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a sleepy village in Anjou, dominated by the Jesuit College where Descartes studied a century earlier. Hume worked in the library, and completed A Treatise of Human Nature (1734–1737), his great book. The book attracted enough of a ‘murmour among the zealots’ to establish his reputation as a sceptic. Thus, when the Chair of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh fell vacant in 1745, his application was rejected. But Hume had a very adventurous career beyond Edinburgh. He took a position as tutor to the Marquess of Annandale, only to find the young man insane. Extricating himself from this situation, he then accepted the invitation of his cousin, Lieutenant-General James St. Clair, to be his Secretary on a military expedition against the French in Quebec. No doubt fortunately for philosophy, unfavourable weather delayed departure so long that the plan was aborted. Hume accompanied St. Clair on an extended diplomatic mission to the courts of Vienna and Turin in 1748, greatly enjoying being entitled to dress up. An invitation to serve as Librarian to the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh brought him home and gave him the opportunity to write his History of England (1754–1762), which became a best seller, guaranteeing him financial independence. In 1763, however, Hume accepted an invitation from Lord Hertford, the Ambassador to France, to serve as his Private Secretary. There he spent three very happy years, again in congenial company. After a year (1767–68) in London as an Under-Secretary of State, Hume returned to Edinburgh for good in 1769. He built a house in Edinburgh’s New Town. His remaining years were spent comfortably, dining and conversing with friends, not all of whom were ‘studious and literary’. His ‘company’, he tells us, ‘was not unacceptable to the young and careless’. One such young person, Nancy Ord, half his age and the daughter of the Lord Chief Baron of the Scottish Exchequer, he seems to have contemplated marrying. He asked her advice in choosing wallpaper. Finding that he had intestinal cancer, from which he seems not to have suffered unbearably, he added a codicil to his will, including a gift to her of ‘ten Guineas to buy a Ring, as a Memorial of my Friendship and Attachment to so amiable and accomplished a Person’. He died on 25 August 1776. Perhaps his stoicism at the end justifies the huge greenish bronze statue unveiled in Edinburgh in 1995, outside the Sheriff Courthouse, of the seated Hume, obese and half naked, draped in a toga, and holding a book — though actually he loved dressing up, as the wonderful portrait by Allan Ramsay shows, done in 1766, ten years before he died. Fergus Kerr OP C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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Hegel places absolute knowledge at the summit of the dialectic. McTaggart demurs, pointing to the imperfect reciprocity of “cognition”, whether as knowledge or as will. He argues for a further category, one might call it love, perfecting or harmonising knowledge and will. The Biblical “knowing as I am known” is assimilable to this. The phrase crowns a passage praising love as alone abiding when knowledge, like “faith”, shall have vanished away. McTaggart concedes that Hegel might or might not be in agreement with him. He is sure, he says, that Hegel believed in personal immortality1 since this, McTaggart thinks, is manifestly needed for happiness. I would agree, while leaving open the degree of identity between the personal and the individual, a possibility of all being “members one of another”, in one another, as the figurative religious expressions have it. We should not see McTaggart’s use of the name “love”2 as signalling an especially “ethical” happiness. Even in religion charity modulates into delight (delectatio). He insists on the significance of the emotions, repressed under dualism as explained by the weaknesses of a fleshly constitution not yet glorified. Mystics such as John of the Cross wrote and thought with the aid of the dualist paradigm. We should admit that a felt or longed for happiness is a main motor of any genuine philosophising. The face or person, the piece of music, the water lapping at the boat gives joy, which one seeks not just to have again as it was. One seeks to wrest from it its secret. The emotions, then, are important. Hegel too, it can be shown, preserved a lasting respect, despite criticism, for the “emotional” school of Jacobi. Finally, for these reasons, “music is a greater revelation than the whole of religion and philosophy” (Beethoven), as giving rise to them. This judgement, furthermore, anticipates the thematisation of the category of revelation in The Phenomenology of Mind as belonging within the philosophy of religion and not as dualistically robbing philosophy of its natural absoluteness, this being that very connaturality of reason with immortality to which we adverted above. It elicits further interpretation of the potentia obedientialis invented by the “supernaturalists”. Nothing is above rational nature. Not only so but it is the same content, Hegel ever repeats, which art, religion and philosophy equally embody, though the form of philosophy, of knowledge, be, as perfect, the abiding form for this content. It has, therefore, the other two within itself. It contains them. Only so could a Boethius, who there is reason to think was identical with the saint and martyr Severino, have found supreme consolation therein. Aesthetic delight, adoration, these emotions belong with 1 2
J.M.E. McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, CUP 1903, ch.2. E.g. at the end of his Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic, CUP 1896.
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perfect knowledge. Therefore the “sons of God shouted for joy” at the creation, beings far removed from those “pure” spirits a dualist philosophy conceives. As for immortality and infinity, for Hegel the other, constituted as I am, only at first limits me. The other is a self , like myself, to whom I indeed am the other. Both are self and other, so there is no limit. We pass over into one another. So I am infinite, in and through the others. The reconciling Yes, in which the two I’s let go their opposed existence, is the existence of the I expanded into a duality, and in it remaining identical with itself . . . : it is God.3
∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗ The promise that He, the Spirit, Holy or holy, “will lead you into all truth”, is precisely a promise that our wisdom will “accomplish” religion, that “revelation” will cease to be seen as coming from “an alien dark power”, that divine knowledge is “closer to ourselves than ourselves”. This was recognised by many Church Fathers, a progress from blind faith to enlightened understanding. This is and was the true Enlightenment, Aufkl¨arung, Illumination. Again, and in illustration, the truth of an absolute predestination is a figurative presentation of our eternal reality. We are not contingent, since the free will we depend upon is absolute and necessary, this being the final and dialectical perfection of freedom. The whole posits itself in what, therefore, is more than “part” and, contrariwise, the part posits itself in what transcends any notion of a composite whole. The contradictions, the mutual repulsions, are relative, the final truth is an identity, of “all in all”, i.e. all in each (as each is in all). Sumit unus sumunt mille, writes Aquinas, in a poem, of the communicant at Mass and this is just what the professedly atheist McTaggart describes in that second chapter referred to in our Note 1. “The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God see me,” wrote Eckhart, drawing the thread at least equally tight. The All, that is, is in each “part”. This being taken up into absolute freedom, in self-transcendence, is our true and supra-temporal state, represented in religion by a necessary bestowal of the lumen gloriae. In arriving at the end, the “promised land”, we come home to ourselves. Philosophy, and the love it embodies (incarnates), accomplishes this. It was always impossible that we, that I, should be contingent. Every and any I can only be absolute. Can we show this? 3
G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, Haper Torchbook, New York 1966,
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One, any “one”, can ask him or herself, “Why should I be one of those who exist?” Why should I form part of a world? A question admitting of no answer is an invalid question. Therefore there is no world apart from my, your or his or her consciousness, taking each and any such consciousness individually and absolutely. So, again, we beget one another and from all eternity, neither born nor dying. This again entails the dialectical destruction of life. Life neither is, was nor can be. Viventibus esse est vivere is a simple refusal of philosophical truth. Esse is esse or it is nothing, and we have still to ask if existence is itself worthily predicated of God, of the Absolute Idea which thinks itself. What has been called necessary being could be superseded insofar as an egoless consciousness, as infinite, is rather the norm, each in all and all in each, “members one of another”. Here “though he be dead yet shall he live” takes on a deeper sense than promised resuscitation, as of one who “sits in the heavenly places”, predestined, unshakeable, necessary. “By faith!” This remains the condition and philosophy asserts, from Socrates to McTaggart, that this a holding to the truth that “The world is rational”, since reason cannot rationally deny itself and outside reason, the known and knowable, there can, necessarily, be nothing. The content appears in religion as one in whom we should believe. This is one presented as “the man”, identified with any other, “I in you and you in me”, “members one of another”. What you do to any other you do to me. This truth is presented in terms of consideration for the poorest or “least”. There is no special viewpoint here, however, since it has to be so if each has all within him, the unity, and this unity includes all without difference. This is the truth which stress upon “the least” would preserve, and not some sickly preference or election of the weak and damaged, such as revolted Nietzsche. Again, though, there is no one who is not the poorest and least, since he is nothing without the whole, the “system”. Yet the converse, again, is equally true. So the simile of vine and branches has universal application, whether or not this would exhaust its meaning. Each is vine to all the branches, making each branch vine in turn and not a vine, which is mere collectivism or “communism”, but the vine. “He that has seen me has seen the Father.” This enunciates a principle of universal application. Ecce homo. This again is not betrayal of religion but its accomplishment, by thought itself, not by this or that thinker in his putative finitude. It comes in the fullness of time, as prepared by religion’s development and with no denial of its role. In eternity, called the heavenly Jerusalem, the seer saw no temple, just as he saw no sun. There was no question, then, of a material world purified in its materiality by being shorn of religion. Idealism, identified by Hegel as the C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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philosophic consciousness, is the converse of this, achieving unity not by negation, but by negating negation. Where one receives then a thousand, indeed all, receive. Sumit unus sumunt mille. This is our liturgical crisis, its real ground, that living now in this intuition we can no longer say why we meet, those who do, to celebrate sacramentally. The veil of sacramentality, of ritual symbolism, is ever being more fundamentally torn apart. Devices such as house masses, liturgical “reform” itself, are all attempts to accommodate a system itself superseded in the widening of philosophical consciousness. This lay behind the Reformation, as subsequent history showed, itself prefigured in Eckhart and others called mystics, in an Augustine, convert philosopher conscious of duties to “the people” (populus christianus). The principle of democracy, however, while protecting religious conscience everywhere, exponentially requires that the right to a reasoning consciousness be developed by all, that there be no “people” or “masses” (no pun intended) but community, and this is the salvation of Christianity itself. The people who should be taught only in parables were a passing phenomenon merely. No one, be they good Samaritan or mother or grandmother, wants or ought to want to remain such simpletons. Thus the absolute religion does not refuse transcendence of its inherently imperfect form (as religion) towards philosophic wisdom, the being led into all truth. ∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗ Regarding liturgy Thomas Aquinas admits as much, conceding that the theory of sacramental signs applies to any and every finite appearance, which is therefore dialectically transubstantiated, as we might for a moment put it. On this see the main Summa, IIIa 60, 5, i.e. the whole article with objections and replies, especially the third reply, where a positivist or fideist stance has to counter the whole weight of what we are developing here. Man has after all, it is there implied, to be restricted (arctari) by divine law (legem divinam). This is Aquinas’s fourth type of law4 . It corresponds to a positive and hence miraculous divine intervention in history distinct from the normal providence (Hegel’s “cunning of reason”) and decreeing through the mouths of chosen human representatives, in the first instance one personally (hypostatically) identified with the intervening divinity as no one else is. If any other representative were thus identified, a possibility that Aquinas admits, he or she would
4
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theol., Ia-IIae 90.
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then after all be the same divine person as the one first revealed or manifested. Such an approach, however, illustrates the imperfection of religion, even the “absolute” religion, qua religion. It obscures the “content” which philosophy must bring to light and “accomplish”. Revelation is thus the very movement of thought effecting this, the highest motion of Spirit and not some extrinsic constriction of it. The appearance of constriction is due to the magical or exclusively religious mentality of those first receiving the more enlightened teaching, which by its own power and beauty is destined to sweep the world. In itself it is sovereignly free as coming from within, as having the very form of spirit, of love. The outside, or how it appears, is so very much transcendent just inasmuch as it is innermost and most intimate, recalling us to a half-remembered joy or hope. It is in no respect alien. It thus corresponds to the (Platonic) account of knowledge as being a remembrance, anamnesis. Thus the revelation presented itself as knowledge and knowledge of knowledge, knowing as one is known, knowing God, the Absolute, and, just therein, “the one he has sent”. This phrase, again, concludes a whole tradition of a mission or sending of prophets in a pre-philosophical culture. Everyone, however, is equally necessary to the totality in unity and so must say, or aspire to say, “The words I speak . . . are spirit and life.” This after all is the only reason for speaking as such, communication with one another. Intercommunion is itself spirit’s essence and ingestion. Sumit unus sumunt mille. This inspired line bears much repeating. That which was true, known from the beginning, this we are declaring. We are ever at the beginning or born anew and there is no world grown old. Alpha is omega. The snake swallowing his tail turns himself inside out in contradiction of all forms but the forma formarum, absolute identity of all with all. This joy, then, is not ultimately something we have never had. It is our own ultimate ground and positing, with which philosophy, our constitutive love of wisdom, is ever and anew making contact, our window upon the timeless and heavenly where ideally and thus indeed really we sit. In that sense we would not seek if we did not possess. In a curved space the rectilinear is impossible, a “fragmentary” perception merely. Questions of revelation and transcendence, and even those of beauty and glory as their own arguments for realities grasped with both intellect and will in one cognitive faculty, are posterior to consideration of the “I” and the “we”. I and we: the “we” is the attempt to merge subject and a world. We do have a world, have the other as other, that is, but we have all of it within self, necessarily. Such absoluteness is the very meaning of consciousness, though there is here a deeper question, regarding not merely what is necessary to C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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consciousness but the absolute necessity of consciousness itself, that there cannot be a contingent consciousness. We speak here of thinking, of spirit. As for animal consciousness, we know nothing of it from the inside, which alone is how consciousness is known. We may venture to say, however, that if there were an inside animal consciousness, an animal subjectivity, then it too would be absolutely necessary. That would be “what it is like to be a bat”. “I” names the unity which we make up. It is not “the ego”, which is third person, but I. It is not even I who write, veering again to third person, nor I who am conscious, necessarily “personal”, as we say, subject. Now how can this be, how can I be, unless as necessary, hence timeless, not here or there in a space, unconditioned? The gap between me, subject, and any phenomenal description of my particular nature, history, parentage or genetic make-up is infinitely unbridgeable. I, subject, ask myself how or why I might be one of this number of others, other subjects even (though I make no commitment here) and there is no possible answer, i.e. the question is impossible. I am indeed “absolute source”, this being the sense or definition of “I”. There is and can be only one I. I am absolute. But this is not a question of language merely. “The community” is a construction. I was never a baby waking to consciousness. Time itself, after all, is phenomenal, how things appear to our “fragmentary” perception. This baby could be described in infinitesimal detail and still nothing would be shown and not a step taken in the direction of showing how I come to be (and not, say, someone else), how I can possibly have become concerned in this. If I could not, then it is all my construction, as I myself am reciprocally constructed by others or even by the others that I myself construct. But then all are one, in absolute need of one another to be at all. The self, that is to say, is an ambiguous and paradoxical construction. In proportion therefore as I am discovered to myself the world, where each thing is itself and not another thing, is negated simply.5 All is I, who am, in identity. If I were produced by something outside myself I would not be myself. Putting it differently, if I were not a baby then I am not now a man or a woman. We are, rather, the angels of tradition, of whom Aquinas felt forced to conclude that they were created with the cognitional species of all things within them, proto-version of the Cartesian innate ideas. This was because 5 Cf, Hegel, Encyclopaedia 70: “But it is stupid not to see that the unity of distinct terms or modes is not merely a purely immediate unity, i.e. unity empty and indeterminate, but that - with equal emphasis - the one term is shown to have truth only as mediated through the other; - or, if the phrase be preferred, that either term is only mediated with truth through the other.”
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he could not in any other way preserve difference between them and an infinite and hence omniscient creator. The plain inference, all the same, is that they are uncreated, are necessary in the Leibnizian sense (Aquinas countenances created necessary beings, e.g. angels, souls, prime matter). Otherwise they are below the human, their knowledge not being got by their own powers. The salient point is that there is no reason to struggle with this obscure matter, these hypothetical big brothers and guardians in an alien but ever so real world, except on a particular deficient interpretation of monotheism. In a philosophy of identity there is no hierarchy of beings. Insight into the humanity of Spirit evokes the spirituality of any and every consciousness, the taking (assumption) of it into the absolute and infinite, “thought thinking itself”. Life “runs away” as having “the germ of death” within it but, and therefore, we, as subject, are not alive, absolutely speaking, but more than that. We are not indeed we as we spontaneously think it, but “members one of another”, each possessing the unity of all. This entails, further, that all such thinking, propositions or making judgements, is itself as illusory as our babyhood or our being found under a cabbage leaf (though this image all the same would confirm at least our backward immortality). It all belongs to that fragmentary skein we call consciousness, overcome partially sometimes in music or dreams, their content at one with that of art, religion and philosophy. There is an Australian tribe who believe firmly and soberly that their ancestors created the world. Here we say we are our own ancestors. If the content should transcend consciousness we can only represent this as a fulfilment and overcoming of fragmentation, as every judgement strives to identify or de-fragment, in copulation, subject and predicate. Here we evoke sexuality and its own brand of striving, at once desperate and joyful. So we might note the claim often surfacing in the homosexual sub-culture that the indiscriminate loving or coupling there encouraged, not so much bi- only as pansexuality, is a release into spirituality taken as identity, as with our sumit unus sumunt mille.6 The wind blows where it will and it is a constant of research that beneath what we may find repellent and unnatural constants of value may yet be found, as promiscuity recalls, mutatis mutandis, love of enemies. 6 Cf. Daniel Gaborr´o, “Nuestros besos salvan al mundo”, Zero, Madrid, No. 102, pp. 118–120. The “gay” community appears here to want to take over the Messianic role of, say, the proletariat in Marxism. Absurdity or development? Both groups, anyhow, were “despised and rejected of men”, a constant for saviours in our culture, from Jesus to the mythical Frodo. But that things are the opposite of what they at first seem, like dialectic itself, lies at the origin of philosophy as well as of all prophecy.
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A realist philosopher such as Maritain might here object to a “confusion of the orders” but it is just this principle, of not confusing them, that is in question all along the line. We can deal similarly with the objection against judging that we make no judgements, this step which, like the ontological argument, takes us out of and away from “the world” in “sovereign ingratitude”. The absolute primacy of self, for whom and in whom are all things, conditions without removing realities of religion such as revelation and prayer, though we may also say it sublates them in the Hegelian sense. God and I are one, and the latter, when understood, is prior, without taint of alien hostility or a finite patriarchalism. In religious history God, the concept, is refined towards identity of self. This is revelation or, as it is called in theology, the history of salvation. Yet it is this unveiling of God, the Absolute Idea, which unveils self to self as absolute universal, first and total. It is this self, the true but trans-empirical, closer than close in identity, which is approached in prayer, spontaneous or more deliberate. Prayer is confession of these truths, in praise or petition, authentic talking to self or, finally, silent meditation or contemplation. All that is written down proceeds from this, in proof of the unity there of all with all. Hence it was taught, again, that the soul is only known in the knowing of others (Aquinas), never self-perceived as isolated particular. It is rather identified with the concrete universal in Hegel’s logic. Bare particulars, it is easily shown, are in the end abstractions, lacking all quality. For in the end everything is left as it is and we but “work upon the trunk”, as Confucius puts it. The timeless eternity of the self is represented in the Augustinian-Platonic divine ideas, such that any act of creation of temporal or finite entities is itself necessarily atemporal and atemporally necessary. Such necessary or irrevocable emanation is itself the perfect freedom, without shadow of doubt or turning. The Word, indeed, is one with its utterer in an interchangeability of concept. Hence there is but one Word, one going forth and returning in recapitulated Spirit, holding all things in one, the Concept. Non moriar sed vivam. “But you are dead and your life is hid with Christ in God.” As immortal, then, we have passed beyond both life and death, music ever returning. ∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗ Election or necessity consists in being or having been or being about to be one of the actual number of beings (or number of actual beings). All such beings are, qua beings, rational, which is to say conscious. This position therefore either excludes the rationality of computers or affirms their subjectivity, their subjectivity, whether individually C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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or generically. Such a computer would be a spirit. “I will put my spirit into them.” One says one of a number, yet one has to transcend number here, as infinity has to be infinitely differentiated. One transcends existence as well. The mystical body, even if proportioned, cannot have limits. How else explain that I, just I, sit here and think and breathe? Outside of me all is nothing, since all that is within me is outside of me, in apprehension. I am that relation, that identity of outside and inside, in which alone the whole unity is realised, is actual, is thought (as thinking itself). “The eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see him” and Eckhart prays to God to deliver him from talking about God. It is in thinking, the activity, that the Trinity, the Absolute, is manifested and it is in the Absolute, therefore, that thinking has its seat. It does not then arise within nature, since this is phenomenal, where we might seem to encounter it as an evolutionary development. Thinking itself situates evolution, rather. Thinking is I; I am thinking, consciousness. So all thinking is within me and I in all thinking. This thinking, moreover, finds its unity in just one thought of itself, one Word, which is thus silence. I am myself, absolute universal. Such a universal can only be found, realised concretely, as individual, “personal”. “Whom he foreknew . . .” The Absolute is the choice of just those persons who are, who choose one another. Yet there is no choice or decision as to who is a person, who, on our part, shall be accorded this right. Any “who” has it as such. Conversely, one cannot imagine a person. The personal just is the actual. If one would succeed in imagining a person then that person would be.7 Personality, rationality, is prior to being, more formal, as all that is (or is not) is relational, having the other, all others or all that is other even back to the otherness of self, as other. It has no parts, all in each and each in all. Thinking does not exist, thinking thinks. One of the things that thinking thinks is existence. Act, not being, is paramount and so being, our notion of it, is resolved into act, not actus essendi over again but actus purus. The mystery we call God is found to be one with self. This is not self-evidently atheism so much as it is, rather, the denial of self as finitude. This was and is the basic truth of absolute religion, as its main symbol, the Cross, makes plain. “In order to come to that which you are not you must go through that which you are not” (John of the Cross). There are many ways of doing that, self-denial, “as having nothing yet possessing all things.” This symbol, this Golgotha, is 7
Cf. the story “The Circular Ruins”, Labyrinths, by J.-L. Borges.
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fearsome to nature and yet, in its presentation as “grace”, perfective of it in the sense of a total transcendence. For nature itself as a whole, along with death, is mere phenomenon. Regarding grace, the prayer of St. Francis is explicit: “it is in loving that we are loved.” This again illuminates those other sayings, “When I am weak then I am strong”, “Dying we live”. In its denial the self is affirmed as universal and divine. “It is in giving that we receive.” If this is definition, then we do not initially receive a power to give. Yet “we love because God loved us.” This is that primary election in which we mutually participate. This identity of elicitation and reception destroys both together as anything other than interim concepts. In this sense the self derives from all history and “a person is a person through persons” (Bantu proverb). History then is entirely dependent upon the self in equal measure and the self can read off its necessity there. So God, it is confirmed, is essential to the world, which is none other than his Word incarnate. That is, there is no world, no nature, only the unities of Spirit “thinking itself”. Such “acosmism” would be wrongly identified with pantheism, Hegel points out. Isaiah’s drop of water on the rim of the bucket intends the same truth. The American presidential candidate, when asked challengingly if he believes in God, should reply that he believes in no God fashioned or conceived by the thought of man and that that is belief in God as the Bible understands it. If there is question as to why or how we, just I, any I, can exist, then here that question finds its ground and possibility as question. There is no proportion or possible link between the self-consciousness through which all is mediated and the objectivities or objectivisations called nature. The same though applies to positive or, rather, positivist theology. Only philosophy can give the key to, as it has learned from, the vital practices of religion. It is in this sense alone that it can be called the handmaid (ancilla) of faith, being in fact its living and selfperfecting substance, not separable from “mysticism”. Experience of God means just this thinking become knowing and not anything else. In this sense no one who thinks errs as and when he or she thinks, however stationed in history or in the development of his or her life. Thus to read, to study, think, is to remember, to see one’s own knowledge unfold in rational understanding. As Platonism must pass over into sceptism and the Sophists into the medieval transcendence, so must every thesis contain the germ of its contradiction, until thinking passes from judgement to perception, perceiving itself as perceiving. There indeed it may “keep silence”. The esoteric is the exoteric, as the transcendent is the most immanent. These are not clever paradoxes but sober truth, were not truth itself inebriate, like the fat man on a donkey, drinking wine, entering Jerusalem, head and tree colliding. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗ The theory of the “multiverse” in physics implicitly identifies possibility and necessity, as in idealism. Expounding the via tertia Aquinas remarks that in endless time “what can happen at some time does happen”. Similarly though, what does not happen could not happen. The superseding of life by ideal rationality, which is final subjectivity, finds illustration in the late Luciano Berio’s “Rendering” of the unfinished piano sketches left by Franz Schubert for a further or tenth symphony. Berio’s orchestration of these sketches alternates with composition in his normal trans-narrational style. Yet the work forms a unity such that with repeated hearings the orchestrations, so close to Schubert’s own when in life, are more and more heard in clear awareness of Berio’s calm and passionless interpolations. We thus have life at its loveliest itself opening on to the Idea transcending it. Here we might recall Findlay’s suggestion8 that Hegel’s philosophy is finally an aesthetic. It renders a vision of reality taken as a whole, as we find in Poe, Goethe, Blake or Joyce, while clearly conscious, again, that thus, thinking the whole or thinking “with the Concept”, we arrive at and have arrived at the inebriate truth. ∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗ So in philosophy one grasps the unity of all things, as is prefigured within the frame of art, the picture, building or circumscribed piece of music. The identity can be called egoless, which means the same as that all is ego, I, myself. I am that; this is I. Or we might say, as well, this is thou. “This also is thou; neither is this thou.” The other I apprehend is within. Without is within, “closer than self”. Can one then say one is necessary, that subjectivity has infinite value? Hegel derives this from the saying that “God wills that all men be saved”, a saying from the “pastoral” epistles variously explained away in much pastoral and religious writing.9 What, one might rather ask, are men? What bounds them, or any one of them, or me? The intuition, issuing in the question of how I, just I, can be one of the finite number of selves one sees walking about, gets explained by a gratuitous creation. A seemingly impossible gift of self to self is postulated, demanding I be there beforehand. Or we must say that creation, as we would expect after all, transcends gift. Gifts are a part of our language within creation. Again, an “external” power 8 J.N. Findlay, Hegel: a Reexamination, Collier Books, New Yory 1966 (Macmillan 1958). 9 Hegel, Ibid. 147, subtext.
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could not give inwardness, consciousness. There is then no external. Rather, “I and the Father are one.” We should not exclude previous meditation from the speaker, whoever he may be. So it has to have wider, universal application. “Before Abraham was, I am.” Yet we hear of the God of Abraham as a God of the living, the ever-living. Yet we can as well say that Abraham never lived, that life itself “runs away” in our attempt to conceive of it. I, my idea, which is not simply another’s idea of me, cannot have begun. My idea is I in self-consciousness. The other is the same, self, beloved. We beget one another as it is “in loving that we are loved”. The saint here enunciates the plain and dialectical truth, as the cause is the effect. If I cannot not be I am thus in my vanishing, into other, as being is non-being. Here is the background to thinking God as love. ∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗ Idealist accounts of reality are often rejected as improbable. Here we forget that the immediate sense-object is internal and that the act of sensing is cognitional, “mediate” in Hegel’s language. This does not contradict Aquinas’s thesis10 that this immediate sense-object or species (appearance, one might translate) is (not id quod but) id quo, that by which the res (sc. “common-sense” reality) is cognised or perceived. For it is part, indeed the whole point almost, of idealist philosophy too that what is immediate is not itself perceived, does not form part of even the common-sense or unreflected world. It is, as species intentionalis, argued for from common experience, as signum formale on the retina or elsewhere on “the body”. Body itself though, in all consistency, must then equally be a construct. Theologically we say that God, nous, reason, created “the world”. If we do not make this improbable move which, claim Hegel or Parmenides, is the philosophical move, then we have the unexplained common-sense world, the latest attempt to explain which on its own terms, or leaving the first mediated data in place, is evolution. This hypothesis is not merely improbable, statistically and in other ways, such as how it stands to the general reciprocity observed in nature, but self-contradictory. The brain, say, has evolved so as to “explain” its own evolution. A loss of philosophical nerve, I mean a desertion of (or by) reason, easily occurs. Thus Peter Geach, after well explaining McTaggart’s Hegelian account of reality, says that we “had better” go on believing in the common-sense world of space and time, though here he equally 10
Summa theol. Ia 85 2.
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deserts contemporary natural science.11 This seems to be because he thinks that the theological doctrine of creation demands, as part of it, a “realist” view of common experience. But there is no reason to think this. It is like thinking that Hebrew or Latin are “absolute” languages or the speech of heaven. Geach merely see-saws here. Such see-sawing is disservice to religion, which requires internally that philosophy “accomplish” it, as the existence of theology developed from initial commentary and interpretation or “prophecy” itself shows. What philosophy adds is a reflexive situating of this “sacred” practice itself. Involved here is a deconstructive interpretation of the paradigm or category of revelation, similar to that made by K. Rahner upon the basic notion, but not the thesis itself, of “inspiration” (of, say, Scripture). Trinitarian theology is another example. Yet this theologian complains, in Sacramentum Mundi (1968), that there has been no Trinitarian theology since the fourteenth century, not seeing that in Hegel’s work it has returned with all the vigour it had in the mind of St. Augustine, who had single-handedly explained or “accomplished” the mystery previously. The theologian, that is, does not explain or accomplish the groundcategory of revelation, upon which he makes his or her “science” parasitic, though it thus remains only halfway between fundamentalism and rational explanation, equivocally see-sawing in fact. Similarly Newman had proposed a doctrine of development without noting that this must in logic require development too of the doctrine of development he thus initiated. Nor can bounds be set to ecumenism, once admitted as method or modus operandi. In fact it is simply dialectic, in which everything finite is consumed as if, or rather because, it never was or is not. Rahner speaks of believing the Apostles. This is his account of “the faith of the Church”. It includes an unexamined or unthematised notion of such faith as might apply if the Apostles stood here in front of us, though even here epistemological queries abound. Belief is not knowledge, for example. Volition is at work in it, even choice. He “saw and believed”. A compelling illumination is implied, which is yet a personal interpretation, called “grace”, a revelation from the “heavenly father” or Absolute. But if the Absolute is itself Reason (Vernunft), is Reason itself, then the distinction that “grace” would make seems merely fancied. Hence Rahner went on to say that everything is grace. Similarly, for Hegel absolute necessity is freedom. The mysterious, here, is not the irrational but, rather, the mystical, knowable to Spirit that “judges all things”. This though is no longer mediation, since Spirit 11
Cf. P.T. Geach, Truth, Love and Immortality, Hutchinson, London 1976.
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effects all that it beholds and, hence, is. Knowledge is dialectic process, not a transition from one real state to another. It is attainment of the singular or infinite reality which “ungratefully” negates the way thither since it is knowable not merely to us but alone absolutely knowable in itself. This is the same as to say that it alone knows itself. There is no subject which is not subjectivity or absolute. ∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗ “Whoever listens to you listens to me,” since all utterance is verbal or of the “Word”. All done to another is done to all, as each is “all things to all men”, as subjectivity is necessarily form of forms, as love is the “bond of being” in universal sympathy. To take any one of these texts in restrictive literalness while leaving the others from this source in their infinitude is but to repeat the incomprehension of “Lord here are two swords”, eliciting the weary reply, “It is enough”. Yet a choice is indeed at work, a refusal to be taken up or transcended, the error of Simon Magus, seeking to reduce understanding to power relations. We receive everything, the All, the whole, from one another, in reciprocated Gift, donum, a name for Spirit. One should overcome “the letter” everywhere, quite apart from questions of interpolation, discrepant versions, textual corruptions. All these phenomena, after all, may well be instances of that “cunning of reason” of which Hegel speaks. This simply means that reason is reality, as death is life’s only possible outcome. Time itself is a figure of dialectic as a whole, though but one category (of Nature) within it. The present, the Now, is the result, negating all that has gone before and “produced” it, to the point where it “no longer” is and hence never “was”. Thus the tu es Petrus, though referred to time and space, belongs in Scripture to a contemplative pattern within which talk of a rock, petrus, ends and climaxes the deeply mystical “Sermon on the Mount”, the latest three-chaptered summary of Judaic wisdom and an extended manifestation of Spirit. One is well-founded, built on a rock, if one “hears” this teaching, as having nothing yet possessing all things, no longer making judgements. One has passed from death to life in love, self in all. This is at once revelation and true philosophy, overcoming “the world” of common-sense and practical prudence. ∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗ In the film Reunion (2002) a mother cannot accept the death of her child. She believes she sees him bodily, embraces him and believes that at least one other, his sister, sees him. He says that he has to go away and asks her to go with him. As she prepares to do this, C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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by suicide, the sister tells her that she, for her part, only pretended to see him. This restores the mother to continued life enriched with positive memory of the departed one whom she believes will “see her again”. “If I go not away the Comforter will not come unto you.” He will teach you all I have said unto you. Similarly with the lingering around the grave. “He is not here, he is risen,” as Hegel loved to quote, and indeed the Resurrection is extended theologically into eternal glorification beyond Ascension in the “heavenly places” where we “sit with Christ”, we who “are dead”. The Marcan climax, “Why seek you the living among the dead?”, seems to know nothing of a tomb emptied of its corpse, or at any rate to attach no transcendent significance to this possibility. A possible decision among the Marcan group not to report “appearances” (“and they said nothing” etc.) gets explained by the theory of a “lost ending”. An “ending” is indeed supplied by a later hand, discrepant in style and outlook, but treated now as “inspired”, which it may well be. We “interpret spiritual things spiritually”, thus “accomplishing” the figurative representations of religion and not “reducing” it. The Gospel urges us to understand (believe) without signs and wonders, which are a concession to “this generation”. The appetite for them embodies a defect in virtue and understanding. Stephen Theron Calle Santiago Guillen Moreno 35 San Fernando de Maspalomas E 35100 Spain
[email protected]
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of this.3 First, esthio appears twenty-seven times in the sixteen chapters of Mark. Second, all of the occurrences revolve around conflict regarding meal customs which, in each case, function as the catalyst for the major point or teaching of the section. What follows is a survey of the more prominent meal scenes. In chapters six and eight of Mark, we encounter two mass meals: the first to an audience of at least 5,000 Jews and the other to an audience of at least 4,000 which included Gentiles. In each instance, the meals occur in a remote place where food is not readily available. Also in each of these scenes it is Jesus who provides food in the wilderness. Both of these roles, host and provider, draw on themes of “divine hospitality” that are found in the Old Testament. Robert C. Stallman, in his work Divine Hospitality in the Pentateuch: A Metaphorical Perspective on God as Host, has shown that the motif of divine hospitality is one that is embedded throughout the Pentateuch. In Genesis at the Garden of Eden, in Exodus when Israel is wandering in the wilderness, and in Israel’s diet prescribed in Leviticus, “God is depicted in terms of a host who provides food for guests.”4 By providing food for His people, God teaches them what it means to rely on Him for their sustenance each day. In and through these meals, God invites His people to join Him in an intimate fellowship, by which I mean partaking of a meal where He is both host and provider. In Mark’s gospel, at these mass meals, Jesus’ ministry is made intelligible within this long tradition of table fellowship. Here Jesus takes up a place at the head of the table where previously, only theGod-who-fed-Israel-in-the-desert could preside. Seeing these meal scenes in light of the Old Testament is important for seeing the roots of table fellowship because something more than mere eating is taking place in the scene. In Jesus’ table fellowship the kingdom of God is given shape and through this an offense is brought on by the act of radical inclusion.
3 esthio 27x in Mark 1:6 (Baptist asceticism); 2:16 (Jesus & disciples contrasted to John), 26; 3:20 (not eating); 5:43 (ordered the girl something to eat); 6:31, 36, 37, 42, 44 (feeding of the 5,000); 7:2–5 (not following custom), 28 (Jesus’ response to Syrophoenician Woman); 8:1–2, 8; 11:14; 14:12, 14 (feeding of 4,000), 18 (eating with the betrayer), 22. Alongside these simple meanings, the verb can be translated to reflect its social element as have a meal, dine; See also Balz and Schneider, Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament Vol 2 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993) pp. 58–60. 4 Robert C. Stallman, Divine Hospitality in the Pentateuch: A Metaphorical Perspective on God as Host, PhD Dissertation (Westminster Theological Seminary, 1999) p. 271. Cf. Stallman, “Divine Hospitality and Wisdom’s Banquet in Proverbs 9:1–6,” in The Way of Wisdom: Essays in Honor of Bruce K. Waltke, ed. J.I. Packer & Sven Soderlund, pp. 117–133 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000); See also, Christine D. Pohl, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999) pp. 27– 29. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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Through not recognizing the role of the meal scenes, this radical inclusion has often been misunderstood. Early on in Mark’s gospel he depicts several conflicts between Jesus and the Pharisees which all revolve around food or eating. The first, and most revealing of these, concerns his eating with sinners. Scholars have traditionally argued that these conflicts arise because of the way the Pharisees maintained a state of ritual purity among their eating companions. Representative of this, Scott Bartchy explicitly says that the Pharisees treat “their tables at home as surrogates of the Lord’s altar in the Temple in Jerusalem.”5 While there seems to be something right about what Bartchy is saying, Jerome Neyrey identifies the wider issue at hand, which is that Jesus is being criticized by the teachers of the Law because sharing a table with sinners “implies that Jesus shares their world, not God’s world of holiness.”6 While for scholars like Bartchy, the tension at hand is between ritual purity and impurity, however there seems to me to be a better way that captures the impact of such meals. E.P. Sanders has argued a stronger claim. His argument is that the conflict came about because Jesus was “associating with, and offering the kingdom to those who by the normal standards of Judaism were wicked.”7 Sanders goes on to explain that “everyone, except the priests, often lived in a state of ritual impurity, which was removed only for entry to the temple or (in the case of the menstruant) for intercourse.”8 If Sanders is right, as I think he is, then the offense of Jesus’ table fellowship comes, not in breaking ritual purity code but comes instead, in the wicked—those people who have sinned according to the Decalogue — being fully accepted at the table of Jesus. To summarize where we’ve been thus far, we have seen that these meal scenes are important because the kingdom of God is being represented in table fellowship and that there’s something radically inclusive about what is being represented. I now want to turn to one last meal scene in Mark’s gospel which I think discloses another important feature about another, stronger, connection between table fellowship and the kingdom of God. In chapter fourteen, Mark records Jesus’ last meal during the Passover. In this meal scene he is aware of what is about to take 5
Bartchy, p. 796. This view is prevalent also in Bruce D. Chilton, A Feast of Meanings: Eucharistic Theologies from Jesus Through Johannine Circles (Brill Academic Publishers, 1997) pp. 13–74. 6 Jerome H. Neyrey, “Ceremonies in Luke-Acts: The Case of Meals and Table Fellowship,” in The Social World of Luke-Acts: Models for Interpretation (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1991) p. 364. See also Jack Dean Kingsbury Conflict in Mark: Jesus, Authorities, Disciples (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989) pp. 11–21. 7 E.P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985) p. 187. Contra Jeremias’ claim that “all Pharisees were haberim and all haberim Pharisees.” 8 Sanders, p. 210. The haberim handled and ate food in ritual purity, but they did not think that the failure to do so was a sin. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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place as he offers himself in fellowship to those who will reject and abandon him in a matter of hours (v. 18). In the course of the meal, Jesus shares the bread and the wine and reveals another level of meaning to their fellowship. Jesus takes the cup and says it is his blood that he pours out for the many. It is through this that Jesus understands the meal to be connected to his death and to the kingdom of God (v. 24). It was this meal that would later become the centerpiece of the early church in the Eucharist. The importance of the table fellowship of the Eucharist to the early church cannot be overstated. The history of the church is the history of the understanding and practice of the Eucharist. And historically, the long debate over transubstantiation and the theology of the Eucharist, the importance of excommunication as a tool of the church, indeed the very shape and accouterments of the church all serve to reveal that the church has understood that table fellowship is nothing less than the embodiment of the kingdom of God. This being the case, I would still contend that the mistake of the church has been to think that the Eucharist is the only table fellowship, which is the embodiment of the kingdom of God. To conflate our understanding of table fellowship and Eucharist makes the Church out to be a container and dispenser of table fellowship. This then, violates those people found on the outside of Christendom. However, if our survey of the meal scenes in Mark’s gospel has demonstrated anything, it is that they are to be read against a long tradition of God at table fellowship with His people. Therefore, we can better understand all table fellowship to be an embodiment of the kingdom of God. Put differently, the church is not the container of the kingdom of God, but rather the kingdom of God is embodied in what I have been describing as table fellowship. Strictly speaking, Jesus’ table fellowship opens up an encounter and life that is neither “church” nor “world” but is the kingdom of God. In this view then, the Eucharist is absorbed into table fellowship and serves its ends, not vice versa. It is not actually the Eucharist which constitutes table fellowship, but rather it is this radical event of God’s Kingdom—that is table fellowship—which makes the Eucharist what it is. Table fellowship, then, is an ongoing event which continues to call people into fellowship with God and with one another. In order to support the claim that the Church has erred in treating the Eucharist as the only form of table fellowship which embodies the kingdom of God, we can point to an event in the book of Acts which reveals a connection between the kingdom of God and table fellowship, outside of the Eucharist. In chapter 10, Peter has a vision of a large sheet being let down out of heaven containing all kinds of ‘unclean’ animals (10:11–12). The voice tells him to “kill and eat” (v 13). Here in this scene, Peter has this vision three times, which emphasizes his role with Cornelius as embodying the C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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kingdom of God through a meal outside of a Eucharistic setting. Peter interpreted his vision as God showing him how the kingdom spreads out beyond Jewish tables on into the rest of the world (v 28). A dialogue soon takes place and Peter recounts his own journey to this Centurion’s doorstep as connected to his being a witness “who ate and drank with,” the risen Christ (v 41). The Church must recognize the importance of God’s broader ministry of table fellowship. So if it is the Church’s duty to carry on with the whole ministry of table fellowship as practiced by Jesus, then what exactly is it that we would be carrying on? Some concluding remarks will be aimed at answering this question. Significantly, in Mark, indeed in the gospels, Jesus is not alone when he eats but rather is always throwing himself fully into the meal. It is at these meals that we see the being-for-others so characteristic of Jesus’ ministry. What I have been trying to show with this paper is that this ministry reveals that the kingdom of God is present in table fellowship. What might this understanding of the kingdom of God look like? Well, we can see that at these meals Jesus demonstrates that people can be reconciled to one another and that communion with God is possible; joined together in this way we have a picture of the fulfillment of what it means to be human. To be clear, I am not asserting that this new understanding of the kingdom represents a significant change in how God relates to His people. Certainly, the reconciliation of people to one another and their communion with Him have long been part of God’s desire for His kingdom. Rather, it’s both the means for understanding the kingdom and the embodiment of that very kingdom that take on a decidedly personal and relational shape in the table fellowship of Jesus’ ministry, the likes of which was only seen afar in the Old Testament. It is the personal and relational aspects which not only make the kingdom of God accessible to our understanding but which also make its inception so desirable and which ultimately draws us into its service. In conclusion, table fellowship is not an instrument that determines which people are brought into the kingdom or made to stand outside of it. Instead, table fellowship is the event or process whereby people are being in and for the kingdom. Put differently, table fellowship is how we are being freely and fully ourselves. It should also be said that table fellowship is not an exclusive membership where only some are invited. Rather, it is a radically inclusive process that changes our behavior towards being for other people and opens up dialog between persons. Finally, as I have said, this table fellowship is not only a representation of the kingdom of God but also an embodiment of it. When Jesus said to his disciples at his last meal, “Do this in remembrance of me,” it was not a command to institute merely a C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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religious ritual, but rather an instruction to the Church to continue embodying the kingdom of God through table fellowship which is open for all the world.9 Joshua Furnal Old Elvet Durham DH1 3HP UK United Kingdom Email:
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9 Thank you to Jeffrey T. Byrnes for his rigorous editing, Nathan Kerr, and one anonymous reader who provided helpful feedback on and earlier draft of this essay; I am grateful to each. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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II. The Virtue of Charity What is charity? Moreover, why is it a virtue in Aquinas’ ethics? According to Aquinas, charity is among the theological virtues, “first, because their object is God inasmuch as they direct us aright to God: secondly, because they are infused in us by God alone: thirdly, because these virtues are not made known to us, save by Divine revelation” (I-II.62.1.corpus). Furthermore, while human persons are created with a natural inclination to God in their reason and will, this natural inclination is not sufficient to direct one to supernatural happiness in God (I-II.62.1.ad3) therefore charity must be infused by God in the soul (II-II.23.2). An infused theological virtue, charity is the form of all the virtues, theological and moral. Charity as form is the mode by which all the other virtues are directed towards God. Aquinas states both “that all other virtues depend on charity in some way (I-II.62.2.ad3) and that “charity is the mother and root of all the virtues, in as much as it is the form of them all” (I-II.62.4.corpus). In what way is charity both love of God and love of neighbor? Charity is both love of God and friendship with God. In the theological virtues, God reveals his happiness to us. As friendship, charity places us in proper relationship with God and neighbor. Based on this, Aquinas states, “the love which is based on this communication is charity: wherefore it is evident that charity is the friendship of man with God” (II-II.23.1.corpus). Despite being imperfect it is still friendship with God (II-II.23.1.ad 1). While charity is primarily friendship with God, charity also includes friendship with neighbor, even extending to enemies. Aquinas explains, “Friendship of charity extends even to our enemies, whom we love out of charity in relation to God, to whom the friendship of charity is chiefly directed” (II-II.23.1.ad 2). This is why Aquinas can say that while one is supposed to hate sin, one is to love the sinner for God’s sake (II-II.23.1.ad 3). Furthermore, Aquinas states, “the charity whereby formally we love our neighbor is a participation of Divine charity” (II-II.23.2. ad 1). Throughout this section, Aquinas establishes the basis of charity within a relationship. This is important for the role of charity in the moral life, given the way Aquinas places charity in the person who loves, who engages in friendship, and ultimately, in the person who does acts of charity. Charity is love, friendship and it is virtue. Aquinas is clear; charity is founded on the goodness of God, participation with God, and it unites us with God. Therefore, it is a virtue. In response to the objection that since charity is friendship, it is not a virtue, Aquinas explains, “For we might say that it is a moral virtue about works done in respect of another person, but under a different aspect from justice. For justice is about works done in respect of another person, under the aspect of legal due whereas friendship considers the aspect C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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of a friendly and moral duty, or rather that of a gratuitous favor” (II-II.23.3. ad 1). Not only is it a virtue, it is the form of the virtues because, “charity is included in the definition of every virtue, not as being essentially every virtue, but because every virtue depends on it . . . in this same way prudence is included in the definition of the moral virtues” (II.23.4 ad1). If charity is a special virtue, it raises questions about the formal relationship between charity and the other virtues. Given that, one can only have charity when God infuses it through grace; the relationship of charity to the other virtues is integral to the comprehensiveness and coherence of Aquinas’ virtue theory. He separates the infused and acquired virtues by carefully delineating an actions relationship to a proximate end and the final end. Insofar as an action is directed to the final end, one cannot have virtue without charity because charity is what unites us with God. However, in relation to the proximate end, it is possible to have virtue without charity. And yet, according to Aquinas, “it is charity which directs the acts of all the other virtues to the last end, and which consequently, also gives the form to all other acts of virtue: and it is precisely in this sense that charity is called the form of the virtues” (II-II.23.8. corpus). Through charity as form, all of the other virtues can be directed towards the final end. Justice, prudence, etc. cannot be directed towards union with God except as formally accomplished by charity. As stated above, charity is friendship with God and this friendship supercedes humanity’s natural capacities, it transcends nature. The natural cannot unite us with the supernatural. He explains, “Therefore charity can be in us neither naturally, nor through the acquisition of natural powers, but by the infusion of the Holy Ghost, who is the love of the Father and the Son, and the participation of whom in us created charity” (II-II.24.3. corpus). Friendship, fellowship, participation, all of the words or images which Aquinas uses in his attempt to explain the relationship of a human person to God created with charity all clearly involve a sense of communion or community with the divine. It is evident, within the framework of Aquinas’s anthropology, that it is divine action, which makes this communion possible. The extent to which a human person is capable of friendship with God depends solely upon the infused virtues and does not depend on the natural capacity of an individual. According to Aquinas, “charity is given not according to our natural capacity, but according as the spirit wills to distribute his gifts” (II-II.24.3. corpus). Having charity depends entirely on grace. Since it an infused virtue and depends on grace, one either has charity or does not. Charity cannot increase by addition, according to Aquinas, “charity increases only by its subject partaking of Charity more and more . . . Therefore charity increases by being intensified in its subject, and this is for charity to increase in its essence; and C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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not by charity being added to charity” (II-II.24.5. corpus). One can participate more fully or more intensely in fellowship with God, but one cannot increase charity in the manner one collects coins. Furthermore, it is God that increases charity; for Aquinas, “This is what God does when He increases charity, that is He makes it to have a greater hold on the soul, and the likeness of the Holy Ghost to be more perfectly participated by the soul” (II-II.24.5. ad 3). Once again, this increase is an increase by God. Aquinas repeatedly emphasizes that the virtue of charity depends on God. This raises a question about the efficacy of acts of charity or living out charity. However, Aquinas does not want to dismiss the importance or relevance of acts of charity. He explains, “charity does not actually increase through ever act of charity, but each act of charity disposes to an increase of charity, insofar as one act of charity makes man more ready to act again according to charity” (II-II.24.6. corpus). Making oneself more disposed to charity is important because, for Aquinas, “man advances in the way to God, not merely by actual increase of charity, but also by being disposed to that increase” (II-II.24.6. ad 3). Aquinas is clear about the infusion and increase of charity – God/ Holy Spirit is the primary actor. If God is the only cause of charity, how does charity decrease? Since God alone causes charity, Aquinas argues, “it follows that even when its act ceases it does not for this reason decrease, or cease altogether, unless the cessation involves a sin” (II-II.24.10. corpus). This is precisely because, “by sinning mortally, a man acts against charity, he deserves that God should withdraw charity from him,” (II-II.24.10. corpus). Even the loss of charity through mortal sin is the revocation of charity by God in this system. Aquinas is clear that every mortal sin is contrary to charity, because charity is friendship or union with God. (II-II.24.12). While charity is primarily friendship or communion with God, it is not limited to one’s relationship with God but also one’s relationship with one’s neighbors. In Question 25, Aquinas delineates how far beyond only God charity applies examining how charity applies to other people, one’s self, one’s body, etc. For the purpose of this paper, I will focus on the object of charity as it applies to our relationships with other people. From the beginning, Aquinas is clear that charity extends to one’s neighbors, by which he means the entire human community. It is clear that one is to love one’s neighbor as part of charity. Aquinas argues, “the aspect under which our neighbor is to be loved, is God, since what we ought to love in our neighbor is that he may be in God . . . Consequently, the habit of charity extends not only to the love of God, but also to the love of neighbor” (II-II.25.1. corpus). For Aquinas, we love others always in some relation to God (II-II.25.1. ad 2). This love of neighbor is related to God but must always be properly ordered as “it would be wrong if a man loved his neighbor as though he were his last end, but not, if he loved C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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him for God’s sake; and this is what charity does” (II-II.25.1. ad 3). The relationship of charity, as stated, is one of friendship and fellowship. It is evident how this applies in general to our neighbor, but since charity is ultimately related to God, how does charity apply to sinners? In accordance with his general optimism concerning human nature, Aquinas points out that while charity can be lost through sin, nature is not (II-II.25.6.sed contra). It is, then, according to Aquinas, “our duty to hate, in the sinner, the sin and to love in him, his being a man capable of bliss; and this is to love him truly out of charity for God’s sake” (II-II.25.6.corpus). The emphasis on continuing to love the sinner in relation to God in charity establishes a basic level of fellowship among all persons demanded by charity regardless of one’s personal moral standing. Charity is love of God and love of neighbor. This requires charity to be ordered in reference to God, the first principle structurally and in specific instances, is spelled out in the order of charity (II-II.26.1). God is to be loved above all else, and all other things are to be loved in relation to God. Even though God is to be loved first and above all given that God is our last end; one cannot love God without loving neighbor. Aquinas explains: for since our neighbor is more visible to us, he is the first lovable object we meet with, because the soul learns from those things it knows to love what it knows not as Gregory says in a homily (In Evang. xi). Hence, it can be argued that if any man loves not his neighbor, neither does he love God, not because his more lovable, but because he is the first thing to demand our love: and God is more lovable by his goodness. (II-II.26.2.ad1).
While it is obvious then, that one must love God more than one loves one’s neighbor, the love of neighbor is integral to loving God. Therefore, a secondary level is needed to differentiate between neighbors – since neighbor as applied to charity includes all other persons – family, friends, strangers, enemies, etc. Through the order of charity, Aquinas establishes guidelines for applying charity in one’s encounters with others. This order provides a basic structure from which to live charity and guide acts of charity – in relation to the self, family, and strangers. Charity, as explained by Aquinas, is union not self-deprecation. In accordance with his ethical theory as a whole, Aquinas maintains the importance of love of self and the value of oneself. He explains, “God is loved as the principle of good, on which the love of charity is founded; while man, out of charity, loves himself by reason of his being a partaker of the aforesaid good, and loves his neighbor by reason of his fellowship in that Good” (II-II.26.4.corpus). The reference point for charity is always ultimately God, one loves out of a relationship with or participation in the Divine. It is also the C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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mandate given by Jesus in the love commandment, where he says, “You are to love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like to it; You should love your neighbor as yourself ” (Mt. 22:37–39, cf: Lk 10:27–28, Mk 12:30– 31). The important element which Aquinas is emphasizing here is that implicit within the love command is the command to love oneself. While he does not cite this here, it is the operative framework behind the entire treatise on charity. Love of oneself is a priority for one’s personal relationship with God and one’s soul. And it is out of this that Aquinas can justifiably say, “therefore man, out of charity, ought to love himself more than his neighbor: in sign whereof, a man ought not to give way to any evil of sin, which counteracts his share of happiness, not even that he may free his neighbor from sin” (IIII.26.4. corpus).2 This self-love is connected to love of neighbor and the order within love of neighbor. Stephen Pope explains, Love of charity for the self refers first to one’s spiritual nature: one is not to commit sin even if by doing so one were able to free the neighbor from sin. Yet charity gives rise to very important forms of self-denial. Indeed, the welfare of the neighbor’s soul takes priority over concern for one’s own body, since the neighbor’s soul is closer to one’s own soul than is one’s soul to one’s own body.3
What then is the structure or order to love of neighbor? By what criteria does one love one neighbor more than one loves another? It is impossible, and Aquinas recognizes this, to love all with charity in the same way and to the same degree. He establishes two separate criteria to structure our love of neighbor. First, charity is measured in relation to God, and therefore one should love those closer to God more (II-II.26.6.ad2). Aquinas states, “Now the object of charity’s love is God, and man is the lover. Therefore the specific diversity of the love which is in accordance with charity, as regards the love of our neighbor, depends on his relation to God, so that, out of charity, we should wish a greater good to one who is nearer to God” (II-II.26.7. corpus). Second, we should love those more closely related to us (our family, friends, etc). Aquinas explains, “Now the inward affection of charity ought to correspond to the outward effect. Therefore charity regards those who are nearer to us before those who are better” (IIII.26.7.sed contra). Furthermore, we love those nearer to us more through natural inclination, in more ways and with more intensity than strangers. Throughout Question 26, Aquinas examines a number 2 It is relevant to note that Aquinas is talking about oneself focusing on the soul. He does not prioritize one’s body over one’s neighbor. He states one ought to love one’s neighbor over one’s own body (II-II.26.5). 3 Stephen Pope. The Evolution of Altruism and the Ordering of Love. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1994. P. 60–61. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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of different cases, which indicate the priority of biological and social relationships in the order of charity. Even within the bonds of family and friends, there is an order to charity which Aquinas examines (i.e. the various familial responsibilities of parent/child, father/mother, and parents/wife) (II-II.26.8–11). Stephen Pope comments: Thomas did not view the order of charity as a simple system of concentric circles (somewhat like the system of concentric spheres that marked the medieval cosmos), in which family and members of one’s own household come first, next close friends, neighbors and associates and finally others in an outwardly radiating gradation of various relations to the self . . . His interpretation of the order of charity recognizes the importance of different spheres of life and acknowledged the need for different schemes of priority, depending on the various matters that are the basis of the different connections people share.4
This is the basic order of charity as Aquinas lays it out. How this order functions and its adequacy in living charity will be examined next.
III. Living Charity In an article on charity and prudence, James Keenan states, “Charity alone serves as the moral description for the morally good person.”5 The most common correlation between charity and the moral life is that only through charity do our virtuous actions contain merit. This fact highlights two important aspects of charity. First, charity perfects the virtues and makes one meritorious. Second, there is an integral connection between charity and virtuous action. Charity is manifested in acts, it is known through action. Aquinas explains that the principal act of charity is to love, not to be loved. He clearly states, “now to be loved is not the act of charity of the person loved; for this act is to love; and to be loved is competent to him as coming under the common notion of good as another tends toward his good by an act of charity” (II-II.27.1). Being loved points to an act of charity on the part of the person who loves. It is clear, then that an act of charity, is an act of loving. What does this look like? In addition, what is its relation to the moral life? Are acts of charity constitutive of having charity? In what, if any situations, is one morally obligated to perform an act of charity? Focusing on mercy, beneficence and almsgiving, this section will argue that acts of charity are an integral part of having the virtue. Furthermore, one 4
Stephen Pope. The Evolution of Altruism and the Ordering of Love. P. 64 James Keenan, S.J. “Distinguishing Charity as Goodness and Prudence as Rightness: A Key to Thomas’s Secunda Pars” the Thomist 56 (1992) p. 411. 5
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cannot have charity without living charity, to a significant extent, through mercy, beneficence and almsgiving. Aquinas examines the effects of charity by separating them into interior and exterior effects. The interior effect of charity, which directly relates to love of neighbor, is mercy (misericordia). Mercy is “man’s compassionate heart for another’s unhappiness” (II-II.30.1); it is always related to another person and not oneself. Aquinas states, “Pity is sympathy for another’s distress, it is directed, properly speaking, towards another and not to oneself, except figuratively like justice . . . a man does not pity himself, but suffers in himself ” (II-II.26.1.ad1). Just as charity has multiple degrees – those one which we love those closest to us and to which we love all our neighbors as persons in relation to God, mercy or pity has differing degrees or motives. According to Aquinas, one is moved to pity and mercy, “either because one looks upon another’s defect as one’s own, through being united to him by love, or on account of the possibility of suffering in the same way” (II-II.30.2. corpus). Mercy, then, is the internal disposition by which motivates one to show compassion for another person, but the way in which this occurs determines whether mercy is an emotion or virtue. Aquinas explains, “Mercy signifies grief for another’s distress. Now this grief may denote, in one way, a movement of the sensitive appetite, in which case mercy is not a virtue but a passion; whereas, in another way, it may denote a movement of the intellective appetite, in as much as one person’s evil is displeasing to another” (II-II.30.3.corpus). Unlike the other interior effects (or the exterior, which will be examined next), mercy is described not only as an effect of charity but a virtue in itself – requiring both the virtue of charity and the other person suffering (II-II.30.3.ad2); it is, for Aquinas, “a moral virtue having relation to the passions” (II-II.30.3.ad3). While to be a virtue, it must be guided by reason, mercy as a virtue has this added aspect found in the emotions. If mercy is a virtue, what then is its relationship to charity? How is it related to charity as love of neighbor? Aquinas explains its relationship to charity stating, “the sum total of the Christian religion consists in mercy, as regards external works: but the inward love of charity, whereby we are united to God preponderates over both love and mercy for our neighbor” (II-II.30.4. ad2). Furthermore, Aquinas goes on to explain, “Charity likens us to God by uniting us to him in the bond of love, wherefore it surpasses mercy, which likens us to God as regards similarity of works” (II-II.30.4. ad3). Given the explanation of charity above, the boundary and distinctions between mercy and charity are blurry. External works of mercy are then also acts of charity. Charity in and of itself is distinct, and the governing structure is the order of charity, however, the external effects of charity are acts of mercy, however, he denies the objection that an C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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act of charity is not an act of charity but only an act of mercy (II-II.31.1.obj3). In dealing with the relationship between mercy and charity, Aquinas is somewhat ambiguous; however, he establishes mercy as a subset of charity emphasizing it as a particular aspect of acts of charity. The first of charity’s outward effects, which Aquinas examines, is beneficence. An act of friendship or charity, for Aquinas, “beneficence simply means doing good to someone” (II-II.31.1. corpus). It is an effect of love (II-II.31.2. corpus). When examining a specific case, an act of beneficence, it seems, can also belong to another virtue. He explains, “if the good which one man does another, be considered under some special aspect of good, then the beneficence will assume a special character and will belong to some special virtue” (II-II.31.1. corpus). He is clear, however, that beneficence is not a special virtue itself but an act of charity (II-II.31.4. corpus). Comparing charity with mercy and justice, Aquinas maintains that beneficence is an act of charity. Countering the objection that doing good for another is either mercy or justice, not charity, Aquinas clearly argues that “just as friendship or charity sees in the benefit bestowed, the general aspect of good, so does justice see therein the aspect of debt, while pity considers the relieving of distress or defect” (II-II.31.1.ad 3). Beneficence then is an act of charity, which consists in doing good for another. Given that charity extends to all our neighbors, to specify what a moral life in accordance with charity looks like and what charity requires of us. Aware of our limited capacities, Aquinas acknowledges that “absolutely speaking, it is impossible to do good to each and every single one: yet it is true of each individual that one may be bound to do good to him in some particular case . . . Hence charity binds us, though not actually doing good to someone, to be prepared in mind to do good to anyone if we have time to spare” (II-II.31.2. ad1). The requirements of charity in the moral life are realistic. One cannot help everyone, but this does not lessen the requirements of charity. Aquinas is clear that in a particular case, one may be bound in charity to aid another and if one is living charity, one must have an openness or readiness to help another in those situations. The strength of charity’s requirements to beneficence and the emphasis on need is evident in Aquinas’s approach to sinners. A mere internal openness, which does not translate into action, is not sufficient. One example is Aquinas’ approach to beneficence toward sinners and those excommunicated from the Church. Aquinas clearly states “if their nature be in urgent need of succor lest it fail, we are bound to help them: for instance, if they be in danger of death through hunger or thirst, or suffer some like distress, unless this be according to the order of justice” (II-II.31.2. ad 3). Throughout the examination of beneficence, the emphasis is placed on need in the requirements of C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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charity. This criterion holds when determining whether or not one owes beneficence to one’s family or a stranger. In general, as our friendship and fellowship is closer to those connected to us, we ought to be the most beneficent to them, all things being equal. However, the issue of need is always central in external acts of charity. Aquinas clearly states “in certain cases one ought, for instance to succor a stranger in extreme necessity, rather than one’s own father, if he is not in such urgent need” (II-II.31.3. corpus). Therefore, one is bound to help a stranger who is in dire need over a family member who is not in such need. A general openness to charity, the removal of obstacles to charity is what Aquinas requires in charity, but this openness does not or cannot exist if it is not turned into action. If when faced with someone suffering greatly, and one does not aid the person through an act of charity (provided they have the means), then one cannot legitimately say that they are open to charity. Furthermore, if one is not open to charity through love of neighbor, then can one be said to love God? Beneficence as an act of charity is at the center of the moral life and the fact that maintaining friendship with God requires friendship or fellowship with neighbor. Pope explains, “Love for the poor involves not simply the donation of money or material goods but also and more importantly the love of friendship – the deeper giving of self that involves affective union and communication as well as benevolence.”6 Beneficence is thus directly connected to almsgiving in living out charity as love of neighbor. Beneficence is by doing good for others; almsgiving is giving to those in need. This second external act of charity is characterized according to motivation. According to Aquinas, “external acts belong to that virtue which regards the motive for doing those acts. Now the motive for giving alms is to relieve one who is in need” (IIII.32.1. corpus). Almsgiving is an act of mercy, which for Aquinas is an effect of charity. The central concern in external acts of charity, for Aquinas, is determination of need. Is all almsgiving an effect of charity? Is it almsgiving when someone without charity gives to those in need? Aquinas answers this objection clarifying that, “accordingly almsgiving can be materially without charity, but to give alms formally, i.e. for God’s sake, with delight and readiness, and altogether as one ought, is not possible without charity” (IIII.32.1. ad1). Almsgiving without charity is not almsgiving for the love of God, and love of neighbor in relation to God. There are two different kinds of alms – spiritual and corporeal. Aquinas offers detailed account of both, however, for the purposes of this paper; I will focus on almsgiving as tending to corporeal needs. Despite the fact that Aquinas prioritizes spiritual alms over 6 Stephen Pope, “Aquinas on almsgiving, justice and charity: an interpretation and reassessment” Heythrop Journal 32 (April 1992) p. 168. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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corporal, this preference for the spiritual only applies in general, all things being equal. For charity, the concern of need takes ultimate preference. He explains, after arguing for the priority of spiritual alms, “Secondly, we may compare them with regard to some particular case, when some corporal alms excels some spiritual alms: for instance, a man in hunger is to be fed rather than instructed, and as the Philosopher observes, for a needy man money is better than philosophy, although the latter is better” (II-II.32.3 corpus). Corporal needs are either that which all human persons need to survive or a specific need of a particular person (II-II.32.2). The requirements of almsgiving for corporeal needs are straightforward in Aquinas. The first and obvious requirement of almsgiving is that the recipient must be in need. He clearly explains, The common need with regard to external help is twofold; one in respect of clothing, and as to this we have to clothe the naked: while the other is in respect of a dwelling place, and as to this we have to harbor the harbor less. Again, if the need be special; it is either the result of an internal cause, like sickness, and then we have to visit the sick or it results from an external cause, and then we have to ransom the captive. After this we give burial to the dead” (II-II.32.2. corpus).
As with the scope of charity itself, Aquinas is careful to set reasonable limits concerning the scope of almsgiving. It is not possible to give alms to everyone. While it is possible to give alms out of what one needs, because of the preference Aquinas shows for the common good over individual goods (II-II.32.6), it is not required. All that charity requires concerning almsgiving is that one give out of surplus. Aquinas is certainly conservative in his views on acts of charity and almsgiving. Included in what one needs is not, as we would hold today, simply what is necessary for a decent standard of living, but what is necessary to maintain one’s station in life. Therefore, what one is mandated to give alms out of, for a prince, is only that which he does not need to maintain the status of prince.7 Almsgiving, and beneficence, constitute love of neighbor. They are necessary conditions for love of neighbor, because, for Aquinas, “love of neighbor requires not only we should be our neighbors well wishers, but also his well-doers” (II-II.32.5. corpus). Charity requires action. As to the requirements of this almsgiving, Stephen Pope argues, Alms deeds are normally considered by Thomas to be acts of mercy, as ‘fitting’ but not strictly obligatory. From the parable of the Last Judgment (Mt 25:41–43), however, Thomas argues that some are punished eternally for failing to give alms and that since no one is punished for 7 Pope, “Aquinas on almsgiving, justice and charity: an interpretation and reassessment” p. 178. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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failing to do what is not commanded giving alms must be a matter of precept (II-II, 32,5).8
While, the language of moral debt is used in connection with almsgiving, the “debts” involved in almsgiving are not legal debts.9 This does establish the moral obligation involved as a weaker obligation than if it were a legal one. However, at the same time, Pope observes, “In extreme cases, in fact, one can be bound by a legal debt to give surplus goods to the poor (II-II, 228, 4, ad 2). Yet even this kind of debt is unenforceable in a court of law.”10 The question is, whether or not moral obligations are the domain of a court of law. Does it detract from the strength of the requirement to live charity that almsgiving, when morally necessary, is not legally enforceable? I do not think it does. As stated above, one can be judged and held accountable by God for the failure to give alms, for the failure to live charity. The possibility of eternal punishment is certainly graver than threat of punishment by a human court. If one can face eternal punishment for treatment of one’s neighbor, whether it is one’s father, friend, or a stranger, then one must say that living charity is a requirement of having charity.
IV. Conclusion: Evaluating Living Charity in Aquinas’ Ethics To sum up, charity is love of God and love of neighbor. Charity is always primarily love of God, friendship with God, unity with God. It is always in relation to God. Love of neighbor is understood based upon relationship to God and not as a proximate end. There is no mechanism within Aquinas’s theory of charity whereby one loves one’s neighbor for the neighbor’s sake. Neighbor love in se would disrupt Aquinas’s total emphasis of all things being in proper relationship to God. Like Augustine, loving and resting in love of neighbor, for itself, represents a disorder in the ordo amoris. While it is true that not all love is charity, the other forms of love do not have the depth that charity has. Because of this, a criticism of Aquinas’ ordering of charity is the lack of love of neighbor as a proximate end. However, despite this Aquinas’ theory of charity is important for contemporary ethics because of the strong mandate to live charity through love of neighbor. Defined based on the love command, love of neighbor remains an integral part of what constitutes having charity. The fundamental question becomes: what is necessary to live and retain charity? Is 8 9 10
Ibid. p. 171. Ibid. p. 171–2. Ibid. p. 172.
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failing to perform acts of charity enough to lose charity? Throughout this paper, I have attempted to argue that living charity is a necessary component of charity itself. That a purely internal openness to charity that is not manifest in actions if the particular situation arises, is incoherent. While granting that it cannot lead to action in every instance, one cannot perform acts of charity to all; an openness that does not lead to action cannot be a real attitude of openness to charity. Furthermore, Pope states, “Love of neighbor has as one of its major components the moral primacy of human need. While generally the nature of a ‘friendly duty’ or even a ‘gratuitous favor’, charity, in cases of real human deprivation, assumes the nature of a grave moral debt (a matter of precept), the omission of which places one in a mortally sinful state.”11 If a failure to act in charity can constitute a mortal sin, then a failure to live out charity is sufficient to lose charity. As Aquinas stated and was addressed above, charity is lost through mortal sin. Moreover, the fact that, for Aquinas, one can receive eternal punishment for the failure to give alms, which is the failure to live charity, illustrates that living charity is required to maintain charity. Even though living charity is a requirement in Aquinas’ ethics, there are elements of Aquinas’ understanding of living charity, which, in my opinion, are inadequate for living charity today. In particular, there are two areas where Aquinas needs to be reinterpreted and pushed further to address contemporary concerns . First, the lack of social critique and social change as the work of charity in Aquinas’ theory of charity is problematic and insufficient for addressing contemporary situations. And second, within the order of charity, there is an overwhelming emphasis on the natural model being based upon the mirroring of God as father. Despite these critiques in Aquinas’ approach, the solutions, I contend, flow directly out of Aquinas’ theology and re-interpreting Aquinas’ rich understanding of charity in the contemporary context does not water down the requirement to live charity but in fact makes it even more stringent. In his understanding of charity and the requirements of charity, Aquinas is socially conservative. It is clear that Aquinas is not mandating acts of charity in every case or equal charity to all. At one level, the basic requirement is openness to charity. Aquinas is not advocating strong social change or challenging the traditional hierarchical ordering of society, which involved stark inequalities. He did not, as stated above, require one to give out of the surplus after basic necessities, but included in necessities that which was necessary to maintain one’s status in society. Yet, as Pope emphasizes, “it is critical to understand that in Thomas’ social vision the ordering of the 11 Pope, “Aquinas on almsgiving, justice and charity: an interpretation and reassessment” p. 186. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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church and world is one of mutual service inspired by charity, not of the domination and exploitation of the lower by the higher (II-II, 183, 2).”12 Aquinas not only accepted the hierarchical social structure, but he also assumed a natural harmony and mutuality within the form of that system. These specific statements of charity and social change do not push the requirements of charity far enough for contemporary society. This is not a sufficient model for living charity today. Given the context of globalization and global poverty, any mandate for love of neighbor must include an examination of social sin and structural sin within the very makeup of contemporary society. As Sollicitudo Rei Socialis comments, “Among the actions and attitudes opposed to God’s will two are very typical: greed and the thirst for power. Not only individuals sin in that way; so do nations and world-blocs. That is why we spoke of “structures of sin.”13 An explication of the requirements of charity today requires attention not only to justice and mercy but also to structures of sin and the injustice inherent in many contemporary social orders. While this is not found within Aquinas’ order of charity, it does flow out of Aquinas’ commitment to charity and justice. As Pope highlights, Aquinas’ own understanding that “charity works through justice – it is not an alternative to it”14 provides resources from which to offer a critique of current injustices based on charity and justice. The relationship between charity and justice also provides a starting point for pushing beyond simply individuals living charity but the presence of justice and charity within communities. Within the order of charity, Aquinas clearly states that the order is always in reference to God (II-II.26.1). This manifests itself in the order in two ways – through greater love of those closer to God (i.e. the holier are closer to God) and in Aquinas’s ordering charity based upon our relationship to God as father (II-II.26.9–11). It must be noted that Aquinas pays attention to the particular dimensions of various familial relationships, showing preference for those closest to us over strangers. For example, he maintains the distinctions and importance within all family relations, stating, “the duty of children to their parents consists chiefly in honor: while that of parents to their children is especially one of care” (II-II.26.9. ad1). At the same time, however, “in this respect the better a thing is, and the more like to God, the more is it to be loved: and in this way a man ought to love his father more than his children, because, to with, he loves his 12
Pope, “Aquinas on almsgiving, justice and charity: an interpretation and reassessment” p. 181. 13 John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, 37. http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_ paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_30121987_sollicitudo-rei-socialis_en.html 14 Pope, “Aquinas on almsgiving, justice and charity: an interpretation and reassessment” p. 186. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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father as his principle, in which he is a more exalted good and more like God” (II-II.26.9. corpus). While a feminist critique of Aquinas’s paternalism and the priority of God as father can be made, that is not the critique, which I wish to make here. Acknowledging the legitimacy of modeling relationship to God as holy and as creator, my critique lies in the fact that these are the only models within the order of charity. In evaluating who is closest to God, there is no preferential option for the poor in Aquinas. Aquinas just simply views the poor as needy. However, in a world where the structures of sin are so prevalent and the situation of the poor so grave, a simplistic understanding of the poor as needy is not adequate – it requires some form of the option for the poor as an integral part of living charity. While Stephen Pope is accurate, that many understandings of the preferential option of the poor are not adequately defined, and “do not sufficiently attend to this need for a theologically and ethically grounded system of priorities.”15 I am not arguing for a particular understanding of the preferential option of the poor, or that such an option would trump Aquinas’ default priority to those closest to us as he explains it (which includes significant limits based on need). However, there must be greater attention to the complexities of poverty, as well as a stronger role of the poor in the order of charity, which is not found in Aquinas, but which is found in the Gospel. Out of Aquinas’ method within the order of charity an argument can be made for a stronger role of the poor (and one, which would be aided by the stronger attention to justice and mercy in structures highlighted above) within the order of charity based upon the poor’s relationship to God found within the Gospels. While not a focus within the order of charity (or the treatise on charity as a whole) of Matthew 25: 34– 46, it is a text which would support greater attention to the poor in the order of charity and the strong requirements of living charity, which have been argued for throughout this paper. With globalization and the recognition of how far reaching the implications of one person or one nation can be living charity must be more than simply attending to the needy we meet. This requires further investigation into the relationship between charity and justice, including a fluid spectrum of responsibility that takes into account globalization and barriers to charity due to structural injustice. Living charity in the twenty-first century must begin with the mandate found in Aquinas and extend to explicitly incorporate Matthew 25, “as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” Meghan J. Clark Email:
[email protected] 15 Pope, “Aquinas on almsgiving, justice and charity: an interpretation and reassessment.” p. 187. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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Bibliography Aquinas, St. Thomas. Summa Theologica. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Allen, Texas: Christian Classics, 1991. 5 volumes. Gilleman, Gerard. Primacy of Charity in Moral Theology. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1961. Keenan, James. “Distinguishing Charity as Goodness and Prudence as Rightness: A Key to Thomas’s Secunda Pars” The Thomist 56 (1992) p. 407–426. John Paul II, Pope. “Sollicitudo Rei Socialis” (1987) http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/ john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_30121987_sollicitudo-reisocialis_en. html Pope, Stephen J. —— “Aquinas on almsgiving, justice and charity: an interpretation and reassessment” Heythrop Journal 32 (April 1992) p. 167–191. —— “Christian Love For the Poor: Almsgiving and the Preferential Option” Horisons 21.02. (1994) p. 288–312. —— Evolution of Altruism and the Ordering of Love. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1994. p. 50–70. —— “The Order of Love and Recent Catholic Ethics: A Constructive Proposal” Theological Studies 52 (1991). P. 255–288. Porter, Jean. “De Ordine Caritatis: Charity, Friendship and Justice” The Thomist 53 (1989). P. 197–213. Waddell, Paul. The primacy of love: an Introduction to the Ethics of Thomas Aquinas. New York: Paulist Press, 1992.
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but pregnant with its own meaning. For this statement, also in the pars prima of the Summa Theologiae, contains in germ a conception of art very different from that which is common today, and one moreover which I believe has implications for our social and even economic practices and institutions. This remark occurs as part of his discussion of the dispositio, that is, the arrangement and qualities, of the human body. In the course of this discussion Thomas notes that every artist [artifex] intends the best disposition of what he is making according to its purpose or end. He writes, “And if such a disposition has with it some defect, the artist is not concerned; just as the artist who makes a saw for cutting makes it from iron, so that it is suitable for cutting; he does not care to make it from glass, which is a more beautiful material, because such beauty would be a hindrance to its purpose.”3 On the face of it, St. Thomas’s explanation is simply common sense. Who would make a saw out of glass? But if we proceed further in our consideration of this passage, we see that making a saw out of glass, even though that would result in a more beautiful object, would in fact be an impediment to art itself, the art of the saw maker, that is. In fact, the pursuit of beauty here is in opposition to art. But why is this a difficulty? It may be thought that the kind of art represented by saw-making has nothing to do with beauty, and that beauty is only a concern of the fine arts. But if we look at Thomas’s well-known definition of art as recta ratio factibilium, the right conception of a thing that is to be made, we can see the connection.4 For under this definition of art is included both the art of the maker of saws and that of the maker of pictures, symphonies or statues. Though certainly these arts differ, they differ as species of a genus, and in our understanding of that genus, art, lies an understanding of the place of the fine arts, of beauty, as well as of the artist, in society. However, we must deal with a difficulty in that usually the fine arts are no longer conceived as art in the sense of recta ratio factibilium, and thus their connection with the more humble arts of making pots or bottles or saws is entirely forgotten or denied. For the fine arts are now commonly regarded as focusing on beauty directly and for its own sake, although as a matter of fact this pursuit of beauty has sometimes led to an entire loss of beauty, or rather, to its subordination to 3 Et si talis dispositio habet secum adjunctum aliquem defectum, artifex non curat; sicut artifex qui facit serram ad secandum, facit eam ex ferro, ut sit idonea ad secandum; nec curat eam facere ex vitro, quae est pulchrior materia, quia talis pulchritudo esset impedimentum finis. I q. 91, a. 3. 4 Summa Theologiae I-II q. 57. In article three Thomas states that “ars nihil aliud est quam ‘ratio recta aliquorum operum faciendorum,’” and in article four “ars est ‘recta ratio factibilium.’” This latter wording is repeated elsewhere including in the Prologus or Prooemium to the Secunda Secundae and in the Summa Contra Gentiles, lib. I, cap. 93. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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the taste or whim of the artist. But it seems to me, that only if the Thomistic conception of art is recovered is there any possibility of doing away with art objects which have neither beauty nor purpose and sometimes even offend our aesthetic sensibilities, and at the same time of regaining for the artist a healthy place in a social order. Perhaps the best way to approach this is by quoting from the English artist and essayist, Eric Gill (1882–1940), who, although if not usually classed as a philosopher, nevertheless was one of the most faithful and radical disciples of St. Thomas on art.5 Gill wrote: Music, if it be separated from occasion (the wedding, the funeral, the feast, the march and the Mass) is, like modern abstract painting and sculpture, nothing but a titivation of the senses, and all that can be said of worshippers at the Queen’s Hall is that they have possibly more refined tastes than those of children dancing to a barrel organ. But whereas the children, like new-born lambs, dance for exercise, the devotees of the concert are more like debauchees at a Roman feast - and if music entered the stomach instead of the ear, owners of concert halls would have to supply spumatoria. They have no use for music - they only want to enjoy it. Music as we know it today, in its latest developments, is nothing but a refined sensationism, a refined debauchery, psychological auto-erotism a` deux, a` trois, en masse. The history of music during the last 400 hundred years is the history of the progressive divorce of music from occasion, and the high talk musicians indulge in is no higher and no more precious than that which birth-controllers use to extol physical union. . .. From Palestrina to Bartok and Stravinsky the history of music is a progress from meaning made attractive by music, through Handel and Gounod who straddled the fence, to music made attractive by meaning nothing at all.”6
In order to better understand what Gill means here, we must look further at St. Thomas’s definition of art as recta ratio factibilium. Something is to be made. But of course made for a purpose. And if so, then that purpose must govern everything about the making: the material used, its external form, etc. If it is a saw, it must be made of some strong material, not of glass, even if glass is more beautiful. But again, an objection will be raised: Why should we care if the 5 In this respect Gill seems to me to follow St. Thomas more closely than an acknowledged Thomist and philosopher, Jacques Maritain, in his Art and Scholasticism. Although Maritain begins by rightly remarking (p. 21) that “the ancients did not give a separate place to what we call the fine arts” and notes the entire dependence of all the arts on their basic meaning as recta ratio factibilium, nevertheless he seems to forget this and in the rest of his book to treat the fine arts as having a direct relationship with beauty, seemingly different in kind from that of the other arts. In any case, he does not stress the basic unity of all the arts and what follows from such a unified conception of art. Art and Scholasticism and The Frontiers of Poetry (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974). 6 A Holy Tradition of Working, pp. 89–90. Originally from Work and Property, 1937. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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saw is beautiful? Indeed, can we really say that a saw is or could be beautiful? Let us explicate this again from Eric Gill. The idea that the distinction between art and fine art is that art is skill applied to the making of useful things and fine art is skill applied to the making of things of beauty, is clearly unreasonable - because there is no reason why useful things should not be beautiful, and there is no reason to suppose that beautiful things have no use. Are tables and chairs and houses and pottery necessarily ugly? Are portraits and statues and church paintings and wall decorations necessarily useless?7
To an extent we recognize this in daily life. Manufacturers of automobiles and even of bottles do take steps to produce objects that are pleasing to look at. But this is without an explicit realization that the relationship of both the more humble arts as well as the fine arts to both use and beauty is essentially the same. All human arts must be rooted ultimately in our capacity and need for external objects of various sorts and for various purposes: houses, pots and pans, saddles, candles, music, pictures, etc. Yet when we make any such thing, our natural instinct is to make it as beautiful as possible. No one, all things being equal, would make an ugly pot if he could make a more beautiful pot that was equally useful. But as Thomas pointed out in the passage I quoted at the beginning, beauty when seen as something abstract or as something pursued for its own sake, cannot be what the artist aims at. A glass saw might be beautiful, but not very useful for sawing. It is only beauty in relation to some end, that is, some use, which art properly aims at.8 When beauty is pursued as an abstraction and as the only goal of an art, this means that the relation of that art to any use has been forgotten. And when it is thus divorced from use and instead beauty is pursued for its own sake, then, paradoxically, this can even end up destroying beauty itself, a point which I will discuss further below. The fine arts were originally accompaniments of important human activities, especially worship of God or the gods. Naturally beauty, as in any other kind of art, was desired, but beauty for a particular purpose. Music for the liturgy is not the same as music for a march or for a dance. Each has its own particular kind of beauty because each has its own particular use. A musician would fail as an artist if he pursued beauty but made his work less useful for its purpose. 7
Ibid., pp. 93–94. Originally from Sacred and Secular, 1940. In the fine arts the artist works toward the same generic end as in the other arts, a certain use enhanced with appropriate beauty. How then do the fine arts differ? It would appear that in the accomplishment of that end, the fine arts allow for greater freedom because their end is less determined. For example, while there is comparatively little difference in the way that a saw can be made if it is to be useful, a composer of music for the liturgy or for a dance has greater freedom with regard to accomplishing his end, and thus more opportunity for greater and more direct engagement with beauty. 8
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“We must not forget that until the end of the eighteenth century the great musicians were only artisans, members of a craft; that they were also great musicians is only incidental.”9 The impressive and beautiful, but liturgically useless, compositions of the last several centuries, such as Verdi’s Requiem or even Bach’s Mass in B minor, are actually less perfect as works of art because beauty was pursued at the expense of purpose, as if they were saws made of glass. Now it might be objected that although the fine arts can be useful at the same time as being beautiful, there is nothing wrong with pictures or music that aim at beauty alone, at being looked at or listened to without reference to any other end simply for the sake of esthetic pleasure. It might seem so if we limited our consideration to the works of art themselves and neglected the question of the social and cultural effects of art. Certainly the nineteenth century abounded in such works, symphonies, paintings, statues, which, because they had no social role, were exhibited or performed in special places segregated from ordinary life, such as museums or concert halls. Many of them are indeed beautiful in the highest degree. But what comes of this? What effects do such works of art have on a culture? In the first place, the fine arts, when divorced from any social role, become the property only of those who have leisure and education to attend to them. The rest of mankind, who formerly might have heard the most magnificent music at public worship or viewed paintings or statues of the highest order in their churches, no longer comes across such works in everyday life. Very often even those works which were intended to adorn churches or other public buildings are now found only in museums, and the best liturgical music is heard not during the liturgy, but as recorded music or in concerts. This produces a schism in a culture, about which I will speak further below. Secondly, now cut off from a public role, which in the past made them accountable to princes, bishops, cathedral chapters or guilds, artists increasingly became responsible only to themselves. It is true that someone else usually has to pay the bill, but, even when the content of the arts began to become esoteric and sometimes even ugly, the prestige of the fine arts, the desire to belong to or patronize the arts coterie, the “arts community” as it is called in the United States, exercises such an attraction that many of the rich are only too happy to pay out large sums for works which it is difficult to believe anyone really finds attractive. To quote Eric Gill again, These special people are quite cut off from the ordinary needs of life and so they become very eccentric and more and more peculiar and 9 Alfred Einstein, “Early Concert Life” in Essays on Music (New York: Norton, 1956), p. 28.
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their works become more and more expensive and so they are bought only by very rich people and so artists have become like hot-house flowers, or lap-dogs and so their works are more and more as peculiar as themselves and so we have all the new kinds of ‘art movements’ and so what we call Art (with a large A) is now simply a sort of psychological self-exhibitionism.10
The maker of fine arts became in a way cut off from the common culture, to the detriment of his art, of the culture, and sometimes even of his personal character. In the Middle Ages the plastic artist paid lip service at least to the lowest common denominators of experience. This even remained true to some extent until the seventeenth century. There was available for imitation a universally valid conceptual reality, whose order the artist could not tamper with. The subject matter of art was prescribed by those who commissioned works of art, which were not created, as in bourgeois society, on speculation. Precisely because his content was determined in advance, the artist was free to concentrate on his medium. He needed not to be philosopher, or visionary, but simply artificer. As long as there was general agreement as to what were the worthiest subjects for art, the artist was relieved of the necessity to be original and inventive in his ‘matter’ and could devote all his energy to formal problems. . . . Only with the Renaissance do the inflections of the personal become legitimate, still to be kept, however, within the limits of the simply and universally recognizable. And only with Rembrandt do ‘lonely’ artists begin to appear, lonely in their art.11
Left to himself, without the external but healthy discipline by which he must express beauty while at the same time achieving a social and public purpose, where was the artist to turn? In the first place he turned to his art, to the very process of creating. This constraint, once the world of common, extraverted experience has been renounced, can only be found in the very processes or disciplines by which art and literature have already imitated the former. These themselves become the subject matter of art and literature. If, to continue with Aristotle, all art and literature are imitation, then what we have here is the imitation of imitating. . . . Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Mir´o, Kandinsky, Brancusi, even Klee, Matisse, and C´ezanne derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in.12
But just as the pursuit of sexual pleasure apart from any reference to its natural procreative function eventually can lead to perversion 10 “Art in England Now. . .As It Seems to Me” in It All Goes Together: Selected Essays (New York: Devin-Adair, 1944), p. 91 11 Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, c. 1961), pp. 16–17. Cf. Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, pp. 158–60, note 43. 12 Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” pp. 6–7.
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or even sexual boredom, if not in any particular individual, certainly in society as a whole, so the pursuit of beauty alone too often led to a kind of artistic perversion and even a boredom that sought in the most unlikely ways to stimulate both the artist and his viewers or listeners. What is the electronic music of a John Cage, for example, except the pursuit of ever more and more esoteric means for a music that has no purpose and thus no standard by which it can be judged? For the purpose of a thing, its final cause, is always a standard against which it can be judged: How well does it fulfill its end? But if the fine arts have no purpose whatsoever, neither to adorn the worship of God or to provide a good beat for marching or dancing, or even (in the end) to please their viewers or listeners, how are we to judge them? Even the criterion of beauty is now gone, since the artist is free to disregard it if he chooses. A work of art with no purpose cannot really be judged at all. For while purely formal criteria may remain, which are not necessarily of no importance, they provide no sufficient standard against which to judge any particular work of art. A pot may fulfill any formal or technical criterion one likes, but if its maker has not sought utility together with appropriate beauty, he has failed in his chief duty. If we look at the passage from St. Thomas again, he points out that a saw ought not to be made from glass because in that case it is not fitted for sawing. That is, when the genuine end of an art is recognized, then the object created by the art will be sound and healthy and fulfill its end, but in addition the relationship of the artist and the things he makes to beauty will likewise be well ordered. An iron or steel saw can be as beautiful as its maker can contrive, provided that it is still useful for sawing. But if saw-making were governed merely by the fantasies and whims of saw artists, saws might be made of glass or paper or anything at all. There is no limit except the inventiveness of the artist. But of course makers of saws have no pretensions. They do not aspire to do anything but make a useful object, perhaps beautified in such ways as they can manage. But the same is not true of the fine arts. There, since the social use of their art has largely vanished, the artists can now usually work free of the end inherent in their art, and thus simply create, with no constraint.13 But with what result we shall see.
13 In fact, the modern conception of art turns on its head the classical meaning of the term, which had subordinated the form of the thing made to its use. For example, “. . .we have often observed that the composer of art music is at liberty to choose from a wider variety of solutions to a particular problem than the composer of practical music. Indeed, it might be said that art imposes freedom upon the composer—freedom to determine for himself the limitations of the system within which he shall construct a design. . . He need not take into consideration any extrinsic determinants that might confine his imagination. . . .” Joseph Agee Mussulman, The Uses of Music: an Introduction to Music C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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The loss of a social purpose for the fine arts led not only to the segregation of art and artist from society but to the cultural schism I mentioned above, an enmity between high and popular culture, and made easier the eventual displacement of popular culture by mass culture. Let us see how this occurred in the arts which make use of human language. While the arts of painting, sculpture and music were being separated from their social functions, something similar was going on with the arts that make use of the spoken word. The theater, of course, had had intimate connections with religious festivals, both in ancient Greece and in medieval and baroque Europe. Now, however, dramatic performances are akin to concerts and art museums, that is, they are special events separate from the rest of life and reserved for those with sufficient leisure and interest.14 They are no longer part of the community’s public and corporate life. But an analogous process has occurred even with poetry. Originally there had been a very close relationship between music and poetry.15 In ancient Greece the typical setting for poetry was “a fusion of word, music, and dance” which Kirby-Smith calls mousike.16 For the poet produced both for and within a community, not in the privacy of his study. The bard’s recitation was “a mixture of memorized recitation and improvisation,” that is, the poem was in part made up on the spot, in part recalled from an immemorial tradition of previous performances.17 This is true, moreover, in every pre-modern culture. Based on studies of living epic traditions in the Balkans and Finland, Authentic, or oral, epics, as they have been handed down to us, are transcriptions of a highly sophisticated oral performance; they are not scripts or texts written down in advance of performance by the performer.18
The words “performance” and “performer” here are important, for even if the bard did not always dance, his singing of the poem had more in common with a dance performance than with someone sitting down in his study to read the Iliad. But contrast that with the writing of poetry as a private act. in Contemporary American Life (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, c. 1974), p. 159. (Emphasis in original.) 14 Film making, however, although it likewise does not fulfil a social role as I am using that term, nevertheless has obtained a wide popularity. But it does so (with few exceptions) as part of mass culture. 15 H. T. Kirby-Smith’s book, The Celestial Twins: Poetry and Music Through the Ages, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, c. 1999), which I follow here, provides a masterful account of the relations between poetry and music from antiquity until the present. 16 Ibid., p. 9. 17 Ibid., p. 62. 18 Ibid., p. 61. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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Horace’s poems give every evidence of being carefully labored, and Virgil is said to have spent an entire day reducing ten or twelve lines into a perfected one or two hexameters. In place of an hour’s oral recitation - a mixture of memory and improvisation - one finds a year’s meticulous labor as the literary epic took the place of the authentic, or oral, epic. The connection with music disappeared almost entirely.19
In the change described here, at least three distinct but related things were happening. The most obvious is the severing of the connection between music and poetry. But this change is simply the necessary result of the other two changes that were occurring. The other two changes concern the social context in which poetry was produced and performed. In the second place then, instead of poetry as part of a public performance with evident social implications, we now have quiet writing in the study which brought about (at least eventually) equally quiet reading in the study. Thus both the poet and his audience are now alone, solitary, no longer part of a community which nourished poetry and in reference to which the poet did his work. Equally important is the third thing that happened here, which likewise follows from the creation and reading of poetry as a solitary act. This is the separation of high cultural poetry from popular poetry. Previously the poetry sung by the bard had to be acceptable to all social classes, for the community for which the poet sang, and of which the poet was also a part, comprised the whole of the population. The poet had to provide entertainment for the masses, as well as for others. In England the type of dramatic entertainment that could please all social classes persisted until the closure of the theaters in 1642. A good example of such a poet and dramatist is Shakespeare, whose plays include both scenes of slapstick as well as the most sublime poetry and tragedy. Such changes in time brought about the complete disappearance of poetry from life. Now that poetic/musical performances were no longer the concern of society as a whole, poetry began that slow withdrawal from life which has been nearly completed in our time. To be sure, there were many vicissitudes in this process, new outbreaks of popular poetry and music, but in the end, they came to nothing. The scene in Beowulf of the bard’s performance gives a picture of this lost type of entertainment, a poetic/musical performance that we have replaced with television. Then song and revelry rose in the hall; Before Healfdene’s leader the harp was struck And hall-joy wakened; the song was sung, 19
Ibid., p. 17.
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Hrothgar’s gleeman rehearsed the lay Of the sons of Finn when the terror befell them.20
This kind of poetry naturally included music, just as so many variety shows on television include singing and dance. For our present purposes, though, the point to be noted is that the divorce of poetry from music signaled its divorce from everyday life, first retreating into the privacy of the study, then vanishing altogether. The things that I mentioned above that caused and accompanied the separation of music from poetry - the different context in which poetry was made and heard or read and the separation of high cultural poetry from popular poetry - are of course akin to what happened in the other arts. When poets, like painters, were functional artists, people still remembered that the fine arts were arts in much the same way as pot making or dress making are arts. They had public and social ends and public and social uses. In the cultures of Homer and Beowulf and the Middle Ages, the best music and the best visual artistic works were part of life. People saw and listened to them as parts of ordinary community life; they adorned their churches and guild halls. Today such artistic works have been removed from ordinary life and put into special times or places such as concerts or museums or poetry readings, events which are not seen by the average person as something of interest. And although there was sometimes a distinction between high cultural and popular cultural works in the past, it was a distinction not an enmity, and the two traditions continued to nourish each other.21 Rustic villagers may not have danced to the works of John Dunstable or Josquin des Pr´ez, but they still moved in a world in which high culture was not cut off from ordinary life but appealed to and sustained the entire people, since it was an integral part of the corporate life of the entire people. In addition to the tragic separation of the artist from a real social role, the removal of the arts from society both created that unnatural separation of high culture from popular culture, and, with the rise of our commercial and industrial civilization, also brought about the death of popular culture. For what is often called popular culture 20 Beowulf , translated by Charles W. Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, c. 1940), p. 35. 21 The influence of popular culture on high culture is well-known and has continued even into our own time. Less widely realized is the existence of an influence in the opposite direction. “We also know little about the age of the various styles of folk music in Europe. Still, we are sure that for centuries there has been a close relationship between the art music of the continent and its folk music. . . .” and “The ballad was developed in Europe in the Middle Ages - first, presumably, by song composers of city and court - and evidently passed into oral tradition and the repertories of folk cultures thereafter.” Bruno Nettl, Folk and Traditional Music of the Western Continents (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 2d ed., 1973), pp. 38 and 52. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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today is in reality mass culture. Popular culture is produced and performed according to traditions handed down in a particular place, and such an artistic tradition can hardly survive in today’s world of electronic communication and mass-produced music and pictures. Ironically, though, it is in the products of mass culture that one finds functional art flourishing: music intended for dancing, poetry sung to music, paintings or statues intended to stimulate religious devotion or patriotic feelings. Unfortunately, largely cut off from healthy cultural roots and often produced with an eye solely for money, most of these rightly excite disdain in the minds of high culture artists, who fail to see that they themselves have contributed to the conditions which have led to the predominance of such mass culture. In speaking of the deleterious effects which the segregation of the fine arts and of the artist himself from an ordinary social role have had on the course of Western culture, we should not adopt too narrow a view of this. As in many matters, it is a question of what predominates. If the arts are generally seen in their rightful place as part of society and as having a social role, then the poetry or music which is enjoyed by an individual alone will not adversely affect things. Certainly there have always been such private reading and music making, and this is as it should be.22 But when such private use of the fine arts is preponderant and seen as the norm, then we will experience the bad results of which I have spoken. Although it is possible to chronicle the history of the various types and forms of the arts in a purely formal manner, noting how particular technical problems were successively approached and solved, nevertheless the forms of the arts are always symptoms and effects of social and cultural realities. The various ways in which artists work and exercise their art and in turn interact with the other members of society presuppose certain forms of social order, and can in turn themselves be causes of social change. For example, the massive orchestral works of the nineteenth century were possible only because the institution of the concert had emerged in the preceding
22 Although apparently there was originally some uneasiness about this on the part of artists. “Beethoven was the first example, and a dangerous one, of the ‘free artist’ who obeys his so-called inner compulsion and follows only his genius. A hundred years before, this attitude of the composer toward his art and toward the world was quite unheard of; in the case of J.S. Bach it appears that he was afraid to come forward with his most intimate and lonely works, the Inventions and Sinfonias, and later the Well-tempered Clavier and the Art of Fugue, without having some special pretext. Therefore he disguised them as pedagogical examples ‘for the use and profit of the musical youth desirous of learning as well as for the pastime of those already skilled in this study.’ Music that did not have a religious or social function still needed some excuse. Even Haydn and Mozart hardly ever wrote music that did not have some such defined purpose.” Alfred Einstein, “Beethoven’s Military Style” in Essays on Music, p. 244. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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century.23 And the art museum was possible only because painting and statues were no longer created for some social use, while in turn the very existence of museums has meant that high cultural objects are now created with the intent of being kept out of sight in special buildings, while the products of mass culture are able to invade our public spaces. And if all this is true, then it behooves those who are concerned with the arts not to overlook the impact of the social role of both arts and artist. St. Thomas’s off-hand remark about saws, then, implies an entire theory about art as well as of the place of the artist and the arts in society. When the fine arts are divorced from their ends, when they pursue beauty without regard to social use, then they become subject to the private whims of the artist. They also begin to be separated from the ordinary life of society, allowing the rise of mass culture, which is inimical to both high culture and a true popular culture. But a recovery of the meaning of art as recta ratio factibilium, with all that is implied by that, can make possible an integration of art and the life of the artist with the social order, to the health and benefit of all three. Thomas Storck 51-F Ridge Road, Greenbelt, Maryland 20770 U.S.A. Email:
[email protected]
23 “The concert audience came into existence with the oratorios and concerti grossi and organ concertos of Handel. . . . In earlier times there was no audience in the modern sense. The church was the only place where a musician was able to reach a fairly large audience - but it cannot be said that the congregation was a real audience with an interest in musical and esthetic values. A church musician serves the church. A churchgoer is there for edification and music is only a means to an end. . . In the past it was very difficult to listen to music just for enjoyment, as a ‘connoisseur’.” Alfred Einstein, “Early Concert Life” in Essays on Music, pp. 26–7. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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When the Second Vatican Council opened the Catholic Church to a cooperative relationship with the world, it encouraged its members, in Gaudium et Spes, “to work closely with their contemporaries” and “to try to understand their ways of thinking and feeling, as these find expression in current culture.”2 The manner of working with contemporaries is given concerted reflection in this “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,” but the document is not specific in its instruction to the faithful in the more nebulous matter of understanding contemporaries’ thinking and feeling. The Council’s “Decree on the Mass Media” provides some guidance, through its attentiveness to art and to mass media outlets as barometers of culture. Yet it gives no specific attention to advertising, where alone we find the sole aim of harnessing the human needs, aspirations, fears, and values of a people, in order to elicit the specific concrete response of product purchase. Since advertising is an eminently practical field, systematic analysis of the human person to whom advertising is directed is not within that field’s chosen purview. The field’s proponents, therefore, are professionally unconcerned with the subjects of theological reflection except where these coincide with buying motivations. But the identification of these motivations and the means of marshalling them can reveal the underlying anthropology of advertising. Is this anthropology at all recognizable from a Christian, or more narrowly Catholic, theological view? If so, might not the science of advertising have lessons for the Church in the communication of its message? These are important questions to answer, firstly, because advertising has been indicted at least implicitly in post-conciliar pronouncements warning of the dangers of materialism and consumerism and, secondly, because attunement to the significant lifestyle influence which is advertising can assist in the correlation between religion and culture that allows the Christian message to be heard.3 In a curious way today, the Church’s efforts at evangelization must include even its own members who—in this age of growing secularization, at least in the United States and in Western Europe where advertising is pervasive and even formative of certain societal streams—are perhaps as likely to be “cultural” participants in the life of the Church as truly religious participants. Identifying basic values communicated in and constructed by advertising, as well as methodological trends in advertising, can provide a sketch of an implicit anthropology that could be interpreted theologically for a “response” by the Church that truly communicates with the “modern world.” To this end, briefly reviewed will 2
Ibid. Recent papal documents discussing these perils include John Paul II’s encyclicals Redemptor Hominis, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, and Centesimus Annus, as well as Paul VI’s encyclical Populorum Progressio and his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi. 3
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be the motivations of today’s consumers as they are communicated in or influenced by the value sets identified by today’s marketers— advertising professionals, as well as researchers, product designers, public relations practitioners, and media consultants—to uncover basic anthropological assumptions that may or may not be shared with those of theology. Next, the thought of Bernard Lonergan on values and the communication of the gospel will be glimpsed, to provide theory and framework for the indispensable theological activity of communicating Christianity to the larger culture. These initial steps are preparatory—justification and methodological guidance—for the final two sections of this article which suggest practical value of advertising’s methods for the Church’s efforts at evangelization. First, current key methods of research and marketing used by advertisers will be considered, in order to spot trends that may be consonant with those of theology either in the methods themselves or in the anthropological assumptions undergirding them. Second, exploratory thoughts about how the Church might beneficially attend to the messages in and methods of advertising will be offered. This study does not intend to provide a comprehensive analysis of consumerism and its influence upon the Church, of reception by consumers of popular culture, or of advertising’s influence upon culture at large, projects which have received considerable attention from such as Tom Beaudoin, Kelton Cobb, Michael Paul Gallagher, Craig M. Gay, John Francis Kavanaugh, Vincent J. Miller, and R. Laurence Moore.4 It aims to offer a complementary vantage point— advertising’s own intentions and methods in the execution of its craft of persuasion. The vantage points are not exclusive, of course, for advertisers’ very business is to know how consumers will react to its methods and messages and to create strategies accordingly. But if any component of advertising is not objectionable and therefore a potential lesson for the Church which has in common with the 4 Important studies include Tom Beaudoin’s Consuming Faith: Integrating Who We Are with What We Buy (Lanham, Maryland, and Oxford: Sheed & Ward, 2003) and Generation X: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X (San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1998), Kelton Cobb’s The Blackwell Guide to Theology and Popular Culture (Malden, Massachusetts, Oxford, and Carlton, Victoria: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), Michael Paul Gallagher’s Clashing Symbols: An Introduction to Faith and Culture (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1998) [original edition, London: Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd., 1997], Craig M Gay’s Cash Values: Money and the Erosion of Meaning in Today’s Society (Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, and Vancouver, British Columbia: Regent College Publishing, 2004) [original edition, as part of New College Lecture Series, Sydney, Australia: University of South Wales Press Ltd., 2003], John Francis Kavanaugh’s Following Christ in a Consumer Society: The Spirituality of Cultural Resistance (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1981), Vincent J. Miller’s Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture (New York and London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004), and R. Laurence Moore’s Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1994). C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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field of advertising the primary task of communication of a message to elicit action, the Church eventually must consider not only the effects of advertising upon our world but the causal factors that are responsible for the existence of the field at all.5 This requires direct engagement with the profession of advertising—no easy feat given the aforementioned lack of an explicit philosophically theoretical foundation of advertising to serve as a basis of comparison and contrast with religious and specifically Christian grounds. Hence, this work is a rudimentary effort to initiate a theological conversation from the “inside” of advertising. First sought must be a warrant for such communication; this is found in anthropological assumptions shared by Christianity and advertising.
Motivations: Communication and Construction of Values Advertising appeals to buying motivations in the form of needs that are perceived to be able to be fulfilled through purchase of products or services material, intellectual, emotional, and/or spiritual. More controversially, advertising creates buying motivations in the form of desires to be met through product or service purchase. The Pontifical Council for Social Communications, in its Ethics in Advertising issued in 1997, was particularly concerned about this deliberate construction of desires that “cause people to feel and act upon cravings for items and services they do not need.” This can exacerbate socioeconomic injustices by persuading the poor to attend mistakenly to “artificially created” rather than true needs, thereby forestalling progress toward alleviation of real problems.6 Beyond influencing perceived needs for products, in distinguishing products, advertisers communicate as well as influence the values of individuals and of societies. About this, too, the Pontifical Council for Social Communications was concerned. Advertisers tend to cater only to demographics with buying power, disregarding other segments of society; they can resort to stereotyping and to pandering to base instincts, thereby
5 While it is an easy assumption that advertising exists because of consumerism, the case could be made that advertising has always existed. The great rhetoricians of Ancient Rome, for example, were no less adept at promoting their aims by showing an agenda’s consistency with an accepted or desired worldview than advertisers are at convincing of the importance—real or imagined—of today’s products and services to our world. 6 Pontifical Council for Social Communications, Ethics in Advertising (Vatican City: Vatican, 22 February 1997), para. 10 [updated 15 July 1999; cited 5 April 2007]. Available from http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/pccs/documents/ rc_pc_pccs_doc_22021997_ethics-in-ad_en.html. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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lowering moral and even artistic standards.7 These practical problems are the result of a basic principle at work in advertising—the construction of subtle and not-so-subtle relationships in the minds of consumers between particular products—and brands of products— and value sets. These relationships are meant to play a powerful role in self-identity so as to motivate purchasing, and it is on this level that advertising can be most effective and therefore either beneficial or dangerous. To explain, the needs of human persons, which advertisers generally assume are expressed adequately if not definitively in the now classical listing of Abraham Maslow—physiological needs, safety needs, social needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization needs—are met in particular social and cultural contexts, and there is diversity of opinion on whether or not they are met across these contexts according to the hierarchy suggested by Maslow.8 So while its concrete and immediate aim is to sell a product and to train consumers to be predisposed to purchase other products by a seller in the future, advertising must concern itself with the cultural and personal values of targeted demographics because these may condition the perception of needs and their manner of fulfillment. Advertising even seeks to influence these values insofar as the values may predispose consumers to purchase. Since values condition need fulfillment, one way of exploring the anthropology assumed by advertising is to examine the values that marketers identify as driving a particular society. Because advertising is directed to targeted groups, advertising analyses will not necessarily net a single anthropology. Looking at Western civilization where advertising is most pervasive and sophisticated, marketers report that values show a marked shift in our day, from a “self-denial ethic” to a “self-fulfillment ethic,” from a “higher standard of living” to a “better quality of life,” from “traditional sex roles” to “blurring of sex roles,” from an “accepted definition of success” to an “individualized definition of success,” from “traditional family life” to “alternative families,” from “faith in industry” and “institutions” to “self-reliance,” from “liv[ing] to work” to “work[ing] to live,” from “hero worship” to “love of ideas,” from “expansionism” to “pluralism,” from “patriotism” to a “less nationalistic” attitude, from “unparalleled growth” to a “growing sense of limits,” from “industrial growth” to “information and service growth,” and from “receptivity 7 Ibid., para. 10–12. The document recommends three moral principles for advertising—truthfulness, respect for the dignity of the human person as an intellectual being with freedom, and social responsibility (Ibid., para. 15–17). 8 See Abraham H. Maslow, Motivation and Personality (New York: Harper, 1954). Maslow’s hierarchy included the named needs in the order given, with self-actualization as the highest need but the last to be met, after the more basic needs. The 1970 revised edition of Maslow’s work included two categories above self-actualization—to know and understand, and aesthetics. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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to technology” to “technology orientation.”9 Such shifts are tracked in order to mark and to respond to trends and sometimes to drive them; as such, they may be temporary and therefore not reliable indicators of basic human qualities. But the categories used for such identification are more stable, revealing certain commonly-held beliefs about the human person. From the categories of analysis given for the values of Western civilization a picture of the human person emerges (1) as one lacking a “perfection” at which progress can be made, whether through asceticism or through indulgence, (2) as one who must determine the value of the material relative to other essential properties of human life, (3) as one who is gendered, which tends to influence societal roles, (4) as one with a drive to achieve, to make progress in life, (5) as one who is social, whatever the communal construction of one’s life may be, (6) as one who is dependent upon others yet responsible for self sustenance and fulfillment, (7) as one whose life must involve occupation or industry, perhaps in balance with leisure, (8) as one who is inspired by models or forms, either of other persons or of ideas, (9) as one consciously both distinct from and united with “others” in essential properties, and (10) as one with privilege in and responsibility to the world which changes rapidly due to forces within and without the person which can enhance or detract from personal development at both individual and societal levels.10 Intriguing links can be made between these ten characteristics and those of the human person as validated by the Christian tradition. For example, Gerald O’Collins, in his book Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus, cites nine “essential traits of human existence”; human persons are “bodily, rational, free, emotional, remembering, dynamic, social, and limited/unlimited beings.”11 A critical anthropological correlation is not an aim of this project and, since it requires little imagination to understand the theological and philosophical dimensions of human reality suggested by O’Collins’s concise summary of its components, that which must be noted is only that implicitly included in O’Collins’s outline are the categories suggested by marketers’ analyses of values; the two sets of human characteristics are not antithetical. Simplistic and ultimately 9 Roger D. Blackwell, Paul W. Miniard, and James F. Engel, Consumer Behavior, 10th ed. (Mason, Ohio: Thomson South-Western, 2006), p. 436, cf. Joseph T. Plummer, “Changing Values,” Futurist 23 (January/February 1989), p. 10. 10 While there is overlapping of values in many of the categories identified, roughly each value shift identified inspired its own category, with the exception of the final two categories. “‘Expansionism’ to ‘pluralism,’” as well as “‘patriotism’ to a ‘less nationalistic’ attitude” inspired category nine. “‘Unparalleled growth’ to a ‘growing sense of limits,’” “‘industrial growth’ to ‘information and service growth,’” and “‘receptivity to technology’ to ‘technology orientation’” together inspired category ten. 11 O’Collins, Gerald, Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 231–232. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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false is a typical dualistic presentation of the person in the larger culture versus the person in the Church. For all of the reports of Western civilization’s demise, it should not be a large surprise that values of Western civilization should bear some likeness, however dim, with those of a Christian anthropology, so imbedded has been Christianity in the development of the Western world. The evidence exists especially in Europe, where, despite the Constitution’s absence of mention of Christianity or other religions that contributed to European civilization, ancient and medieval churches, paintings, sculptures, and music survive as some of its prized emblems. And historical, theological, and otherwise academic writings of or preserved by the Church remain foundational for many fields of study today, if not always for the self-understanding of all Western Europeans and those of their descent. Marketing professionals explicitly credit societal units such as religious institutions, as well as families and educational institutions, with instillation of values in societies’ members. Indeed, marketing studies even have confirmed explicit connections between religious belief and consumption patterns. For example, studies suggest that, in the United States, many are more interested in spirituality than in “traditional religion,” apparently because “[s]pirituality is more personal and practical, involves stress reduction more than salvation, and is about feeling good, not just being good.”12 The focus on spirituality coincides with the burgeoning “big business” of “an increase in the sales of religious books, spiritual retreats, religious logos on apparel, alternative health care, spiritual education, religious broadcast stations, overseas missions trips, and crossover religious music . . . , ” according to the authors of the most widely-read textbook for college marketing students in the United States for the last couple of decades, Consumer Behavior, now in its tenth edition.13 These authors also credit to this enlarged concept of religion the high number of Americans—90 percent— who report that religion is important in their “everyday life.”14 Yet a poll conducted and reported by Newsweek in March 2007 would seem to repudiate part of this analysis by validating the impact in the United States of traditional religion: of American adults, 91 percent reported belief in God, 87 percent reported identification with a particular religion, and 82 percent reported that their religious affiliation is Christian.15 The latter number has been validated by recent 12 Blackwell et al., Consumer Behavior, 439, cf. Richard Cimino and Don Lattin, “Choosing My Religion,” American Demographics (April 1999), pp. 62–65. 13 Ibid. See Moore’s Selling God for an analysis of the history of religion’s marketing in North America. 14 Ibid., cf. Louise Witt, “Whose Side is God On?,” American Demographics (February 2004), pp. 18–19. 15 Brian Braiker, Newsweek at MSNBC.com [posted 31 March 2007; cited 31 March 2007]. Available from http://www.msnbc.sms.com/id/17879317/site/newsweek/. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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Gallup pools.16 This dominant spiritual identification of Americans with traditional religion is perhaps tempered, though, by another trend earlier reported by Newsweek: some Christian denominations have in recent decades engaged in “niche marketing,” especially for the attention of “Boomers,” in catering to the larger culture’s values such as “autonomy and freedom of choice” using approaches such as “megachurches” with “a cafeteria of worship options” and “complete lifestyle services.”17 Just as marketers identify values for a practical aim, there may be pragmatic issues that govern churches’ attentions to the cultural values impacting our “buying” motivations, then. To be sure, there is danger in this. Vincent J. Miller has discussed the commodification impulse of those in a consumer society, showing how this tempts religious believers to pick and choose from their traditions, unmooring practices from the community in which they have their meaning.18 “Cafeteria Catholics,” to use a term in common parlance, have been a concern for the Church for decades now. At what point in churches’ openness to the world does religion become simply servant to culture? Likewise, at what point does the church disappear in the pool of new cultural streams if it cannot articulate its relevance to the world at large? In Europe, a 2004 Gallup collection of data from the Eurobarometer and the European Social Survey revealed dwindling church attendance, with 20 percent or greater weekly worship service attendance reported in only nine European Union member countries.19 But trust in religious institutions remains high in parts of Europe, with half to three-quarters of adults affirming such in one-third of European Union countries.20 This is a perhaps hopefully impressive number given the frequent 16 See Frank Newport, “Questions and Answers About Americans’ Religion,” Gallup, Inc., at Gallup.com [issued 24 December 2007; cited 8 February 2008]. Available from http://www.gallup.com/poll/103459/Questions-Answers-About-AmericansReligion.aspx. See also Joseph Carroll, “Religion Is ‘Very Important’ to 6 in 10 Americans,” Gallup, Inc., at Gallup.com [issued 24 June 2004; cited 8 February 2008]. Available from http://www.gallup.com/poll/12115/Religion-Very-Important-Americans.aspx. 17 Jerry Adler and Julie Scelfo, Newsweek at MSNBC.com [posted 2 December 2006; cited 2 December 2006]. Available from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14754222/ site/newsweek/. 18 See especially Miller’s Consuming Religion, as well as his articles “The iPod, the Cell Phone, and the Church: Discipleship, Consumer Culture, and a Globalized World,” in Getting on Message: Challenging the Christian Right from the Heart of the Gospel, ed. Peter Laarman (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), pp. 173–191, and “Taking Consumer Culture Seriously,” Horizons 27, no. 2 (Fall 2000), pp. 276–295. 19 Robert Manchin, “Religion in Europe: Trust Not Filling the Pews,” Gallup, Inc., at Gallup.com [issued 21 September 2004; cited 8 February 2008]. Available from http://www.gallup.com/poll/13117/Religion-Europe-Trust-Filling-Pews.aspx. 20 See also Robert Manchin, “Trust in Religious Institutions Varies Across EU Map,” Gallup, Inc., at Gallup.com [issued 24 August 2004; cited 11 February 2008]. Available from http:/www.gallup.com/poll/12796/Trust-Religious-Institutions-VariesAcross-Map.aspx. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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loud cries of the triumph of secularization in Western Europe, but it means that less than half of adults in two-thirds of European Union member countries claim trust in religious institutions. Interestingly, advertisers’ very job is to articulate the relevance of its products and services to those who may sense no need of them. The concern about the domination or elimination of religion by culture raises the critical matter of a hierarchy of values. While one contemporary approach to correlation of religion and culture is to dissolve the distinction that allows religion to critique culture, another common response of Christian churches to the larger culture and those who market it, so to speak, is a wholesale critique of its values. It may be that an effective, mediating response—one that preserves the possibility of mutual critique of Church and world even as it promotes genuine “dialogue” that might lead to common efforts fostering human development—would be concerted attention to shared values and a consideration of the possibility that disjunction between cultural and religious values occurs largely with respect to the ordering of values rather than with respect to the values themselves. Given the suggestion of a broadly-speaking shared anthropology assumed by advertising and Christianity, with their overlapping constituencies in the West (if not elsewhere, too), attention to value placement promises fruitful “conversation” between Christianity and the larger culture, for a more effective “response” to culture by the Church. This matter can be considered via insights from Lonergan.
Theology and Advertising: Interpretation and Response Lonergan noted in Method in Theology that division within community may result from “a diversity of culture and the stratification of individuals into classes of higher and lower competence” or “from the presence and absence of intellectual, moral, or religious conversion.”21 The latter case is the more severe, as it can indicate the presence of ideology in those “alienated from . . . true self . . . in the refus[al] of self-transcendence” which leads to conversion.22 If it were the case that advertising bespeaks a decisive division within the world community in which resides the Church, that would mean that there is nothing reflected in advertising of the larger culture—or of particular cultures that may or may not intersect with the concerns of the Church—that can serve as the basis of genuine fruitful 21 Bernard J.F. Lonergan, Method in Theology, repr. ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), p. 357. 22 Ibid. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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communication. The assumption that this is so can lead to alienation of the Church from the larger culture, and vice versa, in accusatory stances that create polarization where recognition of even meager common perceptions could result in growth in understanding leading to conversion. But the shared values noted of the Church and the larger culture suggest that any “division” between the Church and the world reflected in today’s dominant advertising in the West is not necessarily due to a refusal of self-transcendence, even where it might signal a misidentification of the means of self-transcendence. Therefore, there is of course the possibility that the Church can communicate successfully the message of Christ in a way that will allow the larger world to understand it and to receive it. As Lonergan wrote with respect to his functional specialty of communications, the final of his eight theological specialties: The Christian message is to be communicated to all nations. Such communication presupposes that preachers and teachers enlarge their horizons to include an accurate and intimate understanding of the culture and the language of the people they address. They must grasp the virtual resources of that culture and that language, and they must use those virtual resources creatively so that the Christian message becomes, not disruptive of the culture, not an alien patch superimposed upon it, but a line of development within that culture.23
Lonergan submitted that the pluralist “does not consider it his task either to promote the differentiation of consciousness [as of personal and cultural development24 ] or to ask people to renounce their own culture. Rather he would proceed from within their culture and he would seek ways and means for making it into a vehicle for communicating the Christian message.”25 He recognized three types of “theology in its external relations,” which is the functional specialty of communications: those of an academic interdisciplinary nature, those that are “the transpositions that theological thought has to develop if religion is to retain its identity and yet at the same time find access into the minds and hearts of men of all cultures and class,” and “the adaptations needed to make full and proper use of the diverse media of communication that are available at any place 23
Ibid., p. 362. Ibid., pp. 305–319. 25 Ibid., p. 363. Lonergan stated: “If one is to communicate with persons of another culture, one must use the resources of their culture. To use simply the resources of one’s own culture is not to communicate with the other but to remain locked up in one’s own. At the same time, it is not enough simply to employ the resources of the other culture. One must do so creatively. One has to discover the manner in which the Christian message can be expressed effectively and accurately in the other culture” (Ibid., p. 300). Such discovery is not an easy task, for, as Lonergan also noted, “A culture is a set of meanings and values informing a common way of life, and there are as many cultures as there are distinct sets of such meanings and values” (Ibid., p. 301). 24
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and time.”26 While this project is of the first type, it seeks to offer guiding insights into the other two types. Lonergan’s discussion of values assists. In Lonergan’s vision, cultural and personal values are immediately transcended by religious values. Conversely, in advertising and marketing, societal/cultural values are preeminent; religious values may influence but not supplant them. The textbook Consumer Behavior explains that individuals “abandon values when the values no longer meet the needs of society. In fact, some anthropologists view culture as an entity serving humans in their attempts to meet their most basic biological and social needs. When norms no longer provide gratification to a society, the norms lose their relevance to the majority of people.”27 Clearly it is a daunting task to reverse a hierarchy of values. Church documents such as Ethics in Advertising provide ethical guidelines for advertising and for media generally, designed to keep media’s own consumer mentality in check (e.g., “voluntary ethical codes” for advertisers,28 governmental regulation of advertising,29 media monitoring of advertising,30 personal ethical responsibility among advertisers31 ). These are important, indubitably. But since the purveyors of culture are themselves “products” of culture to some degree, they are not necessarily any more capable than their audience of critiquing that culture and its expressions. Recommendations for the Church itself—chiefly for the hierarchical apostolate (e.g., communicating the Gospel message in “new ways” via “new techniques,” educating Church members about advertising’s role and “its relevance to the work of the Church”32 )—are more easily controlled. Ideally, the goal would be not only to make Church members—particularly those of the lay apostolate—wiser in the degree to which they accept consumerist philosophies but to make them more capable of making the correlations between the Gospel and cultural messages that would help them to see how they might reverse in their own minds and lives 26 Ibid., pp. 132–133. It is at the level of the seventh functional specialty, systematics, that “appropriate systems of conceptualization” are worked out “to remove apparent inconsistencies” in “doctrinal expression” and, importantly with respect to communications’ concern for cultural plurality, “to move towards some grasp of spiritual matters both from their own inner coherence and from the analogies offered by more familiar human experience” (Ibid., p. 132). In Lonergan’s first four functional specialties—research, interpretation, history, and dialectic—the tasks of theology include consideration of broad human experience as well as that specifically Christian. For concise explanations of the eight functional specialties—research, interpretation, history, dialectic, foundations, doctrines, systematics, and communications—see Method in Theology, pp. 127–136. 27 Blackwell et al., Consumer Behavior, p. 431. 28 Pontifical Council for Social Communications, Ethics in Advertising, para. 19. 29 Ibid., para. 20. 30 Ibid., para. 21. 31 Ibid., para. 23. 32 Ibid., para. 22. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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the dominant cultural ordering of values. In this way the onus is upon Church members to live the Christian message in the culture, yet in counter to the culture insofar as Gospel values are placed, for an enculturation of the Gospel that could even impact advertising since that field is itself market-driven even as it in part drives the market. The new style of evangelization that can result when Church members internalize and then communicate by example this transposition of values requires that the commonalities of values that the Church shares with the larger culture be emphasized. The starting point could be the seemingly common human experience of the drive for transcendence which, as has been noted, appears to be an acknowledged dimension of life by most “Westerners.” Indeed, even in Western Europe where many claim secularism ultimately will reign, there are reports of new religious fervor in some locales.33 Gaudium et Spes recognizes that all people “feel unlimited in their desires and their sense of being destined for a higher life,” despite their “many limitations” due to their status as “created beings.”34 In our time our limitations are manifested in materialism, “fashionable” world-views offering a false sense of peace, attempts toward an “earthly paradise” to be achieved “through human effort alone,” and the “foolhardiness” of believing that one creates one’s own meaning of life.35 Indeed, advertisers attempt to construct such expectations; so, too, do they sometimes attempt to convince that a kind of transcendence—even if only a self-image unencumbered by the reality of one’s concrete aims and actions—can be achieved through product purchase. “Nonetheless,” the Pastoral Constitution offered encouragingly that “in the face of modern developments there is a growing body of people who are asking the most fundamental of all questions or are glimpsing them with a keener insight: What is humanity? What is the meaning of suffering, evil, death, which have not been eliminated by all this progress? What is the purpose of these achievements, purchased at so high a price? What can people contribute to society? What can they expect from it? What happens after this earthly life is ended?”36 From recognition of these questions flow key values that must be promoted beyond others. But other values must be validated explicitly, 33
See, as a sample of such reports, Andrew Higgins, “In Europe, God Is (Not) Dead,” The Wall Street Journal Online, 14 July 2007 [cited 8 February 2008]. Available from http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118434936941966055.html. 34 Gaudium et Spes, para. 10. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. These questions are communicated in “positive values” of “modern culture”: “study of the sciences and exact fidelity to truth in scientific investigation, the necessity of teamwork in technology, the sense of international solidarity, a growing awareness of the expert’s responsibility to help and defend the rest of humanity, and an eagerness to improve the standard of living of everyone, especially of those who are deprived of responsibility or suffer from cultural destitution” (Ibid., para. 57). C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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too. Otherwise, individuals within the Church experience a disjunction between the great questions and lower pleasures; they experience a dualism that is not only theologically incorrect but that does not allow true integration of the Gospel message and daily living whereas Gaudium et Spes has as its stated goal “to speak to all people in order to unfold the mystery that is humankind and cooperate in tackling the main problems facing the world today.”37 The world today is one of instant communication; ideas and the facts of events are disseminated widely but received with varying degrees of interest, understanding, and/or acceptance. In this situation culture can become both more commonly shared (as in a global culture that has in view the entirety of the planet and not simply a civilization considered normative) and more proliferative (as of many cultures or subcultures formed from increasing knowledge of the sheer diversity of human situations and from rapid development which does not carry all people(s) at the same rate or to the same degree). This can be an opportunity for the Church, for in such a nexus of culture(s) the common human experience of transcendence, the questions that this engenders, and the values that result can more readily appear. And there does seem to be a mode of discourse expressive of such central human concerns across many, if not all, cultures. Story and the unique contributions that the field of advertising contributes to story’s development and “recitation” can serve as vehicle of the Church’s “response” to the world. Two current, related methodological trends in marketing and advertising are ethnography and narrative, approaches consonant with those of academic disciplines including theology, as well as of the Church. They are effective, in each instance, not only because of their ability to express the needs and desires of the human person but because of their ability to persuade the human person. Theologically, the ability of the human person to be persuaded is part and parcel of the possibility of human salvation, for those with free will must choose to accept God. But of course, this possibility of being persuaded can be exploited in ways that will not lead us to our ultimate destination; this is manipulation, the danger against which the Church wishes to guard the world and the very act of which advertising often is rightly accused. The Church also is charged with cooperating with divine persuasion, functioning as a vehicle of such to its members and to the world at large. To the extent that advertisers’ methods are effective at persuasion of the human person, they may be effective for the Church. Methods are not to be confused with media. The Church must do more than utilize available communication vehicles—if and 37
Ibid., para. 10.
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when that is appropriate—if it is to reach the minds and hearts of contemporary persons whose thoughts and feelings have been trained by secular culture at least as thoroughly as by religious tradition.
Methods: Marketing/Advertising The basic marketing of a product or service as a cultivator of lifestyle and as a means of constructing one’s identity and meaning is a strategy that has been described thoroughly by those practicing business and theology alike.38 The novelty recently introduced by advertisers is the combination of ethnography and storytelling to accomplish this. It might be readily and correctly suggested that the methods of advertising change with the times and that even its current storytelling device so compatible with theological methods is not universal and may even be a trend. But that is to the point that theology must engage with such changes if it is to benefit from advertising’s own effective readings of the pulse of the times. A frequent current focus upon rapidly-developing technology’s influence upon our views of self and world fails sometimes to recognize innovations in method as critically as those of media. In the order of method, the “branded” lives of consumers formed by such as logo and celebrity endorsements is an obvious marketing device; others more subtle and as given to evolution and change require as much scrutiny. Ethnography, the branch of anthropology that studies and records descriptively phenomena of human cultures, only recently has been adopted by and adapted for the industry of marketing which includes advertising. Noting that consumers studied in focus groups and via questionnaires and polls do not always report accurately their preferences and behavior, market research companies in the last decade have implemented ethnographic methods of research to observe consumers directly in their natural settings—their homes, their workplaces, their centers of recreation.39 Data is collected on consumers’ 38 See especially Cobb, The Blackwell Guide, pages pp. 184–188 on “Accessorized identities.” 39 See a sampling of literature discussing the use of ethnography in marketing efforts, including research, product design, and advertising: Alladi Venkatesh, “Interpretive Research: Lessons from the Field and A Report from the World of Practice,” Advances in Consumer Research 32 (2005), pp. 347–348; Jean Halliday, “Nissan Delves Into Truck Owner Psyche,” Advertising Age 74, no. 48 (1 December 2003), p. 11; Olga Gonzalez, “Futurespeak” Interview: “Solutions for Evolving Consumer Needs,” American Demographics 26, no. 3 (April 2004), p. 44; Kate Maddox, “Researchers Learn More From What People Do Than Say,” B to B 91, no. 4 (3 April 2006), pp. 63–66; Todd Wasserman, “Sharpening the Focus,” Brandweek 44, no. 40 (3 November 2003), p. 28; Stephen R. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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actual versus reported diets of food, television, and such, which can then used to develop products that meet actual rather than perceived consumer needs or desires and to place products within cultural milieus of value sets that attract targeted groups of consumers. From a theological point of view, there could be little better indication of the fallenness of human beings than that we either do not know ourselves well enough to report accurately our behavior or we do not choose to report honestly that which we do know about ourselves. Interestingly, in marketing literature there is little speculation about why consumers’ own reports are not reliable indications of their behavior. Those collecting and analyzing ethnographic data have given a guess where Church attendance is concerned, however, suggesting that we report that which we believe that we should do; in places in Western Europe where secularization is valued, churchgoers may under-report their attendance at worship services, whereas in the United States where religious impulses are valued, churchgoers may over-report such attendance.40 One practical application of ethnographic research is storytelling. Storytelling in advertising occurs today prominently in two ways. First, magazine and television advertisements sometimes are using ethnographic strategy not only to conduct research but to apply that research in advertisements that elevate a product or service in consumers’ consciousness by association with a culture, a lifestyle, or a cause of which they already have positive impressions. More ambitiously, ethnographic elements are used in advertising to promote a product or service along with a lifestyle, a cause, or a value set.
Rosenthal and Mark Capper, “Ethnographies in the Front End: Designing for Enhanced Customer Experiences,” Journal of Product Innovation Management 23, no. 3 (May 2006), pp. 215–237; Drew Barrand, “Closer Encounters,” Marketing (UK) (14 July 2004), pp. 48– 49; Louella Miles, “Living Their Lives,” Marketing (UK) (11 December 2003), pp. 27–28; Theo Downes-LeGuin, “Integrate Ethnographic Data Into Decisions,” Marketing News 39, no. 4 (1 March 2005), p. 51; Gavin Johnston, “Leveling the Field,” Marketing Research 17, no. 4 (Winter 2005), pp. 16–19; and Erwin Ephron, “The Reality Show of Research,” MediaWeek 16, no. 11 (13 March 2006), p. 28. 40 A Gallup report addresses this “social desirability” theory as pertaining to church attendance, cautioning that observational data suggesting a discrepancy between Americans’ claims and action may itself be inaccurate: “Americans may actually be accurately reporting attendance at various forms of worship, even if not the traditional church attendance,” church attendance may be “a regular part of their lives, even if they are not there each and every Sunday,” and “the reality of that perception [of regular church attendance] in their daily lives may be very real – regardless of their actual church attendance.” See Frank Newport, “Estimating Americans’ Worship Behavior, Part II,” Gallup, Inc., at Gallup.com [issued 10 January 2006; cited 8 February 2008]. Available at http://www.gallup.com/poll/20824/Estimating-Americans-Worship-Behavior-Part.aspx. For additional information, see also the companion report, Frank Newport, “Estimating Americans’ Worship Behavior,” Gallup, Inc., at Gallup.com [issued 3 January 2006; cited 8 February 2008]. Available at http://www.gallup.com/poll/20701/Estimating-AmericansWorship-Behavior.aspx. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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Such advertisements tell a story by depicting the very consumer behavior—flattering or not so—viewed by ethnographic research teams; consumers recognize themselves in the recreation of scenes observed by research teams, and this results in a positive association with a product or service featured as the solution to a particular challenge or as an emblem of a particular view of life or value. Second, some advertisements today function as short stories, showing a moment in the life of an individual or a group and integrating a product as a natural and enhancing element in that moment. While on the surface the product may seem peripheral to the story, consumers who identify with the story thereby may be conditioned to identify with the product. Usually such identifications are emotional attachments—the great merit of narratives, but sometimes the product is integrated into the advertisement in such a way that its “support” of the targeted demographic seems not only emotional but political. Occasionally such product “placement” is explicitly political; the story is told of actual circumstances in the public arena and a product or service “sponsors” a “real life” story or event depicted. Advertising’s use of narrative with incorporation of elements of ethnography at its most pointed, then, responds to and inculcates for values both cultural and personal, in a manner that is more intimately anthropological than other types of advertising and in common with religious traditions in its mode of discourse. The perhaps subtle move from selling products to selling values with positive product associations underscores a basic point being made that cultural impulses are not—at least in the case given of Western civilization—generally contradictory of theological impulses, even though lifestyles promoted by advertising, as largely secular and reversing the hierarchy of values recognized by theology, can be hostile to religion. Theology and many other fields have of late recovered recognition or newly learned of story’s ability to communicate human hopes and fears on a deeper level than other forms of discourse. Since story helps illuminate the latent anthropology communicated in today’s advertising, an anthropology that has been asserted to correspond on a basic level to that of Christianity, might this serve as a conversation point in education of constituencies of the Church and the larger culture about the Christian understanding of “humanity’s noble destiny,” in the words of Gaudium et Spes?41 If so, since advertising’s sole aim is to use its methods to persuade, as bold as the suggestion may seem, might advertising have something to teach the Church in the order of methodology?
41
Gaudium et Spes, para. 3.
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Conclusion: Dialogue of Church and World Where anthropology provides understandings of the human person common to advertising and theology, either culturally or metaculturally, narrative can be effective in communicating the ordering of values held by Christianity. This ordering of values is, of course, preeminently preached in the Gospel narrative, but, given that this narrative is a call and the possibility of graced life, it can be preached in narratives about gospel reception, too. This is a purpose of the stories of the saints, but any Catholic who had been reared in the Church in the last half of a century has missed these stories that were once told prominently verbally and in imagery, in churches, schools, and homes, albeit often told in a way that does not meet modern sensibilities. If narrative were reintroduced in a prominent way to those in the pews and not just shared among those in the academy, advertising might have two lessons for the Church as storyteller— one, focus upon particular moments of a life as encapsulations or emblems of a value or a value set, and, two, use ethnography both to study the “audience” receiving messages and to tell stories in a way that creates strong emotional as well as intellectual associations with central figures or the circumstances of their lives. Neither of these suggestions requires advertising per se by the Church. Not even many contemporary historical-critical accounts of the lives of saints incorporate these lessons which would underscore the relevance of particular saints to our lives today; the stated task of recent biographies is, fittingly, to place the saints in their own historical-cultural locations. Yet doesn’t St. Francis of Assisi—who rejected a life of privilege that might have been maintained through unbridled business practices—show the lie of the consumerism of our age? Doesn’t St. Augustine of Hippo—in his examination and eventual rejection of all of his day’s major thought forms claiming to be absolutes—show the folly of unbounded trust in today’s commerce of trendy ideas?42 Such Christian figures appeal even to the “unchurched.” Indeed, for his love and simplicity St. Francis is known and admired even by many non-Christians. If drawn out explicitly, then, his life’s “comment” on the shape of Western lives today might be heard more loudly than might be surmised. 42
These suggestions are born of my own ongoing research and reflection upon the saints. But ratifying them is an intriguing segment of Miller’s Consuming Religion, pp. 167– 171, in which he describes Robert Orsi’s research into the re-appropriation and, indeed, re-articulation of devotion to St. Jude “as a spiritual practice that enabled the devout [immigrant Catholics in the New World] to clarify their problems and focus their desires” (p. 170). For the original study, see Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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As to the first lesson, to return to the example of Western culture as glimpsed through the lens of advertising, the Western world is face-paced; its younger generations have been trained—not only by the experience of constant rapid change but by its delivery in “sound-bites,” video clips, and blogs—to digest reality in moments, to live each moment as a moment. There are obvious deficiencies in this approach to reality, since the view of the whole for which the moments exist can be sacrificed. Yet this is where the Church can guide, by stringing the moments together, showing how the values captured in the stories that compel lead to larger questions and fundamental truths about the human person. It is worth noting that the Gospel accounts do not provide us with a complete account of the life of Jesus, but with a narrative constructed of key moments of his ministry and the response of those who witnessed it and remembered it from the particularities of their own settings. Such an ascending, inductive approach to use of narrative which is attuned to cultural sensibilities but not slave to cultural messages could be effective in reversing the hierarchy of values seen in advertising, if the moments are shown or “told” frequently enough and sufficiently targeted to the audience both ecclesial and cultural. Stories of Christians (preferably dead, to safeguard humility) who may or may not be saints but who, at least in a particular moment, showcased the possibilities of real human transcendence could be juxtaposed to the occasional moments of human transcendence depicted in advertising which are shown to be achieved through the purchase of products and services and/or which are used to “glorify” the accomplishments of human persons rather than to recognize the graced existence of human persons. Catechetical instruction and homilies are obvious locations for such stories, but other venues in the Church might be considered, as well, to complement the indispensable, preeminent deductive “task” of proclamation of the Gospel. Both the deductive and the inductive “moments” are contained in the full story of our salvation—the story of the gift given and that of the gift received. As to the second lesson, inclusion in these stories of details that mirror those in the lives of audience members would pique interest and intensify both affective and intellectual connections. As already suggested, this is, perhaps, one way in which the stories even of saints could be told more effectively, with an eye as focused upon those looking to models as upon the models themselves.43 Doing so would require critical attention to culture(s) through ethnographic data collection and description. The power of story is not only in 43 The saints’ roles are model, companion, and intercessor, as affirmed by Lumen Gentium in The Basic Sixteen Documents: Vatican Council II: Constitutions, Decrees, Declarations, rev. trans., ed. Austin Flannery (Northport, New York: Costello Publishing Company, 1996), especially chapters VII and VIII, “The Pilgrim Church” and “Our Lady.” C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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the exceptional that inspires but in the ordinary that shows us that such inspiration is not futile. Advertisers convince consumers that the vision of life they construct for us is attainable through purchase; the Church aims to show that the vision of life that is divinely offered to us is available as gift. In either case, the effective “argument” is in the details, for it is through these that any “audience” recognizes itself in the story and is thereby impelled to action. Indeed, scholars make the point that we have access to Jesus’ own sayings and stories, the parables, only from within their context within the gospels; lost to us are the original situations in which they were offered, the manner of their delivery, and their precise wording.44 The evangelists transmitted faithfully the message of Jesus Christ in a manner compelling to their own communities. Not every story—even if told with the intention of disclosing the power of Christ’s work in a life—is transformative; some now neglected hagiographical documents are proof that stories can be told ineffectively, at least for a particular audience. Advertisers dedicate tremendous resources to the development of stories that will appeal to a particular “niche.” The homilist, the parish, the diocese, the charitable organization that truly will be successful in reaching the audience attends to its demographics, not merely aiming for the majority but—as does advertising—to each segment of a congregation. The Church has, or could have, the ethnographic data needed to identify it audiences. Upon joining a parish, for example, many Church members fill out identification and interest cards. These cards could be used more effectively, collecting specific information on state of life, career, etc.; the data could be monitored regularly and known to priests and pastoral ministers; it could be complemented by deliberate observation (by sight or through envelope collection, for example) of the demographics of those who appear for liturgy and other activities at the parish; and homilies, ministries, interest groups, etc., could be targeted and developed accordingly. The Church’s wish is that action elicited by its stories’ inspiration will be matched by guiding contemplation engaging the whole human person as intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and material. As shown, advertising has not such a goal. Again, a reversal of the order of values must occur for a harmony of religious and cultural worldviews. While pastoral ministers are best positioned to lead method’s explorations into the practical world of diocesan and parish life, since 44 This point is made in the opening chapter of John R. Donahue’s The Gospel in Parable: Metaphor, Narrative, and Theology in the Synoptic Gospels ([Minneapolis]: Fortress Press, 1988), pp. 1–27, especially, pp. 1–4. Donahue admits the debt of this now universal insight to Joachim Jeremias; see his The Parables of Jesus, 2nd rev. ed (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1972), original edition, Die Gleichnisse Jesu, 8th ed., Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1970, trans. S.H. Hooke, 6th ed., 1962. For a study of the development of the parables themselves, see also Bernard Brandon Scott, Hear Then the Parable: A Commentary on the Parables of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989). C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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they maintain and create the venues in which any “strategies”—to use advertising’s term—might be applied fruitfully, even administrators must be involved at the “global” level. Concern for loss of the message in the medium understandably discourages many churches from traditional advertising, particularly in view of the evidence that some churches that do advertise have deliberately or in effect “sold” themselves via the philosophy of the marketplace—by commodifying their “products” spiritual and/or material. And, unwittingly today, many denominations might promote the marketplace philosophy in magazines and newspapers that tell stories of transformations or success of church members as “products” of Christian life; thereby the essential challenge presented by Jesus’ own stories—the parables—is barely if at all reflected. The sometimes greater attention today to the production values of “Christian media” than to intellectual content also supports the pervasive cultural favoring of style over substance. But this philosophy is not media’s indispensable partner. Depiction of transformative moments in the living of the gospel today has been the subject of understated, effective television advertisements of such as the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints. Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, and other Christian denominations the world over are in many cases quite effectively utilizing the Internet, making available to members and non-members alike the vast resources of their traditions. Such activities suggest an untraditional way of conceiving of the local church, one that might be explored to advantage—without erasing the geographically local church where alone Catholics can fully participate in the celebration of the Eucharist. Helpful might be websites that direct “surfers” to specific resources based upon their spiritual and ministerial interests. Observation of their site visits could be a form of ethnographic data collection, and their search for material relevant to their own situations could influence the Church’s selection of stories deemed most important for the current audience. The young adult Catholic struggling with faith issues in the twentyfirst century could thereby learn that St. Augustine of Hippo struggled perhaps similarly in the fourth century, as did Thomas Merton in the twentieth century. The adult woman finding her place in the Church could learn of the influence of and works about or of Sts. Macrina and Catherine of Siena. Both of these could find conversation partners and “virtual” directors on the same spiritual path. So, too, Church members could learn of valid ministries outside of their own parishes from which they could benefit or to which they could contribute. The suggestions ventured here as inspired by lessons of advertising are merely rudimentary and would require concerted attention for proper execution, of course. But if theology will be in “contact with
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its own times,”45 as called for by Gaudium et Spes, the warrant for attending to both content and methods of the contemporary cultural lens that is advertising is clear: this field’s pervasive impact upon human self-perception and motivation, particularly in developed and developing countries, can rival the Church’s own influence upon its members and—through its members—upon the world at large. The world “preaches” its news around the clock, pointedly in advertising. How will the Church continue to communicate the Gospel without being drowned to inaudibility, even to the ears of its own members, by the persistent promotion of cultural and personal values as the source of fulfillment? Emphasis upon our felt transcendence, which from a secular standpoint has an analogous sense to religious and specifically Christian values, is perhaps only one of potentially many story lines that can resonate with common human experience and therefore prepare all “audiences” for reception of the Good News. Where advertising’s anthropology is congenial to such themes, an attentive theology might subsume the cultural messages to religious ones, thereby using to spiritual benefit prompts perceived by or even supplied by the “world.” As in the early Church’s sublation of pagan celebrations by Christian holy days, transpositions of values among members of the Church can have an exponential effect beyond the visible boundaries of the Church and, hence, promote an evangelization of example that elicits curiosity about, if not hunger for, Christian words of explanation—and salvation. Patricia A. Sullivan Email:
[email protected]
45
Gaudium et Spes, para. 62.
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history appears isolated from any intellectual context that might lend it lasting interest. Yet it is arguable that his work on Dominican history was not only central to his own personal concerns but central too to the broader intellectual context within which his life and work found their distinctive shape. In 1921 Jarrett published The English Dominicans, a history of the Order in England from its establishment in Oxford in 1221 to its nineteenth-century restoration and subsequent development, to coincide with the return of the Dominicans to Oxford in the sevenhundredth year of their arrival there. The return to Oxford marked the accomplishment of a personal ambition held by Jarrett since his novitiate, now brought to fruition during his tenure as Provincial. In the same year the Catholic Truth Society published a compilation of essays on The English Dominican Province 1221–1921, with contributions from Jarrett, Fabian Dix OP, Walter Gumbley OP and others. Jarrett’s The English Dominicans was dedicated to ‘Ernest Barker My Master and My Friend’. Barker had already acknowledged in print his own affection and respect for his former student. Although a Nonconformist, born in Stockport in 1874 and educated through a scholarship to Manchester Grammar School, Barker had nevertheless during his time as a tutor at Merton College, Oxford found himself responsible for a number of extra-collegiate Catholic students from the Benedictine and Jesuit Halls in Oxford. He was, however, happy to concede that none of his students surpassed Cyril (later Bede) Jarrett. When in 1913 Barker published his own The Dominican Order and Convocation, he acknowledged a large debt of gratitude to his former pupil.1 On the publication of Jarrett’s posthumous study The Emperor Charles IV in January 1935, Barker contributed an introduction in which, echoing his obituary notice at the time of Jarrett’s death the year before, he noted Jarrett’s scholarly passion and his standing as ‘in all things, and above all things, a Dominican Friar, the living exemplar of the long tradition of his Order – the tradition of Scholarship, the tradition of Preaching’.2 When he published his memoirs in 1953, Barker recalled once more his admiration for Jarrett as a scholar and ‘statesman’.3 This reciprocal intellectual bond between Jarrett and Barker has not escaped notice, at least insofar as it bore upon Jarrett. Aidan Nichols OP, has, for example, drawn attention to Jarrett’s lifelong 1
E. Barker, The Dominican Order and Convocation: A Study of the Growth of Representation in the Church during the Thirteenth Century (Oxford, 1913). 2 E. Barker, Introduction, Bede Jarrett, The Emperor Charles IV (London, 1935), p. xvi. 3 E. Barker, Age and Youth: Memories of Three Universities and Father of the Man (Oxford, 1953), p. 54. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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debt to Barker and his other teachers in the Oxford History School, noting that ‘His Oxford sources stayed with him, and permeate his work’;4 and Jarrett’s biographers, Gervase Mathew OP and Kenneth Wykeham-George OP, also noted the decisive influence of Jarrett’s studies at Oxford, notwithstanding that his time there was relatively short compared to the full span of his more conventional Dominican formation.5 It should be recalled that Jarrett was the first English Dominican to attend Oxford University since the Reformation: as Allan White OP has observed, this was an ‘imaginative and bold’ break with convention, ‘to allow one of the brightest Dominican students of his day to enter a secular history school, especially since the Modernist crisis was just about to break against the certainties of Catholicism’.6 Since the relative demise of Ernest Barker’s reputation during the 1960s, and notwithstanding the revived interest in his work during the 1990s, it is more difficult now to appreciate the full significance of Jarrett’s debt to him, and indeed to that broader tradition of English historiography that found its focus at the end of the nineteenth century in the relationship between law and history, and that included in its number Sir Henry Maine, Sir Paul Vinogradoff, Sir Frederick Pollock, Viscount Bryce, A.V. Dicey and F. W. Maitland.7 It was within that broader tradition that the Oxford History School of Jarrett’s day established its collective character, comprising individuals whom Jarrett heard lecture, such as the Christian Socialists A.L. Smith8 and A.J. Carlyle9 , whose work concentrated upon the 4
A. Nichols OP, ‘The English Dominican Social Tradition’, in F. Compagnoni OP and H. Alford OP (eds.), Preaching Justice: Dominican Contributions to Social Ethics in the Twentieth Century (Dublin, 2007), p. 399. 5 K. Wykeham-George OP and G. Mathew OP, Bede Jarrett of the Order of Preachers (London, 1952). 6 A. White OP, ‘Father Bede Jarrett OP and the Renewal of the English Dominican Province’, in D. A. Bellenger (ed.), Opening the Scrolls: Essays in Honour of Godfrey Anstruther (Bath, 1987), p. 221. 7 See S. Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850–1930 (Oxford, 1991), ch. 7. 8 A. L. Smith published Notes on Stubbs’ Charters in 1906. His Ford lectures on the Church and State in the Middle Ages were published in 1913, in part delayed by his agreeing to compile a bibliography of Maitland’s work following his death in 1906 and to deliver two lectures on Maitland as Oxford’s public memorial to him. Smith also associated himself with ‘progressive politics’, promoting women’s education in the university, tutoring students at Lady Margaret Hall, representing the university in its dealings with the Workers’ Educational Association from 1907, and encouraging the African and Asian students who gravitated towards Balliol. See Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Of Smith, Barker remarked in his memoir, ‘Who that knew him and had been quickened and encouraged by his alert and darting spirit, could ever forget A.L. Smith, once my tutor, then my colleague, and always my inspiration?’ Smith in turn Barker recognised as a profound admirer of Stubbs, Vinogradoff and especially Maitland. See E. Barker, Age and Youth, pp. 20 and 328. 9 A.J. Carlyle, in addition to serving as a lecturer in politics and economics, was from 1895 to 1919 the rector of the Oxford city church of St Martin and All Saints. In that C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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relationship between church and state in the Middle Ages, as well as upon Aristotle’s Politics.10 In his introduction to the Letters of Bede Jarrett Simon Tugwell OP described Jarrett as a precursor of what would nowadays be regarded as the strategy of ‘inculturation’. As Tugwell puts it, ‘The Dominicans in England must be genuinely English, at home in and acceptable to English culture’.11 Allan White OP also has drawn attention to Jarrett’s ambition that the Dominican house in Oxford should not so much be part of an attempt to minister to the Catholic minority, still less convert Oxford, but rather to learn from Oxford through a rigorous encounter with modern scholarship and modern problems.12 Gervase Mathew OP, writing in 1937 in an appendix to his brother’s Catholicism in England, offered an earlier, but not dissimilar assessment, when he remarked that Jarrett was ‘intensely English, intensely Dominican . . . It seemed his life work to reconcile Catholicism and the English mind, a new synthesis of Catholic and English traditions – an uncompleted synthesis’.13 A significant part of that synthesis was achieved by Jarrett’s receptiveness to his studies at Oxford. Jarrett’s deep immersion in what Barker called ‘statesmanship’, notably as long-standing Provincial and then Prior at Blackfriars, Oxford, tends to limit the attention paid to his scholarly work. As a result, Jarrett emerges as an administrator who skillfully cultivated English benefactors, with the foundations of new priories in Oxford
capacity he earned a reputation as a liberal thinker and Christian socialist, and became an associate of the Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and the high-Church Anglican, Charles Gore. In 1912 he published two short works on The Influence of Christianity upon Social and Political Ideas, and Wages. His chief scholarly work, upon which he worked from 1895 until the publication of the sixth and final volume in 1936, was his History of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West. It is significant that the main theme of this work has been described as ‘the rule of law, firmly rooted in the nature of things, as the basis of the search for and maintenance of justice and liberty’. See Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 10 Jarrett’s surviving notebooks indicate that he attended A.L. Smith’s lectures at Balliol on Stubbs’ Select Charters, on his Notes on Political and Social Questions, and on Aristotle’s Politics. A.J. Carlyle lectured at University College in Jarrett’s time on The Theory of Natural Law and Social Contract. Jarrett’s notebooks contain carefully arranged notes on the Laws of Nature and Justice, Natural Law and Law of Nations, the Early Christian Fathers’ distinction between the primitive and actual state, Their Justification of Government, Slavery and Property, Their Idea of the Nature of the State and of the Law, and the Political Theories of the 7th–12th centuries. He also attended four lectures delivered by Vinogradoff in 1906. See the English Dominican Archive, Blackfriars, Edinburgh. 11 S. Tugwell OP, Introduction, in B. Bailey, A. Bellenger and S. Tugwell (eds.) Letters of Bede Jarrett (Bath and Oxford, 1989), p. xxxi. 12 White, 229, citing Wykeham-George and Mathew, p. 88. 13 G. Mathew OP, ‘The English Dominicans’, Appendix 1, in D. Mathew, Catholicism in England 1535–1935 – Portrait of a Minority: Its Culture and Tradition (London, 1937), p. 269. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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and Edinburgh and the establishment of the journal Blackfriars as his chief legacies. It is arguable, however, that those practical achievements should be set in a broader intellectual context of which Barker and the tradition of which he formed part are central ingredients. That realignment in turn invites fresh consideration of the way in which Jarrett engaged with secular English culture and of how that engagement generated an intellectual legacy that has something to say more generally about the options available to Christian political theology.
The Legacy of Sir Ernest Barker Sir Ernest Barker’s academic career spanned three quarters of a century, Oxford, London and Cambridge, and a range of academic disciplines that included classics, history and political science. At Oxford, he took a First in Greats from Balliol in 1897, held a fellowship at Merton from 1898 until 1905, combined with a lectureship at Wadham in modern history from 1899 to 1909 and a tutorship for non-collegiate students from 1899 to 1913. This was the period of his direct acquaintance with Jarrett. He subsequently held fellowships in modern history at St John’s (1909–1913) and New College (1913–20) before becoming Principal of King’s College, London from 1920 to 1927. In 1927 he took the newly established chair of political science at Cambridge, where he remained until his retirement in 1938. During an exceptionally fruitful and long retirement, Barker continued to publish scholarly works, with an increasingly European flavour, until shortly before his death in 1960.14 It is possible to disentangle from this diverse output those aspects of Barker’s intellectual legacy that are especially pertinent to Bede Jarrett’s own intellectual development. As Aidan Nichols has suggested, ‘It does not seem excessive to suppose that he [Barker] alerted Jarrett to, in particular, three aspects of medieval life: the role of political notions – chiefly jurisprudential in character – within the total complex of medieval society and its state, and early anticipations of socialist ideas and economics’.15 Jarrett was a student at Oxford, where he read history, from 1904 until 1907. During that time he was resident at the Benedictine Hunter-Blair’s Hall, but had Barker as his personal tutor. It is in the early phase of Barker’s career that the themes most pertinent to Jarrett’s debt might be expected to surface. It was, in fact, in 1906, during the period of his tutorship of Jarrett, that Barker published his first, and arguably most durable, book, The 14 15
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Nichols, p. 400.
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Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle. Barker’s intellectual biographer, Julia Stapleton, has identified in that early work the synthesis of ideas that would characterize his later work in the decades ahead, a synthesis of idealism, whiggism and pluralism. On this account, Barker’s work interpreted the writings of Plato and Aristotle from the perspective of a modern liberal concerned to uphold the values of both personal liberty and government based on the rule of law, while at the same time recognizing the central role of society for the development of individuality.16 Barker, in other words, used his work on Plato and Aristotle to articulate what might be described as a ‘third way’ between the negative attitude towards the state of a whiggish liberal like Dicey and the enthusiastic identity of state and society which characterized the more wholehearted forms of idealism current at the turn of the century. Barker inherited, and acknowledged, from T.H. Green a degree of scepticism about the ability of the state to deliver in practice the ideal described in theory, whilst from Maitland he absorbed an interest in political pluralism that enabled him to acknowledge that the state co-existed with other communities and that unity was dependent on diversity. He also demonstrated a significant debt to his school-friend from Stockport, George Unwin, who became Professor of Economic History at Edinburgh in 1908, and whose work on economic history gave particular emphasis to the creative impact of guilds and other forms of voluntary association.17 To that extent, it might be said that Barker found a measure of sympathy with Aristotle that was absent from his appraisal of Plato. That Aristotelian turn also chimed with Barker’s sense of, and admiration for, what he regarded as English national character. As he put it, there was ‘something French in Plato’s mind, something of that pushing of a principle to its logical extremes’; whilst of Aristotle he observed ‘it hardly seems fanciful to detect more of an English spirit of compromise’.18 In this early phase of his career, Barker had identified the central place within his thought of the balance to be struck between individuals, voluntary societies and the state. As Stapleton points out, the balance was for Barker always uneven and at various stages he favoured one at the expense of the other. In these early years, before the First World War, and despite some reservations, he was 16
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. J. Stapleton, Englishness and the Study of Politics: The Social and Political Thought of Ernest Barker (Cambridge, 1994) pp. 79–81; see also, J. Stapleton, ‘Pluralism as English cultural definition: the social and political thought of George Unwin’, Journal of the History of Ideas 52 (1991) pp. 665–84; J. Stapleton, ‘The National Character of Ernest Barker’s Political Science’, Political Studies 37 (1989) 171–187. 18 E. Barker, The Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle (London, 1906), p. 162. 17
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strongly drawn towards political pluralism, an attachment that would be moderated by the experience of the First World War and seriously damaged by what he saw as the unhealthy upsurge of groups in continental Europe during the inter-war years. Nevertheless, at the time of Barker’s tutorial supervision of Jarrett at Oxford, he was still broadly sympathetic to the pluralist movement, which was developing in the first decade of the twentieth century, in large part in response to the dismissive treatment of ‘voluntary associations’ in the Taff Vale (1901) and Church of Scotland (1900– 1904) court cases. As Stapleton remarks, the ‘lure of pluralism’ for Barker comprised several distinct aspects and a ‘nodal point around which several of his concerns’ converged: first, the Aristotelian sense of the diversity of society; secondly, the notion that the state was a legal corporation with rights and responsibilities like other public bodies; thirdly, the recognition that sensitivity to the wide range of groups in society entailed, perhaps paradoxically, a strong state as a centre of ‘adjustment’; fourthly, a ‘progressive’ model of state-society relations which sought a balance between social innovation and political order; and finally, the particular relevance of pluralism to English national political development.19 Underpinning Barker’s attraction to pluralism was a particular respect for the place of law in political theory and practice. For Barker, it was the Oxford jurists Dicey, Vinogradoff and Bryce, together with Maitland at Cambridge, who drew the conviction that ‘political science lies in the interstices between law, history and political philosophy’.20 Stapleton detects that realisation even in the early work on Plato and Aristotle: ‘There was already in “Plato and Aristotle” an evident sensitivity to law as the institutional essence of the state, even if the ethical perspectives of ancient political thinkers formed the primary focus of the book’s analysis’.21 Indeed, as Stapleton also observes, for Barker, the initial view that political science was, as the Idealists had it, a matter in essence of political and moral philosophy, was even by the time of his early publication on Plato and Aristotle ‘becoming overshadowed by a view of law as the cornerstone of political understanding’.22 Political pluralism, English national character, and the centrality of law to political thought: these features might, therefore, be taken as among the central aspects of Barker’s legacy and as the most
19 20 21 22
Stapleton, Englishness, pp. 90–91. Ibid. p. 62. Ibid. p. 64. Ibid.
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important during the period of his contact with Bede Jarrett as his tutor at Oxford.
Barker and the Dominican Order Barker published his The Dominican Order and Convocation: A Study of the Growth of Representation in the Church during the 13th Century in 1913. From his own remarks in the preface and footnotes, it appears that Barker owed a considerable debt to conversation with his pupil Bede Jarrett for his interest in the history of the English Dominicans, and indeed for his copy of the early Constitutions of the Order.23 Although various contemporary general histories of the Middle Ages had paid some attention to the Dominicans, there was as yet within English historiography nothing on the Dominicans to rival the enthusiasm of scholars such as A.G. Little for the Franciscans. To that extent Barker was breaking new ground.24 The chief polemical import of Barker’s book is to propose that representative government, the central institution of English parliamentary democracy, was based on the constitutional arrangements of the Dominicans. His argument is based on the identification within the Dominican Constitutions of an embryonic form of representative democracy and the hypothesis that the English monarchy’s generally favourable reception of the Dominicans, as well as the coincidence of timing, creates strong grounds for supposing a measure of Dominican ‘influence’ on national political development. In the course of constructing this argument Barker paints a portrait of the Dominican character that reflects his attraction to political pluralism in that pre-War period and to the broader critique of the sovereign state, which he expressed in his essay The Discredited State, delivered first as a lecture in May 1914.25 He sets his analysis of the Dominicans firmly within the discipline of the ‘history of institutions’. It is in that context that he observes that the Dominicans are the ‘most finished model of representative institutions’ and that St Dominic himself had demonstrated genius as a ‘constructive statesman’.26 Comparing St Dominic to his fellow-Spaniard, St Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, and drawing a contrast with the (supposedly) better known St Francis of Assisi, Barker remarks of St Dominic that ‘those who find in the study of institutions a 23
E. Barker, The Dominican Order and Convocation, pp. 3–4, and footnote 13 on p. 14. Ibid. pp. 4 and 9. 25 E. Barker, ‘The Discredited State’, a Paper delivered before The Philosophical Society in the University of Oxford in May 1914, Political Quarterly 1915, pp. 101–21, reprinted in E. Barker, Church, State and Study (London, 1930), pp. 151–170. 26 Barker, The Dominican Order and Convocation, p. 7. 24
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charm as great as in the study of personalities are bound to look at his building to discover its materials and to trace its influence’.27 What Barker discovers among the materials sustaining St Dominic’s Order is a measure of centralized government combined, crucially, with democratic spirit, representative institutions, and a ‘clear-cut’ constitutional arrangement. ‘The Dominican’, he remarks, ‘is general and universal. He belongs to a house, to a province but far more to the whole Order; and he has a cure of souls wherever he may preach. He is delocalized, and he is centralized. He is delocalized: he is not under the vow of stabilitas. He is not a member of a particular abbey, in charge of a particular parish that is under that abbey; he is essentially a member of the whole Order, who will preach at any point in the scope of its action. He is centralized. He is not primarily under the control of a particular abbey; he is a soldier in a militia spiritualis controlled by its generalissimo’.28 The contrast with Benedictine monasticism is explicit, as is the debt to Praemonstratensianism. Yet whereas the Praemonstratensians were ‘aristocratic’, it is the ‘democracy’ of the Dominicans that arouses Barker’s interest, notwithstanding what he sees as the compatibility of that democratic impulse ‘with what we may call Caesarism’, the Master General of the Order often being its ‘moving spirit’.29 More particularly it is the arrangements for ensuring effective election of priors and provincials and effective representation of non-office holding friars at the provincial and central chapters of the Order that led Barker to adopt the observation that the Dominican Order is ‘the most perfect example that the Middle Ages have produced of the faculty of monastic corporations for constitution-building’.30 That observation goes to the centre of Barker’s sense of the character of the Dominican Order as an entire society, a model of community based upon constitutional principle yet free of the state, in dialogue with, yet not subservient to, it. In identifying the bond that had existed between St Dominic and Simon de Montfort’s son, Barker expounds a view of community and sovereignty that is resonant of political pluralism and its debt to Maitland and the Anglican theologian, J.N. Figgis. At the heart of that view is ‘the idea always cherished by the Church’ of ‘power as a trust given by the community, and of the community as in some sense sovereign of itself, even if it delegates its sovereignty to a magister’.31 It is that sense of the community or group as sovereign, and of power as held on trust by ruler for ruled, that informs Barker’s 27 28 29 30 31
Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.
p. p. p. p. p.
9. 11. 17. 18. 27.
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identification of the Dominican Order and its representative institutions as of political significance beyond the confines of ecclesiastical concerns. As he remarks, ‘Whenever men conceive of a group clearly and strongly as a community or brotherhood, they must conceive of it as sovereign of itself; whenever they seek to realise that selfsovereignty in deed as well as in word, they are driven beyond the conception of power as in its nature representative to the actual use of representative institutions’.32 For Barker the English Dominicans of the 13th century were such a ‘brotherhood’. Moreover, it was what he calls ‘the vogue for the Dominicans’ in England in that period, expressed for example by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, in his admiration for Gilbert of Freynet, by the early establishment of priories in Oxford, London and Leicester, and the reputation of individual friars such as Robert Kilwardby, John of St Giles, Robert Bacon and Richard Fishacre, that led to the Dominicans becoming the preferred confessors of the Plantagenet monarchs and so to their purported ‘influence’ on the experiment of representative democracy, first at Convocation within the Church in England at large, and thereafter within the national political life, with Parliament itself conceived of as a federation of separate communities, a ‘communitas communitatum’, brought together by their representatives. Critically, for Barker the ‘centralised government’ of the Dominicans, and of the state, through the adoption of the principle of representation, paradoxically in fact becomes a vehicle for preserving local freedom, thereby achieving a critical measure of unity whilst sustaining life-giving diversity. Barker comments, ‘The representation of the vigorous local life of the shire (after all the supreme differentia of England from the rest of Western Europe) finds its counterpart in, and lends its support to, the representation of the clergy of archdeaconries and dioceses, who are bound up in that local life’; and he goes on, ‘Thus we should find in the strength of a representative principle permeating both clergy and laity, in the strength of a local life in which the clergy share with the laity, in the strength of a national representative system expressing that principle and drawing vigour from that local life, the reasons for the nature of the English convocation’.33 These observations lead to Barker’s resounding conclusion, which is, in his view, of general application: ‘The study of the institutional development of the Middle Ages is an organic whole. We cannot isolate Church and State; not only do they develop side by side, but they interact in their development. The development of representation 32 33
Ibid. p. 27. Ibid. p. 72.
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in Church and State must not be figured in the mind as the advance of two parallel lines in two separate squares; it is the growth of one idea into an institution, in that one and single respublica Christiana under two governments (the regnum and the sacerdotium) of which Dr Figgis has taught us to conceive. Further we must not in our insular way isolate the institutional development of England from that of continental Europe’.34
Jarrett on St Dominic and the English Dominicans Bede Jarrett substantiated his appreciation of the Dominican ‘charism’ in two works that appeared in the early 1920s: The English Dominicans (1921) and The Life of St Dominic (1923). In various ways these assessments echo Barker’s characterisation. In The English Dominicans, Jarrett is especially concerned to demonstrate the way in which the Order from the outset established for itself a place at the centre of English intellectual and national life. As he remarks in conclusion, ‘The House of Lancaster, crafty, unstable, usurping, turned to Carmelites and Franciscans; the House of York and Tudor to the secular priesthood; but the wildest, fiercest, noblest of all the kings since the Normans found in the brethren of St Thomas Aquinas their guides, philosophers and friends’.35 The discharge of such royal counsel Jarrett located especially in the role of Royal Confessors exercised by the Dominicans, chiefly in the reigns of Richard II, Henry IV and Edward II.36 Beyond the immediate confines of Westminster, Jarrett notes that his predecessors in the role of English Provincial had responsibility for more houses than anywhere else in the Dominican world (68 including Ireland and Scotland); they could draw upon members of the Order better educated than any other religious in England; and they could rely upon a curriculum unique for its order, thoroughness and high standards of attainment. Drawing explicitly on Barker’s work, Jarrett devotes considerable attention to the possible role of the Order in expanding from this strong material and intellectual base to provide a model for British (sic) representative government.37 As he puts it, ‘Working out from this central power the Friars Preachers settled themselves deeply in the national life. They influenced public opinion in favour of
34 Ibid. pp. 75–6. For Figgis’ observations, see J.N. Figgis, ‘Respublica Christiana’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. V, 1911, pp. 63–88. 35 B. Jarrett, The English Dominicans (London, 1923), p. 215. 36 Ibid. pp. 106–126. 37 Ibid. pp. 126–28. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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representative government, and specially just that one form of it which became established in the British Constitution’.38 The broader characterisation of the Order upon which these specific observations rest is marked, very much in the manner of Barker’s work, by attention to its ‘elective government’ and its ‘representative spirit’. These qualities Jarrett attributes to St Dominic’s ‘personal contribution’, with the result that ‘Democratic in principle, aristocratic by connection, the order of Preaching Friars in its full activity in England, advising, absolving, negotiating, must directly and indirectly be recognised as a powerful influence. Up till now this influence of the English Blackfriars has been wholly ignored’. Jarrett in fact credits St Dominic with the achievement of establishing the first religious order in the modern sense of the word. He was in other words ahead of the Benedictines, Cistercians and Praemonstratensians in his ‘establishment of a thoroughly organised society, divided naturally into provinces, which had their own assemblies, and yet could deliberate at a central Chapter wherein the whole order met. These legislative bodies, the provincial and general chapters, acted through an executive, the Prior Provincial and the Master General, who being elected by these parliaments were answerable to them’.39 Just as Barker had extolled the virtues of political pluralism by insisting that the power of ruling was a gift held on trust by those who rule, so Jarrett obliquely gives further weight to such views, identifying his own Order as a model of government of that sort. This was, as Jarrett concedes, a form of ‘central government’, yet it was a form of central government that through the principle of representation and the incarnation of a democratic spirit drew upon and in turn energised those local communities which, more than anywhere else, proliferated in the English province. Three years later, in his book on St Dominic, Jarrett took the opportunity to enlarge even further his appreciation of the felicitous combination of strong central government and more localised activism. Emphasising once again the innovative quality of St Dominic’s creation of a ‘modern’ religious order, Jarrett this time explains what that modernity entails, namely, ‘a compact and corporate body with definite rules running through the whole and organised on lines which constituted it a perfect unity’.40 As for Barker, so for Jarrett it is the achievement of unity through diversity that marks the Dominican achievement. That diversity also expresses itself in Dominican ‘mobility’, for, as Jarrett contends, the democratic spirit of the order was a direct consequence of its freedom from a vow of stability. Indeed Jarrett 38 39 40
Ibid. p. 171. Ibid. p. 128. B. Jarrett, St Dominic p. 115.
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considers that combination to be of more general significance since, as he remarks, ‘It seems to be a law of history that the more stationary life is, the more autocratic will be its theories of government. The “unchanging East” is the home for despotism, whether beneficent or otherwise, whereas the movement of trade, the turmoil of cities, the noise of traffic, the frequency of change, lead to the rise of democracy, and as these progress in volume and importance, to the extremes of radicalism’.41 What was true of ‘society’ at large was true of those forms of corporate life that comprised the religious orders: ‘The free cities of medieval history are types of what was commonly noticeable among the more active religious orders. The more they make their home in towns, the more democratic grows their rule; the further and further they retire to the country, the more completely do they put themselves into the hands of a single life-superior. At least this was the natural development of religious life in medieval times’.42 Not for Jarrett, then, the ‘back to the land’ mission of his brethren, Vincent McNabb OP and the Dominican tertiary, Eric Gill. For Jarrett, what he referred to as ‘popular rule’ went hand in hand with the bustle and diversity of urban life.43 At the heart of that ‘popular rule’ Jarrett once again identifies a model of government that has its roots in Barker’s political pluralism and the work of Maitland and Figgis on which it rested. According to the Dominican model, the gift of ruling is at the behest of the ruled, the rulers themselves in effect the ‘executive’ for giving effect to the wishes of those whose trust they honour. Jarrett is quite emphatic that ‘the Dominican government in legislative and in executive rests on these two ideas: first, that all holding office of superiority should hold it by the free votes of those whom they are to govern; and secondly, that in the selection of rulers . . . election shall itself be carried through by means of representation. Further, this also must be recognised, that, in the order of St Dominic, the superiors are only an executive. They have no power of themselves to make laws, but are empowered only to administer the laws of the Order or province, and to see to it that these are carried out by their subjects’.44 For Jarrett, the mark of this elective and democratic form of government is ‘freedom’, an essential signpost on the path to that other mark of Dominican life, the pursuit of ‘truth’. Jarrett speaks of the Dominican ‘spirit of freedom’ and its ‘deep trust’ in the principles of democratic rule, however perilous to bureaucratic efficiency such qualities might be. ‘Truth’ for Jarrett, is not attainable in this life; 41 42 43 44
Ibid. p. 120. Ibid. Ibid. p. 121. Ibid. p. 122.
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yet ‘those who so vainly search and follow it have this measure of success, that though they miss perfect truth they achieve perfect freedom’.45 The exercise of freedom through the operation of Dominican government becomes, therefore, a form of paideia or self-cultivation. As Jarrett observes, autocratic government might be more efficient than democratic government, it might make someone work harder and with greater success, but it is doubtful whether it makes that person any better for it: ‘After all, it is not what a man does but what he is that is of supreme importance in the sight of God . . . True self-culture is the purpose of faith and hope and love’.46 For Jarrett, ‘That is the bequest of St Dominic to his children, to search for truth and to become free’.47
The Respublica Christiana The application of that model by Jarrett beyond the confines of the Dominican Order is apparent in his posthumous publication, The Emperor Charles IV (1935), which takes as its starting-point the life of Charles, King of Bohemia 1347–78, and Emperor 1349–1378. Here Jarrett’s focus shifts to the government of the Holy Roman Empire, a focus that also bears the mark of having been conceived in the inter-war period when the trials and tribulations of the League of Nations were at their most pressing. As Jarrett remarks, ‘The problem of the empire was the problem, therefore, of international unity’.48 The solution to the problem, on Jarrett’s account, came from Charles IV, trained in Paris, the product of Dominican scholarship, and whose plans were, as a result, ‘always simple, clear and the result of intellectual effort’. Charles IV, ‘the Priests’ Emperor’, was for Jarrett ‘a philosopher turned king’.49 That combination of simplicity, clarity and intellectual effort led Charles IV, on Jarrett’s account, to conceive a solution based on an ideal of ‘community, resting not on organised uniformity, but on organic variety of spontaneous local growth’.50 However, as in the case of the Dominican Order, that spontaneous local growth had to be nurtured by a protective and centralised government. The socalled Golden Bull of Charles IV by which he ‘made custom into a code’ and sought a constitutional settlement for the Empire was credited a success by Jarrett because it secured both ‘local autonomy’ 45 46 47 48 49 50
Ibid. p. 126. Ibid. p. 127. Ibid. p. 128. B. Jarrett, The Emperor Charles IV (London, 1935), p. 163. Ibid. p. 170. Ibid. p. 178.
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and ‘central authority’: ‘the “Glory of the Holy Roman Empire”, its variety and unity, were thus to be preserved intact’.51 At the centre of the problem facing Charles IV Jarrett identified the emergence of the secular state. As he remarks, ‘Life was moving away from the sanctuary round which it had so long been centred, was becoming natural rather than supernatural, losing contact with the invisible in the fascination of its new appreciation of the visible, no longer gazing at the heavens, coming down altogether to earth’.52 Of this emerging ‘culture’, Charles was, Jarrett observes, ‘the determined foe’, not because he opposed the emergence of a new culture but because he opposed a new culture that was not ‘derived from the old’.53 As Barker noted in his Introduction, Jarrett chooses to emphasise how Charles IV sought an effective partnership between the Empire and the Papacy, a partnership founded in ‘the unity and peace of Christendom’.54 This was in effect the fading respublica Christiana to which Barker had referred at the end of his book on the Dominicans and to which he had linked the Dominican relationship with national government in the 13th century. Jarrett draws from the example of Charles IV conclusions of even broader application to inter-war Europe: ‘We can definitely see that religion is still the dividing line of world cultures. There are states that are opposed to it; these are vigorous but uncultured. There are states that merely acknowledge its existence; these are vigorous perhaps but lack the serenity of culture. There are states that accept it and build their lives towards it; these can watch the future without fear. The State must not oppose, ignore or even repose on religion. It must minister to it. It should not try to master its subjects’ souls’.55
The Possibility of Socialism The friendship and magisterial example of Barker can, then, be seen to have helped shape Jarrett’s appreciation of the distinctiveness of the Dominican Order and of its debt to the personal charism of St Dominic. That appreciation is based upon an acute sense of the importance of constitutional matters in the formation of Dominican life and ministry and indeed of the supposed wider relevance for, and influence upon, broader political issues of the distinctive Dominican approach, especially in the national life of medieval England but also in the world of European politics at the time of the Holy Roman 51
Ibid. Ibid. p. 217. 53 Ibid. 54 Barker, Introduction to Jarrett, The Life of Charles IV, p. xiv, citing Jarrett, The Life of Charles IV, p. 237. 55 Jarrett, The Life of Charles IV, p. 218. 52
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Empire. For Jarrett, it was the democratic spirit, representative institutions and attendant freedom of Dominican life that established it as a concrete model of social life more generally, with the Order itself representing a prototype of a corporate body, rule-governed yet free, in partnership with but not subservient to the state, whatever the state’s tendency to overbearing sovereignty. Underpinning that model was what might be described as a ‘philosophy of ruling’ that drew its inspiration from English political pluralism, as expressed in the early work of Ernest Barker. That ‘philosophy’ expressed its scepticism of the ‘discredited’ sovereign state by proposing instead a view of voluntary association and ‘community’ as the basis of social life, and of the state as guardian of the gift of ruling bequeathed to it by the myriad communities that made up the confederation. This was, in other words, the state as a ‘communitas communitatum’, in which the boundary between religion and the secular realm was necessarily porous, even to the extent that they formed two parts of an integrated social and political world. It is possible to characterise aspects of Jarrett’s other scholarly work on medieval society, notably Medieval Socialism (1913), S. Antonino and Medieval Economics (1914), and Social Theories of the Middle Ages 1200–1500 (1926) as attempts to describe an earlier world in which such partnership between state and Church was still possible and indeed in which the Dominican Order played a central role as one of those intermediaries between state and society, a voluntary association that both expressed by its very existence the reality of political pluralism and by its intellectual contribution to the life of that society helped sustain social arrangements that were shaped by Christian virtue, by justice and charity. Taken together, these three central works depict an alternative to modern bureaucratic capitalism, finding in the Middle Ages a society that more readily accords with the model of political pluralism and with the virtues of justice and charity, expressed especially in the social theories of St Thomas Aquinas and his fellow-Dominican, St Antoninus. St Antoninus in particular represents for Jarrett a specific instance of the conversion of social theory into social practice: ‘to set up the standard of Justice, to lay the foundations of society on the laws of God, to make men look at economics through the eyes of Faith, was the high endeavour of this great man’.56 Antoninus, in his calling as Prior of San Marco, Florence and later Bishop of Florence, had the tasks of restoring Dominican ideals and of helping to establish democratic government in Florence: ‘His passion then was for the poor’.57 56 57
B. Jarrett, S. Antonino and Medieval Economics (Roehampton, 1914), p. xvi. Ibid. p. 53.
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Just as Jarrett had argued in his work on his own Order that it was the turbulence of the city that promoted true democracy, so in his depiction of Antoninus it is the baptism of commerce with which he is concerned, not so much to recommend withdrawal from the commercial world but to sanctify the commercial dealings of the community. In conclusion of a chapter on the ‘social ideals’ of Antoninus, Jarrett remarks of the ideals set out in the Summa Moralis and ‘put into complete activity in the Greater and Lesser Guilds, and lined in stone along the graceful fac¸ade of Or San Michele’ that they are ‘commercial, it is true, but clean and religious and noble. They sum up a chivalrous and knightly aspect of mercantile adventure. They spell out the splendid Chronicles of the Romance of Trade’.58 Those social ideals that the preceding chapter had described pointed towards an ideal city in which there would be hospitals for the poor and the sick, with doctors paid by the state; fair distribution of property; family-life in which husband and wife work together as complementary beings; education about God, letters, useful arts and crafts; peace between masters and labourers; individual property rights recognised but restrained by the state, which might in certain circumstances insist upon common ownership of all wealth; just wages; the avoidance of the extremes of penury and extravagance; the regular practice of almsgiving; and finally, ‘over and beyond these obligations comes the virtue of magnificence or generosity’.59 It is on the issue of socialism that Jarrett’s work is potentially most controversial and enigmatic. Aidan Nichols, whilst discounting the view that Jarrett is in any meaningful sense a neo-medievalist, nevertheless links his study of Jarrett with that of Vincent McNabb OP under the heading ‘Back to the Land’ and Neo-Medieval Socialism, and suggests, at least indirectly, that Jarrett was, in his work on medieval social theory and on what he somewhat provocatively called medieval socialism, pushing at the edge of what was acceptable to Catholic social teaching in the years after Pius X’s publication of Lamentabili sane exitu and Pascendi in 1907.60 Allan White, as mentioned earlier, also describes the reservations held by some members of the English Province, and indeed by the Order in Rome, about Jarrett’s enthusiastic embrace of non-Catholic and increasingly secular Oxford University, both as student and as Provincial, and his consorting with all manner of Fabians and socialists in London.61 It has also been noted by a past editor of New Blackfriars that its predecessor, Blackfriars, owes its early reputation for controversy to Jarrett’s inspiration.62 58 59 60 61 62
Ibid. p. 78. Ibid. pp. 75ff. Nichols, Preaching Justice. White, Opening the Scrolls. John Orme Mills OP, Editorial, New Blackfriars, March 1984.
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Yet at the same time, Jarrett emerges from his published letters and his biography as what Nichols describes as a generous-minded Tory.63 His devotion to England also, perhaps, brings with it an apparent attachment to the British Empire that befits the son of an Indian Army officer, but hardly fits the mantle of subversion. However, the connection with Barker’s political pluralism, especially in Jarrett’s conception of the history and political significance of the Dominican Order, makes it possible to identify Jarrett with the similarly enigmatic, and ambivalent, character of Christian Socialism in the early decades of the twentieth century. As John Milbank has argued, the Christian Socialists, with their various debts to Coleridge and Ruskin, represent a form of non-Marxian socialism that sets them apart not just from the sort of state socialism that came to prominence in the twentieth century but from the forms of Marxian liberation theology that emerged in the Church after Vatican II. Common to many of the various expressions of the Christian Socialist impulse was a suspicion of the sovereign state and an attraction to the ideal of voluntary association, whether as represented by the medieval guild system, the early trade unions, or by syndicalism. Attractive too was the example of the medieval universities as models of corporate centres of learning, independent of the state yet in dialogue with it, and of the medieval religious orders, themselves early forms of voluntary association, autonomous, free, yet rule-bound and governed by written constitution.64 On Milbank’s account, Christian Socialism did not entail retreat to a form of utopian neo-medievalism, although it did entail a measure of ‘conservatism’ in the face of capitalism’s voracious destruction of all that was solid in earlier forms of social relationship. Yet this was a conservatism that, because of its refusal to accept liberalism as anything other than an entirely contingent, and therefore far from inevitable, stage of social ‘progress’, had within it the seeds of radicalism. That radicalism in turn drew its inspiration from Gospel values of gift and grace, and found in the virtues of charity and justice a critique of bureaucratic capitalism that was ethical and Christian first, rather than prudential in conception or Marxian in flavour. In Medieval Socialism Jarrett is certainly alert to the need to distance himself from the anachronistic view that the Middle Ages saw the development of a form of social theory that would attract the label ‘socialist’ in any modern or Marxian sense. He is, for example, 63
Nichols, in Preaching Justice, p. 401. Cf. Wykeham-George and Mathew, p. 145. See in particular, J. Milbank, ‘Were the Christian Socialists Socialist?’, in J. Milbank, The Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology (London, 2009), pp. 63–74; ‘On Baseless Suspicion: Christianity and the Crisis of Socialism’, in ibid. pp. 112–129; ‘Socialism of the Gift, Socialism of Grace’, New Blackfriars 77 (1996) pp. 532–548; ‘The Gift of Ruling: Secularization and Political Authority’, New Blackfriars 85 (2004) 212–238. 64
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at pains to point out that both the absolute state and absolute individualism were equally unknown to the medieval mind. It was only with the lawyers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that these categories appear, and it is for that reason that Jarrett considers that in the period he is considering the notion of ‘socialism’ is necessarily quite different from its use in a modern context.65 For Jarrett, ‘by socialistic theories of the Middle Ages, therefore, we mean no more than those theories which from time to time came to the surface of political and social speculation in the form of communism, or of some other way of bringing about the transference [of ownership in land and capital from private hands into their possession in some form or other by society]’.66 Nevertheless, he is quite clear that the medieval friars (if not ‘socialist’ in the modern sense) were in both theory and practice among those forging a form of social life shaped by charity and justice and therefore at odds with anything that might resemble modern bureaucratic capitalism. It is not so much that some, like Wyclif, suggested that the friars had lent their support to the Peasants’ Revolt. More than that, the scholastics, whilst acknowledging that there was nothing absolute or sacred about private property, also recognised that ‘peace and rest from faction could be achieved with certainty only on the condition of strict justice between man and man, on the observance of God’s commandments’.67 Reversing in effect the tenets of communism, the scholastics argued that possessions, although legitimately held in private, were for public use, and so established a theory of almsgiving as ‘a matter not of charity but of justice’.68 Dominican poverty was a concrete expression of that realisation, founded upon the theory of Christian virtue, not secular social theory. Nor does Jarrett suggest that political action is the route to social salvation. On the contrary, in Medieval Socialism Jarrett is anxious to give priority to the social over the political, citing Aquinas in support of the ‘medieval socialist’ view that ‘unrest and discontent would continue under any form of government whatever’ and that ‘the more each city changed its constitution, the more it remained the same’.69 The critical factor in determining levels of collective happiness and sadness lay outside the strict political realm: ‘For it was the spirit of government alone which, in the eyes of the scholastic social writers, made the state what it happened to be’.70 By the time he assumed the editorship of Blackfriars just a few years before his death in 1934, Jarrett had seen Pope Pius XI’s 65 66 67 68 69 70
B. Jarrett, Medieval Socialism (London, 1913), pp. 79–80. Ibid. pp. 7–8. Ibid. p. 80. Ibid. p. 90. Ibid. p. 79. Ibid.
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publication of Quadragesimo Anno in 1931 and the papal seal of approval for Catholic Action and ‘Social Catholicism’.71 William Cavanaugh has detected in Catholic Action the naive surrender by the Church of politics to the state, and the espousal of a form of ecclesiology that rested on ‘a very influential but entirely spurious fairy tale’, namely the separation of temporal and spiritual planes and the idea that by infusing secular life with individual action inspired by Catholic social teaching it might be possible to transform the bureaucratic state, whether liberal capitalist or socialist, into a vehicle for fostering virtue and the common good.72 . Jarrett’s debt to Barker and to his prioritisation of legal and constitutional structures in the task of political analysis avoids any such ‘fairytale’ and instead points towards the possibility of combining social action with a form of politics that posits real corporate bodies, voluntary associations, universities, religious orders, as the building blocks of a transformed state, a ‘communitas communitatum’, whereby the Church and its institutions become the site of social transformation, a real and material form of political life that stands as a source of dialogue with, but critique of, those forms of bureaucratic state capitalism and state socialism that would, as Jarrett feared, ensnare mankind’s soul. In his last published homilies and perhaps his best-loved prayer, Jarrett meditated on the belief that ‘There is No Abiding City’. Whilst his attempts to portray medieval social life bore witness to his scepticism of utopian political visions, his exposure to the tradition of political pluralism and associated forms of Christian Socialism, and his explorations of the political structure of his own Order, enabled him to supplement his concern for the ‘social’ with a political vision that gave substance to the Church as a real, not just mystical, body, a form of sacred community not simply a spiritual focal point for individual social action. Without idealising with longing a lost Christendom, fleeing back to the land or, alternatively, placing unconditional faith in the sovereign state or its modern metropolis, ‘the secular city’, Jarrett nevertheless engaged in practical life, in his scholarship and in his spirituality in the real task of building up the Kingdom, however ephemeral its material and constitutional forms. In that task, it was the Dominican Order itself, its history and constitution, which lay at the heart of his vision and offered the intellectual foundations for his ministry of study and preaching. Nick O’Brien Email:
[email protected]
71 72
On his editorship, see Wykeham-George and Mathew, pp. 144–45. W. T. Cavanaugh, Torture and the Eucharist (Oxford, 1998), pp. 137ff.
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were radically questioned and apparently almost discarded within mainstream Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions as well as in some Protestant and Reformed communities. First, the positive elements and that which is shared in common between Christianity and other religions is stressed in the official documents of the Catholic Church and the World Council of Churches (WCC: 1977, 2002). Second, the Catholic Church and the World Council of Churches both hold that salvation is possible for those who are non-Christians after the coming of Christ. The Catholic Church emphasise the mediation of the Church and Christ in this process and the World Council of Churches stress the mediation of Christ in all salvation. Third, there is almost no Christian group that would disagree with equal rights for all religions in the public square. How did this change come about? Through ‘reception’. The answer is that traditional teachings on these matters were received, interpreted and passed on, sometimes with the claim that these teachings were the old ones, other times that these teachings were recasting the old within a new situation and some simply said these were a selection of the old recast into new teachings. ‘Reception’ theory for theologians is a Pauline question of whether the Good News is still being preached or whether something has supplanted the gospel. But it is more complicated than a matter of simple repetition, because preaching is a linguistic action which is contextual, and because there are interesting theories, such as John Henry Newman’s (1846), about the development of doctrine. Hence, while there are overlaps of concern in ‘reception theory’ in cultural studies, literature and theology, I contend that theology’s particular assumptions generate a unique form of reception theory: passing on the faith that has been received, otherwise facing condemnation as Paul teaches in Galatians 1:9. To keep some control over an impossibly wide canvass, I am going to focus mainly on the Catholic Church and Catholic theologians to explore the complex dynamics in this reception process. I will focus on the Second Vatican Council (all documents cited from ed. Flannery 1975), convened by Pope John XXIII, which promulgated the ‘Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions’ (‘The Declaration’ from now on) in October 1965. ‘The Declaration’ was deeply controversial. I have chosen this document from a Council because the Catholic Church has some robust rules for the reception of tradition. It was precisely these rules and their employment that became the central factor in the great debates about other religions at the Council: scripture, tradition and magisterial teachings must not be contradicted or the teachings propounded would be inauthentic. This approach (call it X) insists, to use a musical metaphor, that S¨ussmayr’s hand should be invisible in Mozart’s unfinished Requiem. Another view (call it Y), the majority at the Council as it happens, argued for continuity, but a contextualised appreciation of C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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earlier teachings, such that not all were universally binding at all times and in all places. Returning to our musical metaphor: we all know that S¨ussmayr was not Mozart, but tried to finish the Requiem keeping with Mozart’s style. To group X group Y sounded rather like modernism understood as historical contextualism and relativism. Modernism according to group X had been condemned by Pius XII. To X, Y’s strategy sounded like getting a heavy metal rock band to complete Mozart’s unfinished Requiem: the discontinuity jarred! There were of course many different interest groups at the Council, not just two, and the debates were complicated. See with delicate balance (Oesterreicher 1968, and Laurentin & Neuner 1966, and Bea 1966); and from a generally ‘liberal’ view (ed. Alberigo 1995, 1997, 2000, 2003, 2006); and with a careful hermeneutic of past tradition interpreting the present (Levering & Lamb 2008, Marchetto 2010). However, I shall be drawing on the Coetus Espiscoporum Internationalis, subsequently termed Coetus, a group of conservative bishops led by Bishop Carli and Archbishops Lefebvre and Rigaud to represent the minority view, that I called X above (see ed. Alberigo 1997: 195–200; 2003: 515–18; and Lefebvre 1997, 1982; Nemeth 1994) and to represent what I called Y above I draw on writers from the drafting committee and others closely associated with Oesterreicher, Laurentin, Neuner and Bea to represent the ‘majority’. Both groups were far from homogenous and the latter fragmented further after the Council. The two ‘groups’ underline the curious paradox: both claimed the same ends (continuity with the Catholic tradition) and the same means (using the resources of the tradition), but were utterly at loggerheads in their assessment of the Council. Both groups were engaged with reception of the one true faith of the Catholic Church and both groups questioned the validity of the other’s doctrinal conclusions. A second painful paradox is that some within the minority group, led by Lefebvre, created schism. In their resolute fidelity to magisterial, Conciliar and scriptural authority they eventually rejected all three, not universally, but in a particular context: the authority of five popes (John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI); the authority of the twenty first ecumenical Council, Vatican II (according to the Catholic count); and the authority of scripture which underwrites the pope and the councils in the first two contexts above. ‘The Declaration’ started life as a document on the Jewish people. Here we see another curious paradox (although some would say a disgrace, and others a wonderful grace): what started as a document on the Jewish people ended up as “The Declaration”, which only dealt with Judaism in paragraph 4, in its 5 paragraphs, but also thus attended to the three other world religions (Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism). C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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The Jewish question Slowly, after the Shoah there was profound shock amongst European Christians. Six million Jewish men, women and children were systematically exterminated in the heart of Christian Europe by a Christian nation (Germany), while the largest Christian Church in Europe (the Catholic Church) allegedly made no public condemnations of these genocidal actions. While there has been argument as to whether Nazi anti-Semitism is different from Christian anti-Semitism, and whether the Catholic Church remained silent for a greater good (keeping their operations to save Jews intact, or to keep their own faithful intact), there is no question that a long history of Christian anti-Semitism, especially from the thirteenth century on facilitated this horrific genocide (see Foa 2007). Rolf Hockhuth’s 1963 play, The Representative, staged in Berlin and London in the same year, ignited the European imagination regarding the Catholic complicity question. Hockhuth portrayed Pius XII as avaricious and anti-Semitic. Until Hockhuth’s play, there had been little attention to the Jewish question within Catholic circles. This can be seen from the process conducted by the Vatican prior to the Council. Bishops, Catholic Universities and Catholic Institutions world wide were asked for agenda items. The issue of the Jews featured in two returns. In one, eighteen professors from the Pontifical Biblical Institute stressed the need to combat anti-Semitism. In the other, a bishop wanted a condemnation of ‘international freemasonry, controlled by the Jews.’ (Stransky 1988: 55) Many Jews and a few Catholic theologians had already pointed to Catholic doctrinal and liturgical anti-Semitism as the heart of the problem: the deicide charge made against the Jewish people; the teaching that Judaism, based on the ‘Old Covenant’, was made null and void with the coming of the ‘New Covenant’; the Good Friday prayers that pronounced the Jews ‘perfidious’ (perfidii). Jules Isaac, a Jewish historian, argued this amounted to a ‘teaching of contempt’ which went against Jesus’ teachings (Isaac 1971). Isaac visited Pope John XXIII on June 3, 1960 to plead with him for a change in the teaching of ‘contempt’. Isaac left a file with the Pope who handed it to Cardinal Augustin Bea, Secretary for Christian Unity, asking that the teaching of contempt be addressed. Bea, who had a wide network of Jewish contacts in France, Israel and the United States, drafted a short statement De Judaeis for the Council. Pope John had already changed the Holy Week ‘Solemn Intercessions’ in 1959 when he simply dropped pro perfidies Judaeis from the usual prayer: ‘Let us pray for the perfidious Jews’. He subsequently ordered perfidies Judaeis to be dropped universally. Pope Benedict has once more changed this key prayer in the liturgy (2008), to indicate the need for Jewish conversion to Christ, but has excluded any negative reference to the Jewish people: ‘Let us also pray for the Jews C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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that God our Lord should illuminate their hearts, so that they will recognize Jesus Christ, the Saviour of all men.’ The stormy passage of this document is indicative of the issues of ‘reception’ in three important ways: first, the struggle over the Council text highlights difficulties in biblical hermeneutics; second, we see profound problems in determining which elements of the tradition are authoritative and how to interpret them; and third, we see a growing sensibility to the socio-political impact of theological statements, which perhaps result from the Catholic Church’s loss of social power. Let us look at each of these factors. First, the bible is normative, but its normative meaning requires interpretation. The minority argued that any interpretation must not contradict the main lines of the tradition of interpretation. They argued that the charge of deicide could not be erased for three reasons. First, it was present in the New Testament texts. For example Acts 3:15, established in the Vulgate translation, Auctorem vitae interfecistis, ‘you have killed the author of life’. Paul confirms this in 1 Thessalonians 2:15, where he says of the Jews ‘who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all men.’ The Jewish leaders, who represent the people, are undoubtedly guilty, since Jesus himself says in John 15:24 ‘If I had not done among them the works which no one else did, they would not have sin; but now they have seen and hated both me and my Father.’ This also explain John’s saying that their Father is the devil (John 8:44). Further, according to the representative theory, where in Hebrew thought a person is always representative of their group, this deicide and its guilt thus passes from generation to generation as Matthew confirms both in Matthew 23: 30–32, and in 27:25 when, during the trial of Jesus, the crowd release Barabbas, taking full representative responsibility for this act: ‘And all the people answered, “His blood be on us and on our children.”’ It is not possible to cover the full ranger of texts drawn on, but the Coetus argued that these theological readings of the bible did not of themselves amount to anti-Semitism for they did not enjoin any persecution of Jews. They simply testified to the drama of sacred history which had to be proclaimed by the Church. Bishop Carli, on behalf of the Coetus impressively argued a doctrinal case and carefully distanced himself from any political or racial anti-Semitism (ed. Alberigo 2003: 548ff). To these biblical arguments were added a second factor, the weight of the tradition in accepting such a continuous line of biblical interpretation. The Coetus noted the long line of continuous readings that supported their interpretation of the biblical texts. Third, socio-political factors also came into play and worked in very different ways. The minority argued that the Catholic Church could not tailor the truth entrusted to it so that others would not take offence. The obvious social pressures behind the German and C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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American bishops were viewed by the Coetus as undue and inappropriate interference over matters of doctrine and correct biblical interpretation. Being ‘politically correct’ was not a remit of the Council, only proclaiming that truth handed on by the apostles. Indeed, this same point was taken up and used crudely by some Arab press and countries that were squarely against any Catholic Church pronouncement ‘siding’ with the Jews. For example, while the draft document was still being debated in 1964, a Syrian newspaper editor called the Council a second Judas who betrayed Christ for Jewish money, not this time for thirty pieces of silver but for American dollars (Oesterreicher 1968: 105, citing Herder Correspondence, March 1965, 80). The Jerusalem Times in Jordan ran the headline: ‘Who crucified Christ? The Vatican in the year 1964’. Radio Cairo, on 25 November 1964, through the Constituent Council of the Islamic World, warned of troubled and even bloody relations that could follow if the document was accepted. But the Arabs were not the only protesters against the intention of the Council. The Eastern Churches joined the Coetus’s protests against the document on the Jewish people, but for very different reasons. They were concerned for the safety of Christians in the Middle East, were the Council to ‘side’ with the Jews. For example, the Orthodox Church in Jordan invited Catholics to join them and leave the Catholic Church, rather than face persecution for European and American political gain rather than for the truth of the faith. They also argued that the Vatican was putting serious obstacles against Christian unity and some Orthodox members of parliament pressed for Catholic Schools to be seized by the government. This terrible treble threat: hostility from the Arab world towards the Vatican, endangering the life of Christians in the Middle East, and destroying relations with the Eastern Orthodox churches were used by the Coetus in debates on the Council floor. It is difficult to judge whether this was cynical expediency on their part (as is claimed by some, eg. in ed. Alberigo 2003: 135–93 (Giovanni Miccoli); 546–59 (Ricardo Burigana & Giovanni Turbanti); 2006: 211–21 (Mauro Velati)), for the threats were very real and even caused Cardinal Bea, arch supporter of the document on the Jewish people, to give way to changes on a number of counts. The reception of tradition cannot be separated from the socio-political context, although it cannot be reduced to it either. How were these three factors dealt with by the majority? First, they too held that the bible was normative, but was the minority readings feasible any longer? Take the charge of ‘deicide’, a word not actually used in any New Testament text. Oesterricher argued that the ‘experts’ on the drafting commission and the minority bishops were at odds. The latter ‘would not accept that the reading of the Vulgate [Acts 3:15] . . . was wrong, that according to the original text and the context it should be translated: “You have killed the leader C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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towards life”, that is him who rose first and has prepared the way for others and led them into life.’ (108) (The Catholic authorised Douai-Rheims translation which is closest to the Vulgate has it: ‘But the author of life you killed, whom God hath raised from the dead, of which we are witnesses.’ The Jerusalem translation reads: ‘You have killed the Prince of life’.) The repeated points made by the majority are that the Jews who were involved in Christ’s death: (a) were a limited number of people and (b) did not know this was an act of deicide. These contextualisations should determine the reading of scripture. (For the Coetus the first point was rebutted by the representative theory and the second was explained as the blindness caused by sinful rejection of the truth). Likewise for the majority, the other relevant biblical texts could all be read in this alternative manner. For example 1 Thessalonians 2:15 does not refer to the Jewish people as a whole, nor does Matthew 23: 30–32. John is very clear that ‘Jews’ cannot be applied to all Jews for he also says in 7:31, ‘many of the people believed in him’ and in 11:45, ‘many of the Jews . . . believed in him’. Similarly Mark 14:2 says the opponents of Jesus dared not seize him as they feared the ‘tumult of the people’. Roman 11 suggests that God has a purpose in Israel’s rejection, which can therefore not be attributed solely to hardheartedness and perfidy, but to God’s plans. Admittedly, the Coetus did not question Paul’s theology about Israel’s rejection being part of God’s plan, but they did not deduce from this that Israel was therefore valid in any way apart from Israel as the Old Testament people. Oesterricher dismisses the representative theory adopted by the Coetus arguing that if this was the case, then because the saviour is born from Mary, then Israel must be called the ‘womb of Christ’ (Oesterreicher 1968: 113). But Oesterricher’s argument is more ambiguous than he realised, for it is also precisely the basis for supersessionism: that Israel is properly continued in the Church, as Mary, the ‘womb of Christ’, and not Israel as in post-second temple Judaism. This dispute over reading biblical texts has never really been resolved within the Catholic Church, either specifically in terms of the question of the meaning of Israel after the time of Christ, nor in terms of an agreed hermeneutical rule for scriptural interpretation. After the Council the different hermeneutical emphases continue within official organs in the curia: on the one hand the Pontifical Commission for Biblical Studies when dealing with Judaism criticise allegorical readings which are said to instrumentalise and de-historicise Judaism (Pontifical Biblical Commission 2001: 3); and on the other hand, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger criticised the dominance of historical-critical approaches and urged a retrieval of pre-modern hermeneutical strategies (Ratzinger 1989). The reception of the biblical tradition relies on settling this prior question of hermeneutics. C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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Regarding ‘deicide’, the term was eventually dropped from the document on the explicit request of Paul VI, while keeping the meaning in so much as there was a clear condemnation of attributing the death of Christ to all Jews, then (in the time of Christ) and now. Cardinal Ruffini, who belonged to neither group, argued that ‘deicide’ should be dropped because no one could kill God anyway. The final text reads: ‘Even though the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ (cf. John 19:6), neither all Jews indiscriminately at that time, nor Jews today, can be charged with the crimes committed during his passion. It is true that the Church is the new people of God, yet the Jews should not be spoken of as rejected or accursed as if this followed from Holy Scripture.’ (4) The arguments from tradition are of course partly dependent on the biblical evidence. If one decides that the bible is properly read contra ‘the teaching of contempt’ (Isaac) then any tradition that perpetuates the contempt must be called into question. Calling tradition into question is complicated, given the Catholic view of the authority of tradition, and here again we have a diversity of views regarding the reception of prior tradition. The Coetus held the tradition to be right. The most cautious group within the majority wanted to argue that the tradition of contempt cannot be criticised per se for they wished to avoid an anachronistic charge. They also argued that such tradition is clearly not binding upon the Catholic Church today. Another group within the majority held that one should acknowledge that some teachings within the tradition are in error and repent for this and this would include the teaching of contempt. Most within this group would say that such teachings are not part of the magisterium of the Catholic Church and thus, this is a discernment of good and bad elements within the reformable non-binding strata of tradition. Thus, individuals, not the Church, committed errors in theological judgement. This was in fact Pope John Paul II’s position at the turn of the millennium in his prayers seeking forgiveness from God for the past sins of Catholics against the Jewish people. He followed the International Theological Commission’s report regarding the Catholic shame regarding the Jewish people’s persecutions (1999: 5.5.4). A variation on this position is that one cannot repent for sins that have been committed by one’s ancestors. A fourth position within the majority would acknowledge that the church, rather than individuals in the tradition, erred in some of its teachings. This view forks in two directions: the first would say this cannot apply to matters of faith and morals taught authoritatively (Dulles 2007: 59–81); the second would allow that errors can exist even at this level, even if only rarely (K¨ung 1971: 183–96). In point of fact, no generally accepted authoritative teachings in the tradition apart from biblical commentaries were utilised in the debate C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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by the minority. Anonymously circulated materials at the Council did utilize such arguments. The ghost writer ‘Bernardus’, argued that the decree of 1751, the ‘Inquisition for the Jews’, is binding. The decree included amongst its many rules that Jews may not buy or receive books without those books being censored. It also stipulated that during Jewish burials no religious rites can be publicly observed. For the full text see Laurentin & Neuner 1966: 24–48. Oesterricher drops his calm prose when commenting on ‘Bernardus’: ‘One must really be insane to regard such precepts as the law of Christ’. (118) (Pope Benedict XIV, who promulgated them, was not formally insane). The issue of tradition was not quite as clearly operative as in the argument that raged over the ‘Declaration on Religious Liberty’ (December 1965). There some three hundred years of tradition and the teachings of five popes is pitted against some five years of tradition in the single encyclical of John XXIII. The latter won the debate! For both sides of this reception debate: see Pavan 1969 for the majority, and Davies 1992 for the minority, and D’Costa commentary 2009. Finally, the socio-political circumstances deeply affected both the minority and the majority groups in different ways. The treble threat was significant. However, the American and German bishops strongly supported the text and would not countenance removing it from the Council – a move countenanced by Bea in the light of the treble threat. In the end, two key changes satisfied some opposition to the document, both of which had been requested by Paul VI (who actually made six suggestions for changes). The word ‘deicide’ was dropped; and the ‘condemnation’ of anti-Semitism was toned down to ‘deplores’. Paul VI argued that ‘condemnation’ was a formal doctrinal censure and that John XXIII had wanted to avoid condemnations. The voting on the document (see further below) was remarkable given the turbulent socio-political climate raging around the Council.
The religions enter the Declaration I want to briefly look at how this document on the Jews ended up as one on the ‘Non-Christian Religions’. Three factors are significant. First, Paul VI from the start of his pontificate expressed a positive appreciation of non-Christian religions at various occasions and in most detail in Ecclesiam Suam (1964: 107–108). There he formulated the concentric circles of relations which is adopted by ‘The Declaration’ and Lumen gentium 16: with the Jews specially close to the Church; then the Muslims (based on shared monotheism, not on any covenant relation); then the African and Asian religions. Paul VI explicitly steers away from indifferentism (the view that all religions are possible salvific means) and proclaims the truth of Catholicism (‘that the Christian religion is the one and only true religion’). But C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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he then adds that despite this: ‘we do not wish to turn a blind eye to the spiritual and moral values of the various non-Christian religions, for we desire to join with them in promoting and defending common ideals in the spheres of religious liberty, human brotherhood, education, culture, social welfare, and civic order.’ The key point in this quote is that social cooperation is not dependent on acceptance of non-Christian truth claims, even though there may be elements of spiritual and moral truth to be found in these religions. John XIII and Paul VI created an atmosphere that allowed for a positive treatment of other religions at the Council. Second, a request for some treatment of other religions did not come until the second session of the Council in 1963, when two Cardinals (from Spain and Japan) and especially Bishop Da Veiga Coutinho of India pleaded that the document on the Jews be extended to include other religions. Not until 1964, in the third session, did this request get repeated and then immediately implemented. Requests came from bishops around the world, including a number of African bishops who wanted animism to be included in any extension. (The fact that it was not included meant that some African bishops joint the minority in opposing the document to express their discontent, not in agreement with the minority’s arguments.) Only now did the Secretariat for Christian Unity which was overseeing the document call in new experts, for this new request to address world religions was beyond their expertise. Most significantly Georges Anawati OP from Egypt, an expert on Islam, and Josef Neuner SJ from India, an expert on Hinduism were enlisted, as was Yves Congar OP. There were also others. Hinduism and Buddhism (section 2), and Islam (section 3) now entered the newly born schema, transforming it radically, but carrying the original Jewish document within it as paragraph 4 in the shortest document of the Council. Third, this treatment of the Jews within a wider context was seen as a way of dealing with the socio-political pressures mounting outside the Council. It was thought that the section on Islam might alleviate some Arab concerns. Radical in its context, ‘The Declaration’ was actually given little attention from the Arab and Muslim world. While the Jewish section was the most deeply contested and widely publicised as the document proceeded through the Council, the new sections 1–3 were also contested with equal vigour and on similar grounds: scripture and tradition. In an official letter from the three leaders of Coetus on 11 October 1965, three days before the final vote for the document, the Council fathers were advised how to vote - and why. The letter was apparently in response to a request for guidance on this matter. The minority urged a rejection of sections 1–3 on Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam because of the guiding hermeneutical principle in the document of focusing on what the Church shares ‘in common’ with the religions. This principle, they argued, was alien to C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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the apostles and to the early Church which simply condemned error and preached Jesus Christ. There was no half-way house: what was not from Christ was not from God. Hence, this ‘common’ ground had no doctrinal basis at all and obscured the early church’s relentless call for repentance and conversion. Further, they trenchantly criticised the ‘comparative ideology’ underlying the assumption that which ‘we have in common’. Between a religion of revelation (Catholic Christianity) and religions of nature there is nothing in common. The resultant pictures of the religions, they argued, belonged more to the detached academic style of the history of religions, than the depiction of these religions through the eyes of faith. This is because faith proclaims a revealed Person, Jesus Christ, not a set of beliefs and values to compare with other religions. Grounds for commonality remove Christ from centre stage. On Judaism, we have already seen their arguments, but a new one is added: that the document suppresses the necessary call for the future conversion of the Jews and mission to the Jewish people. Oesterricher criticises this point of theirs in an interesting fashion: in a pastoral Council one had to avoid ‘offence to others’ and given the ‘centuries of injustice’ towards the Jewish people a certain delicacy was required (127). Oesterricher does not argue theologically against mission, although some Catholics have done so since the Council (see below).
The reception of the document at the final session of the Council The final document was accepted by 2064 votes, with 58 against. Interestingly the section on the alleged blood libel curse on Israel and Israel’s rejection by God, which the document sought to refute, was rejected by 245 fathers of the 2080 voting, the highest proportion of non placet votes in any of the eight voting questions put to the Council regarding ‘The Declaration’. The section on Islam had little immediate impact on the Arab world which had instead focussed on ‘The Declaration’s’ attention to the Jews. Most Jews and Muslims saw Vatican positive statements about the Jews as political support for Israel, despite the relentless denial by the Vatican press and its nuncios on this point. Admittedly, some individual Muslims welcomed the statement publicly (Oesterreicher 1968: 104). In the years subsequent to the Council, while ‘The Declaration’ has been mainly welcomed by non-Christians, it has also been criticised individuals and groups from all religions. For most of the world, ‘The Declaration’ heralded a new age in the Catholic Church: other religions were recognised as ways in which truth and goodness were found outside the Catholic Church; these religions sometimes reflected the activity of God; the Catholic Church had much to learn from these C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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religions; and the Catholic Church should cooperate with the religions towards the common good. Whether this involved a change in doctrinal teaching was much disputed by all sides. In terms of ‘reception’ we see emerging a complex set of hermeneutical questions: how is scripture and tradition to be interpreted; which elements of tradition are binding and which not?; and who is to have the final word in determining these answers: the pope, the pope with the college of bishops, individual theologians, or the faithful as a whole? The question of the reception of ‘The Declaration’ is not finished in the promulgation of ‘The Declaration’, but simply starts a new cycle of reception (of the reception). Interpreting the document was and is almost as complex as interpreting the sources that led to the document. Interestingly, the same sub-texts and hermeneutical questions arise in tracking the ‘The Declaration’s’ reception.
The reception of the Declaration after the Council Subsequent to ‘The Declaration’, the official hierarchy has produced a number of statements (through encyclicals, curial bodies – Congregations and Pontifical Councils - dealing with doctrine, mission, the Jewish people, and other religions) clarifying the teaching of the Council and developing further the positive teachings of the Council. These documents also adjudicate in certain debates as to the legitimacy of certain theological interpretations of the Council. The question of the correct interpretation of the Council is still very much contested. There are four different approaches, some of which are compatible with others and some not. First, there is the historical critical school, exemplified by Giuseppe Alberigo and his Bologna School, which assumes that if we can reconstruct the intentions of the historical players in the composition of the documents we can access the meaning of the documents. Second there are varieties of development from the Alberigo thesis, drawing on various theories of reception from cultural studies and philosophical hermeneutics, such as Ormond Rush’s drawing upon Hans Robert Jauss reception theory, or Joseph Komonchak’s utilisation of ‘event’ theory from literary studies ( see Rush 2004; Komonchak 2007). Third, there is the traditional internal hierarchy of Council documents reading-theory, which states that, for example, Dogmatic Constitutions must always guide our reading of lower level documents (a Declaration, in this instance), so that proper interpretation of ‘The Declaration’ only follows from a close exegesis of ‘The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church’, 8–16, as is advanced by Illaria Morali (see Morali 2010). Closely allied to this is a fourth position, that argues that the Council should be read interpreted by the tradition (previous Councils, C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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magisterial teachings etc) as argued by Pope Benedict XVI, Levering, Marchetto and others. (See Benedict XVI, 2005). My own view, which cannot be argued for here, is that the fourth position is capable of including the others, although in so doing, it modifies and corrects the first two. For example, while rightly understanding the full historical context of the Council documents, as Alberigo and his team seek to do, we cannot claim that the meaning of the texts is restricted to the intentions of the historical players individually or as groups, but rather than the texts finally require exegesis also in the more normative light of tradition both before and after the Council. This is admittedly to put the matter too simply, for far too much hangs on this important debate. Some have even seen in the Vatican’s attempt to ‘control’ the reception of the Council documents, papal agreement with the minority position. Let me briefly look at the Coetus after the Council to test this one claim a little further. The Coetus continued its criticisms after the Council and their collective response can be analysed as containing the following three trajectories, some of which overlap and some of which are exclusive. First, the Council was defended (emphasising certain texts and certain interpretations) with the allied argument that liberal modernist interpretations of the Council were misleading. Second, the Council was defended, with the argument that the only correct interpretations must be forthcoming from the pope and the official teaching organs of the Church. Third, a line developed that the actual Council documents had been infected by liberalism and modernism and the teachings represented a schism as they were not continuous with the Catholic tradition. The three key areas causing schism here were religious pluralism, equal civic rights for all religions in society, and most importantly the liturgy. Lefebvre started out with trajectory one, moved to trajectory two, and finally held the third, although many of the Coetus group stopped short at the third trajectory. A reasonable case has been made by Menozzi (1987) that Pope Paul VI follows the first and second trajectories. The same could be argued for Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI (on Cardinal Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, see Rowland 2008: 84–104). This does not mean these three popes belonged to the ‘minority’ during the Council, but that after the Council they all had deep sympathy with some of the minority concerns, and Paul possibly during the Council as well. Benedict XVI has been particularly concerned to heal this schism, and while Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he had close dealings with the Lefebvre schismatics, called the Society of St Pius XII. If we turn to individual Catholic theologians we can see a remarkable diversity of interpretations of ‘The Declaration’ which relate to a number of factors, more of one which can operate in any particular theologian: close historical reading practices (accurate exegesis of C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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the texts and attention to the development of the schema); theological presuppositions already held by that theologian suggesting certain interpretations of the text both maximally and minimally influenced by the exegetes presuppositions; the attempt to read the texts in continuity with the teachings of the Church; the attempt to read the texts as breaking new ground in certain areas and thus not to be interpreted by previous non-binding or binding teachings; the reading of the texts without any constraints from previous teachings. I believe that one can actually interpret these texts ‘correctly’ as indicated above, but this does not itself mean a closure of meaning, but an opening up of new questions and problems. To proceed, I shall focus on a single question related to all religions: did ‘The Declaration’ teach or imply that non-Christian religions might be a means to salvation? This has been hotly debated. On the more ‘radical’ wing, the American Catholic theologian Paul Knitter argues that ‘The Declaration’ is a ‘watershed’ in the Church’s attitude to non-Christian religions for it overturns a basically negative attitude towards other religions into positive appreciation, seeking the common ground and working together in cooperation (1985: 121). Knitter (falsely) argues that ‘the majority of contemporary Catholic theologians’ interpret ‘The Declaration’ as implicitly or explicitly validating other religions as means for ‘authentic “religious experience”’ (124); that is, that these religions have an authentic validity in themselves. Knitter argues that since Rahner is the ‘chief engineer’ of this ‘watershed’, his own approach opens up the real direction intended by the Council. Rahner’s theory of anonymous Christianity and of the anonymous Christian grants legitimacy to other religions as salvific structures until they are confronted with the truth of the gospel and this means, for Knitter, that other religions can be means of salvation (Knitter 1985: 125–30). For Knitter, Rahner did not go far enough. Knitter supports other Catholic theologians who have picked up on what is the obvious ‘next step’ implied within the Rahnerian/ ‘Declaration’ trajectory. Knitter develops two arguments to support this next step. The first comes from the shift on the teachings about the Jews. Since ‘The Declaration’ prohibited contempt and acknowledged the Church’s ‘common spiritual heritage’ (the Old Testament) and prohibited speaking about the Jews as ‘rejected or accursed’, Knitter along with some American Catholic theologians like Gregory Baum, Rosemary Ruether and John Pawlikowski argue that the Council teaches ‘that the Jewish religion was not meant to be “superseded” by Christianity; Judaism preserves its own value and role in God’s plan, alongside Christianity.’ (Knitter, 131). The logical step, argues Knitter, is to apply what has been said of Israel, analogically to other religions – which was Rahner’s argument, but applied with more qualifications and caution by Rahner. This is precisely the move Knitter, Baum, C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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Ruether and Pawlikowski make. The second argument urges lifting Rahner’s ‘time limit’ regarding the provisional salvific efficacy of a religion until the time of its meeting Christianity, what Rahner calls their provisional ‘lawful validity’. Knitter notes the evident holiness and goodness of many non-Christians who have heard about Christianity and in good faith do not accept its message. Can one confidently say that this person’s religion thus has no validity for them because of this, even if we continue to see their adherence to that religion produces all manner of spiritual fruits? Knitter points out that K¨ung has been brave enough to make the next step, moving away from a normative ecclesiocentricism, but has not been able to make the decisive step away from a normative Christology. Knitter is clear that this last move is not an orientation found within Vatican II, but urges theologians to move in that direction. Knitter’s reading of the documents would not have been accepted by Rahner, who actually wrote of ‘The Declaration’: ‘the theological quality of non-Christian religions remains undefined.’ (Rahner 1984: 290) Rahner did not think the actual documents supported a positive or a negative answer to the salvific efficacy of non-Christian religions. I have criticised Knitter’s reading elsewhere (D’Costa 2000: 30–40). The important point regarding the question of reception is that within twenty five years the Council documents are being read as encouraging indifferentism within the tradition (and often called ‘theological pluralism’ in current literature), both towards Judaism and the world religions. Statements from other documents within the Council that clearly oppose such readings are not always properly considered (most clearly: Lumen gentium 14–16, where in 14 the necessity of the Church for salvation is reiterated – Ecclesiam han peregrinantem necessariam esse ad salutem; and Ad gentes 3-7). The same criticism of Knitter cannot be made of Jacques Dupuis SJ who treads a delicate path between Rahner’s inclusivism and Knitter’s pluralism in what Dupuis calls ‘inclusivist pluralism’. Dupuis meticulously inspects ‘The Declaration’ and all related Council texts on this question and concludes that Rahner’s assessment is correct. Furthermore, Dupuis sees the main focus of ‘The Declaration’ as concerned with the ‘horizontal relationship’ of the religions with the Church, rather than the ‘vertical relationship’ of the traditions with Christ. He suggests that had ‘The Declaration’ applied itself to this vertical relationship it may have been able to connect the ‘presence of the values and positive elements in these religious traditions’ to an ‘acknowledgement of these same traditions as legitimate paths of salvation for their members, although necessarily in relation to the mystery of Christ’ (1977: 170). Dupuis eventually finds the magisterial materials for his daring hypothesis from post-Conciliar teachings, indirectly from John Paul’s encyclicals Redemptoris Hominis (1979: 6, 11, 12), Dominum et Vivificantem (1986: 53) and Redemptoris C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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Missio (1990: 28 – ‘The Spirit’s presence and activity affect not only individuals but also society and history, peoples, cultures and religions’) and directly from the document Dialogue and Proclamation: Reflections and Orientation on Interreligious Dialogue and the Proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ (1991) . This document was jointly published by the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples and thus shares in the ‘Church’s magisterium’ (178) according to Dupuis. It should be noted that Dupuis was a key drafter in the former group’s input into the document, although that should not technically bear upon the question of the document’s authoritative status or otherwise. It explicitly says in para. 29: ‘The mystery of salvation reaches out to them [members of other religions], in a way known to God, through the invisible action of the Spirit of Christ. Concretely, it will be in the sincere practice of what is good in their own religious tradition and by following the dictates of their conscience that the members of other religions respond positively to God’s invitation and receive salvation in Jesus Christ, even while they do not recognize or acknowledge him as their Saviour.’ (Emphasis added by Dupuis 1977: 178) Dupuis argues this magisterial statement moves the tradition out of the fulfilment trajectory into acknowledging ‘participated mediations’ of religious traditions in God’s revelation for the salvation of their members. Dupuis can be said to move away from ecclesiocentricism, but upholds a strong Christocentricism. Two further teaching documents of the magisterium apply to the question of judging whether Dupuis’ interpretation of post-Vatican II magisterial teaching have gone too far. This allows us to see the way that the magisterium itself becomes part of the interpretation of the magisterium in a way advocated by my fourth group of interpreters of the Council. Note well, that only the reception of the document helps clarify what constitutes authentic reception. The documents related to Dupuis’ reading are Dominus Iesus, 2000 (subsequently Dominus) and the Notification on the book Towards a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism by Father Jacques Dupuis, SJ (January 2001), both published by the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. I cannot follow through a detailed examination of these documents here (see further D’Costa 2007, 2008). Proposition 8 of the Notification deals with ‘the value and salvific function of the religious traditions’ pertinent to my question: ‘In accordance with Catholic doctrine, it must be held that “whatever the Spirit brings about in human hearts and in the history of peoples, in cultures and religions, serves as a preparation for the Gospel” (cf. Dogmatic Constitution Lumen gentium, 16) [John Paul II, Encyclical letter Redemptoris mission, 29.] It is therefore legitimate to maintain that the Holy Spirit accomplishes salvation in non-Christians also through those elements of truth and goodness present in the various C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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religions; however, to hold that these religions, considered as such, are ways of salvation, has no foundation in Catholic theology, also because they contain omissions, insufficiencies and errors [Cf. Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Lumen gentium, 16; Declaration Nostra aetate, 2; Decree Ad gentes, 9 . . . DI, 8.] regarding fundamental truths about God, man and the world.’
I have cited the footnotes to show the way reception moves both forward and backward so one magisterial teaching, Dominus, can allow us to understand previous teachings (‘The Declaration’ and ‘The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church’), which themselves determine the teachings of Dominus, indicating the constant process of clarification and definition, back and forth, that is required for teaching the truth (in particular contexts). To return to my main theme of the reception of ‘The Declaration’, there are also other readings offered by Paul Hacker (1980), Henricus van Straelen (1994), and the Lutheran theologian Mikka Ruokanen (1992) who basically argue, with some significant differences, that three hermeneutical keys are required for properly interpreting the document. First, drawing on the ‘Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation’ (November 1965) it is argued that revelation is exclusive to the Old and New Testaments. No other religion contains revelation, except Israel in so much as it shares this revelation (the Old Testament). But they oppose the Ruether et al line applauded by Knitter, for they do not attribute to Israel after Christ the continued status of a revealed religion, even if they acknowledge that Israel’s bible is the ‘revelation’ built upon in the new Israel, the Church. Second, they commonly argue that all creation shares in universal grace (that sustains and keeps the world in being), but not in saving grace, which is related to Christ preached and accepted. Third, this makes religions at their best, the highest achievements of the human search for God, but finally preparations (preparatio evangelicae) that require completion in Christ and his Church. Interestingly, Dominus’ much contested distinction between ‘faith’ and ‘beliefs’ (4) corresponds to the first and third point here, but Dominus is opposed to the second in so much as it admits the saving activity of the ‘Spirit’ being present within elements of other religions, mixed with error and superstition, but which nevertheless indicates the presence of supernatural saving grace. This is the position advocated by Joseph Ratzinger and Hans von Balthasar although neither offers a close exegesis of ‘The Declaration’.
Conclusion The reception of scripture and tradition that resulted in’ The Declaration’, itself then becoming tradition, continues in the reception C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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of ‘The Declaration’ by Catholic theologians and the magisterium, along with the re-reception of scripture and tradition mediated by ‘The Declaration’. A remarkable hermeneutical spiral takes place. What is even more remarkable, but beyond my brief here, is the Catholic claim that the Holy Spirit guides this spiral deeper and deeper into the truth given in Christ and safeguarded by the Church. The spiral therefore is both open-ended but also determined by various trajectories. And here the reception of tradition most clearly becomes the question of the development of doctrine, or the elaboration of doctrine already explicitly known and taught and handed on. Above, I have tried to trace the complex hermeneutical issues involved, while also indicating a possible resolution to some of the debates, while at every stage claiming that proper interpretation of the documents is not closure, but a new step in the spiral of ‘reception’ which the apostle Paul warned was an issue of the continuity of truth: ‘if anyone preaches a version of the Good News different from the one you have already heard, he is to be condemned.’ (Galatians 1:9). Gavin D’Costa Email:
[email protected]
Bibliography All documents cited without publisher details are obtainable from the Vatican website in English (and Latin): see http://www.vatican.va/phome_en.htm Alberigo, Giuseppe ed. (1995, 1997, 2000, 2003, 2006 respectively), History of Vatican II, Five Volumes – English version ed. Joseph A. Komonchak (Maryknoll: Orbis) Bea, Augustin (1966), The Church and the Jewish people. A commentary on the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, tran. Philip Lovetz (London: Geoffrey Chapman) Benedict XVI, Pope (2005) ‘A Proper Hermeneutic for the Second Vatican Council’, ix– xv (from AAS, 6 January 2006, 40–53, address given to the Roman Curia on December 22, 2005) Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (2000), Dominus Iesus —— (2001) Notification on the book Towards a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism by Father Jacques Dupuis, SJ Davies, Michael (1992), The Second Vatican Council and Religious Liberty (Minnesota: Neumann Press) D’Costa, Gavin — (2000), The Meeting of Religions and the Trinity (Maryknoll: Orbis) —— (2007), ‘Christian Orthodoxy and Religious Pluralism: A Response to Terrence W. Tilley’ and ‘Christian Orthodoxy and Religious Pluralism: A Further Rejoined to Terrence Tilley’, Modern Theology 23, 3: 435–46, 455–63 respectively —— (2008), ‘Christian Orthodoxy and Religious Pluralism: A Response to Perry Schmidt-Leukel’, Modern Theology 24, 2: 285–90 —— (2009) ‘Hermeneutics and Second Vatican Council’s Teachings: establishing Roman Catholic theological grounds for religious freedoms in relation to Islam. Continuity or discontinuity in the Catholic tradition?’, Islam and Christian Muslim Relations, 20, 3: 277–90 C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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Dulles, Avery (2007), Magisterium. Teacher and Guardian of the Faith (Naples, FL: Sapientia Press) Dupuis, Jacques (1977), Towards a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism (Maryknoll, Orbis) Foa, Anna (2007), ‘The Difficult Apprenticeship of Diversity’, ed. Philip A. Cunningham et al, The Catholic Church and the Jewish People. Recent Reflections from Rome (New York: Fordham University Press): 41–53 Hacker, Paul (1980), Theological Foundations of Evangelization (St Augustin: Steyler Verlag) Holy Office (1949), Letter of the Holy Office to the Archbishop of Boston, August 8, 1949 International Theological Commission (1999): Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past Isaac, Jules (1971), Jesus and Israel tran. Sally Gran [1959] (New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston) Knitter, Paul (1985), No Other Name? A Critical Survey of Christian Attitudes Towards the World Religions (London: SCM) Komonchak, Joseph (2007), in ed. David G. Schultenover et al, Vatican II. Did Anything Happen? (New York: Continuum), 34–62 K¨ung, Hans (1971), Infallible? An enquiry, tran. Edward Quinn (New York: Doubleday) Lamb, Matthew L. & Levering, Matthew eds. (2008), Vatican II. Renewal within Tradition, (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Laurentin, Ren´e & Joseph Neuner (1966), Commentary on the Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions (Glen Rock, NJ: Paulist Press) Lefebvre, Marcel (1997), Against the Heresies (Kansas City: Angelus Press) —— (1982), I Accuse the Council (Dickinson, TX: Angelus Press) Marchetto, Agostino (2010), The Second Vatican Ecumenical Council: A Counterpoint for the History of the Council tran. by Kenneth D. Whitehead (Scranton: University of Scranton) Menozzi, Daniele (1987), ‘Opposition to the Council (1966-84)’, in eds. Giuseppe Alberigo et al, The Reception of Vatican II, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press) Morali, Ilaria (2010), in ed. eds. Karl Josef Becker et al, Catholic Engagement with World Religions. (New York: Orbis Books), 38–69 Nemeth, Charles P. (1994), The Case of Marcel Lefebvre (Kansas City: Angelus Press) Newman, John Henry (1846), An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 2nd ed., (London: James Toovey) Oesterreicher, John M. (1968), ‘Declaration on the Relation of the Church to NonChristian Religions’, ed. Herbert Vorgrimler, Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, Volume III (London: Burns & Oates): 1–154 Pavan, Pietro (1969), ‘Declaration on Religious Freedom’, ed. Herbert Vorgrimler, Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, Volume IV (London: Burns & Oates): 49–86 Pontifical Biblical Commission (2001), The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible Rahner, Karl (1984), ‘On the Importance of the Non-Christian Religions for Salvation’, Theological Investigations Vol 18 (London: Darton, Longman & Todd): 288–95 Ratzinger, Joseph (1989), ‘Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: On the Question of the Foundations and Approaches of Exegesis Today’, ed. Richard J. Neuhaus, Biblical Interpretation in Crisis (Grand Rapids, William B. Eerdmans): 1–23 Rowland, Tracey (2008), Ratzinger’s Faith. The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Ruether, Rosemary Radford (1980), Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Seabury Press) Rush, Ormond (2004), Still Interpreting Vatican II. Some Hermeneutical Principles (New York: Paulist Press) C 2010 The Author C 2010 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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Ruokanen, Mikka (1992), The Catholic Doctrine on Non-Christian Religions according the Second Vatican Council (Leiden: Brill) Straelen, H. Van (1994), L’Eglise et les religions non chr´etiennes au seuil du XXIe si`ecle (Paris: Beauchesne) Stransky, Thomas (1988), ‘The History of Nostra Aetate’, ed. Roger Brooks, Theological Views of Jewish-Christian Relations (Indiana: Notre Dame University): 33–60 World Council of Churches (1977), Guidelines on Dialogue —— (2002), Ecumenical Considerations for Dialogue and Relations with People of other Religions
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Ignatius of Antioch in the world of the early second century’ (Second Sophistic p. 318), though it seems that ‘early’ might stretch to A.D. 135 (ibid.) or 138 (Martyr Bishop, p. 118). For Brent, the crucial thing is that Ignatius must be located before the middle of the second century, because the understanding of the roles of bishop, priests, and deacons put forward in the letters was quite unlike the church order that was to emerge from the second half of the second century onwards and then become normative. Indeed, it was unlike anything seen in the Christian Church, before or since. In Ignatius there is ‘no trace of an idea of the bishop as teaching successor to the apostles being able to guarantee his validity and authenticity by the elaboration of a diadoche or list of teachers in lineal, chronological descent’. The bishop ‘is neither the successor of the apostles, nor does he perform an act of ordination upon presbyters, deacons, or one who is to join him as a fellow bishop of another congregation’ (Second Sophistic, pp. 26, 25, cf Martyr Bishop, p. 116). Ignatius is, indeed, concerned with unity in the Christian community, and he does see the bishop at the centre of his submissive clergy as ‘the effective sign of unity’ (Martyr Bishop, p. 155). But he does not describe ‘an established church order in an existing historical situation’ (Martyr Bishop, p. 151). On the contrary, he spins the whole elaborate panoply pretty much out of his own head, his chief models and reference points being not contemporary Christian tradition and practice, but ‘the pagan mysteries of the Greek city-states of Asia Minor during the Second Sophistic’ (Martyr Bishop, p. 151). In ‘advocating a new church order of bishop, presbyters, and deacons’ Ignatius ‘is constructing social reality rather than reflecting it’ (Martyr Bishop, p. 58); his martyr-procession is ‘a visually choreographed argument for unity and episcopal church government’ (p. 60), ‘a dazzling piece of enacted rhetoric’ (p. 158), ‘the kind of political rhetoric which claims that what is believed should be is what in fact is’ (p. 57). The novelty of Ignatius’ understanding of episcopacy explains both the opposition he met with amongst his fellow Christians at Antioch (Martyr Bishop, p. 53) and the caution and reserve of other early Christians, like Polycarp and Irenaeus, in his regard. It was only because Ignatius so dramatically and effectively proclaimed an anti-docetist christology that Polycarp was ‘convinced that the strange figure, interpreting his martyr procession as though it was a pagan mystery procession, was nevertheless orthodox’ (Second Sophistic p. 313–4, cf Martyr Bishop, p. 158). Although J. B. Lightfoot had given short shrift to the ‘cheap wisdom which at the study table or over the pulpit desk declaims against the extravagance of the feelings and language of Ignatius, as the vision of martyrdom rose up before him’ (Apostolic Fathers II. I, 1889, p. 38), Brent is prepared to acknowledge that Ignatius had a ‘highly strung and, one might even say, disturbed temperament’ (Martyr Bishop, p. 19). Despite the strictures of the great bishop of Durham, some readers of the letters might judge this to be altogether too charitable, and that a more forthright assessment would be that Ignatius was quite simply mad. Certainly, anyone inclined to take that view will find abundant diagnostic corroboration in the picture of Ignatius that emerges from these two books. Brent’s argument for the pagan cultic background to Ignatius’ language and imagery is copious and persuasive. He recognises how odd this must have seemed to Ignatius’ more sober-minded Christian contemporaries, grounded in their own scriptures and traditions, but he argues that, solely for the sake of a spectacularly choreographed display of anti-docetist christology, they were prepared to buy the whole package, even if this meant that the weird bits had to be reinterpreted in the light of their own, emerging, ecclesiology. The case Brent makes for this, if not convincing, is at least plausible. However, this thesis might also encourage the speculation, not entertained by Brent himself, that Ignatius’ journey did not end with martyrdom in Rome but that, after bamboozling first his own community at C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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Antioch and then Polycarp and associated communities in Asia Minor, he cast off the Christian yoke and returned to the paganism in which he was so much more at home, to re-emerge at Olympia as Lucian’s Peregrinus Proteus, and to accomplish near there, by his own doing, the death he claimed to have so long desired, and that he had so long postponed. Brent casts a capacious methodological dragnet, and lands a remarkably catholic catch. In addition to his impressive learning in Ignatian scholarship, and in the literature, epigraphy, and iconography associated with mystery religions, the Imperial cult, and the ‘Second Sophistic’, we are invited to take on board the epistemological contributions of Wittgenstein, Katz, and Chomsky and speculations about the behaviour of bishops at Buckingham Palace garden parties, about the deliberations of the Master and Fellows of a Cambridge college, and about the trials and tribulations of Lindy Chamberlain after her infant daughter had been taken by dingoes at Ayers Rock. Both these books would have profited from the more attentive care of copyeditors. In Martyr Bishop it is twice asserted that Peregrinus leapt into his pyre at Athens (pp. 54, 73), though in Second Sophistic (p. 13) the suicide is said to have taken place at Olympia. It seems to be suggested that the relationship between a bishop and his presbyters had found expression in the furnishings of apse or chancel even before, by Brent’s own thesis, that relationship (to say nothing of apse or chancel) had come into existence (Martyr Bishop, pp. 38, 85–6, 108). Nevertheless, Brent has rendered a very worthwhile service to those beginning the study of Ignatius, and has secured a place for himself in any future discussion of the Ignatian problem. If his contribution to that discussion will be a hotly contested one it will be none the odder for that. DENIS MINNS OP SACRIFICE UNVEILED: THE TRUE MEANING OF CHRISTIAN SACRIFICE by Robert J. Daly, T&T Clark International , London 2009, pp. xv + 260, £24.99 pbk
Robert J. Daly’s latest volume, Sacrifice Unveiled, is an apt culmination to the Jesuit theologian’s career-long pursuit in revealing what he believes to be a more Christian construction of sacrifice. According to Daly, Christian sacrifice is, above all, the eminently interpersonal, Trinitarian act of ‘[humanity’s] participation, through the Spirit, in the transcendently free and self-giving love of the Father and the Son’ (p. 1), all of which is initiated by the Father’s giving of the Son. Sacrifice Unveiled explores the theological and liturgical implications of Daly’s assertion, and the evidence for its Biblical and historical legitimacy. The book is a chronological account of sacrifice’s evolution, and is structured in three parts, connected by two bridges. In Part I, Daly begins to demarcate his Trinitarian redefinition of sacrifice by first rejecting traditional notions of transactional satisfaction. He suggests that these notions, at their essence, ‘disastrously. . . look to the religions of the world, and to the characteristics of sacrifice derived from them’ in defining Christian sacrifice, projecting onto Christianity categorically non-Christian notions of violent propitiation. Instead, Daly proposes, Christians must ‘look first to the Christ event, and primarily from the perspective of that Trinitarian event. . . to understand sacrifice’ (p. 10). From a Trinitarian perspective, sacrifice becomes foremost an act of ‘self-giving’ in which the Father, Son, and Christians, through the Spirit, intimately interrelate. In light of Trinitarian sacrifice, the ‘Sacrifice of the Mass’ should also be reinterpreted, now as the transformational, eschatological event through which the assembly becomes ‘more fully members of the Body of Christ’ (p. 19). C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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After establishing his theological and liturgical agenda, Daly surveys the evolution of Christian sacrifice in Bridge I, using the accounts from the historical witnesses of the Old and New Testaments and the works of the Church Fathers – from the Pentateuch to Augustine – ultimately collating three primary points of historical consensus. First, throughout Christian history, Daly notes that Christ’s death is perennially assessed through the theological precedent of the Akedah, and is thus understood in sacrificial, albeit non-substitutionary, terms. Second, a push towards a spiritualization of sacrifice – moving it from the ritual to the internal realm – is consistently present throughout the textual witnesses. Finally, Christian sacrifice consistently places precedence on internal and ethical disposition over ritual practice. In light of these early Christian developments, however, a question arises: How did Christians come to embrace the inaccurate and wholly violent forms of sacrifice so prevalent throughout Church history? Part II, appropriately titled ‘Atonement and Sacrifice: The Distorting Veils’, details the complex process in which both Atonement theory and Mass fell victim to influences of non-Christian sacrifice. Concerning Atonement theory, Daly writes, ‘Christian antiquity was still a time when sacrifice in the traditional history-ofreligions sense of that word, that is, an eternal cultic act involving the destruction of a victim, was generally taken for granted as an essential part of religion’ (p. 197). This unfortunate presumption resulted in the systematization (most notably in the works of Anselm and Aquinas) of a God bound to anthropocentric categories of satisfaction. Daly identifies a similar misappropriation of sacrifice in both Protestant and Catholic Eucharistic theologies, the developments of which he traces from the Reformation to the contemporary Roman magisterium. Contra the Reformers, Daly demonstrates that, according to early Church liturgies, the Eucharist was indeed understood as sacrificial. However, contra the present Roman magisterium, and particularly the influences of Robert Bellarmine, elemental change or destruction of a victim is not required for a truly sacrificial Mass. Daly notes that both Protestant and Catholic Eucharistic theology, as with Atonement theory, make ‘the same fateful mistake of inductively analyzing the practice of sacrifice in the world’s religions in order to establish a definition of sacrifice from which to examine the so-called Sacrifice of Mass’ (p. 166). What Daly calls for instead is an ecumenical and truer Trinitarian understanding of the Sacrificial Mass, amenable to both Catholic and Protestant concerns, in which the present assembly, through the Holy Spirit, directs its prayer to the Father, and where Christ presents himself in the elements for the transformation of the assembled. In his second bridge, Daly traces Christian models of sacrifice from postReformation modernity to the present day. After critiquing penal substitutionary developments prevalent in modern Protestant dogma, calling them ‘deeply pagan’ constructs that make ‘a shambles of the central biblical self-revelation of. . . a God of love’ (p. 180), Daly posits that scholastic, moment-of-consecration Eucharistic theology continues to be similarly problematic, namely in its de-emphasis of the Trinitarian dynamic between the assembly, Christ, and the Father. After surveying these purported theological errors, Daly turns to unveil seeds of hope for the present Church. In addition to recent burgeoning ecumenical and liturgical renewal movements in both Protestantism and Catholicism, Daly suggests that Ren´e Girard’s anthropological ‘mimetic theory’ provides a truer model of sacrificial origins through which Christians may come to terms with their ‘original sin’ (pp. 213–16) of innate violence. Through this understanding, Daly hopes Christians will come to ‘reject acquisitive and conflictive mimesis, and embrace receptive and transformative mimesis’ (p. 220), manifested through, and most accurately articulated in, Trinitarian formulations of sacrifice. Part III concludes Daly’s volume with a recapitulation of the preceding discussion told through an autobiographical lens, noting the profound influences of the North American Academy of Liturgy, Ren´e Girard, and most notably, the C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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Trinitarianism of Edward J. Kilmartin, on Daly’s own ‘sacrificial’ journey. It becomes clear that for Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled is more than scholastic exercise; rather, it is a fervent meditation and plea for a truer definition and practice of Christian sacrifice. In the hands of the neophyte, such a proposition may seem faddish or, worse yet, unconvincing. However, wielding a lifetime of scholarship and experience, Daly produces a truly ecumenical work that is commendable in mission, monolithic in scope, and abundant in theological perspicuity. MATTHEW WONG THE BANISHED HEART: ORIGINS OF HETEROPRAXIS IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH by Geoffrey Hull, T&T Clark Studies in Fundamental Liturgy , Continuum, London 2010, pp. xiv + 383, £24.99
Reading this book brought to mind the old joke about the terrorist and the liturgist (‘you can negotiate with a terrorist’), not because Geoffrey Hull is either – he is a philologist and a linguist – but because of the book’s subject matter and its argument: the author regards the ‘reform’ of the Latin rite after Vatican II as a cultural and spiritual catastrophe, the deepest wound ever to be suffered by the Church, made even worse by the fact that it is a self-inflicted wound. Catholic sacramental theologians and liturgists of an earlier period made much use of the work of anthropologists such as Mary Douglas and Victor Turner, so it cannot be immediately claimed that Geoffrey Hull, with his particular expertise, is not qualified to speak about this. On the contrary, where the use and function of signs and rituals is concerned, a philologist and a linguist is someone with a contribution to make. (He is also a traditionalist Catholic and this gives passion to his writing.) Unlike the liturgist in the joke, Hull seems to be someone with whom an intelligent conversation would be possible (as indeed are some real-life liturgists). Most of the book is concerned with trying to explain how it could have happened that the Roman Church should depart so radically and so drastically from its Tradition (the capital ‘T’ is important). He sees the roots of it in the rationalism, legalism, pragmatism, and imperialism that, over the centuries, came to characterize Roman Catholicism, and in particular the exercise of Papal authority. He gives a fascinating reading of the two thousand years of Christian history while making it clear that he seeks to focus just on this one problem. Some Popes are criticized for being too weak, others for being too strong. Some are criticized for intervening in the affairs of local churches when and how they ought not to have done, others for not intervening when and how they should have done. The relationship between East and West is at the heart of his argument. The development of papal authority in the West is closely linked with the need for Rome to position itself in relation to Constantinople on one side and the Frankish empire on the other. So, great figures like Gregory VII and Innocent III emerge, powerful and authoritative within their (increasingly only western) sphere. The seemingly natural identification of unity with uniformity had serious consequences not just for relationships with the East but also for the survival of liturgical rites other than that of Rome within the Western church. It is one of the paradoxes that after Vatican II there were fewer rites in the Latin Church than there were before. Rationalistic and legalistic tendencies are there from the beginning in Latin theology and church government, heavily influenced as it was by Roman law and philosophy. The vicissitudes of history, in particular the emergence of nominalism, the reformation, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution – what all these things did to the Church and how the Church reacted to them – meant that C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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at the beginning of the twentieth century loyalty and obedience to the Pope had become central to what it meant to be a Roman Catholic (and not just for the Ultramontane). This helps to explain why the vast majority of Roman Catholics went along with changes in the ‘immemorial rite’, changes which, Hull believes, their instinct of faith ought to have led them to reject. The Papacy had come to believe that it could reverse the ancient law of lex orandi, lex credendi, something Hull sees happening already before Vatican II, with the liturgical changes introduced by Pius X for example. This is also what he means by ‘heteropraxis’: allowing the law of belief to determine the law of prayer rather than the other way round. So one can maintain ‘orthodoxy’ – Rome’s obsession in recent times – while becoming ‘heteropractic’. Hull does not believe that one factor alone is sufficient to explain the problem and a short review must perforce truncate his argument drastically. Theology, politics, cultural imperialism, racism, ignorance, rationalism, persecution, war weariness and guilt – all of these are strands in producing the situation in which the Church could so easily divest itself so quickly of so much of its tradition. He believes, however, that Rome’s treatment not just of the Eastern Orthodox Churches but also of Byzantine-rite Catholic Churches is the most important strand in understanding the problem as well as in pointing towards a solution. There are some appalling stories related here about the ways in which Latin Catholics treated Catholics of other rites in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Ethiopia, and India. Things were even more disastrous when Catholics of those rites migrated to North America, Australia, and New Zealand, and encountered a Latin hierarchy (many of them Irish, sad to say, trying to cope with their own cultural identity crisis) incapable of understanding the Catholic Church as involving anybody other than Latin-rite Catholics. Rome’s treatment of ‘the East’ clarifies the problem since what it felt able to do to other rites it finally felt able to do to its own. The ‘heart’ that is banished is the contemplative and doxological appreciation of the liturgy as something received, into which we are invited to enter, and not something we are invited to invent or create as we go along. The East preserves a sense of this given-ness of the liturgy while the West (so Hull believes) has for the most part lost it completely. There is a familiar comparing of the worst excesses of ‘new rite’ liturgies with the best of ‘old rite’ liturgies. Two concepts crucial to his argument are never defined clearly enough, however. One is the notion of a rite being ‘immemorial’. Its dictionary meaning is ‘ancient beyond memory or record’ (OED) but that alone is not sufficient, even for Hull, to determine whether something is or is not to be maintained in a liturgical rite. He talks about the renewal of rites which will involve removing things that have added themselves somehow: determining what is a valid and what an invalid addition is not clear simply by identifying something as ‘immemorial’ (at least on the OED’s definition of the term). Vincent of Lerins, Thomas Aquinas, and John Henry Newman all speak of development (of doctrine) in terms of making explicit what has always been implicit. But how liturgical development is to be evaluated seems a more complicated question precisely because of the nature and function of rituals. Hull speaks about ‘organic’ development: rites will change as time goes by but will do so authentically only when the change is organic. A major problem Hull sees with the ‘Montinian revolution’ is that it was contrived and artificial, the work of a committee seeking to destroy rather than to build up, and so in no way an organic development. (Cardinal Ratzinger makes a similar criticism of the postConciliar reform in The Spirit of the Liturgy.) But the process of such ‘organic development’ needs to be explained a bit more: we do not wake up one morning to discover that our rituals have developed overnight. Presumably any development in human rituals will involve consciousness, reflection, evaluation, and choice. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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The Bugnini commission can be accused of antiquarianism and immobilism in thinking that the Latin rite could be returned to some imagined primitive form, but may not traditionalists also be criticized for the same things in proposing that the Latin rite somehow reached a final ‘perfection’ four centuries ago and in trying now (once again with a certain artificiality and contrivance) to ‘restore’ that rite? The arguments will clearly continue. Hull’s book is an important, welldocumented, argumentative, contribution to a question increasingly urgent for the Church. For him it is the question, and in that one can only agree. At stake is, not the preservation of a cultural museum piece, but the faith of the Church, the meaning of adoration, and the knowledge of Christ that comes through worship. VIVIAN BOLAND OP MARTHE ROBIN AND THE FOYERS OF CHARITY by Martin Blake, Theotokos Books, Nottingham 2010, pp. 161, £7.95
This work has an importance that belies its shortness and unassuming style, being the first book written originally in English about the 20th Century French mystic, Marthe Robin, foundress of the ‘Foyers of Charity’. While the name of Marthe Robin is known in this country, she has received far less attention here than in her native France, where Jean Guitton called her ‘the greatest genius I have ever met’ (p. 135), and Jean Dani´elou spoke of her as ‘the most extraordinary person of the century’ (p. 56). Others who have testified to her great influence upon them include the philosopher Marcel Cl´ement, and Fr Marie-Dominique Philippe, founder of the Community of St John. Her cause for beatification has been opened. The present book aims to be no more than an introduction to Marthe Robin and the ‘Foyers’ which she inspired. We read first of her early life: her birth, in 1902, as the sixth child of parents who were small farmers south of Lyon, ‘Catholic, if not particularly religious’ (p. 18); her early piety, and the decline of her health from the age of 16 onwards, leading to blindness and paralysis. The author describes, without excessively dwelling on, the extraordinary phenomena said to have accompanied her illness, for example, her reception of the stigmata and continuous shedding of blood, her weekly ‘re-living’ of the Passion, and her passing of fifty three years, until her death in 1981, without food, drink or sleep. The major theme of the book, however, is the spiritual influence which Marthe Robin exercised on the many thousands who came into contact with her, and the importance of the ‘Foyers of Charity’ which from the 1930s, she predicted would be part of ‘a new Pentecost of love’ within the Church (p. 15). After Marthe Robin herself, the principal actor in these events was a French priest of the diocese of Lyon, George Finet. He met Marthe in 1936, and at her request, preached the first ‘Foyer’ retreat in her village of Chateauneuf later that year. It was a 5 day, silent retreat, which has remained the pattern for the Foyers ever since. Under the guidance of Marthe, and with the permission of his bishop, the Abb´e Finet founded a community in the village whose principal work would be to receive those who would attend such retreats. This is known today as the ‘Central Foyer’ and more than 70 others are spread across several continents, although, as the author remarks, there is still none in the Anglophone world. Their Statutes received the final approval from the Pontifical Council for the Laity in 1999. It is a remarkable fact that Marthe Robin never visited the Foyer she had inspired in her own village. Bedridden, she was not able even to assist at Mass for more than half a century, though she received Holy Communion weekly. But C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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in her darkened room, she received a constant stream of visitors seeking prayers and counsel. More than 100,000 names appear in the visitors’ book and this figure does not take into account those who visited more than once (p. 55). The author writes: ‘Her aim seems to have been to lead her visitors to work out a solution to their problems with the help of the Holy Spirit. She did not regard herself, and disliked being regarded, as a kind of oracle’ (p. 56). Nevertheless, it is clear that many people considered that they had received extraordinary graces by means of their brief interviews with Marthe and the author includes a few well-chosen examples. The Foyers themselves are also described by some personal testimonies, including the author’s own. He explains that Marthe Robin believed that she had been instructed directly from heaven that they were to be centres of ‘light, charity and love’, ‘charity’ referring here especially to fraternity among Christians, and ‘love’ to the love of God exercised in prayer (p. 114). The members do not take vows, though most are celibates, and may include both men and women. Each Foyer has a priest-member as its spiritual father, though he is not in charge of temporalities. Some run schools, which the author notes have been a striking source of vocations to the priesthood in France (p. 128). This relatively brief study raises some questions which it would be interesting to see discussed more fully. For example, the author speaks of Marthe as ‘still the subject of controversy’ (p. 12), but it is not clear what the controversy is about. Elsewhere he mentions a crisis that the movement passed through in the 1970s, but gives very few details (p. 81). Some of the most interesting testimonies in the book are those of the philosopher and ‘academician’, Jean Guitton. He emphasises Marthe Robin’s naturalness, and her capacity to adapt her conversation to those to whom she spoke. He remarks on the paradox that it was while living for years in complete darkness that she spoke of ‘Foyers of light’. We also learn that Guitton was urged by Marthe (p. 75) to encourage his friend Pope Paul VI to remain firm and not to abdicate (it would be interesting to know if she ever spoke of that pontiff’s confrontation with Archbishop Lefebvre, another of Guitton’s friends.). This book is written in a personal, even ‘homely’ style. It contains a number of repetitions and, no doubt to keep down costs, no photographs. A useful bibliography of recent books about Marthe Robin, almost all in French, is included. As the author says (p.149), the private writings which Marthe produced between 1929 and 1932, as well as the many letters that she dictated, will no doubt be the subject of much theological study in future years. THOMAS CREAN OP A SOUL-CENTRED LIFE: EXPLORING AN ANIMATED SPIRITUALITY by Michael Demkovich OP, The Liturgical Press, Collegeville 2010, pp.144, £13.50 pbk
Few serious books on spirituality are predicated upon a pun, but Michael Demkovich’s A Soul-Centered Life: Exploring an Animated Spirituality is certainly not like most of these books. Both a thoroughgoing critique of the current state of spirituality, as well as a creative contribution to the field itself, Demkovich’s latest showing is ultimately a plea to re-appropriate the Thomistic teaching on the soul and so literally to reanimate both the Church and the academy in light of the classical teaching. The author takes on two distinct yet related problems: the first concerning those who self-identify as ‘spiritual, but not religious’, and the second concerning the state of spirituality in the contemporary academy. While he stops short of C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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identifying an actual causal relation, Demkovich does seem to suggest that if the intellectual pursuit of spirituality were better grounded and more coherent then it is likely that the confused state of contemporary spiritual practice would reflect that stability. In fact, he structures his book around the connection: the first part lays out the author’s critique of various contemporary models and offers his own alternative methodology; the second part introduces a fourfold schema which is intended to serve as a model for how academic spirituality can be accomplished in a truly integral way; the final part returns to questions posed at the beginning and further argues against the ‘spiritual, but not religious camp’ in a way that is meant to be compelling both to spiritual theologians and everyday undergrads alike. Demkovich’s major critique with the established schools of spirituality present in the academy is that in one way or another they all focus too exclusively on particular practices. In the critique section of the first part the author addresses a number of popular approaches: spirituality as liturgy, as academic discipline, as history, and as theology. For Demkovich none of these will do. When seen as liturgy, spirituality tends to lock practice too fixedly into the rites and rubrics of public worship. As history, it can become too heavily contexualized and so seem remote. And as theology, it tends either to become so distinct an academic discipline as to masquerade as autonomous or to become simply another distinct hermeneutic or analytic method in the context of some broader theological inquiry. Demkovich proposes an alternative vision, of a discipline which sees the soul as the integrating factor of the human person and so spirituality as the integrating field or discipline which binds theology to all other fields as well as to the life of the everyday Christian. Because the soul is the intellectual skeleton-key for Demkovich, this new methodology is necessarily personal. That is, investigating specific people’s spiritualities will be what yields an account of the human person in relation to God that is at once intellectually significant and morally desirable. Most of the book is taken up with case studies in his new method, focusing on the characters of Maximus the Confessor, Catherine of Siena, Ignatius of Loyola, and Teresa of Calcutta. These sketches attend to three major factors that constitute the person’s spirituality: the self, life, and doctrine. Doctrine is of particular interest to Demkovich and so as he associates a particular type of spirituality (ascetic, mystical, aesthetical, and social-critical) with each of the subjects, likewise he identifies a particular doctrine that he identifies as central to their way of life. For instance, the ascetic spirituality of Maximus the Confessor is associated with the mystery of the Incarnation, whereas the speculative mysticism of Catherine of Siena is focused particularly on the Blessed Trinity. As important as the methodological move is for Demkovich, the real upshot comes in his conclusion where he returns to the question of being spiritual but not religious. The critical study of spirituality as presented in the book will always yield both a morality and a doctrinal framework of theology operative in the life of the individual practitioner. The very spiritual person, then, who distances themselves from organized religion out of a fear of dogma and an exclusive moral order, has only succeeded in producing yet another religion. Further, to study any individual spiritual writer or their practices outside of their historical and doctrinal context will necessarily yield a very flawed picture, and any attempt to emulate those practices devoid of their doctrinal content will always be wanting, for the animating force, the very life of the practice, is the doctrine. As Demkovich leaves it, then, the problem of spirituality without religion is either that it is no spirituality at all, or that, in one’s effort to live a given spirituality apart from the religious tradition in which it emerged, one succeeds only in producing an entirely new religion and spirituality. Demkovich sets an enormous task for himself, both to offer a new and insightful approach to spirituality as a discipline as well as to give answer to the question C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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which he associates with the great hunger of the human heart, and the critical importance that doctrine and religious practice have in responding to that need. He accomplishes the latter by way of the former, and in the process takes the reader on a rollicking and sometimes breathtaking romp through the history of largely Western Christian spirituality. This book will serve as a helpful resource to both critical scholars in the field and pastoral care workers, and may just help to answer, at least for some, why ‘spiritual, but not religious’ just won’t cut it for serious thinkers. DOMINIC McMANUS OP PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY, ETHICS, SOCIETY AND CULTURE by John Haldane, Imprint-Academic , Exeter 2009, pp. xv + 400, £17.95 pbk REASONABLE FAITH by John Haldane, Routledge , London 2010, pp. xi + 201, £23.99 pbk
Both books collect earlier articles, dating from 1989 to 2008 in Practical Philosophy (PP), and from 1994 to 2009 in Reasonable Faith (RF), edited to make a sustained argument. Not popularized philosophy, they are addressed to the nonprofessional, not exclusively Catholic, reader. PP is divided into a long introduction followed by three parts with six chapters on ethics, five on society, and four on culture. Professor Haldane (JH) explicitly rejects both idea and image of society as invented by pre-existing individuals (PP 225–26). We are social animals who nonetheless choose the way we live together; to that extent human living is ethical and ‘arguably the deepest source of ethical experience lies in the recognition of human beings as subjects and fellow persons, and as bearers of various kinds of mutual normative relations. Some of the latter may plausibly be regarded as contractual, such as marriage, but others, such as parenthood are culturally transformed relations rooted in our animal nature’ (PP 76). How we choose to live together reveals our values. The common good is a social order in which good values may be realized. Consequently, to know the common good is to choose, both [a] what and [b] how values are to be realized. Because both [a] and [b] will often be contentious, so also will be what is thought to constitute the common good. In chapter 9, which, with chapter 10, discusses the relationship between the individual, society, and state with reference to the liberalism of John Rawls, JH considers how the ‘common good’ is properly to be understood. ‘The apparently radical antiindividualism [of ‘the idea that every law should have as its proper goal the well-being of society as a whole’] is sometimes moderated by commentators who urge an interpretation of society as an aggregate, and thereby treat the “common good” as a distributive notion, equivalent to “the good of each and every member”’ (PP 226). JH opposes that position on the grounds that it is an implausible interpretation of Aquinas (PP 227) and that it misunderstands society. (PP ch. 9 passim). For JH ‘The common good is essentially shared. It is a goodfor-many, taken collectively, rather than a ‘good-to-many’ taken distributively’ (PP 227). He clarifies his meaning: ‘the common good [includes], for example, the notion that what justifies the expenditure of society’s resources upon universities wherein people are supported in their thinking about these very issues is the fact that the goods attained thereby are ‘communicable’, reverting to each member’. This is genuinely thought provoking. Two caveats: first, it does not follow from the fact that something enhances the common good that the state ought to provide it through ‘the expenditure of society’s resources’, if ‘society’s resources’ refers to tax revenue; secondly, precisely how ‘. . . within a community we are all better when some of us achieve understanding’ (PP loc.cit.) needs more analysis. C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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In the liberal tradition, in opposition to the encroachment of the modern state on the lives of its citizens, individual freedom became an explicit and fundamental value. Mill’s On Liberty became the foundational text in English. The ‘common good’ had fused with the ‘good of the state’, and the liberal resistance to ever increasing state organization and control almost inevitably became a resistance to ‘the common good’. Liberalism, by its opponents, and by at least some of its supporters, was understood to be the pursuit of individual good, largely irrespective of the good of others. John Rawls’ ‘conception of justice is a private one’ (PP228), Ronald Dworkin’s insistence on rights is on the rights of the individual (PP 175), but is not also the Roman definition of justice as the settled and enduring willingness to render to each what is due individualist? What is due is due to individuals and the common good in the domain of the just is achieved when each has what is due. Both Rawls and Dworkin may be read as suggesting that the good society is achieved only when certain individual rights are honoured. Perhaps it is that aspect of those writers that leads JH to hesitate to align himself with communitarianism. RF is divided into two parts: Reason, Faith and God (chapters 1–6) and Reason, Faith and the Soul (chapters 7–13). In both parts the word ‘Faith’ is used more to refer to the religious domain than to Christian belief. Christians, religious Jews and Muslims, believe in God; most have not been convinced by a proof. But within Christianity, Judaism and Islam it has commonly been held that God’s existence can be proved. JH is concerned less to present a proof than to show the presuppositions upon which a proof can arise. He makes the very interesting suggestion in chapters 2 and 3 that ‘the traditional arguments can be worked on the basis of [how he understands] idealism as well as of realism’ (RF 36). In several chapters he is concerned centrally with truth, reality and realism. In the Catholic tradition the affirmation that God exists is held to be true. For the realist that affirmation is identical with every other affirmation in that, if it is true, its truth is independent of the person affirming it. Truth is a relation of knowing to what is. Realism does not require a distinction between knower and known. JH does not say that it does; nor does he unambiguously say that it does not. The discussion of Dummett’s ‘anti-realism’ and Berkeley’s idealism is very illuminating. JH concludes that ‘the argument from anti-realism to theism leads to the conclusion that ultimately and strictly speaking realism is false and that Berkeley was correct: to be is to be known – by God’ (RF 46). That recalls Ronald Knox’s limerick in response to the man who found it odd that a tree in the quad continued to be when no one was there to observe it.: Dear Sir, Your astonishment’s odd. When there’s no one about in the quad, The tree that you see Continues to be, Observed by, Yours faithfully, God. When realism is understood as the affirmation that being is known in true propositions then that [a] the created universe including ourselves exists because known by God, and that [b] it exists independently of being known by us, are perfectly compatible. Because, as a matter of fact, God exists and we are, whether or not we realise it, oriented to him, chapter 5 discusses the restless heart, and chapter 6 the idea of finding God in nature: ‘God is both the source and the destination of humanity’ (RF 94). Chapter 6 is a meditation in part on Hopkins’ poem on the grandeur of God. That the world is ‘charged with the grandeur of God’ becomes, perhaps deliberately, ‘the world is changed with the grandeur of God’ (RF 94). The second part of the book discusses the human soul in seven valuable chapters. Eternal life is often overlooked, sometimes disbelieved. I mention only two things. First, in the conclusion of chapter 12 JH discusses very briefly a C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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curious and fascinating argument from St Anselm on immortality based on God’s love and our desire to know and love God. Secondly, several times JH quotes a passage from St Thomas’ commentary on the 15th chapter of St Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians on the resurrection of the dead (c.15, lect.2: the Leonine editor casts some doubt on the authenticity of the section): ‘The soul is part of the body. My soul is not I; and if only souls are saved, I am not saved, nor is any man’. The first sentence is untrue. The soul is not part of the body, and in no other passage that I have found does Aquinas say so. The second sentence is consonant with Aquinas but the style is atypical (cf. e.g. Summa contra Gentiles II.57.16 and IV.79.11; Summa Theologiæ I.29.1 ad 5 and 1.74.4 ad 2). Authentic or not, it evokes the question as to whether the disembodied soul thinks, knows and loves God. If it does, who does so? If it does not . . .? Few will leave these, and other chapters and questions that there is no space to discuss, undisturbed. They may not be convinced of every conclusion but they will have been stimulated, and will not rest easily in sheer asserted disagreement. GARRETT BARDEN THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AND THEOLOGY edited by Andrew Hass, David Jasper and Elisabeth Jay, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2009 [first published 2007]), pp. 720, £27.50 pbk
This paperback version of OHELT is particularly welcome, making a fascinating and pioneering collection of essays accessible to students as well as libraries. The book, despite its title, is not so much a handbook as the representation of an enterprise, its (necessarily tentative) object being, as Elisabeth Jay states in her introduction, ‘to provide a sense of what it might mean to indulge in the interdisciplinary study of English Literature and theology’. The Handbook is organised into seven sections: introductory, formation of the tradition, literary ways of reading the Bible, theological ways of reading literature, theology as literature, the ‘great themes’, and afterword. In the second section, Rhodri Lewis’ chapter on the Enlightenment is a particularly thorough and clear introduction for the literary graduate student, whereas Lynne Long’s account of Biblical translation and prayer books, perhaps aimed at undergraduates, offers only a perfunctory and partial description of pre-Reformation religious writing, which largely ignores the vast sermon-literature and is apparently unaware of primers such as the widely circulated Layfolks’ Massbook. Section Three contains some enthralling material new to literary students not familiar with Hebrew, but Yvonne Sherwood writing about prophetic literature perhaps gets closest to describing the strange linguistic wrestlings involved in speaking of God. The literature/theology nexus is a particularly slippery one to identify and define, and the contributors have interpreted their task in different ways. The essays are in any case valuable in their own right, but it is no derogation of the handbook to say that many, perhaps most, clarify what the interface ‘might mean’, in Jay’s phrase, by falling strictly outside the interdisciplinary remit yet sketching out a serviceable boundary area. A particularly good example is Norman Vance’s sympathetic study of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. Vance’s careful examination of the relationship between George Eliot and Christianity serves to show how her concern with human suffering, while it often implies an unfavourable comparison of contemporary Christian practice with precept, is fundamentally moral rather than religious, let alone theological. Again, Stephen Medcalf’s essay, which traces the religious experiences and developments that influenced particular poems and attitudes in Auden, David Jones and T.S.Eliot, seems at first sight to grasp the interdisciplinary nettle more securely. One might describe it as a spiritual C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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biography of poetic themes, and this factual basis gives it, as with Vance’s essay, a visitor’s passport into the literature/theology world. Certain observations spring to mind. First, it is not literature and theology, strictly speaking, that is the subject of this handbook but literature and religion. OHELT deals with religious writing, devotional writing, and theological writing, which are not all the same thing: Piers Plowman, for instance, is as much about ecclesiology as theology. Secondly, there is a distinction to be made between the about of literature and the how. The purpose of OHELT is not to treat theology as a special category just because it happens to be the subject of a poem or a novel: if it were, one could as easily posit a study of literature and psychology or natural history. It could be argued that two separate studies are implied. One, placed at the rock-face of poetry, asks the question: how does faith affect expression?, down to the use of one word or trope rather than another, or of no tropes at all. Janet Soskice’s important study of this area, Metaphor and religious language (1985), has not been superseded or equalled. Brian Cummings’ chapter on the background of Protestant and Catholic reformations rightly emphasises the importance of Luther’s ‘profoundly verbal’ approach to theology and the effect of this Lutheran emphasis may be seen in Helen Wilcox’ essay on Donne and Herbert, which refers to the argument about a ‘Protestant poetic’ espoused by writers such as Barbara Lewalski. Much work is still to be done on this feature of immediately post-Reformation poetry. The other necessary study is of writing that, as Coleridge put it, understands ‘religion as the element in which [the reader] lives, and the region in which he moves’ (p. 403). Medieval literature falls so obviously into this category that it is easy to ignore the literary implications of what Charles Taylor has described as the loss of a ‘social imaginary’. After Donne, Herbert, and Milton, this sense of religion as an ‘element’ is hardly to be found in lay writers until the assertion by Coleridge of the poet’s vatic role. Whether Wordsworth could be considered at all theological, despite his effusions of spirit, is very doubtful, and the essays on later writers are almost all about professional clerics. To what degree of elegance must a piece of theology aspire in order to be classed as literature? Ian Ker’s essay on Newman points directly to the problem raised by this oddity of nomenclature: Newman was a minor poet and novelist, but one of the great writers of non-fictional prose (p. 624) OHELT’s publisher has ordained in its catalogue that the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes are ‘literature’ while those of John Fisher are ‘religion’, a classification which Fisher would not have minded, but, I suspect, Andrewes would. Such problems of definition, however, are not the fault of OHELT, which has helped mightily to clear the air and perhaps the way for subsequent investigations, such as Regina Schwartz’ recent Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism. Finally, I would venture to suggest that Piers Plowman and many such ‘element’ works are not about theology, nor even about religion: they are about someone wondering how to live a life. Literature is arguably not a discipline at all, it is something to which people naturally have recourse – and so is religion. The truly theological, then, may be found in strange places, and of all the essays in this admirable collection it is, I think, Valentine Cunningham’s hectic and erudite study of James Joyce that best demonstrates this. It reproduces the explosive energy of Joyce’s angry relationship with his Catholic upbringing, quoting obscenity and blasphemy in a tour de force that does not make for comfortable or pious reading – almost, but not quite, more Babel than Pentecost. A wild assertion of word and flesh, it rubs our literary and theological noses in the torment and passion of incarnation. CECILIA HATT C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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RITUAL AND THE SACRED: A NEO-DURKHEIMIAN ANALYSIS OF POLITICS, RELIGION AND THE SELF by Massimo Rosati, Rethinking Classical Sociology Series, Ashgate , Aldershot 2009, pp. xvi + 163, £55.00 hbk
If the mass media in England were to be relied on, one would have thought that any interest in religion within the social sciences had long expired. To a remarkable degree, this is not the case. At present, there is a considerable growth of interest in religion, theology, and matters of the sacred, well typified in this study by Rosati. A paradigm shift in sociology has occurred, involving reappraisals of the interests of Weber and Simmel in religion. Such concerns always figured prominently in Durkheim’s writings and these are likely to increase with the centenary reflections in 2012 on his last great work, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. While not forming a school of thought, there are an unexpected number of Italian sociologists with interests in religion – one has in mind Cipriani, Ferrarotti, Garelli, and Giordan. The works of these Italians translate well, being characterised by e´ lan, rhetorical flourish, and some original theoretical re-castings. They exhibit interesting bibliographies that are exploited well in their texts. Rosati is prominent amongst these, sharing with some particular interests in Durkheim. Parts of two chapters of this study have been published earlier in Durkheimian Studies (the journal of the British Centre for Durkheimian Studies based at Oxford). Overall, this is a well-structured overview of some wide ranging debates that are unfamiliarly cast and to that degree the study has much to commend it. Rosati characterises his work as a personal interpretation (p. 6). Besides his treatment of ritual, largely in the first three chapters of the study, Rosati seeks to find a religious basis for a notion of ‘principled tolerance’ (p. 10) and this quest forms its second part. In this latter part, Durkheim slightly melts into the background. For unknown reasons, the study of ritual has fallen from a dominant position held in sociology and anthropology in the 1980s and 1990s. A value of Rosati’s work lies in its resolute defence of the significance of ritual. In his introduction, he claims ‘ritual behaviour is a barrier against cognitive chaos’ (p. 4). More assertively, he treats rituals as the building blocks of the social. His aim, for what he terms Durkheim’s second programme of research, is to seek a ‘marriage of cultural sociology and religious studies’, which is treated as a ‘very urgent task’ in sociology (p. 6). Chapter 1 starts alluringly with the suggestion that Durkheim is ‘a na¨ıve figure, a deaf and blind positivist’, out of kilter in a strange competition over the tragic basis of modernity (p. 10). This disenchantment with modernity, Rosati suggests, leads Durkheim to stress the moral significance of ritual and the sacred as means to ameliorate on-setting individualism. There is much of value in the chapter, not least on the Jewish aspects of The Elementary Forms that expand a theological dimension to the study. Theological issues also emerge in chapter 2, on ‘modernity and the rise of the introspective conscience’, which is useful on Protestantism and individualism (pp. 24–27). This chapter, dealing also with Mauss, is thoughtful. Echoing Taylor, he charges Protestant-like religions with obscuring the significance of rituals and the sacred. Rosati is at his best when writing closest to Christian theology. Chapter 3, on society, rituals and tradition marks steps into diffuseness. Rosati is heavily reliant on the American sociologist of culture, Jeffrey Alexander, and what emerges is schematic and not very illuminating. It speaks too much of what is familiar on performance, but in ways that add little. The material on Turner, Bellah and Collins is interesting but too soft-focused. The work of Seligman on Jewish rituals emerges not very profitably in relation to the overall concerns of the study (pp. 64–68). In that chapter references start to appear to Rappaport, C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
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the most important sociologist of late, who dealt innovatively with ritual. Within a bitty chapter 4, on ‘Politics: An Anthropological Gaze’ he is given a useful exposition (pp. 90–97) but one that somehow blunts his liturgical and theological significance. Rosati overstates the influence of Durkheim on his work. No study should by judged by a series editor’s preface, where Chalcraft treats as ‘almost laughable’ the notion that the Bible should have as sacred a place in the nation in the early 21st century as it did in 1953, going on to add that ‘Rosati does not make these kind of errors’ (p. x). He might be free from ‘error’ with his recourse to Islam and Confucianism, but what emerges is expositional, uncritical. and oddly removed from the earlier concerns with Durkheim. There is a peculiar and decidedly unpersuasive property to his section on ‘Comparative Perspectives: Rabbinic ethics and Confucianism’ (pp. 84–88) which sits uncertainly in chapter 4 on ‘Self-cultivation: The Individual as a Ceremonial Being’. Insights are cast in manners of assertion so that when he turns to Confucianism in relation to politics and ritual, thin sociological gruel emerges. His main insight drawn from this religion is that ‘personalism, within a network ethic of mutual help, is the ritualist Confucian way to a constrained democratic engagement’ (p. 110). Like Taylor, Rosati seeks new outlets and ambiences for rituals ‘consistent with a post-liberal approach, and above all with a post-post-protestant understanding of religions within the public sphere’ (p. 112). Besides Confucianism and Judaism (references to Catholicism are oddly brief and perfunctory given his emphasis on liturgy in the study), Rosati looks to Islam for solutions. These emerge in chapter 5 on ‘Politics: An Anthropological Gaze’ where he deems Islam as transcending and subverting politics, which facilitates a fusion of the public and the private in ways that are peculiarly resistant both to secularisation and to modernity (pp. 102–106). Islam is used in the context of politics, where orthodoxy of practice, not theology matters most. A glimmer of what Rosati might have in mind as exemplifying his ideal of ritual emerges in his final chapter, on new routes to pluralism in regard to religion. A Jewish dimension unexpectedly emerges though this aspect is not surprising given Durkheim’s rabbinical background. Seligman, a Jewish sociologist who has written on ritual (and who gives the study a glowing jacket cover endorsement) is invoked as exemplary for the multifaith ‘Scriptural Reasoning’ sessions he runs as part of an international summer school, where common religious texts are read in ‘an egalitarian speech situation’, in a ‘neutral place’ (pp. 131–34). He sees these annual sessions as constituting ‘a quasi-liturgical practice’, which signifies one of the main purposes of ritual as conceived in the study, of re-casting boundaries and decentring the self. The ritual seems to involve a lot of listening. The aim is to recognise the particularism of other faiths and to bracket differences, all done in the humility of a ritual ordering where utterance of the ‘error’ of others is unspeakable. The conclusion commences with a vision of multi-faith cacophony in Rome realised by an imaginary figure called Davita who finds solutions in Durkheim’s sociology of religion and his image of society. It then proceeds into cryptic comments on the significance of Durkheim for the new millennium. The end point of the study is to conclude that ‘to ritual and the sacred, eventually, lies the task of teaching (even to moderns) the virtue of the “lightness of thoughtfulness”’ (p. 142). Given his current post as Director of the Centre for the Study and Documentation of Religions and Political Institutions in Post-Secular Society, Rosati’s wrestling with the legacy of Durkheim is interesting in illustrating the increasingly inchoate ends of modernity which seem so peculiarly resistant to sociological encapsulation. KIERAN FLANAGAN
C 2011 The Author C 2011 The Dominican Council New Blackfriars
