“My Mind is My Own Church”: Nature, Faith, and Private Judgment

“If every man really is born with a Pope in his belly, as Luther was supposed to have said, then he must also be born with a Luther in his bowels.” 

At least, that’s what came to mind as I was browsing through John Henry Newman’s works the other day, and happened upon one of his “Discourses to Mixed Congregations,” which was entitled “Faith and Private Judgment.”  In it, he makes the claim that Protestants lack the virtue of faith.  On his telling, if one cannot accept simply and without reserve the teachings of the Church–just as the first Christian converts accepted it from the apostles in the early days of the Church–then one, ipso facto, has not faith.  One otherwise is merely looking for some evidence of the Church–in scripture, from one’s own experience, or the like–but not really taking it on faith, taking it whole.  This reserving the right to opt out of the Church to test it according to one’s own lights is not faith, but reason.  I have to say, the older I get, the more Newman’s words ring true to me.  Here are the relevant passages:

Now, in the first place, what is faith? it is assenting to a doctrine as true, which we do not see, which we cannot prove, because God says it is true, who cannot lie. And further than this, since God says it is true, not with His own voice, but by the voice of His messengers, it is assenting to what man says, not simply viewed as a man, but to what he is commissioned to declare, as a messenger, prophet, or ambassador from God. In the ordinary course of this world we account things true either because we see them, or because we can perceive that they follow and are deducible from what we do see; that is, we gain truth by sight or by reason, not by faith…

This is very different from Divine faith; he who believes that God is true, and that this is His word, which He has committed to man, has no doubt at all. He is as certain that the doctrine taught is true, as that God is true; and he is certain, because God is true, because God has spoken, not because he sees its truth or can prove its truth. That is, faith has two peculiarities;—it is most certain, decided, positive,          immovable in its assent, and it gives this assent not because it sees  with eye, or sees with the reason, but because it receives the tidings  from one who comes from God.

This is what faith was in the time of the Apostles, as no one can          deny; and what it was then, it must be now, else it ceases to be the  same thing…either the Apostles were from God, or they were not; if they were, everything that they preached was to be believed by their hearers; if they were not, there was nothing for their hearers to believe. To believe a little, to believe more or less, was impossible; it contradicted the very notion of believing: if one part was to be believed, every part was to be believed; it was an absurdity to believe one thing and not another; for the word of the Apostles, which made the one true, made the other true too; they were nothing in themselves, they were all things, they were an infallible authority, as coming from God.  (194-197)

Newman goes on to contrast the two different (Catholic, Protestant) ways of conceiving faith thus: “to believe simply what a living authority tells you, and to take a book, such as Scripture, and to use it as you please, to master it, that is, to make yourself the master of it, to interpret it for yourself, and to admit just what you choose to see in it, and nothing more? Are not these two procedures distinct in this, that in the former you submit, in the latter you judge?”  (199)

I was thinking of the this other day, partly because it has been on my mind anyway, but also because of Peter Berger’s post on pluralism, which I linked to awhile back. His idea (and it is not exactly original) is that, in the current modern social climate, one is obliged, whether one likes it or not, to weigh and test religious options against each other, and this would seem to grate against, if not obviate, Newman’s idea of what faith is.  Faith for Berger, if I understand him correctly, can no longer be “naïve,” can no longer be “simple”; it must be, as he puts it in another post, something that presupposes not trust and belief but doubt, in a sort of dialectic battle with trust and belief.  Berger is a Lutheran, and there is perhaps some Lutheran sturm und drang to his version of Christian faith, but to me it just sounds like unbelief simpliciter.   After all, if after having weighed the options, none seems definitively true, can you really say you have ”faith” in the religion of your choosing? Doesn’t this definition of faith just collapse probability and faith together?  I personally have never felt like I “chose” the Catholic Church as one option among many; I felt compelled to it, because I came to believe it was “true” in a way that no claimant to be Christ’s Church is.   Certainly, it seems wrong to me to call “faith” anything but what Newman has described, and the sort of “I believe, but I don’t take this or that literally” stance seems a short distance from the “spiritual not religious” nonsense so many embrace in the pluralistic West.  Or in Newman’s terms, it seems like  a halfway house to atheism.

The ultimate source for this phenomenon, I suppose, is to be found in the Protestant Reformation; that certainly is what the historian Brad Gregory, in his book The Unintended Reformation (a post is coming soon on this book).  I have no quibble, obviously, with saying that the evangelical Reformers of the 16th century are the primary source of Christian division in the West today, but I’m not so sure about laying the formation of our modern, pluralistic civilization at their doorstep.  Obviously, something like the unintended consequences of that debacle had something to do with it, but I doubt it is as straightforward as Catholics like Gregory want to make it.  (I want to say that virtually everything in history is more complicated than that, as you should be able to guess by now.)  As I have said before, I doubt the reality of any actual thing called “Protestantism,” as distinct from the actual, living traditions of Lutheranism, Reformed, and others stemming from the 16th century schism.  For me, “Protestantism” does not denote a distinct theological error, or some sort of demonic force which destroyed the church, but is rather a not-altogether-opprobrious synonym for human nature, for that power of denial that is, to me, of the essence of what it means to be human.  To say, “no, I will not submit!” is demonic if one says this to the Church, but this does not mean that this quality is not absolutely necessary in other arenas of life:  to say no to injustice, to the ugliness, banality, and cruelty of the devil; to reject the slack jawed, mesmeric diversions of our modern entertainment culture; to deny our eyes the insidious pleasure of the pornotopia we currently inhabit, is necessary to our salvation, indeed is part of the obedience we owe to God.

Of course, this power of the will to reject is most often praised as a power of choice these days, and it is in this guise that most people identify as Protestants today. It is the power of judging for one’s self that Newman called “private judgment,” and against which he railed virtually his entire career.   To my mind, perhaps the best expression of this idea comes from the pen of Thomas Paine, at the beginning of his work on religion, The Age of Reason: in the first chapter of that work, when describing his own religious beliefs, Paine disavowed allegiance to any church or religious body, and proclaimed that “my mind is my own my church.”  Poor Tom Paine died in ignominy in the U.S. in the 1820s because of his “infidelity” (i.e., his deism), but to me he embodies in some respects the best of what such a mentality can produce. Paine went from being a Methodist, a Quaker, and finally a deist, all the while exalting his watchmaker God; embarked on a series of disastrous business ventures prior to finding his calling as a political pamphleteer during the American Revolution; and wound up serving in the National Assembly during the French Revolution, only to fall under suspicion during the Reign of Terror, and wind up in prison, marked for execution (where he wrote The Age of Reason); till finally expiring, unloved and unknown, in the very country he helped to establish.  In short, Paine was a true “individual,” in Kirkegaard’s sense of the term.  I have always found Paine’s ideas shallow, derivative, and tedious, but the verve and optimistic good cheer with which he so doggedly pursued them I have always admired, and I attribute these qualities partly to the stubbornness with which he embraced his own individual self.

Thomas Paine (1737-1809): the Patron Saint of Private Judgment

But doesn’t this idea of individuality—of a habitual build up of one’s individual identity, of one’s self—conflict with the idea of faith Newman outlined above?  I think it is obviously in tension with it; but I also think it is something that perhaps the Gospel requires of us in this age, when the intense subjectivity of the individual (the hyper awareness of one’s consciousness, of one’s feelings, and the conceit of their authenticity) is probably no longer avoidable.  It might just be what God wants of us, to build up that sense of our own natural abilities “to will one thing,” as Kirkegaard puts it, but only as a prolegomenon to offering those same capabilities of judging for oneself up to God, primarily, though not exclusively, through the Church.  Certainly, I think that’s what happened in the case of Newman, an “individual” in a modern sense if there ever was one, but also a good son of the Church, with all that this phrase implies.

Of course, I doubt many people who identify with the traditions I mentioned above would sign on to this, or many self-identified Catholics, for that matter; a devotion to “private judgment,” alas, is not limited to “Protestantism.”  Most people when they speak of “faith” in the modern West, mean something they have decided upon for themselves, and from which they can opt out at any time, more or less—at least in regards to questions about God, about religious authority, and related questions.  It is their own “selves” that are the legislators of the beliefs, who lay down the laws, such as they are, of what they shall and shall not believe.  I have met people who, in other walks of life, would never dream of taking their own judgment to be the final word on matters of importance to any other arena of human endeavor, assert with almost pathological defiance their absolute right to determine their religious opinions, the actual content of which is almost always some rhetorical commonplace of a liberal, bourgeois society, which has not much to do with Christian faith as traditionally understood.  One wonders if people who view ”faith” in this manner have ever conceived that it might be something else entirely.  From my experience, I am guessing the answer would be no.

In any case, the point of this long, rambling post, is to point out that one of the things the Church needs to do in order to help spread the Good News, and reconcile men to God through his Body, is to articulate better what the true meaning of faith is, without denigrating that faculty of “private judgment” which many souls now are so infatuated with that it often undermines the possibility of their ever embracing it.

Alypius Minor

What Would Nietzsche Do? Nietzsche and Abortion; or Kermit Gosnell as the Superman

If you have not heard of the Kermit Gosnell case by  now, you may consider your self fortunate.  It is as disturbing as it is revolting, and those of you who need further details can consult this essay by Connor Friesdorf at the Atlantic if you want to peruse the gruesome particulars.  That is not the subject of my post.  Nor am I all that interested in debating the morality of abortion, since that is hardly a question for me anymore.  When I was still an atheist, I simply did not think the question mattered, since human life was meaningless to me anyway; having embraced Christian faith, I can see that, really, deep down, I always knew it to be wrong, but I simply didn’t care.  Faith, I suppose, gave me that reason; or rather, faith in Christ made me see my own life as meaningful in an ultimate sense, and it therefore follows that all other human life has ultimate meaning as well, I being no different than any other.  (There was more to it than that of, course, but more on that anon.) I am not concerned here with arguments about abortion, pro or con; this is one of those matters on which arguments are helpful, but not really central to the debate at hand, if by arguments one means a sort of academic or scholastic arrangement of propositions and conclusions.  The debate over abortion is obviously a matter of intuitions, which, to be sure, have their own hidden logic, but which are primarily about the “gut” rather than the mind.  Which is what brings me to Friedrich Nietzsche.

I have recently returned the work of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) to my Western Civ classes, this time in the form of a “Nietzsche Reader” which I had to discuss with my students.  During the time I was preparing to teach him for class, I first became aware of the Gosnell case, and ever since, a question has seized my mind, and won’t let go:  would Nietzsche have approved of what Kermit Gosnell was doing?  Or abortion more generally?  To some, this may seem an obvious question; Nietzsche certainly expressed the belief, on more than one occasion, that “ascending life” ought to impose itself on “descending life,” to the point of doing away with it; indeed, his major complaint against Western philosophy/Christianity/modernity was precisely the fact that it encouraged the keeping alive of declining types, to the exclusion of the ascending type.  As he put it in Twilight of the Idols, “to create a new responsibility, that of the physician, in all cases in which the highest interest of life, of ascending life, demands the most ruthless suppression and sequestration of degenerating life–for example in determining the right to reproduce, the right to be born, the right to live” (Hollingdale, p.99)  Thus it would seem, taking this text as a starting point, that Nietzsche, whose ideas were to help inspire the Nazis, is merely articulating the sinister aspects of his philosophy.  Nietzsche would favor abortion, at least for the weak, the malformed, something that is increasingly the case, as fewer and fewer babies are born with Downs Syndrome, thanks to modern prenatal technology.

With the abortion debate more generally, there is also a certain parallel between the justification that many pro-choice advocates use for their cause, namely the right of the woman to control her own body, with Nietszche’s emphasis on the will to power:  the unspoken implication of the right to control one’s body is that such control involves the exercise of power over the unborn child.  And power, of course, is his key descriptor of how humans actually behave.  Thus Nietzsche:

However much utility and vanity, those of individuals and peoples, may play a part in grand politics: the strongest tide which carries them forward is the need for the feeling of power, which from time to time springs up out of inexhaustible wells not only in the souls of princes and the powerful but not least in the lower orders of the people…When man possesses the feeling of power he feels and calls himself good: and it is precisely then that others upon whom he has to discharge his power feel and call him evil.  [Daybreak, 189]

Of course, the unborn child cannot call the abortion doctor or its mother evil; it is left to the pro-life protesters to speak for the them.  But it adds to the impression that something Nietzschean is at the heart of it, and that he would favor something like abortion precisely because of the exercise of power involved in it.

And yet, there is something not quite right about this picture.  For starters, it is not really the woman who has direct control over the unborn child, but the doctor, and so it is he (most abortion doctors are men, from what I can tell) and not the mother to be, that really has the power, but the expert.  I guess that doesn’t make much of a difference, if the feeling of power is all that is at stake, but I can’t help thinking that wouldn’t fly with Nietzsche.  After all, he detested the bourgeois obsession with security (“security is now worshipped as the supreme divinity,” Daybreak, 173), not to mention the cult of technology and science which makes “safe” abortion possible in the first placed.  But even more than this, Nietzsche’s ideal Übermensch is predicated on the ascetic overcoming of harsh suffering, of the contradictory forces within himself, on being one who can complete a “victory over strength” (Daybreak, 548), who must “grow better and more evil…the most evil is necessary for the superman’s best” (Thus Spake Zarathustra, “Of the Higher Man,” 5).  None of this sounds like the middle class women who seek abortion for “elective” reasons, nor those women in difficult situations who seek abortion either.  Now, Kermit Gosnell, with his ghoulish, serial killer like tendency to keep aborted babies in jars, might fit the bill, though I have not read enough about his motivations to say for anything for certain.  To me it seems just as likely that he is a moral retard who merely wanted to make money from his “profession,” without any inkling what he was doing was wrong.  To put it another way, he might be less like Nietzsche’s Superman and more like Adolf Eichmann.

So, what would Nietzsche do in a case like this?  Clearly, he would have no beef with abortion per se, but I can’t think but that he might be a little disgusted by the things that Gosnell did—not out of normal, human decency, mind you, but because the smallness of the victims involved would be unworthy of the “higher” type he thought could and should destroy the petty moral codes of mere mankind.  One could reap hardly any kind of transgressive glory from such a “feat.”  I’d like to imagine Nietzsche saying Gosnell would have been a better abortionist if he’d started with  himself, as the only fitting end for such a small life.    Absent a Christian faith in the dignity of all human life, this is about as much justice as one could expect from a Nietzsche.

Alypius Minor

On the Reality of “Pluralism”

There are few sociologists whom I admire more than Peter Berger, who once upon a time was one of the founders of the “secularization” thesis in sociology: namely, the idea that once a society became “modernized” it inevitably became secular. He has for some time now repudiated this earlier position, not least because of events around the world in the last thirty years or so outside of Western Civlization. When I was still in graduate school, I once taught a class on secularization in Western society, and I used one of his books for that course. (The course itself was, alas, a disaster; I am still not a very good teacher but was worse back then, and it was the first time I had had the opportunity to design my own course.) Berger these days is retired, but writes a blog for the American interest, which I sometimes read. In one of his blog posts the other day about the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, he touched on of his favorite themes, that of religious pluralism. Though he has abandoned the secularization thesis, Berger still maintains that whenever a society embraces modernization, it does inevitably mark a shift—not toward secularism, but toward pluralism. Once religions, such as Judaism, no longer have a monopoly over their congregations consciences, must compete in the marketplace of religions with everyone else, they automatically take on a voluntaristic character that Judaism did not have previously.  The same goes for other religions as well.

There is of course much truth in this.  It makes a great deal of difference if, as in the Middle Ages, the Church could claim (to varying degrees) a monopoly on the spiritual lives of its adherents, and the situation in contemporary America, where no such claim can go uncontested.  This is without doubt a huge change, and I would not wish to deny it.  However, it seems to me there is something not quite right about this line of thinking.  A passage from the late Henri Cardinal de Lubac came to me when reading Berger’s post, and it is worth quoting in full:

Plurality is a fact, pluralism is a system—one that has been exalted as an ideal.  The former is observed, the latter is asserted.  The movement of faith tends to rise above plurality, through a spontaneous convergence, while pluralism, through the conscious desire for self-differentiation, affects faith itself.  (de Lubac, More Paradoxes, p. 80)

The first thing to note about this is the distinction, crucial I think, that de Lubac makes between the fact of a plurality of beliefs, and the belief—an interpretation of this fact—that we call pluralism.  Berger is of course aware that there are those interpret this fact differently, as an aberration of the true faith, but favors “pluralism” for a variety of reasons, mainly because of the social comity it allegedly produces.  But he is wrong to point out, as he does in another post, that this pluralistic drive to be as attractive as possible in the marketplace of religions is the default cultural expression of the vast majority of religious institutions and peoples in contemporary America.  The second thing to note is de Lubac’s definition of faith:  that it is something that necessarily “rises above” this plurality of beliefs.  I’ll come back to these definitions in a moment, but first let me go back to Berger’s post and what I believe are the problems with his definition of “pluralism.”

First off his definition of pluralism:

A simple definition of pluralism (or, if one prefers, plurality) is a situation of peaceful co-existence and interaction between different worldviews, value systems and lifestyles.

Note how this collapses the distinction de Lubac, rightly I think, mader between pluralism as fact and pluralism as a belief.  Just because there are a plurality of religions doesn’t necessitate the acceptance of them all, otherwise the Christian faith would simply have disappeared in the Roman empire (early Christians were not, to say the least, “pluralistic,” despite being confronted with a plurality of religions).  Berger goes on to say that this pluralism, combined with politically guaranteed religious liberty, led in America

to a situation in which in which no faith can be taken for granted and in which, therefore, the individual must make choices. This is the situation in which the distinctively American institution of the denomination was created—a voluntary association, which an individual is free to join or to leave.

Berger ends the post by noting that the complications that can arise from this situation for Jewish/Christian dialogue, he ends his post by stating “in the turbulent supermarket of American religion one may well wish for an earlier situation in which faith was a matter of tranquil certitude.  Unless one values the freedom of the individual.”

Now, it seems to me there are a couple of problems with this.  First of all, I think what Berger is describing is a sort of Weberian “ideal type.”  I say this because what he is describing is a bit too pure for an historian’s ears.  It seems to me pretty obvious that peoples in the religious marketplace take plenty of things about their faith for granted, just not the ones that they (presumably) would have in say the nineteenth century, when there was still a marketplace for religion, though not to the same extent.  Most Protestants these days, as far as I can tell, don’t take for granted that Catholics are idolaters, whereas most baptized Catholics in America, if I can trust surveys on the subject, don’t assume theirs is the one true Church.

The bigger problem with his thesis is that the various religions he is now describing, if indeed they are all “voluntaristic” in nature despite their differing theological content, all sound rather like one and the same religion rather than many different ones.  That is, what Berger takes to be the peaceful coexistence of differing religions is merely the reduction of many previously different ones to a new, reduced ideal of religious uniformity (“there are many different paths to heaven, all of which are equally valid,” I believe is the way it is sometimes expressed in opinion surveys on this subject.)   The same thing goes with the supposed “value of the individual”:  Americans, in their religion as in much else, are the most conformist people on the face of the earth, as de Tocqueville noted long ago about Americans.  A few years ago there was some controversy in the Catholic Church in California over when it was appropriate to kneel or stand at communion.  I believe the issue was between some parishoners wanted to kneel at communion, while the bishop was insisting all stand.  This sort of thing would never occur to Catholics in other countries, who alternately kneel or stand or what have you at various parts of the liturgy, including communion.  But not Americans:  with their thirst for equality in all things, all must do the same as everyone else.  It is little different in Protestant megachurches, whose worship, from what I can tell, is a testament to bourgeois conformity (as is the liturgy in most suburban Catholic parishes in the U.S. in my experience.)

My point is that, like Cardinal de Lubac, Berger thinks of the “individual” as somehow rising above all of this.  For him, the individual is that summum bonum for which all of this must be tolerated, and no claims to being the true Church (no popery!) must be allowed to intrude on the sacrosanct sphere of the individual.  (De Lubac’s ideal type, if you want to call it that, is obviously the Church, which for him rises above all this as well.)  But, aside from the fact that previous centuries (the so-called “Age of Faith” and so on) were really not pictures of perfectly tranquil certitude, the idea that this “pluralism” serves the “freedom of the individual” rather than to make conformity easier for the masses is hard for me to take seriously.   I simply don’t meet very many people in America whose beliefs differ so much from what is commonly taken to be Christian belief that their “freedom” might be threatened by overweening religious authority (i.e., the Church).   And those who do genuinely believe differently, are so few in number that they simply don’t matter in a mass society like ours.  Naturally, the exception is invoked in order to protect the rule of “pluralism,” but I don’t think the situation in America has much to do with Berger’s definition of it.  Berger has described himself in the past as liberal Lutheran, and so it makes sense he would take to this idea of pluralism-for-the-individual.  Naturally, as one of those “conservative Catholics” who doesn’t like this pluralism all that much, I see it rather differently—mostly, it just looks like a docile acceptance of unbelief, not terribly dissimilar from Berger’s Lutheranism, which, as a convinced papist, appears to me as a species of unbelief as well.  But there’s no doubt this pluralism, or as I would have it this “pseudo-pluralism,” whatever it is, remains the predominant reality of our times.

Illness & the Joy of Music

When I was a child, I was a bit sickly; I had allergic reactions to certain types of grasses, which is a bad lot when you grow up in my home state of Florida. When I was a child, I recall having to wipe my nose on my pants at the private Christian school I attended when I was about 4 or 5. It is one of my earliest memories. Eventually, I more or less outgrew the problems with my allergies, but I still detest sinus problems when I get colds or the flu.

I am bloggin about this because I have fallen ill in the past couple of days, and illness has a way of reminding me of weaknesses that I am not terribly eager to acknowledge when I am in good health. It is odd, but even since my embrace of the Christian faith, I have found that it is easier for me to approach God in prayer, to draw near to Him, when I am ill, than in my periods of good health. I suppose, it reminds me of my dependence upon him, and of the many gifts he has blessed me with in my life. One of those is the gift of music. I had, before moving from my former parish, been a member of the choir for most of my time there, and had the privilege of being able to sing to God some of the most beautiful expressions of the faith that are a part of the Catholic heritage. I always wished the people in the congregation could hear the polyphony of Palestrina, or Tallis, the way I heard it in the choir when we sang it. It is like nothing else: my own voice joined with a welter of voices around me, like a cloud of witnesses, all distinct, all different, still coming together to form a harmony that virtually lifted you out of your body. And besides this, in my off hours, I have always liked to play guitar and sing, more for therapeutic reasons than anything else, as a means of lightening my anxieties.

Well, since I have been sick, my sinuses have made my throat quite sore, and so the pleasures of song are denied to me for the time being. Strange how you take things for granted, even stranger that you appreciate them that much more when you cannot do them as you are wont to do. Human beings are funny that way. I’ve always wanted to teach a course on the relationship between art and illness, and how people have dealt with it through religion, and artistic expression. Some of my favorite pieces of writing and music came about because of this. John Donne, the great Anglican preacher and poet, wrote his devotional treatise, “Devotion Upon Emergent Occasions,” after his recovery from an illness he thought was fatal. (This was the work where he famously declared, hearing a funeral procession outside his window, that “no man is an island, entire of itself,” such did he identify with the dying man.) Then there is the poem “Crossing the Bar,”‘ by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, which was written after he crossed the Channel while ill toward the end of his life. Even now, I can recite it from memory:

Sunset, and evening star

And one clear call for me,

And may there be no moaning of the bar

When I put out to sea.

For such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,

From that which drew from out the boundless deep

Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,

And after that, the dark.

But may there be no sadness of farewell,

When I embark.

For though from out our bourne of time and place

The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my pilot face to face

When I have crossed the bar.

The poem wasn’t the last that Tennyson wrote, but it appears, per the request in his will, as the last poem in all published collections of his works.

There are many others (Book of Job comes to mind) but for me, the most beautiful work of art I associate with illness is the third movement of Beethoven String Quartet No. 15 in A Minor.  One of his late works, Beethoven wrote this section of the quartet after recovering from a long illness.  On the score, he gave the movement the title, “Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart” meaning roughly, “A Song of Thanksgiving to the Deity from a convalescent in the Lydian mode.”  As this musician and author points out, putting this section in the Lydian mode was a nod to ancient church music, and it exemplifies the prayerful quality that Beethoven could reach in his music.  (This video lecture given by a Stanford professor explains this in more detail.) Like many of his late works, it is very different from the popular image of Beethoven, the defiant revolutionary shaking his fist at God and all authority, as if some sort of Enlightenment icon:  not the bombast of the Eroica, nor the triumphant, almost Titanic humanism of the 9th symphony, but a smallness, a delicacy, and in the 15th quartet, a brokenness and even a humility shine through this music as in no other instrumental piece I have ever heard.  Beethoven, years after having lost his hearing, could still hear the voice of God in his head, and could still give thanks after many years of illness for the gift of life.  I leave you with a performance of this most beautiful of works, and hope it will be a source of joy for you in your time of convalscence, as it has always been for me.

Alypius

The Problem of the Parish

I recently moved to another county in the state where I live, and left the Catholic Student Center which served as my parish while I was in graduate school.   I have now registered at another parish, but not the with the parish within whose boundaries I now live.  The Catholic Center in which I was involved in my former home was one of the best in the country, both for the formation of its members (it offers theology classes to its students free of charge) and in terms of its liturgy, which adheres far more closely to the liturgical traditions of the Latin rite, as interpreted by the Second Vatican Council, than most suburban parishes do, to put it mildly.  My main reason for choosing the parish over the one I am supposed to be a part of is familiarity; an order of sisters that was active at the center in my former town is based not far from my new parish, and the sisters are active there.  The two parishes are otherwise much alike, from what I can tell.

I suppose this makes me a rank consumerist, going where I will rather than merely adhering to parish boundaries.  But the two places are basically equidistant from each other, so this combined with some familiarity decided my choice.  In any case, it illustrates the problems someone like myself, attracted to the beauty, dignity and solemnity of traditional liturgy, tend to find in most parishes.  This is something I think about a great deal, actually, having been a mostly intellectual convert to the faith:  the disparity between one’s ideal of what the Catholic Church is like, and what it actually is in most Catholic parishes these days.  And this problem is not unique to the Catholic Church.  I have recently discovered a series of articles on a Orthodox parish website by Alexander Schmemann, one of the great Orthodox luminaries of the 20th century.  Back in 1965, as Vatican II was underway, Schmemann wrote a series of articles for the St. Vladimir Seminary Quarterly on the “problems of Orthodoxy” in America, and many of the problems he identified are very familiar to any Catholic who has been concerned about the Church in the last fifty to seventy five years.  He describes, in particular, how Orthodox parishes in America, though they are more well attended, whose members give more (much more in some cases) than do parishoners in the old world, were still somehow spiritually bankrupt at the same time.   He identifies the root cause of this as “secularism,” the idea that one’s life and how it is lived are somehow separated from the Death and Resurrection of Christ, that one feels some part of one’s life is “autonomous” from all that.  Effectively, I think he meant the lack of a “total” Christian world view on the part of the individual (a Christian one) was what was lacking.

I wonder about this though.  The parishoners I see at these masses in suburban places like the one where I live seem integrated enough into their lives.  They appear to have a pretty well articulated, all encompassing world view, just one in which the Christian faith, the celebration of its liturgy, and often as not some of its difficult moral teachings,  are merely the least important parts of that world view.  In other words, they have a “total” view of life, which appears to include only the most superficial aspects of the Christian faith:  “giving” to the Church, charity defined as “being nice,” and a liturgy which is “worshipful” and ”spiritual,” that is, comprised primarily of schmaltzy, infantile hymns sung in the manner of some form or another of popular music.  I say this, not to criticize the people at my new parish (I know for a fact that it is much more on board with the Church’s moral teachings than most, which part of the reason that I go there), but only to point out that this life that they lead does have an integrity of its own, it’s just not one in which the great Fr. Schmemann nor myself would recognize the fullness of the Christian faith.   My wonder is how one can convince them there is more to it, that there is a fullness beyond this that is within their gift to participate in.

In any case, I think Schmemann was completely right in identifying the “problem of the parish” as he called it as the greatest challenge to the Church today.  For whether one likes it or not, the old world of the parish–depicted in loving detail for the late medieval, English Catholic world by Eamon Duffy, in his The Voices of Morebath–which was the stable center of an ”organic” community, is not coming back.  The mobility that our technology has given us and the transience of our modern economy have, I am afraid, put an end to this permanently.  What the solution could be to this problem, I honestly couldn’t say.   But then, the Christian life is not supposed to be easy, is it?  “We may not look to our pleasure to go heaven in feather beds.  It is not the way,” so said St. Thomas More (or at least on of his biographers).  Well, maybe next time I will remember that when I am enduring the liturgy at my new parish, and perhaps, after having read through Schmemann’s essay, will have a few answers too.

Why the “Lessons” Drawn from History Are Often Partisan Nonsense That We Uncritically Embrace Unawares

Rod Dreher posted something on his blog a few weeks ago about the French Prime Minister’s admission of French efforts to round up Jews during WWII. He is right to praise Monsieur Hollande, but ends his post with this:

The tragedy in all this is that the effort to stamp out “monstrosity,” even “under its most harmless guises” can also lead to a fanaticism, and to evil. This is the lesson of the Inquisition. How difficult it is to learn to live with a certain amount of evil in human society, to protect society from even greater evils.

I’ve always admired Mr. Dreher, but this ”lesson” is historically obtuse.  I do not want to dwell on this too much, but I hear this refrain so often from intelligent, educated people that I feel honor bound as an historian to write something about it (even though I’m pretty sure no one is going to read this).

First of all, it’s important to understand what the “Inquisition” was and was not.   The practice of appointing “inquisitors” to judge someone’s orthodoxy began in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with the rise to prominence of canon law (many, if not most popes in this period were actually trained in canon law rather than theology).   The pope or a bishop would appoint these inquisitors, usually Dominicans, to investigate claims of heresy, partly because prior to the creation of the office of inquisitor there was no formal legal standard for adjudicating accusations of heresy.  Now, one might think that having no formal way to condemn someone as a heretic is a good thing, but prior to the creation of inquisitors, it was not uncommon for mobs to seize someone they thought was a heretic and, among other things, put them to death.  (See the Catholic Encyclopedia’s article on this subject).  And so the Church decided there ought to be some sort of due process to prevent this type of outrage, and this is where inquisitors came from.  In the Middle Ages, they mostly handed out penances to people (pilgrimages and the like), and only a few people per year were handed over to the civic authorities for punishment.  This is other thing to recognize:  though inquisitors did on occasion, in violation of canon law, use torture in their investigations, they did not kill anyone.  The power to punish by death was jealously guarded by the state, and was usually requested by the state in cases of heresy because heresy was virtually synonymous with treason; the Faith was part of what kept medieval societies in line, policing techniques and government control not being nearly as strong as they are in the modern West.  So no one died at the hands of the Inquisition, if by that one means that clerics performed executions.  In effect, inquisitors originally were more like independent prosecutors, brought to deal with a special case.  This extraordinary characteristic of the office of inquisitor–being freed from any oversight–is also what has made independent prosecutors problematic, and it is not surprising that people abused it.  But this is not the result of fanaticism, just plain, tedious moral laxity.

But what about the Spanish Inquisition?  This too, in the end, didn’t really have much to do with the Church’s putative ”fanaticism.”  Pope Sixtus IV (of the Sistine Chapel fame) gave his dispensation for the inquisitors of Spain to be freed from papal oversight in 1478.  This was the period when the Reconquista of Spain from its Muslim conquerors was taking place, and scholars have generally concluded that the main impetus behind the Inquisition was the government’s wish to root out a potential fifth column within the newly conquered territories.  This process, of course, was very easy to abuse, and many who had grievances against or simply hated converso families (conversos were Jewish families that had converted to Christianity in previous centuries) used the Inquisition to terrorize them.  The Pope very soon regretted his decision, as letters from converso communities came flooding in to ask for help.  He tried to intervene on their behalf, but King Ferdinand (yes, that Ferndinand) politely told him to go piss off.  Thus, the Spanish Inquisition handed over somewhere between 3 and 5000 people for execution in its nearly 350 year history (it was abolished in the early 19th century by Napoleon), but most took place during this early period, from 1478 to the early 1500′s.  This is still a horrible injustice, and bad enough as it is, but it is not the result of fanaticism nor is it on par with modern atrocities with which thoughtless commentators often lump it.

More than this, there was actually some positive benefit to the Inquisition in some respects.  The creation of legal standards for heresy trials was, again, an attempt by the Church to create some sort of due process for those accused of heresy, and this had a very peculiar effect in Spain during the 16th and 17th centuries.  In those centuries, a witch burning craze swept through Europe, in which some where in the realm of 150,000 women were put to death for being witches.  However, almost no women were put to death in Spain during the same period, mainly because the inquisitors in Spain had much higher standards of evidence did than did secular legal bodies elsewhere in Europe.  Scholars have come to recognize (without excusing or condoning the deaths of people convicted of heresy) that much of image of the Inquisition in the Anglophone world especially was shaped by the “Black Legend” of the Spanish in England, and by 19th century French and Spanish liberal writers who wanted to attack the Church’s political power.  It is from them that we get wild claims as to the number of the Inquisition’s victims (in the millions, in some cases), and it is their wildly exaggerted image of the Inquisition that inspired, among other literary creations, the “Grand Inquisitor” of Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov.

What about Galileo?  This again may offend modern sensibilities that an institution has the right to censor someone’s opinions, but the Galileo affair is much more complicated than that.  For starters, one must take into account the historical backdrop to Galileo’s condemnation–the Reformation and its fallout were the reason the Roman Inquisition came into existence in the first place.  Secondly, the Roman Inquisition, as noted above was a legal body; when Galileo first met with Robert Bellarmine and the other inquisitors in 1616, he gave his word that he would not write about the heliocentric system as if it had already been proved to be true.  I’m not clear as to what form this agreement took, but I suspect it was an oath they extracted from him, and the breaking of his promise (when he published A Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems in 1632) was the legal basis for his condemnation in 1633.  Again, this may offend modern or Protestant sensibilities, but it was not ”fanaticism” that motivated the inquisitors.  Moreover, Galileo’s condemnation in 1633 was tied to court politics:  the current Barberini pope at the time, pope Urban VIII, was an old friend of his, and he wrote his Dialogue at his patron’s request.   Barberini had asked him merely to compare the geocentric and heliocentric models, but Galileo, for whatever reason, decided to attack the older model.  He not only did so, but mocked the words that one of his interlocutors in the dialogue used to defend the geocentric model (whom he named Simplicius, to drive home his point), which were in fact words drawn from a work the pope had written himself in defense of the older model.  In other words, Galileo, who was an experienced hand at court maneuverings, blundered badly, and his patron reacted by having him condemned.  One can condemn the pope’s reaction, but it had nothing to do with fanaticism.  And in any case, the Inquisition was right:  Galileo had not proved his theory to be true.  This would have to await the theoretical genius Newton, as many historians of science have come to recognize.

I could go on, but sufficed to say there is plenty of scholarly literature out there that can fill you in.  I recommend especially the works of Henry Kamen, whose The Spanish Inquisition, I have on my bookshelf, as well as Edward Peters’ Inquisition, as starting points.  These lectures by Thomas Madden are another place to look.  (For the Galileo affair, you might try this book by Stillman Drake; this book by Mario Biagoli explains the role of Galileo’s experience as a courtier in his scientific endeavors, as well as the role of patronage in 17th science more generally.)  There is also the article on the Inquisition on the New Advent website.  Finally, if you are too impatient to read books, there was a very good documentary done back in 1994 by the BBC (of all networks!) called The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition, which features, among other scholars, Henry Kamen himself.  I have never been able find this anywhere for sale, but someone has kindly posted it on Youtube, where you can watch it in its entirety.

Well, I hope that wasn’t too preachy.  Obviously, not everyone has the time that an historian does to read up on such things (and the Inquisition is not my area of specialization, I should point out).  But with all apologies to Mr. Dreher, one should be careful in attempting to draw simple ”lessons” from history in the manner that he too often does.   It might be more exciting, more captivating to the imagination to presume that malificent zeal is primary source of evil in the world, but historically speaking, this is not the case.  For every evil that men perpetrate out of misplaced zeal (Al Quaeda) in this world at least as much is due to a habitual, unselfconscious embrace of evil (think Abu Gharib).  In the case of the Inquisition, at any rate, the latter is a much better explanation for its sins than the former.

The Dark Knight Rises; or Why Simple Hollywood Mythmaking is Preferable to Pretentious Attempts at Philosophical Depth

At least in a summer Hollywood blockbuster, that is. Last night, I finally got to see the final installment of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, and I thought I would lavish upon the world my thoughts on this subject, every tedious one of them. So here it goes.

 
First of all, the film itself is highly enjoyable: Nolan is a fine director at the height of his powers, and the movie does not disappoint in terms of action, snappy dialogue, or sex appeal (i.e., Anne Hathaway and Marion Cotillard). Mr. Nolan has, as usual, put together a phenomenal cast, with Bale putting in what I believe may be his best performance in the trilogy, and a host of other actors either returning from the first two films including Gary Oldman (Commissioner Gordon), Michael Caine (Alfred), Morgan Freeman (Virgil Fox), or actors from other Nolan films, such as Joseph Gordon-Levitt (John Blake) and Cotillard (Miranda Tate). I especially enjoyed Ms. Hathaway’s performance, and not just because of my long standing, juvenile crush on this talented actress. I had read or heard somewhere of objections to her being cast in the role of Cat Woman (who is never called by that name in the film), partly because of concerns about her abilities and partly because, apparently, the performance of Michelle Pfeiffer in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns is considered sacrosanct by that section of the American movie going populace that is completely lacking in taste (obviously, I did not think quite as highly of Batman Returns as some did). As to Ms. Hathaway’s talent, I confess I had only seen her in one film all the way through prior to this one, in Get Smart, where she played the straight woman to Steve Carrell’s character.  I believe she did receive rave reviews and some sort of award nomination for her performance in Rachel Getting Married, a film I have not seen. She has also, as I recall, done other films of a more adult nature (i.e., sex scenes) in order to convince audiences that she is not merely the minor star of cheesy, adolescent Disney movies. In any case, I thought she was excellent as Nolan’s Selina Kyle, pulling off the sassy lines and projecting the sort of morally ambivalent character Nolan is drawn to while prancing around in a tight leather outfit—and yet still projecting that same innocent, Bambi-like visage onto the screen that is such a large part of her appeal. This is in no way an easy thing to do, and shows that she indeed is a mature actress. In the future, I will have to seek out more of her films to watch.

Sassy, sexy, cynical, and yet still sweet: Hathaway as Cat Woman

As I must also do with Nolan’s films. Besides the Batman trilogy (all of which I saw in the theater, a rarity for me these days), I have only seen Insomnia and The Prestige, both of which I enjoyed, though I found The Prestige to be morally disturbing. I was not even aware of who Nolan was when I saw Insomnia, but remember being suitably impressed by the film. I have not as of yet seen his Memento, but it along with his first film The Following is now at the top of my Netflix queue. The Dark Knight Rises begins eight years after the conclusion of The Dark Knight, with Bruce Wayne having become a recluse in his mansion. He is moved out of his slumber by the machinations of the movie’s main villain, Bane, who manipulates both the corrupt echelons of government and corporate elite to take over Gotham. As others have note elsewhere, Bane invokes populist ideals in taking over the city, but in a transparently cynical way, while the institutions of law and order are seemingly all corrupt to one extent or another—even Gordon, whose memorializing of Harvey Dent creates the conditions for Bane’s success in the film. Despite the parallels that some have drawn between the film and contemporary events (the Patriot Act and the Occupy Movement readily come to mind), Nolan still manages to suggest such references without doing so directly, and so staying at a general enough level to avoid explicit discussions of politics, which doom so many other films. In fact, though I have several friends whose opinions I respect who insist there must be some sort of consistent political commentary in all this, or that the film has some kind of coherent political philosophy to it, I believe the film is successful precisely because it lacks any real political message. One can understand this better by comparing the last film with the first two parts of the trilogy.

Why man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus!

Nolan has said in interviews that he wanted to bring a sort of realism to the Batman story, moving it away from the comic book style of Tim Burton. He certainly accomplished this in Batman Begins, and though I probably enjoyed The Dark Knight Rises more, the first film is still probably the best in an artistic sense of the three. I say this because it manages to do what Nolan wanted without trying to do too much, which for me was the besetting sin of The Dark Knight. Perhaps it making the Batman story that realistic for more than one film was too much to ask, but whatever the case, Dark Knight definitely tried to do something different.  That film tried rather too hard, in my estimation, for a sort of philosophical depth which is hard to capture in a film, much less in a Hollywood blockbuster.   The exchanges between the Joker and Batman, the Joker and Harvey Dent, where Joker “explained” his “philosophy” were clever, but not necessarily terribly profound, and Gordon’s speech eulogizing Batman at the end would have sounded corny without an actor like Oldman pronouncing it. (“Because he’s the hero that Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now…and so we’ll hunt him…because he can take it…because he’s not a hero…he’s a silent guardian, a watchful protector…the Dark Knight.”) The Dark Knight Rises makes no such pretensions; Blake does challenge Gordon on his “noble lie” with regards to Dent, but that almost seems like Nolan apologizing for such pretensions rather than indulging them. And the most you really get with regards to a coherent philosophy is when Wayne tells Blake that “anybody could be Batman,” and that Batman was only meant to be a symbol. As Batman tells Gordon at a crucial moment in the film, it doesn’t matter who Batman is, since “anyone can be a hero.” One enthusiastic review in the New York Times thought the film hinted at a sort of egalitarian suphero ethic, perhaps because of lines like this, but this surely is not the case. First of all, such lines sound suspiciously like the populist pandering of Bane, and secondly, they directly contradict several of the premises of the earlier films. For example, one of the things Nolan wanted to do in Batman Begins was to give a full account of who Bruce Wayne was, and how he became Batman in the first place. The ending of The Dark Knight Rises suggests that Wayne will have a successor as Batman, one who was A) not a billionaire, and therefore cannot produce the gadgets necessary to fight crime, and B) someone who, unlike Wayne, did not endure several years of training with the League of Shadows (neither did Selina Kyle, apparently, who can hold her own just fine without such training). The fact is that it mattered very much who Wayne is in the first two films, and all of the pablum about anybody being a hero feels like Nolan playing to his contemporary, consumerist audience.   The film’s imagery somtimes suggests this as well, purveying a message at odds with the quasi-nihilistic themes of Nolan’s other films like The Prestige and Inception. For example, Wayne climbs out of the prison in the bowels of the earth where Bane puts him in a rather unlikely manner, whereas the main character in Inception never manages to climb out of the rabbit hole of his mind. And the final image we see of Bruce Wayne reminds one of those clever Dos Equis commercials: “I don’t always leave my superhero responsibilities and run off to Florence with beautiful women, but when I do, it’s with Anne Hathaway.” Which is why Batman is not only The Most Interesting Man in the World, he is also the hero of nerds everywhere, myself included.

Bruce Wayne, hero to NERDS everywhere

Is any of this a problem? Not really.  On the contrary, I regard it as the main strength of the film that Nolan seems to have embraced the limitations of the type of film he was making, and simply gave the audience what they wanted to see. I knew about half way through the film that he had dispensed with the “realism” he was striving for in Batman Begins, and I didn’t care one bit. Nolan, whatever his reasons, decided to close up shop on his Batman trilogy by giving his customers what they wanted: a rollicking good time wrapped up with a feel good ending that suggests, implausibly, and in the most self-flattering “democratic” manner possible, that we all can be superheroes. (In doing so, of course, he also sets up a future reboot of the series, and so the message of “we are all heroes” could be also just be about selling more tickets.) Strict logic and critical thinking are not really essential to a good film; film is basically about using images to manipulate the emotions of your audience, and not about probing the depths of political philosophy. (This is why, after the film industry came of age in the 1920s, the Fascists in Italy, the Nazis in Germany and the Soviets in Russia all saw the potential of film for propaganda purposes and exploited it to great effect; you can go on Youtube and see how well they did this in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, which is disturbing precisely to the extent it draws you in to the world of Hitler’s Germany.) This is not to say that it cannot be done, or that Nolan could not do it; on the contrary, he already has, and I hope he continues to tackle more complicated themes in his movies, but not in a Batman type of film.  (In one of the movie previews, I saw that he is a producer on the new Superman reboot coming out nexst summer, so maybe not.) Like Ridley Scott, whose travails I have detailed before, his talents lie mainly in his use of images (though he is much better at dialogue than Scott), and this is important for more popular types of films, whose stories more faithfully deal in what Aristotle said drama should deal in: simple universal types that everyone can admire and aspire to be. This is why The Dark Knight Rises succeeds:  it suggests political themes without exploring them in any detail, and avoids the fate of films that get too specific, too partisan to be successful. The Dark Knight Rises works because all the little kids can aspire to be Batman (the film actually has a little kid in a minor role, pining for the return of Batman), and all the balding, underemployed, thirty-something losers like myself can imagine themselves sitting in a café in Firenze with Anne Hathaway, and not because of its gritty, physical and psychological realism, or because of its “deep” explorations of contemporary political life. And the fact that the third film in the trilogy undermines and contradicts what he was trying do in the other two underscores to me what a good filmmaker Nolan actually is, in that he is willing to try different things, to experiment. The fact that each film in the trilogy is different and can stand on its own is a testament to his abilities.

Enough of this philosophy crap. Let’s have some ‘splosions!

None of what I have written should imply that film cannot do things like be “realistic” or explore political themes, only that a film does not need to do so in order to be successful as a film. Like every art form, at its best, film presents us with a certain type of truth—a dramatic truth, in the case of film or theater. What the medium of film does almost by its nature is create a world that is essentially utopian in its purity, just as the novel can create the illusion of individual interiority and subjectivity. And especially in a movie like The Dark Knight Rises, this ought to be the main goal: to retell in an exciting, dramatic way the same utopian myth we all want to see. And Nolan has done this brilliantly in my estimation. If you want a really good exposition of political philosophy, you are going to have to read books, I’m afraid. (Perish the thought!)
But what would a more penetrating “philosophical” film look like? For a more genuinely “philosophical” film, one might want to consider the philosopher cum filmmaker Terence Malick, and his film The Tree of Life, which came out in 2011. Which I will get to eventually, so stay tuned and be there next time when I discuss the Book of Job, sexy mother figures, and the proper use of CGI—same Bat Time, same Bat Channel!

Alypius Minor