The Roots of the Conflict

Saint Ambrose

Back in the day Conservative Blog Rorate Caeli often had some postings worth the time to read.  That was before they brought on Richard Cippola and Peter Kwasniewski and Benedict Constable as “contributors” and level of rational analysis and critical thinking nose-dived. I like to read things that make me think and re-think my positions—especially if they contain new information I had not previously considered.  Rare to find that, however, these days on Rorate Cael which is usually as insightful as yesterday’s toast. However, I did see a posting last week entitled “The Condemnation of Action Française and the Birth of Vatican II” and was excited to read it.  The title held some possibility that it might be a significant article, or at least give me some more background on the current ever-widening schism between those of us who embrace the Council and those who reject it.  Unfortunately, I ear-marked it for later and by the time I got back to it, it had been taken down. 

Action Française was a Catholic right-wing political movement in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century France.  It was monarchist and it was deeply anti-Semitic, playing a significant role in the infamous Dreyfus affair. (The family of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre were tied to Action Française.)    The Third French Republic, The French government from the end of the Franco-Prussian War until France’s collapse in the face of Nazi expansion in 1940, was plagued by a lack of social cohesion that polarized French society and Action Française offered an agenda of national unity rooted in France’s historical Catholic culture.  This was opposed—and successfully—by the secularists on the Government’s political left but the rightists were able to offer an effective resistance to the much of the more extreme program of the left, or at least to block some of their proposed anti-clerical legislation. However not all in the Church were willing to sell their Catholicity to Action Française. In 1927 Action Française members were officially denied the sacraments and two years later Pope Pius XI condemned the movement in an effort for rapprochement with the secularist government. The Pope felt that certain right-wing politicians were using the Church for their own political ends rather than acting in good faith.  (The condemnation was lifted by Pius XII at the beginning of the Second World War.) 

The nouvelle théolgie was a movement among theologians—mostly French but also Belgian, Dutch, and Germans—that began about the same time as Action Française fell into disrepute with the Church. The liturgical renewal (some would call it a “revolution”) being born in the Abbeys of Maria Laach, Chevetogne, and Beuron was developing simultaneously as scholars began to study the ancient liturgical texts and better understand the relationship between Patristic theology and pre-13^th century rites. The nouvelle théolgie movement was a reaction against the neo-Thomism promoted by Leo XIII in Aeterni Patris that was so foreign to the ways the Church of the first millennium expressed its faith. Advocates of the nouvelle théolgie looked not to Saint Thomas Aquinas for their theological models but to the older Tradition, to the Fathers of the Church. 

Let me back up for a moment.  From the sub-Apostolic age (approximately 100AD until “The Twelfth-Century Renaissance” the theological foundations of our Catholic faith were set out by a series of bishops and theologians collectively referred to as “The Fathers of the Church.”  The earliest of these is probably Ignatius of Antioch, the final father is Saint Bernard of Claivaux.  The list includes Iranaeus of Lyons, Ambrose, Augustine, John Chrysostom, Gregory the Great, Isidore of Seville, Hilary of Poitiers, Gregory  Nazianzus,  and several dozen other early writers of the Eastern and Western Churches.  These “Fathers” all expressed their teachings in neo-Platonic philosophical terms because in both the Eastern and the Western Christian worlds the dominant way of thinking was neo-Platonism. Neo-Platonism was a “take” on Plato as he was understood and interpreted by Plotinus, a third century philosopher from Greek Egypt.  His philosophy shaped the way people in the Mediterranean world thought and expressed themselves for almost a thousand years.

In the 12^th century, mostly through contact with the world of Arab Philosophy, the West rediscovered Aristotle.  Aristotle had been a disciple of Plato in ancient Athens, but developed his own philosophical methods which depended on logical syllogisms.  Aristotle’s works had been lost in the Western world for centuries but were rediscovered by Arab philosophers in the tenth and eleventh century.  Most prominent among these philosophers was Ibn Sīnā  (or, as we in the West call him, Avicenna).   The cultural exchanges between Islam and the West in the 11^th and 12^th century led to Catholic philosophers becoming very excited about this new way of thinking.  Early Aristotelian thinkers like Peter Abelard were condemned by the Church, but Saint Thomas Aquinas successfully reinterpreted the teachings of the Fathers in this new Aristotelian method and it eventually won the favor of the hierarchy.   Gradually from the thirteenth through the sixteenth century, the Catholic Church abandoned the old neo-Platonic thought and replaced it with Aristotelian, or more commonly called today, Scholastic thought.  In the process, however, Catholic theologians depended less and less on the Fathers of the Church, replacing them with Saint Thomas and his disciples. It proved to be a serious disruption in Catholic intellectual life as the Fathers retreated (or were shoved) off to the sidelines of Catholic thought.

 In the mid-twentieth century advocates of the nouvelle théolgie urged a return to the Fathers as the basis of theological reflection.  An entire generation of theologians: Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, Hans Küng, Edward Schillebeeckx, Marie-Dominique Chenu, Louis Bouyer, and Jean Daniélou embraced the new methodology.  Several of them suffered at the hands of the Holy Office (today’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and previously known as the Holy Office of the Roman Inquisition) under the indomitable Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani because of their abandonment of neo-Scholasticism but the new way of thinking was to prevail.  These were the men who shaped the thought of the Second Vatican Council.

A challenge has arisen in as much as the Councils of Trent and Vatican I drew on the neo-Scholastic way of thinking whereas Vatican II is shaped by the Patristic heritage.  The ideas of each sound strange, even heretical, to the other.  The neatly packaged syllogisms of Scholastic Theology are clear and precise but lack the mystical depth of the Patristic Tradition.  The theology of the nouvelle théolgie writers is not nearly as sharply delineated and narrowly defined as the work of the Neo-Scholastics but have the antiquity of Tradition to their defense.  As a result the Church has lost the intellectual cohesion of the pre-Conciliar days.  Some of us can live with that ambiguity; others struggle.  Much of the conflict in the Church today is rooted in this theological diversity. 

Some Lenten Thoughts On the Church In the Present Millennium

Sorry, things have gotten away from this past week and I have neglected to post any entries.  I hope I can make it up over the next week or two—though the schedule gets incredibly busy at this time of year.  But it doesn’t stop the Krazies, so if they can find the time for all their manic ravings and bizarre pseudo-religiosity, I, in my little self-appointed hermitage, should be able to as well.  It is just that this time of year is so rich in the readings and prayers and liturgies of this season that it is hard to tear oneself away from Lent’s austere beauty and sit at the keyboard.  In the early morning, I just want to take my coffee and sit on the glassed-in verandah and watch the sun come up over the barren late-winter landscape and ponder how these inner and outer worlds coalesce into some sort of harmonious unity. 

This year we celebrate the centenary of the birth of Thomas Merton and the fifth centenary of the birth of Saint Teresa of Avila.  They are two of my favorite spiritual writers.  They have a huge amount in common.  Both were very much down-to-earth sort of mystics—not the sort of flighty and vague romantics so favored by the sentimental and the pious.  Both had wicked senses of humor and were quick to turn a phrase that was both pithy and mirthful.  Both were deeply sensual and each, according to their particular genders, expressive of a highly sexualized spirituality.  But for me what is most important is that each, despite they themselves being monastics, were determined to open the arcane gateway of contemplative prayer to ordinary folk like you and like me. 

I wonder if it had not been for Merton—I read him before I ever read Teresa though I have over my career done a deeper study of Teresa than of Merton—I wonder if had it had not been for Merton would I ever have found the entry point of that Interior Castle of which Teresa speaks?  Had it not been for Merton, I am not sure that I would ever have realized the potential for prayer that went beyond the devotional.  I still enjoy the devotional, of course, much like I still like Jelly Beans; but I am glad that Merton and others showed me the darker and richer delights of still and silent prayer.

Some years back I was part of a group trying to arrange to bring Father William Menninger, like Merton a Cistercian (Trappist) monk, to our parish in Northern Virginia to give a workshop on contemplative prayer.  It was all set.  At the last minute, the pastor—who up to that time had been too busy to learn much about the program other than to insure that Father William was a priest in good standing and of “orthodox” Catholicity, cancelled the program.  “I didn’t realize it was about contemplative prayer,” he protested.  “That is something for monks and nuns, not for mere (his words) lay people like yourselves.  Why, if it isn’t part of our life as priests, would it ever be part of your lives as lay people?”  I had been reading Merton for over forty years at the time—and Teresa for about twenty-five—and I knew that all Christians are called to contemplative prayer.  It is not for “the elect.”  Indeed I have come to realize that all human persons are called to contemplative prayer as Saint Augustine pointed out in his famous lines:

You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

A source, while far less credible than my beloved aforementioned Doctor Gratiae but still infinitely more insightful than any contemporary writer (including Merton), the Jesuit Karl Rahner wrote:   

“The devout Christian of the future will be a ‘mystic’, one who has experienced something, or he will cease to be anything at all.  For devout Christian living as practiced in the future will no longer be sustained and helped by the unanimous, manifest and public convictions and religious customs of all, summoning each one form the outset to a persona experience and a personal decision.

We live, in this country and throughout “the West,” in what has fast devolved into a post-Christian era.  The “Christian Culture” of Europe and Anglophone North America has been for the most part nothing more than an ever-thinning veneer since “The Enlightenment” and its Rosemary’s Baby, the French Revolution.  The days when one’s Christian worldview and consequent values could be widely shared with one’s family, neighbors, colleagues, and friends are gone.  This is not to say that there isn’t a sort of human goodness or moral framework to be found anymore, but it is at best the habitual remnants of an earlier era and more often a natural—and inconsistently fickle—sort of natural sense of decency or integrity.  One doesn’t need to be a Christian—or even a believer—for such natural sense of fairplay, but as I said it is often a very fickle system.  I have written in some previous posts about how the lack of philosophy in the curriculum required for a college education has led to the inability of so many in our society to make any sort of a moral judgment beyond the rule that “works for me” is good and “doesn’t work for me” is bad.   What Rahner is saying in the above quote is that if Christians are to find a moral compass in this “culture” of soulless modernity—or actually post-modernity—they must have some sort of direct experience of God.  The key word here is direct.  God’s presence can be mediated by sacred things, sacred people, sacred actions, sacred gatherings, sacred institutions.  We call these physical manifestations of the Divine “sacraments.”  (I am not speaking narrowly here of the Seven Sacraments as defined by the Fourth Lateran Council but of the entire realm of the sacramental: the visible channels or manifestations of invisible grace.)  Used correctly these sacraments/sacramentals are genuine channels of grace, but as Colm Luibheid points out in the preface to his John Cassian, Conferences (Paulist, 1985), the human heart longs for a direct and unmediated encounter with God.  Our hearts are restless until they rest in God—not in rituals and ceremonies (as helpful as they may be to some), not in icons and candles (as good as they too can be), nor even in the Bread which has become Christ’s Body and the Wine which has become Christ’s Blood—but all this only ignites a hunger for the Creator that transcends the created.  In no way does the Christian ever dispense with the mediated channels of grace—we are incarnate beings and we need the tangible, the edible, the visible, but we are also Spirit and as such we long for that which is beyond the creaturely.  

This eros for God has always been in the human soul.  It doesn’t come with baptism or with some sort of mid-life conversion or being “born again.”  As Saint Augustine points out, we are created with this hunger for God.  It is us; it is who we are.  It has always been there, though not all have let an awareness of the hunger surface.  It was there for the psalmist when he wrote “Like the deer that yearns for running streams, so my soul is longing for you, my God.”  It was there for Jesus when he said: Seek first the Kingdom of God and all these things will be given to you.”  It was there for Saint Augustine when he wrote the line I quoted earlier.  Pseudo-Dionysius, Saint Bernard, Saint Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, Meister Eckhardt, Saint John of the Cross, Francis de Sales, Archbishop Fenelon, and countless mystics in between wrote or spoke of it.  It drove the desert fathers out to lives in the barren wilderness.  It provided John Cassian with the major theme of his conferences.  It populated Mount Athos and Subiaco.  Ignatius experienced it in the cave of Manressa.  Teresa of Avila was obsessed with it.  Elizabeth of the Trinity wrote to her sister Guite about it.  And to come back full circle, it is the core of all of Merton’s writings. 

And it is shaping the Church for its third millennium.  I am somewhat racing a deadline as this evening we have Taizé prayer in our parish.  People still come out for Stations of the Cross and Benediction on Friday evenings, but more and more are coming for the monastic quiet of this simple contemplative prayer around the Cross.  When we have a speaker on contemplative prayer we fill the parish center; when we have a speaker about the Catechism of the Catholic Church a dozen donuts will do.  When I sit in church during the day and see people come in, one less and less sees rosaries come out or prayerbooks opened, but people just sitting silently in God’s presence for 20, 30, even 40 minutes and more.

We need to find ways to encourage people to deeper prayer.  Merton’s books are still to be found in bookshops and on Amazon.  I think the biggest challenge, however, is to convince our priests that there is more to prayer than them parading around in a cope and carrying a monstrance or mumbling away in Latin jingo as they versus apsidem and mistakenly call it versus Deum.  Rahner has not only spoken truly that the Christian of the future will be a mystic or cease to be anything at all, but also that we, as the Church itself, will either be contemplative or cease to be.  

More On The Renewal of Religious Life or It's Not The Veil That Makes The Nun

I am sorry that I haven’t posted in a few days but the combination of an impending Christmas and a wicked winter head cold has conspired to keep me from doing only the bare necessities and then heading for life under the covers.  I do want to tie up this matter of an evangelical renewal of Religious Life and then move onto topics old (Church of England) and new (Pope Francis’ remarks to the Curia and his role in the shift of American policy towards Cuba.) 

Perhaps spending so much time on the renewal of Religious Life strikes readers as an undue amount of time and energy spent on a topic of concern to a small—and increasingly elderly—audience.  But I think that the renewal of Religious Life is crucial for the Renewal of our entire Catholic Church for several reasons. 

1.    Religious Life represents a facet of the Church that is both institutional and charismatic and could well model ways in which the institutional aspects of the Church could be renewed and reformed in radically fresh and innovative ways.

2.    Religious, while having ties to the clerical institution and even having ordained among the members of their communities, are essentially part of a lay movement in the Church and can pioneer paths of spiritual revival for all of us in the Church

3.    The great spiritual traditions of the Catholic Church—Ignatian, Carmelite, Benedictine, Franciscan, Salesian, are in the custody of the Religious and Religious provide the resources for a process of spiritual maturation.  How much is the new energy and vision which Pope Francis brings to the Church rooted in his Jesuit spirituality?

4.    Religious communities have the luxury of being spiritual laboratories where new models of community, prayer, apostolate and evangelical lifestyle can be explored and developed.

  According to the schema we have been working on in looking at what an evangelical renewal of Religious Life looks like, the penultimate key to an evangelical renewal of Religious Life is a friendship with Christ rooted in a life of deep personal prayer.  To a certain extent I have covered this in the two previous postings—the one on an immersion in the scriptures and the other as a life that draws on the riches of our Catholic Sacramental and Liturgical heritage.  But perhaps there is a need to explicitly unpack the idea of personal prayer beyond what was said under those two topics, though I stand firm in my claim that all Christian spirituality is essentially a Scriptural spirituality as one cannot be sure of the authenticity of one’s encounter with God except as we encounter God in his Word. 

I want to go back to my quote from Sister Joan Chittester: “The only reason to come to Religious Life is to find God.”  I agree with her that the search for God is the very Raison d'être for religious life.  Indeed, as I believe that the Religious Life is actually the model or what I earlier referred to as the pace-setter for all Christian life, I believe that as we mature in the faith, the search for God becomes the primary characteristic of human life. 

Now when I talk about prayer, at this state I am referring to contemplative prayer.  Devotional prayers and pieties have their place and even as we mature in the spiritual life they continue to have a place.  But as we mature in the spiritual life we also learn that there is a world of unsurpassable intimacy with God that opens up to us as we learn to let the devotions slide into the background of our prayer and let God take us by the hand and lead us to ever deeper and more secret places in our own soul where God communicates God’s Self to us in a solitary silence. 

Such prayer, if authentic, is not an exercise in spiritual self-pleasuring.  To the contrary, like all maturing, the spiritual journey  requires that we strip ourselves of so much of our religious childishness and come to the maturity that God’s Spirit awakens in us—a transformative maturity in which we wordlessly learn that we are here for purposes great than our own personal agenda.  Like Christ himself we undergo that kenosis, that self-emptying that allows us to be refashioned in Christ, so that Christ may live in us, so that we may participate in his divinity even as he has shared in our human nature. 

This transformation is a life long process.  It can’t be rushed.  For most of us it is years before we come to even see the journey ahead much less to make significant progress on the road.  But it takes long and solitary time with God in Christ and we must make that time a priority.

I am not sure that I see this spirituality in many of the new communities that are emerging in the Church in an attempt to re-invent religious life.  I see devotional prayer.  I see a certain amount of liturgical prayer, or at times a liturgical formulaicism.  (By formulaicism I mean a focusing on precise formulas and rituals that often reduces the actual prayer to somewhat of a minimal amount).  On the other hand, I continue to be saddened by how any focus on genuine contemplative prayer seems to have been bypassed in some of the long-established communities.  I have heard too many Sisters from the various Apostolic Communities told that they should go off to the Carmelites or the Trappistines if they “want to pray.”  

I believe that it is the baptismal call of all Christians to grow in contemplative prayer.  Karl Rahner’s famous dictum that the Christian of the future will be a mystic or will cease to be anything at all is spot on.  Among the ravages of a post-Christian culture, it will only be being rooted in an intense personal friendship with Christ that can give a compass to our existence.  As in so many ways, I believe that Religious need to pioneer the way.  

Evangelical Catholicism--the Church's Great Potential II

St. Ignatius Loyla

Weigel says in his book Evangelical Catholicism that we are to meet the Risen Christ in the Scriptures and in the Sacraments and become friends with him.   I think he is “right on” but I suspect that we would mean different things by “friendship” with the Risen Lord.  In Evangelical Catholicism I don’t see the traces of the sort of intimate relationship with Jesus Christ to which the too often overlooked heritage of the Church’s mystics refers, but instead I see a rather heady and in-the-doctrinal-box Christ that is all too prevalent in 20^th and now 21^st century Catholic piety. 
 When we encounter Jesus in the Scriptures and in the Sacraments it is a mediated encounter.  I would like to explore this idea of evangelical Catholicism more deeply over a series of postings.  In yesterday’s post I gave the opinion that a genuinely evangelical Catholicism would draw on the prophets and the Gospels to root within itself a firm commitment to Social Justice.  I want to return to that idea, but first I think there is a need for establish a more explicit foundation for what Evangelical Catholicism demands of—and, at the same time, offers—us in our appreciation of the Scripture.  And to begin, I want to go back to Weigel’s statement:

The Catholic Church is being invited to meet the Risen Lord in the Scriptures, the Sacraments, and Prayer and to make friendship with him the center of Catholic life.

When we encounter Jesus in the Scriptures and in the Sacraments it is a mediated encounter.   Christ comes to us, not directly, but through the Word read or preached, or through the Eucharist or through the Absolution or through the Anointing.  We encounter Christ through the grace of a Sacramental agent.  Christ’s presence is mediated by a third party.   Now, it is Christ we encounter—don’t get me wrong—but the human soul always wants more, wants a direct and unmediated encounter.  The mystics all speak of these direct encounters: Gregory the Great, Bernard, Teresa of Avila, Sister Faustina, Francis de Sales, Ignatius of Loyola, John of the Cross.  While the mystics tell us of such encounters, such experiences are—by God’s grace—not beyond our capacity.   Indeed I think that most of us have, on the somewhat infrequent occasion, had such a direct encounter when we became suddenly aware of our being in the Divine Presence.  The search for this direct encounter is, according to John Cassian, the raison d’etre of the monastic life, but it is by no means the sole prerogative of the monk or nun.   Cassian knew from his own experience that it is possible for the human soul to encounter God directly, however briefly, in this life in anticipation of the unending enjoyment of his Presence in eternity.  We call this direct encounter of God during the span of our life here on earth “contemplative prayer.”  It is always an infused gift—not something that we can manufacture by our efforts at prayer or our moral behavior or our charitable works (though these can prepare us for his presence)—but God’s choosing to bring us, albeit somewhat momentarily, into his Presence. 

The regular commitment to contemplative prayer is an invitation to a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.  In the Christian tradition, contemplative prayer is always rooted in the Scripture, in the Word.  It is usually tied to some form of Lectio Divina—that cogitatio on the scriptural text. (I hesitate to say “meditation” only because some will interpret this too narrowly, so I am using the more medieval word: “cogitatio” which means “thought” or “reflection.”)  
The reason that our prayer stays anchored in the Scriptural text is that one of the dangers of pseudo-spirituality is the tendency for a person to devise a Christ of their particular imagination.  Rousseau said that “God created man in his own image and likeness and man, being a gentleman, returned the compliment.”  For many people the Jesus they “encounter” in their prayer is nothing other than a projection of their own ideas and prejudices.  When we practice contemplative prayer, we stay close to the biblical text because we know that Word is authentic.  Yet entering into the Word in prayer is a different experience that studying the Word or even hearing it read in the Liturgy.  We can read the Bible for inspiration, for learning, for guidance.  All of that is good. In bible reading, we stay in the text.  But contemplative prayer is more passing through the text as one passes from an outer room into an inner where our most beloved Friend is waiting for us.   Our entrance and our retreat from the Divine Presence is in the Word, and the Word taken in its purity and not as “proof texts” to reinforce our pre-conceived ideas and notions.  In fact, Saint John of the Cross says that one of the signs of the authenticity of our prayer experience is that it challenges the ideas and notions which we brought to prayer.  If we don’t leave prayer somehow changed, we were not in the Presence of the Risen Lord. 
Karl Rahner, admittedly no theological hero for George Weigel, wrote that the Christian of the future will be a mystic or will cease to be a Christian at all.  His point is that living in this post-Christian era, only the person with that direct and unmediated experience of God will have the stamina to remain faithful in a faithless culture.  When we talk about an evangelical Catholicism we need first to ask ourselves what priority we will give to laying the groundwork not for  the piety that is so prevalent in certain circles today, but for a genuine spirituality that brings people into the intimate friendship and knowledge of Jesus Christ.  Piety lets us know about Jesus, but it lacks the ability to give us an authentic introduction to Jesus Christ where he can be the sort of friend Weigel speaks of.