Pascal

Note:  I wrote this post several years ago, in honor of the date for Pascal’s “falling asleep in Christ,” and I repost it here on the anniversary of that day, largely unchanged.

August 19th is the anniversary of the death of Blaise Pascal, mathematician, scientist, and Christian apologist, most famous for his Penseés, his intended defense of the Christian faith.  This will be the 349th year since the death of the man who, though he is not a saint, is an important figure in Christianity, whom the theologian Edward T. Oakes once called “the first modern Christian.”  And in honor of the man, I offer up a few meditations upon on his life and work.

Pascal was born in Clermont in 1623, son of a government official named Etienne Pascal.  His mother died when he was only three years old, and his father raised him and his two sisters Gilberte and Jacqueline on his own, moving the familly to Paris in 1631.  Etienne educated Blaise himself, which kept the boy, who was know to be intellectually precocious from a young age (according to one story, he had discovered Euclid’s thirty two propositions on his own by the time he was twelve), isolated from the society of other boys, but also afforded him some freedom from physical discomfort, as he was a sickly child, and plagued by poor health all his life (he died when he was only 39).  When he was 14, he began attending weekly meetings in the cell of Father Mersenne in Paris, which included such luminaries as Pierre Gassendi and Rene Descartes.  His father became tax collector for Rouen in 1639, and between 1642 and 45, Pascal developed a calculating machine to help his father with the crushing amount of calculations needed for his task (the tax records in Rouen were in chaos at the time because of uprisings) called the Pascaline, which was the first or second mechanical calculating machine ever built (depending on whom you ask).  Pascal’s contributions to mathematics included, among other things, the development of a mathematical theory of probability which laid the groundwork for Leibniz’s & Newton’s work on the calculus.  When he was 16, he produced a work on conic sections (Essai pour les coniques) which is known today as Pascal’s theorem.  When it was shown to Descartes, he refused to believe it was by the younger Pascal; after Mersenne had assured him that indeed the son and not the father had written the manuscript, he dismissed it with his characteristic touchiness, saying that “I do not find it strange that he has offered demonstrations about conics more appropriate than those of the ancients,” adding, “but other matters related to this subject can be proposed that would scarcely occur to a sixteen-year-old child.”

A turning point occurred in Pascal’s life in 1646 when his father broke his hip and was laid up for several months.  The injury was potentially fatal, given the state of medicine at the time, and it was by the care of a couple of the finest physicians in Rouen that his father recovere.  Both of these men were also followers of Jansenism, the Catholic party in France formed around the teachings of the Dutch bishop Jansenius, who espoused a very severe form of Augustinian piety.  Their presence affected the first great shift in his attitude, though it was short lived.  After a couple of years later his father died, and his sister Jacqueline entered Port Royal as a nun, to his great distress and disappointment, and they wrangled over their inheritance for several years as well, further deepening his distress (in addition to his poor health).  He went through what is sometimes called a “worldly period” in his life from 1648-1654, mainly because he pursued marriage at one point and evidently reveled in his now international fame as a scientist.

All of this changed one night, on November 23 1654, which we know because Pascal recorded the events he experienced on a piece of paper and sewed it into the lining of his clothing, changing it whenever he changed his clothes.  Sometimes called “la nuit de feu” because of what Pascal wrote, the evidence of his experience was discovered only upon his death (which was evidently unknown even to his closest associates until then).  It contained a parchment together with a piece of paper with almost identical writing.  It reads thus:

L’an de grâce 1654

        Lundi, 23 Novembre, jour de saint Clement, pape et

martyr, et autres au Marytrologe.

        Veille de saint Chrysogonus, martyr et autres.

Depuis environ dix heures et demie du soirs jusques environ

minuit et demie.

                                       Feu

‘Dieu d’Abraham, Dieu d’Isaac, Dieu de Jacob’  non des

philosophes et des savants.

Certitude, certitude, sentiment, joie, paix.

Dieu de Jesus Christ.

Deum meum et Deum vestrum.

Ton Dieu sera mon Dieu.

 

Oubli de monde et de tout, hormis Dieu.

Il ne se trouve que par les voies enseignees dans l’Evangile.

                    Grandeur de l’ame humaine.

Pere juste, le monde ne t’a point connu, mais je t’ai connu.

                    Joie, joie, joie, pleurs de joie.

Je mon suis séparé.

Dereliquerunt me fontem aquae vivae.

Mon Dieu, me quitterez-vous?

Que je n’en sois pas séparé eternellement.

 

  Cette est la vie eternelle, qu’ils te connaissent seul vrai

Dieu et celui que tu as envoyé, Jesus Christ.

                      Jesus Christ.

                          Jesus Christ.

Je m’en suis séparé.  Je lai fui, renoncé, crucifié.

Que je n’en sois pas separé.

Il ne se conserve que par les voies enseignées dans l’Évangiles.

                         Renonciation totale et douce.

Soumission totale à Jesus Christ et à mon directeur.

Eternellement en joie pour un jour d’exercice sur la terre.

Non obliviscar sermones tuos. Amen.

 

(The year of grace 1654

Monday, November 23, feast of St. Clement Pope and martyr, and others in the martyrology.

Eve of St. Chrysogonus, martyr and others.

From about half past ten in the evening until half past midnight.

Fire. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars.

Certitude, certitude, heartfelt, joy, peace.

God of Jesus Christ.

God of Jesus Christ.

My God and your  God.

Your God shall be my God.

The world forgotten, and all except God.

He can only be found by the ways taught in the Gospels.

Greatness of the human soul.

O righteous Father, the world had not known thee, but I have known thee.

Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.

I have cut myself off from him.

They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters.

My God, why have you forsaken me?

Let me not be cut off from him for ever.

And this is eternal life, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.

Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ.

I have cut my self off from him. I have shunned him, renounced him, crucified him.

Let me never be cut off from him.

He can only be preserved by the ways taught in the Gospel.

Sweet and total renunciation.

Eternally in joy for one day’s effort on earth.

I will not forget thy words. Amen.)

The implication of the “night of fire” were profound:  Pascal virtually ceased to produce new experiments, new works, and dedicated his life to religion, in particular the rigorous Jansenism that his sister had first imbibed, and that he now wholeheartedly embraced. It is out of this change that he would eventually lunge into the theological fray with the Jesuits, most famously in his Provincial Letters, his masterly polemic which did so much damage to the reputation of that order.  The Letters were a literary masterpiece, and I believe none other than Voltaire himself said they were the greatest works in French literature (not coincidentally, his brother was a Jansenist, one of the “convulisonaries” he was normally so contemptuous of).  Some scholars have suggested that his poor health is behind his conversion, hinting, I think, that he may not have been mentally stable because of it.  I’m not sure if he originated the idea, but surely the most famous accusation of this kind came naturally from the pen of Nieztsche, for in Pascal he found the apotheosis of everything he despised about Christianity:  its pusillanimity and exaltation of human weakness, its invention of a purely “interior” realm of spirituality, superior to the realm of the senses, its otherwordliness, its rootedness (as he saw it) in the sickness and physiological deformity of human kind, in other words its ”life denying” characteristics—all this he saw epitomized in the great mathematician.  “And history is in fact rich in such anti-artists, in such starvelings of life, who necessarily have to take things to themselves, impoverish them, make them leaner.  This is, for example, the case with the genuine Christian, with Pascal for example…” (Twilight of the Idols, “Expeditions of an Untimely Man,” 9)   Some of this is ironic, given the fact that Nietzsche himself was a rather sickly person, but the sharpness with which he dispatches Pascal is due to a wish to distance himself from someone who’s influence he thought he had outgrown.  I’ll likely return to this topic at a later date, but for now I can only recommend to the reader Eric Voeglin’s essay “Nietzsche and Pascal,” which discusses his debt to Pascal at length.

At any rate, it it his Pensées for which he is most famous, his apology for Christianity which he did not live to see finished but for which he collected a series of his thoughts, which he arranged into 27 headings (apparently intended as chapters) and began to write down his pensées or fragments.  The first section that Pascal arranged he titled “Order,” and I linger over it for a moment it for a couple of reasons.   One is historical: order was one of the great obsessions of the age in which Pascal lived, as the thought of so many great thinkers, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Grotius, to name a few, was concerned with bringing to order the edifice of human thought in one shape or another to a simplified or more simplified form.  As was another, specifically the obsession with mathematics and in particular geometry as basis for knowledge, so conspicuous in Descartes, Galileo, and Hobbes, is something that influences Pascal’s thought, it being deliberately non-linear, non-scholastic in its orientation.  Pascal’s efforts in this respect can be seen in just such a light, particularly when you think about his devastation of Jesuit casuistry, with all of its complicated justifications for what Pascal took as degradations of the faith.  The other reason I think “Order” is so important has to do with his scientific endeavors.  Here is the first “pensee” of the first section:

Les psaumes chanté par tout la terre.

Qui rend témoignage de Mahoment? Lui-même.

Jesus Christ veut que son témoignage de soit rien.

La qualité de témoins fait qu’il faut qu’ils soient toujours

et partout et misérables. Il est seul.

 

 

(The psalms chanted throughout the world.

Who witnesses to Mahomet? Himself.

Jesus Christ wants his witness to be nothing.

The quality of witnesses is such that they must be always

and everywhere miserable.  He is alone.)

Now the editor of my penguin edition of the Pensées explains this passage purely in reference to the Jews, which is admittedly the immediate context for the passage, but it seems kind of odd that it would be about them since it also explicitly says Jesus “wants his witness to be nothing,” and that “he is alone.”  Part of the problem with interpreting Pascal’s aphorisms is that they are, of course, dislocated from the larger context of his argument; this also explains the attraction of Pascal’s work, in that it abounds in such rich obscurities that an inventive interpreter can make much out of.  The issue which comes to mind on re-reading the Pénsees is the whole question of social credit and the reliability of witnesses in scientific experiments and their reporting in the 17th century, especially the work of Steve Shapin and Simon Schaeffer, whose work showed how social credit (how trustworthy one thought the witnesses of an experiment were) was important if not determinative in how certain scientific disputes were settled in the 17th century (Pascal’s among them, of course).  The question is important, because it raises the whole problem of objectivity, which was a concept just then being born.  Can we in fact have “objective” knowledge of a thing, wholly independent of a human subjectivity, without the mediation of human witnesses?  Pascal seems to say yes and no in the passage; Jesus is “alone” and wants “nothing” to be his witness, while Muhammad is his own witness.  It appears that Pascal wants to say that Jesus alone needs no witnesses, and yet the Jews still remain to be witnesses, proclaiming a messiah whom they will or cannot recognize.  (This would have been a good metaphor for most people in Pascal’s eyes, I imagine, as he thought most people could not or would not recognize the Messiah.)  Or perhaps we should say Pascal thought Jesus needed no witnesses, but that we most certainly need them.  In any case, the paradoxical quality of the Pensées is evident in this opening salvo of Pascal’s, who like other thinkers of his age is desperate for epistemological certainty, but Pascal was more attuned than most to the ironies and complexities involved in such a search.

The main outlines of what Pascal was attempting are clear, however, despite pregnant ambiguity of individual passages:  to raise doubts in the mind of the skeptical, to show the limits of skepticism, then draw them into the reasons for belief in Christian revelation.  It is probably the former which is more widely admired today than the latter, but Pascal’s own summation of what he was attempting might be in “Order,” where he states the intention of his work:

First Part: Wretchedness of man without God.

Second Part: Happiness of man with God.

               otherwise

First Part: Nature is corrupt, proved by nature itself

Second Part: There is a Redeemer, proved by Scripture.

It is worth pointing out here that he doesn’t mean “nature” here to be the natural world; rather he is talking about the nature of man in its corruption, as Jansenism did.  (How far his thought his equatable to Jansenism as whole is debatable, but on this point most Christians at the time still agreed that human nature is corrupt).  Pascal’s first goal then is to prove to those who are satisfied with their lives, content with they take to be happiness, that they do not really possess happiness at all, but are rather mired in the wretchedness of an existence completely ignorant of their own nature, which he expresses as “Condition de l’homme: inconstance, ennui, inquietude” (Man’s condition: inconstancy, boredom, anxiety).   Pascal does this, for example, by pointing out the role of custom, or opinion over human affairs, sometimes with comic poignancy:

Heel of a shoe. “How well made that is! What a skillfull workman! What a brave solider!” This is where our inclinations come from and our choice of careers. “What a lot that man drinks!  How little that man drinks!” That is what makes people temperate or drunkards, soldiers, cowards, etc. (Vanity)

In attempting to show people their wretchedness, Pascal repeats the charge of the contemplative against the great mass of humanity:  namely that they are immersed in activity, and therefore incapable of discerning the hard truth that they are wretched:

Anyone who does not see the vanity of the world is vain himself.  So who does not see it, apart from the young people whose lives are all noise, diversions, and thought for the future?

            But take away their diversion and you will see them bored to extinction.  Then they feel their nullity without recognizing it, for nothing could be more wretched thant to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of diversion. 

Pascal’s great innovation on this theme, one that Leszek Kolakowski picked up on in his book God Owes Us Nothing (the greatest title I think I’ve ever heard, though I have problems with the book), namely that of boredom.  It’s one of the things about the Pensées which make them seem so modern, contemporary society being immersed in the kind of non-stop diversions that Pascal could only dream of (or have nightmares about), all in the service of keeping people perpetually agitated and occupied.  Thus Pascal, according to Kolakowski, stands as the progenitor in a small but fairly distinguished line of thinkers on boredom, notably Kirkegaard and Heidegger.  As A.J. Krailsheimer, translator of the Penguin edition of the Pensées, points out, Pascals’ method for puncturing what Heidegger called “das Gerede” or empty chatter, is not a linear one:  he does not proceed in scholastic fashion (indeed, he helped destroy scholastic education as well as scholastic science) by syllogisms, but by observations about human experience, proceeding in a sort of geometric fashion from several differing points all convering on the same center, namely faith in Jesus Christ.  (Pascal actually draws on several mathematical concepts in his Pensees, most famously in his ”Wager,” which is an extension of his work on the theory of probability.)

Along the way, Pascal takes aim not only at the insufficiency of custom and ordinary experience as guides to ultimate reality about the human condition, but also at reason.  As Edward Oakes has pointed out about Pascal, he was one of the first Christian thinkers to fully absorb the new science of the 17th century, and its potential consequences for Christian belief.  This should be pointed out because, though some thinkers like to distinguish between the rationality of the scholastics and the rationality of more “Enlightenment” type thinkers such as Descartes, Pascal at least in the Pensées, does not make such distinctions.  He thinks of reason in quite universal terms.  Thus when he says that there are times when reason should submit, I do not think one can make him into an historicist and say that he means merely “Enlightenment reason”; he means reason as such.  I point this out because Pascal in the Pénsees is restating what is a Christian commonplace, namely the insufficiency of reason to bring us to the fullness of divine, eternal truth;  but there is a marked tendency in Jansenism toward separating faith and reason so firmly that it winds up lapsing into something like fideism, and I’m not sure that Pascal is altogether free of this tendency, even in his unfinished thoughts. Kolakowski seemed to think so, and in the last pages of his book seems simultaneously to attribute to Pascal the idea that “faith” is something that exists in the human heart only, and that it cannot be communicated at all to other people, and therefore never known as absolutely true or not, without the possibility of solipsism. (God Owes Us Nothing, 197)  There doubtless was an extradordinary internality to Pascal’s life and thought, but I must confess I don’t find this sentiment anywhere in the Pensées.  Such an idea may accurately reflect the outlook of other Jansenists, Nicole or Arnauld perhaps, but I think Kolakowski may be projecting his own doubts about dogmatic Christianity onto Pascal here, doubts of a much more “modern” sort than even Pascal could countenance.  There was one thinker in the 17th century who articulated such an idea rather explicitly, but it was not Pascal: it was John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I believe in his chapter on faith and reason, in which he says in effect that even if God could reveal something to us over and above what we could naturally discover with our reason, we could never communicate it to other people.  But Pascal I don’t think quite went that far, though perhaps he does in other writings beyond the Pensées.

He certainly thought men should begin with evidence of man’s fallen nature, however, and identifies evidence in abundance for it, adeptly recasting traditional Christian commonplaces in brilliant aphorisms designed, as he says in one pensee, to “make religion attractive.”  On the relation of faith and reason, he says in one place that “La foi dit biens ce que les sens ne disent pas, mais non pas le contraire de ce qu’ils voient. Elle est au-dessus, et non pas contre” (faith tells us well what the senses do not, but not to the contrary of what they see. It is above, and not against them.)   And against the vanity of materialist philosophers, he has this to say:  “Immatérialité de l’âme. Les philosophes qui ont dompté leurs passions, quelle matière l’a pu faire?”  (Immateriality of the soul.  When the philosophers have quieted their passions, what matieral substance has done this?)  But Pascal does not want to stop at merely doubting the doubters, or quieting the “dogmatists” as he calls them, with their soul killing absurdities.  He thinks this knowledge of man’s corruption, of his limitations, can be liberating, since it can bring them to a knowledge of God, and of man’s original greatness.  One passage in particular has always stayed with me, at least in the English translation from which I first read it, in the section entitled “Grandeur” or Greatness:  “Toutes ces miséres-la même prouvent sa grandeur.  Ce sont misères de grand seigneur, misères d’un roi déposédé.”  (All these examples of his wretchedness prove his greatness.  It is the wretchedness of a great lord, the wretchedness of a dispossessed king)  According to the editor of my French of edition of the Pensées, Pascal was haunted by images of kings in describing humanity, and quotes a passage from a letter he wrote to his sister Charlotte, where he talks about the saints being enthroned in heaven with Jesus.  Maybe it is the fact that there are basically no more kings left in Western Civilization, but I have always found it a striking and haunting image for the human condition.  (I think Emerson said somewhere that man is a god in ruins, which, though he was a crank, seems to partake of the same sentiment.)  Pascal it seems needed to see human beings as the foulest abyss imaginable, in order to see them as in any way capable of the highest good.  Or more accurately, to be able to see the highest good (that is, God,) they had to be made to see the abyss which separated them from this God.  Hence in Pascal there is almost a sort of “baroque” dualism, spanning the whole of human experience.  For him, the complete wretchedness and banality of humanity points to the summits of its greatness, like a baroque painting in which a figure points to something outside of its own frame, to where humanity was intended to partake of the divine nature.  For him these are the twin poles of human existence:  not body and spirit, as Descartes would have it, nor reason and emotion, as his Romantic descendents might interpret him (there is room for this though, with all his talk of knowing things with the “heart”), but rather between man’s wretchedness and his greatness.  “S’il se vante, je l’abaisse/S’il s’abaisse, je le vante/Et le contredis toujours/Jusques à ce qu’il comprenne/Qu’il est an monstre incompréhensible.”  (If he exalts himself, I humble him, if he humbles himself, I exalt him, and I go on contradicting him Till he understands That he is a monster that passes all understanding)  There is no way of knowing, but it would be nice to think that he would have included his “Mystery of Jesus,” one of his later fragments that is not catalogued, in with the rest of the Pensées, as a way of crowning his much more obvious achievement of casting doubt on the skeptical, though A. J. Krailsheimer says it was merely a private meditation.  It well captures the essence of what he was trying to convey to his intended audience:

I see the abyss of my pride, my curiosity, my concuspiscence.  There is no link between me and God or Jesus Christ the Righteous. But he was made sin for me:  all your scourges fell upon him.  He is more abominable than me, and far from abhorring me, feels honored that I go to him and help him.  But he healed himself and will heal me all the more surely.  I must add my wounds to his, and join myself to him, and he will save me in saving himself.

 

 

Do small things as if they were great, because of the majesty of Christ, who does them in us and lives our life, and great things as if they were small and easy, because of his almighty power.

One can see in the last paragraph quoted above something of his “modernity” in theological terms, sounding a bit like the “Little Flower,” St. Therese of Liseux, who in her private meditations also urged herself to do “little things” as if they were great for God as well.  Here we see Pascal at his most practical, but also his most vulnerable, and therefore most impressive.  It makes me wish he lived just a little longer, to see what his rhetorical genius could have done with time to prepare for something more than a merely negative defense of the faith, as he had done in the Provincial Letters.

Nevertheless, it is significant that these were his “private” thoughts, and not ones he intended to publish in his planned apology.  As Edward Oakes has pointed out, he is perhaps most quintessentially modern in that this profound piety of his was an almost wholly private, internal matter, known only to himself and a few confederates at Port Royal.  This is exactly the sort of religious person that a secularized world tends hold up as the ideal religious person, because it does not impinge on anyone very much.  This tendecy to privatize one’s faith, internalize it, is perhaps, along with both its rigor and the often melancholic introversion which so often seemed to accompany it, is what made Kolakowski end his book by condemning Pascal’s religion as one which “was a religion for unhappy people and designed to make them more unhappy,” despite all of Pascal’s “protestations about the happiness of those who have “found God.”"  (God Owes Us Nothing, 197)  Though I am inclined to agree with him about the excessive rigor of the sect, I think Kolakowski has missed the mark somewhat; again, as his crack about the happiness of those who have “found God” hints that he may be thinking of religious believers more close at hand than the Jansenists (modern day evangelicals?  Hard line Polish Catholic Nationalists?), who were after all not condemned by the Pope for their rigidity but for their intellectual errors—primarily for denying free will to mankind in the quest for salvation.  Pascal himself can perhaps bear the charge of excessive asceticism and morbidity, but not his religion, if one means his piety and his beliefs.  (It should be noted that he did submit to the Pope formally before he died, realizing, as Krailsheimer has noted, that he could not continue as a Catholic otherwise.)  They are pretty much just standard Augustinianism, however morbid Pascal himself may have been.  And as Kolakowski points out, this view of the world has the great advantage of seeing clearly and honestly a rather uncomfortable fact about God in the Christian tradition:  as he puts it, God “simply owes nothing to anybody”; God cannot be bound by any human rules about justice, and we cannot make moral claims on him the same way we can on other human beings.  This may sound banal, but it is the converse of that modern theological trope which theologians of all stripes like to invoke, the “theology of the gift”:  if all life, all creation is gift, then nothing is owed to us, not our friends, not our health, not even our lives.  There is in that sense no “right to life” at all; we are simply, always, in the hands of the God who is, as Pascal never fails to repeat, difficult to understand and know.  (Deus absconditus, as Pascal quotes it in one of his fragments.) This is not normally a pleasant thought, unless you are extraordinarily convinced that God exists and wants to help you.  Otherwise, you will probably run from this God as fast as you can—modernity in a nutshell.  There is of course more, a whole other side to this in the Christian tradition about this problem: the genuine hope and love of God, coming gratuitously from the God of love, being returned by him, is usually combined with a moralism that emphasizes helping others in most contemporary Christian settings, and constitutes the very essence of modern presentations of the Christian faith (not to much effect, it seems); but it’s not the reality of love that is the problem.  The problem comes when knowing that it comes from God and experiencing it with a feeling of absolute certainty is made paramount, and if one is going to treat Pascal’s thought at the level of epistemology only (à la Descartes) then yes, it will seem as if his religion was “not tailored to the needs of an ordinary, decent Christian.”  But I think this is to confuse who Pascal was with what he thought; and what was he?  Almost certainly a melancholic with a tendency to morbid introspection, someone who needed, as we all do, the loving grace and mercy of the God made man, but also better physical health and maybe some pyschological healing, as well as spiritual healing.  Pascal loved God more than any sort of certainty he could attain about God, and that indeed is something that is hard for most people to understand, but it made life worth living for him; he may indeed have been “unhappy” at some level, but he was free, because even in the midst of pain and suffering he could still experience the love of God.  It may not be the most attractive kind of faith, but it was genuine, and therefore I do not think he merits the condemnation that Kolakowski places upon him.

Certainly, Pascal is not for everyone, and as I hinted before, there are some aspects of his thought which ought rightly to be avoided.   Those who are secure in their faith, who do experience that joy without having to be reminded constantly of their wretchedness (though they are aware of it), needn’t bother themselves with the Pensées (though the Provincial Letters might be good reading for those who are convinced they aren’t wretched at all; the modern Jesuits, perhaps?).  Nor should they be indulged in too much by those recovering from doubt or apathy, or those who are like Pascal so intensely melancholic.  That is in fact my own predilection, and it has been a long time since I have allowed myself the indulgence of reading the Pensées, and you can see from what I have written that I have not read them all for the purposes of this assay.  Pascal was, along with Dostoevsky, Augustine, and a few others, once providentially placed in may path to lead me out of painful and wrenching doubt, but I do not like to indulge my temperament too much, even though reading him again is like visiting an old friend who has moved away, and finding him much the same.  But still, Pascal is best suited for those in the grip of doubt, for those who experience the world too intensely, and see in it only the terror and boredom of an indifferent, hostile void.  He is for those who have yet to learn how to doubt their doubt, to put into question all those overwhelming and enervating passions which lead them into either despairing inactivity or entropic fantasy, and yet can “only find peace through a satisfaction of the whole being,” as T.S. Eliot once put it.  The world being what it is, I’m convinced there will always be those in need of Pascal.  I believe they should probably look elsewhere for their ultimate satisfaction, as I myself have, but until they begin to find it, they can start their search in no better place than in the thoughts of M. Pascal, to whose brief life and profound works I can give no better encomium, than to quote this passage from A.J. Krailsheimer’s introduction:

To return to the point de départ, the wretchedness of man without God is the result of making himself his own centre, the happiness of man with God is the result of making Christ his centre, of trying to conform his life to that of a perfect man.  The creator of the universe must remain a hidden God for finite creatures, but in God made man the model is plain for all to follow who are not blinded by self love and self interest.  In these terms one can see how the nuit de feu underlies and explains what followed.  The Pensées, like the Provinciale Letters, are as much a denunciation of the false god of the self as an apology for Christianity.  Such private texts as the Mystery of Jesus show that Pascal’s meditations brought him closer not only to God but to his fellow men, with whom he shared both the guilt and the redemption.  When insecurity and aniexty neuroses, arrogant intellecutalism and unthinking materialism, selfishness and agression have faded from the background of daily living, Pascal may have fewer readers.  In the meantime the Pensées will continue to attract and even inspire countless men and women seeking to escape from a condition of “inconstancy, boredom, anxiety” of which they are only too well aware. 

Blaise Pascal, requiescat in pace.

Memorial of St. Pius X

Books, E-Readers, & Masturbation

There have been a couple of laments written recently about the demise of the printed word, as it appears that Amazon.com, the online seller of books (among other things), now sells more ebooks than printed ones.  The rise of e-reader devices such as Kindle, Nook, the iPad and other such technical instruments have seemingly made books obsolete, and it seems pretty sure that printed books as a mass phenomenon are a thing of the past.   This does not mean of course that they might not survive into the future as novelty items, but the days of there being a “print market” are pretty much numbered. I have to say, my feelings about this, being someone who writes a blog dedicated to viewing the world sub specie aeternitatis are not very sad.  This is partly because, whatever else may happen, it is not as if books are going to disappear; they will become rarer, but then this may improve their appeal, when they are no longer vehicles for information but special repositories for those works we wish to have a slightly more “embodied” relationship to than in the virtual lines of Kindle or iPad.  My thoughts on the subject are much the same of those as Amy Welborn, who noted that the main difference between the reading experience of e-texts and books was that reading bound books seemed to be more of an individual experience, with their physically distinct pages, their different bindings, page textures and so forth. This seems basically correct to me, and I think it has to do with the way that codex makes for combining individual texts into one single artifact which gives it this appeal.   Books in that sense are very individual, despite the uniformity that print as a technology brought to them, and this might be something that will be lost with the coming of e-readers, but I don’t think so.   This is because the e-readers are merely a different technology, meant to serve a different purpose; they cannot by definition serve the same purpose that books did.  Let me explain what I mean by first enunciating what I think are the virtues of these e-readers.

I received a Kindle last Christmas, when the one which my mother had purchased for my father stopped working, and he, being resolutely Luddite, gave it to me.  It promptly started working again, and I have been using it ever since.  It is not nearly as annoying to read as a computer screen, its screen being formatted to look as much like paper as possible, and it is lightweight, so it is perfect for plane flights (packing books and carrying them around is one of those things I like to think of as penance for the unchecked riot of my intellectual appetites).  And, for a graduate student, the space-saving element of such readers cannot be overestimated:  I have way too many real books, and very little space to store anymore.  The virtues of ease and convenience that such readers present are not negligible, to say nothing of the ease of downloading books instantly when you want them, which is also very convenient as well.  Probably my favorite feature of the Kindle is the fact that I can eat and read at the same time, switching pages with one hand, in a way that I can’t with bound books, which requires the use of two hands.  This feature of the Kindle brings to mind Rousseau’s naughty remark in his Confessions, about books that even fashionable ladies could only read “with one hand,” as e-readers allow their users to “multi-task” while they are using them.

This indeed might be fodder for a Luddite’s complaint against such e-readers:  they are better at filling a flat, two-dimensional screen with “information,” and allow their readers engage, in a scatter-brained sort of way, in several activities at once, rather than focusing primarily on the content of what they are reading.  One could see such e-readers as continuing a trend of modern devices which distract us from focusing on our task at hand, or from otherwise escaping from our selves into a larger world, a complaint I hear frequently about the iPod (I run in pretty Luddite circles, obviously).  And no doubt, technology such as the Kindle and other devices can facilitate such scatter-brained ”information overload.”  And the ability to indulge oneself by acquiring texts instantaneously might not be the healthiest thing in the world in moral terms.   But though it makes such things easier, it is well to remember that it is not a cause of such activities; what I have called the “ease and convenience” of the kindle is not something that appeals to a natural desire for such qualities, but is the result of complex cultural relations which make those things desirable.  So also were the cultural elements which made the printed book so powerful a tool for the last several hundred years.

My point is that one can get too caught up in technological change that is going on, and attribute too much to it.  It is certainly the case that e-readers will constitute the normal way people read in the future, but the book as we have known it will not disappear.  Or I should rather say the codex, for that is the real innovation here, as e-readers (as I mentioned above with regards to the color of the Kindle screen) can mimic features of print in a way that they cannot with the codex.   It was, historically speaking, the spread of the Christian faith that made what we know as “books”; before this, they had been scrolls, mostly of papyri, or written on tablets.  In fact, the e-reader is almost more like a virtual tablet than it is anything else, and so interestingly takes us back, in a certain sense, technologically speaking, as much as it does forward.  The codex was perfectly suited to the Christian faith, of course, since it allowed many different texts to be fitted into one single text, something that was necessary for the Christian Bible to exist as one “book.”  The switch to the codex (which took a very long time) helped produce a major intellectual shift in late Antiquity, but my point is that the only reason that the shift occurred was that the profound change in beliefs that the coming of Christianity produced ultimately drove such change.  In my dissertation, I partly addressed the role of print in fostering a “public sphere” in seventeenth century England, and concluded that it did no such thing, precisely because Englishmen of the period were still thinking of public and private life in terms inherited from classical antiquity, and that anything like Habermas’ public sphere would have to wait till the late eighteenth century to find expression, as those terms were slowly replaced by more modern ideas about politics and the state.  I am, of course, taking sides with Adrian Johns over Elizabeth Eisenstein in this matter, and I do not wish to minimize unnecessarily the difference such technologies can make; my only point is that they epiphenomenal, and they only have the impact that they do because they are responses to some change in human relations, serve some sort of purpose in human terms, however exalted or trivial.

Thus, e-readers, iPads, iPods and other such devices may indeed shorten our attention spans and make us more scatter-brained, but this is hardly the fault of the those technologies.  One of the commenters on Megan McCardle’s site that I linked to above remarked that the Kindle allowed them to read several books at once; one might be tempted to blame this on technology, but I was doing the same thing with real books for years before I received mine.   Mostly this was because I had to read 60-70 books for graduate courses, but then that is my point:  it was the system of relations I entered into, which forced me to cram as much crap into my brain as possible per class whether I actually learned anything or not (whether for true intellectual reasons or merely to prove, as I suspect, that you really wanted to be part of the “guild”) which shaped my reading habits, not the technology that I used to read with.   This does not mean I am totally indifferent to the effects of such relations, nor will I sing praises to our allegedly shortened attention spans as if it were a good thing.   I am at teacher, after all; but then students have always had short attention spans.   One only has to read St. Augustine’s Confessions to realize that bad students are not the product of innovations in technology.   If many people no longer have the desire to patiently read through long, difficult works, this is probably the result of a shift in human ways of living; but then I doubt it is really as big a shift as was the change from scrolls to the codex, and if we are merely using such technologies in order to mentally “jerk-off” all day long, this merely means the practice will be more widespread than before, not that it will be universal.  Books we have with us always:  human life is never lacking for the types of tragedies, large and small, that will force us to focus and concentrate more closely, tempt us to contemplation of higher realities rather than mere information gorging when we read.  The dominance of e-readers will not change this, nor, for those who desire more than information, will they make it more difficult.

But then a contemplative like myself would say that, wouldn’t I?

Alypius

The Waters of Meribah, the Waters of Christ

Today’s readings from the Liturgy (Novus Ordo) resound with the image and metaphor of water:  the story of the people of Israel in the desert at Meribah, where they “contended” with God because they were thirsty, is paralleled by the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well of Jacob in Sychar.  The two stories are apposite for me just at this moment, as I have had a certain amount of trial in my life recently; in a bit of frustration (at a very petty thing), I lashed out at God in anger.  It brings me shame, and I have asked his forgiveness, but reading and hearing the story from Leviticus made me recollect my journey from unbelief to belief once again.

The Israelites wandered in the desert, and demanded water from Moses; their complaint, that their desire for drink be satisfied, is not unnatural, travelling through a desert.  According to Robert Alter’s commentary on Exodus, the verb which is used in the passage “and the people disputed with Moses” often appeared in judicial contexts, where it meant to bring a legal complaint.  Thus, the people of Israel are demanding their “rights” as they see them from Moses, and by extension, from God.  Won’t the God who called us out of Egypt satisfy our basic desires?  Moses, frightened, calls upon God for help, and responds, but asks Moses to “pass before the people,” which as Alter notes might well be a direct response;  before God would manifest himself in power, Moses had to “run the gauntlet,” so to speak.   He then strikes the rock with his staff-the same staff which had caused so much destruction in Israel-and the people’s thirst is quenched.  Tellingly, the story ends with the name of Meribah (contention) being assigned to the place, but also with the revelation of what the people’s challenge really amounted to in the first place:  “for their testing the Lord, saying “Is the Lord in our midst or not?” .” 

Israel wanted an assurance that God really was with them, really; they demanded a sign.  Many times since I made the leap of faith to enter the Church I have felt the same way, for I too can still look back to see the lands of Egypt, and know its comforts and consolations; many times have I said, in my own foolish way, “why have you brought us up from Egypt to bring death on me…for my thirst?”   What is worse, for a long time I could not distinguish the nature of this temptation:  have I fallen back into doubt?  Or is it mere spiritual fatigue? Things are not always so clear in the interior life.  The people of Israel contended with a God they knew, but was not sure loved them; for a long time, I believed in a God that, in faith, I believed existed, but did not know.  What the story of Israel at the waters of Meribah made me realize is that, however sinful, my temper tantrum is a progress, though one through a desert:  one does not contend with someone one does not think exists.  My demanding from God my “due measure” of happiness is a sign that, however perversely, I do believe:  one does not curse a person he does notknow to exist.  I’ve cursed enough people in my life to know that distinction, at least.

The story of Christ with the Samaritan women is another example of how the Gospel writers took the images and metaphors of the Hebrew Scriptures, and made them speak Christ.   In the story, when Jesus asks her for a drink, he is met by the incredible response of the woman, who can’t believe a Jew would converse with her.   And when he tells her that if she knew who she was talking to, she would ask him for water, she replies rather incredulously “where do you get that living water?” Or as Chrysostom says, in paraphrasing her response, “Jacob used this water, and had nothing better to give us.”  You have nothing better to give us either; there is nothing better, nothing else than this water we have thirsted for, and will thirst for again.  This has been my own response, many times.   But then Christ promises her, “he who drinks of the water I shall give, will never thirst.” And from there, he calls her out, naming her indiscretions, and leads her to realize that he is a prophet, then revealing himself as the Messiah with the same simplicity that she intially responded with.  The whole remarkable story ends with her evangelizing people in the town, who finally proclaim to her that “we no longer believe because of your word, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this indeed is the Savior of the World.”   Whereas the contention of the Israelites ended with a sign, which could be taken away (and was), the Samaritan woman’s guileless disbelief led to others proclaiming that they knew, for themselves, that God indeed was in their midst.   But who was the source of this knowledge?  The one whom they heard, for, in this story, the roles are reversed; it is not the people, not the Samaritan womaen who is looking to quench her thirst, but God, in the person of Christ:  “But He who was asking drink was thirsting for the faith of the woman herself” (Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, 4:1-42, 11).   God must lead us through the desert, kicking and screaming, so that we can be simple enough to thirst for his love, and that he can respond with the same simplicity, to give that love back to us.  

Lord, grant me the simplicity of spirit that makes me thirst for your love above all things, that you may quench my thirst forever.  In nomine Patri, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, Amen.

The Eastern Churches, the Pope of Rome, & the Problem of Unity

I have recently read a very interesting new work on the prospects of Catholic-Orthodox reconciliation.  It is entitled Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy, and it is by Adam A.J. DeVille, a Urkanian rite Catholic (a deacon, according to his website) who is a professor of theology at St. Francis University in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  He is also the editor of the journal Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, according to his website.  The book takes a look at Ut Unum Sint, the late Pope John Paul II’s encyclical on ecumenism, and specifically his call for other Christians to suggest ways that the papacy might execercise its authority in order to further Christian unity.  DeVille also surveys the response to Ut Unum Sint, as well as Orthodox positions on the papacy in the post Vatican II era.  Having done this, he then proceeds to look at the possibility of a revival of the Roman “Patriarchate” as a way of separating the roles of the bishop of Rome from those of the Successor to Peter, as a way of distinguishing those qualities that are truly necessary for the papacy from those powers that should be exercised only over the Latin Church.   He then surveys the various models of patriarchates from the Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox communions (ten in all), before finally in the last two chapter detailing concrete proposals for a revived Roman Patriarchate and for a revamped papacy, which he would have preside over a standing ecumenical synod of bishops from East and West.   DeVille makes the claim that his book is virtually unique among Eastern Christians in attempting put forth concrete proposals for the reform of the papacy in response to John Paul II’s invitation, and his book certainly seems to be that as far as I am aware.  I offer my thoughts on his in a spirit of charity, as someone who is a not a theologian and who respects the work that Mr. DeVille has done, and whose thoughts are just that—my thoughts alone.

Eastern Views of Papal Primacy

DeVille spends a whole chapter running down the list of theologians who have opined on the nature of the Roman papacy since the 1960′s, and in that chapter he lists the opinions of no less than twenty-four Orthodox theologians on the role that a papacy might acceptably play in a re-united Church.  While he acknowledges up front that there is no one single interpretation from the Orthodox that holds across the Eastern Churches not in communion with Rome (17-18), nonetheless he argues that a certain number of common features emerge amongst those theologians who have addressed the question of the papal office itself (as distinct from the role of Peter in the bible or the historical role of the papacy in the early Church).

DeVille identifies six areas of agreement among these theologians, three positive assessments and three negative assessments of the papacy.  1) Most of these theologians grant that the Pope of Rome had a primacy of some sort during the first millennium, and they are willing to grant that today.  2) Most all recognize a need for the pope in order to re-establish “the good of canonical order in the Church.” (44) 3) Lastly, these theologians recognize the need for a “centre of appeal” and for the pastoral solicitude “for all the Churches.”  DeVille says that these theologians are willing to grant the pope more than a mere primacy of honor but not “the plenitudo postestas that the Pope of Rome currently possesses.” (45)

On the negative side of the ledger, the theologians he reviews uniformly reject any kind of “universal jurisdiction” or as he puts it “juridical power or domination by one bishop over another,” as according to these theologians it has no basis in the history of the early church.  (This is a point I will return to later, as it is something that DeVille emphasizes in his own proposals.)  In particular, he says they reject it on theological grounds as not being reflective of the “Orthodox Trinitarian doctrine in light of which Orthodox ecclesiology is to be understood.” (45)  The second point of rejection is that papal power cannot “be excercised in an extra-sacramental way without a corresponding relationship to a synod of brother bishops whose unity is manifested above all in the celebration of one Eucharist rather than in the functioning of one office.” (46)  The last objection is that the pope must exercise his office primarily “as a bishop” and not as an office apart from other bishops.

There are many interesting things to say about his list of areas of agreement, but I will limit myself to a couple.  First, the theologians he cites are nearly from those parts of the Orthodox world which are willing to countenance reunion with Rome, and it is not clear to me that they are representative of Orthodox opinion generally speaking.  More to the point, and this is something I will return to, it is not clear to me who would be able to speak authoritatively for the Churches of the East as a whole, something that makes talking about “Orthodox opinion” on unsettled doctrinal issues problematic.   In addition, as Hilarion Alfeyev, the Orthodox Bishop of Vienna, and the late Alexander Schemann have noted, the Orthodox have not really given a great deal of thought to what primacy at a universal level would actually mean.  But DeVille does recognize this, and cautions his readers against seeing his recommendations as something more than preliminary.

 

Patriarchates & Synods

And what is his primary recommendation?  DeVille thinks that the Roman patriarchate should be revived in the person of the bishop of Rome.  He proposes this for several reasons.  One is that it would help separate out the functions of the Pope as head of the Latin Church from those that he exercises as the successor of St. Peter, and therefore help clarify what they are. (119)  Another reason is that it would make the government of the Latin Church more acceptable to the Orthodox Churches (i.e., less centralized in the hands of the pope or his curia). (145).   DeVille also argues that it would help make for better governance in the Latin Church by relieving some of the burdens that the Vatican now shoulders alone by “devolving” some of them to patriarchal synods. (146)  This is a point he stresses again and again, how much synods have played in the life of the Eastern Churches, and that they also had a greater role in the first millennia of Christian history in the West.

DeVille spends a whole chapter surveying ten different patriarchates in the Orthodox world (including three of the “Oriental” Orthodox patriarchates), again attempting to identify features which might be suitable for imitation in the Latin Church.   He emphasizes that there is no one single model of the patriarchate in the Orthodox Churches, but finds the most helpful model for the revived Roman patriarchate in the Armenian Church, which has not one but two patriarchs and two “Catholicos,” the princple difference between which seem to be that the former are ecclesiastical leaders with jurisdiction over a given geographic area, while the former are heads “of a people.” (108)  He emphasizes the involvement of lay people in electoral and administrative matters in the various Eastern patriachates (while noting that some do not involve them very much) and in particular that of the Armenian Patriarchate, holding the Armenian Church up as a model for the Latin Church to imitate, especially for Catholics that believe that “popular election of bishops…would somehow result in or be concomitant with, a liberalization and destruction of the Church.” (114)  (Just as an aside, I have to say that I admire any writer who uses the word “concomitant” in their work.  It is a wonderful latinate word which is horribly underused.)

 

Roman Patriarch & Successor of Peter

On the basis of this review of the Eastern Patriarhates, and a review of the literature among Catholic theologians (including Joseph Ratzinger) on the viability of the patriarchate in the West, DeVille goes on to outline what a renovated papacy, its office separated more clearly from that the bishop of Rome as patriarch, would look like.  On the need for a Roman patriarchate, he makes three recommendations:  1), that the Latin Church should set up regional patriarchs to assist the Pope, six for each of the inhabited continents, 2) these regional patriarchs would be assisted by a full synod made up of all diocesan bishops and a permanent synod comprised of the presidents of the various episcopal conferences along with the patriarch himself, and 3) that  these patriarchates so constituted would “take over almost all the functions that currentlly performed for them by the Roman Curia,” thereby reducing the burden on the Curia and giving to the Latin Church a form of governance “recognized by the East.” (146)  Thus the powers over the election of bishops, the supervision of clergy and educational establishments, the maintenance of liturgical life and other duties currently exercised from Rome.  All this would, on DeVille’s reading, help clarify what the unique prerogatives of the bishop of Rome are as Successor to Peter.

DeVille’s revamped papacy would operate much a like a super-patriarch, in fact.  There would be a permanent ecumenical synod which would assist the pope in dealing with any “issues transcending patriarchal particularities and affecting the universal Church as a whole, and so requiring a unified response.”  (150-51)  Taking his cue from Ut Unum Sint, he lists six responsibilities the pope would have in this arrangement. DeVille says that the pope would preside over the ecumenical synod, being able to call it to meet and have a veto over its decisions, though he could only send matters back to it for more discussion if he is unsatisfied with their decision. (151)  The synod itself would be the final court of jurisdiction for cases that were unable to be resolved at lower hierarchical levels of the Church.  The pope would be able to admonish opinions deemed deviant from the unity of the faith, but only when the synod agrees; basically, he would be confined to promulgating their adjudication of such doctrinal questions. (153-54)  Lastly, the pope would be able to promulgate certain definitions of the faith ex cathedra but only if “the synod and the pope together agreed with the bishops that it was appropriate to manifest this charism.” (154)   As for prerogatives that he could exercise on his own, DeVille claims that the pope, beside being able to call the synod together and promulgate its decision, will still act as an “unofficial” spokesman for Christianity as a whole, and will still remain sovereign of the Vatican City State, partly as a way of maintaining the pope’s independence from secular authority. (158)  DeVille also outlines a new procedure in which the pope would be elected by representatives from the local dicoses of Rome, from the wider Roman patriarchate, and then from representatives of the other Churches. (156)

 

Criticisms:  Infallibility and the Problem of Unity

DeVille claims that his proposals, which he wisely says he did not make ”overly specific” precisely in order to “leave the door wide open” in terms of how they might be interpreted, avoid both what he calls “Monarchical “papism” ” as well as “headless “concilarism”. ” (147, 123)  First, let us start with his recommendations for the reorganization of the Roman patriachate.  For the most part, I find his recommendations salutary on this point, especially as a practical matter.  DeVille makes the very important point that, aside from the national episcopal conferences, there are few if any mediating structures between the Vatican and the rest of the Latin Church.  Surely it could not hurt to practice a bit more of the subsidiarity that the Church proposes to the secular world by having regional patriarchs, as well as their synods, to advise him.  One advantage of such a “devolution” is that it would allow for a more personal overseeing of the Church by patriarchs who reside in the places they have authority over.  Several years ago in the pages of First Things, the late Richard John Neuhaus speculated that it might aid bishops in their task of overseeing their flock if the size of the dioceses in the U.S. were reduced and more bishops created, so as to relieve them of the burden of managing a large administration and give them a small enough body of people to oversee that they might have better acquaintance with their own priests, for example.  (I cannot recall the date or the issue, but I believe it was in the “On the Square” portion of First Things.)  He was speaking in the context sexual abuse scandals that have so the Catholic Church, and DeVille also makes passing reference to them as well.  To my mind, there is nothing wrong with the idea that differing levels of consultation and authority, and it may very well have some of the good effects that he proposes it will.   And as for the value of distinguishing between the Pope’s patriarchal duties and those he has a universal pastor, one should need little convincing that the papacy would be better served if it had less to do, and so that part of DeVille’s plan seems to me spot on as well.

The difficulties come with some of his specific proposals, since the devil is in the details, of course, but which also highlight problems with the bigger picture that he is trying to paint.  For example, he holds up the Armenian Church as an example of how lay men and women might be allowed a greater role in the Latin Church (he cautions that this does not mean it must be ”slavishly imitated”), against the objections of “some Catholics that “popular” election of bishops, including the bishop of Rome, would somehow result in, or at least be concomitant with, a liberalization and destruction of the Church.” (114)  DeVille rightly emphasizes that any resolution to the schism between the Eastern Churches and Rome must be primarily theological in nature, as historical scholarship cannot resolve disputes over the nature of authority, which depend for their resolution primarily on a hermeneutic which interprets the historical data.   Moreover, he wants to make the very crucial point that one can have different types of structures within the Church (i.e., more “democratic” elements along with more “monarchical” ones).  However, inattention to historical and cultural differences may make his proposal seem more easily achievable than it really is.  Part of the reason that some Catholics—including the author of this blog—are suspicious of calls for greater lay involvement in the life of the Church is precisely that so much of the push for it has come from those who would alter the Church’s perennial teachings.   Armenia has had a vastly different history, and has a vastly different culture than those countries of Western European descent, and his failure to take this into account sometimes makes his recommendations seem a bit unrealistic.  Even if he is correct about lay involvement, the ghosts of the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution, which saw an aggressive assertion of lay authority over the Church, are not easily exorcised.  And even if they are not as important as theological concerns, they cannot be easily ignored.

But even bigger problems are noticeable in his discussion of the Pope’s restructured office.  He claims that there is nothing in Pastor Aeternus which would preclude the Pope from consulting with the bishops before the exercises his charism of infallibility, which is true, but as he must surely know, both the Vatican I and Vatican II explicitly affirm that the bishop of Rome’s decisions on faith and morals ”need no approval of others, nor do they allow an appeal to any other judgment” (Pastor Aeternus Ch. 4, sec. 9; Lumen Gentium, §25).   This is something that,the Pope could not do in his vision of the Papacy’s new role.  Given the fact that Vatican I binds the members of the Church to believe that he could do this on pain of excommunication, it is not clear how his plan would reconcile what would appear to contradict earlier pronouncements which proclaimed the doctrine to be irreformable.  He does mention in his footnotes, I believe, a private remark by Paul VI to the effect that the post 1054 councils in the West were merely “general councils” and not ecumenical councils, but he does not elaborate on it, and as it stands it’s not much of an argument.   Not only would it undermine the papacy and the Western Church’s credibility to make such an obvious reversal of previous teachings, it would make the Latin Church open to the not unreasonable claim from some Orthodox Christians that the teaching of papal authority had been heretical all along—why else would the Latin Church jettison a doctrine it so often proclaimed was irreformable?

Part of the problem, I think, is that DeVille has the laudable intention of attempting to construct a synthesis of Western and Eastern models of the Church to resolve the schism.  But in his attempt he makes practical proposals before evaluating the premises on which Orthodox and Catholic eccelesiologies rest (such as, for example, what counts as legitimate development of doctrine, or indeed, for the Orthodox, whether there can be development of doctrine or not) so that one can better gauge where (and whether) they can be ”mixed” in the way he attempts to do.   He does this, to a certain extent at least, for the Orthodox, but not for the papacy as presently understood by Roman Catholics.  Therefore we get no sense of why medieval and modern Catholic theologians came to ascribe the powers to the pope that they do, so as to discern whether or not there can be a theological justification for the papacy as presently understood by Rome.  All we get instead is the assertion that the Orthodox will never agree to it, and that it is simply unacceptable, because it is too “juridical” (while at the same time DeVille complains that we don’t really know what jurisdiction means-a rather paradoxical complaint).  Medieval and modern apologists built around the papacy a web of privileges that, yes, came to be overgrown and grossly abused, but in the process they made what I think is a genuine theological development, namely that the locus of infallibility (whether papal or conciliar) was the Church’s center of unity, but that to be so its decisions must be final, that is, beyond them there could be no appeal.   DeVille’s proposal makes the exercise of the pope’s exercise of his infallibility dependent on the agreement (and consensus?  how many patriarchs have to agree?) of the ecumenical synod but the promulgation of the synod’s  decisions on matters of doctrine subject to a papal veto.   He seems to assume there will never be disagreement in these cases, but if there is, there is no way in his plan to resolve the impasse.   In either case, it is not clear to me in his plan as he presents who the actual primate is—is it the pope, or the synod?

And this to me is the real issue when it comes to the primacy—who has the final authority to authentically, and in a way binding on all the faithful, to determine what the deposit of faith means throughout time and history, as those far more learned than myself have pointed out.   And this authority must be clearly visible so that the faithful know where to look for guidance.   In theory, it does not really matter if this authority is vested in a single person or an assembly of bishops, as long as its authority is truly final and cannot be appealed against, though I must admit I think fairly highly of the “papal monarchy” many Eastern Orthodox find so objectionable.  Obviously, this authority must have,  as DeVille has rightly insisted, a theological rationale, but if he is right that the concepts of “juridiction” and “canonical territory” need to be investigated, then surely it might be worth considering what exactly it means to say that “the papacy’s theological justification must be Trinitarian in nature,” as so many Eastern theologians do.  For, as it stands, even in DeVille’s outline, what it sounds like it means in practice is that, at least to me, what is most essential about the papacy’s authority is to be jettisoned for the sake of satisfying Orthodox objections.  For me, this is something at this point I am not willing to accept.

I should stress that I am a layman, and I submit my opinions, such as they are, to the judgement of the Church.  And in all humility, I hope I have not unjustly or uncharitably criticized Mr. DeVille’s  book, which is indeed a very important one, not the least for helping get such a discussion started in the first place.

Alypius

Wrong Man Luther, or Why I am Not a Protestant

I am trained as an historian of early modern Britain, and so I have no claim to any professional expertise in the matter of the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. But I did come to a belief in the Catholic Church while I was in graduate school, and read enough in the way of secondary literature about the Protestant Reformation that I knew, very early on in my search for God, that I could never be a Protestant (and by that I should clarify that I mean any body in the West which is not in communion with the see of Rome).  I read little or nothing in the way of the actual writings of the Reformers themselves until I began to teach as a GTA, when I was required to teach the “Letter to the German Nobility” of Luther for my Western Civ classes.  Since then I have read “Freedom of a Christian,” bits and pieces of the Babylonian Captivity, one of his sermons, and a few pages of his treatise called “The Keys.”  I have also since then read a few paragraphs of Calvin’s Institutes.  I’ve been trying to read more, not because I’ve come to question my beliefs, but because I have gained from my graduate research a desire to read primary sources, and to educate myself more thoroughly as to why I believe Luther and company were wrong.  I have to say, this has been a slow process, mainly because the more I read of Luther, the more contempt I have of his “thought”;  I have Protestant friends who swear he is a genius, but most of what I have read confirms me in the opposite opinion.  I have therefore not tried to read too much of him, to avoid not becoming bitter and hateful toward Protestants.  What I would like to do in this post is outline, such as they are, my objections to Luther, and therefore to what I take to be Protestantism as a whole. 

One of the misconsceptions people seem to have about Luther, at least from my reading of him, is that he was arguing for individual conscience, or that his theology was subjective, and that’s why the Reformation is somehow a bridge to the modern world.  (I once read a glowing but rather ignorant review of the Diarmaid McCulloch’s The Reformation, which spouted this sort of nonsense; McCulloch’s book does argue basically the same thing, but in a less silly way.)  One finds this argument articulated by those who wish to credit Luther with beginning the modern world (usually Protestants who wish to valorize him) or those who wish to deplore it (usually Catholics who blame him for reducing belief to subjectivity).   None of this is true, however; Luther’s major complaint was not that an impersonal church was stifling his private, individual conscience, but that it was stifiling the gospel:  he refers again and again in his three works of 1519-1520 to papal supporters who “contravene such plain and powerful words in Scripture in order to acknowledge the mere dreams of your brains!” or those who “presume upon your figments alone against the clear Scriptures of God.” (“The Babylonian Captivity of the Church,” Three Treatises, Philadelphia, 1970, p. 139)  to Luther it was the Pope and his abettors who were ”subjective,” if one wishes to use that term, since they corrupted the scriptures, which were plain and easy to understand, apparently only for Martin Luther:  according to Mark U. Edwards in his book Luther and the False Brethren, Luther denied any especial authority in debate with Catholic writers, even though they accused him of claiming such authority.  But in his debates with other reformers, he often invoked his special position as the one who had “rediscovered” the gospel when confronting them, and abusing them in a way they never did to him.  The other reformers treated Luther with deference even though he thought them all under the sway of the devil, at least according to Edwards.   This was no doubt because he believed he was the only who had read the scriptures aright.  But it is not because he necessarily was claiming the sole authority to do so.   In other places, he merely adverts to the “priesthood of all believers”  to justify breaking with Rome’s authority.  In a short work he wrote in 1523 called “That a Christian Assembly Has the Right and Power to Judge All Teaching, and to Call, Appoint, and Dismiss Teachers, Established and Proven by Scriptures,” written after a couple of towns in Germany asked him if their parish congregations had the right to select their own priests.  In it Luther claims that bishops popes priests and “everyone else” has the right to teach, but it is “the sheep [i.e., the congregation] who are to judge whether they teach the voice of Christ or the voice of strangers.” (LW, Vol. 39, p.307)  Earlier in this treatise he wrote that one can identify a true Christian congregation by the “sure mark” that “the pure gospel is preached there.” (305)  This is perfectly circular, as it is the Congregation that gets to decide what teachings are in accord with the gospel in the first place.   But he does have a rationale for this.  After admitting that a Christian congregation indeed requires preachers and teacher, he goes on to say that “since in these last accursed times the bishops and the false spiritual government neither are or wish to be teachers–moreover, they want neither to provide for or tolerate any, and God should not be tempted to send new preachers from heaven–we must act according to Scripture and call and institute from among ourselves those who are found to be qualified, and whom God has enlightened with reason and endowed with gifts to do so.” (p. 309)  Luther is appealing to the congregation because the bishops, by their denial of the gospel, have effectively abandoned their office, and the whole Christian congregation can exercise the priestly ministry, because all are priests by baptism.  At least that is how I read him here.

My point is not to approve of what Luther was saying; far from it, as I believe he was horribly wrong.  My only point is that he believed he was acting on an objective criteria in doing what he was doing:  the word of God is clear, and the pope and his allies have muddied it with “human teachings,” laying burdens on the faithful that are not necessary to salvation, etc.  Only by getting rid of the pope, bishops, and so forth, and instituting the clear word of God could remedy this in his mind.  This, of course, means reducing the office of bishop to that of preaching, which is  the “highest office in Christendom” while the “lower offices such as baptism and other pastoral care” are merely secondary. (p.314) The errors in seem very clear to me now:  his mostly non-sacramental way of viewing the office of the priesthood, his misunderstanding of the divine/human character of the church, and his misunderstanding of the bible are painful to read, I have to say.   But even years ago when I was trying to decide which version of Christian belief was true, and things were much less clear to me, his ideas never really seemed to add up.  One of the reasons I could not countenance Protestantism was probably my background an English major; I had imbibed enough lessons from postmodern ideas about language that, whatever the shortcomings of those theories, they forced me to understand that human language can be interpeted in a multitude of mutually incompatible but equally reasonable ways.  Luther’s  insistence that the Scriptures were easy to interpret, and by implication all those who interpreted them wrongly (which included everyone who disagreed with him) were basically anti-Christ, struck me as implausible.   That’s why I understood, more implicitly than explicitly, the need for a divinely guided, infallible interpreter of the deposit of the faith-the Church, in other words.  The writers at the blog Called to Communion have a maxim that describes the concept of “authority” which Luther and all other Protestants subscribe to:  “if I only submit when I agree, the authority I submit to is me.”  In other words, if the definition of the authority of scripture or any other authority includes being able to judge said authority according to  whether you agree with it or not, you are guilty of solipsism–whatever agrees with you is right, and whatever doesn’t is wrong. 

Luther’s beliefs were not subjective so much as they were impossible, and the contemporary experience of the ecclesial bodies that still bear his influence attests to this fact.   In fact, his successors in the Reformation understood this too, which is why they probably moved rather quickly in a more subjective direction in terms of their understanding of authority, given the fact they felt compelled to reject the papacy.   To give one example, the writers at Called to Communion have a way of referring to Protestant ideas of how one knows they have interpreted the Scriptures in light of the Holy Spirit.  They call it “bosom burning,” meaning people who make appeal to some sort of interior, emotional experience.  They accused Calvin of this in one of their posts and I, not wanting to take their word for it, went and looked up an English and then a Latin edition of the Institutes.  Sure enough, in a chapter about how one is to understand the Scriptures, Calvin talks about the “secret testimony of the Spirit” and the “inward testimony of the Spirit”:  he says that one will feel a “vim numinis” that gives you the conviction that the word of God is true.   (Institutes, Part I, Chapter 7, section 5)  Just so, I understood, again, in a sort of unspoken way, that the Church would not satisfy every desire I had, and I didn’t necessarily need to embrace all of its doctrines with emotional enthusiasm.  If one wants a religion that is tailor-made for one’s personality or desires, one has simply made a mistake.  Truth is not like that; it is independent of us.  We conform to reality, and not reality to us.  Like the Roman Stoics used to say, “ducunt fata volentem, nolentem trahunt” (fate guides the willing, but drags the unwilling).    But that was what I was seeking: an authority which was independent of my own ego, my desires (or the desires of the congregation; no use adhering to an authority you get to vote in my mind), primarily because it was my feelings, and not my reason, that had convinced me that God did not exist.  I needed to be sure I wasn’t trying to believe in Christ because I wanted to cease feeling miserable and hopeless (which I did, very badly), but because it was true, and for that I needed such an authority.  Only the Church of Rome fit that description, and none of the various Protestant theories of what the church is seemed even possibly true.*  And I have heard or read nothing that has changed my mind about this convinction since.

So, it was really Luther’s conception of the Church that I could never accept, and by extension, from any Protestant author or representative that I’ve encountered.  Luther, with his anxiety about human corruptions, wanted to separate the divine from the human, the Word of God from the words of men.  The problem with this for me is that the Incarnation, if I understand it correctly,  forever broke down the boundaries between God and mankind.   The kind of absolute separation, and therefore absolute clarity that Luther seemed to covet with regards to salvation, I simply don’t think is possible for a Christian.  God has forever changed the game by becoming one of us, and the fact that he left his authority with the Church means that it is not a mere human institution, but a divine/human institution, even if its memebers are horrible and sinful; for God can work through the evil and the corrupt, can transmit his Divine word through human words, so that “the gifts and callings of God are irrevocable.”  He does not withdraw his promised authority from the Church, even when, as it has recently with the sexual abuse scandals, made a mockery of Him by the actions of those who wield his authority.  This, I think, is what Luther could not accept:  not that God could, but that He would work our salvation through the medium of such wretched fellows asmany of the Renaissance Popes were.  Luther sought to bypass troublesome humanity, and appeal directly to the text of the Bible; he turned the abuses of the popes’ and bishops’ offices into a justification redefining their offices out of existence.  But this is impossible, since books can’t interpret themselves, and in any case aren’t written for their own sake, especially the bible.  It was written for the sake of others in our human words, though inspired by God.  There is no separating the Word from human words anymore;  as the book of Revelation says, “the dwelling place of God is with men,” and it is futile to try to get him to dwell in a only in a book (even the Holy Scriptures!).  Actually, I knew intuitively why Luther was wrong, because his emotional reactions to Roman claims for authority are basically my own:  if I could have come to salvation on my own, by the bible alone, I would have.   I cherish above all things my independence, and it is hard for me to say that his inclinations were totally wrong.  But I was at a point where this was simply not possible; I could not even believe in God, much less the bible, so how could I come to the faith alone through the bible, without human aid?  And in fact, the Christ with his Church teaches us the exact opposite of this reaction. It teaches that your salvation will come through the particular community of human persons he has ordained to transmit the faith to you, and you will have to open yourself up to it in order to be saved.  The bible itself and even the eucharist are, as the prayers of the Roman liturgy proclaim, “the work of human hands,” and you simply have to encounter the humans who bring these gifts to you; that is the way God wanted it, as far as I can realize it.  And I can’t think of any thing I would rather do less than trust another person with the ultimate meaning of my life, and yet this is what Christ asks us to do in the Church:  “whoever seeks his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake, will find it.”  In Luther’s thought, God confirms you as you are, proclaims you righteous even if  you are not;  for Christ and the Church, he transforms you into the righteous person you were meant to be, even if you didn’t really want to be that to begin with.  It was the authoritative voice of the Church, who like its founder “taught as one having authority,” an authority which does not always agree with me, that drew me to her, and away from Protestantism.  I’ve never really looked back, and I bless the God who led me here, and who continues to lead me into all truth–even if he has to do it with me kicking and screaming sometimes.

*The Churches of the East are a different matter, as their claims demand more respect and consideration than do Protestant objections.  However, the essentially conciliarist position which I take to be the basic conception behind their view of primacy in the Church is, I think, open to some of the same objections.

That They May Be One

To day is the 483rd anniversary of Luther’s posting of his 95 these in Wittenberg, usually the date from which most people see the Protestant Reformation as having commenced. Some Protestant denominations, mostly Lutherans from what I can tell, celebrate this day as “Reformation Day,” though it seems not to be celebrated as much anymore. A couple of posts here and here prompted me to think about this, as I am always painfully aware of how difficult it is to articulate the beliefs of the Catholic Church to Protestants and other western, non-Catholic Christians.   I have friend who is an Anglican, and I recall telling him one time, in answer to his question of why I chose the Catholic Church over other options when I embraced the faith, that I could tell that the Catholic Church was a living body, and that the various Protestant churches all looked like dead bodies to me.   I regret having used that kind of image in retrospect, because I would not want to suggest that nothing good remains in those bodies, or that the members of such denominations are somehow not Christian (provided their baptisms are valid).  But the point I was trying to make was that the Catholic Church was true, in a way that other Christian bodies simply are not, no matter how many good things they may contain within them.  It is hard to categorize the objections I’ve encountered from Protestant friends (some are less difficult to categorize, such as one who friend who, none too tactfully, tried to convince me the Pope is the anti-Christ and that the veneration of bishops was a pagan custom) tend to run in the same direction that Martin Luther first laid out:  the Catholic church puts unnecessary burdens on people in the way of salvation, ”denies” the gospel as it were.   Or as my mother put it when I informed I was going to be baptized as a Catholic, “Catholics believe too many things.”  Indeed:  the beliefs of the Catholic Church are extreme, a cause for scandal, whether it be papal infallibility, its teachings on sexuality, or what have you.   Its beliefs seem so singular, so incredible to some, that their very claims to being rooted in a supernatural revelation are easily rebranded as a violation of human nature.  

Of course, the most usual accusation is that Catholics violate scripture with their beliefs, but I have to say, having studied literature, and knowing just how not simple it is to interpret a text, any text,  I have always thought this was the weakest point with which to criticize Catholicism.  No, rather what in Luther and the other reformers, and in their modern day descendants, even in the sort of non-denomination mega-church religion that characterizes so much of what Americans call Christianity these days, I find to be their most compelling point, namely the wish to be rid of the complex, human elements within Catholicism, the mediating priesthood, its claims of authority, and all the attendant difficulties and complications which necessarily result from these things when they become entrenched in human society.  Luther is sometimes accused of wanting to simplify religion or simplify theology, and there is no doubt something to this, but I don’t think that was his primary goal.  I think what he wanted was a simplification of human relationships, a getting rid of the deference and complex ritual that surrounded the late medieval hierarchy, and replace with the supposedly more  simple and pure relationship of Christians in the gospels.   The Catholic Church, with its reliance on a Tradition mediated by fallible human beings, and its all too peccable authority, places the most intolerable burden on its believers: in order to trust God, you must trust these fallible, peccable human beings, and place yourself willingly, knowingly, under their authority, with the knowledge (sometimes forgotten by Catholics) that at some point they will abuse that authority and that trust.  I can think of nothing else I value more than my independence, and it is impossible not to hear in my mother’s complaint or in Luther’s the cry of the very human need to feel as if one can stand on one’s own in relation to God. 

The fact is, however, that God chose to work through human beings, to mediate his grace through the priesthood, through the material nature of the sacraments shaped by human beings (“fruit of the vine and work of human hands, it will become our spiritual drink” or “bread which the earth has given and human hands have made” in the presentation of the gifts in the Roman rite).   To trust God, we are also required to trust other human beings as well, even when this is the thing we want least to do, especially when they are people, like the Pope, whom one will never get to know personally in most cases.   All the Protestant versions of ecclesiology amount to little more than efforts to insure that one will not have to do this, since one has access without  it through the Bible alone.  The failure of such visions of the Church to provide anything like unity is sufficient enough in my eyes to condemn such schemes, but to bring this post back to its original question, how does one convince someone who does not think such unity is necessary that this is the case?     This is something I struggle with all the time, and I really don’t have an answer for it, other than to point out the necessity of some particular structure of unity which is necessary for the church that naturally excludes other possiblities one might find more appealing-the Church is not only one because, being Christ’s body, it unites disparate elements in the same unity (“all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ,” 1 Corinthians, 12:12), but because it is singular, particular; it is this one, and no other.  What some have called the “scandal of particularity” cannot be brushed off in my view, and the only real candidate for it is the Catholic Church (in the West, I should add; the Orthodox are a different matter, though obviously I have chosen to be in communion with Rome because I believe its claims are the best I’ve heard, but this does not imply any parity between the Protestant bodies and the Churches of the East).   I struggle with this often in my own life, wondering why I have to trust and obey this person or this particular group of people, this order of succession and so forth, but I have never doubted for a moment that this was God’s will for me and for all mankind, that we might know him, and be restored to the salvation which was ours by right.  My only answer for now is to pray for the conversion of my friends who do not see the need for the Church, and ask Christ asked the Father to make us all one, as he and the father are one, and to make me more humble, more patient, more willing to answer their questions in a manner worthy of Him who makes us One.

What Democratic Education Means

“But there is something about this endless examining, quite apart from the labour, which bothers me. It sets me wondering about the whole system under which you, as well as we, now live. Behind all these closely written sheets which I have to read every year, even behind the worst of them, lie hours of hard, long work. Even the bad candidates are doing their best and have been trained up to this ever since they went to school. And naturally enough: for in the Democracies now, as formerly in China under the mandarin system, success in competitive examinations is the only moyen de parevenir, the road from elementary school to the better schools, and thence to college, and thence to the professions. (You still have a flourishing alternative route to desirable jobs through business which is largely disappearing with us; but it is at least equally competitive).

This of course is what Democratic education means – give them all an equal start and let the winners show their form. Hence Equality of Opportunity in practice means ruthless Competition during those very years which, I can’t help feeling, nature meant to be free and frolicsome. Can it be good, from the age of 10 to the age of 23, to be always preparing for an exam, and always knowing that your whole worldly future depends on it; and not only knowing it, but perpetually reminded of it by your parents and masters? Is this the way to breed a nation of people in psychological, moral, and spiritual health?”

—C.S. Lewis

Hat tip:  American Catholic

Thou Art a Priest Forever…

I recently had the privilege of attending the ordination of five Catholic priests in Wichita Kansas, this past Saturday, in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Wichita.  I had never been to a priestly ordination before, and I found it quite moving.  There is something quite human about the mere touching of another person, and to think that thi is how a God who became incarnate wished to pass on his authority throughout all of time seems…beautifully fitting to me, though no words seem to do it justice.  These are some photos I took of the event (some of them quite grainy and not well focused), along with a brief description of the Rite of Ordination itself.

The deacons to be ordained, ready to process in

The bishop of Wichita processing in

The bishop and the presiding priest ascend to the altar and begin the mass

The Rite of Ordination  (FYI: this is merely a description of the rite, and not an exact transcription.)

The candidates for ordination are called forward individually, and the director of vocations for the diocese presents them to the bishop, informing him that they have been found worthy of being ordained to the priesthood.

After the bishop delivers his homily, the candidates are called before him again, and the bishop asks them a series of questions, to confirm their intention to carry out the ministry of the priesthood, to which they utter the reply, “I do.”    Then each one of the candidates kneels before the bishop, placing his hands between those of the bishop, and makes a vow of obedience to the bishop.

After this, a litany is sung,  while each candidate lays prostrate before the altar, facedown and with his arms extended outward, while the bishop kneels before the altar of Christ. Next comes the most essential part of the rite, the laying on of hands, as each candidate kneels before the bishop, and the bishop lays his hands on their heads, conferring on them the authority of the priesthood.  Next, the rest of the priests present, which is most of the priests in the diocese, also come forward and lay their hands on the candidates’ heads.

Next, all of the new priests are invested with their priestly vestments, while an antiphon is sung, and then each kneels again before the bishop to have his palms anointed by the bishop, the palms that will prepare the eucharistic thanksgiving from now on.  Lastly, a paten holding the eucharistic bread and a chalice containing the wine mixed with water used in the mass is brought to each of them as they kneel before the bishop.  Then each is embraced, first by the bishop, and then by his brother priests.

Finally, having been ordained, the five new priests then concelebrate the eucharist along with the bishop, and help distribute communion to those present. 

After the mass is ended, the new priests first and then the bishop process out.

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Modernity as the Triumph of the Generic; or Why the Kingdom of Heaven is Such a Cramped and Narrow Place

Instead of fighting, you guys should just come and look at how gorgeous I am!

I had not had the opportunity to see director Ridley Scott’s foray into the middle ages, entitled Kingdom of Heaven, until a couple of days ago, and I have to say, it was just as awful as I expected to be in terms of its historicity.   My initial reaction when it came out was that it would be intolerable, and so I never bothered to see it; a few years ago one of the leading scholars in the field of crusades history, Jonathan Riley-Smith, emeritus professor at Cambridge, came to my university to speak, and if my memory is correct I believe he referred to Mr. Scott’s film as “rubbish.”  Indeed, my own initial reaction to the film was to describe it with slightly more colorful metaphors; I watched the film with my housemate, and we found it so historically preposterous that we were making jokes and talking over the dialogue midway through the film.  So what was so objectionable about the film you might ask?

First of all, credit where credit is due:  in terms of its imagery and cinematography, it is beautifully done, as are most of Scott’s films.  And the performances in the film on are the whole very good:  I was suitably surprised by the performance of Orlando Bloom, though given how low my expectations were this is not saying much, and the actor who portrayed Saladin did a very good job as well.   Liam Neeson was capable as usual, and Eva Green was captivating and mysterious as Princess Sybilla.  (As an aside,  I have an enormous, juvenile crush on Eva Green, so my judgement is perhaps not reliable on this point.)  Kingdom of Heaven did not engage in any macho action film posturing that I recall; there was no mano y mano scene between Bloom’s character, Balian, and Saladin at the end; the dialogue, though not the best, was serviceable, and the costumes, the sets and other visual apparati  were quite realistic.  I also found Scott’s use of CGI to enhance what were location shots to be quite well done, far superior to the fake looking battles scenes of, say, 300.  In short, its production values are quite high, and Scott is a quite an excellent visual artist, especially when considering the scale of the film.

What Scott does not do well is imaginatively capture the beliefs of peoples with whom he does not already sympathize.  The film has a typically warped, Hollywood view of the middle ages.  I have blogged before on the tendency of film to dumb down complex historical realities, and I do understand the need to distill some of the complexity to fit the time frame of a roughly two hour film. But that is not what is going on here.  Rather, the complexity of the crusades (especially the Christian Crusaders) is reduced to stereotypes which jibe easily with the directors view of the world, which is that of a 21st century agnostic.  I am always amazed at the casual way in which people commit murder in big Hollywood films about the middle ages, as if medieval people were sub-human monsters who committed acts of atrocity on a daily basis.  I  have noticed a tendency of film makers to get the audience to identify with the film’s main character by reducing everyone else in the movie to a crude caricature of humanity and making the main character espouse “modern” values.   In Kingdom of Heaven, this means that every Christian cleric (we don’t see any Muslim religious figures in the film) is basically a fiend:  in the beginning of the movie,  Balian’s wife has committed suicide and is refused Christian burial, and the priest who does this also tells Balian’s that the people of his village want him gone because he is a bastard, and that his wife will burn in hell unless he goes on crusade with his father.  When he reveals to him that he has also cut off his wife’s head, Balian runs him through with a sword, and we are meant, I guess, to enjoy this.  Then there are the Knights Templar, who are all bloodthirsty to a man, and start a war with Saladin by indiscriminately slaughtering Muslim villagers; then there is the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem (at least I think he is; its not clear that Scott was aware there were Greek Christians in Jerusalem at the time, or of the differences between Catholic and Orthodox Christians), who when the city is invaded by Saladin advises Balian to surrender and “become Muslims; we can repent later.”  Every single clergyman in the film is either venal, cowardly, or bloodthirsty, and I could be wrong but it seems to reflect a deeper prejudice on the part of the filmmaker, to judge from the choices he has made. 

My name is Liam Neeson, and my sword is bigger than Orlando Bloom

Not so with the knights, whose religious beliefs appear to have been plagiarized from a book that William Monahan picked up in the “Spirituality” section at Barnes & Noble.  Liam Neeson’s character Godfrey of Ibelin is upright, and  Balian is chivalrous as well, at least when he is not committing adultery (but hey, its Eva Green, so its cool; I’m sure the pope would issue a dispensation for that).  More importantly, Balian and the other sympathetic characters are just like “us”:  he proclaims at one point in the film that “God does not speak to me” and that he has ‘lost his religion,’ to which his interlocutor, a Hospitaller played quited well by David Thewlis, replies that “religion is nothing…its what a man practices that matters,” or something to that effect.  At one point, the Princess Eva Green informs Balian that “Muslims want unity…Christ wants us…to decide.”   And near the end of the siege of Jerusalem, Balian stands before the people and gives a stirring but idiotically anachronsitic speech about the meaninglessness of religious differences worthy of a Unitarian minister.  It would be tedious to point out every single instance in the film, but it is clear we are meant to identify with the  characters who are tolerant, doubtful of their own religion but kind to the Muslim “Other,” while everyone else in the film is an evil cardboard cut-out designed make us hate them, in order gain our sympathy for the main characters.

All of this is typical of Hollywood historical schlock; but what I found fascinating about Kingdom of Heaven is the way it distills a sort of modern, pluralistic sensibility, which abhors actual, particular and concrete traditions and beliefs with real (and usually messy) histories, finding refuge in a sort of “generic” humanity shorn of any such complicating features, almost perfectly.   The bland, sterile nature of this generic humanity reminds one of the political philosopher John Rawls, who contended that when considering principles of justice, one must treat human beings as if they had no history, no sex, no race, class, etc.  (See his Theory of Justice)  Or perhaps more fittingly for this film, the contention of the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas that the “face” of the “Other” can never actually appear, because otherwise we would reduce the “Other” to the features of the “Same,” and therefore the visage of the “Other” can only be known as an abstract, cultureless humanity.  The film embodies this quite nicely:  Bloom is himself the British Tom Cruise, bland but acceptable to all; the good king Baldwin has no recognizable face, because it was eaten away  by leprosy; and Eva Green’s character, despite (perhaps because?) of her beauty, cuts her hair off in a gesture of remorse, if not quite repentance, though it is not clear what sin she has committed by not killing the execrable Guy de Lusignan.  In terms of their beliefs, as noted above, most of the characters are just as bland and generic:  when Balian first meets the king, Baldwin exhorts him to be good to those who are weak, to protect pilgrims, without ever mentioning the Christian religion at all.   Saladin’s character is less diluted, mainly because it is difficult to screw up such a compelling historical figure, even for Hollywood directors, but even he is reduced to his own generic maganimity;  when Balian ask him after the surrender of Jerusalem what the city is worth, he responds “Nothing…everything.”   Saladin just could have said it is worth everything because the Prophet had commanded his followers to pray towards Jerusalem originally, or because of the Dome of the Rock, or a hundred other actual reasons why Muslims find the place to be sacred.  Yet that would violate the film’s basic idea, that tolerance is everything, and that if we just abandon everything that is complicated and distinctive about our cultures and civilizations, we’ll all live in perfect harmony.  Or we would, if it weren’t for those pernicious neanderthals who continue insist on the meaning of those differences.  Or something.  I am probably giving the film way too much credit for thought, but it is something that never ceases to irritate me.

Evidently Baldwin's leprosy was so bad that even his horse needed a mask

This was confirmed for me when I watched the behind the scenes features on the DVD I was borrowing.  Scott claimed he had the idea for a film years ago generically called “Knight,” which, unsurprisingly, never went anywhere.   The main writer, William Monahan, claimed he had read a few books on the middle ages, but did not specify which ones;  it appears that Scott likes to shoot more than he needs, and apparently some scenes didn’t make it into the film, so perhaps Monahan’s original script wasn’t quite as bad.  On the whole, though, one gets the impression one usually gets when Hollywood types talk about history, namely that it amounts to getting the clothing to look authentic, which Scott spent a great deal of time talking about.  This is understandable, given that Scott is a visual artist, and I cannot blame him for what he does not know.  Or to paraphrase my advisor, I cannot blame him making the film that he set out to make.  I can only blame him for claiming it is in any way an accurate depiction of medieval history.  This is partly the rant of a disgruntled historian, who is irritated that he will feel duty bound to correct all of the errors that will no doubt be placed in people’s minds, as films are far more influential with the general public when it comes to shaping their view of the past than mere works of history.

What is frustrating about this is that it need not come down to a choice between historical authenticity and good drama.   It is true, sometimes filmmakers and playwrights will have to alter timelines, and the like, to tell the story in a dramatic way.  Some parts of history simply can’t be made into good drama.  But knowing when and where this is possible is part of the art itself; making a film or writing a novel is about drama, and narrative tension, in a way that a history is not.  A good drama means a good story, and while every history does presuppose a narrative, it is not usually about that.  The word itself comes from the Greek historein, meaning an inquiry of some sort, and usually intends to answer some burning question, as Thucydides did in his History of the Peloppensian War (namely, how did Athens lose to those barbarous Spartans?)  History often undermines good stories, which turn out not to be true on closer examination, at least as much as it confirms them to be true. 

In any case, when one writes a history, one takes on a great responsibility, because the people whom you are studying have no one other than historians (usually academic historians) to speak for them, and no one really listens to them.  I remember someone saying that you should always speak up for somebody when they are not in the room, and I have always thought this was a just thing to do.  The worst thing you can do to someone is misrepresent their ultimate beliefs, and you wouldn’t dare do it to someone who is living because they could sue you, but the dead can’t sue, so filmmakers feel content to make up whatever they imagine medieval people believed, which is usually something that flatters their own sense of who they are (oh aren’t we wondefully tolerant, unlike those “fanatical” Templars!).   This is why anachronism in regard to clothing, machinery and the like is not so big of a deal; it is why Shakespeare having a mechanical clock strike in ancient Rome during the course of Julius Caesar does not harm its historical authenticity very much, the reason being that Elizabethan culture had some affinity with the ancient Roman world, and so Shakespeare could enter into its mores and beliefs sympathetically and imaginatively, even if Caesar’s world was not a Christian one.   What is so disturbing about Scott’s generic brand of agnostic tolerance is that apparently cuts him off from being able to understand any civilization that is not “tolerant” in the sense that he understands it—which means he is incapable of imaginatively entering into virtually any civilization other than his own, that of contemporary Western society.  This is why Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven come off as little more than fables about contemporary Westerners, dressed in funny clothes.  Or at least that’s how it often seems to me.

I am Eva Green the Queen of Queens: / Look On My Works Ye Mighty, and Despair.

I should stress that I do not mean to pick on Scott in particular, and that he is in fact a fine artist in many ways.   I have certainly seen far worse attempts at historical film (Braveheart, the Patriot, Cromwell, anything involving John Wayne…) He deserves credit for making big, historical blockbusters attractive to new audiences.  I certainly have always been entertained by his films; obviously Kingdom of Heaven got a rise out of me, so he must be doing something right!  If he didn’t appear to be trading on the supposed historicity of his films, I would haven’t any problems with him at all.  In any case, I want to consider this question of the relationship between film and history bit further, so Iwill probably come back to it in another post or two fairly soon.  Unless I die from the process of completing  my dissertation, in which case it will be safe for Ridley Scott to make another historical epic.   

Remember Thou Art Dust…

If Iwere a sociologist of contemporary religion, I would study mass attendance in Catholic parishes on Ash Wednesday.  It truly is an puzzling enigma:  I have been a Catholic for nearly seven years now, and no matter what parish I am at, the Ash Wednesday mass is always the most well attended mass of the entire year.  More than Christmas, more than Easter, and surely more than any of the Marian feasts in the church’s calendar:  these days are days of obligation, as are Sundays, whereas Ash Wednesday is not (though it is a day of obligatory fasting).   Much the same is true elsewhere from reports that I have heard; often enough, being a member of the choir in my parish, I will notice people coming up to receive ashes who are clearly not Catholic and have no idea what they are supposed to do when they get up there.  But the majority are of course Catholics who never bother to go to mass much in the first place, so much so that I have come to dub the afternoon mass at my parish on Ash Wednesday as the “Cafteria Mass,” where all the Cafeteria Catholic come once a year—for what, I’m not quite sure.  Do they come just to get ashes smeared on their forehead?  Is it because they somehow like this ritual and the accompanying injunction from the priest to “remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return”?  Do these postmodern people actually like being reminded of their mortality?  Or do they just sort of understand that they are sinful, and perhaps this solemn recognition of this at Lent attracts them because it embodies this in a communal way, where they do not have to own up to their sins as individuals?  It would surely explain why all those communal penance services held every year at this time are so well attended.  (Our parish did not this year, probably because a large number of our kids actually do go to confession on a regular basis.)   These may or may not be satisfactory answers; but my real question is this, if I could ask all these people myself:  why do you make such a point of attending this one solemn event every year, when the mass itself, the beliefs and teachings which it is meant to convey, has (at least to my perception) so little affect on the way you actually live your life?  I mean, I go to mass in order to be changed, to have it alter my perceptions bit by bit, to become one in the church’s public prayer, even while I am always myself.  What exactly do they get out of it is my point.  For now I guess I’ll just have to chalk it up  to the mystery of human belief, that it flickers even in the dullest of souls—like mine.

Have mercy on me O God, according to thy steadfast love!  (Ps. 51:3)