Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

A story is making the rounds that Barack Obama made reference, during the campaign, to the importance of the medieval monk Joachim of Fiore, whom he apparently said was “a master of contemporary civilization.” Father Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher to the Pontifical Household, responding to these glowing references by the president to Joachim, has dismissed Obama’s references by denouncing Joachim as heretical. To speak of Joachim, whose theology was one of the sources of Marxism, as a heretic is indeed appropriate, as his writings (unlike those of, say, Von Balthasar) have been condemned by papal decree.

It stands to reason that Barack would speak glowingly of one of his spiritual forerunners, though one wonders who among Barack’s entourage dug up the name of Joachim. Barack is a technocrat, not an intellectual or a scholar. There is no reason to think that he has much grasp of the genealogy of his own ideas. Surely there must have been some liberation theologian out there who suggested bringing up the name, in order that Barack might continue his ruse of belonging to the Christian heritage.

But it is quite intriguing that the medieval monk’s name should come up before the journalistic class at this time. Barack Obama is still accorded the status of deity on much of the world stage, though that will probably diminish as events turn for the worse. Still, Obama’s glorified, secular messianism stands in stark contrast to the crucifying mission of Peter, carried out in the person of Benedict XVI, who is suffering slings and arrows from all quarters, and most of all from within the very Church that it is his divine mandate to shepherd.

We may not be in a final apocalyptic age, awaiting the imminent final battle of Good and Evil. But we seem very well to be in an age that is a type of the final apocalypse, a type of the final revelation or inbreaking of the Kingdom of God in the Second and Glorious coming of Christ. We seem to be in the midst of epochal transformation. Even academes, secular and Christian postmodernists alike, have been telling us something along these lines for decades. Either way, though, whether the transformation be definitive or exemplary, the Church will emerge from the ashes of a dead secularism.

Joachim’s vision is the precursor to the vision of Barack Obama, wherein history is seen as a movement of immanent spirit, transformed into a mythos of secular progress.

Benedict XVI’s vision, by contrast, has been, from the very beginning of his theological career, oriented to the overcoming of Joachim’s distortion of history as coming to a culmination without Christ and the Church. Few people realize that Benedict’s doctoral dissertation on Saint Augustine, and his habilitation thesis on Saint Bonaventure, were both repudiations of Joachimism, with its propensity to degenerate into secular messianism. The Marxist influence on Christian theology was being felt even when Benedict was a student, and he delved into the historical sources that might enable him to combat the influence. These studies by Benedict form the basis for his important book on eschatology, which he has called the most thoroughly researched treatise that he has ever written, and for his encyclical “Spe Salvi.”

Benedict XVI and Barack Obama are starkly contrasting figures: they could not be moreso. Benedict stands for a vision of history that sees all things in their relationship to Christ. He is a theologian par excellence of divine grace, of the Mystical Body of Christ, and of two cities. He knows well the lessons of the twentieth century, the grandchild of the French Revolution (itself a remote godchild of Joachim), the most violent century in human history. He knows that there can be no hope and no future without the grace of Christ, poured out through the sacraments of His Church, and faith in what He has revealed to us.

Barack Obama stands for a vision of history that absorbs Christ into dialectical process, that absorbs the divine nature into man, that extols the delusory progress of seemingly untethered human freedom, where freedom is misconstrued as “choice.” There is little reason to wonder why Hans Kung could wistfully express in public that he would rather have Barack Obama as pope than Benedict XVI. How many Catholics view Obama’s voice as more authoritative than Benedict XVI’s?

Benedict’s papacy represents a definitive overcoming of Joachim’s dialectical distortion of God’s work in history. Barack Obama’s presidency represents perhaps a last, violent, clinging to or grasping at the Joachimite vision. Barack has the capacity to plunge us, perhaps unwittingly, back into the genocidal barbarism of the twentieth century, if he is not careful. Why should not a return to twentieth century Marxian ideas on the economic, social, and political order not lead to the same brutalizing outcomes?

Pray for the Holy Father!

There is a very interesting, or so it seems, book slated to be published soon by T & T Clarke on Von Balthasar. T & T Clarke has a blog, and they have put an excerpt up of the book on-line. The excerpt is quite intriguing: apparently, the book’s author sees the debate about Balthasar as a debate concerning, to some extent, competing Thomisms. I think that sounds about right. I did a dissertation on another, less controversial (for traditionalists), “nouvelle theologie” figure, and I came to the conclusion that he was less neo-patristic (as it may at first seem in reading him) and more Gilsonian Thomist. The same might very well be true of Balthasar, with whom my person of study was good friends. They were both highly critical of the emergence of a totalizing philosophy from out of the early modern scholastic tradition. They both thought that a deeper reading of Thomas does not lead to the condoning of philosophy as a self-sufficient discipline. The guy that I did my dissertation on did not go the Balthasarian route in regard to the kenotic doctrine of Christ’s sacrificial death. But, in many other respects, their theological perspectives cohered. So, I can see this author’s point.

I have no interest in defending Balthasar beyond rescuing him from charges of heresy (or “tending to heresy”) or from those who see him as a scandal to the Church. The reason that I am so inclined to defend him in this regard is because a defense of Balthasar from these charges is a defense of Benedict XVI — whom I view it as my Catholic obligation to defend. Balthasar was so influential to Ratzinger, though Ratzinger is said to be critical of Balthasar’s fascination with Adrienne von Speyer, that one cannot so absolutely call Balthasar’s work into question, as heresy or as scandal, without raising doubts about the theological competence of the Holy Father.

So, forgive me those of you who happen upon this blog who have no interest in intra-ecclesial squabbling, but here is the excerpt:

Balthasar and the Resurgence of Traditional Catholicism

Because Seth, in a previous post, appears perpetually insistent that Von Balthasar, whose theology has been lauded by both JP II and Benedict XVI, would have been a scandal as cardinal because he embraced theological positions that are “heretical or tending to heresy,” I thought that I’d cut and paste an important post from the First Things website by Russell Reno, one of the better young theologians in the Church in America, who teaches at Creighton. The post briefly summarizes Paul Griffiths’s important article from Pro Ecclesia regarding the infamous Pitstick-Oakes debate. In short, Reno seems to agree with Oakes and Griffiths and JP II and Benedict XVI that Balthasar’s theology was not “heretical or tending to heresy,” but that we should recognize, in theological debate, functional categories for orthodoxy, a recognition that has become problematic for post-Conciliar theologians. I would concur with that assessment, but recognize as well that a theologian’s full body of work has to be taken into consideration, as well as his basic intention: Does he desire to think with the mind of the Church? Is he open to correction by the Magisterium? Will he recant specific positions deemed heretical if it is demonstrated that they are so?

Readers will no doubt remember the recent heated exchange in the pages of First Things. Alyssa Lyra Pitstick summarized her analysis of Balthasar’s provocative and dramatic (and by her reading unorthodox) vision of the depths of the paschal mystery. Balthasar scholar Edward Oakes, S.J., rose to defend the orthodoxy of the great Swiss theologian, adducing a cloud of witnesses on his behalf, not least of whom is the current pope. Then there was a counter-response, followed by a counter-counter-response. And did I mention the cascade of letters?

I think it’s fair to say that a lot of dust was kicked up. We shouldn’t be surprised. The passions of faith, magisterial authority, theological speculation: The mix has always been volatile. Truth matters, and the truth about Christ matters most of all.

Enter Paul Griffiths. The current issue of the theological journal Pro Ecclesia features a helpful essay by Griffiths, a Duke professor and First Things contributor: “Is There a Doctrine of the Descent into Hell?” (Summer 2008). With his usual care, Griffiths assesses the main claim about the orthodoxy of Balthasar’s theology put forward by Alyssa Lyra Pitstick in Light in Darkness: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ’s Descent into Hell (Eerdmans, 2007).

Griffiths brackets the thorny question of how to interpret Balthasar, whose vivid biblical imagery and brilliant conceptual formulations do not lend themselves to easy summary. His focus is formal. He wishes only to query whether or not there is a magisterial teaching on Christ’s descent that can be used to assess the orthodoxy of Hans Urs von Balthasar.

Griffiths focuses on two elements of Pitstick’s distillation of the tradition. One has to do with the purpose of Christ’s descent, while the other has to do with the mode. By Pitstick’s reckoning, the Church teaches that Christ’s descent was to “the limbo of the Fathers,” which is to say, to the patriarchs of the Old Testament, in order to liberate them. Moreover, this descent was “glorious” and involved no suffering on Christ’s part.

There can be no doubt that Balthasar’s own theology of Holy Saturday teaches otherwise. Inspired by the mystical visions of Adrienne von Speyr, Balthasar developed an extraordinarily vivid account of Christ’s descent into hell. Instead of entering hell in triumphant splendor so as to rescue the Israelites of old whose faith was awaiting completion, Balthasar envisions the crucified Son of God as a depth charge of divine life tossed into the abyss of dissolution. The more deeply the Son sinks into death, the more profoundly does the eventual, inevitable, and triumphant explosion of divine life reverberate.

So what are we to make of the obvious differences? Balthasar has Christ descending to what really amounts to the metaphysical depths of nothingness, while, according to Pitstick, the tradition teaches that Christ descends to “the limbo of the Fathers.” Balthasar goes to great lengths to dramatize the agony of separation as the dead Son descends ever farther from the everlasting life of the Father, and again the tradition seems to go in a different direction, emphasizing the invulnerable, triumphant divinity shared between Father and Son.

But hold on. Griffiths searches magisterial documents, and he finds that the term “the limbo of the Fathers” occurs only in a text by Pius VI from 1784. As he notes, “The term is not found in the 1992 Catechism, nor in the Catechism of the Council of Trent.” So, it turns out that “the limbo of the Fathers” may have a fine theological pedigree, but it has no obvious or stable place in the Catholic hierarchy of truth. In short, the idea that Christ descends to “the limbo of the Fathers” is part of a venerable Catholic theological tradition that invites reflection, discussion, and debate rather than compels assent.

The same holds for Pitstick’s claim that the Church’s magisterium teaches that Christ’s descent was glorious and without suffering. As Griffiths notes, Christ’s work in overcoming the power of the devil is surely glorious, and calling it so “is deeply rooted in that tradition.” “But,” he continues, “the idea that calling the descent glorious excludes suffering from it, I take to be on much less solid ground.” Aside from a passage from the Catechism of the Council of Trent, he observes that “there is nothing else in the tradition of which I am aware (or of which Pitstick is aware: if she had been she would have told us) which suggests the possibility that her preferred construal of the glory of the descent should be elevated to doctrinal status: nothing creedal, nothing conciliar, and nothing magisterial.”

Where does this put us? At the minimum, Griffiths helps us understand why both John Paul II and Benedict XVI felt no reservations celebrating Balthasar’s intellectual contributions to the Church. Balthasar may have been wrong or one-sided when he was bold and unconventional, but he was not rejecting or undermining magisterial teaching.

More broadly, Griffiths sheds light on the difficulty we all face as the generation after the generation after Vatican II. For a long time now, critique has reigned supreme, and “orthodoxy” has been an empty standard in academic theology. Alyssa Lyra Pitstick’s trenchant analysis of Hans Urs von Balthasar represents an effort to recover a functional standard of orthodoxy for Catholic theology. Griffiths makes a very convincing case that she fails. She both overestimates the precision of the tradition on the destination and nature of Christ’s descent into hell, and underestimates the scope for speculation and debate on this theological topic.

At the end of his essay, Griffiths gives the impression that Pitstick should have limited herself to a school debate with Balthasar over the merits of his theology of Christ’s descent rather than raising the formal question of orthodoxy. I find myself disagreeing.

The estimable precision of Paul Griffith’s critical reflection on Pitstick’s treatment of Balthasar points out weaknesses. But Pitstick’s impulse is surely correct. There have been many remarkable achievements in Catholic thought and practice since Vatican II. Yet there have also been losses, and without a doubt one area of confusion has been about the boundaries of church-loyal theology. In the decades before the Council, a painfully narrow vision prevailed, which had the effect of enshrining a neo-scholastic pattern of thought as obligatory. In the decades after, the pendulum swung toward an overly lax approach.

In this context, Pitstick’s focus on the formal question of the orthodoxy of Hans Urs von Balthasar moves us in a helpful direction. She may overestimate the authoritative status of traditional accounts of Christ’s descent, and she may be wrong about the great Swiss theologian. But she’s right about something very important. We need a functional standard of orthodoxy: one supple enough to do justice to the sorts of nuances Griffiths introduces, but one real enough to help us understand when theological speculation, novelty, and critique undermine rather than enrich the faith of the Church.

I just got back into town today after a quick trip to San Antonio for a job interview (see my earlier post if you want to know why) for a new, very small Catholic college.  I think that it went well except that my 30 year old Spanish has not yet come back, but I am working on it.  I never noticed before how, even outside of South Texas, that it seems easier to find a Spanish language radio station these days then often even a Country music station.  That is to say that I have now embarked upon a steady diet of Spanish radio when possible.  For those so inclined, I would very much appreciate your prayers for the rest of the selection process as the job seems to be an almost perfect fit to me and it will allow cornflakes to continue to populate the kitchen table…for that matter, it will ensure that there will still be a kitchen table.

Piggy-backing upon Hierothee’s most excellent post about the Notre Dame debacle, let me propose the following for your measured consideration. He covered quite well all of the logical inconsistencies of Fr. Jenkins’s rather pathetic rationalization for what can only be seen as a grave act of scandal.  Hierothee pointed out that there are clearly some heinous ideologies that people can hold about which no one can doubt that honoring someone holding the same could ever be honored, even if the end were dialogue and conversion.

In this case we have some one who not simply abets, but actually promotes mass murder.  Whether there are in fact any “accomplishments” to honor (Hierothee’s post assesses this dubious claim), honoring accomplishments while ignoring grave and extensive moral crimes is an intellectual schitzophrenia of the worst kind.  Let us consider substituting for BO, another figure from history who rescued a nation from economic turmoil while having the unfortunate character flaw that he thought some human beings deserved the protection accorded human persons while others did not.

Can we imagine Fr. Jenkins inviting Adolph Hitler to receive an honorary doctorate for his accomplishments in reforming the German economy, putting between 6 and 7 million unemployed  Germans back to work, reenergizing the German economy which had been in shambles after WWI, rebuilding the countries defenses, and unifying the country politically.  Of course, as with all socialist/totalitarian economic programs this probably would not have provided long term stability for the economy or the society but fortunately, the Third Reich fell before the house of cards could collapse under its own weight.

Nevertheless, can you imagine what Notre Dame would have to live down today, if a Fr. Jenkins-esqe school president had thought up some half-baked scheme to honor Hitler and to justify the act by claiming it is in order to dialogue with him.  Or suppose, perhaps, that this hypothetical brainiac had run a Catholic university in Nazi Germany.  Here the parallel would have been even more similar in that he would have been gaining “prestige” for his school with the intelligentsia for inviting a wildly popular leader of the state.  Even accounting for that fact that he oversaw a totalitarian regime, Hitler had approval ratings that still eclipse even BO’s at his highest (the link below reports that Hitler had a 90% approval rating in 1939).

Now some will argue that BO is not the cold blooded fiend that Hitler was and so the comparison with Hitler is unfair.  I say that  the comparison is more fair than they might be willing to admit.  It seems to me that it can only be those who reject the equation of abortion with murder, at least on some subliminal level, who would be drawn to call such a comparison unfair.  Though I admit I have no idea how authoritative this might be, I would still like to point to a very interesting assessment of Hitler’s worst mistakes.  These are so interesting because  they seem, eerily so, to effectively make my case for me:

Ultimately, Hitler’s worst mistakes were:

a) Formulating policy for a great state on the basis of a bizarre and fallacious worldview,

b) buying into his own press and gambling on his supposed Providence-supplied infallibility to play high-stakes power politics with an insufficient purse, and

c) ensuring the vilification of himself and his ideology by practicing industrial genocide on innocents.

How about providing some other personalities in the comment box that we might substitute into Fr. Jenkins’s rationalization so me might demonstrate his folly?

As everyone knows by now, Barack Obama’s invitation to give the commencement address at Notre Dame and to receive an honorary Doctor of Law degree has met with outcry among Catholics who care deeply about issues ranging from the defense of life, to marriage protection, to religious freedom, to educational freedom.

Fr. Jenkins, the president of the university, has responded, via the Notre Dame student newspaper, to this outcry. He argues that the invitation to Obama should not be taken to be a sign that Obama’s positions on abortion and stem-cell research are condoned by the university. Rather, he says, the invitation honors the president for his leadership.

Here’s how Jenkins puts it: President Obama is “an inspiring leader who has taken leadership of the country facing many challenges: two wars, a really troubled economy, he has issues with health care, immigration, education reform, and he has addressed those with intelligence, courage and honesty.”

“We want to recognize his very real and significant accomplishments and his leadership. At the same time, we want to engage him in the future, and I think this occasion will be a wonderful time to do that.”

It is strange to say of a man who has been in office for all of two months that he is being honored for his leadership. Indeed, what little Obama has managed to “accomplish” in his time in office has been a sign of incompetence, at best, and wickedness, at worst. These are hardly characteristics that one should want to honor. He has not exactly stood out as an inspiring and exemplary leader.

As for incompetence, Obama has had a terrible time with cabinet picks, with oratorical gaffes, and with diplomatic insensitivity.

As for wickedness, he has already committed to send tax-payer money for abortions world-wide (the “Mexico City Policy”) and for embryonic stem-cell research at home. He has brought radical abortionists into his cabinet. He has, through his decisions on the economy, set in motion a process of wealth transference to the federal government that will be destructive of intermediate social associations and economic freedom. Measures that he has already suggested will be taken in regard to school choice are deleterious to private, religious educational institutions. Surely, when Jenkins hints that Obama needs to address educational reform, he is not at all suggesting that a man who is as vulgarly scientistic as Obama is going to do anything good in that regard? After his election, Obama made the foreboding suggestion that he is going to restore science to its proper level of dignity. This was, of course, a shot at the Bush administration for placing limits on embryonic stem-cell research, and for other policies and attitudes in the Bush administration that were aimed at limiting, in the interest of the human good, wanton scientific exploration.

Jenkins also makes the claim that inviting Obama to Notre Dame is going to open up room for dialogue with him. His critics, Jenkins implies, are stuck in a ghetto-Church mentality: “You cannot change the world if you shun the people you want to persuade, and if you cannot persuade them, show respect for them and listen to them.”

This is an exceedingly perplexing comment, for at least two reasons. First of all, if Notre Dame had not invited Obama to speak at its commencement ceremony, and were not to offer him an honorary degree, that would not constitute a “shunning” of him. It would constitute, rather, a respect for the educational integrity of the university. It would constitute a shunning of his rank eugenicism, not of him. Jenkins is clearly stuck in an outdated, modernist epistemology of education. The university is not a “marketplace” of ideas, where all points of view are equally valid and worthy of being tested. In fact, most professors who, like Jenkins, are stuck in an outmoded modern picture of education, implicitly contradict their educational liberalism. Universities do not give an open platform to neo-Nazis, or klansmen. Some ideas, it is recognized, are intrinsically evil, recognized as such, and are not given consumer status in the ideological marketplace. Eugenicism, with the crimes against humanity to which it leads (mass abortion, scientific experimentation on the unborn, euthanasia, etc.), should likewise be shunned. Catholic universities have a special obligation to stand as exemplars in this regard, as secular universities, which were themselves quite good about rejecting eugenics after World War II, at least in Europe, have forgotten that the human person is not a natural object in the world to be disposed of at the whim of technocrats, whose uncultivated minds are the bane of education.

Second, Notre Dame is not inviting Barack Obama for the sake of persuading him. They are inviting him for the prestige that will be accorded to them in his addressing the students at their commencement ceremony. Jenkins is pushing worldly cynicism, not the evangelization of those who need the Gospel. He’ll get his thirty pieces of silver for his action, and secularized Catholics, who care more for worldly comfort and for the respect of the worldly than for living their lives in imitation of Christ, will disingenuously laud Jenkins for his fearlessness and tact.

And the final portion…

Toward a Renewal of the Liturgy

For the two theologians who interest us here, it is of no doubt that heaven opens itself, tears itself open: if not, liturgy is only role playing, or nothing happens. The liturgy is an opus Dei, the act of God over us and with us. Romano Guardini emphasizes the fact that the essential in liturgy is not the making of something but of being. Activity is not a value of the whole. It often hides a false interpretation of what is the Church. Just as the liturgy must proceed from a Catholic Christology, it must also be born from a Catholic ecclesiology where the Church is not seen as an institution, a bureaucracy pertaining to worship, and where the priesthood is not considered as the monopolization of sacred privileges. Cardinal Ratzinger writes: “If we want the liturgy to survive, to see it renewed, it is elementary that we rediscover the Church. I will add: if we want to free man from his alienation, if we want that he rediscover his identity, it is indispensable that he rediscover the Church, which is not a misanthropic institution, but that new Nous without which the Je cannot find its rooting and its home.” In effect, the true subject of liturgy is the Church, communio sanctorum of all times and of all places. Also, not only is the liturgy not created by the arbitrary will of an individual or a group but even more profoundly does it unfold three ontological dimensions, described by Guardini and found in all the work of Bouyer and Ratzinger: cosmos, history, and mystery. Ratzinger contests that the liturgy which is not rooted in these three elements runs off track: “The liturgy of the group (…) is not cosmic, for it holds its life in the autonomy of the group. It is not historical: that which characterizes it is precisely the emancipation of connection to history and of self-fabrication, even if one uses the decors of history. And it does not know mystery, because everything is explained to oneself and must be explained. This is why development and participation in it are as foreign as obedience, which opens onto a sensibility which surpasses the explicable alone. In place of all this we have now creativity, which tends to confirm the autonomy of those who are emancipated.” Liturgy rooted in Catholic Christology and ecclesiology is the fruit of a continuous and natural historical development. This millennial process has been broken apart in the post-conciliar drift: “In the place of the liturgy which is the fruit of a continual development, one has put a fabricated liturgy. One left the living process of growth and came to enter into fabrication. One has no longer wanted to continue the growth and maturation of living across the centuries, and one has replaced it – in the manner of a technical production – by a fabrication, a banal product of the moment.”

If Christology and ecclesiology are shaky, the crisis of the liturgy can only ensue, reinforced even more by the trouble shaking the sacerdotal body for which the passion for truth seems sometimes to be absent. Cardinal Ratzinger cites Bernanos to this purpose when this last depicts the Basque bishop: “The boldness of this brilliant priest deceives only him. His base intellect is immense (…) Alas! No one is less worthy of love than the one who lives only to be loved. Such souls, so skillful in transforming themselves to the tastes of everyone, are only mirrors (…) But he never takes notice that he denies each time the eternal sign by which he is marked.” When the suffering of truth is rejected by a priest, or a religious community, liturgy constructs itself on the sand and comes to shift with it. When the Je of Christ in the person of the priest becomes simply the je of the priest who desires to please his community or even to impose on it his views, the Eucharistic mystery is degraded into spectacle. Father Louis Bouyer, with his habitual humor, which did not win for him only friends in this world, will write: “What to say then of that new type of priest/bad-actor, drawing all the attention on himself and orating like a vulgar bartender behind his counter, for the benefit of a wholly passive crowd?” Whereas the liturgy is the school of truth and it will come to transform the priest in the sacred mysteries which he celebrates. Cardinal Ratzinger recalls to his seminarians: “What makes the Eucharist a terrifying mission, is that the priest is authorized to speak with the Je of Christ. To become a priest and to be a priest is constantly to advance on the way of this identification. We will never complete it, but if we search for this identification, we are on the good path: on the path which leads to God and to men, on the path of love.” So that the liturgy rediscovers its sacred character, it is necessary that the priest is conscious of his own sacred character, which is invested to him in spite of his human weakness. He integrates himself then, not in a particular community concerned with its image and in diverting itself, but in the totality of cosmic contemplation, which is impressed upon the facades and tympanums of Moissac, Conque, Vézelay, Autun, Chartres, and many others, which is sumptuously expressed in the Byzantine liturgy and which is still expressed, there is little of the times in this, in the Latin Rite.

The spiritual renewal necessary for the liturgy passes by a return to the true sense of the reality of the Tradition. The conciliar constitution on the liturgy emphasized the fact that Christian cult is the most effective method for teaching Christianity. In effect, all the senses, and not simply the intellect, are involved there and nourished: “(…) in the liturgy one does not only understand in a rational manner, as when I understand a course, but in a complex manner, with all the senses, and one is admitted to a feast which is not invented by some commission, but which comes to me from the greatest depths of the millennia, and, in the end, from eternity,” clarifies Joseph Ratzinger. But the thinking here is particularly needling, because spirituality and liturgy cannot be reserved only to the domain of the emotions. Louis Bouyer emphasizes the danger which lies in wait in cult doing away with intellect: “The effort to make a living liturgy abandon not only the Tradition, but also dogma, the revealed belief in order to awake the emotions in interesting man simply in his human, terrestrial perspectives, and in seeing God only as the means of galvanizing, with a halo of new prestige, of new bursting, the simple conscience that man takes of himself and of his possibilities.”

This is why nothing is neutral in the liturgical use of language, of vocabulary, of symbols, of architecture, of music, of the plastic arts, of the orientation in space, of silence, of the word…. These remarks have not as their objective to present the developments of Joseph Ratzinger and of Louis Bouyer on these specific problems, crucial for a truly sacred celebration. It suffices to consult their numerous and illuminating writings on the subject. An essential element is of course the orientation of the celebration, always turning toward the presence of the Lord. The direction of the altar reveals, even more than the language utilized, the subjacent theology. [Klaus Gamber's] Turning Toward the Lord is prefaced by Cardinal Ratzinger and post-faced by Father Bouyer. This last inspired Gamber moreover, as he is turned to again by Ratzinger, in certain of his works, such as, for example, Architecture and Liturgy.

The adhesion of Louis Bouyer and Joseph Ratzinger to the liturgical movement in France and in Germany was quickly tempered, then struck down, by the reforms instituted and put into practice. Both denounced very quickly the drift coming from the work of the commissions and from the “specialist” centers. They were the pioneers for reclaiming a liturgical movement capable of correcting the errors of the liturgical movement. Cardinal Ratzinger acknowledged that he would test, even before the last Council, a reserve vis-à-vis the rationalism and the historicism of certain representatives of the liturgical reform. Conquered by the content of the conciliar constitution on the liturgy – even though he was theological counselor of Cardinal Frings – he was surprised and disquieted by the almost immediate turn taken by the liturgy in its post-conciliar application. “I could envision that the negative aspects of the liturgical movement would reappear of no more beauty, leading all straight to the self-destruction of the liturgy.”

The liturgy in its actual state – which is not irreversible – is without doubt the mark of the more visible stagnation of hoe and of love which touches the contemporary world and rebounds to the Church itself. Saint Paul speaks of the sadness of this world leading to death, the Fathers of the desert combated the acedia which corrodes the heart, and Saint Thomas Aquinas speaks of a metaphysical indolence which is more than a lack of taste but rather the rejection of what is good and beautiful. And the Angelic Doctor names the daughters of indolence: despair, agitation, wandering of the spirit, verbosity, curiosity, interior inquietude, instability of the will and of being, torpor, pusillanimity, rancor, and malice. Here is a large family which reflects very justly the psychological situation today most widespread in the West. This diagnosis is severe but it comprises its own remedy: “Only the courage to find the divine dimension of our being and to accept it can give a new interior stability to our souls and to our society.” It is not astonishing that in such a stagnation, where the daughters of indolence do not cease to lead us in a macabre dance, the liturgy is the first to suffer. But at the same time it can be a privileged instrument of cure if it helps to direct attention toward the sacred. Tradition and renewal go hand in hand: “(…) to want to choose between the two or to oppose them is exactly to do as if it were wanted that an oak display its foliage in striking the most that one can at its roots. It is, to the contrary, to the degree where its roots are founded very deeply in the earth that the foliage can develop itself most amply,” remarks Louis Bouyer.

The time has come to find its roots, because all did not die and it is enough that they are watered so that the oak recovers its verdure and continues to grow.

Conclusion: In Hope

Cardinal Hans Ur von Balthasar would consider Christianity as the religion of and, not or, not in the addition of things which remain exterior to one another or in the confusion of their identities, but in a profound communion. The liturgy expresses well this and. In effect, it is the reconciliation, always actual and springing up again of the humanity and the divinity of Christianity. Louis Bouyer and Joseph Ratzinger have known to recall to the Church, with faith and brilliance, courage and tenacity, at the heart of a crisis without precedent, that it risks losing its soul in selling off the liturgy, in evacuating the sacred. Each in his domain and in filling the vocation and the task which was his own did not cease from reawakening our intelligence and our conscience. Louis Bouyer has rejoined the old men of the Apocalypse and participates forever more, with the grace of God, in the choir of the cosmic liturgy, after being himself beaten like Gandalf the White Rider of Tolkien. The Divine Providence has placed on the chair of Saint Peter, the object of Eucharistic meditation of the Bavarian cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger. Henceforth, Benedict XVI is in a position to put in place the reforms which impose themselves and which he calls his vows in his work as theologian, in his heart as priest: “(…) the Eucharist is our ground, it becomes our share, such that we can say “Fate has allotted an enclosure of delights and my heritage is splendid.”

The one and the other, so near and so concordant in their thinking, offer to us the necessary material in order to restore what our lack of faith has disfigured.

Here is the fourth part of the translated article:

The Essence of the Liturgy

The particularity of Christian theology is that of being Eucharistic, contrary to all the other religions which always oppose the action of grace for the well-being received from God and the praise of his transcendence. The liturgy reveals therefore to man that he is adopted by God, as is all of creation. Louis Bouyer emphasizes: “Is not the object (of the Eucharistic prayer) that man becomes a child of God and all the cosmos to which man is inseparable, not only adopted in his only Son, but, if one can put it thus, espoused in his very filiation?”

The fruit gathered is indeed the most precious there is. The liturgy is truly Catholic, universal, embracing in its very action man and cosmos. To reduce it to a personal action, independent of the tradition in which it appears, ends in depriving the universe of what gives it life, no more, no less. Joseph Ratzinger insists: “Catholicity is not simply an overflowing pleromatic, still less an exterior appearance of the organization of the whole. It is a central internal dimension of the Eucharistic mystery itself. And it is not necessary to separate it from apostolicity. The condition of apostolicity is Catholicity; the content of Catholicity is apostolicity.”

Louis Bouyer and Joseph Ratzinger both wholly share the conviction – which should appear to be at the source for every believer but which now is no longer in evidence – that one cannot dispose of the Eucharist and the liturgy as one wants, otherwise care for unity and universality disappears. When one lessens or throws out the Catholic dimension of liturgy, this last does not cease to change, to impoverish and to transform itself into communal naval-gazing. Cardinal Ratzinger continues: “The Eucharist then becomes a communal meal, the place where the community realizes itself, finding there the symbol of the reciprocal action of its members (…) At the same time the sacramentality, the sacrality, would soon appear an offensive notion, and one sees in fact stand out, in place of sacramental service, an organization which decides for itself and can then only set up functions and not true vocations. The danger then appears menacing of seeing the community devolve into a simple club.”

Meditating on the symbolic and artistic significance of Bernini’s Chair of Saint Peter in the Vatican basilica, when he was not yet Sovereign Pontiff, Joseph Ratzinger insists on the fact that the Eucharist constitutes the foundation of the Church and that order, as well as love, is inherent to it. This order present in the Eucharist is even, according to him, the “unyielding nucleus” of the order of the Church. The Chair of Saint Peter returns to this unity of order and of love presiding at the Holy Liturgy: “It indicates that the mass is the very center of the Church, that the Church can only be one with the crucified Christ in consideration of the community that it forms with him. Its unity would not be guaranteed by any organizational disposition (…) The Church is not governed by the decisions of the majority, but by the faith which ripens in the Eucharistic encounter with Christ.” And even more, he would add that the throne of the Eucharist is not only the throne of domination, but the seat of uncomfortable service, before concluding with these lines: “The Mass can be compared to the eternal light penetrating in our world and like the sound of the joy of God resounding here below. It is at the same time the means that we have of coming to touch the comforting bursting of this light, coming forth from the depth of our questions and our troubles. The Mass is the guiding ladder of faith and love and, indeed, opens our vision to hope.”

Louis Bouyer, for his part, utilizes the Parable of the prodigal son in order to illustrate the movement which leads us to the liturgy. Each Christian lives only in order to return to the Father. The Mass is what presents before each believer the mystery of the divine Word who searches for him and calls to him. And which crushes him in order to recreate him in the Eucharistic immolation, rendering him conformed to the Cross of Christ, transforming him into another Christ. It is in this way that the Mass is Eucharistic, which is to say the action of exultant graces, jubilant for this return to God, for this rediscovery of the beauty of creation: “In spite of its initial and fundamental aspect of immolation, the Mass indeed comprises, as the final successful return of prodigal humanity fallen far from him, flows and streams of joy. It is in this, which is to say in participating in it and doing it, by a living faith, giving our whole life, that we understand how the liturgy can say by the wood of the cross, joy has come to the world.”

If the liturgy, in all its sacraments, is communion in the Cross of Christ, it would suffer each time that the Christological faith becomes vague, plunged anew in some heresy arisen from the woodwork. Cardinal Ratzinger thinks that the renewal and restoration of liturgy passes by the question present in the Gospel of Saint Matthew: “Who do you say that the Son of Man is?” He affirms: “The theology and practice of the liturgy can only know a fecund development in close connection with Christology.” He rejoins the conviction of Bouyer cited above. The influence of luminaries will bring little by little even believers to have the historical Christ only of yesterday, sidestepping Saint Paul and even the synoptics, in order truly to keep a Jesus who has only ever existed in abstraction. Time is for them only an instant which vanishes irrevocably, nothing of which can be grasped. Whereas the Letter to the Hebrews insists on the fact that: “Jesus is the same, yesterday and today; he will be for eternity.” To know Christ is therefore a path which unfolds itself in the three dimensions of time. Joseph Ratzinger cites Saint Augustine: “Come to Christ you also…Do not think of long voyages…It is by love alone, not by traveling through the oceans, that one joins oneself to him, the Omnipresent. But because this voyage comports sufficiently of vagaries and of tempests of the most diverse temptations, think of the crucified, in order that your faith can climb upon the wood. Then you will not founder.”

Only faith in Christ can lead to a salutary awakening in the domain of liturgy. If the Son of God has not come into the world in order to save us from sin in dying on the Cross, if his agony is not until the end of time, then the first object of cult is not the God of Jesus Christ, but the “we” of those who celebrate, beginning with the “me” of the priest. In such a liturgy, adoration and sacrifice no longer have reason for being: “It is necessary for the participants to assure themselves of their mutual community and to burst forth in this way from their isolation, in which modern existence has enclosed the individual. It is necessary to nourish sentiments of liberation, of joy, of reconciliation, to denounce what is hurtful and to give motivation for action. This is why it returns to the community to create for itself its liturgy and not to receive traditions become incomprehensible; the community represents itself and celebrates itself.” Such a manner of making is opposed to a conception of liturgy such as that held by Romano Guardini, who will consider liturgy as life becoming art.

Such is also the spirit which guides Louis Bouyer from 1943, which is to say just after his conversion and before his ordination as Catholic priest, in his famous letter to Father Pie Duployé, O.P., at the moment of the founding of the Center of Pastoral Liturgy [in Paris]. He expresses the triple hope of rendering and cultivating knowledge of the liturgy, of bringing to it a revivifying historical explication, not at all fastidious or archaeological, and giving access to everyone the entire spiritual world in which it bathes. It seems though that this triple purpose has not been attained for reasons which hold in the crisis of the authority at the center of the Church, whereas the liturgical reform has in course and in the main taken over the liturgy by elements whose first purpose was to accomplish their own agenda and not to give luster again to the work of art bequeathed by centuries of faith. Louis Bouyer will note sadly as the years gradually go by: “The Catholic liturgy has been turned upside down under the pretext that it can no longer be accepted by the secularized masses.”

… and part three…

Upstream: the Sacred

Louis Bouyer has always sustained that the reality of the sacred can only be understood in its diversity and complexity by a phenomenological study on the basis of a comparative history of religions. He would dedicate, among other writings, a whole volume to this question. His authors of reference on the subject were R. Otto, G. Van der Leeuw, and Mircea Eliade.

The separation opened by the Protestantism of Albert Ritschl and the disciples of Karl Barth, followed by a certain brand of Catholicism, between faith and religion, between transcendence and immanence, between the grandeur of God and the reality of creation, leads to an “a-theology,” to a radical naturalism, to an a-cosmic theism which rejects God. The desire to obtain such a Chrisitianity, purified of its human elements, no longer permits the divine to find where it can rest itself. But nothing is more essential to Christianity than of being the reconciliation, according to the words of Saint Paul, of man with God that God himself worked.

The sacred precedes the religious, permits it of being, because it is the remnant manifestation of the presence, of the activity of God, the revelatory sign of His existence. It is therefore essential to the religious, the unity of all our existence in our relation to the world, which has its source directly in God: “To refuse the sacred is to refuse to God all possibility of manifesting himself in the world which He has created. To want therefore a Christianity where all sacrality will be surpassed or abolished is to want a Christianity where God will no longer be named, nameable, or expressible. Whether one wants it or not, the rejection of the sacred ends up therefore in what has been called “the death of God,” but it is really just “the forgetfulness of God.”

The Pagan and Hebrew sacred are transfigured, since the Christian sacred reestablishes the union lost between God and man. We are here in a domain which escapes that which is transitory, hence the necessity to maintain the stability of the liturgy, which expresses what is inalienable in relation to the Creator and his creatures. Joseph Ratzinger declares on this subject: “The liturgy is not a show that needs brilliant producers or talented actors. The liturgy does not live off of “sympathetic” surprises, or captivating “ideas,” but from solemn repetitions. It must not express the present moment and the ephemeral but the mystery of the Sacred.”

The language of the natural Christian sacred has been capable of saying things never said before. This language can not be transformed according to the will of the humors and its ways, because it is the total comprehension of the divine mystery and of its connection with the man who suffers for us. Bouyer and Ratzinger do not believe in the beneficence of the demythologization pronounced by Bultmann. The divine Word, who can only express himself humanly, must explode myth (which was of great utility for guarding at the heart of man the nostalgia for what he had lost since the Fall), and re-found them in radical fashion. Revelation uses the very words of myth but makes appear something radically new, as a great poet is capable of bringing forth inspired images from common vocabulary. Also the Christian symbols and rites take up those that have preceded them but they are charged with the fullness of reality. Myth can be false in the interpretation that it gives of reality, but the symbols that it utilizes remain. Human thought is therefore not only rational but symbolic.

Bouyer remarks that the Fathers of the Church had greatly profited from symbolic thought, which Hugo Rahner calls “nautical theology,” namely the Christian assimilation of symbols contained in the Homeric poems. Following them, Louis Bouyer will search in the myths for that which can be christianly illuminated. This is for him an essential condition in order to escape from the split between man and God and from sin. To refuse it is to expose oneself to Evil in acting as if it did not exist or to espouse it in divinizing oneself, as happened with communism and Nazism: “Man can only live in a world of symbols because that is his situation of spiritual being immersed in the cosmos. If one rejects the truly fundamental and explicitly religious myths which, recast by faith, will be like stepping-stones for the arrival of Christianity, then he will produce demoniac myths, those of his own divinization, obtained by his own force and the eviction of God,” Bouyer warns. The one who pretends to rid himself of myth, of what the myth contains of wholesome power to reveal the holy, condemns himself to refuse the sacred, to repel the divine, to refuse Revelation. Such is the situation of the contemporary world that has rejected myth and the sacred and which is consequently invaded by a return of what myth possesses of the most primal and demonic. Louis Bouyer does not hide his unrest in the face of this movement which touches also the interior of the Church: “Those who pretend to humanize (the Church) in detaching it from the sacred, from the religious, from transcendence, deliver it in fact to this falling back over itself which is the very essence of sin whose issue, when the occlusion is complete, is damnation…”

Before attaining to this abyss of which Bouyer speaks, the practical visible consequence is the leveling of liturgical acts reduced to those auto-celebrations which are no longer differentiated from the multitude of “feasts” instituted by a society which desires to fill up its empty religious metaphysic.

Cardinal Ratzinger comments severely: “A certain post-conciliar liturgy, become opaque and tedious because of its taste for the banal and the mediocre, to the point of making it cold…” The cult which provokes such a trembling of horror has scarcely any connection with the sacred; it is the cult of man by himself. Cult introduces God into the social order which, without him, would diminish man. Such is the experience of the people of Israel whose cult goes beyond the liturgical act and orders human existence in its totality, already preparing it, introducing it even now, to an anticipation of the future and eternal life. Its opening toward heaven gives it its breadth in the present life. Without it, existence would be immured, empty, and desperate. And when the cult falls into the aberration of adoration of the golden calf, there is apostasy, since it is a cult which is not received from on high, but which believes in itself, celebrates itself with delight, and declares itself all-powerful. Joseph Ratzinger, applying this to our contemporary drift in the bosom of the Church, notes: “The story of the golden calf constitutes without doubt an admonition: it dissuades us from all forms of arbitrary and egocentric cult, where it is thought finally no longer necessary to approach God, but fabricates from whole cloth an alternative world. At this stage, liturgy is no longer only a game empty of content. Even worse, it is an apostasy under the mantle of the sacred. It can only result in a sentiment of frustration, a sensation of emptiness – far removed from the liberating experience which is always produced from true encounter with the living God.”

Three stages in Sacred History have been noticed by the Fathers in reading Holy Scripture: from the shadow, to the image, then from the image to the reality. Because we are situated between image and reality, we have need of symbols that connect us to that which is at once present and yet partly hidden. This is why we still have need, partially blind as we are, of a sacred place, of a sacred time, of signs, of symbols, because by these images we will find the heavens. Joseph Ratzinger compares this moment to the march of the Good Shepherd who has taken us on his shoulders and who brings us to the lost fatherland: “Liturgy accomplishes the reversal of exitus to reditus, from dispersion to peaceful contemplation, from the descent of God to our ascension. Graced by it, terrestrial time enters into the present of Christ. It is the great turning in the process of redemption. The Shepherd takes the lost sheep on his shoulders and brings it to his home.”

Such a conception is radically detached from the sociological theories of religion developed by Lévy-Bruhl and Durkheim. The myth and the symbols which lead little by little to the sacred are not first of all etiological but more so pertain to worship. The rite is not an artificial action, outside of rational life and the whole of life, but it is essentially vital, giving its meaning to existence, discovering the presence of God in man, in the universe, and indeed the presence of man in the cosmos. Louis Bouyer concludes in affirmation: “This is why the sacred, that is to say, all that evokes in this world the mysterious divine reality, must be considered at the origin of the efforts of man as much to conceive his situation in the world as in order to establish himself in it: rendering him master of his own life in submitting to the law, or better to say, the fundamental inspiration of all life and of all being.”

Here is a continuation of the aforementioned translation:

Preamble

To render homage to Louis Boyer by accompanying his thought with that of Joseph Ratzinger, today Benedict XVI, is immediately to emphasize to what degree the eminent French theologian was, by his encyclopedic culture, in symbiosis with diverse thinkers, certain of whom were German, and above all how he would carry out with the future Pope, in troubled periods in the Church, the very creation of Communio.

Cardinal Ratzinger justly emphasized this fact in one of his conferences in 2002, before the Eucharistic Congress of Bénévent. Recalling the origin of Communio, he cites the names of Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Louis Bouyer, and Jorge Medina. And he continues by emphasizing that the Church is not first of all a concilium, but koinonia, not simply horizontal but first of all vertical since the communio roots itself in the first place in the Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist.

But how can we aspire to a veritable communion, with God and with others, if the liturgy is no longer understood as “the traditional expression of the Christian mystery in all its plenitude, as gushing fountain?” Louis Bouyer, zealous for the edification of the communio, contests that the instrument has disappeared or has been singularly disfigured: “It is necessary to say it without ambiguity: there is at this actual hour practically no longer anything of the liturgy in the Church worthy of the name. The liturgy now is scarcely more than a decomposed cadaver.” In his first magisterial work, which followed his conversion to Catholicism, he had warned: “We guard therefore against the temptation to substitute for the living liturgy an archaeological reconstruction. But we try to find, in the historical sources of our present liturgy, the inspiration which would permit us the burning atmosphere of its life to our times. Then the immalleable pleats of its hieratic robe would find their ancient suppleness, and the stiff characteristics of its impassible mask would find themselves in the light of a divine source.” This divine delight promised by a liturgy respectful of the sacred is the sign that what is at play is the very relation of love between God and man. The abandonment of the living tradition does not precipitate communion, it precipitates on the contrary its greater impossibility. Certain men of the Church, following in the train of the world, have dangerously replaced living continuity by that which changes, by chaotic movement, by the direction of the wind, abandoning all reference to the past, in what proceeds from Revelation. Believers are the tributaries of the cult which has preceded them, which they receive as a heritage of life. “The liturgy, which is the life of prayer and of adoration of a unique community: the Mystical Body of Christ, which progresses across history to partake of a unique source, the teaching and salvific action of our Savior, always active in us graced by the Holy Spirit,” wrote Louis Bouyer.

With the turmoil that has been stirred up of late in regard to the Holy Father’s lifting of the excommunications on the SSPX bishops, I thought that it would be timely to do a brief exposition of the Holy Father’s thoughts on the deformations in liturgical reform that have been one of the sad marks of the post-conciliar age. For anyone who is not hopelessly naive on ecclesial affairs, it is plain to see that the bitter animosity expressed by Catholics toward the SSPX, and toward the Holy Father’s extension of an olive branch to them, has little to do with Bishop Williamson and much to do with the contemporary Church’s aversion to sacrality.

Frankly put, many Catholics, even those whom one would hope would know better (George Weigel comes to mind)  are not comfortable with an “overly” religious Church. Sacrality has its bounds or limits for them: it is okay as long as it does not become obtrusive or unseemly in one’s life. The sacred should not, for these Catholics, interfere with secular affairs, or obtrude too deeply into the horizontal domain of everyday communal interaction. The SSPX, natural allies to the Holy Father in his desire to renew the Church’s Sacred Liturgy, are bitter enemies of those who are comfortable in a profaned Church. It is not so much their rebellion that draws ire as their preservation of the ancient liturgy of the Church, in which the sacred shines forth in reflection of the divine source and redeemer of all things and bids us to become transformed in its ambiance.

These criticisms I make of secularized Catholics may seem like extreme words, but the Holy Father has himself been quite ”extreme” about the matter of liturgical desacralization in the post-conciliar era. It would be worthwhile to do a close examination of his pre-papal writings on the issue, when he was freer to express his concerns publicly. But I thought that a good way to give a brief exegesis on the Holy Father’s thinking about the sacred and liturgy would be to provide a translation of a brief article from the French-language edition of the international journal Communio, from 2006.

The article was written by a French Jesuit priest, Jean-Francois Thomas, in an issue of the journal commemorating the life and work of the French Oratorian theologian, Louis Bouyer, who died in 2004. Bouyer was himself a great theologian of the liturgy, and his work was influential to the Holy Father. The article gives a beautiful reflection, drawing on some of the writings of Bouyer and Ratzinger, on the essential place of the sacred in Christian liturgy and in Christian life as a whole. But, be forewarned: the respective admonitions of Bouyer and Ratzinger toward the post-conciliar liturgical destruction are well-represented in the article.

I would note, before we begin, that this is a rough translation, and that I do not provide the article’s footnotes. For those, you would have to consult the original article. Here is the bibliographical information: Jean-Francois Thomas, “Notes sur le sacre et la liturgie chez Louis Bouyer et Joseph Ratzinger,” Communio, XXXI, 4 — July-August 2006, p. 45-62.

We shall break the posting of the translation into five parts, providing the first part today. We start today simply with the brief introduction. In the next part, Thomas expounds some of Bouyer’s most important ideas. Ratzinger’s voice will first be heard in the following part. But the two voices are concordant. They flow seamlessly into one another on the question of liturgy.

Remarks on the Sacred and the Liturgy in Louis Bouyer and Joseph Ratzinger

The pages which follow have no other pretension than to propose a gathering of considerations which do not proceed from the pen of a theologian, a specialist of the authors in question, or of the idea of the sacred, but of notes drawn from readings, at random visits in libraries, and which rest on the basis of a priestly conviction: the major and terrifying crisis traversed by the Church for more than 40 years will only be surmounted by a return to the sacred, of which the liturgy is the eminent expression. Such an affirmation can immediately be accused of being reactionary, conservative, or integrist.

The two theologians who concern us have not escaped and do not escape at all this kind of critique, thrown by the very ones who have replaced their catechism with tolerance. It seems to us most fruitful to listen attentively and humbly to these two following, concordant voices in order better to grasp what is the essence of Catholic liturgy.

You probably have noticed that posting has been more sparse than usual over the last week or so.  The tempo has picked up considerably at the Institute of Catholic Thought here in Champaign, but that has not been a good thing.  I was informed at the beginning of last week that due to the economic slowdown our funding stream could no longer support our school of theology so we will be closing it down at the end of the semester and I will get to experience solidarity with those human persons who make up the current 8.1% unemployed.

The task load has increased considerably in trying to place students, in finding a job, in continuing to teach classes, and in handling the unhappy tasks associated with shutting down a school.  This apostolate was growing with the intention of creating a compelling new venue for bringing the Catholic intellectual tradition into the public university environment.  This is an important enterprise which ought to be pursued at universities everywhere.

The thinking, or perhaps a not so close facsimile thereof, that goes on in a public university makes it very much a challenge to introduce Catholic thought.  However, that is in fact the reason for the need.  The challenges are manifold.

The first challenge is simply the name “Catholic.” The myth of a conflict between religion and science, fostered by John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White in the late 19^th century, still has plenty of traction among academics today.  While this reveals a tremendous ignorance of history, we still must contend with the perception that Catholic thought offers only obfuscation.

Many others believe there to be a more comprehensive contradiction between faith and authentic knowledge.  Many contemporary academics simply assume that anytime faith is asserted, reason necessarily has been excluded.  In fact, I have been told directly by one such academic that a person of faith (read Christian) teaching on his own faith tradition has no place in a “secular” university classroom.

Another challenge is what John Cardinal Henry Newman, in his The Idea of a University, referred to as an educational philosophy of utility. That is, little value is awarded to knowledge that does not appear, at least indirectly, to possess economic or technological utility. Given widespread biases against religion and modern philosophy’s supposed discrediting of speculative thought, contemporary academia presumes Catholic thought offers nothing of value. As a consequence wisdom has been traded for knowledge and today’s university concerns itself with only the latter.

Further difficulties arise from the manner in which the specialization has led to a fragmentation of knowledge and its evil twin, what I refer to as an “ontologizing of the method.”  The problem with this fragmentation of knowledge is that there is no longer recognition that all knowledge interrelates and so there is little appreciation for what Catholic thought might contribute to the way one thinks about his discipline.  What I mean by “ontologizing the method” is nothing more than the metaphysical and epistemological reductionism that arises when the scientific method becomes an idol.  Metaphysical reductionism results in materialism and for epistemology it is “scientism.”  Materialism, of course, further prejudices against any claims coming from one perceived as motivated by his religion.  Scientism is essentially positivism which cleaves knowledge into science and opinion; the latter is given little value.  Other challenges presenting include the assumption that education must be values neutral, a distorted view of academic freedom, and a revisionist understanding of the separation of church and state.  All of these hurdles must be taken into consideration if one is to develop an effective strategy for engaging contemporary academia.

These were hurdles that we were embarking upon clearing but the apostolate has now experienced a set back, possibly a lethal one.  Restoring the capacity to think to academics is critical because of the affect that they have on the students and so on the rest of society.  The US university has been a significant contributor to the secularization and the attending fall from virtue that we have seen in the US over the last 50 years or so. This in turn has been a large contributing factor to our nation’s current ills.

With all of the darkness coming out of anti-life federal legislation and policies, state attacks upon the Church, economic woes uncovering the vermin that have always lurked under the rocks, etc this is the worst time to be shuttering such a school.  This darkness points to a very serious spiritual crises that we have finally arrived at.  Such an enterprise as we are now shutting down is needed more than ever today.  The Institute itself will continue to exist but it will be a one man apostolate teaching two undergrad classes a semester.  Better than nothing but not what it was intended to be and certainly not what is needed.

I would very much appreciate prayers first for the students who are directly affected, for other students who will not now learn how to think clearly and be able to defend themselves against the secularizing horde which is academia, and for those of us who have been given the further challenge of finding work in these hard economic times.  Well, I suppose it is back to the unhappy chore of putting an end to a promising apostolate.

One of the most interesting research scholars in contemporary theology and philosophy is Wayne Hankey, a professor of classics at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. He has done some very illuminating studies on the twentieth century retrieval of Neoplatonism among French philosophers and theologians and the influence of these French thinkers on Radical Orthodoxy. We have referenced Hankey here before. Very graciously, Hankey posts his published articles on his webpage at the university. Hankey possesses a mastery of the Greek and Latin sources of contemporary theology, and he is also a competent Heidegger scholar. His work is very helpful for all theologians who wish to engage the postmodern problematic, and he has made some incisive criticisms of Radical Orthodoxy. If my information is correct, he is a recent convert to Catholicism from Anglicanism.

Recently, I had the pleasure of reading one of his articles, entitled “9/11 and the History of Philosophy.”  This article, published in the journal Animus in 2006, is a valuable reminder of just how narrow the scope of philosophy is in the Anglophone world. I would like to share here a brief summary of the article.

Hankey makes the argument that the English-speaking world has artificially confined philosophical inquiry by placing arbitrary limits on our notions of what constitutes rationality. Essentially, Anglophone philosophers have stripped philosophy entirely of its inherent religious dimension. This leads to a major gap in knowledge. On the one hand, it leads to an unforgivable lacuna in what university philosophy faculties present of the historical tradition of Western philosophy. Philosophy departments in England and America exclude Neoplatonism from serious consideration. Neoplatonism was, of course, the main source of philosophical wisdom in the West from the time of Aristotle to Descartes. It was religious and liturgical in its orientation, focusing on the need for Divine Revelation to illumine our minds and hearts if we are to have a true grasp of the Real. Because Neoplatonism did not fully separate philosophy from religion, or reason from revelation, it is not considered by Anglo-American philosophers to be a legitimate exercise of the philosophical enterprise. This attitude to Neoplatonism leads the formators of English-speaking philosophy departments to exclude two millennia of philosophical wisdom from their purview!

On the other hand, this lacuna in the presentation of or knowledge held by English-speaking philosophy departments of the history of philosophy leads to another major gap: it makes it impossible for the West to penetrate with any depth into the intellectual culture of Islam. Islam carried forward the tradition of Hellenic rationality, particularly that of Neoplatonism. Islamic philosophy was never prone to split apart faith and reason, and it developed a profound philosophical culture that survives to our day. The philosophy of Islam has been a continuous practice that has been carried on by Scholastic theologians, Sufis, and theoretical gnostics of various stripes.

For these bearers of the Hellenic tradition in Islam, reason and mystical experience of the Divine are closely intertwined. A full exercise of reason, in their view, requires Divine Illumination. It involves also a participation in a living tradition of philosophical inquiry. Reason, for the Neoplatonist-inspired philosophers of Islam, cannot simply comprise philosophical arguments oriented to logical questions detached from their historical/religious context.

Philosophy for Islam, then, as was the case in Christendom until the advent of Nominalism, and, later, the Reformation, is not adequately lived out if it is not connected to religious practice. Philosophy is, indeed, a way of life in this view. It is no mere abstract theoretical production bent on manipulating human concepts.

How foreign this way of thinking is to Anglo-American philosophers! They have such difficulty understanding it and therefore are lost in regard to our intellectual past and to the present situation of Islamic culture. Hankey quotes from a piece in the New York Times penned by David Brooks after 9/11 to demonstrate the point:

Do the extremists play by the normal rules of geostrategy, or are their minds off in some mystical sphere that is utterly alien to our categories? Do they respond to incentives and follow the dictates of what we call self-interest? Can they be deterred by normal threats to their security? Or, alternatively, are they playing an entirely different game? Are the men who occupy the black hole that is the Iranian power elite engaged in a religious enterprise based on an eschatological time frame and driven by supernatural longings that we cannot fathom?

This quotation from Brooks, Hankey implies, is exemplary of the failure of the West to provide its citizens with a real philosophical education. The West itself, after all, was formed by men and women whose minds were “off in some mystical sphere that is utterly alien to our [present-day] categories.” The men and women who gave the West universities, science, hospitals, law, art — all of them engaged “in religious enterprise based on an eschatological time frame and driven by supernatural longings.” In other words, Brooks embodies in this quotation the profound ignorance of the West to its own intellectual heritage!

For the cultures of Rome, Jerusalem, Byzantium and Persia were all formed by the meeting of Abrahamic religion with Hellenic, specifically Neoplatonic, rationality. The “categories of thought” that are present to Islamic philosophy are the very categories that were once taken up into the great Augustinian and Thomistic syntheses of theology and philosophy. These categories are at the very foundation of the modern universities. Not only the answers to questions that we routinely provide in philosophy, but our very philosophical questions themselves, come to us through this Neoplatonist-inspired tradition. Our lack of sensitivity to the two millennia of philosophy between Aristotle and Descartes — which leads us to deride or to ignore the profound tradition of Neoplatonism –condemns us to ignorance of our very selves.

How have we gotten to the point that we have so thoroughly excluded religion from the intellectual enterprise, and so greatly come to misunderstand or to disregard Neoplatonism? Hankey does not trace out the path, but there is an historical importance implicit in two monikers that he applies: a) he speaks of the “secularized Calvinist” Ivy League schools, and b) he speaks of the intellectual milieux of the “Anglo-Protestant world.”

Why might these monikers get at the roots of the modern West’s profound ignorance of itself? One might surmise that the radical separation of faith and reason that would mock Neoplatonism as unphilosophical stems from an approach to the defense of the faith that was common among Nominalists, Reformers, and ecclesial figures such as Bishop Tempier (who condemned Saint Thomas). These would all have it that we deny the validity of philosophical reason in order to assure the experiential certainty of the data of revelation. Reason is then necessarily pitted against revelation. Given that revelation, shorn of its contact with human wisdom, cannot withstand the assault of reason, reason, now entirely disconnected from religion, eventually emerges as a dictatorial sovereign. This is, in short, where the “secularized Calvinism” of Harvard and Yale comes from, or the Anglo-Protestantism of Cambridge.

Be that as it may, this article by Hankey is highly illuminating. It makes one shake one’s head in wonder at the ridiculous battle of religion and reason that continues to engulf our culture. How ignorant must Daniel Dennett, or Richard Dawkins, be of the history of the human intellectual adventure! This article puts the lie to the pieties of both classical liberals (such as David Brooks) and postcoloniel liberals (such as Noam Chomsky) in regard to the question of Islam. It reminds us that Christian, Jewish and Islamic thought share a common intellectual heritage, and that all of the carriers of the great strands of the Abrahamic tradition can engage one another in a respectful, if firm, dialogue at the level of their shared categories of thought.