bashing here, but it's only fair to record that one of the reasons why I became Catholic rather than Orthodox and remain so (despite occasional bouts of finding myself in angustiis) is the apparent greater openness and philosophical emphasis within Catholicism. Anyway, another issue for another day. As partial penance for this latter observation, I would point you in the direction of Turning East a volume of essays explaining their reasons for conversion from philosophers who became Orthodox Christians.]

Interiority: more on Pope Francis and Amoris Laetitiae...

Interiority...

 

 

Following on from my last post, I have started reading the exhortation and the burgeoning 'secondary literature' (tweets) surrounding it.

 

 

Taking one bit, there seems to be a lot of commentary around (from section 301-2):

 

 



Hence it can no longer simply be said that all those in any “irregular” situation are living in a state of mortal sin and are deprived of sanctifying grace.

 

 

And (footnote 351):

In certain cases, this [i.e., the Church’s help toward him growing in grace and charity] can include the help of the sacraments.

Hence, “I want to remind priests that the confessional must not be a torture chamber, but rather an encounter with the Lord’s mercy” (Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium [24 November 2013], 44: AAS 105 [2013], 1038).

I would also point out that the Eucharist “is not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak” (ibid., 47: 1039).

 

Some thoughts:

 

1) Taken at its word, nothing here is objectionable. Sinners are not cut off from sanctifying grace. Sacraments can (in some circumstances) help. Nothing is said in plain words about (eg) admitting the civilly 'remarried' to Holy Communion.

 

2) It might be objected to 1) that, taken in the light of 'commonsense', the obvious teaching to be taken from the above is, however, that those in illegitimate relationships should be admitted to Communion. Perhaps. But it certainly doesn't have to be read that way.

 

3) It's (only) an exhortation. It's 60,000 words long. The current Pope doesn't go in for detailed scholastic theology but pastoral encouragement. I'm  not sure anyone can write 60,000 words in a text intended for popular consumption and not have some bits that might be better expressed or might in some way be misleading. (I'd probably go further: it's unlikely that such a document wouldn't contain error.) I don't think we should be looking at this document in forensic detail but at its gist.

 

And it's that gist that I want to look at. It's a reasonable thought that Vatican II and Pope Francis are trying to grapple with 'modernity' (and perhaps even 'postmodernity'). One of the aspects of modernity is that of subjectivity or interiority. The rough thought here would be that a purely external teaching of the Church (perhaps expressed as a rule of natural law) has, in modernity, to touch the interior life of a person rather than just be imposed by authority.

 

This (rough and ready) thought isn't one confined to Catholicism. Bernard Williams, for example, comments on the impossibility for the modern mind of taking meaning (in this case teleology) as being unproblematically located in the external world but having immediate internal moral implications:

 

Aristotle saw a certain kind of ethical, cultural, and indeed political life as a harmonious culmination of human potentialities, recoverable form an absolute understanding of nature. We have no reason to believe in that. Once we lose the belief, however, a potential gap opens between the agent's perspective and the outside view.

 

[Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 1993, p.52]

 

Williams' solution to this gap is in very rough terms the idea of life as a reflective personal project:

 

Williams' denial of the possibility of external reasons thus underwrites his views on a whole range of other matters. Together with his scepticism about any and every kind of system of morality, it is perhaps the most fundamental motif of all in his thought. And though the internal reasons thesis too is, in an important way, a negative thesis, it clearly doesn't follow that it has no positive results, nor that it was a thesis that Williams himself held only as an abstract view in philosophical theory. At the outset of his writing career, he took for his own “a phrase of D.H. Lawrence's in his splendid commentary on the complacent moral utterances of Benjamin Franklin: ‘Find your deepest impulse, and follow that’” . Thirty years later he added, when looking back over his career, “If there's one theme in all my work it's about authenticity and self-expression… It's the idea that some things are in some real sense really you, or express what you and others aren't…. The whole thing has been about spelling out the notion of inner necessity.”

[Here.]

 

Now whether that is a satisfactory total replacement for the Aristotelian-Thomist view of natural law is one question (I don't think it is). But it does seem to diagnose the essence of one aspect of modernity and, indeed, modernity at its best: that we have to live out our lives with authentic reflectiveness rather than simply taking the dictates of authority by obedience. (Think Kierkegaard.) So if Catholicism is to speak to modernity it has to speak to that aspect of authentic reflection: it's absolutely no use simply pointing to the natural law or Church authority unless, in some way, those addressed have internalised those sources.

 

So one thought that I am reading Amoris Laetitiae with is that (as Vatican II and, perhaps most effectively, St John Paul II) Catholicism in modernity has to address people with the language of the interior life. Exploring seriously the breakdown of a marriage and what you have done since is something any Catholic in that position needs to do. If that is read as simply a process that is a fudge for giving adulterers Holy Communion, well, there is no way to stop the abuse of any process. (Imagine Pope Francis did not exist. Would you expect such an abuse not to occur either?)

 

So one thing I want to say is that there is indeed a truth about the horrendous expression 'meeting people where they are': the Church does have to engage with the modern 'subjective turn' if it's going to be persuasive. But the other thing that needs to be said is that, in other ways, modernity needs that subjective turn as it is currently absent. I was talking recently to a friend about the domination (or at least the strong presence) of the alternative right within computer engineering. To cut a long story short, you have the strong danger of some of the most powerful people in the future being pumped up on the short of quick solution based, intellectual short windedness typified by New Atheism: there is little sense of the hesitant exploration of the inner life and even of kindness. More generally, while modernity encourages a sort of formal freedom to be whatever you want, it is severely lacking in the practices of using that freedom wisely. It is here that Catholicism offers perhaps the most obvious resources to modernity.

 

In fine, Amoris Laetitiae will not be perfect. It is too long and the wrong sort of document. But at its heart seems to me to be a recognition that what modernity lacks most (and, paradoxically, what it thinks is its strength and through which it wants to be addressed) is that interior life and the practices of that interior life. Although I've only started to read it, it strikes me that, as a whole, it is quite a remarkable thing: a poetic exhortation of the goodness of marriage and the family in a world that, at least in Scotland. seems to think that children are best served by bureaucrats of an indeterminate gender rather than natural parents. Whatever is unsatisfactory about it, that seems to me to be remarkable: it's hard to think of any institution other than the Catholic Church which could produce such a thing with such a media impact.

 

 

 

 

 



Pope Francis and Amoris Laetitia

 Pope Francis has just issued the long awaited exhortation on 'the joy of love' (here).

The only reasonable response to this would be to take some time and read, reflect and ponder. However, I have a long established tradition on this blog of commenting trenchantly on matters of which I know little and I see no reason to change. I accordingly think it important to say something on the exhortation before I've read it.

Judging by Twitter, a lot of commentary on the exhortation has, in the back of the commentators' minds, something like the following scenario. Person A has been abandoned by her husband through no fault of her own. Though desperate for the warmth of a new relationship, she has resisted these temptations because she wishes to remain true to the teaching of the Church on the indissolubility of marriage.  Person B, on the other hand, left his wife. He remarries. After a period of discernment with his Parish Priest, he is restored to communion.

So on the one hand, you have the abandoned spouse forced to live out a life of bitterness and sexlessness. On the other hand, you have the cheerful rogue who manages to get it all: sex and the respectable appreciation of his parish. (Why not add to his success story that he becomes a leading light in the pastoral council etc?) And to this mix we now have (it is claimed by some) the voice of the Pope urging person A not to be such a silly and to find herself a new man.

Now let's put aside what the Pope is actually saying. As I said, I haven't read it myself and the excerpts and commentary I've seen don't convince me that he's said anything like the caricature I've given above. But, certainly, I've no doubt that some parish priests (and bishops) would encourage person A not to be so hard on herself and I'm equally sure that some are already encouraging Person B to take communion whatever Amoris Laetitia may or may not say. So the broad picture remains the same before and after Amoris Laetitia: a (civilly) divorced person has to make some judgment about what she or he should do, bearing in mind that some authorities (priests/bishops/(popes?)) will be urging positions that are certainly at odds with each other and of which some are therefore objectively wrong.

Catholicism is not a slot machine. It is not a matter of putting in an action and getting out, mechanically, a result. In the end, the only thing that matters is whether we are given (by God's action) the Beatific Vision after death. And that will be dependent on God's love and God's perfect justice. Not what I think God will do or what the Pope thinks God will do, but what God, with perfect knowledge and perfect goodness, actually does. Whether I get to become a member of the pastoral council, whether I get access to Holy Communion on the one hand; or whether I remain unmarried and chaste on the other will not guarantee salvation -because in each case there is more, much more to be said. What if the Person A is bitter and hateful? What if she is responsible in part for the breakdown of the marriage? What if Person B is not terribly bright and has come under the influence of plausible libertines, even those (and yes, they exist) among the priesthood? Catholicism does not offer the certainties of evangelical Protestantism: only God knows if we are saved. Nor does it offer the parallel certainty of secularists: that doing your best is enough because, in the end for them, nothing matters. (Perhaps your best isn't good enough. Perhaps you're actually not a very good person.)

It's too easy for modern Catholics to laugh (or regard with fond superiority) the images of damnation of previous generations. But at the heart of Catholicism is that uncertainty, the peril of damnation that, among other things, has made Catholicism so fertile a soil for philosophy and art: the constant, churning attempt to discern God's will through love and intellect, and the constant churning awareness that we may fail. (And so the iron objectivity of the search for truth and the fog of subjectivity through which we pursue it.)

The big building blocks of Catholicism are clear enough. Marriage is good. The sacraments are good. The Pope and bishops and priests have authority. Etc etc. But none of that will save you having to discern, if you are Person A or Person B, what you should, in the final analysis do. And simply thinking, 'Father X says that adultery is no biggie' won't solve it. (Should we rely on Father X? Why I am relying on him? (Does it suit my libido to believe him?) )

I think an awful lot of commentators miss the central thread of Dante's Divine Comedy. It's not a cry of the modern individual against the arbitrary rules of God, nor does it share Milton's fault of sympathy for the Devil (or at least the sinner). It is that essential clash between the subjective, first person viewpoint and God's viewpoint. That liking someone (and particularly liking oneself) is not what decides salvation but the truth of God's care. That care is neither totally divorced from human affections but nor is it exactly the same. And the gap between the two, and the constant (faltering) attempt to discern how to leap that gap over to God's view is what gives Catholicism its depth and salvific power.

I'm off to read Amoris Laetitia now. I fully expect it to be worth considerable reflection but it will not solve or magic away the need for each of us to wrestle with God as far as we are individually able. And in the end, it will be a matter for God alone, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, to discern how well I have peformed that fundamental human duty.

Linda Woodhead on 'no religion'

I've mentioned before that I find a lack of engagement with secularization theory one of the most problematic aspects of much reflection about the state of the Catholic Church. It's all very well suggesting that this or that change in (eg) liturgy has brought about a decline in Mass attendance etc, but that seems simply to ignore the wider changes in (particularly) Western Europe and the declining public place of religion in general there.

Lind Woodhead has been a central figure in that academic debate over the phenonomenon of secularization, and has, in broad terms, been a proponent of the view that religion is not so  much disappearing as changing into spirituality. Her recent British Academy lecture on the growth of the 'nones' (ie those who declare they have no religion) is well worth watching (an earlier parallel transcript of an interview is here):

I take the main messages of Woodhead's thesis to be thus:

a) The largest (and growing) religious identity in the UK is 'no religion'.
b) This identity is not the same as atheist or even agnostic. It is, in particular, not hostile to religion.
c) It rejects, in particular, religious authority figures and institutions, and is liberal in areas such as sexuality and family life.
d) 'Leadership' of this group is up for grabs. Unless churches adapt to this viewpoint, 'no religion' is likely to be captured by groups such as the British Humanist Association and steered into a more stridently anti-religious stance.
e) Churches such as those in Scandinavia and non-Western religions such as Buddhism have been more successful in influencing this group by turning themselves into spiritual paths which fit in with the 'nones' liberal ethos.

As a description, I think much of this is simply true. I do have severe doubts about e): Buddhism isn't terribly influential in Britain and I suspect that the lingering influences of churches in Scandinavia are more about lip service to a tradition than anything else. If that's the best that churches can do, I think I'd rather go down fighting than humoured as a marginal cultural tradition.

Where I do agree is that Catholicism (and frankly I don't much care what other ecclesial communities do) needs to offer itself as a spiritual and cultural path: in other words, we need to offer people a Catholic culture without insisting that they become fully signed up members of the Church. I say that, not because I don't think becoming a fully practising Catholic doesn't matter -it does- but because I think (normally, not always) full conversion is preceded by seeing the point of Catholicism as a belief system and as a practice. In a fight (or a culture war) I'd put my money on a culture armed with Alasdair MacIntyre. Walker Percy, James MacMillan and even Andy Warhol (and that's only a start) against one armed with Judith Butler and TOWIE. You can add to that personal colourful spiritual practices such as lighting candles and saying the rosary.

In other words, even if one accepts Woodhead's view that institutional Christianity needs to become a spirituality, it is possible to argue that Catholicism can offer this as an ancilla to rather than a replacement for the full religion. The Church teaches what it has always taught, undiluted and unchanged. But it encourages (hold the vomit) 'people where they are'. So you don't want an authority figure? Fine. Say a rosary and read Dionysius the Areopagite whilst listening to Byrd. Nobody's going to drag you to Mass if you don't want to go. Some will remain stuck there in a sort of aesthetic limbo. Well, no worse than many now and better than Dawkinsian know nothings.

The City of God will remain surrounded by the City of Man. A City of Man in which some of the spirituality of Catholicism is recognized and valued will be better than one which is overtly and consistently hostile. In other words, we need to practise a culture war (or at least a culture ooze) which is not directly aimed at getting people to be Catholics but at getting people to be catholicized. (By all means do the direct evangelism as well. This is not an either/or but both/and.) It might not work, but really it might. At the very least, people will get closer to their natural end and earthly flourishing, even if they do not attain their supernatural end.

The whole of Catholic art, philosophy and mysticism against... Well, after all, what?

Something must be done: Adam Curtis and Bitter Lake

                                             
                                       Another Mass? Perhaps not such a bad idea after all...


I finally caught Adam Curtis' 2 hour + long documentary Bitter Lake on the BBC i-player yesterday. (Wikipedia article here. Iplayer here.) It's primarily a reflection on the US and UK involvement particularly in Afghanistan, with the message that Western governments began spinning a simplistic story of good versus evil to support their policies since Reagan, a strategy which has failed and led to foreign policy disasters and a remaining sense of confusion and hopelessness in politics.

It's well worth watching. Death, in particular, can rarely have been made more beautiful. My simple reaction (one that unfortunately others have got to before me: see the Wikepedia article) is that the attack on simplistic narratives is ironically in tension with the simplistic narrative of the film. It also teases. Practising argument by juxtaposition, it suggests that the banking crisis and ISIS are also areas in which this urge for simplistic solutions based on simplistic narratives have failed without doing much to back up these claims, however plausible they may be quite apart from the film.

Whatever else the film is, it is certainly an exercise is the politics of aesthetics. (One of the creepier moments is some well bred art historian lecturing a bunch of Afghans on the importance of conceptual art in nation building.) A well constructed piece can leave you with a sense that 'you've got it': that a convincing vision has been given you which has revealed the truth about a complex situation. Added to this is the vanity of the modern artist contra the bourgeoisie: I have seen through what others have not. Both are abiding sins of popularism and its political child, democracy. In two hours, I have seen what my preceding complete ignorance of Afghanistan might have been expected to be a poor preparation for; in two hours, I have seen through their knavish tricks. To the barricades!

Applying this to current British politics (and particularly 'progressive' Scotland) one might note the attractiveness of (simple) visions: it is like this, and those who disagree are simply fools or giant alien lizards. (That, by the way applies to many in both unionist and nationalist camps in Scotland. For every foam flecked cybernat, I could name a unionist commentator writing off the SNP as a cargo cult.) It also explains, I think, much of the gut reaction to attempts by various people such as Gerry Hassan and the National Collective to insist that creative dance and its ilk should play a key role in our political culture: aesthetics is an unreliable element in politics and perhaps the best thing is for politicans, as in Plato's Republic, to escort the artist to the borders of the State.

But in a wider way, it also a reminder that natural religion is part of rationality. As I've noted before, belief in God is something accessible to reason. To put it more strongly, if you don't believe in God, you're not (fully) rational. Now this is something that is profoundly unfashionable to claim, both within the Church and outwith it. (Note how both sides seem to chummily accept the label of 'faith' for religion.) This, of course, is not something touched on (well, except perhaps unwittingly through Curtis' use of Tarkovsky's Solaris) in Bitter Lake. But rational people in times past squared the circle between something must be done and not actually knowing what to do (or even knowing that there was nothing they could do) by praying. In the absence of a belief in prayer as action, the temptation to rush in and do something is increased. Prayer is however doing something, perhaps the most important something. That secularists are too irrational to see this and have to be left floundering around in a mad frenzy is of course unfortunate but there's little to be done when people close themselves off to a key aspect of reality...

Preaching to the unconverted

                                               
I'm embracing my inner hippy on this one...

I've been struck a couple of times recently chatting to the 'young' (as one does) that a not uncommon type is 'pretty decent half Catholic'. You talk to a twenty year old or so, get thinking that they've pretty sound on a lot of things (solid grasp of the importance of family; not too materialistic; just a fundamental sense of decency) and, you sort of half suspect that or wonder whether they've had a Catholic upbringing. And 9/10 (based on an entirely objective, scientific statistical sample) they have. (They might even still go to Church.)

Now it's quite likely that this 'pretty decent half Catholic' (PDHC) will also hold views that make any orthodox Catholic squirm. Typically, they'll be in favour of same sex marriage, abortion (though perhaps only allowing the freedom for other women to choose), aardvarking outside marriage etc etc. If you push on this, you'll probably get some sort of response along the lines of 'well, no one takes the official line on this seriously anymore' or the sort of blank look that anyone could still be so homophobic and sexually repressed whilst not painting themselves in woad.

I mentioned in my last post the strategy of 'Aesopian Catholicism' (basically disguising your true thoughts, and, in the broad sense I'm going to be using it here, 'keeping your head down'.) Although there's more to be said about this, I'm not advancing this as a particularly good strategy. But it is certainly a current one. And if you're a moderately serious young Catholic who, while not rejecting Christ or the Church, is probably more interested in the opposite sex and in the daily business of life, it's entirely understandable. ('No one takes that seriously anymore' is probably translatable as 'Look, let's drop this subject' in many cases.)

There's a knock on effect among the clergy. If you have a congregation of PDHCs, even if you're the most orthodox, fire breathing priest imaginable, you might wonder precisely what to do with them. Get too rigorous and you'll probably drive what are, after all, sinners needing mercy and the sacraments across that line that takes them completely out of the Church. Say nothing and you're simply complicit in their slackness and ignorance and removing any possibility of maturing in the faith and morality. I think this explains much of the fairly well known 'Father Nice' syndrome: just as it's easy for a PDHC to forget the teaching of the Church in the effort to keep out of trouble, so it's easy for the Father Nices of this world to forget what the Church actually teaches in an effort not to drive off the (half) well -disposed but ignorant.

Solutions? Absolutely no idea. Screaming at them they're all unbelievers and are going to roast in Hell probably won't work in more than a few cases. Keeping silent about the depth of the Church's teachings and vision is cheating them of a chance of growth. But again the Benedict option is useless as a total solution. (It might work as a reservoir for PDHCs, but you then need to talk about how you establish aqueducts to distribute the water/teaching to the parched.)

Mediaeval Catholicism has often been mocked as presenting itself as a) a spiritual elite  who b) sneaked sinners into Heaven by a mechanical application of sacraments (grace) instead of effecting true conversion. Whatever the truth of this criticism, it's perhaps worth reconsidering the merits of such an approach. Whatever its dangers, such a view does correctly acknowledge the state of most people (and I include myself in this). I need grace and frankly I need a Church that is going to try to save me as a PDHC myself. And since (given the absence of autos-da-fe) I'm not liable to be frightened into submission, I'm gong to have to be persuaded, seduced even. From my standpoint, you could have sermons on sexual morality till the cows went home: the advantage of age is that stops being so much a problem. But being a smug comfortable git? Well...

More the setting out of a problem than a solution. But here's a suspicion. The priesthood, certainly in its everyday parish variety, is not well placed to seduce into the depths of Catholicism. In part, this is a matter of time. If you have few priests and a decline in non-Sunday contact with parishioners, there simply isn't the number of hours required for such a seduction to work. In part it's a matter of position and formation. This is tricky to articulate, but perhaps one can get a sense of the difficulties here by imagining the problems of a priest or religious enthusing over Rubens' portrayal of flesh and sexual allure. (If it's done, I bet they'd only go and ruin it by going on about sacramental presence and the like. You need rather more of the earth and Crazy Jane's 'Love has pitched his mansion/In the place of excrement' and perhaps just the simple joy of being alive.)

In sum, it's the laity and the culture which have to do the heavy lifting here. And the key problem (well, an important one anyway) is not to construct communities of the saints, but to work out how -as the Middle Ages did so well (and let's give Rubens and Yeats a place in the long middle ages)- PDHCs immersed in the pleasures of this world can still be led to the next one. Because if there are neo-benedictine communities, I bet I'll be one of those left on the outside with my sloth and lusts and my box sets of Breaking Bad wishing that someone would drag me, half despite myself, into heaven.