Too catholic to be Catholic?

Peter Leithart has written an interesting post on a question that he is asked (with varying degrees of friendliness or hostility, depending on source): why not just swim the Tiber already?

Leithart talks of the pain which the church’s divisions cause him, which I think many of us can share:

The division of the church, especially since the Reformation, has largely been a story of horror and tragedy, with the occasional act of faithful separation thrown in.  I regard the division of the church as one of the great evils of the modern world, which has seen more than its share of evils (many of which are, I believe, quite closely related to the division of the church).  What more horrific sight can we imagine than to see Christ again crucified?  Christ is not divided.  I think our main response to this half-millennium of Western division, and millennium-plus of East-West division, should be deep mourning and repentance.

However, he continues, “it’s because I am so passionate to see the church reunited that I, not grudgingly but cheerfully, stay where I am”. He then presents two broad arguments as to why he considers himself to be “too catholic to become Catholic or Orthodox”.

The first is a fairly familiar list of objections to Catholic teachings (though I’ve been a Lutheran for long enough to do a double-take at his suggestion that iconoclasm is part of “true catholicism”):

Certain Catholic teachings and practices obscure the free grace of God in Jesus Christ; prayers through Mary and the saints are not encouraged or permitted by Scripture, and they distract from the one Mediator, Jesus; I do not accept the Papal claims of Vatican I; I believe iconodules violate the second commandment by engaging in liturgical idolatry; venerating the Host is also liturgical idolatry; in both Catholicism and Orthodoxy, tradition muzzles the word of God.

These are not, however, the “primary driving reasons” for Leithart to remain Protestant (probably just as well, I suspect a Catholic reader of that list would observe). Far more important to him is the question of what becoming a Catholic would say about his former Christian life, and the life and faith of those he left behind:

Here’s the question I would ask to any Protestant considering a move: What are you saying about your past Christian experience by moving to Rome or Constantinople? [...] Are you willing to say that every faithful saint you have known is living a sub-Christian existence because they are not in churches that claim apostolic succession, no matter how fruitful their lives have been in faith, hope, and love? For myself, I would have to agree that my ordination is invalid, and that I have never presided over an actual Eucharist.  To become Catholic, I would have to begin regarding my Protestant brothers as ambiguously situated “separated brothers,” rather than full brothers in the divine Brother, Jesus.  [...] Why should I distance myself from other Christians like that?  I’m too catholic to do that.

I do wonder how “catholic” Leithart really is here, though. After all, his list of objections to Catholic and Orthodox teachings imply that Catholics and Orthodox believers are obscuring the free grace of God, muzzling the word of God, and engaging in systematic idolatry in almost every element of their worship. It’s hard to see how that is any better than the Catholic Church calling Peter Leithart a “separated brother” or claiming that he is not validly ordained.

Setting that aside, it seems to me there are two slightly separate issues here: the question of whether one could be a Catholic, and the question of whether one could become a Catholic. What Leithart sees as the errors of Catholicism would prevent him from being a Catholic, and what he sees as the sectarianism of Catholicism would prevent him from becoming a Catholic. Or to put it another way: however truly “catholicity” might be found in the Roman Catholic Church (as it clearly is, for Leithart, even if in his view mixed with errors), the costs of becoming a Catholic would only be worth paying if to do so were absolutely necessary. And for Leithart, it is not necessary.

Marriage and procreation

“How can you say that marriage is about procreation, when plenty of married couples can’t, won’t or don’t have children (and plenty of unmarried couples or individuals do)?”

This is a point often made in the current debate about same sex marriage – generally with an air of aphoristic finality, as if declaiming a truism that only an utter fool (or bigot) could deny. The emphasis on marriage’s link with procreation, it is implied (or, often, stated explicitly), is thus a post hoc rationalisation cobbled together by those who wish to exclude same-sex couples arbitrarily from an institution that is really just about two people loving one another and seeking mutual happiness.

The first point I’d make in response to that argument is that you could easily rephrase it as:

How can you say that marriage is about two people loving one another and seeking mutual happiness, when plenty of married couples are miserably unhappy and unloving?

In other words, the outcome of particular marriages shouldn’t be confused with the purposes of marriage – and of the state’s recognition and regulation of marriage.

The second (and more substantial) point is well expressed by David Novak in an essay on the ABC Religion & Ethics site. Novak quotes Prof Martha Nussbaum, a supporter of same-sex marriage, who writes that:

marriage … supports several distinct aspects of human life: sexual relations, friendship and companionship, love, conversation, procreation and child rearing, and mutual responsibility.

Novak divides these purposes into two categories. The first is what Prof Nussbaum calls the “expressive”, and Novak calls the “private”, purposes of marriage: “sexual relations, friendship and companionship, love, conversation, … and mutual responsibility”. The second is “procreation and child rearing”, which Novak argues is the only aspect of marriage in which the state has any valid interest. After all (as supporters of cohabitation outside marriage have been telling us for decades), why should it be any concern of the state with whom, and how, I engage in “sexual relations, friendship and companionship, love, conversation, … and mutual responsibility”? However, the state, and society as a whole, does have more of an interest in the procreation and rearing of children.

Novak then goes on to address the objection quoted at the start of this post:

But, if marriage’s sole public reason is procreation, and coincidentally being responsible for those whom a couple has procreated, then why has marriage never been “limited … to the fertile, or even to those of an age to be fertile,” as Nussbaum puts it?

I would answer that objection by citing the old legal principle: de minimis non curat lex, which could be translated loosely as “the law is only made for what usually obtains.”

The fact is, the majority of people who marry are fertile and are of an age to be fertile. And how could we reasonably establish a criterion to determine who is fertile and who is not? Moreover, in an age when new reproductive technologies are enabling persons heretofore assumed to be sterile to become parents, almost no one can be presumed to be incurably infertile.

Even if a couple does decide between themselves from the outset not to have children, that is their private agreement which in no way impinges upon the public reason for marriage per se.

The question is whether the inherently non-procreative nature of same-sex relationships makes “marriage” an inappropriate word for them, given their capacity for “sexual relations, friendship and companionship, love, conversation, … mutual responsibility” and, yes, the raising of children. In other words, is “marriage” the word we use for “a loving relationship, recognised and endorsed by the state, between two consenting adults”, or is it the word we use specifically for “the union with procreative potential”, pre-dating both church and state, and the exclusive property of neither?

Now, that’s something that it’s possible to have a debate about. But what’s not possible (though some people are trying very hard to make it so) is to say that the existence of childless married couples makes the linking of marriage and procreation a self-evident absurdity.

Dying well

The archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, has written today on the need to talk about death more in our society, and to recover the concept of “a good death”. See also this news report on the archbishop’s comments, and here for more on the Dying Matters Awareness Week referred to by Dr Sentamu.

For many, “a good death” (or, as I’m inclined to prefer, “dying well”) can only mean a death whose timing and circumstances they choose for themselves. As I posted recently, Pope John Paul II offers a different perspective on what a “good death” means. See in particular his observation that:

Even pain and suffering have meaning and value when they are experienced in close connection with love received and given.

Also his call for a “contemplative outlook” in which we “do not take possession of reality but instead accept it as a gift”:

This outlook does not give in to discouragement when confronted by those who are sick, suffering, outcast or at death’s door. Instead, in all these situations it feels challenged to find meaning, and precisely in these circumstances it is open to perceiving in the face of every person a call to encounter, dialogue and solidarity.

The image at the top of this post may be helpful in establishing this contemplative outlook (at least, I hope it is, since I am a long way from possessing such an outlook for myself). It shows a statue at the Abbey of Our Lady of Fontgombault called Notre Dame du Bien Mourir: Our Lady of Dying Well.

This site tells the story of this statue:

Our Lady’s monastery goes back to a hermit by the name of Gombaud who lived in a cave on the site around the year 1000. This Black Madonna was originally known as Our Lady Mediatrix of All Graces. For centuries she watched over the Abbey from her vantage point, high above the northern portal of the abbatial church, overlooking a garden and the little cemetery of the monks.

Her name change goes back to an incident during the Revolution: A young man had climbed a latter with the intent of destroying this statue. He was swinging a hammer, but before he could hurt her he fell and was fatally wounded. He lived just long enough to realized the error of his ways, repent, and make his peace with God and his Mother.

In 1991, the statue was brought inside the abbey church and given the crown that can be seen in the photograph.

(Thanks to Revd Stephen Heard for informing me about Notre Dame de Bien Mourir.)

Offensive?

I’d heard that Archbishop Cranmer was the subject of a complaint from the Advertising Standards Authority concerning an “offensive and homophobic advertisement” he had supposedly carried on his blog, but hadn’t known what the advertisement in question was (I don’t follow His Grace’s blog or Twitter feed).

I was genuinely stunned to discover just now (via this post) that this is the advertisement in question:

Now, wherever you stand on the question of same-sex marriage, and whatever you think of the Coalition for Marriage, to describe that advertisement as “offensive and homophobic” seems, well, over-sensitive, to put it mildly. And for the ASA to attempt to suppress its publication seems more than a little sinister.

O mystic rose

This magnificent window is the thirteenth-century north rose window at Notre-Dame de Paris. St Thomas Aquinas would have seen this window when it was brand new – a pretty mind-boggling thought.

That observation is made by Fr Robert Barron in his book Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of Faith (see previous post). Fr Barron continues by describing the window as a demonstration of St Thomas’s description of beauty as “occurring at the intersection of three elements: wholeness, harmony and radiance”.

But as Fr Barron goes on to point out, this window’s beauty is more than skin-deep. It is rich in symbolism intended to give “a foretaste of the beauty of the beatific vision”.

First, there is its numerical symbolism:

Around the central figures of Christ and his mother are eight small circles. Then on the next major row we find sixteen circular images (medaillons in French), and on the next twice sixteen, or thirty-two, images, and then finally another row of thirty-two. If we add thirty-two, thirty-two, sixteen, and eight, we arrive at eighty-eight. In a word, the entire window is an artistic meditation on the number eight.

Eight is “a symbol of eternity, since it stands immediately outside of seven, which evokes the seven days of the week, or the completed cycle of time”.

A second important area of symbolism is the window’s complexity. When Fr Barron first visited Paris as a young man, he returned to Notre-Dame every day to look at this window, “partly because there was so much to take in”. He continues:

The vision of God is like that. Saint Bernard said that heaven will slake our thirst, but the very slaking will, paradoxically, make us thirsty for more. We will know all that we want to know, but that very satisfaction will convince us how much we don’t know. Thomas Aquinas said that what the saints in heaven grasp for the first time is just how incomprehensible God is and therefore just what an adventure the life of heaven will be.

The north rose window at Notre-Dame reflects only one tiny facet of the incomprehensible, inexhaustible God who has revealed himself to us in Christ and whom we encounter in his church. But what a facet!

The Beatitudes and true happiness

Fr Robert Barron has an interesting analysis of the Beatitudes in his book Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of Faith. Fr Barron begins by observing that “Blessed” is the first word uttered by Jesus in his role as “the new Moses” (as St Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount presents him):

The Greek term in Matthew’s Gospel is makarios, which is probably best rendered with the simple word “happy.” The law that the new Moses offers is a pattern of life that promises, quite simply, to make us happy.

To see how the beatitudes set out “a pattern of life to make us happy”, Fr Barron suggests an analysis which distinguishes between the “positive” and “negative” beatitudes. Working out from the centre, the four “positive” beatitudes are:

• Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
• Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
• Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
• Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

The four “negative” beatitudes (those which can strike us as “confounding and counterintuitive) are then:

• Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
• Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
• Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
• Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Fr Barron suggests that these four beatitudes address the ways in which “the mysterious curvature of the will that we call original sin” cause us to “deviate from the very actions and attitudes that will make us happy”: in particular, the way we try to satisfy our hunger for God with created things. Following Thomas Aquinas, Barron identifies these as wealth, pleasure, power, and honour, which he describes as four “addictions”.

So “blessed are the poor in spirit” is “neither a romanticizing of economic poverty nor a demonization of wealth”, but rather “a formula for detachment”: for freeing ourselves from our addiction to wealth and material things.

Similarly, “blessed are those who mourn” can be expressed, Fr Barron suggests, as “how blessed you are if you are not addicted to good feelings”. Pleasure is a good thing in itself – and Jesus is not calling us to a puritanical renunciation of all pleasant sensations – but when we treat pleasure as an absolute good, it becomes an addiction that can rule our lives.

“Blessed are the meek” is about breaking our addiction to worldly power. Again, Jesus is not saying that any exercise of political power is always wrong, but about being detached from the drive to power that can be “the strongest, most irresistible temptation of all”.

Finally, “blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake” addresses our addiction to personal honour, to being well thought-of. “Many people who are not terribly attracted to wealth, pleasure, or power are held captive by their desire for the approval of others,” Fr Barron observes. To be “persecuted for righteousness’ sake”, by contrast, is to face mockery and dishonour for the sake of the crucified Christ.

And it is this crucified Christ who best exemplifies what he teaches in the beatitudes:

Thomas Aquinas said that if you want to see the perfect exemplification of the beatitudes, you should look to Christ crucified. The saint specified this observation as follows: if you want beatitude (happiness), despise what Jesus despised on the cross and love what he loved on the cross.

On the cross, Jesus despised the four worldly addictions of wealth, pleasure, power and honour, as he was stripped naked; suffered physical, mental and spiritual agony; rendered helpless and powerless; and exposed to the ultimate of dishonour through suffering the death of a common criminal.

What did Jesus love on the cross? “The will of his Father.” And loving the will and mission of his Father to the end, he was able to live out the beatitudes to the full, with what he loved and what he despised on the cross being “in a strange balance”:

Poor in spirit, meek, mourning, and persecuted, he was able to be pure of heart, to seek righteousness utterly, to become the ultimate peacemaker, and to be the perfect conduit of the divine mercy to the world. Though it is supremely paradoxical to say so, the crucified Jesus is the man of beatitude, a truly happy man.

The four gospels: contradiction or mystery?

One of the criticisms often levelled at the four gospels in the New Testament is that they contradict one another: events are reported in a different order in one gospel than in another, Jesus’ (and others’) words are reported differently, and so on.

In his book, Prayer, Hans Urs von Balthasar puts forward an interesting explanation for this: namely, that it is part of how “I live my life by faith, i.e., my vision is veiled”:

In contemplating the gospel and the history of salvation in general, I am astonished, again and again, at the degree of this “veiling”. It is as if God is not particularly interested in our attaining any kind of systematic grasp of his revelation. How much there is that we do not know about Jesus! How dependent we are on a knowledge of the laws of literary composition when we wish to approach his word, his Person! We find the same or similar words put in different contexts by different evangelists, we find the same events recounted differently. It is as if the Holy Spirit, the author of scripture, has actually placed a veil in scripture itself over the mystery of the Lord’s earthly life, a veil we cannot lift. (p.175)

However, this veil is not impenetrable; we are not left without clear knowledge of the Lord’s life and ministry. On the contrary:

 He is there, attested beyond doubt in portrayals which no mere man could ever have invented. His image springs from the page, pulsating with life. But he himself escapes from all the conceptual snares we lay for him: “transiens per medium illorum ibat” (Luke 4:30).

This should be something we recognise in our own contemplation of Christ and his gospel: that we cannot attain a perfect knowledge; that much will remain a mystery to us:

The contemplative will come to love this mystery. It is part of Jesus’ secret, part of his will, that he is flesh and not a ghost; that he is neither sage, ascetic, mystic, nor theologian, but Son of Man; that he is content to be regarded as Joseph’s son. There is much in Christianity which can be subjected to exact analysis. But the ultimate things are shrouded in the silent mysteries of God. What is ultimate in Jesus is turned, not toward men, but toward the Father; it is itself contemplation, and action within contemplation.

A Choral Rosary

I’ve been having fun putting together a Spotify playlist of settings of the Ave Maria – bookended with the Lord’s Prayer and the Gloria Patri: A Choral Rosary.

Full track listing (since Spotify’s tagging is a little inconsistent):

1. Stavinsky: Pater Noster (Otche Nash)
2. Elgar: Ave Maria
3. Holst: Ave Maria
4. Mendelssohn: Ave Maria
5. Fauré: Ave Maria
6. Parsons: Ave Maria
7. Josquin Des Pres: Ave Maria
8. Cornysh: Ave Maria
9. Liszt: Ave Maria
10. Saint-Säens: Ave Maria
11. Stravinsky: Ave Maria
12. Vivaldi: Gloria Patri/Sicut Erat (from Laudate Pueri)

If you don’t have Spotify, then my apologies: you will just have to meditate on the Joyful, Luminous, Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries in silence.

George Grant: the “good” vs “values”

The First Principles website has a fascinating profile of George Grant, “incontestably the most important Canadian conservative thinker of the twentieth century”.

What I find most interesting about Grant is his clear-eyed rejection of both what we would now call neoliberalism and US imperialism. On the former, the writer of the profile, Neil G. Robertson, writes:

For Grant, it was a serious confusion to associate conservatism with the ideology of the free market. As he was fond of pointing out, the right to make as much money as you can is the apotheosis of liberalism, not a mark of conservatism. For Grant, conservatism was related not to one side of the modern debate between socialism and capitalism, but rather was rooted in a desire to conserve still abiding instances of an older, pre-modern relation of humanity to God and the world.

Grant contrasted “the older European culture of contemplation, reflection, and higher purpose united with social solidarity” with “the revolutionary individualism of the United States”. Grant’s lament for his own nation was that it was giving up the former for the latter; it seems equally the case that in Europe, and especially in Britain, “revolutionary individualism” has become dominant over any older culture of “contemplation, reflection, and higher purpose united with social solidarity”.

Influenced by Jacques Ellul, Grant argued in his later work that this triumph of individualist modernity was an unavoidable consequence of modern technological society, at the heart of which lies “a conception of the essence of humanity as freedom or as will”, with technology as an instrument “mastery of both human and non-human nature”. For Grant, while technology has undoubtedly “greatly liberated human beings from suffering and the slavery of work”, it has also turned the world “into potential raw material, at the disposal of our ‘creative’ wills.”

This then leads Grant to a fascinating insight into contemporary talk of “values” or “quality of life”, which has almost completely supplanted “the older language of the ‘good’”. For Grant, this is a consequence of our “technological fate”:

The older language implies a given order or set of purposes, and with this, a sense of “nature” as an ordered whole—ultimately, for Grant, a sense of God as the fundamental source and end of this order. But this older language has been replaced with a language that derives worth from a realm of “values” that are posited by human agency.

To Grant, the language of values is a confused language: “Everybody uses the word ‘values’ to describe our making of the world: capitalists and socialists, atheists and avowed believers, scientists and politicians. The word comes to us so platitudinously that we take it to belong to the way things are. It is forgotten that before Nietzsche and his immediate predecessors, men did not think about their actions in that language.”

In other words, “the good” implies a prior order to which we seek to conform, whereas “values” imply that we are ultimately free to choose our own notions of meaning and truth.

Grant’s vision of technological modernity’s destruction of all prior concepts of “Justice” and the “Good” led him a position that could appear (and in many ways was) “deeply pessimistic”. However, against this he insisted that “to be a Christian one cannot be a pessimist”. Even if all that can be achieved in some circumstances is “lamentation and waiting”, and utopian hopes are “folly”, Grant rejected “inaction or cynicism”. As he told student protestors in 1965:

Nothing I have said denies for one moment the nobility of protest. Nothing I have said denies that justice is good and that injustice is evil and that it is required of human beings to know the difference between the two. To live with courage in the world is always better than retreat or disillusion.

The politics we should adopt in the face of technological modernity was one of realism without despair, and of seeking opportunities to express our humanity through our love and intelligence. As Grant told his student audience:

We must face the laws of [technology’s] necessity—its potential to free men from natural necessity, its potential for inhumanity and tyranny. We must not delude ourselves and we must not throw up our hands. We must define possible areas of influence with the most careful clarity. When in this mammoth system can we use our intelligence and our love to open spaces in which human excellence can exist?

Redefining marriage

To return (with some reluctance) to the subject of same-sex marriage, one of the key areas of contention is whether same-sex marriage involves changing marriage for straight couples. Supporters of SSM generally insist that it doesn’t; opponents claim that SSM means “redefining marriage for everyone”.

What neither side generally addresses explicitly is what the current definition of marriage is under English law. I looked this up recently in Halsbury’s Laws of England – the most authoritative summary of English law – and was pretty startled by what I read.

Here is paragraph 1 of Halsbury’s Laws, Vol. 72: Matrimonial and Civil Partnership Law (full version here):

1. Marriage. Holy matrimony is the estate into which a man and a woman enter when they consent and contract to cohabit with each other and each other only. The solemnisation of matrimony in church is on their part the attestation in the presence of God and of the Church of their consent and contract so to do, and on the Church’s part its blessing on their union. According to the doctrine of the Church of England marriage is in its nature a union permanent and life-long, for better for worse, till death them do part, of one man and one woman, to the exclusion of all others on either side, for the procreation and nurture of children, for the hallowing and right direction of the natural instincts and affections, and for the mutual society, help and comfort which the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity.

The first observation to make on this definition is that it is completely incompatible with any supposed distinction between “civil” and “religious” marriage. Under English law as it stands now, marriage IS “holy matrimony” as understood by the Book of Common Prayer. Not that every wedding has to take place in the Church of England using the BCP, but that every wedding under English law, whether civil or religious, results in the same legal state: the single state of life which English law calls “marriage” and the Book of Common Prayer calls “holy matrimony”.

So to introduce “equal civil marriage” necessarily involves introducing a new definition of marriage which makes clear the distinction that must now exist between “marriage” and “holy matrimony”: in other words, redefining marriage.

Now, you may well consider that it is anachronistic for marriage to be defined in the way set out above, and high time that a modern, statutory definition were introduced to replace it. But that’s not what is being presented to us in the consultation on “equal civil marriage”, and it shows how superficial the thinking is behind the government’s proposal.

A second point we can make in passing is that the linking of marriage to sexual intercourse and the procreation of children – that is, to marriage as a conjugal state – is indeed fundamental to how marriage is understood under English law, and not something retrospectively invented by opponents of same-sex marriage in order to “exclude” same-sex couples (who are undoubtedly as capable as straight couples of “the mutual society, help and comfort” that forms part of the purpose of marriage, but not its entirety as implied by talk of “recognising love and commitment”).

Finally, though, one point that is easily overlooked about this “definition” of marriage: it isn’t really a definition at all. English law doesn’t define marriage: it merely recognises the existence of marriage as an institution which exists independently (and, indeed, prior to) the state, and then proceeds to regulate that institution as it deems necessary for the common good – in particular as regards the registration and dissolution of marriages.

To introduce “equal civil marriage” as the government proposes (as distinct from introducing a parallel, but legally distinct, institution of same-sex marriage) is thus to remove that independent existence from marriage and make it entirely a creature of statute: that is, of the state. Again, even if you consider this change of status for marriage to be right and necessary, it surely needs more careful thought and consideration – and more honesty as to intent – than is on offer from the government’s current proposals.

(Incidentally, the image illustrating this post, taken from Wikipedia, is a woodcut showing “How Reymont and Melusina were betrothed / And by the bishop were blessed in their bed on their wedlock” – a vivid illustration of both the conjugal nature of marriage, and its existence independent of state involvement…)